Demonology (33 page)

After the seizure, she went slack. (Merediths heart stopped. And her breathing. She was still.) For a second, she was alone
in the room, with her children, silent. After he dialed 911, Jimmy appeared again, to try to restart her breathing. Here’s
how: he pressed his lips against hers. He didn’t think to say,
Come on, breathe, dammit,
or to make similar imprecations, although he did manage to shout at the kids,
Get the hell out of here, please! Go downstairs!
(It was advice they followed only for a minute.) At last, my sister took a breath. Took a deep breath, a sigh, and there were
two more of these. Deep resigned sighs. Five or ten seconds between each. For a few moments more, instants, she looked at
Jimmy, as he pounded on her chest with his fists, thoughtless about anything but results, stopping occasion
ally to press his ear between her breasts. Her eyes were sad and frightened, even in the company of the people she most loved.
So it seemed. More likely she was unconscious. The kids sat cross-legged on the floor in the hall, by the top of the stairs,
watching. Lots of stuff was left to be accomplished in these last seconds, even if it wasn’t anything unusual, people and
relationships and small kindnesses, the best way to fry pumpkin seeds, what to pack for Thanksgiving, whether to make turnips
or not, snapshots to be culled and arranged, photos to be taken —these possibilities spun out of my sister’s grasp, torrential
futures, my beloved sister, solitary with pictures taken and untaken, gone.

EMS technicians arrived and carried her body down to the living room, where they tried to start her pulse with expensive engines
and devices. Her body jumped while they shocked her —she was a revenant in some corridor of simultaneities —but her heart
wouldn’t start. Then they put her body on the stretcher. To carry her away. Now the moment arrives when they bear her out
the front door of her house and she leaves it to us, leaves to us the house and her things and her friends and her memories
and the involuntary assemblage of these into language. Grief. The sound of the ambulance. The road is mostly clear on the
way to the hospital; my sister’s route is clear.

I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself. I should consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should
conflate her two children into one, or reverse their genders, or otherwise alter them, I should make her boyfriend a husband,
I should explicate all the tributaries of my
extended family (its remarriages, its internecine politics), I should novelize the whole thing, I should make it multi-generational,
I should work in my forefathers (stonemasons and newspapermen), I should let artifice create an elegant surface, I should
make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later, I should wait until I’m not angry, I shouldn’t clutter a
narrative with fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I should make Meredith’s death shapely and
persuasive, not blunt and disjunctive, I shouldn’t have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn’t have to suffer, I should address
her here directly (these are the ways I miss you), I should write only of affection, I should make our travels in this earthly
landscape safe and secure, I should have a better ending, I shouldn’t say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn’t say
she had her demons, as I do too.

These stories first appeared in the following places: “The Mansion on the Hill”in the
Paris Review,
and in
Pushcart Prize
24;
“On the Carousel”in
Fence;
“The Double Zero”(based on Sherwood Andersons “The Egg“) in
McSweeney’s;
“Forecast from the Retail Desk”in the
New Yorker;
“Hawaiian Night”in the
New Yorker;
“Drawer”in
Esquire;
“Pan’s Fair Throng”in
Conjunctions,
and in a gallery pamphlet at a show of Elena Sisto’s paintings; “The Carnival Tradition”in the
Paris Review;
“Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set”in
Primal Primers,
and on Word.com; “Boys”in
Elle;
“Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal”in
Lit,
and in Fiona Giles’s anthology
Chick for a Day;
and “Demonology”in
Conjunctions,
in
Pushcart Prize
21,
in O.
Henry Prize Awards,
in
The KGB Bar Reader,
and in
Survival Stories.

Quotations from Nijinsky are from the excellent Joan Acocella translation; quotations from Nietzsche are from the translation
by Douglas Smith.

For encouragement and support: my family, Julia Slavin, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, Susan Minot, Mary-Beth Hughes, Heather McGowan,
Elizabeth Gaffney, George Plimpton, Bradford Morrow, Alice Quinn, Bill Buford, Gregory Crewdson, Fiona Giles, David Ford,
Adrienne Miller, Margaret Nagle, Dave Eggers, Laura Iglehart, Courtney Eldridge, Bill Henderson, Michael Pietsch, Walter Donohue,
Michael and Nina Sundell, all at Yaddo, all at Cranberry’s, and the most extraordinary Melanie Jackson.

Lyrics excerpt from “If I Loved You”by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II copyright 1945 by Williamson Music. Copyright
renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

Lyrics excerpt from “The Wedding Song”copyright © 1971 (Renewed) Public Domain Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

Also by Rick Moody

____________________

A Novel

“Rick Moody’s first novel, set in New Jersey, has established its author as his generations foremost chronicler of middle-class
malaise in tristate exurbia. Moody’s dark wit and unflinching eye for the bathetic render him a particularly appropriate seer
of con temporary alienation, and the inevitable —not wholly unjust —comparisons have been made: to Updike, to Cheever, and,
more accurately, to Amis fils.“

—Claire Messud,
Village Voice

“Impressive.… An auspicious debut.“

—
New York Times Book Review

A Novel

With a new afterword by the author about the movie
The Ice Storm

“A bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family… . This is a good book, packed with keen observation and sympathy
for human failure.”

—Adam Begley,
Chicago Tribune

“Moody is a stylishly clever writer.“

—
Time

“The Ice Storm
works on so many levels, and is so smartly written, that it should establish Rick Moody as one of his generation’s bell wether
voices.“

—
Hungry Mind Review

A Novella and Stories

“Intense and unnerving.… A narcotizing tour-de-force of sex, drugs, and dementia.”

—
Vanity Fair

“Often wonderful… . Moody’s language pushes and pulls boundaries; it avoids and seeks intimacy, with the same insistence,
terror, and self-consciousness as Moody’s protagonists.”

—Amy Bloom,
Boston Globe

A Novel

“A tough, funny, gorgeously detailed domestic thriller… .
Purple America
is the stuff of classical tragedy, told in insistent, laser-bright prose. Reading it is a transfiguring experience.”

—Ben Neihart,
Baltimore Sun

“By turns utterly harrowing and guiltily hilarious.… An emotional roller coaster destined to be considered one of the fictional
achievements of a generation.”

—Rob Spillman,
Details

“Mr. Moody at his best.”

—
JANET MASLIN
,
New York Times

“Rick Moody is one of those writers you can’t ignore, because you don’t know what he’ll come up with next Yes, on the surface
it’s Moody’s daring and talent that exhilarate us, but on a deeper level we recognize the effort his people make to memorize
their losses, to somehow keep alive what can’t be saved, to placate their demons.”

—
STEWART O’NAN
,
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“By turns terrifying and wickedly funny… . A delightfully quirky collection.”

—
MICHAEL SHELDEN
,
Baltimore Sun

“Demonology,
both the story and the collection, is a shriek of pain, a rending of garments, a howl… . It seems totally beside the point
to ask whether these stories are good, or bad, or entertaining. They’re overwhelming. For me, the appropriate response to
a book like this is an answering cry, a matching confession.” —
NAN GOLDBERG
,
New York Observer

In
Demonology
Rick Moody writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth (“Boys“) and the rueful onset of middle age (“Hawaiian
Night“), about midwestern optimists (“The Double Zero“) and West Coast strategists (“On the Carousel“), about visionary exhilaration
(“Forecast from the Retail Desk“) and delusional catharsis (“Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13“). This exuberantly praised
collection, full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, firmly establishes Rick Moody as one of the leading literary
voices of his generation.

RICK MOODY
is also the author of the novels
Purple America, The Ice Storm,
and
Garden State,
which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award; one previous collection of short fiction,
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven;
and a memoir,
The Black Veil.
He has received the
Paris Review’s
Aga Khan Prize, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His
short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Esquire,
the
Paris Review, Harper’s,
and
Grand Street.