The Quick & the Dead (16 page)

Alice reluctantly dragged her tongue from the tantalizing vacancy. “Can you see it when I smile?”

“You should forgive him, for starters. Forgiveness is cool.”

“Forgiveness is optional,” Alice said. “Sometimes it’s not appropriate at all.”

“Forgiveness is complicated, you’d like it.”

“I’m not a complicated person.” It was as though he were talking about Corvus again.

“You ever watch that television show,
Ricky and Romulus
? Every Tuesday five to five-thirty? One’s a paraplegic black guy, and the other’s the white guy who crippled him in a robbery. Black guy says, ‘I have forgiven you, I am in the living process of forgiving you, I want to help you get employment, an apartment, a high school diploma, I want to help you get clean, I want to pay off your credit card debts.’ Romulus is a good guy. Can only move his lips and eyebrows. Looks like a big gray melon sitting in a chair. Ricky, on the other hand, is a skinny, jittery, hyped-up, drug-addled flamboyance cursing and bawling ‘Lemme alone, I’ve served my time, I’ve paid my debt to society, I don’t want your skanky forgiveness, get off my ass, I wish you were dead, man.’ They go at each other for fifteen minutes and then viewers call in with supporting arguments. It’s a remarkable program.”

“How can it be on every Tuesday?”

“They’ve been on for over a year now. The quality of mercy is an inexhaustible subject.”

Alice thought that their first time alone together had gone well. Well, fairly well. When she got back home she asked her granny and poppa about
Ricky and Romulus
. Did it exist? She stood in darkness just around the corner from them, worrying about the havoc her tooth would wreak on their small savings.

“I don’t watch that,” her granny said. “It’s like those wrestling programs. There’s something insincere about it. If we’re free Tuesday five to five-thirty,” her granny said, “we’re usually tuned into
Women Betrayed by Companion Animals
. Some of those stories can make your hair stand on end.”

No lights were shining in the Airstream. Alice slipped into her room, which she thought of as the kind of room where somebody who someday would do something cataclysmic would spend her formative years. The only decoration was the picture of the woman and the octopus. Alice loved this picture and had studied its every nuance. She undressed, and as she was pulling her T-shirt over her head, the tooth fell to the floor. She picked it up and almost put it beneath her pillow. When she had been a little kid, of course, teeth had dutifully turned into cold hard cash, in one of the perverse and jolly customs perpetrated on little kids. A classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy. The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth—what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

She got into bed and waited for sleep. She liked waiting for sleep. It wasn’t like waiting at all.

She reflected on the octopus, as she did most nights, so intelligent and shy but extending itself, as it were, moving out of its solitary nature, unoctopuslike, impossibly in love. She had always related more to the octopus than the woman, although the woman had to be fairly interesting to find herself in this situation. An octopus could brood and plan for
the future, that was known, everybody knew that, and it was undoubtedly brooding and planning at the very moment depicted, while the woman looked as though she had given up. The octopus, so bright and solitary and weird, was giving the situation its full attention, whereas the woman knew that it was suffocating and being poisoned by its bloodstream just by being in the room with her, and that brooding and planning wouldn’t help at all. The difference in attitude was what made the situation tragic.

C
orvus chose to volunteer once a week at the nursing home, Green Palms, and the first Thursday Alice and Annabel went too. They were accepted and acknowledged much like the dogs, Tiffany and Helen, who made their rounds on Fridays.

A green van transporting a few gloomy cleaning ladies and a manic, moonfaced physical therapist picked them up and took them out into the foothills, where Green Palms was concealed in a magnificent riparian area. Nothing was supposed to be built here, but the developers had won approval by making the nursing home the cornerstone of their resort package. Green Palms was state-of-the-art End of the Trail. In an act of conceptual brilliance, it was tastefully concealed from the resort’s supper clubs, ballrooms, pools, gymnasiums, and stables; a glimpse of it could be afforded from the golf course, but from the more expensive suites it was invisible, and from a distance it could not be seen at all. The van wound its way slowly up narrow roads and through a number of guardhouse gates, which opened in recognition of a decal on the windshield.

“I wish we lived in a gated community,” Annabel said. “I mean, the strangest people come up sometimes and say they’re lost, and Daddy believes them.”

“Gated communities should be unconstitutional,” Alice said.

Then they were there.
The palm at the end of the mind
, Alice thought when they arrived, a line from a poem she’d read at school. The teacher had spoiled it for her somewhat by saying that the poet, according to his notebooks, had considered another line for that slot.
The alp at the end of the street
. She could hardly imagine anyone getting to the palm at the end of the mind via the alp at the end of the street, but the ability to do so, she thought, was what this place was all about. They were all
solipsists in Green Palms, all heroes and heroines of their own vanishing consciousness.

Corvus suggested that Alice and Annabel think of the people here as already being dead, which meant that visiting with them and doing little things like rubbing cream into their hands or spraying a pleasant scent on their pillows was something very special.

Annabel protested this.

“That seems awfully extreme,” Alice admitted.

“When you’re with them, have a picture in your mind of yourself drinking from a glass,” Corvus said. “And picture the glass as already being broken, shattered.”

Annabel had never seen Corvus so … animated, if you could call it that.

Inside, Alice was given a Mr. Barlow and a Very Brucie and an Ottolie. Annabel was assigned to a Mrs. Fresnet. “Oh, that’s that inexpensive champagne,” she said. “Is she part of that champagne empire?”

“Do Mrs. Fresnet, and then we’ll see about you,” a nurse’s aide said.

Corvus was directed to a waiting room where a number of residents were waiting for a marimba player who’d failed to show up. It had been an hour now. “You’re going to be a terrific disappointment to them,” the aide said, “but you’d be doing staff a big favor.”

Annabel was looking at something crumpled standing in the hallway, saying “A nice soft peach” over and over. People hobbled and eddied around her. It was a little crumpled man, and he had been saying “A nice soft peach” for about ten minutes now. She approached Mrs. Fresnet’s room with dread.

Alice went to Mr. Barlow’s room first. Mr. Barlow had been a professional gardener—the master gardener, actually, in Washington’s Floral Library—who couldn’t care less now about his tulips, or any tulips: the Mary Poppins, the Dreaming Maid, the White Triumphator, the Queen of Night. Alice couldn’t get much out of Mr. Barlow, who just stared at her with glittering eyes. Very Brucie was better. He still had some odds and ends to relate. In his youth, he said, he had been handsome and reckless, and the wild things he had done had been referred to as “very Brucie.” He had a barely viable roommate whose presence didn’t bother him at all. The only difficulty was when the man’s son visited, which put a
strain on everyone. The son, a bald, florid man in a tight gray suit, had visited intensively in recent weeks, playing the “Rosa Mystica” at his father’s bedside on a small tape recorder. The “Rosa Mystica” was supposed to be unbind-and-assist music, but the father didn’t die and the son stopped coming. Alice wondered if the tape she’d seen in the parking lot that very morning—broken and unraveled, smashed, really, it appeared to have been run over or stomped on—was the same. No way to know for a certainty.

The air in Green Palms felt restrained. There was a sense that salvation was being deliberately, cruelly withheld. And there was a speechless concurrence that it was hardly significant that in their lives the birthday presents had been purchased, the weeding done, the letter written, the windows washed, or the preburial contract sensibly arranged. And if, with some effort, they could recall the affairs that had been consummated, the roads taken, the languages mastered, the queer meals eaten in foreign lands, of what lasting consequence was that? This had been the destination all the while. Having been a good householder, having run a tight ship, having fought the good fight, whatever, it mattered not at all. Alice pushed Very Brucie in his silent shiny chair around the hallways, her hands trembling a little. She was here because of Corvus.

Mrs. Fresnet, who, as far as Annabel could ascertain, was
not
of the Fresnet empire, was worrying that her “Do not revive” form was not on file. Annabel went to the office to inquire and came back with a copy of it. Mrs. Fresnet took the form and studied it, then smiled at Annabel. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Annabel asked, smiling back. “For your peace of mind?”

“But this is a copy,” Mrs. Fresnet said, “not the real thing. The only real thing they give you in here is custard.” She opened her mouth wide, and Annabel was afraid she was going to let out a corker of a scream, but Mrs. Fresnet slowly closed her mouth again. “I have fifteen dollars in my account that can be withdrawn weekly for personal hygiene, and I want you to withdraw that fifteen dollars and keep it. It’s yours. Then I want you to get me out of here and drive me away, out in the desert into the sun-steeped scene of a bigger, darker world.”

It couldn’t be sun-steeped and dark at the same time, Annabel thought, but you had to give these people some latitude. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have a license to drive. I don’t have a car.”

“When I was your age, I was more resourceful,” Mrs. Fresnet said. Then she opened her mouth again and gave an ear-splitting, sustained scream. Annabel ran out of the room to the nurse’s station, where the same glum aide was presiding.

“She feels better after she does that,” the aide said. “Then she asks for some cup custard, and you’re supposed to get the cup custard and sit there while she eats it, which will take, in your perception, forever.”

“Please tell my friends I’ll be waiting for them in the van,” Annabel said.

“The van’s not out there now.”

“I’ll wait for them in the place the van’s supposed to be when it’s there,” Annabel said. She was never coming inside this place again.

Alice had advanced to Ottolie, who resembled an iguana. She sat in her chair, wrapped in an iguana-colored shawl, and didn’t acknowledge Alice for some time.

“I never sleep, you know,” Ottolie finally said. “Never. Someone sleeps for me. She lives in Nebraska.”

“That’s great!” Alice said.

“Aksarben. That’s where I get a lot of my people. You have to learn how to delegate tasks.”

“I love your name,” Alice said. “It’s such a pretty name. Could you spell it for me?” Alice had picked up a brochure at the desk that said visitors should engage the residents in simple recall.

“I’ve changed my name.” Ottolie slowly blinked her eyes. “When I was a little girl traveling with my parents, their name was Wright. Mr. and Mrs. Wright. We all had a horse named Tony. Tony the horse. Have you ever had to bury a horse? It’s a heck of a dilemma. You need your father to do it. They’re the ones who do it best. Mothers are no good for that situation. Do you know what might happen to you tomorrow? You could fall or be pushed. You could be the result of a random bullet.” She leaned toward Alice with the details. “Somebody celebrating his baby daughter’s birthday, firing a gun into the air. You happened to be in the
vicinity. Wasn’t intended for you, was meant to fall harmlessly to earth, but it ended up on your plate anyway. Or mercury could leak through your gloves. Say you were conducting an experiment with a type of mercury that had no known relevance to anything and it splashed on your skin and there you’d be, six months down the road, rotting from the inside out. You’d say to yourself, Why was I fooling around?”

A nurse walked by Ottolie’s room and waved.

“Every person who dies in here,” Ottolie confided, “is the victim of one of those bitches relieving their sexual tension. They strangle us, and it relieves their sexual tension. I’m sure you don’t know anything about sexual tension—you’re too skinny—but these nurses have it.”

Another nurse passed by.

“That one’s the worst,” Ottolie said.

They both regarded the empty doorway and the wedge of waxed corridor beyond. Actually, Alice did have some suspicions about the nurses. In a book she’d been reading about nurses’ experiences in Vietnam she had come across one nurse’s account of goober contests. The nurse was working in a ward where no one ever got better, no one. They were all just boys in there, none of them much older than twenty, and they were all comatose and mostly limbless and the nurses would upon occasion, usually national holidays, place them in competition with one another. Bets were taken, money changed hands. The nurses would prop them all up in bed and arrange the beds in a row. Each nurse had a boy and each would clean out her boy’s tracheotomy hole at the same moment and the boys would involuntarily shoot out these big balls of phlegm, sometimes a considerable distance. The nurse recounted that she had had a hard time adjusting when she returned home, which was of little surprise to Alice. The boys who had shot the goobers were long dead, and the girl nurses were old women now, recalling their youth.