The Quick & the Dead (24 page)

Alice had a little theory about the soul that she was somewhat loath to share, as certain of her theories had been discredited in the past. For example, when Alice was a child, she had believed the sex of a baby was determined by the one who’d tried hardest in the making of love; girls were made by women who
concentrated
, and boys when the woman wasn’t quite paying attention. Concerning the soul, she had tentatively concluded that when someone ended up in this waxed and fluorescent way station that was Green Palms, his or her soul was still searching for the treasure meant for it alone. But the search had gone on just a shade too long. The soul didn’t know where it was, only that it was in the place where the treasure meant for it alone would never manifest itself. As a tentative conclusion, Alice had to admit this wasn’t much, and there were several large issues it didn’t address at all. Still, there had to be an explanation as to why some people ended up being tenured to death for so long without being dead.

“Birth is the cause of death,” Nurse Daisy liked to say, which is why they didn’t allow her to fill out the death certificates either, although she once had scribbled, “The set trap never tires of waiting,” and, since no one could decipher her handwriting, it sailed on through.

Nurse Daisy dragged and bobbled Freddie around in the tub. “Makes you feel like a little baby, doesn’t it, Freddie? Dawdling and dandling in here with all your life before you, which is why you can’t remember it.” She turned to Alice, “More suds, dear, please.”

Alice hauled in the brush and foamed it up with a bar of Ivory. She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to convince Nurse Daisy to eschew the use of Ivory.

“They test all their products on animals,” Alice had told her. “I could provide you with some very disturbing and convincing brochures.”

“Ivory soap is the madeleine of our country’s innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “No one can resist the evocative smell of Ivory on a bit of clothing or human skin, most exquisitely on bed linen. The smell draws one toward trees and earth, silken dough rising, rain in the early morning. The numbing weight of infrastructure, franchises, seven hundred channels—all is lifted from us with its purifying scent.” She fluttered her small, coarse hands Heavenward.

“Ivory soap’s parent company is responsible for the death of fifty thousand animals annually,” Alice said.

“Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “Honestly, dear, sometimes you sound as though you just fell off the turnip truck.” She gave Freddie a quick two dunks. “Whoopsie and whoopsie! Peekaboo! Here you are again!”

When Alice had first started coming here, Freddie would say, “I want to go
hoooome
,” just like they all did, but he didn’t say it anymore. The management explained to Corvus and Alice that the residents didn’t really want to go home, they just wanted things to be the same as they once had been. The distinction had to be made. Home didn’t have anything to do with it, they assured Alice and Corvus.

“Where’s your friend today?” Nurse Daisy asked.

“Which one?” she said.

“The only one you have. When I was your age, I only had one friend, too. We were girls together.”

“She’s assisting Nurse Cormac,” Alice said.

“Nurse Cormac was born with a wimple. I hate her pious guts. No balls. Timidest person I ever met. Feckless do-gooder. Simpleton.” She spoke without excitement.

Alice daubed Freddie unhappily. He was very old, inert, massive, and alive.

“You ever drown anyone doing this?” Alice said.

“Would they allow me to continue if I had?” She reeled Freddie in a bit.

“Well, I don’t know,” Alice said. “Don’t you think he’s clean enough now?”

Nurse Daisy pretended to look at a watch on her wrist, although Alice had never seen her wear one. “Still possible for your circle to close today, Freddie. Still some time left in the day for the circle to do the right thing. But the circle closes in its own good time, doesn’t it, Freddie? Can’t rush your secession into dust, the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea …” She had hoisted Freddie up and away from the tub and was keeping him more or less upright on a padded vinyl trolley. “Towels, please, dear,” she said to Alice.

With relief, Alice swaddled Freddie up. A soapy smell rose from his pale, globe-shaped head. Innocence. Incomprehension.

“There’s my little bunny,” Nurse Daisy said.

Someone screamed, and Alice blinked.

“Nothing serious,” Nurse Daisy said. “I know my screams.”

Alice frowned.

“You think I’m adding a teeny tiny bit to their suffering, don’t you?” the nurse said. “But no one consciously suffers here. That’s the tragedy of this place. All this remarkably calibrated suffering and not a bit of consciousness involved.”

Nurse Daisy dried Freddie and dressed him in a blue sweatshirt (“
Iowa Hawkeyes
today, Freddie”), a diaper and red sweatpants. She regarded her handiwork with a very complicated expression, an expression Nurse Cormac couldn’t have achieved if it had been painted on her. She stroked Freddie’s vigorously rampant eyebrows flat with her finger. The flesh around her simple gold wedding band was swollen. She should have that thing cut off and enlarged, Alice thought.

“Do you go home to a husband?” Alice inquired. She couldn’t imagine.

“I’m sure your own story is far more intriguing. Do you get credits for coming here? Points?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said.

“Complicado, our impulses. The tubies, dear, for Freddie’s feet.”

Alice ripped open a fresh package of tube socks. She knelt and pulled the white socks over the large feet, which were sadly warm, and bloused the sweatpants over them. Secreted beneath his skin just below the breastbone was a battery that kept his weary heart beating wantonly. It had been implanted when the subject of his future was still coming up. A
majority of the tenants of Green Palms were so implanted. Nurse Daisy called the apparatus the Devil’s little lamb. She called the socks toddling tubies for negotiating the chasm—the chasm, as Alice understood it, being the divide between life and death, although in this place the chasm had shrunk to a crack, even less than a crack, a crease, something technical and maladroit that people here couldn’t manage to fall into.

Freddie had a daughter who came to visit, and she was sixty-six, but Alice hadn’t seen her for a while.

They wheeled Freddie out of the scrub room into the main corridor, then down to an enclosed patio where they deposited him with three silent, similarly swaddled denizens. The patio faced the arbor where the employee of the month was entitled to park. All month a dented car painted with flowers, childish pansies, and petunias had been parked there. It belonged to Nurse Cormac, who frequently was awarded this honor.

“No daisies, you’ll notice,” Nurse Daisy said, “a quite conscious omission.”

“You ever get to park your car in that slot?” Alice asked.

Nurse Daisy ignored this absurdity, though she did snort softly through her delicate nostrils, another anomaly on her blocky, unbalanced face. The repertoire, if not the mobility, of her features seemed endless.

They both studied the small, optimistic, reliable car. A wooden fish, with which Nurse Cormac was known to be well pleased, carved in the Holy Land, dangled from the rearview mirror. It had been rendered in an abstract rather than classical manner. The only other explanation for the artist’s banal vision was that it wasn’t a fish at all.

They turned and walked back along the corridor, the smells of supper, creamed, minced, mashed, and pattied, preceding them.

“If we don’t take our time about it,” Nurse Daisy said, “we can still bathe Hattie.” Hattie used to be a beauty from Philadelphia with a lovely voice, but now, wrinkled, mute, and weighing scarcely more than a boom box, she was here. The body was but a foolish thing, Nurse Daisy liked to assure her, nothing but a counterpart, a substitute, a saboteur, a fraud, and a thief. Unremarkably, her words never soothed. If Nurse Cormac was known for assuring everyone she touched with her cool hands that
the Lord Jesus would appear to them in the manner that would enable them to see Him most clearly, in the form they would most recognize, a personalized, monogrammed, shaped-to-order savior for the end of each distinctive life, Nurse Daisy tirelessly projected an unambitious unimaginative Death, who showed up wearily and never on time.

A toilet flushed. Someone howled, “I want to go
hoooome
.”

“Do you know what position Freddie used to hold? He was an important man, a good man. It’s no secret. Let me tell you. He influenced thousands of lives in this state.”

“What difference does it make?” Alice said.

“So you think that reality is the present, is that what you think?”

This was the most remarkable query Alice had ever heard. She wasn’t going near this one. But she said, “Reality’s no present,” something her poppa might say but hadn’t to her knowledge. She wondered where Nurse Daisy went after work. She imagined her home to be a thorny, unwelcoming wattle.

“Ho ho,” she said. “Very good. Present as in ‘gift.’ Up for assisting me with Hattie?” She believed that Alice was not among her anonymous accusers, the names of which were legion.

In fact, Alice wasn’t one of them, but still the woman wore her out. She blushed and lied. “My friends and I are going to a movie.”

“In my day,” Nurse Daisy said, “when you went to a movie, just as you were settling in and the lights had gone out, a film personality would appear on the screen appealing for funds for some worthy cause promoting human health or longevity. A disease that required eradication—some part of the Devil’s work that needed to be stamped out. Do you believe that disease and death are the Devil’s work?”

“I do not.”

“The Devil is Jesus’ brother. Throw that up to Nurse Cormac sometime, she’ll go through the roof. Do you know anything about electricity?”

Charged particles manifesting themselves as attraction and repulsion, Alice thought mechanically, though she knew that for the nurse this explanation would hardly suffice.

“Negative electricity is as good as positive electricity,” Nurse Daisy instructed. “It’s all electricity.”

Alice thought with discomfort about her oftentimes casual use of electrical products.

“Let’s return to the movie I was speaking about—or rather, as it was in my day, the pitch before the movie. A film star would appear, and the star would appeal to you directly, look right into your eyes. He would acknowledge your presence before him. And he would talk about this or that disease or viral calamity or genetic injustice and his words would be interspersed with the images of all manner of humankind struggling to be well, and he would thank you in advance for opening up your heart. Then the lights would go on, and individuals would pass through the aisles soliciting donations. People would dig into their pockets and purses and give to fight the evil afflicting others. There was something about the lights and the rows upon rows of strangers and the waiting for the movie that would make every person give, not a single one abstaining.”

“I would’ve abstained,” Alice said.

“Your quarter would have paid for a monkey, your dime for a rabbit, your nickel for a mouse to help researchers find cures.”

“What!” Alice yelped. “You didn’t give, did you? You left the movie in protest, didn’t you?”

“You were able to do so much good for a quarter in those days. They made it easier for you than they do today. Today it’s harder to make a person feel guilty. You know the man who blew up the building and killed one hundred sixty people? His sister said he’s not guilty even if he did do it. His sister said, ‘He’s not a monster.’ She remembered happy times together. They played Clue. On their parents’ birthday they would make them breakfast and serve it to them in bed. How did that All-American ritual get started, do you think? It’s always seemed quite unwholesome to me. To serve your parents breakfast in bed on their birthdays? I’d bet anything you never did it.”

They had reached the nurse’s station, where the nurses were chatting about the previous evening, when two residents on the same floor had died within ten minutes.

“That happens so often,” one said. “Months go by, then out of the blue, one gets taken. Then another one.”

“You think It thinks, Well, as long as I’m
here
,” the other nurse said a
little giddily. She was regarding a plate of cookies as though it were all a matter of selection when clearly it was not, the cookies being identical as far as Alice could tell, round and brown with colored sprinkles. They looked desperate, as if baked by someone in despair. Most of the gifts or goods in Green Palms exhibited that aura. When the nurse finally selected one, she had to move others to get at it. She took her first bite just as wizened Wilson Greer II rolled up in his wheelchair.

“Is that the
balut
, ladies? Share the
balut
, for Christ’s sweet sakes! No hoarding!” He extended bony fingers toward the plate. Wilson had it in his head that any treat people gathered around was unhatched duck embryos still in the shell, something he’d discovered in the Philippines prior to becoming a guest of the emperor and participating in the Bataan Death March. There wasn’t anyone on the floor who didn’t associate water being sucked down a drain with Wilson’s aural memory of the sound of his best friend and fellow officer Colonel Rodney Wren being bayoneted on the road. There wasn’t anyone who had been around Wilson more than five minutes who didn’t have the catchy ditty

rollicking around their brains, insistent as any show tune.

“You’re not eating that correctly,” the hoary warrior told the nurse. “You have to make a little hole in it, suck out the broth, then peel the shell slowww-ly and eat the yolk and the chick. It’s best before the beak and feathers appear, but sometimes you can’t be choosy, you know?”