The Quick & the Dead (38 page)

Corvus’s eyes were open. She cleared her throat softly. “I …” she began.

Alice waited anxiously, encouraged.
I …
Who knew what it meant exactly, but it indicated that Corvus still knew how to disengage herself from the unconsciousness she preferred. She had inched out a bit from
the sleeping bag’s cocoon. These things were actually sort of malevolent-looking, Alice thought.

“I was in a tree,” Corvus said, “between the branches of a tree, and this voice was saying ‘I hold you lightly between two fingers, and if you disobey me I will drop you.’ ”

“Wow,” Alice said. “Who … what does it say you’re supposed to obey?”

“That wasn’t clear. It pretty much stresses the holding lightly part.” She cleared her throat again.

“I’m glad you’re awake. You’ve been sleeping for
days
. Why don’t we get out of here and camp in the Airstream for a while? We could hook it up to the truck and even go someplace.”

“The Airstream’s still here?”

“It’s parked in the side yard,” Alice said. Was it indeed in the side yard? Had the bad boys wearied of harvesting her granny and poppa’s unkempt vegetation to supply the demanding clean urine market and decided to employ themselves more traditionally by simply stealing things?

“I haven’t seen the Bubble for a while,” Corvus said. “I’d kind of forgotten about it.”

“Well, it’s right outside,” Alice said worriedly.

“I’ve been everywhere these last few days,” Corvus said. “I never want to travel again.”

“I just want to make sure it’s there,” Alice said. “I’ll be right back.”

Silence crept up on Corvus again, encircling her. She’d been dreaming too of a great racetrack enveloped in fog, a light on a great stanchion burning in but not through the fog. People thronged the course. A laconic voice said,
The field is in motion
. She was not of the race. She was alone, watching it.
Innumerable millions
, the voice said. She felt the fog lingering, dissolving on her face. Again she was weeping.

She crawled out of the sleeping bag and stood up, then walked unsteadily down the little hall to the bathroom. She wore a shirt of her father’s. Fury gazed at her without moving. Everything had been scaring the soup out of him for days. Who was that now? He was too anxious to bark, and what was the use, anyway, what was the use of sounding the alarm?

Beyond the thin, aqueous-colored wall she heard Alice’s poppa saying, “They don’t use the word
used
anymore. With cars it’s preowned. With books, preread. With clothes what would you say, preoccupied?” Around her on the shelves were the old people’s innocent salves and potions, their eyewashes and aspirins and expectorants, their Q-tips and Vicks and Pond’s, their flannel cloths and boxes of Endangered Species Band-Aids. The shower curtain hung before the tub on a crooked suction-cupped rod featuring grand, Rubenesque ladies gazing in a sultry manner out at the toilet, which had a puffy-lidded seat the color of charlotte russe.

It all was sadness, every bit of it, the purchasing and placing alike.

On the shelf was a little black comb, an old person’s comb, sincere and ready to work, hardened dandruff high up in the tines. Corvus regarded it for some time. Then her eyes fell on a nail brush, and she ran water and used it to scrub the comb. Dark particles fell onto the sink’s white surface, small particles, but not extremely small. The universe supposedly had come into being in the form of an extremely small particle containing space and time. Or through an event, was the newest theory, and, lacking form of any kind, contained the genesis for space and time though not, in the beginning, space and time itself. The elegance of the newest theory consisted in the admission that there was no beginning. This was debunked by more ambitious theoreticians.

The black flakes stopped falling. The comb now appeared a lovely shining thing. Ace, by name. A particle. An atom. A jot.

She would like to devote herself to such small, foolish good works, to have nothing, to labor in a job without honor, purposelessly, without contrition, for years. Each day the same though not the same, day after obsolete day in infinite vocation. The secretive thread of the weeks. She would labor unconjoined. She would not be remembered.

Corvus went barefoot down the hallway, past Alice’s room, past the living room where Alice’s poppa’s face was bathed in the television’s ashen glow. “Hello there,” he called. Alice’s granny was preparing snacks in the kitchen. “Who’re you talking to, dear?” she said. He saw no one now. He’d been seeing more phantasms than usual of late. Maybe he should put a hold on those cheesy snacks of Ritz and cheddar, the most
daring offering they made to one another these days, miniature Grim Reapers, little artery-wadding missives, Belial buttons on a chipped floral plate. But he liked them.

Outside, there was still some daylight not yet squandered, but the big crime lights on the concrete phone poles were shining regardless. The street was lined tightly with vehicles, though no car passed. Corvus’s Dodge truck was at the curb fifty yards away. She softly passed the Airstream on her thin light feet. The door was open, and she glimpsed Alice moving about inside. It looked all jumbled up in there, a-tilt and a-scatter, and Alice was bent over a bowl, about to pick it up.

Corvus padded down the sidewalk. It was smooth and wide, and profane suggestions in both Spanish and English were etched on each square, the words in cramped unhurried script, as though copied from some holy guide instead of being its own screaming, shit-streaked cabala. She reached the truck. Someone had sideswiped the door and she couldn’t open it, so she opened the passenger door and slid across the seat. She pulled out, shifting slowly, no thought arising, to Green Palms.

Nurse Daisy stood outside, smoking a cigarette and cooling her forehead with a moist baby wipe.

“
Catachresis
is the word of the day,” she said to Corvus in greeting. “It was yesterday’s word as well and, most probably, tomorrow’s. It should be emblazoned on the pediments of this place. Catachrestic. Catachrestical. Catachrestically. The sound alone’s enough to have one running for the exits. There’s a rattle to it, a yeomanly phlegm. Its root means ‘against what is necessary.’ But try using it in a sentence. It won’t fit. Resists the long thought. Nurse Cormac ran off with the exterminator. Those exterminators can talk rings around most people, and she fell for him hard.”

She had drawn the cigarette right down to the filter and now placed it in a sand-filled urn among a good hundred others. “I sometimes think of freshening this up, raking the sand tidy with a fork, lightly sketching a pattern of wings in the Gnostic manner. I never will, of course, because I
like it this way too. Not doing one thing is equal to not doing something else. Who said the following? ‘Love, and do what you will.’ ”

Corvus cleared her throat but didn’t speak. Corvus, barefoot, in her father’s shirt, her hair unwashed.

“We have a new neighbor in my neighborhood.” Nurse Daisy pulled out a fresh baby wipe from a packet and rubbed it over her temples. “It’s a pet drop-off bin. People can drop off unwanted dogs and cats in specially marked bins. It’s rather like a mail chute, which will accept animals up to fifty pounds. They drop down softly into a concrete chamber, which is checked and emptied once a day. They’re kept for four days at the shelter, where they’re offered the opportunity for another life in the form of a stranger coming in, though as you know there are never enough strangers. On the fifth day, bright and early, before the sun comes up, before the water dish has to be filled again, there’s sodium Pentothal, quick-quick-quick. It’s a humane alternative. There’s disease out there, worms, blindness, mange, valley fever. There’s neglect and random cruelty. There are designer poisons that take days to work their way through the system. How would you define,” Nurse Daily asked, “the word
humane
?”

Two wraiths pottered out onto the balcony above them and dawdled, scratching their arms. Corvus could hear the rasp of their dry skin.

“I know how you got this far,” Nurse Daisy said. “You figured out what you ought not to do, and you determined to do it. Against all advice. Not against the odds, however. The odds were always good. But to serve is not to love, you know. You could be washing old feet from now till doomsday, and there’ll still be that hard dark little seed of doubt, that seed of awareness that isn’t love.”

The wraiths looked down on them with immense eyes. They scratched.

“I hope you don’t think you’ve been chosen,” Nurse Daisy said.

Corvus said nothing.

“I would rather speak five words with my understanding than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue, as the Good Book says. But you understand nothing, so you’ve decided to be dumb, and how long will this last, forever?” She looked out at Corvus from deep within her mismatched face. “Nurse Cormac was such a talker. My ears still ring from
her prattle.” She touched her tiny ears, which looked as though they’d been grafted on in some long-ago emergency operation by an inappropriate donor. “Winging her way to Kansas, she is, with her exterminator. Back to the seemingly endless plains where he was partly raised, back to the rats in the silos who were missing their master, missing his particular etiquette with them.”

One of the wraiths was scratching his white arm with a card, an efficient scraping that sounded different from the other’s ragged nails. Then the card tore free and fell like a dart at Corvus’s feet. A Happy Birthday card with balloons on it, much thumbed and twisted. Inside, someone had written, “From all of us.” The wraith leaned over the balcony railing, gesturing wildly, and commenced to cry. The other wraith began blubbering as well. “Hey!” Nurse Daisy screamed. They both fell silent and stared at Corvus resentfully.

“They can’t see you, of course,” the nurse said. “Most everyone in this residence has the dark water in their eyes, glaucoma. They only pretend to see you. It’s much like life here, but it’s not life and that’s why you came back. Because you were going to leave us, weren’t you? You were that close to leaving, but then—let me guess—you saw some cruddy thing that had within it all the importunate treasure of
being
, some cruddy thing that turned radiant in the light of your regard. So you’ve come back to wait without waiting, as one waits for the dead. You’re not one of those signs-and-wonders girls; you’ll have nothing to teach, you’ll serve in silence, you’ll get the dark water yourself, you’ll labor undetected, they’ll bury you out of this place like some failed old postulant.”

The card beamed up at Corvus, its little back cracked.
From all of us!

“That funny friend of yours,” Nurse Daisy continued, “does she know about your decision? What a funny friend. She would’ve dissuaded you if she were able, but she’s not able enough. Solitude is no refuge for the rebellious. She would never begin her search here. And if we’re not what we will become, what are we, then?”

Corvus stood motionless. The evening’s small moths dabbled around her.

“It’s better to be dumb,” the nurse said, “than to speak from a heart that’s all darkness and distraction. I’m agreeing with you. I suppose we should go in. Are you ready to enter our little charnel community, not as
docent or guide but as a living member? Do you vow to keep your wits among the witless? Do you commit yourself to pondering ceaselessly the uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love, that great reality for which all else must be abandoned?” She stood and seemed to lunge toward Corvus, but it was just one of the heels on her sensible shoes skidding, no harm done.

“I’m not glad you came,” Nurse Daisy said. “If I were the wishing sort, I’d have wished otherwise, for your sake. But I haven’t wished for anything for years and years.”

They passed the children’s drawings on the wall. Pigs, cows, and bears. Wolves and butterflies. Birds, lots of birds.

“Scant comfort, the gullibility of children,” Nurse Daisy remarked. “It’s completely cynical, this continuous peddling of the natural world. It’s not out there anymore! Even old-timers don’t find anything familiar in this empty symbolizing, this feckless copycatting.”

She looked at Corvus. “I’d wager that as a child you colored between the lines. And where has it gotten you?”

There was a newly empty room. In fact, an aide was still washing down the plastic sealing the mattress; some still bright flowers were tumbled in a cardboard carton along with rubber gloves and the menu for the week. “I want to go
hommmmmme
,” Nurse Daisy mimicked softly. “Thirty-one months, every waking minute, not one bloody, blessed other phrase.”

Fluorescent brightness gnawed at the room. The aide swiped the mattress with a lavender sponge. There was a fuzzy slipper in the carton, a paper roll of pennies, not filled entirely, maybe thirty cents’ worth. Corvus looked at all this from not far away, drifting, with the raven’s eye.

The nurse scooped up the coin roll and dropped it into the pocket of her smock, which shone dully as though waxed. “It costs more to make pennies than they’re worth, but the utterly useless exerts a sobering
restraint upon society. If I have a penchant for anything, I believe it’s for useless things.”