The Visiting Privilege (49 page)

H
e had taken the boat from the mainland when he was still a young man and stayed on. He remembered the first night being the hardest, as they say the first night of being dead must be. But he was not newly dead, he was entering for the first time what would become his life. He slept that first night on the beach, curled behind a boat, and his dreams were no longer those of his childhood—the plastic ball enclosing a plastic lion crushed by the doctor's car as over and over the doctor's pale car arrived at the anguished house.

He woke to a stinging rain and a strong east wind. The road to town was dark with little birds, dovekies he was later told, little auks blown in from the storm. He scooped up as many as he could catch and placed them in the bushes.

“Not there, not there!” a man in yellow oilskins shouted. “They live only on water, they can't lift their bodies into flight from land!”

Together they carried dozens back to the sea but as many others died exhausted in their hands.

Later the man in oilskins said to him, “What is your name?”

“Nicodemus.”

“Not Nick?”

“Nicodemus.”

“He was the gentle one.”

The man was long retired from some successful industry. Now he was a hobbyist, a birder. He offered to hire Nicodemus as a handyman for his own grand residence, which he would vacate after Thanksgiving. In a matter of weeks, Nicodemus knew everyone on the winter island. He fixed pumps, caulked boats, split wood. He shingled roofs with the help of the waning moon.

Still, nothing was familiar to him here, neither morning nor evening. In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. Dusk and night being a figment of fog, an exhaustion of wave, the time when blackness sank into the town as if buildings and trees were a pit to be filled.

A deer fell on the once friendly hillside, the crack of the gun sounding a playful instant later.

His benefactor died on the mainland in a traffic accident. The great stone house was sold immediately. Nicodemus stayed on, in a single-room cottage on the grounds. In the South it would have been called a shack. He became more solitary; his health was not good, but his strength never failed him, he was very strong.

The new owners' big Airedale had had surgery. Nicodemus carried the dog into the house and laid him on pillows and comforters that had been arranged on the floor by the fireplace.

“When do the stitches come out,” Nicodemus asked.

“They don't take them out anymore,” the new owner said. “They dissolve on their own when their work is done.”

The man's wife was slouched in a wing chair reading a paperback book. She looked at the dog and said, “Poor guy, poor Blue.” Then she glanced at the book again. “Lem hated the film Tarkovsky made of
Solaris.
I want to see
Stalker
again. I think it's his masterpiece. What a genius.”

“Would you like a drink,” the man asked Nicodemus.

He shook his head.

“I'd like a drink,” the woman said. “Something fun, not just a gin and tonic.”

“A martini?”

“That's not fun, that's trouble. Oh, don't bother to make me anything.”

“Breakfast of Champions. That's what Kurt Vonnegut called a dry gin martini.”

“Oh yes,” she said, mollified. “He's a genius. When he speaks, it's genius speaking.”

The dog did not recover. Within the week Nicodemus was called upon to bury him.

“I can't do it,” the man said. “I loved Blue so much. I just can't see him now, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Nicodemus said, though he did not.

“I don't like that man,” the woman confided to her husband. “Do you know the story of that servant of Frank Lloyd Wright's? He went berserk and killed Wright's mistress and her children, others too, with a shingling ax. He served luncheon, then killed them and burned the house down as well.”

“Nicodemus is not a servant,” he said, laughing.

“Yes he is, he's dying to serve, that one, believe me.”

Her husband laughed again and shrugged, but she had decided. She didn't like Nicodemus, his silence, his solitariness.

“I think he's illiterate too,” she said. “I bet he is.”

At the end of the summer, he was let go. It was all right. He found another place, a real shack this time, out by the old haulover, past the striped lighthouse that the summer residents had moved back from the eroding cliffs at enormous expense.

Fewer than a hundred people lived on the island in the winter. The library and church were closed. The hotel was boarded up and the flags put away. The numbered planks of the beach club's pier were stacked in the ballroom. There was a single fire engine but no school. Someone taught him backgammon, baffled that he didn't excel at darts. He drank bitter coffee at the grocer's store.

A scalloper opened the door and announced, “I must bring back the can of corn I bought yesterday. I thought it was pineapple.”

The bakery remained open. Her specialty was still Parker House rolls.

“Maybelle come in the other day and she says she's got two husbands. ‘Why, Maybelle,' I start, and she says, ‘One drunk and one sober.' ”

The ferry came three times a week in winter, sometimes not even that when ice choked the passage. But the winters were no longer as cold as they had been, the storms as dire. The dovekies had only that one year been blown ashore, the year he had arrived, now a long time ago.

He could no longer work as he once had. Sometimes, he couldn't catch his breath and at those times he would think, You're my breath, you belong to me. We have to work together. You need me too, he'd address his breath. But oddly, he didn't really believe his breath belonged to him. It was a strange thought that didn't trouble him particularly.

Each summer, more and more people arrived on the island with their enormous vehicles, their pretty children and roisterous pets. It was another season and each summer Nicodemus liked them a little less and they liked him a little less as well, no doubt. There were more creatures dead in the summer. Drowned dogs, car-hit cats and deer and foxes. All manner of birds, gulls, herons and songbirds bright as gold coins. One night in August, on one of his late strolls, for he no longer slept well, he came upon a flock of wild ducks that had attempted to walk across a road that bisected two ponds, a habit safe enough at certain hours and one accommodated mostly with tolerant amusement. But some vehicle had torn through them and continued on, leaving a crumpled wake of the dead and the dying.

Nicodemus picked them up and placed them beside the marsh's shores. Others he put in his jacket, attempting to calm and warm them before their inevitable deaths. This was observed by some who passed by, including Brock Tilden, the owner of a new guesthouse. He admired the thoroughness with which Nicodemus returned the unfortunate site to a relative sense of serenity, even carrying some of the birds off with him, perhaps to eat, Brock thought, for Nicodemus was known to be both odd and resourceful.

Brock was a big booster of the island and its potential. He was a gracious hotelier and many who stayed in his pleasant rooms were so charmed by his enthusiasm and helpfulness that they went on to buy or build places of their own. Brock's idealized version of the island relied heavily on the picturesque and the modestly abundant—he had organized the first daffodil festival in his gardens only that spring—and the dead animals that were increasingly littering the roads and lanes had become an aesthetic problem, demanding a solution.

He conferred with several of the other business owners and they sought out Nicodemus and presented a proposition. They would provide him with a truck, a gasoline card at the dock's pumps and two thousand dollars a year to make the island appear as though death on the minor plane were unknown to it.

“On the minor plane,” Nicodemus said.

“Well, yeah, we can't do anything about the big stuff,” Brock said, thinking irritably about the prep school boy suiciding by his daddy's basement table saw in June just as the season was starting, or the stockbroker all over the news who was found with an anchor line tied around his ankle. “But we can maintain a certain look that sets this place apart. Dead animals are disturbing to many people. There's also the ick factor.”

“What about litter,” Nicodemus asked.

“We've got people for litter. This job is yours alone. We'll put it in the beautification budget.”

The truck was old but the heater worked and the clutch didn't slip. The bed was wood and had slatted sides. Nicodemus drove slowly along the roads with a red cloth hanging from the tailgate and when he saw the carcass of a dead bird or animal that had been killed due to a momentary and fatal lapse in watchfulness or timing, he would signal a stop, paddling his arm from the window, and step down to the sand-straddled road. He would always pick them up with his ungloved hands and lay them carefully in the truck. He stroked the clotted fur, arranged the stiffening limbs and curved talons, then wrapped them in scraps of sheets and towels. He put the dogs and cats he deemed to have been pets in coffins of cardboard in case they would be claimed and restored to someone's futile care. He printed descriptions on cards and posted them on the grocer's public board along with the advertisements for massages, pellet stoves and dories. If they were not claimed in two days he would bury them in the meadow ringed with pines behind his shack. It was the blackness of their eyes that touched him, the depthless dark of their eyes.

In the winter nights, the sea could have been dark fields or an endless forest of felled trees.

In his room, he ate from chipped plates and forks marked with another's initials, and kept letters that had never been for him neatly tied with string. He had a postcard of a lion in a zoo and one that spoke of a William he had never known from an Elisabeth who promised she would soon arrive. He took the letters from the dump, from the sunken spots in the ground that the flames couldn't reach. The gulls wobbled in the smoke's heat when the island's trash was burned there, and the letters smelled of orange rind and ash.

All his worn furnishings came from the dump. “What do you do with your money, Nicodemus?” they teased him. He didn't know, he had no idea where it was and didn't need it.

He was gaunt, but clean and neat. His hands became the most remarkable things about him. They were beautiful, unworn by the work he did. “You need a good pair of gloves, Nicodemus,” they said. But he didn't wear gloves even on the bitterest days, when even the sandpipers' heartbreaking cries were quieted by the cold.

In the summer, the children called him the Undertaker. They would sometimes kill small things for sport and say, “The Undertaker will take care of them now.”

He slept little. He didn't think he slept at all, but that was an illusion, he knew. He would think of himself as resting beneath a large black wave, just before it curled and fell, wondering: Why am I this Nicodemus? Why am I not another? When I die, will I become another? Does God love all equally? Does he love the living more than the dead?

It seemed to him that God must love the living more, but could he love the dead less, having made them so?

That summer was the hottest anyone could remember. The flowers browned against the white fences, the berries withered before they were blue. At the ends of the roads, there were dark mirages and the boats seemed to ride on glass.

One night, as he buried a shattered animal, he placed a note in its grave.

Later, he thought, I must not do that again.

He wore his wool shirt, his heavy serge trousers, and he was shivering from the heat as he drove down the road. The boy who always begged to travel with him when he worked was waiting as he always was and Nicodemus, for the first time, stopped and picked him up. Everyone knew the boy. He wasn't a bad boy, but if someone asked if they liked Peter their answer would be,
Not yet.

They found a deer first, then two raccoons, small and large, the warm wind still purling through their fur. Nicodemus stayed in the cab while the boy heaved the bodies into the back. The following day he picked the boy up again, though he could barely look at him. But after that, no more.

They found him in his shack, his beautiful hands crossed on his chest, his mouth agape in the awful manner of the dead. He was old and he'd had a strange life. It was unsustainable, really, the life he was leading at the end, the kind of work he'd devoted himself to.

They missed Nicodemus. And Peter was no more than an epigone, they agreed. Still, they had to say that the boy managed to keep the island just as clean.

A
year after my mother moved farther out, she became obsessed with building a tortoise enclosure. This was in preparation for receiving a desert tortoise—
Gopherus agassizii—
or, as the Indians would say, or rather had said,
komik'c-ed—
shell with living thing inside. That's the Tohono O'odham Indians. My mother said she'd read that somewhere.

I was recently at a party and found myself talking to a linguist who told me that we had been pronouncing
komik'c-ed
incorrectly but that it meant pretty much what my mother claimed it did.

Sometimes I drink too much but mostly I don't. I go to AA meetings on occasion but I can't really bond with those people and never see them socially. They're nice enough but some of them have been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I have a copy of the Big Book and sometimes I read around in it but it never makes me cry like Wordsworth's
Prelude,
say. I don't have
The
Prelude
anymore. I misplaced it, unbelievable, but it was falling apart with my looking at it so much and I moved away too after my father died so it was probably misplaced then. My mother is a widow now for two years but she never worries about her situation or talks about it like some people would. She never let on to me or others that she was sorrowful or lonely. I'm twenty-one. It could be argued that there are worse ages to lose your father than in your twentieth year but I found it to be a difficult time, mostly because I was just old enough to try to take it in stride. Sometimes I think it would have been worse if I was eight or even twelve and I don't know why I indulge myself like that. It doesn't make me feel better and I admit I have no imaginative access to the person I was then. I can't imagine that girl at all. I certainly can't imagine having a conversation with her. My mother told me that when I was eight all I wanted to do was swim. Swim, swim, swim. Then I stopped wanting to do this. When I was twelve she said that my most cherished possession was a communication badge I'd earned in Girl Scouts. It showed a tower emitting wiggly lines.

Which is odd because communicating is not a skill I naturally or unnaturally possess. I'd prefer to think of myself as a witness, but honestly, I doubt I'm even that.

The apartment I moved into is a shithole but convenient. Bars, restaurants, automobile services galore and a Trader Joe's where you can buy pizzas fast-frozen in Italy and coconut water from Thailand, not that they're unusual anymore, it's what's come to be expected. The apartment complex is clean, inexpensive and devoid of character. We tenants just refer to it as a shithole because it's so soul-sucking. We don't really believe our souls are being destroyed of course because we feel we have more power over our situation than that. The facility has a good view of sunsets in the summer when they're not at their most legendary and it's too hot to sit outside and view them anyway.

Shortly after my father died and I moved into the shithole without even my
Prelude
to remind me of loftier, simpler and more beautiful emotions, my mother sold our house in the foothills and moved into a run-down adobe on thirty acres of land in the mountains. Is there any kind of adobe other than run-down? I think not.

After a while she began to speak frequently of a neighbor, Willie, and his water-harvesting system. He had a twenty-six-thousand-gallon belowground cistern and got all his water from roof runoff during our infrequent but intense rains. I feared Willie might be a transitional figure in my mother's life but he turned out to be an old man in a wheelchair with an old wife so cheerful she must have been on a serious drug regimen. They did have an ingenious water-collection system and I was given a tour of all the tanks and tubes and purifiers and washers and chambers that provided them with such good water and made them happy. They also kept bees and had an obese cat. The cat, or rather its alarming weight, seemed out of character for their way of life but I didn't mention it. Instead, I asked them if his name was spelled with an
ew
or an
ou.
They found this wildly amusing and later told my mother they'd liked me very much. That and a dollar fifty will get me an organic peach, I said. I don't know why my mother's enthusiasm for them irritated me so much. Soon they were gone, however, both carried off by some pulmonary infection that people get from mouse pee. A man my mother described as a survivalist later moved into their house and I was told little about him other than he didn't seem to know how to keep the system going and ended up digging a well.

It was Lewis with an
ew
that kept bringing diseased rodents into the house, is my suspicion.

From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city's botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.

My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film's existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.

On the other hand I find it difficult to believe that my father no longer exists. He lives in something I do not recognize. Or no longer recognize and never will again. There are philosophers who maintain we are not our thoughts and that we should disassociate ourselves from them at every opportunity. But without this thought, I would have no experience of the world and even less knowledge of my heart.

I've had a comfortable life. I've not been troubled or found myself an outcast or disadvantaged in any way. This too was the case with my mother and father. Lives such as ours are no longer in vogue. Since I've lived in the shithole, however, I've found that another's perception of me can sometimes be unexpected. For example, the other night I was looking at some jewelry in an unsecured case at Hacienda del Sol, waiting for my friends to arrive so we could start drinking overpriced tamarind margaritas, and this hostess stalks up to me and says, “Can I help you”…in other words, You look beyond suspicious, what are you even doing here…

She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.

“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she'd been the one to feel my father's last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she'd evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.

My point is that however fortunate your life or—considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it—your death, it's usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.

So my mother is out there alone, in what I swear is one of the darkest parts of the mountain, with only a rarely-in-residence survivalist for a neighbor, and she is erecting a three-hundred-square-foot protective enclosure for a reptile that isn't even endangered, though my mother claims it should be.

I don't go out there much to visit, not nearly as often as I should, I suppose, but I'm aware that the work is proceeding slowly. My mother is insisting on doing everything herself. The most strenuous part is digging the trench, which Fish and Wildlife guidelines mandate should be fourteen inches deep. The trench is then to be filled with cement and a wall no less than three feet tall built on top of it. All this is to prevent the tortoise from escaping, for this is to be an adopted tortoise, one that has been displaced by development and should not be allowed to return to a no longer hospitable environment. At the same time, everything within the enclosure should mimic its natural situation. There should be flowering trees and grasses, a water source and the beginnings of burrow excavations, facing both north and south, that the tortoise can complete.

The site my mother had chosen was several hundred yards from the adobe. Wouldn't it be easier, I asked, if she just enclosed an area using one of the house's walls? Then she wouldn't have to dig so much, it would be more of a garden, and she could bring out a table and chairs, have her coffee out there in the morning, maybe have a little fire pit for the evening—no, not a fire pit, certainly, what was I thinking? But possibly her aim should be the creation of a pleasant and meditative place that she could utilize for herself as well as for this yet unacquired tortoise.

Actually, I think a space for meditation is the last thing my mother needs. I don't even know why I mentioned it. She didn't respond to my suggestion anyway. She simply said she wasn't doing this for herself.

The earth on the mountain is volcanic and poor. Some of the stones my mother dislodges are as big as medicine balls. She uses some sort of levering tool. Still, it's dangerous work, as every part of the grieving process is if it's done correctly. Don't think I don't realize what my mother's up to.

“If you injure yourself your independent aging days might as well be over,” I said. She laughed, which I hoped she would. “Where did you come across that dreadful phrase,” she asked. “Someone in the shithole,” I answered, and she laughed again. “Why are you punishing yourself,” she said, “by living in that place?”

One of my acquaintances here is a widow too, but she's only ten years older than I am. Her husband died in one of those stupid head-on wrecks blamed by the surviving driver on the setting sun.
It blinded me!
She kept his shoes. People would visit her and there would be his running shoes in the bathroom, his boots by the couch, and if he'd been old enough for slippers they would have certainly been by the bed. They'd been in the home they had before she moved here, now sort of on display, she told me, sort of stagy. Everyone who saw them was moved to tears and she kept them out longer than she should have, she realized that. Then one day she just threw them away—they were too beat-up to give to charity—and she got rid of a lot of other things as well and moved into the shithole.

We can't keep pets here. It's one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don't feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he'd received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was no mention of what happened to the dog afterward, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?

Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it's not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.

“So,” I say to my mother, “have you met this tortoise?”

She said she hadn't, but had filled out all the paperwork and was on a list. She'd be contacted when the enclosure was complete.

“So you don't know how old it is or whether it's a he or a she or whether it's a special-needs tortoise with a malformed shell or a missing leg.”

“I don't,” my mother said.

“I would think that after going through all of this, all the womanhours and expense, you'd want a perfect tortoise.”

“Well,” my mother said, “maybe I'll get one.”

My mother used to be much more talkative. There used to be a lot more going on, more being said, lots of cheerful filler. Maybe that's why I go to AA as much as I do because at least people are telling stories, pathetic and predictable as they may be, and all manner of reassurances and promises are being made. When I go into my mother's little house now, I don't recognize much. There seems to be very little remaining of the life I had known, been cocooned in, you might say. I should have emerged from it in glorious certitude by now.

Often I think, and it is with a certain dismay, that I will age out of the shithole one day, for it is a young crowd who reside here briefly and then move on. The ones who stay don't remain in touch with those who leave. What would we speak of with one another? When someone vacates, the manager comes in, paints the walls, sands the floors and cleans the windows. New tenants arrive quickly—it's cheap, practically free! It's convenient! We're not crazy about them at first but we gradually enfold them. No point in playing favorites here. We're all pretty much the same.

My mother finally finished the trench. It was pretty impressive when you think it was all accomplished by her hand. Then she bought some rebar and a cement mixer and in really no time it was all filled in and ready to accept the blocks. But then matters slowed down again. It was June and the heat was beginning to build. She'd be working, covered head to toe and with a hat and welder's gloves, but gradually she'd only get a few hours in between dawn and dusk. The rest of the time I don't know what she did—waited in that little adobe for dawn and dusk, I suppose. She didn't have air-conditioning, just a rattling, inefficient swamp cooler in need of new pads.