Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (4 page)

Except when I hurt, this shall be your story.

End lesson one. You won’t mind, will you, if I run a bit past the bell?

And. For. It? (Something’s missing here, but no matter.)

When God wrote on Belshazzar’s wall, the critic Daniel decided the enigmatic words were “weighed weighed counted divided,” and that they meant the king’s reign had been judged inadequate and that his land would be divided. But here, instead of a judgment, they are an injunction: writer, reader, weigh everything twice, make everything count, and separate yourself from your writing reading the way the snake sheds its skin, while bearing in mind, too, who you reader writer are—you are the slough, and your common text is the sly shining snake.

I wonder what disease it is I have, whether I shall die tomorrow, or sometime later. Considerations of this kind lend no urgency to my work. That only happens in stories, and the idea of death makes me nervous. It’s two forty-five. And dustily snowing. Peg Crandall has gallstones. She’s awake with the pain. Pister Welcome is hiding from his fate. Lycoming rots in his grave. I wish it were light. And morning.

For in the morning I shall make paths over the hills, shape five-pointed stars, draw the balls of bulls, and on a steep slope like the side of an advertising sign, I shall step off the word—
lemonade
—in a hand that’s a double of the deity’s.

The spirits were not easy in the house. The cupboards, for instance. And the deep malicious grass. She would have to persuade him to move.

The spirits were uneasy, restless, tossing like a sleeper at dreams, and Ella listened, filling the empty afternoons with their concerns, her husband at his insurance, autumn at the still gray mark it makes before blowing into winter. It would be hard, he loved his grass. She pulled at her teeth and felt the beginnings of one of his corrections. He was forever making mistakes and dragging that rough long redgreen angular eraser bumpily over the error, bulging the paper.

Here’s his moonlike face coming in, not a cloud or a star, shining down on a desk leafed in paper. His plump hands finalize a crease. Rings dignify his fingers. Rolls of rubber lie like defecations. There it is: tissuey, pink. First the white, then the carbon and the flimsy. Next an art gum to neaten. He’ll whisk it all off in an instant, she thought, or blow the leavings in the air. That should belie him. His manner, his business, the whole of his duplicator life, should be exposed by the puff, but the poor tormented creatures whom he cheats, they cannot understand or care, they don’t wish in any way to believe it. He could pee out his nose, they’d not notice, they’re so frightened, so polite.

She slid one of the humps, gathering speed. O
OWO
O. Gum left crumbs, not rolls of rubber. She felt them between her toes unpleasantly. Never need false ones live to be a hundred. Here—’way we go. O
OHO
O. A body could come to grief. She never understood why vocal emanations were so easy from his office or why her husband’s voice, when he was there, was always captured in her coffeepot, escaping wanly out the spout. Dear me. Death and taxes. The Lord knew—bless His splendid hair—she didn’t like to slide that well. Edgar’s mouth was surely nothing like a spout, more like the slot in a needy box. You’ll be well taken care of, Mrs. Muvvers, a policy like this. Protection against death. S
PA
aa. Ella cruelly scratched and stretched her legs. Hot water would steam him out. You will always be poor at spiritual analogy, you haven’t the astral eye at all, Madame Betz
had said. All rightie, Madame Smart, I’ll read a book to pick up speed. Madame Betz had a combative head. Run over by a train, the cards had said—no—Wednesday—eleventh. That would be the Central likely since it was the only one to Stocking not a block from her. Well, she’d not live to be a hundred either, thank the recumbent Lord. Not in the cards. But she’d have a good skullful of teeth—that was a comfort. Oh sliding was indeed a pleasure. She’d have to take back all her reservations. A pleasure it was. One of the few remaining. O
OHO
O.

Sunk in a chair, arms and shoulders aching, Ella stared at her thin brown hands as they made the motions of cutting and dealing cards, and through the lattice of their pantomime she heard and felt and saw the bodies of the ghostly dead in the pop of contracting timber, in the smokelike grain of wood in doors, in the presence of draughts in the shut house. She put water to the coils and drew the blinds until the thinnest of its patterns marked the walls; then sank with a weary groan into the flower-covered chair and held up her weary hands to cut and deal and conjure. To be water and metal and not to mind. Then a gray waste of ease for a moment. Peculiarity of quiet. Contentment of non-being. Not a star in the sky, not an eye. Gratefully she rested, bobbing softly. The water hissed and steam plumed in the kitchen. Hushush. The spirits put their palms over Ella’s ears. Through the crossing, through the interlacing of her fingers, better than any milky bowl or any smokey glass, she could hear the spirits treading the silence.

It hadn’t been easy: becoming a clairvoyant. Ella’d had to refine the organs she already had past any range and tolerance printed on their ticket, create others out of nipples, belly button, warts and scars and finger ends, then even from thumbs and elbows, the most recalcitrant pieces of her body, making them receivers of signals never before known, and refining her general dialing and directional procedures, so that each hair was
an antenna, whether stationed on her head or across her eyebrows, out a mole, underarm, above her pubes, down her leg, in her ear or nose; likewise her teeth were tuned, her sunken cheeks were dishier than a radar’s, and her lobes turned like wary eyes.

Noises, I can see noises, she had once said to a neighbor, immediately regretting it, seeing the tremor in her neighbor’s face. It was a face like her own face, a famished face: narrow, high, deeply socketed, thin. There was a soul like her own soul too, behind it. Ella’s conviction was that her own had the shape and nature of molasses. Her neighbor’s face, however, was not wrinkled and brown as Ella’s body was all over. It was pale and transparent, and her skull lay like a quiet shadow under it. Ella could see, she thought, the world of her neighbor in her neighbor’s head. She had told her friend something about the spirits, a good deal in fact, too much perhaps—yes, almost certainly too much, but it was even now necessary not to surprise her. The world rolled through her like a sea, the skin no seawall to it, and no one afloat in that tide could have guessed by a sky change or by any other that they had been swept beyond her body wall and bobbed now in the basin of her brain. Her smile would be the same, her eyes would glow with the same warmth, her head incline to the same sign of sympathy and kindliness as if nothing had passed between you but a bit of the mildly interesting and sometimes useful spew of the sea. Sympathy she had, the sympathy of the ocean: vast, unconscious, and impersonal. Nevertheless, from time to time a gesture or a grimace or a tale would disappear and not return, caught in something underneath that indifferent surge which Ella decided was her neighbor’s similar soul, and then her neighbor’s eyes would narrow and her lips tremble and her skin darken. For a moment there would be a real wall between them, and Ella would think, ah, now she is conscious of herself.

Ella had been wrinkled when she married. Now her edges were yellow and her hair streaked; her eyes like the holes of pebbles in the moment after striking water. Her nose was pinched and her eyes were angular and sharp, as were her chin and the bones at the base of her neck. Between her meager breasts, because of a cheap crucifix (now pitted with sweat) she had worn since a child, there was always an oblong green smudge. The skin at that place had several times become infected, raising once a lump the size and shape of a peanut in its shell, which while it stayed Ella regarded with religious awe as the mark of her talisman and thus the sign of her faith, staring down an hour a day as might a Hindu holy man to where the crucifix rubbed against the swelling and turned it successively green and pink and curd.

What Ella had said to her neighbor was true, she could see sound, and as plainly there in space and with its own distinct shape and feature as one might see an elk—antlered, hoofed, and bearded. All her senses were acute, but she could hear and see and feel most marvelously well: the tremor in her neighbor’s face, the scrape of cloud, the grumble of molasses, like her soul, folding from its bottle, the rattle of smoke in a pipe, and the squeak of a suede glove fingering a chair tassel like the startled outcry of a mouse.

Cut, said Mrs. Maggies, off. Shut of her pains, if she had any, Mrs. Granley said. With the good Lord now, I hope, poor soul, said Mrs. Panishome. A sweet lady she was, so kind, though I hardly knew her she kept to herself and never returned a civil word a civil word …

Hush. Sugar crock. Left the lid off. How did they get in there? The cards would never tell Ella the date of Ella’s demise, but Mrs. Maggies always sounded elderly. Ella’d have to live long enough for Mrs. Maggies’ voice to crack. She returned to her chair with sugar in a cup, water raining in the pot. We shall
simply have to move. The spirits are uneasy. It’s that cupboard, to be sure, the sugar lid ajar again and they get out. She peered in the cup and shivered from the cold. The pattern on the wall grew pale. The pulse is low, she thought. They’re out.

Her husband hadn’t known of the smudge when he married her, although he could hardly have been blind to her drying eyes and broken lips, and, if he chose, he could have simply imagined the rest; but he was not an amorous man, easily discouraged, preferring vulgar dreams in which vague shapes performed the act at his behest; so but rarely, tired, after bowling as it happened sometimes, when sleep had stopped his senses up with nightmare and he reached out for a form within it vague enough to violate, did he roll upon her, grubbing in her nightclothes with his hands and thrashing wildly with his body, while rigid, silent, dry, Ella thrust his penis in. She became pregnant once in this way. Shortly after their baby’s birth its father developed a severe condition of the back that required him to sleep on a board on the floor. Ella so cheerfully accepted this arrangement that she gave her husband, on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary, a wide and highly polished maple plank.

Sanding all those years like a burglar sharpening his fingers, and he squat always by the ace of swords, she was worn too finely now, her senses were so smoothly turned they seeped through locks ahead of picking them and sacked the world. How he frightened Madame Betz with his bellowing, poor trampled lady. Well, no harm to the astral body. Still all those pieces of brain about. Perhaps she should visit to say goodby, that would be friendly, but there would be that thick wintergreen odor of death she couldn’t abide, it made her sneeze, and the spectral skulls jabbering and glowing, and she would almost certainly fall in the glass, as she did the last time, though the last time on the sea beach it was pleasant, like a postcard land with no wind blowing, the clouds pinned and the long white scratch
on her globe showing against the sky absurdly like a long jag of thunderless lightning.

The nerves in her shoulders twitched and her eyes ached. Dangerous to shut them. She would fall back in the darkness behind the lids, soon somersaulting, and who knew how far the acrobat would take her down. When you were clairvoyant, as she was, you had to guard your entrances, but if you did not leave them open, if you fearfully closed them all, then you’d be alone in there … alone. It was a wet cold castle. Better to pass into any other thing, the most outlandish lampshade, and let hot bulbs beat against you, or flatten yourself in military garments, stiff as metal, or otherwise dangle in a drape or a string, feckless and loose and gentle, or ooze through a wall like the damp in the spring. Sometimes they were surprisingly sweet modes of being. In Madame’s bowl upon a painted sea a pond of ducks, one tipping under, another tipping up, across the bill of the upward one a smile as silver as a fish for knowing what the mud at the bottom of the lake was like. Bite. That pain in her shoulder again. She wondered, suddenly, how a pipe felt, bent.

Sometimes her knee would begin to burn and she would think back desperately: a knee, that would be early, I was six, no, four, not the time in the gravel, it hasn’t got that grated quality, I could feel the stones in the form of a square; not the ice either, the sting had a special pulse, I’d know it anywhere. It was the shape of a lake on a map, with little flurried lines around the shore. There were weeds, the bank at her back, mud on her hands. She felt the breeze against her leg, her skirt thrown up, and the sky seemed terribly far off at the end of converging trees. There were burrs in her hair. She hadn’t braids then, and her scalp pulled fiendishly. I’ve dirtied my dress but no one will punish me, no one will care. She lay against the bank, her knee throbbing comfortably, and watched the clouds.