The Quick & the Dead (39 page)

The aide pressed fresh sheeting onto the bed and steered the carton into the hall with her foot. In the quiet, Nurse Daisy’s breathing seemed to hiss a little. “Each room a palimpsest,” she said. “I’m self-obliged to tell you, this place may not always be here for you. It’s under investigation by the state. It’s not just the dog meat, the trifecta tostadas, it’s a number of things across the board. Records aren’t being kept, bums aren’t being scoured properly. Rat tails have been observed in the darndest places. Thus the exterminator’s eventful arrival. As for the doctors, they’re comically unqualified. Indeed, they’re not even doctors, not even
vets;
they’re handymen, gardeners. Death was once frequently portrayed as a gardener in serious verse. One of the problems with our technological age is that we can’t picture death as a gardener anymore, or picture it as anything. A straight line on a screen is the best we can do.…”

She paused, and again Corvus could hear the rasping hitch in her breathing. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. The horror of the orifice, its foolish greed, seemed apparent to her, its ardent deceptions and ambitions.

“You will make this your oratory,” Nurse Daisy determined.

Corvus searched within herself. She had no intention of praying. But here she would hone her willingness to suffer, make it an ability, a feat no one would acknowledge or admire, least of all herself.

“You think you’ve found sanctuary here, but the whole place is closer than you think to being condemned, the whole kit and kaboodle. It will be turned into another desert spa. Loofah treatments, bikini waxes, energizing soaks. The quick will take it by privilege, storm it by entitlement. The new administrators will be utterly disapproving of your role. You’ll be exiled once more, yet unable to wander like your funny friend. Of course she’s doomed to wander, she has no choice. You’ll grow further and further apart, you two, or perhaps it’s closer and closer apart. Two halves of the same broken shell. Hell has no birds, it’s one of its more alarming attributes. Do you believe me?”

She stared at Corvus. Her lopsided face narrowed and grew taut.
“You’re a bit of deadwood, you are, a fruitless tree, fit only to be rooted up and cast into the fire.” She smoothed her chalk-bright uniform, which she preferred to more casual attire. “I’d kiss you good night, but I don’t want to frighten you.”

“You don’t frighten me,” Corvus said.

S
herwin was a great observer at parties. Never drinking himself, he had a great advantage, but the sound was beginning to get to him. It actually began to pain him, the sound of a party, the bedlam rattle and howl, the partygoers’ faces opening and emptying and moist with excitement. Sherwin was becoming a little prim about it, and it was affecting his playing. He should do something else. Move to a metropolis or get another face-lift.

He moved from “I Get a Kick Out of You” to Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major, which he played badly. “The underclass is menacing,” a man said. “I don’t care how well we seem to get along waiting in line at the Dairy Queen.” Sherwin continued to softly crucify Haydn. “I mean, what are you
supposed
to get your mother after all these years? I got her a couple dung bunnies. They’re little bunny figures made by Amish craftsmen from sanitized, deodorized, hundred percent cow manure. She can put them in her garden.” Sherwin threw back his head and exaggerated his technique. “My wife’s going to call Victoria and tell her she’s letting me go. Victoria insisted that my wife make this call. She wants everything clear, she’s a helluva girl.” Sherwin started to play Haydn well, just because he could. “What happened to furniture? Don’t they do furniture anymore, the Amish?” A woman approached the piano. Her lips were chapped beneath bright lipstick. She had a small black mole on her throat.

“Nice beauty mark,” Sherwin said.

“You think so?” She nibbled at the lip of her champagne flute.

“Is it real?”

“Real?” She seemed genuinely puzzled by the inquiry, then drained the flute. “Who do you tell your troubles to?” she said. “I’m just curious.
I don’t want to hear them myself, but I’d like to know. I tried to tell mine to my dog, and she growled at me. I lay down beside her and I put my arms around her neck and I snuggled up to her and cried in her fur and told her my troubles and she growled at me.”

“What a
bitch
,” Sherwin said, pecking away at the Haydn. He cocked his head like a feckless little sparrow. Realizing he was overdoing it. One of these days he was going to get knocked on his ass by a broad like this.

“The hell with it,” the woman said. “Nobody likes to hear your troubles, not even a goddamned dog from the pound who should be grateful for every breath she’s allowed to draw.”

“We should all be grateful,” Sherwin said in his oiliest manner. “We are here to praise, to sing our little song of praise.”

The woman regarded him. Her hands shook. She was really very drunk. “I know everybody in this room,” she said. “And you know what I see when I look at them? I don’t see anybody I know.”

“What are your troubles, anyway, dear?” Sherwin asked.

“I’m a survivor,” she said. “People dismiss me as a survivor. They say, ‘That Adrianna, she’s a survivor,’ but they don’t say it in a nice way. It has a lot of negative connotations the way they say it.”

“You’ve been through a lot, have you, dear?” Sherwin had stopped playing, he couldn’t quite recall when.

“Oh, fuck off,” the woman said. She made a crooked way across the room on her battered high heels.

No way that mole was real, Sherwin thought. He was losing more and more of his already limited ability to extend himself to others. He should get an eye-lift, maybe, or go back to school, live in the city and study philosophy. Read Schopenhauer again. He loved Schopenhauer. There was a man who had the ability to extend himself to others. Hadn’t people gathered each midday outside his favorite hotel to watch him eat? To him they were nothing, everything was nothing, but they were all crazy about him, even the women, who were forever approaching him, wanting to be seen with him, attempting to ingratiate themselves with his white poodle; there was always a white poodle, a succession of white poodles. The children of the neighborhood called the poodle “young Schopenhauer”—they had his number, yet everyone else adored him, not the complacent, egotistical, and cold man that was Schopenhauer
but his thinking. His “the way of escape is not by the way of death” was the most delightful suggestion. To escape the fuss and pain and striving and confusion of trying to live, fully or interestingly or just at all, to escape all that through self-destruction, though not through the gate of death …

“How about playing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’? You know ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’?” A young man wearing a squash blossom necklace the size of a softball was looking at him with shy concern. He wore soft pleated trousers and a muscle shirt.

“You want ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’?”

“I’ve been
asking
,” the youth said.

“I love ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’,” Sherwin said. “It just goes on and on.”

The youth’s friend materialized beside him. “Well, play the goddamn thing then,” he said. The two of them could be twins, but this one was shaggier, coarser. Cute, Sherwin thought.

“I was just about to take a break,” Sherwin said. “It’s break time. I wouldn’t want to play it when my heart wasn’t in it.”

“You should get a new personality,” the rough one said. “Yours is just about worn out.” He was looking pointedly at Sherwin’s tuxedo jacket, which was, in fact, a little shabby. Sherwin had four of them, all in barely presentable condition.

“It’s not that easy, pretty,” the muffin one said. “You’re very skilled at it, but most people wouldn’t know where to begin getting a new personality.” He put his hand on his lover’s arm.

Sherwin sensed great animosity toward his person tonight. Perhaps his true self, usually so carefully concealed, had become visible, and instead of being remarkable resembled a little speckled stone that kept presenting itself to be kicked. People mostly left him alone. Or avoided him, whatever. But he was having a problem tonight. His friend Jasper, who was having a problem with brain lesions, who was dying, actually, had said, “Now, Win, when you’ve got a problem, don’t think of it as such. Think of it as a mystery, then it’s not a problem anymore but a lovely mystery.”

Someone in the vicinity was saying, “If we can get enough people in that subdivision, there’ll be enough effluent to support a golf course.”

The rough darling was giving Sherwin a big murderous smile. His left incisor had been sharpened to quite a point. Sherwin missed being in love, the danger and stupidity of it. He walked outside and lit a cigarette. My self, he thought, a little speckled stone. Weren’t there screaming stones somewhere? Probably in Celtic lands. They screamed when something bad was about to happen, some avoidable catastrophe poised to occur.

The woman with the rucked heels and sticker mole was lying on a chaise longue, her eyes closed and her hands folded over her stomach. Some people passed out like that, just had the knack of doing it in a formal fashion.

Sherwin walked around smoking. The party had reached that warbling keen, the trilling glossolalia he knew so well and detested. He saw what appeared to be a buzzard just before the curve in the driveway and flicked his cigarette at it. It dragged itself off a bit. A buzzard and something wrong with it to boot. He regretted throwing the cigarette. That had been unkind. He lit another and leaned on the haunch of a red Mercedes convertible whose bumper sticker declared, “My Friend Was Killed by a Drunk Driver.” Person always had to have a certain kind of face on when driving that car. They must have another car they drove when they wanted to relax. Could this belong to the woman who’d passed out, the survivor who couldn’t even get her dog to listen to her troubles? Did Schopenhauer tell his problems to his poodles? Maybe that’s why he had a succession of them.
Let me just run this past you … Human life has no goal, nor could the goal be reached even if it existed. Sound right to you?

That was the problem, the dilemma, Jasper was attempting to turn into such a delightful mystery at Green Palms. He had told Sherwin he was committed to conscious dying; he was sure he could make a go of it. You’ve got to go on a tour of unaccustomed thinking, Jasper said. If you’re willing to take the tour, then … What? Sherwin had asked. What then? Anything can happen, Jasper said. That’s all? Sherwin said. That’s enough to make me laugh. Anything can happen? That’s all you get for going on this tour? Jasper had never been congenial or hopeful, and now he was; it was terrible timing. His skin was sallow and his feet were bloated and gray, the long thick nails curving downward almost like a
bird’s talons. He couldn’t bear the slightest pressure on his feet, not even a sheet; the breath of a door closing, a breeze, was agonizing beyond endurance. Sometimes the two of them would lose themselves for long moments, regarding Jasper’s feet. Fissures would appear, exposing a slice of shining liquid, or a bruise, a black aureole, would be born. The feet seemed to want to possess a life independent of Jasper, who they possibly and quite rightly felt was going to quit them soon.

I’ll be the first one to die consciously, Jasper assured him. Others have tried and failed, but I’m not going to fail. I think you have to start practicing for this moment at an early age, Sherwin said. Before I came here and was in the hospital there was this kid there, Jasper said. I never met him, he was in pediatrics and they wouldn’t let me near pediatrics, but he was seven years old and he was going to die and his wish, his only wish, was to get into the
Guinness Book of World Records
. I didn’t think that was even published anymore, Sherwin said. The record he was going for was to possess the largest collection of business cards by any individual on earth. Boxes were set up all over the hospital for people to drop their business cards in, to help this deluded kid meet his goal. I just wanted to find him and shake him, you know? That kid made me so angry, and the people who encouraged him in this … this
project
made me even angrier. They should’ve been helping him to die consciously. That might be hard for a little kid, Sherwin said. Yeah, to give him the benefit of the doubt, seven’s a funny age, Jasper said. Even so, I just wanted to shake him; and that wasn’t doing me any good, you know. Dying’s like any other job, it’s important to do it right. You’ve got to purify yourself. Maintain a schedule. With a schedule it doesn’t seem so bad. On Jasper’s schedule was a visit to the coast. He wanted cold seawater poured over his head, flattening his hair, chilling his scalp. He wanted the feel of that. They had to let him fly out to the coast, come back, it could be done, it wouldn’t even take a day. This place is full of dying people, you know, this place I’m in, Jasper said, and none of them is going to die aware because they’re so old and they don’t have the strength for it. But I am because I’m young, Win, I’m young.

You’re going to make me cry, baby, Sherwin said. But he didn’t feel close to crying. He didn’t even know why he came to visit Jasper. They’d had some good times once.

If you were me, I don’t think I’d stay with you like this, Jasper said. It’s awfully nice of you to visit me.

You wouldn’t stay with me? Sherwin said, professing anguish.

I don’t think so. I probably wouldn’t, Jasper said. I don’t like sick people.

Jasper faded in and out. He was struggling against it. He thought he was doing it in a new way.

I want to be
good
at this, Win. All these people here, they see with their memories. It’s no good, Win.

I thought you were supposed to make nice memories, Sherwin said. I thought that was the point.

I asked my aunt to put my years and my months and my days on my marker, Jasper said. Do you think she’ll do that?

I don’t know from aunts.

They don’t do it so much anymore, the months and the days. Jasper blinked his eyes several times. I’m going to change the subject. I’m announcing this so you’ll know I’m doing it deliberately, that it’s not like a weird mental convulsion I’m having. I’m doing this consciously. I don’t think my voice sounds right. I’ve got to concentrate. Maybe you should go.