The Quick & the Dead (40 page)

Sherwin undesirable even here at deathside; it was humiliating. Sherwin began feeling sorry for himself. No, I’m going to stay with you, baby.

Jasper looked upset, as though Sherwin were insisting on going into a party where people would think they were a couple.

Sherwin laughed. I know what you’re thinking, baby.

Jasper raised his hand and smashed it all about in the air around his head. That’s not possible, he said.

I’m loathsome, aren’t I, Sherwin said, but didn’t we have some good times together?

I’m not having a retrospective here. I don’t want a retrospective. This is the tour now proceeding forward. I’m taking the tour by myself. Am I making sense? Is my voice all right? I don’t want you. I never wanted you.

You’re lovely and lucid, baby, Sherwin said. I never thought we were more than friends.

You’d like to exchange places with me, but you can’t.

That’s what I want, Sherwin said, to exchange places.

You’ll die someday, Jasper said. Fuck up your own death, don’t try to fuck up mine.

Spittle poured from the corners of Jasper’s mouth. He fumbled for a tissue in his bathrobe pocket and mopped at it. It’s the medication, he said.

Before Green Palms, when Jasper had been in the hospital, the doctors had opened up his head, looked inside, lay their scalpels down, and closed it up again.
We just lay our scalpels down, son
. For a while this phrasing had intrigued Jasper. He heard in it some obeisance to the mystery, the beautiful mystery that waited beyond the mere problem.

Sherwin smoked and thought of Jasper, who was probably dead by now, the aunt back in Alexandria thinking, But I don’t want to put on the months and the days. That boy could be so affected sometimes.… For all Sherwin knew, Auntie might have been a figment of Jasper’s lesions. The point was that Sherwin couldn’t even have a conversation with a dying person without getting insulted. Wasn’t being treated with insolence by the dying virtually impossible? And Jasper had been an insecure, unformed youth, still working on his languors and dislikes. They hadn’t known each other to any true degree. Jasper knew nothing of Sherwin’s suicide attempts, but then few did. Even Sherwin wondered how many could be counted as intentional. Sometimes he’d come up with six, sometimes eight, it depended on how inclusive he wanted to be. Do you count as one, for example, the thousand men who’d had you? He didn’t usually count that. He’d thrown himself down a flight of stairs once; cut himself (embarrassing, that one, for they were clearly the cuts of a malingerer); smashed up a few cars (he didn’t drive anymore, having lost confidence in that method); commenced to hang himself but then thought better of it. His most deliberate one was Seconal in the fine hotel: order some room service, masturbate to Pay-per-View, go out in a king-sized bed with a view of the Catalinas. But his vomiting had annoyed the people in the next room (a couple marking their thirtieth wedding anniversary) to such an extent that they called the front desk,
and his efforts were thwarted by a pissed-off concierge. He’d never be allowed to play his parasuicide game in that establishment again. The fulfillment of one’s most cherished desire can often founder on one’s choice of means. He couldn’t interest his body in helping him out. It was as though his body was saying, Wait a minute, we’re not through with you just yet. We’ll let you know when it’s time. You have no idea what we have in store for you, you dabbler, you fabricator, you.

Sherwin no longer thought about his suicide stratagems in a responsible, straightforward fashion. He longed for an audience, an audience of one, namely Alice. Why Alice, he wasn’t quite sure. He was a little annoyed with her for losing interest in him, obviously, but that in itself wasn’t enough to propel him toward another attempt. He didn’t construe his attempts as a reaction to anything, had never made even one in response to a particular, dispiriting event. He didn’t want any connection to exist between occurrences in his flimsy life and the suicide act, should it occur. He wanted to deepen the gulf between what he was and the way he behaved. Still, he thought he’d probably been born a suicide, born with the little nothingness gene, the predilection to nothingness. Everyone must have it, it’s just that Sherwin and his kind, or as he like to think of them, his
ilk
, nurtured and appreciated it and in fact would not be able to live without doting and dwelling on it. The thought of suicide was his passion, his pet, something he shared only with his own starved heart. The little nothingness gene—most people let it atrophy. Or they smothered it with the habit of living and self-interest. But Sherwin kept his in operating condition.

He wished he could get Alice interested. She didn’t have to do it herself—he wasn’t the kind of person who wanted company, exactly—but if she would just apply herself to conversation about it. Still, was there anything more boring than people talking? No, there was not.

He turned back toward the house, went into the kitchen, and ate, in rapid succession, a number of bread rounds topped with tiny, colorful, irrationally wedded and chic foodstuffs.

One of the caterers rapped his knuckles. “Hey, man, slow down. It took me half an hour to put that tray together. Eat some cashews or something.”

“What’s the occasion for this event, anyway?” Sherwin asked sulkily.

“Why should there be an occasion? People have parties.” He shifted the tray out of Sherwin’s reach. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

Sherwin saw the host’s daughter in the corner, flirting cautiously with one of the servers, a boy wearing his hair in a long ponytail.

“Hiya … Annabel,” he said, her name coming to him.

She widened her eyes. The piano player looked so
morbid
. He was really the strangest person—the pitted skin, the too-black hair, the pale artificial-looking hands. When he wasn’t playing the piano, they just hung there. He was really so ungainly and disturbing. “Jonathan and I were just talking about puns,” she said, “about making puns. Whether that was middle-class or not.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin pronounced.

“Every single thing you can probably classify whether it is or it isn’t,” Annabel said. “It’s maybe a waste of time, but it’s sort of fun, too, and could help you get organized and maybe save you some time eventually.”

“Do you believe you’re going to be resurrected or reincarnated?” Sherwin asked. “Quick, which?”

Annabel appeared frightened, but the boy looked at Sherwin and said softly, “Resurrected.” She looked at him gratefully.

“But there are rules, the rules being, you’ve got to have all your own parts,” Jonathan continued. “Can’t have artificial organs, grafts, plates, implants, or someone else’s blood in your body at the time of death. I intend to keep to the rules. If you don’t abide by them, I honestly couldn’t tell you what would happen, regardless of your beliefs.” He looked at Sherwin appraisingly, as though to say, You’re just fucked, man.…

Sherwin felt he was being toyed with.

“I’d like to come back as—” Annabel began.

“That’s transmigration,” Jonathan said, “not reincarnation.”

“Oh …” she said.

“But both of those things are voodoo,” the boy said. “Resurrection’s the way to go.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin opined.

“I’ve got to serve these salmon puffs,” Jonathan confided to Annabel.

“So,” Sherwin said after he’d left, “where’s your friend tonight? That Alice person.”

“She’s either with Corvus or looking for her … whatever, like she usually is.”

“I kind of hoped I might see her here.”

“How old are you?” Annabel asked.

He’d forgotten for a moment what he’d told Alice. He usually told women that he was twenty-eight. He couldn’t get away with that with men. “Twenty-eight,” he said.

“How old
really
?”

“You’re hurting my feelings,” Sherwin said. In the other room, someone was playing the piano. He might as well not even be here tonight. It was a strange night, the kind of night where thoughts of the immeasurable greatness of the sea that none can cross kept intruding. He liked to keep such thoughts in their place. He didn’t mind entertaining them amusingly while alone but found them formidably undesirable when they accosted him in public. In public, he preferred harboring thoughts of self-destruction, but not of the way-of-death variety.

One of the buttons of his shirt was cracked in half—therefore not qualifying as a button, right?—and Annabel could see his skin, which was watery white. He had to be forty years old, maybe even more. She shuddered. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me how old you are. You’re only as old as you feel.” What did that actually mean? Annabel wondered. She wished she hadn’t said it.

“You don’t want to know anything about me,” Sherwin pouted.

“Oh, I don’t,” Annabel said with great feeling.

“Well, we’re both great fans of Alice.”

“We
are
?” Annabel said.

Sherwin laughed.

“Alice can be so mean,” Annabel said. “Maybe you don’t know her mean side. Once I said to her, ‘You’re such a septic, Alice,’ and she was all over me because I said ‘septic.’ She’s so vain about language. It was just a little mispronunciation, and she was all over me.”

Sherwin laughed again.

“I don’t think Alice will ever have fans.” Annabel said. If Alice were here, she’d be having a fit about salmon being served. The whole thing about salmon
was
sort of pathetic. That need to return. And when they
did succeed in returning to the place where they had been born or spawned or whatever, didn’t they just rot?… like immediately …

“If you’re not a fan by nature—I don’t mean just a fan of Alice’s, but a fan by nature—then you must be aware of the presence of God.”

“Oh, I can’t—I just can’t talk like this.” Annabel said.

“An awareness of the presence of God enables a person to resist the false values of mass communications, which create fans, enthusiasts, fantasists.”

“I think mass communication is wonderful,” Annabel said. “I think it’s done an awful lot of good.” She had turned quite pale.

“Hey, relax,” Sherwin said. “I’m just kidding around.”

The ponytail had returned to the kitchen, his platter of salmon puffs denuded.

“Jonathan!” she screamed.

“Will you tell Alice I’m sorry I missed her?” Sherwin said.

“Sorry you missed her,” Annabel said. “Certainly.” Is this what they did together, he and Alice? It was sick.

She picked up a little ceramic butter dish, took the top off, and then put it back on. The lid was in the shape of a little hen, and a chick was nestled in the hen’s wing. She had bought it for her mother for Christmas one year and of course her mother had hated it, wanting nothing with the merest whiff of domesticity as a gift. Annabel took the top off again; it fit back only one way. How absorbing this little dish was … she wished Sherwin would leave. She glanced up and saw with relief that he actually was walking away, twitching and rolling his shoulders in the dark tuxedo. He was so odious and
incoherent
. Someone else was playing the piano anyway. Was he even necessary?

Sherwin passed through the kitchen and slowed but did not stop his passage into the great room, where the guests were still striving toward the party’s high note, which it might not achieve. Madder music was required. He didn’t look at the piano. By the door there was a table in the shape of an elephant. Indian, Sherwin thought. Right? They’re the ones with the smaller ears, the longer face. On top of it was a glass of white wine with an hors d’oeuvre in it, looking for all the world like a turd in a toilet.

Outside, he moved away from the light of the party, down the length of the house. Below, cupped in the valley, the lights of the city trembled, and high up, in further darkness, a greenish wad of light burned solitary and bright—a mine reopened, working out its semiprecious stones. He stood and smoked. Sometimes we exist, he thought, and sometimes we pretend to exist, which takes considerably more effort. He walked to the end of the house. Metal animals were spiked into the decoratively inclined earth as one-dimensional entertainment. A troupe of quail. A life-sized javelina.

He hadn’t realized how big a house it was. One wing angled off westward. The house, subtly, seemed to go on and on. Sherwin grinned and shook his head. It was like the classic dream where you dream there’s one more room to your house—silly me, it’s been there all the while, and what? I’d forgotten? A whole other room! Of course it wasn’t his own house, it was his sometime employer’s house, the man who signed the checks. He touched the handle on a glass door, and it slid back on its tracks with a dry whisper. He patted the wall for a light switch.

It was a bedroom, ornate as the rest of the house but tousled and cold. Cold as a meat locker. There were silk sheets on the bed of a dark rose color. Long mirrors, the kind you attached to the backs of doors, leaned against the walls. Drinking glasses and books scattered about, a few table lamps, the ones with shades as tall as a child. An overhead fan rotated slowly, making the room colder still. Now, this was a room you could go out in, a room that made no bones about it. This would be a room to introduce to Alice.