James Sallis - Moth

“Shit does that. People ought to know it. Course, people ought to know a lot of things.” He held up his glass, looked through its amber to the light outside. I knew from long experience just how that warms the world and softens it. “You want another one?”

“Better not. Still a lot to do. We square with the tab?”

“It’s cool.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got an appointment myself. Tell you what.” He slid out of the booth and stood. Bent to pick up, yes, a briefcase. “I’ll ask around, see what I can come up with. You have a picture of this girl?”

I took out my wallet and gave him one of the copies. Also one of my cards, scribbling the motel’s phone number on the back, then, after a second’s thought, the NICU number and Teresa.

“If you can’t get me, leave a message for her. And thanks, man.”

He shrugged. I sat and watched as he climbed into the Camaro, buckled up, started the engine, hit his turn signal and eased out into traffic, sunlight lancing off the chrome.

My second week in Clarksville, on a Tuesday, I got back to the motel midmorning, having left the hospital at five or so and been on the streets since (with a stopover at Mama’s Homestyle for a kickass breakfast), and found two messages waiting. I didn’t look at the second one till later. But Teresa had called to say they were “having some trouble” with Baby Girl McTell and she thought I might want to be there.

A nurse I hadn’t met before, Kristi Scarborough, brought me up to date. Around six that morning, stats had dropped into the seventies and hovered there; ABG’s confirmed a low PO 2and steadily increasing PCO 2. It could, of course, be a number of things: cardiac problems, a sign that the lungs were stiffening beyond our capacity to inflate them, infection, pulmonary edema. The baby was back on 100 percent oxygen, and ventilator pressures had been raised. Gases were slowly improving. I stood before an X-ray viewer staring at loops of white in Baby Girl McTell’s belly. Like those ancient maps where the round, unknown world has been cleft in half and laid out flat. Necrosis of the bowel, Nurse Scarborough told me; a further complication. It almost always happens with these tiny ones. But for now she’s holding her own.

Kristi used to work the unit full-time, she told me, but last year had married one of the residents and now put in only the hours necessary to keep her license, a day or two every other week, while husband John oversaw an emergency room just across the Tennessee line, broken bones, agricultural accidents and trauma from the regional penitentiary mostly (once, a hatchet buried in a head), and “they” tried as best they could to “get pregnant.”

I left at three or four, finally, once Baby Girl McTell seemed to be out of immediate danger, and over a cheeseburger and fries at Mama’s looked at the second message.

Call me. Clare.

I went back to my room and did just that. She answered on the third ring, breathing hard.

“Greetings from the great state of Mississippi.”

“Lew! I’ve been worried about you.”

I told her about Baby Girl McTell.

“Hospitals are tough. You haven’t found Alouette yet, I take it?”

“She’s as gone as gone gets. But I will.”

“I know. I’ve missed you, Lew. Any idea when you’ll be back in town?”

“Not really. I don’t know what I’m into here, or how long it may take. I’ll give you a call.”

Outside, a fire truck and police car went screaming by.

“I spent about half of my teenage years waiting for people to call who said they would, Lew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

“I know. You really are-that’s what makes it so difficult.” I listened to the sirens fade. Wondered if she could hear them, all those miles away. “But it is good to hear your voice.”

The door slammed in the room next to mine and a woman stalked toward her car, a pearl-gray Tempo. She got in and started it, then sat there with the engine running. A man came out of the room and leaned down to the window, holding his hands palm up.

“You’re very important to me, Clare.”

“I know, Lew. I know I am.”

The man walked around the car and got in. They drove away.

“When I get back-if it’s possible, and if you want to, that is-I’d like for us to spend some time together. A lot of time.”

She was silent a moment, then said, “I’d like that too, Lew.”

“Good. I guess I’d better try to get some sleep now.”

“Take care.”

I hung up and watched my neighbors pull the Tempo back into its slot, get out together and go back into their room.

An hour later I got up and, sitting naked on the side of the bed, improvising abbreviations in my rush to get it all down, scribbled ten pages of notes.

In a featureless gray room with light slanting in through windows set high in the wall a man says goodbye to a group of men we slowly realize are his fellow prisoners, the community he’s lived among for almost ten years. He is being released because another man has confessed to the murder for which he was convicted, and which he in fact committed. He distributes his few possessions: half a carton of cigarettes, a transistor radio, a badly pilled cardigan. No one says much of anything. He turns and walks to the door, where a guard joins him to escort him out. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do,” Bad Billy says behind him, but he can’t imagine anything Bad Billy would not do-or hasn’t done, for that matter. He will go out into the world and find that he is absolutely alone and hopelessly unsuited for the narrow life available to him. And so he will invent a life, a thing that makes a virtue of his apartness, cobbled together from routine, false memories, old movies, half-read books. Until one day a woman will come suddenly, unexpectedly (“like a nail into cork”) into his life’s ellipsis to disrupt it; and, as he struggles up out of his aloneness, as he fights against his own instincts and the circumstances of his life just to make this single human connection, his careful, wrought life collapses. When he steps out into sunlight now, it blinds him.

Those ten pages, virtually word for word as I scribbled them in the motel room that night, became the first chapter, and the very heart, of Mole , a book unlike anything else I had written, purely fiction in that every character, every scene was invented, purely true in that it is in purest form the story of all our lives.

The desk clerk and I obviously were not destined to become close friends. He wasn’t accustomed to taking messages for guests and didn’t like it much, and as I came in from the hospital the next morning, he motioned at me through the front glass (a hand held high, opening and closing twice, as though waving good-bye to himself) then wordlessly shoved a couple of slips of paper over to me.

Of course, one had to take into account that he seemed to work around the clock-whenever my erratic va et vient took me by the office, day or night, I’d look in and see him here-which is enough to make even one of Rilke’s angels growl.

Teresa had called to let me know that, minutes after I left the unit that morning, someone had tried to reach me. I flipped over to the second slip of paper, which just read Camaro , then back to the first. Said you might want to check out a house in Moon Point. No direct connection that he knows, but things happen there. Hope this makes sense to you, Lew. And an address, of sorts.

They grow their boys tough out there by the catfish channels, I want you to know, and they ain’t about to bend over for no big-city dude in a coat and tie.