James Sallis - Moth

“Good. You’re up,” he said.

“Up. Yes, and going home.”

“I’d have to recommend most urgently against that, Mr. Griffin.”

“Recommend away.” I turned to face him. “Look, I appreciate what you’ve done. And I’m more than willing to accede to whatever continuing treatment you prescribe. But the truth is, I don’t have insurance, I can lie around at home every bit as well as I can here, and meanwhile there are things to be taken care of.”

I suppose I should have said truths are.

“You’ll promise to come in first thing in the morning?”

I nodded.

“Through ER. Just tell them I’m expecting you for a follow-up, and to beep me. It’s against hospital policy, but they’re used to it. I’ll be here-somewhere. That way I can officially discharge you now and you won’t have to go AMA, which can always lead to problems farther down the road.”

“American Medical Association?”

“Against medical advice.”

He helped drape the shirt and button it, then went out to the desk to do the paperwork. I joined him there eventually, shook hands and thanked him again.

“They’re going to ask for a deposit downstairs at the business office. I’m sure they’ll even insist that it’s mandatory, but it isn’t. The hospital’s supported by public funds and legally they can’t demand payment. Just tell them you don’t have any money with you.”

I didn’t have. And as it turned out, they didn’t ask, probably because I didn’t go by the office.

I got a cab outside the hospital, had the driver take me home and wait while I went in to get money. Like most people who’ve been poor and on the streets, I had cash squirreled away in various spots around the house. Alouette had found some of the stashes, but others were intact. I took the driver a ten, doubling his fare, and came back in for the damage report.

Everything was still in her room except for clothes, personal items and a small suitcase. It seemed to me there were a few vacancies on the shelves, with books canting into them where others had been removed, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I only wanted it to be so.

I found her note in the kitchen, on the table around which, in the best southern tradition, we’d sat night after night talking.

Lewis,

I think you’re okay, your arm I mean, and I think by now you have to know something’s wrong. You probably have a good idea what it is.

I tried so hard, I really did. I hope you can give me credit for that. But everything’s so ordinary now, so plain.

I can’t do this any longer. I don’t want to hurt you, and I know that I will unless I go now. Of course, I’ll hurt you either way, won’t I? There’s just not any way to win.

It would be nice if I could believe I’m doing something good by leaving, but I guess that would only be fooling myself. And I don’t need any more practice at that.

Thank you for everything you did and tried to do for me, Lew. And thank you most of all for loving my mother. Yes, I remember that.

Alouette

Years were to pass before I saw Alouette again.

I rented a car that very afternoon, of course, and drove back up to Mississippi, scouting roadsides the whole way. I had midnight dinner with Sergeant Travis, left my suitcase for a few days at Dee’s-Lux Inn but was mostly away from the room, spent two nights at a Quality Inn in Memphis. Then drove one-armed and empty-handed back to New Orleans. No sign of Alouette anywhere.

Mardi Gras is just over as I sit on a bright Ash Wednesday by the window in the upstairs front room writing this. All week I’ve looked down to watch crowds swarm toward St. Charles for parades, people stroll past at all hours in mask and costume, young women in pairs with backpacks and cotton sweaters, men with the plastic webbing of six-packs looped into their belts. Now the street is awash in trash: beer and soft-drink cans, waxed paper cups, containers from Popeye’s and Taco Bell, discarded strings of beads, broken doubloons. The old house creaks around me. A tree limb screeches at the pane, and from somewhere behind, deep within the house, a dull moan starts up each time the wind peaks.

Some inchoate equation between the masking and forced revelry of Mardi Gras, the expert self-deception Alouette recognized in herself, and my own in this account, suggests itself. Finally there’s little enough difference between them.

I remember that Robbe-Grillet, at work on Le Voyeur, traveled briefly to the Brittany coast to refresh his memory of its setting and found that he had no interest in actual gulls, that he cared now only for the gulls of his fiction.

This much is true: Alouette was gone. And I was left thinking, in that self-engaged manner we all have when suddenly alone, that it all had been for nothing.

But maybe (I thought then) something would come of it after all. Maybe we do good things, things that matter, without ever realizing it. Maybe those are the best things we do.

Or maybe, just as Alouette tried so hard to believe her departure might be virtuous, that is just something I want to believe. We betray ourselves into going on; but it’s also given us to choose the form of that betrayal.

Alouette was gone. Gone into the darkness that took my son, the darkness that took her mother, the darkness that is so much in us all.

I sat looking for a long time out into that darkness. It was almost midnight, with a chance of rain. The phone’s ringing brought me around. I answered.

“Lew,” and when she took time getting the next word out, I knew it was Clare. “How are you? I just heard, a few minutes ago. About Alouette.”

“It’s not like it’s wholly unexpected.”

“That does nothing to diminish the pain.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. Except maybe in movies about boys learning to be men.”

“Pain can be good, Lew. The same as other strong feelings. Love, fear, devotion. It can give us reasons to go on when there aren’t any others. It can become a new center for a new self.”

Or an excuse for all sorts of evasions.

But I said: “You’re proof of that, Clare.”

“Of course, it can also give us a reason to make a perfect fool of ourself at eleven o’clock at night.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“God. I hope not.” She was silent for a few moments. “I guess what I’m doing, really, is using the situation as an excuse to call and say how much I miss you. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

“I miss you too. More than you can know.”

“You could have called.”

“No, Clare. I couldn’t.”

“Okay. So I never was much good at these coy, girlish ploys. Give me credit for trying. I was supposed to call you. And now I’m doing that.”

“It’s good to hear your voice,” I said after a moment.

“I’d like to see you, Lew.”

A moth fluttered into my window’s light again and again.

“Okay.”

“If that’s all right with you.”

“It is.”

“You understand …”

“I think so. I’d like to see you, whatever I do or don’t understand.”

“Maybe we could have a drink.”

“That would be great. Where?”

“I don’t know. Tip’s, maybe?”

“ Ca va .”

“Want me to pick you up?”

“I’ve had enough car for a while. I’ll walk. See you there. Give me fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Oh, Lew, I almost forgot: Bat came home. I went out Tuesday morning and there he was, sitting on the car, like nothing ever happened.”

“Nearest thing he could find to his fridge, I guess.”

“I guess. God, I’m looking forward to seeing you.”