Thomas Disch - 334

Not long after this adventure Lottie realized that she was no longer holding steady at 175, which was bad enough; she was gaining. She bought a Coke machine and loved to lie in bed and let it fizzle the back of her throat, but noncaloric as this pleasure was, she went on gaining alarmingly. the explanation was physiological: she ate too much. Soon Shrimp would have to give up her polite fiction about her sister’s Rubens-like figure and admit that she was just plain fat. Then Lottie would have to admit it too. You’re fat, she’d tell herself, looking into the dark mirror of the living room window. Fat! But it didn’t help, or it didn’t help enough: she couldn’t believe that she was the person she saw reflected there. She was Lottie Hanson, the five-dollar tomato; the fat woman was someone else.

Early one morning in the late fall, when the whole apartment smelled of rust (the steam had come on during the night), the explanation of what was going and had gone wrong presented itself to her in the plainest terms: “There’s nothing left.” She repeated the phrase to herself like a prayer and with each repetition the circumference of its meaning would expand. The terror of it slowly wound its way through the tangle of her feelings until it had merged with its opposite. “There’s nothing left”: it was cause to rejoice. What had she ever had that it wouldn’t be a liberation to lose? Indeed, too much still clung to her. It would be long before she could say that there was nothing left, absolutely, blessedly nothing at all. Then, the way revelations do, the brilliance faded, leaving her with only the embers of the phrase. Her mind grew furry and she started developing a headache from the smell of the rust.

Other mornings there were other awakenings. Their common feature was that they all seemed to place her squarely on the brink of some momentous event, but facing in the wrong direction, like the tourists in the living room calendar’s “Before” view of the Grand Canyon, smiling into the camera, oblivious of what lay behind them. The only thing she knew for sure was that something would be demanded of her, an action larger than any she’d ever been called on to perform, a kind of sacrifice. But what? But when?

Meanwhile her regular religious experience had enlarged to include the message services at the Albert Hotel. The medium, Reverend Inez Ribera from Houston, Texas, was the female side of the coin of Lottie’s tenth-grade nemesis, old Mr. Sills. She spoke, except when she was in trance, in the same flutey teacherish voice—broad r’s, round vowels, whistling sibilants. Her less inspired messages were the same sour compound of veiled threat and headlong innuendo. However, while Sills had played favorites, Reverend Ribera’s scorn withered impartially, which made her, if no more likable, somewhat easier to take.

Besides, Lottie could understand the bitterness that drove her to lash out in all directions. Reverend Ribera was genuine. She achieved real contact only now and again, but when she did it was unmistakable. The spirits that laid hold on her were seldom gentle, and yet once they’d established their presence, the ridicule, the threats of aneurisms and financial ruin were replaced by mild, rambling descriptions of the other side. Instead of the usual abundance of counsels, the messages of these spirits were uncertain, tentative, even distressed and puzzled. They made little gestures of friendship and reconciliation, then skittered off, as though expecting to be refused. It was invariably during these visitations, when Reverend Ribera was so visibly not herself, that she would pronounce the secret word or mention the significant detail that proved her words weren’t just the spiritual outpourings of some vague elsewhere but unique communications from real, known people. The first message from Juan, for instance, had been “his” beyond any doubt, for Lottie had been able to return home and find the same words in one of the letters he’d written to her twelve years before:

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, v es tan largo el olvido. Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos, mi alma no se content a con haberla perdido. Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa, y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.

The poem wasn’t Juan’s in the sense that he’d written it, though Lottie had never let him know that she’d known that. But even if the words came from someone else, the feelings had been his, and were his now more certainly than when he’d copied them into the letter. With all the poems there are in Spanish, how could Rev. Ribera have picked just that one? Unless Juan had been there that night. Unless he’d wanted to find some way to touch her so that she could believe that he had.

Later messages from Juan tended to be less other-directed and more a kind of spiritual autobiography. He described his progress from a plane of existence that was predominantly dark brown to a higher plane that was green, where he met his grandfather Rafael and a woman in a bridal gown, barely more than a girl, whose name came through as Rita or ’Nita. The ghostly bride seemed determined to make contact with Lottie, for she returned on several occasions, but Lottie was never able to see what the connection was between herself and this Rita or ’Nita. As Juan advanced to higher planes, it became harder to distinguish his tone from that of the other spirits. He alternated between wistfulness and hectoring. He wanted Lottie to lose weight. He wanted her to visit the Lighthalls. Finally it became clear to Lottie that Reverend Riber a had lost contact with Juan and was now only faking it. She stopped coming for the private meetings, and shortly thereafter Rafael and other distant relatives began to foresee all kinds of dangers in her path. A person that she trusted was going to betray her. She would lose large sums of money. There was, somewhere ahead, a fire, possibly only a symbolic fire but possibly it was real.

About the money they had been well-informed. By the first anniversary of Juan’s death the four thousand dollars had been reduced to a little more than four hundred.

It was easier than it might have been to say good-bye to Juan and the rest because she had begun to establish her own, more direct lines of communication with the other side. Off and on over the years Lottie had attended gospel meetings at the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church, which met in a rented hall on Avenue A. She went there for the sake of the music and the excitement, not being deeply concerned about what seemed to draw in the majority of the others—the drama of sin and salvation. Lottie believed in sin in a general way, as a kind of condition or environment like clouds, but when she felt around inside herself for her own sins she drew a blank. The nearest she could approach to guilt was thinking about the ways she’d messed up Mickey’s and Amparo’s lives, and even this was a cause rather of discomfort than of out-and-out anguish.

Then one dreadful August night in ’25 (an inversion layer had been stifling the city for days, the air was unbreathable) Lottie had stood up in the middle of the prayer asking for spiritual gifts and begun to prophesy in tongues. It lasted only a moment the first time and Lottie wondered if it might not be just a simple case of heat prostration, but the next time it was much clearer. It began with a sense of constriction, of being covered and enclosed, and then another kind of force struggled against this and emerged through it.

“Like a fire?” Brother Cary had asked her.

She remembered Juan’s grandfather’s warning about a fire that might be symbolic or might be real.

It was utterly dependable. She spoke in tongues whenever she came to the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church and at no time else. When she felt the clouds gathering about her, she would stand, no matter what else might be happening, a sermon, a baptizing, and the congregation would gather round her in a great circle, while Brother Cary held her and prayed for the fire to come down. When she felt it coming she would begin to tremble, but when it touched her she felt strong, and she spoke in a voice that was loud and clear with praise: