Thomas Disch - The Genocides

With a feigned casualness, she sat on the step below his. “You know, Buddy, I come here a lot too. I get so lonely in the new town—it’s not really a town at all, it’s more like summer camp with the tents and having to carry water from the stream. Oh, it’s so boring. You know what I mean. You know it better than me. I always wanted to go live in Minneapolis myself, but first there was Daddy, and then…. But I don’t have to tell you .”

It had grown quite dark in the ruined village. A summer shower began to fall on the leaves of the Plants, but only a few droplets penetrated their cover. It was like sitting in spray blown in off the lake.

After a considerable silence (during which she had leaned back to rest her elbows on Buddy’s step, letting the weight of her thick, sun-whitened hair pull her head back, so that as she talked she gazed up into the faraway leaves of the Plant), Greta let loose another well modulated laugh.

Buddy couldn’t help but admire her laugh. It was as though that laughter was a specialty of hers—a note she could reach that other contraltos couldn’t.

“Do you remember the time you put the vodka into the punch at Daddy’s youth meeting? And we all started doing the twist to those awful old records of his? Oh, that was precious, that was such fun! Nobody but you and me knew how to twist. That was an awful thing to do. The vodka, I mean. Daddy never knew what happened.”

“Jacqueline Brewster could twist well, as I recall.”

“Jacqueline Brewster is a pill.”

He laughed, and since it had become so much less customary for him, the laughter was rough-edged and a little shrill. “Jacqueline Brewster’s dead,” he said.

“That’s so. Well, I guess next to the two of us she was the best dancer around.” After another pause, she began again with a great show of vivacity. “And the time we went to old man Jenkins’ house, out on County Road B—do you remember that?”

“Greta, let’s not talk about that.”

“But it was so funny , Buddy! It was the funniest thing in the world. There we were, the two of us, going at it on that squeaky old sofa a mile a minute. I thought it would fall to pieces, and him upstairs so dead to the world he never knew a thing.”

Despite himself, Buddy snorted. “Well, he was deaf .” He pronounced the word in the country way, with a long e .

“Oh, we’ll never have times like that again.” When she turned to look at Buddy, her eyes gleamed with something more than reminiscence. “You were the wild one then. There wasn’t anything that stopped you. You were the king of the heap, and wasn’t I the queen? Wasn’t I, Buddy?” She grabbed one of his hands and squeezed it. Once her fingernails would have cut his skin, but her fingernails were gone and his skin was tougher. He pulled his hand away and stood up.

“Stop it, Greta. It won’t get you anywhere.”

“I’ve got a right to remember . It was that way, and you can’t tell me it wasn’t. I know it’s not that way any more. All I have to do is look around to see that. Where’s Jenkins’ house now, eh? Have you ever tried to find it? It’s gone; it’s simply disappeared. And the football field—where is that? Every day a little more of everything is gone. I went into MacCord’s the other day, where they used to have the nicest dresses in town, such as they were. There wasn’t a thing. Not a button. It seemed like the end of the world, but I don’t know—maybe those things aren’t so important. It’s people that are most important. But all the best people are gone, too.”

“Yes,” Buddy said, “yes, they are.”

“Except a very few. When you were away, I saw it all happen. Some of them, the Douglases and others, left for the cities, but that was only at the very beginning of the panic. They came back, the same as you—those who could. I wanted to go, but after Momma died, Daddy got sick and I had to nurse him. He read the Bible all the time. And prayed. He made me get down on my knees beside his bed and pray with him. But his voice wasn’t so good then, so usually I’d end up praying by myself. I thought it would have looked funny to somebody else—as though it was Daddy I was praying to and not God. But there wasn’t anybody left by that time who could laugh. The laughter had just dried up, like Split Rock River.

“The radio station had stopped, except for the news twice a day, and who wanted to hear the news? There were all those National Guard people trying to make us do what the Government said. Delano Paulsen got killed the night they got rid of the National Guard, and I didn’t know about it for a week. Nobody wanted to tell me, because after you left, Delano and I went steady. I guess maybe you never knew that. As soon as Daddy got on his feet, he was going to marry the two of us. Really—he really was.

“The Plants seemed to be everywhere then. They broke up the roads and water mains. The old lake shore was just a marsh, and the Plants were already growing there. Everything was so terribly ugly. It’s nice now, in comparison.

“But the worst part was the boredom. Nobody had time to have fun. You were gone and Delano was dead and Daddy—well, you can imagine. I shouldn’t admit this, but when he died, I was sort of glad.

“Except that was when your father was elected mayor and really started organizing everybody, telling them what to do and where to live, and I thought: ‘There won’t be room for me.’ I was thinking of Noah’s ark, because Daddy used to read that one over and over again. I thought: ‘They’ll take off without me.’ I was scared. I suppose everybody was scared. The city must have been scary, too, with all those people dying. I heard about that. But I was really scared! How do you explain that?

“And then your brother started coming to visit me. He was about twenty-one then and not really bad-looking from a girl’s point of view. Except for his chin. But I thought: ‘Greta, you’ve got a chance to marry Japheth.’”

“Who?”

“Japheth. He was one of Noah’s sons. Poor Neil! I mean, he really didn’t stand a chance, did he?”

“I think you’ve reminisced enough now.”

“I mean, he didn’t know anything about girls. He wasn’t like you. He was twenty-one, just three months younger than you, and I don’t think he even thought about girls. He said later it was your father who recommended me! Can you imagine that! Like he was breeding a bull!”

Buddy started walking away from her.

“What should I have done? You tell me. Should I have waited for you? Put a candle burning in the window?”

“You don’t need a candle, when you’re carrying a torch.”

Again the lyric laugh, but barbed with undissimulated shrillness. She rose and walked toward him. Her breasts, which had been noticeably slack before, were perceptibly less so.

“Well, do you want to know why? You don’t. You’re afraid to hear the truth. If I told you, you wouldn’t let yourself believe it, but I’ll tell you anyway. Your brother is a two-hundred pound noodle of wet spaghetti. He is completely and totally unable to move .”

“He’s my half -brother,” Buddy said, almost automatically.

“And he’s half of a husband for me.” Greta was smiling strangely, and somehow they had come to be standing face to face, inches apart. She had only to stand on tiptoe for her lips to reach his. Her hands never even touched him.

“No,” he said, pushing her away. “It’s over. It’s been over for years. That was eight years ago. We were kids then. Teenagers.”

“Oh brother, have you lost your guts!”

He slapped her hard enough to knock her to the ground, though in fairness it must be said that she seemed to cooperate and even to relish the blow.