Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

When she arrived back home, having survived her near-death experience, Gina was supposed to lie down, but she didn’t want to be horizontalized. She couldn’t see the point to it since she wasn’t particularly tired and she certainly wasn’t dead, either. Her throat hurt; that was about it. What she really wanted to do was to call a few people. She took her cell phone along with four cookies into her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on her bedspread with two of the cookies hidden beneath one knee and the other two cookies behind the other knee, and she wondered which of her friends she would call first to tell about her near-death. She was glad to see Wilbur again, scrabbling in his corner. He welcomed her back with a few quiet, loving little squeals.

She bit into the first cookie, leaving three and a half.

She decided to give her friend April the first call, but April wasn’t at home — nobody was (and they didn’t have an answering machine or voicemail over there, it was medieval) — so she tried Danni instead. Danni took it on the second ring. Danni did all the phone-answering at the Wiesiewski house. Danni was pretty and stuck-up like the rest of the Wiesiewskis, but she was a good listener when she had to be. When Danni asked Gina, “Whassup?” Gina told her that they’d been out at Copper Lake, and she’d been swimming, and — this was a secret, Danni absolutely could not tell anyone — she thought she saw this ghost-person under the water who looked exactly like Gordy Himmelman, and, no, she couldn’t describe how it had happened, but it was like he had dragged her down under the water, and it was incredibly beautiful down there — it was not ugly — and she almost drowned, but her father or somebody had brought her back to life.

Gordy Himmelman? Danni asked. You’re kidding. That freak? Besides, he’s dead. Are you crazy? What are you saying?

No. Gina said that she was not kidding, swear to God, and not crazy. Did she sound crazy? No. This was weirder than being crazy. In fact, she said, it would be just exactly like Gordy Himmelman to be a ghost, because when he was alive, or semi-alive, or whatever it was he had been when he had been living, he had always wandered into places where he wasn’t wanted, and it would therefore be like him now to show up here, there, and everywhere. She ate her cookie and bit into another one, which left two and a half. She touched her hair. It was still damp and probably dirty from the lake water. She would have to shampoo it soon.

It’s like he’s in charge of something real interesting, Gina said.

Danni asked Gina if she could tell anyone, and Gina said, well, no, not really, or: well, you can tell some people, but only as long as you get my permission first, and they have to promise not to tell. “I don’t want everybody to know,” Gina said. “It sounds too weird.”

Danni said she understood perfectly.

Within four days Gina’s telephone was ringing every half-hour from kids she knew who thought they had seen Gordy or someone like him: Ron Burr told Chrystal Chambers that he thought he had seen Gordy in the Elysian Fields Shopping Mall, walking as if he were battery-powered and under remote control from Mars, into one of the theaters at the multiplex, but when he followed him in, Gordy wasn’t there. He had just vanished like shit in a shitstorm. Ron said he was a loser. Losers disappear on you, but now that he was dead maybe he wasn’t such a total loser after all. Death could revise you. The day after that, April, Gina’s friend April Cumming, claimed that she had seen Gordy Himmelman outside her window, looking in, like some creep stalker jackoff; then ugly little Georgette Novak, who wanted to be popular and who worked at McDonald’s because people claimed that her parents wouldn’t give her an allowance for clothes, said that she had served Gordy Himmelman a Coke and fries, and that he looked verifiably dead, which at least was convincing, and he paid her with money that totally disappeared after she put it into the cash drawer. He had paid her with bogey money. Rona Elliott said she had seen him out in the park, where she had been walking her dog, Buster, who barked hysterically at him. Gordy stood on the other side of the park, waving at her, as if he were signaling. She turned away, and when she turned back, he was gone.

Other reports put Gordy in a tree, way up where you couldn’t reach him, Gordy moving around in the house at night, Gordy’s image appearing suddenly on the computer screen, Gordy calling in the middle of the night and asking for the time, Gordy appearing on a three-A.M. infomercial — in the background in a kitchen, staring at the camera, while in the foreground they were selling a kitchen gadget.

They said he looked like himself. They said he was everywhere.

Danni told Gina that April had said that all these sightings were, like, mass hysteria, and that the Justice Department was looking into it, because it might be the work of terrorists. You had to be on a twenty-four-hour alert.

And it would have died down, too, Gina thought, if one of the nicest boys in her class, Sam Cole, who was sweet and a good athlete and really good-looking — he wasn’t like most of the other boys, and the boys knew it, and because he was both tough and goodhearted, nobody ever said anything bad about him — hadn’t been riding home from a dentist’s appointment on his bicycle and hadn’t been hit by a newspaper truck backing down a driveway. Because, after that, all the kids in Five Oaks who were even close to Sam’s age knew that Gordy Himmelman had pushed him into the path of that truck. They didn’t exactly tell their parents, but they told each other, and that was how they knew.

This is how it was: there were terrorists for their parents, and there was Gordy Himmelman for them.

The woman in front of Patsy at the VitaDrug prescription counter had been taking antipsychotics for so long that she had apparently lost control of her tongue. Patsy didn’t even pretend to look away. While the woman waited for her credit-card number to go through, her tongue emerged from her mouth like a snake from its nest, angled left and right experimentally as if testing the air for bugs or oxygen density, then retreated back into her mouth before emerging again, this time staying out as it continued its ceaseless explorations. Her purchases were piled on the counter in a haphazard fashion. Along with the drugs nestled in their bar-coded, stapled bags with the “Ask the Pharmacist” cartoon on the front, showing a bald-headed man with a small-town smiley face (none of the pharmacists here looked like that: they were all East Indian), the woman had bought three cylindrical containers of potato chips, four cans of tuna, and two six-packs of diet cola. She made Patsy think of a lizard-lady preparing for a party with the other lizard-ladies, all of them sitting outside on the terrace, passing the tin cans from lap to lap, their tongues wagging, the fat of their ankles spilling out over the tops of their shoes.

All through October, when she was alone, or running errands after work like this, after having picked up Emmy from day care, Patsy somehow found herself at the end of her goodwill. This falling-away from sympathetic feelings for the helpless was new for her. Random compassion without any outlet now struck her as a Saul-like indulgence. Against strangers, she could feel her heart slowly hardening, developing a shellac. Her charity was failing her. If any woman deserved her pity, this woman did. But her pity seemed unavailable to her. Everything she had was directed toward her children these days: this one, and the one to come. And Saul, too, of course.

After picking up her prescription for Dorylaeum, a vitamin supplement and sleep aid for pregnant women whose occasional side effect was that it made time speed up, Patsy wheeled Emmy in her stroller down the aisles past the magazine rack, where two middle school girls were talking quietly to each other as they flipped through the new issue of Gloor . They appeared to be dressed for Halloween, and it was now late October, and their white hair, kohl-darkened eyes, bleached skin, and black raggedy clothes accessorized with pins displaying cryptic symbols gave them the aspect of ghosts. When Patsy passed them, they gazed at her with the fixedness of the dead. They were part of the growing number of middle schoolers and high school kids who were affecting the gothic mortuary look. In the space of several weeks, a small but significant cult of Gordy Himmelman had surfaced, and this style, Patsy had heard, was meant either to ward him off or to evoke him. They called themselves Himmels. All over town, out of the corner of your eye, you could see these neo-goths, these Himmels, with their staring-fish expressions. Saul and Patsy’s paperboy, Darryl Anderson, was now a part-time Himmel. He was a nice kid and hadn’t quite mastered the doom-laden frown yet. Some of the others talked in a kind of code, the way they imagined that the dead might.