Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

At the hospital, it had seemed that he was watching the action from a great distance, as if he were standing outside a dance hall where strobe lights were flashing. The hospital had seemed garishly bright, and he had closed his eyes often, needing to rest them. When he opened them, he would get a flash of something new, something he would only see quickly: the blood-covered shirt, the notebook that was open and then closed, a needle going into Louise’s arm. When he blinked the needle had been pulled out; Louise had been standing and then she was sitting. He saw people but not groups of people; a nurse’s hand, but not the nurse’s body. His son, in a white bed: For a second he had seen all of him, a little boy in a bed, but then he had seen only his eyes. John Joel had said that Mary was a bitch. His mouth had moved, but nothing else, and he had wanted to move toward him, but the nurse had stepped in. He blinked, and then the nurse was between him and his son, and he was staring at her hand, turning. The corridor stretched before him, long and narrow and bright; and from there, somehow, to the inside of the car, with Louise on the seat beside him. Then he managed to focus on the important things, one by one: key in ignition, hand on wheel, foot on accelerator. He had gotten to New York the same way. He had not seen the whole backyard, but only the tree under which it had happened; and then he had seen his car, gotten into the car, and from there to New York it was a series of simple, mechanical movements. They tell you when you are learning to drive not to stare straight ahead, but to take in what is happening around you. Next to him was an empty seat. He looked at his hands on the wheel, then through the windshield, and then at the speedometer: He watched the needle climb and climb until he was going the right speed. He knew that he was falling asleep, and that he shouldn’t sleep. Her hand was on his chest, but he had been wrong — it was inadequate to hold him down. He wasn’t heavy, as he had thought, but light, speeding.

“What’s the matter?” she said, when he sprang up from the bed.

He stood in the room, shaking sleep out of his head. He had to go back, but he was afraid to move out of the room, afraid to move from the spot he stood in. Nina was standing beside him, pulling his arm the way Brandt did, but she had more power. She could lead him back to the bed. He blinked, and he was sitting on the bed, Nina’s arm around his shoulder, Nina pressing up against him. She was crying. He talked to her, said words, said something, but she kept on crying. Talking to her was as futile as trying to get to the top of the stairs. Time had stopped. He was telling her that they were stopped, and she was shaking her head no. She didn’t believe him? He decided to trust her. He smiled and pulled her down on the bed with him. If time hadn’t stopped, then it was safe to sleep, and when he woke up things would go on. It was possible that things could go on. If he slept, it did not mean that he would sleep forever.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

He thought that she knew him so well that she had read his mind. He thought she was asking him whether or not he was going to stay awake.

On his side, next to her in the bright room, he slept.

He dreamed that Nina was on a train. It was a train in a foreign country, a train somewhere in Europe, and it was winter, a bright day, bare trees and bright sun as the train took a curve and straightened again. She had on a winter coat, black, and she was sitting in a compartment alone, on a long wooden bench that faced another wooden bench. She was looking at the haze of passing scenery out the window. And then a couple came into the compartment, a man and a wife. They had a newspaper with them, the New York Times, and when they put a section aside she asked to see it. They were surprised that she was also an American. Just the three of them, two facing one, Nina in her black coat. She had taken the paper, unfolded it, turned the page, and there was his picture. Sitting on the train and opening a newspaper she had found his obituary, and that was how she learned that he was dead .

“I’M STILL looking around the farm, and I’m able to count all the chickens. Seems like there hasn’t been one chicken dinner, if you know what I mean. Chickens still going every which way, you keep hearing about how they get their heads chopped off and their bodies go running forward, but when I look around, I don’t even see any feathers. More and more chickens, nicer and nicer farm. Pastoral. People would say I was an evil character for dealing a few drugs, but look who gets blown away. Not my chickens. Way I look at it, we’re all still struttin’ around Maggie’s Farm. Bunch of chickens struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine. You pick up a newspaper and read about what happened at Three Mile Island, you try to tell me that my chickens are causing any trouble like that. Might be a little stoned, but they’re just struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine, and nobody’s catching them for nothing. Too many bad things pinned on drugs. No way that ten-year-old was high, according to you, and there he was, up in a tree, shooting down. No way drugs explain why this is a bad world. Chickens got all upset a while back there, thinking the sky was falling. Acid didn’t do that. The United States space program did that. Chickens ought to squawk. They fucking ought to claw the dirt about that one. Not that there’s any good it would do them. United States government doesn’t have to pay attention to a little bit of scratching in the dirt.”

Horton was stoned. He was trying to get a Morton’s chicken pot pie out of its foil baking dish and onto one of Nina’s plates. He liked to remove the top piece intact, but it was already in three pieces, and he hadn’t even tilted the pie onto the plate yet. He worked the fork around the edge again, tilted the pie. “Good a thing to eat as any other,” he said. “Cheap, too. Hey, I made a joke. Talking about chicken, and I said cheap.”

“I feel responsible,” she said. “I’ve talked to John about this every day for a week, and I still feel responsible.”

“Homewrecker? You feel like a bad lady homewrecker? People don’t want their house disturbed, they don’t go out looking to disturb it. He just wanted the lights burning all night in the chicken coop. Wanted more production. Willing to risk a tasteless egg or two to take on more.”

“Will you please stop talking about chickens?” Spangle said.

He was cutting his steak. No place Nina suggested for dinner had pleased them, and finally they had smoked up again and gone to the food store, and this was what they had come back with. One steak, one Morton’s chicken pie, and eight bags of Doritos.

“You told me these were great,” Spangle said, biting a Dorito. “Same old taco chips. I don’t see any difference.”

“This is really getting to me,” Nina said. “There’s a real crisis in my life, and I end up entertaining the Marx Brothers.”

“No way we’re the Marx Brothers,” Horton said. “Take a look. I’m black, he’s white. We might be half-brothers, if Mama was fooling around with the wrong rooster, but there is no way you can take in the two of us and say we’re brothers. Shit. We’re not even soul brothers. You know who’s a soul man now? Not Huey, not Eldridge. Fatso, on Saturday Night Live.” Horton bit into another Dorito. “You think brother Huey traded in his wicker throne for modular furniture? What do you bet me?”