Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

— You came back, Grandma stammered when he let me in. She squinted.

— Of course. I touched her shoulder. I’m not leaving.

She was lying on the examining table with both legs bent at the knees so that her soles were flat and her shins faced the back of the room.

— The hip is fine, he said as he went around the examination table. Deep bruises takes longer to heal at her age.

If he had been speaking with her before I got there he wasn’t doing so anymore. Now I was the authority in the room. — But now we find another problem, he said. I am cutting it off.

— Cutting where?

— From my leg, Grandma muttered.

He had a silver tool that looked like a cookie cutter stubbed into her shin. Blood came out from where the silver plunger hid. Dribbling down my grandmother’s leg.

— Shit! I screamed.

He pulled the cutter out; it had a small cylinder of her flesh in the once-hollow core now. — I will do stitches, he said.

Grandma held her face like she was trying to pull it off.

— Can you feel it through the anesthesia? I asked.

— There is none, the surgeon said.

— Where did it go?

— I didn’t have any, the doctor said. Many people here don’t get any. It is expensive for all sides.

He carried some thin black thread in his palm. — She wanted none, he added.

Grandma rubbed her two thin bent arms together at the elbows, inches above her face.

— How come you’re not screaming? I’ll get the police! There’s blood, Grandma.

She told me, — I had him do it this way.

The Russian stitched the site. Explained that after giving Grandma this punch biopsy he’d send the flesh to test for cancer.

I fell back into a chair clutching my own leg.

— I am sorry, Grandma whispered. To all of you. Many nights I wonder how I brought this sickness to my children.

Instead of running away I pulled the chair closer. The doctor’s needle made no sounds entering her skin except for Grandma’s rasping. She said, — What did I do to you?

— You’ll never be able to move around on that leg, Grandma.

— Why should I be spared?

The doctor must have wanted to be charming. He thought he was making a joke.

The Russian said, — Now your children will have to carry you.

I was part of a Current A fair family. The Hard Copy demographic. Rescue 911; Real Life Stories of the Highway Patrol; Unsolved Mysteries starring Mr. Robert Stack. Beginning on November 14 th television news and the reputable papers explained that the entire U.S. Government was shutting down due to budgetary squabbling between Democrats and Republicans, but the effect on us was minimal.

Looming cuts to our national budget were advertised as either a prelude to the Rapture or Satan taking control, depending on your political affiliations. Even atheists and the spare Marxist agreed when allowed a few minutes of punditry on cable stations. The way politicians yelled I expected warlord-supported gangs to commandeer our homes and daughters. Federal Government deadlock was on every major network which meant, of course, that many of us changed the channel.

To programs that were more entertaining. I was a fan of the Morton Downey Jr. show just like Nabisase. When Grandma had finished with the Star I took it to the bathroom and read quietly. One of us was watching television at all times.

Besides, serious news only reported on small lives like ours when they’d been caught in the trajectory of someone’s gun. Other than that it was war crimes, statewide fires and unctuous assemblymen; famine in the hot belt of the planet. More important, I’ll agree.

Call ours minor items then. The shooting of Mary Jo Buttafuoco. A priest who had a sex change. One Hartford man who’d faked more on-the-job injuries than anyone in America. Ordinary epics. Legends are still to be created.

Into that stewpot add a beauty pageant for virgins. No national scandal, but a five-minute item for sure.

The revised Norton Anthology of Poetry was on my sleeping bag open to the bottom of page 1249. I’d opened it while feeling particularly distant from college one evening; actually pretending I’d enjoyed my Survey of American Poetry seminar freshman year. I plowed it from the bottom of one of my book boxes and read awhile, but turned it down when Grandma called to me from the living room.

— Anthony! Come on, Anthony!

Even my sister said my name as she hadn’t done since the 12th, and it was the 20th already; hearing Nabisase speak to me really was a miracle worth thanking Selwyn for.

When I got upstairs they were on the couch. Grandma leaned forward, left elbow on her good thigh, resting her chin in that left hand, tapping the tip of her nose with her pointer finger.

Nabisase said, — Anthony, look at this.

The TV was speaking.

A cabbage-headed man hosted the show, but he wore a suit for dignity. His Australian accent made him sound smarter. Out of those clothes he’d look like any alcohol-pounded, red-faced, barender, but not behind a desk.

— Beauty pageants built this country, he said.

— They’re one of America’s sacred institutions. Women make more money, have more power, now than ever before in human history, but let’s hope we never forget to appreciate the precious faces of the ladies who compete in the pageant system year after year. Here’s our Jerry Ganz with a story we call, Pretty as a Picture.

His face dispersed into pixilated dust on the screen, which refocused on the image of a shaded runway. It was footage of a contest, but not Miss Innocence. Women in their twenties wearing gowns; this passed quickly. To teenagers in a similar promenade.

A new deep voice began; Jerry Ganz.

— Beauty, he began. Pageants, he finished.

— Every state in the nation hosts dozens each year. Fitness America, Cracker Jacks Bikini Contest, Miss Italia, The Black Mother and Daughter Pageant. Even Manhunt International, for gentlemen.

— While most of us can see that these institutions celebrate competition, excellence and, yes, good looks, not everyone agrees. The weekend of November the 10th found over forty families traveling to a small town named Lumpkin on the border between Virginia and West Virginia. A place where crime of any kind is rare.

— You can see the local temperament at the annual Apple Picking Festival, where families from every part of Frederick County come to enjoy apple cider, apple pie and apple fries.

The shots of sunny orchards were replaced by flashbright footage of college-aged men and women, skinny and sanguine, surrounding a Wendy’s restaurant.

— Film obtained recently shows this band of college students taunting helpless travelers a year ago. The old women you see trapped in this circle of belligerent twenty year olds were only buying copies of The Rescuers Down Under, a Disney film, for their nephews and nieces. When they were accosted, in 1994, at a Parsipany, New Jersey, rest stop.

— The Miss Innocence pageant was different from many others because they only accepted contestants who had held onto their virtue. A contest for girls from ages eleven to seventeen who’d done what few will nowadays— remain a virgin.

— Here you can see the Blue Ridge Theatre. Where musicals such as Oklahoma and The Music Man are regularly run. Gospel choirs practice on the second floor. And on Saturday, the 11th, these girls staged one of the most enjoyable shows in years.

The tabloid show had film of the night of the blowout: the protestors walking around outside the Blue Ridge, of them opening the door to the service hall. A camera man had perched himself at an auditorium window and there was footage of people inside running, spasming, crying as the flares burned. You could hear the horns, but the glass muffled it some. They had shots from inside the protestor’s yellow bus, but none of Uncle Arms.