Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Don’t engage yourself,” Sherwin said. “That’s the key to everything. Don’t traffic in social responsibility.”

“I don’t want to be socially responsible at all,” Alice said. She wanted him to be dark, the things he said to be dark. She didn’t want advice or for him ever to be helpful.

“Look, honey, if you believe in the utter value of the individual, you’ve got to devalue the rest of the world.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, it’s necessary. It just follows.”

“It hurts to talk,” Alice said.

He crushed some ice and wrapped it in a rag. “That underwear is perfectly clean, I assure you,” he said.

“How do I look?” Alice asked. “Do I look okay?”

“One seeks in vain among debased superlatives.” He pressed the ice against her jaw, then shrugged. “It’s too late for this. Do you feel nostalgic yet?”

Through the cold she could smell nicotine on his stained fingertips.

“That guy had a job before you environmentalists took it away. Now he has nothing to do but ride his bike, his only treasure, then go home at night to terrorize his children and beat his wife. Spousal abuse is directly linked to environmental regulation. It can be stamped out only by stamping out nature — not human nature, the other one. That alone will provide jobs and stop the breakdown of the American family.”

Alice reluctantly dragged her tongue from the tantalizing vacancy. “Can you see it when I smile?”

“You should forgive him, for starters. Forgiveness is cool.”

“Forgiveness is optional,” Alice said. “Sometimes it’s not appropriate at all.”

“Forgiveness is complicated, you’d like it.”

“I’m not a complicated person.” It was as though he were talking about Corvus again.

“You ever watch that television show, Ricky and Romulus ? Every Tuesday five to five-thirty? One’s a paraplegic black guy, and the other’s the white guy who crippled him in a robbery. Black guy says, ‘I have forgiven you, I am in the living process of forgiving you, I want to help you get employment, an apartment, a high school diploma, I want to help you get clean, I want to pay off your credit card debts.’ Romulus is a good guy. Can only move his lips and eyebrows. Looks like a big gray melon sitting in a chair. Ricky, on the other hand, is a skinny, jittery, hyped-up, drug-addled flamboyance cursing and bawling ‘Lemme alone, I’ve served my time, I’ve paid my debt to society, I don’t want your skanky forgiveness, get off my ass, I wish you were dead, man.’ They go at each other for fifteen minutes and then viewers call in with supporting arguments. It’s a remarkable program.”

“How can it be on every Tuesday?”

“They’ve been on for over a year now. The quality of mercy is an inexhaustible subject.”

Alice thought that their first time alone together had gone well. Well, fairly well. When she got back home she asked her granny and poppa about Ricky and Romulus . Did it exist? She stood in darkness just around the corner from them, worrying about the havoc her tooth would wreak on their small savings.

“I don’t watch that,” her granny said. “It’s like those wrestling programs. There’s something insincere about it. If we’re free Tuesday five to five-thirty,” her granny said, “we’re usually tuned into Women Betrayed by Companion Animals . Some of those stories can make your hair stand on end.”

No lights were shining in the Airstream. Alice slipped into her room, which she thought of as the kind of room where somebody who someday would do something cataclysmic would spend her formative years. The only decoration was the picture of the woman and the octopus. Alice loved this picture and had studied its every nuance. She undressed, and as she was pulling her T-shirt over her head, the tooth fell to the floor. She picked it up and almost put it beneath her pillow. When she had been a little kid, of course, teeth had dutifully turned into cold hard cash, in one of the perverse and jolly customs perpetrated on little kids. A classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy. The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth — what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

She got into bed and waited for sleep. She liked waiting for sleep. It wasn’t like waiting at all.

She reflected on the octopus, as she did most nights, so intelligent and shy but extending itself, as it were, moving out of its solitary nature, unoctopuslike, impossibly in love. She had always related more to the octopus than the woman, although the woman had to be fairly interesting to find herself in this situation. An octopus could brood and plan for the future, that was known, everybody knew that, and it was undoubtedly brooding and planning at the very moment depicted, while the woman looked as though she had given up. The octopus, so bright and solitary and weird, was giving the situation its full attention, whereas the woman knew that it was suffocating and being poisoned by its bloodstream just by being in the room with her, and that brooding and planning wouldn’t help at all. The difference in attitude was what made the situation tragic.

Corvus chose to volunteer once a week at the nursing home, Green Palms, and the first Thursday Alice and Annabel went too. They were accepted and acknowledged much like the dogs, Tiffany and Helen, who made their rounds on Fridays.

A green van transporting a few gloomy cleaning ladies and a manic, moonfaced physical therapist picked them up and took them out into the foothills, where Green Palms was concealed in a magnificent riparian area. Nothing was supposed to be built here, but the developers had won approval by making the nursing home the cornerstone of their resort package. Green Palms was state-of-the-art End of the Trail. In an act of conceptual brilliance, it was tastefully concealed from the resort’s supper clubs, ballrooms, pools, gymnasiums, and stables; a glimpse of it could be afforded from the golf course, but from the more expensive suites it was invisible, and from a distance it could not be seen at all. The van wound its way slowly up narrow roads and through a number of guardhouse gates, which opened in recognition of a decal on the windshield.

“I wish we lived in a gated community,” Annabel said. “I mean, the strangest people come up sometimes and say they’re lost, and Daddy believes them.”

“Gated communities should be unconstitutional,” Alice said.

Then they were there. The palm at the end of the mind , Alice thought when they arrived, a line from a poem she’d read at school. The teacher had spoiled it for her somewhat by saying that the poet, according to his notebooks, had considered another line for that slot. The alp at the end of the street . She could hardly imagine anyone getting to the palm at the end of the mind via the alp at the end of the street, but the ability to do so, she thought, was what this place was all about. They were all solipsists in Green Palms, all heroes and heroines of their own vanishing consciousness.

Corvus suggested that Alice and Annabel think of the people here as already being dead, which meant that visiting with them and doing little things like rubbing cream into their hands or spraying a pleasant scent on their pillows was something very special.

Annabel protested this.

“That seems awfully extreme,” Alice admitted.

“When you’re with them, have a picture in your mind of yourself drinking from a glass,” Corvus said. “And picture the glass as already being broken, shattered.”