Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Alice had a little theory about the soul that she was somewhat loath to share, as certain of her theories had been discredited in the past. For example, when Alice was a child, she had believed the sex of a baby was determined by the one who’d tried hardest in the making of love; girls were made by women who concentrated , and boys when the woman wasn’t quite paying attention. Concerning the soul, she had tentatively concluded that when someone ended up in this waxed and fluorescent way station that was Green Palms, his or her soul was still searching for the treasure meant for it alone. But the search had gone on just a shade too long. The soul didn’t know where it was, only that it was in the place where the treasure meant for it alone would never manifest itself. As a tentative conclusion, Alice had to admit this wasn’t much, and there were several large issues it didn’t address at all. Still, there had to be an explanation as to why some people ended up being tenured to death for so long without being dead.

“Birth is the cause of death,” Nurse Daisy liked to say, which is why they didn’t allow her to fill out the death certificates either, although she once had scribbled, “The set trap never tires of waiting,” and, since no one could decipher her handwriting, it sailed on through.

Nurse Daisy dragged and bobbled Freddie around in the tub. “Makes you feel like a little baby, doesn’t it, Freddie? Dawdling and dandling in here with all your life before you, which is why you can’t remember it.” She turned to Alice, “More suds, dear, please.”

Alice hauled in the brush and foamed it up with a bar of Ivory. She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to convince Nurse Daisy to eschew the use of Ivory.

“They test all their products on animals,” Alice had told her. “I could provide you with some very disturbing and convincing brochures.”

“Ivory soap is the madeleine of our country’s innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “No one can resist the evocative smell of Ivory on a bit of clothing or human skin, most exquisitely on bed linen. The smell draws one toward trees and earth, silken dough rising, rain in the early morning. The numbing weight of infrastructure, franchises, seven hundred channels — all is lifted from us with its purifying scent.” She fluttered her small, coarse hands Heavenward.

“Ivory soap’s parent company is responsible for the death of fifty thousand animals annually,” Alice said.

“Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “Honestly, dear, sometimes you sound as though you just fell off the turnip truck.” She gave Freddie a quick two dunks. “Whoopsie and whoopsie! Peekaboo! Here you are again!”

When Alice had first started coming here, Freddie would say, “I want to go hoooome ,” just like they all did, but he didn’t say it anymore. The management explained to Corvus and Alice that the residents didn’t really want to go home, they just wanted things to be the same as they once had been. The distinction had to be made. Home didn’t have anything to do with it, they assured Alice and Corvus.

“Where’s your friend today?” Nurse Daisy asked.

“Which one?” she said.

“The only one you have. When I was your age, I only had one friend, too. We were girls together.”

“She’s assisting Nurse Cormac,” Alice said.

“Nurse Cormac was born with a wimple. I hate her pious guts. No balls. Timidest person I ever met. Feckless do-gooder. Simpleton.” She spoke without excitement.

Alice daubed Freddie unhappily. He was very old, inert, massive, and alive.

“You ever drown anyone doing this?” Alice said.

“Would they allow me to continue if I had?” She reeled Freddie in a bit.

“Well, I don’t know,” Alice said. “Don’t you think he’s clean enough now?”

Nurse Daisy pretended to look at a watch on her wrist, although Alice had never seen her wear one. “Still possible for your circle to close today, Freddie. Still some time left in the day for the circle to do the right thing. But the circle closes in its own good time, doesn’t it, Freddie? Can’t rush your secession into dust, the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea …” She had hoisted Freddie up and away from the tub and was keeping him more or less upright on a padded vinyl trolley. “Towels, please, dear,” she said to Alice.

With relief, Alice swaddled Freddie up. A soapy smell rose from his pale, globe-shaped head. Innocence. Incomprehension.

“There’s my little bunny,” Nurse Daisy said.

Someone screamed, and Alice blinked.

“Nothing serious,” Nurse Daisy said. “I know my screams.”

Alice frowned.

“You think I’m adding a teeny tiny bit to their suffering, don’t you?” the nurse said. “But no one consciously suffers here. That’s the tragedy of this place. All this remarkably calibrated suffering and not a bit of consciousness involved.”

Nurse Daisy dried Freddie and dressed him in a blue sweatshirt (“ Iowa Hawkeyes today, Freddie”), a diaper and red sweatpants. She regarded her handiwork with a very complicated expression, an expression Nurse Cormac couldn’t have achieved if it had been painted on her. She stroked Freddie’s vigorously rampant eyebrows flat with her finger. The flesh around her simple gold wedding band was swollen. She should have that thing cut off and enlarged, Alice thought.

“Do you go home to a husband?” Alice inquired. She couldn’t imagine.

“I’m sure your own story is far more intriguing. Do you get credits for coming here? Points?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said.

“Complicado, our impulses. The tubies, dear, for Freddie’s feet.”

Alice ripped open a fresh package of tube socks. She knelt and pulled the white socks over the large feet, which were sadly warm, and bloused the sweatpants over them. Secreted beneath his skin just below the breastbone was a battery that kept his weary heart beating wantonly. It had been implanted when the subject of his future was still coming up. A majority of the tenants of Green Palms were so implanted. Nurse Daisy called the apparatus the Devil’s little lamb. She called the socks toddling tubies for negotiating the chasm — the chasm, as Alice understood it, being the divide between life and death, although in this place the chasm had shrunk to a crack, even less than a crack, a crease, something technical and maladroit that people here couldn’t manage to fall into.

Freddie had a daughter who came to visit, and she was sixty-six, but Alice hadn’t seen her for a while.

They wheeled Freddie out of the scrub room into the main corridor, then down to an enclosed patio where they deposited him with three silent, similarly swaddled denizens. The patio faced the arbor where the employee of the month was entitled to park. All month a dented car painted with flowers, childish pansies, and petunias had been parked there. It belonged to Nurse Cormac, who frequently was awarded this honor.

“No daisies, you’ll notice,” Nurse Daisy said, “a quite conscious omission.”

“You ever get to park your car in that slot?” Alice asked.

Nurse Daisy ignored this absurdity, though she did snort softly through her delicate nostrils, another anomaly on her blocky, unbalanced face. The repertoire, if not the mobility, of her features seemed endless.

They both studied the small, optimistic, reliable car. A wooden fish, with which Nurse Cormac was known to be well pleased, carved in the Holy Land, dangled from the rearview mirror. It had been rendered in an abstract rather than classical manner. The only other explanation for the artist’s banal vision was that it wasn’t a fish at all.

They turned and walked back along the corridor, the smells of supper, creamed, minced, mashed, and pattied, preceding them.