Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Alice understood exactly what he meant about losing his Indian guide. It was the worst thing. They were supposed to stay with you always, but that was only if events went as anticipated, which they seldom did. But an Indian guide would never lead you here unless he was a particularly resentful one. Your nagual —your guardian spirit — wouldn’t lead you here either.

Corvus was coming out of the library, where the well made their attempts to relate to the unwell. The library was designed to look like a tasteful room in a private club. Light fell warmly from beneath orange shades. There were oils of Montana’s mighty Missouri River before the power plants got their hands on it. A few little upper-class knickknacks. Books behind leaded glass. But the leather-looking chairs were actually upholstered in vinyl, so bodily leaks could be wiped off in a jiffy; and beyond the draped windows waited the white ambulances with their silent sirens that never sounded on their passage to the undertaker, that moved softly down the highway, softly, when employed. Alice had seen them go.

“I saw your friend the piano player,” Corvus said. “Is he performing in the rec room, do you think, or is he visiting someone?”

Alice didn’t want to see Sherwin in this place; in fact, she didn’t want to come across him in most places. Someone laid a frail hand on hers. It was a hand belonging to a tiny old man. “What meat mollifies the howl of famished shades?” he said, patting her as though these words were his gift to her. Let her do with them as she wished. Alice had been in Green Palms long enough to know now that when they said “meat,” they didn’t mean “meat.” Even a month ago, if the tiny old man had come up to her and asked, “What meat mollifies the howl of famished shades?” she would’ve recused herself on the basis of her vegetarianism, but no more. Words didn’t even mean their opposite here — they could mean anything. The tiny old man shuffled away.

The rec room was near a long windowless area with a door at either end. Alice looked in the first door and saw nothing, just the fish tank with its glittering grottos. The fish looked as though they didn’t know what they were doing here either.

She walked down the corridor, past the wall covered with children’s drawings. Alice believed that encouraging young children in the arts gave them the false assurance of interpretation. Their artwork was forever being displayed at Green Palms, although the children themselves rarely made an appearance. When they did, they were met with bafflement, even hostility, by the residents. Alice looked in the second door.

“Isn’t that him?” Corvus asked.

Alice saw no resemblance between the shabby man in the windbreaker and Sherwin, whom she had found so unfathomable and thrilling. This man looked … hazy.

“No?” Corvus said. “Well, he’s got to be his double-walker then.”

You couldn’t tell from the double-walker’s expression whether he’d been visiting with someone or was just about to. Usually you could tell.

“Call his name,” Corvus said. “I bet he’ll raise his head and look at you.”

“I will not ,” Alice said.

“Call another name and I bet he won’t.”

The windbreaker was a dreary green that Annabel would probably call fern, ugh . He had the demeanor of someone who had to determine every day how to present himself, someone who was holding himself together with the greatest effort, who was exhausted by it and taking a rest from his labors now.

“Absolutely no resemblance,” Alice pronounced.

“How would you describe him, then? Describe the differences.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Alice said. “It just isn’t him at all.”

“And though to anyone other than yourself the likeness would be quite uncanny, you don’t feel drawn to him or touched by him?”

“No!” This reminded Alice of Nurse Daisy’s “We must see things we do not see and not see things we do see.” It was too much to remember, and she didn’t think it was a desirable thing to do anyway. She didn’t want to do it, and she didn’t want Corvus to do it either. Was this what Corvus was doing? The man in the green windbreaker was no more than a wraith of Sherwin, a visitor here, a stranger. He didn’t acknowledge them. He seemed, as they say, lost in thought.

“He’s got protuberant eyes. That’s supposed to mean a person has a good memory. Does he have a good memory?”

“No, I don’t think so. You mean a past? I don’t think he has any past at all. Let’s go. I don’t do as well in this place as you do.”

“I spent all afternoon with Merry Mendoza,” Corvus said. “Merry Mendoza thought that a fly in the courtyard was her sister Julia come back to life. Not every fly out there was Julia, of course. Merry could differentiate. And could reflect quite unsentimentally on flies in general. It’s easier to kill a fly than save it, she told me, because some flies aren’t nobody. But still, say you do save a fly, she said. For example, it’s inside and it’s struggling to get out but the window’s shut and it’s buzzing against the glass, so you try to catch it between your fingers or, better yet, cup it in your hands because it’s not nice between your fingers, it’s wet, so you cup it in one hand and open the window with the other and release it and the fly’s out there thinking, I want to do something for that person, but then it begins to think, Be realistic, what can you do?”

Alice didn’t think it was healthy to discuss flies all afternoon. She studied the children’s drawings. Apparently it was a traveling exhibition that had originated in the Wildlife Museum and would continue on, after it had been sufficiently absorbed by the geriatrics, to the state university library. Alice realized that the drawings were meant to depict animals, most of which resembled airplanes or cars. A child named Cedric had printed over a rectangle of dirty white, “The skin under a polar bear is black. Polar bears in fack are individuals of color.” Cedric had received an A over a B+ for his efforts, the lesser grade possibly because he had misspelled fact. He had also written a short letter of appreciation to the museum itself. “I really enjoyed all the different animals. I hope you got some more the next time I come.” The Wildlife Museum had been erected almost a decade before, and Alice and her little classmates — all then the same age the fawning Cedric was at present — had been given a free tour. She bitterly recalled her docility, her naïveté, her credulity, her utter lack of judgment. In a too-big dress and red cowgirl boots she stood tittering with her group, awed and irreverent at once. She had felt a giddy self-satisfaction, she remembered, looking at the animals.

They were hollow, she’d learned, all the children had learned, utterly hollow. It was possible to make them lighter and lighter, and they were being made lighter and lighter. A child could hold one aloft. Each year through grade school she went back— Mark your calendar, children! — but grew suspicious. This hollowness wasn’t such a good thing, she decided, this lightness, nor was the darkness behind the drains that had become their eyes. And they were not beautiful, they were not, this way. She felt not duped but a subject of attempted neutralization. They were your other. Guardant. Nagual . But you were being taught not to know them, not to recognize them. They were semblances wretched and unassimilatable.

She also remembered an egg. It was in the museum’s BIRD OF PARADISE display. It was convivially child-sized, and “What you can do” was printed on it above a small creased hole like an infant’s mouth, through which you could drop coins to purchase a hectare of rain forest, or prairie, or marsh and save it from vanishing. Had Alice put her tooth money in? She doubted it.