Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Corvus,” she said, “would you like the last of this body butter?”

Corvus opened her eyes. “No, thanks,” she said.

Annabel smiled at her. “It’s important to keep your skin moisturized.”

Corvus closed her eyes again.

“I don’t want to be part of a control group,” Alice was saying. “You know, when doctors give people placebos and other people medicine that might help them, I don’t think that’s ethical. I don’t want a placebo, and I don’t want the other stuff either. I want to be free.”

A hot breeze raised the scalloped edges of the pool umbrellas. It sounded like wavelets lapping far away. Corvus was making it sound like this, against any will she could muster not to: it was the sound of water filling her ears, the memory of the water her mother’s friend had offered. An early call to chaos and calamity, to the other side. But she had survived that moment and was now surviving sorrow.

There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

“Corvus?”

She didn’t open her eyes, just breathed in, breathed out. She’d had her own brief career as a lobbyist in the arcade for the still-living dead. She had wished to restore them to some success. She had talked and talked to them, projecting herself without words. She had clasped their worn, warm hands. They had thought her a fool. She needed to tamp herself down now, tamp herself down, measure out her breaths until they were gone. No one had to know she was doing it.

“Although sometimes people can get better if the placebos are administered in an enthusiastic way,” Alice said. “I don’t know, it’s a complex issue. I don’t want to be indifferent to anything, I don’t want to think of anything as inevitable.”

“Things are inevitable,” Annabel said. “Lots of things just are.”

“I don’t want to be”—Alice wasn’t sure about this—“credulous? But maybe I do.”

“You’ve really got us in a state of suspense here.” Annabel looked irritably at her stomach — flat, though not so flat as she’d like. Beaded with perspiration and oil, it looked pretty good, she thought, though utterly wasted on present company. She hoped she could hold on to her good skin, not hold on to it literally of course, but an awareness of the importance of proper maintenance, which she had, must surely give her an advantage over girls who didn’t give it a second thought. A phone rang. It was never for her. No one even knew she existed up here, out in the desert in this stupid house.

“You can still see the moon,” Alice said. “I like it when you can still see the moon in a daytime sky.”

Corvus opened her eyes, moved her eyes without moving her head, breathed in, breathed out, tamping herself down into that leached and lightless depth. She saw the moon, almost empty, standing hollow. Her mother’s friend had always pointed such a moon out to her. It appears that way because it’s carrying the dead, she’d told Corvus in her quick, low, gay voice. The moon is killing itself from carrying so many dead; you can expect to hear something strange when the moon lies like that. How had her mother happened to have as a friend such a Lilith? How had they met? For that matter, how had her parents met? She had never been told. She would never be told now. The hair of our heads will be like clouds when we die, her mother’s friend had said, your hair and mine and that of everyone we love and hate. I don’t hate anybody, Corvus had said. Like clouds, this woman said, when we become as clouds.

Carter hung up the phone. He and Donald had planned a most satisfactory evening for themselves, although that ambitious union Donald had in mind was still on hold. They were going to hear a string quartet downtown — opera companies never came within miles of this burg — after which they would enjoy a late supper. He felt better. Everything seemed fresher now, even though he was still uncertain about how precisely to proceed. “Should I order cyanide,” he sang, “or order champagne?” He should throw another party soon. Get that piano player back.

Alice’s granny and poppa were looking at a puzzle in the funny papers, a block of wavy, unfocused multicolored lines. They would bring the page close to their faces, then push it slowly back.

“I see it,” her poppa said.

“I see it, too,” her granny said. “Why don’t you try it, Alice?”

Alice studied it, crossing her eyes even. She wanted to be the kind of person who could see things that weren’t initially or even necessarily there, wanted the surprise of seeing the other something that was in everything, its hidden nimbus, its romance. “I don’t see anything,” she said. She felt hot with disappointment, as though in this simple optic failure she had failed the challenge of life.

“You don’t see the kayak?” her poppa asked.

“Kayak!” Alice said. “All it is is a kayak?”

“When I was a girl, it was Jesus opening his eyes,” her granny admitted. “These big heavy-lidded eyes, and they’d just slide slowly open and bore right into you.”

“Didn’t have to explain, just proclaim,” her poppa said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

“Why bother, if it’s only a kayak!”

“Don’t get so upset, honey. Go get Corvus. See if she can spot the kayak.”

“She’s sleeping,” Alice said.

“That young woman sleeps too much,” her granny said. “I wish there was something we could do for her.”

“A locked heart is difficult to unlock,” her poppa said. “We’re giving her shelter for the moment, that’s the important thing. Shelter is what she needs right now.”

He cleared the table of the Sunday papers, and put out the supper things. They were having tortilla soup and coffee cake tonight. They had their favorites frequently.

“Do you know they’re raising pigs now for their organs alone?” her poppa said. “No more bacon or those barbecued ears that Fury likes. They’ll be too valuable for that.”

“I think Fury buries them directly, to tell you the truth,” her granny said.

“Seeing animals as food is so primitive,” Alice said.

“That’s what they’re saying. This is more civilized. Pigs will be bred for hearts and valves adequate for transplanting into needy humankind.”

“That is so wicked,” Alice said.

“If you needed a kidney,” her poppa asked, “would you accept one from a guinea pig just to tide you over?”

“Certainly not,” she said.

“A guinea pig kidney wouldn’t do Alice any good,” her granny protested. “It would be far too small.” She was more down to earth than her poppa, who sometimes just liked to stir things up.

“Animal donors are the future,” he said. “I can see the first pig on the cover of Time . The pig prior to the selfless donation of his heart to the president.”

“ Time , that rag,” her granny said. “Well, I think it’s unfortunate. What will happen to children’s books? What will become of the classics? Remember your favorite, Alice? It was Charlotte’s Web .”

“ ‘No one was with her when she died,’ ” Alice said, her mouth full of coffee cake.

“What’s that?” her granny inquired.

Alice swallowed. “No one was with Charlotte when she died. That’s how it ends.”