Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Think with me, Alice!” he cried. “Think with me! What can be done? You’re a thoughtful girl, a daring, irreverent girl. It would be a remarkable achievement.”

“I could be Girl of the Year,” Alice said gravely.

“At the very least!”

“It’s against the laws of nature, Mr. V.”

“People have done worse to nature, far worse. You of all people are aware of the perniciousness of humankind’s presence on Earth.”

Someone was listening to her! Or at least overhearing her as she wedged her warnings about ecological collapse into the most benign conversations. “The impending extinction spasm is going to produce a cataclysmic setback to life’s abundance and diversity,” she mumbled hopefully.

Carter looked at her blankly. There was a wafer of connection here. The dead are coming back. And it had to do with the diminishment of everything else. Like happiness. It was not just millennial thinking. It was Ginger. Perhaps there were other cases. The dead are coming back. Or not going away. Whatever.

“Your wife has got to be just in your mind,” Alice said.

“Not my wife anymore,” Carter protested. “Please, at the very least—”

“I mean, you don’t even go into your room now, do you? I see you sleeping in the living room.”

“Sometimes I go over to the Hilton,” Carter admitted.

“The Hilton! They poison coyotes at the Hilton! They have the ones made of bronze in the lobby and then they kill the real ones on their stupid golf course!”

“I’ll speak to them about it. Alice, dear, we’re veering off track here.” It was a lucent night, of a brilliance he was beginning to loathe. In fact, it was night again; the days just kept collapsing into one another. He had come back to pick up some shirts and see Annabel, but where was Annabel? He had estranged himself from Annabel with his … his instability. He had no idea where Donald was. He might be out on a date for all Carter knew. An immense encephalitic moon hung above them all, and it seemed an appropriate moment to plot the murder of someone dead, it just did. Weren’t those stars up there dead? And they kept twinkling away, didn’t even know it. There might be some foundation for Ginger’s claim after all.

“Does she ever show up anywhere other than your room?” Alice asked.

“Never at the Hilton. I think the Hilton confuses her. They’ve got five hundred rooms over there, you know. Two hundred suites.”

“Well, where is she now?”

“God knows,” Carter shuddered.

“She’s in your mind,” Alice persisted.

“No, no, only to the extent that we’re discussing her. You know how that works.”

Alice didn’t. Her own thoughts were like a masked, hoarsely babbling mob, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“So what does she want from you?”

“She wants me to die ! She wants me to share death with her!” She had always wanted to share her problems with him, her weight, her menses, the fading away of her menses, her crushes on men … now this. She was relentless.

“Everybody knows you can’t share that,” Alice said. “Maybe you only think she wants that. She probably wants something else.”

“But what would that be? There isn’t anything else.”

“Some tiny thing, maybe,” Alice said. “Microscopic. Infinitesimal.” There was, of course, something horrible about the infinitesimal.

“No, no, she wants me to join her and go on as though nothing happened. She’s getting more — maybe you’re right in part. At first it was like motes, but—”

“Motes?”

“Yes, motes, they didn’t add up at first. The first few nights she appeared, it was all sort of ambiguous.” Maybe if he’d hired a band to play during the cremation; that’s what the Buddhists did, according to Donald. But the crematorium was in an industrial park! And the undertaker said it would take three hours. No exceptions. It had always taken three hours, it would forever take three hours, which sort of ruled out a normal band. The undertaker, an unhappy man as he had never realized his dream of being a Navy SEAL, having an unreliable stomach, was not sensitive but nonetheless seemed to be functioning intuitively with the three business, for didn’t three symbolize spiritual synthesis? Didn’t it solve the problem posed by that infernal dualism? Three was a remarkable figure for the situation, Carter remembered thinking even at the time. He had never considered going to the industrial park as an observer for those three hours. He had passed the wretched plot on the highway many, many times; Ginger, too, for that matter. One building made velvet, another corrugated cardboard, another paint. One place had been busted for churning out fake military medals. Another, he thought he’d heard once, rendered horses. Oversized American flags flying, chained dogs everywhere, the hulk of bulldozed trees. Still, maybe if he’d had a band — a band might have been just the thing to occupy Ginger’s mind during the difficult transition.

“But we’re not talking motes anymore,” Carter said. “This is far beyond motes. She’s strong now. Strong . Sometimes I think she’s about to yank me up out of here. She’s just waiting for me to lose my balance, and then …” He trailed off. He wanted to get back to the Hilton, have a few drinks in the bar, take a piss in one of their splendid urinals filled with crushed ice. There was a world out there, a world where he could still be active. Donald said he should strive to make his mind buoyant and flexible, capable of addressing any situation. Yes, yes, he had only to convince this girl here, Alice, that she had what it took, had the potential, to murder his dead wife.

“Does she live in your room now that you don’t?” Alice asked.

“Live there?” Alice didn’t grasp the problem at all. “Why, no. That would be all right if she did, if she couldn’t get out. That would be perfectly acceptable. But I’m afraid — let me tell you what I’m afraid of — that because I don’t go into that room anymore, it gives her license to go everyplace else. I think I made a tactical error by abandoning the room, see, she was pretty much contained there. She hasn’t come to the Hilton yet, but why wouldn’t she, once she figures it out? Those key cards are hardly the ultimate in human ingenuity.”

“Maybe it’s her soul you’re seeing,” Alice proffered. This somewhat fit in with her more recent theory that the soul was something you acquired only after you were dead, and by then it was determined to pursue what was most important to it, no matter how misguided the pursuit was. Mr. V. was the treasure meant for Mrs. V. alone, which was having unfortunate consequences for Mr. V. Marriage sort of disturbed Alice; it seemed all aftermath.

“Her soul?” Carter shook his head and felt something pop and grind subversively. No, no, this was Ginger, a simple yet practically incomprehensible parallelism to Ginger. Clearly one couldn’t murder a soul, or if one could it would be very bad, one of those inexcusable things. Still, he realized he was using Alice, or trying to, as cat’s-paw. He should be ashamed of himself. “I’m sure it’s not her soul. It looks just like her — I mean, just like she did.”

“Just like she did when?” Alice asked, for there couldn’t be just one moment that was you, could there? When you looked like yourself, the way you’d be remembered?

But Carter did not address this question. “She used to be rather languid, viperish certainly, but sort of indolent, the way vipers are when they’re not trying to sink their fangs into you. But now she wants to sink in her fangs and she’s coiled with intent. Coiled .”

Alice wanted to help Mr. V. out, he looked on the brink. “Let’s take a look in your room again and see if she’s there.”