Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Emily felt a little sleepy. She was demanding of herself full and chaotic days that reflected neither rhyme nor motive.

Practically had the Dalai Lama on his hands here, but not in some airy-fairy sense. Nothing airy-fairy about Pickless. Nerves of steel. Would get over keeping those mangled things in boxes, just a phase. But no time for many more phases. Time running out. In a sense we’re all already dead. We are. Shouldn’t think so much. Thought supposed to be preferable to unconsciousness but develops its own problems. When thought first appeared, early thinkers believed they had to pluck out their eyes in order to do it properly. Shows how far we’ve gone, but further to go still. Something better than thought out there. Pickless had work ahead, no doubt about it. Must sense no limits. All things possible, otherwise why generation after generation? Still, wished they’d shared a bit of the past together. Wished she’d known Africa. Remembered the nights there, all nights the same then, all the creatures’ eyes glinting visible in the meadow beyond the camp, in the meadow beyond.… Wasn’t this wonderful, he’d be saying to her.…

Emily suppressed a yawn.

Corvus was in her sleeping bag in the corner. Both girls had sleeping bags that could maintain life’s functions down to twenty degrees below zero, which Alice thought was excellent if unnecessary to present circumstances. They didn’t cost any more than the ones that only worked down to zero, although Alice admired the kind of person who would risk one of those instead. When self-preservation became overly important, you were doomed. When you began making sacrifices toward security, you were lost, lost, lost.

Alice watched Corvus closely. It had been some time since Corvus had said anything. Her hair was dry and stuck up at odd angles.

“I think we should get out in the here and now,” Alice said. “Drive around in your truck and carpe diem .” Sherwin had told her that she gave the carpe diem concept a bad name. She’d been thrilled by this mis-judgment but was avoiding the piano player nonetheless. Mr. V. was giving a party tonight that she was also avoiding. From now on she would just step nimbly out of Sherwin’s way at every opportunity. He could talk about the blackness of white to someone else. He could ask another to tub cuddle. She was no longer impressionable. Being in love had been interesting, but not exactly, and she wouldn’t want it to happen again. As an inappropriate love object, Sherwin had been practically perfect, but she had to move on.

Corvus’s eyes were open. She cleared her throat softly. “I …” she began.

Alice waited anxiously, encouraged. I … Who knew what it meant exactly, but it indicated that Corvus still knew how to disengage herself from the unconsciousness she preferred. She had inched out a bit from the sleeping bag’s cocoon. These things were actually sort of malevolent-looking, Alice thought.

“I was in a tree,” Corvus said, “between the branches of a tree, and this voice was saying ‘I hold you lightly between two fingers, and if you disobey me I will drop you.’ ”

“Wow,” Alice said. “Who … what does it say you’re supposed to obey?”

“That wasn’t clear. It pretty much stresses the holding lightly part.” She cleared her throat again.

“I’m glad you’re awake. You’ve been sleeping for days . Why don’t we get out of here and camp in the Airstream for a while? We could hook it up to the truck and even go someplace.”

“The Airstream’s still here?”

“It’s parked in the side yard,” Alice said. Was it indeed in the side yard? Had the bad boys wearied of harvesting her granny and poppa’s unkempt vegetation to supply the demanding clean urine market and decided to employ themselves more traditionally by simply stealing things?

“I haven’t seen the Bubble for a while,” Corvus said. “I’d kind of forgotten about it.”

“Well, it’s right outside,” Alice said worriedly.

“I’ve been everywhere these last few days,” Corvus said. “I never want to travel again.”

“I just want to make sure it’s there,” Alice said. “I’ll be right back.”

Silence crept up on Corvus again, encircling her. She’d been dreaming too of a great racetrack enveloped in fog, a light on a great stanchion burning in but not through the fog. People thronged the course. A laconic voice said, The field is in motion . She was not of the race. She was alone, watching it. Innumerable millions , the voice said. She felt the fog lingering, dissolving on her face. Again she was weeping.

She crawled out of the sleeping bag and stood up, then walked unsteadily down the little hall to the bathroom. She wore a shirt of her father’s. Fury gazed at her without moving. Everything had been scaring the soup out of him for days. Who was that now? He was too anxious to bark, and what was the use, anyway, what was the use of sounding the alarm?

Beyond the thin, aqueous-colored wall she heard Alice’s poppa saying, “They don’t use the word used anymore. With cars it’s preowned. With books, preread. With clothes what would you say, preoccupied?” Around her on the shelves were the old people’s innocent salves and potions, their eyewashes and aspirins and expectorants, their Q-tips and Vicks and Pond’s, their flannel cloths and boxes of Endangered Species Band-Aids. The shower curtain hung before the tub on a crooked suction-cupped rod featuring grand, Rubenesque ladies gazing in a sultry manner out at the toilet, which had a puffy-lidded seat the color of charlotte russe.

It all was sadness, every bit of it, the purchasing and placing alike.

On the shelf was a little black comb, an old person’s comb, sincere and ready to work, hardened dandruff high up in the tines. Corvus regarded it for some time. Then her eyes fell on a nail brush, and she ran water and used it to scrub the comb. Dark particles fell onto the sink’s white surface, small particles, but not extremely small. The universe supposedly had come into being in the form of an extremely small particle containing space and time. Or through an event, was the newest theory, and, lacking form of any kind, contained the genesis for space and time though not, in the beginning, space and time itself. The elegance of the newest theory consisted in the admission that there was no beginning. This was debunked by more ambitious theoreticians.

The black flakes stopped falling. The comb now appeared a lovely shining thing. Ace, by name. A particle. An atom. A jot.

She would like to devote herself to such small, foolish good works, to have nothing, to labor in a job without honor, purposelessly, without contrition, for years. Each day the same though not the same, day after obsolete day in infinite vocation. The secretive thread of the weeks. She would labor unconjoined. She would not be remembered.

Corvus went barefoot down the hallway, past Alice’s room, past the living room where Alice’s poppa’s face was bathed in the television’s ashen glow. “Hello there,” he called. Alice’s granny was preparing snacks in the kitchen. “Who’re you talking to, dear?” she said. He saw no one now. He’d been seeing more phantasms than usual of late. Maybe he should put a hold on those cheesy snacks of Ritz and cheddar, the most daring offering they made to one another these days, miniature Grim Reapers, little artery-wadding missives, Belial buttons on a chipped floral plate. But he liked them.

Outside, there was still some daylight not yet squandered, but the big crime lights on the concrete phone poles were shining regardless. The street was lined tightly with vehicles, though no car passed. Corvus’s Dodge truck was at the curb fifty yards away. She softly passed the Airstream on her thin light feet. The door was open, and she glimpsed Alice moving about inside. It looked all jumbled up in there, a-tilt and a-scatter, and Alice was bent over a bowl, about to pick it up.