Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Fluorescent brightness gnawed at the room. The aide swiped the mattress with a lavender sponge. There was a fuzzy slipper in the carton, a paper roll of pennies, not filled entirely, maybe thirty cents’ worth. Corvus looked at all this from not far away, drifting, with the raven’s eye.

The nurse scooped up the coin roll and dropped it into the pocket of her smock, which shone dully as though waxed. “It costs more to make pennies than they’re worth, but the utterly useless exerts a sobering restraint upon society. If I have a penchant for anything, I believe it’s for useless things.”

The aide pressed fresh sheeting onto the bed and steered the carton into the hall with her foot. In the quiet, Nurse Daisy’s breathing seemed to hiss a little. “Each room a palimpsest,” she said. “I’m self-obliged to tell you, this place may not always be here for you. It’s under investigation by the state. It’s not just the dog meat, the trifecta tostadas, it’s a number of things across the board. Records aren’t being kept, bums aren’t being scoured properly. Rat tails have been observed in the darndest places. Thus the exterminator’s eventful arrival. As for the doctors, they’re comically unqualified. Indeed, they’re not even doctors, not even vets; they’re handymen, gardeners. Death was once frequently portrayed as a gardener in serious verse. One of the problems with our technological age is that we can’t picture death as a gardener anymore, or picture it as anything. A straight line on a screen is the best we can do.…”

She paused, and again Corvus could hear the rasping hitch in her breathing. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. The horror of the orifice, its foolish greed, seemed apparent to her, its ardent deceptions and ambitions.

“You will make this your oratory,” Nurse Daisy determined.

Corvus searched within herself. She had no intention of praying. But here she would hone her willingness to suffer, make it an ability, a feat no one would acknowledge or admire, least of all herself.

“You think you’ve found sanctuary here, but the whole place is closer than you think to being condemned, the whole kit and kaboodle. It will be turned into another desert spa. Loofah treatments, bikini waxes, energizing soaks. The quick will take it by privilege, storm it by entitlement. The new administrators will be utterly disapproving of your role. You’ll be exiled once more, yet unable to wander like your funny friend. Of course she’s doomed to wander, she has no choice. You’ll grow further and further apart, you two, or perhaps it’s closer and closer apart. Two halves of the same broken shell. Hell has no birds, it’s one of its more alarming attributes. Do you believe me?”

She stared at Corvus. Her lopsided face narrowed and grew taut. “You’re a bit of deadwood, you are, a fruitless tree, fit only to be rooted up and cast into the fire.” She smoothed her chalk-bright uniform, which she preferred to more casual attire. “I’d kiss you good night, but I don’t want to frighten you.”

“You don’t frighten me,” Corvus said.

Sherwin was a great observer at parties. Never drinking himself, he had a great advantage, but the sound was beginning to get to him. It actually began to pain him, the sound of a party, the bedlam rattle and howl, the partygoers’ faces opening and emptying and moist with excitement. Sherwin was becoming a little prim about it, and it was affecting his playing. He should do something else. Move to a metropolis or get another face-lift.

He moved from “I Get a Kick Out of You” to Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major, which he played badly. “The underclass is menacing,” a man said. “I don’t care how well we seem to get along waiting in line at the Dairy Queen.” Sherwin continued to softly crucify Haydn. “I mean, what are you supposed to get your mother after all these years? I got her a couple dung bunnies. They’re little bunny figures made by Amish craftsmen from sanitized, deodorized, hundred percent cow manure. She can put them in her garden.” Sherwin threw back his head and exaggerated his technique. “My wife’s going to call Victoria and tell her she’s letting me go. Victoria insisted that my wife make this call. She wants everything clear, she’s a helluva girl.” Sherwin started to play Haydn well, just because he could. “What happened to furniture? Don’t they do furniture anymore, the Amish?” A woman approached the piano. Her lips were chapped beneath bright lipstick. She had a small black mole on her throat.

“Nice beauty mark,” Sherwin said.

“You think so?” She nibbled at the lip of her champagne flute.

“Is it real?”

“Real?” She seemed genuinely puzzled by the inquiry, then drained the flute. “Who do you tell your troubles to?” she said. “I’m just curious. I don’t want to hear them myself, but I’d like to know. I tried to tell mine to my dog, and she growled at me. I lay down beside her and I put my arms around her neck and I snuggled up to her and cried in her fur and told her my troubles and she growled at me.”

“What a bitch ,” Sherwin said, pecking away at the Haydn. He cocked his head like a feckless little sparrow. Realizing he was overdoing it. One of these days he was going to get knocked on his ass by a broad like this.

“The hell with it,” the woman said. “Nobody likes to hear your troubles, not even a goddamned dog from the pound who should be grateful for every breath she’s allowed to draw.”

“We should all be grateful,” Sherwin said in his oiliest manner. “We are here to praise, to sing our little song of praise.”

The woman regarded him. Her hands shook. She was really very drunk. “I know everybody in this room,” she said. “And you know what I see when I look at them? I don’t see anybody I know.”

“What are your troubles, anyway, dear?” Sherwin asked.

“I’m a survivor,” she said. “People dismiss me as a survivor. They say, ‘That Adrianna, she’s a survivor,’ but they don’t say it in a nice way. It has a lot of negative connotations the way they say it.”

“You’ve been through a lot, have you, dear?” Sherwin had stopped playing, he couldn’t quite recall when.

“Oh, fuck off,” the woman said. She made a crooked way across the room on her battered high heels.

No way that mole was real, Sherwin thought. He was losing more and more of his already limited ability to extend himself to others. He should get an eye-lift, maybe, or go back to school, live in the city and study philosophy. Read Schopenhauer again. He loved Schopenhauer. There was a man who had the ability to extend himself to others. Hadn’t people gathered each midday outside his favorite hotel to watch him eat? To him they were nothing, everything was nothing, but they were all crazy about him, even the women, who were forever approaching him, wanting to be seen with him, attempting to ingratiate themselves with his white poodle; there was always a white poodle, a succession of white poodles. The children of the neighborhood called the poodle “young Schopenhauer”—they had his number, yet everyone else adored him, not the complacent, egotistical, and cold man that was Schopenhauer but his thinking. His “the way of escape is not by the way of death” was the most delightful suggestion. To escape the fuss and pain and striving and confusion of trying to live, fully or interestingly or just at all, to escape all that through self-destruction, though not through the gate of death …

“How about playing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’? You know ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’?” A young man wearing a squash blossom necklace the size of a softball was looking at him with shy concern. He wore soft pleated trousers and a muscle shirt.