Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Jasper looked upset, as though Sherwin were insisting on going into a party where people would think they were a couple.

Sherwin laughed. I know what you’re thinking, baby.

Jasper raised his hand and smashed it all about in the air around his head. That’s not possible, he said.

I’m loathsome, aren’t I, Sherwin said, but didn’t we have some good times together?

I’m not having a retrospective here. I don’t want a retrospective. This is the tour now proceeding forward. I’m taking the tour by myself. Am I making sense? Is my voice all right? I don’t want you. I never wanted you.

You’re lovely and lucid, baby, Sherwin said. I never thought we were more than friends.

You’d like to exchange places with me, but you can’t.

That’s what I want, Sherwin said, to exchange places.

You’ll die someday, Jasper said. Fuck up your own death, don’t try to fuck up mine.

Spittle poured from the corners of Jasper’s mouth. He fumbled for a tissue in his bathrobe pocket and mopped at it. It’s the medication, he said.

Before Green Palms, when Jasper had been in the hospital, the doctors had opened up his head, looked inside, lay their scalpels down, and closed it up again. We just lay our scalpels down, son . For a while this phrasing had intrigued Jasper. He heard in it some obeisance to the mystery, the beautiful mystery that waited beyond the mere problem.

Sherwin smoked and thought of Jasper, who was probably dead by now, the aunt back in Alexandria thinking, But I don’t want to put on the months and the days. That boy could be so affected sometimes.… For all Sherwin knew, Auntie might have been a figment of Jasper’s lesions. The point was that Sherwin couldn’t even have a conversation with a dying person without getting insulted. Wasn’t being treated with insolence by the dying virtually impossible? And Jasper had been an insecure, unformed youth, still working on his languors and dislikes. They hadn’t known each other to any true degree. Jasper knew nothing of Sherwin’s suicide attempts, but then few did. Even Sherwin wondered how many could be counted as intentional. Sometimes he’d come up with six, sometimes eight, it depended on how inclusive he wanted to be. Do you count as one, for example, the thousand men who’d had you? He didn’t usually count that. He’d thrown himself down a flight of stairs once; cut himself (embarrassing, that one, for they were clearly the cuts of a malingerer); smashed up a few cars (he didn’t drive anymore, having lost confidence in that method); commenced to hang himself but then thought better of it. His most deliberate one was Seconal in the fine hotel: order some room service, masturbate to Pay-per-View, go out in a king-sized bed with a view of the Catalinas. But his vomiting had annoyed the people in the next room (a couple marking their thirtieth wedding anniversary) to such an extent that they called the front desk, and his efforts were thwarted by a pissed-off concierge. He’d never be allowed to play his parasuicide game in that establishment again. The fulfillment of one’s most cherished desire can often founder on one’s choice of means. He couldn’t interest his body in helping him out. It was as though his body was saying, Wait a minute, we’re not through with you just yet. We’ll let you know when it’s time. You have no idea what we have in store for you, you dabbler, you fabricator, you.

Sherwin no longer thought about his suicide stratagems in a responsible, straightforward fashion. He longed for an audience, an audience of one, namely Alice. Why Alice, he wasn’t quite sure. He was a little annoyed with her for losing interest in him, obviously, but that in itself wasn’t enough to propel him toward another attempt. He didn’t construe his attempts as a reaction to anything, had never made even one in response to a particular, dispiriting event. He didn’t want any connection to exist between occurrences in his flimsy life and the suicide act, should it occur. He wanted to deepen the gulf between what he was and the way he behaved. Still, he thought he’d probably been born a suicide, born with the little nothingness gene, the predilection to nothingness. Everyone must have it, it’s just that Sherwin and his kind, or as he like to think of them, his ilk , nurtured and appreciated it and in fact would not be able to live without doting and dwelling on it. The thought of suicide was his passion, his pet, something he shared only with his own starved heart. The little nothingness gene — most people let it atrophy. Or they smothered it with the habit of living and self-interest. But Sherwin kept his in operating condition.

He wished he could get Alice interested. She didn’t have to do it herself — he wasn’t the kind of person who wanted company, exactly — but if she would just apply herself to conversation about it. Still, was there anything more boring than people talking? No, there was not.

He turned back toward the house, went into the kitchen, and ate, in rapid succession, a number of bread rounds topped with tiny, colorful, irrationally wedded and chic foodstuffs.

One of the caterers rapped his knuckles. “Hey, man, slow down. It took me half an hour to put that tray together. Eat some cashews or something.”

“What’s the occasion for this event, anyway?” Sherwin asked sulkily.

“Why should there be an occasion? People have parties.” He shifted the tray out of Sherwin’s reach. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

Sherwin saw the host’s daughter in the corner, flirting cautiously with one of the servers, a boy wearing his hair in a long ponytail.

“Hiya … Annabel,” he said, her name coming to him.

She widened her eyes. The piano player looked so morbid . He was really the strangest person — the pitted skin, the too-black hair, the pale artificial-looking hands. When he wasn’t playing the piano, they just hung there. He was really so ungainly and disturbing. “Jonathan and I were just talking about puns,” she said, “about making puns. Whether that was middle-class or not.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin pronounced.

“Every single thing you can probably classify whether it is or it isn’t,” Annabel said. “It’s maybe a waste of time, but it’s sort of fun, too, and could help you get organized and maybe save you some time eventually.”

“Do you believe you’re going to be resurrected or reincarnated?” Sherwin asked. “Quick, which?”

Annabel appeared frightened, but the boy looked at Sherwin and said softly, “Resurrected.” She looked at him gratefully.

“But there are rules, the rules being, you’ve got to have all your own parts,” Jonathan continued. “Can’t have artificial organs, grafts, plates, implants, or someone else’s blood in your body at the time of death. I intend to keep to the rules. If you don’t abide by them, I honestly couldn’t tell you what would happen, regardless of your beliefs.” He looked at Sherwin appraisingly, as though to say, You’re just fucked, man.…

Sherwin felt he was being toyed with.

“I’d like to come back as—” Annabel began.

“That’s transmigration,” Jonathan said, “not reincarnation.”

“Oh …” she said.

“But both of those things are voodoo,” the boy said. “Resurrection’s the way to go.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin opined.

“I’ve got to serve these salmon puffs,” Jonathan confided to Annabel.

“So,” Sherwin said after he’d left, “where’s your friend tonight? That Alice person.”

“She’s either with Corvus or looking for her … whatever, like she usually is.”