Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead

“Hey there,” the boy said, grinning at her. “You here for the vigil?”

“No,” Alice said.

“First time, huh?”

“What’s it for?”

“Tonight it’s for the aquifer. Lots of people can’t quite grasp the aquifer.”

“Grasp it?”

“Understand how it works.” He was so skinny his ribs showed.

She splayed her hand out before her. “Don’t explain,” she said.

“Last night it was the octopus. Would you have liked that better?”

She would not confess to this.

“Those big eyes, man. And, if they like you, they turn this rosy color. You know what its flesh feels like? Like the inside of your cheek. But things aren’t looking up for the big mollusk. Richly deserving of a vigil, the octopus. Night before that, the Greenland ice sheet. You can’t play favorites.” He was efficiently handing out candles as he spoke. “To continue backwards. Wild horses on BLM land, fetuses, the earth in general, that synagogue from the thirties downtown they want to demolish, fetuses again. We try not to repeat in a month’s time, but fetuses keep coming up. They’re in demand. As a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization, we have no agenda. No long-term goal. We’ve got vigils against stuff, too. Nights against grafted cactus, technological entrancement, alternative fuels, the fur trim on those big ski parkas you see people wearing when it ain’t even cold? That’s German shepherd.”

People were pushing against her, beginning to gather, gazing in earnest at the unlit candles, fingering and crimping the paper skirts. They had pictures of dusty foreign children pinned to their breasts. Pictures of beached whales. Human limbs in ditches. Humans without limbs in ditches.

“Caring doesn’t have to be elitist. True compassion is wordless and hopeless of effecting change. You know what’s nice? When we run out of candles on any given night. Then people come back earlier the next night. They want to be assured of a candle. To be without a candle is not a good thing.”

People were chatting, smiling solemnly. Some had pictures of scenic highways hanging from eyeglass cords around their necks. These were the adopters — having adopted stretches of asphalt, library shelves, eroding beaches, grizzly bears, unique deadly microbes that nevertheless were singular life-forms and should not be exterminated.

“I’ve learned a lot since I started giving out candles. I’m going to start selling them soon, a nickel a pop, but for now they’re free. I used to be so dumb you wouldn’t believe it, but now I’m the Candleman. I’m smart and sane, living on the glow, the displacement in the air the flame makes. I could go anywhere with this routine. The world’s my oyster.”

“What does that mean?” Alice said.

“Another mollusk. Or are you referring to ‘anywhere’? You don’t know what anywhere is? You can live there when you don’t know where else to go. You can make a living anywhere off the caring of others. Feel it! I can feel you feeling it. We’re connected, you and I. I’m looking for a busker babe to work the crowds with, that could be you.”

“You’re kidding,” Alice said, offended. She wasn’t about to be someone who was in a place only because she wasn’t anywhere else.

“You ever live in a pipe, a box, a Dumpster?” the Candleman said. You can be born without an enzyme, a brain, a sense of wonder. You can live like a rat, man, then boom , something better comes along. I’ve seen what comes next. Vigils. Concern is the new consumerism. A person’s worth can be measured by the number and intensity of his concerns. Candles, lighting a candle, confers the kind of fulfillment that only empty ritual can bring. Empty ritual’s important. It’s coming back as a force in people’s lives. Its role is being acknowledged. It’s the keystone for tomorrow’s dealings in an annexed and exploited world. And holding a candle, cradling a little flame with others holding their candle, cradling their little flame gives people the opportunity to experience something bigger than themselves without surrendering themselves to it. A single candle is the symbol of individuated as opposed to universal life. The latter scares people. They don’t want any part of it. It’s spooky, like primordial slime, man, it’s not pretty. Still, a candle alone is nothing. The Candleman knows that. You know that. You’d feel stupid holding it, looking at it. But in the midst of innumerable strangers holding theirs, it works. It’s absolving, it’s reassuring. I’m down to two. Only two left. Take one.”

But they were gone in a twinkling, the first claimed by a man, friend of the Salton Sea, the last by a woman, friend of the symphony.

“Concern for the aquifer isn’t enough tonight,” the Candleman said. “I’ve been detecting a softening around the edges for some time now. Specificity isn’t flying. Running out of candles is no longer going to be the exception but the rule.”

“It seems kind of diluted out here,” Alice said.

“Still ten minutes before shutdown and the lighting, and every bloody candle gone,” the boy marveled.

A well-dressed gentleman in yellow trousers looked unhappily into the empty box. There was a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose.

“Precancerous?” the Candleman asked solicitously.

Others came, looked into the empty box, departed wordlessly.

“The moment of silence is going to be the new desired thing,” the Candleman said to Alice. “It’s the appropriate response. There’s a pertinence, a satisfaction, in respectfully acknowledging what’s about to become history, whatever can’t cope, can’t adapt or relocate.”

Two people walked past wearing straitjackets, their mouths covered with tape.

“Some, you know, their concerns are obscure, but they’re all participating in a healthy outrage and sorrow. There’s nothing like lighting your little candle when all around you others are lighting theirs. Nothing! Illumination. Extinguishment. Equilibrium. Then everybody goes home.”

“I’m not going to be a part of this,” Alice said.

“Not going to be a part!” He chuckled. “You’ve got to be a part. Don’t you know anything about mathematics? The lost invariants of life can be found only through numbers and their relationships. You have a number, and what you think has happened to you has a number too. It’s all numbers, man, just numbers. God talks in numbers, endless numbers.” He gestured at the crowd. “This is nothing.”

He really reminded her of that boy, that long-ago midsummer boy who had seemed so desperate to explain himself.

“You’ll be a part of it, all right,” the Candleman assured her. “You dream, don’t you?”

Night was approaching in languorous measure. Alice didn’t want to be here for it. And she didn’t believe everything was numbers. Why would God bother to talk in numbers? This boy wasn’t very convincing. She turned away from him without answering, away from the modest spectacle about to occur.

“You got no choice!” he shouted. “You’ll see!” Oh, she thought she didn’t dream, but one morning she was going to wake up, yes, she was, she would wake from the dream even the most reluctant and particular have but once, the one where four animals arrive to carry you off for the moment. You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.