Rick Moody - The Diviners

“You were walking down the street and you were attacked by someone,” he says. “You were struck in the head.”

“How was I struck in the head?”

“You were struck with a brick or perhaps a cinder block,” the father says. He looks pained to be saying it.

“Where was I going?”

“You were going to the library.”

“Why was I going to the library?” she asks, because now she has a great number of questions. Every question sends her scurrying off in a number of directions, and each of these questions generates further questions.

“You were going to read,” he says, “or you were going to do research. We don’t exactly know why you were going to the library. We think you were going to do some research for a project that you were preparing.”

“You were always going to the library,” her mother adds. The two Asian people have risen from their chairs now, as if rising from their chairs were some kind of synchronous ballet that they have prepared for this moment. The mother takes the victim’s hand.

“And then what happened?” the victim asks, because this is what she wants to know. How does a thing cause another thing to happen? How does one event become another, as when a brick becomes a sort of vengeance? Or is this just a condition of her brain, to believe that one thing always leads to another? Some days she goes from her room out into the hall, and from the hall to the elevator, and from the elevator to another floor, where she is meant to attempt to walk and to move her limbs in a coordinated way, and in the complexity of this there is nothing for her but to marvel. Because there are so many persons rushing around the hospital, and for these persons and for the persons recuperating in the hospital, there are all these causes and effects. Things causing other things.

“After the brick,” she says.

“Then you were very badly injured, and of course people called for an ambulance.”

“I want to see it,” she says.

“What do you want to see?” her mother asks.

“I want to see what my head looks like,” she says, because she knows now that they have concealed this from her. They have waited for a time when she will be sturdy enough to see. They have been in possession of the story for a long time, the story of the brick, and they have doled out portions of the story, and they have discussed the story when they believed that she was not conscious or was sleeping. There was a time when she was not able to be in possession of her story, when the two people who are her parents were its stewards, and they concealed things because there were many things that she might have known, but she was not ready to know them. Now she is ready.

“I don’t want you keeping it from me. I want to know what it looks like.”

The mother gives the father another one of those wounded expressions, and then the mother begins to go rummaging through a handbag beside her chair. The word occurs to Samantha now before the mother even produces the object, and the word is mirror.

The victim says, “I know about the brick. I learned about it. The brick is from Utica, which is in Asia.”

The mother and father look at each other, and the father begins to move toward the door, but the victim shakes her head no because she does not want the doctor and she does not want any restriction on the liberal flow of this catechism. She wants the free exchange of information because she will be asleep again soon, and while she is awake, during this brief day, let her experience its dramas. The father stands at the foot of the bed while the mother takes from her handbag the object known as a mirror, and now she is beside Samantha, and Samantha seizes the mirror, and she moves it around, and she tries to arrange it so that she can see her face, but the mirror keeps pointing in the wrong directions. She sees the wall behind her or she sees the curtain that separates her from her roommate, who is about to have brain surgery. She can’t hold the mirror steady, the mirror is capricious, and she feels some sensation in her, the feeling is known as rage, and she demands that her mother should steady the looking glass. She needs for it to be held where she can see it, because her hands don’t work, not the way they ought to, and nothing in her body works. It is a useless piece of equipment, this body, it is a mess, she tells her mother. “Now, just hold the mirror up where I can see and don’t say anything,” and the mother has to reach around her, to the far side of her head, because it is on the right side of her head, because the brick was used on the right side of her head, because whoever used the brick was behind her, and then alongside her, and so they hit the right side of her, and she was thrown to the ground, and her brains were dashed out of her head on this right side; of course, her cell phone went flying, and now she and the brick and the rage are one, and she can see, she can see how they have shaved all of the hair from her, and she can see that there is a scar and stitches, and the scar runs the length of her skull from her forehead back and down, to her ear, and the shape of her head is irregular where the scar is, there are some bulges here and there, it is not a round head or a smooth head, her head is not shaped like a head, it is shaped like a mess. Her head looks like something in a butcher’s shop.

She also notices that her eyes are strange. That she is Asian.

“What kind of nationality am I?”

“You’re Chinese American. Your grandparents came from China.”

“Who did this to me?”

It’s the question that they aren’t prepared to answer, these people. The question of who did it to her. Also the question about why she is not dead. She knows now that these are the questions that they don’t want to answer and don’t want to talk about. Maybe it is a Chinese characteristic, not wishing to discuss things that are painful to discuss. Maybe before, she was the kind of person who accepted this reticence. She doesn’t remember. She will not tolerate it now. She knows which questions to ask because she feels sick when she asks them. She feels as if the room itself wants to scream.

Again, it is given to the father to answer. “We do not know who did this to you. They believed they knew who did it to you, but now they are not so sure.”

This is all on a Monday, or so she thinks. She will wake tomorrow and she will ask more questions, and they will not want to or will not be able to answer.

Will she have to have more surgery? They do not know. What is wrong with her brain? She has had several strokes. When will she be able to walk? They do not know, but she has to keep trying. What’s wrong with her arm? She has carpal tunnel, from typing. What did she do before? She worked in an art gallery. Can you explain art to me? Well, art is the category of human endeavor that has no purpose. Art is what people do to describe general human aspirations. Why was I interested in art? Your mother and I do not know why you were interested in art, because we do not understand art very well. Your grandfather worked in a laundry, and I worked as an accountant so that you could go to the university. When you went to university you became interested in art. You taught us a lot about art, her father goes on, but until you grew up we knew nothing about it. It was something you put over the sofa, if you were lucky enough to have a sofa. You took us to see paintings, her father says, and you took us to see photographs, and they were so complicated and so powerful that we didn’t know to what to compare these things. What kind of art did I like? We don’t know how to describe the kind of art you liked. You liked very modern things. Whereas we liked very old things, things that reminded us of China. The people you worked with, they can explain to you about art. How will you put me in touch with them? You could telephone them. Who were my friends? Your friends were people you knew from the gallery and from when you went to college. We didn’t know many of your friends. Why not? Because you didn’t choose to bring them home to us. Was I in love? We don’t think you were in love. Are you sure? We don’t think you were in love. You had a boyfriend for a while, but then this romance ended, as things often do when people are young. Why do you say that? Because young people do not understand love.