Rick Moody - The Diviners

Madison, in front of a bowl of Swedish fish, admits to Otis Redding. She admits to Stradivarius.

“You didn’t tell him about The Diviners ?”

“What’s The Diviners ?”

“The miniseries.”

“What miniseries? Since when is it a miniseries?”

“Since this morning, which you would know if you bothered to come into the office in the morning. Now I want you to get the writer on the phone and tell him to put something about water rights in western states into the treatment. And maybe Native American turquoise. Western guys love turquoise.”

“Who’s the writer?”

“It’s based on a novel by Marjorie Howell Finkelstein; I think she’s a big features writer for women’s magazines. I think she wrote the treatment herself, but we have to get a different writer on the project. There’s no way we can work with her. I called Vic Freese this morning, he claims to be repping it, but I told him we had already optioned the story and that we were going to bring all of our resources to bear on the project. We were going to make it our project.”

Vanessa gets up, absently rubbing her neck as though it’s a magic lantern that will yield ever greater reservoirs of falsehood.

“Did you actually option it?”

“We have to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein and we have to option it before you go home tonight. Find out who her agent is, track her down. Get on it. Get western water rights into the treatment, and turquoise, and Indians, and have a copy of it on the Mormon guy’s desk tomorrow, with a budget sketched out. And here, have a Swedish fish.”

Then Vanessa does a thing she never does. She gets ready to leave early. She says she is going out for drinks, even though it’s only three in the afternoon. The dingy black raincoat flies around Vanessa as though she’s a vampire, and she’s out the door. Madison remains behind, leaning against the flimsy divider of Annabel’s cubicle.

“Any idea where the hell I’m supposed to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein?”

“I think it’s Melanie Horace Fahnstock,” Annabel says. “That’s the writer’s name.”

“Any idea how to contact her?”

“I might be able to find out.”

“Never mind. I’ll do it.”

Thaddeus comes out of his lair with a crumpled-up piece of paper and, in front of the assembled (Jeanine off in the distance, looking like an orthopedist’s brochure on bad posture), he attempts to do some kind of double-pump layup thing into the trash barrel.

“Do you know anything about this Finkelstein woman?” Madison asks, though she tries to avoid talking to him. “The one who wrote this Diviners thing. Are we really supposed to be taking it seriously?”

“You’re definitely supposed to be taking it seriously, and I think the writer’s name is Fedderman, actually. Melanie Fedderman. There’s some middle name, too, because, you know, genre writers, they always have a middle name or two in there. The story has enormous promise, by the way.”

“Nobody gives a shit about any miniseries now. We should do a show where attractive girls, like, show their cervixes to advertisers. That would make a splash.”

Annabel says, “I’ll write up a proposal.”

Thaddeus says, “My agent knows her agent. Want me to make the call?”

“I’m supposed to make some kind of offer.”

Mrs. DiNunzio rustles past, carrying a couple of files. The office poltergeist.

It’s near upon feeding hour, and everyone, in gowns and slippers, is working his or her way out of the sunless crevices of the ward and heading for the nurses’ console. Rosa Elisabetta, a leafless sapling in terry cloth robe and slippers, is ahead of the curve, ahead of the men climbing out of their beds. Men, festering, uremic, unshaven. She hasn’t made their acquaintance, doesn’t intend to. They tremble like candle flames at the end of their wicks. A strong breeze would blow them out. Still, near to the feeding hour, they bring forth untapped reservoirs of life, morbid jokes, gallows humor, toothless smiles.

“Go listen to the lecture,” the nurse says to her, waving in the direction of the common area, with its ample but depressing population of houseplants. “Don’t be hanging around here.”

“I already know all that they’re going to say.”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t be here.”

The nurse’s tone is patently offensive, as are her press-on fingernails. But Rosa is insubstantial, like the others, and when she reaches out for things, when she puts the flat part of her palm on the nurse’s console, the result is complicated. The palm is stretched as though testing plane geometry, swooping down over the console. Her palm is a bird. Moments seem to pass, and then she feels the smoothness of it, the console. She locks eyes with the nurse, whose name she has forgotten. Rosa doesn’t even know for certain if she has seen this unnamed nurse before. The nurse’s eyes are big and brown and bloodshot, as if she has wept on duty. The nurse is shooing her, waving her away, as though Rosa is an insect, and what Rosa watches in particular are the nurse’s hands.

“Repetition of key concepts,” this unnamed nurse continues.

Bodies toddle down the corridor at the leisurely pace of detoxification. Jocular exchanges between the penitential. It takes Rosa an interminable length to turn and look at what the unnamed nurse is pointing at, namely, the death march of the addict population. “Take suggestions. Go to the lecture.”

Rosa Elisabetta nods, in keeping with a diminished vocabulary of dignity that is native here. And then she moves away from the console and she does her best, reaching for intermediate clinging stations, which are located around her. There is a doorknob, which is certainly a clinging station, on the way to the common room where the lecture is taking place. Also a water fountain. And here is a leaning station, by the fire stairs. Almost there. She is at the threshold of the lecture, and what she can see is that the lecturer is covered with tattoos. She can see that he’s African American and he’s smiling. She believes she is hearing a repetition of key concepts, and the words are drifting. Surrender to win, sick and tired of being sick and tired, one day at a time, let go, let God. The lecturer makes use of strategic drifting. He harnesses drifting terminologies, and they are almost percussive. Or else there is an echolalia, which is a pathological repetition of key concepts, as when the medication level goes down. She dreads the medication level going down because then there is the possibility of seizure. Again.

There are these things she hears. Earlier in the day, she heard things, she heard importunings, beseechments, and last night she heard things, all of it in a language of desire, as if want were never expressed in American English before, as if it were only expressed in these affected parts, where desire and rage are in a state of riot. Maybe these voices in her affected parts are annealed by this strategic repetition, and maybe she is redeemed by medication, because she knows, or thinks she knows, that the man who is asleep in the chair in front of the lecturer, one of four people attending, has not moved from that chair for several hours, not even to face in the direction of the television monitor, which for most of the afternoon has been tuned to talk shows. These shows are a clinging station. A clinging station is a station that must be visited prior to release. It must be wiped clean afterward.

The lecturer says something about how pleased he is to see her there, but she doesn’t respond. There is a windowsill and there is the temporary pleasantness of going to a windowsill and of seeing something out the window. She has a sense of the window as an opening, onto a street, and a street opening onto a city, and a city opening onto a nation, and she considers these openings, but she forgets the particular relationship between these things, window, outside, grid system, nation, heavenly body. Her hand flutters up to the window, to touch it and to feel that it’s cold. And it’s a surprise, as if a dove has suddenly alighted on the scene.