Rick Moody - The Diviners

The lecturer offers some further repetition of key concepts to the seats in front of him, where those four bodies are strewn as though air-dropped. And he looks over at Rosa Elisabetta, touching the window. And then he returns to his praises of God and sobriety. Getting from the window to an unoccupied seat takes a sequence of muscle contractions. A shoulder of an unconscious man is a clinging station. It’s as though she is part of some peristaltic massage, having swallowed herself in an attempt to purge all things from her body. The taking in and the excreting outward. Rigors of motion seem as if they are happening on the inside, even though they are probably happening on the outside. Eventually, she is in one of the seats in front of the lecturer, and it has taken her so long to get there that it appears that the lecturer is done with his presentation. Now he is giving his telephone number to a man in the front row, one of the few alert enough to understand. Then he comes to stand in front of her.

“How many days? If I may ask?”

Rosa Elisabetta raises her hand, provisionally, holds up the fingers.

“Three days, three days. No complaining about three days. Three days is better than no days.” Here he takes her hand for a moment. Many perils to be considered in the interior of the ward, like being incarcerated with liars and drug addicts and petty criminals and fornicators, and these are so preoccupying, these perils, that she has not got around to avoiding germs. Under other circumstances, Rosa Elisabetta would recoil from allowing an African American man covered with tattoos to take her hand, but there’s no time for that now because she forgot to think about it, and this is an instant in a vast conspiracy, and she doesn’t know how to stop it exactly, the recognition of simultaneities, and so her hand is now in the massive palm of the lecturer, and because there is no time to stop the events spinning around her, there’s no time to resist being held lovingly by an African American lecturer.

If time were expressed as a sequence of hands, then time has all but stopped, since it is eons, epochs, since either of the hands belonging to Rosa Elisabetta was entrapped in the hand of another. Her daughter is not exactly a hand-holder type, a sentimentalist. This thought dawns on her with reasonable clarity. There is this thought, and there is the hand of the lecturer, which is the leather recliner of hand-holding hands. It is pale at the palm, elsewhere dark, and it is thick, meaty, where others would be bony. In his hand, hers is shriveled, with laces of vein and artery. She is in a state of considering geologic time where a single breath in the passed-out heroin addict in the chair nearby is reduced to an infinite series of partial decisions and undertakings. That’s how long her hand is in the lecturer’s hand, that’s how long she is experiencing gratitude, before he says, “I’ll say a little prayer for you.” Then back to the light speed of things overtaking, repetition of key concepts, nurses urging them down the hall to the dining room. Carts bearing the trays go by, rubber wheels moaning on the linoleum. Addicts totter after, because they will follow any smells, even if they are the same smells as last night, namely, fruit juice container, three spears of broccoli boiled until nearly liquefied, freeze-dried carcass of chicken, and a half-dozen french-fried potatoes still icy in their centers.

Somehow she finds a leaning opportunity in the dining room, bearing up her tray, and she is attempting to blow a long gray tangle of hair out of her face, away from affected parts, as she sits. With grim determination, she opens the juice and takes the plastic utensils from their plastic sleeve. Women are rare here, but still there is a young woman, no older than her daughter, sitting opposite. And the young woman rips into her unsubstantiated chicken as if this were the first hospital dinner ever consumed. Rosa Elisabetta is impressed with the display. Around the room, the sleepers attempt to eat faster than seawater turns boulders to sand, sometimes successfully.

The girl says, “Hey, can you answer a question?”

Rosa raises an eyebrow.

“Do you think I should tell them that I’m bleeding? I’ve been bleeding for ten days. I never bled like this before. I was living in a squat, so I just didn’t get that much to eat. Know what I mean? Now I’m bleeding. Man, you can’t believe. Like there’s a mouse in me doing flips. Know what I mean?”

“I can’t —” Rosa says. And then, as if the question were a marvel, “Your name?”

Her name is Dee. Rosa whispers the name after hearing it spoken. So simple it might be possible to commit it to memory at some point. Rosa nods, as if by nodding she can get across a spectrum of advice. Run, don’t walk, where the bleeding is concerned. The girl seems to say something. Not like there are a lot of women to talk to. The girl gestures around the room, as if to prove her hypothesis. True, there is Rosa and her roommate, an obese woman who has not yet risen from her bed. This obese woman had something injected and then she slept, and she’s sleeping still. And then there’s the girl, Dee, and apparently Dee doesn’t have a roommate, although she probably will, maybe tonight. People are coming and going. Remarks, which are observations, get condensed down to elemental gestures in her affected parts. Rosa looks at thinking from an angle and then she looks at it from another angle. She seems not to get around to saying much.

“Want to play cards later?”

Unclear. How many transactions in this marketplace of detoxified ideas would be involved in the playing of cards? The idea of later is almost impossibly complex, and Rosa cannot commit. In fact, while she’s turning it over in her mind, dinner has come to an end.

“Rosa, try just eating the broccoli.”

The nurses treat her as though she’s never heard of food, as though food has never traversed the boundaries of inside and outside, as though digestion has never before degraded her, as though she has never had a seven-course meal with a pasta course and a meat course. With the resistance to these commands she feels a little more like herself; nevertheless, she does eat the broccoli, which tastes like air. And then, using the chair as a clinging station, she rises up, last to leave, and carries her tray to the cart.

The television has been fired up again, and those who are able are on their way into the common area, where Rosa imagines she can hear the sound of the theme song of one of those programs that does nothing but show police in the midst of making arrests. There is a brownie in Rosa’s hand. How did she come to acquire a brownie? Rosa shoves the entire brownie into her mouth. From nowhere, her daughter appears, having brought her some clothes from home. Her daughter is a hazard coming down the corridor, and her daughter represents the flood of language. This is a corridor of perils. Her daughter comes to rest, as though made inert by her, Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, somewhere not far from the door to her bedroom, the room she shares with the slumbering obese woman who will one day awake.

“How are you feeling?” Vanessa asks.

She has made a provisional decision not to deploy the moisture arguments from her moisture ducts, but she is not in a position to make these tactical decisions, so the best Rosa can do when faced with the ambulatory memories represented by a black raincoat and its contents is to avoid comment on the moisture arguments in the hopes that they will soon abate. Or perhaps she can blame the moisture arguments on environmental insults. Too many days indoors with not enough stimulation and no exercise, and moisture arguments are involuntarily activated in the presence of the possibility of human kindness. She attempts rictus, that simple arrangement of muscle groups, but she is not sure if this offering is transmitted properly. Vanessa looks harried, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing, and Rosa Elisabetta is perhaps, in some register, prepared for the fact that her daughter might not be able to believe in this place.