Rick Moody - The Diviners

A dial tone by the time the night nurse comes over and takes the handset from her, replaces it in its cradle.

“You can’t be up doing this sort of thing.”

“I was. .”

“I don’t care if your ass falls off, you can’t be out here on the phone at this hour. Now, get to your room.” The night nurse puts an arm around Rosa and walks her down the corridor. For a second, it’s as if there’s no time but this time of the corridor. As if she needs just one thing to bring about the cessation of voices and that thing is another person’s arm around her. If human kindness were reliable, then Rosa might leave behind these fortressed walls and return to Eleventh Street, where she left off, to store up a new supply of backdated magazines and newspapers while forgetting to eat. But the fact is that human kindness must come to an end, and it comes to an end right before the door to the room that she shares with the slumbering obese woman. Inside, a darkness more perfect and terrifying than any she has known. The nurse says nothing, points into the space, and then Rosa follows the end of her arm, the crooked pointing finger, and continues, tentatively, into the room as the night nurse firmly closes the door behind her. Immediately, Rosa can hear the voice of some politician, the mayor of the city, and the mayor is calling somebody, city councilman, or maybe it’s the chief of police. Must be. The mayor is talking to this personage about his new program to prevent the spread of some menace that she can’t, at first, identify. “Look, we’ve got to have something in place that deals with it; we have to indicate that we have zero tolerance for it because you know any time of day someone could be just walking down the street,” and then gradually the nature of the call emerges, “and could allow waste to spread on the block, someone else comes along, you know, they could. . there could just be a spreading of waste; we just can’t have that.” “But,” remarks the other, “are you sure that you want to allocate resources on this? After all, even with the. . and do we really think this is a pressing issue when we —” “Listen, your job is to implement, and what I think would do the trick is a small mobile force deployed at all the frequent locations, like around the parks, and we could issue summonses for people who don’t discharge their obligations, and the reason we need to do this is that if someone sees one. . one mound of waste, then he is going to feel that it’s really not a critical situation and actually it’s rather cold here in the middle of November and maybe it would be all right for Rover here to. .”

Rosa gives a moan at the content of the exchange, and she whispers the words “dog waste initiative” to herself in bed, hoping that she can put aside these phrases, that the night might swallow her into its river of forgetfulness. But just as she’s imagining the possibility of sleep, notwithstanding voices, the obese woman, whose somnolent form has uttered no word since first it was installed in bed, speaks out: “You can tell me.”

“Tell you what? ” Rosa asks.

“What’s bothering you.”

“I don’t need to. . This certainly isn’t. . My being stuck in here with no freedom. . of movement. . and the medication is making. . it’s making my foot twitch.”

“Tell them.”

“Who?”

The obese woman rolls over so that her massive form is facing Rosa’s bed, and Rosa is almost certain that she can make out the glimmering beacons of her tiny eyes.

“You’ve been here for a week. They can’t hold you unless you’re a danger to yourself. So you tell them that you aren’t suffering with whatever you’re suffering with. Then they have to release you, because you are not a danger to yourself.”

“What about —”

“There’s an insurance angle, too. Insurance doesn’t want to cover rehabilitation. Halfway houses, everybody knows. Even the doctors don’t believe in them. Really, they just want to send you home.”

“I’m as fit as —”

“They’ll hold you if you mention hearing things or seeing bugs.”

“I don’t see any —”

Rosa glances at the clock on the table between them. After three, and she’s no closer to sleeping than two hours ago. She doesn’t know why she tells the obese woman about the telephone calls, which she feels she should conceal, but she does.

“What kind of telephone calls?”

“I can listen in.”

“People are saying things about you?”

“Nobody says anything about me. . I’m an old woman. But I can listen.”

“You can hear these conversations and not even one of them is about you?”

“Wait,” Rosa says —

“The darndest thing I ever heard,” the obese woman says. The obese woman has been in bed a week, having been lifted into bed and then occasionally turned by a team of four men; the obese woman is addicted to some incredibly powerful opiate, because of her aching knees and her stress-fractured feet; she’d been camped in front of the television for another week, looking forward to another episode of American Spy or whatever her program was, swallowing down the pills, in the chiaroscuroof narcosis, trying to decide whether or not the Clapper would really be a good thing to have in the living room.

“Wait,” Rosa says. The static overcomes her. The crackle of the cellular telephone, as though the calls are not transmitting properly, as though the service is given to interruptions. Every third syllable is impossible to make out, the voices beginning to tell her the things she’s not meant to hear. This one is coming from Washington, and she doesn’t know if she can stand it if she has to listen to a lot of people talking about things having to do with Washington. “Got to get our people down there, get them down there in force; we need people, we need placards, and we’re going to have to start paying people to do what we need them to do, now, which is that we need them on the ground there, because we need to make disbursements, get some of the young people working on the campaign, and we have to start paying these people to get on the planes right now. Hell, we have to start booking the seats, and we have to get them down there and we have to have them observing, we have to have them on the ground, wherever people are counting votes. Because we can’t have them redoing what has already been done, so we need to start spending the money.” Like the voice is not even having a conversation with another person but just rehearsing a conversation that will take place at some future moment. The words are so close in her head that they are louder than any other sound. Sometimes it’s as if they are louder than even the things she sees, and she wants to swat away the voices. She’s not even sure if she can see anything because the calls are so loud. Should be some kind of volume control.

“What’s happening?” the obese woman is saying.

“Somebody’s talking about the election.”

“Everybody is talking about that.”

“What do you mean?”

How could she have overlooked the possibility before? Suddenly, it’s possible that the obese woman herself has something to do with the telephone calls. Maybe she is some kind of dispatcher or a router, some kind of personnel manager of the people talking. “Do you have something to do with it?”

“I haven’t voted in twenty-five years.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“What?”

“About the election?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

Everything that’s happening is happening below the threshold of the visible. The same outside. The people who voted, they don’t count, because it’s happening below the surface. Everything she sees, the city out the window, the cars, the parks, the skyscrapers. Somewhere even farther down, underneath the lowest part of the subway system, there’s another layer, where the decisions are made. It’s like two hundred people, and their sons and daughters go to parties together, and they meet on Friday nights down in the bunker and they play cards and they decide who gets what country. This one gets to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Kazakhstan. That’s what the Friday-night card players say, and they divide up their winnings, and they divide up their businesses, and they give one another a pat on the back. Some people get to see these things, some people are special and they can see below the layers, and these people are gifted.