Lydia Millet - Magnificence

“Not the point,” said Sal. “It’s a dark hellish vision.”

“Well, but—” started Nancy.

“What she might mean,” interrupted Addison, “is it’s this, you know, kinda bad poetry.”

“It’s not fucking gay-ass poetry, man,” said Sal. “It’s music .”

“But—”

“You just don’t get it,” said Sal, and shook his head in disgust.

“I had to dissect a worm once,” said Nancy to Casey. “Back in Invertebrate Biology.”

“Excellent,” said Sal.

“Could you check on Angela?” asked Casey, as Susan began to move away. “She’s lying down upstairs. In the room with the Arctic fox.”

“Of course,” said Susan.

She passed Reg and Tony on her way to the stairs, standing in front of an eagle diorama outside the birds-of-prey room.

“It’s totally Natural History Museum,” said Reg. “Circa 1950.”

“I love it,” said Tony.

“Me too,” said Susan, and they gazed at the eagle. It had its wings back and talons out, coming in for a landing. Beneath it, on a gritty stretch of fake sand, a mouse cowered.

Walking up the stairs, she stopped and stood still on the landing, as usual. No airplanes, but there was a searchlight weaving back and forth across the sky. Always some light, in that black square — what you observed was forms of light — she tried to assess her drunkenness. She needed to drink more water, clearly. She breathed in, found a familiar body against her, and leaned back, contented.

“Ten minutes alone,” said Jim into her ear. “I can get the job done in ten. Done and done well.”

“I have to check on Angela.”

She was drunk enough to have a pleasant feeling of chaos — a fluid chaos, not harmful but thrilling — she could welcome it, she could feel a kind of carefree anger against the cousins brewing in her and trying to supplant the fear of them. She walked with Jim along the darkened second-floor hallway and knocked on the door of the Arctic room, then, when there was no answer, pushed it open. Under the blaze of overhead light the white fox crept forever, but no older woman.

“She’s nowhere,” said Jim.

“She has this, you know, early-onset Alzheimer’s, basically,” she said in a low voice. “With some other things going on too. Mixed features, I think the shrinks call it. We need to find her.”

They checked the other bedrooms, one by one — Rainforest, Himalayas, Indian Subcontinent. Then onto the barren wastes of Mongolia and The Soviet Union. She rarely came in here. Beyond an amateurishly painted Lenin, The Soviet Union had nothing but a massive, shaggy animal that looked like a bison, marked WILD TIBETAN YAK,and a sturdy horse marked EQUUS PRZEWALSKI.

“This guy shot horses ?” asked Jim.

Finally they had checked every room save horned beasts. As they approached she could hear the shower running from her own bathroom and in a flash she remembered: the woman had tried to kill herself in a bathtub once, after her husband left. The onset of her decline.

“Wait,” she told Jim, and rushed forward to open the bathroom door. “Angela? Is that you?”

Only the small bulbs over the vanity were lit. When she flicked on the rest she saw Angela standing up in the bathtub — not naked, small mercies. She had a towel wrapped around her and her hair plastered down on her head and the shower water was spattering down behind her.

Susan was relieved.

“Are you OK?” she asked, and reached past Angela to turn off the faucets. Water fell on her hair and face as she stretched her arm out. She looked around hastily till she saw the hook that held her terrycloth robe. “Here. Put this on.”

Angela looked at her blankly. Soaking wet, she was pitiable.

“Here, I’ll — right arm — left arm — there you go,” and she tied the belt around the slim waist and snaked the towel out from beneath. “Why don’t you come with me.”

Angela’s clothes were nowhere to be seen so Susan led her toward the closet. Jim stood next to the open bedroom window smoking, holding his cigarette outside.

“Could you go find T.?” she asked him. “Or Casey. Either of them will do.”

She wouldn’t ask Angela what she had been doing in the shower — it seemed a rude intrusion. And when she asked about the clothes again the woman looked vacant, so she held up a dress of her own. “Do you think you could be comfortable in this one?”

Angela nodded but seemed distracted.

After some awkwardness she got the dress on, albeit with difficulty, as Angela stood limp and pliable in front of her. She was wondering if she had to find shoes for her too — whether they wore the same size — and then giving up and heading for the bathroom sink for a glass of water when T. came in.

He put an arm around his mother and steered her over to the bed to sit down.

“She suffers from trichophobia,” he said. “Now and then. One of a number of complications.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is,” said Susan.

“No one does. It’s a fear of loose hairs.”

Susan gazed at him dumbly, sitting on the edge of the bed with his mother, slowly patting her hand. After a few seconds she ducked through the bathroom door and filled a cup.

“It’s intermittent,” said T. “But when it — she tries to wash them off.”

“Animal hairs, too? Because in that case—”

“I don’t think so,” and he shook his head. “It’s long hair that’s the trigger, mostly. This extreme disgust with long hairs. And it’s if they’re loose, only. Not if they’re on your head.”

There was fear of everything these days, she found herself thinking — as though it was magnanimous. A generosity of fear.

The fear of litigation. Was there a name for that?

She remembered an earlier impulse.

“Listen,” she said abruptly. “I haven’t asked you yet, but I do want to know. How was he?”

“How—?”

“In those — those days you were down there with Hal. How did he seem?”

T. gazed at her levelly, idly draped an arm around his mother’s shoulders.

“He seemed all right,” he said mildly.

“It’s that — you’re the only one I can ask.”

T. nodded, his head barely moving, and gazed past her to the open window.

“He was worried about me,” he said. “I was nothing to him, but he was still worried.”

She waited. On the nightstand a clock was flashing 12:00.

“He was preoccupied, though,” he went on. “He was down there looking for something.”

“You,” she said.

“Yes, but — yes and no, I got the feeling.”

She preferred not to look at him straight on, so she switched her gaze to his mother instead, who was studying her own bare feet. The toes were polished light pink.

“I should say, I do know why he went down there,” T. said gently, after a minute. “But in the end it wasn’t that. I mean yes, he was recovering. He slept a lot. A bit of binge drinking. And in his spare time he was looking for me. But also, he was — I remember thinking he was like a child.”

“A child?” she asked. It surprised her.

“There was something childlike about him. Like someone who’s never left home. That’s what it was: someone who’s lived in one place all his life. And then suddenly travels to a new country.”

On the wall beside them the African plain was palely visible. She reached out her right hand to sweep her fingers over the painted fringe of tall grass that grew up from the floor.

Of course, you couldn’t feel the grass.

Still the smoothness of the wall was somehow disappointing.

“But he had traveled before,” she said softly. “I mean we traveled together. Mostly before the accident. We did road trips. And we went to Europe, once. He was impressed by Europe.”