Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

If I do see René’s rose-colored lamp beside my deathbed, it will be beautiful to me. I will want to touch and linger on every thread of its carefully woven fabric, especially the bits of gold that you half-see when you lean up close to shut off the light and then forget. I will cry to think I ever forgot. I will cry to lose it. It will be the same if Jean-Paul appears before my bed in a dark nimbus of smells and party music. His oafish ridicule will be sweet, like wine. Because I won’t taste it again. I’ll wish I could hold his bloated, blinking face in both my hands and kiss it good-bye. I’ll want to take back the curse I muttered as I turned away. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll miss that, too.

The bus stops at the light. Sun shines lovingly through the cloud cover and warms us through the dirty windowpanes. The bus hums in the light. We are all quiet in the warmth and the sound of the humming motor. I look outside and see a little budding tree, its slim black body shining with rain. Joyous and intelligent, like a fresh girl, the earth all new to its slender, seeking roots. I think of Trisha, erect and seeking with sparkling eyes. A fleshy nimble tree, laughing as it discovers the dirt. Stretching up its limbs to tell the sky what it’s found.

This moment could come to me on my deathbed, too. If it does, I will love it so much that I will take it into death with me. Perhaps if I try, it will dissolve in my arms. But I will try.

The light changes. The bus chugs forward. Veronica’s face floats in the window for an instant before blending with mine. She was right: Alain did go where most people wouldn’t, though not because he willed it. He couldn’t help it. The storm of movement was in him all the time. He lived in pieces, jumping from one falling meteor to the next, and going wherever it went. Of course, everybody has different directions in them. I saw three in my mother when Daphne and I met her in the family diner, and she had more than that. But she was not quick or flexible enough to jump from one to another. Even just to feel three at once made her awkward and confused. She didn’t have the strength to hold that much opposition in one place. That’s why she went back to my father. She still had all her different directions. She just chose to ignore most of them. She came back and became Mod again, mom with a hard d and a nasal o .

But sometimes the other directions took shape and ran against one another, filling the house with invisible war. At night, I sometimes started up with my heart pounding, scared not by a dream but by an image flying loose from thought, big and loud as a freight train: my parents in their room upstairs, their faces distorted with hate, screaming curses and lunging at each other with knives.

I yank the rope, signal the driver that it’s my stop. His head is a human pellet against the wide gray windshield. Directions: Mottled light and shadow go down; droning wipers go side to side; driver’s head goes up.

Alain had the strength and the flexibility; that was his misfortune. I saw him with his daughter once on a windy street. I knelt to meet her; he knelt, too. He pressed her cheek to his and introduced her as “Tiny Duck.” He didn’t introduce me to her. She didn’t mind. She laughed and put her hand on his head and said “Goose” in English. He laughed, and I saw his eyes were the same as they were with me. He could not stop, even for her. He could not stop even to be sad about it. Speaking English back to her, he said “Duck” in a mock-British accent and put his hand on her head. “Duck”; he put his hand on my head. “Goose,” and she put her hand on him. She didn’t look at me. She must’ve met a lot of girls named Duck.

We stop at the curb; the door suctions open. A mist of rain and traffic noise floats in and breaks apart. People stir and cough. I come down the aisle of heads. Duck, duck. The driver acknowledges me with the hard side of his silent head. Goose. His human hand squeezes and pulls; his crabbed wing of a door folds closed. The bus drives off with a loud swoosh, a gray rainbow of sound that twinkles and evaporates. In the distance, Alain and my mother sparkle and evaporate.

I turn off the main street and go down a wide road into a grove of giant redwood trees. It is a canyon at the foot of a mountain. It is a dignity preserve for rich people. Homes are set way back from the street or nested up on high hills with wooden stairways winding up their sides. Invisible children yell and run down an invisible path. The sun flashes in an attic window. The wet pavement is lush as a stone sponge. Giant trees grow up out of it and buckle it with their knotted muscley roots. Their bark is porous, like breathing skin. Through their skin you feel the beat of their huge hearts from deep in the ground. People drive slowly and weave around them, passing one at a time. I picture the lady I saw in the car with the bracelets driving through the trees, her mind fluttering against the glass.

When I first moved here, I lived in this town. I didn’t live in the canyon, but I’d come to walk in it. I’d come especially when I felt afraid, knowing I had hepatitis but not feeling sick yet. I’d look at the big trees and the mountain and I’d think that no matter how big any human sickness might be, they were bigger. Now I’m not so sure. How much sickness can even a huge heart take before it gets sick itself? The canyon is full of dead and dying oaks. Scientists don’t know why. It’s hard to believe we didn’t kill them.

The wind rises. The rain dashes sideways. Slowly, the trees throw their great hair. Their trunks creak and mull. My fever makes a wall in my brain. A door appears in the wall. It opens and another dream comes out. Is it from last night, or the night before, or every night? In it, a man and woman are on a high-speed train that never stops. Music is playing, a mechanical xylophone rippling manically up a high four-note scale again and again. Bing bing bing bing! It is the sound of a giant nervous system. The man and woman are built into this system and they cannot leave it. They are crying. Looking out the window, they see people hunting animals on game preserves. There are almost no animals left, so they have to be recycled — brought back to life after they’ve been killed and hunted again. Mobs of people chase a bear trying to run on artificial legs. It screams with fear and rage. The man and woman cry. They are part of it. They can do nothing. Bing bing bing bing!

My forehead breaks into a sweat. I unfasten a button and loosen my scarf. The air cools my skin; the fever recoils, then sends hot tadpoles wiggling against the cold. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body but the mind, too. Keep going over the symptoms. It’s not a character defect; it’s an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining to become something more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass.

I button my coat and let myself sweat. I try to think of something else. I think of an interview I heard with a religious person who had two kinds of cancer. The radio host asked her if she’d prayed for God to heal her. She said that she had and that it hadn’t worked. When she realized she was going to die, she asked God why He hadn’t healed her, and He answered. She actually heard His voice. He said, “But I am.”