Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

They were waiting for a wheelbarrow to be brought to them so they could go down to the cabin and transfer their belongings to the new room in the manse. The scene before them had changed a little. A substantial white trailer had appeared down the lawn, off to the side. A lit-up sandwich sign set up next to it said Serv-U. Flashlight beams swung in the darkness.

A young black man in a Serv-U uniform — yellow jumpsuit, knee-high yellow rubber boots — was accompanying Gruen and Joris to the tower to help in their relocation. Another of the Serv-U men ran up and abandoned a wheelbarrow directly in front of Ned and Nina, saying nothing. He hurried away. He had been an old black man with one milk-white eye, wearing a drenched watch cap. Serv-U was probably one of the minimum-wage day-labor outfits that raked up workers from among the homeless and unemployed in Kingston, which was richly supplied with them. He and Nina seemed to be on their own. Nina would hold up the golf umbrella while Ned pushed the wheelbarrow. They set off.

As they were turning the corner of the manse, Nina told Ned to stop. He was confused.

“Wait,” she said sharply, startling him. Gesturing unclearly, she led him to a spot close to the house and pointed upward at a deck two floors above.

She spoke into his ear but she was too close. He pushed her away and quietly asked her to say it again so he could understand.

She said, “There’s a traveling fight going on. You don’t pay attention! It started back in the middle of the house and now it’s here.” One of the sliding doors leading to the deck was in play. It had been slammed shut and then opened and slammed shut again.

Iva and Elliot were fighting. Elliot was better than Iva at keeping his voice under control. She was in a volcanic state, threatening to call someone, apparently weeping. One of the two of them made a sound closer to a growl than Ned had ever heard anyone make.

“I shall talk to him, and he will come.” That was Iva.

“Pressure him, and not only will he not come, he won’t even send the video.” That was Elliot. It was very intelligible. Something that sounded like rough body contact, or someone falling, was happening now. Then the traveling fight evidently moved off into other venues in the house. A voice distantly yelling was Iva’s. Ned was holding his breath.

“I have no idea what this is,” Ned said.

“I do,” Nina said.

“You just got here,” Ned said.

“Somebody important is not coming.”

“I guess,” Ned said, “that would be Kundera not coming.”

“They’re upset. And Dreyfus won’t be coming either,” Nina said.

“That’s not funny,” Ned said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, and strode off with the umbrella. He followed. Over his shoulder he could see that Serv-U workers were unspooling electric lines from the trailer to the tower and the manse. It looked as though they were going to be around for a while.

The Serv-U worker with the white eye crossed their path. Where was Dale Coy, now? Ned wondered. He hadn’t thought about him in years.

“For about six months,” Ned said, “there was a black guy named Dale in our group, freshman year.”

“He left the group?”

“He did.”

“Why?”

“I don’t remember,” Ned said. But he did remember. He thought, Coy hated one of Douglas’s Christmastime song parodies like “It’s Beginning to Look a Bit Like Kwanzaa,” and Doug hadn’t spared the substitute Christmas promoted by Ron Karenga and the black nationalists in those days. But Douglas had done parodies of regular Christmas carols, too, lots of them. Ned thought, You can’t call everything that’s funny, funny, without losing friends.

He said, “We weren’t that enlightened about race. I guess we assumed that bad race incidents were destined to be like firecracker explosions after the Fourth of July. They’d get fewer and fewer and then stop.”

“I think that old man had a bleeding cut on his hand. There was blood on the wheelbarrow handle. None of them are wearing work gloves. It’s cold, too.”

“I could say something,” Ned said.

“I’ll remind you,” she said.

Nina was out in the rain again, with her umbrella, standing near the hump of rock she and Ned had been calling Moby Dick, and she was there because it was one of the few places she was sure of getting a good cell phone connection.

Her mother answered. It would be about seven p.m. there.

“Okay tell me,” her mother said.

“Everything’s okay. Everything’s working. I got here and nobody seems to mind.”

“Where are you staying? What kind of place have they got you in?”

“Well we were in a sort of dollhouse, which I liked, but now we’re moving to a new place in the main house. I just had a look at it. It’s a nice room, pretty big, like a good motel room, everything you need, except we have to share a bathroom with Ned’s friends Gruen and Joris. They’re in the bedroom next to ours. It’s a good big bed, and the room is built over a rollicking stream pretty much like Niagara Falls. Directly underneath us.”

“ Oh that’s so good , Neen!” Her mother’s sudden enthusiasm puzzled her. But that was Ma.

“Why is it, especially?”

“Negative ions, don’t you know anything? It’s good for theum … negative ions are pouring up from the mashing water.”

“Okay.”

“You pay plenty to get a negative ion generator, a machine. You’re getting it free.”

“Do I have to inhale a lot perchance?”

“ No . It penetrates by itself. You’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll feel wonderful, like running around, and Ned too.”

“Good. He needs a lift. By the way, we did it on time.”

“Thank God then.”

“And Ma, listen. I think that a couple of hours afterward I felt something new like a very refined I don’t mean refined I mean fine, as in … fine thing like a … fizzing, in there. I feel it right now.”

“Okay, I’m going to go out on a plank and say you did it.”

She wanted to believe Ma. It was sad, but she wanted her to be right. Her mother had called herself a dialectical materialist until she decided to learn astrology, which wasn’t a good fact to be thinking about now.

Nina said, “I hope you’re right.”

“I am. In your voice I hear something.”

“You didn’t used to believe things like this.”

“I still don’t. But I can do it. I got attuned . So listen to me for your own good. And by the way since you’re being smart with me I’ll tell you something else you have to do. You have to watch where you sleep from now on.”

“Oh God, what does that mean?”

“It means you have to be head north feet south.”

“Well if your head is north the only place your feet can be is south, right?”

“Okay, be smart with me. It’s alignment . If you grow carrots in a tray of dirt and grow them athwart the axis you get crummy short carrots but if you align the dirt bed along the axis you get tall sweet ones. And don’t laugh, this is in a decent book by a man René Dubos, an MD who was supported for years by that bloodsucker Rockefeller at the Rockefeller whatever it is medical foundation. So align your bed.”

“I’ll do my best. I’ll take care of it.”

“The march, howum,” Ma said.

“We’re still getting good news. How about you?”

“Don’t worry about Los Angeles, but something is wrong, I can tell, you’re not telling me.”

Nina sighed. “I’m trying to think of what it might be.”

Ma said, “You know.”

“Well the only thing it might be is the son of Ned’s friend who died, he’s a peeping Tom. I know this because he peeped at me. He’s fourteen or fifteen.”