Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

They were near the apex of the road, the land in shadow and colder, though the sky was still a clear, empty blue. This might have been how the apostles talked in the quiet remembrance of Jesus, in the distillation of what was said, and why it was said, and how it would form four gospels of a varying life, but a singular message.

Thomas said, ‘I could take your blood pressure now, Mr Price, give you a good indication of your general health and a prognosis of how you might spend the next twenty years of your life. You want me to tell you?’

There was a question behind the question. Norman had his eyes on the dirt road.

Thomas stopped with the tacit awareness that they had come to a point of obvious impasse. He said, ‘Why don’t you ask why we came and met you?’

Norman answered. ‘I might first ask myself why I came.’

Thomas acknowledged it. ‘I guess that is another way of asking it.’

This was all new to Norman. The terrain and the essential freedom of being somewhere he had never been before, and to be in the company of Thomas Strait, a man who talked like Tom Joad, and Norman, aware that Steinbeck, on his travels, he must have happened upon these straight-talkers of distilled truths, men who understood the essence of life and knew it since birth, against all the inducement that understanding and knowledge came only from books.

Off in the distance, Thomas pointed to a brown-bricked building fashioned in the clay of the river’s bed. It was a former Tuberculosis Hospital. Thomas explained, his voice reverently solemn. ‘We can only imagine the capacity for suffering people had in the past, when losing a child in birth, or to disease, was almost a certainty, and nothing lasted. Religion served its purpose. I see God as a way of allowing us to ask the right questions. I don’t think religion was ever about answers. That’s where modern philosophy got it wrong.’

Thomas kept staring across at the hospital on the hill. ‘They were so scared, everybody in town. You don’t know what fear is like until it takes the form of illness or plague. Compassion dies, and fear sets in. Supplies were just loaded onto carts hoisted up to them by a mechanical pulley. Patients went up there and died for the most part.’

They were further down along a run of fence line. In the emerging clearing, Thomas pointed to mannequins of a vintage dated to the thirties and forties. It was apparent as they got closer, each eerily lifelike, and yet of another era, the mannequins hewn with a gaunt leanness that defined a time of want and scarcity.

They were clothed in sundry outfits, coats and dresses, in sweaters and skirts, a man not unlike Mr Feldman in a long trench coat and black unlaced shoes.

The mannequins had come from a store long closed in downtown Saint Louis. Thomas explained it. Someone had the idea to use them as scarecrows, truckloads of them delivered out to the surrounding areas, and then, mysteriously, over time, they began aggregating at the base of the Tuberculosis Hospital, and then there were mannequins of children, gathered in among the adults, a community of dead souls. It just happened all of a sudden. It was never decided.

Thomas Strait shrugged in staring out at the hospital. He was arrived at some point in his head. ‘To tell the truth, Mr Price, I’m looking for something sustainable. In a Composition Text at the college they had a chapter on a Business Proposal, how to apply for grants and federal dollars. What I’m proposing would be a regional educational center where we would make up a biography card for everyone who died at the hospital. They kept copious records. One of the victims, Marshall Ames, was a confidence man who was said to have inspired Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man . This Ames made a livelihood aboard the great Mississippi paddle steamers when plantations were lost in the roll of a dice, and all that went with them, a holding of slaves, a wife and family made destitute.’

They were stopped, looking at the sun falling on the distant brownstone building.

Thomas Strait continued. ‘Aside from the bio cards, I have a script of Ames’s life and on some others. I got Kenneth reading the life of Marshall Ames for me right now.’

Kenneth’s name was dropped without the slightest hitch of unease or qualification.

Thomas Strait kept on talking. ‘Like I said, this would be a living history of a region, maybe actors dressed in period costume coming forward and announcing themselves, like ghosts. I see the dying in beds, and a clutch of infirm in a room under the salubrious warmth of light, just playing cards, talking after the times. I have in my head how it might all work.’

Thomas Strait turned and looked at Norman. ‘That about how you come upon your stories, Mr Price?’

Norman said, ‘I like the idea of ghosts, and the fluidity of decentering any one story. It would be better than a play letting people form their stories.’

Thomas Strait smiled. ‘You see now that’s what I was thinking, like you said, a decentered story that don’t occupy any one place. I think that’s the American story, Mr Price, I really do.’

*

Norman was still unsure what was being asked of him, or if something was being imparted and nothing was being asked of him, but something given him, a way of seeing life that was up to then not immediate and obvious.

Thomas got round to it slowly, how injurious it would be for Kenneth to go back to Chicago. Kenneth had a gift for drama. He had been active through high school. People said he had the looks, but sometimes one’s greatest asset could go against you. That’s what drew Kenneth to Chicago, acting.

Norman knew the story. He had fallen on the abject spectre of Kenneth: a man with looks and little else. Kenneth had read so hopelessly for the part, coming to the awareness that nothing was going to work out career-wise, as he had anticipated.

Norman had met Kenneth in that awakening vulnerability. There had never been real love, just an intense attraction, and maybe not even that on Kenneth’s part, and only the promise of shelter, the quiet reprieve against going home without fame or fortune.

For Norman, there had been the salve, the presence of observing a beautiful failure, seeing the quiet injustice of God’s creation, seeing how such splendor could be sent out into the world, and that it counted for naught. It was apparent over the time they had been together, the luminescent sheen of Kenneth coming from the shower, the singular vein run along his cock, the taper of his thighs, his inherent beauty, Kenneth’s inventory of his assets — what of this plated chest and abs, all of it amounting to nothing.

Thomas Strait was still talking. He had a way of shoring up questions unasked and offering alternatives. He knew why Norman had come down here. In the subtle persuasion of an alternative for Kenneth, Thomas made his case. They were on a dirt road, and it might have been Jesus laying out some plan of redemption and reform, some way back that wouldn’t involve miracles, because there were no more miracles anymore.

They were again stopped and looking at sun on the distant building. Thomas pointed. In the glint of light, in the breeze, was a movement and a communion of people gathered below, or it seemed they were, in the way clay was gathered and breathed life into, so the universe gained a consciousness.

Thomas was talking, in what were tongues of fire, but, when Norman listened, it came out as something ordinary.

*

They were in Chicago by seven o’clock, in advance of Norman’s meeting with Nate Feldman. Norman emailed and accepted the invitation. He showered out at Lee-Ann’s house in a claw foot tub, a genuine antique and allegedly worth a fortune, Norman sanguine enough to understand the interchangeability of so many lives, so many convergent hopes.