Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“No,” he said, studying me with his bloodshot eyes, “I see you are not.”

“Have you been swimming?” I said, trying to resume our old intimacy.

“You’d better go back to your bunk now,” he said, “and tuck your shirt in.”

“But it’s been nine days! I know you’re not supposed to count.”

“Whoever told you that?” he said. “Of course you’re supposed to count the days.”

Not long after, the girls who distributed Snack were released and the girl who would have the job at the bakery and even Lisa. She strode away, her mighty bronze and black hair swinging.

I started counting the days.

When I counted a certain way I had not been there anywhere near nine days.

New girls arrived. They didn’t need to know me either because the reality is DUIs will never be among the elite at the Mission. One of the new ones — she was just in for violating probation — managed to hang herself. No one could figure out how she got away with it. Like everyone else she had been asked a dozen times throughout the admission process if she harbored suicidal thoughts but she must have lied.

For a while afterward there were more guards, even men, boys really. The boy guards always looked uneasy. There’s a shitload of girls in the bathroom, we heard one of them say anxiously. Somehow the numbers had gotten away from them. There are supposed to be only seven of us in the bathroom at any given time.

The girls gave one another facials at the picnic table in the little cement yard where we were allowed to go at erratic times. The times became even more erratic, if that was possible, after the hung girl. Her name had been Deirdre, but no one mentioned her by name. It was just too weird to call her by her name.

A facial was just squeezing blackheads and whiteheads. Even so, I was not invited to participate, neither as extractor nor as extractee. I felt so isolated and alone, though no more than usual.

My lawyer said, “You’re better off where you are for the time being. The environment out here is not conducive to…” She paused.

“To what?”

“Conducive to your privacy, to your ability to come and go.”

“I want to be able to come and go out there.”

“Don’t we all,” the lawyer said. “I mean in the deepest sense.”

From the very first I had found her annoying.

“But I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“A felony’s a felony,” she said.

I spent my days attempting to read a little pamphlet entitled The Room . It was about file cards and Jesus. It was pretty depressing. It was trying to provide hope but I didn’t find it hopeful. Too, the problem might have been with the lighting, which was deliberately terrible. It took forever to read anything.

Then I saw Mr. Hill again. I rushed to the red line painted on the floor. He nodded for me to advance.

“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.

“Hello!” I said. Thinking quickly, I added, “I am to be released today.”

Then I wanted to take it back because by my calculation N. Frame had been released many days before.

“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Hill said. “You’re a recidivist and your time with us starts all over again.”

Despite myself I thrilled to his use of the word recidivist, which is a lovely-sounding word.

“I’m really not N. Frame,” I said. “But for my own actions I take full responsibility. I am so contrite.”

He looked at me wearily.

“I am,” I said.

“Nothing you do will be enough,” he said. “No compensation will suffice.”

“I know, I know, I know,” I said.

He shifted the folders he held from one hand to the other. “Enhanced punishment,” I heard in part.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, for enhanced was a lovely word as well, though I believe in this context it wasn’t as nice as it sounded. “Am I a recidivist or did my sentence just get worse regardless?”

Even before I finished I felt the unworthiness of my question. I retreated to my bunk and I thought of Mr. Hill returning to his residence beneath the Mission, where the light was good and where water moved as if it were alive and where possibly dozens of the pressed pink shirts I admired were in orderly rows. Our clothes smell of metal — our soap and socks and even the candy that we keep. It all smells unconsolingly of metal.

It was very late and all was quiet. There wasn’t a dream moving.

The girl with the tattooed eyelids said to me, “There is no Mr. Hill.”

I felt better immediately.

Her eyes were shut, of course. There was a design on her lids but I had always felt that any attempt to determine what it was would be most unwise and I feel that way still.

He had taken the boat from the mainland when he was still a young man and stayed on. He remembered the first night being the hardest, as they say the first night of being dead must be. But he was not newly dead, he was entering for the first time what would become his life. He slept that first night on the beach, curled behind a boat, and his dreams were no longer those of his childhood — the plastic ball enclosing a plastic lion crushed by the doctor’s car as over and over the doctor’s pale car arrived at the anguished house.

He woke to a stinging rain and a strong east wind. The road to town was dark with little birds, dovekies he was later told, little auks blown in from the storm. He scooped up as many as he could catch and placed them in the bushes.

“Not there, not there!” a man in yellow oilskins shouted. “They live only on water, they can’t lift their bodies into flight from land!”

Together they carried dozens back to the sea but as many others died exhausted in their hands.

Later the man in oilskins said to him, “What is your name?”

“Nicodemus.”

“Not Nick?”

“Nicodemus.”

“He was the gentle one.”

The man was long retired from some successful industry. Now he was a hobbyist, a birder. He offered to hire Nicodemus as a handyman for his own grand residence, which he would vacate after Thanksgiving. In a matter of weeks, Nicodemus knew everyone on the winter island. He fixed pumps, caulked boats, split wood. He shingled roofs with the help of the waning moon.

Still, nothing was familiar to him here, neither morning nor evening. In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. Dusk and night being a figment of fog, an exhaustion of wave, the time when blackness sank into the town as if buildings and trees were a pit to be filled.

A deer fell on the once friendly hillside, the crack of the gun sounding a playful instant later.

His benefactor died on the mainland in a traffic accident. The great stone house was sold immediately. Nicodemus stayed on, in a single-room cottage on the grounds. In the South it would have been called a shack. He became more solitary; his health was not good, but his strength never failed him, he was very strong.

The new owners’ big Airedale had had surgery. Nicodemus carried the dog into the house and laid him on pillows and comforters that had been arranged on the floor by the fireplace.

“When do the stitches come out,” Nicodemus asked.

“They don’t take them out anymore,” the new owner said. “They dissolve on their own when their work is done.”

The man’s wife was slouched in a wing chair reading a paperback book. She looked at the dog and said, “Poor guy, poor Blue.” Then she glanced at the book again. “Lem hated the film Tarkovsky made of Solaris. I want to see Stalker again. I think it’s his masterpiece. What a genius.”

“Would you like a drink,” the man asked Nicodemus.