Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

In the summer, the children called him the Undertaker. They would sometimes kill small things for sport and say, “The Undertaker will take care of them now.”

He slept little. He didn’t think he slept at all, but that was an illusion, he knew. He would think of himself as resting beneath a large black wave, just before it curled and fell, wondering: Why am I this Nicodemus? Why am I not another? When I die, will I become another? Does God love all equally? Does he love the living more than the dead?

It seemed to him that God must love the living more, but could he love the dead less, having made them so?

That summer was the hottest anyone could remember. The flowers browned against the white fences, the berries withered before they were blue. At the ends of the roads, there were dark mirages and the boats seemed to ride on glass.

One night, as he buried a shattered animal, he placed a note in its grave.

Later, he thought, I must not do that again.

—

He wore his wool shirt, his heavy serge trousers, and he was shivering from the heat as he drove down the road. The boy who always begged to travel with him when he worked was waiting as he always was and Nicodemus, for the first time, stopped and picked him up. Everyone knew the boy. He wasn’t a bad boy, but if someone asked if they liked Peter their answer would be, Not yet.

They found a deer first, then two raccoons, small and large, the warm wind still purling through their fur. Nicodemus stayed in the cab while the boy heaved the bodies into the back. The following day he picked the boy up again, though he could barely look at him. But after that, no more.

They found him in his shack, his beautiful hands crossed on his chest, his mouth agape in the awful manner of the dead. He was old and he’d had a strange life. It was unsustainable, really, the life he was leading at the end, the kind of work he’d devoted himself to.

They missed Nicodemus. And Peter was no more than an epigone, they agreed. Still, they had to say that the boy managed to keep the island just as clean.

A year after my mother moved farther out, she became obsessed with building a tortoise enclosure. This was in preparation for receiving a desert tortoise— Gopherus agassizii— or, as the Indians would say, or rather had said, komik’c-ed— shell with living thing inside. That’s the Tohono O’odham Indians. My mother said she’d read that somewhere.

I was recently at a party and found myself talking to a linguist who told me that we had been pronouncing komik’c-ed incorrectly but that it meant pretty much what my mother claimed it did.

Sometimes I drink too much but mostly I don’t. I go to AA meetings on occasion but I can’t really bond with those people and never see them socially. They’re nice enough but some of them have been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I have a copy of the Big Book and sometimes I read around in it but it never makes me cry like Wordsworth’s Prelude, say. I don’t have The Prelude anymore. I misplaced it, unbelievable, but it was falling apart with my looking at it so much and I moved away too after my father died so it was probably misplaced then. My mother is a widow now for two years but she never worries about her situation or talks about it like some people would. She never let on to me or others that she was sorrowful or lonely. I’m twenty-one. It could be argued that there are worse ages to lose your father than in your twentieth year but I found it to be a difficult time, mostly because I was just old enough to try to take it in stride. Sometimes I think it would have been worse if I was eight or even twelve and I don’t know why I indulge myself like that. It doesn’t make me feel better and I admit I have no imaginative access to the person I was then. I can’t imagine that girl at all. I certainly can’t imagine having a conversation with her. My mother told me that when I was eight all I wanted to do was swim. Swim, swim, swim. Then I stopped wanting to do this. When I was twelve she said that my most cherished possession was a communication badge I’d earned in Girl Scouts. It showed a tower emitting wiggly lines.

Which is odd because communicating is not a skill I naturally or unnaturally possess. I’d prefer to think of myself as a witness, but honestly, I doubt I’m even that.

The apartment I moved into is a shithole but convenient. Bars, restaurants, automobile services galore and a Trader Joe’s where you can buy pizzas fast-frozen in Italy and coconut water from Thailand, not that they’re unusual anymore, it’s what’s come to be expected. The apartment complex is clean, inexpensive and devoid of character. We tenants just refer to it as a shithole because it’s so soul-sucking. We don’t really believe our souls are being destroyed of course because we feel we have more power over our situation than that. The facility has a good view of sunsets in the summer when they’re not at their most legendary and it’s too hot to sit outside and view them anyway.

Shortly after my father died and I moved into the shithole without even my Prelude to remind me of loftier, simpler and more beautiful emotions, my mother sold our house in the foothills and moved into a run-down adobe on thirty acres of land in the mountains. Is there any kind of adobe other than run-down? I think not.

After a while she began to speak frequently of a neighbor, Willie, and his water-harvesting system. He had a twenty-six-thousand-gallon belowground cistern and got all his water from roof runoff during our infrequent but intense rains. I feared Willie might be a transitional figure in my mother’s life but he turned out to be an old man in a wheelchair with an old wife so cheerful she must have been on a serious drug regimen. They did have an ingenious water-collection system and I was given a tour of all the tanks and tubes and purifiers and washers and chambers that provided them with such good water and made them happy. They also kept bees and had an obese cat. The cat, or rather its alarming weight, seemed out of character for their way of life but I didn’t mention it. Instead, I asked them if his name was spelled with an ew or an ou. They found this wildly amusing and later told my mother they’d liked me very much. That and a dollar fifty will get me an organic peach, I said. I don’t know why my mother’s enthusiasm for them irritated me so much. Soon they were gone, however, both carried off by some pulmonary infection that people get from mouse pee. A man my mother described as a survivalist later moved into their house and I was told little about him other than he didn’t seem to know how to keep the system going and ended up digging a well.

It was Lewis with an ew that kept bringing diseased rodents into the house, is my suspicion.

From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.

My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.

On the other hand I find it difficult to believe that my father no longer exists. He lives in something I do not recognize. Or no longer recognize and never will again. There are philosophers who maintain we are not our thoughts and that we should disassociate ourselves from them at every opportunity. But without this thought, I would have no experience of the world and even less knowledge of my heart.