Читать книгу Death Wishing - Laura Ellen Scott - Страница 11

6.

The rally had been very much like a good church service in that we were released into the wet heat of a Sunday afternoon, feeling utterly perfect for a moment. But all perfect emotions degrade. That’s why church goers keep going back.

On our way to the trolley shelter, Pebbles walked between Val and me. She tested out a line from Mirella’s song: “Now I’m no longer doubtful . . .” It’s a tough song for anyone, and more than talent you need confidence. Pebbles didn’t have a lot of either. She coughed at the end of the phrase, and I placed an encouraging hand on her back only to find myself touching Val’s hairy fingers, already in place. He should have at least stayed on his side of the girl’s spine.

And then she dropped the bomb. “We’re supposed to think about what we want.”

Correct, but difficult to embrace. Even convinced of the need to Wish Local, I didn’t find it any easier to think of the world without me in it. And that was the real problem wasn’t it? To think of a place and time beyond death that was a lot like this place, this time. I glanced at Val and found his face unreadable. I couldn’t tell if he was worried, upset, confused. Pebbles, however, looked as if she’d risen a level above us. Her face was blissing, all cheeky sparkle, like she could see many kinds of wonderful futures, and it didn’t matter that she wouldn’t be there to enjoy them. I put it down to her upbringing in the church. All intellectual arguments aside, she had been raised right for the current situation.

Not so Val or even myself. We were doomed to wallow in rationality, at least for a time, until we could pull ourselves out and come to grips with duty.

I think I was supposed to say something wise at this juncture. Material responsibility is actually the least difficult duty of being a Grown-Up. Any boob can get a job, feed his family, and guard the perimeter. There’s no craft in that part of life. Where it gets tricky is in that impossible area of making sense out of uncertainty and stabilizing chaos. It can’t be done you see, but it’s still part of the job.

I had no wisdom to impart. Worse than that, my panic was on the rise. “Here’s what I wonder,” I said. “Are we supposed to not tell?”

Val laughed. “You mean like throwing a penny in a well or blowing out the candles on a cake? You think that by telling your wish it won’t come true?”

“Who knows? You say that like it’s crazy talk or stupid. Truth is we don’t know the rules, so nothing is crazy. Or maybe it all is.”

“Telling doesn’t make a difference,” Pebbles said. “It can’t.” Clearly, she didn’t like this line of discussion. She stopped us, pivoting around so she could put her hand on my chest. “I’m going to wish something to do with music. I don’t know what yet. Victor? What are you gonna wish before you die?”

I felt woozy under the mad sun. Val stood apart from us, his arms folded, keeping an eye on the distance so we didn’t miss our ride. “I really don’t know,” I confessed. “I don’t think about death. At least I haven’t before.”

Pebbles nodded, more sympathetic than I deserved. She turned to Val. “What about you then?” There was a little icy edge in her voice that said she still hadn’t forgiven him for making her feel awkward the night before. Val didn’t seem to know it, but the balance of power between them was shifting.

He unfolded his arms, ran fingers through his hair to stall. But then he came out with what was on his mind: “Why does everyone think they’re a wisher? Rollie says there are more successful wishes here than anywhere else, but the odds are still insane.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Pebbles said. We started walking again, the three of us in a row. “I don’t think the odds have anything to do with this.”

“I don’t either. Not really,” said Val. “I just think that if you’re a wisher, then maybe you’d know. You’d have some kind of feeling about it. And I just don’t.”

My heart sank. Val had me going with his talk of odds—a tidy little argument against having to decide. But knowing wasn’t feeling, and feeling was king. He felt nothing about the Wishing, and he was off the hook. Me? I felt something. A little, tiny, scared something.

We reached the trolley stop and came upon a man spread out across the bench, not quite asleep but certainly not very conscious. He wore a red and white checked long sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up to his brown throat. He might have been a restaurant worker. He certainly smelled like food garbage. He shielded his eyes with his forearm, showing off pits stained with ancient perspiration. In black uniform slacks, he’d propped a bent leg up on the bench and let the other dangle. He seemed to be roasting himself. The mere sight of him made me dizzy.

I suppose the main problem for me was that I never spent a great deal of time wanting, at least not on a large scale, beyond my passion for whatever food or drink hovered before my eyes. My memory seemed full of holes. I remembered wanting only those things/people/goals that I attained, eventually. I did not remember the things/people/goals I must have given up on. Surely that meant I had some sort of brain damage.

What did I want to leave behind? Nothing? That was a hell of a thing.

I excused myself and hustled over to the nearest trash receptacle, where I regurgitated. Though not quite an accepted custom in New Orleans, public vomiting isn’t rare either. Open disgust at such behavior is perhaps less appropriate than the act itself, although I have known spectators to respond with a round of golf applause.

Val and Pebbles politely turned their attention to the slow moving streetcar emerging like a villain or a hero out of the heat waves. I recovered before the trolley came, wiping my fingers around my mouth and pulling my skin clean. I was angry with my own face. The trolley gasped to a stop, vibrating at rest, impatient. I collected myself, climbed into the vehicle, and thumbed my coins into the box. I tasted tears and bile. Val wouldn’t look at me. Pebbles couldn’t keep her frightened eyes off of me. Neither suggested the hospital.

I sat by myself, feeling fat, useless, and rancid. “If” was just about gone. That was Rollie’s real message. “If” was a luxury, attached to what would never happen. But now things did happen, and “if” was a loaded gun, a sacrilege, a reckless waste of heart and thought. If I die. And certainly I would. But I didn’t have a wish yet.

I needed a wish now, and damned quick it seemed. No fooling around any more.

Back home, I called Brenda, my ex wife. She sounded bored by my question, as if its simplicity insulted her intelligence. “Of course I have a wish, Victor.” Her tone made me feel like a slob.

“Well what is it?”

She answered with a prim little cough. One of her professor tricks that had devolved into a tic. “I wish that Val receive the entirety of my estate upon my death to dispose of as he pleases. And I documented this wish into a will. Isn’t that ingenious?”

“Don’t be a bitch, Bren.”

“I thought about setting aside a portion for you as well, but Rick would find that irritating, and besides, the likelihood of your succeeding me in death—”

“Oh do stop.” Rick was her new husband, the Dean who had secured her academic position. “Why can’t you ever take me seriously?”

Brenda said, “I might if it didn’t seem like you were descending into childish magical thinking. You know, Val can handle all that southern gothic crap, but you? You’re getting soft in the head. Picking up some bizarre lisp and going around in capes?”

“I do not lisp.”

She ignored me. “No wonder you’re buying into all this mythology.”

“I really appreciate you taking the time to inventory my decline.”

She went quiet. After a moment she said, “Sorry.”

“Brenda.” And for some reason I catapulted back to a sex memory: Brenda on the butcher block table. Me thin. Val safely away somewhere—camp? My face went hot, a blush from embarrassment, not arousal. Irrationally, I imagined that she could see into my mind. I said into the phone, “Help me think about this.”

Another sound from her throat, this time more human than pedagogic. “I don’t know where to begin, Vic. This isn’t like you.”

“I’m aware of that. But I seem to be changing. Recent circumstances and all that. Why don’t you have a wish?”

“You mean aside from the existential crisis, the consuming narcissism, and the outright dizzying lunacy that attends wish design? I’m an atheist for Christ’s sake—”

“Yes, yes. Cut to it, love.”

Brenda sighed. “Victor. I have new wishes every God-damned day. Dozens of them. I lay awake at night trying to imagine the repercussions of even the most fractional change.”

I imagined her in that sleepless state, lying next to man who was dead to the world and oblivious to or perhaps even tired of Brenda’s neuroses. She needed to be held more. “Oh dear,” I said.

“Exactly. I’m a wreck.”

“And Rick? Is he as conflicted as you?”

“Oh no,” she said. “He’s had his wish for fucking ever. Something about honeybees. Very responsible. Very targeted. Very linguistically simple, so he can say it even under the most challenging circumstances, like in a car crash.”

I liked the idea of Rick in a car crash. I also imagined a number of other challenging, drawn out scenarios featuring Rick gasping, groaning, coughing out his bee wish. “Well now see, you are being helpful. I might not have thought about the compromised speech aspect.”

“So you’re having trouble picking a wish?”

“I’m having trouble picking any wish. Email me your castoffs, maybe I can use one of those.”

“You’re disgusting,” she said.

“Perhaps I should wish for a stinkier cheese.”

“You should wish for men to have babies.”

“Or women to be less brittle.” I regretted it as soon as the words left my mouth, but it was too late. She hung up. I don’t know if she was furious, bored, hurt, worried, or driving out of cell service. That’s new technology for you. No longer do we have the option of giving notice of our displeasure by slamming the phone into the cradle. A hang up doesn’t even come with a click anymore. Your person is there and then suddenly she’s not. I have found myself on multiple occasions continuing a line of heated argument long after Brenda had ended the call. It’s a problem because she’s missed my best, most elegant rebuttals that way. And that in itself is a curiosity—why are my finest insights always preceded by the idiot behavior that made her hang up on me in the first place?

A cruelty crossed my mind. A Grinchy thought. I could wish for her to fall in love with me again.

That night Val and I ate separately but together. That’s how it goes, me working as slowly as possible through an orange chicken Lean Cuisine, and Val plowing through a carton of takeout pasta from Fiorelli’s. It smelled insanely good, but Val had flipped up the lid making it difficult for me to get a real eyeful. He had a music magazine open beside his dinner. He pretended he was reading it. Dinner was awfully quiet.

Except for when I said, “You’re growing fonder of the girl.”

“Not really.” He didn’t look up.

“Why mess with this Wish Local stuff at all, then. Why take her seriously?”

“I don’t.” He closed the magazine and slurped a forkful of Bolognese. “I wanted to just lay low till all this blew over. Like you,” and here he pointed his glistening fork at me. “But now it’s all gone too far. It’s beginning to feel like . . . Well, it’s stupid of me not to pay attention anymore. Even if I’m not a wisher, and I’m pretty damned sure none of us are, I need to prepare.”

He leaned forward, buffeting me with his garlic breath. No, garlic and parmesan. “I am not so arrogant that I think I can change the world. But I do know there’s folks out there that are going to change the world for me.”

His words alarmed me, but I misunderstood. “But Val, we can’t live in fear. That’s not what we came down here for.”

Val leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “Not fear, Dad. I’m not afraid of this bullshit.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

He closed the lid to the carton and tossed it into the trash. I could tell by the way it tilted in the air that there were still a few precious morsels inside. He hadn’t eaten the bread that they usually packed in with the entrees. He was sparing me the sight.

Val then wiped the sides of his lips, pulling his face into a smirk that wouldn’t take. “I’m talking about fortune, Daddy. Fuck fear. I’m talking about getting ahead of this damned thing.”