Mary Lou. What Annabel needed was a way to put her talent and her energy to use. She did a great deal of work; but no one thanked her for it and most of it could have been done by a Make Three robot without the Baleens’ knowing the difference—all the cooking so lovingly and skillfully done, all the sweeping and dishwashing and pottery making, for years. And no one thanked her for it.
I must write this down quickly, before the emotion of it paralyzes me while I sit here, on this morning in early summer, as I approach the end of this part of my journal.
We went on like that, Annabel and I, doing kitchen work together and talking after my readings in the mornings. I learned of many more things than the art of cooking and the sense of sexual puritanism that was not only Annabel’s but was a basic part of the culture of the Seven Cities of the Plain. Where the Baleens had come from Annabel did not know, except that they had been wandering preachers at one time, generations before, until the Bible and the literacy that went with it were gradually lost. She had been born in Swisher House, but her mother had been a wanderer in her youth. Once they had been singers of religious songs, but the “Plague of Childlessness” had caused old Baleen to silence them from singing, when Annabel was a young girl. She had been the last one born in the Cities.
I never tried to make love to her again. I have thought since that I should have tried; but once she had told me how she felt about lovemaking I was too confused and uncertain. I would think about Annabel and Mary Lou, loving them both and knowing both were unattainable. And somehow it was almost good that way. There were no
Or so I thought until the morning that I came down to find a dirty kitchen with scraps of bread and eggshells on the table and in the sink where the family had fixed their own breakfast. Annabel was not there. I went outside to look for her.
She was not anywhere near the chicken house. I went around the side of Baleena to where I could see the empty, overgrown city of Maugre. There was no sign of life there. I started to go toward the obelisk and then, on a sudden impulse, opened the door of the pottery shed.
The smell in the shed was overpowering. A rigid thin body, with its skin burned black and with what was once its hair now a charred black mat around the skull, stood with its back to me, facing the potter’s wheel. The arms were straight and the hands still gripped the edges of the wheel.
Along with the burned flesh there was still the smell of gasoline in the little room.
I turned and ran, all the way to the ocean. I sat on the beach and stared out at the water until Rod Baleen found me there that evening.
We buried her the next day. I was sent with Rod and an older man named Arthur to get a coffin.
The coffins were in a deeper level of the Mall, one that I had not known about before. It was down a stairway with a sign that said DEEP SHELTER.
There was a warehouse full of coffins, all of them made of green-painted metal. Stenciled on each were the words DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. They were piled to the ceiling, in neat rows, in a room labeled MORTALITY ROOM.
Rather than go back up the stairs we carried the empty coffin down through a hallway on the other side of the warehouse. We passed under an arch with the sign RECREATION AREA, and past a huge empty swimming pool and then past a doorway that said LIBRARY AND READING ROOM. Grieved as I was, silently carrying that grim and ugly coffin, my heart leapt when I saw the sign and I had to restrain myself from leaving Annabel’s coffin right there and rushing through the doorway.
At the end of the hallway there was a large door with the sign GARAGE AND VEHICLE STORAGE. Rod pushed it open and we came into a room that was filled with thought buses. They were parked next to one another in row after row. All of those whose fronts I could see had the sign MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.
At the end of this room, down past a long row of buses, was a pair of sliding doors big enough to admit a bus. Rod pushed a button on the wall by the doors and they opened. We stepped in, carrying the coffin, and rode a big elevator that took us back out into the sunshine through doors at the back of the obelisk. We drove to the pottery shed, where the women had done the best they could to make Annabel’s body presentable. They had put a new black dress on her and a blue apron. But there was nothing that we put in the coffin that I could recognize as Annabel.
There was a beautiful slim vase on a shelf in the pottery shed. Annabel had told me she had made it years before but that old Baleen would not let it be used in the kitchen because it was “too fragile.” I went and got it and placed it in the coffin, in what was left of Annabel’s arms. Then I closed the lid and fastened it down.
The funeral was held in Sears. Annabel’s coffin was brought down on the elevator on a thought bus. I am grateful to old Baleen that he let me be one of the pallbearers; he had never said anything but I think he knew something of how I felt about Annabel.
We sat in chairs in the shoe department with the lights turned on softly and Baleen made some kind of a speech and then he handed me the Bible that he had brought with him and told me to read from it.
I opened the Reader’s Digest Bible but did not read from its text. Instead I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.’”
The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabel to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.
The cemetery was several miles north of Maugre, near an ancient four-lane highway. There were rows of thousands of tiny white Permoplastic grave markers with no writing on them. We took Annabel out there in a thought bus.
That night when everyone was asleep I left the house quietly, went to the Mall, and found the library. It was a room bigger than the kitchen at Baleena, and all of its walls were covered with books. The small hairs on the back of my neck prickled, standing there in the middle of the night in that silent room with its thousands and thousands of books.
I put two small ones in my jacket pockets:
They all said MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.
Upstairs in Sears, I found a shelf board, some black paint, and a brush. I painted the name ANNABEL SWISHER on the board and then with a hammer and some nails from the hardware department I managed awkwardly to nail the board to a stake. Then I took one of the Baleens’ buses to the cemetery and with my hammer drove the marker into the ground at the head of Annabel’s grave. Afterward I told the bus to take me to New York. It went to the ramp that led to the highway and stopped. It would go no farther.
I stayed up all that night reading the book by Joseph Conrad, only partly understanding it. In the morning Mary and a woman named Helen prepared breakfast; I ate with the family.
After breakfast I told old Edgar that I would like eventually to move into this house and he did not object. In fact, he seemed to be expecting some such thing from me.
The place, all redwood and glass, was a home for mice and birds. I cleaned out the birds’ nests and Biff went to work on the mice in a manner that I can only describe as professional. She had the last mouse out of there within a week.
The old furniture was rotted; I had a bonfire with it on the beach and watched it burn for an hour, thinking of Belasco and of that charmed moment back in Carolina.
I was not supposed to take things from Sears, but I went there every night for a week and no one objected. I think the Baleens did not really mind as long as I did not do it openly. Their sexual morality may have been that way too, and had Annabel and I been secretive about being lovers it probably would have offended no one. Probably they thought we were lovers anyway.
I got furniture from Sears, and kitchen equipment, and bookshelves. And I began making a collection of books from the library.
