“Dinka. It means ‘I’m lucky to be with you.’ It was an illustration, meaning you don’t understand my language and I might as well be talking Dinka. I’m sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a conversation with someone with no religious sensibility at all. Look…oh Lord, how can I express this so you’d understand? Okay, God is omnipotent, and good, but there’s evil in the world, bad things happen, and they sometimes happen to good people. How to explain this? Well, we’re advised in the strongest terms not to try, but putting that aside, and also putting aside pure materialist atheism for a second, how do you live in a world like that? Y’all can be like the Buddhists and say it’s all an illusion, no good, no evil, break free of all attachments, and then if y’all make it, return as a bodhisattva and dispense compassion. There’s fatalism. You see it in Job, in the classical world, the Stoics, and it survives pretty well intact in Islam: God knows, we don’t, shut your trap and drive on, don’t whine, it’s ignoble, and so on. Not a stance that would appeal to us improving Americans, so what we do is to whine alot while drugging ourselves into insensibility with work, sex, money, actual drugs of course, and the illusion that we can live forever. Most of us live terrified, desperate lives and die like dumb animals in places like this. On the other side, we have what Weil said about the greatness of Christianity being not that it provides a supernatural relief from suffering, but a supernaturaluse for it. Say you have every good thing. Then you thank God for the honor of being able to serve the poor and wretched. Now say everything is taken away from you, you’re crushed like a bug. Simone calls itmalheur, the last extremity, nothing left of your personhood at all, sociology has failed, medicine, economics, politics, all the usual dodges are futile, but on the other hand you’re a tissue paper away from God. Lose everything, get everything and more, unimaginable graces. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You can’t lose.”
Only some of this got through to Lorna. She had been trained to discount the content of what the insane had to say, and to examine their speech only for the evidences of pathology or to find some entry for the insertion of a therapeutic remark. She now does so.
“Well, if suffering is so great why did you devote your life to a nursing order? I mean, why relieve suffering at all, if suffering brings you close to God?”
“Because it’s a commandment. It’s also a paradox, but if you’re impatient with paradoxes you need to stay away from Christianity. Atheism is so beautifully simple, like a kid’s drawing. I can see why you’re reluctant to let it go. I certainly was when I was at St. Catherine’s.”
“Which is what?”
“It’s a priory of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. It’s in the Blue Ridge, the Virginia panhandle, right close to where I was staying. You’ll read about it in the notebook I gave you, my first sight of it. What all happened there is in the next one, and all the stuff about Africa.”
Dideroff falls back against the pillows and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s the dope. Have you cured me enough today? I really need to drift off.”
Lorna puts her notebook and recorder away in her canvas attache case, making agreeable noises to hide her distress. She has never had a session like this with a patient; yes, occasionally you draw a therapeutic blank, but this one was completely out of control, almost as if the patient were therapizing her!
Dideroff opens her eyes and smiles. “Sorry for the two-minute theology, it’s a bad habit of mine. St. John of the Cross warns against it as an impediment to spiritual progress. Don’t forget the notebook. I just finished another one. I never thought it would take so many pages. But one more ought to do it.” Dideroff indicates a school notebook on her nightstand; Lorna picks it up and starts to leave. She pauses at the door, feeling a certain resentment now, a need to exert control. She says, “Emmylou, do you want me to do anything about your houseboat? I’d be glad to go talk to your landlord if you want to keep it.”
“Oh, thanks, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” says Dideroff.
“I’d like to live on a boat sometime. How did you manage to find it?”
“It was offered, and the price was right. I didn’t hardly have a dime when I got here, and Mr. Packer said a good tenant was valuable to him and he’d let me stay there until I got on my feet. He got me the job at Wilson’s too.”
“So he was, like, an old friend?”
“Oh, no, a Samaritan. I just happened to run into him in the airport lounge. I’d never seen him before in my life. And it turned out we had some mutual friends.”
Feeling a little slimy, Lorna checks through ward security and takes the elevator to the lobby. There, instead of descending to the parking garage, she goes to the staff cafeteria, where she orders an iced tea. She sits alone at a table and reads the notebook rapidly, taking no notes. She calls Paz to tell him about it and arrange its delivery into his safekeeping, but his cell phone is busy. She leaves a voice mail message. She feels better than she did a little earlier, although her hand ever rises to caress the lymph nodes under her jaw. Rubbery. She tells herself it is a mild infection she is fighting off. On the elevator, she becomes aware of a mild itching on arms, back, and thigh. That was it: the other night out in the Glades, mosquitoes bit her and she is having a small reaction to their bites. It’s happened before. Stop worrying, she tells herself, but her heart still pounds so.
She walks toward her car. She is nervous in parking garages and holds her case under one arm and her keys ready in the other hand. Just as she reaches her car, a man steps out from behind a pillar. He is wearing a plastic Porky Pig mask and carrying a large hunting knife. She hands over her bag without giving him any trouble.
Seventeen
It seems like all we did that winter was talk, the three of us in Orne’s living room around the hot cube of the stove occasionally tossing in a chunk of oak and pulling out of our mouths some idea, cut to size, quartered, aged, and dry like the wood. It was mostly me and Skeeter who talked, which I found strange because Orne had always been the biggest talker I knew, but he seemed content to sit sipping home-brewed beer or corn liquor and listen to us chop logic.
Topping was what our conversation was mainly about, I have to say that even though Skeeter was supposed to be Orne’s best pal he was mean to him in a sly way that for some reason Orne didn’t seem to resent, always putting him down about things of the mind. He was hard as blazes on old Nietzsche because he knew Orne had sort of built the whole structure of his life on that philosophy, and Skeeter had got pretty good at tearing it down. Nee Chee, he would say, how can you take him seriously? He never made any money and he never got laid. What the fuck good is his philosophy if he never made any money and never got laid, when the point of his philosophy was you ditch God and then you’re the superman and you can do what you want, and here’s superman Nee Chee wandering around Europe jerking off in low-end hotels collecting cheap soup in that stupid mustache. And more like that.
So I am drifting again. This is not the important material. The important thing was that Orne was fading away from me that winter. I thought it was because I couldn’t get pregnant and Orne was a planning man and a planning man don’t like it when his plans go awry even in a small detail like that. I said I could go to a fertility clinic I looked up in Roanoke, but he said no because he didn’t trust doctors. He had a couple of theories about them too. It never did occur to me that every time I wasn’t there Skeeter was tearing me down to his best buddy, but I didn’t find that out until it was much later and didn’t matter anymore.
So one day he was off on one of his trips without even a farewell fuck like we used to and near as soon as his dust had settled on the road the best buddy was trying to get into my pants. And I wouldn’t let him and it really peed him off, because we were not what you would call a moral bunch, a point he made a good deal of. I mean why not? What’s a fuck between friends after all, why is it different from borrowing a truck or a tool, he would say, Orne won’t mind, you want me to ask him? In fact, I can see he’s trying to get rid of you already, and listen, darlin’, I wish I had a dollar for every time Orne and me switched off girlfriends, I mean whatis your problem?
On the other hand…I guess that besides being tedious and all it was also interesting to be courted that hard, something you kind of miss in the whore business, and Skeeter was an interesting man aside from him being a bandy rooster type with the shaved head and the tats, although built up from lifting weights. He really had been to all those places, buying and selling weapons, and occasionally he would seem to forget about his seduction routine and just go on about Abidjan and Mombasa and Nairobi and the mountains of the moon and the Andes and slipping planes into secret airports at night and the sweating faces of desperate men shining in the light of flares.
