And after that, Tess Clark didn't visit.
19
In her dressing room, Miss America is screaming.
In bed, her skirts pulled up and her stockings down, Miss America screams, “Don't let that witch take my baby . . .”
Kneeling next to the bed, toweling the sweat from America's forehead, the Countess Foresight says, “It's not a baby. Not yet.”
And Miss America screams, again, but not in words.
In the hallway outside the dressing-room doorway, you can smell blood and shit. It's the first bowel movement any of us has had in days, maybe weeks.
It's Cora Reynolds. A cat reduced to a flavor. To crap.
“She's there, waiting,” Miss America says, panting, biting her fist. Pain pulling her knees up to her chest. Cramps turning her onto her side, curled in the mess of sheets and blankets.
“She's waiting for the baby,” Miss America says. Tears turning her pillow dark gray.
“It's not a baby,” the Countess Foresight says. She wrings water from a rag and leans over to wipe away sweat. She says, “Let me tell you a story.”
Wiping Miss America's face with water, she says, “Did you know? Marilyn Monroe had two miscarriages?”
And for a moment, Miss America is quiet, listening.
From our own rooms, putting pen to paper, we're all listening. Our ears and tape recorders tilted toward the heating ducts.
From the hallway outside the door, in her Red Cross nurse uniform, Director Denial shouts, “Should we start boiling water?”
And, kneeling beside the bed, the Countess Foresight says, “Please.”
Again from the hallway, Director Denial's head and white nurse-hat leans in through the open doorway, and she says, “Chef Assassin wants to know . . . how soon should he put in the carrots?”
Miss America screams.
And the Countless Foresight shouts, “If that's a joke, it's not funny . . .”
The invisible carrot, the story left over from Saint Gut-Free.
And from the hallway, Chef Assassin shouts, “Calm down. Of course it's a joke.” He says, “We don't have any potatoes or carrots . . .”
Shortsighted
A Poem About the Countess Foresight
“An electronic tracking sensor,” says the Countess Foresight, shaking her plastic bracelet.
A condition included in the terms of her recent parole from prison.
The Countess Foresight onstage, she's folded inside the webs of a black lace shawl.
A turban of blue velvet wrapped around her head.
A ring with different-colored stones on every finger.
Her turban, pinned in front with a polished black stone,
onyx or jet or sardonyx,
some stone that absorbs everything. Reflects nothing.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
The shadows of dead movie stars, the residue of electrons bounced off them
a hundred years ago.
Those electrons passed through a film of cellulose,
to change the chemical nature of silver oxide
and re-create chariot races, Robin Hood, Greta Garbo.
“Radar,” says the Countess. “Global positioning systems. X-ray imaging . . .”
Two hundred years ago, these would get you burned as a witch.
A century ago, at least laughed at. Called a fool or a liar.
Even today, if you predict the future or read the past from indicators
not everyone can recognize . . .
it's the prison or the asylum you'll eventually call home.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents
the rest of us don't recognize as real.
A psychologist at her parole hearing called her crime “acute stress-induced psychosis.”
An “isolated, atypical episode.”
A crime of passion.
That would never, ever, ever happen again.
Knock wood.
At that point, she'd served four years of a twenty-year sentence.
Her husband was gone with her kids in tow.
Two hundred years from today, when what she saw, and read, and knew,
when it all makes sense.
By then, the Countess will be nothing but a prisoner number.
A case file.
The ash of a witch.
Something's Got to Give
A Story by the Countess Foresight
Claire Upton phones from a bathroom stall in the back of an antique store. From behind a locked door, her voice echoes off the walls and floor. She asks her husband: How tough is it to get into a video surveillance camera? To steal a security videotape? she says, and starts to cry.
This is the third or fourth time Claire's been to this shop in the past week. It's one of those shops where you have to leave your purse with the cashier to get inside. You have to check your coat, too, if it has deep, roomy pockets. And your umbrella, because some people might drop small items, combs, jewelry, knickknacks, inside the folds. A sign next to the old-man cashier, written with black felt-tipped pen on gray cardboard, it says: “We don't like you stealing from us!”
Taking her coat off, Claire said, “I'm not a thief.”
The old-man cashier looked her up and down. He clicked his tongue and said, “What makes you the exception?”
He gave Claire half a playing card for each item she left behind. For her purse, the ace of hearts. For her coat, the nine of clubs. Her umbrella, the three of spades.
The cashier eyed Claire's hands, the lines of her breast pockets and pantyhose, for bulges that might be something stolen. Behind the front counter, all over the store, hung little signs telling you not to shoplift. Video cameras watched every aisle and corner, showing it on a little screen, stacked with other screens, a bank of little television monitors where the old-man cashier could sit behind the cash register and watch them all.
He could watch her every move, in black and white. He'd know where Claire was at any moment. He'd know everything she touched.
The shop was one of those antique-selling cooperatives where a lot of small dealers band together under one roof. The old-man cashier was the only person working that day, and Claire was his only customer. The store was big as a supermarket, but broken up into small stalls. Clocks everywhere made a wallpaper of sound, a din of tick, tick, ticking. Everywhere were
