“I know. It was totally crazy. I could hear myself speaking. My voice was like it was coming from somebody else.”
“I’ve seen that animal. The kid fears that animal. Won’t say it but does.”
“What is it?”
“A Newfoundland.”
“The whole province,” she said.
“You’re lucky.”
“Lucky and crazy. Marko.”
He said, “Forget the music.”
“He spells his name with a k.”
“So do I. Forget the music,” he said. “It’s not a message or a lesson.”
“But it’s still playing.”
“It’s still playing because she’s dead. Lying there. Being sniffed by big dog.”
“I need to get more sleep. That’s what I need,” she said.
“Big dog sniffing dead woman’s crotch.”
“I wake up at some point every night. Mind running nonstop. Can’t stop it.”
“Forget the music.”
“Thoughts I can’t identify, thoughts I can’t claim as mine.”
He kept watching her.
“Take something. Your mother knows about this. This is how people sleep.”
“I have a history with the things people take. They make me crazier. They make me stupid, make me forget.”
“Talk to your mother. She knows about this.”
“Can’t stop it, can’t go back to sleep. Takes forever. Then it’s morning,” she said.
The truth was mapped in slow and certain decline. Each member of the group lived in this knowledge. Lianne found it hardest to accept in the case of Carmen G. She appeared to be two women simultaneously, the one sitting here, less combative over time, less clearly defined, speech beginning to drag, and the younger and slimmer and wildly attractive one, as Lianne imagines her, a spirited woman in her reckless prime, funny and blunt, spinning on a dance floor.
Lianne herself, bearing her father’s mark, the potential toll of plaque and twisted filaments, had to look at this woman and see the crime of it, the loss of memory, personality and identity, the lapse into eventual protein stupor. There was the page she wrote and then read aloud, meant to be an account of her day, yesterday. This was not the piece they’d all agreed to write. This was Carmen’s piece.
I wake up thinking where’s everybody. I’m alone because that’s who I am. I’m thinking where’s the rest of them, wide awake, don’t want to get up. It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de direccion. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID. My father who told jokes he didn’t care clean or dirty the kids have to learn these things. I had two husbands they were different except for their hands. I still look at a man’s hands. Because somebody said it’s a question of which brain is working today because everybody has two brains. Why is it the hardest thing in the world, get out of bed. I have a plant that needs water all the time. I never thought a plant could be work.
Benny said, “But where’s your day? You said this is your day.”
“This is the first like ten seconds. This is still in bed. Next time we’re here maybe I finish getting out of bed. Next time after that I wash my hands. That’s day three. Day four, my face.”
Benny said, “We live that long? By the time you take a pee we all be fatal.”
Then it was her turn. They’d been asking and then urging. They’d all written something, said something about the planes. It was Omar H. who brought it up again, in his earnest way, right arm raised.
“Where were you when it happened?”
For nearly two years now, ever since the storyline sessions began, with her marriage receding into the night sky, she’d listened to these men and women speak about their lives in funny, stinging, straightforward and moving ways, binding the trust among them.
She owed them a story, didn’t she?
There was Keith in the doorway. Always that, had to be that, the desperate sight of him, alive, her husband. She tried to follow the sequence of events, seeing him as she spoke, a figure floating in reflected light, Keith in pieces, in small strokes. The words came fast. She recalled things she didn’t know she’d absorbed, the fragment of spangled glass on the lid of his eye, as if sewn there, and how they’d walked to the hospital, nine or ten blocks, in near deserted streets, in halting steps and deepest silence, and the young man who assisted, a deliveryman, a kid, helping support Keith with one hand and holding a pizza carton with the other, and she nearly asked him how someone could phone in an order for takeout if the phones were not working, a tall Latino kid but maybe not, holding the carton by the bottom, balanced on the palm of his hand and out away from his body.
She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past. They sat dead still, watching her. People, lately, watched her. She seemingly needed watching. They were depending on her to make sense. They were waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt.
She told them about her son. When he was nearby, within sight or touch, in himself, in motion, the fear eased off. Other times she could not think of him without being afraid. This was Justin disembodied, the child of her devising.
Unattended packages, she said, or the menace of lunch in a paper bag, or the subway at rush hour, down there, in sealed boxes.
She could not look at him sleep. He became a child in some jutting future. What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us. There are moments frozen in the run of routine hours. She could not look at him sleep without thinking of what was yet to come. It was part of his stillness, figures in a silent distance, fixed in windows.
Please report any suspicious behavior or unattended packages. That was the wording, wasn’t it?
She almost told them about the briefcase, the fact of its appearance and disappearance and what it meant if anything. Wanted to tell them but did not. Tell them everything, say everything. She needed them to listen.
Keith used to want more of the world than there was time and means to acquire. He didn’t want this anymore, whatever it was he’d wanted, in real terms, real things, because he’d never truly known.
Now he wondered whether he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone, content in lonely old age, and whether all the rest of it, all the glares and rants he had bounced off these walls, were simply meant to get him to that point.
This was his father seeping through, sitting home in western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin.
There was a second level to the high-low games. Terry Cheng was the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike. The idea was to arrive at two allotments of equal monetary value but never of evenly distributed colors, or anything close to that. He’d stack six blue chips, four gold, three red and five white and then match this, with steel-trap speed, fingers flying, hands sometimes crossing, with sixteen white, four blue, two gold and thirteen red, building his columns and then folding his arms and looking into secret space, leaving each winner to rake in his chips, in unspoken respect and semi-awe.
No one doubted his skills of hand-eye-mind. No one tried to count along with Terry Cheng and no one ever harbored the thought, even in the brooding depths of the night, that Terry Cheng might be wrong in his high-low determinations, just this once.
Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes. Then they stopped calling each other. There was nothing left, it seemed, to say about the others in the game, lost and injured, and there was no general
