Malcolm walks into his study. C.C. needs more than decades. She needs divine intervention and electric shock. He’s unsteady and angry. This is the new order. One wishes to be a singer, a TV show hostess, an architect or engineer, and the whole mechanism of struggle and revelation is extinguished. The planet is succumbing to magical thinking. He’s seen the global village. It’s a millennial cargo cult under an atrocity of lurid neon.
“You were born with a stick for a spine,” Patricia says, pushing his study door open without knocking. “That stick is up your ass. Don’t mistake it for a backbone.”
Malcolm is stunned. He hasn’t heard Patty say ‘ass’ before. He thought her genetic code precluded forming a certain strata of words. The inexplicable vulgarity was shouted with intensity.
“Is it focus, Malcolm? Or are you blind?” Patricia positions herself next to his desk and leans into the wall. She’s obviously prepared to stay.
Malcolm McCarty remembers graduate school, the books, the eyestrain in libraries with inadequate light, and the relentless deprivation. How hungry he was, filling his pockets with crackers and packets of ketchup from cafeterias. He ate this later, reading, underlining and memorizing. What did he fail to notice?
His mother was in the hospital that last semester. Each weekend he drove a borrowed car to San Diego. He underlined passages while she slept. He was revising his dissertation. His mother was hideous. Choking and sobbing sounds released themselves from her body, as if she were already buried and now lived underground. His mother, with her feline mews and growls. Then the weeks of strangling, as if the individual events of her life had coalesced and formed a rope. In the act of breathing, she was hanging herself.
All Things Considered is coming from Pittsburgh, battered by static. It sounds feeble and distant, partial and disabled. It might be posthumous. What are they saying? Tractors in Thailand and Tunisian Theater? The tumultuous tale of Tin. Tsunamis in Taiwan?
Malcolm McCarty is losing his linearity. He’s thinking about blueberries and Patricia in the anointed yellow summer of creeks and bridges and sly moons. He doesn’t know why he’s lying on his study floor in what is now inexorably night. Something is cleanly and queerly pounding in his head. Not an aneurysm, he decides, but a newly formed, uncharacterized disease.
It’s a retrovirus, a hybrid mutation hatched from the millennium itself. It’s come from the juxtapositions of travel that should never have been taken conjoined with alien objects, texts and sacramental vases stolen from tombs. Some artifacts have glyphs that explain everything. Why the Buddha came and went and what he thought when he pretended to smile. You can trace the first characters with your fingers, but you’re holding this stone under the eerie distorted neon of Shanghai dusk. The air is humid and soiled and his hands are violently shaking. Hands so cold they’re turning his arm numb.
“You don’t know women,” Patricia screams. “You fucking asshole.”
Can his wife be saying this? He studies her mouth. He tries to read her lips. A huge 0 is forming. Is it another vastly inappropriate anatomical reference? There’s a buzzing in his ears, not insects, but birds in cages. It’s the Hong Kong market, warehouses the size of airplane hangars, boxes and crates and bamboo cages of canaries and parakeets stacked to the ceiling, all a glistening sordid yellow as if they had swallowed torches.
A disciplined man does not drop to the floor like a wind-ripped maple leaf. First they decay, infected and jaundiced. They’re contagious, spread to the pines, and it becomes a forest of hepatitis.
“Call 911,” Mac instructs. “Now.” Each word is a stone, carried on his back across snowdrifts, and mortared with his blood. He isn’t talking but building pyramids, one enormously heavy boulder at a time.
Why isn’t this woman placing his head on her lap? Why isn’t she dialing the telephone and taking his pulse? Can’t she see he needs a blanket? Why is she turning away, walking past him and staring out the window?
“Mac, all those spelling tests and optional extra credit essays. All those book reports and book reviews and book revisions that always come at Thanksgiving. What did it get you, really?” She turns and stares at his face.
His wife is a stranger who purports to understand calligraphy and claims an affection for gardening. She’s entirely false. He’s observed her in the orchard and she rarely prunes a branch. She feels revulsion for the ground and her headaches are a too convenient camouflage. Patricia is a fraud with a collection of cripples and illiterates she captures and enslaves. She’s a pathological liar with a secret agenda, scrapbooks he’s forbidden to touch and dresser drawers that are locked. That’s where Rachel’s bracelets are. How has he come to this juncture with such a person?
Patricia is doing something with flames. Perhaps it’s a ritual of propitiation. She’s removing a paper from her pocket. It’s a document. She’s setting it on fire.
“The results of your echocardiogram,” she reveals. “Seems you have a bit of a valve problem.”
Patricia lights a cigarette with the flame that’s charring the paper. A vault problem? Her cigarette is infecting the air, making the individual molecules harder to gather and trap.
He realizes the sheriff wasn’t threatening him. It was a warning. “Sheriff Murphy.” Malcolm tries to sit up. He’s resting on his elbows. “Call. Now.”
“Sheriff Murphy? The Romeo of Wood’s End? You’re so Elizabethan,” Patricia muses, inhaling and exhaling streams of silvery smoke. “Let’s not even go there.”
She expels flames because she’s a dragon. She’s Zima, the river goddess who drowns children. She rides a camel with four humps and wields an acetylene torch.
“You’re MacBeth’s wife,” Malcolm McCarty realizes.
“You’re a pompous little prick,” Patricia laughs. “I’m Medea.”
Professor Malcolm McCarty is having auditory and visual hallucinations. It’s from the sickness pitching him to the floor that’s rocking like a vessel at sea. Of course, such diseases are inevitable. He’s simply the first to encounter this particular virus or spasm or whatever it is taking his breath absolutely.
Bob Lieberman knew something was coalescing in the electronic stew. A global patois rose from the verbal graffiti and smiley yellow faces. It’s savage. Flames come out of its mouth.
His arm is numb. He can’t he feel his hands. An enormous aviary is puncturing his jaw and exiting through his forehead. All the stone steps, temples and bronze bells, carved wooden bridges, rivers and orchids, blueberries and gazebos are losing their clarity and dissolving.
Professor Malcolm McCarty knows he has the right to define and name this phenomenon. But it’s virulent and accelerating. In the sky, an armada of zeppelins pass trailing banners announcing Feast of Old Men Feeding Demons, Night of the Burned Boy and Woman Lost at Sea. He watches them glide by. How will he assemble the data, derivation and trajectory? Jesus Christ. He will die first.
A GOOD DAY FOR SEPPUKU
Tommy Sutter rides his bike along Maple Ridge Road from Wood’s End to the college. It’s precisely twelve miles from his house on Lincoln Street to the campus and he’s ridden this road thousands of times
Sometimes he passes Professor McCarty and waves. Professor McCarty teaches at the College of Northern Pennsylvania and only wants to talk about bicycle construction, the intractable stupidity of his students and books. Has he read Catcher in the Rye yet? What about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? His wife, Patricia, comes out on the porch to announce that they’re retiring to Florida. Tommy nods and pedals on.