Rex—
We never talk any more, really talk. You’re so busy with your “graphs and charts.” And whoever answers your phone there is not passing my messages along. Or possibly you are only pretending to be ignorant of them? It is humiliating for me to appear at canoe class alone. It is so painful for me now to remember our first summer at the cottage, you nursing my sunburn so tenderly. Last week at breakfast when I showed you my plane ticket, you laughed and laughed. Maybe you are laughing as you read this, I don’t know. But if you miss me and are sorry, it is not too late. Write c/o Hotel Empire, El Kharga.
Optimistically,
B.
Once again, B.B. was subject to the caroms of association. Having snapped at the end of the second sentence that this was the letter to her husband that had never been sent, he thought of the extinct passenger pigeon, the Transatlantic Cable, and Riverdale High valentine cards after that, Lulu with her haughty, rhodium-plated poodle pin. All without any proof that he was remembering his own experiences, and not someone else’s.
Heat lightning over the plains. Phone-talk radio. He couldn’t keep his eye off the mileage counter, reassured by any movement of the numbers.
“Go ahead, Emporia, Kansas,” said the phone-talk host.
White moths continued to collide with the windshield, spattering their essential liquors.
“I have a question for Major Hoople,” said the voice from Emporia.
He placed another nicotine lozenge under his tongue.
The Dew Drop Inn concierge refused his check and mimicked his bad pronunciation. The kitchen was closed, she told him, and then called the bellhop to help ridicule his clothes.
“But this is what I always wear,” Brick protested, flouncing his white linen suit, smoothing the lavender band of his boater.
The bellhop’s little finger, which had lost its top joint, first touched the side of his nose, then traced his eyebrows.
“Clochard,” he said. “Walking backwards around the world.”
Brick had no choice. He dined under the sodium lamps of a roadside park that memorialized the Colorist Uprising of 1968. The cold forests around him were thick with fir and spruce. Raccoon dogs called to one another. He ate a bologna-and-sweet-relish sandwich. He tried to make a nest on the slippery back seat of the car, and everything came apart. Sleep came hard; it was like the finish line of a forced march. He shivered and twitched with a dream that went something like this:
Moving through a suite of apartments in a rose-pink building at the corner of Wilshire and Western. Eating jellied consommé at a glass table, taking Russian cigarettes from a Chinese box. Chrome accents. White bisque bas-relief Pegasus over the fireplace. Parrot climbing drapes. Santa Anita results on radio KNBC interrupted for bulletin flash. “Rex missing! Posse formed! Search dunes!”
Brick’s descent from the mountains was one long afternoon of switchbacks. A light rain fell. The pastures were empty. Gasoline was unavailable in village after village, but wine was everywhere. Fog lay in the valley. Pennants dangled over the roadblock and militiamen in silver shirts searched every car for booty from last night’s tomb rifling. They pried up mirrors and slashed water bags.
Now Brick recognized all plot elements as lab work, a run of testing obstacles, captive panels clocked and rasping with the stylus over an unspooling graph paper band. Fine, then. Over we go.
And there were promising dust clouds. Slag heaps and cactus signaled the final push. He mopped himself with a blue shirt, tied it over his head; and then, ominously, he ceased to sweat. Fear preceded caution: character was fate. He rolled the windows up as he neared the city. Men in white djellabas lined the road, and they were not too proud to beg.
The Hotel Empire lobby smelled of beeswax and mice. Bullet-riddled furniture had been pushed all into one corner. The hollow columns were wrapped in gold foil. Brick had no trouble locating his man, nibbling salt plums at a glass table beside the pool, sunlight glinting on his hair.
“Glad you could make it,” Rex Morgan said.
“I guess I’m what you’d call kind of a stooge.”
“You were allowed to find me. Not encouraged, not coerced.”
“Fine. Just fine. How much luck does that use up?”
“I’m a doctor. I can give you new prints, a different face.”
“What good would that do?”
Brick saw that his next line would be, “Where is the ethical component?” But he was able to stop himself. Suppose his words were like antibodies: formed in the past as specific response, then stored for use? He could learn to dissolve them.
“Our too shabby flesh, hmm?” Morgan said, pulling Brick’s hand to his throat to feel the driving blood.
Dusk had already happened. Day, having moulted like an insect, exuded a fresh night. Children crouched inside the sandstone wall to pee. Voices out of the lemon grove turned bitter. A salesmen of very first-rate Irish tweed inquired at the desk about licensing. Glasses of sweet mint tea were brought to the table. Morgan tilted in his chair to drink. His cheeks were rouged, his pupils unusually large.
“Is this too scenic?” he asked. “Just say the word.”
“I have an awareness problem. It makes me a little jumpy.”
“I’m a doctor. I can take care of that too.”
“Drugs? A regimen?”
“I know, I know. That’s no way to solve it.” Morgan clenched his teeth, batted at a wasp, edged forward. He sighed. “Just look around you. It’s everything that’s wrong with development policy.”
“A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” Brick’s antibodies were hooked in and he could not interrupt the process. “Scenic, romantic, historic. Resources alarming in their potential, and the keystone for a vital future. Am I talking too much? Just say the word.”
“You need to go up and rest,” Morgan said palliatively. “The fighting won’t begin for hours.”
Fresh smell of citrus. Face of travel clock averted. Wallpaper with a repeating figure of minarets. More than a presence, dismay. Recognizable. As yellow fat taste in mouth. As harsh feel of sheets on skin. Possible tampering with chemistry? Question Rex, but he won’t answer anymore. Room completely dark now. From here cannot quite see over wall. Impossible.
The moon was high, half full. Goats foraged in the empty riverbed. Scooters buzzed and wives bargained for rolls of toilet paper. A prerecorded muezzin’s call was inadvertently set off. Tires burned in the street beside the monogrammed car.
ROSELLA, IN STAGES
[6]
SOME GUESTS ON THE porch had just returned from a hike to the falls. They were loud. Rosella, crouching, studied them from inside the hemlock hedge. One fancy lady had little moss bits on her shoes.
“What swells the heart is timelessness.”
“I must disagree. Rather, it is purity in the here and now.”
This city man wore clothes like a farmer would, and went out every morning to draw. Rosella had followed him to Ship Rock and seen him pee over the edge. And then right away after, Mama looked at her outside the kitchen, said, “Have you been eating pitch again, Rosella?” and smacked her hard.
Mama didn’t like so many guests this time of year, and having to cook for them all because Minnie was away with hectic fever. The foreign people wanted trout for breakfast every day. Which Poppa said meant they weren’t Jews, at least.
Getting out of the hedge meant torn stockings, so Rosella went in the barn to take them off. It was nice to kiss the horse. He gave back warm air out of big nostril holes and pushed with his head. Rosella buried her stockings and shoes in the oat bin. She would say a man from the woods had robbed her.
They were still loud on the porch. About the President’s doctors in Buffalo saying he ought to pull through.