“Maybe their skin rotted on them or their bones suddenly grew through their skin; maybe they scratched themselves to death. Regardless of how, they all ended up the same way, dead and senseless and inactive, lost in a stupor, incapable of doing anything that matters, totally lost and cut off from anything that’s new. I think we’re like that too.
“We keep deciding that we’re going to be different, or announcing that we have become different, but we stay the same. Lots of other morons have stood up here where I am and said, It’s become obvious that we were doing something wrong, let’s figure it out and do better. I’ve said it to myself. For months I’ve been wondering what we did, what exactly that we did that was so bad that it warranted”—she waved her hands around a couple times, making it somehow a very tired gesture—“all this. A few times I was sure that I’d figured it out, but every time I figured one thing another would come along seeming even more atrocious and obvious. I want for there to be one thing, or one way to describe everything. Lately, but not finally, I’ve been thinking that it wasn’t any of the hundred million obscenities we practiced but something else entirely — merely that we were insincere. I say merely, but really it’s a big thing, to always say sorry, sorry, and never mean it. My mother did that. Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to beat the shit out of you with a sack of oranges. I’ll never do it again until the next time.
“How many times are you supposed to put up with that sort of thing? How many times are you supposed to believe someone? What are we getting wrong, that I can still get up here and complain to you about this? Because we are still doing it. There is something excellent that we should be sensitive of and that we should embrace — if we ever really meant that we wanted it. Once or twice during this whole trip I think I believed it, that we were different, that we had finally meant what we said, but I say it again, look around you. Then look back across the water at that empty boat and ask yourselves how we are really different.
“I am so sick of that shit. Aren’t you? Aren’t you sick of hearing how you’ve been corrupt from your very birth, a transgressor from the womb and always liable to the wrath of your mother? Aren’t you sick of going oh, oh, oh! Aren’t you sick of being all worried about it for five minutes and then going back to bed or back to your dog or back to your fabulous floating golden dildo — whatever it is that distracts you from all the sacred affections, the joy and love and fear and sorrow and desire and hope, and makes your hospital life your everyday life again. It’s getting to be a bit of a drag, and an old story, one that everybody should know by now. You shouldn’t need any more morons up here to remind you or to call you away from all the dumb shit.
“But I’m up here anyway, about to call you away from all the dumb shit, because I feel like we have one last chance to turn and recognize the fine thing that’s among us before the really horrible shit comes down. We’ve been floating along like that was all we had to do — get up in the morning and eat and entertain ourselves and keep the kids from getting too bored. Like we would just float into what’s coming. That’s true, we’re on our way to something, but it’s probably not what you’re expecting — not the place where the houses are made of chocolate and your puppy won’t ever die. The people on the boat floated into something. They weren’t saved.
“And I’m saying it again. Come away with me, whoever wants to. Whoever thinks that they can be sincere and fucking mean it this time. Whoever will look around with me and say, Fuck this, you’re all dead, be dead — I want to live. We made a dead council and passed dead rules and played dead games with each other. We had some dead parties and did some dead fucking and some of us have paired off into dead couples and dead families and we are all dead together — a promiscuous mix in a giant grave. We have declaimed deadly against the mistakes of the old world and said that we would not repeat them, but more than half of us can’t even decide what they were and the other half probably has an opinion but doesn’t really care. Well, I quit it. I quit from the dead council and the dead games. There is something else we have to figure out — not just why it happened but what we’re going to do about it, how we’re going to make ourselves new — before it’s too late, and I’m starting on it right now. Here I go.”
She looked down at the floor and was quiet. Jemma could tell that she’d closed her eyes, though she couldn’t see it. A whole minute passed in silence, then Karen asked, “When is she going to go?” People started to murmur, and then to talk, and then, here and there, to shout. “Go on,” Wanda Sullivan called across to Vivian. “Get going, I’ll come, too.” But Vivian just stood there, going somewhere, Jemma could tell, inside her head, not able to see where her friend was going but perceiving that she was getting smaller and smaller until she was gone entirely.
The Council met in emergency session to replace Vivian, or rather to replace the office vacated by Monserrat when she was promoted by Vivian’s resignation to the office of Second Friend. Ishmael remained First, and Jemma remained as she was, unaffected politically but really quite depressed by the whole development, and distracted during the replacement hearings by perseverating thoughts on dead friendships.
“Of course we’re still friends,” Vivian had told her when she went to visit her after the speech. “Why would that change?”
“Well, that big breakup speech, for one thing. When did I suddenly become somebody you couldn’t talk to?” Vivian held up a pair of black underwear, gently shaking out the folds in the silk before she folded it up and put it in her suitcase.
“It’s not like that. It wasn’t the sort of thing to talk about, until it was time. I just decided all of a sudden, and then the angel made me talk about it. She knew all the time, I think. She acts like a fucking airhead but she knew the boat was coming and the kid was coming and she’s keeping bad secrets even now. She knows it’s almost too late, and she gave me a kick. A little one, but I needed it.” Jemma was leaning in the door. She stood up straight, folded her arms and unfolded them, then leaned against the other side. Vivian kept folding her huge stock of underwear, slowly and deliberately.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I already talked about it,” Vivian said, and that’s all she would say, by way of explanation, or denial, when Jemma asked if it wasn’t something about her, if it wasn’t that Vivian wanted herself to be the grand pooh-bah, if she didn’t think that Jemma wasn’t taking it all seriously enough or trying hard enough. “I can try harder,” Jemma said. “You know that about me — I can always try harder. Maybe if I try harder I can get the kid to wake up. I know you have a plan — we can do it together.”