It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
23
You would think that the ward throve at night, that the inpatients of detoxification were at their best overnight, in half shadows, stirring up from their apnea. You would think that the wraiths would be up and wandering, mumbling as they passed. But you’d be wrong. Rosa alone is up, gazing out the window at the neon of the chain bookstore on the next block over. Maybe if she listens carefully enough to the sounds of the nightscape, cars toiling up Seventh Avenue, sirens, jets overhead, then she’ll hear what’s genuinely taking place, rather than what is not. It doesn’t matter, though, how loud she gets them to turn up the television in the dayroom.
There are events that are almost certainly taking place, and then there are dubious events. Those conversations she heard today, those girls, the ones who work in publicity or whatever it is that they do. They were gabbing with the development expert at her daughter’s company, gabbing about some intern she’d hired. “You wouldn’t even believe how lazy this girl is; she sets a new record for laziness. She’s so lazy that she can’t be bothered to refuse to do anything, because it would take too much energy to refuse. She’s so lazy that it’s amazing she even comes in; she just sits there like a bump on a log, and it’s not like she’s doing her nails or anything because she doesn’t have any nails. She chews at her nails, all the black nail polish is chipping off, and she bites them anyway.” “Doesn’t that make you sick? Plus, aren’t you supposed to avoid eating your nail polish?” “Totally. You shouldn’t eat it. I guess someone should design edible nail polish; maybe we should tell Mercurio.” “Reminds me of those . . . those edible panties that that girl, who was that, used to talk about, remember?” “Wait, why does it remind you of . . . never mind, ick.” Then, after Rosa overhears this conversation in her detoxifying head, she can’t stop saying the words edible panties, as if these words are somehow the key, as if they are deeply relevant to the present, edible panties, and over dinner she can’t stop herself from saying it. When she’s at the dining table with the girl, the one with bleeding problems, she keeps saying “edible panties,” and the girl keeps asking why. But Rosa, who finds the whole notion of these underdrawers shocking and improper, can’t figure out why she keeps saying it, she just does.
That’s a conversation composed of people she likes. If she has to be overhearing cellular phone traffic in her head, at least she’d prefer to overhear the conversations of people she favors. She could offer advice to the voices. “Is it true that you’re having a problem with . . .” Whatever it might be. Unfortunately, her difficulty is not just with conversations of people she knows. Now if she stands too close to the window, she hears these telephone whispers from the entire expanse beneath her. They are out there in the universe, conversations drifting over her like a layer of digital smog. “Honey, no one is hotter than you; you are just the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Are you alone?” “Sure.” “And what are you wearing, baby?” “You’re not going to start in with this again, because last time you didn’t talk to me for like three weeks afterwards, and it made me feel dirty.” She doesn’t know for certain what these people are talking about, but she has an idea. No one should have to overhear these conversations, which are a layer of pollution.
She heads for the pay phone, the one in the corridor that they all share. At the nurse’s console, there’s a night nurse, asleep in her chair, chin planted in the middle of her chest, mouth open. A fusillade of snores issues from that mouth. Rosa pays the nurse no mind and slips past her to the wall phone. She presses the zero in the keypad and waits. A sequence of beeps. An actor’s voice comes on, the voice of Darth Vader. Before she can evaluate the particulars of the Vader voice, there’s a hiss and another voice comes on. This voice asks her what she needs. “Well, you see, I’m in a . . . I’m in the . . . I’m indisposed . . . and I’m finding myself in this unusual situation. . . .” She waits for supportive words from the operator; none are forthcoming. “The situation is . . . well, uh, the situation is that there are certain telephone calls that are . . . that are —” Rosa tries to whisper the complaint, so that the night nurse won’t be disturbed. The operator replies, “Do you need a number? Because that’s what we’re supposed to —” “Not at all,” Rosa says, shuffling in her paper slippers, back and forth. “I don’t need any numbers, I have all the . . . ” “You’re complaining about people who talk too loudly on their cell phones? I’m sorry, but you can’t blame the telephone company for people who talk too loudly into their phones; you should take that up with the —” “That’s not . . . ,” Rosa says, “I’m saying that I . . . I’m saying . . . that I can hear the conversations —” “But where can you hear the conversations?” “Everywhere, everywhere I go, I can hear them in my head. . . . I can hear the people and they’re having the . . . and I can hear what they’re saying, even if . . . people I don’t know very well. I keep expecting . . . I’m going to hear my ex-husband . . . with his floozies, I haven’t . . . he hasn’t . . . probably twenty years, but my daughter . . . she might want to . . . since he’s her father, and if I could hear that conversation, maybe, but instead . . . or I hear some businessman who’s making some deal in a . . . acquaintances . . . or I —” “Excuse me, ma’am, we can’t —” “She ought to be able to talk to that . . . her father. . . . I don’t give a goddamn whether I ever speak to him, but that’s just not right, and I want you to talk to whoever it is there that . . .” “Ma’am?” “Your manager . . . I am a person who has connections. . . . I was . . . I used to know people who could get things done, and maybe now I’m . . . maybe my circumstances . . . no reason why your company needs to pick on an old woman,” and she tries to remind herself to pipe down, to keep it to a whisper, but she can’t help herself, because it’s an outrage, you know, these corporations, just not answerable. “You can’t go filling my brain up with these calls . . . no reason why a woman like me should have to hear . . . and I guarantee you . . . you don’t want to have that kind of trouble on your hands —”
A dial tone by the time the night nurse comes over and takes the handset from her, replaces it in its cradle.
“You can’t be up doing this sort of thing.”
“I was . . .”
“I don’t care if your ass falls off, you can’t be out here on the phone at this hour. Now, get to your room.” The night nurse puts an arm around Rosa and walks her down the corridor. For a second, it’s as if there’s no time but this time of the corridor. As if she needs just one thing to bring about the cessation of voices and that thing is another person’s arm around her. If human kindness were reliable, then Rosa might leave behind these fortressed walls and return to Eleventh Street, where she left off, to store up a new supply of backdated magazines and newspapers while forgetting to eat. But the fact is that human kindness must come to an end, and it comes to an end right before the door to the room that she shares with the slumbering obese woman. Inside, a darkness more perfect and terrifying than any she has known. The nurse says nothing, points into the space, and then Rosa follows the end of her arm, the crooked pointing finger, and continues, tentatively, into the room as the night nurse firmly closes the door behind her. Immediately, Rosa can hear the voice of some politician, the mayor of the city, and the mayor is calling somebody, city councilman, or maybe it’s the chief of police. Must be. The mayor is talking to this personage about his new program to prevent the spread of some menace that she can’t, at first, identify. “Look, we’ve got to have something in place that deals with it; we have to indicate that we have zero tolerance for it because you know any time of day someone could be just walking down the street,” and then gradually the nature of the call emerges, “and could allow waste to spread on the block, someone else comes along, you know, they could . . . there could just be a spreading of waste; we just can’t have that.” “But,” remarks the other, “are you sure that you want to allocate resources on this? After all, even with the . .
. and do we really think this is a pressing issue when we —” “Listen, your job is to implement, and what I think would do the trick is a small mobile force deployed at all the frequent locations, like around the parks, and we could issue summonses for people who don’t discharge their obligations, and the reason we need to do this is that if someone sees one . . . one mound of waste, then he is going to feel that it’s really not a critical situation and actually it’s rather cold here in the middle of November and maybe it would be all right for Rover here to . . .”
Rosa gives a moan at the content of the exchange, and she whispers the words “dog waste initiative” to herself in bed, hoping that she can put aside these phrases, that the night might swallow her into its river of forgetfulness. But just as she’s imagining the possibility of sleep, notwithstanding voices, the obese woman, whose somnolent form has uttered no word since first it was installed in bed, speaks out: “You can tell me.”
“Tell you what?” Rosa asks.
“What’s bothering you.”
“I don’t need to . . . This certainly isn’t . . . My being stuck in here with no freedom . . . of movement . . . and the medication is making . . . it’s making my foot twitch.”
“Tell them.”
“Who?”
The obese woman rolls over so that her massive form is facing Rosa’s bed, and Rosa is almost certain that she can make out the glimmering beacons of her tiny eyes.
“You’ve been here for a week. They can’t hold you unless you’re a danger to yourself. So you tell them that you aren’t suffering with whatever you’re suffering with. Then they have to release you, because you are not a danger to yourself.”
“What about —”
“There’s an insurance angle, too. Insurance doesn’t want to cover rehabilitation. Halfway houses, everybody knows. Even the doctors don’t believe in them. Really, they just want to send you home.”
“I’m as fit as —”
“They’ll hold you if you mention hearing things or seeing bugs.”
“I don’t see any —”
Rosa glances at the clock on the table between them. After three, and she’s no closer to sleeping than two hours ago. She doesn’t know why she tells the obese woman about the telephone calls, which she feels she should conceal, but she does.
“What kind of telephone calls?”
“I can listen in.”
“People are saying things about you?”
“Nobody says anything about me. . . . I’m an old woman. But I can listen.”
“You can hear these conversations and not even one of them is about you?”
“Wait,” Rosa says —
“The darndest thing I ever heard,” the obese woman says. The obese woman has been in bed a week, having been lifted into bed and then occasionally turned by a team of four men; the obese woman is addicted to some incredibly powerful opiate, because of her aching knees and her stress-fractured feet; she’d been camped in front of the television for another week, looking forward to another episode of American Spy or whatever her program was, swallowing down the pills, in the chiaroscuroof narcosis, trying to decide whether or not the Clapper would really be a good thing to have in the living room.
“Wait,” Rosa says. The static overcomes her. The crackle of the cellular telephone, as though the calls are not transmitting properly, as though the service is given to interruptions. Every third syllable is impossible to make out, the voices beginning to tell her the things she’s not meant to hear. This one is coming from Washington, and she doesn’t know if she can stand it if she has to listen to a lot of people talking about things having to do with Washington. “Got to get our people down there, get them down there in force; we need people, we need placards, and we’re going to have to start paying people to do what we need them to do, now, which is that we need them on the ground there, because we need to make disbursements, get some of the young people working on the campaign, and we have to start paying these people to get on the planes right now. Hell, we have to start booking the seats, and we have to get them down there and we have to have them observing, we have to have them on the ground, wherever people are counting votes. Because we can’t have them redoing what has already been done, so we need to start spending the money.” Like the voice is not even having a conversation with another person but just rehearsing a conversation that will take place at some future moment. The words are so close in her head that they are louder than any other sound. Sometimes it’s as if they are louder than even the things she sees, and she wants to swat away the voices. She’s not even sure if she can see anything because the calls are so loud. Should be some kind of volume control.
“What’s happening?” the obese woman is saying.
“Somebody’s talking about the election.”
“Everybody is talking about that.”
“What do you mean?”
How could she have overlooked the possibility before? Suddenly, it’s possible that the obese woman herself has something to do with the telephone calls. Maybe she is some kind of dispatcher or a router, some kind of personnel manager of the people talking. “Do you have something to do with it?”
“I haven’t voted in twenty-five years.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“What?”
“About the election?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
Everything that’s happening is happening below the threshold of the visible. The same outside. The people who voted, they don’t count, because it’s happening below the surface. Everything she sees, the city out the window, the cars, the parks, the skyscrapers. Somewhere even farther down, underneath the lowest part of the subway system, there’s another layer, where the decisions are made. It’s like two hundred people, and their sons and daughters go to parties together, and they meet on Friday nights down in the bunker and they play cards and they decide who gets what country. This one gets to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Kazakhstan. That’s what the Friday-night card players say, and they divide up their winnings, and they divide up their businesses, and they give one another a pat on the back. Some people get to see these things, some people are special and they can see below the layers, and these people are gifted.
“I think you need to be medicated,” the obese woman says.
“I am medicated.”
The obese woman will not discuss it further. As precipitously as she began talking, she has stopped. Conversation is a brief eruption in the expanse of silence. And in the midst of considering ideas about silence and conversation, Rosa hears someone pounding on the door, announcing that breakfast is going to be over if she doesn’t get up. Rosa treads quietly past the massive bulk of the obese woman, dons her robe and her paper slippers, and shuffles out, squinting, into daylight.
More bodies wobbling ahead of her. Down toward the dining hall. The light is a disinfectant of particulate material that has been sprayed liberally to cover the stench of poisonous darkness. Breakfast is the same dispiriting meal she’s had every morning here, and she can eat none of it. The tray comes and goes. After which, the consulting physician ambles in and asks if he can have a word with her. Rosa nods.
“Right, good. Well, uh, I’ll . . . We’re wondering if you happened to notice anything unusual last night, with your, uh, with your roommate.”
“Unusual?” She begins to hear a buzzing in her ears, and her eyes dart across the field of the room, as if stray sounds might be coming from anywhere, and she tries to fix on a possible origin, as if by alighting on a cause, she could relax a little into the singularity of her condition.
Rosa tries to shout, “I didn’t hear anything!”
“Anything at all? Because we have, uh . . . Well, the problem is that she has . . .”
He doesn’t know how to put it, what will soon become the problem of the entire ward. But she can tell. The obese woman has expired; she has gone over. It’s true. There’s a troika of orderlies, and they have
managed to heft the obese woman onto a gurney, and they are wheeling her out of the ward just the way she came in, and a cluster of the detoxifying is there to watch, gathered by the nurse’s station. The large shape goes out with the sheet drawn up over its head. The obese woman never even got to have a name. No one visited her, and no one called for her, and now she is going off for disposal.
“We’re going to have a meeting to discuss it in a few minutes, so that anyone who has any feelings on the subject will have an opportunity to share his or her feelings. It’s important in times like this for the community to gather. There will be grief counseling. If you need it.”
“I’ll tell you what I need,” Rosa Meandro says to the doctor. “To get out of . . . I don’t want to go out of here like she did. . . . I have served my seven days; it’s time for me to go. I am not a danger to anybody.”
“We can discuss that later.”
“I’d like to discuss it now.”
The issue, technically, is that she has to be released to someone, the doctor says grudgingly, and this person will have to meet with the social worker, go through an outtake process, and so forth. But Rosa doesn’t want to be released to her daughter. Vanessa will not agree to the release, and Rosa doesn’t want to be confined in her apartment, telephone conversations or not, because confinement makes her problems worse. She doesn’t have to put up with it anymore, she feels stronger, and if they won’t let her go, she’ll bribe her way out, she’ll go out for a candy bar and then she’ll pay the elevator operator, and then she’ll be on the ground floor before anyone knows what has happened. She’ll be gone. But just as she thinks this, just as she should be explaining to the doctor about how important it is for her to be released, she begins to listen in on a stray telephone conversation. “You don’t understand, the thing is he was on the phone with her at the time that she was hit, he was actually talking to her from his studio, it’s the most beautiful —” Giving way immediately to some strategic planning conversation about gross volumes of doughnuts, interrupted by Vanessa calling from somewhere to check up on the miniseries, bothering some man and then another, also about the miniseries, “We’re going to do it, we’re going to get it done, and we’re going to get it done because no one else is doing anything like this, and I want you to consider this a green light, and I want you to pick whichever version of the story you think is the best one, and I want you to get the budgets together, and I want you to bring them in here where I can see them by first thing tomorrow morning, and that’s the last I want to hear about it,” then the prospects for a long winter with much precipitation, and a conversation about the fastest route from Albany to Providence, “Just shoot on over on I-Eighty-four,” and in the midst of this the doctor asking her something, but she can’t really understand, except that suddenly she is curious. Why don’t any of the conversations mention her? The obese woman should never have brought it up! Even her daughter’s conversations never mention her! The conversations are about market share, or they are about venture capital, or they are about how the campaign needs to protect its investment by sending operatives down to Florida, it needs to get the public relations initiatives on its side; none of these conversations mentions Rosa, as if she’s not even here anymore.