The Gnome Stories, page 15
A touch of snow floats down from the sky like television static.
I think of my wife out there somewhere and the one I buried just before her. I think of the hundred thousand women everywhere at this moment, at once, looking through their screens at me, fingers resting on their engagement rings, deciding whether to give away their names.
Opportunities for Intimacy
It is not as though Shelly fears waking up surrounded by the dead every morning, exactly, since the dead are in every way natural; that is, it is to be expected eventually by the time starlight makes its way from us to the next star over, that we will all be gone, vanished into a point or a line in an epic poem or the great whatever. And she is not squeamish about these sorts of things—she’s seen bodies, for God’s sake; she’s seen hundreds of them, been down to the morgue for identifications, seen them cut up like pumpkin pies for medical exploration. She’s walked through the bisected cow behind Plexiglas that caused such a stir at the Tate Gallery in London years back. She’s buried her father, a half-dozen friends, and a number of animals—a couple of cats, a dog, twenty-one goldfish, two ill-advised rats, and a barracuda that lived less than a week. What Shelly hates—and this is why she sometimes panics in moments like this, lying next to her lover in the platform bed, the comforter wrapped around her like she is a mummy, hoping (and almost praying, even) for her to breathe, to exhibit some sign of life—is the thought of sleeping an entire night with a person without realizing that they are dead, that they are no longer a person at all. What would this, what does this say about her, that she would even wish them dead before sleep found her so she could tell in advance and do something, take on the immediate heartbreak instead of postponing it awfully until morning?
This happened to her once, years ago, with her cat Rotato, so named by a girlfriend because of his fatness, after that As Seen on TV gadget that peels potatoes for you as it rotates like a magic ball, available then and even now for the unbelievable price of $19.95. Rotato passed in his sleep, and worse, in her sleep, and by the time the sun hit the two of them from the edge of the world again he was stiff and still fat and had been silent, unmoving for hours. The girlfriend was absent for this, and came back a day later from a spring break trip, to the bad news and a very slight measure of guilt, as she had always said that cat was too fat to live.
And please get it straight, because she doesn’t fear death. This is why she is so good at her job—she tells this to herself as she’s dangling off an overpass, the front of her car teeter-tottering, nudging out above the oncoming traffic just north of Ames as I-35 passes through Iowa on its way north to the land of Big Ice or south to the big wide angry of Texas. There’s some lesson here about balance. Fulcrums. Something to remember from the semester of physical science in ninth grade. Simple machines and what is meant scientifically by the word work.
This is perhaps a result of an unusually drunken night and one too many of her lover Sandy’s Reader’s Digest “Drama in Real Life” columns that she collects, that she posts on a floor-length bulletin board as evidence of Angels in Action (Sandy’s words, not hers—Shelly does not go for this crap, and the sentimentality of this lame shrine is sometimes in fact held against said lover, as is her actual subscription to Reader’s Digest, even if it was the result of a teenage lifetime gift subscription. We all have these lists, Shelly tells herself, that we compile for some future use when inevitability eventually happens, and everything will be finally somehow held up to the light and weighed against us). The drinks were the result of a minor fight, a spat, even, sounding like they’re a married couple or something with shared accounts and matching duvet and bedskirts from Bed Bath & Beyond. This is the result of the sort of conflicts most couples have—the minor schisms, the revelation of what two people simply don’t like about one another, that in this instance led Shelly out the door in anger. This is the result of years of emotional training and of a complicated Rube Goldberg series of actions that has brought her to this point, tipping out across trucks thundering north filled with stinking compartments of chickens or lazy honking hogs, their snouts poking out through slats like stumps after logging.
This work—and she only remembers the definition vaguely, as in there was an explicit definition, but she doesn’t remember what it was, per se—should have stuck with her in physical science, but there were other things happening at that time in her life, her father just dead in his easy chair, luckily not while she was sleeping, and so science didn’t get the attention it should have, and thus she doesn’t know exactly what to do and how to solve the problem. Do you pitch forward or back? It seems obvious, but she remembers something about counterweights from a story problem, some kind of Train A is leaving Minneapolis loaded with a ton of hay and traveling west at forty miles per hour. It was always some oddly low number, meaning don’t trains travel faster than cars? Meaning they do in Europe, she thinks, but not in Iowa where Amtrak is liable to show up five hours late if the train shows up at all, and the first time Shelly had to drive down an hour south of Des Moines to pick up Sandy—her real name, not short for anything—and Shelly had to wait five hours for the thing to arrive and all there was to read were magazines called True Confessions, which, while erotic, were almost certainly untrue. She thinks to herself that this wheeling mental process she’s engaged in means that she is, perhaps, in shock, that the drinks and the skid and the guardrail impact have combined to addle her. She knows this much.
The work Shelly does is about living, not dying. This is an important point. She breaks the news to patients who have come in for HIV testing (or who sometimes come in for something else, but subsequent tests turn it up). All positive tests are referred to her because she’s good, because she does not fear death, because she has—as those she works with say—a gift for delivering this kind of news. Because Shelly is in her way unflappable. A real one of a kind, and most people couldn’t bear to do it, they say, and they don’t understand why it doesn’t bother Shelly. But it’s true, it doesn’t. Sometimes she gets angry when Sandy refers to her as the Death Nurse, even when she knows she’s joking, because this is a concern, that the patients will find out which nurse handles all the bad news, that they will find out and be able to divine (or even avoid—and patient care is all about bypassing defense mechanisms) the nature of their news. To this end, she handles other cases, too, and there aren’t as many HIV cases here in Iowa as there are in the bigger cities, so she would estimate that less than thirty percent of her cases are concluded in this manner.
So when she herself is up against the actual thought of death—here precariously caught between the two car seats like in some kind of melodrama (it would be better if she were tied to the train tracks in an old-timey dress, kicking—now that’s almost hot, she thinks) and waiting on either rescue or doom, she thinks she’s lucky to be the one to bear this burden and keep it from another Subaru, the grocery and Microsoft edition, one with a passel of kids therein, or one with a heavy-hearted couple who had just lost a child, who might have both more and less to live for, gearing up to try again but each secretly fearing the same result. Shelly’s willing to take a certain amount of weight, of pain and suffering, upon herself. She’s like one of those self-flagellating monks. She is stronger, she thinks, than some.
Certainly she is stronger than some of her patients, one of whom—when told the Bad News—took off running at full speed through the labyrinthine hallways, through the waiting area with its recycled magazines, in fact, knocking a child over, and out into the street through traffic: running full-out away from the news that people equate with either shame or death or both, as if she could outrun microbiology. After sharing a brief stunned moment with a passing nurse Shelly took off running after the patient, and who knows what the other patients might have thought. Finally she caught up to the patient eight blocks later under the shadow of an abstract sculpture that adorns the grounds of the Iowa state capitol building. She had stopped, obviously out of breath or maybe just out of ideas, and Shelly collided with her, caught her in an inadvertent hug, normally not part of Shelly’s range of human responses to these situations, but this was not a moment anyone could consider normal, and so Shelly held on to her, and they shared this moment while maybe two dozen bicyclists came out of nowhere and flowed as a group, a school of glittering spandex fish, around them and then just as suddenly disappeared.
That’s what you missed, Shelly thinks, the you being the other nurse who didn’t run after them: you missed that meeting, that pocket of emotion. We have treatments, Shelly told the patient. It’s not the death sentence it used to be.
In her last job before this one, she handled 911 calls. As such this predicament should be familiar. Shelly knows that she should have a cell phone, and it should always be charged, and what the costs are for those who aren’t prepared. And she does have one, but it’s dead. She let her account lapse a day or two ago. Who could she call except for her lover, who’s sprawled out on their bed, hopefully breathing, and angry at Shelly for Closing Things Off As She Always Does. This is why Shelly was out getting drunk. You need an outlet, she thinks, and sometimes it’s the bleary pause of alcohol, and sometimes it’s lightning striking in the middle of a field and setting the thing ablaze and calling the police because you forgot what the fire department number was in that moment. You need some way to siphon energy away from you, to get beyond yourself. She drank, went to the firing range to blow the faceless faces off silhouettes, and was on her way back after the liquor and the concentrated bursts of violence when she swerved to avoid an animal in the road and skipped into the guardrail, which, while keeping her from entirely sailing through, did partially give way, which explains how she got into this story problem of a mess.
Someone in oncoming traffic must have noticed her predicament and called the police, who will respond quickly, she thinks. She did the 911 job for five years, which no one ever believes, because the average tenure of 911 operators is less than a month. You do hear some real emergencies in 911 calls, but mostly it’s the usual weirdness: people calling because they fear they’ve been poisoned by their spouse, or somebody’s got six lures caught in the skin of his hand, or somebody is in the house, and it’s not some sex game this time, they swear, so please come quick. Nine times out of ten it’s stuff that should go to the non-emergency line, but it doesn’t have a snazzy number like 911, so here we are. The other one of out ten was where it got fucked up: husband’s caught both his arms in the thresher; he’s coming for me with a gun or a railroad spike; or more often it was just fragments of agony and confusion, barely understandable—people are not articulate about their terror, their pain, when put on the spot. People wheel and spin and kick out into space. And there’s nothing to do but wait on the line with them or until the phone goes dead, is replaced in the handset, and then hope for some kind of timely intervention.
Someone, as it turns out, is about to intervene on Shelly’s behalf. Here’s Joseph, sixteen, the owner of the animal—an armadillo (pretty weird for Iowa). Really, he would call himself its friend, not its owner, though it makes for an underwhelming friend, since it’s not particularly pettable or affectionate. But it’s certainly not a possession! Joseph is about to come up from the field of swaying corn that he was detasseling, a thankless and mostly awful job that he took to make him enough money to Get the Hell Out of Iowa. He brought his armadillo, whose name is Hank, in a cat carrier with him to work. When his supervisors called it a day but told him he could do some overtime if he wanted to and left him alone in the quickly darkening field with just a floodlight for a companion, Joseph went back to get Hank out and let him have some fresh air while he worked.
Like Shelly, Joseph is good at his job even though it sucks. His father’s word for it, not his, since Joseph won’t complain: this is the most money he can make doing anything legal at this age in Iowa, and while the work is hard, so is Joseph, or so he supposes, and he has something to prove. If he doesn’t make it out of here, he thinks, he’ll end up defenestrating turkeys in one of the giganto turkey barns around here, the new and more humane way to kill the birds that he’ll invent when on the job—no blade involved, no gas or crushing blow, just their first and only opportunity—though somewhat attenuated—for flight. He tells himself: you get to go out on top, you assholes! Well, even in his fantasies in Iowa, at best, he’s inventing methods of dispatching poultry and not doing anything really interesting. He knows it’s bad for him, the state’s huge brain drain—all the best students and professionals emigrating out to other—if not better—possibilities in other states with flashy names like Illinois. He could live in Wrigleyville and watch the tourists stream in to watch the Cubs. Or he could work in Texas on one of the oil derricks that he has heard infest the sections of beach that have not been turned into condo-land.
Joseph is repulsed by turkeys, the bumbling birds that his family slaughters for a living. They are hard to love en masse: their strange desires and the awful smell of tens of thousands of them congregated in close quarters. Why turkeys? he’s asked his dad, and not gotten a satisfying answer. At school he’s known as the Turkey King, The Golden Turk, El Turkamauga, and jokes are made about his smell, which, to be fair, is not good, though not on account of turkeys. He’s not gone through anything worse than any other teenager, of course, but it seems pretty bad to him, and in his very darkest moments, he’s even contemplated what he could do with his father’s gun. He knows it’s a wrong thought he’s having, and it’s not persistent, but it’s scary how powerful it is when he’s in its grip.
He would never do it. He has restraint, and that’s the difference, he tells himself, though if his father knew he’d contemplated it, he’d be terrified, and that’s one reason why he’s working late, why he’s proving something by being overproductive, by emptying himself into sweat and work and corn and supremely itchy skin.
Hank freed himself, it seems, and scuttled out into the corn—these things are way smarter than they look or have a reputation for being—and upon discovering this, Joseph had to run through the rows of corn shouting. He became more and more desperate, since he had to have his armadillo special ordered in the pet shop here, and this fact, when it got out, contributed further to his reputation for stink and weirdness at school. There was No Way, he told himself, that his armadillo would get away from him, and when he finally traced its path out to the road he feared the worst for Hank (he’s heard that in Texas some citizens run down armadillos for sport), but when he cleared the wall of corn, he saw Shelly’s predicament first, and only then saw Hank, balled up and stunned by this near miss, and scooped him up, then looked into the wreck, feeling something sort of like astonishment. Here, he thought, was a thing he in some small way caused to happen, even as he knows it’s not properly his fault. He holds his breath, his Hank, and thinks of what he will do next.
About twelve thousand feet above this threesome, a plane drops through the base of the sparse clouds that tower over the state at night, starting its descent into the bore of the Des Moines airport. No one is waiting there for Donald, who toys with his wedding ring, thinking about what that traditionally means in stories, now loose on his finger since he’s lost so much weight in the past six months—nearly a hundred pounds down from his earlier mass, which defined the American obese, and even now down close to three hundred pounds he still had to buy two seats on the little jet, knowing that he wouldn’t fit in one, or that he might but that it would inconvenience his seatmate, and he’s loath to do this, especially now that he’s on the slide toward slim and the kind of physical beauty and bodily control that he has so long admired in others. You see them on the television all the time, and six months ago he decided that what he needed, what his wife and he needed, was a change, was more control, was more constraint on his various appetites, so he took action—at last he took action! And lo, here he was, returning: a changed mind, a changed man.
From above it seemed the same. Down in it, it was easy to forget how small it all was, but then you didn’t get this perspective very often. It sure seemed big enough up close.
Their marriage, he felt, might be on the ropes, but what marriage wasn’t? He was on the verge of becoming that other kind of American grotesque, the lonely divorcé, and this is what he hated most of all, living up to what the world thought of him. Two of his coworkers referred to theirs as starter marriages, only probably as a joke. He looked down at the evening landscape below gridded out by the highway’s lights as the plane banked toward the city and the future. His truck was there, in hock, in the airport parking lot, and he would return to his wife, who was thinking of him now, perhaps, if she wasn’t out at the bar where she threatened to pick up men while he was gone. He thought this probably a joke. He hoped it was a joke, but their jokes had acquired an edge in the last year, so it was hard to tell. He could not count that possibility out: Would he find her home when he got home or would he not? He was thinking of her thinking of him and of fireflies in Iowa fields in summertime, where everything grows tall enough to keep everything obscured forever beneath corn, if you get away from the cities and out into the silence, whether you come via anger, exhaustion, desperation, or accident.
In the meantime, if he squinted, maybe he could barely make out the shape of Shelly’s predicament, not that there would be anything he could do about it from up here. But maybe witnessing the rescue would mean something to him.
You should know that evening fireflies in a field just outside Ames constitute a happening. How can I tell you what it’s like to be so surrounded, illuminated by a thousand LEDs, like some kind of rock show Providence, some crazy and perhaps meaningful earthen low-lying constellation? They wouldn’t be out just yet. But in half an hour, as Donald drove the long way home through the fields, they would come alive around him.
