Magnificence A Novel

8


“It’s not one of theirs,” said Jim, when he got off the phone with the city of Pasadena.

There were old women milling around them in the kitchen, wearing pastel colors and cheerfully garish prints. One blouse had numerous teddy bears, with pink and blue bows around their necks.

Angela had invited some friends over, unbeknownst to Susan, who had believed she had none. Without prior warning the house had filled with elderly ladies from a church book club.

Angela wore a delicate crucifix and went to mass now and then, when she suddenly felt the need, but her beliefs were opaque to Susan. The other churchgoers she knew were all old and most were also female; only the old attended church these days, she’d told Susan solemnly, unless you counted the poverty-stricken, ethnic, or Deep South states where, if you believed the statistics, millions were joyously awaiting the Rapture. But these were not Catholics. Angela’s church was part white and part Mexican, she said, and the whites were all old because young whites did not believe in God. Thus the book group was elderly white ladies devoted to reading Christian novels and discussing them.

There were, said Angela, some old white men in the congregation too, but if they read at all they tended to avoid fiction, which they believed was frivolous. And anyway the novels favored by the book club often had a romantic bent, even though they contained references to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, the saints, and other popular and interesting characters in the Bible. Some were historical, telling the stories of these biblical figures, while others were just about regular people now, Angela said—regular people who were godly. Usually they were also Catholic, but not always.

Angela had recently attended a meeting of the group on impulse, her first time. She quickly volunteered Susan’s house for the next meeting, then forgot she’d done so until the ladies arrived. They’d brought food with them—macaroni casseroles, triangular white-bread sandwiches, powdered diet drinks and frozen layer cakes. Curiously they had also brought stacks and stacks of paper napkins, napkins by the hundreds.

“They don’t know anything about it,” went on Jim, over the white, wavy head of a half-deaf woman sipping lemonade from a paper cup. “The guy said he never heard of that—a manhole in someone’s backyard that wasn’t authorized by the city. I got the feeling he didn’t actually believe me.”

“I should probably just leave it alone, shouldn’t I,” said Susan. “It could be part of some ancient sewage system the city doesn’t use anymore.”

Jim shrugged. The white-haired lady hovered between them, not moving or seeming to register their presence; she drank her lemonade with sucking sounds and stared with watery blue eyes into the great beyond.

“I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “You wanted to do something with that part of the yard, was that it?”

“I want to make sure there isn’t a basement,” said Susan.

“A basement? It’s a manhole. It’s hundreds of yards from the house.”

“I know.”

“Listen,” he said, and looked down again at the white wave hovering beneath his chin. “I really need to get going to the office. It’s halfway through the day already.”

“So go, so go,” she said, and smiled at him as the lady drinking lemonade kept standing there, clueless.

He loved his wife, she thought as he left the kitchen, or rather his ex-wife, now; he loved her and he always would. In this house there was unrequited love and there was love of the dead. She and Jim cherished these two streams of affection, at once different and the same: they lived inside two loves that went out and did not come back to them.

•

Casey had decided to send faxes instead of letters. Airmail from Borneo took too long, she wrote, while faxes were instant.

She had them sent to the machine in T.’s office, and Susan would come in on good mornings to find their curled pages waiting for her, thin and slick, some of them always fallen or fan-blown to the floor. The pages had no numbers, typically, only long disorderly paragraphs of Casey’s barely legible scrawl interspersed with !!! and ??? so often she had to piece them together painstakingly, the last word of one to the first word of the next, before she could begin to read.

At first the places and even the facts seemed purely fictitious.

From here in Long Banga to the clear-cuts in Gulung Mulu . . .

On the way we stopped in what claims to be “Berkeley’s sister city”: Uma Bawang.

Among the Penan of Upper Baram, murder, rape, and robbery are unknown. Selfishness is considered a crime.

After a few letters she stopped grinning reflexively every time she encountered a foreign word. It wasn’t funny, of course. Indeed the current events Casey described were alarming: episodes of police brutality, conflicts between the natives and the logging companies, the wholesale liquidation of primary forests, the erosion of mountaintops and massacre of wildlife. But there was also the day-to-day, and Casey included rough, childish sketches of the local fauna, as though they might be added, by proxy, to Susan’s collection.

She started with a mount that hung in a tourist lodge near the research station, a civet cat, and then moved on to living subjects. There was a male proboscis monkey with a huge dangling nose like an ancient drunkard, beneath which she had written The big nose is thought to be attractive to females; there was a pangolin, a distant anteater relative, with the legend Talk about freaks. The monkey had its dangling, pear-shaped nose, then also a large potbelly and beneath that a small red penis sticking out. Susan knew the color because Casey had drawn an arrow toward the offending organ and written red.

Next there were drawings of people, women with earlobes stretched all the way down to their chests, heavy earrings pulling down the impossibly long holes—six inches, seven or eight. Orang Ulu, wrote Casey. An ancient man with boar’s teeth piercing the tops of his ears: Village elder, Bungan festival in Punan Sama.

Casey rarely wrote about herself or her feelings except to mention a casual fact briefly: Our shower is a bag of water with holes in it. Or I do miss the junk food. And Sucks to do laundry once a month. Still her daughter was close there, in the unkempt script and the abrupt turns of thoughts—in some ways closer than when she was home.

Susan hoarded the faxed letters. She read them to remind herself of the realness and texture of Casey whenever she felt afraid. One foreign place was not the same as all others; Casey would not fall under a knife. She kept the pages stapled, smoothed flat, although they wanted to curl, and pressed between two big dictionaries she carried up to her bedroom from the library.

But they did not last. She was distressed to notice how quickly the ink faded.




One afternoon she got home after a half-day at the office to find Angela leading some church ladies through the second-floor rooms, pointing out both the taxidermy and the house’s architectural features.

“The building has been nominated for historic status,” she said proudly, as Susan hovered in the hallway.

There was a message from the estate lawyer in Century City, whom Jim had pushed to give her case more attention: a date had been set for the adjudication of the cousins’ will contest. She felt her stomach sink when she heard this—did that mean the case had not been dismissed, or something, as they had hoped it would? Or could it still be dismissed?

Jim would explain when he got in, she told herself, and went outside to where the church ladies were picking their way through the back garden, gazing down into the fishponds and nodding. Angela had her arm around one of them—the white-haired one from the kitchen, hobbling unsteadily.

Worried about the will, hoping for some distraction, Susan hurried toward them, on a path to overtake. As she came up behind the last in the group—an imperious fat lady in red and gold and another, in gray, who looked timid and thin by contrast—the white-hair with Angela stumbled and emitted a gasp of fright.

“You’re all right, Ellie dear,” said Angela, whose arm had stopped her from falling. “You’ll be fine.”

“Tripped me,” said the lady.

“Let’s see,” said Susan.

In the pebbly soil between the flagstones of the path, at the white-haired lady’s feet, was a thin piece of black tubing.

“Part of the irrigation system,” said Susan.

“It’s unsafe,” said Angela.

Susan gazed at her.

“It waters my garden,” she said after a pause, irritably.

“This way, honey,” murmured Angela, but she gave Susan a punitive look.

•

When Jim came over after work three of the ladies were still present, in Oksana’s room off the entrance hall. It was almost six-thirty in the evening and they had never left; they sat there in armchairs and, as far as Susan could tell, said hardly anything. There was the oldest—the white-haired lady—and the slight one in gray and the large one bedecked in the colors of the Chinese emperors. They each had a copy of a Christian novel nearby; this one featured a handsome angel who flew down to earth to help a single mother with a crippled child, then fell in love with her. A couple of them even had drinks beside them. The conversation appeared to be moving with exceeding slowness.

When Susan and Jim came to stand in the doorway Angela was telling the plot of the novel. The other ladies ignored them.

“The angel starts out too proud, you see,” said Angela, and turned to Susan. “You see, the angels that come down to help people are often the proud ones. God gives them penance. Having to come down from heaven is a punishment for them.”

In a corner, Oksana painted her fingernails fire-engine red and watched her small television. On the news, someone was dead.

“I mean it, they’re not moving,” whispered Susan to Jim, as they veered away from Oksana’s door and down the hall to the bar area where they liked to drink their dinnertime cocktails. “They’ve been here since like ten a.m. It’s like they’ve been installed. Like furniture.”

“But you can’t sit on them,” said Jim.

She poured him some scotch.

“The lawyer left a message for me,” she told him. “He said they set a court date. Is that bad?”

“It’s neutral. Look, wills get contested all the time. But will contests are hardly ever won by the people who bring the objection. Keep that in mind.”

“I was hoping maybe it wouldn’t even make it to court, though,” she said.

“I’ll go with you. Don’t think about it.”

•

As the evening wore on she and Jim grew fixated on the question of when the old ladies would leave. When ten, then eleven o’clock rolled around both of them were making trips down the hall so that they could walk past Oksana’s open door and see whether the ladies were still there. Then Jim would return or Susan would return to him, shaking their heads in disbelief. Susan was aware of acting vulture-like. The truth was it shouldn’t matter to her—the ladies were quiet and infringed upon no one but Oksana—but she was intrigued by the unlikeliness of the ladies’ presence, of their remaining in the room as though they were frozen there, as though they were inevitable.

Finally it was eleven and Susan hovered in Oksana’s doorway like a parent executing a curfew.

“Let me run something up the flag,” she said. “Maybe Jim or I could drive you ladies home tonight? Because night driving can be dangerous—”

“Oh no, dear,” said Angela. “No no no. We’re having a slumber party!”

The faces turned to her then, all three of the visitors staring. Oksana continued to ignore them and ignored Susan too, eyes fixed on a late-night talk show on the television. Susan noticed she had put on a nightgown.

“A slumber . . .”

“Oh yes. We’re sleeping in my room.”

Was Angela lucid?

“Oh,” said Susan uncertainly. “Ladies? Is that . . .”

They seemed to be nodding, though it was almost imperceptible in the dimness of the room. It struck her as absurd—either a comedy of errors or a group mania of some kind. They had to be in their late seventies and eighties; they must need comfortable beds, she thought, need their routine, their home environments; they must all have some complaint, minor or not, arthritis, bursitis, porous and brittle bones. There was no way they could intend to sleep in Angela’s bed, no way they could have made that plan on their own. Had Angela misled them about the facilities? Had they been fed? Was she even taking care of them?

“If you’re staying, please use the bedrooms on the second floor,” Susan said finally. “OK? There are plenty of beds up there. Most have their own bathrooms, though some share. Jim will be happy to help you up the stairs, if any of you needs a hand. Because frankly I can’t imagine you’ll all be comfortable in Angela’s room. There’s only the one bed in there! You realize that, don’t you?”

“Upstairs will be quite suitable,” said Angela, with a certain smugness.

“But then the staircase is hazardous too, or at least it could be,” objected Susan, recalling the white-haired lady—Ellen, she guessed—tripping on the small piece of black tubing.

“Young lady,” said the portly dowager in red, turning in her armchair with sudden severity, “you know, we may be getting on, but we’re certainly not deceased yet.”

“Oh no, I didn’t—” started Susan, but Jim interrupted from behind her.

“Oksana,” said Jim, “why don’t you come and get me when these ladies want to go upstairs. Or, of course, when you’d like to go to bed yourself. I’ll be glad to accompany them.” He looked at the imperious one. “No offense intended, madam. I’m a lawyer by trade. I’m thinking purely of our liability here as homeowners. Or call it responsibility. A broken hip could be costly.”

With the ladies staring at him Susan withdrew and he followed.

“I can’t believe you said that,” she whispered.

“Angela’s taking advantage of you,” he said. “She should have asked first. It’s bullshit.”

“I mean, she does have dementia,” said Susan.

“She’s also manipulative.”

•

It was almost midnight when Oksana came to get them, with tired eyes and traces of cold cream on her cheeks. Jim went to escort the women upstairs while Susan got towels out of the linen closet and sorted them into groups, a bath towel, hand towel and washcloth for each lady, and then carried them up the narrow back stairs formerly used by servants.

She went to the rooms and laid the towels out—a small pile each on the twin beds of the Arctic and another on the queen bed in the Himalayas—before meeting the guests in the upstairs hallway, where they stood with Jim under the dome. After they had shown them to the rooms, walking back to their own, she stopped Jim with a hand on his arm.

“I murdered Hal,” she said. “I killed him. You should know that about me.”




In the morning she went into the bright kitchen happy because Jim had been kind to her, Jim understood that she had killed and though maybe forgive wasn’t the word, he saw and didn’t give up on her. She came down in a good mood and found them seated around the table, four ladies in nightdresses with gleaming fish overhead, eating toast with marmalade and listening to some kind of quaint homily about daily life: National Public Radio. Angela had made breakfast for them, even brewed them a carafe of her weak, stale coffee from a can, which she preferred to Susan’s gourmet beans.

Angela was animated, rising to get them fresh toast as it popped up in the toaster, and Susan saw she had been changed by their presence: the older ones made her energetic, gave her a central role, bustling around. But surely she couldn’t sustain it, Susan thought, she’d have to absent herself again or even perform a broadly insane act, such as stripping naked or locking herself in a room. Then the ladies would quietly take their leave.

Jim had gone off to the office so it was only Susan and the ladies; her kitchen felt crowded. She spooned up some yogurt, drank a half-cup of the weak coffee and then went outside and crossed quickly to the shed in the backyard, where she chose a shovel from the dirt-encrusted fleet of them propped up against a shelf. Backhoe, she thought, wasn’t that overkill anyway? She could find out what was beneath the manhole without the help of large earth-moving machines. Of course she could.

On the shelf beside the shovels she found an old, dusty gray pair of gloves, shook them in case there were spiders or splinters in the finger holes and then pulled them on. Last time she’d tried to wield a shovel she’d rubbed blisters on her palms and torn them open. A kind of water had flowed out when they ripped: was that pus? But it had been light—transparent, inoffensive.

We know so little of our molecules, she thought, the molecules we are . . . so little about them. A proof they’re in control: they guide our hands, they make us grow, they form our children inside our bodies—miracles come from them, all that has ever been, all that will be. Meanwhile our conscious selves perform their rudimentary acts, those simple sums. What shall I be, whom shall I love: those are the easy parts, behaviors that we call ourselves, they’re only icing, floral borders, all that we think we are is trivial while what we really are is not even known to us. If there is a machine, a ghost in the machine—they always said the machine was the body, didn’t they? Philosophers?—but no! The body’s both of them, machine and ghost. The body’s not only the vessel but also its spirit, the body is visible but its animators impossible to see. Materialism, she thought, sure—she might be a proponent. But she didn’t like the flatness of answers, the stolid and dull arithmetic of being, not at all! Rather the glory of the unseen. She believed in the ineffable, great mystery, great creation, only that it was lodged in molecules, in molecules, beyond the human ability to see.

The final authority of the microscopic.

She carried the shovel into the back, through the trees, stuck its blade into the ground a few inches from the manhole and then stood on it with one foot. She hopped awkwardly to sink it further, then dismounted, scooped and flung. And again. It was hard, boring work and soon she was dizzy and distracted. As the minutes passed she felt blisters starting on her hands again despite the gloves, felt dirt down the backs of her sneakers and in between her toes, and just as she was thinking how tedious it was the spade hit underground metal.

“Well of course,” said someone, and she looked up to see the elderly dominatrix, now clad not in the red and gold ensemble of yesteryear or her ruffled nightgown from the breakfast hour but in a voluminous dress of deep and vibrant purple. Around her neck hung a crescent-moon pendant in silver, vaguely redolent of Wicca or perhaps the New Age.

Were there obese Wiccans?

“Of course what?” asked Susan, out of breath.

“You’ve hit the shaft.”

“I didn’t know there’d be one,” said Susan. She stood resting, catching her breath. What a stupid idea, digging. Of course some Wiccans were obese. Sure—even morbidly so. No different from other Americans, most likely. One of Casey’s best friends in high school had been Wiccan. She worshiped the moon goddess, the feminine principle, and told Casey not to use tampons. She advised Casey only to use sea sponges when she had her period. The use of tampons was a denial of the sacred nature of womanhood. The tampons were the patriarchy. Sponges by contrast came from the ocean, which some viewed as feminine. And also by contrast with the tampons, manufactured by companies that men owned and designed to men’s specifications, the sponges were not shaped like penises or missiles.

But with sponges you had to wash the blood off in the sink.

Susan had run interference. She spoke of practical benefits. After the accident Casey lost touch with the Wiccan friend, who went to college and presently joined the Young Republicans.

Susan squinted at the purple-clad woman and tried to imagine her dancing at midnight before an altar to the horned god.

“You think it goes deep?” she asked.

“Too deep to tackle with that thing. Don’t make me laugh. It’s probably solid iron. You could be talking twenty feet deep.”

“I’m sorry,” said Susan. They’d never been properly introduced. “I’m not sure I even know your name! I’m Susan, Susan Lindley.”

She stepped forward and stuck out a gloved hand, which the large woman took and pressed lightly. She wasn’t without grace, Susan thought. Around her own mother’s age, if her mother were still alive—older than Angela by almost a generation but clearly far more coherent.

“Portia,” she said.

“Porsche?”

“No, not the sportscar,” said the woman haughtily. “The moon of Uranus, for instance, discovered by Voyager 2. I myself predate the Voyagers by several decades, needless to say. I was, like the moon, named after the heroine of The Merchant of Venice, if you knew your Shakespeare. All of the Uranus moons are named after characters in Shakespeare. And Pope, of course.”

“I don’t know my Shakespeare or my planetary trivia,” said Susan. “How many Uranus moons are there?”

“Perhaps you recognize this line: ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath.’ Sound familiar?”

“It does. The gentle rain part. Definitely.”

“That line’s Portia’s.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Portia.”

“About the moon,” went on Portia, lifting the too-large necklace off her chest, “little is known.”

“I see.”

“And to answer your question: there are twenty-seven.”

“Many moons.”

They were gazing at each other. Susan realized she tended to like the woman, found a kind of reassurance in the woman’s pompous presence.

“Anyhoo,” said Portia. “What you need here is simple: a backhoe.”

“I’m not sure I know where to get one,” said Susan. “I did find a guy with a jackhammer. But a backhoe, that’s a whole other level.”

Hal had ridiculed people who used that turn of phrase. A whole other level. A whole ’nother level. Both, according to Hal, were not only annoying but also ignorant. His least favorite common phrase had been Can I help who’s next? But Susan had stubbornly used the language he looked down upon. She saw his point, certainly, but she couldn’t get behind the snobbery.

Like Hal, this woman seemed the type to value correct speech.

“Child’s play,” said the woman. “Leave it to the Yellow Pages and to me. If money is no object?”

“Well, it is an object,” said Susan, as they started back to the house. She carried the shovel parallel to the ground, trailing clods of earth as they went.




The day of the court date Casey called. It was hard to hear her—a delay in the connection so that their voices often crossed. Susan talked over Casey without meaning to and only heard half of what she was saying.

She was hazy on time zones, but it was so many hours different there that it was almost the same time—was it across the international dateline? She did not know. She strained to hear over a kind of swishing windy sound—the sound of space, she wanted to believe, the sound of the stratosphere, of falling interstellar dust . . . though it was probably none of these, it was probably the sound of wires and circuits, metal and fiberglass. Casey was talking about bamboo—something about the properties of bamboo. Bamboo was good, was the gist of what she was saying. She mentioned the Dayak, who were apparently a tribal people. It rhymed with kayak.

Susan pictured them in loincloths, although she had no evidence for this. They would look better in loincloths than she did, that much was certain. Smiling, wearing loincloths, the whole ear thing, and now also carrying bamboo. Possibly in spear form, sharpened at one end, or then, in a more modern context, as strips of light-colored flooring. Bamboo floor coverings were increasingly popular.

Searching for something to prove her own attentiveness, though she could still only half hear, she asked after the other tribal people Casey had written about.

“But how are your friends, the Penan and the Punan Bah?” she asked loudly, enunciating as best she could, though as usual the names made her want to laugh wildly. No offense to the Penan or Punan Bah, she thought, none meant at all, it was the phonetics.

“. . . are the Dayak, Mother,” came Casey’s voice.

•

Jim was supposed to meet her outside the court building so she was driving there in her own car. She was nervous, dressed neatly in conservative clothes with pearl earrings and flat, unglamorous heels, and she listened to the radio as she drove—she had always been irritated by NPR, all her adult life, and yet all her adult life she had listened to it faithfully.

One exit’s worth of freeway driving was all it would be: first surface streets, then a mile on the freeway, then surface streets again. And yet as soon as she merged onto the 110—on NPR a well-known interviewer, Terry Gross, was earnestly complimenting a rap musician on his genius—she knew she would never make it. The traffic was stopped, bumper-to-bumper, as far as she could see, though in the opposite direction it was moving freely. Technically it was spring, but the smog was more like summer smog, heat rippling in the dirty air, and a torpor had descended over the long lines of cars. Up ahead people had gotten out of their vehicles and were walking back and forth, some standing aside by themselves and smoking cigarettes, others in groups, talking and gesticulating. It had to be an accident.

She wished she had a cigarette, but then she never bought them herself, only bummed them off Jim. She thought of getting out of her car, like the others, and asking one of the other smokers for one, but then that seemed too disgusting. Anyway she had never liked to get out of her car on the freeway, even when the traffic was bumper-to-bumper and at a dead halt. The concrete had a gray desolation and the air was unbreathable, and she knew a cigarette would seem even viler as soon as she stepped from the car. She waited fifteen minutes with the windows up, cooled by the air-conditioning, glancing frequently at the digital clock on her dashboard, jiggling her foot and occasionally swearing as the minutes ticked away and the hour of the hearing approached. When it was six minutes before the hour she became irritated with Terry Gross, whose earnest tone, it seemed to her, had grown more and more sycophantic. More and more, the intimacy of this trademark Terry Gross tone, as she spoke to the rap star and flattered him several additional times with her eager references to his brilliance and creativity, seemed to suggest that she, Terry Gross, was a longtime proponent and appreciator of rap music and even quite possibly a credentialed expert on the rap-music subject.

The longer Susan listened, becoming increasingly frustrated and impatient, the more it seemed that the impression being conveyed was that she, the white, middle-aged female Terry Gross—unlike she, the white, middle-aged female Susan—was a proud, savvy collective owner of what she lavishly called the rap-music phenomenon. Susan felt resentful of this pandering self-inclusion, of this proprietary, rap-music-savvy, rap-music-loving Terry Gross.

At four minutes till her court date she switched off the radio in a fit of pique and rolled down the windows all the way. Let the heat flow in, she thought, let it boil. The fumes from the idling cars almost choked her but stubbornly she refused to roll up her windows again. Not yet, she thought, not yet. In her annoyance and frustration, her incipient rage, she associated the rolled-up windows and air-conditioning directly with Terry Gross: if she closed the windows again and switched the AC back on it would be necessary to turn the radio back on too, and it would have to be NPR because the commercial stations were all men or products screaming at you, which was even more hateful in this situation of car entrapment than the quiet, earnest, middle-class, educated, and maddeningly empathetic tone of Terry Gross, and so the rolled-up windows meant letting Terry Gross and her sycophantic rap-music interview win.

Three minutes. Two minutes. One. Still no movement. She wished she had a car phone, like T. or probably the rap guy. He certainly had a car phone; most likely he was using said car phone to converse with Terry Gross. Then it was fifteen minutes past, then eighteen, and the tension drained out of her because she had to give up. She had missed it. There was no reason for her to be sitting here anymore, no reason save the obvious fact that she was trapped.

A bearded man in a baseball cap walked by her car and she rolled the window down briefly to ask him if he knew anything. He told her there was a multicar pileup where the 110 merged with the 5. Cars had crashed and people were hurt, he said. “So count your blessings, lady.”

She watched him in the rearview mirror as he continued down the line of cars, slouching, moving so slowly it seemed he felt no urgency at all. He walked like a defeated or dazed person, yet he had spoken sharply. Maybe he had seen something, maybe he was grieving.

When Casey had her accident there were courageous bystanders who went in to help the trapped and wounded victims. One or two of them talked to Hal and Susan later, in the hospital—told how the accident had changed their lives, too, though they had not been physically injured. Some of them never recovered fully, but wrote to Casey and told her how they had cried themselves to sleep at night for months after they came upon the scene.

And they had not been hurt at all.

After the man disappeared from her rearview mirror she surrendered to Terry Gross, surrendered completely. She closed her eyes and listened to the empathetic Terry Gross tone and to the rap-loving earnestness as it flowed over her. I love rap music too, she thought, making a generous gesture. She would reach out to Terry Gross, the rap guy and their mutual passion, thus elevating her own mood. I also find it creative and brilliant, she said in her mind to Terry Gross and the rap guy. It is brilliantly creative, it is creatively brilliant. Not only that, but all of it is brilliant, not just the white-friendly, woman-friendly versions favored by college students but also the gangsta version, the version with bitches, hos and gats, the completely misogynistic, racist, homophobic and violent, even nihilistically brutal version.

I love it, love it, love it. Mmm-hmm. I love it and I love all self-expressions, ironic and otherwise, all of them under the sun. I love pornography, gangsta rap, war video games, all fantasies of violence. These fantasies preoccupy the insane men and keep them from their actual work of angrily murdering. Let us not condemn these proliferating, vibrant simulations, these models of brutality. No, let us praise them as though they were condoms. Maybe that explained Terry Gross and her rap appreciation. Maybe the gangsta rap was viewed, by Terry Gross, less as an incitement to gangsta-type acting out than as an artistic, prophylactic screen against it. Maybe the rap Terry Gross and the Planned Parenthood Terry Gross were actually one and the same.

I am a nice person, Susan thought steadily. No one will take my house from me. She was a murderer, sure, like the angry men who did not listen to enough rap music—perhaps this was her own problem also, perhaps she needed a larger dose of rap—but not of the angry variety; she was a polite murderer, the white kind, white-skinned and white-collar. Although, come to think of it, she had liked an Ice Cube song Sal forced them all to listen to after the dinner at Casey’s apartment, the night before Hal flew off. Hal had been sleeping then, passed out, and Sal played for them an album titled Death Certificate.

In fact the song had been hilarious. Her favorite part was a line concerning oral sex, where the slutty daughter ate nuts voraciously, not unlike, said Ice Cube, hummingbirds. It could be ascribed to poetic license, she thought, but let’s face it: Ice Cube lacked a solid education on the subject of bird diets. He was funny anyway, whether because of the curious nut-eating hummingbirds, undiscovered in the annals of nature, or despite them. It was hard to say. The natural history of hummingbirds was not the point. The point was that they rhymed with cummingbird.

Too late. The probate court judge would either rule without her or not; it was out of her hands now. It always had been, of course. But still she should have left the house earlier, prepared for something like this . . . up ahead they might be carting a dead person away. Oh, poor, dead people. No more rap music for you. No more of Terry Gross either.

Hal had liked Terry Gross, but had not liked, as far as she knew, rap music, except for the kind sometimes referred to as old-school, from the seventies or maybe the early eighties, say “White Lines” or “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. He had liked those very much when they first came out and he and Susan were younger, but the nineties brand of rap he’d had less patience with. He might have been surprised at this new Terry Gross version, this new rap-music-loving Terry Gross.

No ambulances had passed her on the shoulder, she realized—where were they all, the sirens and the lights? Maybe they’d passed this way before she came onto the entrance ramp herself . . . the man had seemed sure of what he said, sure it was a pileup. She opened the door and got out, stood beside her car and squinted ahead, searching for even the faintest sign of movement. But there was a gradual curve in the road and she couldn’t see past it.

You didn’t know what was happening out of view; you never did. You lived your life in a small part of the world, with only the faintest inkling of what was everywhere else.