The Broom of the System

7
1990
/a/

Lenore Beadsman was in possession of the following items. One of two square bedrooms with polished wood floors and inoperative fireplaces on the third floor of an enormous gray house belonging to a Cleveland oral surgeon, in East Corinth. Three large windows, two facing west, all so clean they squeaked, only one open, because only one had a screen. From the windows a view of the outside at the right-hand edge of which the tight seam of geometric suburban ground and dim sky was punctured by the far thin teeth of Cleveland. Windows through which late in the day came a sustained blast of pumpkin-colored Cleveland sunset. Windowsills that were really window shelves, and jutted out so far from the low window-bottoms they could be sat on, and were, although there were nails and sharp perpendicular paint chips, which problem was solved by the placement of black corduroy cushions, which Lenore also owned, on the sills.
A chest of drawers from Mooradian’s .in which were clothes and on top of which, leaning on a triangular cardboard support that folded out of its back, was a photo of Lenore, her sister, her two brothers, her great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman, and her great-grandfather, Stonecipher Beadsman, grouped around a deep wooden globe of the earth in a pretend den in a photographer’s concrete studio. Taken in 1977, when Lenore was eleven and temporarily minus front teeth. There was also, leaning back against that picture, an unframed picture of Lenore’s mother, in her frilly white wedding dress, linen, next to a large window filled with filmy spring light, looking down and arranging some wedding-related items in her hands. The picture resting on a spread-out cotton handkerchief with “Midwestern Contract Bridge Championships, Des Moines, Iowa,. 1971” embroidered onto one comer.
Three drawers of socks and panties and so on, and one drawer of soap. A bed, unfortunately at the moment unmade, with a shiny old heavy maple frame and a pillow with a pillowcase with a lion on it that Lenore had had for a very long time. A shelf in the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs on which were crowded bottles of seltzer water and ginger ale, some dark old carrots with limp tops, some limes. An area of the freezer crammed full of plastic bags of frozen vegetables, frozen mixed vegetables, on which Lenore largely lived.
A soft easy chair, old, covered in thick brown pretend velvet, that could recline so far back one’s head almost touched the floor. A footstool with a woven straw top. A small black table that served poorly as a desk and was at the moment bare anyway. A black wooden chair that went with the table and was irritating because one of its legs was shorter than the others. An even more irritating, blindingly white-bright overhead light fixture. Two ceramic low-wattage soft-light lamps with painted nut-and-flower scenes on the bases, purchased as alternatives to the overhead light, lamps that threw huge praying-mantis-ish shadows of Lenore and Candy Mandible on the room’s cream walls after sunset.
Eleven boxes of books from college, most of them Stonecipheco boxes, with red-ink drawings of laughing babies on the cardboard sides. All the boxes unopened, the athletic tape wheedled from the college trainer on the pretext of a mysterious pre-graduation sore ankle not even cut off, yet, and turning yellow. The boxes piled on either side of the west windows and supporting a tape player and a case of tapes and a fuchsia depressed and budless from lack of water in the August heat. A popcorn popper that popped popcorn with hot air. A box of Kleenex. A pretend tortoise-shell hairbrush. An old walker in the east comer, with two aluminum parabolas joined by twin mahogany support bars with soft cloth handgrips and the name YINGST carved in the wood of a bar above a hanging Scotch-taped publicity photo of Gary, the especially smiley Lawrence Welk dancer. Half-access to a bathroom down the hall, meaning half-access to a sink, a commode, a medicine cabinet, a tub with a shower fixture, and a soap-crusted shower curtain covered. with profiles of yellow parrots.
A bird cage on an iron post in the northern comer of the room. A mat of spread newspapers, beaded with fallen seed, on the floor below it. A huge bag of birdseed to the right of the newspaper, leaning against the wall. A bird, in the cage, a cockatiel, the color of a pale fluorescent lemon, with a mohawk crown of spiked pink feathers of adjustable ‘height, two enormous hooked and scaly feet, and eyes so black they shone. A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging by a string of Frequent and Vigorous paperclips in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s own bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist. Nevertheless. A bird that very occasionally and for a disproportionate ration of seed could be induced to stop hissing and emit a weird, extraterrestrial “Pretty boy.” A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of, itself. Lenore refused to clean the mirror anymore, because as soon as she did so it was, in about half an hour, covered with dried spit again. A Black and Decker hand vacuum to vacuum seeds and the odd fallen feather or guano bit lay on the floor to the right of the bag of seed, having fallen out of its wall mount a few nights before.
Some personal items in the bathroom. A closet full of white dresses. A shoe stand bulging like a raspberry with black canvas. A bookshelf over the desk table half full of books in Spanish. Also on the shelf an annoying clock that clicked and buzzed every minute on the minute, and a little clay Spanish horse with a removable head in which was Lenore’s spare key. Above the west windows, broken venetian blinds that fell on the head of whoever tried to let them down. A tiny frosting of cracks in the glass of the tops of the windows, from airplane noise.
A manual called Care for Your Exotic Bird. A patch of chewed wall behind Vlad the Impaler’s cage from where Vlad the Impaler had gnawed on the wall in the dark when the mirror-show had closed, a patch from which plaster protruded, and about which Mrs. Tissaw was not pleased, and in regard to which a bill was promised.
Rick dropped Lenore off and she ran upstairs and came into her room and took off her dress. There was music and clove smell from under Candy’s door. Lenore’s room was filled with sad hot orange sunset. Vlad the Impaler had his feet hooked into the bars at the top of his cage and was hanging upside down, trying to find some reflective purchase at the very bottom of his smeared mirror.
“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Lenore in her bra and panties and shoes.
“Hello,” said Vlad the Impaler.
Lenore looked at the bird. “Pardon me?”
“I have to do what’s right for me as a person,” Vlad the Impaler said, righting himself and looking at Lenore.
“Holy cow.”
“Women need space, too.”
“Candy!” Lenore went and opened Candy Mandible’s door. Candy was stretching, on the floor, doing near-splits, in a silver leotard, with a clove cigarette in her mouth.
“Christ, sweetie, I’ve been waiting, how are you?” Candy got up and moved to turn off her stereo.
“Come here quick, listen to Vlad the Impaler,” Lenore said, pulling Candy by the hand.
“Nice outfit,” said Candy. “What about the unclear emergency? How’s Lenore and Concamadine?”
“You’re sweet, but that kind of talk can lead exactly nowhere,” said Vlad the Impaler, staring dumbly at himself in his cloudy mirror. “My feelings for you are deep. I’ve never claimed they’re not.”
“What the hell is going on with him?” Lenore asked Candy.
“Hey, that’s what I was just saying,” Candy said, looking at Vlad the Impaler.
“Pardon me?” said Vlad the Impaler.
“I was rehearsing what to say to Clint tonight, tonight I’m going to break up with him, I decided. I was in here practicing while I waited for you.”
“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Here’s some extra special-wecial food.”
“How can he talk like that all of a sudden?” asked Lenore. “He only used to say ‘Pretty boy,’ and I had to like pour tons of seed down him every time, to get him to.”
“There are lots of pretty girls in the world, Clinty, you’re just so incredibly serious,” Vlad the Impaler said.
“Clinty?” said Lenore.
“Clint Roxbee-Cox, the V.P. at Allied who drives the Mercedes? With the glasses and the sort of English accent?”
“Clint, Clint, Clint,” twittered Vlad the Impaler.
“Shut up,” said Candy Mandible.
“Anger is natural,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Anger is a natural release, let it out.”
“He could never talk like this before,” Lenore said.
The orange light on the shiny wood floor began to have slender black columns in it as the sun started to dip behind downtown Cleveland.
“Weird as hell. I was in here at like six-thirty, and he just hissed and writhed. And I went for a run, and I came back, and I rehearsed what to say to Clint, and then I went to stretch out, and then you came,” Candy said, tapping her cigarette ashes into Vlad the Impaler’s cage.
“Of course you satisfy me, Clinty. Don’t think you don‘t,” said Vlad the Impaler.
“Did you feed him?” Lenore asked Candy.
“No way. I’ve still got that scar on my thumb,” Candy said. “You said you’d do it all the time.”
“Then how come his dish is full, here?”
“Women need space, too.”
“He must not have eaten from it this morning,” said Candy. “Is that a new bra?”
Vlad the Impaler began to peck at his seed; his pink mohawk rose spikily and fell.
“This is just like the bizarrest day of all time,” Lenore said, untying her shoes. “Rick and I had dinner with Mr. Bombardini? Of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame?”
“You met Norman Bombardini?” Candy said.
“I just don’t know what you mean by love. Tell me what you mean by that word,” Vlad the Impaler said.
“You’re going to have to buy a very small gag,” said Candy.
“Candy, the guy is trying to eat himself to death because his wife left him. He already weighs about a thousand pounds. He was eating eclairs off the floor.” Lenore took her bathrobe from the bedpost and undid her bra in the sun and headed for the bathroom. Candy followed her down the hall.
“You can’t hold me to promises I didn’t make!” Vlad the Impaler called after them.
/b/

Lenore took her shower while Candy Mandible leaned against the sink and smoked a clove cigarette in the steam.
“I don’t get it,” Candy said. “How can they just let twenty patients walk out and not see them or stop them?”
“Hobble out, is more like it,” Lenore said from the shower.
“Right.”
“I’m just going to assume, I guess, that if my father knows about it, Lenore’s OK. I’m going to assume that he took her to Corfu with him for this summit meeting with the president of this other baby food company. Except Gramma’s always had about zero interest in the Company. Except Dad and Gramma more or less hate each other. Except Gramma really has to have things ninety-eight point six or she gets blue. Except there’s like twenty-five other people gone too. Corfu would have to be pretty crowded. But I’m going to assume Dad took them somewhere. Except God I didn’t even think he knew where the Home was, anymore. Even though he owns it. He always handles it through Rummage and Naw.” The shower hissed on the curtain for a moment. “I don’t know if I should wait till Dad comes back or not. I can’t just fly to Corfu. I don’t have any money. And plus who knows where they are in Corfu.”
“Rick could lend you money. God knows Rick’s got money.”
“I haven’t even told Rick about it yet. He’s hurt.” Lenore turned off the shower and stepped out.
“I think Rick sort of flipped out, a little bit, up there, today.” Candy threw her cigarette in the toilet. It hissed for a second. She began to brush her teeth.
“He seemed OK at dinner. He just wants to know where I am all the time. The one who’s flipped and landed heavily is that Norman Bombardini. He was talking about infinity, and living butter?”
“What?”
“My robe smells like the bottom of a rug,” Lenore said, sniffing at her brown robe. “It’s all mildewy.”
“You could see if Lenore’s maybe staying with anybody else in your family,” said Candy.
“And what the hell is with Vlad the Impaler?”
“You could see if Lenore’s with anybody else in your family.”
“What? Yes. That’s a good idea. Except no way she’s with John, he can’t even be reached, and neither can LaVache, because Dad told me he doesn’t even have a phone. And why would Gramma go all the way to Amherst? Maybe Clarice, I guess. Except if Gramma was still around here, which Clarice obviously is, she’d have called to at least let me know she was OK.”
“Maybe she tried and could only get Steve’s Sub.”
“God, that’s another thing, what a rotten day at work. That Peter guy who looks like a negative never came back, and we sure didn’t hear from any tunnel guy.” Lenore tried to get steam off the mirror. Candy dried Lenore’s back with a towel and took off her silver leotard and stepped into the shower. Lenore stuck her arm in behind the plastic curtain and Candy handed her the soap and Lenore gently soaped Candy’s back, the way Candy liked. “And we get call after call at the board, almost all wrong, and Prietht was laughing.”
“I’m really going to kill her. I’m going to murder her, soon. A negative?”
“And Walinda was just unbelievably mad that I was late. She was really going to fire me. She kept saying, ‘Don’t play.’ ”
“When she says ‘Don’t play,’ you know she’s really mad,” Candy said, stepping out of the shower. The steam in the bathroom was now so thick Lenore could hardly see to open the door. She opened the door. A rush of cool hall air came in and cut the steam. Lenore began to brush her teeth.
“I should shave my legs,” she said. “My legs are making that sound when I rub them.”
“So shave.”
“And then Candy what’s with Vlad the Impaler? I think he must be sick. Rick said the lady in the store said cockatiels didn’t really even talk that much, as a rule. Maybe he’s dying, and this is like the huge burst of fireworks at the end, right before the fireworks are over.”
“Clinty, the sex is great, you know the sex is great, I’ve told you how you fill me up, but sex is only like a few hours a day, you can’t let it totally rule your life,” said a raspy bird voice from down the hall.
“Little f*cker sounds pretty healthy to me,” Candy Mandible said, walking naked down the hall, Lenore in the bathrobe behind her. “If Mrs. Tissaw hears this stuff, we’re really up the old fecal creek. We better start teaching him some Psalms or something.”
Candy went into her room and Lenore into hers. In Lenore’s room it was very pretty now. The floor and lower walls were liquid black, and dark tree shadows moved in the orange bath of sunset on the upper walls and ceiling.
“Sex is a few hours a day?” Lenore called to Candy.
“Clint, Clint, Clint, special-wecial,” Vlad the Impaler crooned into his mirror.
“Jesus wept,” Lenore said into Vlad the Impaler’s cage. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
Vlad the Impaler cocked his head and looked at her.
“Lenore, Clint is just something else, I have to tell you. He’s super. He turns me inside out. He’s a horse, a camel, a brontosaurus,” Candy said from her door, demonstrating with her hands. “Like this.”
“Yes, well, ummm,” said Lenore.
“Inside out! Like this!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.
“Shit on a twig,” Lenore said.
“But he’s so possessive,” Candy continued. “He keeps asking me to marry him, and getting mad when I laugh. He thinks making me come gives him the right to my heart. How can such a big boy be such a little boy? My eye’s on the president of the whole company, Mr. Allied.” Candy stood on dancer’s point in Lenore’s doorway and let the last orange bits of sunset fall on her cheeks. She was a really pretty girl, all curves and ovals and soft milky shine, with thick dark hair, even darker now when wet. It lay like a blanket of chocolate over her breasts and back. A plane flew over, low, rattling the windows in their frames for a moment.
“Now let’s have a night to remember, and remember each other always,” Vlad the Impaler said to his reflection.
Lenore slipped a clean dress over her head. “When does this night to remember begin?”
Candy looked at the clock just as it clicked and buzzed a new minute. “Any time now. I’m just going to go over to his place for dinner, then I imagine we’ll mate like animals for hours and hours and hours.”
“A real romantic,” said Lenore. “Jesus wept, Vlad the Impaler. The sins of the fathers. I shall not want.”
“Jesus shall not want.”
“Attaboy.”
“I’m still waiting to hear about Rick, you know, mating-wise.” Candy called from back in her room. “It’s been months, after all, and if he’s as super as you say ... I’m waiting for minute anatomical tale-telling. Otherwise you’ll just force me to find out for myself.”
“Yes, well, ummm.” Lenore put on clean socks.
“Just kidding. But really, we are partners in crime after all. And describing one can make you feel closer to it. I mean him. Really. Angles and bends and birthmarks and everything. It makes you intimater.” Candy came in, in a pale old violet cotton dress that had been Lenore’s for a long time, and was just perfectly too small for Candy, and clung to the not insignificant swell of her hips. She knelt at the window in the shadow and put mascara on, looking at her reflection in the black lower rectangle of the clear glass pane. Outside, crickets were starting.
“Making me come. Me as a person,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Where is that ditzy bitch?”
“Sorry about that.”
“May I please have a ride to Rick’s? I left my car at the Building.” Lenore finished tying her shoes and brushed out the curves of her hair. “I think Vlad the Impaler’s going to be OK food-wise. He must not be eating much.”
“Yes you may have a ride. Listen, you going to water that plant, or what?”
“It’s like an experiment.”
“The sins of the feathers!” screamed Vlad the Impaler. “Who has the book?”
“What book?” Lenore asked Candy.
“Search moi. Listen, I’m late. Shall we.”
“Yes. Good night, Vlad the Impaler.”
“Love has no meaning. Love is a meaningless word to me.”
“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”
“ ‘Real Birds.’ ”
“Thanks again for this dress. It may get tom, I’m warning you now.”
“People should have wedding nights like your breakups.”
“Women need space, need space!”
/c/

“Are you bothered by speculations about whether it bothers me that you never tell me you love me?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
“Well you shouldn’t be. I know you do, deep down. Deep down I know it. And I love you, fiercely and completely—you do believe that.”
“Yes.”
“And you love me.”
“.... ”
“It’s not a problem. I know you do. Please don’t let it bother you.”
“....”
“Thank you for telling me the Grandmother news. I apologize for being a pain in the ass at dinner. I apologize for Norman.”
“Well, God, I wanted to tell you. Except I don’t really even feel like it’s telling. You tell facts, you tell things. These weren’t things, they’re just a collection of weirdnesses.”
“Even so. Are you bothered by the book being gone, too?”
“.... ”
“The book is a problem, Lenore. The book is your problem, in my opinion. Hasn’t Jay said you’re simply investing an outside thing with an efficacy to hurt and help and possess meaning that can really come only from inside you? That your life is inside you, not in some book that makes an old woman’s nightie sag?”
“How do you know what Jay’s told me?”
“I know what I’d tell you in his place.”
“.... ”
“Be legitimately concerned about a relative who’ll turn up with a Mediterranean tan and a terse explanation from your father, Lenore. Is all.”
“You fill me up, Rick, you know. You turn me inside out.”
“Pardon me?”
“You turn me inside out. When we .. you know. What we just did.”
“I fill you up?”
“You do.”
“Well thank you.”
“A story, please.”
“A story.”
“Please. Did you get any today?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Good.”
“I actually began a journal today, too, really. Just jottings. Random, et cetera. It was interesting. I had wanted to ever since I was young.”
“Well good. Can I read it, ever?”
“You most certainly cannot. A journal is almost by definition something no one else reads.”
“I guess I’ll just settle for a story, then, please.”
“Got another interesting one today.”
“Goody.”
“Sad, though, again. Do you know where all the really sad stories I’m getting are coming from? They’re coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely ... interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.”
“So let’s hear it.”
“A man and a woman meet and fall in love at a group-therapy session. The man is handsome and jutting-jawed, and also as a rule very nice, but he has a problem with incredible flashes of temper that he can’t control. His emotions get hold of him and he can’t control them, and he gets insanely and irrationally angry, sometimes. The woman is achingly lovely and as sweet and kind a person as one could ever hope to imagine, but she suffers from horrible periods of melancholy which can be held at bay only by massive overeating and excessive sleep, and so she eats Fritos and Hostess Cupcakes all the time, and sleeps far too much, and weighs a lot, although she’s still very pretty anyway.”
“Can you please move your arm a little?”
“And the two meet at the group-therapy sessions, and fall madly in love, and stare dreamily at each other across the therapy room every week while the psychologist, who acts very laid-back and nice and wears a flannel poncho, leads the therapy sessions. The psychologist by the way it’s important to know seems on the outside to be very nice and very compassionate, but actually it turns out we find out thanks to the omniscient narrator he’s the only real villain in the story, a man who as a college student had had a nervous breakdown during the GRE’s and hadn’t done well and hadn’t gotten into Harvard Graduate School and had had to go to N.Y.U. and had had horrible experiences and several breakdowns in New York City, and as a result just hates cities, and collective societal units in general, a really pathological hatred, and thinks society and group pressures are at the root of all the problems of everybody who comes to see him, and he tries unceasingly but subtly to get all his patients to leave the city and move out into this series of isolated cabins deep in the woods of whatever state the story takes place in, I get the feeling New Jersey, which cabins he by some strange coincidence owns and sells to his patients at a slimy profit.”
“....”
“And the man and the woman fall madly in love, and start hanging around together, and the man’s temper begins miraculously to moderate, and the woman’s melancholy begins to moderate also and she stops sleeping all the time and also stops eating junk food and slims down and becomes so incredibly beautiful it makes your eyes water, and they decide to get married, and they go and tell the psychologist, who rejoices with them and for them, as he puts it, but he tells them that their respective emotional troubles are really just on the back burner for a brief period, because of the distraction of their new love, and that if they really want to get cured for all time so they can concentrate on loving each other for ever and ever what they need to do is move away together from the city, I get the feeling Newark, into a cabin deep in the woods away from everything having to do with collective society, and he shows them some cabin-in-the-woods brochures, and suddenly the psychologist is here revealed to have tiny green dollar signs in the centers of his eyes, in a moment of surrealistic description I didn’t really care for.”
“Man oh man.”
“Yes but the man and the woman are by now pretty much completely under the psychologist’s clinical spell, after just a year of therapy, and also they’re understandably emotionally soft and punchy from being so much in love, and so they take the psychologist’s advice and buy a cabin way out in the woods several hours’ drive from anything, and the man quits his job as an architect, at which he’d been enormously brilliant and successful when he wasn’t having temper problems, and the woman quits her job designing clothes for full-figured women, and they get married and move out to their cabin and live alone, and, it’s not too subtly implied, have simply incredible sex all the time, in the cabin and the woods and the trees, and for a living they begin to write collaborative novels about the triumph of strong pure human emotion over the evil group-pressures of contemporary collective society. And they almost instantly, because of all the unbelievable though emotionally innocent sex, have a child, and they have a close call at labor time because they barely get to the tiny, faraway hospital in their four-wheel wilderness Jeep, which the psychologist also sold them, they barely get to the hospital in time, but everything’s ultimately OK and the child’s a healthy boy and on the way back from the tiny hospital deep in the woods, though still very far from their even deeper and more secluded cabin, they stop in and have a talk with a retired nun who lives in a cabin in a deep valley by the highway and spends her life selflessly nursing retarded people who are so retarded even institutions don’t want them, and the man and the woman and the retired nun dandle the baby on their knees and talk about how love can triumph over everything in general, and collective societal pressures in particular, all in some long but really quite beautiful passages of dialogue.”
“Killer story, so far.”
“Just wait. And they go back into the woods as before, and for a few years everything is great, unbelievably great. But then, like tiny cracks in a beautiful sculpture, little by little, their old emotional troubles begin to manifest themselves in tiny ways. The man sometimes gets unreasonably angry at meaningless things, and this sometimes makes the woman melancholy, and an ominous empty Frito bag or two begin to appear in the wastebasket, and she puts on a little weight. And right about then their child, who’s about six, now, begins to have a horrible medical problem in which whenever he cries—which little children are obviously wont to do, they’re always falling down and bumping into things and banging themselves up—in which whenever he cries, the child goes into something like an epileptic fit; his limbs thrash around and flail uncontrollably and he almost swallows his tongue, and it’s just very scary, obviously, and the parents are extremely worried, even though they think and hope that it might be just a phase, but still they love the child so fiercely and completely that they’re frantic. And the woman is now pregnant again. And all these little ominous things go on until, months later, they’ve gone in the Jeep all the way to the tiny far-off hospital for the woman to have the second baby, and as the baby’s being delivered the older child happens to slip on a wet patch in the hall and falls and bangs his head, and he naturally begins to cry, and he immediately starts to flop around in a convulsive fit, and meanwhile the baby is being bom, a girl, and when the kindly old country doctor slaps her bottom to get her to breathe she of course starts to cry, and she right away goes into a miniature epileptic convulsive fit of her own, so both children are at the same time having fits, and the quiet little backwoods hospital is suddenly a madhouse. But the kindly old country doctor quickly gets things back under control and examines both children on the spot and diagnoses them as suffering from an extremely rare neurological condition in which crying for some reason decimates their nervous systems, it harms their hearts and brains by making those organs disposed to swell and bleed, and he says that every time the children cry, as of course normal children can be counted on to do quite a bit, the fits will get worse and worse, and that more and more damage will be done, and that they will be in danger of dying, eventually—especially the older child, in whom the condition is more advanced and serious—unless, that is, treatment is administered to keep them really ever from crying.”
“Wow.”
“And the kindly old country doctor hands the man and the woman roughly a hundred little bottles of a certain special very rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, since it’s such a prohibitively long and difficult trip from their secluded cabin to the tiny hospital, and he promises that as long as the children have a dose of the medicine whenever they look as if they might start to cry, to nip the crying in the bud and so prevent fits, they’ll definitely be fine, and the parents are of course frantically worried but also relieved that it’s at least a treatable condition, but also the strain is making their old emotional problems a little worse, and the man is ominously unreasonably angry at the universe for making his children have epileptic fits when they cry, and at the really unavoidably exorbitant bill for all the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and the woman is ominously yawning, and she makes them stop at the tiny deep-woods grocery store and buy virtually every junk-food item in the place, which clearly pisses the man off, because she’s already put on some weight, even though she’s still very pretty, and his being pissed off makes the woman even more sad and sleepy and hungry, and so on in what we can see has the potential to be a vicious circle.”
“Would you like some of this ginger ale?”
“Thank you.”
“....”
“And so they get back to the cabin, and things are more or less as they were before, although the woman is eating and sleeping a lot and gaining weight fast, and the man is so angry at the exorbitant price of the anticrying medicine that he vows to make a special effort to control his temper and be extremely nice to both children so they’ll cry as little as possible. But of course meanwhile his old emotional temper problem is little by little getting worse and worse, and the strain of being artificially nice to the children is really telling on him, and at ever more frequent intervals he has to run deep into the woods to yell and punch trees with his fists, and he becomes involuntarily cruel to the sweet sad woman, and hisses at her about her steadily increasing weight late at night when the children are asleep at the other side of the tiny cabin, which hissing of course only makes the woman more melancholy and sleepy and hungry, and she quickly shoots up to her old pre-love weight, and then some. And this goes on for roughly a year, with some potentially really terrifying epileptic crying fits from the children, especially the older one, being averted only by administering the special medicine just in time.”
“I’m engrossed, I admit it.”
“Well, and now on the disastrous and climactic night of the story, symbolized by a really unbelievable rainstorm outside, with the wind screaming and big gelatinous globs of rain pelting the cabin, the four are sitting at dinner, and the woman’s plate is piled almost to the ceiling with Hostess Cupcakes, and she’s yawning, and the man, who is under enormous strain, is unbelievably pissed off, and struggling every moment to control his temper, and the older child, who’s now about seven, whines a little bit about not wanting to eat his peas, which the woman had been too sleepy and gorged even to bother to unfreeze and cook, and the whine on top of everything else so angers the man that he involuntarily fetches the child a tremendous slap, purely involuntarily, and the child flies out of his chair, and falls, and knocks over a little table, on which are kept, in a place of honor, on a purple felt pad, all the precious bottles of the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and all the bottles are broken, and all the medicine in an instant ruined, and of course the child naturally starts crying from the tremendous slap and goes right away into a severe epileptic fit, and the baby, at all the negative commotion, begins to cry, too, and goes into a little fit of its own, and so suddenly the man and the woman have both children having epileptic crying fits, and no medicine to keep the fits from grievously harming the childrens’ hearts and brains and maybe killing them. And they’re frantic, and the kids are flopping around, and the woman finally manages to get the baby semi-calmed down by holding it and bouncing it and crooning to it, but the older child is in a very bad way indeed.”
“Good God.”
“So both parents are completely frantic, and they decide all they can do is for the man to take the older child in the Jeep and try to get to the tiny far-off hospital just as quickly as possible, while the woman calls ahead and gets them to make up an emergency batch of anticrying medicine right away, and that thus the woman should stay and try to call and keep the baby, who is now more or less stable in the mother’s arms but who hates to ride in the Jeep and would certainly cry disastrously on the way to the tiny hospital, from crying and convulsing any more, until the father can get back with the medicine and the also hopefully saved older child. And so the man carries the flopping boy out to the Jeep in the gelatinously heavy rain and off they go, and the woman begins to try to call the tiny far-off hospital but can’t get through because, as the narrator tells us, the hospital’s lines have been hit by lightning, and so in desperation the woman finally calls their old psychologist in the city, because he’d told them when he’d sold them their cabin that if they ever needed anything not to hesitate to call, and she gets hold of him at his downtown penthouse and begs him to drive to the tiny far-off hospital and get some anticrying medicine for the baby and bring it down to the cabin right away. And the psychologist, after he’s reminded of who the woman is—he’d forgotten—reluctantly says OK, he’ll do it, even though it’s raining gelatinously, and says he’ll be right there, but as soon as he hangs up, who should stop by but a current patient, whom the psychologist had been trying to convince to buy a cabin and live out in seclusion, and so the psychologist delays for a bit while he stays and shows the patient brochures and tries to convince him to buy a cabin, and we’re again rather irritatingly reminded that there are tiny green dollar signs in the centers of the psychologist’s eyes.”
“Bastard, though.”
“No lie. And meanwhile the man is driving like mad in the Jeep toward the tiny far-off hospital, with the boy, who’s no longer convulsing but now is sort of autistic and slack-jawed and still obviously in a very bad way indeed, and the man’s driving like mad, but it’s very slow going, in the dark and the gelatinous rain and the mud of the deep-woods roads, and the man is so incredibly angry at the universe for putting his family in this position he feels as if he’s about to explode, but through enormous strength of will he keeps the lid on, and keeps driving, and eventually gets off the muddy deep-woods roads and onto the highway, where the going is at least a little faster. And the woman is meanwhile back at the cabin, waiting for the psychologist to arrive with the anticrying medicine, and she’s so full and so upset and depressed at everything , that’s happened that she’s yawning all the time, she’s unbelievably sleepy, and it gets still worse as the hours go by and it gets late and the gelatinous rain drums rhythmically on the cabin roof, but the baby is meanwhile having small but severe convulsive attacks whenever it cries, and the only way the woman finds she can keep it from crying is to hold it against her enormous Frito-crumbed breast; whenever she puts the baby down, it cries and begins to have an epileptic fit. So she’s staggering back and forth with the baby. And this goes on, some switching from scene to scene, the psychologist finally makes his sale and gets going, and he has an .incredibly fast and expensive car, paid for out of cabin profits, and he gets to the tiny backwoods hospital in no time flat, and he talks to the kindly old country doctor, and after a brief wait while the kindly old country doctor practically kills himself making the anticrying medicine in almost no time, the psychologist gets the medicine, and says the man will pay for it, and starts jetting down the highway toward the deep woods and the far-off cabin, at incredible speed, and in an ironic and ominous twist he goes right by the Jeep, for obvious reasons headed in the other direction, while the Jeep is pulled over in the dark with a flat, which the man is in a rage in the storm fixing, while the child slumps in the front seat in a bad way, and the psychologist’s incredibly fast car splashes a huge wave of rainwater on the man from clear across the highway and knocks the jack handle out, of the man’s hand, and the jack handle hits something small but vital on the axle of the Jeep, and partially breaks it, which the man doesn’t notice, because he’s so pissed off at the psychologist’s car for splashing water on him that he’s jumping up and down and screaming and giving the receding car the finger, and just temporarily out of control.”
“Jesus.”
“And meanwhile back at the cabin the woman is almost passing out, she’s so melancholy and worried and sleepy, but she can’t let go of the baby or it will begin to cry and flop epileptically. And the woman heroically and movingly holds out against sleepiness for just as long as she can, waiting for the psychologist, but finally she’s simply physically unable to stay awake any longer, being awake is just no longer an option, and so, as the only possible compromise with circumstance, she lies down on her bed, still holding the baby against her breast to keep it from crying and convulsing.”
“Oh, no.”
“And she falls asleep and rolls over on the baby and crushes it and kills it.”
“Oh, God.”
“And she wakes up and sees what’s happened and falls into an irreversible coma-like sleep from grief.”
“OK, that’s enough.”
“And the psychologist pulls up about ten minutes later and enters, in his poncho, and he sees what’s happened, and he calls the police to report it. And the only police in such a remote area is the state highway patrol, and the psychologist gives the patrol dispatcher a description of the man and the Jeep, which he is of course familiar with but just hadn’t seen when he splashed it, and he tells the dispatcher to have the patrol cars on the highway look for the Jeep and give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital if they’re found, and meanwhile also to get over to the cabin and have a look at the crushed baby and the comatose mother. And the dispatcher relays all the psychologist’s remarks to the troopers by radio, and a cruiser starts speeding down the highway on the way to the cabin, and on the highway it encounters the Jeep, and does a fast U and pulls it over, and the officer in the cruiser gets out and goes to the Jeep in the gelatinous rain and offers to give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital, and the man accepts, and as he’s getting the boy ready to be carried from the Jeep to the cruiser he asks the officer if it was his wife who had called the police, and the officer says no and then completely disastrously tells the man what he’s heard has happened back at the cabin, and to the accompaniment of a huge ripping clap of thunder the man flips out completely with uncontrollable anger at the news, and starts involuntarily flailing around with his arms, and one of his elbows, by accident, hits the boy, slumped in the seat beside him, in the nose, and the boy starts to scream and cry again and immediately flops onto the floor of the Jeep and begins to convulse, and his head first knocks the gearshift out of neutral, then his head gets wedged next to the accelerator, and the accelerator gets floored, and the Jeep takes off, with the officer caught and holding on and riding along the side because he’d been reaching in the window trying to calm the flailingly angry man, and the Jeep starts heading for the edge of the highway, beyond which lies a deep valley, a cliff, really, and the man is so angry he can’t see to steer, and the officer tries to grab the steering wheel from outside and steer away from the cliff, but the sudden tension on the wheel completely snaps the small but vital thing on the axle that had been broken by the jack handle’s flying out of the man’s hand earlier, and the steering fails completely, and the Jeep with the man, the boy, and the officer plunges over the cliff and falls several hundred feet onto the cabin where the old retired nun, you may remember, was nursing the prohibitively retarded people, and the Jeep falls onto the cabin and explodes in flames, and everyone involved is horribly killed.”
“Holy shit.”
“Indeed.”
“.... ”
“A thoroughly, thoroughly troubled story. The product of a nastily troubled little collegiate mind. And there were about twenty more pages in which the huge beautiful woman lay in a pathetic fetal position in an irreversible coma while the psychologist rationalized the whole thing as due to collective-societal pressures too deep and insidious even to be avoided by flight to the woods, and tried to milk the comatose woman’s dead family’s remaining assets through legal maneuvers.”
“Mother of God.”
“Quite.”
“Are you going to use it?”
“Are you joking? It’s staggeringly long, longer than the whole next issue will be. And ridiculously sad.”
“....”
“And atrociously typed. That bothers me too. An unbelievably involved story that some sad kid must have spent months dreaming up and working out, and then he types it with his elbows. I’m going to send a personal rejection slip in which I advise the kid first to learn to type and then to go writhe to some suggestive music.”
“I liked it. I thought it was a killer story.”
“Yours is not a literary sensibility, Lenore.”
“Gee, thanks a lot. Spunkless and non-literary.”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
“....”
“Come here. Come on.”
“Go peddle your papers.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Lenore.”
“....”
/d/

“Frequent and Vigorous.”
“Fnoof fnoof.”
“Frequent and Vigorous.”
“What?”
“Operator. Frequent and Vigorous.”
“Lenore.”
“Gasp a similar ladder. Operator. Special-wecial food.”
“Lenore! You’re talking in your sleep! You’re being incoherent!”
“What?”
“You’re being incoherent.”
“Fnoof.”
“That’s better.”
/e/

“Holy cow!”
“Fnoof fnoof.”
“What the hell!”
“Fnoof. What?”
“Rick, I don’t own a walker.”
“What?”
“I don’t own a walker. I especially don’t own Mrs. Yingst’s walker, with that Lawrence Welk guy’s picture on it. What was it doing in my room?”
“What walker?”
“And what did Vlad the Impaler mean special-wecial food, who’s got the book?”
“What? That bird should be killed, Lenore. I’ll kill it for you.”
“Nobody’s in Corfu, at all. I’m being messed with.”
“Fnoof.”
“Jesus.”