“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.”
8. 1990
/a/
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION, THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1990, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.
DR. JAY: So it would be safe to characterize yesterday as just not a good day at all, then.
MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: I think that would be a safe assessment, yes.
JAY: And how does that make you feel?
LENORE: Well, I think sort of by definition a day that isn’t good at all makes you feel pretty shitty, right?
JAY: Do you feel pressured into feeling shitty?
LENORE: What?
JAY: If a bad day is by definition one that makes you feel shitty, do you feel pressured to feel shitty about a bad day, or do you feel natural about it?