Serafina was fearless, like Tirant. Unlike him, however, she was a realist. When she became one of the richest traders on the island, few knew it because she was careful not to flaunt her wealth, or tie herself to any man. For the rest of her long life, she also kept her voracity for knowledge to herself along with all her foreign books, two thousand at last count, hidden in a priest hole she built with her own hands behind the massive mahogany armoire in her bedroom.
21
Gone
People always leave something behind when they go, a letter, dirty tissue, loose change, a gum wrapper. But not McCabe. It was as if she had never been in the house. As the sun began to set on Thanksgiving Day, I sat on the floor in front of the open refrigerator eating slices of supermarket ham and white cheddar with my fingers. I’ll eat here like a pig until McCabe shows up, I thought. “That’ll sure bring her back,” Reason remarked, blowing cigarette smoke in my face. “You don’t know why or where McCabe has gone,” she said, ignoring my protestations that McCabe must be back in New York City tending to her gallery. “Furthermore,” she added, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old one, “you don’t even know why you care.” That was preposterous. One thing I was absolutely certain about: I cared that McCabe had vanished because I was about to kill her. I needed her here for that purpose. This rational certainty was the cornerstone of our domestic happiness since my accident. Reason didn’t hear my indignant answer. She had returned to my frontal lobe, where she dwelled, having implanted her poisonous pods.
The more rational a certainty, the harder it is to kill the vulture of irrational doubt circling overhead. The tools of reason faiclass="underline" the hungry vulture just circles lower, excited by the stench of the logical brain. McCabe’s sudden absence, the clean blank page she left, the way she erased herself from the house, amplified the doubt, which was now being played inside my head by a full, bombastic symphonic orchestra, all 230 instruments in thickly imbricated harmony. It was, and it wasn’t, the “Finale” of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, in whose tragic reverse recapitulation Goebbels had found the equanimity to admit that two thousand years of Western history were in danger.
I returned to my room on my hands and knees, oozing blood and pus. By the time I was soaking in the tub, my orchestra had stopped playing, and I, too, contemplated doubt with equanimity, even with pleasure. With the familiar (McCabe) gone, leaving a horrific chasm worming with serpents at the end of the map, doubt—musically implanted, repeated doubt—had become familiar. Why and where McCabe had gone, why she hadn’t told me, and why I cared now, seemed legitimate subjects of inquiry. Physical pleasure and its concomitant indolence fueled this benign view: the warm water luxuriously covered my body up to my throat. This was my first bath in a month. I left my feet out, propped on the tub ledge, wrapped in clean towels. Tomorrow I might get them wet and see what happened.
I examined McCabe’s disappearance dispassionately. An emergency could explain the suddenness of her departure. Could it explain her silence, too? I imagined McCabe getting a dead-of-night phone call from her boy assistant: her gallery, along with Manhattan’s southern tip, set on fire by Caliphate terrorists, or flooded, or blown off (all of which had happened more than once before, although her gallery was unscathed each time). McCabe calling Elmira’s only cab and rushing to the state capital, where she rented a plane to fly her to Chicago (the lone commuter flight to that destination today, Thanksgiving Day, being at 7:00 p.m. instead of the usual 7:00 a.m., which I knew because I had been keeping tabs on all means of exiting Elmira, for my own sake). McCabe arriving in New York from Chicago to find the tip of the island in flames, or at least her gallery. McCabe caught up in the testosterone hysteria of the heroic rescuers, maybe even escorted away in handcuffs for trying to jump a Firecop barricade to save her precious Beuys, still in its German crate, or hurt by a falling cornice, or huddled with her lawyers and insurance people, unable to place the one call even mass murderers are entitled to, so she could let me know, out of common courtesy, her whereabouts. As I pulled myself out of the tub and onto the cold, tiled bathroom floor, I swore to stop scratching the bloody crust of McCabe’s disappearance. Pragmatism and action were all that mattered now. McCabe had to be brought back to the slaughterhouse.
After sanitizing my feet with the washes and ointments in McCabe’s nurse’s bag and putting on a pair of clean white socks, I crawled on my belly and elbows from bathroom to bed to spare my knees, pushing the bag ahead of me with my forehead. My feet looked less unnatural than when I had taken off the bandages. Whether this was an objective fact or mere habituation, it’s hard to tell. My knees, though, looked like raw steak, with strips of dead, bruised skin still attached here and there. I treated them with whatever potions seemed to apply. The storm’s howl had turned into a spasmodic whistle. The rain had stopped. A thin sliver of the new moon peeked out from behind the slow-moving clouds, still low and dense like bags of coal, a reminder that the storm could resume if it wished. I fell asleep only after I swallowed a narcotic pill from my pillow cache.
The phones were still dead the day after Thanksgiving. Petrona did not show up for work. The Little Ohio had risen higher than in the celebrated flood of 1863 when two-thirds of Elmira was buried in mud and left there because most able men were fighting with Grant in Vicksburg. Elmira was rebuilt on top of its own grave in brick this time, not wood, when the survivors returned. All day, the local radio played Perry Como and The Beatles in an orgy of self-congratulation disguised as public service. Churches vied with one another to offer sanctimonious, useless emergency services, generally involving prayers and donuts. Idiots who let their dogs and cats roam and shit everywhere pleaded tearfully for their safe return. The pièce de résistance, however, was The Witnessing, as the radio announcers solemnly called it, a fifteen-minute call-in segment every hour, during which the town’s remaining whites disgorged family memories of that great flood and heroic war. This is what we have and you will never have: a genetic memory of Elmira’s foundation, and second foundation after the great flood. They hammered that in all day long without actually saying it. You just had to listen to their repressive gasps. Forbidden to call a nigger a nigger, a spic a spic, a wop a wop, etcetera, on the radio and in most public forums, Elmira’s whites had created a new tongue rich in elisions, and syntactic and semantic black holes, where the now unmentionable were buried and forgotten, as if they had never existed, with no markers left on their linguistic graves. The new flood was a time machine, a tongue-loosener, a fountain from which sprang a fraternity of pale hue. Elmira was jubilant.