“Jesus, don’t cry, Vince. Look, I’ve brought some eggs. Had any breakfast?”
“Lard on stale bread, Sal.” He’s not talking, he’s croaking. “You can’t beat that at the Ritz.”
“Well, come on then, buddy, let’s scramble up the eggs. I also snuck out some bacon. I’m starved.”
At the stove, stirring the eggs with a fork while Vince brews up a pot of weak coffee from the last grains in the can, Sal says: “Listen, Vince, I can take out another loan on my house, and me and Gabriela, we can cover you for a few months and see if we can’t get this sorted out.”
“No, it’s not the mortgage. They’re after me, Sal. I won’t let them drag you down too.”
“Well, at least let me talk to Gaby’s cousin Panfilo. He’s a pretty good lawyer. Maybe he can fight this thing.”
“For free?”
“Sure, for free.”
Though he knows nothing will come of it, that somehow cheers him up, and he carries his coffee and plate of bacon and eggs out to the porch, feeling like he’s getting control of his life again. This is my house, asshole. My whole life is in it — just try to take it away.
Dreamers often remark on the vividness of their dream worlds, which are not perceptions but are very much like perceptions (where does all that stuff come from?), and at the same time on their instability, their dissolving boundaries, their lack of continuity. John P. Suggs is not a dreamer, as he has often said, but were he, he might describe his waking life as like one. Lights come and go. Sounds and talk make little or no sense; it’s like spinning a radio dial. The people at his bedside fade into one another. His personal nurse will be speaking to him in her yattery way and she will grow a beard and become his surly mine manager. This is not what really happens — he knows that, he’s not crazy — but it’s the way his damaged mind is processing the random fragments that it registers. His own thoughts are no better. He hears himself thinking things he doesn’t understand himself. He’s never quite asleep, nor awake, either. But he has these moments of lucidity, and he has to use them. He and the camp nurse — she’s not completely stupid — have worked out a rudimentary eye-blink code. Voiceless, he must act; there is much he must do, and the only action left him is instruction. He waggles his working finger, his call for attention. She pulls a chair up to his bedside with pencil and paper in hand.
Down the corridor from Mr. Suggs and beyond the double doors in the women’s wing, Clara Collins-Wosznik slumps despondently outside her daughter’s room, consulting with the doctor on his morning rounds. He talks too fancy for her troubled mind, but she nods her head at whatever he says. While he is talking, they wheel a dead body by, sheeted head to toe. Clara says a little prayer for the dead person, for herself, for Elaine. Were the doctor not here, she would drop to her knees. So much sadness in God’s world. It is getting her down. She has been able to resume her leadership duties at the camp, working several hours a day in the office in and around trips to the hospital, catching up on the budget and inventory and essential letter-writing, restoring all the weekly practices such as Bible study and Evening Circle, which had somewhat dropped away in her absence, and meeting with all the people out there individually to plan out the rest of the summer, but the old energy and concentrated attention are not there. She feels like a prisoner of her own creation, able to do what’s demanded of her but no more. It’s still only morning and she’s dead tired. She knows it’s just from worrying and told the doctor so when he remarked that she did not look well and would she like to visit him for a check-up, maybe some blood tests, an X-Ray? She said she didn’t have time; she’d pick up again soon enough when Elaine started getting better. What she’s most distressed about this morning is that the poor child has been put back on the feeding tube again, her hands strapped to her sides, ankles in shackles, head in a kind of brace, and that ugly coiling thing snaking out of her nose like her innards are being pulled out through her nostrils. It is an image to rival the worst of the punishments of the Last Judgment. Ben, who has been somewhat distracted and not his old easygoing self, said in the office last week that maybe they just ought to spare her this suffering and leave it all in God’s hands, that they can’t keep on feeding her that way forever. She was upset by this and told him so, though she knew he was in deep pain, loving the child as if she were his own, and fearing for her. Truth be told, Clara has had similar thoughts and did not object when they stopped using the tube for a time to see if Elaine would go back to feeding herself or at least allow herself to be fed, and she was not sure she wanted the tube back if she didn’t. There’s a nurse out here who has been able to talk to the girl a mite and she did get a few spoonsful down her, but then Elaine clamped her jaws shut and that was that.
“Of course, emaciated females often suffer from amenorrhea,” the doctor is saying in his kindly but frustrating way, “but the urine samples seem to indicate…”
Clara doesn’t know what the doctor is talking about but is too ashamed to ask and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about urine samples, so instead she brings up the issue of forced feeding again. It was just such an awful thing, couldn’t they maybe stop it?
“I’m afraid she seems determined to starve herself,” the doctor says. “We could let her do that to herself, I suppose, but not to the baby.”
What?
“Unless…”
“What are we gonna do about Elaine, Ben? She won’t eat and won’t talk and won’t bestir herself. She probably wouldn’t breathe if she could find a way to stop. I can’t hardly bear to look on her with that thing up her nose.”
“Maybe it ain’t right to make her suffer so. Maybe we should just only leave her be. Let the Good Lord decide.”
“How can you say that, Ben? She’d just go and die! We can’t let that happen!”
“No…but then I don’t know what.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t of come back here.”
“It woulda been worse for her out on the road.”
“I know. (She sighs.) But, well, it’s not right to say it, Ben…but this don’t feel like—”
Darren, hearing someone outside the door in the main hall, hits the pause button, hides the tape recorder under a loose stack of paper, goes to check. It’s only Hunk hauling in a stack of wood for the partitions in the new women’s restroom next door. Hunk grunts and nods and heads off to the kitchen for breakfast, which may or may not be his first one. He eats enough for three or four people, but then his wife and kids hardly eat anything at all, so it comes out even. Clara, Darren knows, is at the hospital, Billy Don is sleeping in after night guard duty, and Mrs. Edwards will be down at her garden by now. The only one he’s not sure about is Ben, but he’s not likely to come to the office unless Clara is here. So, unless Billy Don staggers over early, he should have the place to himself for another hour at least for this urgent task. Which is his alone. The Prophet’s final resting place has been dug. The Fourth this year is on a Saturday; Darren has scheduled the graveside ceremony on the Mount the day after. He is not sure exactly what will happen but he must know everything he can know before then. Ben is less involved since he got back. Darker in mood. God has been a little slow to act, he has said on these secret recordings. Clara said he mustn’t talk that way, but she also seems full of doubt. Maybe those who opposed the temple were right, she allows at one point on the tapes. And now these thoughts that he’s just been listening to from a week ago about abandoning her mission here. Darren, sitting in the office, door closed and locked, ponders this waning conviction, which may be part of a larger scheme of things. It’s almost as though what happened to their daughter was ordained so as to weaken the present church leaders’ resolve, or to expose their hidden weakness, make them more vulnerable to the rise of new, more intransigent leadership strong enough for the end times. Clara and Ben have been brilliant at getting the message out, creating a large movement, playing their part as Ely Collins in his martyrdom played his, but now a new phase has begun, and maybe — Jesus himself had no patience with family sentimentality — they’re not up to it. Perhaps Abner Baxter should attend the ceremonial burial of the Prophet. It might be useful for him to hear these tapes. Darren punches the play button, leans his ear into the speakers, keeping the volume low.