If you are, then what am I, Fire said, and cackled.
Interesting how you keep switching between the pronouns we, us, and I.
Is it? I don’t think so. Fire paused, then, taking a shuddering breath, began again. About Selah, she killed herself — hanged herself, to be precise, from the branch of a bristlecone pine that grew on the edge of our property.
I’m sorry, Sunil said. That couldn’t have been easy for you at twelve.
It wasn’t.
Do you know why she did it?
We were downwinders, you know, downwind from the nuclear tests. She had leukemia, she was dying, so she gave us away and hanged herself.
Gave you away?
She gave us to Fred’s dad, Reverend Jacobs, and his freak show, the Lord’s Marvels.
Is that how you grew up? With a circus?
A sideshow, Doc, a sideshow. Not a circus. Yes, we grew up as freaks and hardcore downwinder nationalists. Sideshow or die, Fire said.
Why do you call yourselves freaks, Sunil asked.
It’s a badge of honor, Fire said. That’s what Reverend Jacobs gave us. Pride. You see, freaks are made, not born. Birth defects, unusual genetic formations, they make you less capable in this able-biased society, but they don’t make you a freak. Freakery you learn, you cultivate, you earn.
And what’s a downwinder nationalist, Sunil pressed.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Doc, Fire snapped. Look into it, do your own fucking work.
Your attitude is not very constructive right now, Sunil said.
Yeah, whatever, Dr. Phil, Fire said. We want a phone call. Don’t we get a phone call?
The telephone was invented to talk to the dead, Water said.
Sunil noted that Water’s tongue seemed to protrude a little from his mouth when Fire was speaking, but not when they were both silent. It was a small thing but one he’d noticed the day before at County. He didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all.
When you say the telephone was invented to speak to the dead, what do you mean, he asked Water.
Just that, Doc, Fire replied. That’s what Edison invented the telephone for.
When Thomas Edison died in 1941, Henry Ford captured his last breath in a bottle, Water said.
If you could have a phone call, who would you call, Sunil asked.
Fred, Water said.
Fred, Fire agreed.
What is Fred’s last name, Sunil asked.
Fred Jacobs, Fire said. So do we get our call, Doc?
The word “doctor” comes from the Latin doctori, meaning to teach, Water said.
Thank you, Water, Sunil said. Is there any way you can get your brother to speak to me, he asked Fire.
He is speaking to you, Fire said.
I see, Sunil said. Giving the chart to the nurse, he said, I’ve modified their medication, be careful with the dosage. And with that, he headed out the door.
What about our fucking phone call, Fire yelled.
Twenty-five
I miss my mother terribly, Sunil thought as the gondola sailed under the fake bridge. In truth, Dorothy had died many years — when her mind folded in on itself and opened along the crease — before her body gave up the struggle. It had been a lonely and difficult time for Sunil and he would most certainly not have made it without White Alice.
A drizzle of crumbs from a bag of chips that a fat Midwestern family were stuffing into their faces on the concrete arch above brought him back to the gondola and the chlorine smell of water and the blue sky that was so blue it couldn’t be real. He watched the family with a mixture of envy and disgust. To be part of a group so oblivious seemed attractive. The gondola turned a bend and his thoughts returned to his mother.
I miss my mother, he said aloud to the gondolier. Is that a childish thing to admit?
The gondolier shrugged.
Sunil was twenty-three when Dorothy died. He was far away in Europe, in Venice, that city she had loved but had never visited. Dorothy was locked up in the Soweto mental hospital for blacks. It was housed in the barracks of an abandoned mine workers’ camp. The barracks consisted of one long bungalow built to house five hundred men and sat in the middle of half an acre of dirt and bush scrub, with broken windows and walls that had not seen paint since it was built. The air of abandonment around it was real.
In Dorothy’s room, pictures of Venice cut out of magazines were pasted across the walls. Other than those colorful walls, the room was bare except for a bed and an altar. On the altar were a single candle, a small statue of the Jesus of the Sacred Heart, and a statue of Mary with a half-melted face, probably from being too close to the candle flame. The altar also held, in a glass jar, a coiled piece of string stained dirt-brown from dried blood. It took all of Sunil’s willpower not to look at the string — it represented everything that had driven his mother here.
On one visit to see Dorothy, Sunil brought a large detailed map of Venice stolen from the library. They spread it out on the floor and she touched each of the sites she loved: the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, which held Titan’s Assumption of the Virgin, a painting she loved because the model for the Virgin was a famous courtesan; the Piazza San Marco, with the dual columns crested by Saint Mark’s winged lion and Saint Theodore standing on a crocodile, tiles laid out like a flat labyrinth; the Doge’s Palace; the path of the Grand Canal; the Rialto Bridge; and even the brown patch that was the beach at the Lido. Omar Sharif used to holiday there, Dorothy said. Even then Sunil knew she would die in those barracks.
As soon as he left South Africa to study in Europe, Sunil went to Venice and crisscrossed the canals, touching walls, gazing at paintings in churches and galleries and museums, even approaching the statutes that terrified him but held such grace and awe for her. That was when the telegram had arrived announcing her death. He took a ferry to Isola di San Michele and wandered around the graves, watching a bulldozer push the headstones of funeral-plot debtors into a pile for trash against a far wall. Picking a spot by a tree, far away from the giant statue of the angel in the middle of the cemetery, he laid a single rose under it and said the Lord’s Prayer. On the ride back, he tore the telegram into many pieces and watched them flutter into the oily water. Then, and for a long time, he felt nothing more than an overwhelming sense of relief. Years went by before the grief arrived, the way it often does, unannounced, as quiet as the morning when you break down into your cup of coffee, crying.
After Dorothy died, Sunil couldn’t bring himself to return to Venice, the real one, but when he came to Las Vegas and discovered the Strip, he began to come to the Venetian. And there he would ride a gondola for hours lost in this private rosary, this ritual of faith and grief.
The ride has ended, sir, the gondolier said, interrupting Sunil’s thoughts. Do you want to go again?
Sunil had been around twelve times already in two hours.
No, thank you, he said, getting out.
He tipped the gondolier and walked into the hotel lobby. After checking in, he went up to the room to wait for Asia. She’d finally called back and agreed to meet him there. While Sunil waited, nursing a scotch from the minibar, he became aware how sad it was for a forty-four-year-old to have had only two serious relationships, both plagued by gulfs of impossibility. Asia’s arrival brought him back to the present, and with it an animal hunger.
Later, Sunil traced the tattoo on her shoulder. Trae Dah it said in cursive made from the winding stem of a rose. It took him back to the first night they’d spent together. He’d found her online, on Craigslist, and she came over in less than thirty minutes, like her ad promised. That night she’d worn a tank top and he’d noticed the tattoo on her shoulder.