American Innovations: Stories (16 page)

“You write about medicine?”

“No, no, I just write e-mails,” Q said. “I’m not a writer. But I was married to J’s father—that’s how I’m connected to J. J says I write very good e-mails.”

“I woke up with my neck sore like that once,” another science fiction writer said. In addition to writing, he was in a band that had a hit song based on
Beowulf
. “I didn’t go to the hospital, though. I just took ibuprofen.”

“But you
could
have gone to the hospital,” Q said. “Because you all have insurance in England. The whole country is insured.”

Now J was worried that Q didn’t have health insurance; that was how her secrets usually manifested, like a tuba sound straying into a pop song. J intervened. “It wasn’t just painful to move his neck. I think he really couldn’t move it,” she argued, as if Q were beleaguered, when in fact she seemed aglow. Also, J was just guessing at these details; she didn’t know who or what Q was talking about.

“They have names like C2, C3,” Q was explaining. “One of those Cs—he was missing it entirely.”

“It had eroded away?” M asked.

“No, they just didn’t know where it had gone,” Q said. “I think maybe it was never there. I visited him after he had the surgery,” Q went on. “They didn’t remove the tumor because it was in a bad place for removing it, but they did give him an extra C made out of concrete—”

“I doubt it was concrete—”

“When I left to come down here, he was still in the hospital because he was afraid to go home until he had the results back from the biopsy. But I think he’ll be fine. They scanned the rest of his body and found there were tumors in other places, too, which is a good sign—”

“That sounds like a bad sign,” the woman knowledgeable about birds said.

“It’s not a bad sign,” Q said definitively. “I have a friend who’s a doctor.” Now Q seemed not aglow; she began to speak more slowly. “She says that after a certain age, if we look at anyone’s body, there’s all sorts of things there. When there’s many things like that, it’s not a problem.”

“Incidentalomas,” M said. “That’s what you’re trying to say. That lots of things are just incidentalomas. I agree completely.”

“Has anyone seen that George Clooney movie that’s playing?” J said. She ate quickly. J and Q weren’t the very first to leave, but they were nearly the first, though they were detained near one of the tripping hazards as a very elderly and apparently blind man, dressed in an all-white suit and holding a cane, was being guided out by the greeters.

As he was passing, J asked, “Q, is there something medical going on with you?”

“I’m livelier than you are,” Q said. “I could stay another hour, easy.”

“I mean, do you have medical news?”

“You should be more cheerful,” Q said. “It would be good for your health. You know—that would be something good to write about. About how you take on a good mood in order to have good health. You do that for thirty days and track what happens. That’s something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don’t exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.”

*   *   *

The next day they were out the door by 8:19 a.m. There were almost no obligations; it wasn’t until the following afternoon that J was expected to give a brief talk—on Martian dystopias—and later have an also brief conversation. Her only other duty was to enjoy. And there was even a small stipend.

J and Q looked for somewhere to have breakfast. At the first café, omelets were $13.95, which seemed a little bit much. Not a lot much, but it just seemed unpleasant and like it would set expectations that the omelet really would be quite good, which surely it wouldn’t be. It was already hot outside. At the next place, the omelet was $16.95. They went back to the first spot, where a window seat was available.

“I feel skinny in this town,” Q said. “At least there’s that.”

It was true: although the festival participants were relatively fit, the locals were relatively not fit. And a bit flush in the face. Like alcoholics. Obviously they also had less money. One felt guilty noticing. Apparently the locals were called Bubbas. Why did everyone, even J and Q, feel superior to the Bubbas? It was terrible.

“And I think for a time, supposedly, this was a fashionable town,” J said. “Artists and gay people. Which are both groups that I think of as made up of mostly thin people. And maybe a few charismatically fat ones.”

“It’s never charismatic to be fat,” Q said.

“It can be, I think.”

“No, never,” Q said. “And there are no children here, either,” Q observed. “That’s the other weird thing.”

J of course had no children, not yet, anyhow. Neither did Q—no “natural” ones.

“It’s very weird,” Q said, “to not have children. People who never have children are always still children, which, if you ask me, becomes disgusting. Even though children, of course, are sweet. I think the people who live here—I think they must have come here to run away from other things.”

J had of late turned over in her mind the idea of having a baby that Q might move in to help raise; maybe Q needed a place to stay? “How’s your friend Morris doing these days?” J asked. “I heard he was in the ICU.”

“I think he’s better,” Q said. “To be honest, I didn’t like visiting him in the hospital. I really thought he was dead. It was unpleasant.”

“Who’s taking care of his place while he’s in the hospital?”

“Maybe his children? Though they’re very selfish. Morris said over three hundred people visited him while he was in the hospital. That’s because of his activity with the Toastmasters Club. It’s really about being friendly and taking care of other people by cheering them up.”

The omelet was not that good, though it wasn’t bad. There was a newspaper.

“It says here that Gene Hackman was hit by a truck,” J said. “He lives here. He was on his bicycle, and he was hit. Not very far from here at all.”

“Is he OK?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“Is he old?”

“It says eighty-one.”

“These days that’s young. I bet he’ll turn out to be fine.”

Why would he be fine? J thought. It was a truck. He was eighty-one. The physics was not promising.

*   *   *

Twenty-four hours then passed in an extraordinarily slow blink. It was too hot to read or think or get hungry, and it wasn’t even that hot. One could walk around, but there wasn’t much territory to cover. The local graveyard was probably the prettiest thing in town. The graves were aboveground because the ground wasn’t really ground; it was hard coral that could not be dug up. The graveyard didn’t really look all that much like a graveyard; it was more like an ambitious papier-mâché project that schoolchildren had put together. Except that one saw no children. One saw lots of margarita bars. There was a party for a ninety-five-year-old art collector—maybe the blind man in white?—who owned many things in town, but J and Q slept through it. Finally it was the next afternoon, and J did an unusually bad job with her minimal obligations.

“You should have just told some jokes or something. Everyone likes to laugh,” Q said. “We all need a little more laughter in our lives.”

“I failed,” J said.

“Sometimes failing is what’s needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It’s terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins. Like Morris—if it weren’t for the Toastmasters, Morris would be in his coffin.”

*   *   *

That evening there was a double birthday celebration for two people named Norm. The Norms! Turning seventy-five and eighty-five. J and Q didn’t sleep through the party; they rode rented bicycles over to it. There were many loud-print shirts, and lots of alcohol. A woman with thick, long gray hair held back by a headband was wearing a high-waisted bright yellow skirt and platform sandals. Among the snacks were bright yellow peppers. The party was mostly outdoors, on a spacious deck between the main house and a guesthouse. Gentle lighting illuminated a small swimming pool. A little baobab tree grew through a hole in the deck. What might have been an anti-mosquito device had black light properties, or, at least, there was a pale blue Gatorade sort of drink that glowed in its aura, like new sneakers in a haunted house.

J found herself in conversation with a woman whose mouth dragged left, perhaps from a stroke, or maybe it was just a thing. The woman was a host, it turned out. It was her house; one of the Norms was her husband—her husband who was younger than her. The other Norm was staying in host Norm’s guesthouse with his young lover, although apparently his young lover was, just for this week, staying elsewhere for half the time, because
his
even younger lover, “the chestnut,” a graduate student in French literature, was in town, visiting. Visiting all of them. J realized that the host was the woman who had written a book called
Real Humans
, which J had for years been pretending to have read; it was a seminal nine-hundred-plus page post-apocalyptic book that imagined another way to live decently, ethically. On an island that, it was speculated, was modeled on Tasmania; there were creatures like wallabies there. J commented on how nice the guesthouse looked.

“Yes, we built that so our kids can stay there when they visit us. With their kids.”

“That sounds smart,” J said.

“Do you have kids?” the author of
Real Humans
asked.

“I don’t,” J said.

She looked J over. “Well, one day you will,” she said. “What you’ll find out then is that you don’t like to cook breakfast for them. People are weird with their breakfasts. They have very particular demands, and you’ll find that dealing with them can be very annoying.”

“I can imagine,” J said.

“You know what’s strange?” the woman asked.

“OK. What’s strange?” J wondered where Q was.

“You’re going to go on living,” she said. “And I’m not going to go on living. I might go on for a while. I’m eighty-seven. But you’re going to continue into a future that I’m never going to see and that I can’t even imagine. I mean, this cocktail party is just like one my parents might have thrown fifty years ago. But in other ways it’s a completely different world. I hear people on their cell phones saying, ‘Yes, I’m on the bus now. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ Or, ‘I’m in the cereal aisle now.’ Well, that’s just so strange to me. It’s like people can’t be alone. I don’t find that normal. Do you find that normal? Do you do that tweeting? Do you understand those things? I know that I can’t follow. So I just don’t. But you’re just going forward into the future. You’ll go forward and forward, into it. And I won’t.”

“I’m here with my mom,” J said. “I better go check in with my mom.” J couldn’t recall ever having used that phrase out loud. It sounded almost like science fiction.

She couldn’t find her!

Then she found her.

Q was in conversation with M. And also with the lover of the other Norm, the guesthouse Norm. And also with a man who had lived for a long time on a boat. The man had lived on the boat when real estate in Key West was too expensive, he was explaining, but now he was back on the island again. Which had he liked more? Well, he liked both. Then the other Norm’s lover was explaining that sure, Norm didn’t like to sleep alone when “the chestnut” was in town. Especially since his recent health scare. But one couldn’t be at the sugar teat all the time, the lover was of the opinion. The other Norm was in sight, looking pretty happy, talking to some people near a fountain. The other Norm was a painter and a language poet, known to have been living in relative health and joy, and with numerous lovers, while HIV
+
, for decades.

J did feel a little spooked by the openness of it all.

It had to be how it had to be, the lover was saying. And it helped keep things really hot—there was that, too. The conversation went back to boats.

Someone startled J with a tap on the shoulder.

“Did you find your mom?” It was the
Real Humans
woman.

J blushed.

“Look,” the woman said. “I can see you’re disgusted by us.”

“What?” J said.

“I know about young people. They’re very conservative and very judgmental.” She had now opened up her speech to the whole group, but she was still clearly addressing J. “You think we’re all decayed and dying, which we are, of course, but you’re dying every day, too. You’ll just keep dying and dying. I know from my own children.” She took a sip from her little blue drink. “I mean, look at you. Quiet as a superior little mouse.”

“Let me get you some water,” M said to the woman.

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t need water. I’m just saying something about this young woman. She’s had her little bit of success. She’s thinking to herself, I’m not going to make the mistakes these people made. I’m going to keep my head down and work and not hurt anyone’s feelings too much and not get hurt myself. She thinks she’s solved it all with her preemptive gloominess and her inoffensiveness.”

“You should enjoy your party,” the man who had lived on a boat said.

“There’s a subspecies of these young people,” the woman was saying. “They’re very careful. The young women especially; they’re the worst—”

“You’re so right,” Q said. She took hold of Real Humans’s arm. “They are the worst. This one’s probably innocent enough, though.”

“She’s a wily mouse, you don’t know. Do you have children?” she now asked Q. “They’re very judgmental. If you have children, you know.”

“This one’s kind of my daughter.”

She gave Q the once-over. “Yes, they’re all kind of our daughters, aren’t they?”

“I wouldn’t take any of this too seriously,” Norm’s lover said to J. “She’s been starting arguments at parties for thirty years. Haven’t you?”

“For fifty years,” Real Humans said.

“Did you hear about Gene Hackman?” Q asked.

“He doesn’t really live here,” Real Humans said. “He lives one island over. I heard he’s doing just fine.”