The Diviners (50 page)

Rosa gives a moan at the content of the exchange, and she whispers the words “dog waste initiative” to herself in bed, hoping that she can put aside these phrases, that the night might swallow her into its river of forgetfulness. But just as she’s imagining the possibility of sleep, notwithstanding voices, the obese woman, whose somnolent form has uttered no word since first it was installed in bed, speaks out: “You can tell me.”

“Tell you
what?
” Rosa asks.

“What’s bothering you.”

“I don’t need to . . . This certainly isn’t . . . My being stuck in here with no freedom . . . of movement . . . and the medication is making . . . it’s making my foot twitch.”

“Tell them.”

“Who?”

The obese woman rolls over so that her massive form is facing Rosa’s bed, and Rosa is almost certain that she can make out the glimmering beacons of her tiny eyes.

“You’ve been here for a week. They can’t hold you unless you’re a danger to yourself. So you tell them that you aren’t suffering with whatever you’re suffering with. Then they have to release you, because you are not a danger to yourself.”

“What about —”

“There’s an insurance angle, too. Insurance doesn’t want to cover rehabilitation. Halfway houses, everybody knows. Even the doctors don’t believe in them. Really, they just want to send you home.”

“I’m as fit as —”

“They’ll hold you if you mention hearing things or seeing bugs.”

“I don’t see any —”

Rosa glances at the clock on the table between them. After three, and she’s no closer to sleeping than two hours ago. She doesn’t know why she tells the obese woman about the telephone calls, which she feels she should conceal, but she does.

“What kind of telephone calls?”

“I can listen in.”

“People are saying things about you?”

“Nobody says anything about me. . . . I’m an old woman. But I can listen.”

“You can hear these conversations and not even one of them is about you?”

“Wait,” Rosa says —

“The darndest thing I ever heard,” the obese woman says. The obese woman has been in bed a week, having been lifted into bed and then occasionally turned by a team of four men; the obese woman is addicted to some incredibly powerful opiate, because of her aching knees and her stress-fractured feet; she’d been camped in front of the television for another week, looking forward to another episode of
American Spy
or whatever her program was, swallowing down the pills, in the chiaroscuroof narcosis, trying to decide whether or not the Clapper would really be a good thing to have in the living room.

“Wait,” Rosa says. The static overcomes her. The crackle of the cellular telephone, as though the calls are not transmitting properly, as though the service is given to interruptions. Every third syllable is impossible to make out, the voices beginning to tell her the things she’s not meant to hear. This one is coming from Washington, and she doesn’t know if she can stand it if she has to listen to a lot of people talking about things having to do with Washington. “Got to get our people down there, get them down there in force; we need people, we need placards, and we’re going to have to start paying people to do what we need them to do,
now,
which is that we need them on the ground there, because we need to make disbursements, get some of the young people working on the campaign, and we have to start paying these people to get on the planes right now. Hell, we have to start booking the seats, and we have to get them down there and we have to have them observing, we have to have them on the ground, wherever people are counting votes. Because we can’t have them redoing what has already been done, so we need to start spending the money.” Like the voice is not even having a conversation with another person but just rehearsing a conversation that will take place at some future moment. The words are so close in her head that they are louder than any other sound. Sometimes it’s as if they are louder than even the things she sees, and she wants to swat away the voices. She’s not even sure if she can see anything because the calls are so loud. Should be some kind of volume control.

“What’s happening?” the obese woman is saying.

“Somebody’s talking about the election.”

“Everybody is talking about that.”

“What do you mean?”

How could she have overlooked the possibility before? Suddenly, it’s possible that the obese woman herself has something to do with the telephone calls. Maybe she is some kind of dispatcher or a router, some kind of personnel manager of the people talking. “Do you have something to do with it?”

“I haven’t voted in twenty-five years.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“What?”

“About the election?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

Everything that’s happening is happening below the threshold of the visible. The same outside. The people who voted, they don’t count, because it’s happening below the surface. Everything she sees, the city out the window, the cars, the parks, the skyscrapers. Somewhere even farther down, underneath the lowest part of the subway system, there’s another layer, where the decisions are made. It’s like two hundred people, and their sons and daughters go to parties together, and they meet on Friday nights down in the bunker and they play cards and they decide who gets what country. This one gets to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Kazakhstan. That’s what the Friday-night card players say, and they divide up their winnings, and they divide up their businesses, and they give one another a pat on the back. Some people get to see these things, some people are special and they can see below the layers, and these people are gifted.

“I think you need to be medicated,” the obese woman says.

“I am medicated.”

The obese woman will not discuss it further. As precipitously as she began talking, she has stopped. Conversation is a brief eruption in the expanse of silence. And in the midst of considering ideas about silence and conversation, Rosa hears someone pounding on the door, announcing that breakfast is going to be over if she doesn’t get up. Rosa treads quietly past the massive bulk of the obese woman, dons her robe and her paper slippers, and shuffles out, squinting, into daylight.

More bodies wobbling ahead of her. Down toward the dining hall. The light is a disinfectant of particulate material that has been sprayed liberally to cover the stench of poisonous darkness. Breakfast is the same dispiriting meal she’s had every morning here, and she can eat none of it. The tray comes and goes. After which, the consulting physician ambles in and asks if he can have a word with her. Rosa nods.

“Right, good. Well, uh, I’ll . . . We’re wondering if you happened to notice anything unusual last night, with your, uh, with your roommate.”

“Unusual?” She begins to hear a buzzing in her ears, and her eyes dart across the field of the room, as if stray sounds might be coming from anywhere, and she tries to fix on a possible origin, as if by alighting on a cause, she could relax a little into the singularity of her condition.

Rosa tries to shout, “I didn’t hear anything!”

“Anything at all? Because we have, uh . . . Well, the problem is that she has . . .”

He doesn’t know how to put it, what will soon become the problem of the entire ward. But she can tell. The obese woman has expired; she has gone over. It’s true. There’s a troika of orderlies, and they have managed to heft the obese woman onto a gurney, and they are wheeling her out of the ward just the way she came in, and a cluster of the detoxifying is there to watch, gathered by the nurse’s station. The large shape goes out with the sheet drawn up over its head. The obese woman never even got to have a name. No one visited her, and no one called for her, and now she is going off for disposal.

“We’re going to have a meeting to discuss it in a few minutes, so that anyone who has any feelings on the subject will have an opportunity to share his or her feelings. It’s important in times like this for the community to gather. There will be grief counseling. If you need it.”

“I’ll tell you what I need,” Rosa Meandro says to the doctor. “To get out of . . . I don’t want to go out of here like she did. . . . I have served my seven days; it’s time for me to go. I am not a danger to anybody.”

“We can discuss that later.”

“I’d like to discuss it now.”

The issue, technically, is that she has to be released
to
someone, the doctor says grudgingly, and this person will have to meet with the social worker, go through an outtake process, and so forth. But Rosa doesn’t want to be released to her daughter. Vanessa will not agree to the release, and Rosa doesn’t want to be confined in her apartment, telephone conversations or not, because confinement makes her problems worse. She doesn’t have to put up with it anymore, she feels stronger, and if they won’t let her go, she’ll bribe her way out, she’ll go out for a candy bar and then she’ll pay the elevator operator, and then she’ll be on the ground floor before anyone knows what has happened. She’ll be gone. But just as she thinks this, just as she should be explaining to the doctor about how important it is for her to be released, she begins to listen in on a stray telephone conversation. “You don’t understand, the thing is he was on the phone with her at the time that she was hit, he was actually talking to her from his studio, it’s the most beautiful —” Giving way immediately to some strategic planning conversation about gross volumes of doughnuts, interrupted by Vanessa calling from somewhere to check up on the miniseries, bothering some man and then another, also about the miniseries, “We’re going to do it, we’re going to get it
done,
and we’re going to get it
done
because no one else is doing anything like this, and I want you to consider this a green light, and I want you to pick whichever version of the story you think is the best one, and I want you to get the budgets together, and I want you to bring them in here where I can see them by first thing tomorrow morning, and that’s the last I want to hear about it,” then the prospects for a long winter with much precipitation, and a conversation about the fastest route from Albany to Providence, “Just shoot on over on I-Eighty-four,” and in the midst of this the doctor asking her something, but she can’t really understand, except that suddenly she
is
curious. Why don’t any of the conversations mention her? The obese woman should never have brought it up! Even her daughter’s conversations never mention her! The conversations are about market share, or they are about venture capital, or they are about how the campaign needs to protect its investment by sending operatives down to Florida, it needs to get the public relations initiatives on its side; none of these conversations mentions Rosa, as if she’s not even here anymore.

Rosa says, “Call my daughter; you can release me to my daughter. Have the . . . someone can call my . . . you can release me to my daughter.” But the doctor is retreating to the dayroom. By the time Rosa fathoms what has been said to her, he is underneath the television set, rubbing his hands together nervously, and now Rosa is shuffling toward the dayroom. She is listening to the radiator and wondering if the radiator is actually making the noise that it seems to be making, the sound of someone strangling. The ward is talking excitedly about how wonderful the obese woman was, even though nobody actually interacted with the obese woman because she never came out of the room even once.

In the afternoon, her daughter is meant to come and collect her. Rosa is wearing the clothes she was wearing when she was admitted, and she is frail, and yet she is filled with a grandiose hope. She has come to have a purpose. She has survived this reversal and she is repaired, more or less, and the sunset over the western expanse of Brooklyn, out the hospital windows, is magnificent, and the beauty of the sunset on Thursday is a metaphor for her indomitability, no matter if she’s going to have to return on an outpatient basis so that they can monitor the blood levels of the medication that makes her mouth so dry she can barely peel her lips apart to complain. She is special, in her way, because she has been chosen to hear conversations, and if she is to hear the conversations on the outside, then she will be special there, too, because she knows things that no one else knows, and this makes her worthy and important. The inner workings of politics and culture and conspiracy are revealed to her and her alone.

At
4:30
, Rosa asks the nurse, since she’s standing in her street clothes (overnight bag at her feet) by the door marked Exit, if she can just go down the hall to get herself a nice candy bar, a little snack. The nurse has two calls on hold, as well as, in front of her, a snaggle-toothed man in his underwear demanding special treatment in Cantonese, and she can’t be bothered to think twice about Rosa and the candy bar. Maybe if she were thinking, this nurse would think about why Rosa needs to take her overnight bag to go to the candy machine down the hall, but it doesn’t cross her mind, and by the time it does, Rosa is already on the elevator. By the time they check the elevator, Rosa is already on the street. By the time they check out the front of the hospital, she’s past the chain bookstore, heading for the liquor store.

It’s important to choose a liquor store that is different from the last you visited. This is known as freedom of choice. When was the last time you went to the liquor store? Which liquor store were you going to? How is that liquor store laid out? Were you just a couple days away from being incarcerated in the detoxification ward? Then you must certainly go to a different liquor store because your patronage at various establishments ensures that there will be competition among package store businesses in your area, as it also ensures that you do not get personally close to any of the owners of these businesses. No choice but to go farther over, onto Sixth Avenue, where Rosa hopes she can find a store where she has not been lately. This she does, in a state of apprehension.

It’s rush hour, and the weather seems sharply colder than when she was incarcerated, and she might feel bad about her daughter, who will be at the hospital any minute now and who will be wondering why her mother is not in the hospital, and the hospital employees will be sheepishly searching the premises, but Rosa cannot worry about this now because she has a mission, and the first part of the mission is the liquor store, and when she reaches it—there are the usual warped linoleum floors and the reek of fresh industrial detergent—she is overwhelmed with hopefulness. The liquor store is owned and operated by Spanish speakers. She selects a pint of cheap rye whiskey and she asks the owner-operator if he will dust off the bottle, and this he does, when at last he understands, making use of a handy feather duster he keeps behind the register.