Slow Funeral Read online

  “Hi, you asked me to call?” she said, putting the statement in question tones and feeling silly for doing so.

  “Maude? You sound different.”

  “Not drunk,” Maude said.

  He laughed, then asked, “Do you want to meet me for dinner?”

  “Sure,” she said. Inertia could keep her in Berkeley. She was curious to see how the social worker would react to her confession. Inertia delays decisions in cases of real ambivalence. And Douglas had been eager and grateful.

  “Have you been living in that commune long?”

  “Karmachila? A year,” Maude said, her good opinion of him evaporating. She hated being an exotic to men. A long, cool body like hers, with big eyes close to thyroid-deformed and a high-bridged Anglo nose ready to hook witchwise in old age, should have a vagina immune to chlamydia and yeast infections, should burst with secret passions to match the eyes and belie the small tits. I don’t like screwing when I’m bleeding; she thought about telling him, but didn’t, instead waiting for his next words.

  “I could cook you dinner at my place,” Doug said, meaning, perhaps, I really want to get laid again but sober.

  “You don’t know much about me,” Maude said, meaning, you don’t know I’ve been declared psychotic. She realized she listened to him the way the social worker listened to her, allegorically, antagonistically.

  “I miss who I used to be, when I spent months on the road, had Beat dreams. You had the guts to stick with it.”

  “That’s what I am,” Maude said, “a person who was freeze-dried in 1973.”

  “The kids are bringing back the sixties,” Douglas said.

  “Where’s your house?” Maude asked.

  He gave her an address in the hills. Maude hoped her left Ferragamo would be okay by then.

  Douglas’s front door was a puzzle—not a literal one but an ornate bas-relief sculpture in wood and glass that at first looked technical rather than artistic. Maude looked at it and how it almost fought the 1940s brick house with the asymetrical entrance porch roof that swept to the ground on the outside. She rang Douglas’s bell and heard something whir. If he has a camera over the door, it’s quite hidden.

  “I’m an engineer, hope you don’t mind,” Douglas said as he opened the door. The interior visible behind him made Maude wish for a technical education. The walls were real plaster, the doors were solid wood with brass hardware. But everything was slightly skewed to match the angled abstractions and crystal of the front door.

  She felt a slight breeze as she crossed the threshold. Douglas said, “It’s an air curtain. Keeps the bugs out.”

  “You’re a technical wizard, then,” Maude said, wondering if she could get him to follow her back to Bracken County. He could work technology against the magic.

  “You don’t hate engineers? I thought everyone in Berkeley who wasn’t one hated us.”

  “I’m Southern,” she said. “In the mountains, half of us are nostalgic for the future.” She could see her father hadn’t been this kind of engineer.

  “Oh. What brought you to Berkeley?”

  “I was fleeing the ones who are nostalgic for owning people.” Magic, she added to herself, but she’d never admit that to him. She also wished she hadn’t been so quick to screw him. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression, the way we met. I’ll say that I don’t usually meet men that way if you’d feel better.”

  Douglas lowered his head and said, “You want to see my kitchen?”

  “Sure.”

  As he led her, he said, “So, what should I say? You seemed so weird at the bar, claiming you really knew the difference between real magic and hippie wishful thinking. Now you’ve come to dinner in a suit and scruffy Ferragamos, your hair in a twist that looks almost like a Klein bottle.”

  “I inherited the shoes. And one of my crazier housemates tried to flush the left one down a toilet I suppose she felt it symbolized decadence.”

  He laughed. They were in the kitchen, an engineer’s dream of microwaves, power stirrers adapted from lab equipment, and ultrasonic cleaners. All the mundane kitchen equipment hung from hooks over the two stoves: pots, woks, forks, spatulas.

  A man’s kitchen, Maude thought. A woman would have put everything up in the black lacquered cabinets that ran in a U around the room. She opened one—empty.

  “It’s set up like a true workspace,” Douglas said.

  “I see.” Maude opened another cabinet and saw cans and jars of staples. So he did hide mundane food. “So what do you want for dinner? Shall I cook for you?”

  “You’re so different tonight.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Maude said. She sounded mean to herself and wondered if he’d take offense. He’d taken the two-days-younger Maude to bed. Perhaps he preferred her? “I’m sorry if you were expecting some New Ager who’d freak at your kitchen, think you were an ecological disaster before you left the house to design vast systems to mechanize away what little magic was left in the world.”

  “I do wonder about what I’m doing some days.”

  “So do I. I recycle, I’m on welfare which cuts into the defense budget and ecologically incorrect spending of the middle classes, I… Maybe we could trade?”

  “And you live in a house that’s into magic research. That’s what your roommate told me.” Douglas went to the glass-fronted refrigerator and took out some large shrimp. The shrimp were uncleaned, with the heads still on. They looked unspeakably expensive and very fresh. Maude’s mouth exuded saliva.

  “You’re not allergic to iodine, are you?”

  “Oh, no. I love shrimp.”

  “Prawns. I thought I’d grill them. I’ve got some great bread from this little bakery.” He began cleaning the prawns.

  Maude wondered if they’d been cultured in some high-tech filtered system, if they were freshwater prawns. She’d read about Hawaiian prawn culture. An engineer’s meat, if they are. “I could make the salad.”

  “Sure.”

  She washed her hands and looked through the glass refrigerator doors. “Try the garden,” he said. “In back.”

  He had raised beds with imported soil over Berkeley’s black adobe. Maude pulled out radicchio and some red leaf lettuce, then some radishes and parsley. She came back and saw the salad spinner sitting on the counter.

  “It’s not battery operated?” she asked as she took the greens and salad spinner to the sink. Douglas shook his head and turned the prawns over a gas grill built into one of the stove tops.

  Maude whirled the salad dry and found balsamic vinegar for the dressing.

  “Oh, on welfare and you know what that is?” Douglas said.

  “Remember, I inherited Ferragamos.”

  “Remittance woman?”

  “Are you trying to hurt my feelings?”

  “No. Why are you on welfare?”

  “Because I’m crazy. I believe witches are trying to recruit me and technological cities keep me safe. I’m half attracted to the witches, only my father, who was a technical man, not a witch, wanted me to keep out of my mother’s people’s business.”

  “I hope I don’t remind you of your father.” He turned off the gas. Maude felt alienated, distanced from him as he slid the steel skewers from the prawns. “Why would Berkeley keep you safe?” he asked after he snipped dill over the prawns. “People hate engineers here.”

  “People hate what they depend on but can’t control.”

  “I suppose I’m guilty of that. You really believe in witches?”

  “That’s what I said to get declared crazy.”

  “So, you’re a thief, really. A scam artist.”

  Maude thought, he’s found a way to explain me away. “Yes, I suppose I am. I confessed yesterday in group.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Do you think you’re that much of a psychological catalyst?” Maude smiled.

  “I’m sorry I left before you woke up, but I had to get to work.”

  “I wish… never mind. I’m sorry.
” She found the virgin olive oil to go with the balsamic vinegar and mixed a dressing in a cruet.

  “Couldn’t your family help you?” They sat at the table. Maude could sense that he’d optioned the concept that she might be crazy, would buy if she couldn’t come up with a better explanation. Good liberal, he wants to help.

  “They want me to come home.” Maude knew if he believed in magic, he’d defend it. People in Berkeley who believed in magic never hated it.

  “Why don’t you?”

  Maude shrugged and ate one of the prawns. It was fabulous. She felt the magic pick at her. Douglas looked concerned.

  “Want to come with me for a visit?” He leaned away from her as if she’d been too fast, vulgar. Maude knew she seemed a touch desperate. “Maybe after we get to know each other better.”

  “You need to get off welfare. You’re not crazy.”

  “You’re trained in psychology?”

  “It’s obvious when someone is mad enough for welfare. You’d make me very uncomfortable if you were that insane.”

  “Instead of just a little uncomfortable?”

  “And if you were insane, you wouldn’t be so able to gauge the impact of what you say on me.”

  “I’m an impact statement, all right.”

  “Don’t try to sound nutty.”

  Maude ate her salad and finished off another prawn. “I’d be embarrassed to go back now with nothing. My father wanted to prove he could fight the powerful people, Bracken’s ruling class, and win, make one of them an honest woman. My grandmother, she was active with the powers that be when she was younger, but…”

  Douglas leaned back from the table and looked at her. “Perhaps we should forget about last night and make this the first date.”

  Maybe the next time should be the first date. Maude said, “I love your door. An engineer with esthetic sense, I’m impressed.”

  “I play the guitar, too.”

  “I used to play mandolin, but the strings bit my fingers.” A metaphor, not a Bracken County reality, but Maude visualized strings with tiny mouths biting blood out of her fingertips after she said it. Would Bracken County mandolins make it real if she took up a mandolin again?

  Douglas pulled out his guitar and began playing “Saray Allen.” Maude felt the ballad shaping and taking a life, but not here in Berkeley protected by microchips.

  “Do you know ‘Lord Weary’s Castle’?” she asked when he finished.

  “I know of it,” he said. “The professors tried to figure out who wrote the ballads. It’s obvious that some of the ballad writers were social critics.”

  “Bards, after sundry punishments, could be hanged in sixteenth-century Scotland,” Maude said. “That’s the best reason I could think of for not putting your name on your work. I’ve seen people whose lives seemed modeled after ballads.”

  “Maybe the ballads were mimetic?”

  “You don’t hang mere journalists.”

  He looked at her as though he might decide that she was crazy. “You’re obsessed by where you’re from, half of you redneck, half antebellum aristocrat. I’ve met other Southerners who had the same problem.”

  “I have a hate-love relationship with the place,” she said, “but it’s not precisely the South. Nor precisely the mountains. It’s the interzone.” Between magic and reality, she thought.

  “And because you slept with your lover and someone saw you leave the motel or his house at five A.M., that made you the town slut.”

  Maude said, “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “A black friend?”

  Maude shook her head. He seemed less interested after she rejected his romantic story about her early sex life. “I didn’t want to get involved in a family quarrel. But now, I’ve got to go back for a funeral.” Is this mundane enough? “Why are you, an engineer, so interested in magic?”

  “I sense the gestalt of the problem, then work out in terms I can transmit to others what I already know. I thought perhaps magic used such a sense in an exaggerated way. I kinda hoped it might be more real than that, but if all I got was more intuition, I’d be pleased. It’s mostly metaphors, your ‘powers-that-be,’ that sort of thing.”

  “But what really intrigues you is Aleister Crowley’s sex magic.”

  “I read up on that because someone like me was involved in it. I certainly can get laid without magic.”

  Maude didn’t reply but began picking up the plates. After she’d loaded the dishwasher, Douglas asked, “I’m sorry. Do you do anything physical besides sex?”

  Maude wondered if he wanted her to weed his garden, perhaps. “Right, we need to share other interests besides magical sex. I like to walk. Hike.”

  “Backpacking?”

  “I just have a sleeping bag and pack. I can’t afford the rest of the equipment.” Doug looked down at her Ferragamos. She said, “I didn’t inherit a tent.”

  “You’re obviously not happy with the way your life is going. Maybe you need to get away from Berkeley to be able to consider what you’re going to do next. I’d like to take you camping next weekend.”

  She’d turned out too weird or too reasonably neurotic for his cock tonight. Maude felt rejected, but considering how stupid she’d been to want him to come with her back to Virginia, she was lucky she’d see him again. She nodded.

  He kissed her gently, and said, “I’ll pick you up at your house about nine. Can you get up that early?”

  “Even welfare people have appointments and alarm clocks.”

  “Don’t categorize yourself.”

  She leaned against him at the door, but he didn’t kiss her again. She said, “Language is categories.”

  “Don’t make the map smaller than the territory.”

  “Maps always are.” Maude remembered a map in Bracken County that a person entered as though it were a world. That map was a malignant maze, larger than its surface. She could visualize it now, a brown thing that looked like it could have been drawn with squid ink on a split sheepskin, framed in a holly and ebony frame, a map of Bracken County perhaps, nothing quite right, every feature somewhat familiar. The witches donated it to Kobold School. The nonwitches hung it so high only the boldest children got trapped. The witches didn’t mind. Witch children could escape.

  One summer, when she was back visiting, she heard a child crying from the map. “It only traps fools who won’t listen to warnings,” her grandmother told her.

  Maude, at eight, couldn’t verbalize why she thought it was unfair to hang such a map in the grade school.

  She came back from her memories to Doug’s voice saying, “Okay, we’re being rabidly metaphorical. Don’t limit yourself to a diagnostic category.”

  “I know I’m not schizophrenic. Except maybe my ambivalence. I guess I’d better get going. Thanks for dinner.” Douglas watched by his sculpture door until she got in the car. He went back in his house when she turned on her headlights.

  Maybe I’m wrong and the Bracken County rich fake their magic to keep other people from challenging them. I wish.

  2

  * * *

  GAME PLAYED WITH GREEN STONES

  Maude sold plasma on Thursdays. The regular clients at the plasma center tended to be street Maoists, people waiting for New York State to transfer their unemployment benefits, or kids sent over by the big cult house just off campus. This Thursday, Maude walked in and used the toilet. Under a revolutionary message, a cynic had written:

  IF WE CAN’T GET IT TOGETHER FOR

  CIGARETTES WITHOUT SELLING PLASMA,

  HOW CAN WE GET IT TOGETHER

  FOR A REVOLUTION?

  My sentiments precisely, Maude thought. She sometimes wondered if the plasma sales drained vitality from her, but the money lifted her millimeters from the very economic bottom. The money kept her emergency fund intact. It was beer money. Meeting strange men in bars money.

  The technician found Maude’s file and sat her down in the chair. “Left arm,” Maude said. The manager of the plasma
center sat in a chair across the room, selling himself his own plasma. Maude had quit wondering if he did this to reassure the donors or if he was weird about needles.

  The plasma center’s feel was something of a beauty shop, a conspiracy of denial. No poverty, we’re all students here, the technician’s finger seemed to imply as it moved the counterweight over so the bag would take a pint and no more. The technician watched her finger as though it was a familiar foreign thing that knew what it was doing better than she did.

  Maude lay back and closed her eyes. She planned to buy something to take camping with this money. Her eyes opened briefly when the technician took away the plastic bag filled with plasma and blood cells, then again when the woman returned with her red and white blood corpuscles in sterile saline.

  While the chilly fluid dripped back into Maude’s arm, she felt as though she’d surrendered to a machine vampire. What had seemed tolerable last week seemed utterly degrading today.

  For a couple of dollars more, would I rent my cunt? But then, didn’t she rent it for dinner already? Maude felt like a reanimated corpse as she walked on Telegraph Avenue, past panhandlers who claimed to be too medicated to sell their own plasma. What does Douglas want? She took a bus down to Mental Health.

  The other patients were hostile; the social worker didn’t refer at all to her confession on Monday, but rather said, as the session was breaking up, “Mary, I’d like to talk to you.”

  Maude stopped. The woman was looking at the needle hole in her arm. After the others had left, the social worker said, “You’re doing drugs.”

  “No.”

  “What’s that needle hole in your arm?”

  “One of my roommates is trying acupuncture.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m doing saline. It makes me feel like a corpse, cold saline infusions.” Maude hoped her lie was bizarre enough to seem a likely symptom.

  On the table behind the social worker’s chair, a Physician’s Desk Reference lay open to the entry on Prolixin, an injectable antipsychotic. The social worker said, “I’d like you to come to Inpatient for an evaluation. We’d like to try a new medication.”