Amy Falls Down (25 page)

“On what? Maxine, what are you—”

“Your assigned topic is ‘Whither Publishing—the Writer’s POV.’ Sorry about that. You’re on with Marzen and somebody else, I don’t know who, but believe me, you’ll be the icing.”

Despite her growing alarm, Amy laughed. “That’s the stupidest title I’ve ever heard,” she said.
Whither
was a silly word except when used by the ancient dead, like Malory. No one could use
whither
unselfconsciously.
Here I am using “whither.
” “You of course said no,” she said.

“Basically all you have to do,” said Maxine, “is riff on what you’ve been saying on the radio. The NPR rants are really strong, but you’ll probably also get asked about the Molloy massacre, which isn’t really on point, but remember, they’ll be drinking.”

“Are you talking,” Amy asked, her breath quickening, “about some kind of Skypy thing, with me on a giant screen? You know I don’t have the face for that. I have a radio face. I have a radio body. Tell them no.”

“There’s a business class ticket ready for you, both ways. They’re paying for everything.”

Amy was instantly light-headed, light-bodied, weightless. She didn’t feel safe in her chair. “Give me a second,” she said, navigating to her bed, falling into it like a rickety invalid. She closed her eyes against the spinning. She was as frightened by this physical reaction as she was by what Maxine was saying, and she had to tune her out to understand why. All she had to do was say no. She had been saying no her whole life, half the time to Maxine, who knew better than to even hint at Amy getting on an airplane. Why was she doing this now? “Business class what?”

“You know what,” said Maxine, sounding like the voice of God.

“No,” said Amy faintly.

“I tried to do Amtrak, babe. I’ve been online all morning and on the phone, trying to come up with a way to get you out here in two days, but it ain’t happening.”

“Two days??”

“I told you. You don’t listen. Day after tomorrow, nine o’clock. Well, you’re supposed to get there for dinner, but I already told them you might not make it.”

“Wait a damn minute.” Amy rallied, sitting up in bed, the blood beginning to return to her extremities. “Two days means I’m an afterthought, a last-minute sub. Toni Morrison backed out. Joyce Carol Oates has to wash her hair. They went through ninety names and finally got to mine. Well, tell them to stuff it.”

Maxine coughed and hacked for a solid minute. Anybody can cough. It’s not like a sneeze. Maybe there was nothing wrong with her lungs at all, and she was trying to wheeze Amy onto that plane. Amy waited her out. “Okay, I lied,” Maxine said. “I set this up two weeks ago. I just forgot about booking a train. I’m sorry.” More coughing.

“I don’t believe you,” Amy said, the tension between them suddenly thick, bringing memories of that morning in Boston where they parted ways over uneaten bagels and bitter old coffee. They were right back there again. Max was dying, Amy was turning to stone, and Maxine was about to throw down a napkin and tell her to call when she gave a shit. All Amy had to do was hang up. She listened to the silence and knew Maxine was listening too, and as it lengthened, it changed somehow, took on a perceptible quality, a color. She had read about people tasting sounds and hearing colors and dismissed synesthesia as a rare example of science bumbling out of its proper zone, but now the absence of sound, which had been a black smudge, was lightening into blue. Amy lay back and closed her eyes. “Maxine, what aren’t you telling me?”

Maxine lit a cigarette in response. Amy heard a metal lighter flick open, clang shut. Hearing, she could smell steel and lighter fluid and charred cotton wick.

“Is that the old Zippo?” asked Amy. “The Reddy Kilowatt Zippo?”

“You got a memory,” said Maxine.

“I miss Reddy Kilowatt. Whatever happened to him? The energy crunch, I suppose.” Reddy Kilowatt’s act was encouraging people to light up every room in the house and turn night into day. “At Colby we had a house mother we called Reddy Kilowatt behind her back, because—”

“It might as well be lung cancer,” said Maxine, “but it’s not. Pulmonary shitstorm. I’m not gonna die tomorrow, but I’ll probably miss the Mayan calendar deal.”

“Are you alone?” asked Amy. “Who’s going to help you out?”

“I’m all set,” said Maxine.

There was another long silence between them, paler blue. Alphonse clicked into the bedroom and, in a rare display of fellow feeling, stood next to the bed so that Amy could lay her hand on his great warm head.

“I really did forget about the train,” said Maxine. “I was going to set you up with a sleeper through Chicago, and then stuff happened. I messed up. And then this morning I tried to fix it, but I can’t. You’ll have to fly.”

“I know,” said Amy. What had frightened Amy from the start was that she knew she was going to do it.

Maxine said she’d email instructions about the plane and the hotel and they said good-bye.

Amy lay unmoving until night began to fall. She didn’t think about Maxine, sick and dying, and what that meant. She didn’t think about the plane, the speech, all those goddamn people, the cameras, the plane again. She didn’t think about her own mortality. There would be plenty of time to do all that on the plane. For a while she didn’t think of anything, and then, gradually, she began to puzzle over timelines.

If Maxine had set up the round table thing two weeks ago, then she had known about it since before Amy’s schlep to KYJ. This had to mean that her epic throwdown of Chaz Molloy had nothing to do with the invitation. If her blog comments were at all significant, then the KYJ interview probably increased awareness of her among the Whither people, but they already knew who she was.

Baby steps. That’s why Maxine forced her to go to LA. She had understood that in order to get Amy on a plane she first had to dislodge her from her chair, her house, her town. Having journeyed to that far-off radio station, Amy couldn’t tell herself that travel was out of the question, that she wasn’t that kind of writer, that kind of human being. And
of course
she had waited to spring the New York trip on Amy at the last minute. Amy didn’t have enough time before boarding to make herself crazy sick. Maxine had planned all of it, and what humbled Amy now was the realization that Maxine actually knew her. Perhaps she had known all her clients this well. Perhaps she knew Henrietta Mant like the back of her hand. Perhaps this was simply a business skill. Amy didn’t take it personally, but it moved her anyway.

*   *   *

At midnight, when the dishes were done, when she’d sent word to all student writers and Carla about her imminent departure—telling everyone when she’d be back, doing the grown-up thing, as though she believed she would survive the trip—she sat in her darkened parlor waiting for Alphonse to pound at the back door. He was barking out there in the yard, which he didn’t often do this late at night, and she might have to go get him in a minute. His bark was basso and, as barks go, easy on the ears, but still her neighbors needed their sleep.

Amy marveled at her own calm. When she was young, she had lived in the future: looking forward to some events her greatest happiness—the anticipation always more thrilling than the thing itself; dreading other events a full-time job. “How about right now?” Max would ask her. “Right now is excellent,” at which she would claim that of course she lived in the present, in the here and now, who the hell didn’t, she just wasn’t zen about it, and eventually she would pretend to concede his point, but she never understood it, or indeed how any sane adult could revel in the moment if there was something serious right around the corner. It was a preposterous notion, like setting up camp in the mouth of a bear cave, because “Right now, they’re hibernating.” But here she was, at peace, and in less than forty-eight hours she would be locked into a whining metal coffin, and she would just deal with it then. She was profoundly incurious about how ineptly she would do this. When she was young, she would have driven herself mad rehearsing.

His bark was getting louder, even deeper, outraged. Something was infuriating him and he was not about to let it go. Amy stood on the back steps and peered out onto the raised garden, where she could just make out his shape in the discreet light of a waxing crescent moon. He was standing his ground there, tossing something big into the air, grabbing it again after it landed with a thump, over and over, growling and barking continuously, berating it. Alphonse never killed things—he wasn’t bred to, and it wasn’t in his nature anyway, so the object couldn’t be an animal. When Amy got closer she could see it was the giant beef bone from Ralph’s. “What’s your problem?” she asked him. He threw down the bone and barked at it full-throated, rhythmically, his whole body shuddering with each bark. One bark per second; you could set your watch. Amy shined her flashlight on the bone. “Look,” she started to say, “it’s your own damn bone, for Pete’s sake,” and then she saw it was covered with tiny black grease ants, swirling about its surface from top to bottom in smoothly shifting patterns. It looked like they were trying to spell out a rude message. No wonder he was angry. Any other dog would have shrugged it off, but not Alphonse. Alphonse had the attention span of Boris Spassky, and he never forgave an insult.

Amy grabbed his collar and tugged him into the house. “I don’t blame you one bit,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll wash it off and leave it inside. Tomorrow I’ll still be here.” He muttered something under his breath and went to bed. What a wonderful dog he was. Barking at ants in the moonlight, and she allowed the thought, just for an instant, that this would someday be a memory. That all that remained of this stalwart, irascible creature would be this image, which would disappear when she died, along with whatever random memories of herself remained extant, and that she had no say in who remembered her, and that in no time at all, no one would. But right now he was immortal. Right now was excellent.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Storyteller

The next morning Maxine FedExed her a twenty-DVD Conquer-Your-Fear-of-Flying course, the running time of which was over one hundred hours. Since Amy would be airborne in thirty-six, she called Maxine to complain and was told that DVDs numbered 19 and 20 represented a crash course. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Amy asked.

“I hate it when you lose your sense of humor,” said Maxine.

“Well, then, stop sending me to my flaming violent death.”

“They have DVD players onboard. You can watch it while you fly.”

“And change my ticket to one-way,” said Amy. “I’m taking the train back.”

“What makes you think I bought a round-trip ticket? You’re booked on Amtrak sleepers from Penn Station to LA.”

Amy hung up rather than thank Maxine for her thoughtfulness. She really couldn’t manage that on the day before her flight. She spent the rest of the day cleaning her house and throwing away most of her clothes, outfits she hadn’t worn for years and didn’t want strangers rifling through with pity and alarm. By the time she was through, two drawers had been completely cleaned out. Alphonse frolicked in her half-empty closet. Since she would be gone either forever or for only two days, she made ordinary arrangements with the Blaines.

The night before, she slept like ice, dropping off without preamble, and woke up the same way an hour later. She spent the rest of the night at her computer. At dawn, just before she turned it off, she erased her search history, depriving anyone who came in after her death to mop up the spectacle of her search strings:

plane crash statistics

plane crash statistics by company

why do planes crash?

jet engine failure

what happens when you burn to death?

breathing at 30,000 feet

falling from 30,000 feet

jet crash survival rates

fear of flying

acrophobia

agoraphobia

claustrophobia

pteromechanophobia

airport security

cattle handling

heavy-duty squeeze chute

max winston

amy gallup

Having numbed herself with facts and images and secreted two capsules of Klonopin in her change purse, Amy stayed frozen through the drive to Lindbergh and the two-hour check-in procedure. Docile passengers trundled single-file as though actually confined by narrow cattle chutes. Though some of the livestock were white-faced, exuding fear, most were nonchalant or downright happy. Eventually they were separated into shorter lines, one for breeding, one for slaughter. Many carried infants, kept their older children close, reassuring them with pats, corralling them with firm yanks. In her head, the slaughterhouse threatened to morph into Auschwitz, and Amy shut the movie down and would have blushed in shame had her blood been warm enough. It was so odd how the same mind could entertain competing narratives simultaneously. In one, she shuffled to her death; in the other, right alongside it, she sneered at her own self-indulgent terror. What a ridiculous woman. Amy took off her sandals, placed her pocketbook in a gray feed bin. A distinguished elderly Frenchman was led off down a special third chute, swearing about his
souliers
, apparently refusing to take them off. Good for you, she thought, as she submitted to an outrageous X-ray strip search,
Aux barricades!
But by the time she took her seat on the plane, he was two rows behind her, being laughed at by his American wife.

The hackneyed phrase “in the belly of the beast” had entered her mind at the moment she entered the plane, which was a good thing, as it annoyed her and dulled the horror of the moment. Belly indeed. The plane was no whale, no Questing Beast. It was an ugly place crowded with uniform objects all shaped like blue and white lozenges, no sharp corners or edges anywhere. Lozenge chairs, lozenge windows, lozenge compartments, the whole thing like a giant box of Sucrets. Amy was now encased neatly in dread. There was no wildness to it, though, nothing she could not handle. The first thing she did after getting settled was to take out her notepad and jot down “Manageable Dread.” This was a hubristic act, not to mention a crap title, but what the hell.