The Ghost Apple (30 page)

“At night repeat the bolus,” the doctor was saying, “and the third day repeat the purge. If in six days you do not find the discomfort much abated, repeat the boluses and electuary. You must not omit every day to bathe and wash the parts two or three times . . .”

“What parts?” I said.

“. . . and every night when going to bed to rub a small bit of the ointment to the butt and under-part of the penis.”

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said. “It’s just the heat, the mosquitoes. I caught a bug or something.”

The doctor rolled his eyes. “Intemperance destroys many more constitutions than anything inimical in the climate.”

He gave me some dietary advice. I was to avoid greasy foods, windy and flatulent foods, spicy and salty foods. Bread,
panada
, barley gruel, and linseed tea were to be my only nourishment for a few days.

When he’d gone, Codrington went out to have the prescription filled, and I fell asleep and dreamed that Megan and I were married, and Bish Pinkman was our child.

Codrington came back to deliver the mysterious medications, but now that my fever had spiked again, I was so disoriented that my only concern was to follow the doctor’s instructions to the letter. I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me.

Codrington prepared the so-called “vomit” himself, and reminded me to take it by the tablespoon until it operated. I’ll spare the reader a description of this part of my ordeal.

The next morning I was well enough to come downstairs and drink a cup of weak tea. The Free Produce people were there again, now dressed in shorts and T-shirts. They were very polite and kind, asking after my health and trying to include me in their conversation, but I still felt weak. After about fifteen minutes, I went back to bed.

The fever returned in the early afternoon, and in my delirium I wandered into the bathroom and ate at least half a tube of toothpaste. I vomited for what seemed like forever, and when Codrington found me I was curled up on the floor of the bathroom, encrusted in dried toothpaste. I was dreaming that
I
was a naked slave girl! I remember worrying that Codrington could see the inside of my dreams, and I was very ashamed.

The next morning the fever was gone once again, but I was feeling wiped out. I tried eating some oatmeal, which tasted wonderful and wholesome, and then I got into the pool and tried to relax for a little while.

But the fever returned, and Codrington kept forcing me to take the bolus and the electuary—a kind of sweet paste—and it seemed like I’d never get better as long as I was taking all that medicine. I had bizarre, vivid dreams once again, so that when I woke up late the next morning and saw Megan standing at the foot of my bed, dressed in rags and thin as a rail, I was certain I was still asleep.

“Pinch me,” I said.

But she started crying. She hugged me. I didn’t know what to do or think or feel and I just hugged her back and told her that everything would be okay. And in that moment, after everything that had happened, I believed it. Everything would be okay. I missed my wife so much that I could hardly stand it, but I
could
stand it.

From: “Maggie Bell”

To: “Chris Bell”

Date: March 24, 2010, at 1:00 PM

Subject: (no subject)

 

Mr. C,

It's only because I worry about how Mom and Dad will react. Dad would say all the wrong things, call people up, yell at them, cause trouble. All I want now is quiet, so don't worry. I know maybe I didn't make sense on the phone. I'm just exhausted. But yes, that is what I need you to do. Don't say anything. Just think good thoughts about me and I'll be home in a few days. I'm staying with the dean this weekend.

I don't know. A person could go crazy trying to think through to the truth of it. Plenty of good people eat Big Anna junk food and wear underwear made by kids in Southeast Asia, and the same people spend their time writing petitions to raise the minimum wage and ban plastic grocery bags. It doesn't make them hypocrites. It makes them people living in an imperfect world. The only lesson is the basic one, which you don't have to work on a sugar plantation to learn: Just try every day to be better, and never stop trying.

Capitalism. I don't know. Capitalism means pain and fear but also a walk on the moon and a hybrid car and this email and all the comforts that make life less bad. Capitalism is just people and when we say it's evil, we're really just expressing our disappointment with people. In the fact that people are not better than they are. That they're just people.

I've spent the last day or two sitting out on the porch in the cold, drinking tea and staring at the melting snow and the spring rain. I feel fine. I've decided that I'm allowed, after everything that happened, to feel fine. The thing I learned is that I'm tough. I always thought so and now I know for sure.

 

Jeez, man. We'll be okay. I love you,

M

Christina Montana

Prof. Collier, English
401
b

Creative Nonfiction Assignment

April
3
,
2010

At Home with President Beckford

Inside the museum it was unendurably hot, the walls were running with moisture, the hygrothermographs had been destroyed and the pieces were scattered through the ravaged galleries, a scroll here and a needle there, and someone said that he’d said that humidity was good for the paintings, but maybe he despised the paintings, it didn’t matter, the truth was that in the unbearable lethargy and mortifying reek of that museum there was no room for motive or decision or even impulse, there was only the roaring silence of a haunted orchidarium and the overwhelming musk of a perfumery in flames. We didn’t know where to turn in that disorder of violated sarcophagi, it seemed as if time had stopped, nothing moved, nothing mattered to us any longer, certainly not the minor procedural concern that had brought us here, a matter of getting our schedules signed, of getting him to sign off on our course selections for the fall, because after everything he was still acting chancellor of the English Department, such things were his responsibility, paperwork was paperwork and paperwork must be done, we couldn’t expect Tripoli’s antique computer systems to adjust to the capricious whims of mankind.

A filthy derelict of a man, dressed in the uniform of a porter or footman from another time, met us in the prehistoric gloom of the Brewster Gallery and introduced himself as Mr. Bish Pinkman III, associate director of the Vocational Writing Program. He asked if he could bring us something to drink, coffee or tea or wine, and he offered us handfuls of sinister white tablets, which he had arranged on a dull salver from the college’s collection of antique silverware. To satisfy the demands of our anxiety, we ordered wine, we ordered chilled white wine, we hoped it would cool us down, but even more we hoped it would calm our hammering hearts and enable us to keep our heads long enough to navigate out of that evil paradise of smoldering Dumpsters and indistinguishable trash-heap exhibits and early American paintings covered with the most obscene graffiti. Only when he turned to go did we see that Mr. Pinkman III was hobbled, there were small dumbbells bound to his ankles with chain and baler twine, it was ghoulish, and we listened with horror as the ghastly thump of his homemade shoes died away. In the quiet that followed we could hear impossible sounds, we could hear children talking softly, dogs whimpering, tormented birds singing show tunes, the martial rhythm of construction. We could not swear to the reality of any of this and we had already begun to accept that what we heard and saw in that place was only as real as we made it, no more, so that when Mr. Pinkman III returned and handed us trophy cups filled with cane liquor, we drank and drank, we felt an animal thirst, we didn’t care why he’d asked what we wanted if he was only going to bring cane liquor, it turned out that cane liquor was just what we wanted. We helped ourselves to some of his white tablets, why not, to hell with it, we’d follow the slope all the way to the bottom.

In the entry hall we saw maintenance trucks parked among the garbage and the medical waste and the ruined antiques, we saw stuffed flamingoes from the natural history collection twisted into impossible contortions, we saw a blind man striking his twisted knee with a gavel. Mr. Pinkman III walked ahead of us without asking where we needed to go and what we needed to do, he walked ahead without guiding us, talking to himself, weeping softly, arguing a point, but he could only be taking us to him, where else was there to go, so that when we reached the furnace heat and jungle damp of the upper floors, when we saw the huge continents of mold on the walls, when we thought we could not go any further because of the swelling in our feet and the fluttering of our hearts, we knew these could only be his own private rooms and offices, and they were not guarded by a three-headed jaguar, as we had heard, or by a statue with eyes that could burn a student to cinders within her clothes, as some of us had read, but only by a clacking bead curtain drawn across the doorway. We went in, withdrawing our folded schedules from our pockets, we remembered now why we had come, it was absurd but it was a requirement, the fine for a late schedule was twenty-five dollars.

And there he was, it was him, he had a fine mist of white hair and delirious blue eyes and teeth like we had never seen, they were like piano keys, and he was sitting on a throne in that riot of broken Mayan stelae, of dead orchids, a potted banana tree, a dismantled vehicle, so many other things, treasures of pre-Columbian art, junk and trash, a portable toilet stuffed with prints from the looted gift shop. He asked us if we wanted some coconut wine, he was just about to enjoy a thimbleful, the stuff was packed with electrolytes, and we said sure, why not, to hell with it, and how about a few more white tablets? Mr. Pinkman III came hurrying across the gallery in his madman’s shoes, those shoes that were made from rawhide and loneliness and duct tape, and he distributed the coconut wine, a trophy cup for each of us and a thimble for him, he didn’t require more, he was pickled in the brine of his unconquerable scholastic ambition, he was mummified by time passing, always passing, he was only a man after all, and he was petrified by his stony asceticism. Everything had been said of him in his very long life and we wondered what could be true. He had been a pirate in the Cayman Islands, a smuggler in the Florida straits, a wrecker on Key West, he had witnessed the advent of steam, he had been a founding partner of Standard Oil, he had conceived of the Tropical Fruit and Rail Company during a night of lunatic sweats and visions, he had taught Benito Mussolini to play the clarinet, he and Teddy Roosevelt had sealed a blood pact by shooting each other in the thigh, it went on and on, what did it matter, the coconut wine was like the chill vapor of death, we knew that we would never leave that place, the past was more real to us than the world outside, that springtime world of radiant rain, so close and so remote in the tinted window.

He motioned for us to sit and we did, cross-legged in the garbage, pouring sweat and not looking at him now for fear that he had the faculty of bewitching students with his eyes, and then we handed our schedules to him and we heard his astonishing pronouncements, and they were astonishing because they seemed so clear, because they had a hallucinatory lucidity. Don’t take this class, have you satisfied your pre-
1800
requirement, avoid Carlyle, have you taken English
125
a. His voice had a hypnotic quality, we could hardly keep our eyes open, it was impossible to say what time it was, or what day, or what season of the long academic year. He spoke without pause, telling us to extend ourselves, Latin is of great utility, you’ll want to take three credit hours of English
565
, you’ll need a senior seminar, have you taken Math
215
, do you have experience in weapons manufacture, you may want to check out Hertfordshire on postcolonial theory.

He was still talking when Mr. Pinkman III arrived and motioned for us to follow. The birds were singing their show tunes, the orchids filled the air with their whore’s perfume, and he was still talking, he was unfazed, he had a great passion for requirements, he knew all the abbreviations, he knew the course catalog by heart, but he hadn’t signed our schedules, we’d have to pay the fine after all.

Minutes / April 2010 Faculty Meeting

The dispassionate secretary, who had missed the last two faculty meetings and had been looking forward to this one, at least insofar as he was capable of looking forward to anything, took too much Malpraxalin® beforehand, fell asleep on the toilet in the hallway bathroom, and arrived twenty minutes late. There were only six or seven faculty members in attendance, of whom several presented an even more dissipated appearance than the secretary himself, who had not bothered, or who had perhaps been unable, to fasten more than two of the six buttons on his shirt, and who wore a pair of filthy slippers instead of shoes.

There had been some trouble on St. Renard. The acting president was explaining that at least two sugar plantations had been forced to suspend operations following terrorist attacks by Professor Kabaka’s Antillia Liberation Army (ALA), although he assured us that everything was now under control. His loyalties, of course, lay with Big Anna®, which he characterized as a “bulwark against the evil of colonial nationalism.” In the same spirit, he moved that we condemn the actions of Professor Kabaka and the ALA.