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Authors: Jonathan Lethem
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the cradle of Rose’s doorway. Rose, on her bed, seemed a mile high.
“There’s no him,” Miriam whispered.
“Unless you return to college, pack your things and live elsewhere.”
“Not Queens.” Two mummies, entombed side by side, bargained at the affairs of the living from their holes beneath the earth.
“Then what?”
“The New School.”
“You didn’t get enough of Trotsky from Mr. and Mrs. Abramovitz and their son who’s too good for anything but Harvard, you need to go bask in that hotbed of do-nothing I-told-you-so’s?”
“I’m not interested in Trotsky one way or the other, Mother. I want to study ethnic music.”
This was good enough for a shriek from the statue-corpse.
“Ethnic music?”
“You said return to college.”
“That’s
college
?” No matter how it might appear to anyone less versed in Roseology, the tragic sobbed interval between the first and second notes of this song indicated concession to the inevitable. (A Jackie Wilson sob again.) Achieving this, some butterfly-broken-on-a-wheel part of Miriam managed a smile.
And more: The butterfly raised a wing, tested the sky. “But not this semester, Rose. It’s too late. I want you to send me to Germany.”
“What’s this?” The tones rehearsed
betrayal, betrayal
, but with none of the previous vigor.
“If you want me to go to college, first tell me where he is and buy me a ticket to visit.”
“It’s too much,” Rose attempted. But stopped. The black oven was not so far away, odor still trickling through the apartment. Miriam saw that without conceiving it in advance—two souls can enter a passage like this one, a night and morning like this one, without a plan!—she’d begun extracting from Rose the full and exact price of never mentioning this episode between them again.
“Germany to see him and then I start school in the spring.”
“Too much,” Rose whispered now.
“No, it’s time I had a look at him. You even want me to, so I can tell you what I find.”
“You could go get it from your
omi
, from Alma. Anytime you’d wanted, you could have asked your grandmother for that bastard’s address.”
“Maybe so. But I want it from
you
.”
“Leave me alone.” The woman on the high bed refroze herself into the carved decoration atop a tomb.
So it was that at last, at the end, Miriam set herself on her own sheets and mattress, still in the fresh dress that she’d worn for her brief headfirst expedition into the oven, the bedcovers, from within which she’d momentarily tugged at Porter’s uncircumcised, squirting prick, still flung aside into the corner where she’d discarded them after wriggling into her panties and hose, and lay there, eyes exhausted but wide to the ceiling, and merely breathed. The two of them in their rooms, as ever and always, breathing. The ceaseless arrangement of mother and daughter coiled in fury at each other yet still bulwarked together inside this apartment against the prospect of anything and anyone else outside. Temple and tomb of childhood, armory of Rose’s defiance. Before sleep enfolded her, Miriam sensed Rose’s fingertip bruises along her soft upper arms. She could nearly count them, eight fingers and two thumbs, where they throbbed. In the next days they’d bloom and fade through purple, blue, banana-yellow, before vanishing.
It had been a trick question, a paradox beyond even Aesop’s devising. How could you possibly learn the identity of the Grey Goose
by asking the Grey Goose
? For, after everything, this was at last unmistakable: The Grey Goose—inedible, adamantine, undead, warping any implement that dared glance in its direction, let alone that dared to attack—was none other than Rose Zimmer.
3
Cicero’s Medicine
“Do you want to know what I really think?”
The speaker was Cicero Lookins. Or, rather, his head. One of two heads, bobbing in valleys and crests of seawater that refracted in the weighty silent air like a sunstruck
“There’s no him,” Miriam whispered.
“Unless you return to college, pack your things and live elsewhere.”
“Not Queens.” Two mummies, entombed side by side, bargained at the affairs of the living from their holes beneath the earth.
“Then what?”
“The New School.”
“You didn’t get enough of Trotsky from Mr. and Mrs. Abramovitz and their son who’s too good for anything but Harvard, you need to go bask in that hotbed of do-nothing I-told-you-so’s?”
“I’m not interested in Trotsky one way or the other, Mother. I want to study ethnic music.”
This was good enough for a shriek from the statue-corpse.
“Ethnic music?”
“You said return to college.”
“That’s
college
?” No matter how it might appear to anyone less versed in Roseology, the tragic sobbed interval between the first and second notes of this song indicated concession to the inevitable. (A Jackie Wilson sob again.) Achieving this, some butterfly-broken-on-a-wheel part of Miriam managed a smile.
And more: The butterfly raised a wing, tested the sky. “But not this semester, Rose. It’s too late. I want you to send me to Germany.”
“What’s this?” The tones rehearsed
betrayal, betrayal
, but with none of the previous vigor.
“If you want me to go to college, first tell me where he is and buy me a ticket to visit.”
“It’s too much,” Rose attempted. But stopped. The black oven was not so far away, odor still trickling through the apartment. Miriam saw that without conceiving it in advance—two souls can enter a passage like this one, a night and morning like this one, without a plan!—she’d begun extracting from Rose the full and exact price of never mentioning this episode between them again.
“Germany to see him and then I start school in the spring.”
“Too much,” Rose whispered now.
“No, it’s time I had a look at him. You even want me to, so I can tell you what I find.”
“You could go get it from your
omi
, from Alma. Anytime you’d wanted, you could have asked your grandmother for that bastard’s address.”
“Maybe so. But I want it from
you
.”
“Leave me alone.” The woman on the high bed refroze herself into the carved decoration atop a tomb.
So it was that at last, at the end, Miriam set herself on her own sheets and mattress, still in the fresh dress that she’d worn for her brief headfirst expedition into the oven, the bedcovers, from within which she’d momentarily tugged at Porter’s uncircumcised, squirting prick, still flung aside into the corner where she’d discarded them after wriggling into her panties and hose, and lay there, eyes exhausted but wide to the ceiling, and merely breathed. The two of them in their rooms, as ever and always, breathing. The ceaseless arrangement of mother and daughter coiled in fury at each other yet still bulwarked together inside this apartment against the prospect of anything and anyone else outside. Temple and tomb of childhood, armory of Rose’s defiance. Before sleep enfolded her, Miriam sensed Rose’s fingertip bruises along her soft upper arms. She could nearly count them, eight fingers and two thumbs, where they throbbed. In the next days they’d bloom and fade through purple, blue, banana-yellow, before vanishing.
It had been a trick question, a paradox beyond even Aesop’s devising. How could you possibly learn the identity of the Grey Goose
by asking the Grey Goose
? For, after everything, this was at last unmistakable: The Grey Goose—inedible, adamantine, undead, warping any implement that dared glance in its direction, let alone that dared to attack—was none other than Rose Zimmer.
3
Cicero’s Medicine
“Do you want to know what I really think?”
The speaker was Cicero Lookins. Or, rather, his head. One of two heads, bobbing in valleys and crests of seawater that refracted in the weighty silent air like a sunstruck
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