Future Home of the Living God(9)

When we get there, a black truck with wooden-slat sides is pulled up and six or seven people are pulling rolls of grass off the back. Someone has dragged a long hose from behind the casino to water the dirt in the oval. Sweetie and I get out of the car and pitch right in. Between the two of us, we carry a sod roll to the site and carefully place it just so against the other strips. It only takes half an hour to do the whole thing. Then the others go, the truck too, and my new mom and I are left with the hose, watering down the grass.

This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.

Sweetie lights up and sits on the sacred rock while I stick my thumb in the stream of water and spray an even fan back and forth over the instant green lawn.

Sweetie sighs—there it is again—shakes her head in that sexy way, and looks out over the parking lot.

“Right on cue,” she says, pointing with her cigarette. “That’s Eddy, see? Just like always, he’s looking for material, and I’m it.” She stands up and slings her lighted cigarette with an eloquent motion into the drain at the parking lot curb. She takes the shoelace from her pocket and wraps it around her fingers. Eddy parks and gets out and Sweetie preens a little. I can see she has this fantasy that her husband is slavishly devoted to her, which already I don’t think is quite the case, but which somehow works because she can interpret anything he does as an act of obeisance. For instance, he has a slushie in the pickup’s cup holder, and now she reaches right in through the open window and fishes it out with a sigh that says my man takes good care of me.

“So this is Cedar,” says Eddy, getting out of the truck, walking up to me, shaking hands like a well-socialized person. His attitude is just right, not too familiar, and yet he, too, suddenly has tears in his eyes. He’s trying not to stare at me. I sense that he is struggling hard to maintain the right distance, the right balance. And like me, he immediately goes for the abstract and talks too fast.

“I was going to ask what’s up, how are you, something of the sort, but we can already answer that, right? Gawiin gegoo, nothing. Well, that’s not strictly true, is it, since the world as we know it is coming to an end and nobody knows what the hell is going on or how our species is going to look four months from now.”

“Then again, maybe she just wants a slushie,” says Sweetie as she hands me the cherry ice soup. “That’s enough out of life.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.” Eddy gives me a surprising smile. I say surprising because Sweetie told me that he never does smile.

“Hey, he’s smiling,” I say to Sweetie. “I thought he never smiled.”

“I don’t, as a rule,” says Eddy, smiling again at me. He looks like such a nice man, really, a little shy, even sweet. “I’m afflicted,” he says, half kidding. “I suffer from a chronic melancholy, the sort diagnosed by Hippocrates as an excess of black bile.”

Then he tells me that he elects to believe that he shares his condition only with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and great statesmen like Winston Churchill. He doesn’t have the modern sort of depression, he says, the kind that can be treated with selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. His is the original black dog.

“We’re all going down the tubes, the fallopian tubes that is, not to mention the seminal vesicles,” he says as he cheerfully throws back his head and lets the sun hit his face. “Ah, that feels good.”

“The whole world can go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” says Sweetie, “as long as Eddy’s in a good mood.”

“I’m in a real good mood.” Eddy plants a tender little kiss on Sweetie’s mouth. She looks at him, dazzled.

“That was unexpected,” she says.

Eddy’s about six two and has a slender build. His face is thin and foxlike, secretive, worried, and that rare smile is wistful, very tentative. But suddenly he is smiling way too much, grinning like an excited child, and I know that there’s something wrong with him. His emotions jump too fast for perfect mental health.

“It’s just that I knew it all along.” His black, thick hair stands on end like a little boy’s exuberant cut. “All my life I’ve sensed an unseen deterioration, Cedar, I’ve always known that this was happening. It has colored my mental processes and been the reason for all that I have written. I have waited for it and known that it, or something like it, would come. I just feel an enormous sense of calm. Perhaps relief.”

Sweetie did not describe Eddy as manic—that wasn’t part of his self-diagnosis—though I’ve read that depressives may seek out manic episodes as the melancholy weighs so heavy and keeps their thoughts so sluggish. Maybe Eddy is getting his wish. His demeanor right now might be temporary euphoria—an extremely understandable reaction to the strangeness of this disaster, so I am gentle with him and issue an invitation. I am going to ask them to lunch, after which, I decide that I’ll drive back to Minneapolis, counting my blessings all the way.

“Let me take you two out to lunch, okay? Come on.”

“There’s still lunch? Of course there is,” says Eddy. “We can probably still sit down and order our usual Cobb salads and wild rice soup. Lettuce is still being shipped here, most likely. Corn is still tasseling. Cows have not stopped giving milk. But then, I think, it won’t take long before they give a lot less as they are bred for milk capacity.”