Mudwoman (22 page)

There are subjects that philosophy cannot approach. There are subjects so bared, so exposed—the antic beating heart, which no words can encase.

She lay without daring to move, sprawled on the steps. Trying to recover her breath. Her heart that was a kite blown high into the treetops, fluttering and thrashing. And her bones—her legs, arms—were any of her bones broken? Her head had been struck—hard—against the rungs of the railing.

“I didn’t ‘lose consciousness.’ I’m sure I did not.”

She was explaining to someone: a doctor. His face was young and unclear as if incompletely formed. This supercilious stranger would pass judgment on her neurological condition, shining a pencil-thin beam of light into her defenseless eyes.

He would pass judgment on her spiritual condition, shining a pencil-thin beam of light into her eyes.

If the pupil of her eye did not respond—there was neurological damage.

Spiritual damage would be more difficult to detect.

She was certain she hadn’t been
concussed.
That was crucial.

The boy—Stirk—had been
concussed.
That is, he’d lost consciousness from a blow or blows to the head. And that was crucial.

Of course you’re all right, Meredith! Count to sixty and then—get up! As if nothing has happened.

So Agatha advised. Agatha who had little patience for self-pity, whining, and evil.

M.R. began counting. But soon the counting became confused with the more erratic beating of her heart and the blood-pulse in her ears that frightened her, for it meant that the pressure of her blood was high, a pounding against a thin membrane that might burst.

She must see a doctor, soon. She’d been so very busy, she had several times postponed her yearly examination.

The physical ignominy and discomfort of the pelvic exam—during which M.R. was determined to carry on a bright brisk stoic conversation with the very nice (woman) gynecologist.

No time! No time! No time for her meager
self.

No one loves a weak, needy child. No one loves a weak, needy, homely child.

In the Skedds’ house, she had known: who could possibly love Mudgirl? Only an Angel of the Lord could save her.

About her on the steps the soup was still dripping! What had smelled delicious in the kitchen now just smelled—badly.

She’d been so very hungry, now all hunger had vanished. Her body was livened with adrenaline like an electric current. So stupid of her to have grasped a bowl scalding-hot from the microwave, thinking to carry it all the way upstairs without adequate protection for her fingers—now, Mildred would discover the stained carpet.

Canny Mildred would deduce something of what had happened in the night. Without her staffs—household, administrative—M. R. Neukirchen was helpless as a child.

But here was a new surprise, a shock—blood.

Was she—bleeding?

In amazement M.R. touched her throbbing face and her fingers came away bloodied—why this was so unexpected, she could not have said. Yet it seemed to her a fresh rebuke, a threat to her precarious well-being. For it seemed that M.R. was bleeding not just from her mouth, where her teeth had pierced the soft inside of her lips, but from a cut in her forehead as well.

Head wounds can bleed copiously. Capillaries close beneath the surface of the (thin, vulnerable) skin. Oh, Mildred would see this evidence!

Stand! Get up! A towel to stop the bleeding—paper towels. No one will know.

M.R. was chiding herself for she was so very disgusted with herself.

She was chiding
him.

He’d tried to hang himself—had he? Tried, and failed.

After the fraudulent claim of being assaulted, who would believe him?

Desperate measures propel desperate people.
She
was not desperate, she had never wished to harm herself.

Where others wish to harm us, we have little need to harm ourselves.

Maybe it was her sickness-with-guilt that had caused her after all to harm herself. For the boy was her responsibility, or had been. And she had failed.

“It can’t be my fault. He is not my—fault.”

Yet her voice wavered, uncertain.

It had to be so: the boy had parents, a father. It had come to light that the father had spoken harshly with the son in a series of telephone calls in the wake of the alleged assault. For, from the first, Mr. Stirk had not given much credence to his troubled son’s most recent accusation of having been harassed, threatened and attacked.

Mr. Stirk had not been nearly so sympathetic as the University president, in fact.

Or so the rumor was. M.R. was loathe to listen to rumors. You found yourself wanting to believe the worst, to alleviate your responsibility.

Trembling with the strain of lifting her suddenly-heavy body graceless as a bag of peat moss yet M.R. managed to haul herself erect, panting. A premonition of age—old age—this terrible heaviness of being.

“Oh! Oh God.”

She was whimpering with pain, and ignominy. She’d forgotten that her face was bleeding, here was fresh blood smeared on her fingers. Something about the basement door—another time, it had been left ajar. She could not think that it was left ajar to annoy her, this was an absurd reasoning.

Her sweatshirt, jeans, even her woolen socks smelled of soup—stank of soup. How nauseating, the odor! Never again could she bear the smell of chicken-lentil soup, the very thought of it made her want to gag.

Strange that her face was still bleeding. More seriously than she’d wished to believe. Not the mouth-wound, on the inside of her (swelling) lip, but the head-wound. Oh God—if she needed stitches!

Andre would know what to do. Andre Litovik, master of emergencies.

Especially, Andre was skilled in dealing with emergencies which he himself provoked.

In daily life Andre prevaricated and drifted like a man in a canoe who has neglected to bring a paddle with him. In the accelerations of daily life, Andre became suddenly aroused, capable.

It was not the fault of daily life, Andre conceded, that it lacked sufficient coherence and predictability for one of Andre Litovik’s scientific temperament, still he’d fled from the daily-ness of life into the chill of interstellar space.

He would console M.R:
Don’t catastrophize!

Many times he had consoled M.R. Often, he’d consoled her for the harm he had done her, always inadvertently.

He would point out an advantage of living alone: no one knows of the diminished and ludicrous individuals we are, when we are alone.

No one knows of our desperation. When we are alone.

From a distance, we all appear poised. Where our
appearance
has intervened in the face of our
being.

Yet: if M.R. had been seriously injured, her skull fractured for instance, no one would have known until morning.

If she’d broken her neck. Her back. If—just maybe—she had
died.

And then, what a commotion! What an alarm!

If she’d been seriously hurt and needed help she’d have had to crawl—to drag herself—back downstairs to the kitchen, to call 911.

In the kitchen, reaching for the phone that was on the wall. How many seconds of excruciating pain, reaching for the plastic phone on the wall. And if she’d managed to contact 911—an ambulance would have rushed up the drive of “historic” Charters House in a flurry of swirling red lights, siren alerting everyone within earshot—what shame!

She fell on the stairs? Neukirchen? Drunk?

No—worse.

Worse how?

She’s losing it
.

M.R. was standing, leaning heavily onto the railing that seemed to her now rather loose, wobbly. The bleeding from her forehead continued, she’d been wiping it on the sleeve of her University sweatshirt. Her ribs hurt, her right ankle was numb with pain, her head, her jaws, her mouth—blood beat frantically in her ears—her heartbeat was still rapid and arrhythmic—the kite thrashing in the wind, tangled in tree limbs. Yet she would retake control, like seizing a steering wheel that has begun to spin—
You have been spared this time. You will survive!

At the foot of the spiral stairs, still gripping the railing M.R. took a deep—cautious—breath preparatory to making her way back into the kitchen where she would press paper towels against her bleeding face—she would try to wash at the sink—cold water might staunch the bleeding and countermand the swelling—for already her mouth felt as if she’d been bitten by an adder. Determined as Agatha insisting that if one
holds in the Light
one will prevail against confusion, ignorance, evil
Of course you are all right. You would not have been spared otherwise
even as a giddy black mist rose before her as if taunting her and in horror she saw the boy—as vividly as if he stood before her, as he’d stood before her leaning on his crutch in her office—the boy with the doomed eyes—the boy with the moist pink tongue aimed at M.R.’s heart.

Didn’t what, President Neukirchen? Hit me?

H
e wasn’t dead. Though he had tried to die.

A terrible death, he had tried to die.

Out of despair, shame—spite. Out of spite this wish to confound his enemies. And his own family, perhaps.

In the crazed week following his claim of being assaulted on the University campus by a gang of fellow students Alexander Stirk had been interviewed on cable news programs—the “Stirk case” had flashed about the Internet like something radioactive—each issue of the University newspaper had devoted a sizable portion of the front page to developments in the “Stirk case” with the barely restrained hysteria of a tabloid publication. The admission that Stirk had lied about having been harassed at his prep school several years before—an admission Stirk made to township police on the third day after the claim of the attack, for he’d had no alternative by this time—had been greeted with dismay by Stirk’s supporters, and gratification by his detractors; police officers refused to discuss the case with the media yet it quickly became known that the police investigation had become an investigation largely of Stirk himself.

Abruptly then most of the conservative commentators who’d supported Alexander Stirk in the interests of excoriating the liberal University publicly repudiated him; his undergraduate friends in the YAF were quoted in the University newspaper as feeling “betrayed” by him and “disgusted” by him; his professors, among them Oliver Kroll, could not be reached for comment or could only say tersely that they were “reserving judgment” until the case was resolved.

Through this, stubbornly and defiantly Alexander Stirk continued to insist that he had been assaulted, exactly as he’d claimed; though it was true that he’d lied about the previous harassment,
he was not lying now.
It was a new claim of Stirk’s, reported to M.R. by one of her assistants, that the male undergraduates who’d attacked him had known about the incident at Stirk’s prep school, and had acted with the cynical assumption that they could do “anything” to him—“with impunity”—since he wouldn’t be believed when he accused them.

Now anyone could hurt him.
It was an observation M.R. had had herself.

In making the claim, however, Alexander Stirk was behaving recklessly—defiantly. Yet, you had almost to admire his brashness.

For the twenty-year-old understood, as M.R. in her early forties couldn’t allow herself to even consider, that in this era of the Internet, in this season in which the use of deadly force against a quasi-“enemy” was presented to the credulous public as a media event titled, like the newest multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster film,
Shock and Awe
—it didn’t seem to matter much what had
truly happened
but what might be
believed to have happened
by a sizable number of people.

In polls, American citizens debated the merits of the exciting new war in Iraq, and the older, less-exciting war in Afghanistan. In polls, it seemed to be determined that the United States was fighting the terrorist forces—the very individuals—who’d brought about the catastrophe of 9/11. Whether this was
historical fact
was not so relevant, if the majority of American citizens believed it.

Stirk had lied to her—he’d looked her in the eye, and lied. And she’d wanted to believe. For it was a belief in her own powers of persuasion—a vindication of the light-within which was M.R.’s deepest self—in which she’d wanted to believe.

Alexander Stirk’s on-campus case fell under the commingled jurisdiction of the dean of undergraduate students, the director of campus security and public safety, the director of counseling and psychological services, and the University’s legal counsel. All of these parties had reported to M.R. their strong conviction that Alexander Stirk should withdraw from the University for an indeterminate amount of time pending the outcome of the investigation—his presence in Harrow Hall was a distraction to the other students, and a continual burden to the University, that was obliged to provide “security” for him when he ventured out of his room; he’d ceased attending classes; he didn’t appear to have recovered from his injuries, but refused to seek any further medical treatment. Stirk, however, refused to “retreat”—refused to be “banished”—in interviews he spoke of remaining in “the very bastion of the enemy, to fight for justice.”

After the embarrassment of their confrontation in M.R.’s office in Salvager Hall—(selected details of which had been spilled out into cyberspace like malignant spores)—M.R. knew to maintain a dignified reserve about the Stirk case. The University president was stoic, uncomplaining; even privately she refrained from commenting on it, still less publicly; she didn’t need to be cautioned by the University’s legal counsel to say nothing. Even to Leonard Lockhardt in the privacy of her office she was reticent, circumspect; even to Leonard who believed, as nearly everyone did now, that the assault was a hoax, and Stirk a shameless liar, M.R. said—“Yes, but we can’t assume that we
know.
Even now. We must wait until the investigation is concluded.”