“I heard about diviners.”
“But where did you hear about it?”
“I just heard about it.”
“Ma, you’re on drugs.”
Rosa cannot dispute certain hypotheses because it’s too tiring to dispute them. The orderly comes by and tells her to sit up.
“The story, it’s incredible, it’s like this gigantic story spanning thousands of years,” and then Vanessa, ignoring what Rosa has said, goes off on her plot summary, and Rosa is unable to follow the story, just as she was not really able to understand the voices after the seizure. She told the doctor that she had heard the voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, and she said she believed that they were the voices of persons acquainted with her, but they were not just any kind of voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, then, and she said that she was hearing voices from telephones. And he asked how did she know that they were voices on telephones, and Rosa said that she knew because there was static on the line. So, he said, you are receiving cellular telephone traffic? It had not occurred to her that it was cellular telephone traffic, because Rosa has never used a cellular telephone, and she only really knows about them because once she went to a matinée with a friend and she heard a cellular telephone go off; well, and then Vanessa, her daughter, has one, and her daughter let her try her cellular phone once, but who would she call? There was no one to call except her daughter. Nonetheless, it was a working theory that telephone calls took up residence in the affected parts, and when the affected parts were operating in such a way that one piece of information followed another, she formulated the thought that she had begun receiving the cellular telephone traffic of the city of New York
in her head.
She was now in condition of receiving and she could single out certain calls, and they were in fact the calls that had anguish in them, she could overhear only the calls that had anguish in them, for instance a call where some man was realizing that some stock that he had was going down. And she could hear that Annabel was suffering, not that Annabel gave away her anguish, because Annabel was a good girl and she would not let a little thing like a married man provoke a scene, but Rosa could hear the loneliness, all these calls were about loneliness; for example, later there was a call from Annabel to her parents, there was a call to her parents —
“So it’s going to make a really great television show, that’s what I think. I think we’re going to try to pitch it to one of the cable stations, and maybe there’ll be a way to make part of it in Italy, you know? Like, if they take it, I could just make sure that part of it’s in Italy, and maybe we could go back over there.”
And the other girl, is she an intern, the other girl, the one with the burns? It was late at night, and she was thinking about the burns. The obese woman in the next bed was like an oppression. Soon the obese woman would awake. And Rosa was afraid, and the part of her that was afraid was also overhearing the conversation from the girl with the burns. And now Rosa is hearing it all again, in the dining room with her daughter. She’s hearing, in her head, about the burns.
“Did you hear this thing in the papers? About Annabel’s brother? Ma, are you listening?”
It is almost the time of medication, which is why the voices, the telephone calls, are back, because it is the time of medication, which is the time when detoxification of addicts appears as what it is, a medical problem, and the moisture arguments do perhaps include a recognition of a retreating backward away from Vanessa, and from the neighborhood, and into the logic of the telephone calls.
“It’s in the papers. It’ll be the front page tomorrow. You watch and see if someone brings the paper in. A woman got hit in the head with a brick walking home yesterday, in midtown. She was just walking along, and someone hit her in the head with a brick. Just because she was there. I mean, who’s surprised about that? The thing is that the woman was hit in the head by a bicycle messenger. And they released information about a suspect this afternoon, and the suspect they are looking for is Annabel’s brother. Apparently he got into some kind of scuffle yesterday. So if you talk to Annabel, be nice to her. Her brother is missing. He just took off somewhere. Didn’t show up for work.”
The orderly announces that visiting hours are over. Vanessa helps Rosa up onto her feet, and Vanessa tells her that she loves her, in a nonchalant way, and then they walk down the corridor together, and the only clinging opportunity, for the moment, is onto the arm of her daughter. Rosa Elisabetta is worried about what night brings, about the fresh information of the night, which is worse than the television squawking in the dayroom. The only good thing about her illness of overheard voices is that it is not an illness of overheard television programming. Now she is back by the nurse’s console, and her daughter is talking to someone, and no doubt her daughter is describing their exchange, describing affected parts, describing the unusual occurrences that are now taking place in affected parts, and this is not good because it augurs a dosage escalation and a further reduction of things in their infrastructural simplicities, but there is no time for that because now the addicts are lining up.
His mom! His mom! Coming into the room! His mom is beautiful! He forgets his mom is coming into the room and then she comes into the room, and it’s a surprise and then here she is and he loves her. He forgets how beautiful she is, and then suddenly she is coming into the room to take him home, and he remembers that she is so beautiful, because she has hair this dark, and she has dark eyes, and she is beautiful and round. And she’s his mom. And she has the spot right between her eyes which is a beautiful spot, and nobody else’s mom here has that spot, which means it is beautiful. And when his mom smiles, it’s a beautiful smile, and when she doesn’t smile, that means it’s a time before smiling, and this is a beautiful time because a smile will come along soon. And his mom talks in a beautiful way that is different from the way that everybody else’s mom talks. She says things in a beautiful way, a way that sounds different, because she comes from another place, but he can’t remember what this place is called. He knows that he lives in Queens, and he is in Queens now, at least he thinks he is, and his mother is in the room and she is talking to the nice lady, and the nice lady and his mom are smiling and they are pointing. He is good and maybe he is the best of all the children. And the nice lady is going around the room and she is showing his mother all the things that everybody has made today, like Eddie made an airplane and then Eddie spent a long time standing in one corner with the airplane, making the noise of an airplane. He was there almost all day, and the nice lady had to tell him he needed to do something besides just make the airplane noise, and he didn’t pay any attention, and later another boy went over and pushed him down and told him to shut up, took away the plane, stamped on it, and everyone started crying. The nice lady tried to explain about how they didn’t need to cry and that this was a problem to solve, but Jaspreet didn’t understand what she was saying and neither did Eddie or the other boy, the stamper, and anyway, Jaspreet just wanted to use the glue stick and to be left alone. He’s excited about lining up the glue with the edges of things that he has cut out. He’s excited because he will not use too much glue on these pictures that he has cut out. If you put too much glue on, then the picture won’t stick. But if you put down just the right amount of glue, then the picture stays, and this makes him happy, like his mother coming in makes him happy. Also, there is a girl called Denise, and Denise makes him happy, he isn’t sure why. When she gets mad, she throws everything on the floor and cries, and one day she wouldn’t stop biting other people and she punctured the skin on Jaspreet’s arm. But even when she is crying, he always wants to put his hand on the top of her head. Sometimes he just gets up in the middle of the class, and then he goes over and puts his hand on the top of her head. No matter what she is trying to do, he will put his hand on the top of her head. Usually there are pigtails or there is a braid, but sometimes the hair is all pulled up on the very top, and there is a thing that makes it stay on the top of her head, and if he puts his hand on the top of her head when this thing is making the hair stay up, then she will squeal or cry, and the nice lady will say, “Jaspreet, stop touching the top of Denise’s head.” Or the nice lady will tell him to stop touching her ear. Because he also likes to touch Denise’s ear, the little part at the bottom of her ear, it has a gold ring in it, and he just likes to go and touch this spot. If she’s in a good mood and has not thrown things on the floor or bitten anybody, then she smiles when he puts his hand on the top of her head, and they stay there like that.
His mom goes and looks at all the things that everyone made out of paper, and she tells Eddie that his plane is good, and she tells Denise that her picture of a horse is good, and then she tells Maurice that his boat is good, even though it’s crusted with glue, and she tells Mohammed that his racing car is very good, and then she comes and looks at the picture that Jaspreet has made, which is a picture of the sun. The sun is smiling down on the land. And his mother comes and asks him what the land is that the sun is smiling down on, but he doesn’t answer because he doesn’t like to answer. But he smiles up at his mother because his mother is beautiful and so is the nice lady. Then the nice lady asks, “Jaspreet, can you just this once tell your mother what it is a picture of?” And she points at the sun, which is smiling. “What is this that’s smiling here? We know you know the name of it. Just tell your mother how you know the name. Can you do that for me?” Jaspreet smiles at his mother and smiles at the nice lady, but he has a feeling like he does not want to say the name of the sun. If he had drawn a tree, then maybe he would say that its name was
tree,
though maybe he wouldn’t say that, either, just because. If he felt like it, maybe. But today he doesn’t want to say that the sun has a name, because he just doesn’t want to, and what he wants is what he wants, even though his mother is beautiful. It’s important to go home now because it’s the end of the day, or at least he thinks so, and when his mother picks him up, then he doesn’t have to go out into the hall with the other kids, because when he is with the other kids out in the hall something horrible happens. One time he threw up.
“Come on, Jaspreet, just one word, and it will make our day complete. We will feel like we have had an especially good day if you will just say one word.”
He says nothing. He can see that his mother is not smiling now, and actually she is making a face that is not such a nice face, and she is taking him by the wrist, telling him that it is time to go, but he has not put away the glue stick and the picture, and he begins to cry out about the glue stick, but not exactly about the glue stick, because he would rather not have to use any words, but it’s just a fake cry, a fake sound coming out of his mouth, a mouth-wide-open cry, and Maurice starts to cry out, too, and some of the others, too, and soon everybody is pounding on the table, and the nice lady looks afraid because it’s scary when everybody gets mad, and they could start spilling paint. Jaspreet just wants to put away the glue stick, put the lid on the glue stick and take it over to where the supplies go, where the glue sticks and the pens and the crayons go, but his mother has him by the wrist and she is telling him not to argue with her now, just come on along, please, because there are things to get for dinner and she does not have time. There’s some more about the glue stick, and he wants to tell her about the glue stick, how wonderful the glue stick is, and that’s when he finally gets out the words “Glue stick,” and everyone hears the words, the nice lady hears the words, and everyone applauds because they know it’s a good day when Jaspreet finally says something.
Later he’s in the supermarket cart, standing. Even though he is way too big to be standing in it. He can see that no other kids his size are standing in the supermarket cart, just kids that are half as tall, and he has ripped open the box of cereal with his teeth and he is putting cereal in his mouth, piece after piece. And his mother is pushing him down the aisle in the cart, and he is making a trail of cereal behind him. His mother used to try to get him not to eat the cereal on the way down the aisle, but now she just lets him. She could get him to stop with the trail, but so far she hasn’t noticed. One day a man frightened him by telling him not to eat the cereal. Another time he saw the same man, and the man didn’t say anything. Cereal is Jaspreet’s favorite meal. Sometimes in the morning there are television shows that have a lot of commercials with cereal. He just waits patiently until the television is turned on. He watches whatever is on. If there is cereal in the show it’s even better.
What is the best kind of cereal? The best kind is whatever kind he is eating. Sometimes he eats cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the aisle, his mother says there will be dried lentils, and there will be chapattis and there will be aloo gobi and there will be cashews and naan bread, which is a bread that he likes. There will be achars. He likes cereal better. Soon they are clumped in a line behind all the people clumped, and his mother hands him a newspaper with a lot of ladies in it. He is distracted by the ladies until his mother is going past the man with the machine where you rub the boxes. This man asks if Jaspreet would like to rub one of the boxes, and Jaspreet looks at his mother, and his mother sighs. What he really wants is to ride on the belt that goes past the man, but he will not do that today, since there are a lot of people behind them. Instead he will put the box on the machine. He runs around the end and stands where the man with the apron is standing, and he takes the box of cereal that he has already eaten most of, and he rubs the box and rubs the box again, and the machine beeps. He wants to do it again.
The man says, “Just once, otherwise you’ll have to pay for it twice.” To Jaspreet’s mother: “He’s a natural.”