The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

Author:Denis Johnson [Johnson, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812988635
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

For Liz

Liz was the only woman Link had truly loved, he confided in me many times, as his body and mind failed him in his deranged bedroom with the dangerous wood-burning stove surrounded by the tottering stacks of flammable publications…I often observed him lying in bed, holding his cellphone in one hand and in the other a can of charcoal-lighting fluid—his little trick was to stretch his long left leg out and hook the stove’s door handle by his toe, flick it open with a simian flair, and train an incendiary stream into the flames within to produce a small-scale explosion followed by five minutes of hard, bright burning (poor circulation gave him cold extremities), meanwhile yacking on the phone with Liz, who lived in San Mateo a hundred miles away. She and Link had been married and parted decades before.

The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Liz, a black-haired beauty even now in her sixties, had become in recent years a physically quite tentative and cautious person, with a ceremonious, exploratory footstep, because she no longer had any idea where she was going or where she’d been as recently as two seconds ago, her memory and identity wiped away by Alzheimer’s disease. But she stayed serene and cheerful, and greeted everyone, whether a lifelong acquaintance or a brand-new face, with a hug and a smile, saying, “Hello, stranger.”

Of the scores of family and friends who adored and supported Liz—in fact, of all the human beings in the world—Link was the only person she recognized. And in this world, which is only Now, she knows him perfectly, as if they’ve just risen from their custom-made king-plus-size waterbed—have I mentioned he was six foot nine, a sliver over two meters tall?—the two of them beautiful and young, and rich from his many business enterprises. Liz doesn’t know her husband Malcolm, a retired U.S. naval captain who sees to her every need and even calls Link’s telephone number for her nightly; and nightly Liz and Link talk on the phone and she pledges her love, and Link, who has never for a minute considered, in his own heart and mind, the marriage ended, drinks in these declarations and answers them with his own in the midst of a world without forward or backward, without logic, like the world of dreams, thanks to Liz’s dementia and to Link’s opiated vagueness and diabetic spikes in blood sugar, his occasional insulin psychosis, and the cycles of delirium driven by the ebb and flow of toxins, mainly ammonia, in his bloodstream.

Liz rarely left her own home in San Mateo, but Malcolm was willing to bring her north for a visit. She knew Link’s voice, and we hoped she would recognize Link’s face too, though they hadn’t been physically present to one another for many years. Link vowed to me he would live to see Liz again. Liz, of course, had no idea any of this was being considered. Because taking her places was a matter requiring a lot of care and strategy—and time—Link was forced to count the days and hang on.

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