The Bad News

It's morning. Night is over. It's time for the bad news. I think of the bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my fourth-grade schoolteacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness, pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs and knowing--as the sun comes up--exactly where to drop them. On me, for one.

At our place, the bad news arrives in the form of the bad-news paper. Tig carries it up the stairs. Tig's real name is Gilbert. It's impossible to explain nicknames to speakers of foreign languages, not that I have to do this much.

"They just killed the leader of the interim governing council," Tig announces. It's not that he's impervious to bad news: on the contrary. He's angular, he has less body fat than I do and therefore less capacity to absorb, to cushion, to turn the calories of bad news--and it does have calories; it raises your blood pressure--into the substance of his own body. I can do that, he can't. He wants to pass the bad news on as soon as possible--get it off his hands, like a hot potato. Bad news burns him.

I'm still in bed. I'm not really awake. I was doing a little wallowing. I was enjoying this morning until now. "Not before breakfast," I say. I do not add, "You know I can't handle it this early in the day." I've added that before; it's had only an intermittent effect. After this long together, both our heads are filled with such minor admonitions, helpful hints about the other person--likes and dislikes, preferences and taboos. Don't come up behind me like that when I'm reading. Don't use my kitchen knives. Don't just strew things. Each believes the other should respect this frequently reiterated set of how-to instructions, but they cancel each other out: If Tig must respect my need to wallow mindlessly, free of bad news, before the first cup of coffee, shouldn't I respect his need to spew out catastrophe so he himself will be rid of it?

"Oh. Sorry," he says. He shoots me a reproachful look. Why must I disappoint him like this? Don't I know that if he can't tell the bad news, to me, right now, some bilious green bad-news gland or bladder inside him will burst and he'll get peritonitis of the soul? Then I'll be sorry.

He's right. I would be sorry. I'd have no one left whose mind I can read.

"I'm getting up now," I say, hoping I sound comforting. "I'll be right down."

"Now" and "right down" don't have the same meaning they used to. Everything takes longer than it did back then. But I can still get through the routine, out of the nightdress, into the day dress, the doing-up of the shoes, the lubrication of the face, the selection of the vitamin pills. The leader, I think. The interim governing council. Killed by them. A year from now I won't remember which leader, which interim governing council, which them. But such items multiply. Everything is interim, no one can govern anymore, and there are lots of them, of thems. They always want to kill the leaders. With the best of intentions, or so they claim. The leaders have the best of intentions as well. The leaders stand in the spotlight, and the killers aim from the dark; it's easy to score.

As for the other leaders, the leaders of the leading countries, as they're called, those aren't really leading anymore, they're flailing around, you can see it in their eyes, white-rimmed like the eyes of panic-stricken cattle. You can't lead if no one will follow. People throw up their hands, then sit on them. They just want to get on with their lives. The leaders keep saying, "We need strong leadership," then they sneak off to peek at their poll ratings. It's the bad news. There's too much of it: They can't take it.

But there's been bad news before, and we got through it. That's what people say about things that happened before they were born or while they were still thumb sucking. I love this formulation: We got through it. It means dick shit when it's about any event you personally weren't there for, as if you'd joined some We club, pinned on some tacky plastic We badge, to qualify. Still, We got through it--that's bracing. It conjures up a march or a procession, horses prancing, costumes tattered and muddied because of the siege or battle or enemy occupation or butchering of dragons or 40-year trek through the wilderness. There'd be a bearded leader hoisting his standard and pointing forward. The leader would have got the bad news early. He'd got it, he'd understood it, he'd known what to do. Attack from the flank! Go for the throat! Get the hell out of Egypt! That sort of thing.

"Where are you?" Tig calls up the stairs. "Coffee's ready."

"I'm here," I call back down. We use this a lot, this walkie-talkie of air. Communication hasn't failed us, not yet. (Not yet is unaspirated, like the h in honor. It's the silent not yet. We don't say it out loud.)

These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think of as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window. True, there are little things going wrong with us--a knee here, an eye there--but so far just little things. We can still have a good time, as long as we focus on doing one item at a time. I can remember when I used to tease our daughter, back then, when she was an adolescent. I'd do it by pretending to be old. I'd bump into walls, drop cutlery, fake memory loss. Then we'd both laugh. It's no longer such a joke.

Our now-dead cat, Drumlin, developed cat senility when she was 17. Drumlin--why did we call her that? The other cat, the one that died first, was Moraine. Once we thought it was amusing to name our cats after glacial-dump geological features, though the point of it escapes me now. Tig said Drumlin ought to have been named Landfill Site, but he was the one whose job it was to empty her litter box.

It's not likely we will have another cat. I used to thing--I thought this quite calmly--that after Tig was gone (for men die first, don't they?) I might get a cat again, for company. I no longer consider this an option. I'll surely be half blind by then, and a cat might run between my legs, and I'd trip over it and break my neck.

Poor Drumlin used to prowl the house at night, yowling in an unearthly fashion. Nothing gave her solace: She was looking for something she'd lost, though she didn't know what it was (her mind, in point of fact, if cats can be said to have minds). In the mornings we'd find small bites taken out of tomatoes, of pears: She'd forgotten she was a carnivore; she'd forgotten what it was she was supposed to eat. This has become my picture of my future self: wandering the house in the darkness, in my white nightdress, howling for what I can't quite remember I've lost. It's unbearable. I wake up in the night and reach out to make sure Tig is still there, still breathing. So far, so good.

The kitchen, when I get to it, smells like toast and coffee: not surprising, because that's what Tig has been making. The smell wraps around me like a blanket, stays there while I eat the actual toast and drink the actual coffee. There, on the table, is the bad news.

"The refrigerator's been making a noise," I say. We don't pay enough attention to our appliances. Neither of us does. Stuck onto the refrigerator is a Photo of our daughter, taken several years ago; it beams down on us like the light from a receding star. She's busy with her own life, elsewhere.

"Look at the paper," says Tig.

There are pictures. Is bad news worse with pictures? I think so. Pictures make you look, whether you want to or not. There's the burned-out car, one of a series by now, with its skeletal frame of twisted metal. A charred shadow crouches inside. In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task--putting your shoes on your feet in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.

We don't like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it's coming our way. Herd of deer in the meadow, heads down grazing peacefully. Then woof woof--wild dogs in the woods. Heads up, ears forward. Prepare to flee! Or the musk-ox defense: Wolves approaching is the news. Quick--into a circle! Females and young to the center! Snort and paw the ground! Prepare to horn the enemy!

"They won't stop," says Tig.

"It's a mess," I say. "I wonder where the security was?" When God was handing out the brains, they used to say back then, some folks we could name were last in line.

"If someone really wants to kill you, they'll kill you," Tig says. He's a fatalist that way. I disagree, and we spend a pleasant quarter of an hour calling up our dead witnesses. He submits Archduke Ferdinand and John Kennedy; I offer Queen Victoria (eight failed attempts) and Joseph Stalin, who managed to avoid assassination by doing it wholesale himself. Once this might have been an argument. Now it's a pastime, like gin rummy.

"We're lucky," says Tig. I know what he means. He means the two of us, sitting here in the kitchen, still. Neither of us gone. Not yet.

"Yes, we are," I say. "Watch the toast--it's burning."

There. We've dealt with the bad news, we've faced it head-on, and we're all right. We have no wounds, no blood pours out of us, we aren't scorched. We have all of our shoes. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there's no reason not to feel pretty good. The bad news comes from so far away, most of the time--the explosions, the oil spills, the genocides, the famines, all of that. There (concluded on page 137) Bad News (continued from page 68) will be other news, later. There always is. We'll worry about it when it comes.

Some years ago--when?--Tig and I were in the south of France, at a place called Glanum. We were on a vacation of sorts. What we really wanted to see was the asylum where Van Gogh painted the irises, and we did see that. Glanum was a side trip. I haven't thought about it in years, but I find myself there now, back then, in Glanum, before it was destroyed in the third century, before it was only a few ruins you pay to get into.

There are spacious villas in Glanum; there are public baths, amphitheaters, temples, the kinds of buildings the Romans put up wherever they went so they could feel civilized and at home. Glanum is very pleasant; a lot of upper-level army men retire here. It's quite multicultural, quite diverse: We're fond of novelty, of the exotic, though not so much as they are in Rome. We're a bit provincial here. Still, we have gods from everywhere, in addition to the official gods, of course. For instance, we have a little temple to Cybele, decorated with two ears in token of the body part you might wish to cut off in her honor. The men make jokes about that: You're lucky to get away with just the ears, they say. Better an earless man than no man at all.

There are older Greek houses mixed in with the Roman ones, and a few Greek ways linger still. Celts come to town; some of them wear tunics and cloaks like ours and speak decent Latin. Our relations with them are friendly enough, now that they've renounced their head-hunting ways. At our villa I once entertained a leading Celt to dinner. His hair was odd--reddish and curly--and he was wearing his ceremonial bronze torque, but he was no more ferocious than some other men I could mention, though he did have an eerie politeness.

I'm eating my breakfast in the morning room with the mural of Pompona and the Zephyrs. The painter was not first-rate--Pompona is slightly cross-eyed, and her breasts are enormous--but you can't always get first-rate here. What would I be having? Bread, honey, dried figs. Fresh fruit isn't in season yet. No coffee, worse luck; I don't think it's been invented yet. I'm drinking some fermented mare's milk, as an aid to digestion. A faithful slave has brought the breakfast in on a silver tray. They're good at slavery on this estate, they do it well: They're silent, discreet, efficient. They don't want to be sold, naturally: Being a house slave is better than working in the quarry.

Tig comes in with a scroll. Tig is short for Tigris; it's a nickname bestowed on him by his erstwhile troops. Only a few intimates call him Tig. He's frowning.

"Bad news?" I ask.

"The barbarians are invading," he says. "They've crossed the Rhine."

"Not before breakfast," I say. He knows I can't discuss weighty matters right after getting up. But I've been too abrupt: I see his stricken look, and I relent. "They're always crossing the Rhine. You'd think they'd get tired of it. Our legions will defeat them. They always have before."

"I don't know," says Tig. "We shouldn't have let so many barbarians into the army. You can't depend on them." He used to be in the army himself, so his worry means something. On the other hand, it's his general view that Rome is going to hell in a handcart, and I've noticed that most retired men feel like that: The world simply cannot function minus their services. It's not that they feel useless; they feel unused.

"Please, sit down," I say. "I'll order you a nice piece of bread and honey, with figs." Tig sits down. I don't proffer the mare's milk, though it would do him good. He knows I know he doesn't like it. He hates being nagged about his health, which has been giving him some problems. Oh, make things stay the way they are, I pray to him silently.

"Did you hear?" I say. "They found a freshly cut-off head, hung up beside the old Celtic votive well." Some escaped quarry worker who ran off into the woods, which they've been warned against, heaven knows. "Do you think they're reverting to savagery? The Celts?"

"They hate us, really," says Tig. "That memorial arch doesn't help. It's hardly tactful--Celts being defeated, Roman feet on their heads. Haven't you caught them staring at our necks? They'd love to stick the knife in. But they're soft now, they're used to luxuries. Not like the northern barbarians. The Celts know that if we go under, they'll go under too."

He takes only one bite of the lovely bread. Then he stands up, paces around the room. He looks flushed. "I'm going to the baths," he says. "For the news."

Gossip and rumor, I think. Portents, forebodings; birds in flight, sheep's entrails. You never know if the news is true until it pounces. Until it's right on top of you. Until you reach out in the night and there's no more breathing. Until you're howling in darkness, wandering the empty rooms in your white dress.

"We'll get through it," I say. Tig says nothing.

It's such a beautiful day. The air smells of thyme; the fruit trees are in flower. But this means little to the barbarians; in fact they prefer to invade on beautiful days. It provides more visibility for their lootings and massacres. These are the same barbarians who--I've heard--fill wicker cages with victims and set them on fire as a sacrifice to their gods. Still, they're very far away. Even if they manage to cross the Rhine, even if they aren't slain in thousands, even if the river fails to run red with their blood, they won't get here for a long time. Not in our lifetime, perhaps. Glanum is in no danger, not yet.

Is bad news worse with pictures? Pictures make you look whether you want to or not.