• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1308 0

the weak and faltering sister venturing out to scavenge food scraps from the cartoon-character disposal baskets with swinging doors. It was sheer luck that their stay at the mall coincided with a spell of mild weather. No one knew at this point why they didn’t ask for help. It was probably just the vastness and strangeness of the place and their own advanced age that made them feel helpless and adrift in a landscape of remote and menacing figures. The Treadwells didn’t get out much. In fact no one yet knew how they’d managed to get to the mall. Possibly their grandniece had dropped them off in her car and then forgotten to pick them up. The grandniece could not be reached, Babette said, for comment.

The day before the happy discovery, the police had called in a psychic to help them determine the Treadwells’ whereabouts and fate. It was all over the local paper. The psychic was a woman who lived in a mobile home in a wooded area outside town. She wished to be known only as Adele T According to the paper, she and the police chief, Hollis Wright, sat in the mobile home while she looked at photos of the Treadwells and smelled articles from their wardrobe. Then she asked the chief to leave her alone for an hour. She did exercises, ate some rice and dahl, proceeded to trance in. During this altered state, the report went on, she attempted to put a data trace on whatever distant physical systems she wished to locate, in this case Old Man Treadwell and his sister. When Chief Wright re-entered the trailer, Adele T. told him to forget the river and to concentrate on dry land with a moon-scape look about it, within a fifteen-mile radius of the Treadwell home. The police went at once to a gypsum processing operation ten miles down river, where they found an airline bag that contained a handgun and two kilos of uncut heroin.

The police had consulted Adele T. on a number of occasions and she had led them to two bludgeoned bodies, a Syrian in a refrigerator and a cache of marked bills totaling six hundred thousand dollars, although in each instance, the report concluded, the police had been looking for something else.

The American mystery deepens.

14

WE CROWDED BEFORE THE WINDOW in Steffie’s small room, watching the spectacular sunset. Only Heinrich stayed away, either because he distrusted wholesome communal pleasures or because he believed there was something ominous in the modern sunset.

Later I sat up in bed in my bathrobe studying German. I muttered words to myself and wondered whether I’d be able to restrict my German-speaking at the spring conference to brief opening remarks or whether the other participants would expect the language to be used throughout, in lectures, at meals, in small talk, as a mark of our seriousness, our uniqueness in world scholarship.

The TV said: “And other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio.”

Denise came in and sprawled across the foot of the bed, her head resting on her folded arms, facing away from me. How many codes, countercodes, social histories were contained in this simple posture? A full minute passed.

“What are we going to do about Baba?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“She can’t remember anything.”

“Did she ask you whether she’s taking medication?”

“No.”

“No she’s not or no she didn’t ask?”

“She didn’t ask.”

“She was supposed to,” I said.

“Well she didn’t.”

“How do you know she’s taking something?”

“I saw the bottle buried in the trash under the kitchen sink. A prescription bottle. It had her name and the name of the medication.”

“What is the name of the medication?”

“Dylar. One every three days. Which sounds like it’s dangerous or habit-forming or whatever.”

“What does your drug reference say about Dylar?”

“It’s not in there. I spent hours. There are four indexes.”

“It must be recently marketed. Do you want me to double-check the book?”

“I already looked. I looked.”

“We could always call her doctor. But I don’t want to make too much of this. Everybody takes some kind of medication, everybody forgets things occasionally.”

“Not like my mother.