QUICKSILVER IN THE HAND
Originally published in Canteen.
MERCURY WAS BAD and everyone knew it. It made the evening news and the health section of the paper with the regularity of fiber-rich snack strategies, Feldenkrais for ADHD toddlers, and the gluten-autism connection, which was less tenuous than you’d think.
She found the metronomic rhythm of its media appearances to be soothing. The breathless cut-and-paste of the 24-hour news cycle leaked air when it was mercury’s turn to tap dance its 45-second ba-dum-bum. Good for barrel-scraping cocktail oratorio and other interstitial moments that happened before and after things. The mercury story was nothing new, even when there was a new mercury story. Women of child-bearing age were given the tuna kibosh. The metal-mouthed were damned to dental obsolescence; fillings were unfilled and refilled with something white. And the newsiest bit of news was the new sushi statistic, which had the city on edge.
The more upscale the sushi, the more mercury it leeched from the sea. The culty places with their rarified maritime ova, and the ova of ova. The untainted offspring of the already pristine, Matryoshka dolling down to sheer essence: the buttery gossamer of fish as art. Sushi fetishists. The heat of their collective wasabi-daubed smirk might finally lose some bite. But the lumpy lunch-break league with its plain-Jane plastic trays of midday indulgence, safe supermarket sushi—theywould be fine. They’d sometimes get use of an associate’s boat or cabin or box seats. His tie would blow over his shoulder on a windy day, and she’d yank a little at her skirt to get the drape right. Maybe they were underpaid and unhappily married. Their kids might be worse at algebra or less athletic than they’d hoped. But their mercury needle wouldn’t wiggle.
Mercury was a heavy metal and it was toxic. That she knew, but not much else. Her heavy head did the mercury mazurka. Mercury was on her mind since she’d been sick for days—feverish and bone-weak—taking her temperature, still, with a last-gen thermometer. Next illness, she decided, she’d go digital. She’d be up and running, even while she was down for the count. Another skirmish won in “the new healthy.” It was cheaper than replacing her fillings and more palatable than trading tuna for one of the safe, strange swimmers on the good-fish list.
But she liked the way the old thermometer looked in her medicine chest. A weighty old wandlet, a dignified slash of analog apothecary in relief against the so-sleek-as-to-barely-exist cosmeceuticals and nutrabeauticals, packaged in shades of faintest gray. Dependably leaden amidst the hybrids and abstractions that may or may not have worked. The thin red line didwork. Whatever its toxic threat, it worked. But you could never be too safe. So she’d trash the old thermometer once she was well enough to leave the house.
“THE RECYCLING BINS,” said a friend. “The blue one.”
“Bring it to the doctor,” said another friend. “You know—those sharps containers?”
“Hazmat,” said the executive secretary, who seemed to know things. “With the jumpsuits. Make an appointment, they’ll pick it up.”
Wizard Tommy, her apartment superintendent, said, “No hazmat, and no way you put it in the bins. Look in the Yellow Pages.”
The stickers on the recycling bins said “no.” Her doctor’s office said “no.” She called her mother in California, the unofficial American capital of both sushi and the environment, but her mother was more concerned with the fever, the illness, than paraphernalia. She learned that hazmat—more an idea than a fixed entity—had no phone number. The Yellow Pages had nothing. The Internet had everything, too much, ultimately nothing. Her chimerical search sprouted heads, heads of heads, vestigial digits, a tail. An anemone of recordings and warnings, estimated wait times and prompts. She pressed the button to hear it in Spanish, which bumped her back to the main menu. Online, the 2012 Special Waste Schedule for New York City Residents looked as if it held promise, but it was a 27-page PDF and she lacked the vim. She bookmarked it for later.
The Internet oozed mercuriana. Mercury is the smallest and innermost planet. Hermes to the Greeks, Mercury was the god of speed, the messenger god. Rather than operate alone, he preferred to work in tandem with other forces. He had winged sandals and his day of the week was Wednesday (mercredi, mercoledì, miércoles). Mercury is a volatile element. It’s sometimes called quicksilver, which was a surfwear brand in the 1980s. Some poet compared love to quicksilver in the hand—“leave the fingers open and it stays, clutch it and it darts away.” Alexander Calder created Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Mercury is a common ingredient in mascara, except in Minnesota, where it’s banned. Alchemists attributed magical powers to it. Quicksilver was a film (Kevin Bacon, 1986). And at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way, we this way. Exeunt.” This was right before everybody went off on separate yearlong pilgrimages before ostensibly reuniting and getting married. It was a puzzling ending—a happy one—but because the couples didn’t marry, was it technically a comedy?
HER HEALTH IMPROVED. She whirled back into the brackish tsunami of city life. She returned to work and met friends for dinner. It was the vernal equinox, then spring. The streets looked longer and deeper, the daylight less blue. The sun made her dizzy, so she walked fewer blocks at once and she drank drinks with electrolytes. She kept the thermometer in her purse. She would toss it just as soon as she knew where.
She named the thermometer Darren. It was not a name she liked, but it was the first that came to mind, which gave it some integrity. Darren joined her at work, while she was window-shopping, in the insides of cabs. He was around while she slept and with her on the subway. She’d forget about him until accidentally fingering his slender length while rifling around for keys or something else.
From her desk at work, there were phone trysts: the Bureau of Solid Waste, Reduction & Recycling; the Bureau of Hazardous Waste Regulation; the Interstate Mercury Education & Recycling Clearinghouse (IMERC) of the Northeast Waste Management Officials’ Association (NEWMOA). She winnowed through the wires, flagellating and ciliate. It was protozoan and complex; it undulated. Her all-star team: Yvette, Mr. Tony, Dorothee (with two e’s), Kevin #347, Waldorf Roosevelt (a Jamaican), and Lee. She had Yvette’s sympathy, Mr. Tony’s vexation (was he mocking her?), and the earnest curiosity of Lee, whose un-sotto voce—more of a Sinitic bark (not that she was anti-Sinitic)—did little to reveal his or her gender. He—or she—commended her for holding on to Darren until she could dispose of him properly. She was agood citizen. No one had answers. They all jotted down her phone number. They would check with their supervisors and be in touch, they said.
MICROMANAGEMENT WAS THE dominion of spinsters and loners, the aged. This early vigilance, she knew, was a bad sign for a single, not-old woman. She imagined her friends with a Darren and felt sure they’d all have thrown him in the trash and gotten on with their lives. But she could not. Darren and his nebulous poison might’ve wound up in the river, the water supply, a child’s lunch, breast milk, the air. The world oozed putrescence, more and more and more each minute. Entire populations—micro and mini—were on the wane. Landfills swelled with medical equipment, industrial machinery, satellites, specimen slides. Cows oinked, pigs mooed, baby birds slid quietly into their crude-oil cocktails. What she wanted was a stadium-size sinkhole, a fetid repository that would suck Darren down into its morass without ceremony. A spot on a toxic tapestry, a single dirty dot lodged deep in a Where’s Waldo?. But on his own, hot and hard amidst the melon rinds and coupons of low-risk domestic garbage, he was a gin-blistered nose on a Dresden face.
SHE WAS A PEDESTRIAN among hundreds, downwind of street-shwarma sizzle, roughed up in the diesel and drone. What if they knew? This short, tall, blow-dried, pockmarked, supermodelish, sweaty, newly in love, crippled, heartbroken, god-fearing, scandalous, curly-straight United Nations of sidewalkers—what if they knew about Darren in her purse? Did they have Darrens of their own? It’s good, in the urban tussle, to keep something to yourself, even if you don’t particularly like the thing. Secrets give you velocity on the avenues. You move upstream, downstream, through huddles and hives, on concrete. You insert yourself, then glide, thrust, and then glide. Secrets make you smooth and hairless, speedy with secrets, secretly so. Army-jacketed old communists with brass knuckles in linty Velcro pockets, pockets that date back to when Velcro was the new thing; decapitated heads in the bowling bags of loners; last night’s underwear balled up at the bottom of a pretty girl’s purse; a Ziploc filled with the chest hair of the lover you love; the decaying condom in a college student’s thin wallet; the wedding ring you remove and put in the pill case for half an hour so the fishmonger tokes you an extra couple of scallops for your signature paella.
Darren’s there-ness consoled her. She appreciated his constancy. What she didn’t like was the idea. It was the stuff of bestselling fiction and made-for-TV movies: woman walks around with secret thermometer, taking the temperature of modern life, monitoring the climate, registering the degree of something or other. A recent divorcée, she was sensitive to the mawkish and maudlin, to what the 20th century called Movies of the Week. A billion-dollar industry, divorce. Things to buy. Books, surgery, getaways, classes, shoes, advanced degrees, chocolate—but only a bite! You get makeovers and you learn to surf or shoot guns. You travel, switch jobs, maybe you whore around. You have a thing; she didn’t want a thing. Wasn’t it enough to spend your days and nights doused in this strange new scent, Eau d’Alone?
She kept her job, made weekend plans in advance, canceled a quarter of them, smelled the baby-scented babies of friends, drank way too much three or four times a month, sneered back at sneering shopgirls, and visited museums with old boyfriends who’d grown up or grown paunchy or grown a beard or who now grew tomatoes in their gardens upstate.
ON A SATURDAY, she accompanied her friends Peter and Sadie to the giant toy store on Broadway. Their five-year-old son sat in a tiny chair and pretended to pour tea and arrange cookies on a plate. It was Alice’s mad tea party, all done up in caustic-smelling, unregulated Melamine. She considered sticking Darren in one of the tiny teacups, cocked at a jaunty angle like a demitasse spoon. But the mother, Sadie, steered them away from the tea things toward the more rough-and-tumble part of the store—the part for boys—where children generally got hurt.
Monday morning on the subway platform, she asked herself what would happen if instead of a dollar bill, she put Darren in the busker’s guitar case. Would the busker think it payment? A threat? Flirtation? A joke?
After work, in the bookstore where they knew her, on Third Avenue near the Japanese restaurants, she thought she might leave Darren in a book. An outlandish bookmark, but where? Žižek? Bushnell? Proust?
THAT NIGHT, HER first date since the divorce, the first in seven years. He ordered a cask of amontillado. The bar had neither casks nor amontillado. It was a showy, ineffective move. They drank and talked. The earth continued to turn; it neither shook nor stood still. Would the caskmaster be open-minded enough, she wondered, to incorporate Darren into a one-night stand? Not that she wanted to. She didn’t ask. He asked—he asked her upstairs for another drink. She refused, with one foot in the cab, presenting her face for a lip-jaw graze that happened so fast, she wasn’t sure it happened at all.
Going online after a bad date is one of life’s better pleasures. Postdate dates with the Internet date back to before she was married. It feels a tiny bit shady, even if you deviate from deviant websites and avoid prurient chatrooms. Maybe you’re just price-busting dustbusters, Wikipedia-ing the Talmud, or Urban Dictionary-ing thetaint(see also driving range, grundle, firewall, rumblestrip.). But looking at a screen is no worse than a postdate wank and not nearly as bad as a postdate date, the second date of the night. She’d done them all before and knew she would again.
The 2012 Special Waste Schedule for New York City Residents. Its virtual girth, its cyber size, tonight was the night. Truncating a date in favor of a 27-page biohazard PDF: perhaps the world’s greatest insult, she thought. She learned that the entire to-do gets done in a garage on 30th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. You get six visits a year, no more than two thermometers per visit.
Special clause, three-part sidebar: “What to do before, during, and after a hazardous waste incident.” Before a hazardous waste incident? Before a hazardous waste incident? Barring clairvoyants and Chicken Littles, of which there were no shortage in the five boroughs, barring the Delphic and the ditzy and the ditzily Delphic, how does one know a hazardous waste incident is going to happen?
The site is open on Saturdays from 10 in the morning until 5 in the evening, except for the last week of each month, when it’s open on Friday instead. For reasons unexplained, the site is closed on March 1 and November 1. But it was June, so she didn’t care.
SHE WALKED WEST. The impersonal, highwaylike whoosh of Houston Street. It was unseasonably hot. Sixth Avenue, heading north toward 14th, the sidewalk a long, gray griddle. Steam rose up from the pavement, eddying around the bare-ankled clop clop en route, en masse, en suite, buzzing to and from the hashes and benedicts that ranked at least three stars on the brunch blogs. Up past 14th Street, commerce grew big and lusty. Commerce grew a bushy, foot-long beard and hypertrophic breasts. The heat appeared not to hamper the spending habits of weekending Americans with their bags full of bags full of other bags. She stopped for a smoothie but the machine looked pithy and clogged, so she moved on. The last leg of the trip was remarkable only for its blistering white heat, her sweaty upper lip and lower back, a dearth of shade, and two sunny sides of the street. She arrived at the location feeling dehydrated, with a sudden spectacular loneliness. She was far west, near the dirty river, its ambiguous industry, its gentlemen’s clubs. She reached in and fingered Darren.
A small, fluorescent-lit bunker of a room. She parted the silky pink curtain. A woman sat behind a window that was probably bulletproof. The large microphone that sprouted up in front of her, bolted to her desk, was a drooping metal opium poppy. Above the window, a sign had been Sharpied by someone with the shakes or just a shaky hand: “NYC RESIDENTS MUST PROVIDE A PICTURE ID AND PROOF OF RESIDENCY, SUCH AS A UTILITY OR TELEPHONE BILL THAT CONTAINS THEIR NAME AND NYC ADDRESS.”
“I believe you, honey,” the employee told the microphone poppy, which amplified her words and lent them authority. “But if you don’t have proof of residency, I can’t accept your thermometer. Or anything, for that matter.”
“But I have my picture ID. It didn’t say I need a utility bill…”
“You shoulda called us up. Internet’s outta date.”
“There was no phone number on the website.”
“Sure there is. Buried in there somewheres, real small probably.”
“Listen. Please? It’s 90 degrees. I walked miles to get here. The thermometer’s tiny. It’s a thermometer. People are bringing truck tires. You can’t just take it? Just today?
“First of all, you shoulda took a subway. Second, size got nothing to do with it. You gotta prove you’re a resident, above and beyond your photo ID.”
She made her eyes miserable. She made them plead with the woman and her rules. She tried to look beleaguered. She wasbeleaguered. It didn’t matter.
“Get yourself a smoothie or go in a store with A/C. Lucky you don’t have to work.”
SHE WALKED EAST to Ninth Avenue and down 10 blocks to 20th Street. From there, she zigzagged her way into Chelsea toward the shop with the frozen yogurt that wasn’t really yogurt, or frozen, but each time she ate it, the cool, lemony tartness sprung her into a brief happiness (before she’d tire of it and toss the last few spoonfuls). She was still an avenue away from the not-yogurt shop when throngs of people began taking formation on the sidewalk. Was it an AA meeting? An audition? An early gallery opening? That sale?
That sale. The big one. With deep designer discounts. As part of the Manhattan citizenry oath for those aged 30 through 50, you were conscripted. Each season, you attended and enjoyed this sale. You waited in line for entry. You waxed poetic about past sales while waiting in line for entry. You bought things you’d never normally buy, that you probably couldn’t afford, that you resold for a pittance. The ******* Warehouse Sale. She went once, before she was married, and became the owner of a deodorant-stained, ill-fitting bandage dress in emerald green, only $400 instead of the original $800. But that was then.
On this day, inside, after having been frisked and bag-checked, she felt the heat. Different from the heat outside, it was as if the cavernous space had birthed its own ecosystem. Harried publicists shot bargain bootie with camera phones and beamed images to clients, while gloriously groomed men split their attention between slim Belgian blazers and each other. There was hunger, and speed. No movement was wasted, no sets of eyes unsquinting their mission. They were in country. In the bush. Two honey-haired yentas at the haute end of the age spectrum debated the virtues of an Hermès cuff versus an Hermès datebook, both in the classic Hermès orange. She went straight to the shoes.
The knee-high equestrian boot was not an option for obvious reasons; she might as well have tossed Darren into the dumpster all those weeks ago. The gladiator sandal was also out of the question: It was open-toed and he’d have ended up on the floor. She scanned the aisle. Shoebox-flanked shoppers mimicked the polyrhythm of African dance, shucking and squatting, arching and hunching. There was very little she could have said or done to make them stop, had she wanted to make them stop.
Her choice became clear. Kismet in red at the end of the aisle. She knew it from six feet away. Her two-second traversal of those six feet included no formal cognizance, just movement, the pre-cerebral pull of going-toward. It was a single red ballet slipper, mateless, with a dainty bow, size eight-and-a-half. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Girlish innocence, sturdy construction, a classic.
She reached into her purse and touched Darren. He felt like a pen. She closed her palm around him tightly, tighter, brought him up out of the purse, then let him go. Darren was inthe red slipper.
SHE FOUND A TABLE in the empty restaurant across the street. It was one of those businesses without identity—decor, menu, and waitstaff all mildly incompatible—an ambience of stiff midday suspension and mildewy off-hour malaise. It seemed to have just been renovated, as though it had very recently been something else.
She chose a window seat that faced *******. She watched its heavy industrial doors disgorge dazed-looking shoppers and the things they carried, their pace slower in the sun than it had been inside. She looked for signs of chaos: clustering customers, a hiccup in traffic flow, the wooot wooot of an alarm. EMT guys—or hazmat—if she waited long enough? She felt like an operative in a spy film, watching for the fruits of her dirty work to combust while sipping Campari across the avenue, a stoic Cold Warrior in an Yves Saint Laurent trench. She changed her order to Campari.
Realistically, a security guard would toss Darren into the garbage like yesterday’s coffee grinds. It was doubtful but possible there’d be screams, a panic moment, another post-9/11 false alarm followed by an uptick in consumer confidence, business back in black.
Darren, she said aloud as she put on her sunglasses to repel the hot, white finger of daylight pointing in at her. Darren,she said again. Where was her Campari? It was taking too long. Darren, she said.You that way we this way. Exeunt! She was sure she was the only person who’d ever said the word exeunt aloud in that particular restaurant. The waiter finally brought her Campari, served all wrong in what appeared to be a parfait glass. Exeunt, she said again, aloud. The waiter was foreign—maybe Central American or Southern European—and he might’ve thought exeunt was “thank you” in some other language. “Enjoy,” he said. “Today is too hot.”
***
MALERIE WILLENS 