There's Something I Want You to Do

At the cemetery, in broad daylight, when it was her turn, she stabbed the shovel that had been handed to her into the pile of dirt, and, forcing the blade downward, scooped out a measure of clay and sand and soil. She carried the shovelful to the grave site and dropped it over Catherine’s casket, on whose surface it made a hollow sound — like a groan from another world, mixed with the sound of her own grief. Then she seemed to wake up and heard the sounds of the others assembled there, and someone took her hand, and someone else took the shovel.

—

Twenty-four months later, Amelia found herself in Baltimore, sitting in a hotel lobby at a conference of translators. From the cocktail lounge came peals of alcoholic laughter, followed by jokes told in Polish, Russian, French. It was a habit of translators to speak in collage-expressions in which three or four languages were mixed together. Ostentatious drunken polyglots! As she waited for her friend to meet her — they had reservations at Baltimore’s best seafood restaurant — she spied, across the lobby, Robert McGonigal, whom she thought of as the Old Translator. He sat slumped there in an ill-fitting suit, focused on the distance, rubbing his forehead above his massively overgrown eyebrows. He wore the thickest eyeglasses Amelia had ever seen, with lenses that made his eyes seem tiny. McGonigal’s versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid were still being taught in colleges and universities everywhere, as were his translations of Pasternak, whom he had known personally. He had known everybody. But now he was sitting in a hotel lobby alone, wearing a facial expression that said, “I have seen it. You cannot surprise me.”

She rose and walked over to where he was sitting. She wanted a blessing from the old man. Jack and Gwyneth were to be married in two months, in Italy. What would the future bring them? There had to be a blessing. McGonigal seemed to be gazing through space-time. Standing in front of him, Amelia introduced herself, and McGonigal nodded at her, as if she were a speck on eternity’s wall. Nervously she prattled on, and, as she heard more polyglot joking from the bar, she thought, Well, I might as well tell him. Somewhat against her better judgment, she related the story of her efforts to translate Sorovinct’s poem “Impossibility.”

“I couldn’t do it,” she said, and McGonigal gave an imperceptible nod. “It just wouldn’t go. And then I went to bed, and Sorovinct appeared to me in a dream.” McGonigal, startled, suddenly began to look at her closely. “I was in his house,” she said. “His wife and dog were there too.”

“What happened then?” McGonigal asked, his voice ancient and whispery.

“Well, he told me that I’d never get that poem right. He brought out his book of poems and pointed at another poem.”

McGonigal’s face took on an air of astonishment.

“And he said, ‘This is the poem you must translate. This one you’ll get in no time.’ ”

“So?”

“So I woke up,” Amelia said, “and I translated the poem in half an hour.”

“I am astonished,” McGonigal said, struggling to get to his feet.

“Well, I…”

“I am astonished,” McGonigal repeated. By now he was standing in front of her unsteadily, studying her carefully. He had taken Amelia’s hand. “Are you seriously telling me…” He seemed momentarily incapable of speech. “Are you seriously telling me that that’s the first time that such a thing has ever happened to you?”

“Well, yes.”

“My dear,” he said, his voice coming out of eternity. “Oh, my dear.” He opened his mouth and exhaled, and his breath smelled of Catherine’s grave, and then, as Amelia drew back, the grave started to laugh at her.

PART TWO

Lust

“Sir,” the security guy says, “please move away from the gaming table while you are on the phone.” Benny finishes his call to his friend Dennis, who has been giving Benny advice, and he slips his phone into his pocket.

The guard, dressed in a tight sport coat, nods affably, an action that does not seem to come easily to him. He looks like a college-educated brute. He has a crew cut, a Bluetooth in his ear, and a thick neck that tests the collar button on his white shirt. Like those of every other mean motherfucker Benny has ever known, the guard’s eyes are as blank as the lens of a camera.

Benny returns to the blackjack table in the Gray Wolf Casino outside the town of Phelps Lake, Minnesota, where he has been trying to lose all the money he has in the world and to mess up his life in a thoroughly convincing way. He’s acting out, and he knows it, and his friend Dennis, over the phone, has been telling him so. Nevertheless, he’s not succeeding. Two guys seated at the blackjack table have observed Benny with polite disbelief. He had been hoping for a spell of bad luck, but all he can do is win.