The March Hare

Dr. Bill Retz was speaking to his receptionist when a motorcycle went past his office. He waited clamly for the sound to die away before continuing. Did Aileen know where his PalmPilot was? Dr. Retz could not find it anywhere and was lost without it, as she knew. Aileen pushed back her chair and went in search of it. Dr. Retz went out into his waiting room, where pan flute music played over the recessed speakers and fish swam back and forth endlessly in their fifty-gallon tank. He wondered if he should have it redone, if it was too sterile or if sterile was what people wanted when they brought their children to a doctor.

Aileen squeaked back up to the front desk in her rubber clogs, handed him the PalmPilot, and sat down again in front of her computer. It had been in the bathroom, on the tank of the toilet. Dr. REtz thanked her and went back to his office, where he planned to fall asleep in his chair until his next patient came in.

The same motorcycle that had interrupted the doctor came to a stop outside Judge Lafayette's Bar and Grill. There was no longer any Judge Lafayette, but as long as there were people alive who remembered him the name worked well, and when those people died off the fact of the bar and grill would replace the original Judge in the common memory. Inside, one of Judge Lafayette's twelve legitimate great-granddaughters wiped down the bar, two argued in the kitchen about who was supposed to have made the sweet tea, a fourth was upstairs in the office writing out checks and balancing the books, and three more stood out in the courtyard, kicking at dead plants and planning how they would change things. Of the other five, two were away at college, two were at the dance school they owned together, and the last, Camille, was in a room above the office, which stank of mold and dust and untouched things, where she went to smoke privately. At the sound of the motorcycles engine roaring up, idling, shutting off, she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, hid it among the ancient papers, and went downstairs. They would be opening soon.

In this way the morning went on, and, since no one knew yet that the Artist in Residence was now the color of the new asphalt jus layed out on the highway, everyone was fairly bored with it. Dr. Retz saw a few patients and thought that his office should be repainted a robust red as he examined an inflamed throat. Camille Lafayette smiled gently at the customers in Judge Lafayette's and stuffed their dollar bills into her pockets while her sisters did their daily dance of talking and sweeping and pouring around her. Charlotte Morgan ate a lemon wedge for her own lunch; she felt unable to swallow anything else.

And May, in the stucco house in silent downtown, finished dabbing blue onto Saint Sebastian's shorts and moved on to the red of his boxing gloves. Though she sat in the stream of sunlight coming in through the window her new skin did not sweat, and the cut on her ankle itched already with its healing. If she had had nothing else to do that day, she might have noticed these things. As it was, she was thinking that she should never have proposed to do this series in egg tempera because it made everything harder and maybe not better.

A single police car rolled down each of the streets, one by one, past cafes and sandwich shops which proliferated in Fairwell. Even the shops that sold only one thing or the art galleries that served sushi did well there, because the people were proud of them and willing to spend their money to keep things from failing. The only businesses that ever failed in Fairwell were pawn shops and laundromats, and there was not a strip mall to hold them, and everyone who could afford a house in Fairwell preferred to have their own laundry room, and no one pawned anything because their money was enough, always, and they never had the need.