CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders Page A

I let him in and he unloads histotebag of cookbooks for sale. Today it’s “Crazy Cajun Carnival” and “Going Bananas with Bananas: A Caribbean Primer.” But I know what he really wants. With my eyes I tell him wait. Finally Gaither finishes raking my sub-par Disbursement Ledger over the coals and goes across the mall to O My God for some vintage religious statuary. I slip the headset on Feltriggi and run Youth Roams Kansas Hometown, 1932. It’s all homemade bread and dirt roads and affable dogcatchers. What a sweet grin appears. He greets each hometowner with his ghost limbs and beams at the chirping of the holographic birds. He kneels awhile in Mrs. Lawler’s larder, sniffing spices that remind him of his mother elbow-deep in flour. He drifts out to the shaded yard and discusses Fascism with the iceman near some swaying wheat. His posture changes for the better. He laughs aloud. He’s young again and the thresher has yet to claim his arms.
    Gaither comes back with a Saint Sebastian cookie jar. I nudge Feltriggi and tell him that’s all for today. I take off his headset and he offers me a cookbook in payment. I tell him forget it. I tell him that’s what friends are for. It’s seventy bucks a session and he knows it. He rams his head into my chest as a sign of affection.
    “That type of a presence surely acts to deflate revenues,” Gaither says primly as Feltriggi goes out.
    “No lie,” I say. “That’s why I nearly beat him up every time he comes in here.”
    “I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” she says.
    “Me neither,” I say. “That’s why I usually don’t really do it.”
    “I see,” she says. “Let’s talk briefly about personaltragedy. No one’s immune. But at what point must mourning cease? In your case, apparently never.”
    I think: You never saw Elizabeth lanky and tan and laughing in Napa.
    “I like your cookie jar,” I say.
    “Very well,” she says, “seal your own doom.”
    She says she’s shocked at the dryness of my treadmill bearings and asks if I’ve ever heard of oil. She sighs and gives me her number at the Quality Inn in case I think of anything that might argue against Franchise Agreement Cancellation. Then out she goes, sadly shaking her head.
    It’s only my livelihood. It’s only every cent Elizabeth left me. I load up my mobile pack. I select my happiest modules. Then I go off to my real job, my penance, my albatross.
    Rockettown’s our ghetto. It’s called Rockettown because long ago they put up a building there in which to build rockets. But none were built and the building’s now nothing, which is what it’s always been, except for a fenced-off dank corner that was once used to store dilapidated fireplugs and is now a filthy day-care for the children of parents who could care less. All around Rockettown little houses went up when it was thought the building would soon be full of people making rockets and hauling down impressive wages. They’re bad little houses, put up quick, and now all the people who were young and had hoped to build rockets are old and doddering and walk by the empty building mumbling why why why.
    In the early days of my grief Father Luther told me to lose myself in service by contacting Elder Aid, Inc. I gotMrs. Ken Schwartz. Mrs. Ken Schwartz lives in Rockettown. She lives in Rockettown remembering Mr. Ken Schwartz and cursing him for staying so late at Menlo’s TenPin on nights when she forgets he’s been dead eighteen years. Mrs. Ken Schwartz likes me and my happy modules. Especially she likes Viennese Waltz. Boy does she. She’s bedridden and lonely and sometimes in her excitement bruises her arms on her headboard when the orchestra starts to play. Tonight she says she’s feeling weak. She says she used to be a different person and wishes she could go back to the days when she was loved. She mourns Fat Patrice and their jovial games of Old Maid. She mourns the front-yard oak the city felled without asking her. Mostly she