Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

to hide my stitches as best I could. I was looking for work, I went with a department-store blush and a Cadillac smile.

      There was a pale man in a brown suit sitting at the reception desk: he handed me a form and asked me to fill it out before I met with a counselor, and I took it back across the carpeting and sat on a green couch that seemed to have been stuffed with sawdust. Just one sheet of paper, they weren’t asking for much: they wanted to know what education I’d had, my skills, last few jobs, my references. But the printing was so neat, the lines were so straight, the pen they lent me wrote in such a boring blue. I don’t have any other excuse. The questions were so slow, and my heart began to itch.

      —So I perjured myself all over the page: from the top to the bottom I filled in someone else’s story, sucking liar’s carbon from the tip of the pencil in between inspirations. I made up an entire life, right there in that shabby little office, in that strange little city: a better and more suitable life, one I thought they wanted. I said that I went to Catholic college in Chicago and worked in an office called Acme Prosthetics on the weekends, as a volunteer at a community center—pause, my breath quickened, I was becoming euphoric and I thought about the pink nurse—as an orderly in St. Sebastian Hospital the summer after I graduated. I listed references: a fictional professor in whose class I’d flourished and a project coordinator with an unpronounceable last name. The only truth I told was my name, my age, and my new phone number, and when I was done I held the paper in my lap as if it were the family Bible.

      Cold air from a vent in a corner of the ceiling ruffled the posters on the wall. I crossed my legs and listened to the fluorescent light fixtures buzzing overhead. An imposing woman in a powder blue skirt and a white blouse with a big bow at the throat came through a door across the room; she stopped for a moment to gaze out the window, then came and stood above me. All right then, come on, she said, giving me a smile that barely made it past her coral-colored lipstick. Everything about her was enormous: her bare arms ballooned from her sleeves and her hips were as wide as the trunk of an oak; only her feet were small, and as we walked back toward her cubicle I wondered how she could stand a day’s worth of the pain she must have suffered from her cheap blue shoes. She lowered herself into an office chair; it seemed to sink into the carpeting. Well, you look employable, she said as she lifted her great, gaping purse off of a second chair and motioned for me to sit down beside her. We can be thankful for that. She peered over at me. But honey, I’ve got to ask you, before we even begin.—She gestured at my forehead. What happened?

      For a moment I was startled; then I settled slowly back in my seat and gave up one more tall tale. It was the only thing I could do. Once upon a time … I started, pulling my hair back. The counselor gave me a get-out look … I was the Bride of Frankenstein, I concluded.

      She paused, then let loose with a high-pitched giggle and said, Shit, honey, weren’t we all.

      I had a little accident with my car, I said resignedly, and she nodded.

      Well. Her hands were pink, her nails were crimson. She turned up the first sheet of my application, stared down at something I had written on the page below, and spoke without looking up. Well, O.K. I’m glad you came in. Most people we get in here can’t do anything at all, and if they can, then no one is going to trust them to do it. So what kind of thing are you looking for?

      I had already decided and I didn’t hesitate. What else was there for me to do, in a world of blindness and injury? I want to work in the field of health care, I said.

      The field of health care? Doesn’t that sound nice. I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, even when she said it a second time. The field of health care. She glanced down at my application again. You have some experience here …

      I gestured toward Illinois. I studied nursing up north, I said. I never finished, but I interned in the hospital for a year, and when I was in high school I was a candy striper.

      All right, then. She pulled a few tan-colored files out of a drawer by her side and began to flip through them, shaking her head. No, she said, and then stopped just long enough to stare at a sheet of paper that puzzled her. No. There’s a hospital—are you union?

      I never had time to join, I replied.

      No, she said. Well, then, you can go downtown and sign up, and wait three weeks for it to process through, and then I’ll have something for you. Or … Here she tempted me. Such a sympathetic woman, I never would have guessed she was working, from whatever distance, for the devil. There’s some nonunion work, she said, if you’re willing to be an orderly.

      I’d like to start as soon as possible.

      Of course you would, she said, and dug through her files some more. There’s this, Eden View. Can you work with old people? It’s just cleaning up, mostly, but it’s work.

      I said that was fine, and she wrote out the name and address on a square of purple paper that she removed from a multicolored stack on the corner of her desk. If you can get out there this afternoon, I’ll call them.

      I’ll go, I said. And I went, thinking nothing, just like a pebble that’s been dropped down a well.

      

      Eden View: right away I decided it was a terrible name, it was insulting and embarrassing. No one was going to believe that you could see paradise from there, just because someone else said you could. They called it a rest home, a community. They would have called rape Love-in-springtime, and slander Legend. I thank God I won’t have to die in that kind of place.

      It was an asylum for old people; I found it in a neighborhood of clapboard houses on the eastern edge of town, where the city began to thin out into tired and odd-shaped public parks that never received visitors, an area so homely and forgotten that as far as I ever knew, it had no name. At one in the afternoon, I arrived outside the front door.

      The building was red brick, three stories high, with a white roof on top, and it was surrounded by small, neat grounds with benches placed here and there. I walked in from the midsummer heat to a shadowy, cool reception area. At the front desk a nurse was talking on the telephone, absently twisting the line around her index finger as she spoke. When I showed her my appointment slip, she took it, examined it, and wrote down a room number on the top margin, all the while listening to the voice in the receiver and occasionally saying, Yes it is … Yes it is.

      I was interviewed by an old man in worn blue jeans and a cowboy shirt, and the entire hour was absurd: when I first found his open door and saw him standing awkwardly beside his bare desk, he seemed so helpless and out of place that I thought he was a patient under the delusion that he could hire me. I’m sorry, I said, and started to leave again, but he took hold of my arm high up by my shoulder, welcomed me in, and said he was Personnel. He asked me to sit and I took a hard wooden schoolhouse chair next to the door. There was a moment while he searched his desk drawers for a pencil, which turned out to be on the floor by his foot; with a groan he stooped down to retrieve it, and returned pallid and trembling from the effort. He was a puppet, and he made me feel bashful for having more blood than I could use. Now, he said. All right, then. He studied my application. I see you lived in Chicago.

      That’s right, I said.

      I’ve got a grandson living there. I guess he’s still in school.

      He looked at me hopefully, but all I could do was nod and say, How nice.

      Studying, what do you call it? The electric, the wires, and the … He made a motion with his hands as if he was threading a needle.

      Yes, I said, and looked out the doorway at a nurse who was passing by.

      He was quiet for a second, and then he abruptly sat down behind his desk and began to ask me a string of questions. They were dull, but I was honest, and he must have been just who he had claimed to be, because when the hour was done, he offered me a job, and when I went down to the nurses’ office to fill out some forms, the big brusque administrator just looked me up and down a few times and told me I could start on Monday of the following week.

      

      But I want to tell you about Bonnie, because Bonnie is where everything begins: