High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (28 page)

“You really shouldn’t.” I tried to take it from him, and the wine spilled some. I let go of his hand. He straightened with a brief surge of strength, and said: “You will not do that again.”

He looked at the wine, and then he swallowed it all in one gulp. Red streaming from the sides of his mouth, he coughed. His shoulders convulsed and he spat. Then he turned, retching into the tubful of water.

He wiped his mouth, and said, “Your grandfather. We used to stay in hotel rooms. He traveled.”

I tried to give him the water.

He waved it away, and said, “Took us wherever he went. Every room a Bible.” His face was glowing. “Said they came from angels. Angels wore suits, key rings big as hula hoops. A briefcase full of Bibles. Had keys to every room in the city.” His head lolling back and forth. “Where are the wings? Got holes in their jackets?”

“You never talked about him.”

A long pause. “Hotels give me nightmares.”

I took a sip of the wine, and set the bottle on the tub.

“He’s been a constant concern,” he said. “Your grandfather distresses me.”

He was looking at the cloudy bathwater.

“They promised him it was coming.” He coughed. “Light from Heaven, and it’s all over.” He wiped his mouth. “And the faithful will be glorified!” He coughed again. “But then it’s the bread truck. And the birds in the morning, and the milk bottles…”

I put the glass of water to his lips. He sipped from it, and the cot made a snapping-bone noise.

I realized I was crying, and I let it happen.

He was talking now hardly above a whisper. “You’re the last one, a long line of God’s men. American men. You’re the lucky one. Your grandfather, and his father. And his. You should have a boy. He’ll be lucky.”

There are brief glimpses that take you outside, beyond. The last time I smoked marijuana, I was thirty-four and sitting with a good client, poor guy had leukemia. My world opened out like the night-black sky and went on forever, unknowable. There is that long sigh that scoops you out all empty inside from your bowels and all through your soul when you’re standing at the edge of a thing like the Grand Canyon. You wonder at the marvel of a crack, a single crack that opens up turning into something like this, where the world below breaks open and has nothing to do with you, and knows not a thing of what goes on outside its own rocky moon-mountain insides. And your hand is holding someone else’s. Truth comes at you like the floor of an elevator shaft. There are only two good reasons I can think of for God. There is the Good Lord as uncanny family inheritance, a strange great gift from the people who birthed you. Say your prayers before bedtime. Like Dad gave me his God, and his father his, and his father’s father, et cetera. Ad infinitum, for all I know. And of course the Good Lord comes in handy when you first meet the creeping fear of anything unknown, the first time He takes someone away forever.

Dad dropped his legs over the side of the cot and readied his hand at the sink. He took the wine from my hands, and I let him. He drank it all down, in one slow and controlled swallow, and said: “The Blood of God.”

I helped him pull himself up.

He pressed a hand to the tall red wall. His knees were quaking. He whispered, “We’re nothing, you and I, and everyone. Two ways, son, only glory.” He paused. “And frustration.”

He let go of the wall, and he wavered.

“Glory has been patient.” His voice was slurred.

And then he fell.

Everything moved slowly as I reached for him. His arms going around my neck like a lasso, and then it was his weight and my weight together. The pinkish clouds of wine in the water were shifting, and we fell now together, slowly, against the side of the tub. His hand struck the water and our weight knocked hard against the porcelain, and the wine bottle fell in the pool, splashing red water on the walls. A dark blood cloud poured from the bottle, unfurling, rolling, and swirling in the pink dusky storm in the bathwater. The whole sky, all of it, I saw it there like a rippling mirror as we fell back together on the low red floor. I became aware of real time moving around me and beyond me in echoing swirls. I felt we were outside the world somehow, fallen outside and deep inside some borderless moment. It was vast and it was exhilarating. I was aware of my skin, of the very space in my skull, of the infinite space in my skull, of the tidal rush and pull of the so many people we are and can be and ever once were. I was aware of my very own heart, aware in that same way I’d been so many times of my stomach: it was full. My heart was full. I held my father in my arms, and I didn’t want to lose him, and I didn’t want it to be too late, was I too late? I wanted to go back in time, but I couldn’t. And so I became very afraid. Above us, red clouds were poised so still. Then they broke and fell like rain.

EAST AND WEST

4

Desire can be so exhausting, and has way too long a memory. It was early fall, and the leaves were turning papery and thinning on the trees. The afternoons were suffused with that sad and lovely melon glow, when everybody knows the days are getting shorter and those last hours of work and school take on a fresh purpose, letting out in a day already going dark. Halloween candy was falling off the drugstore shelves. I didn’t want winter to come any sooner than it had to. It had been weeks since I last spoke to Sarah and told her that Dad was being taken to the hospital.

Part of me wanted to tell her about the nurses giving me nasty looks. I mean, What kind of son lets this happen to his father? How they had to feed him through tubes because a body can only take so much before it breaks down, before it starts eating itself. How my father could not, or would not speak. About how Dad and I shared milk shakes from the hospital cafeteria, and the nurses split them into two small cups, and we used thick plastic straws.

I sat there beside him watching the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest, and made plans for the move because I hoped to take him with me back to California.

I needed to clean the house and get it ready for sale, but so much of my time was spent at the hospital that I couldn’t really get much done. I slept in the chair next to his bed and spent my mornings scanning the
Times
and the
Post,
and I thought about giving him a haircut because his hair had gotten so long. I read the magazines and movie guides for celebrity worship: what’s she wearing; who is sleeping with who. They were everywhere you looked, on the windowsills, in waiting rooms, by the vending and coffee machines. And I fell in love daily with Latina soap stars on telenovelas. There was a TV affixed in the right upper corner of his room. I realized at some point that I’d not been with a woman for a very long time, and what a pity it was that I hardly ever thought about it anymore, but also that now I was thinking about it a lot, actually. Practically all the time.

I had been casually talking with one of the nurses—in the elevators, or smoking out front in the parking lot. Not my father’s nurse, but one of those passing nurses, always swishing through the hallways in her mint-green scrubs. Her name was Leeann and she had a bright blond and glorious Afro, magnetic blue eyes. Skin so fair I could see veins in her cheeks. I’d spoken with her a few times. Always something like Hello, ma’am, overly polite, and she’d say something like Hello, yourself, before I finally realized we were flirting.

We wrestled in a maintenance closet at two o’clock in the morning, where she pressed me up against the wall like this was our last, last chance, and the world was falling apart outside.

The next day, feeling guilty, I wrote to Sarah.

I considered calling. She deserved to know more about Dad’s health, but calling felt too easy, anyway. And when was the last time I actually wrote a letter? There was something deliberate and mature about it, or at least I thought so, maybe even romantic. I sent her a postcard of the New York skyline: “Dad’s not doing well. Things don’t look good. I need to sell the house, which is a mess. I thought you’d want to know.”

She called me a week later. It seems Nikos had a conference at CUNY, and while she hadn’t planned on joining him, maybe now she would. She could check in on Dad and say hello, if I was open to it.

By the time she arrived, I was no longer sure I wanted her around, which isn’t to say I didn’t. I did want her, very much. I wanted her there in the house and in the hospital sitting vigil with Dad. I wanted her back home in Otter. And I wanted her every morning after, beside me wrapped in a warm toss of bedsheets, from that day on forever forward. I opened the door and there she was, in her arms a bright white daisy explosion in a cheap glass vase.

She pushed them at me and said, “You’re supposed to take them.”

She walked past me into the hallway. “So how far away is the hospital?”

In that moment, it was finally over for me. Not just because we were finished, but because we were both revealed, each of us new to the other. I saw her in the light of her new love, and I was standing there in the slant space of my father’s sickness, all of which hurt crushingly only for as long as it took me to turn and follow her inside. I asked her where they were staying.

“Downtown, with a friend.”

“One of his.”

“Yup. My friend, too, I guess.”

“I’m happy to hear it.” I told her some more about Dad, as she placed the flowers on the dining room table.

She looked around. “This is why I love your father. He is so sad and totally fascinating. Like one of those mystics in the desert. But it’s Queens.”

I think it was actually those silly flowers that finally let the old house breathe. Like I’d been holding my breath for weeks, I let go a long low sigh.

She said, “I don’t see any cat shit. So there’s that.” She took a protein bar from her pocket, and pulled back the wrapping. Took a bite, and pulled a daisy from the vase, gave it to me. “How can I help?”

She said she wanted to help clean while I sat with Dad. Nikos was out and about working anyway. By the time I got back from the hospital, she’d scoured the kitchen floor, emptied out a closet, and started organizing some of Dad’s things. She said she wasn’t sure if she could come back the following day. But she did. And again said she could only stay for an hour or so. Nikos (I still find the name preposterous), he understood.

But she stayed all day long.

“He wants me to be happy,” she said. “Anyway, he’s busy with social functions. Meeting with colleagues. He’s never been to New York.”

The days got shorter as we filled the boxes with garbage and set them on the street. We rented a Dumpster and joyously threw bags from the upstairs bedroom windows. We kept an ongoing pile of possible saves—the more interesting-looking books, the cleaner clothing. A few tchotchkes, the figurines my mother favored, and a sun-bleached jawbone my father found upstate in 1987. He’d Sharpied the date at the gum line. The wooden cross. The plate. I packed the family albums, and we braved the attic and its noxious air, urine-colored fiberglass falling from the rafters in leprous chunks. We sopped up puddles in the basement, and tried to identify a blue spongy mold. We boxed up his spirals and his papers, because God forbid some garbage picker, some young and impressionable squatter find my father’s dreams and exegeses and start a cult. We nudged the cats into the backyard. I carefully packed his mail-order shield in bubble wrapping, removed the red bulb.

Sarah asked if she could stay at the house for a couple of nights, because it was a waste of time going back and forth on the trains. It would just be for a day or two, because Nikos’s conference was over; he had other business, but not much, left. I said of course. We’d pretend like it was normal and comfortable. I think it felt, for both of us, like a way to fully bury our past. She slept in my old room, on a bare mattress on the floor. I slept downstairs, on the living room sofa where I’d been from the start. Sarah went and sat with Dad at the hospital, and he never said a word to her. He just lay there in his semiwakeful state, eyes closed, alpha waves ebbing on the EEG. I was happy to have a break from the hospital, because I don’t like hospitals. There’s nothing so strange about that. Amad told me he’d fainted at the hospital before even arriving at their inaugural Lamaze class. The doctor talked to me about refeeding syndrome, and the possibility of cardiac arrest and coma. We had to sell the house.

That second day, we both stayed home and cleaned, staying out of each other’s way, mostly, and not owing each other a thing. It was like living together again but without the relentless loan and debt of love, or even good conversation. And I finally made a clear and deliberate decision, one I was sure she’d made a long time ago about me. I decided it would be healthier for me if I just didn’t want to want her anymore.

*   *   *

I was sitting beside Dad, one morning at the hospital, marveling at the mysterious thing an eye can become when it sees. I asked him if he could see me. He never answered or moved his head. He just looked. I was flipping through the channels, when I looked up and saw the ghostly face looking down at me. I jumped to my feet, approached the TV. It was Issy. I don’t know how else to say it, but I saw his angelic baby face up there on the TV screen, his name in white graphic letters, Ismael “Issy” Demundo. I looked around for Sarah because I wanted someone else to see.
Does anybody see this?
But she was back at the house.

The anchor said that recent information had come to light regarding Issy’s disappearance, maybe even a possible suspect, whose identity was still completely unknown. A bartender had come forward and described a conversation he’d overheard twenty-five years before. He said the man had a mustache and wore a dirty white T-shirt. The man talked about the missing little boy from Richmond Hill, said he was the one that took him. And all of this would probably not have gotten the attention of the news if not for the fact that the latest episode of a detective show called
Cold Capers
was based on Issy’s story, on the resurrection of Issy’s case, which had long gone cold but now had a fresh new lead. The photo was the same as the one from our family album. I noted the date and the time of the episode.