Tales of Accidental Genius (3 page)

“Will bronze work?” came a voice from the bedroom. Akin replied that bronze was even better, and the old man returned with the miniature statue of an elephant.

Akin told the old man to get more peas ready, then raised the tank lid and dipped the elephant's trunk in, just below the surface of the water.

The old man watched.

“Wow,” Akin said. “These readings are hard to believe.” Then he turned to the old man. “This water is so clean, the dopamine level ain't even registering.”

“Scrubbed clean every Sunday,” the old man assured him. “Rain or shine.”

Akin tried to imagine how his mother might break it to the old man, if he were a child, like his younger brother, Sam.

“Before we go back to the peas,” Akin said. “There's bad news and there's good news.”

The old man's lower lip began to shake, and Akin could see how he might have looked as a boy.

“Which would you like first?” Akin asked. “Good news or bad news?”

The old man glanced at the cabinet of ceramic figures, then at the photographs on his mantelpiece, at faces once capable of moving and making sounds. They were people who had known him the way he remembered himself. The woman in the largest picture had been his wife. Sometimes it felt like she was just out shopping, or on the other side of a door about to come in.

“The good,” he said finally. “because I'm an optimist at heart.”

Akin took a deep breath.

“Well . . . the truth is—it wasn't constipation or Piper's bladder.”

“Not his bladder?”

“Piper was pregnant.”

For a few moments, the old man's expression did not change, as though words ceased to have any meaning.

“With twins,” Akin said, pointing to two tiny new fish darting excitedly around the tank.

The old man moved his head as close to the glass as possible.

“Congratulations,” Akin told him. “You're a grandfather.”

The old man couldn't believe it. “All these years I thought Piper was a young chap!”

The tiny fish were unstoppable, flapping their bodies through the legs of a plastic deep-sea diver.

“And they've been in here all this time?”

Akin nodded.

“Tells you how bad my eyes are!”

When Akin explained that Piper had most likely died in childbirth some time ago, the old man had to sit down. Akin found some instant cocoa in the cupboard, then filled a kettle and bashed the cocoa with a spoon until it broke into chunks.

The old man went into detail about Piper as a young fish. Then he got up and stood over the tank, where his grandfish were scooting through Piper's old castle and fake plants.

“They're the spitting image of him,” the old man said.

“And fish live longer when they have company.”

When the reality of Piper's loss began to sink in, Akin put his hand on the old man's shoulder. “Loads of fish die in childbirth,” he said. “It's a lot of stress for them to push the fish babies out.”

“But, what I don't quite understand,” said the old man, turning to Akin, “is how Piper got in the family way to begin with?”

“Well,” Akin said, trying to think of something, “I suppose it's like Mary and the baby Jesus.”

“The Bible story?”

“Yeah, but underwater.”

The old man thought about it.

“My wife, Doris, and I never had any children ourselves. I got Piper after she died just to have a little friend in the house.”

“Now you've got two little friends.”

T
HE OLD MAN
wanted to lift Piper's body out by himself but couldn't steady his hands, so Akin took the spoon from him. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

When Akin was nine years old, he came home from school and found his father in the upstairs bathroom on the floor with a plastic bag over his head. Akin tried to get the bag off, but there was too much tape and his fingers kept slipping.

Sometimes he dreamed that it was happening again, and sometimes the bag came off and he saw his father's eyes.

T
HE OLD MAN
watched as Akin scooped up Piper's body in the spoon.

“Dear God,” Akin said. “Please accept Piper into your flock in Heaven.”

Akin offered to take Piper's body to the park, but the old man said he'd bury her in the morning under one of his potted plants.

Akin put the kettle on again and watched the old man sprinkle a few meal flakes for the two young fish, who were zooming around in the water, completely unaware of the tragedy from which their lives had sprung forth.

While they were on the couch holding mugs, the old man said he was going to call one of Piper's children Akin, if Akin didn't mind.

“Call the other one Doris,” Akin said.

I
T TOOK A
long time to get home. The bus was crowded with people talking about the snow, and there were several text messages from his mother, asking where he was.

As Akin neared the front door of his house, he noticed light falling from the living room window onto a patch of shallow snow. He stepped over and put his face to the glass. His mother and brother were on the sofa and didn't see him. The television was on and the night echoed with the faint ring of applause. His brother's feet were on a cushion and his mother was rubbing them with an expression Akin recognized as worry. There were empty choc-ice wrappers on the arm of the sofa, and a loose stack of Chinese takeaway containers on the carpet.

In the far corner of the living room was a Christmas tree. It was tall and well lit. They bought it from an all-night convenience store that kept them outside between bundles of firewood and boxes of vegetables.

Sam insisted on carrying one end of the tree, but had to keep stopping to rest.

When they got home, their mother kicked off her slippers to climb the attic ladder and get the Christmas things down. Akin waited on the second step for her to lower the boxes.

They spent the afternoon decorating the tree with ornaments that caught the light. As they were putting the star on, Sam asked if Santa Claus was real.

“Of course he is!” their mother exclaimed. “Haven't you made your list yet?”

After she had vacuumed up the needles, they held hands and cheered when the lights came on.

Sam lay on his back and looked up into the branches.

On the mantelpiece were photographs from their summer holiday in Cornwall.

One night they couldn't find a bed-and-breakfast and had to sleep in the car. Sam said if anyone came he'd protect them, though Akin knew it would be up to him as the older brother, and stayed awake as long as he could, waiting for figures beyond the glass to bear down upon them. But all he saw was the faint glow of stars from deep in the universe; proof that other worlds are as imaginary as this one.

T
HE MAGICIAN ARRIVED
in a small gold car, then changed in the men's restroom. He wore makeup and a dinner jacket with a tear in the breast pocket.

Lights had been on throughout the facility since lunchtime. Rain lashed the windows. Everything in the garden was blowing around, and fallen leaves made the paths slippery. It was late autumn and the days were shorter.

The magician asked everyone's name. His finger swung from face to face, but only half the group answered. Some couldn't remember, while others had lost the ability to speak and be understood. The nurses didn't intervene. They perched on stools between wheelchairs and were always calm. Residents on the chintz sofa looked small or twisted.

The magician's name was Eric and his first trick involved a slow and deliberate disappearance.

His own children, who were in high school, often made fun of him. They smoked pot and didn't always show up when it was his day to see them. Eric had been out of full-time work most of his life. Card tricks and disappearing balls were only a hobby, but they paid enough to cover rent and gas. Any tips were saved
for movie tickets or the latest video game he heard teenagers were lining up to get.

Eric's wife had divorced him three years ago.

She was from San Antonio. The night they met, she was wearing tight jeans and cowboy boots. Eric kept buying drinks and they played pool. He remembered that night like a music video. They were married within a year. Her sister and mother came up from Texas. She insisted on a white wedding, and their first dance was to something quick by Garth Brooks.

Eric worked then at Carpet Warehouse. But the dry, chemical smell of dyed fabric made him sneeze, so he left that job for another, stacking shelves at a discount supermarket. But the manager said he was too slow
facing out
and mixed things up in the warehouse.

When his wife got home from work, she would take off her shoes and drink wine. Eric looked forward to them watching
The Late Movie
, and muted the commercials so she could talk about her day. He didn't mind not having a job, and wrote himself out a routine for cleaning, tidying up, and laundry that he put on the refrigerator for his wife to see.

At least he was there when the kids got home, to fix snacks and to play. Also, he learned the correct times to cook anything from frozen, and served grilled-cheese sandwiches by sliding each stack dramatically from a sizzling pan onto plates like a Benihana chef.

But after ten years like this everything changed.

The children had grown private and liked to stay in their rooms. His wife began working longer hours and going out with her colleagues on weekends. Eric stuck to the routine as much as possible—staying up for
The Late Movie
, doing laundry on
Wednesday and Friday, and practicing his magic after meals once the table had been cleared.

Then, one Saturday morning, as Eric was changing a lightbulb in the refrigerator, his wife came to him very upset and said she wanted a different life—one she had been imagining. He followed her upstairs and sat on a corner of the bed. She told him their marriage was at an end and she wanted to separate. The television was on downstairs. Eric could hear the kids laughing. His wife said she would take the children to the mall that afternoon and explain what was happening.

He was to pack a bag and go before they got back. The next day, she would run errands so Eric could see his kids for a few hours. This would be the first of his allowed visitations, she said.

The house was in her name and they would share custody.

As he was still unemployed, she would not ask for alimony.

She had never seen a man cry in such a way, and tried to comfort him by saying that the children didn't need looking after anymore. In a few years they would be out of school and have their own lives.

For six months, Eric lived at the Best Eastern Motel in Union City. He used to sleep with the curtains open because the sign, lit up at night, made him think of Las Vegas.

Then he found an apartment near the golf course.

He had taken a few things from the house but didn't want to upset his kids' sense of order. There was a wooden bed already in the apartment when he moved in. It had E.T. stickers on the headboard and they glowed in the dark. He used to lie there looking at E.T.'s glowing finger, wondering if there really were other worlds and if he would ever see one.

A year later at a yard sale, he picked up a couch and a circular table where he could eat dinner and practice new tricks.

Eric had always believed that magic was his chance to do something great, and he dreamed of performing at luxury hotels and casinos for honeymooners and conference executives. It was one of the few things his kids still loved to see—even if they no longer believed that magic was real.

A
FEW OF
the residents clapped after each trick, copying the nurses. When the cards came out, the magician asked for a volunteer to shuffle, but then thought worse of it. If the deck fell, the few who
were
watching might start to give up.

Then a resident raised her hand. When Eric approached with the cards, she pointed to the man next to her. “Bill's good at this,” she said.

Bill nodded and reached for the deck.

The magician felt renewed by their confidence and watched the cards flutter in the old man's hands like an accordion.

“That's good,” the magician said. “Great handwork, Bill.”

“He also plays the piano,” the woman added. “Sometimes I think it's the radio, but it's him!”

Bill handed the cards back. The magic act continued with scatterings of applause.

The final trick involved a hat and silk handkerchiefs.

A nurse with braces on her teeth seemed especially interested, so the magician asked her to step forward and hold the squares of silk that kept appearing from the hat.

It was almost time for supper. Everything was ready and the
cooks stood with their arms folded. The kitchen staff watched too, setting down silverware as quietly as possible.

The nurse holding the silk squares remembered setting the table as a little girl. Her name was Mary Ann. She'd grown up on a street with other Italians. Her brother joined the Air Force, and had a box of Star Wars figurines under his bed, which he looked at whenever he came home. Their late grandmother's station wagon was still in the driveway. Its blue fabric roof was ripped and it didn't run. Sometimes her father sat in it with the cordless phone and made bets.

Mary Ann went to see them as much as she could. Her father read the paper and her mother cut out coupons she'd never use, telling her all the people she knew who were getting divorced.

The family dinner plates had pictures and a faded gold rim. Her parents had received them as a wedding gift. Each bite revealed part of the picture. On one plate, a cart was being pulled through a low river. Children on the riverbank rubbed their hands. The sacks on the cart bulged like full stomachs. There was also a dog, and the horses moved slowly. The children in the picture didn't have shoes and could play all day. Mary Ann was grown up now, but the children on the dinner plates were still children.

Once, on a school trip to the city museum, Mary Ann had seen the same picture hanging in a gallery with its own security guard.

The smallness of their lives frightened her.

T
HE MAGICIAN BROUGHT
his show to a close. Outside, it was still pouring. When a series of flashes made the lights flicker, a
few of the residents suddenly clapped. Thunder made the dinner glasses ring.

Bill the card shuffler, pianist, and longtime resident had once been in a storm that kept him and his wife another night at a motel in Union City. There was a mustard-colored telephone, a pack of cards, and a Bible in the bedside table.

Bill's wife made him roll off her stockings. Then she lay back and reached out her arms. Her hair was still wet from the bathwater. A gold necklace lay flat upon her chest. Their kisses were quick and hot.

After, they smoked in bed. Bill held the ashtray. There was also some gin in the car, and she watched from the window as Bill searched the trunk in the pouring rain. They were tired but couldn't sleep. Bill had taken the hotel cards and shuffled them into equal stacks for a game.

All that remained of his marriage now, the only evidence of a grand family home, had been distilled into the few possessions that decorated his room at the facility: a New England writing desk, a brass lamp, and a lone dining chair that stood beside his electric hospital bed, along with the gray machine that would one day keep him alive.

When she was training as a nurse, Mary Ann learned that the worst comes when the body goes dumb. At night she and others worked quickly and quietly, wiping and drying, rubbing in creams with an odor that lingered on her hands and carried into her other life.

After the magic show, the nurses told Bill how well he had shuffled the magician's deck. The woman sitting next to him who had been kind was called Wilma. She referred to him as
“my Bill
,
” and got upset when anyone else sat beside him in the Nutmeg Room for meals.

Bill's face had once been full and dark. The nurses called him Cary Grant. They guessed what he was like in his heyday. A trench coat. Umbrella. Aftershave. Newspaper folded under one arm. They imagined him dancing. Opening doors for women. Eating cherry pie at lunch counters in a three-piece suit. They looked at the things in his room when he was asleep—fingered the Wedgwood cuff links he kept in a motel ashtray.

Wilma had once been a physician, but could no longer apply even a Band-Aid by herself. She had the notion of once being a mother, but couldn't be sure whether it was a boy or a girl.
Any
visitor could have been her child.

On summer afternoons, Bill and Wilma sometimes pored over a jigsaw before dinner, or sat outside on a bench with their bodies touching, dusk settling on tall trees.

Bill had been admitted to full-time care after taking a taxi to work one day, seventeen years after his retirement party. His wife consulted their daughter in Seattle, and they agreed that care was the right thing. Bill's wife wasn't allowed to stay with him in the home—even on the first night—but all Bill cared about was finding his slippers.

Wilma was in a terrible state when, years later, she was admitted to the center. She had been leaving things on. Going out in winter without a coat. Looking frantically for a dog that had died years before.

Of course, Bill had been through it all. Aging is not for sissies! he told her.

E
RIC WAS INVITED
to stay for dinner after the show. Entertainers were always seated at a top table and asked to wear a red hat that identified them. He talked about magic and did the table tricks his kids liked to see growing up.

When they were in middle school, Eric's children had loved to watch wrestling on TV—so much that Eric found a place where they could see it live. Afterward, the wrestlers came out, and the kids lined up to get T-shirts signed. The concession stand sold cardboard photos of wrestlers in their costumes. On the train home they ate doughnut holes and argued about which wrestler was the nicest in real life.

One time, a drunk guy stumbled into their train car. He was not wearing any shoes. When he overheard what they were talking about, he told Eric's kids that wrestling was fake. When he tried to grab one of the cardboard pictures, Eric whipped out his fake thumb and made a five-dollar bill disappear. The drunk moved closer. Eric's children had seen it before, but watched as though it were the first time. Then the drunk man said that he wanted to try, and Eric took his hand at the wrist and taught him the correct motion.

M
ARY
A
NN BROUGHT
the magician his dinner on a tray. Prime rib au jus with baby carrots and a dinner roll. When Eric asked for a beer, she laughed and sat beside him.

Eric wanted to know about the man who had shuffled the cards and the woman who volunteered him.

Other nurses chimed in.

“Bill centers her,” one of them said.

“And when she goes, the other won't be long after,” said another.

Wilma sometimes kept the things Bill gave her. She had them under her pillow and put her hands on them at night. His room was at the other end of the hall, and she imagined him, younger but in the same pajamas, eyeglasses on the edge of his nose, a ribbon of brandy on the bedside table, the street outside gleaming with old and heavy cars.

She wondered if he had been faithful.

She knew he was married because he still wore a ring.

If Bill had any kids, they had given up, because no one came.

A few times a year a woman appeared and said she was Wilma's daughter. She spent time with Bill too, holding his hand so he wouldn't feel left out.

Wilma felt she was a nice person and obviously meant well, but what a relief when she left in the evening; it took so much effort to pretend. Wilma's memories were more foreign to her now than dreams, and the world outside, a place where she had already ceased to exist.

Bill's lips reassured her whenever he spoke. There was something noble and magnanimous in their shape that seemed to forgive the world for letting them get old. Wilma imagined lying upon them, and a moment before sleep, plunging weightless into the darkness of his mouth—into everything he wanted to tell her.

Sometimes Wilma remembered random things, such as her driveway, and the feeling of pulling into it with a bump. Or was it the house where she grew up and her father was driving?

Now and then, she heard a dog bark.

“Where's the dog?” she once asked Bill. “I haven't fed the dog.”

Bill told her not to worry—that the dog was in Heaven.

“A puppy again, Bill?” Wilma had answered, hopefully.

He had a dog too. Sometimes he felt the sensation of his hands in its yellow coat.

Usually in the afternoon, the nurses put opera on a headset for Bill, which made it impossible for Wilma to talk, so she went to her room and slid into bed.