The Fugitives (29 page)

SMARTBERRIES

24

S
ATURDAY
morning my eyes opened early, and I lay there comforting myself, a ritual I’d grown accustomed to. There are some mornings when I wake up dreaming a child’s plangent dream: I want my father, badly enough that it upends the day, even as its first cold light is just icing the slats of the blinds. I’d fooled myself that I’d done my grieving when he first got sick; I’d certainly done enough of it then. The telephone call from my mother telling me of the “significant” growth that had been discovered on my father’s brain came only days after Rae and I had returned with the kids from her parents’ house in North Truro, our annual vacation there an unfailing restorative so dependably lacking in any need to make real decisions that for the duration of our stay I always felt like I was my own pampered child. This year the trip had come two months after the successful publication of my third book, a story collection, and it was while we were at the beach one August day that the call had come from the Boyd Foundation. Suddenly years of difficulty seemed to have been completely overcome. I was a famous man, I was a respected man, now I was a secure man. I was stupid with health when my mother had called; sunburned and toned from swimming in the sea each day, immortal in my own mind. I sat with Rae at the kitchen table that night, weeping and drinking, until finally she’d corked the bottle of whiskey and led me to the bedroom, where she sat me down on the bed and then kneeled on the floor before me to remove my shoes.

Everything still worked, I remember thinking. I had a woman who loved me, taking my shoes off in a bedroom full of solid old pieces of furniture, chosen individually over the years, a bedroom made of the history of my own adult peculiarity. Kids sleeping in the next room. This was the moment, the time, when I’d always hoped that my father would die: when I didn’t need him. I had everything, and everything worked, so it was time to give up my father, the way I might give up a favorite old jacket with a torn lining. Was that really what I’d thought, when I dared to anticipate his decline and death? That I could substitute for him happy memories that would then take their place among all these other objects and possessions? My father would die and I could then contemplate the Empire dresser in the bedroom while recalling him, taking comfort in both object and memory? Of all the unexamined dumbnesses. Happy memories were just another greeting card idea that I hadn’t gotten around to looking at carefully. Now I had to look at it. “Happy memories.” What did these happy memories even consist of? My most familiar memory of my father is of him working at his desk, which was located in the dining room that we never used. His desk was a long piece of sanded and stained plywood that he’d laid atop three two-drawer file cabinets. Papers and books were piled on the dining table. I also remember him working at his desk in his office on campus. This was a conventional desk, made of metal. His office had embrasured windows, slits really, near the floor, which made for a dim, cool ambience. I remember him sitting in the easy chair in the living room under a lamp at night, reading. He read until late, usually heading upstairs long after my mother had gone to bed. He would look up and smile when I came in from wherever I’d been. I could remember him smiling. I could remember walking with him to the elementary school I attended, a half-mile stroll we shared each morning. That would be a happy memory. But then I might remember the last time I’d visited my parents before the diagnosis, when my father and I had taken a walk on a fall afternoon, winter and the smell of wood smoke in the air, and my father, breathing hard, had asked me to please slow down, I was going too fast for him. I’d looked at him and for the first time was aware that he had become an old man. The cancer would already have been eating him then, undoubtedly, but he was old in any event, and the imprint of death was present; the presaging of the
something
that would be eating him, and sooner rather than later. That would not be a happy memory. But the bigger point was that I couldn’t, now or ever, imagine spending the rest of my life merely
remembering
my father. To remember anything at all is to point out the ineradicable distance between you and that thing.

On the airplane the next morning I was sweating booze from every pore and it reminded me in this one respect of the hungover flights I experienced coming home from college on vacation, two weeks’ worth of dirty laundry stuffed into my duffel bag. Otherwise nothing in this most generically familiar of spaces seemed reminiscent of anything. I made conversation with an elderly woman sitting next to me who was returning home after visiting her son and his family in New Jersey, and all I could think, looking at her healthy old face, was that she would be alive after my father was dead. I gazed at a photograph of George Bush in the
Times
and thought the same thing. With even the least likely human on the face of the earth I would soon have more in common than with my father, who would enter death, that least human of things. Even the prospect of a burning Christian Hell, given that it’s composed of our most familiarly human fears, is more human than the nothing, the oblivion, we all face. The Greeks had it right; only the zombie detachment of an Asphodel Meadows could truly represent the annulment of death.

I’d told my mother not to bother picking me up at the airport, since I’d rented a car—not the huge, lulling SUV I had been tempted to reserve, but a mid-sized sedan that I knew would keep at bay my father’s sense of modest propriety, which I had a feeling would be easily provoked under these circumstances by any display of ostentation on my part (and I was right; catching sight of my wristwatch, an Omega I’d splurged on after returning from the Cape, my father told yet again one of his favorite stories, about the visiting dignitary to the campus, a wealthy and famous man, who had inadvertently delighted my father when he checked his watch—a Timex).

I drove through the familiar towns, places with names like Philo, Crothersville, and Kalona, places I knew from Little League games and 4-H fairs; easy enough back then for me to imagine the lives there, but now they seemed little more than electrified ruins, amid which an outlier species of human dwelled. It was hot, but I was driving with the window rolled down, and the dry air and dust were getting to me, so I stopped at an IGA for a pop. While the cashier, a girl of about twenty, was ringing me up, we both noticed simultaneously a five-dollar bill on the floor behind the counter. She discreetly placed one of her feet on it.

“Your lucky day,” I said. She blushed slightly.

“Well, we’ll see when I do the register tonight.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Don’t matter. Tape’s got to match the drawer.”

“Good luck,” I said. She turned to peer through the big plate-glass windows overlooking the parking lot and evidently spied the license plate on my rental, which was from Colorado.

“You’re from a long way off.”

“Denver,” I said. I opened the pop and took a drink from it.

“Here for a visit?” she asked.

“Business. At the U,” I said. “I sell copy machines.”

“My cousin repairs them down to Ash Grove.”

“That’s a real good job,” I said, “so’s selling ’em. People have to make copies, good times or bad times. They want those words copied for other people to read. Get ’em right.” I leaned on the counter. Why not? Why baffle her with the truth? Brightly lettered signs in the windows, announcing the specials, London broil and pork chops. Why remind her that we would all end up as cold meat? Besides, it was a distraction.

“You know, they used to in the olden days hire people to sit there and copy documents all day long with a pen. Can you believe it? And you know what they made?”

“No,” she said. “What?”

“Mistakes. They made lots of mistakes. But who wanted to go back and copy a document by hand all over again? They would prefer not to, I’d say. So they’d let the thing go out with mistakes all over it. Caused the outbreak of the Civil War, in fact.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes. Some papers went back and forth between north and south and one copy said one thing and the other said another thing and before you knew it the states were at each other’s throats. You don’t hear about that too much but it’s a documented fact. So I kind of tell people that copy machines help keep the world a little more civilized. Whether it’s a newspaper article, or a term paper, or a contract, or a memo, every document’s a story, and everybody wants the story to be right. Everybody wants the story to be accurate. Everybody wants the same story. You yourself were just talking about it.”

She looked a little blank. I couldn’t blame her.

“The drawer, the tape. Tape’s a story. Tape’s not lying. Tape says there’s supposed to be five dollars more in that register than there is, you know you’re going to have to go and put that bill right back in the drawer. If not, well, it’s yours.”

I was enjoying myself. I felt a reedy, Midwestern Plains twang enter my voice, a slight syntactical rearrangement impose itself on my sentences, a type of linguistic code-shifting that I often unconsciously, or unselfconsciously, adopted when I was back home. She nodded. Another customer had come up to the checkout stand and was beginning to place her groceries on the conveyor belt. “That’s interesting,” she said, and, wishing me a great day, dismissed me. I was a salesman, after all. I had nothing left to say anyway, my vapid creativity having fizzled as I became faintly aware that I was making fun of this poor girl.

THE NEXT WEEK
undid whatever salubrious effect the Truro vacation had had on me. I was initially reassured to be in the presence of my father, who looked tired and a little thin though otherwise much the same as ever, but it quickly became obvious that he was simultaneously very ill, fearful, and determined to do things his way: that very first night we disagreed about whether he should allow a neurosurgeon to operate immediately to remove the tumor, which the MRI had indicated was at risk of “imminent herniation,” which itself could lead to massive stroke or permanent neurological impairment. He wanted to wait through the weekend, to “think about it,” and although I couldn’t see what there was to think about, I refrained from badgering him—it wasn’t my head that was going to be cut into like a cantaloupe. Periodically, I repeated my strange and unaccustomed weeping routine, remembering all the spots around my parents’ place where I could hide to do it. Behind a dilapidated shed, I found an old rubber ball, faded and pebbly in texture. It still smelled of rubber, but it crumbled in my fingers. I must have belted it back there about thirty years ago, and this introduced a new dimension to my grief, which, I was learning, shuts down all possibility of liberation from it. The present was all anxiety, the future was unthinkably imminent pain, and now the past became salient in its irretrievability.

The surgery was finally scheduled to take place six days later, the day before I was to return to New York, and during that interval I had a chance to see exactly how poorly my father had been functioning: his appetite had disappeared, he quickly grew impatient with the book he was reading, he was irritable, and he tired easily. He became confused in conversation even as, with almost desperate urgency, he retailed anecdotes that he had told me a hundred times: he knew that 101st opportunity might not come. (And he wanted to know what was to come and what wasn’t—this was, in its way, the worst week. Once he abandoned any hope of recovering, he chugged toward death as if it were any ordinary deadline he was determined to meet.) My mother, meanwhile, seemed slightly off the air throughout: having become accustomed to the behavior that was so startling to me, she now was absorbing the implications of what it all had turned out to mean. She became angry at me only once, when she learned that I had called my father’s doctor to quiz him from a long list of questions I’d prepared.