The Heaven of Animals: Stories (20 page)

Stay at the library all day, every day. Don’t leave until your fingertips are gray with ink, until your tailbone aches from the curve of the library’s stylishly modern chairs, until the letters of words run together, taunting you in a jumble of tiny black serifs. When you can’t take any more, are ready to give up, you will know guilt.

.   .   .

Don’t mention his meals, the salty meat, the too-sweet desserts.

Sure enough, one evening, he’ll return from work, sit at the kitchen table, and, for a long time, watch the wall. Join him. Touch his shoulder. Ask what’s wrong, and he’ll say only, “I can’t
taste
anything.”

.   .   .

Give up. Sit in your favorite chair at home and watch daytime TV. Watch all of the hospital soap operas and wish it were that easy: the lifesaving operation, the miracle cure. Let your thoughts drift back to cancer. Dream of lung transplants.

Recall a piece in
The New York Times,
the cancer-ridden chimps tested at Johns Hopkins and the experimental drug that saved their lives. Try to remember why a drug getting such extraordinary results was not approved for public use, what side effects rendered it too risky. Wonder whether the drug will be sold soon. Know that it will be ten, twenty years.

Wonder whether the drug is for sale on the black market. Commit yourself to several Internet searches. When nothing legitimate turns up, launch your keyboard across the room. On a piece of white stationery, scribble
FUCK THE FDA
in angry black ink. Tape the paper to the wall above your computer.

After a few days of this, go back to the library.

.   .   .

By winter, you will know more than the doctors. Surprise the physicians with your repertoire of medical terminology. Throw around cancer jargon, the consecrated slang of the disease. Recommend treatments. Exude condescension before the doctors get the chance. Inquire in regard to the latest studies. Question their methods.

Grow irritated when a doctor hasn’t heard of a specific drug or experiment or clinic in Southeast Asia. When the doctor apologizes, blow a short burst of air up into your bangs and look out the nearest window just to let him know you can’t be fooled.

.   .   .

When your husband comes home from the restaurant one night and falls to the floor, understand it’s time for him to stay home. Forget the library. Help him forget his work. Concentrate on chemotherapy. Concentrate on radiation. Concentrate on making it through each day.

Notice the hair in the bathroom. Strands in the sink and shower, tangles in drains. Dark hairs on white tile. Piles collected in corners as though swept there. When you find clumps in the bed, collect the hair. Save it in a Ziploc bag like a child’s first haircut keepsake. When he finds the bag and yells at you, throw it out.

Once he’s lost the last of his hair, tell him that he is beautiful. When you want to hear him laugh, stroke the dome of his head and purr like a kitten.

Discover that you both love to sing. At night, in bed, sing old standards, improvising your own lyrics. On Christmas Eve, when he sings
Chestnuts roasting on a funeral pyre,
follow it up with
Gangrene nipping at your toes
. He will laugh and laugh. Wait until he’s asleep to sob.

Try church. Have him recall his altar boy boyhood. Let him teach you the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer. Learn how to take communion. When the priest places the wafer on your tongue and says, “This is His body, broken for you,” think,
This is
his
body
. Spend the rest of the day whispering it to yourself:
This is his body. This is his body
.

.   .   .

There are certain things you should know.

There will be things you can’t make better. Don’t try to hold his hand when he coughs. Don’t try to trade
Seinfeld
reruns for hours of meaningful this-is-your-life conversation. (He’ll want nothing to do with such talk.) Don’t attempt to help him upstairs if he nods off watching the news, even when you think he’d sleep better in bed.

Be reminded that chemotherapy can cause sterility. Accept that he will never give you children. Wonder why you don’t have children already. Wonder why it is that you never want a thing until it’s no longer inevitable.

Know that no matter how many laps you walk to raise money for research, no matter how many free T-shirts you earn, in spite of remissions, life’s short revisions, your husband is still going to die.

.   .   .

The night his blood sugar level drops, when he has the first seizure, call 911. Ride in the ambulance with a paramedic who will try to make conversation. Her words will sound like a song sung through a tunnel a mile away. Ask her to stop talking. Ask her again. When you realize you’re screaming, bury your face in your husband’s shirt and cry.

Once he comes out of insulin shock, sit beside him on the thin hospital mattress. Watch him sleep. Stay awake, all night, running your hand down his arm, shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist. Realize you spent so much time studying the disease that you forgot to prepare for what comes next.

Study the room and find you don’t know the name of a single piece of medical equipment or what each instrument does, aside from the IV bag and the heart monitor. Or, you will think you know which screen belongs to the heart monitor—the life of the man you love graphed in electric green—but there will be so many screens, your husband hardwired to a dozen machines.

Try to get comfortable in the recliner by the hospital bed. Tell yourself that you could sleep if only you knew the name of the mechanism hanging over his head, the black accordion pumping up and down in the glass tube, collapsing in on itself like a Slinky, then stretching, exposing its ribs as it inflates.

.   .   .

From this point forward, spend your days in the hospital room, for this is where he is meant to spend the rest of his life. Learn to tell when he wants to talk about this and when he doesn’t, regardless of the words that come out of his mouth.

Buy a potted plant, something beautiful but easy to care for. Place the plant on a table by the window, where it will get plenty of light. Water it every day. Tell yourself that as long as the plant lives, he will live. On his worst days, imagine the plant as his lifeline.
The plant is alive. He cannot die.

Get used to seeing blood drawn from his body. Eventually, he won’t notice the needles. At night, trace the veins of his arms. Rub the purple circles left by needles jabbed too hard. Hold your breath and kiss each bruise.

Give him cigarettes. The first time he asks, spend a day rationalizing doctors’ orders. Once you accept the pointlessness of this, once you see that cigarettes are just another kind of morphine, that the end is
here,
that the only thing left to sacrifice is suffering, you’ll give him whatever he wants.

Be brave. Outside the hospital, on the sidewalk, hold him up while he smokes. When he says something like
There go seven more minutes,
try to laugh. Walk him back to bed, wheeling the IV stand the whole way.

On an evening when he is awake and alert, in a good mood, when the doctors have gone for the night and the visitors, like so many spectators, have filed out of the room, pull back the covers and touch him. Caress him. Take him into your mouth. Don’t stop when he cries out. Don’t finish him off, the way you always have, with your hands. Don’t stop until it’s over, until the warm rush fills your mouth and his feet rattle the rail at the end of the bed. Don’t make him have to say thank you.

.   .   .

While he’s still lucid, write the will. Forgive yourself for not doing this sooner. Write the will quickly, then put it away in the safety deposit box at the bank with the marriage license and birth certificates. Marvel at how these three—birth, death, and the union that came between—fit into an inch-deep metal drawer.

At the hospital, bring him books. Bring him every book he never finished, every book he always wanted to read. Read them to him, as many as you can. Don’t talk doctors or painkillers or funeral arrangements. Don’t make him leaf through brochures to pick out a casket, flowers, the perfect burial plot.

There is no last lesson, no big picture, no final words, so waste less time on what’s real. Read to him and let his mind wander. Let him fall in and out of sleep. Read even when you know he’s not listening.

.   .   .

When the very end is in sight, tell him you’re leaving. You’re leaving and you’re taking him with you. Clean him and dress him and pull out his IV. Let the fluid flow from the tube to the floor. Unplug the heart monitor, and pull the black pads from his chest, from the crop-circle whorls they’ve made in his chest hair.

When he protests, you must not give in. He will thank you later, no matter what he says now. He’ll worry about expenses, about insurance coverage. He’ll worry about
being a burden
. Tell him he’s too young for that. Tell him the word
burden
doesn’t mean what it did when your ailing mother said it because he
means
it, and because he never could be. When all else fails, tell him to shut up because you’re not spending another night in the hospital.

When you lift him, his lightness will make you dizzy. He will feel like a child in your arms. Help him into a wheelchair, then make a break for it. Wheel him out a side door, and, when you hear a woman’s voice, don’t look back. Drive home and pull all the phones off of their hooks.

.   .   .

Put him to bed in his
real
bed. Lie down beside him for the first time in months. Understand that things will move quickly now, without fluids and pills, monitors and morphine, electrodes and tubes. Wipe his forehead and neck as he sweats. Bring him more covers when he grows cold.

While he sleeps, listen to him breathe. Watch the covers rise and fall. Lie awake counting breaths, timing the space between, considering their distance. As the breaths grow farther apart, try to formulate an equation to see whether, at this rate, he’ll make it until morning. Wonder, in the silence of daybreak, whether each breath you just heard was the last. Do this, and you will know despair. You will know helplessness.

Fall asleep with the sunrise, weak, feeling alone.

.   .   .

Wake to his smile beside you, and see he’s been watching you sleep. He’ll be too tired to talk. Don’t try to fill up the silence with words.

Help him out of bed with quick, simple commands.
Lift your head. Help me with your feet. Hold my shoulder.
Otherwise, keep quiet. Nothing you say can make this sacred. Everything you want to tell him before he dies is only for you, so pray it to yourself tonight when he’s gone.

Take him to the beach. Take him because it is beautiful. Take him because you can. Take him midmorning, bundled in blankets, because it’s spring and still cool before noon. Sit on the shore and trace your initials together in the sand like high school lovers. Play tic-tac-toe and let him win. Hold him as he coughs and coughs and coughs. He will rattle like a skeleton in your arms. Dig a trough in the sand for him to spit into. Scatter sand over the yellow-brown bile when the hole is full.

Sit like tourists watching the water and you’ll wonder why you never did this. Fifteen miles from the ocean, and in ten years you never came here together, not once. Consider this, but don’t dwell on it.

When your husband turns, gives you his confession, when he tells you every terrible thing he’s done, every way he’s wronged you, no matter how it hurts, don’t make him beg your forgiveness. Tell him you love him, that nothing else matters. Do this because you’ve reached the end together, because why make it harder? Because maybe love is more than fidelity. Because maybe a broken promise can still be kept.

Love him, this man who now begs you to find someone else and soon, who wants nothing for you but happiness.

The whole round world will funnel into nothingness, and you will see the truth in his eyes: that life, that
living,
is more than what’s come before. That all you have is this moment, this sun and this sand, these seagulls overhead and white clouds and blue sky, and don’t look away or he’ll disappear. The world is here only as long as you look for it, only as long as you keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes on him and he’ll never leave you, will stay if you can just keep from blinking.

And your eyes will ache, they’ll burn from holding them open for so long, and when you blink, like that, he’ll be gone.

Me and James Dean

J
ill’s had James Dean since college, a gift from her parents before they died—car crash—which makes him extra-special to her, a last link to her ancestry or something. For Jill’s sake, Dean and I maintain an amicable enough relationship, though there’s been tension from the start, each of us sure Jill belongs to him.

The courtship was rocky, Jill waiting for Dean to warm to me. Our lovemaking was interrupted more than once by barking and a paw on my pillow. Five years after our wedding, he still jumps in bed between us, growling if I turn in my sleep. More than once, I’ve had nightmares of waking unmanned.

.   .   .

Tonight, after Dean’s been let into the bedroom, he nuzzles Jill’s crotch and glares at me in a way that says:
I smell where you’ve been, buddy
.

Jill says, “Do you think we’re meant to be?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, thinking,
Here we go again
.

“I mean,” she says, “what if, in the end, your husband and your soul mate and the person you’re supposed to be with—what if they all turn out to be different people?”

“Are you seeing Roger again?” I ask.

“No, sweetie, I told you. That’s over.”