Another Broken Wizard (9 page)

“Dad, that’s a hell of a way to talk to the guy who’s going to be in charge of your meds.”

He laughed. I laughed. After spending most of our first two decades together somewhere between suspicion and hostility, the present situation was funny. Nothing was forgotten, some of it was forgiven, and we were in this mess together.

“Seriously though, we let you wreck two cars. You’re over your limit already.”

“I admit, one I did crash. But the engine seized on the other one. That wasn’t me.”

“Because you did some crazy shit with it and tore open the oil pan.”

“Mom might have done that, or the oil pan might have just been faulty. I’m just saying you can’t prove that I did anything, and we will never know.”

I knew. I ripped it open driving in the Shrewsbury gravel pits with Jeff.

From there, the night became less fun. Dad showed me where he kept his will, his long-term-care insurance papers, his living will, his prescriptions, his PIN numbers and the keys to his storage locker. A feeling of terrible acceleration—that it was all happening too fast—churned my insides. We sat on the couch and watched the news, then got a pay-per-view movie. The movie was a slight variation on the man-who-can-beat-up-all-other-men genre. A very slight variation. But the bad guys got theirs, and got it in a satisfying way. Dad got up and tossed me the remote.

“You tired? Why are you going to bed so early?”

“It’s going to take me a while to get to sleep. I figure I’d better start early.”

“Are you scared?”

“I mean, Jesus, people die during facelifts and tummy tucks. This is open heart surgery. I’m not exactly afraid, but I can tell that my thoughts are going to go around and around for a while.”

“But you said this place does this surgery all the time,” I said, looking for some words to slow the acceleration.

“I know. It’s routine. Just relax. It’ll be fine. I’m going to get some sleep.”

Dad looked me in the eyes, nodded and went to his bedroom. I was twenty-nine and old enough to know what he was doing just then. He was being the man in the situation. I don’t know how he slept or if he slept. I only got two or three hours myself.

Part Two—The King Philip Memorial Wing

If Worcester folks from either 1848 or 1898—or 1948—could visit downtown Worcester today, their first question might be: Where is everybody?

—Albert B. Southwick

150 Years of Worcester: 1848 – 1998

17.

Tuesday, December 30

That morning was a bleary exercise. I drank half a pot of coffee and kept asking Dad if he needed me to do anything. Coffee and dread propelled me. I’ve had dreams where I’m being led to my execution, and this felt a little like that. On the car ride to Newton, Dad kept bringing up new concerns, new chores. His friends would call, and I should call them back to tell them how the surgery went. I should call the rehab center and the people who would be putting rails up in the bathroom and hallways in his apartment, and the nursing service and so on.

“After the divorce, first thing I did was to make sure I got long-term-care insurance through the Veterans Administration. They’re going to lose a fortune on me,” Dad said, trying to sound proud.

I nodded and drove. Words were just out of reach.

“And you better eat all that food you bought—I bought—at the supermarket. You got enough to last if we don’t meet until judgment day,” he said.

“Well, I’m not going to fucking starve while I play nursemaid.”

“You better eat all of it. Even if I die,” Dad said, coaxing a laugh.

The hospital was a big institutional beige brick sprawl. I parked and we walked through the early-morning dimness and chill of the parking lot. The lobby was all beige walls with dark blue upholstery and wood accents. It was the embodiment of reassuring normalcy. We checked in and a woman who described herself as a concierge and took us into the hospital itself. There, the fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum in the glare of another routine emergency.

Leaving us in a curtained-in room with a bed, Dad changed into a hospital gown and sat on the bed. A nurse came in, followed by the anesthesiologist, cardiologist, oncologist and surgeon. The nurse, a plump Italian woman in her early forties, stayed the duration. The doctors each had something to say, mostly hello. I already knew the gist—a lump they couldn’t identify—too close to the heart—cut through the sternum. I didn’t really want to hear the rest of it. It’s not like I was going to be called in to the operating room. I just gave them hard, clear looks as they spoke to Dad, to let them know they should take this surgery seriously, or else. It was all I could think to do.

The whole thing ran more quickly than I’d expected, partly because we were in an operation-only wing of the hospital, and December 30th isn’t a popular day for that kind of thing.

After the last doctor left, the nurse gave Dad a sedative. The gown and the fluorescent lights made him look pale and his growing relaxation worried me, irrationally. We looked at each other while the nurse fussed with tubes and wires and the curtains. By the time he got to the pre-op room, Dad was pretty out of it.

“So do you live around here?” the nurse asked me, mostly to fill the silence.

Her face seemed too lively, too expressive, like she was used to talking to children or retards.

“No, I live in New York.”

“New York City?”

“Yep.”

“Oh my God, I love New York. I was watching
Flip This House
, you ever watch that?”

“No.”

“The other night, this woman bought a little apartment in Manhattan for five hundred thousand dollars, then she re-did the kitchen, the bathroom, everything, repainted it, tore out the carpet, put in new floors. She sold it for over a million dollars. I couldn’t believe it.”

I tried to tell her with my eyes that what I wished for most in the world was to wipe her name from the book of life. After a few minutes of silence, she showed me to the waiting area and said it would be few hours, at least five, before I could see him. They’d made the waiting room big enough for the emotions that would, inevitably and despite their best efforts, erupt there. It had indestructible blue furniture and bright wood walls, under kinder lighting. I sat in one of the armchairs, dazed by dread. The TVs that angled down from the upper corners of the room showed a bitchy old lady adjudicating the legal fallout of a failed relationship between two sub-morons.

In the astonishingly uncomfortable blue arm chair, I discovered that I could not play along with the magazines and their cheery, advertiser-friendly, full-color neuroses. Maybe Africa is a mess, maybe I do have bad body language, maybe western economies are facing a great depression, maybe I do have ten to twenty pounds of waste trapped in my colon, maybe I don’t know what she really wants, maybe the suits in my closet are a year out of date. But I had bigger fish to fry at the moment, and no way to fry them.

There was a big Irish family on the other side of the waiting room, whispering to each other about the court show on the TVs. After an hour, I got up and just started walking until I was outside.

18.

I found Dad’s car, got in and started it. At the gate of the parking lot, it became clear that in the duress of the morning, I had lost the parking ticket. I explained my situation to the old whiskey-nosed Irish guy in the booth. Humorous and sports-related buttons covered his orange safety vest. When explaining my error didn’t work, I asked politely to be given a break. Then I inquired how well he understood what a fucking prick he was. When that didn’t work, I gave him twenty-five dollars. Injury loves insult, it seems.

Growing up in Worcester, I didn’t really know much of Massachusetts east of Natick. So I followed the road I took to the hospital into Wellesley, a manicured suburb of Boston. I parked the SUV by the train stop and walked up to the main drag. Most of the shops catered to women in late middle age with too much time and money—expensive doodads to hang from your porch, set in your lawn or put on a coffee table, big hats, clothing for dogs, garish handbags and absurd jackets. I found a Starbucks and sipped my coffee among the soft music and pale wood walls until it occurred to me that it was more or less identical to the hospital waiting room I had fled.

Back out on Main Street, I was too surly to be around old ladies, Korean college girls or the Saabs and Volvos that dominated the strip. I was about to go back to the car when I saw a bookstore. I checked the shelves, then asked if they had the book I was reading about Hadrian. They didn’t. I browsed the tables of cookbooks, TV-spinoff books, ghostwritten celebrity self-congratulations, and yes-you-can bullshit—all the blatant garbage that took the place of the book I wanted. I was about to exile myself back to Main Street, when, by the door, I saw a rack of books marked “Local Interest.” I only looked to stoke my growing furor, wryly wondering what it was that human house pets in a town like Wellesley could possibly be interested in. But I found a book about the history of Worcester. I flipped through it and saw a long chapter on King Philip’s War. There was a book about the war on the shelves as well. I bought both and left. The idea of having a few books to read in the hospital calmed my fury for the moment.

Fists clenched and muttering, I was clearly not someone who belonged among the boutique shops, church spires and smug Colonial charm of Wellesley. Back at the hospital, they would be better prepared for the distraught, with closets full of tranquilizers, if it came to that. I walked back to where I parked.

In the cold, pale sunlight, on the windshield of Dad’s SUV, something waited. It couldn’t be a ticket, because I remembered putting quarters in the meter, too many, actually. But there it was, a parking ticket. The text explained I had parked in the spot the wrong way. I looked left and right, then circled the car, to see if there was someone I could murder. Then I took a deep breath, tore up the ticket and gave the finger to anyone who might be spying from a nearby building, like a true Mass-hole. Maybe that’s how they get that way.

19.

Boredom had soaked into the Irish family in the waiting room. The clean-cut, red-haired, mid-twenties son in a polo shirt, the punked-out teenage daughter with dyed-black hair and dark circles under her eyes both flipped listlessly through magazines. The younger, redheaded kid played indifferently with the action figures in his lap. And the overweight, watchful and stern mother just stared off. The older son talked to the mother about getting coffee, who asked the other kids, who gave him a consensus. My cell phone said I had several hours to go. My brain wasn’t up for the trip to the 1600s that my new books required. I took deep a few breaths and closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, I saw the punky Irish girl was looking at me.

With a smirk, I got up and charted a course for the hospital cafeteria. After getting lost more times than I’d like to admit, I found the half-empty cafeteria. I loaded up a tray with Swedish meatballs, fries and a donut and got a table by a window overlooking the whiskey-nosed parking lot attendant from earlier in the day. I watched him take tickets and give change from his booth. I wished him ill. I was down to a few fries and the donut when the punked-out teenager from the Irish family plopped down in the chair across from me.

“So what’s your tragedy?” she asked, sipping her diet Coke provocatively through a straw.

“No tragedy. I’m just here for the magazines and the food.”

“My father is having part of a pig heart sewn onto his own heart because he ate like a pig all his life. Nobody but me thinks that’s ironic,” she said, her eyes darting around in their deep brown circles. She had a thick Massachusetts accent.
Paht of a pig haht
.

“Huh. My dad’s having an anomalous mass removed from near his heart. We’ll see.”

She smiled. It took the edge off my anger.

“Where’s your mom?” she asked as if I was a child lost in the mall.

“Divorced.”

“And his family?”

“His mother and father are dead. He has some half brothers and sisters that I never met. I don’t know if he told most of his friends. He doesn’t like to be a burden.”

“What about to you?”

Regarding her more closely, she wasn’t as young as she seemed at first, just skinny and dressed to dispute the claims of adulthood. Her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. She had a long, almost wolfish face. Compared to her ruddy, stocky brothers, she was definitely the mailman’s kid.

“Just lucky. Any other unpleasant truths you think I’m overlooking? How about that my father could die in there? Oh wait, I already got that one.”

“I’m just saying,” she said. Then she looked at me and things went quiet for a moment. “How about this place?”

“It’s okay as far as these things go. You live around here?”

“My parents and my little brother live in Sherborn. I live there too, sometimes. I’m going to Framingham State.”

“Where’s Sherborn?”

“It’s near Natick. How about you? Wait, can I guess?” she said, pulling up her chair and getting excited. It felt like someone had chosen to visit me in the land of the dead. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t want her to go.