Exley (3 page)

Anyway, none of the soldiers I asked ever knew my dad, and so I stopped asking them. I walked right past the soldier, toward a guy shouldering a duffel bag, coming right at me. He was wearing a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off; there was a black tattoo of a vine creeping from underneath the right sleeve all the way to his knuckles. He stopped in front of me, raking his right forearm with his left hand, tilling the skin, I guess, before he planted another vine tattoo in it. And his eyes were bloody. I don't mean they were red, like he had allergies or had been crying; I mean they were filled with blood, like he'd been wounded somewhere in his sockets, behind his eyeballs. His hair was military short except for a ridge of slightly longer hair going from his forehead to the nape of his neck. It was the kind of haircut you get when you don't know what kind of haircut to get. He was young, too. He hadn't even started to shave yet; he was probably only thirteen years old. That was the scariest thing about him. Like he would do something to me that a normal kid would do, but much worse. I could imagine him taking my bike away from me, for instance, and then strangling me with it.

But he didn't do that. Instead, he asked, “Yo, where's the library?”

We were both standing right in front of the library, but I didn't want to say those words. I was afraid they would sound like this:
You're standing right in front of it
, stupid. So I just pointed. The guy looked in the direction I'd pointed, and I kept walking, toward the bottom of Washington Street, where I hit the Public Square, turned around, crossed the street, and walked back. It was the fifth time I'd walked up and down the street, and
still
, I couldn't find the VA hospital.
I could not find it
. I knew there
was a VA hospital in Watertown because I knew some of my classmates' fathers had been patients there. And I knew the VA hospital had to be on Washington Street. Because that's where all the hospitals were. Because if it wasn't on Washington Street, then I couldn't imagine where it was. And if the VA hospital wasn't on Washington Street, and I couldn't find it, then how was I going to find my dad? I started to panic a little just thinking about it. Then I saw the guy with the cutoff denim jacket crossing the street, stopping traffic, coming right toward me, and I started to panic a lot more. He looked mad, like I'd given him really bad directions; he looked so mad that it didn't seem like it would do any good to say I was sorry. This might be why I said, when he reached my side of the street, “Do you know where the VA hospital is?”

His face changed. He stopped looking mad and started looking helpful, like a Good Samaritan with a bad haircut. “You're standing right in front of it,
stupid,
” he said, and pointed.

I looked in the direction he was pointing, and there it was, right between the historical society and the
Daily Times
building. The VA hospital was set way back from the street, with a big lawn and big oak and maple trees between it and me, which is probably why I hadn't noticed it. The other hospitals on Washington Street had been built sometime after my parents had been born but before I had, but the VA hospital was from another time: it was made of big blocks of gray stone and had two huge Corinthian columns in front. It looked like a temple, not a hospital. We were studying ancient Greece and Rome in social studies and had done a unit on columns. That's how I knew the VA hospital's columns were Corinthian and not Doric.

I turned away from the VA hospital and toward the guy to thank him. He looked mad again. He bared his teeth; some of them were missing, and the ones that weren't were the color of old newspapers.
“Yo,
” he said,
“where
is the
library?
” He asked this like he'd asked me the question many times, and not just once, and like I hadn't answered him. I had, although not with my mouth. So I said, “It's right across the street,” and then pointed. He looked where I pointed, and while he was looking away, I ran with my bike toward the VA hospital.

The woman at the VA hospital's front desk didn't look up at me as I
walked toward her, but instead kept her eyes on her computer monitor, which hummed like a spaceship. I couldn't see what she looked like from the waist down (the desk the woman was sitting behind came up to the middle of my chest), but from the waist up she looked like a nurse: she was wearing a blue cardigan sweater, and underneath I could see what looked like a lighter blue medical uniform. Her hair was short, curled but not curly, and so black it had to be gray underneath. She looked a lot like the nurse at my school, Case Middle School. The nurse at school was always telling me, when I came into her office with a headache or stomachache, that no, I wasn't sick, and so no, she wasn't going to let me go home early. I could imagine this nurse telling me,
No, you can't see your dad
. Or even worse,
No, your dad isn't here. No, there's no patient here named Tom Le Ray
.

There was a set of swinging doors to the right of the front desk. I had begun to think about trying to walk toward and then through them before the woman saw me when she said, still looking at her computer screen, “Can I help you?”

“I'm here to see my dad,” I said. “He's a patient here.”

The woman finally looked away from her computer screen and at me. She pursed her lips, crinkled her eyes, and basically arranged her face to look sympathetic. “What's your father's name?” she asked in a voice that was much gentler than when she'd asked, “Can I help you?”

“Thomas Le Ray,” I said.

The woman nodded again, looked back at her computer, typed for a few seconds, and then said, “Room D-1.” She nodded in the direction of the swinging doors. “Right through there, first room on the right.” I thanked her and had turned to walk through the doors when she added, “I
wondered
when someone was going to come see him.”

“Who?” I said.

“Your father,” she said. Her lips were still pursed, but not as sympathetically as before. “He's been here two weeks and you're his first visitor.”

“Two weeks?” I said. I wondered why Mother was crying today if my dad had already been in the hospital for two weeks. Maybe that's why she was crying: because he'd been there for two weeks and she hadn't told me
about it or gone to see him herself and she felt guilty about it. Or maybe she hadn't been told until today. I kept hearing — from the news, from Mother, from pretty much everyone — how we were struggling to win the war; maybe we were struggling to call people to tell them their husbands and dads were home from the war and in the VA hospital, too. “Why didn't anyone call and tell us?”

“I'm sure someone did,” the woman said. She returned her eyes to the computer, pounded on the keys for a few seconds, and then said, “Yes. Apparently someone called and talked to your father's wife.”

“Mother,” I muttered.

The woman frowned at me, then at the computer. “It says here it was his wife.”

“No, no, it was,” I said. “His wife is my mother.”

“Yes, well,” the woman said. “When your mother was informed that your father was a patient here, she apparently said, ‘Very funny, whoever you are. Tell Miller very funny and nice try.' And then she hung up.” Then the woman, who wasn't wearing glasses, turned away from the computer and looked at me the way someone with glasses looks at you when they look at you over their glasses.

“Huh,” I said, and tried to think back to two weeks ago. There was a night around that time when Mother was especially grumpy; when I tried to cheer her up by telling her a joke I'd heard at school about what kind of cheese you're not allowed to have (the punchline is “Not yo cheese,” but said really fast to also sound like “Nacho cheese”), Mother said, “You think you're so funny, Miller,” and then asked me if I needed to see my doctor more than once a week. It made no sense then, but it did now. But I didn't want to go into all that with the woman. So all I asked was, “Did you call my mother today, too?” I was sure they had, because Mother had been crying in the bathroom. But the woman looked at her computer again and said, “No.”

“Huh,” I said again. “Weird.”

“That's one word for it,” the woman said, then arranged her face again. “But it doesn't matter. I'm sure he'll be happy to see you now. And you've come on the right day, too!”

“I have?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “Your father has been quite the sleepyhead for the past two weeks. But today he finally woke up!”

I pushed through the swinging doors, and then I ran, my sneakers squeaking like crazy: past utility closets, X-ray labs, vending machines, and more vending machines. Why did I run? Because two weeks was a long time to be asleep in the hospital; I had the feeling that if I didn't get to my dad right away, he'd fall back asleep or . . . well, I didn't want to finish the thought.
Please, Dad
, I said to him in my head.
Hold on
.

I ducked into the room on the right, closed the door behind me. And there was my dad.

He was lying in bed, sleeping. At least, his eyes were closed. I walked over to his bed and stood there, looking at him. My dad looked different, so different that I checked his bracelet to make sure that it really was him (it was). Before my dad went to Iraq, he almost never combed his hair or shaved, but someone had recently given him a buzz cut and shaved his face, too. He looked groomed and awful. I'd dressed as a hobo for Halloween the year before and wished I still had the burnt cork Mother had used to whisker my face so I could use it to whisker my dad's. The room smelled like applesauce and baby wipes. The table beside my dad was piled high with Dixie cups, which I guessed he used to wash down whatever pills the nurses brought to him.

“Hi, Dad,” I said quietly, very quietly, the way you speak to someone who is sleeping, even if you want him to wake up. “It's Miller.”

My dad didn't answer. My poor dad. Because I was pretty sure that when the nurse said my dad had been “quite the sleepyhead,” that meant he'd been in a coma. There were a bunch of tubes running out of him and into a bunch of bags and machines; one tube went from his nose to a machine that looked like the kind of thing clowns blow up balloons with at your birthday party. The machine didn't seem to be on. I tried hard to trust the machines and the tubes and to not think at all about what would happen if they stopped working. I tried hard not to think of what might have put my dad in a coma, just like, over the past eight months, I had tried not to think about what he was doing in Iraq: if, at that moment, he was trying to kill someone; if, at that moment, someone was trying to kill
him. Because I knew he was; I knew they were. Because every time I did think of that, I started to cry. And as everyone knows, Crying Doesn't Do Anyone Any Good. That's why I'd been trying to Stay Positive for the past eight months, and I tried it now, too. I thought that at least my dad was back in Watertown. I walked closer and touched my dad's legs, his arms, through his blanket. They were still there. At least he had his legs and arms. And the Dixie cups were a good sign: that meant that he was awake enough to drink out of the cups, at least some of the time; at least, even if he'd been in a coma and was asleep now, he'd woken up earlier today. At least he was
alive:
I could see his chest rising and falling. But there wasn't a book open on it. This was weird. Before he'd gone to Iraq, my dad was an English professor at Jefferson County Community College. I don't think I'd ever seen him lying down without reading a book. Or sleeping without a book lying open on his chest. And when I say “a book,” I mean just one:
A Fan's Notes
, by Frederick Exley.

I took the book out of my backpack, pulled a chair close to my dad's bed, sat down, took a deep, deep breath. This is the kind of breath you take before you do something that you're not supposed to but that might be, probably is, the right thing to do even if you're not supposed to do it. Anyway, I took the breath, and then another, then looked at my dad. His left eye was closed, but the right one was open and looking at me.

“Hey, bud,” my dad said in a croaky, tired-sounding voice.

“Dad!” I said. I jumped out of my chair and hugged him, or tried to. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to hug someone who's connected to tubes, but the trick is to hug that person hard enough for him to know that you're doing it, but soft enough so that the tubes don't. Anyway, I hugged my dad as best I could. When I stopped hugging him, I sat back in my chair. Both of my dad's eyes were closed now, and I was scared for a minute that I'd done something to the tubes after all. But then my dad said, “For Christ's sake, bud, what time is it?”

“I don't know,” I said. I looked around the room for a clock but I didn't see one. When I looked back at my dad, his eyes were still closed, but there was a slight, sleepy smile on his face.

“It's time for you to stop holding
A Fan's Notes
and start reading it to me,” he said. “I know you can do that, can't cha?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to act like it was no big deal, even though my heart was beating so fast I thought I might need one of my dad's machines to slow it down. I opened the book. I skipped all the early pages that aren't numbered and so aren't really part of the book and went to
page 1
. I read the title of chapter 1 — “The Nervous Light of Sunday” — to myself, and then the first sentence out loud to my dad: “ ‘On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York . . .' ”

Before I go any further, I should say this: you might not know that Exley's book had Watertown in it, but I did, just like I knew it had swearing and drinking and sex and crazy people and insane asylums and electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy and misogyny and football and English teachers in it, too. I knew all this even though I hadn't actually read the book. And how did I come to know that?