Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (4 page)

I waited for her to finish. When she didn't, I said, “Let's pretend what?”

“Let's pretend two people are lying next to each other in a room. Let's pretend they're talking about one thing and then another. It got too hard to put words in their mouths. They stopped cooperating.”

She rolled over, knocked her knee against the wall. “They started saying things like, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I need air. I'm tired of being depicted. I want to live.”

I thought about her burn-ward story, the way boys were on one side of the room and girls were on the other. Before lights-out, the nurse came in and made everyone sing and then closed a curtain to separate the boys from the girls. After a while, I said, “You sleeping?” She didn't answer, so I went downstairs.

I poured a glass of water, and looked around my father's office for something to read. On his desk were a dictionary, a thesaurus, and something called
The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine
, which I flipped through.
When a man grows old his bones become dry and brittle like straw and his eyes bulge and sag
. I opened the top drawer of his filing cabinet and searched through a stack of photocopied stories until I found a stapled manuscript titled “Mexico Story.” I sat down on his loveseat and read it.

In Mexico
, it began,
some men still remember Pancho Villa
. I prepared for a thinly veiled account of my father and Lara's vacation, but the story, it turned out, followed a man, his wife, and their son on vacation in Mexico City. They've traveled there because the mother is sick and their last hope is a healer rumored to help even the most hopeless cases. The family waits in the healer's sitting room for their appointment. The son, hiding under the headphones of his new Walkman, just wants to go home. The mother tries to talk to him but he just keeps saying,
Huh? Huh?

The three of us go into a dim room, where the healer asks my mother what's wrong, what her doctors said, why has she come. Then he shakes his head and apologizes. “Very bad,” he says. He tells a rambling story about Pancho Villa, which none of us listens to, then reaches into a drawer and pulls out a wooden back-scratcher. He runs it up and down along my mother's spine.

“How's that feel?” he asks.

“Okay,” the mother says. “Is it doing anything?”

“Not a thing. But it feels good, yes? It's yours to keep, no charge.”

I must have fallen asleep while reading, because at some point the threads came loose in the story and mother, father, and son leave Mexico for a beach that looks a lot like the one near our house. Hotels looming over the sea oats. The inlet lighthouse just visible in the distance. I sit on a blanket next to my father while my mother stands in knee-deep water with her back to us.

“She's sick,” my father says. “She doesn't want me to say anything, but you're old enough to know. She's really . . . sick.”

If she's sick she shouldn't be in the water, I think. Her pedal pushers are wet to the waist, and if she wades in any deeper, her shirt will be soaked, too. I pick up a handful of sand and let it fall through my fingers.

“So it's like a battle,” he's saying. “Good versus bad. As long as we stick together, we'll get through it okay.”

My mother walks out of the water. She is bathed in light and already I can barely see her. She sits next to us, puts her hand on my head, and, in the dream, I realize this is one of those moments I need to prolong. I put my hand over hers and hold it there. I push down on her hand until it hurts and I keep pushing.

“You can let go,” she says. “I'm not going anywhere.”

The next morning I found my father in checked pajamas near the Christmas tree. He carefully stepped over a stack of presents onto the tree skirt and picked up a gift from Carrie and me. He shook it and listened. He tapped on it with his finger.

“It's not a watch,” I said.

He turned to me and smiled. “I've narrowed it down to two possibilities,” he said.

“Here.” He waved me over. “Sit down, I've got something for you.”

I sat on the couch and he handed me a long, flat package wrapped in red-and-white paper. “Wait, wait,” he said when I started to unwrap it. “Guess what it is first.”

I looked at it. All that came to mind was a pair of chopsticks.

“Listen,” he said, taking it from me. He held it up to my ear and shook it. “Don't think, just listen. What's that sound like to you?”

I didn't hear anything. “I don't hear anything,” I said.

He continued shaking the gift. “It's trying to tell you what it is. Hear it?”

I waited for it, I listened. “No.”

He tapped the package against my head. “Listen harder,” he said.

buzzers

S
oon after Andrew left the hospital for the airport, he knew his father would die, and that's exactly what he did. His mother was sleeping on a foldout chair while Dora, his little sister, sat on a stool studying her father's respirator. She was cycling through the machines again, figuring out which worked and which did not. The heart monitor appeared to be working, but the respirator left her skeptical, something in the way the rubber flue trembled as it collapsed and bloomed, collapsed and bloomed. Her father was expending every last bit of energy, vigor, whatever it was, to keep the machines alive.

When the heart monitor flatlined and her father let out a last long sigh, she stood up and walked over to the side of his bed. Another machine began emitting a series of agitated beeps, and she touched his shoulder, still warm beneath his sweatshirt, and his hair, which felt like hair, of course, but she wanted to be sure. She wasn't afraid. She was ready. She'd seen a movie where a woman places coins atop her dead husband's closed eyelids. Dora liked this, but her father was on his side. He looked happy, she decided. Plus she didn't have any coins.

She noticed that on her father's forehead, shining under the muted glow of the overhead track lights, was a single red speck of party glitter, which, when she shifted her view, pulsed like a tiny cinder. Quickly, before the doctor arrived, she used her fingernail to remove it. Holding it on her finger, she hesitated to let it fall to the floor. She wasn't superstitious, but flicking the glitter to the floor seemed like an improper thing to do. How had it ended up here, and what had it celebrated? She could feel her confidence disappearing. She had no idea what to do with the glitter. A doctor and two nurses in breast cancer T-shirts came into the room and checked her father's pulse. Her mother sat up. “What is it now?” she said.

Her mother and the doctor went into the bathroom, where Dora heard the awful pull of the chain-light. The nurses began printing and tearing readouts from some of the machines, and Dora thought: receipts.

She searched his face. It looked gray, with an expression that was not calm or serene or undisturbed—but gone. She wouldn't cry; she had already cried. Crying now would be a big step backward. She could wail, or keen. People still keened, didn't they? She reached under the covers and held her father's hand, cold. Room temperature, but cold. The moment she touched it she wanted to let go, but the nurses were watching, so she held on. She imagined something unspooling like anchor-chain inside of her and trailing after him wherever he was going. Away, away. Now would be an ideal time to keen, but it wasn't the kind of thing you willed your way into, you just did it, which was why Dora wouldn't be able to do it.

She asked one of the nurses for his ID bracelet. The nurse looked to the other nurse, who wasn't paying attention, and then quickly and efficiently clipped off the bracelet and handed it to Dora.

She looked at her finger and saw the glitter had vanished, and she was relieved. She had lately become a careful reader of signs and this seemed a very good sign.

I
n the airport, Andrew tried not to move while the hand-wand made excited noises above his belt buckle, once, twice, three times. When the security guard was finished, he asked if the belt cost a lot of money. Andrew told him that it was his father's, so he didn't know, and the guard said, “In my experience, things that look expensive usually are.”

He walked with a group from his design class to the gate. They wore dark simple clothes and tried to project a European uniformity. Andrew bought a newspaper and sat at the gate reading an article about a red tide on the Gulf Coast. Red tide, the article said, was caused by algae blooms, which attacked marine life and turned the water a rusty color. The article called the algae “toxic salt-loving algae,” and made it seem dastardly and inexorable, like death itself.

Seated around him were his classmates, the future architects of the world, on their way to Vicenza, Italy, for a monthlong course in city planning. Andrew had always wanted to be an architect, even before he knew what architects did—especially before he knew what they did.
Architect.
It sounded smart, upstanding, conclusive. People warned that the program was hard work, but it wasn't. It was long work. Stare, sketch, hold wooden dowels together while the glue dries, stare some more, sketch some more, solder. His finished models looked more like a building's circuit board than an actual building. Defending them during pinup, Andrew would point out subdominant structures and transparent intersections. “What I'm investigating is the junction of these lozenges here at the center,” he would say. And: “What I'm investigating is the conversation between opposing insertions.” And: “What I'm investigating is the way space negates space.” And: “What I'm investigating are tones.”

Of course, of course, his classmates said. Many of their models were doing the very same thing.

The trip to Vicenza was standard for students entering their third year. In Vicenza, the Renaissance architect Palladio had designed basilicas and villas for the aristocracy, turning the city into his personal design lab. There, the professors wanted the students to be aware of
relationships
, both particular to Vicenza and universal to human occupation. That's what they said. Andrew waited for them to elaborate, but they said no more. Sometimes he found their cryptic instructions interesting, even exciting, and other times—currently, for instance—they seemed negligent, a way of alluding to a world without the burden of making sense of it.

Nonetheless, he was eager to go. He'd never been on a long flight or to Europe, so the minute he stepped onto the plane he would find himself on unfamiliar territory. This was one of the reasons people traveled, he guessed, to go from the known to the unknown, a thing he'd never longed for until now. “Over my dead body,” his father said when Andrew asked if he should forgo the trip. It was meant to be a joke, but no one, including Andrew's father, had laughed. What Andrew wanted right now was to be where he couldn't understand a word.

Aboard the airplane before takeoff, he sat in a middle seat away from the rest of the group, between an older couple who seemed to be traveling together. They traded excited comments about the complimentary purple socks they were given. Both of them freed the socks from the plastic and put them on. Andrew kept his in his lap atop the Walter Benjamin book he'd been carrying around for the past month. The woman, who sat to his left, asked his name and he told her. He asked if she wanted to switch seats with him and she said she did not. “We'll have plenty of time to sit next to each other in Athens,” she said. “Athens, Greece.”

This conversation starter, if that's what it was, went unheeded by Andrew. He wanted to put on his headphones and read Walter Benjamin until he fell asleep, but didn't want to appear rude. He waited for the woman to elaborate. She wore long clip-on earrings that jiggled as she rooted around in her pocketbook. To his right, the man wrapped his old socks in the plastic and was trying to figure out what to do with them.

After a few minutes, the woman leaned forward and said, “I never finished telling you about Annie. Where was I?”

“Tongue cancer,” the man said.

“Can you imagine anything more gruesome? I didn't even know one could get cancer of the tongue.”

“It's an organ like everything else. It's got cells.”

“It must be new,” the woman said.

Andrew opened the book. He read, “There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the
flâneur
who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of the gentleman of leisure.” He closed the book. He watched the flight attendants walk back and forth preparing the plane. They were solemn and purposeful, but when a passenger requested something, the attendants brightened while tilting their heads to show utmost receptiveness.

One of them came by and said, “Please remember to turn off all electronic devices before we push back from the gate.”

The woman asked the attendant how many pilots there were on a transatlantic flight like this one, while Andrew reached into his pocket to turn off his phone. It had already been turned off. When he turned it on again, he saw that a message was waiting. It was from his mother. An echoing sigh. “It's happened,” she said.

The woman next to Andrew was now holding the attendant's arm to fix her in place. She asked if all four of the pilots were copilots, like cocaptains on a bridge team, or if one was a main pilot and the other three were copilots, or if they were all simply pilots, and would it be too much trouble to get a small glass of tonic water for her and her husband before the plane took off? Tonic water settled the stomach.

“I hope you get this,” Andrew's mother said.

When the message ended, a digitized voice gave him numeric options. On the cover of Walter Benjamin was a picture of a glass-roofed arcade below a much smaller picture of a woman's face. It was a pensive face, not necessarily kind-looking, but full of thought, especially in the vicinity of the mouth. Only half of the face was visible in the frame, and if Andrew's first impulse wasn't to hurry and gather his things and exit the plane and make his way back to Orlando to be with his mother and Dora, maybe it was because he wanted a few more minutes to figure out this woman's face.

At the start of his second year, his instructors recommended that he find a single philosopher whose ideas he approved of. Not to let the philosopher's ideas impose themselves too rigidly on what he was building, but to think of them, the ideas, as a miner's helmet, the light by which he sees what he's building . . .

Andrew was still holding the phone to his ear, he realized. “For more options, press star,” the digitized voice repeated, another group of words that hadn't yet cohered into anything that made sense.

It's happened
. He knew that if he stayed in his seat a little while longer, it would be too late to do anything. In a few minutes the bay doors would close, the plane would leave the gate, take off, and, seven hours later, land in London. He would call his mother from a pay phone in the airport while waiting for the connecting flight and explain that he didn't get her message until it was too late. He thought: in a few minutes the doors will close and I won't have to make a decision. I'll be locked in transit, trapped.

He opened the in-flight magazine and mentally filled in the crossword puzzle. Both the husband and wife, he could tell, were watching him, so he turned the page. As he read an article about the steakhouses of Denver, he decided that if he came across the word
yes
, he would tell the flight attendant he needed to get off the plane. But if he found the word
no
, he would stay on the plane. Searching the page, he found
no
once, twice, again, again.

As if to further confirm things, the man on his right offered him a piece of gum. It was the kind that came on a bubbled sheet of plastic, like sore-throat drops, and when Andrew accepted the offer, the man expertly pressed two through the foil into his hand. He leaned over and pressed out two more pieces for his wife, who declared, “We'll all have the same breath!”

A
ndrew's father first went to the hospital on Halloween morning. He'd eaten scallops for dinner and was up all night with what he thought was food poisoning. The doctors decided to keep him overnight for tests. When Andrew and his mother and sister visited him, the hospital staff was wearing costumes over their uniforms: pirate orderlies and vampire nurses. Andrew thought hospitals were impervious to things like Halloween, but in walked his father's doctor, dressed in a cowboy hat and boots. “Howdy everyone,” he said. This put none of them at ease.

His father was scanned and biopsied. He was given a prognosis and sent home with a hospital pocket calendar filled in with four months of appointments. The prognosis, as told to Dora and Andrew: Dad'll be visiting the hospital for at least four more months. After that, things proceeded very slowly. From one day to the next he looked and acted more or less the same, but if Andrew compared him with a picture from before he got sick, the difference was startling. He looked thinner, of course, and shorter. Everything about him seemed reduced in scale, even his bathrobe, his meals. For breakfast he ate a handful of raisins; dinner was a slice of toast.

For half his life he managed the jai alai fronton. His coworkers there brought tamales to the house, one pan after another. It became a joke between his mother and father. “I say we start freezing them,” his father would say. “Store them and thaw them out years from now to see what they tell us.” There were cheese tamales and turkey tamales and breakfast tamales. His mother cleaned the tamale pans and returned them filled with cookies.

Whenever Andrew went to a restaurant, he found himself looking for scallops on the menu. He hated scallops. He hated the word,
scallops
. It sounded like a disease in itself.

Every so often he allowed himself to imagine his father being around in ten, fifteen years, but even before he was admitted to Fourth West, everyone had resigned themselves to the worst. Andrew saw how his father seemed to be attending to last things, boxing up old clothes, calling friends he'd lost contact with. There was a slight, barely noticeable shift of balance in the house. His mother became quieter, his father louder, more erratic.

Andrew left for college, a four-hour drive. He was distracted from his schoolwork for a while, and then he was so busy he had no choice but to be swallowed up by it. He enjoyed the dull repetitiveness of studio work, making things out of other things. He went to a party where one of his female classmates said to him, “My father's dying, too.” He didn't know if she was offering sympathy or trying to start a conversation. How casually she said it, as if pointing out they were wearing the same brand of sneakers.