Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Dad remains condemned to his solo nation. For all his formal and continuing education, he carries with him his place and time: immigrant parents, needy upbringing, the Lord’s Prayer crocheted to the kitchen wall. He acquires enough worldliness to be sardonic when he recites the Kipling credo. But inside I can see the perpetual schoolboy scribbling over his writing desk, working on a schoolboy theme: All we need do is keep our head and give the world our best shot, ignore that it is godforsaken, hellish, and forever damned.

  For all his insistence that we look full face into the evil of the day, he never gives up his love of the escapist film. Without Orchestra Wives to live in, he would have died in 1951. The American black and white Hollywood Canteen gives him a kingdom to rule during his long exile. Achieving the impossible, poking his head through the walls of prison, gazing up close at the murderous truth of where we really are, he has no language to tell what he sees except the only tongue he is native in: Boy meets Girl; Boy goes to War; Boy fights War to Irving Berlin; Boy returns to Girl, to Betty Grable.

  If is now and forever his only weapon against brute realism. He must give in to brute realism in order to turn it around. But to turn it around, to move the pragmatic world, he must create a somewhere else to wedge the lever. I can hear his famous bass: “And it wouldn’t be make believe if you believe in me.” And he has trapped me just as hopelessly between these irreconcilables. In the early sixties, when the first films from Indochina come across the television and the whole nation changes the channel, he stands me, a little boy, in front of the tube and says, “Don’t look the other way. We are going to have our day in the trenches after all.” But this time, he is wrong. Event will skirt us again. I have already learned from him that this is a movie. I slip past experience by the slimmest margin.

  It is heroic that, after his first sign of sickness, Dad not only stays alive for another fifteen years but he even begins to shift around for some way to rehabilitate himself. A proof-of-personal-loyalty project. A project doomed from inception. Another handful of documents for the archives. I see my father setting off on this endeavor, starting the hobby that he will never abandon, giving it increasing doses of time and attention until it replaces all other activities, including the motions of everyday life. I see my mother, one afternoon, in one of the blamelessly median houses where they raised their blamelessly median family, earned the advanced degree, received the promotions, paid the utilities, garnered the accolades, destroyed the credit cards, and suffered the jury of peers, walking in on him in his makeshift study. He is sprawled over a pile of papers and forms—army insurance vouchers, mortgage tables, letters from since-sacrificed friends. He couches his chin in the inside of his bent arm. Mother’s immediate impression is that he has again passed out, for hours, with no one to attend him.

  As she comes near him, however, he shifts position. She gasps and jerks back, not expecting the corpse to move. He takes no notice of her alarm, makes no effort to soothe it. He says, instead, eyes not focused on her but off somewhere, opaque, “I have an idea.” A matinee production, definitely Off-Off Broadway. That first, vast operation the army had started him on. The name his separation papers poetically gives it. “An American Theater.”

  I have a picture of the man in front of me, taken during those last few weeks. He sits at a table, facing the camera front on. My sister stands behind him to one side, head next to his, arms around his neck in a joking, exasperated choke. She is grinning. He is on the edge of death. He is grinning too.

  I can’t believe that I did not see before what was so patently clear to the camera. Because he was a man who threw everything back to me in the abstract, I abstracted his real suffering. Dad had a burst appendix once, and was still walking around. He didn’t check in to a hospital for two days. And that was the only time I remember him entering a hospital. The only time until the last. As a result, it was easy, in those winter months of 1978, for me to overlook the chaos of pain in his still-joking face. He masked it convincingly, in character. But I have no excuse for not seeing it.

  The photo makes it obvious: Dad wants to go down. It has nothing to do with his legendary distrust of doctors. It isn’t a religious thing, God knows. The man is a lapsed Lutheran at best, whose faith can only charitably be called private and eclectic. He simply wants the sharp, stabbing pain, and will sooner die of it than mask it with analgesics. He demands to feel the genuine and valuable signal of something gone wrong that needs correcting. He wants death by loneliness to add to his vita. It is not too auspicious a biography, as biographies go. But with the right death, it could become the corrective biography for his time, an era when the unexperienced life has at last gotten the uncontested upper hand.

  For he has had one small brush with real history. And he wants to experience, to go through, just this once, once in this one life, what he has seen, the outside’s killing abundance and the inside’s incapacity to know. That is the disease so obvious in the photograph. The one I failed to see.

  My father, as should have been obvious to us for a long time, was a very sick man. Real sickness, although all we saw were the symptoms. We worried most about the irrelevant name of the disease. The problem, only now obvious, is that we never sat down and asked him what was wrong until he was jaundiced beyond recall. We should have tended to the illness, not the evasion. When I think of him retching in the bathroom, a sound I simply didn’t hear as it happened, I realize we should have remedied the unforgiving minute, and not left him to his solo distance run.

  In the end, my father’s sickness was his need to love people without knowing whether they deserved it. His madness came from never giving up on a place that had embraced the escalating and retaliatory threat. He lived through the specific moment of modern history when, in order to free ourselves, we locked ourselves away. And oddly, irrationally, he held to the boy’s hypothetical: if you, being hated, do not give way to hating . . . My father is lost, cut off from mankind, doomed to an idea. But, strange to say, the idea is compassion.

  I sit in the middle of a folder of papers. From a couple of incisors, I reconstruct the whole skeleton in all its dips and sways. Blind to the fact that nothing more can be said on the matter, the world keeps minting new sons and fathers. I forgive the misguided grade-school teacher: there are only hackneyed themes.

  Now I must find in his surviving records—the photos, letters, government forms—a way to forgive myself for not seeing how sick my father really was. I must find, in his life, the proof that history is not the big, which will never reform, nor the little, which will never know where it is. I must be coaxed to act on my own. Tell me how free I am, Dad. Tell me how free I am. Here, in the tracks and tapes of his having once lived and breathed and moved and changed other people, what counts is not the past or the future but the Standing Now, a thirteen-year-old explicating, as if all history depended on it, unwitting of what waits for him:

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—

  The child at the school desk writes to me, long after his death, from the morning of the very day that starts to rip his life apart, “you’ll be a Man, my son!”

  14

  The VA sure can pick ’em,” Ailene said brightly, by way of making conversation. She had honed, after three decades of practice, the art of cheerful inanity, speaking nonsense simply because anything she might say, however fatuous or misplaced or filled with hollow cheer, was better than silence.

  Lily, from the backseat of the rented sedan, returned Mom’s inanity, stripped of the redeeming well-meaning. “The outbound Ike is a dismal expressway, Maywood is a dismal suburb, and this place,” she gestured as they pulled into the hospital lot, “is a particularly dismal hotbed of sepsis.” She lit a cigarette over the objections of Eddie Jr., trapped in the seat next to her.

  Artie was still arguing how inefficient the
folks had been in leaving their car in De Kalb, abandoning Rach’s too-small Pinto in Grant Park, and renting a car to go a dozen blocks to the southwest suburbs. Only Rach paid him any attention. “It’s unpatriotic to be efficient, chump.”

  Dad was the only happy one of the whole group. He had blossomed into the African Adventurer returning to the London Explorers’ Club. He evidently hoped to compare notes with the only group on earth—wounded veterans—who could understand or empathize with him. He had packed lightly for the occasion in the same beaten-up khaki duffle bag stenciled “PFC Hobson” that had taken him through his two-year tour of duty across the American Campaign. But when the rental pulled in to the Hines parking lot and the family bailed out, Pop hadn’t the strength to hoist the bag out of the trunk let alone haul it into the building. He signaled Artie: “Cover for me, before your mother finds out.”

  Artie passed the task along the chain of command. “You take it,” Artie told Eddie Jr. He added, under his breath, “Private.”

  Little Eddie grinned and saluted, poking himself in the eye for additional effect. The whole Hobson parade followed the flag into the hospital lobby, single file, as all families walked. Eddie Jr. further entertained his older brother by launching into a virtuoso Mack Sennett routine, spinning around and waving the bag precariously at every passing hospital employee, raising a finger and saying, just out of earshot, “Front! Front! What kind of establishment is this? Get me the manager.”

  Artie, against his better judgment, laughed out loud. But when Dad, on the far side of the entrance from the little vaudeville act, independently invented a variant on the Hotel Hines joke by approaching the registration desk and saying, “I have a reservation for one. Indefinite stay,” both boys registered disgust on the roofs of their mouths. The old man’s breaches of taste seemed stripped of their last shred of good humor.

  “I’m sorry we ever decided to take your father out in public,” Artie said. “We should have let him simmer in his own gangrene.”

  “What? And give him what he wanted?” Eddie Jr. recovered his saving, crooked smile.

  The check-in staff directed Pop to an invisible upper floor typically reserved for basket cases. Because the initial history and physical wasn’t for a couple hours, everybody tagged along. Rach brought up the rear, humming, “I Love a Parade.” The halls of the place looked, to quote vintage Ailene, like a bomb had struck. Trays of pills, strings of plastic tubes, and carts loaded with listless fluid sacks littered the halls. In the crowded rooms, Artie caught a glimpse of patients cabled to masses of chrome and dials, the pale flicker of electroluminescent reds that, like miniature marching bands, arranged themselves into high-tech readouts. The numbers delivered the final judgment, the quantitative evaluation that told the professionals at a glance everything they needed to know about how near the attached body was to deliverance.

  And at a glance, Artie saw what the centuries-long drive for eternal progress had led to. Death used to be a horrible, demanding, agonizing, nauseating ordeal, the closing experience. But his era had at last taken care of it, turned it into a level spot on a graph, a rounded decimal. Artie imagined the hospital suite as the final State Street window: Christmas in the seventies. The moving parts were all silicon and semiconductor. The anxious family huddled in the shared sickroom, looking not at the mass they were related to but at the Christmas lights on the life-support machine, happy with the glorious temporary uptick of the LED.

  People filled the halls too, in a manner of speaking. The white outfits walked crisply and tried not to touch anything, while the drab-green seersucker robes slouched, slumped, or shuffled about uncaringly in their hospital-issue tissue slippers. They traded the horrible for the anesthetized at a hideous rate of exchange. In short, the place was a grotesque clearinghouse and convention center for the jaundiced, tumored, and forsaken. The advantages of bringing together into one place such a supersaturation of the sick eluded Artie as he threaded his way toward Dad’s appointed ward. Wasn’t that a sure way of making the sick get sicker, by power of association if not contamination?

  Rachel finished her perfidious tune and started in on “St. James Infirmary.” She sang, bluesy, “My God, why couldn’t it be me?” a line Artie did not recall from the original, but which he couldn’t imagine Rach interpolating. His sister had never been in better voice, and he liked the way the antiseptic corridor echoed with the smoky key.

  Dad marched cheerfully down the hall to his sentence, saluting left and right, stating his rites of passage by calling out divisional numbers from the Big One, on the outside chance of finding a distant regimental buddy. Those wounded vets who weren’t engaged in reconnoitering the halls sat in stunned silence in scattered lounges, shuffling dog-eared fifty-one-card decks of Armed Forces complimentary playing cards and picking over obsolete Sports Illustrateds. Some huddled around sets blaring afternoon soaps, not really watching. Some just sat, eyes closed, hands clasped to the armrests of their chairs.

  Dad beat the rest of the family to his suite by a hundred steps. But by the time everybody else got there, he introduced his roommates as if they were old friends. Mr. Banks, Army, ’54–’56, a big, stately black man from down by Blue Island, was eager to discuss and analyze his symptoms with all newcomers. Mr. Menkis, or just Menkis, as Dad already presumed to call him, Marines, ’41–’46, a pasty, frightened fellow from Cicero, shrank back into the corner by his bed. At the family’s onslaught, he asked in a pathetic, reedy voice, “Is everybody moving in, or . . . ?”

  While mother reassured Menkis that there was only one new tenant, Pop experimented with the green shower curtain that could be pulled on a runner around his bed, sealing it off in a parody of a private room. He then hopped into the bed and jacked with the hydraulics. Rach, by this time, had shifted to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Lily listened to Mr. Banks’s symptoms, told him that it sounded to her like diabetes, that millions of people had it, that it could be maintained, and that the sufferer could still lead a full life.

  An officious teenager in short white smock and clipboard came in to get Pop’s dog tags. Between questions, Pop stage-whispered to Artie, “Tell him about Dr. Wolff.” Artie rolled his eyes, pretending not to hear anything. When the kid finished fact-gathering and left, Dad wheeled on his eldest and demanded, “Why didn’t you say anything? Aiding and abetting? Trying to withhold evidence?”

  “Pop, he’s just an orderly. He hasn’t a thought in his brain.” Artie became inexplicably depressed. Experience was a cruel joke; no wonder most people shut it off long before getting to it.

  “Well, when the real doctors come, make sure that you tell them what you’ve discovered.”

  “Tell them yourself, man. You’re the one who discovered the son of a bitch.”

  “I can’t tell them,” Pop said, still smiling.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m the patient. That makes me the last person in the world that the doctors are going to believe about anything.” He gave his son a look at once soulful, long-suffering, and sardonic: How can I prove my loyalty, when the very attempt to do so draws suspicion to itself?

  “I’m sure that the doctors know all about Dr. Wolff’s work without my . . .” Artie trickled off, unable to complete the thought. The whole exchange was ludicrous. Pop suckered him into irrelevant places one last time.

  “Without your throwing them for a lupus?”

  “Exactly.” Artie grinned, unable to help himself. The man would never reform; but suddenly, that was all right. Everything was all right, worthwhile, because everything was already lost. The pressure was off. All he really had to do was live. Pop’s triple pun suddenly seemed very funny.

  The first doctor showed for a cursory prep. He verified the work-up so far and made sure Pop knew when to go where for what tests. Ailene intercepted the physician diagonally on his way out. With an economy of words she said: “He’s weak and he’s bleeding and he’s blacking out. That’s cancer, isn’t it? You can tell us. We want
to know the worst. We’re not your typical family.”

  The doctor put on his professional counselor’s demeanor. “Differential diagnosis is a subtle thing, Mrs. Hobson. There is often no telling, from symptoms alone, just what is wrong with a patient. That can only be gotten through observation and more observation. The best thing you can do now is head home and dwell as little as possible on the matter. I personally will call you when we have a lead on anything.”

  “They want us to leave, Ma,” translated Eddie Jr. after the physician had gone. Setting a good precedent, he went to the bed where Pop was changing into hospital gown for the first battery of tests, and shook his hand. “So long, big guy. We’re outta here.”

  Dad looked up. “I know this is going to be hard for either of us to believe I’m really saying,” he said offhandedly. “But try to do what your mother says.”

  “Within reason,” said Eddie Jr., grinning. Everybody followed suit, saying good-bye and good luck as well to Mr. Menkis and Mr. Banks. Rach was last.

  “Know what?” she asked, leaning over and jabbing at the terminally sick man.

  “No. What?” A comeback from way back, one that used to send her into howls of laughter when she was little. At eight, she could have played that same question-and-answer game all day long, and probably still could.

  “I think you’re schizo.” Dad returned his polite smile: Is that a fact? “And I hope the both of you will be very happy here,” she added, kissing him with impeccable sweetness.

  Mom was crying softly when they dropped off the rental car. The De Kalb contingent walked Rach and Art back to the Grant Park garage. Her two departing children could give the woman no comfort short of lying, so Artie simply said, “We’ll be out soon. Call us as soon as you hear anything. Anything at all.”

  Mom demanded that Artie or Rach go out to Hines the following day. No objection of impracticality or irrationality would dissuade her, so they promised to make the visit. Artie pointed mother, sister, and brother in the direction of the bus station and watched them disappear down the way—however temporary and vulnerable—back home.