Orson had cried then too—when chinstrapped William had collapsed, in agony, from the rocks into the grass—but Orson had been a child then, and the family hadn’t worried.
Now, however, the incident at the marsh had incited a growing animosity toward Orson, and therefore a growing interest. After years of being avoided, or ignored, or honestly forgotten altogether, Orson’s standing had shifted from embarrassment to curiosity. At the rare event at which he would grace the family with his presence—a Memorial Day cookout, a Thanksgiving Day banquet, a Labor Day potluck—a gang of children would creep after him, peering at him from behind furnishings or shrubberies, studying his every tic. Gabe, a towheaded toothy boy who excelled at firing fireworks, insisted that Great-Uncle Orson could speak to animals. “He talked to the squirrel, and the squirrel nodded.” Abby, a chubby pigtailed girl with an allergy to peanuts, claimed that Great-Uncle Orson had broken a plate. “But it was broken,” Abby whined, although the remains of a plate were never found, and nobody, other than Abby, had heard the plate hit the floor.
Boxes were hauled from attics, photographs dusted with shirtsleeves. “That’s him as a kid?” asked Dylan, who was pathologically suspicious and often would force adults to repeat things, as if checking for inconsistencies. “That’s him,” said mustached Alexander. Dylan and his brothers squatted over the photographs to rummage through. Orson and Pearl standing sweaty, grinning, behind a lemonade stand. Orson and his parents at a horseshoe pit, pointing, exclaiming. Chinstrapped William helping Orson roast a frankfurter over a bonfire. “He looks so average,” said Dylan’s youngest brother, chewing a candy skull. Dylan frowned. Dylan squinted at the photographs. “That’s him?” Dylan asked, again. Alexander confirmed, again, that the child was Great-Uncle Orson, and then Zack’s daughters appeared in the doorway in baggy superhero capes and said that anybody who wanted to trick-or-treat had about one second before they got left behind.
There were those in the family who claimed they would be boycotting Orson’s rites—bearded Lauren and bearded Morgan among them—as punishment for the disrespect that Orson had shown to Pearl. But the truth was that there also was a certain amount of anticipation now for Orson’s rites, this secret feeling that something about Orson’s rites might be exceptional, or memorable, or unusual somehow. When they were together, none of them spoke of it. Only when they were apart—in line at the supermarket with a certain sister, playing cribbage in the lamplit kitchen of a certain aunt—would they speak of it, confidant to confidant. As the secret spread, however, the truth became clear. They all had the same feeling. They couldn’t wait.
Other rites were held, those years, the last of Orson’s generation’s. Special permits were required if the departing had chosen a method other than pills, but the departing rarely chose other methods. Orson’s cousin Jennifer chose pills, her fireplace, a frosty midwinter evening; Orson’s cousin Benjamin chose pills, a rainstorm, his old deer blind; Heath, Orson’s cousin-in-law, chose pills; and like that, Orson’s generation vanished, leaving only Orson.
The family waited for the invitation to Orson’s rites, but the invitation never came.
The traditional age for rites was seventy.
Orson, now, was seventy-three.
Their feeling shifted from anticipation to concern. Orson, they realized, was stalling.
* * *
They argued along the banks of a frozen pond, scarved with scarves, gloved with gloves, watching their children skate in loops across the starry ice. Stalling wasn’t uncommon—hadn’t great-grandmother, grandmother-in-law, great-aunt Winnie delayed her rites for over a year, canceling them, rescheduling them, canceling them, until she had found, finally, the courage?—but stalling was nevertheless uncomfortable for all involved. And, pointed out bearded Morgan, set a bad example for the children. And, pointed out bearded Lauren, was tremendously unpatriotic. And, pointed out bearded Morgan, was socially, and environmentally, and fiscally irresponsible, and arguably borderline criminal.
The family decided to send somebody to address the situation. Everybody except Zack agreed it should be Zack.
“Remember, he listened to you about Mom’s rites,” said mustached Alexander.
Alexander’s husband offered to come and help, but Zack grunted, waved the offer away, and then lurched onto the ice with a goalie mask and hockey puck to the jeers of the children.
The next day, after work, Zack drove to Uncle Orson’s apartment.
At the door, Uncle Orson’s face was streaked with stripes, the aftermath of a nap on corduroy pillows. His cheeks had hollowed, as if he wasn’t eating properly, and his hair was plastered to his brow. He was wearing his bathrobe over a pair of sweatpants and a ragged sweater.
Uncle Orson gathered magazines from a battered steamer trunk—limping with every other step—dumped the magazines on the kitchen counter, and set out a plate on the trunk, of crackers, which were stale, and which Zack ate out of politeness nonetheless. Chewing a cracker, surveying the apartment, Zack tucked his hands into the pockets of his suit coat and felt some unknown object there. Peeking into the pocket, Zack spotted a bottle of glittery nail polish. His daughters sometimes hid objects in his suits that they knew would embarrass him if discovered at work. His revenge was hiding baby photos of them in their textbooks to spill out onto their desks at school.
Uncle Orson seemed glad to have a visitor, but also had nothing to say. Uncle Orson just sat there, staring at the balcony, beaming, as if enjoying how the view was altered when shared with Zack. From the sofa, Zack could see into the darkened bathroom. The gleam of tiles. A glint of mirror. Boxed eye drops, grimy bottles of antacid tablets, gnarled tubes of hemorrhoid ointments. An unwashed cup brimming with multicolor painkillers. These were good signs. Stallers often became eager to quit stalling as their health worsened, as rites became less of a menace and more of a relief. From a purely selfish position, that was what rites offered: escaping the intensifying pain of living within a deteriorating body.
The internet had said today the wind would blow toward the lake.
The wind was blowing toward the lake.
Water dripped, dripped again, into the sink.
Zack explained that the family was wondering about Orson’s rites.
Uncle Orson’s face collapsed, like the flimsy frontage of a rundown building.
“Wouldn’t you say it’s time?” Zack said.
Fingers trembling, expression flickering between a scowl and a wince, Uncle Orson reached for a cracker.
“If you’re afraid nobody will come, we’ll make sure everybody comes,” Zack said.
“I’m not going to do the rites,” Uncle Orson said.
“If you need money, we’ll help you pay for the ceremony,” Zack said.
“I’m not going to do the rites,” Uncle Orson said.
Zack started to speak again, then actually heard what Uncle Orson was saying.
Zack frowned, confused. “You’re what now?”
“I’m not going to do the rites,” Uncle Orson muttered, as if ashamed, and then slipped the cracker between his lips.
“You can’t not,” Zack said.
“There isn’t any law,” Uncle Orson said through a mouthful of cracker.
Zack unbuttoned his suit coat, leaning forward, elbows to knees. “How many years has it been since you taught? Nine? Ten?” Zack said. Uncle Orson gulped the cracker down. Zack hunched even closer yet, trying not to become upset, gesturing vaguely. “You can’t keep on, just, consuming resources, creating waste, without contributing anything to society. There are eleven billion of us on this planet. A family planning policy helps prevent drought, prevent famines, wars over energy. By stalling, you’re hurting everybody, you’re hurting my generation, you’re hurting the kids’ generation, you’re hurting their kids’ generation, you’re living like a primitive.”
Now that Uncle Orson’s secret was out, Uncle Orson seemed to relish saying it.
“I’m not going to do the rites,” Unc
le Orson said.
“Doing rites is a privilege we haven’t always had,” Zack said.
“I don’t care what it is,” Uncle Orson said.
“Our ancestors, your ancestors, fought for these rights,” Zack said, angry now.
Uncle Orson gathered the plate.
“I don’t want them,” Uncle Orson said, and limped to the kitchen for another box of crackers.
* * *
When Zack reported that Orson wasn’t stalling but in fact refused altogether, the family exploded, as across the stands rival fans erupted, with cap-waving applause, at a home run.
“Troglodyte!” shouted Morgan.
“Oh, what, he’s going to cling to every last scrap of a second? Rot away, wither up, until he’s incontinent, blind, demented? How much is he really going to enjoy those last few years, that he won’t even hear, or taste, or remember?” shouted Lauren.
The rivals sat down again, some still applauding. Zack’s daughters, one over at shortstop, one in the outfield, were mouthing words at each other, gossiping between plays.
“But he must understand the alternative!” said Morgan’s wife.
“Forget his duty to society. How about his duty to himself? Because the outcome, if he refuses rites, is going to be inhumane. Hasn’t he seen pictures of how—how wasted, how ruined—people became in those barbaric homes?” said Lauren’s wife.
Mustached Alexander, standing, was booing the unpaid umpire.
“He was a history teacher,” Zack said, yanking Alexander down. “He’s seen the pictures.”
By sundown, everybody knew. The family—several cousins especially, with municipal political positions, wary of any potential scandal—insisted Zack talk sense into Orson, through whatever means necessary, before Orson became conspicuously overage. Zack didn’t know how. “Just go back,” smiled Zack’s wife, popping a pan of popcorn in the kitchen, slapping Zack’s butt, “and make him understand.”
So Zack did. He went back—several times—and every time found himself unable to talk to Uncle Orson about the rites. Instead, Zack sat on a wobbly foldout chair on the balcony and watched Uncle Orson feed seeds to birds. A wren with speckled plumage would alight on the chipped railing. Uncle Orson would offer a handful of seeds, nibble a seed as an example, try to encourage the bird to eat. Beyond the railing, sunlight gleamed on the windows of the relish factory. Clouds made shapes. Sitting there next to Uncle Orson, Zack felt very much like a child. Like a bulky, lumbering, hairy orphan, wearing a work suit like a costume. Zack didn’t often have time to think, to sit and think and reflect, which was perhaps why he was so often so happy. He rather fiercely wanted to live a moral, responsible, good life. But those evenings on the balcony, as he tried to find the words to reason with Uncle Orson, he began to admit that he didn’t understand, exactly, why everybody did things how everybody did. It made him feel very lost. As if he weren’t a member of any family, but was ultimately just himself, bewildered, alone.
Afterward, Zack would drive home and pretend to have made some progress.
And in the brownstone apartments across from Zack’s office, a hunched balding woman hung herself with an extension cord while Zack tried to balance an account. And as Zack jogged through the misted streets of the city, sweating through sweatbands, breathing steam, the kin of a gaunt bespectacled woman huddled beneath umbrellas to watch as the woman leapt from a bridge and then tumbled, coattails flapping, toward the water below. And Zack’s barber celebrated a birthday—a seventy-first—by carving his arms with a razor and bleeding himself dry, and after that Zack’s hair was cut by a younger barber with tattooed arms who told no jokes. A stranger buttoned and fastened and zipped himself into soaking clothes, and then sat on the pier, alone, until the clothes froze and he froze. A muttonchopped retiree leapt from the roof of a hotel, landed on an empty taxi, broke his spine, his pelvis, multiple ribs, and both heels, and failed to die, until his rites were completed by a doctor with a syringe. Elsewhere in Minnesota, among the thousands who died in those years of alcohol poisoning, several were seventy-year-olds who had chosen whiskey or brandy for their rites. Another poisoned herself with caffeine, another poisoned himself with cocaine, another with insulin. Another with oxygen. Another with water. Another ate a colorful blend of monkshood seeds, nightshade root, and yew berries, with a demitasse of foxglove tea. In Idaho, a lifelong conservationist opted to be eaten by wolves. In Pennsylvania, a former flyweight boxing champion elected to die of heatstroke in a sauna. In Arkansas, a renowned painter painted herself, her skin, sole to brow, with silver paint, and thereby suffocated. In Florida, a court-martialed general disemboweled himself with a dagger. While in Minnesota, across the street from Zack’s home, a retired librarian was starving, ate nothing, as her friends came and went, saying hello, checking how she was, with rites that lasted almost a month. And as Zack and his daughters loaded sacks of sausage and eggplant and detergent into their trunk, the sound of a pistol firing echoed across the parking lot of the supermarket, the sound of rites completed, followed by a family applauding, from a fenced yard nearby. And as Zack and a coworker bought espressos from the stand in the park, a faint tart smell of smoke lingered above them, the odor of a house fire, accidental, caused during the rites of an electrician who had chosen electrocution. And as Zack jogged through the dripping streets of the city, splashing through puddles, panting, a withered stubbled man pinned with a brittle corsage lowered himself gingerly onto train tracks below, while the conductor of the oncoming train sounded the whistle, and sounded the whistle, cheering him on.
People became bodies. The animate the inanimate. Zack jogged home and began setting the table for supper as his daughters, clutching worksheets, begged for help with math.
* * *
They ate gelato sometimes, the family. Raspberry, hazelnut, pistachio, lemon. Kaleidoscopic plastic tubs, strewn across the heavy oak table, with wine from their cellarage. As their spoons flashed, they obsessed over Orson, like a child unable to leave alone a loose tooth. What did Orson live for? What was it that had given him this mania for life? A lover, a drug, a hobby? A goateed cousin who rented a studio in Orson’s neighborhood reported that Orson was often sighted walking along the relish factory, gathering speckled pebbles. Could somebody please explain that? Another cousin reported once spotting Orson sitting on a bench in the park, appearing to be taking extreme pleasure in the temperature of the paper cup of coffee clutched between his bare hands. The cousin hadn’t said hello. A pimpled nephew, who had an internship that summer at the offices of Orson’s physician, and who normally had only the utmost respect for the confidentiality of patients’ records, had peeked at Orson’s, and reported now that Orson suffered from a recurring affliction that was downright nauseating. Zack mentioned the hemorrhoid ointments, but the pimpled nephew laughed these off, as if, compared to this, hemorrhoids were nothing. The pimpled nephew bounced his eyebrows. Did they want the details? Did they? Huh? Nobody did. Bearded Lauren, waving a wallet, claimed to be willing to wager anything, any amount whatsoever, that Orson had a total of zero friends, companions, and acquaintances. Bearded Morgan dared somebody to make a wager. The goateed cousin was slapping Zack on the back, pointing at their spoons, comparing flavors. What was it? What was it that had given him this mania for life? What did Orson live for? Zack’s daughters were obliterating the other children at table tennis in the garage, using spin moves Zack had taught them that they claimed to have invented.
At work, Zack often would stare in a daze across the street at the arched window where the woman had hung herself with only cats for an audience. After the rooms were emptied, the apartment was rented by a curly-haired woman with curly-haired children, who moved taped boxes into each room, and untaped the boxes, and unpacked the objects stowed there, carefully choosing a place for each object to rest—a china cabinet just shy of a radiator, a record player on the windowsill—this here, this here. Zack worried not only that he had failed to persuade Uncle Orson, but that Uncle
Orson had managed to persuade him. Zack worried constantly. Raking leaves, dusting windows, forking frosting from birthday cake. Zack wasn’t sure anymore whether he could go through with the rites when his own time arrived.
But, then again, Zack never had to.
The week after his fiftieth birthday, while jogging at dusk across a bridge, Zack became nauseated, Zack’s vision blurred wildly, and Zack collapsed, dead, of an aneurysm, on the concrete. Sneakers still knotted. Sweatbands still damp.
The moment before the blackout, as Zack began to stumble—Zack’s thinking was getting muddled, Zack’s vision was going foggy—Zack clung to a memory from years before, of the cloudy morning that Uncle Orson had taken Zack fishing.
As Zack’s younger brothers had slept, Zack’s mother, bleary-eyed, in a nightgown, had toasted Zack a slice of bread. Then Zack—holding the toast in his teeth—tied his boots, zipped his jacket, and ran from the farmhouse across frosted leaves to Uncle Orson’s sputtering car. And they drove together under the stars to the lake, where they sat with fishing poles in a metal rowboat and waited for something to bite. Zack ate the toast, Uncle Orson gave some pointers, and then they cast the poles, again and again, into the pale fog. And dawn broke. And the sunrise cracked. And clouds settled across the sky. And the fog scattered. And they still hadn’t caught anything. And, that whole time, the exact same gull had been circling overhead.
“Nothing’s happening,” Zack complained.
But Uncle Orson smiled at the clouds, and smiled at the rowboat, and smiled at the gull, and smiled at the poles.
“Nothing has to happen,” Uncle Orson had said.
Then Zack hit the concrete and Zack was gone.
Darkness had fallen by the time the medics carted off the body.
Why Visit America Page 4
