Accompanied by the strumming guitar and uplifting flute cadenzas that in his boyhood typified alternative folk services in his father’s church, these warnings were all delivered with a lilting, lobotomized pleasantness—the tone of voice in which one might read bedtime stories to small children about mischievous bears and over-curious kittens. Meantime, ads for high blood pressure medicine alternated with ads for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, ads for high cholesterol medicine with ads for two-for-one pizza, ads for acid reflux medicine with ads for a chain restaurant’s baby-back ribs. Averse to inferring conspiracy, he perceived only an odd sort of balance.
He kept trying to come up with comforting things to say. He repeatedly fought the impulse to assure her that she’d come through surgery with flying colors, because he obviously had no idea. Yet absent sham clairvoyance, he could do little but ferry Glynis more apple juice than she wanted. Last night’s voluble dinner now seemed improbable. Today Shep and his wife had barely spoken. Only a warm hand on her neck seemed to make a difference. This was a time of the body. To communicate was to communicate with the body.
He didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking. His thoughts were selfish, but there was too much time. Too much empty space and suffocating quiet. So he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if there was anything, any single prospect no matter how small, to which he was looking forward.
He hated his work. He hated hating it, too; to despise the company he had brought into the world seemed a parental betrayal. He feared his son’s getting older almost as much as Zach did—since lately that’s all the boy appeared to do, just get older, not wiser or clearer, no more determined or firm in himself. He dreaded suing Forge Craft for damages, when the damage was done; civil jurisprudence would entail more forms, procedures, and postponements, in which Glynis’s medical circumstances were drowning him already. And he was hardly relishing the imminent arrival of Glynis’s family from Arizona. He would put them up while Glynis recovered. Feed them, ferry them to the hospital, keep them entertained. The controlled neutrality he had maintained in relation to his in-laws for years now was bound to slide to impatience.
He tried to think conventionally, to anticipate the joyful day of his daughter’s marriage. But Amelia was at that age when she’d doubtless marry the wrong boy, whom she’d rapidly outgrow. He would know this, despoilingly, on the day. At her wedding reception, he pictured his toast to the happy couple as forced, himself already mournful over their pending divorce. He pictured all the other guests speculating wanly about how long this one was likely to last, while making cynically good use of the open bar. Posing for group snapshots, he would envision the prints shoved ashamedly into a bottom drawer. The lavish flowers would wither in his mind’s eye as in time-lapse photography. It would descend on the father of the bride like a divine vision that within a few years these two flushed and devoted young people would no longer possess each other’s current email addresses.
Nevertheless, Amelia was the type who’d expect a wedding with all the bells and whistles. A modern woman who, over the course of her life, would blithely recite “til death do us part” two or three times with no sense of self-consciousness. She was a girl-girl. Clothes. As scathing about violation of the rules of fashion as her mother felt above them. Her hopped-up, hectic determination to have “fun” was a little tiring. He worried that the intensity of her resolve to live it up in her twenties betrayed a corresponding pessimism about her life thereafter. He worried, too, that she saw her own father as the embodiment of the very party’s-over adulthood that the girl was so desperate to forestall.
He was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200K Dartmouth BA in “media studies” might have been available through a free trial subscription to The Atlantic Monthly and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for fifty dollars a month. His daughter’s dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he’d accrued previous to the sale of Knack. Shep may not have expected his own father to send him through school, but it was customary now: a child had a right to a university education. So he should not resent the expense, and therefore he did not resent it. Yet after decades of single-ply, turkey-burger stinting, actually to be punished for the frugality had been, well—disconcerting. His cash assets had flat out disqualified Amelia from financial aid.
He kept it to himself, of course, that he found Amelia’s style of dress—the bare midriff, the skimpy tops, the glitter on her breasts—not so much risqué as obvious. Trying too hard to be a woman, and therefore childish. Consequently, in that vision of her wedding, he foresaw her coming to loggerheads with her classically tasteful mother, who—
Who would not be there.
In relation to Glynis, there was nothing to look forward to. Nothing. While friends would never have described Shep Knacker as irksomely sunny, he was an optimist all the same. Yet he did not understand what an optimist could contemplate when not a single cheerful advent plausibly awaited in his future.
Amelia called late afternoon. She surprised him. So demonstrably upset by the news at first, she would surely have planned to visit before the surgery. Her reason for demurring—having to work through the weekend on the next issue of the money-losing, negligible-circulation arts journal that she helped to edit—sounded generic. His daughter’s pep talk with her mother was short. Of course, today he’d no right to complain that anyone else in the family had nothing to say.
Shep sneaked another skewer of cold shrimp, which he shielded ascending the stairs. He stood before his son’s door. What a radical gesture it had come to seem, simply crossing this threshold. His first knock was soft, inaudibly deferential. He tried more loudly a second time. After formally opening the door, Zach stood blocking the entrance, as if his father were trying to sell him something.
“Mind if I come in?”
He did mind. But Zach was, on the surface, well behaved. He drew back to resume his seat at the computer. Feeling a little foolish still holding the bamboo skewer, Shep sat springily on the edge of the bed, ill at ease. It wasn’t the posters of bands he’d never heard of, or the mess. It was the plain fact of not being welcome. Kids never seemed aware that “their” rooms were a generous conceit on the part of the parent who paid for the entire house. It was Shep’s right, legally, morally, and financially, to walk into this room whenever he liked. Then again, some dim consciousness that in truth children had no territory may have explained why they defended their illusion of territory with such ferocity.
“I wanted to check if you had any questions,” said Shep. “About what happens next.”
“Happens?” Zach gave no indication that he had any idea what his father was talking about.
First Amelia, and now this. “To your mother,” said Shep, as if reminding the boy that he had one.
“They’re going to operate. And then she’ll come home and take drugs and she’ll lose her hair and shit.” The boy’s phrasing was crude, but uninflected.
“That’s pretty much it.”
“So why would I have any questions,” said Zach, stating this very question in the declarative. “It’s on TV all the time.”
“Not—all of it,” his father said lamely. Cancer in the world of entertainment was a neat one-word expedient for the disposal of characters who had served their purpose, and would vanish politely off-camera. It added gravitas to a series in danger of seeming trivial. It provided a plot twist from which primary players reliably recovered in an episode or two—never more than a season.
“So what part do they leave out?”
Agony, he wanted to say. Time, he wanted to say. Money, he did not even want to say, but that, too. “I guess we’ll find out the hard way.”
The boy was incurious. He should have had questions. Yet it was not as if Zach had no sense of mystery, as if he regarded the world as known. To the contrary, the appurtenances of his life were nothing but mystery. Take that computer. When Shep was fi
fteen, he did his homework on a typewriter. It was electric. He may not have completely understood the circuitry through which a tap on a key raised the arm of a letter. Still, he could watch the arm rise, inspect the three-dimensional backward a affixed to the metal. He could grasp the elementary process by which it struck an inky ribbon and stained a black a-shaped mark on a physical piece of paper. But when Zach typed an a, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father’s car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world, was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn’t involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of Zach’s life—and these days, machines didn’t sputter on you, develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked, or they stopped dead—the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn’t. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo—charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
At that moment, Shep had his first glimpse of why Zach might seem to be getting older in an exclusively temporal sense. Nothing the boy had been taught in school had supplied him the slightest jurisdiction over the forces that controlled his life. Second-year algebra failed even fractionally to inform him about what to do when their broadband service cut off besides call Verizon—the sorcerers; it failed to illuminate what “broadband service” really was, beyond merciful access to magic. This passive, unmastering relation to the material world permanently suspended his son in the powerless dependency of childhood. So it made perfect sense that Zach would be uninquisitive about his mother’s treatment. Modern medicine’s hocus-pocus was surely as supernatural as everything else.
Supernatural? Shep wanted to recall to his son the slick, membranous skin between the leaves of an onion. That, he would say, is like the onion’s mesothelium. It will be tedious, but it won’t be fancy: they will slice her like a vegetable. And then pick, bit by bit, the tiny shreds of that onion skin that look peculiar—too stiff or too slimy or the wrong color. Sewing her back up is not so different from the way we truss a turkey at Thanksgiving, to keep the stuffing in. This is the old world, he wanted to say. This is the world of typewriters and vegetables part spoiled, and what makes it so frightening to me and your mother isn’t that it’s inconceivable, but that we understand it.
“I think it would be nice if you helped keep your mother company today,” said Shep. It was exactly the sort of near-order that his own father would have delivered.
“I don’t know how,” said Zach.
Shep almost rejoined, I don’t know how, either, and could not fathom how they had all been reduced to such rudimentary social ineptitude. Presumably people had been falling catastrophically ill since before the species walked upright. There ought to have been a protocol, perhaps a strict one.
“She’s only watching TV,” Zach added.
“Then go watch it with her.”
“We don’t like the same stuff.”
“Go watch whatever she wants to watch, and at least seem to enjoy it.”
His son sullenly closed out his computer. “She’ll know you told me to.”
She would know. And he could force his pliable son to sit vigil at his mother’s side, but he could not make him want to. In general, Zach had inherited the worst from both his parents: his father’s obedience, and his mother’s resentment. The combination was deadly. At least rebellious resentment led somewhere—to defiance, to a sometimes flamboyant overthrow of the existing order. The obedient kind fostered only disgruntled inertia.
Shep put a hand on his son’s arm. “The next few months are going to be difficult for all of us. Your mother won’t be able to give you a ride to school; you’ll have to take your bike. I may need you to chip in and do some cleaning, or make up beds for guests. You just have to remember that however hard it is for us, it’s going to be a whole lot harder for your mother.”
The speech was gratuitous. He was playing at being a good father rather than being one. Zach had sometimes been petulant about possessions, nagging for things that “everyone else” got—to Shep, costly gimmickry that would only fill the gap between the last and the next must-have. Zach found his father’s constant budgeting for an “Afterlife” baffling if not deranged, and his campaign for that iPod had been so persistent that Shep had relented out of boredom. But in all other respects the boy asked for too little. So the one aspect of his mother’s illness that he would have registered from the very start was that the importance of whatever he wanted or needed or was had just been demoted from slight to zero.
That night in bed, Glynis curled on her side away from him, assuming the same position that she had when she was pregnant. Shep drew up closely behind her, aware that he had become leery of touching her abdomen, yet sensing that this instinctive avoidance should be resisted. He felt distant from her. It wasn’t Pemba; it wasn’t Forge Craft. It was that what was about to happen to her was not about to happen to him. He pressed harder, since she would sense their distance. But when he laid a hand gently on her stomach, she moved it with equal gentleness away.
His experience of the night was of insomnia, though to remember the dream the next morning he must have slept. He was reroofing a closed-in porch, and the owners had wanted the original roofs removed before the shingles were replaced. It was an attractive house that seemed to have what they call “good bones.” There were many layers of previous roofing jobs, and as he pulled them off each revealed patterns that he recognized as the sequence of wallpapers that he used to peel back from a tear beside the bed of his boyhood. When he pulled up the roof’s last thin covering, expecting the blond timbers of this sturdy house, the cavity underneath the final tar paper was black and corrupt. The timbers were infected with mold. Beetles and grubs scuttled from the light. The wood of the frame was moist, and crumbled at his touch. Though seemingly sound from the outside, the roof had been leaking for years. As he stood to call down for his workmen, the beams would no longer support his weight, and the structure gave way.
Since Glynis couldn’t have any, he skipped his own morning coffee, so mobilizing for their departure took too little time. He wondered if all along he had made coffee every morning not for the beverage itself, but for something to do.
It was still so early that the traffic toward northern Manhattan was light. The sun had not yet risen. Shep associated driving in morning darkness with excitement, a flight to India with a three-hour advance check-in. He was excited now as well, but it was the excitement of fire alarms, of blizzards, of 9/11.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Glynis volunteered; he was grateful that she was talking. “But what frightens me most is the needles.”
Glynis had a life-long aversion to shots. Like so many aversions, in the absence of her overcoming it this one had grown only worse. When they watched movies in which heroin addicts injected themselves, she turned her head away, and he had to tell her when it was safe to look back at the screen. During news reports about new drug discoveries or vaccination programs, she left the room. She was ashamed of it, but she could never bring herself to donate during blood drives, and traveling to countries that required inoculations for cholera or boosters for typhus had always been an issue. It had taken him years to appreciate the enormity of
the gesture, the scale of her earlier determination to cooperate with her husband’s aspiration, in her submission to hypodermics for his sake.
“I thought of that,” he said. “The contrast medium for the scans … How did you do it?”
“With great difficulty. Before the MRI, I almost fainted.”
“But you’ve also needed blood tests—”
“I know.” She shuddered. “And there will be more. The chemo … You sit there with an IV in your arm for hours. When I think about it, I get woozy.”
“But in relation to other stuff, you’re such a stoic! Remember when you sliced your middle finger in the studio?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you forget. I was using that flex-shaft burr shaped like a miniature buzz saw. It grabbed the silver and kicked. I was lucky I didn’t lop off half the finger. I still don’t have any feeling in the tip.”
“Yeah, but you came downstairs all matter-of-fact, and announced quietly, like, It is my clinical opinion that I may need a few stitches, Shepherd, and I’m a little concerned that I shouldn’t drive with only one hand. In the same tone of voice that you’d have asked me to run to the A-and-P because unfortunately we were out of chives. Which is why it took me too long to notice that the rag around your left hand had turned crimson and was starting to drip. What a hard-ass!”
She chuckled. “I bet if you looked closely I was a tad pale. And I’ve never used that buzz-saw burr again. It’s still in my kit, with the grooves stained brown.”
“But this needle phobia. Won’t it probably ease up? With having to keep getting past it?”
So Much for That Page 14
