by BRIAN HALL
“Are you in pain?” Saskia asked.
Lauren ignored this. “You’ve never forgiven your father,” she said. Over the last few weeks her voice had lowered in pitch, become friable.
“That’s right,” Saskia said.
“I wish you would.”
“Is that a dying wish?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Saskia sat on the floor next to the couch and looked at her mother. What a beautiful woman she had always been. How tough it was, probably, to be such a beautiful woman. To have to deal continually with men who believed they had a claim on her merely because they desired her. Men like her father, who wanted to control women, mold them, encage them.
“It would be easy to lie to you, I guess,” Saskia said. “And I probably would, if this weren’t a dying wish. But Thomas doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”
“It’s not for him, it’s for you.”
“Yeah, that’s what people always say. I don’t buy it. Forgiving him feels like abandoning any standards of decency. Those standards comfort me.”
“But he—”
“He fucked Jane when she was thirteen, right? Remember? I knew about it when he did it in a tent in Norway, and you knew about it when he kept doing it here in the loft in the barn. And we did nothing. Yeah, yeah, we were all under his spell. We were three weak women, two of us still munchkins, one of us getting fucked by the Wizard of Oz. Well, no, I’m pretty sure he was fucking you, too, right? Jane in the afternoon, you at night, right? Though I’ve never directly asked you about it. Here’s my chance, do I get a dying wish, too?”
Lauren closed her eyes. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“I’m always like this.”
“Yes . . . well . . .”
“If I weren’t his daughter he would have fucked me, too. And I’d have let him do it. What is that called, the hat trick, the triple crown?”
Forgiving Thomas would mean forgiving Lauren and herself, and yes, wasn’t it a grotesque irony that one of Thomas’s legacies was that she couldn’t do that. But cult leaders were possible only because of their followers, and to absolve the latter of their gullibility was to invite the phenomenon to occur again and again. One has a moral responsibility to be a grownup. Lauren actually was a grownup at the time, so her culpability was greater. But Saskia restrained herself from saying this out loud. She was mean, but she wasn’t that mean.
The next morning, when Lauren was still in bed, Saskia apologized. Sort of.
“I’m sorry for some of what I said. Any other wish you want to express, I’ll do it, I promise. But not Thomas. I can’t.”
Lauren stared into space for a number of seconds. Then she said, “I understand.”
Saskia burst into tears.
After that, Lauren’s cancer progressed quickly, maybe aided (even the Western doctor said) by her acceptance of it, and in late August Bill and Saskia set up a bed in the living room and brought in a hospice nurse to teach them how to administer palliative care. During the last two weeks a friend of Lauren’s named Amethyst showed up several times, usually bringing along three other women, and the coven would burn little bowls of greenery and chant, holding hands in a circle. They praised Lauren for the beautiful death she was having and cried what looked to Saskia like tears of joy. Meanwhile, Mette wouldn’t get with the program. The different routine in the house upset her. She acted out, broke a dish.
When Lauren wasn’t sleeping, she murmured softly, references to things in the past that Saskia didn’t recognize—“No, you said that”; “The bicycle isn’t there”; “Far, it’s far, it’s far.” Sometimes she repeated a phrase over and over, in Hindi or maybe Sanskrit. Saskia asked Bill, who said he had no idea. She couldn’t ask Jeeves, because Lauren didn’t have dial-up internet at the house (Saskia should be grateful there was a phone), so she steeled herself and called Amethyst, who recognized it right away from fragments Saskia had been able to make out: “Om asato ma sadgamaya. It’s a mantra.”
“What does it mean?”
“Lead me from unreality to reality. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality. It’s so wonderful that she’s saying that.”
“Mm, thanks.”
“How are you doing, sweetheart?”
“I’m managing, thanks.”
The unreal days went on. Lauren’s long auburn hair, which had never turned gray, lay spread out on the pillow to either side of her large, handsome head. Saskia gently brushed it every morning, struggling with emotions that clashed painfully. For one thing, the hair made her think about the treatments that Lauren had refused. Saskia knew it wasn’t literally for the sake of her hair that Lauren had refused them, but hair was natural and healthy, while losing it was what happened to Hiroshima victims. Also, her hair was beautiful, and Saskia couldn’t help thinking that Lauren’s devotion to purity was rooted partly in vanity. At the same time, not having brushed Lauren’s hair in many years, Saskia was carried back to when she was twelve years old, when she considered it the greatest privilege to be allowed to do so. She had envied her mother’s hair—in truth, worshipped it—and it was only while brushing it, in the evening, in long meditative sessions, that she could occasionally get her mother to talk to her about anything personal. And here she was, all grown up, still envying the hair, still hoping that her mother might say something meaningful to her—about motherhood, about raising a daughter, about her own childhood, about dying, about anything. Anything except Thomas. Saskia had never called her “Mom.” Lauren hadn’t wanted it. She’d always said she wanted their relationship to be one of equals, which sounded supportive and wise when Saskia was ten, and like a self-deluding abdication of responsibility when Saskia was fifteen.
Every day, she looked more angelic. Her halo of brushed hair glowed in the sunlight coming through the living room windows. The September weather was heavenly. When Saskia sat next to her bed, she sometimes held her hand, which felt awkward, since they had hardly ever touched. Sometimes she talked to Lauren’s closed eyes about any quotidian thing that came into her head, the temperature outside, the goldenrod just beginning to flower, the rice Saskia burned that morning, the rat they couldn’t catch who was eating the soap at night. That felt awkward, too, but she persevered.
What does she remember now, these many years later? The last days blur together. At one point she said to Lauren, “I’m sorry I said all those angry things to you about the cancer treatments. It was none of my business.” At which she felt another spurt of anger: You never allowed yourself to be my business. At another point she said, “I feel like I want to call you ‘Mom’ now. Unless you complain, that’s what I’ll do.”
Bill, the goodhearted boob, though devastated, was helpful and attentive. He said to Saskia, “She always loved you.”
“You forgot to add, ‘in her own way.’”
“You know that, don’t you?”
“She’s dying. This isn’t about me, is it?”
Examine every hard impression, and test it by this rule: whether the impression has to do with the things which are up to us, or those which are not; and, if it has to do with the things that are not up to us, be ready to reply, “It is nothing to me.” (Saskia has found her Epictetus.)
She remembers one other thing. When Lauren wasn’t sleeping or looking forward to reality, she occasionally opened her eyes and said simple things like, “Thank you” (adjusted blanket) or “That’s nice” (damp hair stroked back from forehead). At rare intervals she seemed more lucid for a few seconds. Once she looked pointedly at various parts of the room, as if memorizing them. Then she looked at Saskia and held her gaze steadily, which she had done very seldom in her life. She said almost inaudibly, with a teaspoon of breath, “You’re a good girl, Saskia.” She used to say that when Saskia was twelve, helping care for the younger children, and Saskia would retort, “Woof.” N
ow, she wondered if Lauren might be seeing the child.
“I’ll take care of everything,” Saskia said. “Don’t worry.” Lauren smiled and closed her eyes.
In the case of everything that is loved with fond affection, remember to tell yourself what sort of thing it is, beginning with the least of things. If you are fond of a jug, say, “It is a jug that I am fond of”; then if it is broken, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you are kissing; and then you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.
At the end of the first week of September the hospice nurse checked Lauren’s vitals and said they had better call in everyone who could make it. Melanie couldn’t come because she had just given birth, and Jo was in San Jose helping out. Quentin flew in from Boston, Austin and Shannon drove down from the farmhouse. Then Lauren hung on through the next three days, breathing long and deeply, hour after hour. It seemed as though she was relaxing herself with a meditative technique. The nurse said she had never seen anything quite like it at this stage. Quentin had to return to his job. The twins drove back to their place. The following day, Saskia and Bill took turns by the bedside. Nothing changed.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the author wants it to be: short, if he wants it to be short; long, if he wants it to be long. If he wants you to act a poor man, a cripple, a public official, or a private person, see that you act it with skill. For it is your job to act well the part that is assigned to you; but to choose it is another’s.
That night, the room began to smell of death from Lauren’s breath (she, who had always smelled so good). At 3:00 a.m. her breathing became labored. Her head began to inscribe circles as her lungs heaved, and her eyes opened sightlessly. Sometimes her breathing would stop for several seconds, then begin again. At 7:17 a.m., her breath halted and Saskia, looking at her face, knew at once that she had died. The clear demarcation startled her. The minute tremors and blood-cell pulses of a living face that one normally doesn’t notice, all ceased simultaneously. The effect was like a freeze frame.
It was September 12, 2001. Saskia called the nurse, who arrived at eight and made an offhand, appalled reference to New York City that neither Bill nor Saskia understood.
* * *
• • •
So Lauren’s death was the fall of a sparrow.
Bill arranged for a memorial service at the New Age retreat center Lauren often went to. Lauren’s friends popped up, one after the other, and celebrated her triumph with wet shining faces. Unable to bear it after a certain point, Saskia escaped outside with Mette and kept her entertained by walking with her through a labyrinth, which had been constructed with lines of stones set in the grass. This kind of thing was right up Mette’s alley—a demarcated path, a rule to follow. Saskia had the vague idea that New Agers believed that when you reached the center of the labyrinth you were supposed to have gained some insight, or attained peace or something. All she found was the Minotaur—thoughts of her father. She did feel guilty, after all, for not having tried to reach him regarding her mother’s illness. But she told herself that her feelings were her concern, not his. He had banished them from his concern long ago.
It turned out the house and land didn’t belong to Lauren, but to a trust owned by her brothers, from whom she’d been estranged for many years. Not that it mattered. Saskia had never expected to inherit anything from Lauren beyond an eating bowl and a pair of sandals. In fact, there was a little more than that. Lauren had left the contents of the house equally to Bill, Saskia, Jo, Melanie, Shannon, Austin, and Quentin. Saskia would have cleared maybe a thousand dollars, except that a crude pencil sketch of a naked hairy man graphically fucking a naked hairy woman that had hung in the dining room forever—a payment for a few weeks of macrobiotic food and a lively co-ed crash by a long-ago communard who was now a famous artist—sold for $82,000. Saskia’s share amounted to just enough money to make it conceivable, if somewhat reckless, to move to New York City. A number of people that fall were going in the opposite direction. But Saskia felt passionately that 9/11 was an assault by purists on mongrelism, and she wanted to throw her lot in with the mongrels.
Well—that, and also she had an acting career to pursue. It was January 2002. Mette was almost seven, Saskia was thirty. It was high time to figure out what her actual life would look like.
2011
10:23 a.m., March 2, 2011
Dear Mette,
Happy 16th birthday. Please say hello to your mother for me.
I’m pleased that the Newman volumes continue to interest you. You’ve increasingly made me regret that I never looked into them myself, although I remember their position in my father’s bedroom bookcase when I was growing up. I, too, thought the bindings were attractive. As for your comments about Laplace, if you want to have fun with probability problems in more depth, I could mail you the textbook I worked through when I was a little older than you are now. I have a feeling you would like the subject. Let me know.
Have you heard of the Monty Hall problem? If not, google it. It’s an extremely simple veridical paradox. The solution has always made sense to me, but plenty of people, otherwise good with numbers, have been bothered by it, including my father. He had good company—none other than Paul Erdös refused to believe it until he saw it proved in a computer simulation.
Speaking of my father, I wrote one of those “data sets” the other day, the first I’ve written in a long while. You were probably hoping they had disappeared forever. I wondered why I was thinking about him more lately, then realized that he died five years ago this January. I’ve always found it interesting how the human brain can subconsciously keep track of time passing with remarkable precision. Even more, that the subconscious seems to prefer round numbers. If we humans had twelve fingers, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about my father until next year. In any case, here it is:
Data Set: Futility
My father hated parties.
But he did have one party trick.
He would imitate a defense satellite trying to destroy a wave of incoming ICBMs.
He would pump his arms like recoiling cannons and rotate from the waist, moving in jerks, with incremental backward corrections.
This was meant to evoke the recalculations of a feedback mechanism trying to track a fast-moving object.
He would give up one ICBM, jerkily try to target the next, give up on that, try the next.
It was a good imitation, and everyone would laugh.
Except for my father, whose face wore a wild and angry glare.
Years later, he developed Parkinson’s disease.
Because Parkinson’s induces both muscle tremors and muscle rigidity, it leads to a characteristic movement called “cogwheeling,” in which the limbs move in incremental spurts.
The disease also rigidifies the face and suppresses the blink reflex, causing the sufferer to look wild-eyed and angry.
Finally, it often destroys the brain’s ability to focus on a subject.
Now life in bits and pieces flew continually past my father.
Like some frightful episode of The Twilight Zone, he had been turned into his party trick.
Love,
Your Father
1:10 a.m., March 3, 2011
I looked up the Monty Hall problem. I agree with you, it only seems paradoxical at first. Speaking of twelve fingers, what are the next three terms in the following sequence: 84, 91, 100, 121, 144, 202, 244, 400, ___, ___, ___?
That thing with your dad sounds bad.
Please send me your probability textbook. Do you need it back?
1994
Mark landed in Zagreb, relieved to have survived another flight. He hated flying. All construction designed for public use was structurally overengineered except airplanes, which had to be light enough to get off t
he ground. In bad turbulence he could hear the cabin flex like a drinking straw, he could watch the wings flap. It was inarguably the safest form of travel, and normally he trusted statistics, but not in this case, not on some unreachable limbic level. He wished he could say to Saskia, See? I can be irrational, too.
After checking into his hotel, he found his way to UN headquarters. They were housed in a dingy white building, probably nineteenth century, but he didn’t know enough about European architecture to be confident. Surrounding the building was a makeshift wall with a different person’s name written on each brick, flowers laid along the bottom, candles lining the top, tattered photos, scribbled messages. Inside, he was told it was a memorial to Croats who had died or disappeared during the siege of Vukovar. “They blame us,” said the young UN soldier at the intake desk, speaking with cheerful dislike. “They think we should fight their war for them.”
Mark found the correct office, waited an hour, confirmed he had permission to be on the flight the next day, was handed a waiver indemnifying the UN, its agencies and personnel, including but not limited to etc—it was a long sentence—from any legal liability in the event of his injury or death. He was to affirm that he was acting under his own volition as an independent agent etc—another long sentence. He signed here and there, initialed there, there, and there. He was told to appear again at 0800 hours. It was the first time Mark had heard someone outside of a movie say “oh-eight-hundred hours.” What a sheltered life he had led.
He returned to the city center on foot. He always walked in unfamiliar cities if he had the time. He liked to absorb details as they randomly presented themselves, the look of buildings and people, the sound of conversation, the amount and kinds of shops. He tried not to form opinions—that universal human delight and comfort—which would necessarily be ignorant. Simply hear and see. But today he didn’t take in much, other than an impression of summery youth, old men in black hats that maybe were fedoras, fake-limestone stucco nearly black with soot, blue trolley cars, a plethora of Croatian flags in red and white. His thoughts were in what would probably be called “turmoil,” and a fair fraction of that turmoil was a self-questioning about whether all his life he had insulated himself too much from mental turmoil. How cowardly of him that he had left that to Susan—the family and its unhappinesses, the world and its tragedies—freeing himself to focus on more-rewarding topics. Obliviousness often served selfish ends.
