Walking Wounded

by Robert Devereaux

  Hallway now. He hung near the baseboard, stifling an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Door ajar. The voices came clearer. “I decided to keep it from you one more day what with your birthday and all. I thought-”

  “C’mon, Marcus, forget that, my birthday is nothing.” Her voice was raw. Conner stopped feeling so impish.

  “I’m sorry. I think it’s really finally-”

  “We’ll get it looked at first thing tomorrow morning. We can go now if you want, Poudre Valley’s emergency room. I can leave Conner a note, he-’’

  “No, it’ll wait.” Dad too harsh. He lowered his tone and Conner felt thickness in his throat: “It’ll wait. We can set it aside for the evening, no sense in spoiling the festivities.”

  “Shall I call the hospital?” Her voice was quavering, and on the hallway wall opposite their door, a pool of sun high up vibrated like disturbed water, reflections of some unknown something inside. The disease had hit at last and Conner fancied he felt a sleeping caterpillar curled tight in his own head, just now beginning to wake.

  “Yes, better prep them so we see the right man, so he shows up and raises the right hoops.”

  “C’mon, Marcus, it might be something else.” But her voice betrayed her.

  “Sure,” Dad said, knowing better.

  And Conner stood in the hallway, package tight to his chest, trying not to breathe as a nightstand drawer opened and phonebook pages flipped by and Mom lifted the receiver and punched in a number and, after a pause, spoke into it. Her words were low, lower than their conversation, but she said it, said what he knew she would-and when she did, he wanted nothing so much as to get away, to be by himself in the outdoors and let free whatever this churning, woozying stuff was inside him. But some of it spilled out, and his grip on the package loosened and made fumbles of noise, so that first Dad came out and Mom soon after and he couldn’t help it, he was weeping like a baby in their arms.

  ***

  Marcus had had a weekend to absorb it. Sherry’d gone to Cheyenne on some vague last-minute thing, their planned Sunday afternoon tryst up in smoke. Wasn’t working out in any event, months of fantasy more intense, more reciprocal than the reality; and he much doubted he’d’ve been able to pretend to no problem if they had bedded down. So here he was, before his students-but his thoughts were on a quiet time spent alone by the overcast lake in City Park, Conner on his mind. And Katt. And a father and his effervescent daughter come down to feed the ducks and geese that honked such frenzied giggles out of the little girl.

  What had the doctor said? The Huntington’s was there all right-he’d always known as much despite the odds they invariably cited-and it was active. Last spring, word of the HD gene’s discovery had been published; but that was a far cry from curing it, nothing Marcus would benefit from, though his son had a chance if the disease waited a decade or two before striking. He and Conner had had a heart-to-heart, late in October in his study, on just this subject, himself sober, somber even, hearing his own father’s voice in the words he spoke and yelling at himself ineffectually inside to break free of that mold, not to make light of it surely, but not to funerealize it either. He had decades, a nice slow descent, a nice long time to burden his family with his incapacity, if you trusted the averages. But Dad had fallen apart much faster than that, and already Marcus could feel the place in his head-fancy, surely-where his mind was seeping out. Nothing betraying yet in the way he moved, but every fumble now posed a question.

  “Let us speak, dear friends,” he said, putting on for their amusement his haughtiest John Housman, “of the death of Falstaff.” Then his own voice, the fair Belinda giving him a tantalizing eye amid the laughter: “Fat earthy man, in an odd way the counterpart to Dromio’s offstage kitchen wench in A Comedy of Errors, this expansive girthful rogue was perhaps Shakespeare’s most memorable character.” More damned automatic pilot, this lecture, but it was what they paid him for, and it didn’t get in the way of or betray to public knowledge the grief he felt for himself and for his son. “All the world, pure appetite fulfilled, generous in falsehood and in being caught out, in love with all manner of fleshly delights-such was Falstaff.”

  He spoke of sex and erections and the pastoral in the reporting of Falstaff’s death, what might have been gained or lost in seeing him die instead of hearing about it; but all the while he was glancing at Belinda perfectly formed, and watching his son’s face gain a quick maturity there in the study as he recounted for him for his grandfather’s death; and feeling, always feeling, the nugget of nothing growing inside his brain. Little packing-snail, slowly expanding, taking over territory, desiccating gray matter as it grew. His movements would become as random as his father’s, mind as loose-limbed and imbalanced as his body, out of control and a burden to Katt and Conner. Neuroleptic agents would counter the effects for a while, but they offered no cure. When would it kick in, when? Surely not for another dozen years at the earliest; surely he was feeding his fear into imagination’s boundless hopper, and once the shock abated, he’d settle, resigned, into inevitability.

  That was how these things worked.

  A kid in the back, chair-drape and ankle-cross of the radically bored, raised a slow arc-swung hand. “I’m still PO’d at Prince Hal for dumping his fat pal in the previous play. I mean I get why and all, but he was dead wrong.”

  Little smart-ass, thought Marcus. Would make an okay Hal, this Bentley Frink.

  “I can guess where you’re taking us, but please expound, expand, explain, or expostulate as you will.”

  He’d shown them Orson Welles’s brilliant The Chimes at Midnight, a pastiche of Falstaff scenes with Welles acting the role of the fat man himself. Frink had looked puzzled then, uncharacteristically reserved. Marcus knew that his puzzlement would inevitably turn to bravado in class.

  Frink smiled like the junior tottering on senior that he was. “Seems to me old Will meant the demoting of Orson Welles to reflect badly on politics, even given the clean-up-his-act of prince-become-king. But today, he has other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to bring the counterweight onstage to remind us of the bad taste of banishment. Good Prince Hal, acting unkingly, has put down his impish side, so the allure, the sheer charm, of that impishness is left backstage.” Translation: Frink calls Shakespeare to task for casting Prince Hal in too good a light, the banishment of Falstaff swept under the rug in 2 Henry IV.

  What a stupid pointless game this academic rumination became after a while, even as it exercised minds. Here he stood, propped at the edge of his desk, his brain losing a cell with each beat of his heart, and they spoke of story. “Good point,” he said, thinking how puerile it was really, “and it saves the bother of decking the player out for one measly scene, when he was most likely busy with one or the other hefty part.” And that’s when Marcus began to feel a rise of something wrong, an inner upsurge. The classroom, caught in a whirlpool of Cartesian collapse, melded window and desk, floor and ceiling, a rush of students closing in as he clung to his fall, deskwood sliding by. A dizziness wrapped in his voice’s high piping seized him, sheer panic in his sustained repetitive cry. He was going to die. He was going, absurdly, to lose all respect from his students with this incessant yelping. Hands moved upon him, sounds leaping from concerned faces. The floor felt too solid at his back, the sunlight too harsh and intrusive.

  Someone cushioned his head on a coat, some angel, her breasts going by-and it was Belinda. Concern hung in her eyes, and a sheen of dismissal. Wasn’t fair. The process was supposed to be slow, years of lassitude. The front of his face sheeted in fever and tears and the classroom kept spinning spinning spinning through the animal howls coming up elemental from his depths, confusion without end.

  3

  A LIFE IN WARPS AND TATTERS

  Tuesday, July twenty-ninth. After Marcus’s collapse the previous afternoon, Katt’s life had become awash with tumult; summoned from a meeting at HP, white-faced Kristy rushing her to a phone, the emergency room intern clearly clueless
about the problem, then leaving Conner a message and speeding west on Harmony and up LeMay to the hospital where Doctor Bein, finally matched up with Marcus, peered curiously into his eyes. “Ever had any heart problems?” he’d asked. She’d said no. “Could be a first,” his medicinal odor, a hint of arrogance; “I’ll run some tests.” But he suspected (so much was clear from his stunned puzzlement) and she knew that it was the Huntington’s kicking in much sooner than anyone could expect. Such was the conclusion the doctor quickly came to, but Katt refused, over Bein’s protest, to let the hospital keep him from his family one moment longer in its pointless probative thrall.

  Now, with Marcus bedridden upstairs and Conner doing his best to mope alone, avoiding them both, Katt felt the house, airy and expansive before they arrived, close hard and tight around her like a throbbing fist. She couldn’t believe, hunched over coffee in the breakfast nook beside a triptych of rain-swept windows, how superior she felt-nor how depraved. All the house sounds, tall fridge just beyond the butcherblock centerpiece, the dull boom of new wood settling, the whole proprioceptive feel of the walls flowing in every direction toward her, meeting up, homing in-these appeared, to her ears, to trumpet her guilt, to make it as obvious as the sheeted rain itself.

  Yet no one had called her bluff.

  No one had said word one.

  She brought the mug to her lips for a quick sip, hot roil of mist there, too sharp an angle, scald and a spill as she set it down. French vanilla scented the air, pain so slight at her lipburn that the touch of her tongue sent it fleeting. Katt’d begun in the past week to feel apart from her colleagues at work, from her fellow bodyworkers, from the BBS crowd. Her thoughts were ever with her mate and with Conner, pure love toward her son, a morbid blend of love and fixated waiting toward Marcus. What had Lyra said? Caring leads to healing. Her caring had gone off.

  Protective insulation, perhaps; closing down her openness to keep away the pain of what she was about. Conner, his face an open wound, served as her lifeline. Even keeping to himself, her son felt close by, someone to cling to in their grim vigil over his father.

  Katt looked up sharply. Rain spattered like a sweep of pellets against the glass. She thought there’d come a summons, his voice seeping down through wood and plaster. She rose. The garish air pressed her back, but she moved against it. More candles, she needed more candles, light that soothed, that didn’t demand so much. Everything was so harshly defined, the oak grain of her cabinets hurting her eyes with its sharp swirl, the edges of doorways like honed razors daring her to pass.

  Every step seemed a reproach, here in this new world of Marcus’s collapse. Up the off-white stairs she pulled herself, feeling off-balance at every step, thick railing sturdy and yet absurdly balsa-frail at the least pressure she applied. The air above, gloomed in hallway darkness, pushed against her like fog puree. But she drove through it as part of what felt like an unending penance. Marcus called to her again. His door, edged in lamplight, stood slightly ajar. Katt gripped it, pushed feebly in, found him resting upon pillows, one forearm fulcrumed at his sweaty brow.

  His eyes were closed. The man she was killing, sweet Marcus, she’d met years ago on the Pentacrest one breezy spring day, each the other’s destiny. Married in the tiny white chapel down by the student union, a child, a settling in. And now she was con-eluding his life, which stunned her at how wrong and how right it was. “Marcus?” Softly, she’d no idea if he’d heard her approach: “You need anything?”

  As he turned to her, his forearm curved down so that his hands hugged the covers to his chest. “Oh hi, Katt.” The center had been punched out of his voice.

  “Can I get you something?”

  Marcus shook his head, rolling it on the pillow like an empty gourd.

  “I thought I heard you call me.” There was that smug superiority again, not in what she’d said, but in how she felt. Her frame filled the doorway, as strong and sturdy as the jamb she leaned against. For all her man’s stocky Mediterranean muscularity, he shrank under the sheets, no strength apparent in his diminutive mien. They’d been so close in so many ways, yet she’d kept her discontent from him until it took on a separate life of its own. Now she was crushing him like a bug. And no one knew. It wasn’t any gloat or ego revelry she felt. It had no tone to it, no boasting, no villainy triumphant, though of its wicked nature she had no doubt. A soft distanced pride. That’s what she felt. Appalling, but she was not appalled. The turning of a pot gave a potter as much satisfaction.

  “Oh. Oh yeah, I guess I did. Maybe some juice?”

  “Sure, what kind?”

  “Anything but V8.”

  “Okay,” she said. She felt the impulse to close the gap between them, sit beside him, touch his cheek in love and sympathy, lean forward to embrace him. If she’d done so, she knew in her heart that it would feel, and be, both monstrous and true. This must be, she thought, what they mean by depravity. She held in her hands the power to be his healing angel; and yet the thought of using her power that way, of doing anything other than urging his illness on, moved her not in the slightest. He smiled. His face had aged some, but it was the same smile she’d first seen on that sunny July fourth on the Pentacrest, bicentennial of the nation’s independence and the beginning of her sad slide into the soul-prison their marriage finally became. She could do it. She ought to do it. Go to him, lay her hands on his head, confess her misdeeds, heal him-ah but then he’d want to know why, and the D-thing would come up and she’d spin right back into lying-No, she didn’t want a divorce, everything was fine with her-because women in the Hunt family didn’t do the D-thing, no way, no how.

  “What?” he asked, wondering at her hesitation.

  “Hmm? Oh nothing. Just lost in thought.”

  “A penny for them.”

  Grim smile. “Maybe another time,” she said.

  More likely never.

  ***

  Conner became aware, sitting in the rec room in the basement staring at the rain-washed silver of the window well, that his left hand was idling upon his head, doing monkey-preening things. Stuff that’d begun so long ago, it was now unconscious, stuff that just happened when he sat alone and let his mind meander. There was the nose-picking, of course, fingertip in and then down to taste. But his restless fingers also wandered through his hair, freeing loose minute scales of skin, catching them under the nail, bringing them also to his lips where teeth and tonguetip experdy retrieved them. And they’d begun now to move in warm caress over his cheeks and chin, pausing to glide about the beginnings of acne. He knew he ought to keep his hand away from all that, free himself of bad habits-but they felt so good, almost as if they were an integral part of him, and he doubted he could.

  He glanced about.

  Rec room.

  Right.

  There was nothing to rec with even if he’d felt the urge. Just boxes of unpacked stuff. Dad had promised a Ping-Pong table right there, near where the furnace stood idle. Conner bet that would never happen now.

  The door to the upstairs stood open. Funny how you could paint a mind-map of the first floor, use the sound of people’s footsteps to track them from kitchen to hall to living room, up the stairs or out the front door. He heard her move from over yonder-the breakfast nook he’d seen her at-to the foot of the stairs; and then he felt her take them, soft slow animal pads. Time to snag some chips from the pantry, bring ’em down here and stuff his face.

  He bounded up from the slung-back folding chair and crossed the cement floor. Off-white carpet coaxed him a step at a time up into the great room. He heard them up there talking. Whenever his mom stopped, he felt things in his brain throbbing in tandem with the sounds his dad made in reply. He wanted to shut himself in his bedroom but it was real close to theirs and didn’t allow him any privacy at all. No, just keeping clear of them-outside seemed wrong too-was best; no school, no friends, walks and biking felt like too much work, and what if Dad died while he was out? Absurd. He’d be like this, maybe not bedridden bu
t confined, for years and years. That’s how Woody Guthrie had been. But then the disease hadn’t hit the folksinger as hard or as fast as it’d hit Dad.

  He opened the pantry, cereals below, healthy snacks mixed in with the junk food above. Ranch chips! Hidden behind some open stuff. Rustling of clipped bags. Then he’d snagged them, was pulling the bag through the noisy blockade, holding them back from bursting forth like dam water spilling onto the floor. Success.

  “Hi, Conner.”

  He gave a start. “Oh, hi, Mom.” Not even looking. He swung the pantry door shut.

  “Wait-give-me-a-hug-before-you-go,” it came rushing out of her, and he turned slightly away and she was upon him, crushing his body to her. He raised his arms along her back, the bag clutched in one hand. He wanted to be gone, not in this strange hug. Felt weird. She sniffed in a breath and he realized she was crying. Or at least her eyes had tears in them.

  “You okay, Mom?” His chin dimpled the green blouse she wore, just below her shoulder. Up past her ear, the ceiling fan hung motionless.

  “Yeah,” she said, lots of pressure softly released. “It’s just that… it’s hard dealing with it now that it’s finally happened.” She had her hand on the back of his head, cupping his neck through long dark hair. “You may never get it, you know. Fifty-fifty, they say.”

  He nodded, released an mmm. Yeah, he knew. HD was not always passed on. His head might be okay, his fears might be unfounded. But he didn’t think so. No, a coil of illness, a sleeping bug, lay tucked snug inside. All in good time. Grisly notion: If it weren’t there, he’d be betraying his dad. That was bull pucky, he knew, but the thought nagged at him anyway.