by Yuvi Zalkow
I didn’t sleep even a moment that night. I read sections from about twenty of his books—some of the books I recognized and some were completely unfamiliar. The newest books strayed pretty far from his area of expertise. They weren’t your traditional textbooks on biochemistry and organic chemistry, they were more like a study of the world cultures—books about Native American medicinal compounds and Chinese healing techniques and diseases that Eastern European Jews were genetically predisposed to and a book about the mushrooms consumed by the Inuits.
As I drove my father to the surgery the next morning—my eyes burning from such a long night—he told me that he’d slept better than he had in years. I told him that I read some of his books during the night. I asked if he had lost interest in his chemistry studies.
“It’s all chemistry,” he said.
We were quiet for the rest of the drive, but just as I was pulling in to the parking lot, he said, “Oh!” I was afraid that we had forgotten something critical for the surgery, like his health insurance suddenly expired or he forgot his lucky fly fisherman pendant, but then he said, “I got something for you.”
He opened the bag he was holding—the bag that I thought had a change of clothes in it—and he pulled out a book: Best Short Stories of 1997. I looked at the book for so long I nearly rolled right into a parked car—not that my father was concerned.
“I hope,” he said, “you don’t mind that it’s used.”
#
The instant my father was wheeled off to surgery, I started getting stomach cramps and felt a bout of diarrhea coming on. The instant my father was wheeled off to surgery, my mother whipped out a deck of cards from her purse and started playing solitaire on the waiting room table. I always envied how my mother dealt with stress through games while I dealt with it through my gastrointestinal tract.
Fifteen minutes of silence went by, the two of us the only ones in the room. My mother played solitaire like that was her main reason for coming to the hospital—Kings in the Corner, Klondike, Freecell, Pyramid, Black Widow. I began reading the book my father had gotten me. My dad was into giant books, giant books with scientific formulas and well-researched studies and historical facts, so it was flattering to think he had gone out of his way to get me this collection of little stories. It was full of odd tales, mostly interesting, about drunk acupuncturists and talking buildings and edible mushrooms. And then I got to a cancer story, an old man that dies of prostate cancer, and I got stuck. I had read the same paragraph forty times without comprehending a word.
“Mom?” I said as I sat at the table next to her.
The sound of her cards slapping the table didn’t stop. “Yes, mameleh?”
“What would you do if Dad died?”
“Chas vi-cha-lee-lah!” she said to me, and she put the cards down on the table. She closed her eyes. This phrase comes from the Bible. I looked it up after my mother admitted one time that she had no idea where it was from. Abraham used these words when he was arguing with God. He told God that he shouldn’t destroy the city of Sodom, that it would be unjust to kill the innocent.
My mother opened her eyes again and before she started playing with her cards again, she looked directly at me. I could see in her eyes the prayers that she had recited, the quiet bargains she was making with God to save her husband. There was a whole world my mother never spoke about.
“But what if it happened?” I said to my mom. “What then?”
“Mameleh,” she said. “Let’s talk about then then. Okay? It is bad luck to talk about then now.”
I had one hand on the table and she put her hand on my hand like she was trying to pick up a card and put it in the right place.
My mother thought you could cause death by talking about it. I thought you could cause death by not talking about it.
#
After the surgery, they wheeled him into a recovery room. He was still under the influence of the anesthesia and his false teeth were not in his mouth and he barely had his eyes open. As two nurses wheeled him into place, he reached his hand out in my direction and with the driest kind of whisper he said, “Yuvi?” He said it like he wasn’t even sure who I was.
My mother held his hand and I pressed ice cubes against his dry lips. My mother blessed God, and I blessed the doctor. My father looked so thirsty and it seemed the water evaporated the moment it touched his lips. So I kept applying the ice, and I got wrapped up in it, like this task was pivotal in saving my father. Whether or not my father was ready for his time to come, I wasn’t. I didn’t want to have to learn about my father through his piles of chemistry books. It took the nurse to finally come in and tell me to stop.
“Enough,” she said. “You’re only making things worse.”
#
My mother and I took care of my father during the two weeks he was recovering from the surgery. Every minute, I had part of my attention on that tube coming out of him, terrified someone would step on it by mistake.
This was the last time I ever stayed with my parents for several weeks at a time. I moved to Portland shortly after the surgery, and my visits back home never felt long enough. When the doctor finally removed the catheter two weeks after the surgery, my father and I were both a little disappointed that our time together was over.
“You’re lucky I got cancer,” my father said to me. He was wearing a diaper at that point, because it takes time to regain bladder control after two weeks with a catheter. My incontinent father was right. And for years, he threatened to get another disease so that we could spend more time together. “I’ve already done cancer and heart disease,” he said. “Maybe this time I’ll do diabetes.”
And he said it with such joy. He loved the big diseases.
#
Sometimes, when I don’t know what to write, when I feel too naïve to come to any insight or conclusion, I write down the raw details I learn in a day or a week or a year. Here are some of the details I wrote down during the month of my father’s surgery:
1. My father loves to watch and rewatch the first Godfather movie, and my mother is attracted to Al Pacino.
2. 240 milliliters of urine can fill a pretty large container.
3. My mother, when she was a child, slept in a small bed with her three sisters and she had nightmares about cats and rats.
4. In 1936, when he was seven years old, my father tried to dig a hole to China.
5. The human penis, when it has a catheter going through it, looks as helpless as a crushed mushroom.
#
The digestive system freezes up as a defense tactic. Once it decides everything is safe, it will start up again. But this transition period can be awfully painful. That’s what they told us and that’s how it went for my father right after the surgery. And then my father farted and that was that. He told me that when he farted, it felt like the whole world opened up for him. It felt like the pain in his gut had been with him forever. Even though he never kept kosher (a bacon lover from the beginning), he said it was like every un-kosher thing he had ever eaten in his life was stuck inside of him, every resentment and nasty feeling. And then he farted. And the fight was over. He told me he farted so loud that the nurses on duty asked for his autograph afterward.
But before this fart, he was an unhappy man. He pressed on his gut and his eyes were shut tight and he was groaning in a way I couldn’t stand to hear. He had a little button to release morphine into his blood and even though the drug affected him, his pain didn’t go away, it just got more abstract.
Without any morphine, he said: “They should’ve killed me in that operating room.”
With one dose, it was: “I’m a slave to their science.”
And with two doses, he said to us: “All these years and we’re still wandering in the desert.”
Book 4
MARS
Chapter Twenty-five
Stalking
So here’s what I do: I look up Yousef ’s address and I drive to his house and I sit in my car, waiting.
It’s like a stakeout, except I don’t have any reason to be staking out.
His house isn’t a house. It’s an apartment. It’s in an old apartment complex, which is a bright purple building. I park in the lot a few spots away from his front entrance and wait.
Here is why I’m doing this: I have no idea.
Here is a more honest reason: Because Shmen told me to take my novel further. For a month I’ve been going nowhere with this suggestion and so I thought Yousef could help. A man with such a different background. It’s got to help. My editor will love it. Maybe I can even convince Yousef to help me write a whole storyline about a Muslim character who bumps up against the main Jew in the novel and teaches him some insightful meshugas about some insightful topic. It could give the book more depth, more foreskin.
Here is a more honest reason I’m here: I’m lost and desperate.
#
After four hours of no activity, I realize that something has to give. Jews don’t have the constitution for a stakeout. I haven’t even brought Fritos or coffee. And so I go inside the apartment complex. I climb the stinky, stained, old-carpety stairs and knock on his door.
#
The door squeaks open all by itself, like a movie door, like it’s playing a part, and I’m sure I’ll see a dead body on the floor. Except there’s no body at all.
“Hello?” I say. The room is dark and all the furniture is brown or gray. It smells of lavender or maybe sandalwood. Whatever it is, it makes the air feel thick. He is using one of those big, old trunks as a coffee table. On this table, there’s a bowl of dates. I think about that Raiders of the Lost Ark scene, that poisoned date flying up in the air in slow motion and how we’re so worried for our hero. There’s also a black photo album on the table. The kind my folks used to have. The kind they had before digital cameras made each individual photograph so much less precious.
Beside the photo album are three 4x6 photographs. I know immediately that the man in these pictures is Yousef ’s father. He’s got Yousef ’s charming, crooked smile, but he also has gray hair and wrinkles. A sweet-looking man. The way the pictures are laid out on the table, I know that the man is dead.
I didn’t expect it to happen so fast.
I walk toward the pictures and pick one up. His father is holding a half-eaten green apple in one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other hand. He’s smiling, a delicious bite of apple still in his mouth. I look on the back for a description or a date, but there’s nothing.
A toilet flushes. The sink starts running.
And so I start running. And it’s not until I’m in the car that I see I still have his photograph in my hand.
Chapter Twenty-six
Sleeper Cell
On the way home, I get a drink at the bar, a drink that I shouldn’t get because I’m supposed to be getting off the wagon, or on the wagon, or whichever is the one that is less fun. I hide in the corner of the bar and drink. The first martini burns in the best possible way. And the second one doesn’t burn at all.
Yousef must have known that there wouldn’t be much time left for his father. But still there is no way to prepare for it. He’ll need more time.
It was stupid to steal that photo. I’m not a thief normally. Usually my problem is that I leave too much of myself on the table. But I love the picture. I love that half-chewed apple and that smile. I don’t want to give it back.
When I get home, my house is completely dark. But I rarely turn off all the lights. Even the light that has a broken switch—the one in the bathroom, the one you have to stand on the sink and unscrew to turn off—is off. The digital clocks are still running, so I know it’s not a power outage.
My first thought is: thief, burglar, rapist, terrorist, maybe it’s Yousef getting back at me for stealing the photo, or maybe there’s a sleeper cell in my bathroom. Or all of the above.
My next thought is Julia.
Which is far scarier to consider.
A FACE LIKE THAT (PART 1)
You drew a picture of your father once. It was a penciled sketch of a father and daughter walking through an empty parking lot. You’re no artist—and it was just one momentary impulse to sketch—but this picture is as clear to me as any photograph. You in pigtails with each tail sticking out in frizzy balls that were so thick in the penciled sketch that some of it rubbed off on my finger when I touched it. I should have been more careful.
I wouldn’t have figured that stick in your mouth was a spoon except that you told me so. The cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream wasn’t even in the sketch. But your father was there—a giant next to little you—with your hand reaching up to hold onto his. His eyebrows were down low and he was walking ahead of you so it looked like you were being pulled along. You were looking up at him, or maybe you were looking up at the sun or some planet that existed outside of that sketch.
I was lying next to you when I first saw the sketch. We were newlyweds, or at least recentlyweds. Remember how the two of us would lie underneath that heavy comforter, the one that made getting up so fabulously impossible? The sketch was on my side of the bed, underneath the Kleenex and the aspirin, like this new sketch was already trying to get buried.
You were deep into some glossy magazine. That was your favorite thing back then, before you became so driven by your work. If cigarettes were your thing, then you’d have been smoking one right there. If you were in a Fellini film, then you’d be reading a magazine while tapping your cigarette against an ashtray that would have been between us.
“You were such a cute girl,” I said. “Even in a sketch.”
In a typical situation, it would’ve been a reasonable thing to say. But I should have known better.
The magazine went down. Your face came up. The half-closed eyes, the half-tightened forehead. You squinted at that sketch in my hand because of the way you have trouble seeing things after reading.
“Oh,” you said. “That.” Your imaginary cigarette: it got crushed into that imaginary ashtray. You turned away, you slipped out of the bed without the comforter moving a bit, and there was the backside of your body—so bright from the morning sun—walking out of the room, leaving me alone with your sketch. It was like you had to go, like you had something to do, like your naked body was off to the bank.
And I was left with the pencil smudges on my fingers, left with that sketch in my hand. There wasn’t much else in the drawing, just you two in the parking lot with those parking lines where the cars were supposed to be. Underneath the drawing you had written the words, “A Face Like That.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
A Real Man
“Julia?” I call out. “You there?”
No answer.
“Ani poh-ched,” I whisper, which is what I would say to my
mom when I was scared in my crib. But my crib is now bigger and darker and potentially full of redheaded gentiles. Not the kind of thing a mom prepares you for.
It’s dusk. The world outside is so full of shadows and my throat burns and I can’t remember how many times I’ve called out for her. This is how it goes in my bad dreams—for years it’s been the same way. The world is too dark, my voice doesn’t work, the shadows cover up the things making the shadows. Sometimes the things themselves no longer exist: it’s just shadows. And then sometimes I see someone dead in my dreams. Usually my father. The skin and body look alive, but all the important things are gone. And when I wake up from these dreams, my throat aches and I have to remember who and what I am.
In real life, in my dark house, I see that Julia is on my bed. She is curled up in the fetal position. This is in real life. My estranged wife is in a t-shirt and shorts and curled up in the bed that we used to share. Right next to all the pots and pans I put on the bed to replace her. And I can see Julia clearly, even in the dark, her beautiful, gentile skin. A bright spot in the room. She’s breathing, she’s alive. This isn’t one of those dreams.
I sit next to her. She doesn’t move. But when I touch her, real gentl
y on the back, her body somehow shakes my hand off of her.
“Don’t touch,” she says through her clogged nose. “What is it?”
“Fuck you,” she says. “You probably hate me.”
I think about this for a minute. I can think of a boatload of
arguments; there were fights, annoyances, secrets. Deception. Frustration. Communication issues. Impotence. But no hate. Maybe it’s the clarity of the darkness, but all I see is two crooked people who still care for each other.
“No hate,” I say. I rub her back and she lets me this time. I want to say the word “love” out loud, but it still doesn’t come, so I have to settle for the negation of hate.
“Julia,” I say. “You left me, remember?” There is snot all over her face and when I reach to caress, to get my hand right in the snotty mess, she grabs my hand and pushes it away. She won’t look at me, and I know she doesn’t want me to look at her. Even so, I can’t stop looking at her, the way it seems that her cheekbone is trembling underneath her skin.
“I have something to tell you,” she says. “And you’re not going to like it.”
I already know what it is that she’s going to tell me. The way she doesn’t look at me. The way I can sense the burden in her bones. I know it before she needs to say anything. My staring at her only adds to the shame she feels. I saw it in the hospital and I see it here and even though I don’t usually know the difference between my worries and reality, this time I know that they are the same thing.
So I look away. I look down on the floor. At that pile of scattered papers. It’s my novel. Or my non-novel. Or whatever it is that you call all that stuff that I write every day. Last week my editor said it was “even worse than desperate.” Some days, it’s just me talking to the people who can’t (or don’t/won’t) talk to me anymore.
