“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Don’t change the subject.”
So he made the apology. He thought of Quichotte rising formally to his feet to speak, then falling to his knees and touching the Trampoline’s dress at the hemline. That last kind of self-abasement wasn’t Brother’s style, but if they had been video conferencing he might have stood. He tried to speak with something like his character’s formality, to be wholehearted and undefended in his remorse. When he finished he realized his heartbeat had accelerated and he was breathing heavily, an old man who had overexerted himself. He had to start thinking seriously about what he ate, and about getting fit, he told himself, not for the first time. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had died after going to the gym as everyone in California was obliged to do by the state’s unwritten laws, to worship at the altar of one’s body all the world’s gods of health, whose names were only known to those who, being vegan and gluten-free, were pure enough to receive the information: Fufluns the Etruscan deity of plants, wellness, and happiness, Aegle the Greek goddess of the healthy glow, Maximón the Mayan hero god of health, Haoma from Persia, and Panacea the goddess of the universal cure. Ever since Brother read about Adams’s death he had started saying, half joking, half defensively, that exercise was to be avoided because it killed people. Don’t panic. Have some fries with that.
But now, after doing nothing more strenuous than telling his sister on the phone that he was sorry for his past misdeeds, he was stressed out and gasping for breath. The death angel hovered and then set him free. (Later, when the angel released the plane in which he was crossing the ocean, he thought, that’s two lives used up, and I’m not a cat.)
His jumbled thoughts about death and Equinox filled the gap between the conclusion of his apology and the beginning of Sister’s response, which came after a lengthy pause. When she spoke her words were as measured as a legal deposition. “Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related,” she said, “but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. The connection between them is the act. It is for the actor to decide whether or not he feels regret and remorse for the act, whether or not he is willing and ready to apologize in the hope of making amends. It is for the person acted upon to decide whether or not she feels able to set the act aside and move on, which is to say, to forgive. The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive. Alternatively, one may not feel ready to apologize, and still be forgiven, if the forgiver is ready to let bygones be bygones. You have apologized. That was and is your decision. I accept that it is a genuine apology. Now it is for me to decide whether or not I can forgive what you did. Or maybe I have already decided that. Or perhaps I never will.”
“I’m glad there’s at least one lawyer in the family,” Brother replied. “Pa and Ma would have been so proud.”
Those were their first moves. The purpose of the opening in the game of chess, Brother thought, was to establish command of the center and to give your pieces the greatest possible positional advantage. He had begun with a sacrifice, the unreserved apology, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he had improved his position as a result. In the conversations that followed they circled one another, Brother reluctant to abase himself further, Sister playing a cautious game, defensive and slow. They ventured into childhood memories, not very successfully. The past, the peacefully dead mother, the suicide father with the empty bottle of pills by his bedside, Sister’s affair with Sad-Faced Older Painter, the slap, all of that felt like treacherous territory, in which one or both could easily make false moves and lose ground that would be hard to recapture. Their few forays into old times led to strained exchanges.
“Do you still sing?”
“Only in the shower.”
“That’s a shame. No more Tweety Pie?”
“The cat got my tongue.”
After some early awkwardnesses of this type they stayed away from reminiscence, by unspoken mutual agreement.
Brother quickly moved beyond the chess metaphor. Chess was a war game, and he was trying to make peace. Chess ended when you killed the king, and there could be only one winner. He wasn’t trying to win. He was trying to recapture something he had lost.
They found they could talk to each other more easily about the present. Slowly at first and then with growing heat Sister told Brother about her racial equality work and her pro bono legal cases. “I’ve reached the point where I’ve had to give all that up,” she said, in one of her first admissions of vulnerability. “I don’t want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world—the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle—but on many days every week that’s how it feels. It feels like I have to get up every day and hit my head against a wall. After a couple of decades of doing that kind of work, I need to start taking better care of my head. Time to step away from my place at the wall, to make way for a younger head. Somebody else’s turn.”
Not all the obstacles her clients faced were racial. Some were capitalist: for example, many members of the Bangladeshi community in London were employed in restaurants, and many of their Bangladeshi employers denied them the most basic of employee rights. Other hurdles were ideological. “I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,” she declaimed. “All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”
During these conversations she didn’t tell him of the other, more imperative reason why she was giving things up—her bad health news, the utterly unfair invasion by a second carcinoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, of a body already ravaged by its Pyrrhic victory over breast cancer. She didn’t yet feel that that news belonged to him, that he had a right to it. Instead she talked with pride about Daughter’s achievements in the rag trade. She also spoke at some length about her husband “Jack,” the loving judge, and, in a step toward greater intimacy, described his fondness for wearing women’s gowns when entertaining at home. “What our friends understand, even though nobody else nowadays seems to, is that it has nothing to do with sexuality. It’s just a fashion preference. At least in our small charmed circle such innocence is still allowed.” He heard again a kind of exhaustion in her voice, and tried to tell himself that the cause was probably her feeling of being out of step with the conventional progressive attitudes of the time. The old left-right simplicities didn’t fit anymore, and a woman like Sister, who had identified with the left all her working life, might well feel worn down by the new rhetoric. Time for someone else to bang their head against the wall.
He didn’t entirely convince himself. Something was badly wrong with her, he could hear it in her voice every time they spoke, but he understood that she didn’t yet trust him enough to tell him what it was.
He told her a little about Quichotte: the character of the aging TV addict, the love of the unknown woman. She laughed. “I’m glad to hear you are capable of sending yourself up,” she said. He began to make the usual literary protest, he isn’t me, he’s fictional, etc., but she stopped him. “Don’t even,” she said. “It’s better if I think you’re lampooning yourself. It makes me like you a little more.”
He didn’t talk about the Trampoline, or tell Sister that he had given Quichotte’s fictional half sister the same illness and brutal surgery as Sister herself had undergone many years ago. That revelation could wait for later. Maybe a lot later. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t go down well.
(“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” Czesław Miłosz once said.)
They were finding their way back to each other. There was one angry exchange, Sister’s famously pyrotechnic temper getting at least this one final, spectacular outing, but even that, Brother afterwards thought, was essentially affectionate, the subject being Sister’s fury that Brother’s long silence, the years it had taken him to consider attempting a rapprochement, had robbed her of family life for all that time. His return, and his attempt to re-create the familial bond, infuriated her because of its tardiness, which she translated into uncaringness, unfeelingness, and what with her Eliza-Doolittle-meets-Elizabeth-II accent she called arseholery. “Did you ever have any comprehension, did you even possess the capacity to comprehend, what it might have felt like to imagine having an older brother by my side, that I could turn to, on whom, if need be, I could lean? No, never mind, rhetorical question, I already know the answer. Of course you can’t bloody imagine it, because you were too busy swanning around bloody New York fantasizing about bloody espionage. You know who the real James Bond was? An expert on Jamaican birds whose name Ian Fleming stole for his 007. That seems to sum you up pretty damn well. As a secret agent—correction, as somebody writing about secret agents—you make an excellent ornithologist. As a human being? Not even as good as that.”
That was just Sister clearing her throat. The aria followed, a song of accusation to rival the mighty “Abscheulicher!” in Beethoven’s Fidelio. He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand—O abominable one!—that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself? No, of course he did not understand, such understanding was beyond the ken of monsters, abominable ones, who rutted and grunted in the mud of ugliness and rose up to murder what was beautiful, or what might, with proper husbandry, become a thing of beauty. They had never been that close, she cried, but if he had shown even the slightest desire to come closer to her she would have responded a thousandfold. But instead, there was his unjust accusation of a financial crime, there was the slap, there were the ensuing years of prideful unrepentant absence, and these were unforgivable things. And in spite of that there had been times—so many times!—when she had told herself, Yes! You can do the impossible, you can forgive the unforgivable, only let him ask, let him come to my door and bow his head and say, at last, after so long, after the years of blindness which were caused by my stupidity, I recognize the wrongs I did, I feel the pain you felt at their injustice, I see the truth, and the truth is that I have been guilty of arseholery, and so, at your door, with head bowed low, this arsehole asks to be forgiven. That was all he had to say and do. And now here he was doing and saying it, but he had left it so late, he had been so stupid for so long, that her rage could not be quenched. He should hang up and go away, take his voice out of her ear, let the silence between them be resumed, for she was accustomed to that silence and it was too late for peace.—No.—That was not how she had meant to end.—He should call her again tomorrow. There was no more to be said today.
Words to that effect.
And after the tirade, she was spent. “I have to go,” she said faintly, and hung up. Brother had the impression that she had used up every ounce of her strength—her remaining strength—and had been brought to the point of collapse. He sat quietly with his thoughts for a long time after the end of the phone call. He tried not to allow the Shadow to become real. But he was becoming more and more certain that she was very sick.
There were no calls for a few days following the explosion. When she finally did call him she was calmer and quieter. She asked him more questions about his writing and he found himself willingly doing what he never did, which was, to talk about a work in progress. He was not a particularly superstitious man, but he did have this one superstition: don’t let the work come out of your mouth or it will never come out through your fingers. But he answered Sister’s questions willingly enough, and was encouraged by her interest in what he had to say. He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche.
Nothing very ambitious, then, she said.
And it’s about opioid addiction, too, he added.
That was when her defenses dropped. When he described to her his research into the American opioid epidemic and the scams associated with it, he felt her attention intensify, and when he talked about his character Dr. Smile, the devious fentanyl spray entrepreneur, and his unscrupulous willingness to allow his product to get into the hands of people who didn’t need it, or not for medical reasons, he had her full attention. By the time he finished, she had made a decision.
“I have something to tell you about my condition,” she said, and in a flash of clarity he remembered his encounter with the man who had called himself Lance Makioka, among other names. “Your estranged lady overseas,” Makioka had said. “How much do you know about her present condition?” And when Brother had asked him what he meant, he had backed away from the usage. “I should have said ‘situation.’ Her current situation.” And here it was again, the menacing word.
“Your condition,” he repeated, and then she told him.
She had contacted the doctor in America, the brown person, the top man, but had told him frankly that she wasn’t keen on flying over to spend, what?, six months?, the rest of her life?, all her money?, receiving treatment in the United States. He had studied her case, been thoughtful, kind, and understanding, and had referred her to a “very good man” in London. The illness was unpredictable. In some cases, with the right treatment, life could be prolonged by many years. In other cases, regrettably, things moved quickly. “I’m in the latter category,” she said flatly. “The prognosis is bad.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“I see.”
“What I’m most afraid of,” she told him, “is pain. They say women have a much higher pain threshold than men. They say it’s because we are the ones who have to go through childbirth. I say it’s because most women have a much higher everything than most men. But now that I’ve waved that flag, I immediately have to admit that I’m not one of those heroines. I dread pain. The final pain, what did you call it just now? Breakthrough pain.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault,” she told him. “And as it happens, there may actually be something you can do to help.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Your fictional character, Dr. Smile,” she said. “And his fictional spray, InSmile™. Do they have real-life models? I’m wondering if there may be an actual doctor or doctors you read about, or better still, with whom you may be acquainted? And a product or products that actually exists or exist?”
Brother didn’t answer her for a long moment.
“So, not ‘anything’ after all, then,” Sister said.
“Sublingual fentanyl sprays are available on the market now,” he replied carefully. “And breakthrough pain”—he restrained himself from saying in terminal cancer patients—“is exactly what they are intended for. I’m sure your British physician knows what’s available in the UK and can prescribe the right thing.”
“Haven’t you heard about British doctors?” she said. “They don’t like giving their patients medicines for what ails them. They think medicine is bad for sick people.”
“But I’m sure that in your case, if the prognosis is—”
“Yes or no,” she said. “Can you get hold of it for me? Do you know a man?”
Again, Brother took a moment before answering.
Then, “Yes,” he said. “I do know a man.”
“Do this for me,” she said, “and then get on a plane as quickly as you can.”
“I just want to say that you are a respected attorney and your husband is a judge, and this would be borderline against the law. Or, not even borderline, in fact.”
“Do this for me,” she said again.
“Okay,” he said.
“And then get here soon.”
“How soon?”
“Just get on a plane and come.”
* * *
—
ALL AIRPORT CUSTOMS HALLS were designed to make even the innocent feel guilty. NOTHING TO DECLARE: the sign might as well have read DEAD MAN WALKING. He was convinced he would be stopped and found to be in possession of a highly restricted substance, without any proof of his right to carry it—which was to say, doomed, as surely as if he was on his way to the gallows. But in the drama in which he had agreed to participate, he was for the moment a player of secondary importance, so he passed uneventfully into the unrestricted liberty of Arrivals.
Brother asked the cab driver to turn on the air. This was not understood. He had to say “air-conditioning.” The cabbie said it wasn’t working, sorry, mate, open a window. What came through the opened window was a blast of hot air. London was enduring what the cabbie called a scorcher. A heat wave in London, Brother thought, felt like an oxymoron, like nonstop drizzle in L.A. Here it was nevertheless, the temperature at 9 P.M. still in the high eighties, whatever that was in Celsius, thirty? Thirty-five? Who knew. There was no understanding the British and their systems. Road signs gave distances in miles but bathroom scales used kilograms. You could buy a pint of milk in a supermarket or a pint of beer in a pub, but at the gas station fuel was measured in liters. Athletes ran the “metric mile,” fifteen hundred meters, but a cricket pitch was twenty-two yards long. The money was decimal but everything else was a muddle, and even the European Union had long ago given up the attempt to make the Brits standardize their weights and measures, one of many early signs that the country resisted the idea of being fully European.
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