It was almost a relief to arrive in the middle of other people’s crises and leave the crisis of America behind. At home he had stopped listening to the news and avoided social media to shut out the daily nonsense as much as he could. He had his book to write, and this private crisis to deal with, the crisis of Sister, and that was all he could handle right now. The apocalypse of the West would just have to wait in line.
He looked out at the night sky and experienced once again the illusion of a void. There were holes in his field of vision, spots of nothingness. These seemed different in kind from the floaters he was used to. So either he had begun to experience some sort of degeneration of the retina, or, alternatively, the crumbling of the cosmos as prophesied by his character Evel Cent had begun to occur in the real world as well as the fictional. That was absurd, he scolded himself. That is absolutely not what is happening. That’s a thing I made up. He made a note to visit an eye specialist on his return from London.
He called Sister’s phone. An unfamiliar female voice answered.
It was Daughter. “She’s resting,” she said. “But we are expecting you. Your room is ready. Also…” She paused, then continued, “I’m really excited to meet you. I’ve been wanting this to happen for I don’t know how long, and I should confess that I was the one who wrote the first email from my mother’s computer. Pawn to King Four. That was me.”
“Then I’m greatly in your debt,” Brother said. “I’ll be there shortly.”
“You should know,” Daughter said, lowering her voice, “that my father finds it hard to forgive slights against my mother. Just as she gets furious on his behalf if anyone criticizes him. They have always been that way, super protective of each other. I’m just telling you in case he’s a little cold toward you when you arrive. He’ll get over it, I’m sure, now that you and my mother have patched things up.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Brother said.
He remembered the neighborhood from his student days when he had long hair and a Zapata mustache and wore purple shirts and red crushed-velvet flared pants. In those days, on the street with the famous weekend market, there was what people used to call a head shop called the Dog Shop whose owners had, for unexplained reasons, attached a giant human nose to the wall above the entrance. He had read somewhere that in the old days the area’s poor would sometimes steal the dogs of the rich, take them away and train them to answer to different names, and then sell them back to their former owners on this very street. He had gone into the Dog Shop one day and asked if that story was the origin of the name, to be met with stoned hippie blankness. “No, man. It’s just a name, man.” Too bad, he thought. Even then, half a century ago, the culture was already beginning to be a thing without memory, lobotomized, with no sense of history. The past was for dead people. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
And the restaurant below Sister’s duplex was called Sancho. There were moments when it seemed that the whole world was echoing his work in progress.
He rang the doorbell. A buzzer sounded and the door to the apartment clicked open. Judge Godfrey Simons, in open-necked white shirt and slacks, stood at the top of the stairs to greet him. The welcome, as Daughter had warned, was not warm. “Look who’s showed up at our door after all these years,” the judge said. “Don’t you think there’s something a tiny bit ghoulish about appearing at this juncture after not being bothered to drop us so much as a postcard for donkey’s years? Something a teensy bit macabre?”
Daughter pushed past him. “Stop it, Daddy.” Then, to Brother, “We’re very glad to have you. And he’s not actually nearly as much of a curmudgeon as he sounded just then.” She turned back to her father. “Behave.” He snorted, a good-natured sort of snort, and turned away. Brother climbed the stairs and went in.
When he had imagined Sister on the other end of the phone, his picture of her had been influenced by her grand accent. He imagined her dressed more or less like the queen, in heavy floral-patterned fabrics that resembled sofa upholstery or curtains, and made her look, in his mind’s eye, like human furniture. Sometimes, in an unkindly playful mood, he imagined a tiara on her head and, on her body, the kind of puffy-sleeved, farthingaled ballgown he had seen in Masterpiece Theatre programs about the Tudor royal family. As a result of these fantasies of ballroom wear and upholstery, he was unprepared for the woman he had come to see as she actually was: which was to say, a very sick woman indeed. She was in her bedroom on the upper floor of the duplex, and was unable to come down to greet him, or, as he soon learned, for any other reason. She had lost a lot of weight, and in her nearly emaciated condition needed help to clean herself or perform her bodily functions. The illness was a daily humiliation, but she bore it without complaint. Only her voice remained strong.
“There are several complications which can arise from CLL,” she told Brother, wasting no time after a brief embrace. “The mildest are infections of the upper and lower respiratory tract. I have experienced both of these. Unfortunately, they have been the least of my problems. It can also happen that the immune system fouls up. The cells which are there to fight diseases become confused and attack the red blood cells, as if a lawyer for the defense were suddenly to switch sides and join the prosecution. This doesn’t happen very often, but it is happening to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Brother said, using the words people used when they had no words.
“Oh, I haven’t even reached the good parts yet,” she said. “CLL increases the risk of developing other cancers, such as melanomas and lung cancer, and yes, you’ve guessed it, there are now shadows on both my lungs. That’s the silver medal winner. The gold medal goes to the CLL itself. Very occasionally, it can switch into a much more aggressive cancer, called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. In the cancer business we refer to this as Richter’s Syndrome, probably because it’s an event of earthquakelike magnitude. In the dying business we refer to it as forget-about-it. This is what I now have. Welcome to London.”
She was attached to what the judge called “her Heath Robinson contraption.” Brother had to dig deep to remember who Heath Robinson was. But the tangle of tubes and drips that were needed to provide what the body could no longer provide for itself made the judge’s meaning clear enough. “Oh, right,” he said. “It’s a Rube Goldberg machine.”
“We don’t need the American version here, thank you,” the judge said. Still not that friendly. “Heath Robinson will do very well.”
It wasn’t right to argue at the bedside of a dying woman, but Brother couldn’t resist going one more round. “Then there’s Gyro Gearloose,” he said. The judge’s face reddened.
“Be nice, Jack,” Sister said.
Nodding with great deliberation, the judge turned to go. “I’ll leave you two to do whatever it is you need to do,” he said. “I’ll be downstairs.” Daughter left the bedroom, too, and then Brother and Sister were alone.
“So now you see me,” she said. “Looking skinny, no?”
She was receiving in-home hospice care. During the day many people passed through. Doctors, nurses, paid professional caregivers, therapists, friends. Later the family took over. Daughter spent most nights here nowadays. She and the judge shared the night shift. “They’re both exhausted,” Sister said. “That’s why Jack’s so irritable. He’s a man who likes his sleep.”
“I can understand that,” Brother said. “I’m the same.”
“It won’t be long now,” Sister said. She had briefed herself thoroughly on the signs of approaching death. “Different patterns of sleeping and waking,” she said. “Check. I never know when I’ll drop off, and I wake up at all odd hours these days. Diminished appetite and thirst, check, and I used to love fine dining and good wines. Fewer and smaller bowel movements, just as well, since I need help getting to the bathroom and cleaning myself, so the less of that, the better. The blood pressure situation isn’t good, and often my heart ra
ces, and sometimes it’s difficult to breathe properly. Is this getting to be too much for you? You’re looking a little pale. No? Very well then, we proceed. There’s also, I’m sorry to say, incontinence. I have a rubber bedsheet under here, it’s like being a baby again, imagine how much I love that. And my body temperature fluctuates. Sometimes I’m sweating, at other times my skin feels cold to the touch. It’s a long list. The body fights for life until the very end. We are all death’s virgins, and we don’t easily yield up our flower.
“And oh, yes, there’s one more sign. More pain.”
“Is that a morphine drip?” Brother asked, and she nodded.
“I have grown to love morphine,” she said. “But I’m hoping you have something even better for me. Did you bring it?”
“I brought a supply,” he said, “but I don’t want to just leave it by your bedside, because the risks of overdosing yourself are considerable. One ten-microgram dose will buy you about an hour’s relief, and it’s only to be used when the morphine won’t cover the pain, and there are strict limits on how much you can use in a day.”
“What, and if I don’t obey, it might kill me?” She laughed hard, and the laugh became a cough, and that took a while to subside, and there was expectoration, and there was blood mixed up in the mucus.
“I remind you of what you just said to me,” Brother told her. “Don’t yield up your flower too easily.”
“Give the sprays to Jack,” she said, very tired now. “Jack’s in charge.”
* * *
—
LONDON THAT NIGHT WAS full of noises, cries borne upon the dark air revealing distant anguish, shouts of anger, drunken glee like the cackling of broomstick witches. Brother lay awake in the small spare bedroom—Sister’s office, Brother on the fold-out couch—listening to nearer noises, Daughter and the judge waking and resting, going to Sister’s bedside to do what needed to be done. The air was clear but he had the feeling of being lost in a fog and not knowing his way home. Was his own work here already completed? Should he leave? What, if he did not leave, might he usefully do for her in these last days? The fog thickened around him, and he slept.
“Tell me a story,” she said in the morning. “Tell me about playing hide-and-seek around and inside the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park on Malabar Hill. Tell me about the Sunday morning jazz jam sessions in Colaba and how we listened to Chris Perry’s saxophone and Lorna Cordeiro’s voice and then we were taken to Churchgate and ate chicken Kiev at the Gaylord. Tell me how we went to Goa for Christmas and Saint Francis Xavier rose up out of his casket in the Basilica of Bom Jesus and gave us his blessing. Tell me about the Spice Mountains of Kerala and the elephants of Periyar. Tell me about when we built our first and last snowman in the Kashmiri mountain meadow of Baisaran. Tell me how we stood at the tip of Kanyakumari and the waves came from left and right and straight ahead and all crashed together at our feet and soaked us and we were happy. Tell me about going to visit the home of Satyajit Ray in Calcutta and his family showing us the notebooks in which he prepared his movies, pictures on the left side, words on the right. Tell me about the night I got an ax and smashed the Telefunken radiogram to pieces so that Pa and Ma could never dance together again. Tell about how we, you and I, went on a killing spree across India for years until they caught us in an old Cadillac and filled us full of holes which was exactly how we would have chosen to die, because it’s important how one chooses to die. Tell me anything. Tell me everything. There isn’t very much time.”
He understood that she was asking him to describe her dreams, rather than anything that had really happened, and so instead he told her about his own imaginings, or, in other words, about his book. At first she interrupted him constantly, saying, “This isn’t nearly as good as the story I want you to tell me, about when we ran away from the flat in Soona Mahal and robbed a bank,” or, “I think you should stop and talk instead about the night we flew out of our bedroom window and floated in the air of Westfield Estate and looked in at all the grown-ups’ bedroom windows and watched them making love, or snoring, or fighting, or all three, not in that order.” But when he began to talk about the younger days of “Miss Salma R,” and the day when her grandfather grabbed her by the wrists and kissed her on the mouth, she became very attentive. Near the end of the story she stopped him.
“This isn’t possible,” she said.
“It’s fiction,” he replied, confused.
“We never told you about this. Don’t tell him, we agreed, it will upset him.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“Ma and me.”
“What is ‘this’?”
“Did someone else tell you? Otherwise how could you know? Did he tell you?”
“Who is ‘he’?”
“You really don’t know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know and you made it up without knowing.”
“I think you have to tell me a story now. Something happened between you and our grandfather? Is that even possible?”
“Not our grandfather.”
“Then who.”
“Why do you think Ma left Pa and moved into Soona Mahal. When I was five years old.”
“Oh,” he said, and felt the ground fall away beneath his feet.
* * *
—
“DID YOU AND MA think about telling me at any point?”
“Yes. No. Maybe when you were older, we thought.”
“But you were much younger than me. I was the older brother.”
“You were the beloved son. Firstborn and only. You had to be shielded.”
“You didn’t trust me even when you were five years old.”
“I’m sorry. But this isn’t about you.”
* * *
—
“YOUR WHOLE PICTURE OF the world broke,” he said, “and you felt like you had gone mad.”
“Yes.”
“And I didn’t even notice.”
“Boys. They notice nothing.”
“And then five years later they made up and we had to go back and live with him. You had to go back and live with him.”
“Imagine how I felt about that.”
“What was Ma thinking? How could she do that?”
“Maybe she thought, we have punished him enough. Maybe she thought, I was older now and he had learned his lesson. Maybe she thought, a family should always try to be together, and children need a father. Maybe she was concerned that rumors would circulate and put us to shame. Maybe rumors were circulating and she already felt ashamed. Maybe she thought, I love him. Maybe she wanted to dance.”
“And had he learned his lesson?”
“He never touched me again. He never looked me in the eye. He hardly ever spoke directly to me. He resented me. And he wouldn’t pay for my college education abroad.”
“So it wasn’t just because you were a girl and therefore inferior.”
“That also. But I didn’t want his money anyway. I worked, I won my scholarships, I hauled myself out of there by my own bootstraps, I never went back, and I never asked either of them for anything ever again.”
* * *
—
IT WAS BEWILDERING AT such an advanced age to understand that the narrative of your family which you had carried within you—within which, in a way, you had lived—was false, or, at the very least, that you had been ignorant of its most essential truth, which had been kept from you. Not to be told the whole truth, as Sister with her legal expertise would know perfectly well, was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth. Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.
And then he had been writi
ng about an imaginary girl in an imaginary family and he had given her something close to Sister’s fate, without knowing how close to the truth he had come. Had he, as a child, intuited something and then, afraid of what he had guessed, buried the intuition so deep that he retained no memory of it? And could books, some books, gain access to those hidden chambers and use what they found there? He sat at Sister’s bedside, deafened by the echo between the fiction which he had made and the fiction in which he had been made to live.
It wasn’t about him, she had said, and that was right. But she was dying, and he would live, and after that it would be his burden to bear, because she would have set it down.
* * *
—
SHE SLEPT MUCH OF the day, went in and out of sleep. The judge was busy with paperwork at his desk. Daughter ran between her business and her mother. The hospice team members came and went. Brother found a wooden upright chair and placed it in a corner of Sister’s bedroom, keeping out of the way. He had a notebook on his knee and made entries in it.
In the Valley of Wonderment, said Quichotte, the Wayfarer, in the presence of the Beloved, is filled with awe and understands that he has never known or understood anything.
There’s an old Jewish joke, Evel Cent said to Miss Salma R in a deleted segment of their interview. In the joke an old Jew in Germany in the 1930s goes into a travel agency looking for a country to flee to. On the counter of the travel agency is a globe of the world and the old Jew points at one country after another, the United States, Canada, Mexico, wherever, and each time the travel agent shakes his head and says no, they aren’t accepting any more refugees. Eventually the old Jew doesn’t have any more countries he can point to, so he turns away from the globe and says to the travel agent, “So this one’s all full up. So maybe you got another?” Our neighbor Earth project answers that question with a big Yes. Yes, that old Jew can be one of the NEXT people. And so can all of us.
Quichotte Page 31
