Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  Maybe not: Elwin Cross Sr. had stopped chewing, though a wad of food was visible inside his cheek. But his dentures weren’t to blame. He was gazing past his son’s shoulder, toward the hallway, confusion muddying his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “We should call your mother,” he said. Urgently, as if he’d forgotten her birthday, their anniversary. “Here, pass me the phone.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Sure we can. They let me call long-distance here. Is she long-distance? Pass me the phone.”

  “Try to remember, Dad.”

  “Remember what? Jesus, you kids. Always with the memory games.”

  “Why can’t we call Mom?” Emotionlessly, professorially: the Socratic Method as Alzheimer’s therapy.

  “They let me call long-distance. Look over there—at the goddamn phone bill. I can call anywhere I want. I can call Timbuktu.”

  “No,” said Elwin. “Just try to remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Why we can’t call Mom.”

  The elder Cross took a breath, sucking in his lips so that they disappeared entirely into his mouth: the way children imitate the toothless elderly. He sighed through his nose as his lips reemerged, his face suddenly colorless, his eyelids blinking and reblinking like those of someone emerging from a nap. “Because she’s gone,” he said finally. “She died.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay. It’s just . . . I knew that. I did.” He resumed chewing the gray mushball of venison stored in his cheek, then said glumly, “This is good. What is it?”

  “It’s venison. I told you.”

  “Right. You told me.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “The goddamn medicines, is the thing.” With a knife he glumly rolled the peas around on his plate. “They say it could be a potassium deficiency, too.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  They ate in silence after that, avoiding one another’s eyes. His father was embarrassed, and though he knew it was wrong, Elwin was embarrassed for him. Their forks squeaked against the plates. From across the hall came the sound of moaning, bovine and forlorn-sounding, or maybe just excremental. Nurses glided past the open doorway, their crepe soles whispering sffft sffft to the floor tiles. A telephone rang in a distant room, an old-fashioned analog ring: the past calling to say hello.

  “So tell me,” his father finally said, then paused, his strain visible. A pained but familiar ellipsis filled the room. “Tell me—tell me what’s bold and new in the field of linguistics.”

  “Well,” began Elwin, grateful for this new swerve. After decades of longing for a deep or even semi-deep conversation with his father—about the war, about his childhood, about his father’s infrequent but cataclysmic night terrors that had so traumatized Elwin and his siblings as children (their father curled into a ball in the upstairs hallway, weeping madly, their mother cradling him while ordering the children to close their bedroom doors and go back to bed)—Elwin now mostly desired small talk. Work (meaning his, not his father’s), the weather, bodily matters. Every other subject bore them straightaway into a fog of hurt and humiliation.

  “I did have an interesting call yesterday,” Elwin said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “From an outfit called Attero Laboratories. Connected to the Department of Energy.” This was the call Rochelle had fumbled, the one that had loomed strangely and ominously over Elwin as he’d lain in his bed, exhausted and bleary-headed, after dismantling the deer. The caller had left a voicemail the next day, and the fierce urgency with which Elwin had dialed him back seemed, in retrospect, dodgy and ridiculous—further cause for concern about his own mental state. His physician had prescribed antidepressants, after his and Maura’s split, but Elwin had resisted taking them because of the potential for weight gain as a side effect; now he was reconsidering. Numb and fatter: There was the best suit he could drape upon his future.

  “Energy?” said his father.

  “It’s still a bit unclear. Apparently Congress has commissioned the department to come up with a warning system for a nuclear waste depository out west. In New Mexico.”

  “Congress? What did they call you for?”

  “That’s what I asked. An ‘Expert Judgment Panel,’ is what he said. A few weeks of meetings, here and there.”

  A slight pshaw. “Since when are you an expert on nuclear waste?”

  “It’s an interdisciplinary panel. Physicists, geologists, nuclear scientists, philosophers. A folklorist. Even an artist.”

  “And a linguist.”

  “And a linguist, right.” From deep within him Elwin felt a tiny, reflexive, decades-old prick of defensiveness about his chosen field. His father had never quite approved, dismissing much of linguistics as “theoretical posturing.” Chomsky, Lakoff, et al. Elwin had long ago resigned himself to the idea that his area of specialization—applied linguistics, the application of linguistics to real-world problems—was a direct response to his father’s distaste, a bid for his respect. “There’s a language death component,” he said. “Whatever system they implement has to be effective for ten thousand years. The full radioactive lifespan. So the question—presumably the reason I got the call—is how to communicate when no language has proven itself durable for—well, for really a fraction of that time.”

  “Hell of a riddle,” his father said, licking whipped yams from his spoon.

  “It is, isn’t it? Of course I said yes. I mean, ten thousand years. It’s mind-boggling. Old English, that’s just a thousand years old, and barely comprehensible. Middle English is five hundred, and that’s hard to read, too. Swadesh’s formula says that any language will undergo a total lexical transformation in ten thousand years, though I think that’s way overstated—more like five thousand. So the question is how you communicate over deep time.”

  “Communicate what?”

  Elwin’s shoulders slumped. “Dad, I just told you—”

  “No, I mean, what’s the message?”

  “Oh. That. Well, it’s . . . something along the lines of, ‘Keep Out,’ I suppose.”

  “Here be dragons.”

  “Something like that. Apparently there was another panel already, a Futures panel, that came up with all sorts of these wild scenarios for us to address. Human extinction. Extraterrestrial interference. Radical stuff. But it all has to be factored.”

  “Human extinction,” his father said, not quite as a question.

  “Every possible scenario,” said Elwin. “It’s all rather science-fictiony, isn’t it? Might even be fun, I don’t know.” He pondered this for a moment, as it emerged unedited from his mouth: Fun? Maybe, in the way a crossword puzzle or riddle book could be fun: as a mental distraction, a reprieve from the colorless lassitude of marital collapse. Some people—Elwin envied them—had children to get them through. Must be hard to wallow, he thought, while searching for lost mittens, packing lunches, darting from soccer games to ballet practice, fielding questions about why the sky’s blue or why they always build gas stations across the street from other gas stations. All he had, on the other hand, was Bologna, and his father, and rooms full of students who he’d long ago realized didn’t care what he was saying. And a 1998 Jeep Cherokee, nursing a busted nose in a lot at a Route 24 bodyshop, that would soon be wondering why this minor injury—no fault of its own—had caused Elwin to abandon it. “I could stand a little fun in my life right now,” he said, as much to himself as to his father.

  “Huh.” At this the elder Cross snorted, and drew his fork around his plate. His mouth was curled into something like a smirk.

  “What?” Elwin said.

  “It’s just funny, when you think about it,” he said, cocking his head and closing one of his eyes. “All the terrible effort of human civilization, the great big arc of it. And in ten thousand years the only intelligible trace of it might be your ‘keep out’ sign in the desert, stuck in a big heap of trash.” He lifted his eyebrows and wagged his head.
“Sucks the wind out of your sails, doesn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” said Elwin.

  “Well, it’s rather chilling, when you do,” said his father. “Nice of you to cheer me up like that, son. Adds a whole new perspective to the day.” Joylessly chuckling, he said, “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving, Dad.”

  “Same difference. Where’s Boolah?”

  “What do you need?”

  “I’m done, that’s all.”

  “With what?”

  “My dinner. That was good. Compliments to the chef.”

  Chef: Elwin winced. Compliments to the chef indeed: for poaching Maura from him, for ending civilization as he knew it. Among the myriad injuries from Maura’s betrayal was that she’d spoiled, for Elwin, the stalwart pleasures of eating in restaurants. The mere sight of a toque, or even a sauce-painted plate, was enough to put him off his feed. That was one reason he’d become a bleak regular at Burger King and sometimes Taco Bell: no chefs in those joints. Just workaday cooks, trying to earn enough for a down payment on a new tattoo and wholly uninterested in fucking Elwin’s wife.

  He gathered up his father’s plate with his own, then dumped the uneaten portions into the trash can by the bed, drizzling the plastic liner with gloppy, plasma-like streams of the cranberry-port sauce. In the bathroom he rinsed the plates in the sink, searching for something with which to scrub them. After a paper towel proved ineffectual, dissolving into mush, he used his naked hand, rubbing at the yam remnants to dislodge them into the faucet stream. The insignia on the back of the plates, which were of the oversized, wide-rimmed, plain-white variety used in fashionable restaurants, rewound Elwin’s memory back to the plates’ origins: Maura buying a dozen place settings at a Napa boutique and crowing about the good price that’d struck Elwin as grossly excessive though he’d kept that to himself. She’d left them when she’d moved out, all twelve settings, despite his suggestion she take them. “What am I going to do with twelve plates?” he’d asked, yielding from her a disinterested shrug. Perhaps they were no longer fashionable, or maybe her chef had a thing for square plates—whatever the reason, she didn’t want them anymore. He remembered staring at the plates with tender sympathy, then, as if they too were victims here—innocent spectators, caught in the crossfire. The bycatch of a marriage. Only after realizing that twelve plates meant he could conceivably go almost two weeks without running the dishwasher did he come to appreciate the relinquishment.

  Washing his hands, he noticed the red, quart-sized sharps container, for needle disposal, affixed to the wall beside the mirror. On it was a label emblazoned with the familiar international biohazard symbol: a plain trefoil, or triple Venn diagram, with its three overlapping circles superimposed upon a fourth circle at the center. He studied it for a while, the water gushing uselessly over his hands. It looked vaguely heraldic, and also, with its evocations of the Holy Trinity, not-so-vaguely Christian—like something you might have spied on a shield during the Crusades. But what did it say? he wondered. He tried fishing meaning from it, failed, then tried willfully misreading it, to see if he could glean an erroneous message from it. At this he failed, too. It was a blank symbol, he decided, that wouldn’t look out of place stitched onto an athletic shoe, or stenciled onto the back of a fashionable porcelain dinner plate. A leftover corporate logo, slapped onto medical waste. Meaningless. Only when he heard his father call did he realize the water was still running.

  “What is it, Dad?” he said. “Want me to help get you started with the file cabinet?”

  “The file cabinet? No. That’s a nice one, though, isn’t it? Boolah got it for me. No, pass me that stack of files over there on the chair. No, underneath there. The green folders. I think it’s the green ones. Just hand them all to me.”

  “What about the mail?” Elwin said.

  “What mail?”

  “Right there, beside you . . .”

  “Eh, it’s junk. It’s not worth the effort. Anyway your mother handles all that.”

  “Dad,” Elwin said. The dilemma was always whether to correct him or let the delusion slide, and was mostly decided by Elwin’s energy level. Sometimes the effort felt constructive; other times, a waste. You could jog him back to reality, but not for long—the duration of the visit, at best. “We just went over this, remember?”

  “We went over it, right.”

  “About Mom.”

  Vacantly, he said, “All about her, sure.”

  “Look, I’m happy to help you—”

  “No help needed. I’ve got to get some work done. And you’ve got your sweetie waiting for you at home.”

  This time Elwin didn’t object; he just lowered his head, wishing his father was right (though resisting the wish, or trying to, the way he tried and failed to resist cleaning his plate) and wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave. Hail hail, the gang’s all here—for good.

  “I can stay,” Elwin said, masking the truer sentiment: I want to stay. Which itself masked an even truer one: I have nowhere else to go.

  “I’ve got lots of work to do,” his father said. “You probably do, too. What’s new in the world of linguistics these days, anyway?”

  “Just the same-old,” sighed Elwin. Game over, he thought. Finito. Kaput-ski. “That’s fine, Dad. No worries. It was good to see you.” Then, softly: “Do you have your glasses?”

  “Right here. Or, right over there. Somewhere. Oh, right here.” He smiled at Elwin, then reached out his hand—awkwardly, like a businessman closing a meeting. Confused, Elwin responded in kind, then watched as his father took Elwin’s meaty hand in his own spindle-fingered one and patted it, gently, three times. Elwin was momentarily struck by the sight, by the Sistine Chapel–ish disparity between his hand and his father’s: the age, the shapes and sizes, the vital pink heft of his versus the frailty of his father’s dwindling grip. It was like interspecies contact, or deep-time communication: a connection defined by distance.

  “Jane says she might visit tomorrow,” Elwin said.

  “That’s nice of her.”

  “I’ll try to swing back by on Sunday.”

  “You’re a good kid,” his father said, then fumbled his glasses onto his head, licked a finger, and opened the topmost file folder on his bed. Dismissed, Elwin stood there for a while, watching his father read, noting the way his father’s lips trembled slightly, like those of a child restraining himself from mouthing all the words, and the way his eyes zigzagged along the page. For a moment he pondered the irony: that in fifty-four years he had never needed his father as much as he did now, yet his father was gone, or, if not quite gone, then cemented in the past, and unable to receive signals from the present. But then he decided it wasn’t an irony, it was merely the broken gears of time, or the way life can feed you when you’re full (youth) and starve you when you’re hungry (midlife). Elwin fetched his coat and plates and drifted toward the doorway. He looked back once, as he left the room, but his father didn’t look up. In several minutes, he knew, his father would forget he’d ever been there.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” the desk nurse told him on the way out, but she didn’t look up either. The world is casting me aside, it’s burying me, Elwin thought, descending the steps outside. As he walked he glanced backwards once, to make sure he was at least depositing footprints in the snow, that not every trace of him was being extinguished—that he too hadn’t been totaled, at least not yet—not yet. The radio was naturally playing Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” when Elwin started the car. Cursing, he flipped it off, but not before the melody had latched onto his brain, the “oh oh, oh oh, ohs” of the chorus hounding him all the way across the river to New Jersey.

  6

  AN HOUR AFTER EATING THANKSGIVING DINNER, Dave Masoli was stari
ng into the toilet with wide-eyed awe and admiration. He couldn’t recall ever making anything so beautiful as this in his life. Not even the Cashomatic PayDay eLoans deal, in which he and his partner had scored a $1.3 million debt portfolio for $12,750 in a bankruptcy auction and started clearing a profit on it within two hours. But no, that was business, while this—this might be art. Suspended in the toilet was what could only be called the perfect turd, the turd a man might aspire to produce his entire life but despite daily attempts never achieve: an unbroken coil of three (Dave counted) equidistant loops so smooth and unblemished that it looked machine-made, like the compression springs on a shock absorber. Even the ends were flawless, not pinched or severed but rounded and polished-looking, as if milled on a lathe. And the color! A deep and unstreaked chocolaty brown: not Hershey’s bar brown, but that other one, the more bitter candy bar he’d always traded to his brother on Halloween—Special Dark, that was it.

  Dave was stunned. How could he, the humble son of a Turnpike toll collector, a man with no discernible artistic talents save finding money where others thought none existed, have possibly squeezed something so precious and perfect out of his ass? Standing over the toilet, he wondered if this was what childbirth might feel like: the sensation of being on the sweet end of a miracle, the bodily pride, the instinctive urge to nurture and protect. But then . . . how could he preserve this glory? Flushing struck him as criminal. Leaving it, dishonorable—and anyway, no one else in the house (certainly not now, with the house overrun with Sara’s relations) was sensitive enough to appreciate a thing of beauty like this. Whoever came next would just say ewwww, look away as the toilet scarfed it down, then creep back downstairs whispering about the unflushed potty like it was some lowgrade family scandal, eager to finger the dirty culprit, the poo vandal.