by Jonathan Dee
“Your daughter is here,” the nurse said softly to him. She didn’t make it into a question, like she was trying to reorient him; it wasn’t condescending in that way. There was no more progress or recovery, in that sense, to be made. It was just about making him less terrified.
Incrementally, the light came back into his eyes. From that terrible leveling impersonality, he returned to occupy his own face, and where a minute ago he hadn’t really seemed in the room at all, now he dominated it again. He struggled to raise himself up on the pillows, and his hand started vainly toward his hair before falling back on the comforter. He licked his lips. “Hello, Sinbad,” he said hoarsely. “What do you make of all this?”
The nurse was already backing away discreetly from the head of the bed before Cynthia even realized she was moving toward it. She hadn’t heard herself called Sinbad in about thirty-five years.
There was no getting around it: he felt like a total pussy for having been taken out and disoriented so completely by one blow to the head. One’s head, he felt, should be tougher than that. He didn’t see any blunt object around and so was thinking that maybe it was only Novak’s fist after all. And Novak was a figure whom he would have naïvely estimated, as recently as a couple of hours ago, that he could take. Fear and heedlessness were all the guy was really armed with, and it turned out to be enough.
He was still a little in and out, maybe just from the shock of it all. He was sitting on Novak’s rancid couch, at the end of the living room farthest from the door. He had to squint a bit against the blazing lights. He could see that a lot of the furniture in the room had been pushed around so that it was no longer in the configuration he remembered from when he first walked through the door. Most of it was now in front of him, and one wall, the wall directly across from him, was cleared away. Novak wasn’t in the room but Jonas could hear him moving around somewhere-maybe around the corner in the kitchenette. Then he heard something else-a ringing phone-and he recognized the ring as his own, though it was coming not from his pocket where his cell phone belonged but from somewhere else in the apartment.
Novak came around the corner from the kitchenette, holding Jonas’s cell phone in front of him like a compact mirror. “Stop it,” he said. After the fourth ring it stopped. Novak put it back in his own pants pocket and left the room again.
What the fuck is happening? Jonas asked himself. He couldn’t make sense of it. He wasn’t restrained or tied down in any way. It was possible to get up, and yet he couldn’t, and he realized that what was really going on was that he was frightened, almost to the point of paralysis. The series of events that had led to his being here in this room at all was so bizarre and arbitrary that it seemed to him like if he thought about it logically enough, he could actually undo it, like snapping himself out of a dream-prove to himself that he wasn’t here, but somewhere else much more familiar.
He felt like he might throw up, but instead he went to sleep again, and when he woke up, a good portion of that blank white wall in front of him-the upper third of it or so-was covered with a picture. The whole place now smelled like Sharpies, which was sickening but still something of a blessing considering the other smells the Sharpies were masking. The picture itself was fantastically detailed, full of dogs and cats and televisions and those signature open-mouthed faces, like a Brueghel almost but without the technique, an unpatterned riot of primary industrial color, and it might have been beautiful, but Jonas really couldn’t see it.
Cynthia asked Dawn to fax her whatever she could find on the Silverberg Hospice and learned that it was one of the most popular, high-profile charities in the city, well run and financed to the gills. She was secretly hoping for a different answer because she had conceived this fantasy that she would just buy the place. It’s not like there was anything she could have improved about it. She would have given everyone there an immediate raise but she also just wanted to be able to succumb to the illusion that every single professional in the building was working for nobody else but her-the sort of selfish emotional fancy anyone with a sick parent or child might have had, the difference being that Cynthia had the resources to make such fancies real every once in a while. She wondered if her father was in the best-appointed room available and though she could have learned the answer to this question in five minutes just by walking up and down the hall-there were only about eight other rooms, and the apparent custom was for the doors to stand open-who knew what you were liable to see when you poked your head in one of them. She finally got up the nerve to ask one of the nurses; the answer was that the rooms differed only in whether or not they had the lake view. No one there ever looked at her strangely when she had a question like that.
The hospice really only employed one doctor. He made the rounds twice a day, and he did almost nothing, which Cynthia had to keep reminding herself was the goal. She overheard an exchange at the nurses’ station between the doctor and Marilyn that suggested they both belonged to the same church: that explained a lot, she said to herself, though in truth she wasn’t sure what it explained at all.
It was particularly hard to watch when they would change the sheets in her father’s bed with him still in it, the gentle but practiced way they rolled the wisp of his body from side to side, the passivity outside the reach of shame with which he submitted to it. He was similarly receptive to being shaved, though it was easier for Cynthia to understand the sensual appeal involved there. Knowing him, he’d probably splurged on the occasional professional shave back in the day. She wished she could do it for him, but there was no way she could trust herself to stay calm enough; shaving someone’s face with a razor would have been nerve-racking even under better circumstances. When watching this kind of upkeep got to be too much for her, she stood out on the veranda and stared at the artificial lake. It was easier to look at somehow when the birds were around; they didn’t seem on any kind of schedule, though. Irene didn’t join her out there, because Cynthia had told her she was allergic to cigarette smoke-a lie Irene likely recognized, but there were moments when Cynthia found she just couldn’t bear anyone’s company.
She would have brought him anything at all to eat, and they encouraged her to do that, within certain limits; his systems were closing down, and so anything too hard to digest might not bring him as much pleasure as she expected. But he had very little interest in food. Once he asked for ice cream, which was brought to him immediately, but after Cynthia fed him one spoonful, he declared himself full. He had always had a terrible sweet tooth, so maybe the whole ice cream thing was more memory than desire anyway.
“Would whipped cream help?” Irene asked him, too loudly, from over Cynthia’s shoulder. “Do you remember how I used to put whipped cream on it for you?” She spoke to him in a tone of dramatic simplicity, like she was sitting at a Ouija board. It wasn’t long before he was asleep again, his mouth open, his breaths arrhythmic. The two of them sat on opposite sides of the great bed and talked in hushed tones when they talked at all. The nurses brought them meals, after a fashion; Irene kept suggesting they give themselves a break and go out somewhere for a lunch or dinner where they could, she said earnestly, stop whispering, but Cynthia declined. Her excuse was that she was too afraid that her father would wake up and ask for her and she wouldn’t be there, which was true though not comprehensively so: whatever it was that Irene was so eager to talk about, Cynthia felt pretty certain she did not want to talk about it. Disillusionment was too bitter a prospect.
It wasn’t hard to outlast Irene: around dinnertime she would start to yawn, and a few minutes later she drove home to sleep in her own bed. Visiting hours were technically unlimited, but the nurses kept suggesting, in their seen-it-all way, that Cynthia go back to the hotel and get some real sleep too. She’d seen the nurses wheeling some kind of cot down to the far end of the corridor, for a guy she’d bumped into a few times at the nurses’ station or the soda machine who was there waiting for his wife to die of leukemia. His eyes were always red. He looked about
forty and had a bald spot that was so sunburned it was peeling. He gave off absolutely no vibe that suggested he wanted to talk to Cynthia about anything, which was great, because Cynthia had no desire to talk to him either. They scared each other a little bit. If your experience was too similar to someone else’s then maybe it wasn’t worth all that you felt it was.
When she was too tired to stay awake, or when she needed a change of clothes so badly she could smell herself, she would give in and call Herman and have him drive her back to the hotel. But she couldn’t really sleep there either: it engendered despair even more quickly than the hospice, she found, because it was nowhere, and she had no one. She would turn the TV on, mute it, try to figure out what time it was in China, and then call Adam anyway.
“He’s not dead yet,” is how she would begin these calls.
“Is he comfortable?” Adam said. “I actually don’t know what I even mean by that. What about you? How are you doing?”
“I don’t know. It’s rough. Sometimes he’s fine, sometimes he’s agitated and it’s pretty hard to know what to say to him. I just want to be some kind of comfort to him but it’s all so deep inside him at this point that you can’t get at it.”
“What about this Irene? Is she any help at all? I mean presumably she’s been with him the whole time he was sick, so maybe she’s more used to the signs or whatever?”
References to the past, even the recent past, made her instantly tense, or maybe it was just lack of sleep. “You’d think,” she said. “But actually she tends to fall apart every time his condition slips the least little bit. It’s almost like she expects me to help her get through this, which is so not what I signed on for.”
“So what other-”
“I mean she’s not exactly a complex figure,” Cynthia said. “You can look at her and pretty much imagine what that whole relationship was like. You can see what a good audience she must have made. She’s like a dog. One bit of kindness and she’s so grateful she forgets about whatever happened a minute ago.”
She squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying.
“What about the nurses, though,” Adam said. She loved him for changing the subject. “You’re getting some help from them at least, right?”
“The nurses are basically unicorns,” Cynthia said. “I feel like I should photograph them to prove that I’m not insane.”
He laughed. There followed one of those silences the presumed awkwardness of which was the difference between a conversation on the telephone and a real one. “Listen,” he said. “This may sound weird, but one thing I keep thinking about, which may or may not make you feel any better: you will not have to go through this yourself.”
“I thought I was going through this myself,” Cynthia said.
“No, I mean… I’m sorry I’m so far away. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. But what I mean is that you and I pretty much had to start over in terms of family, and we did it. We succeeded. We’re Year Zero. Those things can’t ever be taken away from you again. Who knows why he chose to live like he did, but you will never be alone in that way. Just in case you were looking at him and wondering that.”
That he would even try to articulate something like that meant more to her than whatever he was actually saying. “Baby, we didn’t just succeed, we’re a fucking multinational,” she laughed, wiping her eyes. “We’ve trademarked ourselves. It doesn’t get any more solid than us. Anyway, I am madly in love with you. Do you ever wonder what would have become of us if we hadn’t found each other?”
“Never.”
“Yeah, me neither. Listen, have you been able to get a hold of Jonas?”
“No. I left messages. You mean he doesn’t even know you’re down there?”
“Maybe not. I mean definitely not, or else he would have called. How about April? Is she right there?”
“Next door. Still sleeping. It’s not quite six A.M. here. I’ll send her your love.”
Each day the dementia was a little more pronounced. You could always tell from his eyes when he didn’t know where he was. Somehow he both recognized Cynthia and believed she was away at college; sometimes she seemed younger to him-“Do you want me to read to you?” he said to her once-but mostly he asked questions about classes, and about how soon she had to leave again, when the new semester began. Which was odd, since the two of them had never had a conversation like that for his memory to draw on. He was out of the house intermittently for as long as she could remember, and then gone for good by the time she was nine or ten; by the time she went away to school, whole years would go by where she would hear from him only via letter or the occasional, unpredictable phone call.
“So,” he said to her, “any boyfriend at present? Or boyfriends? At your age, that’s allowed, you know.”
She smiled at him. Irene sat across the bed from her, though at the moment he didn’t seem to know she was there, and Cynthia found it perversely satisfying that, for all the other woman knew, father and daughter were remembering something that had actually happened. His lips were cracked; she refilled a kind of sippy cup from the water pitcher that always sat by the bed and held it to his mouth. “A few,” she said to him, a little coquettishly, imitating the self he thought she was. “Nothing exclusive.”
“Well, you just have fun. That’s what youth is for. You don’t need me to tell you to be careful. You have your mother to do that.”
She wanted only to be generous. Still, she was worried that she was going to start holding things against him. It did get to her a bit that the past into which he was receding wasn’t what really took place, wasn’t even the past at all-more like something new. Unless this was a fantasy he had kept to himself for a long time, and now he had been stripped of the ability to maneuver between what was in his head and what was outside of it.
Several times, over those first few days, he would suddenly try, apropos of nothing, to get out of bed; he would submit when she touched his shoulder, but he kept looking around him for something on the floor, like maybe something had fallen there. The third or fourth time it happened, late at night when the two of them were alone, he passed from a mild curiosity into a state more like anger.
“Dad,” she said, “what-Dad, stop-what are you looking for?”
He looked up at her as if she were asking him to repeat something he’d already said ten times. “My shoes,” he said. “Where the hell have I put them? Do you know where they are?”
When her own panic and reluctance to restrain him physically reached the point where she started to cry, she caved in and buzzed for the night nurse, Kay, who was there in two seconds. Part of the reason she didn’t like relying on Kay was that her father seemed, in his deluded way, to be in love with her, and flirted with her ridiculously. Despite the fact that Kay was about sixty and fat as a house, Cynthia didn’t blame him. Her wry competence in even the scariest situation was fucking hot.
“Charlie, what are you worried about?” Kay said calmly. He stopped fidgeting and stared at her with his mouth open, like a baby. Cynthia felt herself starting to lose it again and went out into the corridor. Kay joined her out there about two minutes later.
“Is he all right?” Cynthia said, her voice shaking a little. “Did you give him anything?”
“He’s fine,” Kay said. “Just a little worked up. That happens. We try not to overdo it with the drugs.”
“It’s just, I don’t know what I did to set him off. He was looking for his shoes. It sounds so stupid. But that’s like the tenth time it happened. He was always kind of vain about his appearance. Maybe it’s you he wants to look all dapper for.”
Kay shook her head. “That’s not it,” she said, smoothing the front of her festive-looking uniform. “Believe it or not, that’s kind of a common one, the shoes. Or the coat, or the purse if they’re women. Had a lady in here just a few weeks ago who kept accusing me of stealing her hat.”
Cynthia looked at her, confused.
“They know,” Kay said. “On some le
vel. They know they’re about to go on a trip somewhere, and they need to get ready. Yeah,” she said, nodding at Cynthia as she started to cry again, “I know, right? You think it’s a metaphor or something until you’ve seen it a few times.”
In Dongguan they stayed in a Western-style hotel where everyone spoke English and the food was badly cooked but still recognizable and you got a strange, xeroxed version of The New York Times slipped under your door; but in the morning when they drove out to someplace called Changan, nothing outside the bubble of the car was the least bit familiar anymore. The foundation had built a new dormitory for the people who worked at some factory-it even had the Moreys’ name on it, supposedly-and so they were all going out to have a look. One of the bodyguards had told April this part of China was called the Pearl River Delta, but that had to be some kind of marketing term because it was the butt-ugliest place she’d ever seen in her life. Nothing but concrete and smoke and claustrophobia and a sky that had no hint of blue in it anywhere. The fact that every character on every sign she saw outside the hotel was completely incomprehensible to her made her feel like she was a baby. She kept trying to hold on to her contempt for all of it but in truth the sheer strangeness was so menacing that she sat with her arms folded the whole time just to keep from shaking. The driver offered three times to give her his coat.
Adam sat beside her in the back, reading that little photocopied Times from the hotel. Past his head she could see the bodyguard, whose motorcycle traveled with them everywhere. Why? Why did no one seem freaked out about that except her? Her father had had some kind of meeting that morning, he wouldn’t say with whom. Business, he’d said. The fund, not the foundation. Whatever the hell that meant.
