The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  Irene’s lips were pursed, and her face moved irregularly like a bobblehead.

  “I think our interests here actually coincide,” Cynthia said. “I would imagine that you, an older woman with no visible means of support, as they used to say, are thinking that your years of devotion to this fun guy with the rich daughter, if you can hang in there until the end, deserve some recompense.”

  “I beg your-”

  “And I,” Cynthia went on, “I would like you to go away and let me have this little bit of time alone with him. I would like that very much. I feel like I can see a way for these desires to dovetail nicely. Can you?”

  Irene’s face had gone bright red.

  “It’s not about you,” Cynthia said. “You seem like a nice enough person.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “I mean, I don’t want to be rude.”

  “If not now, when?” Cynthia said.

  “He abandoned you,” Irene said, and then put her hand over her mouth. “I know that he was a terrible, terrible father to you. He knows it too. And he took your money. All those years. He never asked for it, but he could have refused it. He should have.”

  “Au contraire. He could have had anything he asked me for.”

  “I wasn’t even sure you’d come down here,” Irene said. “I really wasn’t. He said you would, but I thought that was just the way he wanted to see things. And yet you seem so in denial about it all-”

  “You had fun with him, didn’t you? I can tell. It’s sad when the fun comes to an end. Somewhere in the world a woman learns that lesson every day.”

  Irene closed her eyes. “I’m just trying,” she said, “to honor his wishes. I’m just trying to do what’s right. Money has never even occurred to me.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s true. Let it occur to you now. You honored his wishes. That part is done. I’m asking you to honor my wishes now.”

  She began eating. It seemed as if even Irene’s hair had started to come undone as they sat there at the table, as if she were riding in a convertible or sitting uncomfortably on a boat. Into her eyes came the glaze of the rest of her life. Cynthia knew her father well enough to know exactly what he had meant to this poor woman, all the high spirits, all the promise, all the purpose implicit in taking care of someone who expected to be taken care of. But now he was on his deathbed and there were no more high spirits for Irene. Abruptly her mouth fell open, and she emitted a laugh that was more like a bark; she shrugged, with her hands in the air, and shook her head as though denying that she was even the person saying what she was about to say.

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

  “Done,” Cynthia said. She reached for a napkin and pulled a pen out of her bag. “I’m going to give you a number to call. Call it tomorrow. There’ll be something for you to sign as well.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Cynthia was about to insist, as she knew she should have, but something in Irene’s face advocated for mercy. Instead she looked down at the table and spun the syrups meditatively. “God, this is decadent,” she said. “Do people down here really eat like this? Boysenberry syrup? Well, okay, what the hell. When in Podunk.”

  “Do you,” Irene said, and then closed her eyes and put her head in her hand. “Do you need a ride back to the hospice?”

  “That is very kind of you,” Cynthia said, reaching for her cell phone. “But no.”

  When Jonas’s cell phone began ringing more insistently, Novak, who could not figure out how to turn it off, came up with a novel solution: he walked briskly into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. Jonas saw it when he went in there. He was allowed, it seemed, to get up from the couch-nothing but fear restrained him-though whenever he did, Novak would stop drawing and stare at him, inscrutably, like a cat, until he was back in his seat again. Jonas was left unsure whether his status was that of a prisoner or hostage of some kind or whether he was simply free to leave. Novak had already demonstrated how far he was willing to go to enforce his own sense of it, though, whatever that was, and Jonas didn’t really feel up to the risk of testing him again. At least not yet.

  One of the things that enervated him was the fact that he hadn’t eaten in-well, he didn’t know anymore how long he had been here. Along with the phone he had been relieved of his watch, though for some reason not his wallet or his car keys. The paper had been torn down from the windows but the shades were drawn. Novak had pulled a two-step ladder out of his bedroom, presumably for covering the parts of the wall too high for him to reach, and Jonas thought maybe that would be the time to break for the door, but he hadn’t seen him use it yet. The food from Arby’s had been sitting in the kitchen long enough to contribute to the rank, maddening airlessness, which was almost enough by itself to put you back to sleep.

  Novak worked without stopping but he didn’t work particularly fast. Jonas decided, maybe too dramatically, that whatever was going to happen to him would happen once the wall drawing was finished. Of course there were other walls to fill, though filling them would require moving the furniture again. There was no look of rapture or emotion on Novak’s face as he drew; just concentration, that was all. As for what he was drawing, it was just another reconfiguration of the same shit he always drew; it was obsessive and incomprehensible and conveyed nothing, which would once have presented itself as a virtue but was frustrating now that there was something Jonas actually wanted to know. Novak’s mural was no sort of key or portal to anything. And drawing pictures didn’t seem to liberate him from his inner misery at all. If anything he looked grayer and more haggard than he had when Jonas first arrived. It was all one burden, a huge burden, but one for which Jonas had lost all capacity for empathy or even interest. It would not admit him. For the life of him he couldn’t remember why he had been so excited about coming here.

  Out of nowhere there were footsteps on the stairs outside Novak’s door, and then a knock, not a friendly one. Jonas’s head lifted up like a dog’s, but Novak did not even react. His fingertips were completely browned by Sharpie ink of all colors. “Joseph?” a woman’s voice called. He went about his business, not responding but not making any effort to be silent either. “Joseph?” More knocking. “Joseph, if you are in there, I have warned you about taking garbage out. I know you don’t like to do it but you have to. I can smell it from all the way down on the sidewalk. Do you hear me?”

  Novak may or may not have needed glasses but he worked with his nose almost touching the surface on which he drew. He was working now, in green, on one of the square, blank-screened, rabbit-eared TVs he favored. This particular one sat on the roof of a gas station.

  “By tonight,” the woman said. “By tonight or I am calling your brother.” The footsteps receded.

  Use your key, Jonas yelled in his head, use your fucking key, you idiot, and then, cursing himself for his cowardice, he jumped up and ran for the door. Just as quickly, Novak dropped his pens on the floor and cut Jonas off, just by standing between him and the exit. Jonas stopped and put his hands up in front of him, his head pounding. Novak’s leg started to shake. Tears came into his eyes. “Just please be still,” he said. “Just be still. Unless you have to pee or something, and then just use the bathroom. This isn’t my fault, you know. You think you’re so smart but you’re stupid. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now?”

  What exactly was she hoping might still happen? She was desperate that he not die, that was true, and she knew there was something shameful about that feeling because of its obvious defiance of what he wanted, back when he could want anything. She would never have admitted out loud to anyone how much she needed him to stay alive. But that wasn’t because there was something she had to have from him before he went. It was more that she couldn’t imagine herself in the world without him somewhere in it too. He was the living rebuke to whatever other people may have said or thought about his selfishness, his delinquency,
his supposed mistreatment of her, because his adoration of her was no fake, no pose. He knew how to do it, and to make her feel it, from afar. He believed in her self-sufficiency. She adored him too. Everything was good between them, but she needed him alive in order to prove that.

  So as bad off as he was, it was agony for her to watch him slip even farther. In his sleep his breathing degraded into a terrible sort of rasp: she’d heard the phrase “death rattle” before and at first assumed that this was it, but then maybe not, because he woke up again. He hadn’t spoken in a day. She took over from the nurse the task of balming his lips, which were cracked all the time, because he no longer had the wherewithal even to lick them.

  Still, when she would start awake in the chair by the head of his bed, or when she would rush in from the veranda overlooking the phony lake because she thought she’d heard a noise, she tortured herself with the thought that he had said something and she’d missed it.

  She stopped going back to the hotel. She called the front desk to make sure Herman would continue on a 24/7 retainer, with whatever increase in pay that necessitated. It was silly but without Herman she was cut off from everything else she knew. She had no idea where the hell she was. On the other hand, maybe Marilyn the nurse could give her a ride somewhere if she needed it. Maybe they’d even have to stop off at Marilyn’s home first, on their way to wherever they were going, so Cynthia might get a glimpse of how such people lived.

  Time had shrunk down to the point where its only unit of measure was each irregular breath. One night, or day, she woke up in the chair and found him staring right at her. “Sinbad?” he said. His skin was drawn taut around his skull, but the film that seemed to lay across his eyes most of the time was gone.

  She sat forward. He seemed a little sweaty; she dampened the washcloth and gently patted his forehead, his temples, his cheeks. “That’s nice,” he said clearly.

  Bright institutional light slanted in from the open doorway; only by looking through the half-closed louvers could she see that it was dawn. Unless that was dusk. Either way, it cast the empty lake and the man-made berm beyond it in shades of the same blue.

  “Don’t cry,” her father said. But she wasn’t crying. She even put her fingers to her face to make sure. “I’m not crying, Dad,” she said to him, and smiled.

  “There, there,” he said. He was looking right at her. “Take it easy. I’m right here.”

  Why should her first reaction, when he would stray like this, be to try to correct him, to bring him back into the moment? What difference did it make anymore, as long as he wasn’t mad or agitated or looking for the goddamn shoes he was never going to put on again?

  “Okay, Dad,” she said. “Thanks. I feel better now.”

  “Good. We probably have to get to the church pretty soon. Don’t we?”

  Cynthia felt his delusion pulling at her like a drowning person might pull at your ankle from under the water. What was it? He couldn’t possibly be talking about his own funeral?

  “What time is it?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, but she couldn’t be sure he saw, so she cleared her throat and spoke. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, with a bit of a rasp now, “I’m sure we have a few minutes. They can’t very well start without us, can they?”

  She held the cup to his mouth and he took a sip of water. Some of it ran down his cheek, and she reached out and stopped it with her fingers before it reached the pillow.

  The way to stay with him, if you didn’t understand exactly where he’d gone, was to eliminate the backdrop of time and place, forget about it, let it fade away, so that it was just the two of you standing against a blankness. So that there was only the present. This was what the two of them knew that no one else had ever understood. Everyone always wanted to know how she could forgive him, but forgiveness was a false premise. The whole idea of forgiveness presumed you were locked in the past and trying to let yourself out. She wasn’t going to drag him back in that direction, to make him explain why he’d lived as he’d lived. That wasn’t who they were. Each moment bore only on the next one and if you were going to be successful in this life, that was the plane on which you had to live. If you started going on your knees to the past, demanding something from it that it hadn’t given you the first time around, you were dead. She asked for nothing from it. Neither did he. She was proud of his lifelong refusal to give in to the pathetic narcissism of depression or remorse. He had done what he had done and there was no changing it. There was no going back. She leaned over until her mouth was close to his ear.

  “I’m so tired,” she said. “Is it okay if I lie down with you here while we’re waiting?”

  He stared at her, every muscle in his face gone slack; his left hand spasmed a bit, and she recognized that what he was trying to do, or thought he was doing, was patting the bed beside him.

  She still didn’t know how those rails worked, so she had to climb over as if it were a fence and drop down beside him as gently as she could. She curled up with her back to him on top of the comforter, which didn’t smell that great, and listened to his even, shallow breathing. She didn’t move; he was so frail that she was afraid of hurting him. “This is your day,” she heard him say. “It’s all in front of you. What a gift to be young.” Some hours later she felt a hand on her shoulder; it was a nurse, one she hadn’t seen before, trying to wake her as gently as possible, and before she had even lifted her head she could tell from the look on the woman’s face that her father, whose weight she could still feel on the bed behind her, was gone.

  What had he come here looking for? It was all forgotten now. He had a vision of himself trying to explain all this to someone-what he was doing there in the first place, what he had expected to find, and not to Nikki or Agnew either but to a total stranger who didn’t know who he was-and he felt nothing but that stranger’s disgust for the folly of it. It was all so trumped up. He had invented it for himself. It was like there was no actual heart of darkness anymore and so he had to go and build one up out of nothing, and he had done such a good job of it that maybe now he was really going to die here and wind up as just another element of the overpowering stench in which Novak somehow managed to live.

  And where was that Stockholm-syndrome thing you heard about? All he felt for Novak-whom he had romanticized into a figure who suffered for his art and for his noncompliance with the jaded world and its corrosive history-was an instinctive homicidal hatred, as he would for an animal that threatened him. The guy was balls-out insane and that was all there was to it: what difference did it make, to him or to anyone else, if his drawings hung in museums or if he just drew with his own shit on the walls of some madhouse?

  Novak mumbled to himself as he worked. The wall was about eight feet by eleven feet. Like a giant piece of paper, was maybe how it presented itself to him. He covered every inch of it. Horror vacui-the phrase popped into Jonas’s head, a phrase he’d once had to ID on the final in Agnew’s Art Brut class. The wall was turning into a landscape of sorts, a flat, dimensionless one, full of those same gas stations and dead TVs: whatever it was he was trying to say with those few icons, he was apparently never going to get it said. A river ran across the picture, or maybe more of a canal, since it flowed straight as a board from one side of the wall to the other. A road made of water. All kinds of people and detritus were borne along in it, some aboard rafts or boats, some swimming or maybe drowning-the ambiguous open mouths of everyone in the picture made it impossible to tell. Novak worked the way a house painter might work, strictly in terms of space, from left to right; no figure seemed more important or more difficult to him than any other. It might have been his masterpiece; at the very least it was going to get him evicted. The strongest feeling Jonas could work up about it was fear of what would happen when it was finished.

  A definite knot had formed on the back of his head, right where his skull met his neck. He had touched it so often he couldn’t tell if it was still g
rowing. Maybe it was life-threatening. He was quite sure he’d suffered a concussion at the very least: he felt like sleeping, he was not at all confident that he knew how long he’d been there, he had a headache like he’d never had before, which the blazing lights just made worse. He’d lived his whole life without ever being seriously hurt: that couldn’t be right, it seemed to him, it was too ludicrous, and yet he tried in vain to think of another time in his childhood when anything like this had happened. And just like that, there it was: the Stockholm thing, the point of identification with your captor. His whole life is stunted, Jonas thought; it has not conditioned him to survive even one day outside his own front door. Neither has mine.

  His mind drifted a bit and then suddenly he was aware that Novak was lying prone on the floor, working on the last bit of white space on the wall, the lower right corner. Except he didn’t seem to be working at the moment. There was a green Sharpie still between his fingers, and Jonas waited and waited, trying to quiet his own breath, until finally the Sharpie rolled out of Novak’s hand onto the floor.

  “Joseph?” he said softly. Jonas couldn’t see his face, but it made sense, certainly, that he might have been asleep. As far as Jonas knew, he hadn’t slept the whole time they’d been together, however long that was. Nor had he seen Novak take any kind of pill. Pills must have been a significant part of his regular, solitary life. Who knew how that would affect him physically. “Joseph,” he said again.