The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  (Sung by a chorus of doctors)

  The white one just might help you,

  Though it makes your heart beat fast

  And it makes your tongue feel sandy

  And your eyes feel hard as glass.

  So there’s clanging in your left ear

  And a buzzing in your right—

  If you overlook the symptoms

  It will help you sleep all night.

  Tra-la!

  Or you could try the blue one,

  If you don’t care how you look,

  If you don’t mind tiny blisters

  Filled with icky greenish gook

  That will start out on your stomach

  And then overrun your skin.

  Anyway, you don’t get out much—

  So you won’t mind staying in.

  Tra-la!

  This new one’s just the ticket.

  Just ignore the gloomy press.

  Those stories are all nonsense

  Placed by nuts seeking redress.

  Yes, one patient shot his family,

  But that doesn’t happen much—

  We know other patients like it,

  And that’s good enough for us.

  Tra-la!

  This red one is a killer.

  You’ll feel like a brand-new man,

  If you don’t mind weird sensations

  In your procreative gland.

  Call my cell phone if it stiffens

  And you can’t get it to bend—

  You’ll be rushed back with a siren

  And you’ll never shtup again.

  Tra-la!

  Tra-la, la, la, la!

  That will be one hundred twenty-five dollars, please.

  “Oh, that’s funny, Billy,” Mom says.

  TRICK OR TREATMENT

  “Your father and I have just finished discussing his options,” Mom says. “We feel fortunate to have skirted what was obviously a medical disaster in the making.”

  Uncle Marty talked Dad into watching a college basketball game with him in the den. From the other end of the house we can hear Marty shouting. He has a bundle of money on the game.

  “At this point we’re going to change our strategy. We’re going to do what I initially thought we should have done, and that is to care for him on our own. From this point your father is going medication free, and his symptoms, including the bizarre sleep disturbance, will have a chance to subside.

  “Our home routines will be different for a while. I spoke to Dad’s office and they’re extending his medical leave. We expect it won’t be a long one once he recovers from the medications. I’m going to change my work schedule”—Mom’s voice breaks, and she stares at Triumph until she’s calm again—“to half-time, from two thirty in the afternoon until six. That will allow us to provide Dad with continuous care throughout the day. Billy, you will come home directly after school so that you can take over from me at two fifteen. It would be best if you and I can overlap for a few minutes before I leave, in case there’s anything we need to go over.

  “I know how scary it’s been for both of you to see him this way. He told me he hates to have you see him like this. He never wanted to be someone you felt sorry for. He wanted to be someone you looked up to. He wouldn’t even want me to have this conversation with you. He wouldn’t even want me to tell you what I just said. But I did, so there it is.

  “Your father and I are going to need all your help to get through this time. Once it’s over…we’ll turn the page on this chapter and never look back again. What do you think about that?”

  Linda is flopped on my bed. “Of course, Mom,” she says. “We’ll do whatever it takes to get Dad well again.”

  Mom raises her eyebrows at me.

  I raise my eyebrows back.

  “You can go, Linda.”

  “Okay, Mom.” She kisses Mom on the way out.

  Mom stays in my desk chair. I’m down low this time in the beanbag.

  “What?” she asks, looking down at me.

  “I know you need me and everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “But—I’m coming home right after school?”

  “Yes.”

  “And staying here until six o’clock? Monday through Friday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Linda?”

  “What about her?”

  “Shouldn’t she come right home too?”

  Mom has a few ways of looking at people that make them shut up. One is to remove her reading glasses and place them on top of her head. She kind of combs the arm of the glasses slowly through her hair first in a way that can be scary. But this time it doesn’t work.

  “Shouldn’t she?”

  Mom shrugs.

  “You’re not going to answer me?”

  “You know she wants to help. But she can’t, really. She’s just too young. This is not the time to complain.”

  “Shouldn’t she get a chance to try? Maybe she’d turn out to be good at it. Better than me, even.”

  “Billy.”

  “Maybe she has a knack, or a special gift.”

  “Will you keep your voice down, please?”

  “Hey, I know.”

  “What?”

  “You could get her a little nurse’s uniform. Wouldn’t she look adorable in it?”

  “What is the matter with you? This isn’t the time.”

  What is the precisely calibrated bored look that says Mom’s judgment is so obviously wrong that everyone realizes it except her?

  “What if I want to do something after school?”

  “You have important plans?”

  “That’s neither here nor there. What if I did have them?”

  “This isn’t forever. It’s just for a few weeks. Until he’s over it.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “I’m not giving you a choice.”

  “All right, then, I guess I won’t say no.”

  “It’s only for a few weeks.”

  “A few weeks. All right.”

  After Mom leaves, I take her spot at the desk. Inside the desk is a Hohner Special 20 harmonica Grandma Pearl got me. I had asked for it, in fact, but it’s still sealed in the package with the instruction book. Had I ever learned to play it, I would create an ugly sound at a special decibel level only Mom could hear, letting her know I will never be her orderly.

  BATTLESHIP

  I’ve been playing Battleship with Dad. Somehow, he always ends up looking for my Destroyer last.

  The Destroyer is the very smallest of five boats—it occupies only two spaces on the game board—and so it can be hidden anywhere. Dad seems to have guessed a hundred times, systematically, all over the board. In fact, he seems to be creating a scientific net of guesses to throw over the grid and ensnare my Destroyer. I can see his web of guesses spreading over the grid, from A1 way up in the lefthand corner, seeping downward and outward over the transparent green plastic of my ocean and covering the four boats of mine that he has already sunk.

  Yet somehow he’s missed D9.

  In the meantime I’m just as systematically trying to avoid sinking his last boat, the massive, five-space Aircraft Carrier. I’m doing a kind of hot-coals dance around the perimeter of the only five spaces where his Aircraft Carrier can possibly be. I waste guesses. I guess some spaces twice, although Dad doesn’t seem to notice. But what I’m most occupied with is telepathic bulletins. As his guesses get quieter, more discouraged, and further apart, I stare down at the dinky little Destroyer stationed on D9 and 10 and I chant to myself, D9, D9.

  And Dad looks up and says, “C7?”

  Earlier we played Thousand Rummy. And just as on the previous days, Dad was the one to draw the ace of spades. If it was Gin, Thousand Rummy, or even Concentration, Dad would sit there in his pajamas (he sometimes wears his pajamas all day now), press his lips together decisively, and flip over a card…and there it would be.

  The ace of spades, the Death Card.
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br />   How can this keep happening? It’s getting so that we wait for the ace of spades. It seems to look for Dad. Since we stopped seeing Fritz and ended the medicines, a sense of doom sits over Dad like a mist.

  So there it is, Dad seems to say. He looks at the card like he’s been expecting it. He drops his head into his hands like a condemned man. The writing on the card, which seemed innocent before he got sick, seems to have turned into an ominous message.

  DEBONNAIRE, OLEET PLAYING CARD CO.,

  MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. “SUPERKOTED” ™

  What does this mean to Dad?

  The ace of spades stands on its unipod and stares my father down. It’s a heart upside down. It’s the opposite of a heart.

  POUNDS OF CURE

  Mom and I return to the house after a Saturday afternoon in the library.

  “Whatcha got there?” Marty asks. Dad trails him into the dining room.

  Each of us dumps a double armload of reading material on the table. I have nine books, including Affirmations in the Key of Health by Lillian Drakava; Make Up Your Mind: Self-Empowerment Through Mood Selection by R. Candelbaum, MD; Go for the Joy by Sybil Lucien-Simple, MSW; and a thinner one called Darkness Manifest by an award-winning novelist, as well as a stack of journal and magazine articles, some photocopied and some printed off the computer.

  On the way there, Mom said she was lucky, in this difficult time, to have a teenage son with my capacity for understanding human nature. I have to admit that it was strangely fun finding books that described what Dad was going through. There were almost too many matches to choose. When I asked the librarian how I could tell if a book was any good, he told me to look for letters after the person’s name. A shelf full of credentials—PhD, EdD, LICSW, and DDiv—cleared its throat at me, but I chose some authors with no letters, like the novelist (ultrasad eyes, extra neck skin), just because I liked their pictures.

  “You can tell a lot from their pictures,” Linda agrees, picking up books and flipping them over.

  The books in Mom’s stack include Feed Your Brain by Wilbert and Orralie Curtis, The Feel Good Vitamin Bible from the publishers of Feel Good magazine, and Peace Without Pills: How Eating Right Can Replace Costly and Potentially Harmful Psychotropic Medications by Evgenia Sutter, CNC. Behind the crinkly, scuffed plastic library covers, the smiling Curtises wear matching red-and-white checked shirts and hold out palmfuls of unprocessed grain. Evgenia Sutter has long brown hair and wears a white lab jacket with eyeglasses in the pocket.

  Some faces are like a hard pill. Others are more of a loose powder. One of them will be the cure for what ails Dad.

  AUTODIDACT

  Mom stays up late cramming information from her library books and articles. She reads paragraphs aloud, as if putting words in the air will pollinate Dad with a cure.

  Like most Americans, she says, she has always known the basics about proper nutrition without bothering to follow them. But now, like the cop or soldier in the movies whose buddy is killed, she announces, “This time, it’s personal.” She memorizes the foods and supplements that provide B vitamins 1 (thiamine), 2 (riboflavin), 3 (niacin), 6 (pyridoxine), and 12 (cyanocobalamin), as well as folic acid, inositol, vitamins C and E; crucial minerals such as calcium, chromium, magnesium, selenium, iron, iodine, and zinc; and the amino acids gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), S-adenosyl L-methionine (SAMe), serotonin, melatonin, L-tryptophan, 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), DL-phenylalanine (DLPA), trimethylglycine (TMG), omega-3 fatty acids, and tyrosine.

  These substances, Mom learns, improve brain function, restoring the moistness and flexibility of certain membranes and helping brain cells to manufacture the chemicals they need to keep the neurotransmitters signaling. But so many expert opinions, she tells us, are difficult to sort out. One book says that serotonin and melatonin are chemicals that the brain will produce after a body consumes the right combination of foods. In another book, melatonin and seratonin are capsules you can buy in the health food store. If both are true, where did the chemicals for the capsules come from? Mom shudders. Maybe she’s getting morbid because it’s so late (Dad is already in bed and listening to a talk show on the radio), but as I pass by her chair, she tells me her thoughts are taking a ghoulish turn. You hear about gravediggers and organ thieves. Is someone stealing brains and selling the chemicals from them?

  The experts in Mom’s books agree that someone with Dad’s symptoms should avoid coffee and cola, alcohol, sugar, and dairy products. But a major source of two crucial substances, calcium (helps to maintain a healthy central nervous system) and tyrosine (stimulates the brain’s production of norepinephrine), is cheese. Mom wonders aloud if she should give him cheese or not. Should she look for a special, nondairy cheese? Kosher cheese? And where would she find extract of Griffonia simplicifolia, an African plant (and source of 5-hydroxytryptophan)?

  And, Mom wants to know, what about Evgenia Sutter’s habit of saying “widely celebrated in Europe,” “available inexpensively in Europe,” and “exhaustively tested throughout Europe”? Have these chemicals been tested in America? Are they known by the same names here? Do they maybe have a “street name”?

  Mom tells me she fell asleep earlier this evening and had a nightmare that she was arrested for trying to procure Griffonia simplicifolia in a back alley. She describes the dream: A bus ride back to New York, the city she thought she had left for good. Returning just once more, for Dad’s sake. Walking late at night from playground to decrepit coffee shop to back alley. Looking over her shoulder whenever she hears a sound. She can’t find the right address, the city makes no sense. The layout of the city resembles Granada, Spain. Has New York really changed so much since she left? When she finds the place where the deal will go down, it’s an alley behind a deserted high-rise. A gaunt, shivering figure approaches and asks for the password.

  “Ignorance.”

  “No.”

  “Impotence.”

  “No.”

  “Hegemony?”

  “No.”

  “Fluoridization?”

  “Okay.”

  “How much?” she asks.

  “Two thousand,” he says. “Cash.” Mom has only twelve dollars. In the dream, she forgets that she can go to an ATM. She finds a knife in her pocket, Grandpa Eddie’s old fishing knife. The knife flashes under the streetlight, and a siren begins to wail.

  Hours later Mom’s reading lamp is still on.

  “Mom, go to bed. It’s the middle of the night. You’re asleep again.”

  “I never meant to cause any harm,” she says out loud.

  “It all seemed so simple,” she says.

  “Mom, you need to stop reading.”

  I shake her awake. The tip of her index finger is white where she has used it as a bookmark.

  LIGHT

  The four of us are playing Monopoly in the dining room when Uncle Marty struggles into the house with his arms around a box, walking it in on top of one shoe.

  “Good grief,” says Mom. Mom, Linda, and Dad crowd around him while I stabilize the game. Mom was winning.

  “You thought Christmas was over,” he tells the family, “but it’s not. A late Christmas gift for the lord of the manor—my big brother, Bill.”

  Even Dad is impressed. When Marty lays the mammoth gift in the center of the living room, Dad crouches over it to peel away the Christmas paper. Large block letters on the side of the box say VITA-LITE.

  “I can’t get the flaps open,” Dad says over his shoulder.

  “I’ve got it, bro, no problem.” Marty borrows my pocket knife and pries off the heavy-duty staples.

  Dad removes several sheets of crumpled newsprint and slides out the light box. It’s about the size and depth of a small kitchen table. Marty pulls out the rear leg to stand it upright.

  “Thank you, Marty,” Dad says.

  “Don’t thank me yet. Wait till you see this.”

  Marty crawls under the Christmas tree, reaches for the outlet, and unplugs the holiday lights.


  “Oh, no!” Mom complains.

  “Mom,” Linda says, “it’s January eighteenth. It had to happen sooner or later.”

  “But it was so cheerful.” She drops into a seat in the conversation area.

  “Sorry, Adele,” Marty says. “But this thing uses a good flow of juice. I wouldn’t want you to short anything out.”

  Half the lights in the house pulse, then flicker. The part of the living room where Dad is gets flooded with white light, like a prison courtyard during an attempted break.

  “Aack,” Linda says, lifting an arm to shield her face.

  “I think it’s too strong,” Mom agrees.

  “But this could be just the thing for Bill,” Marty argues. “Don’t close your eyes, bro—open them. You have to have them open so it can act on your retinas.”

  “It’s going to blind him.”

  “No, it has to be strong in order to work. Look at him—I think he looks better already!”

  “That’s because he’s getting a tan,” says Linda.

  “Such a costly gift, Marty,” Mom says. “You must have spent several hundred dollars.” Normally Dad would have said something like this too. He was always warning Marty that his credit card balances were too high.

  “It’s just a way of saying thank you, Bill, for all the support you’ve given me this year, with everything I’ve gone through. I can honestly say that this has been the worst year of my life. Without you to talk to, I don’t think I would have made it.” He presses one eye with the back of his knuckles.

  Then he takes Dad by the elbow. “Sit down, bro, and I’ll tell you more about how it works. This unit runs at twenty thousand lux—that’s up to forty times the brightness of normal indoor light!”

  “What good does that do?” Linda asks.

  “You just sit in front of the light each morning—”

  “For how long?” Mom asks.

  “Up to about an hour—and the light travels up your optic nerve and basically tricks your brain into thinking it’s summer. The light tinkers with the chemicals in your brain, and you, you know, just stop being depressed. Everyone is happier in the summer and sadder in the winter. Haven’t you ever felt that way? Doesn’t it make sense?”