He hadn’t been running things; he’d been run. He did his father’s taxes. He hired his father’s gardener. If only to service his father’s vanity, he kept the retired medical researcher’s AMA membership paid up. He ordered his father a crate of ruby-red grapefruits from Florida every Christmas. He’d put his own personal life and career on hold, while his siblings got off with rare, distracted Skype chats. For all his manly biceps, Peter remained the little boy in that first-grade photo: meek.
Arriving at terminal five by 7:05 p.m. was little short of a miracle. He had twenty-five minutes before the flight would board, and he’d checked in online. Rolling only carry-on, Peter should squeak onto the flight, just. It all depended on security.
The line wasn’t bad; February wasn’t a month for heavy travel. He made a futile effort to repress his compulsive incredulity that every day millions of people were forced to go through this elaborate tedium of queuing, disrobing, and being X-rayed because of the freakishly high likelihood—any likelihood being freakishly high—that passengers will blow up their own planes. (Don’t say “blow up.” Not even in a mumble.) In other walks of life, the same assumptions about humanity’s poor sense of self-preservation would dictate tall fences along every curb, lest pedestrians hurl themselves en masse into oncoming traffic. Or you wouldn’t even allow such a thing as cars, lest drivers plow blindly into concrete stanchions the moment your back was turned.
Enough. For the rest of this journey, he should focus on its purpose. False alarms had inured him to this errand, but this time it was pneumonia—or “ammonia,” as Dod had croaked on the phone, one of the several recent slips. If by now he might find in his father’s passing an element of relief, ample time remained to admit as much in the years to come. Just now, he should prepare for grief.
In a line full of seasoned fliers, there’s always one moron who waits until the last minute to pull all the crap from his luggage and holds everyone up.
Before he’d any firsthand experience of the parental fade to black, Peter would have imagined a softening, a rounding of edges, on the part of both parent and erstwhile child—as if both parties were scoops of ice cream placed for a benedictory moment in the sun, and all the rumples, ridges, and rills smoothed to leave uniform balls of benevolence. To the contrary, the aged seemed to seize only more stiffly into who and what they had always been—their rumples got bumpier, their ridges peaked, their rills ran deeper—so that if you could compare them to ice cream, it was more to the sort so hard that you couldn’t ram a spoon into the carton. Into his dotage ever more vainglorious, Dod was bafflingly unembarrassed by neighbors bringing pies, church congregants doing his grocery shopping, and volunteers from age-related charities replacing the rotten floorboards on his porch. He took the obeisance as his due. These many gestures would have constituted karmic goes-around-comes-around had the imperious codger ever done for others himself, but Daniel Dimmock had never in his life run chores for the elderly, much less baked anyone a pie.
More disconcertingly still, far from “softening” himself, far from gaining a sense of perspective on a father’s minor failings, which he might soon recall with a backhanded tenderness, ever since intuiting during yesterday’s phone call from Raleigh that this time his father wasn’t planning an encore, Peter had flushed with waves of rage. It was as if in the next day or two he had to fit in all the pique he’d suppressed for decades, because once his father was dead there’d be nothing to do with it—the way you scurry about duty-free spending the last of your foreign coinage on chocolate. There wasn’t any earthly point to fuming at a corpse.
Given that he had been through this dash to bid farewell several times, with its customary saying of last things, it would seem unlikely that there were any last things left to say. Nevertheless, Peter’s head roiled with speeches, and they resembled nothing like, Father, you’ve set such a fine example of a life well lived, and Esther, Luke, and I have always been grateful to enjoy such an accomplished, brilliant, distinguished, formidable … WHATEVER, since the one thing that fathead didn’t need was another compliment! Instead, Peter pictured railing at his father’s bedside, How come you think you’re so special? You never batted an eye at the hours and hours I spent—days, weeks even—arranging for your whole ground floor to be wheelchair-ramped in preparation for your return home with that hip, and getting the master bathroom ripped out, railed, and installed with a roll-in shower. I still have a life, or I did—I have kids who are young adults and need my counsel, but no! I have to fly back to RALEIGH.
“Sir—you’re up,” nudged the woman behind him, not unkindly.
“Oh, sorry!” Peter placed a premium on competent air travel, and hurried to remove his tablet, per usual providing the iPad its own separate, giant gray tray. He fished out his cell, change, and keys. He removed his overcoat, folding his sports jacket neatly beside it. Though its modest buckle shouldn’t have set off the detector, he slid his belt through the loops, and nestled it by the coats in a tidy coil. From the same prudence, he unstrapped his slender watch. He tugged off his shoes, ruing the second-day socks. He pulled out his Ziploc, no larger than one-quart size, containing shampoo, deodorant, and toothpaste, no more than three point four ounces or one hundred milliliters, making sure to put the baggie, in accordance with the standard specifications, on top of his overcoat, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE STUPID BAGGIE IS GOING INTO A GODDAMNED X-RAY.
Okay, yes, true—during this calm, methodic execution of his duties as a responsible flier, who completely understood that all these precautionary imperatives were contrived only for the safety of himself and his fellow passengers, he did feel a teensy-weensy twinge of irritation. The liquids protocol was inane. It had been roundly demonstrated that determined malefactors could concoct a successful science fair project with miniatures. Worse, the tiny bottles so consumed TSA agents, who took a malicious pleasure in confiscating costly moisturizers of three point five ounces, that they forgot entirely to look for detonators wired to big wads of Semtex. That was why the agency finally lifted the ban on cigarette lighters in carry-on luggage. In test runs, its officers had found the lighters all right, veritably every one, but had left the guns.
Peter scanned the signage—no sharp objects, explosives, or firearms—to confirm he’d been fully compliant. It was a creepy word, beloved of authorities everywhere, who treasured its ambience of simpering eagerness to please, spineless groveling, wormlike subservience, and pants-wetting terror. Compliance admitted of no resistance; if you pictured the word as a thing, it was floppy and flaccid and on the floor.
Raising a hand to the folks behind him in apology that he hadn’t initiated this striptease in more advance, Peter rushed his four plastic trays down the rollers, while opposite a languid TSA agent with bright green nails looked on sullenly, blah-blahing in a monotone about liquids and gels. Once the last tray got traction on the rubber belt, he gave his pockets a nervous extra pat for a nail clipper or stray quarter. Another agent waved him wordlessly to the scanner—the guy’s only job. Nice work if you could get it.
The curved clear plastic doors opened, à la Star Trek elevator—this whole clunky pod thing had that cheap, knocked-together look of a set for 1960s television—and he assumed the position, fitting his socks into the blobby footprints, lifting his arms in submission. He’d read in the Times a while back that these machines were rarely serviced, and the quantity of whatever carcinogenic rays they shot through you was frequently off the charts. For a short while thereafter he had insisted on being a “male opt-out,” delighting in putting staff to the extra trouble of a pat down. But the thrill wore off. They’d snap on latex gloves as if he carried some disease, clearly put out by this asshole who couldn’t get with the program, the while feigning all that respectfulness: “Now, I’m going to run only the back of my hand down your inseams.” At some point, a bubbly TSA officer had assured him that all those old health concerns had been seen to, and now Advanced Imaging Technology was perfectly safe. He had no reason
to believe her. Yet from laziness, as well as resignation, because in the end the tyrants of antiterrorism would always triumph, ever since he’d been compliant.
You know, I finally looked up the Dimmock Shunt online—Peter’s bedside tirade had meanwhile resumed—and it turns out that nobody uses it anymore! So you did your part for renal medicine back in the day—a day over fifty years ago—what of it? Esther learned Chinese. CEOs of massive American companies ask your daughter for her advice. Esther is important. Luke is on TV. For that matter, why was it always so important to you to be important? Me, I may not have changed history or pulled in big bucks, but at least I have a feel for other people, don’t I? Since it’s hardly a surprise that as an MD you never worked with flesh-and-blood patients, more “drooling imbeciles” you might actually have had to talk to. And my clients like me, believe it or not—and they get better, they learn to speak more clearly, they remember more words or get them out without sputtering, and afterwards they’re thankful—
“Over here, sir.”
“What?”
The African American agent who issued him off to the side would not have looked nearly as fat if her pants weren’t so tight. Their waist bit at an unflattering point, cutting under rather than containing her stomach. The uninflected flatness of her voice reminded Peter of his “subtle” acting in college. Had his mind not been clamorous with that saying of last things, he might have noticed: perhaps far enough into her shift that the time had started to drag, yet not so advanced into her workday as to be buoyed by the proximity of its conclusion, this youngish federal employee exuded the kind of boredom that is dangerous.
“Raise your arms, sir?”
Peter was stymied. He’d taken out his tablet, removed his coats and shoes and change and keys, put his dinky toiletries in that insipid baggie, surrendered in stocking feet in their unconvincing plastic pod, and now there was still more procedure, more insincere suspicion, more Mother May I. Fair enough, he duly thrust out his arms on either side, as if to do that minute arm-circle exercise that looked lame but made your shoulders ache like a bastard. Yet he also allowed himself to say aloud, along with the suggestion of an eye roll, albeit brief and certainly not overdone, “Oh, for pity’s sake.”
And that was a big mistake.
For two reasons, the first being obvious, since the cardinal rule of air travel was Keep Your Head Down. It was as if he’d barely survived a mass murder, and had been lying motionless amid the bodies. But rather than continue to play dead, in emitting Oh, for pity’s sake, he had effectively jumped up and shouted, “Wait! Over here! You missed one!”
The second reason Peter knew the grumble would prove a grave misjudgment was neurological: it connected mind with mouth. At airport security, your sole protection from capricious persecution, arbitrary search and seizure, and indefinite detention without charge was the privacy of your head. An eternal infuriation for enforcers of every sort, a riot of apostasy, sedition, and mutinous insult—your pants make you look fat—was more than possible to entertain with disgraceful impunity just so long as these unacceptable sentiments were hermetically contained between ear, right, and ear, left. But to continue to provide a bouncy castle where a host of emotions lethal in the open air—disgust, contempt, derision—could imperviously leap, carouse, and interplay, this small, rounded safe house couldn’t have any holes. Where the brain most commonly sprang a leak was around the upper and lower jaws.
With a warning glare after that for pity’s sake impertinence, the TSA agent began tracing his spread legs and outstretched arms with a black plastic wand, which like all their other kit looked phony. It recalled those IED-divining gizmos some shyster had sold to the Iraqi army, in which its soldiers continued to place a superstitious faith at checkpoints even after the implement had been exposed as containing nothing but an unactivated credit card.
Alas, once mind was fatally connected with mouth, it was the dickens to close the valve. So the self-preservational part of Peter—which kept him from, say, hurling himself into traffic—tried frantically to summon his mental plumbers: Hurry, this is an emergency, I need to shut the fuck up. But until his cranial tradesmen answered the call, the back-sass percolating through his skull would dribble right into terminal five.
“But I already took out all the coins, the keys,” Peter objected, his tone perhaps not overtly hostile but certainly a tad testy, when it should have been obliging, obsequious, sniveling even, and a far better line of attack would have run something like, I’m so sorry, Officer, I seem to have made some grievous error that is all my fault, and I deeply regret putting you to any unnecessary extra trouble.
“This scanner isn’t a metal detector,” she droned.
Which he knew, really, he supposed, he hadn’t been focused, and getting that wrong was flustering, vexation being the very antithesis of what was required: perfect self-control. So when she ordered, “Empty your pockets, sir”—there was no please—he didn’t say, Oh, yes, certainly, sorry, whatever did I forget about? Why, you poor officers, you must get so tired of us scatterbrained passengers never getting the procedure right no matter how many times we go through this, but:
“I did everything I was supposed to. If on top of the iPad and the shoes and the coats, the keys and the change and the belts, you’re also supposed to completely and utterly empty all your pockets of absolutely everything—down to the fluff, and the threads, and the grit—the signs, or at least one of the officers out front, should have said so.”
In concert with this inadvisable disquisition, Peter was indeed emptying his pockets; he was complying. But within reach, there was no table or surface of any sort on which to pile what little he could scrounge from his jeans: a crumple of dollar bills; a used tissue; a plastic unbreakable comb, bent by the curve of his buttock; in the watch pocket, perhaps having gone through the wash, an individually wrapped, long-forgotten cool-blue mint, soft and turning white; a to-do list (“take out trash”; “check in online”; “pick up and freeze small Junior’s cheesecake for Dod, even if he won’t live to eat it”); two tablets of Tylenol in a scrap of Saran Wrap in case of a headache now a virtual certainty. So he put the detritus on the floor. Since there really was nowhere else to put the stuff, the functionary might plausibly have forgiven his depository of choice, if only he had stooped to display these miserable wares in a suitably cringing spirit. While he certainly wasn’t acting cowed, Peter would still have characterized himself as merely “placing” these offerings at the official’s feet. Yet perhaps an observer who described him instead as “slamming” the wad of singles onto the linoleum would have been exaggerating only by an increment or two.
Her boredom moderated by a hint of relish, the plump overseer cried, “Supervisor!”
Just then, Peter made a connection between a last lump at the very bottom of his right front pocket and the scanner’s output screen—on which a bland outline of a figure in a posture of surrender was accented by a single red spot on one thigh, like a child’s representation of a boo-boo. His fingers closed around the source of this nonsense: a ChapStick. That was the boo-boo.
By the time the supervisor showed up—a swaggering thirtyish black guy in dreadlocks; oh, great, this encounter had every capacity to escalate into a race matter—Peter had placed the offending item amid the sad little pile of paper and plastic wrap on the floor, which looked so like trash that next he’d be accused of littering. He’d resumed his feet-spread stance and—because, after all, he had never been given permission to put them back down—thrust his arms back out, fingers outstretched, once again in seeming preparation for arm circles.
“You got a problem, mister?” the supervisor challenged, coming an intimidating inch or so too close. “You gonna be my problem?”
“No, sir,” Peter said, jutting his chin but not in the man’s direction. Avoiding the superior’s gaze, he trained his own at a forty-five degree angle to the agent’s face. Absurdly, he kept his arms extended. Bend-over-backward obedience could d
ouble as defiance. “I’ve done everything that was asked of me, sir.”
“You gonna pick that stuff up off the floor?”
“Yes, sir. If you say so, sir. But I was ordered to take everything out of my pockets, sir.” Peter had seen enough boot-camp movies to bark rigidly at attention like a green recruit.
“You in my house,” the man purred, taking another half step into Peter’s personal space. “Don’t disrespect me in my house.”
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