The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  A few months after we’d cleaned out my father’s trailer, I sat at the desk in my downstairs study and browsed several Web sites where, for a nominal fee, the visitor could search for information about his or her ancestry. The idea had been suggested by Lynn and Monica, who’d become so computer-savvy over the years, they referred to themselves as “techno-crones.” The two of them were of the opinion that a person couldn’t fully know herself unless she knew her history, which they had formerly called “herstory,” and which I currently called “mystery.” The number of ancestry sites surprised me; out of the initial dozens, Google yielded about eight pertinent hits. One site featured an animated American flag waving in the vacuum of cyberspace. Another droned a listless rendition of the National Anthem. Every site required the user to fill out a questionnaire. With no idea what the family name had been before it was changed, with no idea where in Russia my paternal grandparents had come from, I had scant information with which to conduct a search. I figured the best bet was to start with my father’s name and work as far backward as the database allowed. But first, I needed to make a short list of potential sites.

  When I opened my desk drawer for a pencil, I was flabbergasted to discover that Hell was gone. Its absence was alarming. Its absence was gigantic. Had I grown so blasé about the sight of flames leaping up every time I opened the drawer that I failed to notice their disappearance? I reached deep inside the drawer and, except for pencil shavings stuck to my palm, came up empty-handed. After systematically inspecting every other drawer in the desk, I ducked beneath it to rummage through the wastebasket and pat the shadowy floor around my feet. Could I have dropped the video or thrown it away by accident? I had no recollection of moving it to a different place, or any clue as to why I would have moved it, if in fact I had. Hell-fire isn’t easily overlooked, and it was troubling to think of myself as a person who could lose track of something so significant.

  Lapses of memory on this scale never failed to trigger panic; they marked me for my father’s fate, brought me closer to the chaos of his final days. Forgetfulness was untenable.

  I burrowed through a hutch in my study where I kept my health and car insurance records, stubs from utility bills and school paychecks, all meticulously filed away as a hedge against the day when bill collectors and repo men would track me down like wild game. As often happened when I scrambled to locate lost keys or a misplaced wallet, each dead end, each indication that the world refused to yield the missing object, only added fervor to my search. I ransacked the shelves, fanned accordian folders. Miscellany rained to floor. A videotape, I said to myself, doesn’t just get up and walk away!

  Seconds later (I had to reassemble the events of that night on the following day), I stood amid the papers scattered at my feet. Was I still at the trailer? I slumped into my desk chair. On the computer screen there blinked a long, very long, possibly endless list of people with the surname of Cooper. During a blip of lucidity, I realized I must have accessed an ancestry site with my credit card. I possessed just enough presence of mind to wonder how much I’d charged to my account. If one was charged on a per-name basis, I’d be broke by morning. It occurred to me that I should walk upstairs, wake Brian, and tell him that something strange was happening, but just as I gripped the armrests of the chair, my reason for standing evaporated.

  As I’d suspected in what seemed like a previous lifetime, both the names Edward and Cooper were too common to narrow the search, and so, with a couple of rubbery jabs at the keyboard, I typed in “1906” and hit return. Endless mutations swelled the ranks: Edward Coopersmith, Everet Coombs, Emma Koestenbaum, Ellen Kincade. Mutations of my father’s name were dredged from the nation’s telephone books, census reports, immigration records, ships’ manifests, and, for all I knew, from the data banks at the Library of Congress. As I scrolled down the page, half the population of America flew upward at a blinding rate.

  The rapid motion strained my eyes. I closed them for a moment and dimly remembered that Dr. Montrose had been kind enough to prescribe sleeping pills without my having to drive all the way out to Oxnard to meet with her. This memory was hitched to an even dimmer memory in which she warned me over the phone that one of the side effects of the drug might be a brief phase of amnesia. I wondered what she’d meant by brief, in the sense that I had no idea how long I’d been in this indefinable state of mind. My state of mind is often indefinable, and for a person accustomed to a fair degree of ambiguity, the equipoise between consciousness and dream didn’t, at first, seem strange.

  Returning from the pharmacy that morning, I’d uncapped the bottle and gazed longingly at the little cylindrical pills at the bottom, a spellbinding blue. Throughout the day, I’d imagined how deliciously soporific it was going to be when I finally popped one into my mouth: the tender weight of it on my tongue, the draft of tap water washing it back, peristaltic contractions coaxing it deeper and deeper into my stomach, where it would dissolve in a bath of gastric acid and saturate my bloodstream with one irrepressible message: Sleep. Which is another way of saying that I’d imagined taking the pill so often and with such vivid anticipation, I wasn’t sure if I actually had.

  For legal reasons, I’m not at liberty to give the name of the sleep aid or the pharmaceutical company that produces it. I can say, however, that the usual lullaby of brand names—Ambien, Restoril, Halcyon—doesn’t begin to describe the physical effect of the drug, which was like being whacked over the head with a velvet sledgehammer.

  When I willed my eyes to open, I looked across the room and saw, just beyond the door to my study, cracks in the wall of the stairwell. I hadn’t noticed them before, and I went to take a closer look. Paint flaked onto the stairs as I ran my hand along the plaster, and it seemed that only a slightly greater application of pressure would send the wall crumbling down around me. I was certain that the cracks had been caused by our automatic garage door opener, an antiquated mechanism whose rusty chain strained with effort and shook the house. Had I been wrong all these years to think that my father had gone overboard by suing his next-door neighbors because he believed the tremors from their garage door had damaged his living room walls? Or was I, like Dad, prone to focus on cracks in the plaster?

  Everything Brian and I had retrieved from my father’s trailer had been packed into cardboard boxes and stored in the garage; could I have put To Hell and Back with the rest of his stuff? I needed to get my hands on the tape right away, otherwise I’d lie awake all night and worry that, if I’d placed it in the garage and didn’t remember, I was turning into my father. If it wasn’t there, I’d also lie awake and worry that I was turning into my father. But wait! Insomnia was no longer a problem! I had sleeping pills! I trudged upstairs to the kitchen—the steps were steep and many—and tapped a pill from the bottle. As the pill dropped into the center of my palm, it triggered a wave of déjà vu. Not your average dawning of familiarity. I had déjà vu of having déjà vu of having déjà vu, followed by several et ceteras. I was lost in a loop of eternal return. I swallowed the pill.

  The garage door loomed before me, looking especially heavy and impenetrable until I realized I was holding the … the … clicker. I raised my arm, aimed, and clicked. I’d been eager to return home from work or errands many times since we’d lived in that house, but never had the sluggish opening of the garage door seemed as auspicious. The mechanism lifting the door was fitted with a light socket on a ten-minute timer, and the interior of the windowless garage, built into the hillside, blazed with light. I’d recently replaced its burnt-out lightbulb with the only unused bulb we had in the house, an amber bug light that, for reasons only entomologists know, repels insects. To human eyes, however, especially ones as dilated and sleep-deprived as mine, the light was anything but repellent. Our cars gleamed like mobile gold bricks. Exposed pipes were gold-plated. The walls were gold bullion stacked to the rafters. I’d discovered Eldorado in my own home, its gate rising before me and spilling twenty carats of light into the dark suburban str
eet. Cars parked along the curb were burnished. Every shrub and mailbox in sight was transmuted into precious metal.

  While standing unsteadily in the middle of the street and gazing straight ahead, I went to sleep on my feet. The next thing I knew, I lurched to attention, muscles clenched to prevent a fall. Awed all over again by the Midas light, I walked—no, was drawn—into the garage. Cardboard boxes were stacked against the back wall, a corner of my father’s jumpsuit sticking out from beneath a flap. It was the one article of his clothing I’d kept (Betty had given the rest away to a local charity, which, I later found out, was the Oxnard chapter of Benny Hinn Ministries). Its polyester was destined to outlast me, a synthetic blend so durable it could probably withstand Armageddon.

  I was opening one of the boxes when the gold air went black, tripped by the timer. Not so much as an afterimage tarnished the dark. Heat poured in through the open garage, but the summer night was moonless and the neighbors had long ago turned off their lights. I thrust up my arms to feel my way outside and struck my hand on the side of my car. It’s a good thing I dropped the clicker because the noise of shattering plastic woke me from another plunge toward sleep. The crickets nearby abruptly ceased. Then resumed in unison. Or else it was blood pulsing through my ears. I took another step and began to buckle. I crossed into another country where the body is seized like contraband. I landed softly, padded, it seemed, by my willingness to fall. The concrete floor felt cool against my cheek. The surface of the world was too hard for sleep, and yet I slept deeply. I dreamed I was my father, searching the dark for misplaced possessions, and though he sensed their presence nearby, he’d forgotten what he wanted, and why.

  Starless and immense, night was visible beyond the wooden joists of the roof. When I blinked away sleep, I realized I wasn’t looking into the sky after all, but at sheets of tar paper stapled to the ceiling. I’d fallen asleep in the narrow space between our cars. A glance right and left revealed dim glimpses of each car’s undercarriage and the zigzag tread of radial tires. I was like a man who wakes on a two-lane highway, grateful he hasn’t been flattened by traffic. My neck was stiff, feet tingling with pins and needles. It required concentration to lever myself into a sitting position. Once I was sitting, it required concentration to stay that way. Through the gaping garage door, I could make out the vague gray geometry of our neighbors’ houses and, less distinct still, houses rising on the hills behind them. It was dawn, what Sylvia Plath called “the blue hour,” a time before the city stirs, before silence drowns in the din of daily business.

  Perhaps I would have been more upset by my predicament had I not felt so rested. I hadn’t slept for long, but a brief reprieve from insomnia left the perpetually restless part of my brain (which is to say the entire cranium) refreshed and ready to get back to work. Overnight I’d become a neophyte of sleep, a convert to its cause. Brian probably dozed through the whole episode, and if I snuck back into bed now, he’d never guess I hadn’t slept beside him. It would have been a shame, though, not to take advantage of the early light and search for the video one last time. I got to my feet, brushed off the dust.

  What a relief when I spotted flames in one of the boxes! My neck and back relaxed. I grabbed the video and returned to the house, greeted by the sight of papers scattered over the floor of my study. It didn’t take long to remember rummaging through the hutch, not desperate to find the video so much as desperate not to lose it and, by extension, my mind. I was about to slip To Hell and Back into my desk drawer when I had to brace myself against the wall. This residual drowsiness promised a few more winks if I headed up to bed, but it also offered the ideal state in which to finally watch the video. I was alert enough to pay attention and padded with just enough pharmaceutical armor to brave a visit to hell by myself.

  I mounted the stairs. Slid the tape out of its sleeve and into the VCR. Adjusted the volume and lay back on the couch.

  The ministry’s logo spun on the screen: a white dove radiating spokes of light and perching upon a gold cross. The credits rolled to mournful organ music, though any little ditty played on an organ usually sounds like a dirge to me. What a shock when Dr. Rawlings parted the curtain and shuffled onto the set through clouds of dry ice! His shoulders were stooped and narrow. What had been the stern rock face of his features in the photograph wasn’t as nearly intimidating on video; the corners of his mouth sagged forlornly, the pouches beneath his eyes making him look preternaturally sleepy. Sleepier than me. He turned and faced the camera. The incinerating glare I’d braced for wasn’t much hotter than a ray of winter sun. “Good death experiences?” he asked. “They’re a dime a dozen. You never hear about the Hell experiences because the Hell experiences are embarrassing. It’s an F on your report card. A slap in the face.”

  I had to force myself to stay awake while each interviewee discussed losing his moral bearings and wandering down a wayward path (drinking, stealing, gambling, etc.) until an illness or accident temporarily ended his life and gave him a firsthand taste of Hades. “The only thing keeping me alive,” said one man, “was that I didn’t want to die.” Another prefaced his story with a tearful disclaimer, saying he was unable to divulge the ugly details of what Satan’s minions, who had fooled him by dressing in hospital scrubs, did to him once they lured him down a smoke-filled hallway. Then he proceeded to describe “tearing, biting, tearing, scratching, gouging, ripping, and biting.” Still another told of seeing both his mother and stepmother walking toward him, but their dresses had no pockets, and he remembered the phrase, You can’t take it with you.

  The five men who had returned from Hell were Caucasian and in their late fifties, leading one to conclude that either Hell’s population is suspiciously homogeneous or that these men were not a representative cross section of the damned. Notable too was their shared clairvoyance; they each claimed to have known, as they hurtled toward a fiery pit, the principal sin committed by the screaming souls they were about to join. In every case it was precisely the sin about which the interviewee himself was most troubled. So, Hell is hellish either because it’s a big roiling psychological projection or because it’s divided into Dantean sub-Hells such as Alcoholics’ Grotto or Fornicators’ Molten Core.

  Hell looked like—because it was—stock footage of rising flames. To represent each man’s journey to the underworld, he (or the actor who played his younger, unconverted self) was superimposed over flickering orange fire while twisting in torment. Special-effects-wise it was a mistake to show the same wall of flames over and over; with each repetition, it seemed less burning and unbearable, a condition one could gradually adapt to like the temperature of a hot tub.

  The tape was almost over and the sun was coming up. Light stretched across the carpet, defined the walls. The house slowly resolved around me, becoming, as it had every morning for seven years, a place I remembered from the night before. I could hear Brian, up for the day, brushing his teeth in the bathroom. He passed by the door, surprised to see me up so early.

  “I’m watching a documentary about hell,” I told him, nodding toward the TV.

  “Oh,” he yawned, “I wondered what you were up to.” Then he staggered off to make coffee.

  When I looked back at the TV, Dr. Rawlings had changed from his suit into a white coat. A stethoscope hung from his neck. “Once you’re dead,” he said, “there’s not a thing you can do about it. But God has given us the power to restart the heart and get the lungs working before clinical death sets in.” He made a distinction between resuscitation and resurrection, and as he did so, the camera pulled back to reveal a female mannequin that lay atop a gurney and stared insensibly toward heaven. The mannequin wore a red, white, and blue jogging suit, her ample blond hair shining like gossamer.

  “We said we’d show you how to start somebody’s heart up again, and you do it with your bare hands.” Dr. Rawlings looked at the mannequin and managed an expression of halfhearted alarm. “So, immediately, you see if she’s all right.” He cleared his throat and sh
outed, “Hey, lady! Did you faint?” Then into the camera, “Maybe she’s intoxicated and she’ll talk to you. Or she just bumped her head.” He walked toward the gurney without a hint of urgency. So calmly, in fact, I thought he’d walk right past it. He instructed the viewer to listen, look, and feel if her chest was moving.

  “If we can catch people before they die,” he said, “we give them the option of accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior. If they die like this”—he nodded toward the woman—“we don’t have to question where they went. But those that die on the street, where did they go?”

  At least hell’s got a fire to make the place homey. If you don’t believe in the afterlife, you can’t light a match, a candle, nothing! Or so my father—May he rest in peace—would have answered back.

  Dr. Rawlings pinched the mannequin’s nose between his thumb and forefinger and pried open the retractable jaw, exposing the scarlet cavity of the mouth. For all his medical training, he seemed a little squeamish about placing his lips over a strange woman’s mouth, even for educational purposes, even if she was inanimate. But once the doctor set his personal feelings aside, he bent over, inhaled mightily, and blew a gale of air into the patient. The chances of reviving a mannequin are slim, of course, however skillful the mouth-to-mouth, yet the utter futility of the task made it all the more heroic. Our host shifted his head this way and that until he and his subject were tightly sealed together, sharing an airway. The exhalation was a superhuman feat; Dr. Rawlings was like one of those opera singers who can hold a note for so long you start to wonder if their diaphragms are connected to an air hose. When his breath finally gave out, he pressed his fingers to the mannequin’s neck, said “Boom, boom, boom,” and leaped back into action. He pumped the chest with a vigor just shy of violence, the heels of his hands sinking into the springy sternum again and again. The mannequin’s running shoes jumped with every thrust.