A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak

by Molly O'Keefe

  She turned and started folding up the clothes. “Dad, you can’t live like this. You’re a mess.”

  “Leave those things alone,” he whispered. It hurt to watch those clothes handled with such disregard, even from Jennifer, who had wept so hard at the funeral she’d nearly caved in on herself.

  “I can’t stay long.” She continued to fold and stack Rosie’s clothes, the linen shirts and the blue jeans. Her good sweaters and the silk slips she slept in. She was going to put them in boxes, drop them off at some Goodwill or resale shop. Some stranger would consider buying Rosie’s favorite flannel shirt and then decide not to, without ever knowing how Rosie looked in her garden when she wore that shirt. How it smelled when she took it off at the end of the day—like grass and dirt and spaghetti sauce. “I’m on spring break, but I’ve been hired to teach piano lessons at the university, so I’ve got a week before I have to be at school. But you can’t…”

  “Leave those things alone!” he yelled, and Jennifer jerked, her lips, tight and trembling. The slips fell to the floor. “Don’t touch them. Don’t touch anything!”

  “Dad, I’m trying. I want to help.”

  “I don’t want your help.” Immediately he regretted yelling at her, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  Well, that wasn’t true, was it? He was an alcoholic with no reason left for sobriety. No wife to love, no ability to care for the daughter who hated him.

  Yes, he thought, there was always something he could do. He turned from the bedroom and stumbled down the stairs and through the kitchen to his chair. Back to the bottle and glass that were there.

  Behind him—his daughter, his precious baby—followed like a bull, snorting disapproval.

  “Dad, this is disgusting. You’re living in filth!” She kicked aside a dirty plate.

  His hands shook and half the bourbon spilled onto the chair and the floor.

  “How long have you been drinking?” she asked. “Since Mom died?” He didn’t answer, focused on getting the liquor into the glass. “Before that? When?”

  Since the day after the doctor’s appointment.

  He dropped the glass and just drank from the bottle. The burn and slide of the liquor chased away the sick shakiness.

  “Dad!”

  He ignored her. She yelled some more. She threw something at him and it glanced off his shoulder. But he stared into nothing and drank.

  It had just been a regular doctor’s appointment. A physical. She hadn’t been sick. Tired. Nothing. Healthy as a horse. But the blood work had shown something else, something dark and dangerous and advanced in her lungs and thyroid, and within seven months she’d been on life support.

  At some point Jennifer left. And Walter sat back down in his recliner and drank with hands that shook and eyes that would not stop watering.

  It had just been a damn physical.

  Walter floated, reeled. And then the earth was beneath his feet with a jerk and crash. He bumped into the hospital bed and then into the monitor. His heart pounded in his ears and he couldn’t get any air into his body.

  “Dad,” Jennifer whispered and fell into the chair beside the hospital bed. Walter swallowed and tried to find his center of gravity. His daughter was here.

  Get it together, Walter.

  “Dad. I’m so sorry.”

  Walter, clumsy and feeling too big in his own body, pushed himself between her and the bed and got down on his knees so he could see her face. “Sweetheart. Jenny.” Twenty years vanished and this was his daughter before him. His baby.

  She groaned and cried, muttering a constant apology.

  The boy reappeared with his phone. “I found her file,” he said. “She hasn’t spoken to you in twenty years. That must have been a hell of a fight.”

  “I started drinking again.” Those words sounded so innocent, so free of the desperate and ugly reality. Walter was smiling, the muscles in his face ached from the force with which he was joyful. “But she’s here. She’s come back.”

  He stroked his daughter’s face but she continued rocking with her guilt, unaware of him.

  Walter had stopped drinking six months after Jennifer’s visit, but it was too late. The porous remains of their relationship had evaporated. He’d reached out once, after being sober for a few months, but she’d been curt. Disbelieving. There was no way he could blame her and so he’d backed off. Gone back to the empty house and Beaverton and fiddled with his lawnmower, waiting to die.

  He got letters occasionally. A picture when she eloped. But that was all.

  Except now, it would seem. His daughter rocked back and forth, and finally reached out to grab his hand, the one attached to his earthly dead body.

  “You did the right thing with Mom, Dad. I’m sorry I blamed you for so long. And I’m sorry I didn’t try harder.” Her loud, thick voice was filled with endings, with doors shutting and opportunities gone. She took a deep breath, dropped his hand, and stood. “I should have tried harder, Dad.”

  She walked back to the door, wiping her eyes.

  “No,” he breathed. “No. Where are you going?”

  She opened the door and Walter turned on the boy. “Where is she going?”

  “She’s leaving. I don’t think she intends to spend the rest of the night beside your dead body.”

  This couldn’t be. It couldn’t happen this way. He threw himself at the door in an attempt to block it, but she opened the door through him and then stepped right into where he stood, and he was nauseated with the sensation of two hearts beating in his chest. His slowing down and Jennifer’s running fast.

  But she walked through him, out into the hallway, and the feeling ended.

  “Walter, really we need to go,” the boy told him.

  No. No no no no no. Twenty years and this is it? Desperately, he thought about the beat of his heart and concentrated as hard as he could, willing everything into making that heartbeat real. He focused on the physical, on the feel of the air on his skin, on the sore ache of his nose from the tubes, on the push and pull of his lungs and his heart, of the breath that came in and left. He created the sensation of sheets against his skin, a pillow under his head, the light pressure of blankets on his old body. He thought about Rosie, about his daughter. About a second chance and the things that would be different. He cataloged his regrets, highlighted his mistakes. He made promises to Rosie’s Catholic God and suddenly in the silence of the hospital room the heart rate monitor beeped.

  4

  Walter’s legs buckled and he put his hand to his knees to keep himself from falling face first on the ground. The right leg, his bad one, collapsed and he pitched sideways into something plastic and sturdy. His vision was blurred, but he knew he was no longer in the hospital. The ground beneath his feet was green. Grass? And the smell was mud and pine trees.

  “Mr. Zawislak? I can not impress upon you the magnitude of the mistake you tried to make in there.”

  “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Nonsense, you’re dead.”

  “Oh God,” Walter moaned, his stomach and the taste of bourbon burned in the back of his throat.

  “What were you thinking, trying to jump into your body? You’ve been dead for an hour. Though, I must say, you managed to make your heart beat.” The boy laughed a little. “I’ve never seen that before. Never even heard of that. The guys are not going to believe—”

  Walter was on some kind of cosmic tilt-a-whirl. “Please, kid. Shut up.”

  “You just think you’re going to be sick. Tell yourself you’re fine and pay attention.” He slapped Walter on the back, but the sensation of the boy’s hand on his body was rather liquid. Everything was liquid except the rolling nausea in his belly.

  Walter heaved himself upright and filled his body with the rain soaked air. “I’m fine,” he told himself, and after a moment his vision cleared and the sickly sweet taste of imagined alcohol was gone.

  Miraculously, he felt good, though his heartbeat was sluggish. He presse
d his hand to his chest and could no longer feel that healthy thump and pound.

  “It’s your body’s memory,” the boy told him, and Walter finally focused on the kid. “It remembers your heart beating and your lungs taking in air and even your bad eyesight. It takes a while for the nerves to forget.”

  “Forget?”

  “What living felt like.”

  That seemed reasonable. Well, as reasonable as things could seem.

  “Listen, you are in a highly volatile state,” the boy said. “Simply remembering an event in your life has the power to pull you back in time. You need to clear your mind of all—”

  Walter was heaved sideways. Backward. He wasn’t conscious of remembering anything in particular but suddenly he was in his rocker again. The fabric soft. It was new. Moonlight slid through the windows as he rocked. God, he was tired. Jennifer, a baby, an infant, was a sweet-smelling lump against his heart.

  Walter was dragged over gravel. Glass. Hot coals. And then pop! he was in the bathroom at the Primrose Suite in that fancy hotel in Milwaukee he always stayed at for work. He was putting those travel shampoos in his kit bag to take home to Rosie.

  Next time, he thought. Next time she’ll come too.

  Walter was lifted from the bathroom, spun like a sock in a washing machine, and tossed down, back to earth onto his bar stool at Rudy’s.

  “Another?” Rudy asked, big and mean behind the bar.

  “Why not?” Walter asked, having had another too many three drinks ago. It didn’t matter, no one was waiting for him. He could drink himself to death. Right here.

  “Walter?”

  He turned sideways. A young man, a boy really, he didn’t know, dressed in black and wearing thick black glasses, stood beside his stool.

  “You have to come with me,” he said. “You have to focus. You’re dead. None of this is real.”

  It felt real. His buzz was certainly real, but something about that kid seemed more real.

  Walter gave the beer and shot glass Rudy set down in from of him one last fond glance goodbye and closed his eyes against the pain of being jerked out of the bar.

  Again he crash-landed against green grass that smelled of rain and pine. He rolled over to his back, wincing since every bone in his body felt abused. His muscles sore.

  “I’m an old man,” he protested. “I can’t take this.”

  “You’re a corpse. You’ll survive.” The boy laughed. “Well, not in the strict sense of the word. Or any sense, really.”

  “Are you, like, my guardian angel?”

  “If that’s comforting to you. Sure.”

  His angel—or whatever the hell he was—whisked his hand along the flat plastic seat of a swing and the collected water scattered, caught the light before splashing over Walter’s face.

  “I warned you,” the boy said. He was wearing those glasses still. The big thick ones. “I told you to clear your mind.”

  Walter didn’t even know where those memories had been kept, where they’d come from.

  He sat up, his legs stretched out before him.

  “Where are we?” he asked. They were no longer in the hospital. Instead it looked like they were in a small backyard.

  A house and patio with sliding glass doors at one end and big fence at the other. He saw other houses over the fence, beyond the trees. Heard the sound of cars on a road, the crackle and snap of a streetcar passing.

  It had just rained, and the air was cool and wet and silvery gray. The wet pine tree to his right smelled like Christmas and the grass was the greenest thing he had ever seen.

  Colors look so good when you’re dead.

  A doll at Walter’s feet had been left out and was drenched, driven into the dirt by the force of the recent rain.

  “It’s just a backyard,” the kid said.

  “How did we get here? I mean...how does all this work?”

  “Trust me, the mechanics of it are quite dull.”

  “But what…?” He couldn’t process it all. His infant daughter in his arms, the Primrose Suite. The hospital room and that feeling of being back in his body. Of wanting so badly to talk to Jennifer. It had been stupid, but it had been real in a way the last twenty years of his life had not. “Was that it? Were those the days I relived?”

  “No. As I tried to explain earlier, your body is liquid, mist, a puddle.” The boy looked heavenward. “All the earthly constraints of physics and natural law don’t apply to you now. You can go wherever—or maybe I should say, whenever in your life. The curtain has lifted and if we’re ever going to get through this, you must give me control. I have a list. I have a protocol. It’s much simpler if you just—”

  “Fine,” Walter said, happy as always to give up control. “You’re in charge.”

  The boy nodded and punched something into his phone. Powerful things those phones. “Now, I must warn you about the pain. It will come and go, and when it comes, it will get worse.”

  He was used to pain. His hip throbbed even now.

  “The more days you go back to visit. The more days you remember without fully accepting your life and your death, the more it’s going to hurt.”

  “I thought this was supposed to be a gift to dead people. Sounds like torture.”

  “Just trying to help you decide.”

  The boy grabbed the phone from his pocket, consulting the screen with a furrowed brow.

  “Now, you get to remember the days on my list before making a choice.” He looked at Walter through his lashes. “We found that most people over forty-five couldn’t remember half of what had happened to them, and if they could actually recall the event they wanted to relive they got the date all wrong. In any case, the list and visits make things much more tidy. You’ll be in your body, as you were, not as you are now.”

  The opportunity that presented itself was dizzying. He turned to the boy who flickered and winked in the strange, liquid air.

  “I know what day I want to relive.”

  “You sure? We haven’t really gone through the list yet.”

  “I don’t need the list. I want the day Jennifer came home from school. I want to go back and…”

  “Fix something?”

  “Exactly.” If he was sober when Jennifer showed up, and if he just talked to her and listened to her, the whole rest of his life, even his death, might be different. Memories realigned, changing even as he thought about them, and the things he tried to forget were smaller, mutable, but fixing things with his daughter was a solid and real possibility.

  The boy shook his head. “No can do.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no going back for you, Walter. For anyone. You get to relive a day but you can’t change it.”

  Suddenly, from the rich soil at their feet, a green aluminum filing cabinet erupted, sending clumps of grass and dirt into the air. A door slid out and the kid removed a manila folder. He hummed and flipped through the pages. Finally he grimaced and pointed at something on one of the faded cream pages.

  “See, you’d change that day, but the next day you’ll wake up on the bathroom floor, drunk and sick just like you did the first time around. It took you six months to stop drinking, and changing one day won’t fix that.” He flipped another page. “Jennifer will start the systematic removal of you from her life, no matter what happens on the day you go back to relive. You can’t change anything.” The boy shrugged.

  Walter’s hopes, which had gone up into the stratosphere, crashed and he stepped back and ran into the bright yellow plastic slide again.

  “Oh!” the boy continued. “And you can’t tell people to buy Google stock or bet on the Cubs for the World Series. Lots of people tried that.” He returned the folder to the drawer and the whole thing descended back into the soil, the earth repairing itself like it had never given birth to an aluminum filing cabinet.

  The world swam. Walter stumbled again, and the slide was at his back. The boy put his hand on Walter’s arm, something Walter could barely feel, like
the light brush of a breeze rather than flesh and bone. “I’m sorry, Walter. It doesn’t work. Life goes on just like it did. No changes. No do-overs.”

  “So what’s the point?” Walter asked, bitterness pouring from his mouth. “Why do this if we can’t change anything?”

  The boy looked surprised. “Well, I suppose it’s not about changing your life. It’s about appreciating it. That’s why we do this. To remind you of what you’ve forgotten.”

  Walter looked up at the Technicolor sky with the carousing clouds and felt a yawning desolation in his chest.

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” he said. “Just let me go. I don’t want to stick around. I don’t want to watch what happens on Earth. I just want…” Walter hauled in a deep breath and felt suddenly every moment of his age. “I’m just tired.”

  The boy sucked his teeth. “No can do. Policy. Just let me show you what you’ve forgotten. It’s beautiful. Every moment, even the bad ones, have something redeemable.”

  “You have the wrong file.”

  “You can go back and see your wife.”

  Walter spun, got dizzy, and braced himself against the slide.

  “I don’t want to see her.”

  The boy watched him carefully with dark, dour eyes and then smiled, and the smile made Walter think that the kid knew more than he did. The boy reminded him of his cousin Dan. Who’d been too worldly for the rest of the Zawislak family.

  “All right. There has to be something you don’t mind re-experiencing. How about one more day of sleeping or eating…” The boy’s voice was that low, melodious soothe Walter remembered from the gray hallway, and Walter felt the slow bob up of his emotions. His anger thinned out.

  Walter’s stomach growled, his not quite dead nerves making their presence known. Rosie had always said he’d miss his own funeral for a buffet.

  “There you go. I’ve heard bacon truly lives up to its reputation. It’s all you heart-attack victims can talk about.”

  “Does it have to be my life?” Walter asked. “I mean, can I choose someone more interesting? Can I be Neil Armstrong?”