Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  Jack shot me a look of panic.

  “No. Jack’s a strict vegan. We’ll find a place in town that has soy burgers.”

  My mother smirked at me. “You’re not going to get drunk, are you?” “All right, Mom. Relax. You’ve both got my cell number. Any problems, call me, okay?”

  Jack and I drove to downtown Sheboygan and stopped at a restaurant called the Rathskellar. It was musty inside, the walls cluttered with framed photos of local legends–legends if you knew who won the Wisconsin Polka Fest in ‘88.

  We took stools at the bar. I half expected a guy in lederhosen with an accordion slung over his shoulder to appear and serenade us the place was so anachronistic. Jack ordered a pilsner and I ordered a tonic water. When I said “tonic water,” Jack reared back and looked at me. “What’s up with that?”

  “I’m not drinking.”

  “What?”

  “I sobered up out of Portland. Had to.”

  Our drinks came and Jack took a healthy quaff off his frosty one. “Is this till you get back, or…”

  “I don’t know, Jack. I feel better. I can deal with shit. And I’ve had a lot of shit to deal with since the IPNC.”

  The bartender placed some menus in front of us. Jack was fiddling with his iPhone, nodding to himself. “Wow, Martin West no longer drinking. I’m calling the trades.”

  “Bet they don’t stop the presses,” I said.

  He had no response. Without libations as our low common denominator, it was strange how little we had to talk about.

  “How’s Byron?”

  “Good.”

  “Ever talk to Carmen again?”

  “Nah.”

  “The reality TV thing still happening?”

  “Yeah. Goes in a couple months.”

  “That was one crazy trip, wasn’t it?”

  “One crazy trip,” he echoed. I could tell he was uncomfortable with the fact I wasn’t drinking. Maybe my not drinking was an inadvertent judging of his, I don’t know.

  The bartender returned. “You guys want to order something?”

  Jack folded his menu and handed it to the beefy guy. “I’ll pass.”

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m going to drive back to Milwaukee and take this red-eye”–he glanced at his iPhone to double-check the time–“back to LA.”

  “I got a room for you and everything, Jack,” I said.

  “I know. I just want to get back. You got your mom and the whole deal at your aunt’s and shit…” He brought his mug to his mouth and drained the beer. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s good you quit drinking, man.”

  We locked eyes briefly, then just nodded at each other. There was nothing left to say. It was as if, without alcohol, we no longer had anything in common. Stop drinking and you lose friends. We were on different wavelengths now. It was sad.

  Jack ferried me back to the Sheboygan Hotel. We clasped hands in the peace shake, held them tightly for a moment, then let go.

  “Call me when you get back,” he said.

  “All right. Sure you don’t want to crash here?”

  “No,” he said definitively. “I really want to get back.” What he really wanted was to get to the airport bar. Fair enough. He was drinking for two now.

  “All right, man. Take it easy.”

  “You, too.”

  Watching him drive off I felt eerily like someone had just died.

  chapter 21

  Iwas yanked from a deep, disquieting sleep by the ringing of my iPhone. It was a frantic Alice calling, tears hobbling her words: “Your mother’s been taken to the hospital. She fell unconscious.”

  I dragged a hand across my tired face. It was pitch black in the room. A digital clock read 5:11 a.m. “What hospital?”

  St. Nicholas was located less than ten minutes from the hotel. Experienced at finding my way to the ICUs, I located my mother fast in one of the curtained bays, lying flat out with a ventilator strapped over her nose and mouth. She appeared to be breathing rhythmically, but of course once they get you into the ICU there is no mercy; their goal is to keep you alive no matter what cost, no matter what suffering, no matter how tragic and doomed the scenario.

  I pulled up a fiberglass chair, sat down, finding my mother’s hand on the mattress and giving it a squeeze. “Hi, Mom? It’s me Miles.”

  She grew agitated, but her hand squeezed back. An anxious Alice hovered by the curtain, a fretful hand to her mouth.

  I rose to speak to her. “What happened?”

  “She was trying to go to the bathroom when she fell.”

  I nodded. “You’ve talked to the doctors?”

  “They’re pretty sure it was another stroke.”

  I looked down at my mother. The poor woman had endured so much–pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack, congestive heart failure, and now another stroke. Not to mention raising three obstreperous kids!

  A nurse on the graveyard shift slipped into the bay and told us, in a consoling voice, there was no more we could do. She suggested we let my mother rest.

  I spent the next two days wandering around Sheboygan with Snapper. And yes, half the women stopped to coo over him and chat me up. It was like walking with a newborn.

  Several times I checked in on my mother. She was showing guarded improvement, but she looked bad. Alice fed me dinner both nights. She admitted that she didn’t think she could take care of her sister, apologized if she had given me that impression. It was just too hard, she said. We let Dave go. I would have to find a home.

  By the third day, after they had stabilized her, she was transferred out of the ICU and into a step-down unit she shared with another woman in traction, both arms and legs in multiple casts, held in place by various ropes and pulleys. My mother, hooked up to a feeding tube, was otherwise off life-support, sentient and aware of her surroundings. Her head listed more than before and the left side of her mouth sagged worse than I remembered. When she spoke it was monosyllabically, in a hoarse voice that seemed to be issuing from a bathysphere. The morphine compounded the already extreme difficulty she experienced in vocalizing her thoughts and moving her one good arm. Her expression was all but affectless.

  “How are you, Mom?”

  “O-kay,” she barely managed.

  “You had another minor stroke.”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly. “It hurts.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  There was a silence. I held her hand in mine. She stared blankly into space. Her eyes had a kind of forlorn, faraway look, half in the corporeal world, half in the realm of the already dead.

  “Do they want to keep me here?” she asked, enunciating painfully.

  “For a while. Yes.”

  Her head lolled in my direction and she did her best to fix her watery eyes on mine. She spoke in a sepulchral voice. “You promised.”

  Her words nonplused me; no, staggered me. My heart raced wildly.

  Despite the effort it clearly required she kept her eyes fiercely locked on mine. “Miles,” she croaked. “You–prom–ised.”

  “Where do you want to go, Mom?”

  “Home.” Belafonte’s lyric sang in my head.

  “Home where?”

  Very weakly, she lifted her index finger and suspended it in the air. “Where everyone is,” she said, still disoriented, still with that voice that suggested she was only half in the world.

  “Everyone who?”

  Her face grew disorganized as if she couldn’t understand that I couldn’t understand. Or, worse, that I was resisting. Her expression suddenly turned childlike, as if through the shifting clouds of misapprehension she had spotted a patch of blue. “You know. The family.” She nodded to herself with a close-mouthed, self-satisfied smile, content that we, mother and son, were in unison.

  I stared into her nirvanic gaze, focused on some spectral presence only she could make out. As she stared absently into her private numinous realm
, I saw she had already gone, crossed her own Rubicon. Now, she was asking me one last favor.

  Her eyes floated off. At a shuffling of heels on the linoleum, I turned. The attending physician, a young woman, sidled over, a clipboard pressed to her chest. I got up from my chair and we drifted out of earshot of my mother, who appeared to have been narcotized back asleep anyway.

  “What’s the extent of the damage, Doctor?”

  “We won’t know until we get her out of here and into rehab.”

  “But she’s probably lost some more motor control? Her speech is more aphasic. That much I can tell.”

  The doctor smiled, mildly impressed that the patient’s scruffy-looking son knew some of the stroke vernacular. “Probably,” she said. “She’s getting old.” She glanced at the medical history. “I can see she’s been through a lot.”

  “Yes, she has.” Tears formed in my eyes and I blinked them back. I launched into the story. My mother living at home, then put into assisted-living after a congestive heart failure, being miserable, and how I had brought her back to live with her sister, and what an insane trip it was, “And now this.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing impatiently at her watch, more patients to see, more life-and-death situations to attend to, more grieving families to face with a stoic countenance. “At least she’s alive.”

  “What kind of a life is this?” I said, fastening my eyes on hers. I was hoping she’d have an answer, but none was forthcoming. Certainly not the answer my mother had sought from her son.

  “I’ve got to go,” the doctor said, smiling. “Talk to her. That helps.” She pivoted in place and walked off.

  Between visits to the hospital, I wandered aimlessly around Sheboygan. I’d have taken Snapper, but didn’t have the patience or focus for all the passersby who’d buttonhole us on the sidewalks. The storm that had been building had finally arrived to blanket the city with gray, impenetrable skies. Rain intermittently poured from the saturnine heavens. It was growing cold, the early fall portending another punishing winter. There wasn’t much to do. Snapper was subdued, as if he sensed the gravity of the situation. Alice was in limbo. Grief and infirmity had arrived at her doorstep and she didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave. My mother’s words haunted my every waking moment.

  I stopped in from time to time at Alice’s, but we had little to talk about except my mother, too gloomy a topic for extended conversation. Alice wondered aloud what would happen when she got out and I said that I didn’t know, that I would probably have to put her in a home this time. “The dreaded end of so many lives,” I muttered, more to myself than to Alice. It was unfair of me to bring this to her again. Why was I trying to get my mother’s sister, no youngster herself, to look at the contemptible way, in this medically aggressive society of ours, we require people to die? I think she was relieved when I said her sister wouldn’t be coming back to her place, that that was no longer a tenable option.

  My handlers back in LA were understanding, and professed to be eagerly awaiting my return so they could send me on meetings and pimp me out for lush writing assignments. I felt divorced from the whole whirligig–entertainment business, wine world, clawing to get me to this pitch session or that tasting. The exaggerated Hollywood excitement to capitalize on the updraft of this evanescent fame barely registered.

  I called Hank and brought him up to date. My older brother kept mostly silent, probably afraid that once our mother was discharged I was going to make a move to dump her on him. First our larcenous younger brother, now me, then him–Mom getting worse at each way station. After reassuring him I would put her in full convalescence if need be, I asked whether he had heard from Doug. In a fusillade of expletives, he said he didn’t want to see or hear from “that fucking asshole.” No one prepares us for this, I thought, as I let a bitter Hank go, reassuring him that I would take care of everything. My mother’s dream of finding a reunited family in the afterlife seemed just that: a dream.

  A week after my mother’s stroke I found her in the step-down unit with a physical therapist on one of my many visits. They had taken her off the feeding tube and were, all over again, helping her to relearn how to eat. Yogurt dribbled from the left side of her mouth and the PT patiently wiped it up, encouraging her to try again. As my mother tentatively tried to spoon more yogurt into her mouth, I noticed that her coordination wasn’t what it had been and she had trouble finding her mouth. More depressing, she appeared listless, torpid to the point of not wanting to soldier on with this wheelchair-bound, nursing home way of life. I couldn’t tell whether it was the effects of the latest stroke, or just the fact she’d made clear, emphatically, that first visit: that she had given up on trying, on life.

  The PT left us to spend some time together. Before he walked off, he said, “You’re doing well, Phyllis. You’re going to get back to your old self.”

  I smiled, but I wanted to smack him.

  My mother ignored his encouragement, and stared sullenly into space. Her expression defied such optimism, no doubt an occupational necessity the PT had been trained to manufacture. What was he going to say? You’re fucked up and you should be warehoused in a ward for people on the precipice?

  My mother wouldn’t look in my direction. Rain streaked the windows on the far side of the room. The bed between the window and my mother’s was empty. “Where’s your roommate, Mom?” I asked. Not that I cared greatly; it was just a way to break the silence.

  The answer to my idle question came in a voice so dark and cold and angry it sent shivers up my spine. “She died.”

  In an effort to brighten the saturnine mood, I said, “They got you off the feeding tube.”

  My mother went on staring into space, as if any improvement, any exhortation to keep her in the fight, were an insult.

  I let a silence ensue. All we could hear was the rain pecking at the window.

  “Snapper’s doing well.”

  She nodded, as if she no longer cared. “Good.”

  “He’s his old self, eating…”

  “I don’t care,” she chopped me off. “They won’t let him in the poor folks’ home,” she nearly shrieked.

  This was a different woman. She had gone to the edge of death and been denied it too many times. We were locked in combat over one thing, and one thing only: her wishes, and my willingness to carry them out.

  Still without looking at me, she said, “You promised, Miles.” Her head lolled my way, and her voice gained in intensity. “You–prom–ised.”

  I stared into the dark tunnels of her eyes and swallowed hard. Death without dignity was everywhere in this hospital.

  “I’m never going to get out of here,” she said bitterly, her words garbled again. She turned back to me and demanded, “Get me out of here.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  She extended that crooked index finger, barely raising her hand. With an expression that might have seen through all the walls in the universe, she gargled, “Home.”

  “Home where? Back to Alice’s?” I asked, whether in an effort to ground her, or ground myself, I can’t say.

  She looked confused. She became agitated, vexed by my inability or unwillingness to understand. “No,” she said. “Home.”

  “Away from this misery?”

  She nodded imperturbably and her face grew long, sad, the first sign of emotion I had seen in her since she her readmission. “Home.” Then, chillingly: “Where my father and mother are. Where Rusty is.” With supreme effort she raised her hand higher and pointed the index finger skyward. “You promised.”

  I made an appointment to see a doctor. My Xanax supply was depleted and, with my mother back in the hospital, I was chronically insomniacal. It was raining hard when I pulled up to the two-story cinderblock medical complex. In a small waiting room with a kindly receptionist manning a switchboard, I filled out my medical history. I had to chuckle to myself when I came to a series of questions regarding my psychological well-being–anxiety (yes
); depression (yes); schizophrenia (probably). I lied on the form so as not to alarm the doctor.

  A nurse opened a door and led me into a tiny examination room. She weighed me, took my blood pressure, and told me to wait. I asked her what my weight was and was mildly alarmed to find I had gained some fifteen pounds since my last office visit. I was too afraid to inquire about my blood pressure.

  The doctor was a genial man in his mid-fifties, with thinning blond hair and a quiet demeanor. He glanced at my answers to the questionnaire, then at the nurse’s various measurements and readings. “Your blood pressure’s elevated,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “150 over 98,” he said matter-of-factly. “Normally I would recommend putting you on high blood pressure medication.”

  I related in my most concise story-telling mode, as if I were pitching a movie idea to a bored and jaded studio executive, what I had been through with my mother, what had stranded me in Sheboygan, postulating that this could be the cause of my elevated blood pressure.

  “So, what’s the reason for your visit?” he asked.

  I filled him in on my history of panic and anxiety, ending with, “I need a refill on my Xanax prescription. And,” I added, “I’d like to get a sleeping aid.” I looked him in the eye. “And none of this Ambien or Lunestra housewife crap. They don’t work for me. I need something strong. Something that will knock me out. I haven’t slept in days. I’m going to go mad if I don’t get a decent night’s rest.”

  He returned my stare. I hung my head, feigning–well, not really–fatigue.

  And for some reason, the weight of everything unloaded: the emotional journey with my mother, the flukish success of the movie based on my book, my downward spiral into an ongoing, wanton bacchanal, going cold turkey and seeing the world in the raw light of sobriety. I broke down and cried. The doctor just stood there. I heard the scratch of pen on paper. Brushing back tears, I looked up.

  The doctor handed me two small squares of paper off his prescription pad. “Don’t go mixing these. The sedative is very strong.”

  “Sure, Doctor. Thank you.”