His father had never called him Rob before. Not once in his life.
A gypsy cab dropped Rob off at St. Mary's Emerg entrance. Reuben stood shivering under a cone of blue light near the doors.
"What happened?" Rob's dread was such that he could hardly breathe. "Tommy—?"
"He's alive." The past hours had shrunk Reuben, cored and hollowed him; Rob was afraid to touch his father for fear he'd crumble to dust.
In the Emergency room they sat on orange plastic chairs bolted to the wall. Reuben explained. Rob couldn't quite wrap his head around it. In his mind's eye he still saw his uncle as he'd been earlier that evening: shadowboxing the fridge, dancing on the tips of his toes with a loaf of Wonder Bread clasped to his chest. Rob could not conceive of Tommy as he was at this moment: in an operating theater five stories above, strapped to a steel table with a precision window carved in his skull.
"Who?" he wanted to know.
"I don't know," Reuben said. "Some guy. A kid. Never even seen him before."
"What do we do?"
"Nothing else to be done. We wait and see."
The hospital surged: nurses hustled down the halls in response to code greens and yellows and blues; orderlies ran cases of blood mixture to the dialysis ward; a janitor guided a doodlebug over the floor. Few paid any mind to the man and boy sitting on the bolted orange chairs. Their tragedy, whatever it might be, was unexceptional.
Chapter 10
The taxi eased through the wrought-iron gates, following the drive up to Paul's parents' house. A taste of early spring: stalactite-thick icicles dripping on the eaves, patches of brown lawn under the melting snow.
Last week a letter from a local barrister's office was delivered to the boxing club. Paul's uncle Henry had passed, it informed him; the will was to be read next week at his parents' estate, and could he please attend.
He checked himself in the cab's side-view mirror. A twisting slash on his cheek was healing badly, its puffed edges the same blue-black as a dog's gums. He hadn't slept well since the fight, suffering nightmares in which he fought great shadowy shapes the height of power poles that came at him with barbed-wire fists.
Three people sat in the living room: his father and mother, plus a young man dressed in wool pants and sweater. The estate lawyer, Paul assumed. His parents held recipe cards, as if they'd prepared speeches.
The young man motioned to a straight-backed Tiffany chair. "Paul, please take a seat." "It's a shame about Uncle Hank," Paul said, sitting. "What got him— high blood pressure? Lord knows he loved his salty snacks."
"Your uncle is alive and well." The young man spread his palms, an apologetic gesture. "Max Singleton, Paul. I'm an interventionist."
"Oh, this is cute."
"Calm down." Singleton's air was that of a scientist handling a highly unstable element. "We're just here to talk, Paul."
"Does Uncle Hank know about this subterfuge?"
"That's neither here nor there," Max the Interventionist said. "Your parents are worried, Paul. The situation is grim, maybe, but not beyond hope. This afternoon you're in range of death; tomorrow you can be in range ..."—dramatic pause— "... of life"
"Seriously?" Paul appealed to his folks. "This guy is serious?"
"We're here to help, Paul," Singleton went on. "Will you let us do that, Paul—will you let us help?"
Paul didn't care much for the constant repetition of his name; must be a tactic they taught at the Interventionists' Academy. "Ah, what the hey."
Barb Harris, demure in a black silk blouse, snatched a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table. "Don't be so flip, Paul." Jack Harris sat beside her in a charcoal-gray suit. They looked like a couple of funeral mourners.
"Mr. Harris," Singleton said. "Start us off."
Jack shuffled his recipe cards and swallowed. Paul noted the sunken rings around his father's eyes, the four-day growth of beard.
"Son, I always thought we were decent parents and made the right choices more often than not, but clearly we've let you down in some critical way. I've watched you fall apart and cannot for the life of me figure out why. There seems to be nothing I can do to help—you won't let anyone help. I'm afraid for you, Paul. Deeply afraid."
"Oh, come on—"
"You seem to believe I wanted you to follow in my footsteps... and maybe, thinking back, okay, I did want that. But I don't care now— you don't want to work at the winery, fine. Do anything you want, just so long as you're safe. I mean that. Absolutely anything."
"But..." Singleton prompted.
"But you've got to quit this self-destructive quest you're on. This... jihad. You need help, son. A car is outside—will you let us take you someplace so you can get better?"
"What, you got the paddy wagon waiting? Men in white coats ready to chase me across the lawn with butterfly nets?"
Singleton made a motion as though he were tamping down a patch of soil—calm down, Paul, calm down. "Mrs. Harris," he said, "you go on."
"Paul, I want to let you know how much I love and admire you. But I'm scared that if you don't stop this abuse and turn yourself around you will not be with us much longer. I can't stand thinking you are not in a safe place; whenever the phone rings in the night I'm terrified it is about you, telling me you're dead. So please, Paul, give me back the wonderful and caring son of whom I've always been so proud. A car is waiting outside—will you please accept the help that is being offered and get treatment today"
"This car," said Paul, "where would it take me?"
"The treatment center is top-notch," Singleton assured him. "A secluded country estate, rambling meadows, cool valley streams, a four-star chef ..." Paul thought Singleton would whip out a brochure."... the best specialists trained in the treatment of various mood disorders—"
"Are you gay?" Barb blurted. "Is that it, Paul? You feel passionate for men?"
"What your mother's trying to say," said Singleton, "is that sudden interest in hyper-masculine activities is frequently indicative of a latent homosexual drive."
"The posters in your room," his mother went on. "Those ... surfing posters."
"So, what, being gay is a mood disorder? Are you gonna cart me off and straighten me? Would it be better if I was gay—I mean, would it make this any more palatable? Okay, fine, I'm gay. Gay as a French foreign legionnaire!"
"See?" Barb spread her hands, apologizing for her son's behavior the way she might for a senile dog with a penchant for biting the mailman. "It's like I said—he's disturbed."
"Oh-ho-ho!" Singleton gave a ghastly chuckle, the chuckle of a man who'd just witnessed a ten-car highway pileup and was trying to wring a drop of hope from the tragedy. He cast his soothing gaze upon Paul. "Nobody's disturbed here, are they?"
"What do I know? You're the professional."
"That's right—I'm the professional. And I say nobody's disturbed."
"I'm sold," Paul said amiably.
"Why are you doing this?" his father wanted to know. "Why take punches just to prove you can? Why suffer just to suffer? That's how animals do it, Paul—no, animals have more sense."
"Because . .." Paul was staggered a bit by his father's question. ". .. people need to suffer. People need to feel pain and experience want and get smashed apart if only to fix themselves."
"Do you have any idea," Jack said, "what you're asking of us? A son asking his parents to let him go through hell in hopes he might come out of it a better man? Who says you're going to come out better— who says you don't come out scarred and irreparable? We can't let you do that. It goes against every single parenting instinct; it goes against basic human nature."
"And is it our fault?" Barb said. "Our fault you didn't suffer enough? What should we have done—daily beatings to strengthen your constitution?"
"Mrs. Harris—"
"No, really, I'd like to know. Would you have rather we'd locked you in the root cellar, fed you bread and water—would that have been suitable?"
"Let your parents know how you'
re feeling," Singleton told Paul. "Let them in; together we can help."
"Do any of you remember that killer whale, Friska?" Paul said after a moment's consideration. "She performed at the amusement park down in Niagara Falls. This animal-rights group held a rally to free her a few years ago. A bunch of protesters chained themselves to the park gates, and they had this giant blow-up whale with a lead ball and chain clapped to its dorsal fin. The park agreed to set her free; they drugged her to the gills and flew her to Vancouver Island and dumped her in Queen Charlotte Sound. But the thing is, this whale, she was born and bred in captivity. Her whole life she's fed, cared for, protected. She was out of shape, bloated, and sickly. She didn't know how to protect herself. Her life was this tiny pointless world where all she'd ever done was perform tricks when the trainer's whistle blew. Maybe she dreamed—if whales dream at all—about her natural place in the world, the ancestral sea. But even so, would she really have understood?"
Max the Interventionist opened his mouth to interject. Paul shut it with a look.
"I think of her limited world blowing up in those new unknowable depths," he went on, "the strange fish and new waters and her not even having a concept of those depths, not knowing the language of any whale pods she might meet. That sudden, violent explosion of her world, lawless, lacking the parameters that had governed her existence: just bubbles and seaweed and storms and freighters and volumes of blue water that went on and on forever. A tuna boat found her floating near a wharf. She was drawn to sounds she understood: machinery, motors, human voices. Her belly was slashed open. She got chewed by a boat's rotor blades, or maybe killed by other whales—or by creatures much smaller than her. Her tongue and lower jaw had been eaten.
"They winched the body in and buried it in a whale-sized casket. Over a thousand people at her funeral. A picture in the paper: a giant half-moon-shaped coffin lowered into the ground. The caption went, Noble burial for a noble creature." Paul laughed, a brittle hack. "Burying a whale. How unnatural is that?"
"Paul—" Singleton said.
"Shut up and let me finish. I think about the whale and wonder—who's to blame? The amusement park for keeping her penned up all those years? The protesters for freeing her? The more I think about it, the more I come back to the idea that it was nobody's fault. The whale was born in captivity, the trainers loved and cared for her, the protesters were doing what they thought was right. Everybody's heart in the right place. But the reality is this poor whale adrift in a place she doesn't understand, scared shitless and so fucking witless she didn't last a week on her own. But what if she'd been given a chance to strengthen herself so that she might survive?"
"Paul," Singleton said, "all these fears and regrets can be worked through in therapy."
"Jesus Christ," Paul said, "did you hear a word I said? I don't have any regrets!"
"But first you need to admit you need help," Singleton overrode him. "Will you do that, Paul—admit you need help? Will you let us help you?"
"You knew the answer to that the minute I walked in here."
Singleton nodded. "I'd like you to set your credit and bank cards on the table."
"Why?"
"Your bank account's been frozen." Jack Harris looked impossibly weary: a man crossing a desert on a mission whose purpose he could not recall. "The cards are in my name."
Barb's needless clarification: "They aren't yours, Paul."
"They aren't, are they? I can't lay claim to any of it. Nothing stands in my name. None of it's mine."
He fished the cards from his wallet and laid them on the glass- topped coffee table.
"They're yours again," said Singleton. "Anytime you'd like. Just let us help."
Paul looked at his father and mother sitting on the couch, hopeless and confused. "Why didn't you ever let me suffer?" he said. "Just once, let me struggle?"
"We're your parents," Barb said. "We love you. How could we let you suffer?"
He went to his bedroom to gather a few things. The room smelled musty and tomblike, a scent peculiar to places long absent of human habitation.
His mother poked her head through the door.
"Is it okay?"
"Come on in."
Barbara sat on the edge of the bed. "Was it really so bad, Paul? The life you—the lives we had together?"
"It wasn't bad," Paul told her, "just fake and empty. All the people I knew, guys I went to school with—what stories did we have? You and
Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, their parents and on back—you have stories."
"You really believe that, don't you? That everyone who came before had it rough. Sorry to tell you, kiddo, but it didn't happen that way. I was a farmer's daughter, your dad a farmer's son. Our parents weren't rich but there was always enough. Christmases, birthdays ... god, I had a pony. And my dad fought in the war, yes, but with no choice. Was he courageous? I'd like to think so—but he was courageous because the situation called for it. Circumstance can make a hero out of anyone."
"Or a coward."
She smiled sadly. "Is it worth it, Paul—to suffer your whole life just to prove you can?"
Paul could not tell her his deepest fear: that his suffering would always be insufficient and never enough to ensure any lasting happiness. "Do you ever think of the old house we lived in, before Dad bulldozed it? You ever think, what if we'd lived there forever?"
"Sometimes I do," Barb admitted. "But our life ... we've moved on." She fixed her hair and said, "We could get you counseling, Paul. You could stay here with us, or we could rent you a place, and you could see a therapist. I've heard Prozac—"
"Mom, I love you and I love that you're trying to understand what I'm going through, but..." He hugged her, kissed her cheek, held her at arm's length with his hands on her shoulders.
Barb reached into her skirt pocket and produced a tinfoil packet. "Hold out your hand."
She dropped two small objects into his palm. Whitish yellow, the size of corn kernels, each tapering to a pair of reddened tips.
"I called Faith, the girl you were out with," she said, "the night... that night. She told me the bar you'd been at. I went the next day and hunted around for hours until I found them."
Paul picked one up, rolled it between his fingers.
"Mom, is this—are these—my teeth?"
She nodded, her entire being swollen with hope. Did she really think it would be that easy? Like his teeth were the wave of some magic wand and—poof!—everything went back the way it was? Paul turned them over in the light, realizing, with dawning awareness...
"Oh my god—these aren't my teeth!"
"Sure they are," Barb said quickly. "Who else's?"
"No, they aren't," he insisted. "They're too ... big, or something. Too yellow. This one's practically brown." He saw the tiny lead plug. "It's got a filling! I never had a cavity in my life!"
"Maybe you did," his mother reasoned. "Maybe you forgot."
"How do you forget that?"
"You've been hit in the head a lot lately."
But they were obviously not his teeth, which brought up the obvious question:
"Mom, who the hell's teeth are these? Where in god's name do you find teeth!' Paul's mind reeled. He saw his mother rummaging through Dumpsters behind the dental clinic. Creeping through windows to snatch molars from beneath sleeping children's pillows. "Did you buy them? How much does a tooth go for in today's market?"
Barb was weeping now, sniffling and holding her head.
"I thought..." Her chest hitched. "Thought maybe ..."
"Hey, calm down." He laughed a little—getting over the initial shock, he saw it was the craziest, most impetuous thing his mother had done in years. He was oddly touched.
"What are you laughing at?"
"Nothing." He stifled another chuckle. "It's nice, really. A very ... nice gesture."
But his mom was not to be consoled. Tears turned to sobs. She sat on the bed, rocking.
"Oh, come on. Really, I love them. Look."
"See?" he said. "Peachy. Good as new."
He grabbed another tooth—a canine?—grasped firmly, and drove it into his lower gums. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror: the tooth, large and brown as a Spanish peanut, jutted from his mouth at a coarse angle. This one looked like a tusk.
"I vant to suck your BLOOD!" he bellowed in his best Nosferatu accent. "Blah! Blah! Blaaaaaah!"
Paul collapsed into uncontrollable giggles with blood bubbling over his lips. He found the whole scene uproariously funny.
He wiped tears from his eyes. Barb regarded him with an expression of stunned, horrified awe. The room was silent save the pitty-pat of blood on the floorboards.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought maybe ..."
But Barb was already up, running to the door and slamming it behind her. Paul heard her stockinged feet thumping down the staircase, ungainly in flight.
He spat another mouthful of blood and wiped his lips on the pillowcase. On the dresser sat a framed photo of himself on the afternoon of his high school graduation. He smiled under his mortarboard, as did his folks on either side of him. Paul struggled to recall himself at that age, that boy's dreams and needs and fears. He wondered how his then-self might've reacted had his now-self shown up on that sunny afternoon years ago, crashed the graduation ceremony all cut and bruised and bloody. Would then-Paul have been sickened and ashamed—or fascinated? Perhaps he would've viewed his future self as a different species of creature altogether, one whose life bore no resemblance to his own.
Paul waited while the whore—her name, she said, was Adele—paid for the room. The A-l Motel: owing to a string of dead neon, the marquee read simply A MOTEL. Niagara Falls, the red-light corridor. Streetlights along the quay cast their brightness upon the frozen Niagara River, a blue-gray sheet stretching to the rocky escarpment of New York State.
The Fighter Page 17
