The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  The wheelchair was supposed to be a way to extend the patient’s range. It should have been there for her to sit in when she got tired. But Gloria’s chair wasn’t portable. It was big, heavy, hard to maneuver. One had to take off the leg rests, remove the special seat cushion, which had been laboriously constructed in the workshop at Beth Israel, and collapse the frame to take it outside. Even then, the task of fitting it through the doorway placed one at a mechanical disadvantage and required strength and balance. Corey prided himself being able to do it. (He was surprised to learn that Joan could do it too.) Then one had to carry it down the steps. Furthermore, it was fragile and expensive, which mitigated against rolling it on gravel.

  Without the chair, his mother couldn’t stay outside for long. She’d get tired and have to head inside. She’d be too tired to take the stairs. Corey would pick her up and carry her inside. But for her, it was humiliating to be carried.

  As a result, for increasingly long periods, she was staying continuously indoors, seeing no one but Joan and Corey, the clinic staff on her monthly outings to Longwood, and the social worker. This was bad for her mental health, but it was a trend that would only continue as she got sicker.

  In early summer, inspired by his construction job, Corey wanted to build a wheelchair ramp or a set of walker stairs outside the house. They’d be three feet wide with three-and-a-half-inch risers instead of standard seven-inch risers. He went to Lowe’s and priced the supplies. But the project cost too much, plus he’d have to get permissions from the state. Dawn got involved, claiming she could get funding from Share the Care, but she wouldn’t find an answer to anything until after the summer had passed.

  To offset the monotony of her life, as the summer progressed, Gloria lived increasingly online. She spent entire days indoors sealed in with the air conditioner running, watching videos nearly around the clock. It was a model of addiction. It left her feeling empty and needing more of the same.

  “I should pull myself out of this in the time I have left,” she said. “Life is a gift. I’m not using it.”

  She made an effort for several days, but it petered out.

  Corey said, “I see what’s going on and I’m worried about you.”

  She became deeply upset. First she turned cold and told him sarcastically she couldn’t be as good as he was. Then she grew silent and he could tell she was weeping. He kneeled by her chair and held her skeletal arm.

  “I can’t do any better! I tried! I tried!”

  “We’ll just get through it—any which way we have to.”

  At night, Gloria ate dinner in her Mafia Boss chair with her prison fork.

  Joan came home after dark, and she’d sometimes sit with Gloria and go through her book collection, asking about books or CDs or paintings she used to have. “Do you remember that painting of the lady in the shower?”

  “I lost that somehow.”

  “That was a good painting.”

  “Gone with the wind.”

  Gloria’s physical condition remained the same throughout the summer, at least to the naked eye, though it had to be assumed that, at the molecular level, her motor system was continuing to deteriorate. Sitting in her chair in shorts, her exposed legs twitched as if hammers in a piano were striking the wires. But rather than reading about medicine—whether Western or Eastern or homeopathic—she looked at paintings on the Web. YouTube had slideshow videos of artworks set to New Age music, Gregorian chant, Sicilian folk music, Vivaldi and the like.

  “Listen to that!” she said, her eyes closed, shaking her head with wonder, a feat she could still perform.

  A night breeze came from the marsh side of the house, through the kitchenette window.

  At this moment, she seemed to have stopped denying her fate. Nor was she angry. She was something else. One day, when Corey was carrying her downstairs so she could take a walk, she asked if he believed in miracles.

  “I think anything’s possible.” He raised his chin at the ocean. “The fact that the universe is the way it is, that life is this way. Who could have predicted anything in our lives? Yeah, I think a miracle is possible.”

  “Do you think I could go into remission?”

  The days got hot and muggy. At night they ran the AC on high in Gloria’s room to keep her cool.

  Even with Corey’s paycheck, the electricity bill was hard to pay. They had another air conditioner in the back of his closet but didn’t run it. Hers was the cold room. Everyone in the house went to Gloria’s room for a drink of cool air. As she got sicker, Joan had stopped sleeping in the same bed with her. She slept on the futon—Leonard’s old bed—with the living room window open, the rare car going by, lighting up the walls, then the crickets in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  For all he thought he was doing, he wasn’t vigilant; he was failing to see everything he could do. He could have built the ramp, but didn’t. It wasn’t the social worker’s fault he failed. He could have done yogic breathing and used prana to bring his mother peace.

  Why didn’t he? Good question. The disease, stress, arrogance, impatience, blindness.

  24

  The High Summer

  A strange thing happened around the Fourth of July when the fireworks were going off on the shore. Corey drove out to the Neck. He thought he was going to see Tom. Along the way, he passed the Hibbards’ neighbors grilling in front of their houses with their friends. The day was hot. He drove uphill into the trees with his elbow out the window of the hatchback. He was coming from work. His arm hairs held black iron dust from cutting rebar with a grinder, like the pollinated hairs on a bee’s belly after crawling inside a flower. He could hear the birds and smell the woods. He parked.

  The garage was open, but Tom’s pickup wasn’t there. Corey walked across the yard, cement on the knees of his jeans. The yard glowed in the sun. His boots crushed the grass into the warm black dirt. He knocked on the door and said, “Hello?” No one answered. He went around the side of the house and looked. In the semicircular hollow before the trees, he saw Molly lying on a lawn chair alone in the sun.

  He said hello and she looked at him and said hi.

  “Do you need anything?”

  She said she was fine. He found himself walking towards her and when he reached her, he wasn’t sure what to do. He bent down and hugged her. Then to be near her, he sat on the grass. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the woods lazily as they talked. He had a hard time thinking of things to say.

  He reached up and played with her arm.

  “Been working out?”

  “No.” She’d been lying here relaxing finally. It had been a busy summer.

  She got up to get a drink. He followed her inside her father’s house. Tools lay all around the carpet. The lights were off. The sunlight glanced past the roof and entered the abode by reflection. The shadows of trees mingled in the shaded rooms. She took a pitcher of water and poured a drink and set it on the chopping block. A fly flew past their heads. Her father had left out a pack of hamburger meat. “I should put that away,” she said. “He’s such a pain in my ass. Just kidding. I love my dad.” She drank her glass of water.

  Corey reached out and laid his hand on her hip while she drank. She was wearing a bikini. The burs of his callused hand ticked against the fabric. Across the border of the nylon, her skin was smooth as a space-age polymer. It was only possible to invent that polymer by playing with millions of atoms for millions of years.

  She told him that if they did anything they could never be friends again, but that if he restrained himself their friendship could continue.

  He petitioned her for mercy and asked her to believe that their friendship would only be improved if she were merciful in this instance. However, she remained steadfast. The choice was his; he could have the one thing but not both.

  If she put it t
hat way, he didn’t think he could very well proceed, and he withdrew his hand from her hip.

  Just at that moment, the door opened and Tom clumped in in his heavy boots and black wraparound safety glasses and beard. He greeted his daughter, who glided away to the backyard. He strode into his kitchen and got a beer. When he opened the refrigerator door, his hand, which held the handle, was an inch from Corey’s chest—the kitchen was a small room—and Corey saw it in such high definition that he could see the cross-hatched crevices in that massive, thick-fingered rhinoceros-skinned extremity. “I saw your car,” Tom said from inside the refrigerator. Corey mumbled that he’d just dropped in to wish him a happy Fourth. Tom came out with a beer. He uncapped it.

  “How’s work?”

  “It’s great. It’s a lifesaver.”

  Corey pulled himself together and went home to his mother.

  The night came. His guilt-sickness eased. He left several messages on Molly’s phone, apologizing. She didn’t call back, so he contrived to see her the day after. “I really needed to apologize in person,” he said. “For what?” she asked. She’d already forgotten. She made out the whole thing to be unimportant and talked to him in such a way as to give the impression that it had never happened.

  Oh, he kept reliving the moment in her kitchen before her father came home!

  * * *

  —

  Around the same time, one day after work, Joan put on a green mud face mask to cleanse her hormonal skin and went for a jog along the shore in the late-afternoon sun. She ran among the strange formations out on Houghs Neck. There were rocky cliffs and rusted iron railings to climb the stairs and jetties going out into the dark blue water. She came upon an empty sub-development like a vision from Northern Ireland—wooden houses, shuttered. A jungle gym, deserted. She jogged through, the road leading from one Norway-shaped peninsula to the next, the little penile Norways of the coast.

  On her way back, she ran into Tom. His snow-white truck was stopped at the end of a dead-end street that met the ocean.

  “Hey, what’s up, guy!”

  He was wearing black shades and a Harley-Davidson do-rag. He stopped in the act of pulling a tackle box out of his truck and said, “Hey.” There was a bucket of seawater at his feet and a folding knife on the pavement. His fishing rod was propped against the railing and his line was out.

  She had forgotten the mask. It was cracked and sweated through. Green mud was running down her neck into her cleavage. The roots of her hair were stiff with mud. Her fat, golden brown upper arms shone with sweat. A heavy metal guitar was wucka-wucking out of her earbuds.

  “I’m the girl from Corey’s house!” she shouted.

  “I know. Of course. How are ya? What are you doing, jogging?”

  She pulled her earbuds out. “Yeah. I’m getting this fat off from the winter. It’s getting harder and harder to lose. I want to go to the beach without embarrassing myself.”

  “You’re not going to embarrass yourself.”

  She put a hand on her hip, shot her hip out, did a fingernail display and head-shimmied. “Right?”

  Then she saw her reflection in his truck. “Holy shit, did I leave my mask on? Is there green on my face?”

  “It’s fine,” said Tom and waved away the subject. He was getting set to fish but could offer her a ride.

  “That’s okay. I need to get the miles.”

  “So, that’s your thing? You’re into working out?”

  “Yeah, working out. Karate.”

  “No shit? Karate.”

  “I was never one to leave my fate in other people’s hands. There’s sick people out there, I’m sorry.”

  Tom listened to her talk about it. “I know,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter.”

  “We understand the danger from growing up the way we did. It’s like they don’t get it anymore.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed.

  Her iPod was still screaming.

  “Is that AC/DC?”

  “I think so. Let me check. Most definitely. You recognize it?”

  “Of course. The music of my misspent youth.”

  “Want to hear it again?” She held the earbud out to him.

  The Hibbards became a subject of discussion in the Goltz household that night. Gloria said of Tom, “I’m sure he’s very nice, but I met him once and thought he was bor-ing.” Corey rushed to Tom’s defense. He described the precision and complexity of the project in Norwood. “He’s the man I admire most of all!” Gloria thought her son was cut out for more in life than being an HVAC installer. Corey said he didn’t think there was anything more than that in life; it was one of many paths to glory, all of which were equal—scholar, fighter, builder, farmer, sailor, poet, monk. All were equally good ways of getting to Nirvana.

  “Corey, I want you to go back to school and get your diploma and then I want you to go to college.”

  “Mom, I’d do anything you wanted, but I don’t want to do that.”

  “Joan, can you tell him?”

  “I dunno. I kinda always felt like school’s for fools.”

  “Joan!”

  “Mom, it’s okay. Please—I understand. But I respect Joan’s path.”

  Gloria was so adamant she risked offending Joan.

  Corey tried to bring them all together: “Reading, doing art, doing poetry, thinking independently, living a life of independence: Isn’t that what you’ve both done? That’s what we all respect.”

  “But there’s so much more!” Gloria cried.

  Joan said, “I guess I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette.”

  When she was gone, Corey said, “I think you’re hurting her feelings.”

  “Who cares? So what! For God’s sake, this is your life we’re talking about.”

  “Well, Mom, I can’t just do what my mommy wants me to do. I’m seventeen. Let me figure it out.”

  Later, Joan remarked to Corey, “Your mother sure cares about you.” Corey was mortified at the implication that he had an overprotective mother.

  * * *

  —

  In the middle of a hot August day, a black Mercury, reflecting the sun, turned down the crooked street and stopped. Leonard and his passenger, Adrian, got out. The sky was blue. The block was quiet. The trees in the nearby park stood still; there was no wind. Leonard wore black trousers, an undershirt and carried handcuffs on his belt. His companion was wearing a black baseball cap, skimpy jean cutoffs, black combat boots, and no shirt, his torso so perfectly muscular it didn’t look real. He gave off ripe body odor. The older man led him to his house and unlocked the front door.

  “Gosh, I can’t believe you’d take me into your confidence like this,” Adrian said. “I know you don’t like people.”

  “You were ready,” replied Leonard, letting him inside where it was suddenly dark. “But this isn’t my total confidence. This is one degree. There are further degrees. You’re not seeing everything.”

  “I’m not sure I could ask for anything more than this. I love it here. Just to sit here and do physics—it’s such a great place! I love the depressing neighborhood. It’s so grim and nihilistic—almost like a chunk of uranium where nothing can live except me—without meaning—creating my own meanings, like Nietzsche says, from math and physics—just these perfect, precise facts of the universe that I can discover with my mental power.”

  “Well, that’s Malden for you. It’s a depressed area. That’s mainly because of corruption, mind you. No one wants to commute from here, thanks to the tolls, so the property values crashed in the eighties. But there are some compensations. You never know who your neighbors are. Take a look across the street. See that house? The guy who lived there would interest you. He killed his girlfriend.”

  “He did? I’d love to talk to him and ask him what it was like!”

  “You can ask me
. He told me everything.”

  “You’ve got to tell me.”

  “We’ll have to think of something you can do for me.”

  “I was willing to make those phone calls for you.”

  “And I was willing to get you the best lap dance in Boston.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something painless. I know you don’t want to jeopardize your university career.”

  “And then you’ll tell me? Is it good?”

  “It’s vivid.”

  “I can’t wait. That’ll be perfect for my psyche.”

  “You’ll feel like you’re there.”

  “That’s how I want to feel! That’s what I’m into: using fantasy and rationality to control the world, while minimizing risks.”

  25

  Into the Throat

  The morning slipped by like water, as it always did when he was moving. His super had him shoveling dirt. But when the job was done, the super was too busy to tell him what to do. Corey went around looking for an assignment. He offered to hold a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood against a two-by-four while a carpenter hammered in toenails. Soon, they were surrounded by other low-level employees looking for a way to be useful. There are often more hands at a construction site than needed. Each held out a tenpenny nail, hoping the carpenter would take it. Redundant and stalled, Corey stewed in aimlessness and dissatisfaction. The journeyman carpenter hammered away, a well-oiled machine. He never stopped moving; his body and spirit flowed together.

  At break time, instead of sitting with the rest of the crew on the sidewalk in the shade, Corey went to his car and ate his sandwich with the key in the ignition and the radio on, listening to NPR. Without meaning to—and without pleasure—he thought of Adrian, doing physics and punching his heavy bag with ever-increasing force.