Chapter 1 #22
Now, grab you some Heavenly grub. Name your poison.
A heightened version of the best meal you ever had?
Sure, here you go: Paris, 1986, scallops but looking pretty as a dessert, gold leaf sprinkled over the top.
An exact re-creation of that special birthday meal Mother whipped up when you turned ten?
Steak, fried potatoes, angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries and afterward Mother let you have a sip of her wine out on the porch swing?
Eat up, please enjoy. That had been back in the days when he’d sometimes go wading after school in Crow Creek.
Having missed the bus, he’d walk home in wet trousers, only to catch all kind of heck from Mother upon arrival, including the belt.
Which, in those days, was common. And nobody minded about the so-called violence of that.
Much.
Once a salamander from the creek hopped out of his pantcuff and sent Mother dashing into the bedroom wailing at the top of her lungs.
Wait.
This was no gray manse on a misty moor.
Where was he?
Where the hell was he?
The Colorado place? Which they’d always called, for some reason, “the chateau”? Some chateau. Last time they were up there, there’d been a big pile of tires behind it. Little Joel’d better get that goddamned tire pile gone or he’d be looking for a new position.
Well, this wasn’t the chateau.
And it wasn’t Key West and wasn’t Maui. The elegant Minton place?
No, the Minton place had burned down on Halloween, tail end of Vietnam.
Couzens Hall, second floor, his freshman-year dorm room, freshly painted?
With the clanking radiator? Lying here in his quiet dorm, he couldn’t wait.
He could do it, he could do all of it. The untainted semester lay ahead.
He’d made a vow to attend every home game this fall.
Had saved up, bought a special new sweater in maize and blue, school colors.
But no.
Hang on there.
Christ, where was he? How old was Julia?
There’d be a clue in that. Three, four? Bangs cut straight across, cute as a bug?
Recently they’d all pulled up together in front of the Sammons Center: him, Viv, Julia.
Yes, right: he’d snapped at the Mexican kid there, No wheelchair, get away, ya no lo necesitamos.
Julia had been driving. Driving the Mercedes.
So, she couldn’t be three, a kid wasn’t allowed to drive at—
Ah, God, it all came back: he was old, sick, had endured months of just the most horrendous degrading crap: scans, chemo, different chemo, more scans, blood work, ports, stitches from when he’d fallen in the bathroom, endless consultations after the stitches got infected, the first operation, then the second, and then he’d gone blind in the eye in front of the tumor, had fallen again (stitches in a different part of his face), and started throwing absolutely everything up and then came the news that—well, no more chemo.
Had the tumor shrunk? No, not at all, and also?
He might lose that eye. Thanks, thanks so much, you merciless quacks.
The cancer was everywhere. In one shoulder, down the spine, in the liver, the bladder, you name it.
How about my shoes? he’d said. No, the nurse said wryly, your shoes are fine.
He’d been short with her once too often.
Chubby bimbo. Squat incompetent. He didn’t care if she was Ethiopian or Ugandan or whatnot.
More power to her on that front. No: he cared that she was such a goddamned bitch to him all the time.
In his prime he’d have gobbled her up and spit her out.
Now he needed her. He reached over, touched her hand.
As if they were equals. She wasn’t having it.
Curled her lip like she smelled something off.
Had they given up on him, then? No, no, they had not, she said, they were referring him to Sovereign and the great folks over there.
To which he’d said, Hospice? Good God, are you serious?
She was. Serious.
Serious as a heart attack.
And now he was diapered, he recalled grimly.
Him. He was. K. J. Boone was. A team of changers swooped down on him four times a day in the sudden smell of asswipes and the sound of efficient under-the-breath coordination.
“Got a little something on the, uh, inner leg, Janie.” The Russian guy lifting him up at the hip with one gloved hand while the Boston-sounding gal reached under him and—
The air-con came on now with a familiar whump and air began flowing out of it.
He could picture the exact grating on the vents.
Ack, this was the house on Owl Flight Terrace.
In Dallas. Jesus Christ, he knew every inch of it.
He was in the guest bedroom, second floor.
Why was he in here? In the Slop Room? Why wasn’t he in his own goddamned room?
Had he worked so hard all these years just to end up croaking in the Slop Room?
He’d speak to someone about this. Or have Viv do it.
Who was “Viv” again?
Your wife, you dope, he answered himself.
She was here. Viv was. Right here. Julia too.
He was eighty-seven.
Eighty-seven goddamn years old.
All done.
He’d done it all.
It was finished.
—
His breath was labored and shallow, his internal organs barely functioning, his blood flow had almost ceased, his heart was beating irregularly, like an afterthought.
He was moments from death and knew it.
Into the room came a feeling of dread, as if some livid part of the universe had been summoned and, regardless of who or what must be broken in the process, intended to establish that it, and not the other (merciful, loving) part reigned supreme.
Jill was still very much within me.
Not-Jill was still very much within me.
We were an inseparable unity, no longer we, but I.
And resolved henceforth to think and act as one.
Present in my charge was a desire to confess something he’d previously been withholding.
Go ahead, I said.
Don’t hold me to this, he said. Spitballing.
Go, I said.
And he stopped speaking to me and began reasoning in my direction, as it were.
All right, look, what if he had? (he began).
Made some mistakes?
Let’s say (just say, for the sake of argument) that he’d been “wrong.” About certain things.
Wrong in arguing against a view that now, more and more, seemed to have become, by some sort of public consensus, the prevailing/mainstream view.
A view supported by the (yes, he could say it now) apparent increase (anecdotal, but still) in the frequency of certain extreme weather events, occurring so frequently recently that, before his illness, he’d gotten in the habit of turning off the news before the weather came on.
The weather made him anxious. He felt blamed by it.
Which was absurd, but. Then the weather had started bleeding over into the real news.
So he’d stopped watching the news. Who needed it? Nothing new under the sun.
Who needed to see, for example, the filthy, storm-surging Mississippi flooding a kid’s birthday party, at which some photographer, intent on tugging heartstrings, had found (arranged, more likely) a cluster of pink birthday hats on a little tabletop floating away downriver?
Not new. Well, all right, kind of new. But he didn’t need to see it.
Or some African grandma in her scorched field of cassava or whatnot, toddling up to the camera with a dented cup, begging for something, anything.
Or in France, a house absolutely zipping down a hillside through a gauntlet of still-standing houses, the street a sluice of sorts, the scale of the thing just amazing.
In Peru, a drone flew over (and over and over) burned-out foundations of home after home, in the driveways of which sat smoldering cars, and between two of the cars stumbled a doe who’d caught fire, fur singed black, and then she dropped in a heap, braying plaintively from her unnervingly wide-open mouth.
(Tough, tough to watch, nobody wanted to see that.) In Carmel, the Pacific swept this frail old fart right off his feet (tsunami, Japan) and when his equally frail wife went to help him, the ocean took her and her walker too, and you heard, on the video, someone say: Are they gone?
And someone else said: Are they coming back?
And a third person, possibly their adult son, started screaming bloody murder and the newscaster said, Could this, too, be considered climate-related?
Having a pretty good idea what the answer was going to be, he’d turned the goddamn set off.
It was all a sort of enviro-porn and he didn’t need it. It wasn’t scientific, it was conjectural, it implied specious connections between A and B. There were, yes, for sure, strange things happening, but to blame it all so simplistically on one specific cause, one particular—
Shitsake, you did your best. You staked out a certain position.
That was how science worked. It was called having a hypothesis.
Having staked out that position, you defended it.
What supported that position was “good,” what threatened it was “bad.” That was called human nature.
When you were in charge of a thing, you did your best to protect the interests of that thing.
That was called acting as a responsible corporate steward.