Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  But the truly observant, which in the early days included only Mother, soon detected what changing facial bones made undeniable. Nobody had nobody’s nose. Out of the blue, each child grabbed a face by mail order, arriving at unique features for no other reason than being the only one of the batch to hit upon a particular chin. Inertial aunts continued to comment on the unmistakability of the strain. But strangers, from the far side of the communion rail on the family’s occasional Christmas or Easter forays into church, looking over the mixed bag of visages, pronounced a glottal “adoption” while choking down the host.

  Yet even the garden variety of faces seemed uniform compared to the personalities each staked out, persuaded by Dad’s post–Iwo Jima, pre-prefabrication policy of rugged individualism. Rachel let a talent for language die on the vine because big brother Arthur showed the skill before her. She took up sports, retroactively curtailing older sister Lily’s perfection of the half gainer. Lily then shifted to an artistic sensitivity, which Artie had given up for his first Lent following puberty. The kids carved out claims on the map of special interests like so many colored wedges driven into blank Antarctica. The loser in this land grab was the latecomer. Eddie Jr., already condemned by name to suffer little-Rickyism without his father’s even having the excuse of being Cuban, arrived at adolescence to find no decent interests left, and had to take good-natured ineptness for his identity. The four-ovaled photo now bore only the faint traces of other scripts long since abandoned.

  De facto, the kids weren’t going to give up their hard-won second, third, and fourth opinions on what ailed Eddie Sr. They had been raised from infancy under the illness’s milder forms. They all witnessed identical symptoms: they grew up seeing the sightings, the sick stomachs, the fainting fits. They had heard, for years, their mother’s periodic, confidential “Your father is not well,” an explanation as inscrutable as the ailment itself. But Lily suffered the hope of periodic remission while Rach hid in good humor, Art kept ironic distance, and little Eddie stuck to fledgling optimism and kidding. Prescription remained a private patent, more individual temperament than observation. The complications of the last two weeks, Pop’s sudden and violent relapse into spells after years of relative health, could not trick them into unanimity.

  But if the children split on the causes of sickness, they agreed on one shared treatment: no one ever spoke a word of what was going on out loud. By unspoken agreement, they kept mum in public. During one of the rare times that they had touched on what they ought to do about the man’s steady deterioration, Lily ended up hurling Rach through a screen window. The boys, pulling their sisters apart, themselves degenerated into a profanity match that they were only able to patch up by mutually agreeing that neither woman knew what the hell she was talking about.

  They were of the same face once again at least on how to handle the old man among themselves. And so, when he finished counting Dad’s hammer toes by eights, Artie calmed down and reminded himself that what had just happened was nothing that he hadn’t cleaned up after countless times. He stood up, tested his tendons, and went inside. There he ambushed Eddie Jr., who was seeing how long he could bounce a Ping-Pong ball on a hot skillet before it melted.

  Artie grabbed little brother’s neck and squeezed. “I need your help transporting someone near and dear to you across state lines, sport.” Eddie’s face crumpled in fear, which he at once expertly oiled into a look of amused long-suffering. His eyebrows asked, “Again?” although Eddie stayed silent.

  The two brothers walked to the porch, arms on each other’s shoulders. They surveyed the body, discussing how best to grip it. They had worked together like this the summer before, toting ceramic tile into a trench dug out to the city’s main. They lifted their father’s bulk up off the bed, one man-child under each armpit. The passage up the stairwell was so cumbersome that the three bodies jammed for a moment and could not twist forward. Little Eddie called out, “Wait. I’ve seen this one. Laurel and Hardy. The Piano Movers, right? What do I win?” He won, for the moment, a maniacally guilty laugh from his brother.

  Dad shocked them both by choosing that instant to regain awareness. “Have a little respect for the dead,” he said, starting the sentence inaudibly and ending it in full voice. His brisk return to speech so startled his sons that they pulled opposite ways at the turn of the stairs, popping the bottleneck. Dad carried on, “Oh, how sharper than a children’s teeth is . . .”

  “That’s enough,” Artie said, covering the man’s mouth.

  “Cool out, Pop,” Eddie Jr. added, gently. “We got you.”

  Artie had a sudden urge to do violence to both father and brother: squeeze thumbs, wrench arms, throw somebody against the wall. He masked the impulse as he always did—by grinning pleasantly. A dish-breaker at age ten, Artie had since gotten self-control down to a science. At eighteen, he had timed his outbursts carefully for when they would take the opposition off guard and give the best results. At twenty-five, he had paired the physical spasm with the follow-up grin for so long that the desire to hurt father and brother for their inanity melted quickly into the self-defense of goodwill.

  The boys got their father undressed and under the covers. Whatever Pop had seen only a few moments before faded back into the domestic landscape, retreated behind the billboards. The old man went down willingly with nothing further to say for himself than, “You guys are the greatest.”

  “We owe it all to you, Pop,” Eddie Jr. said, flicking off the light. Neither son moved to leave. Instead, they sat quietly, one on the floor, the other across the arm of a chair, two aging athletes agreeing to an informal time-out. They gathered themselves in the dark, listening. Soon came the subtle shift in breathing that marked their father’s departure into sleep.

  “Look at him,” Artie said, eyes adjusted to the dark. “He looks just like a boy of ten.”

  “Twelve, more like,” said Eddie Jr.

  “Have it your way,” Artie grinned. They went back downstairs.

  Lily lay in wait below. She’d witnessed the whole proceedings, hiding in her room at the back of the house. Now she emerged to direct them into the kitchen. She gave them both a glass of her specialty: herbal tea of her own devising, a recipe she squirreled away in a spiral notebook under the chapter heading “Sixties Without Shame.” Artie took his glass with the grimace reserved for acts of comfort. “We’ll only drink this stuff under one condition. You have to play pinochle with us.”

  Lily agreed reluctantly, although all three knew that attempting the game with her was largely an academic exercise. Every few tricks she had to stop and count suits, tapping her fingers on the table for all to hear. Mid-trick, she would ask, “What’s the rank again? Ace, King, Ten?” And Eddie Jr. would have to repeat exasperatedly, “Ace, Ten, King.”

  Somewhere between table talk and point counting, Lily risked a slow stroll onto forbidden territory. She began confidently enough, as if there were more ways to self-esteem than being able to keep track of what trumps were out. “I remember the first time I ever saw Dad have a spell,” she said. “We were still in the Brook Street house. I had just turned eight.” She might have been talking about being taken to see her first stage play.

  “Seven,” corrected Artie, pulling a card from his hand. “I was eight.” He checked her latest mistake firmly, another Ace-King-Ten.

  She scuffed a consonant in silence. “You’re wrong, as usual. I was in Mrs. Buntz’s class, and that was third grade, so I was eight. But we’ll let it slide. For the sake of pleasant conversation, we’ll say seven. Anyway, I was in that upstairs room with the dormers—remember?—getting in my weekly half hour of TV. Do you suppose we were the last children in the Northern Hemisphere to have our TV viewing rationed?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Artie. Flapped by his sister’s patter, he’d misjudged a trick. “That’s not the card I meant to pull.”

  “Laid is played,” Eddie Jr. said, keeping his glee as clinical as possible. At the same time, he filed away
that old cardsharp’s line for use at his high school buddies’ next off-color joke-off. Out loud, he added another favorite Hobson card-table adage: “Never send a boy to do a man’s job.”

  “I imagine we were,” said Lily, habituated to answering her own question. “I remember the color of the bedspread. The house smelled like pepper steak.”

  “The house smelled as a pepper steak smells,” corrected Artie, revenging himself for his wasted trump.

  “The house smelled like pepper steak. The television show was nonfiction, of course. We could watch two nonfiction shows a week, and doubling the allotment always seemed worth having to learn something. A travelogue—somewhere in Asia, I think, although I wouldn’t have known Asia from Newark at the time. Five minutes into it Dad came in, which meant that you couldn’t enjoy the show anymore because he’d quiz you on everything. ‘How far is that country from here? How long would it take an airplane flying five hundred miles an hour to get there?’”

  “‘What language do they speak there?’” Eddie Jr. contributed.

  “‘Do you know our country’s foreign policy in the area?’” Artie said, despite himself.

  Lily swelled and picked up speed. “But when they showed footage of this lost temple, for some reason he shut up. I can still see the place, the camera moving over it. Amazing: a ruin, but intact. No human had touched a stone for hundreds of years. A pack of monkeys had taken the place over, colonized it. A temple given up to gibbons. I remember thinking, at age eight, that it looked like the last record of civilization. Then suddenly: bang. Dad went down behind me, flat on his back. I’ve never been so frightened before or since. I thought . . . God, I don’t know. I thought I had killed him, somehow, by what I was thinking.”

  Artie folded his cards, touched a finger to his eye socket, closed his eyes, and nodded. Lily enjoyed her brother’s rare commiseration. She should have left the empathy at that, more than she expected. But wanting one last shot at the topic, and feeling that pushing the point might lead, for once, to partial action, she added, “Do you think it’s epilepsy, or something?”

  “It’s obviously not epilepsy,” Artie snapped, retrieving a second miscard from under Eddie’s fist, which the kid slammed down to prevent removal. Neither relented, and they ended up tearing a corner off the card.

  “But something like it, maybe?” Lily said, retreating into the hypothetical.

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘something like.’ We already know he’s got ‘something like’ epilepsy. It’s called a family.”

  All at once, from his unassuming slouch, Eddie Jr. demanded, “Why the hell doesn’t he go see a doctor?”

  The outburst surprised the two older children, so long had it been since they thought of that possibility. They exchanged sardonic looks. “‘The human body is a marvelous machine,’” Artie said, in a fair imitation.

  “‘It has had a million more years’ experience in detection and correction than the boys at the Mayo Clinic,’” completed Lil. Pop’s distaste for doctors, his aversion to organized health care, his empirical respect for the mechanism, was one more strange twist of the man’s arch rationality.

  “Why don’t we force him, then?”

  Artie took on the task of educating the dewy-eyed. Patient, patronizing, he said, “I don’t suppose you remember The Abscess? You were just a log in your father’s eye at the time. He came to breakfast one morning looking like he already had a meal stuffed in his right cheek pouch. I’m talking golf ball. And damn him if he wasn’t tough enough to pull off a lesson on the theoretical approach to pain. The monster didn’t even take an aspirin. All for our benefit, of course. I would have passed out. But he: he just sat there doing this comic bit. ‘I wish I had one on the other side, too. I could be Nixon.’ Canadian bacon and a hard biscuit, with an entire molar going off like dynamite in the back quarter of his jaw. Two days later, it’s gone. Successfully healed through calculated neglect. Return to Normalcy.”

  Lily took up the slack. “He loves those newspaper exposés about people going into clinics with kidney stones and coming out of surgery on a platter. It’s a statistical wager for him: the odds are better if you don’t screw with the equilibrium.”

  There lay the heart of the problem. They had slipped easily into card-table rage against the man’s evasiveness, and without changing conversational tones they had ended up somehow adopting the enemy’s logic with no one noticing. But Eddie Jr. must have heard the false turn, because he attacked them with a violent burst before he too succumbed to reason. “So what are you saying?” He stood up, flailing. “That we should let him treat passing out the same as a toothache? That just because he makes a theory out of suffering, that we have to too?” He stopped long enough to notice Artie waving his fingers at him, a facetious, down-boy ripple of digits. Eddie took his seat again, shyly. “I mean, do we gotta wait until he can’t object, and then carry him into the ER? Great. Then we have to listen to the surgeon say how amazing it is that the guy was still walking around alive for so long.”

  “What we’re saying,” Lily explained sympathetically, “is that your father’s second-favorite literary passage in the whole world is the bit from Tristram Shandy—‘I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health . . .’”

  “‘. . . and other evils of life,’” Artie assisted, although Eddie Jr. could have done the same.

  “‘. . . by mirth.’” Lily delivered the quote intact, despite never having tried to memorize it. Sheer repetition on Pop’s part. She smirked, despite herself, remembering his first-favorite speech, Kipling’s “If,” done at an insanely high speed. If you can keep your head, she tested herself, lost to the conversation. When all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Yes: she could probably finish that one, too.

  Artie didn’t think that was what they meant at all. What they were really saying was that addressing Dad’s illness clinically was not step one. But he thought it wiser not to break up the rare consensus he had with Sis. So he said, “What we’re saying is that your father has a considerable jump on us. If we go to him now, he’ll laugh. He’ll just point out, correctly, that he’s been passing out harmlessly for far longer than we’ve worried what to do about it.”

  Eddie fiddled with his suits. “Hey, what’s with the ‘your father’ all of a sudden? You two trying to blame him on me now that he’s gone whacko?”

  Lily, back from mental poetry, countered, “Can you give us one good reason why we shouldn’t?” Ten minutes of talk with the boys, and she inevitably picked up their sardonic style. The moment of truth or consequence passed as subtly as it had arrived. No one knew who was on who’s side; Pop had confused them again. On one point, though, they were still allied. They had all skirted what they all knew to be the real issue: none had the courage to take on Dad’s confidence game head on.

  “Damn right we’re blaming the relapse on you,” Artie chipped in. “After all, don’t you think it’s more than a little suspicious that Pop should wait to have hallucinations again, after all these years, until the very month you have your . . . hem . . . majority thrust upon you?”

  Little Eddie was interrupted in his attempt to use the blade edge of the Jack of Diamonds on his brother’s jugular by the return of Mother and the missing Rachel. Ailene closed the front door after her and butted it shut repeatedly with her behind. The big oak slab had not closed properly since the early part of the century, and refused to cooperate at this late date. Through the runway leading from the kitchen, the card players saw that both Mother and Sister were red and raw from the night cold.

  Artie thought: they slipped out the back way just before the drama broke. He knew that they couldn’t have known the fit was coming on, yet their technical innocence irritated him all that much more. He demanded: “Where did you two run to?”

  Rachel shuffled kitchenward, left wrist to hip, right arm extended. She grabbed Artie and echoed, “Two-run-too . . . two-one-two . . .” He wrestled out of h
er dance clinch and asked again. Rach returned his stare, simian fashion. “Art thou thine sister’s kipper snack?”

  Mother adjudicated, coming down the runway, rubbing her shoulders and burring. She had dropped fifteen pounds after the birth of each child and now nothing stood between the elements and her internal organs. “We were at the Northern Lights. And—” She paused, walked over to the gas stove, and threw open a burner. She placed a kettle over the stove, indulging in the ritual more for the dangerous blue halo of flame than from any real desire for boiling water. “And,” she said again, her dramatic pause revealing itself as the fake reticence of a little girl who can’t wait to give her news. “They carded me.” Smug, she skipped over to Eddie and pushed his nose in, making a smock sound with her cheeks as she did.

  “And you showed him your license?”

  “I had to.”

  Eddie Jr. had long ago become inured to the indignities always meted out on the youngest. He expected his elders to fault him for their still being as capricious and immature as he. But he thought it a particularly ignominious blot on the family name (not that the family name couldn’t use another blot here and there to touch it up and restore the symmetry) that his mother, being carded, should dutifully surrender her two forms of ID. “I suppose, Mother dear, that you got up there and fruged, or whatever you young folks are doing this year, with the best of them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ailene demurred loudly. “I’m no spring chicken, and you know it.” Then why, the question hung about the kitchen, begging for someone to ask, did you fail to see through the heartless practical joke on the part of the doorman?