by Ellen Datlow
When he expressed his jealousy to Melanie, his wife reminded him that Hunter’s abode had been paid for by bullets zipping past him, once pinging off the helmet he almost never wore, not to mention, by threats from local warlords and field commanders, a few of which had drawn perilously close to coming true. His Pulitzer, his books, his house had been earned risking his life to show the world sights it didn’t want to see, but needed to. All of which was true, nor had success curdled Hunter’s personality. He was essentially the same guy Carl had met when they started karate classes together in their early twenties, at the Double Dragon Dojo in Poughkeepsie. These days, the principal difference in Hunter, as he himself liked to say, was that he could afford the top-shelf single malt he preferred. (In fact, he was part owner of a small distillery somewhere in Scotland; Carl couldn’t remember its name.) Yet this did little to dilute Carl’s envy for his friend’s dwelling. As far as he was concerned, if you had to select a location in which to live out your last days, Hunter’s was about as good as any.
Or so he thought. He wondered if Hunter shared his opinion, if he spent his time conscious of the understated beauty surrounding him, or if the prospect of his impending end, the one he’d already tasted, chased other concerns from his mind.
The road passed between the gnarled ranks of an apple orchard, and without warning Carl found himself remembering his first and only HIV test, taken at twenty-three, when he was not long out of a relationship which had given him a case of the crabs cured in one long night, and trust issues which would require longer to treat. Over a pitcher of cheap beer, he had relayed the tale of his ex-girlfriend and her infidelities to a coworker at the Office Max he was then assistant-managing. Instead of the chuckle and expression of commiseration he was expecting, Porter had stared at him with concern. “Dude,” he said, “please tell me you were using protection.”
“At first, sure,” Carl said, “but then she was on the pill.”
“Have you been tested?”
“For what?”
“What do you think? AIDS.”
“Oh,” Carl said, “I don’t think I—”
Porter cut him off. “You were having unprotected sex with a girl who was cheating on you with someone who passed on crabs to her. Who knows what else he might have given her?”
“But . . .”
“You really want to chance it?”
He didn’t, and so Carl had gone to the Department of Health to have his blood drawn; although, self-conscious about meeting someone he knew there, he drove twenty miles up the Hudson, to the office in Wiltwyck. After sitting on a molded plastic chair in the waiting room, Carl was directed to a closet-sized office, where he sat on another uncomfortable chair while a nurse dressed in a brown pantsuit and cream blouse asked him questions about his sexual and drug-use history before instructing him to roll up his sleeve. She filled a vial with his blood, taped a cotton ball over the spot on his arm, and gave him a slip of paper with his ID number on it and told him his results would be ready in two weeks.
Carl had spent that time trying not to think about the test’s outcome. In unguarded moments, though, he would recall his older brother’s best friend, Wayne Ahuja, who had suffered with and then died from AIDS-related complications over the course of a year and a half. Ever skinny, Wayne had become positively skeletal as his health worsened, his skin yellowing from the cancer consuming his liver. Toward the end, he had lost vision in his left eye, and for reasons of which Carl was unsure, had taken to walking with a cane. Throughout his decline, Wayne had retained an exasperated sense of humor, complaining of dying from a fling with a paralegal, and not a debauched weekend with Freddy Mercury. While he refused to be despondent—at least, publicly—about a month before he entered hospice care, Wayne said to Carl, “You know, I’m going to miss not seeing Paris.”
They were sitting on the back porch of Wayne’s mother’s condo in Beacon. Manny, Carl’s older brother, was helping Mrs. Ahuja in the kitchen. It was a warm spring day, but Wayne was wearing a cardigan and a blanket draped over his shoulders. Carl said, “Paris?”
“I’m treading perilously close to stereotype, I know,” Wayne said. “I can’t help it. I’ve always loved France. When my father was alive, he used to fly to France for business. He always brought me a souvenir, a little Eiffel Tower, French comics. The way he described Paris made it sound like the most amazing, wonderful city. In high school, I took French 1, 2, 3, and 4, all with Madame McCarthy, who was a flake. My junior year, there was a class trip to Paris, but we couldn’t swing it, financially. My first real crush was on an exchange student from Besançon my senior year; he was beautiful and totally clueless, just thought I was very friendly. I’ll say. In college, I majored in French. One of my teachers, Claude, was from outside Paris, and I used to ask her about the city in my terrible French. I watched every French movie Blockbuster had on the shelves. I read The Stranger, first in English and then (slowly) in French. A lot of poets, too, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valéry. I liked Baudelaire the best; Rimbaud always seemed like he was trying too hard to play the bad boy.
“Anyway, my plan was, once I finished college, I would work for a couple of years, stay with Mom to save money, and then spend a summer in Paris. I intended to hit all the tourist spots, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, Shakespeare & Co. I fantasized about finding a job while I was there, but hadn’t figured out how to make that happen. I wasn’t concerned. I assumed I had time. You know what they say happens when you assume?”
“You make an ass of you and me,” Carl said.
“There you have it.”
That was their last conversation; the next he saw Wayne, he was lying in his coffin in a funeral home in Fishkill. The final expression on his face suggested disappointment, as if, after his lengthy suffering, whatever Wayne saw approaching was anticlimactic. Carl had not forgotten the look, made uneasy by what it suggested.
The apple trees gave way to open fields dotted with rocks. As the date of his test result had approached, he remembered, he had noticed a sensation at the limit of his perception, not unlike the feeling of pressure his ears registered during a change in altitude. No amount of swallowing or yawning affected this pressure; indeed, it strengthened each day. He noticed, too, the people and objects around him outlined ever-so-slightly in black, as if they were comic book illustrations and he aware of the inker’s hand. He recognized the link between the sensation and the black haloes and understood both as by-products of his escalating anxiety. Yet he could not shake the suspicion that this was more than an elaborate hallucination, that he was perceiving these things more than inventing them. Perhaps they had always been present, waiting for a situation of sufficient duress to disclose them.
By the time Carl was driving Route 9 to the Rhinecliff-Wiltwyck Bridge, he had decided that what he had grown aware of was death, was the void, the nonexistence atop which everyone and everything sat like soap bubbles quivering on the surface of dark water. At any moment, an individual bubble might burst, or dwindle to nothing, and the remaining bubbles would shift to close the gap, and it would be as if the particular bubble had never existed. Crossing the bridge high over the Hudson, he felt himself as hollow as any mix of soap and water blown into a sphere, his life a momentary structure fated to collapse.
Threaded through this apprehension, however, was another, of the sheer loveliness surrounding him. From the mid-afternoon sunlight bright on the corrugated surface of the Hudson below, to the chrome shine of the bumper in front of him, from the fine hairs on the knuckles of his right hand resting on the steering wheel, to the long blades of green grass nodding on the other side of the road as he drove off the bridge, beauty met his eyes wherever he turned them. A long line of passengers waiting to board a Trailways bus for Manhattan might have been figures in a painting by Brueghel. The buildings on either side of Broadway glowed with Technicolor vibrancy. A group of children running home from school could have stepped fresh from Renaissance marble. The impre
ssion swelled like a great piece of music rising to a crescendo, in its own way as pitiless as the sense of death with which it was entwined. Lightheaded, he parked up the street from the Department of Health. He was in the grip of an experience more profound than any he had undergone since the death of his father two years before, a moment in some ways adjunct to the earlier one. It continued as he once again entered the small office, where a different nurse, wearing a green dress and a necklace of large green beads, passed him a piece of paper on which he read the word NEGATIVE. Nor did it cease upon his return to his car, where he sat with the engine off and let relief spill through him. Perhaps the imminent dread of death lessened somewhat, but his recognition of the glory of the world did not. It held steady, even climbed a few rungs higher. By the next day, it would diminish considerably; while the morning following returned him to normal.
After that, the closest Carl drew to perceiving the raw, unfiltered beauty around him were the births of his daughters. Random moments in the intervening decades offered glimpses of loveliness, but nothing to compare with what he had known during his swing into death’s orbit. He wondered if Wayne Ahuja had known the same beauty as he was dying, if perceiving the world’s grace was compensation for losing it, if the disappointed expression on Wayne’s face post-mortem was because whatever came next could not approach the beauty he was leaving.
On his left, the ground dropped to Lake Champlain, across whose shining breadth the Adirondacks stood in a line like the wall to some unimaginable kingdom, their jagged heights draped in snow.
IV
Despite previous assurances that he would do so, Hunter had not paved the long driveway to his house. It was a nod to privacy, a complement to the NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to the trees at the end of the drive; albeit, one easily overcome by anyone willing to take the quarter mile rutted dirt slowly enough to avoid scraping their vehicle’s undercarriage. For most of its course, the driveway ran between dense rows of tall red pine. Amidst the trunks to the right, Carl glimpsed a figure in jeans and a red jacket, a woman walking beside a golden retriever, who ran and gamboled about her. That didn’t take long, he thought; although the woman could as easily be Hunter’s doctor, checking her patient’s status, or his lawyer, here to review details of his will. She could have offered to take out the dog as a kindness. Or maybe she’s the reason his third wife left him. Hunter had always been charming, to put it mildly. In fact, it was a particularly credible threat from one woman’s angry boyfriend that had brought him to train at the Double Dragon. His flirtations and an extended affair had strained his first marriage far past what Carl had been certain was its breaking point; the end of the same affair had undone marriage number two. With Hunter’s third trip to the altar, Carl had wondered if his friend might be ready to settle, but it would hardly be surprising to learn that, even in the face of a terminal diagnosis, Hunter remained restless.
And what business is that of yours? Melanie might have been sitting in the car with him. That isn’t why you’re here, is it?
“No,” he said.
The trees thinned and fell away, revealing the short hill atop which Hunter’s house sat. The architect had been after something in the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had constructed a long wooden box with a flat roof and a western wall composed of two stories of windows, which Hunter said made the place a bitch to heat during the Vermont winters, but offered stunning views of the lake and the mountains. The driveway climbed through tall grass to a pair of garage doors set in the hillside below the southern end of the house. An olive, late-model Range Rover was parked in front of one of the doors, an older blue Volvo before the other. Carl tagged the Range Rover as Hunter’s, the Volvo as belonging to his dog-walking guest. He stopped far enough behind the vehicles to allow either’s departure. He retrieved the plastic shopping bag with the bottles of Auchentoshan and Talisker in it, and stepped out of the car for the walk up the stone steps to the front door. The air was cold and damp, brimming with the promise of snow.
Hunter opened the door as Carl was leaning to press the bell. “Hey!” he said, “You made it!” He looked terrible. The weight he had accumulated with his semi-retirement was gone, devoured by his sickness. He was as thin as he had been when he and Carl had met, thinner. A belt cinched on its last hole secured his jeans to his hips, while his blue and white flannel shirt enveloped him like a small tent. A faded blue baseball cap shielded a face drawn to the bone. Carl embraced him, and his friend felt insubstantial, more fabric than flesh. It’s as if he’s already gone. They released one another, and Hunter gestured at the shopping bag. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Water of life,” Carl said.
“Bit late for me,” Hunter said, “although I swear, it’s what’s brought me this far. You know how long the docs gave me? Three months. ‘Put your affairs in order,’ they said. ‘This is gonna be quick.’ That was nine months ago, almost ten, at this point. Who could have guessed? But come in, come in,” he said, retreating inside the house.
Carl followed, passing along the front hall to the living room, a vast open space across which were scattered couches, love seats, and easy chairs, all upholstered in the same black padding, each oriented more or less toward the large flat-screen TV hung on the wall to the left. A doorway in the same wall led down another hallway, past a number of closed doors on the right, a wall of windows on the left, which showed the tops of the red pines and, beyond them, a shining stretch of Lake Champlain, a cluster of the Adirondacks. They emerged into the kitchen, which was centered around a sizable island whose gray and white marble top glowed with the afternoon light. Hunter continued to another doorway, which admitted to a smaller room, its walls lined with tall bookcases stuffed with volumes shelved without apparent regard to size, subject, or author. Facing the windows and their view, a pair of easy chairs in the same black padding as the living room furniture flanked a small table, atop which rested a pair of glass tumblers and a jug of water. Seating himself on the far side of the table, Hunter nodded at the glasses and said, “There you go. I’ll trust you to decide which bottle we finish first.”
“You don’t think it’s a little early?” Carl said. “Don’t you want to have lunch?”
“Early was a long time ago,” Hunter said. “I’ll have Annie order us a pizza when she gets back. You like mushrooms? Don’t worry about it. We’ll order two pies. You can get what you want.”
“Fair enough,” Carl said. He removed the bottles from the bag, set them beside the glasses. “As I recall, you favor the Auchentoshan.”
“You recall correctly, sir.”
He poured three fingers’ worth into one tumbler, reached for the water. Hunter raised his left hand. “Don’t bother.”
“Do I have to give the speech about how the drop of water unlocks the Scotch’s flavors?”
“At this point, I prefer my experiences undiluted.”
“If you insist.” Carl placed the bottle on the table and settled into his chair.
“Ahhh,” Hunter said, smacking his lips after his first taste. “This is the stuff.”
“It’s even better with the water,” Carl said.
“You don’t let up, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Dying’s looking better and better.”
Carl supped from his glass. “What’s the latest on that?”
Hunter shrugged. “We’re in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two strikes. Not much longer to go. Maybe a week or two. Maybe less.”
“You seem in pretty decent shape, all things considered.”
“You mean, for a guy who’s already a skeleton?”
“Is that what’s different about you? I thought it was your hair.”
“You’re not wrong about that.” Hunter removed his baseball cap, revealing a head rough with stubble.
“Chemo?”
“Yeah.” Hunter returned the cap to his head. “I stopped a month ago, once the docs told me there wasn’t any point. Had you seen me while
I was on that stuff, you would’ve had no trouble believing the end was nigh. Since I discontinued it, I feel pretty good. You know, for a guy who’s on his way out. It’s strange: This is what got my mom. I’m five years older than she was, but in the end, heredity won.” Hunter raised his drink, frowned. “Goddammit, why is this empty?”
“Hang on,” Carl said, and poured him another generous portion of Scotch.
“Good man,” Hunter said.
“Still a no on the water?”
“Why do you insist on asking questions you know the answer to?”
“Hope springs eternal, or something.” Carl’s glass was almost finished. He refilled it with less than he’d served Hunter, added a drop of water. Outside, on the lake, a boat was heading south. Exactly what type of vessel it was, he couldn’t say, only that it was neither sailboat or speedboat. A yacht? Maybe. It appeared to be making good time; long waves rolled away from it in a V.
“What about you?” Hunter said. “How’s Melanie? How’re the girls? Everything okay at the dojo?”
“Good, good, and yes,” Carl said. “Melanie’s not long back from a trip out west to a couple of shows. She did pretty well at one of them, may have found a new outlet for her jewelry. Deb has one more semester to go at Binghamton, then she’s looking at NYU for her master’s. Art history. Karen’s at community college, leaning toward nursing. We’re up to a hundred and fifty students at the studio, give or take.”
“That is good.”
“I can’t complain.” Carl tipped his glass at Hunter. “Any word from—it was Jill, right?”