I lean my head back and stare up into the skylights my father and Billy put in last summer before Dad’s neck and back started to hurt. I shift my gaze. From this vantage it looks like my father has an enormous rack of antlers. His chest seems to heave with the effort of holding them up.
“Indulge me,” he says, handing me my drink and sitting down beside me. The port is sweet and plummy; it lies heavy on your tongue, coating your mouth like blood distilled with fire. “This is the story about a man who kills a bear.”
“Oh, sure, that’s child friendly. I see a pop-up book, with lots of blood. A scratch-and-sniff, like Pat the Bunny: Slaughter the Bear.”
“For Christ’s sake, can’t you just listen, Evie?” he says. “One time.”
“By all means,” I say, staring out the French doors at the deck and the woods outside.
“Okay, one day this father goes out deer hunting in the forest on the Blue Mountain with some of his buddies. He’s out in the forest and somehow he gets separated from them so he’s all by himself.”
“Wait,” I say. “Give me more details.”
“Fine, he’s a good man, he’s got a family, a wife and two daughters.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Does he love them, do they love him, has he ever cheated on his wife, does he secretly love one of his daughters more than the other…”
My father grits his teeth. “This is my story,” he says. “Let me tell it.”
“Oh, please, go for it.” I couldn’t stop him.
“Okay, so all of a sudden, it starts to snow, and so he decides to head back. Just then, a huge grizzly bear appears in the pines in front of him. The guy is like, Oh shit. You see, no grizzly bears had been seen on the Blue Mountain in, say, a hundred years. Right then, the bear charges at him, and the man stumbles backward into a ravine, dropping his gun on the way down. Well, it looks pretty bad for him.”
“I’ll say. This is the part the kids go crazy for, right?”
He ignores me and takes a sip of his port. “When he comes to, he’s hurt his leg in the fall, he’s lost his gun, his friends don’t know where he is so they can’t help him, and worst of all, he’s pissed off this grizzly bear, who he’s sure is still in the area. The father thinks, Oh great, I’m going to die. If the bear doesn’t kill me and eat me for supper, I’ll starve to death in the woods. He’s never been so scared in all his life. He’s praying like crazy.”
“Really? He suddenly gets religion, huh,” I say, but my father barrels on ahead.
“Somehow, though, the father manages to crawl out of the ravine and find shelter under some low-hanging pine branches covered in snow and he builds a fire, which he knows will keep away the animals, and he eats the beef jerky and cookies his wife and daughters put in his pack, and before you know it, he falls asleep.”
“He falls asleep? Doesn’t he know he’ll freeze to death if he falls asleep? He can’t fall asleep, Daddy,” I say. “Shouldn’t this story at least teach Annabelle survival skills?”
“He knows it, but he can’t help it. The guy is in a tremendous amount of pain, and—”
“He can’t. For Christs’ sake, he should think of his wife and daughters, think of how much they love him. That should keep him awake.”
“He’s doing what he can,” my father says. “So lo and behold, in the morning the hero is still alive! He can’t believe it. He thanks God. He somehow manages to crawl up the ravine and finds, as if by miracle, his gun, sticking up out of the low branches of a fir tree, and he starts to make his way home, knowing his wife and daughters are, by now, really, really worried about him. Just then, he hears a sound and turns, and sure enough, it’s that damn grizzly bear again.”
“Same bear or different bear?”
“Same bear.”
“Is that possible?”
“Why not?” my father says. “Just let me finish, all right?” He leans closer to me. “But this time the bear is so close the hero can see his cruel black eyes and razor-sharp yellow teeth. The bear swings at him. The giant paw gashes the father’s face. Just as the bear is ready to go in for the kill, the father lifts his gun and, though he can barely stand, he shoots the bear. But it keeps coming at him, so he shoots again and then again, and finally, with the last shot, the bear gives a great bellow and collapses, dead.”
My father sucks in his breath, as if he can see the bear staggering and falling into the snow before him. He drinks his port.
“No one can believe how brave and lucky this guy was. Like I said, nobody’d seen a bear, let alone shot one, in these woods for a hundred years,” my father says, his voice faltering a little. “Oh man, people remember this and talk about it and talk about it forever,” he says, his cheeks all pink, then he pauses. “They say what a great and brave man he was, or whatever. You can make the ending good.”
“Oh, am I supposed to write this all down?” I say.
“No,” he says. “I will, and I thought I’d do drawings, a little pen-and-ink jobby. Or you could do the drawings….”
He reaches over and grabs my foot for a second, giving it a little shake, the way he used to reach into the backseat when he was driving and grab me around the ankle and give me a squeeze, as if to tell me he hadn’t forgotten I was there.
“That’s not a bad story, is it? It’s pretty good, I think,” he says, sounding pleased with himself.
“It’s not bad,” I say, laying my head on his shoulder. I can smell wood smoke in his sweater and the encroaching tang of something metallic, medicinal.
“Does he apologize to his family for worrying them half to death?”
My father doesn’t answer. He frowns for a moment and I wonder if he is in pain. He finishes his port and lowers the glass to the carpet. “You decide.”
“You know what, Daddy? I was so afraid that when you were telling the story, you were going to have the ending be, ‘And then the hunter died. That’s the way these things are. Life is cruel. Nature is merciless and unpredictable.’” I can’t catch my breath.
For a long moment, the library is silent, except for the wind pressing against the glass doors. He shrugs, as though the ending is out of his hands.
“Well, you don’t know, it could go that way,” my father says. He reaches down to pick up his port glass as though he’s forgotten it’s already empty.
“No,” I say. “That’s a shitty ending. I mean, I wouldn’t tell a kid that story. What kind of story is that?”
My father straightens his back defensively. “It wouldn’t mean the man wasn’t brave or good, or that he shouldn’t be remembered that way, does it?” my father asks. “Hey, we are talking about mortals here.”
“He’s the hero,” I say. “Remember?”
“Yes, but he has to be real, right? Not some kind of—”
“Real doesn’t last.” My hand is shaking so badly, I’m afraid I’ll spill, so I swallow the end of my drink.
“Listen,” he says, exasperated. “You take the story, use it. Do with it what you will.”
He leans over and takes my hand between his, and for an awkward moment we hold hands on the sofa, his cold hands holding my warm ones.
“It’s a gift.” He brushes an invisible lock of hair from my forehead. “A good father, a brave hunter out in the wild, come on, that’s a character a kid would remember, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” I say. I don’t want to fight.
“It’s a good story, don’t you think?” he asks me again, his eyes shining. He bends down and picks up the bottle of port. He pours some in his glass, and then mine, saving the last drops for me.
“All right, all right,” I say. “It’s a good story.”
“I know you expect more,” he says. “Listen, I would hope having gone through all this for sixteen years that I’d have developed some sense of understanding of either myself or the illness, and it’s really disappointing. I don’t really have anything to offer you. It’s just kind of one of those things that
everybody does, and I’m probably going to do it sooner than I should be, and certainly sooner than I would like to.”
Slowly he gets up from the sofa, the empty bottle in hand. He kisses the top of my head, then he opens the library doors and steps out onto the deck. I watch as he raises the bottle over his head and flings it off the deck and down into the woods. From the sofa I can hear it land, hear the clink, as it finds its mate in the tall grass.
TRY AN OUTLINE
1. Finding Out
A. The Phone Call
Your father says, “I have some bad news.”
You say, “No.”
You are afraid of this bad news. You’ve heard bad news before, and it’s never good.
He says, “I’m afraid so.”
You say, “No, no, no.”
How long can you keep him at bay like this?
“Oh honey,” your mother says. Her voice is drunk on tears. Damn her. She always takes his side. Always. Last time this happened it was the same damn thing. What about that surgical cure?
“It’s bad,” he says. This is how he explained the very first bout of cancer to you fourteen years ago. You were a kid. Bad meant not good. It did not mean death.
“How bad?” You imagine some pain, some unhappiness, discomfort, but life. Still, you think you feel a small tear, like fabric being ripped inside you.
“I’m probably going to die,” your father says. It sounds like a bad movie written in English, translated into Chinese, then into pig Latin.
“It’s already metastasized to my spine, and who knows where else,” he says. “You know what that means.”
“No,” you say. But you’ve already tried this tactic.
B. What You Do
1. Refuse to sleep in your bed. Pull out the sofa bed and turn on the TV. Cartoons. It’s after midnight. Watch cats being flattened with anvils, a mouse blown apart by a rocket. See them in the next frame, unharmed, not a scratch on them. Watch a bird set an elaborate and comical trap for a coyote, watch it work. Count down the hours until you board your train. Five hours.
2. Wonder if there are any chimpanzees right now going under the knife in the name of lung-transplant research. Speculate that if your father were the president of the United States, somebody would do a transplant. Wonder if there are medical mail-order catalogs where you can order lungs, flat and blue and inflatable upon arrival. Fail at strategy. Four hours.
3. Don’t take chances. Take another sleeping pill.
4. Embrace unconsciousness.
2. Dealing with the Intruder
A. Wake. Wonder when you fell asleep. Wake with the word metastasize on your tongue fizzing in the back of your throat like an aspirin. Metastasize, metastasize, metastasize, metastasize. You can’t stop it.
B. When you see your father he looks perfectly healthy. “Cough,” you say. He shakes his head, then messes up your hair the way he used to when you told him knock-knock jokes. None of this makes sense. Back in those halcyon days of Dixie riddle cups and book reports, when you and Dad camped out every school night at the dining-room table bent over homework, he’d say, “Okay, you’ve got a problem. Try an outline, break it down into things you can handle. Then attack it.”
When will you learn?
Introduce the option of a second opinion.
“I saw them myself, Evie,” your father says as though the cancer cells were UFOs. Your father has a Ph.D. in chemistry, he believes in the power of science, he believes in his doctors. Don’t rock his faith. Remember that somewhere you read that a good mental attitude is the most important weapon in the battle against disease. What the hell were you thinking by trying to get him to question his own doctor? Why not just tie his hands behind his back and push him down a flight of stairs?
Ask yourself whether you would rather have him alive and in pain for five years, or alive and pain free for one. Go for five. You are so selfish.
When you see him out watering his orchids in the greenhouse and dancing to “Jumping Jack Flash,” using the hose as a microphone, realize there’s been some kind of terrible, hilarious mistake. One day you’ll laugh about it. Remember that mix-up with the X rays, how we thought Dad was dying but it was actually somebody else! That was rich.
When your father flies into a rage at your confession that you will feel lost without him, and yells at you that you better start taking your life seriously, stop wasting time, and start saving for your future, think it’s the cancer talking, not him.
Think, You can’t make me. Guess you’ll just have to stick around. Hold my hand.
Don’t say this. He looks mad enough to hit you.
When your father gets angry, back down. Talk calmly, like he’s a man on a ledge about to jump; he holds his life in his hands.
The customer/dying man is always right. Here’s your paper hat and yellow blazer, welcome to suffering school!
When he starts to tell you the story of The Bad News, how his doctor of fourteen years said, “Everything looks great. You look healthy. Seven years no cancer, that’s what we call a surgical cure. Let’s just pop this chest X ray up on the screen to make sure…,” close your eyes. When he says, “And there they were, millions of tiny cancer cells everywhere, filling my lungs, and the doctor said to me, ‘Jeez, I hate to tell you this, Chas, but you’re going to die. I’m so sorry,’” don’t tell him he’s told you this story already three times before. Wonder if he’s saying it because he doesn’t believe it. Does he really need to keep hearing it? Do you?
“The doctor was so upset,” your mother adds. “He really likes your father.”
“Well, of course he does,” you say. Hate the doctor. Who is this putz? What kind of car does he drive? Mercedes, you bet it’s a goddamn Mercedes.
In addition to making stupid, irritating observations like “the doctor really likes your father,” your mother looks like hell. She’s too skinny, she looks as breakable as a dime-store comb, but she’s trying to be brave, brave and jaunty, like one of those teeny plastic swords stabbed through an orange wedge in Polynesian cocktails. Try to imagine other kinds of inanimate snappable objects your mother resembles. Your little sister, who has driven up in a pouring rain, is wearing the oversize tortoiseshell glasses that she had in high school, in lieu of her contacts. The only one who looks okay is your father. He looks great. He’s in the driver’s seat. You are just the terrified passengers.
“What’s so weird,” he says, “is I feel fine. I feel really good.”
Later, he confesses that his back hurts; what he thought was the aches and pains of playing squash at fifty-five is cancer wrapped like lace around his spine. “All that helps,” he says, “is alcohol, especially red wine. Expensive red wine.” Make a note to buy red wine when you’re out at the store today. Remember a goofy T-shirt you once saw, LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO DRINK BAD WINE.
Should you buy it?
Should you buy one of those baseball caps with a ponytail sewn inside it?
Pray that your father doesn’t lose his hair.
Try to keep yourself from imagining his bald skull.
C. Imagine Cancer
The doctor says that visualization is very important in combating your illness. Try to imagine the cancer, the doctor says.
Space: Your father’s lungs are a constellation of cancer cells. Exploding stars. Once in a blue moon, a cell will shoot like a comet across his lungs and land somewhere else in his body, someplace soft and spongy, like his kidneys, maybe. There it will burn like an asteroid.
Nature: His body is a hive of cancer with worker bees pollinating cancer cells throughout his body as if it’s a garden, rubbing their cancer-covered legs up and down his spine, poisoning his vertebrae with fast-blooming tumors.
War: Cancer cells are an army of soldiers intent on taking your father’s life. Colonizing his body, they plant land mines and flags, claiming body parts as their own. Blowing up vital organs that are the territory of the well body. Seizing the heart, conquering the brain.
Slapstick: Cancer cells are stainless steel ball bearings careening around his body. Somebody could slip on those and really get hurt.
Home: Cancer cells are ill-mannered houseguests who keep showing up each day with more and more children, and won’t leave no matter how many Slim Whitman records you play. Cancer is a houseguest you can’t get rid of without burning your home to the ground.
3. Take Charge
A. Write the doctor, who has your father’s trust, a very angry letter, threatening that if he doesn’t save your father you will make his life a nightmare. You will stalk him. Kill one of his children.
Scare yourself. Are you a good daughter or what?
B. Fear that if you send it, the doctor will intentionally let your father die. Don’t send it, but keep it.
C. Go to the store and buy all your father’s favorite foods. Chocolate Häagen-Dazs, hard pretzels, lard-fried potato chips, and a cheese-steak sub with fried onions and pickles. “Fat,” you say to the cashier, “is no object.”
Buy yourself a pack of extra-strength mentholyptus cough drops. You can’t get breath anymore, your lungs feel like someone is squeezing them, flattening them like an accordion. Lungs, the oompah organs.
D. Buy books about living with cancer. Do not read them, or open them.
E. Buy all the Joseph Campbell books your credit card can suffer. If there’s an answer to the question Is there a God? this guy likely has the answer. Never open them.
F. Think about Dr. Linus Pauling. King of the Cs. Lived to be an old, old man. Buy a life’s supply—it would seem—a thermos-sized brown jar of vitamin C with rose hips. What is a rose hip? Are there iris hips? Tulip thighs? 1000 milligrams, that’s a lot of oranges. Present the vitamins as though they were frankincense and myrrh. Don’t be hurt, when your father says, “Thanks,” but doesn’t even take one. You’re not giving up. Wonder why it is that people in health food stores always look like they are sick or dying? Is it all that kelp?
G. Metastasize! It sounds like a laser shot out of the palm of a superhero.
Use Me Page 19