Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  “You could help me with the facts,” Raymond says.

  “Sure, sure,” she says, shutting him down. “But you know. I don’t know much more than you.”

  Such a response is just what Vince expected.

  She put the papers down on the glass coffee table, Windex streaks still visible on its surface. Her eyes scrutinize their home: the brick walls, the exposed ductwork, the wine racks overhanging the kitchen island, the pulley system on the ceiling by the front door where they store their two mountain bikes, unused since Raymond’s diagnosis. Their studio used to be a glass factory during Gastown’s boom years a century ago.

  No words remain to fill the awkward silence that follows. Lucille has already told Raymond about her upcoming trip to Kenya. She has taken one trip a year, dutifully, since her husband died. “Ngorongoro Crater,” she announced, mispronouncing the location. “This October. All the animals will be there.”

  The silence crackles between them.

  To give himself a break from the tension, Vince stands up. “I’ll go make us a snack.”

  “I’m not hungry, are you hungry?” Raymond says.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, I can’t really stay,” Lucille says. “Like I said, you can’t leave the kitten on her own for too long.”

  In the safety of the kitchen, a semi-partitioned area in the corner of the loft, Vince prepares a fruit-and-cheese plate to go with their cappuccinos. He can waste ten, even fifteen minutes this way, if he cuts the pieces small. But then he hears Raymond break his promise by telling Lucille about the ghost.

  “Raymond,” Vince calls from the kitchen, “you want strawberries or cantaloupe?”

  But Raymond persists. “At first he was only a black smudge on a chair.”

  “Honey, did you say strawberries? Do you want them sliced, with sugar on the side?”

  “Yesterday, Mom, he whispered in my ear.”

  “Sliced or whole? What was that?”

  Three months ago the ghost made its first appearance, and the sicker Raymond gets, the more often it comes. The books that Vince has started to read behind Raymond’s back say that the dying are often visited by the dead, as if the dead are welcoming them, but Raymond is anything but comforted by the presence of the ghost. Vince takes this as a good sign. He already feels like he’s losing Raymond, piece by piece.

  These days, when Vince looks at his lover, he sees both inside and outside Raymond’s body at once. Vince watches the shoulder-heaving struggle of each small breath, and in his mind’s eye he sees past Raymond’s chest to the distended vena cavae and pulmonary veins, beyond the breastbone to three-inch strips of white connective tissue covered in nodules, waterlogged. He sees Raymond’s deoxygenated blood running rampant with bacteria, his ventricles rebelling against the declining authority of his sinoatrial node. It’s a coup d’état of the body.

  He hasn’t told Raymond that he’s haunted by the waking nightmare of seeing his lifeless body on an ambulance gurney. It’s a vision that paralyzes Vince no matter what he’s doing – washing his lover, standing in line at the grocery store, spooning food into Raymond’s mouth – and forces him to clutch the sink or reach out for a chair to balance himself before the room starts to spin. But he’s never told Raymond, because the mind can play tricks; can make you believe things are worse than they are, can make you give up hope before all hope is truly lost. Take Y2K, though the millennium is still more than a year away, the world is already screaming about the end times. He reminds himself to ask the doctor again about Raymond’s medication – maybe it’s a dosage problem that’s causing him to imagine the ghost. Or it could be a viral hallucination – the ghost often rides in on Raymond’s fevers.

  By the time Vince returns with cantaloupe squares and grapes, strawberries halved and fanned out on a glass plate, Raymond has told his mother what he’s already told Vince: he thinks he’s seen the ghost at least once before. He remembers his dad getting a phone call at home, how he’d piled Raymond and his sisters into the red station wagon and driven them to the Hotel Europe on skid row, not far from where they are living now. Raymond strains to say so much.

  “Honey,” Vince says. “Your mom doesn’t want to hear about all that.”

  “A man was dragged out of the tenement house in handcuffs,” Raymond continues. “Covered in his own crap.”

  Lucille twists the wedding band that she still wears round and round on her finger. Vince worries that if Lucille thinks Raymond’s going crazy too, she will be even more reluctant to visit than she is now. “Your father had a brother,” she finally answers, her voice strained. “Once or twice he came to the house but your father sent him away. They didn’t get along. Your father thought he’d be a bad influence on you kids. Your uncle was a bad seed from the very beginning. Your father didn’t like to speak about him and I didn’t pry.” She sighs, looking up at the ceiling. “Charlie was sent to Woodlands. But I don’t know the details. A lunatic asylum is not the kind of thing you talk about over dinner. Anyway, why would Charlie visit you?”

  When Raymond and his mother stare each other down, their eyebrows wrinkle their foreheads with the same tense conviction.

  Raymond has told Vince before the Chinese believe that a soul with no tomb to call his own is destined to forever roam the earth. Vince understands this idea of not wanting to let go. He imagines his fingers pried from Raymond’s lifeless ankles: he will have to be dragged, clawing and biting, away from his dead lover.

  “I don’t remember anything else,” Lucille says. Her leopard-skin shoes tap nervously on the glazed concrete floor. Then she dismisses Raymond’s ghost with a laugh. “I guess if your dad took you with him to the Hotel Europe, I must have been at work. I don’t know if he said anything to me. He must have. We always talked about things, we didn’t keep secrets.” But the way she presses her eyes shut suggests otherwise to Vince.

  Over the years Vince has heard enough of Raymond’s stories. As a family, they didn’t speak what was on their minds, they shouted it, drowning out their true meaning. His father never accepted Raymond’s sexuality. And after he broke up with Libby, the dental hygienist, and moved out of the apartment they had shared, quit college, and started performing in drag, his father had disowned him. And Lucille, being a traditional wife, never spoke out against her husband. Never pleaded with him, not even in whispered words, not even on his death bed, to reconcile with his son. “I wish she’d tried,” Raymond once confided to Vince, “you know, to help my dad come around, so we could make our peace.”

  She scratches her head and Vince sees black dye collect under her fingernails. “I wish I could remember more, but I don’t. I’m losing everything these days, not just my memory,” she says, changing the subject. “My memory, my car keys, even my temper. It never ends. I never lost my temper at all when your father was alive.”

  The urge to say, “Maybe you should have, just once, for Raymond’s sake,” burns on Vince’s tongue. But he bites down hard and winces, keeps his thoughts to himself.

  Nestor, the homecare worker, arrives at 7:50 a.m., punctual as always, knocking out a familiar rhythm on the door: Shave-and-a-haircut-ten-cents. His cheeks are red as he comes inside, saying, “Hallo, hallo, hallo,” and puts four bags of groceries on the counter, shopping being just one of the many things Nestor Matapang does for Raymond and Vince. Raymond, half-asleep on the couch since seven, pulls himself together, wipes his mouth with his hand, runs his fingers through his hair.

  “You looking good today,” Nestor says.

  “Well, I try.”

  “I have a thing for you that is exciting.” Nestor flamboyantly whips a CD out of his pocket.

  “You found it!” Raymond beams.

  “Kenny Rogers? Since when do you like country music?” How can you live with someone for twenty years and still be surprised by them?

  “It’s an album I used to listen to when I was a teenager,” Raymond says apologetically.

  “I didn’t find it at home,” Nestor
says triumphantly. “Even after I look. So I go out and buy you one.”

  Vince isn’t sure if he likes Nestor. He is probably a nice, decent person, but Vince considers everything he has to do for Raymond – from tacking down the scatter rugs, removing electrical cords from under foot, and scouring the grocery shelves for non-slippery wax, to massaging out the cramps from his toes and wiping the sweat from his brow while he sleeps – as his responsibility and his privilege. He acquiesces to Nestor’s visits only because he can’t do it alone.

  Nestor Matapang likes ping pong and euchre and watching golf on TV. He holds a bachelor’s degree from a university in the Philippines, where he worked as a lab technician, but he says he cares for his patients intuitively, with the healing power of God. And to Vince’s dismay, he listens to Raymond’s ghost stories. At first, Vince worried that Nestor might have Raymond sent to long-term care if he thought Raymond was losing his hold on reality. But Nestor had worked at Woodlands Hospital for eight years as a psych assistant before the institution closed for good. His ideas about what was normal were more liberal than most people’s. Nestor wasn’t bothered by Raymond’s questions and even seemed flattered by all the interest. “What did the patients eat? What kind of treatment did they get? Did anyone ever escape?” Charlie’s ghost and the curiosity he engendered brought Raymond and Nestor closer together, and though Raymond was still frightened of the ghost whenever he made an appearance, he was no longer as scared of Charlie as he had been. And the more at peace he became with the ghost, the more insecure Vince felt.

  Raymond hung on Nestor’s every word, and at the end of the day, he was bursting with news. “Patients had their teeth pulled so they couldn’t bite staff,” he told Vince. “They had experiments conducted on them. Ones you wouldn’t perform on a dog. They once locked up a woman for giving birth out of wedlock.”

  Vince hated it. The morbidity. How easily Nestor could steal what was left of Raymond’s attention. After all, this was Vince’s final audience with Raymond, too. No one, no matter what they say, really died alone. Raymond, daily, took little pieces of Vince with him.

  “Today, I make you Filipino rice,” Nestor says as Raymond watches him unpack the groceries with an intimacy that makes Vince uncomfortable, like a lover, still enraptured by the other’s newness; watching the fingers around a green pepper, the curved lips while humming a tune. Maybe it’s how Raymond looked at him years ago.

  Vince gathers his briefcase and puts on his overcoat. The migraine that attacked last night is asserting itself forcefully over his left eye. Maybe it’s just the stress: the lack of sleep; the soreness in his back from lifting Raymond into the bath creeping into his head; the worry about trying to feed him, when he won’t eat; the outrageous cost of drugs and medical home-care supplies. Their life savings are gone. They are living off Vince’s credit cards, and Vince has been losing weight steadily for a month. But he will not break his promise to Raymond. As difficult as it sometimes is to witness Raymond’s slow decline, he will not give up this heartache for anyone, least of all for Nestor Matapang, Raymond’s new flame.

  What does Nestor know about how Raymond smells when he sweats at night, the animal odour that fills the room and reeks of something turning, almost spoiled, so unlike the smell Vince has loved and licked from his lover’s skin for all these years? Or the panic of waking to the cold, bare pillow next to him at night? No matter that Raymond has just gone to the washroom, Vince is always disoriented, momentarily unsure if the worst has already happened, if Raymond is dead or alive. What does Nestor know about living with the constant threat of losing the person you love most? Who is he to fill Raymond’s head with the horrors he saw at Woodlands?

  But Nestor is no pushover. Back in the Philippines, he had demonstrated against Marcos, even setting fire to the Malacañang Palace with a large group of other protestors, while wearing a balaclava and throwing Molotov cocktails. Maybe this is why when Vince tells him to stop talking to Raymond about the ghost, Nestor holds Vince’s gaze a second too long for his liking and almost mouths the word but.

  Vince’s office is on the second floor of the Germanic studies department and has a view of a parking lot and the roof of the B wing, white with pigeon filth. In the distance he can see a single cherry tree that still has no leaves yet, and a black crow in its bare branches. The smell of freshly brewed coffee gently permeates the hallway outside his office.

  “Have you tried Trinity Western in Langley?” says the woman on the other end of the line, the secretary of an evangelical preacher who claims to have seen both Paul the Apostle and God personally. She explains that the preacher is doing revivals in Florida right now, and she tells him she’s sorry. He takes note of the name she gives him for future reference, and dials the next number on his list, the home of a fifteen-year-old Ethiopian boy who is said to have cured the musician Slim Sandy of pancreatic cancer. He makes an appointment with the boy’s father for three weeks from now.

  He calls Lucille and gets her machine. “Lucille, it’s Vince calling again. Are you getting these messages? I know you’re busy with going to Africa, but, look … you can’t avoid this situation any longer. It’s not going to go away. Christ, it’s been two weeks since you’ve seen him –” The machine cuts him off. Damn.

  Last he calls the Santo Daime Church of the Modern Light of the Queen. He looks at his wristwatch. It’s time for class, but still he leaves a voice mail, meticulously summarizing the details of Raymond’s illness and his hopes for Raymond’s full recovery, before descending the stairs to the first floor, where students are already packed tightly together in the hallway, grappling with their books, on their way to the next class.

  Usually, he likes to get to class a few minutes early, to settle himself down, remove his overcoat at his leisure and arrange it over the back of his chair. Then he takes his lecture notes from his briefcase and lays them out, in order, on the podium in front of him, writes a few relevant things on the board, things he finds necessary to shift his frame of mind to a teaching one. But today he is late and most of his second-year German language students are already in class, forty-five faces upturned and expectant, pens poised.

  Suddenly, he can’t remember the lesson plan.

  Most weeks he manages to maintain a persona in front of a class, present a façade of professional calm and confidence. To hide his fluster he affects a stern face and shuffles through his papers, begins talking about upcoming assignments. But his fingers are trembling and he drops two pieces of loose leaf to the floor.

  Eventually he tells them to open their textbooks and gives them an assignment from the fourth chapter to complete. The subjunctive mood, he explains, is a feeling used to convey wishful thinking and statements contrary to fact: If I promise … If I swear … If only he had twenty more years …

  When he returns to his office, Lucille has left a message with the department secretary. She is volunteering with Kids Up Front this weekend. It’s a commitment she just can’t get out of, but she’ll be in touch soon. At least she called back. He doubts she bothered calling Raymond to tell him herself.

  He allows himself a moment to contain his frustration.

  With Nestor at the house, he’s free to scout back-alley shops for an hour or two after class, and today he has an appointment with a traditional Chinese herbalist.

  The shop smells like fungus and has shelves that reach to the ceiling, holding glass jars full of dried starfish flakes and vials of ginseng. A wizened man tells Vince about hu zhang, or “tiger’s cane,” and Japanese knotweed, which he has for sale as a powder or in capsules. He lowers jars down from the shelf and arranges them for display on the counter.

  “Dan shen pien,” he says. “This good, too. Have no reaction with other medicine from your doctor.”

  “They’re not treating him,” Vince says irritably. “That’s the whole point.” The team of doctors who had been working to save Raymond’s life abandoned him when it became clear he was going to die anyway within t
he year despite their best efforts. They gave Vince a piece of paper with the address and phone number of a local palliative hospice. After Vince had recovered from the tremendous shock of being told “nothing more could be done,” he took Raymond home.

  What helped him get through the day was setting little goals and making tentative plans: he will call the next three numbers on his list. Remember to pick up some vitamin D for Raymond, along with some organic soy milk. After work tonight, we’ll eat dinner and I’ll get Raymond to eat more than half his meal. We’ll watch a TV show that will keep Raymond awake past the first commercial. We’ll sit on the couch and plan something for the weekend.

  “We’ll visit a costume shop.”

  “Try on fluorescent plastic boas.”

  “Go to Playland, ride the wooden roller coaster.”

  “Eat sushi with our fingers. On a picnic in Stanley Park.”

  “Are you sure it won’t be too cold?” Raymond said.

  “Yeah, but we’ll have morphine,” Vince answered deviously.

  It doesn’t matter that some of their plans involve things they’ll never do. It was the planning that mattered, the fact they were using phrases like “you will” and “we will,” and never stopped talking about the future.

  Now Vince tries to explain to the man behind the counter, “All we have is morphine. That’s it. The doctors aren’t giving him anything.”

  The herbalist catches Vince’s gaze and holds it for a long time. His demeanor becomes less businesslike. “I give you some ginseng tea, for yourself,” he says. “Ginseng tea and ginseng root will give you strength. It is good for your health, you drink this, please.” He weighs a small amount of the waxy-looking root on an old balance scale and puts the chunks he’s cut into the size of coins into paper envelopes. Then he places everything into a bag. As he rings up the purchase, the man says, “In our life, four out of five things do not happen as we wish.”