Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

On Sunday morning — Rudy’s second morning in the hospital — he woke up with a hard-on, not just a morning erection but the kind of pulsating ache that had visited him on Christmas Eve. When the nurse came in to give him a shot of li-docaine his prick was sticking out so straight he could hardly turn over on the bed. When he did manage to turn over he saw that Medardo’d brought a pair of pajamas and his dopp kit and his copy of Philosophy Made Simple, which he’d asked for on Saturday. Rudy was going to be in the hospital for a week and wanted something to read.

  The nurse lifted his hospital gown and swabbed his left buttock with a bit of alcohol and put a bandage on it. “I’ll be back this afternoon,” she said.

  What did it mean? What was his prick trying to tell him? What Rudy thought it was trying to tell him was this: he thought that his prick was mocking his condition; he thought that his prick was telling him that he’d never hold a woman in his arms again. He’d known that this might be the case ever since Helen died, but suddenly he knew it in a new way, and his chest tightened up and he thought he might be having another heart attack.

  He closed his eyes, and when he did, he pictured the nurse coming back to give him another shot, only she was younger, and she was beautiful, and instead of a hypodermic needle, she had a glass of wine in her hand, and as she leaned over, one of her perky breasts poked out of her blouse and a nipple dangled above his lips, and his hand reached around behind her to caress a firm buttock.

  He kept his eyes closed till he heard someone at the door: the nurse coming back into the room, naked, holding a glass of wine. Two glasses. But it wasn’t the nurse, it was a priest. Rudy could smell tobacco on him and was overwhelmed with desire, a real knock-down, drag-out craving, for a cigarette.

  “The doctor said you were pretty down, might want to talk,” the priest said. “Father Russell, OMI, last of the Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate.” He held out a hand. Rudy didn’t feel like shaking it. The priest looked vaguely familiar.

  “Might,” Rudy said.

  “I gave you a ride home the other night,” the priest said. “From Pepe’s. After your swim.”

  “That’s it,” Rudy said. “I thought you looked familiar.”

  “You know,” the priest said, “sometimes pain is God’s megaphone, his only way to get our attention.”

  “Hold it right there, Father. You got a cigarette?” It was the first time Rudy’d ever called anyone Father. He called his own father Dad, and his kids called him Papa or Pop.

  The priest laughed and reached under his robe for a crumpled pack of Old Golds. Was he wearing a regular shirt under his robe, a shirt with a front pocket to hold cigarettes?

  The priest pulled a silver lighter out of another hidden pocket, opened the top, and held the flame under the tip of Rudy’s ciga rette. The cigarette tasted wonderful, even though it made Rudy dizzy But since he was lying down anyway it didn’t matter. He hadn’t had a cigarette in years. He’d quit when Helen and Mar-got were in Italy.

  “You know, Father,” he said, and he started to complain: about the job he’d left on the market in Chicago; about the house he’d sold; about the coolness between him and his daughters; about the GET-OUT-OF-HELL-FREE cards he’d find wedged under his windshield wiper every time he came out of the public library in McAllen; about the gun racks in the back of every pickup and the patriotic bumper stickers on every other car: AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT; about the call he’d gotten from an assistant warden at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, wanting some Texas avocados for a condemned man’s last meal. “The man wants gua-camole made from Texas avocados,” Rudy said. “He ought to know they’re not in season yet. The trees haven’t even set any fruit yet, for Christ’s sake. I asked if they could postpone the execution till mid-September. The assistant warden didn’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you just go back home?” the priest asked.

  “To Chicago? Too late. I’ve burned my bridges.”

  “I understand, you don’t want to lose face; but this heart attack gives you a perfect excuse to build them up again, your bridges. Without losing face, you see what I mean? No one would blame you now. You’re off the hook. You don’t have to prove anything anymore. Just live. All you have to do is live. Sounds like your daughters would be happy to have you back in the Midwest, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “No, no,” Rudy said. “Just live. Just live. But how? But why? For what?”

  “Why don’t you come to mass with me at the seminary?”

  “I’m not a Roman Catholic, Father,” Rudy said, holding out a hand for another cigarette. The priest gave him a second ciga rette and flipped open his lighter. “My wife used to smoke,” Rudy said.

  “Was your wife a Catholic?”

  Rudy laughed. “She used to say that the Roman Catholic Church was the most corrupt institution in the history of the world, the number-one enemy of democracy and reason and freedom.”

  “You could believe that and still be a Catholic,” the priest said. “But what about you?” the priest wanted to know. “What did you see?”

  “What did I see, Father?”

  “When you were dead, or almost dead, right after your heart attack.”

  Rudy tried to sit up: “Did you read that article in the magazine section in last Sunday’s paper? ‘Is There a Light at the End of the Tunnel?’“

  Father Russell, OMI, nodded.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something, Father; it wasn’t like that. I came as close to death as you could get; I came right up to the bank of the river and stuck my toe in. You’d think I would have caught a glimpse of the other shore, wouldn’t you? Hell, the far shore of the Rio Grande is only ninety feet away. It’s like standing in the batter’s box and checking how deep the first baseman’s playing. But I came back with nothing. What happened to the tunnel of bright light these people were talking about in the paper? With Helen waiting for me at the end? And my folks? Where was the welcoming committee? Where was the field full of flowers? Huh?”

  Father Russell started to say something but Rudy interrupted him. “Maybe it was too dark,” he said, “or maybe there was nothing to see. And not only that,” Rudy said, interrupting himself, “I don’t feel right now that life is especially precious. I don’t value it any more than I did before. Maybe even less, in fact. I don’t really give a shit, Father. One way or the other; take it or leave it. Epicurus says that death has nothing to do with us, because if you’re alive, then death is not, and if death is, then you’re not. Something like that.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Father Russell said, and Rudy could see that the priest didn’t know any more about death than he did.

  The nurse came and threw the priest out. “Shame on you, you know you’re not allowed to smoke in here.” When he’d gone, she said to Rudy, “He hangs around the hospital because he’s lonely. I’m not even sure he’s a real priest. I think maybe he got in some kind of trouble over in Reynosa. Now they left him in charge of the seminary.”

  “Then he couldn’t have been too bad.”

  “There aren’t any students in the seminary, Mr. Harrington. It’s empty. There’s no one there. Nadie.” She picked up the cigarette that the priest had left on Rudy’s little table, snapped it between her fingers, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  That’s when Rudy changed his mind and thought he’d go to mass with Father Russell after all.

  Later that week he had another visitor, the Russian, who brought with him a copy of the McAllen Monitor, which had a picture of Norma Jean on page 2: ELEPHANT SAVES LOCAL GROWER’S LIFE . “She save your life,” he said two or three times as Rudy was reading the article. “Now you do something nice for her.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’m glad you see my point, because USDA inspector is coming along with all kinds of new regulations and rules. It is going to be a very difficult time for Norma Jean. I got to move the water faucet because she turn it on and off; I got to move the electricity wires t
hat go over her head, because she can pull them down with her trunk. I got to make her stall bigger. I got to make her fence more volts so she don’t run away … Twenty years we been living happy the way it is.

  “Mr. Rudy, you got room at your place. You got three double-size stalls in the barn where Creaky used to keep his horses. You just got to move those old field bins Creaky left stacked up in there, unless you move them already, and tear down the inside walls. You got a paddock. You just need to put up a fence, three little wires. I do it all for you, and I stay there in the barn at first, is no problem. So many regulations and rules.”

  “You mean you want to board Norma Jean at my place?”

  “Just while I fix up my little barn. Otherwise USDA is going to make me too much trouble.”

  “Its out of the question.”

  “Out of the question? She save your life, Mr. Rudy, how can you say no?”

  Rudy tried to say no, but he couldn’t do it.

  After the Russian left, he read the article in the paper and admired the photo of Norma Jean.

  Rudy spent a week in the hospital, and then Medardo took him home. On Friday morning, sitting in his bathrobe on the veranda, Rudy looked through the index of Philosophy Made Simple. There was nothing on sex, nothing to explain a hard-on. But there was a chapter on something called the mind-body problem, which went like this: on the one hand you’ve got the body, which is part of the material world. Matter: atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. These atoms and such don’t have purposes or desires. They just whirl around according to the laws of physics. On the other hand, you’ve got the mind, and the mind wants all sorts of things. It’s got all kinds of purposes and desires.

  Well, how does the mind, which does not take up space or have any moving parts, make the body move? How do we crook our fingers?

  Rudy tried it, held his finger up and counted to ten, and on the count of ten he crooked his finger. But how did he do it? He couldn’t figure it out, and apparently no one else could either, not even Descartes, who wanted to say that it all happened in the pineal gland at the base of the brain, but nobody believed that anymore. And just think about how much more complex a penis was than a finger. A penis had a mind of its own. You couldn’t boss it around the way you bossed your finger around.

  He tried these ideas out on Medardo, who stopped by to see if Rudy needed anything — tried to get Medardo to crook his finger. But Medardo was skeptical and deliberately misunderstood him. “You can’t just stand there and come,” Medardo said; “you need el frote.”

  Later that afternoon Medardo returned with bacon, eggs, a sirloin steak, pork chops, potatoes, beer, and wine, but he drew the line at whiskey and cigarettes. No Jack Daniels for Rudy No Old Golds.

  When Rudy protested, Medardo waggled his index finger sideways. “What did the doctor say, Rudy? — no smoking, no drinking, no heavy foods, no sex. Am I right? 1 brought you bacon and 1 brought you a big steak. Enough is enough.”

  Medardo was on his way to Estrella Princesa. The groceries he’d brought were on the kitchen table. “You want me to help you put this stuff away?”

  “I’ll do it after you go. Listen, did 1 tell you the story about Aristotle and Alexander?”

  “Two or three times, Rudy.”

  “Then let me ask you something: Is that the sort of thing you get up to at Estrella Princesa? Playing horsey? Montar al caballito?”

  Medardo smiled. “Oh my, yes,” he said; “it’s exactly the thing.” He laughed.

  “Take me with you,” Rudy said. “I want to go with you.”

  “Go with me? To Estrella Princesa? Whoa!” Medardo rubbed the back of his hand over his mustache.

  “Not today, Medardo. In two or three weeks.”

  “Those Mexican whores would kill you, Rudy, a man in your condition.”

  “Do you know what, Medardo?” Rudy said. “I don’t even care.”

  Medardo shook his head. “Those Mexican whores would kill you,” he said again.

  “What difference does it make now?” Rudy asked.

  “You don’t want me to have to tell your daughters that you died in a Mexican whorehouse, do you?”

  “I thought this was a private club?”

  Medardo held his hand out, palm down, fingers extended, and wiggled it back and forth, as if he had palsy.

  “Do you know what, Medardo?” Rudy said again; “I don’t care. I might even enjoy it, in fact. Can you think of a better way to go? El orgasmo, bang, that is it, it’s all over.”

  “Well,” Medardo said, “you’ve got a point. You’ve got your affairs in order, right? You got your will made out?”

  Rudy shook his head.

  “I want you to make out your will first, all right? Save your daughters a lot of grief later.”

  “My wife made out her will,” Rudy said.

  “Good for her.”

  “We got one of those standard forms from a stationery store. Maybe you could pick up one of those for me.”

  “I’ll get one for you on Monday.” Medardo got up to leave, but Rudy poured the rest of his bottle of Pearl into Medardo’s glass. “One last drink.”

  Medardo waggled his index finger at Rudy a second time. “Not the ultimo trago, Rudy You mean the penúltimo trago — the next-to-last drink.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The last drink, Rudy, that’s the one just before you die, and that may be sooner than you think.”

  Rudy’d been out of the hospital for three weeks. He still hadn’t told the girls about the heart attack. His own brush with death hadn’t bothered him, at least that’s what he told himself, and he didn’t want it to bother them, but on Sunday he went to mass with the priest, Father Russell. He wasn’t supposed to drive yet, so Father Russell picked him up in his old Pontiac.

  Rudy figured he’d blend into the congregation, stay away from people who looked as if they might try to put him on a committee, and simply try to affirm, in the most general way possible, that our lives in this world, this universe, are not without meaning and purpose. But the nurse had been right; there was no one to blend in with: no seminarians, no congregation, no community. Rudy was the only one in the huge seminary chapel, except for the plaster-of-paris statues that lined the walls. He waited in the chapel till he got tired of waiting, and then he wandered back to the sacristy where Father Russell was struggling to get into some complicated vestments.

  “I haven’t said mass in six months,” Father Russell explained. “You have to have at least one person in the congregation to say mass.”

  Rudy thought the mass was supposed to be in English, but Father Russell said it in Latin, and Rudy couldn’t understand a word till Father Russell invited him, in English, to come up and take communion. He went. He knew that this was against the rules, but he went up anyway and knelt at the communion railing. He took the dry wafer on his tongue, but Father Russell didn’t offer him any wine. Rudy held the wafer on his tongue, let it soften, the body of Christ. He could almost feel his heart getting stronger.

  Afterward he was anxious to leave, to get out of there, but the priest didn’t want him to go. Rudy could understand that. They ate in the huge seminary kitchen. The priest didn’t know how to cook. They ate bologna and mayonnaise on white bread, and drank sweet sherry wine.

  “What’s the greatest tragedy in the history of the world?” the priest asked, pouring himself a little more sherry.

  Rudy had no idea.

  “Take a guess.”

  “The Holocaust?”

  Father Russell shook his head.

  “World War II?”

  Father Russell shook his head again.

  “I really don’t have any idea,” Rudy said.

  “The burning of the library in Alexandria,” Father Russell said.

  “You mean in Egypt?”

  The priest smiled.

  “Are you serious?” Rudy asked.

  “Mr. Harrington,” he said, “the library had the medical manuscripts of Sain
t Luke. Cures for cancer. Cures for heart disease. Cures for leprosy. For everything. All lost. But I’m something of a healer too, a curandero. That’s how I got in trouble with the bishop.” He leaned over the table and put his hand on Rudy’s chest.

  How crazy can you get? Rudy thought. It’s no wonder they left him all alone at the seminary But he didn’t push the priest’s hand away.

  Medardo didn’t bring the standard will form till Friday. His cousin — a justice of the peace from Hidalgo — came with him. Rudy opened three beers and they sat at the glass-topped table on the veranda.

  “I’m going to arrange something with a woman who specializes in older men like you,” Medardo said; “men with a heart condition.”

  Rudy didn’t want to discuss these matters in front of a third party, but he had no choice. “How old is she?”

  “Don’t worry, Rudy. This is a beautiful woman. You’ll thank me. But I’m going to stay right here and drink this beer while you fill out the will, okay?”

  Rudy left everything he owned — the grove, the pickup, the two farm wagons, Creaky’s old two-ton truck with slatted sides that they’d use to take the avocados to the packing house in Hidalgo — to the three girls. The only tricky thing was the piano. If Meg kept the piano, then each of the other girls would get five thousand dollars at the outset. Once that was taken care of, the estate would be divided three ways. Rudy signed the will and Medardo witnessed it, and Medardo’s cousin notarized it.

  “Now you won’t have to worry,” Medardo said. “No fighting over who gets what. And if something should happen, God forbid, your daughters will never know. The newspaper will say that you had a heart attack in a downtown club. That’s all. Very discreet.”

  “I forgot about the chandelier,” Rudy said. “The dining room chandelier was probably worth more than we paid for the house. It’s up in Meg’s attic right now, all packed up in newspaper.”

  “It’s part of the estate,” Medardo’s cousin said. “Your daughters can sell it, or if one of them wants it they can have it appraised and settle it like the piano.”