Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  During the nearly twenty-four hours it takes for the test results to come back your temperature spikes to over 105 degrees, dangerously close to fatal, and the nurses pack your bed with ice and open up two saline drips, one in each arm, yet still can’t keep you hydrated. Amy hunts you down and arrives at Mount Auburn to tell you that she’s on oral antibiotics as a precaution but Mass General is holding Ruby for observation for a couple of days even though so far she’s shown no signs of being ill. You’re distantly aware of and grateful for Amy’s presence, but none of what she’s telling you really registers, because you are trapped in a fever world your mind has created, and in that world this is what’s happening:

  You are at Ruby’s bedside in a very large, featureless hospital room with an overhead fluorescent and a large bare window looking out on Beacon Hill. There is nothing at all wrong with you, but Ruby is so sick that her crying produces no tears. She’s turned pink with fever. Doctors and nurses come in, observe, listen, palpate, notate, and leave again. Day and night trade places several times outside the window, but little else changes. Ruby continues to cry, her skin the color of a steamed lobster. The same doctors and nurses come in, perform their listless duties, leave again. Occasionally you rise from your seat and go to the window and look out on the city. You’re up so high that you have to press your face against the glass to see down to the street. People move in clusters on the sidewalks, go into and out of shops and restaurants, play Ultimate Frisbee in the park. Every day for a week the sun shines cheerfully, and people who from this height seem never to have experienced sadness go about their important and happy lives. Eventually it is too much and you turn away and sit again by Ruby’s side. At night you leave the fluorescent on to mute the cheerful twinkling of the city lights through the window, and find yourself wishing often that there were curtains you could draw to block them out completely.

  In the dream Ruby continues to cry without end. The large empty room overflows with her keening. It’s a sound not of pain, nor of sorrow, but of fear. And the fear is not hers, you come to realize, but yours.

  Finally the sound ends when Ruby dies. It happens early on the morning of the eighth day, while you are dozing in the chair, and at first the sudden silence is the only indication that anything has changed. You open your eyes and see she’s still bright pink, her limbs still stiff and angry, tiny fists clenched against her chest—the same posture she’s displayed since the ordeal began. Slowly, though, her body begins to relax. The pink runs out of her like watercolor rinsing away, and her legs and arms settle to the mattress. Her face softens and goes slack, the little mouth slightly agape and white with dryness, and for a moment you are reminded, horribly, of old roadkill lying on its back in a gutter. You lift Ruby from the bed—it’s the first time you’ve touched her—and as you hold her to your chest you can feel the warmth leaving her body already, a cruel irony given that she was killed by fever.

  It’s another cruel irony that this is the only time she’s ever been still in your arms.

  You rock her for a while. The sun rises fully over the city outside, and the doctors and nurses come in. Now that Ruby’s dead they try to offer you comfort and reassure you they did all they could, even though you were here the whole time and saw for yourself how very little was done. But even if you felt their condolences were sincere you wouldn’t be inclined to accept them. You find, strangely, that you feel no need to be comforted, that you are in fact somehow buttressed by your sorrow, and all you really want is to take your daughter and leave this place.

  So that’s what you do.

  You grab a blanket from the bed and wrap it around her, then walk out of the room and down the hall to the elevator banks. The doctors and nurses stand around you in a semicircle, saying you can’t do this, there are procedures that need to be followed, paperwork that needs filling out and filing, but you ignore this, and when you’re tired of listening you push through them and take the stairs. The doctors and nurses follow. Sixteen floors to ground level, with their protests echoing down through the stairwell. You come out into the lobby, which is cavernous, with marble floors and balconies and skylights, more like an imperial palace than a hospital. As you approach the revolving doors that lead out into the world the doctors and nurses call for security, and two uniformed guards step in front of you, blocking your way. You can’t do anything to fight them with both your hands on Ruby. So instead you lean close to one of the guards and whisper to him. You say, “We made a mistake. We spent too much time trying to hide from the inevitable. I thought I was done with that, but I wasn’t. Now I want my daughter to feel the sun on her. While she’s still not too far from here. Do you understand?”

  But the guard does not. He’s staunch, unmoved in every sense.

  “It was my mistake,” you say. You hold Ruby’s body out to the guard, as an appeal, and as evidence of your guilt, and he takes a step back. At first he looks at Ruby as if she’s a bag of rotten garbage you’ve asked him to dispose of, but then, after a few seconds, something in his face shifts, softens, and he steps aside and lets you through.

  You wake in a quarantine room at Mount Auburn and see Amy and Ruby on the other side of the glass, and you are bathed in relief. Amy notices you are awake and she lifts Ruby’s arm and waggles it at you, a pantomime of a wave: Hi, Daddy.

  Five days later, when the CDC doctor gives the okay, you are released from the hospital. The first thing you do is kiss Amy on the cheek, and the second thing you do is take Ruby from her. You hold Ruby precisely as you had in the dream, and she nestles against you and goggles at the world as you leave the hospital, staring up at the rooftops, grasping at strangers’ lapels and mustaches and takeout lunches. For anyone else it would be a mundane thing, having a happy baby on their shoulder, but you have never experienced a moment quite like it. Your joy is matched only by Amy’s shock; she walks beside you and stares in disbelief, even crashing into the end of a bench and skinning her knee. The three of you stop and sit on the bench while Amy fumes and swears and blows on the scrape to cool it. When she’s finished she turns to you again and asks, “What the heck is going on here, with you two? I want answers.”

  You smile at her. “I don’t think I could explain it if I tried.”

  “Try,” Amy says. She makes a funny face at Ruby, who grins and squeals and turns away, playing hide.

  “Okay. When I was sick, I had this dream. And I figured something out. That help?”

  “Nope.”

  “I told you.”

  Ruby, of course, just takes it all in stride. So to speak.

  But as the years pass this does not remain true. Not surprisingly, she turns out to be fairly precocious, and by the time she’s four she’s reading at a ninth-grade level and devours any text she can get her hands on, from Shakespeare to shampoo bottles. This is not a problem, of course, until a stormy day in January when her preschool is canceled due to snow and so instead you walk hand-in-mittened-hand with her to the public library on Broadway. You spend the afternoon sitting at a table near the window and flipping through back issues of Rolling Stone and the Economist, while Ruby reads Choose Your Own Adventure books almost as quickly as they can be pulled and reshelved.

  For some reason, on one of Ruby’s return trips to the stacks, the CYOA series loses her interest and she fixates, instead, on a book titled And Then There Was One: The Mysteries of Extinction. Twenty minutes later you look up from a brief about sham elections in Congo to find her crying quietly across the table.

  “Baby?” you say. You put your magazine down and move around the table to sit next to her. “Hey.”

  And at the sound of your voice she stops trying to control her weeping and yields to it. It’s the sort of pure, inconsolable grief that only children are capable of, and as you try in vain to comfort her and field glances from other library patrons ranging from concern to annoyance to suspicion, in the back of your mind you are reminded of a day from your own childhood involving prophesies, stock footage of nu
clear weapons tests, and your own overwhelming grief.

  Of course Ruby is not grieving for all of creation, merely the savaged environment and the animals that call it home. Still, as you were transformed back then, so now is she transformed. She quickly develops an encompassing interest in environmental causes. She begins carrying a tattered, heavily annotated copy of Silent Spring pretty much everywhere she goes, partly because she likes to have it at hand, and partly because she’s found that people are curious about a little girl carrying around such heavy reading, which provides her with just the opening she needs to push her agenda. When she isn’t busy with schoolwork she spends most of her time engaged in sober research or writing letters to politicians. At night, in bed, Amy worries out loud about her. You try to reassure her, and this reassurance is genuine, because there is an important difference between who you became when you first saw the Destroyer of Worlds, and who Ruby has become now: she is still happy, still quick to laugh, and that, more than anything, is what matters.

  A few years later, when your father is diagnosed with cancer, you do not try to cure him. Instead you let the doctors do what little they can, and leave the loft in Cambridge with Amy and Ruby and move back to Maine to tend to him while he dies.

  At first, though, he doesn’t require any care. Most people would have difficulty reconciling the still-muscular, hulking man with the fact of his death sentence, but you are not at all surprised when you arrive home and find him pulling fence posts in the front yard without aid of tools or machinery. He is your father, after all, John Senior, a figure nearly as powerful as the Destroyer of Worlds itself; how else would you find him? He doesn’t notice you and for a while you stand there watching as he works the posts loose with his bare hands, though really his hands can’t properly be referred to as bare, because years of ceaseless work in all manner of weather have toughened the skin to the point where gloves would be redundant. When the posts are loosened sufficiently he squats sumo-style and yanks them free with an upward jerk so powerful that dirt flies up as if cherry bombs were going off in the post holes. Eventually you make your presence known and he shakes your hand and the two of you stand there on the lawn for a moment, looking everywhere but at each other. You feign interest in the fence posts lying on the ground, in the flags flying from the pole overhead—the stars and stripes, as well as a black POW banner—and then you ask if he wants some help and he says Sure, there are gloves in the garage if you need them.

  This is as close as you will ever come to discussing his illness. You find the gloves, and put them on, and get to work.

  For months after, this is how things are. Your father remains your father, and he does everything he’s always done, and you relax in his shadow, tiny and grateful and safe. For a while you even believe it’s possible he will beat this on his own, that he is simply too strong to be killed by something as mindless and piddling as mutated cells. But then one evening in November you go to dinner at the Olive Garden and when the meal is finished he cannot stand up from his seat, and suddenly you notice how the sweatshirt hangs limp from his shoulders, how he’s run out of holes on his belt, and you wonder where did that portable oxygen tank come from and why is he so gray and Jesus what on earth is happening to my dad?

  He needs a hand up from his seat, but because he’s proud he tries to signal you to just hold down the table, keep it from tipping over while he uses it for leverage. You can see that’s not going to work, so you stand and move behind him and put your hands under his armpits, and he looks like he’ll weigh no more than a bucket of ash so you are surprised to find he’s quite heavy even now, and as you help him rise you can feel his muscles working, weak but defiant, refusing to wither away altogether no matter what biology tells them. You give him a little extra, too, kind of lifting him off his feet for a moment, because you want him to feel your strength and know that he did a good job, that he created and raised a man in his own image.

  But you fall short, inevitably, inevitably. Because whereas in your situation your father would do whatever was required of him without hesitation or exception—without really even thinking—there are times, now that he actually requires care, when you balk and fail. One such occasion: Until recently he was able to take off his own clothes and get himself up on the table for his weekly massage, but now he is too frail, and the job falls to you and Karen the massage therapist. Until this moment you have not seen him naked, but you have seen how angular he is under his clothes, the hint of his wasted body, and you are afraid. You help him up from the couch and guide him to the table. Even with his oxygen cranked to five liters the walk of ten feet and two stairs has him gasping. You keep him standing long enough for you to get his pants unfastened and down, and then he collapses to the table. His legs are pixie sticks, candy cigarettes. You could easily wrap your hand all the way around his thigh. He tries to swing his legs onto the table but he can’t get them up all the way, and you hesitate, not wanting to take from him even the smallest thing, but then he says “I can’t,” and you lift his legs for him one at a time with grief rising in you like a throatful of vomit.

  He lies down, exhausted, before you realize that he still has his T-shirt on. You ask him to sit up again, which is almost too much even though you and Karen help him. You wrangle the shirt over his head, hurrying because you don’t want to touch his wasted body. You twist his arms behind him and pull and stretch the shirt, revealing the bruised chest, the belly fat with tumors, the wispy black hairs. You lay him back down, trying to avoid touching his bones, but that’s all he is now, bones and skin. You light the fireplace, burning with shame at your cowardice, as Karen sets to work.

  Then comes the night before your father dies, a cold Wednesday in December. You’ve just tucked Ruby in underneath her Captain Planet comforter when the phone rings. From the other end your mother tells you that she needs help; she was able to get your father to the toilet but now can’t get him off. It takes you twenty minutes to drive to their house over dark country roads glazed with black ice, twenty minutes during which you cannot stop thinking about your father sitting with his pajama pants around his ankles and his bare feet on the cold linoleum, the best and proudest man you will ever know in this or any other version of your life, waiting in shame to be lifted off the toilet while his knees clack together with the chill.

  You cannot drive fast enough.

  You let yourself in the front door, hoping though you know better that in the time it’s taken you to drive here your father has somehow found the strength to get himself up. No one’s in the living room, so you walk down the hall and into the bathroom, where you find your parents exactly as you’d feared: your father on the toilet, head down, your mother crouched on the floor in front of him, her hand over his.

  “Okay,” you say, trying to sound decisive, proactive, up to the task. You move past your mother and squeeze into the narrow space between the wall and the toilet. “Okay.”

  You crouch in front of your father and look into his eyes and what you see there very nearly breaks you. “Dad,” you say. “I’m going to pick you up, all right?” He drops his gaze and nods. You slide your hands under his arms and try gingerly to find the best purchase, though there is no gentle way to lift a grown man. Your mother’s still on her haunches to the left side of the toilet, ready to pull your father’s pants up once he’s on his feet. She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Here we go, Dad,” you say. You straighten your back, as if observing proper form for lifting a heavy package, and you push with your thighs and your father gasps and then you are both up. His legs are completely dead and you’re supporting all his weight, which is difficult while you have him at arm’s length, so you wrap him in a bear hug and clasp your hands behind his back. This close you’re forced to press your head against his chest and so you’re looking straight down and you see things that will visit you every day from now until the world ends: his legs trembling so violently that in any other context it would be comical; y
our mother cursing as she tries to pull the pajama bottoms out from under his feet; the toilet bowl, glimpsed between his knees, full of blood.

  Even after your mother succeeds in getting his pants up and fastened there is still the question of how to move him from here to the bed. He gestures toward the walker—because of a tumor pressing against his vocal cords he’s lost his voice almost completely, and gesturing is pretty much all he can do now—but you know that’s not going to happen, because whatever strength he had to get himself in here has abandoned him completely. Listen: you know without having to be told that there’s only one choice, and every second you stand here trying to pretend there’s some alternative is a season in hell for your father.

  “Dad, I’m going to carry you, okay?” you say. He shakes his head and waves his hand again at the walker, wheezing in frustration, but you’ve made your decision and you tell your mother to get out of the way. She moves back toward the bedroom as you bend at the waist. With your right arm under his shoulders and your left behind his knees you lift, and as he rises so does a memory, at once incongruous and plainly fitting: you as a boy of seven or eight, asleep on the sofa after convincing your mother to let you stay up late to watch the Creature Double Feature on WLVI, waking to the smell of warehouse dust and the feel of his huge hands under you as he carried you to bed.