Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  Suddenly your father finds his voice. He moans and cries and writhes in slow-motion in your arms, and you stand there stupidly, looking down at him, instead of moving toward the bed. He’s crying because he’s in pain, of course—monstrous pain, brought by you to a mind-erasing crescendo. Pain he’s been denying for the last three months whenever you or your mother asked him if he had any discomfort. Pain so terrible that by the time you actually get your feet moving he has, mercifully, passed out and gone limp in your arms.

  You place him in the bed, thinking: gentle. Gentle. Gentle.

  Because you are a coward, rather than spend the night you leave your mother alone with him and head back into town. You drive around the empty streets, smoking cigarettes. The first time you pass You Know Whose Pub is genuine happenstance. The second you wonder what sort of subterfuge your reptile brain is up to. The third time you pull over into the dirty slush by the curb and sit, engine idling, trying to figure out what it is you’re doing, exactly. You stare at the bar’s tired façade: greasy glass door smeared with a thousand fingerprints, neon sign atop the awning, draped with old cobwebs even in winter. From the single window a jaundiced light emanates, giving the bar’s interior the look of an aquarium filled with urine. The muffled baseline of “You Give Love a Bad Name” thumps through the brick exterior.

  You light a cigarette and crack the window and sit there for a few minutes longer, thinking. Then you get out of the car, flick your cigarette into the gutter, and step in out of the cold. Over the blare of Bon Jovi you ask for a double of anything. What you end up with is supposed to be bourbon, near as you can tell.

  As the liquor slides down and begins to warm you, the one thought you’ve been avoiding through your father’s illness rises up and flits about your brain like an angry wasp: You could have stopped this from happening. You could have prevented this. You could have kept it from being so. You had the foreknowledge and you had the means.

  You did nothing.

  If we may interject here for a moment? Because already you’re ten fingers deep into the bourbon, and in real danger of ruining the life you’ve spent two lifetimes working for. It’s our contention that in this version of things you have in fact done plenty. Plenty. You want to talk about could have? How about this: We gave you infinite options, and you could have easily chosen to live in a world free of both comets and cancer. You could have sidestepped those heartaches, and certainly we would not have blamed you. You chose instead to suffer every same calamity and anguish a second time—chose, in fact, to risk suffering still others—and changed nothing but yourself.

  Listen:

  Everything ends, and Everything matters.

  Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got—your wife’s lips, your daughter’s eyes, your brother’s heart, your father’s bones and your own grief—and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.

  You get up a little wobbly from your stool and place a twenty on the bar and walk back out into the early morning. You smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk. The cold clears your head enough that you feel okay to drive, which you do carefully, like a teen in driver’s ed, hands at ten and two, eyes scanning the dark road, foot hovering over the brake pedal. You pull into the driveway slowly, killing the lights to avoid waking Ruby. When you go inside Amy is seated at the kitchen table with her hands around a mug and a pot of tea still steaming on the range top.

  You sit across from her. She catches a whiff of your breath, grimaces, then stands and pours another cup of tea and sets it in front of you.

  “This is your one get-out-of-jail-free card,” she says, and at this moment you are more grateful for her than you ever have been in either of your lifetimes.

  The next day you and Rodney and your mother and Amy and Ruby are with your father at the moment he dies. When he stops breathing you put your hand on his chest and feel his heart ebb and fail. Your mother climbs into the bed and holds your father and talks to him even though he can’t hear her anymore. She tells him to breathe. She tells him to wake up. You call the funeral director and while you wait for him to arrive you set about preparing your father’s body. You take off his oxygen and button his pajama top, which had come twisted and undone as he struggled through those last hours. His mouth wants to hang open and for a while you hold it shut, gently, so that when he stiffens it will stay closed. Rodney wants to know what he can do, and you tell him to wrap your father carefully in the bed sheet. By the time he’s finished with this the funeral director has arrived. His name is Bill. He’s younger than you expected and he keeps it dignified but loose. He recognizes Rodney and says, “Boy, I bet your father was proud of you.” Then he asks if you want to help him remove the body. “Some people do,” he says, “and some people don’t. So I always ask.”

  You take Rodney aside and ask him if he feels up for this.

  “Whatever you think is right, Junior,” he tells you. “That’s what I want to do.”

  So you tell Bill that you and your brother will do it by yourselves. Bill nods, goes out to the hearse, returns with the stretcher, and steps aside. You slide your hands under your father’s shoulders and almost recoil when you feel heat lingering in the mattress. Then you and Rodney lift the body onto the stretcher and secure the straps, and together you bear your father out of his home.

  Afterward you sit with Ruby by the fireplace and listen to her talk about what she saw and how she feels. She asks if smoking killed your father, and you tell her yes. Then she wants to know why you’re still smoking, and you have no good answer for her. Even if you were able to tell her about the Destroyer of Worlds, she would not consider this a solid reason for continuing to smoke. And frankly, she would be right.

  For weeks and months afterward, your father’s absence, and the sad and painful manner in which he died, hangs over your family.

  When the fallout of your father’s death has settled, Ruby resumes her one-girl campaign for the environment. She sends an e-mail to Maine senator Olympia Snowe about a bill to allow oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Snowe plans to support the bill, but is impressed with such a sober and informed letter from a ten-year-old, and grants Ruby an audience. Amy’s begun work at a local law firm, so you fly to Washington with Ruby. The two of you ride in a black limousine to the Russell Senate Office Building and are escorted through security and into a large office. There’s a pair of sofas facing each other on the blue carpeting, and you sit on the one facing the picture window. Ruby puts her hand in yours and squeezes.

  “Nervous, babe?” you ask.

  “No,” she says. “Not really. The flying made me nervous. But I’m okay now.”

  You expect to wait a long time, but after just a few minutes Snowe comes in, beaming a broad, practiced politico smile. She offers you her hand, says hello. Then she bends at the waist to greet Ruby. You feel an irresistible swell of pride at your daughter’s composure. She’s all business, unsmiling as she shakes Snowe’s hand and looks her directly in the eye.

  Snowe sits facing you on the opposite sofa.

  “Senator Snowe,” Ruby says. “I guess you know why I’m here.”

  “Yes,” Snowe says. “I was very impressed with your letter.”

  “Thank you. So you must be ready to explain why you’ve decided to support the provision for oil drilling in next year’s budget resolution.”

  You don’t know what Snowe was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. She looks at you, eyebrows raised. Maybe she thought someone else helped Ruby write the letter, that Ruby was the heart and someone else the brains. Would have been a reasonable assumption, but all the same she was mistaken, and she’s just now s
tarting to realize that.

  “Senator?” Ruby says.

  Thus begins a debate that lasts nearly two hours. Snowe talks about creating jobs; Ruby counters with statistics linking increased alcohol-ism and diabetes to drilling in the North Slope. Snowe cites reduced dependence on foreign oil; Ruby calls this a panacea to distract from the real issue of alternative energy. When Snowe talks about reducing gas prices, Ruby chides her for deliberately ignoring the fact that even if drilling began today it would take fifteen years for the oil to reach market.

  An aide enters and tells Snowe she has a meeting in five minutes. Snowe looks up, thinks a moment, and tells her to cancel.

  Instead she invites you and Ruby on a tour of the Capitol complex. You see the House and Senate chambers, the Supreme Court building, and the U.S. Botanic Garden, where Ruby fawns over the Baja Fairy Duster, a flower that looks like a crimson starburst.

  Over a lunch of Ruby’s favorites—tater tots and BLTs with Miracle Whip—she asks Snowe if her opinion on the drilling provision has changed.

  “I’ll need to think on it,” Snowe tells her. “But when I decide, I promise to let you know personally.”

  But she doesn’t need to, because the following evening, just hours after you arrive home from the airport, you see Snowe on CNN announcing that she will not support the provision. This is momentous not just because the vote is very tight, but because it means Snowe has broken party lines and defied the White House. When asked by a reporter why she’s suddenly changed stances, Snowe tells of meeting with a remarkable, passionate ten-year-old who knew more about the issue than most any expert she’s talked to. You grab Ruby from her bedroom, where she’s still unpacking, and return to the television in time to hear Snowe refer to her by name.

  It’s only half an hour or so before the phone starts ringing off the hook. First the local papers want a comment, and the CBS affiliate in Bangor asks for an interview. The next day producers for The Daily Show, Larry King, and NBC Nightly News call. You say you’ll get back to them, and together you and Amy sit down with Ruby to talk it over.

  “I want to do it, Dad,” she tells you. “People are finally ready to listen. I’ve been working for this my whole life.” You have to suppress a smile, because no matter how smart or serious, Ruby is still just a ten-year-old, and to hear her say she’s been working for something her whole life, like she’s Nelson Mandela or something, is, let’s face it, pretty funny.

  You send Ruby to bed and you and Amy go back and forth for a couple of hours.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Amy says.

  “You know how important this is to her,” you say.

  “Of course I know . . . you think I don’t know that?” Amy says. “Lots of things that she needs to be protected from are important to her, Junior. Jai alai. Excessive chocolate consumption. If she wanted to climb into one of those redwoods and sit there for a year to keep it from being cut down, would you let her?”

  “Going on The Daily Show,” you tell her, “is not sitting in a tree for a year.”

  “It just feels like something we should be shielding her from, you know? First this, and the next thing we turn around and she’s dancing on tables and doing coke out of serving bowls like the second coming of Drew Barrymore.”

  “Amy,” you say.

  “I know, I know.”

  The following week you are all three in New York. You tape five shows in two days, and the composure Ruby had with Senator Snowe is on full display—as you watch her you’re reminded powerfully of how confident and self-possessed Amy was when you first laid eyes on her in the Gifted and Talented classroom twenty-odd years ago. She keeps pace with Jon Stewart, joking about the reproductive habits of polar bears—a crack about only having sex once every three years, which elicits raised eyebrows from Stewart and a cackle from Amy, standing with you just offstage—and tolerates Larry King’s banality with a gentle indulgence unusual in someone of any age, let alone a child.

  You return home to Maine, thinking that will be that, but when the shows air the whole thing starts to snowball. Next thing you know Ruby’s on the cover of People and receives an invitation to speak before Congress next month in the week leading up to the vote. Talking heads compare your daughter to Samantha Smith, saying that what Smith did for geopolitical relations, Ruby is now doing for environmental causes, and polls show public support for ANWR drilling down to an all-time low of 11 percent, from a high of 46 percent just two months ago.

  In the midst of all this Rodney’s Chicago Cubs have made it to the World Series, and you and Ruby take a break from her media blitz to fly to Cleveland for the first two games against the Indians. You’re just getting situated in your seats behind home plate, Ruby struggling happily under the weight of full fan gear and tofu dogs and cocoa, when a reporter from the Plain Dealer recognizes her and introduces himself.

  “I didn’t know you were a baseball fan,” he says to her. “Where do you find time to follow baseball, with everything else you’re doing?”

  “My uncle plays for the Cubs,” she tells him matter-of-factly, biting the bare tip off her tofu dog.

  Crap, you think as the reporter warms to this new subject.

  There aren’t many dignified news outlets left, but even those few that remain are unable to resist such spectacular fluff, especially after the Cubs win the Series: America’s newest darling just happens to be the niece of one of baseball’s greatest living players? Oh, do tell.

  Of course Rodney’s happy to hit the talk show circuit with Ruby when the Series ends. He’s always been bad at interviews, but where he stumbles Ruby picks him up, and their natural dynamic—friendly ribbing, Stooges-style antics, and the occasional spontaneous thumb-wrestling match—plays well on television. Whenever Letterman or Kimmel ask too many consecutive questions about the trick to turning a perfect double play, Rodney says simply, “What Ruby’s doing is a lot more important than baseball. Maybe we should talk about that.”

  You know well that he’s wrong. What he’s doing matters just as much.

  Ruby’s efforts come to a head in December, when the Senate votes 78-22 to strip the ANWR drilling provision from the congressional budget resolution. The vote takes only half an hour, and afterward Ruby stands bundled against the cold on the steps of the Capitol, hand-in-hand with Snowe, and the two of them take turns heralding the victory for the assembled press.

  Two days later NASA announces the discovery of the Destroyer of Worlds, and everyone forgets all about Ruby, and the Cubs’ triumph, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

  It matters, now, that you gather your family in. You’re correct in assuming that the U.S. government (and possibly others) have known about C/1998 E1 for longer than they’re admitting, and in an effort to minimize panic and attendant bad behavior they’re now lying about how much time is left—they say over a year, when you know it’s more like two months. But you’re glad for this lie, because it means the transportation infrastructure continues to function and so Rodney is able to fly in from New York and join you and Amy and Ruby and your mother at the house you grew up in. It also means, happily, that the Remington 870 12-gauge you buy at Dick’s remains loaded but unused, racked on the wall in the mudroom. The mood in your small part of the world, far from the murderous anarchy you expected, is one more of muted grief and togetherness, like Christmas right after someone has died. People linger in large, quiet groups in restaurants. Couples who haven’t enjoyed one another for years walk around holding hands as if they’re soldered together. National Guard troops kick the dirt on street corners and play cribbage at checkpoints, rifles forgotten inside their Humvees. Store shelves do go barren in spots, and there’s the occasional shortage of gasoline, but beyond this life is more or less normal, if full of advance grief.

  It matters, too, that your foreknowledge of the end of all things offers no insulation from this grief. You had thought that it would, but no. And it hits you at odd times. E.g. here you are at a diner
, the final Dad-and-Ruby date, staring across the table at your daughter’s sad countenance, her brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her skin pale and perfect like skim milk, and oh God yes your grief is full and violent, worse than you could ever have imagined, bad enough to make you dig the tines of a fork into your thigh under the table.

  You seek every day to offer Ruby some guidance or consolation. But there is none of either to be had, and her understanding of this fact is evident in her growing silence, in the sorrow draped over her features like a shroud. What makes it worse is that her sorrow, it’s plain to see, is for you, not for herself.

  And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned—to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try and control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.

  Except that there’s one last thing, and to say that it’s important is a gross understatement. You would be an abject failure as a son, brother, father, and husband if you just let this one go without at least thinking it through. So you spend every night of the last week thinking, and you can’t decide, can’t decide, it’s impossible either way, so you take your dilemma to the one person you’ve turned to, in this and every other life, since the day the Challenger exploded.

  Broaching the subject of the government’s false timeline with Amy is not an issue, because by now the jig is up—fireballs have been raining down on São Paulo and Wichita for four days, and the comet itself, visible even in daylight since the announcement, looms ever larger in the eastern sky, like some giant murderous Q-Tip. So the topic of discussion, as you sit together on the last night, is whether or not to kill Ruby before the Earth bursts into flames.