“She was Indian?”
“Chinese. I think.”
“The immigrant makes you think of me. The shady newcomer. Very nice.”
“The software, you idiot. How’s today? Any better? I’m trying to be a better boss.”
“I have a cousin on my mother’s side, he disappeared ten years ago muling CPUs in his rectum from Eritrea. This woman with the DVDs, she could be screaming inside for help. Did you buy anything from her? Did you give her any money at all?”
“No.”
“Good. I have regretted almost every purchase from these people. The quality is very often bad.”
“I may be here a while.”
“And I am here.”
“My father’s really sick.”
“I had a feeling.”
“And I really do need you. You know that, right?”
He said, “More than you ever could.”
“Good.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“Josie.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Perfect.”
We were quiet again.
I said, “Make sure you give Teri my love. Rub her belly for me.”
“I’ll do that.”
“So I’ll be here, then,” I said.
“And I am here, my friend.”
I crossed the street and walked by the construction workers, by the bright orange cones, the yellow tape. I looked at my phone: six o’clock. It was rush hour. Six o’clock? The day had gone by so fast! No way Dad was still sleeping. I headed toward the main avenue a few blocks away, toward the subway stair that opened like a hell’s mouth down inside the sidewalk, and I saw the bobbing heads. The bobbing rise of people coming from the trains, and they just kept on coming. They were shoulder close and moving fast, on cell phones sharing with their spouses, and they were coming fast my way. I used to look down on them, people like this. I said they were already dead. I said, Let them walk along their walls like rats in search of scraps. But now I saw not some marching millipede, khaki-legged and gruesome—no, I saw the quivering, the miscellaneous, the crowded and alive, busy soul of humanity. They came at me, surrounding me and passing like a stream flows around a fallen tree. I stayed very still—actually, I was in the way, and I enjoyed every last muttered complaint they made. Every curse. Then I turned and joined them, I walked, and I would go wherever they led me. Not because this was the true way, or the right way, but because this was just one way among how many ways alongside other people right here on this planet and, my God, that sounds so dramatic but really it just felt nice. I couldn’t remember the last time I was so fully alive. Everyone’s head was bobbing, and I saw the front doors of every building, and the TVs through first-floor windows. I felt warm air on my skin, wafting up from the sidewalk grates. The sun was going down orange in the alleys. Evening was on its way, and I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. Six o’clock? Why was I out and about gallivanting? With a sick father at home? Who needed me, more than he knew, and was possibly looking for me, and calling out my name at this very moment? I hailed a taxi, and told the cabbie I was in a hurry.
The bathroom door was open and red light poured into the dark hall, the red pooling on the floor and seeping up the opposite wall. My father was on the cot, his arms limp like snapped wings, belly pressing upward like a boil. There was a bottle of wine beside him, an empty glass. He was breathing. It was labored and thin, but he was breathing. I lowered the toilet lid because open it seemed too portentous, too hungry. I sat. I touched his head and his fine hair. It was nearly seven. I told myself I would call an ambulance if he didn’t wake in the next thirty seconds. I’d bought some groceries from the convenience store down the street: a frozen pizza, crackers and cheese, a soft apple. I put the groceries on the floor. I dialed 911 and asked for an ambulance. He opened his eyes.
“How you doing down there?”
He smiled. “You remember?” He stuttered a bit. “Preaching from door to door?”
“I do. Some.”
“You were what?”
“Maybe seven.”
“You were speaking the old language, and that only comes from one place.…”
“Hey, I called for an ambulance.”
He closed his eyes.
I arranged his legs on the cot and folded the pillow under his head, raising his head.
He pressed his hand to his side. “The body doesn’t want to go.”
“Maybe you should listen to it.”
“No reaching God in a monkey suit.”
The red was all around us. Everything was suffused with dark light. He made a look of disgust, and said, “What’s all this to me, anyway?”
“There’s me.”
He touched my knee. “Of course.”
“Good dreams?”
He laughed. “I was standing right there,” he said, pointing with his finger at the tiled wall, up in the corner by the ceiling. But he couldn’t move his arm. “Right there was Rockaway Beach. You remember Rockaway Beach?”
“I do.”
“We went with your mother.”
“I remember. You threw me in the water.”
“I didn’t scare you?”
“Of course not. We were playing.”
He pointed at the ceiling, and it seemed to take all his strength. “I was hot inside, and light in my belly, and a hand comes taking me to Heaven. Your mother’s all light. And you’re all light. And all your kids are light.”
“I don’t have any kids.”
He said, “You were an old man standing next to them.”
“And Sarah’s where?”
“She was light.”
I drank some wine from the bottle and held it up to the red bulb to see how red, my father on the floor, at the bottom of a deep red gorge. I was supposed to save him, to stop anything like this from happening. I had failed.
He asked, “What time is it?”
“About seven.”
“A few more hours till Sunday.” He looked at my glass.
“You promised you’d eat.”
“I will, come Sunday. At midnight.”
“That’s five more hours. The ambulance will be here by then.”
He tried to sit up. “I’m not hungry. Not thirsty. And swallowing hurts.”
“You need food and you need water.” His face looked flushed. There was a dappling of purple spots along his arm. “I think you have a rash.”
“Fine.” His eyes were lazy, starting to loll in their sockets.
“You’re not fine.” The skin around his mouth was cracked.
“Okay,” he said. “Go ahead. Get us some bread. And wine.”
I helped him sit up. “I got groceries.”
“Rip me a piece and bring water. Pour me wine.”
“Not a good idea.”
“You want me to fight when they get here?” He leaned against the side of the tub.
I brought the bread and the pitcher from the kitchen.
“Pour me a glass.” He tried to tear off a piece of the bread. “You do it.”
I poured the wine and tore off a piece of bread. I gave it to him. He took the bread in hand, raised it slightly, and said: “The Body of God.” He tried to take a small bite, pulling at the bread with his jaw. He dipped the bread in water and sucked at it. He raised his glass of wine.
“You really shouldn’t.” I tried to take it from him, and the wine spilled some. I let go of his hand. He straightened with a brief surge of strength, and said: “You will not do that again.”
He looked at the wine, and then he swallowed it all in one gulp. Red streaming from the sides of his mouth, he coughed. His shoulders convulsed and he spat. Then he turned, retching into the tubful of water.
He wiped his mouth, and said, “Your grandfather. We used to stay in hotel rooms. He traveled.”
I tried to give him the water.
He waved it away, and said, “Took us wherever he went. Ever
y room a Bible.” His face was glowing. “Said they came from angels. Angels wore suits, key rings big as hula hoops. A briefcase full of Bibles. Had keys to every room in the city.” His head lolling back and forth. “Where are the wings? Got holes in their jackets?”
“You never talked about him.”
A long pause. “Hotels give me nightmares.”
I took a sip of the wine, and set the bottle on the tub.
“He’s been a constant concern,” he said. “Your grandfather distresses me.”
He was looking at the cloudy bathwater.
“They promised him it was coming.” He coughed. “Light from Heaven, and it’s all over.” He wiped his mouth. “And the faithful will be glorified!” He coughed again. “But then it’s the bread truck. And the birds in the morning, and the milk bottles…”
I put the glass of water to his lips. He sipped from it, and the cot made a snapping-bone noise.
I realized I was crying, and I let it happen.
He was talking now hardly above a whisper. “You’re the last one, a long line of God’s men. American men. You’re the lucky one. Your grandfather, and his father. And his. You should have a boy. He’ll be lucky.”
There are brief glimpses that take you outside, beyond. The last time I smoked marijuana, I was thirty-four and sitting with a good client, poor guy had leukemia. My world opened out like the night-black sky and went on forever, unknowable. There is that long sigh that scoops you out all empty inside from your bowels and all through your soul when you’re standing at the edge of a thing like the Grand Canyon. You wonder at the marvel of a crack, a single crack that opens up turning into something like this, where the world below breaks open and has nothing to do with you, and knows not a thing of what goes on outside its own rocky moon-mountain insides. And your hand is holding someone else’s. Truth comes at you like the floor of an elevator shaft. There are only two good reasons I can think of for God. There is the Good Lord as uncanny family inheritance, a strange great gift from the people who birthed you. Say your prayers before bedtime. Like Dad gave me his God, and his father his, and his father’s father, et cetera. Ad infinitum, for all I know. And of course the Good Lord comes in handy when you first meet the creeping fear of anything unknown, the first time He takes someone away forever.
Dad dropped his legs over the side of the cot and readied his hand at the sink. He took the wine from my hands, and I let him. He drank it all down, in one slow and controlled swallow, and said: “The Blood of God.”
I helped him pull himself up.
He pressed a hand to the tall red wall. His knees were quaking. He whispered, “We’re nothing, you and I, and everyone. Two ways, son, only glory.” He paused. “And frustration.”
He let go of the wall, and he wavered.
“Glory has been patient.” His voice was slurred.
And then he fell.
Everything moved slowly as I reached for him. His arms going around my neck like a lasso, and then it was his weight and my weight together. The pinkish clouds of wine in the water were shifting, and we fell now together, slowly, against the side of the tub. His hand struck the water and our weight knocked hard against the porcelain, and the wine bottle fell in the pool, splashing red water on the walls. A dark blood cloud poured from the bottle, unfurling, rolling, and swirling in the pink dusky storm in the bathwater. The whole sky, all of it, I saw it there like a rippling mirror as we fell back together on the low red floor. I became aware of real time moving around me and beyond me in echoing swirls. I felt we were outside the world somehow, fallen outside and deep inside some borderless moment. It was vast and it was exhilarating. I was aware of my skin, of the very space in my skull, of the infinite space in my skull, of the tidal rush and pull of the so many people we are and can be and ever once were. I was aware of my very own heart, aware in that same way I’d been so many times of my stomach: it was full. My heart was full. I held my father in my arms, and I didn’t want to lose him, and I didn’t want it to be too late, was I too late? I wanted to go back in time, but I couldn’t. And so I became very afraid. Above us, red clouds were poised so still. Then they broke and fell like rain.
EAST AND WEST
4
Desire can be so exhausting, and has way too long a memory. It was early fall, and the leaves were turning papery and thinning on the trees. The afternoons were suffused with that sad and lovely melon glow, when everybody knows the days are getting shorter and those last hours of work and school take on a fresh purpose, letting out in a day already going dark. Halloween candy was falling off the drugstore shelves. I didn’t want winter to come any sooner than it had to. It had been weeks since I last spoke to Sarah and told her that Dad was being taken to the hospital.
Part of me wanted to tell her about the nurses giving me nasty looks. I mean, What kind of son lets this happen to his father? How they had to feed him through tubes because a body can only take so much before it breaks down, before it starts eating itself. How my father could not, or would not speak. About how Dad and I shared milk shakes from the hospital cafeteria, and the nurses split them into two small cups, and we used thick plastic straws.
I sat there beside him watching the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest, and made plans for the move because I hoped to take him with me back to California.
I needed to clean the house and get it ready for sale, but so much of my time was spent at the hospital that I couldn’t really get much done. I slept in the chair next to his bed and spent my mornings scanning the Times and the Post, and I thought about giving him a haircut because his hair had gotten so long. I read the magazines and movie guides for celebrity worship: what’s she wearing; who is sleeping with who. They were everywhere you looked, on the windowsills, in waiting rooms, by the vending and coffee machines. And I fell in love daily with Latina soap stars on telenovelas. There was a TV affixed in the right upper corner of his room. I realized at some point that I’d not been with a woman for a very long time, and what a pity it was that I hardly ever thought about it anymore, but also that now I was thinking about it a lot, actually. Practically all the time.
I had been casually talking with one of the nurses—in the elevators, or smoking out front in the parking lot. Not my father’s nurse, but one of those passing nurses, always swishing through the hallways in her mint-green scrubs. Her name was Leeann and she had a bright blond and glorious Afro, magnetic blue eyes. Skin so fair I could see veins in her cheeks. I’d spoken with her a few times. Always something like Hello, ma’am, overly polite, and she’d say something like Hello, yourself, before I finally realized we were flirting.
We wrestled in a maintenance closet at two o’clock in the morning, where she pressed me up against the wall like this was our last, last chance, and the world was falling apart outside.
The next day, feeling guilty, I wrote to Sarah.
I considered calling. She deserved to know more about Dad’s health, but calling felt too easy, anyway. And when was the last time I actually wrote a letter? There was something deliberate and mature about it, or at least I thought so, maybe even romantic. I sent her a postcard of the New York skyline: “Dad’s not doing well. Things don’t look good. I need to sell the house, which is a mess. I thought you’d want to know.”
She called me a week later. It seems Nikos had a conference at CUNY, and while she hadn’t planned on joining him, maybe now she would. She could check in on Dad and say hello, if I was open to it.
By the time she arrived, I was no longer sure I wanted her around, which isn’t to say I didn’t. I did want her, very much. I wanted her there in the house and in the hospital sitting vigil with Dad. I wanted her back home in Otter. And I wanted her every morning after, beside me wrapped in a warm toss of bedsheets, from that day on forever forward. I opened the door and there she was, in her arms a bright white daisy explosion in a cheap glass vase.
She pushed them at me and said, “You’re supposed to take them.”
Sh
e walked past me into the hallway. “So how far away is the hospital?”
In that moment, it was finally over for me. Not just because we were finished, but because we were both revealed, each of us new to the other. I saw her in the light of her new love, and I was standing there in the slant space of my father’s sickness, all of which hurt crushingly only for as long as it took me to turn and follow her inside. I asked her where they were staying.
“Downtown, with a friend.”
“One of his.”
“Yup. My friend, too, I guess.”
“I’m happy to hear it.” I told her some more about Dad, as she placed the flowers on the dining room table.
She looked around. “This is why I love your father. He is so sad and totally fascinating. Like one of those mystics in the desert. But it’s Queens.”
I think it was actually those silly flowers that finally let the old house breathe. Like I’d been holding my breath for weeks, I let go a long low sigh.
She said, “I don’t see any cat shit. So there’s that.” She took a protein bar from her pocket, and pulled back the wrapping. Took a bite, and pulled a daisy from the vase, gave it to me. “How can I help?”
She said she wanted to help clean while I sat with Dad. Nikos was out and about working anyway. By the time I got back from the hospital, she’d scoured the kitchen floor, emptied out a closet, and started organizing some of Dad’s things. She said she wasn’t sure if she could come back the following day. But she did. And again said she could only stay for an hour or so. Nikos (I still find the name preposterous), he understood.
But she stayed all day long.
“He wants me to be happy,” she said. “Anyway, he’s busy with social functions. Meeting with colleagues. He’s never been to New York.”
The days got shorter as we filled the boxes with garbage and set them on the street. We rented a Dumpster and joyously threw bags from the upstairs bedroom windows. We kept an ongoing pile of possible saves—the more interesting-looking books, the cleaner clothing. A few tchotchkes, the figurines my mother favored, and a sun-bleached jawbone my father found upstate in 1987. He’d Sharpied the date at the gum line. The wooden cross. The plate. I packed the family albums, and we braved the attic and its noxious air, urine-colored fiberglass falling from the rafters in leprous chunks. We sopped up puddles in the basement, and tried to identify a blue spongy mold. We boxed up his spirals and his papers, because God forbid some garbage picker, some young and impressionable squatter find my father’s dreams and exegeses and start a cult. We nudged the cats into the backyard. I carefully packed his mail-order shield in bubble wrapping, removed the red bulb.
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