“Yes, we were aware of that,” Benjamin says.
“Right,” the pathologist says absently, and he falls silent; Benjamin can hear him paging through some documents. “Hold on a second,” he says.
Open up. How can you even say that about someone? Benjamin suddenly pictures his mother, opened up. There she lies, on a sterile slab, three levels below the ground in the hospital, cold and alone. His mother’s belly like a rose of skin, and hiding somewhere in her viscous innards is the answer to the mystery, jotted down on paper by the pathologist who’s leaning over her, information that will be passed on to involved parties, sons who want to know what happened, why it all went so fast, how it was even possible that a person who was planning a trip to the Mediterranean one day was dying an excruciating death the next.
“Well, what baffled us was that events progressed so quickly. So more or less immediately after the death, we decided to take a look and see what happened.”
“And what did you find?”
“Your mother had previously had a tumor in her thyroid gland, were you aware of that?”
“Yes,” Benjamin said.
“She also had inflammation in her abdominal cavity. We found a perforation in the wall of her stomach, and the stomach acid leaked out, you might say, causing larger and larger portions of her belly to become inflamed. Unfortunately, this is a very painful condition.”
The brothers exchange glances around the patio table. Because they were there, they knew what that pain was, they saw it translated onto her face in her last hours of life, how it first appeared as a crook of her eyebrows and on her tense, pursed lips. Then it got worse. She whimpered and moaned, grabbed at the staff members and snapped cruel things at them. Pressed the button so nurses would appear at the door. When she said her stomach hurt, one nurse asked if she wanted an antacid.
“An antacid?” said Mom. “Do you think this is heartburn or something?” She stared at the nurse, her mouth open, her eyes sparking in contempt. “My stomach is burning! Don’t you get it? It’s burning like fire!” Even though she was so small and helpless, he felt the terror that came with hearing her voice rise into falsetto, that familiar screeching sound of his childhood, from when she erupted.
She screamed for hours. Then she went silent.
Still entirely conscious, with her eyes fixed on the wall across from her bed, and now she didn’t say a word. The brothers tried to reach her, signaling in front of her face, calling her name. But she didn’t want to talk anymore. It was like she refused, in protest against her pain.
And then the thing with her face happened. Her mouth must have been dry; her upper lip became stuck to her gums. Her face froze in a grimace, her front teeth creating a sneer that now invaded Benjamin’s mind several times a day. That silence was so unlike her. She lived in fury, but her final two hours passed without a sound. She lay there quietly in the bed in the corner of the room, her teeth gleaming in the dim afternoon light. One of the brothers asked a doctor if she was conscious, if she could hear them. After all, her eyes were open. No, the doctors couldn’t really say.
At last Mom closed her eyes. More and more people came into the room—as her condition deteriorated—and then, once it was determined that nothing could be done, they trickled back out. The dose of morphine was increased to ease her pain, and maybe that made the end more tolerable for her, but no one was sure because that grimace stayed on her face even as she was rolled out to the chapel, and now that the pathologist is talking about the pain Mom must have felt, it’s Mom’s silent farewell there in her hospital bed that Benjamin pictures once more. Even as he thanks the pathologist for calling and hangs up, and as the brothers sit without speaking, gazing down at their beer cans, the image pops into his mind. That mute grin, refusing to leave him alone.
“Do you think the sauna is ready?” Pierre asks Benjamin.
“I turned it on an hour ago,” Benjamin replies. He looks at the clock. “It should be warm.”
Nils hands his phone to Pierre.
“I took a few pictures that actually turned out,” Nils says. “Swipe right for more,” he says.
On Nils’s phone is a photograph of Mom on her deathbed. Pierre groans and hands the phone back to Nils.
“Why do we have to look at that?” Pierre asks.
“I think it’s nice,” Nils replies. “You can tell she’s at peace.”
“Peace?” Pierre says. “She’s clearly in pain.”
“No, she’s dead here,” he says. “You can’t feel any pain if you’re dead.”
“Why would you take these pictures in the first place?” Pierre asks. “It’s perverse. Taking pictures of a dead person and showing them around. You did the same thing when Dad died. I don’t want to see pictures of my dead parents.”
“There’s nothing ugly about death—maybe it’s about time you realized that.”
“Would you please just respect that I don’t want to? I don’t want to see, and that’s that,” Pierre says. “A grieving son does not want to look at pictures of his parents in the moment they died.”
“Grieving…” Nils mutters. He takes a sip of beer.
“What?” Pierre says. “What do you mean?”
“You sure do seem to be in deep sorrow.”
“Shut up, we all grieve differently!”
Silence around the table.
“Can’t you just accept it?” Pierre says. “I don’t want to see pictures of Mom dead. Put that shit away.”
Nils doesn’t respond. He picks up the phone and looks through it, smiling and nervous, browsing aimlessly among the various apps, and slowly the feeling of being wronged begins to emanate from him. Pierre doesn’t notice at all, but Benjamin can certainly feel it as Nils’s umbrage at being admonished and humiliated unfurls into a state of pique he battles in silence. He gets up and goes inside.
“Pierre,” Benjamin whispers. “That was unnecessary, don’t you think?”
“But he’s nuts, right? I wanted to chew him out even back at the hospital when he started taking photos of her. But when he forces me to look at them, it drives me crazy.”
“We have to try to get through this so we can carry out Mom’s final wishes. So we need to not fight.”
Pierre doesn’t respond. He tilts the little bowl of chips Nils has put out, but there are none left. He looks down at the table for a moment, then gets up and walks inside. Benjamin can see his back through the open kitchen window, can hear his firm voice.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so hard on you about the pictures.”
Nils, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up.
“No worries,” he says. “It was the wrong time to show them to you.”
Pierre puts out his arms, Nils stands up, and it sounds like applause as they clap each other on the back. Benjamin feels the skin of his face pulling and realizes he’s smiling. The hug is brief, but it doesn’t matter because it definitely happened, and for a moment or two Benjamin sits on the patio with a sense of absolute satisfaction, like when you’re unspooling a tangled net after a night of strong winds and bountiful hauls, and it seems hopeless, like you might have to throw the whole net away. But then you turn one loop in an unexpected direction and you hardly have to use any force and there’s a rustle and the net releases itself, flowing out of your hands and arranging itself neatly on the hooks on the wall.
Pierre and Nils appear on the stone steps. Pierre holds up three cans of beer.
“Bro time in the sauna!”
And they walk down the narrow path to the lake. They stand in front of each other on the little sauna porch and take off their clothes; slowly and rather reluctantly, the brothers are uncovered. Benjamin sees the identical burn scars on his brothers’ shins, from the time they rubbed erasers on each other’s skin until they shrieked and it smelled like burnt hair and flesh and Dad n
oticed what they were up to and slapped the erasers out of their hands. He sees Pierre’s foot fungus, the red skin between his toes. Benjamin observes Nils’s bare back in the sauna. The collection of moles is still there, like a scattershot of brown dots that landed between his shoulder blades.
| 10 |
The Ghost Hand
Red-fingered and howling, Pierre and Benjamin had been smacking each other’s hands with a flyswatter, but soon they were shushed and banned from the kitchen by Mom and Dad. There needed to be peace and quiet, because important things were happening around the kitchen table. Benjamin and Pierre sat on the stairs with a good view of the well-thumbed papers, the stubs and formulas on the table. Dad picked up one piece of paper, stared sternly at it, and put it back where it had been. Nils was at the short end of the table, signing a document; Mom swiftly placed it aside and provided another one. Mom and Dad had been doing this for a long time, sitting with Nils and making strategies, muttering in grave tones, pointing and exchanging papers. Today was the deadline for applying to high schools, and this was it. All the papers had to be sent in so their eldest son could be guided forth into the academic world.
For a number of years, Nils’s efforts at school had given him special standing with Mom and Dad. He was the family’s great hope, the one that would do something with his life. It had always been that way. His performance in first grade was so outstanding that he had skipped second and gone straight to third, and each time he came home from school he had something in his backpack to show off, one triumph or another. Writing assignments that their parents eagerly read aloud to each other, or schoolwork that was examined and discussed. When Nils came home with the results of an important exam, Mom always gathered the family, wouldn’t open the brown envelope until everyone was present, and she took out her reading glasses and decoded the test results in concentrated silence while Nils stood next to her, waiting with nervous posture, one hand on his waist and the other resting on his thigh. At last, when Mom understood the breadth of Nils’s success, she shook her head and peered over her glasses at him with a smile. “You’re ridiculous,” she said. And always the same thing as she held the test up to Benjamin and Pierre: “This is how it’s done!”
It was raining out. No lights were on, aside from the ceiling fixture, which cast a yellow glow over Nils’s future on the table. Benjamin and Pierre sat in the murky dark of the stairs, watching what went on in the kitchen, listening to these pivotal conversations.
“Are you sure you want to choose German?” Mom asked, looking down at a document.
“Yes, I think so,” Nils replied.
“Well,” said Mom. “It’s just too bad about French. I think you would have loved that language—it’s so refined and beautiful.”
“I was going to see if you can add a language outside of the curriculum, so I can study both French and German. Just want to get used to the school and my work first.”
The proud parents exchanged glances. Benjamin looked at Pierre and saw that he was slowly extending his middle finger in Nils’s direction. Benjamin snickered and followed suit.
“Fuck you,” whispered Pierre.
“Fuck you,” whispered Benjamin.
“Fuck you forever,” whispered Pierre. Benjamin shoved Pierre in the side.
“Oh no,” Benjamin said, looking at his middle finger.
“What?” Pierre asked.
“Can’t you see? Ghost hand.”
Pierre watched as Benjamin’s hand changed, his fingers spreading until they looked like gnarled branches on a dead tree, and the hand suddenly turned toward him. Pierre leapt up and dashed down the stairs and Benjamin ran after him, chasing his brother through the kitchen, then capturing him and shoving him to the floor.
“Ghost hand!” he cried. “It’s not me! It’s someone else controlling my hand!”
Benjamin flipped Pierre onto his back and used his knees to pin his arms to the floor, and then he tickled Pierre’s belly and chest and armpits.
“Stop!” Pierre shouted, trying to get away.
“How can I stop? It’s not me!”
Benjamin tickled him harder; Pierre couldn’t breathe, his face twisted in a happy grin, and even though Benjamin could hear the protests from the kitchen table, Nils’s roars and Dad’s horrified noises, he kept at it, because there was light and air in Pierre’s bubbly laughter, and Pierre laughed without making a sound and twisted his head right and left and right again, and then he started to cry. Benjamin let go.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did it hurt?”
Pierre didn’t answer. He turned onto his side and buried his face in his hands. Benjamin stood up and saw a puddle of urine gleaming on the wooden floor, and he saw the dark stain over the fly of Pierre’s jeans. Molly reached the puddle first; she gave it a cursory glance and walked away.
“Mom…,” Benjamin said, nodding at the puddle.
“Oh my God,” she said, standing up.
She found a dish sponge and dropped it into the liquid, then took the sponge to the sink and wrung it out. The pee ran down her fingers when she squeezed it, but she wasn’t bothered. She was unfazed by bodily fluids and always had been. Certainly she was upset whenever Dad forgot to put up the toilet seat and left dribbles on it; she would shout at him, but she never bothered to wipe it up, just sat down and let the backs of her thighs absorb the pee. Mom made another pass with the dishrag. Benjamin went to Pierre, who was crying on the floor.
“It’s no big deal,” Benjamin said. He put a hand on his brother’s back. “It happens to me all the time.”
“No it doesn’t,” Pierre said between sobs.
“Sure it does,” he said. “Hold on!”
Benjamin pretended to check himself; he stared up at the ceiling.
Pierre looked up from behind his fingers. “Now I peed my pants,” Benjamin said.
Pierre laughed through his tears. Mom wrung out the last bit in the sink. “Go change your clothes,” she told Pierre. Mom took her newspaper and cigarettes and went to the living room. Dad concluded the ceremony at the kitchen table and stuffed the thick bundle of papers into an envelope. He let his slack, bestial tongue hang from his mouth as he drew the row of stamps across it; then he stuck them on the envelope. An enormous number of stamps. He handed the letter to Nils.
“This is a big day,” said Dad. His voice broke. “My big boy,” he said. Sobbing, he hugged his son. Nils’s clumsy attempts to participate in the hug. His temple against Dad’s, his arms limp, like tubes of flesh around Dad’s waist.
“Time to go,” Dad said, and Nils ran upstairs to get changed.
Benjamin went out to sit on the stone steps, gazing up the slope and the narrow path where Nils would soon vanish. The tractor path was the only way in. And it was the only way out. It was like a skinny gravel intestine that linked the cottage with reality. And if it were to become overgrown, this place would go insane; it would have lost all reason. Sometimes Benjamin just sat and stared at the path, mostly to reassure himself that it was still there, where he had last seen it. A few times each summer, Dad would go out with the scythe and cut back the grass that always grew between the tire tracks, to ensure free passage. The children always followed along but had to stay behind him; when they got too close he gave a shrill cry and pointed at the blade of the scythe. “This can chop off your leg without you even feeling it.” While his brothers got bored and trooped off, Benjamin would follow his dad all the way up, standing behind him and supervising. When they were done, they had a look at what they’d accomplished. “That’s how it should look,” said Dad. “Like a long grass pussy.” He laughed and tousled Benjamin’s hair, and they walked back down the path.
Benjamin turned his eyes to Nils’s moped, which was parked outside the root cellar. Nils wasn’t even fourteen, but Mom and Dad trusted him; they knew he was a cautious driver. Benjamin had never
been allowed to try out the moped, but when Nils first got it he had let him stand next to the machine, rev it in neutral, and Benjamin felt its power and it dawned on him just what the moped was capable of. It was a way out, to the other side. Now Nils had brand-new opportunities to escape. The kid who was always making himself scarce suddenly had the means to disappear faster than ever, and go even farther away. And Benjamin stood next to the moped and revved with his right hand while Nils carefully watched over his vehicle. Benjamin realized the moped would change everything, that it would leave him conclusively on his own, and he revved and revved, making the engine roar to drown out his own despair.
Every morning, Nils took off for the town, where he’d gotten a summer job in a grocery store, but he also came back each evening with tastes of the city. At the end of his shift, Nils cleaned the bulk candy aisle and instead of throwing out what customers had dropped on the floor, he gathered it in a bag and gave it to Benjamin and Pierre. They poured the contents out on the kitchen table, picked hairs and dust bunnies out of the pile, rubbed away dirt and grime, culled the pieces that had taken the most punishment, the trampled gummy bananas that still sported shoe prints, the sweet rum sprinkles that had been flattened like five-kronor coins. And then they ran down to the beach with their spoils so they could eat them in peace. It became a tradition: Nils came home with dirty candy and Benjamin and Pierre sat down by the lake, gazing out at the water, stuffing their mouths, and sometimes the candy squeaked and crunched in their teeth when they got a piece of grit and they sputtered and spat it out on the rocks and giggled.
Pierre got changed and sat down on the stone steps with Benjamin to watch as Nils took off. Nils was getting ready for his journey. He put on the overlarge helmet and pressed on the saddle to see if the tires had enough air. He placed the envelope in a plastic bag and fastened it to the cargo rack and Dad checked to make sure he’d done a good job. Then he headed out into the world, first to a mailbox to secure his future, then to work, and Benjamin watched him vanish up the slope, listening to the sound of the engine, which was eventually drowned out by the wind, and he knew the feelings in Nils’s body, because he was on his way now, on his way to the other end of the gravel path, and he had been there himself, those times he was allowed to accompany his parents when they went grocery shopping. It was like a gravitational pull, the string of gravel like a gateway to another dimension, you went fast and sort of lost control until at last you were spat out on the other end, onto asphalt, well-maintained, to a place that looked like a community, where there were houses on either side of the road. Sometimes, in his solitude, he thought about the other end of the gravel path, and how life began there.
The Survivors Page 7