The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 5

  A man was leaning over Leland’s hospital bed, gently holding open his right eyelid, blinding him with a penlight. “Sorry for the rude awakening,” the man said. He had a North Carolina accent. “I tried to rouse you, but you were out—and I mean out.”

  “Have we met?” Leland’s tongue felt weighty and slow in his mouth. His head thumped.

  “We have, actually.”

  Switching off the penlight, the man straightened and stepped back. Leland blinked away spots of purple and green until he saw, finally, the wire-framed glasses, the glossy black hair, the clean-shaven face of the doctor he’d met in the ER.

  “Ramanujan,” Leland said. “Like the mathematician.”

  “You remembered.”

  “Couldn’t hardly forget. You haven’t, um, seen my daughter, by any chance?”

  Ramanujan held his hand in the air, level with his eyebrows—Corinne-height, more or less. “Yay tall? Blondish? Blue shirt? She asked where the cafeteria was—said she wanted coffee. There was a boy here, too.” He lowered his hand to his chin. “Long hair. Very sweaty.”

  “Must be John Carter. My son.”

  Ramanujan scrubbed his hands together to warm them. Tipping forward over the bedrail, he probed Leland’s abdomen—left, right, center. “Any pain? Nausea? Cramping?”

  Leland shook his head. A mistake: The thudding in his skull worsened. The locus of the pain lay an inch or two above his right eyebrow, where the pot must have landed. He searched with his fingertips for the precise spot, touched the gauze bandage that covered it, and pressed on it until he sucked in his breath and tears pricked the corners of his eyes.

  “Hands off,” the doctor said. “You have a couple of stitches under there.”

  “Stitches, not staples? I thought it was all staples now.”

  “Not on your face, unless you want a really gnarly scar.”

  “I’ve always wondered if they just, you know, hit you with a Swingline.” Leland clenched his fist as if squeezing the trigger of a staple gun. Even though he was closing his fingers around empty air, the feebleness of his grip alarmed him. He dropped his hand and let it lie on his chest.

  Whether or not Ramanujan understood the miniature drama unfolding before him, the tiny crisis of debility and denial, he put on a compassionate face. “You’re doing great,” he said. “Your blood pressure’s coming up, your lungs sound good, heart sounds good, you’re not concussed. Unless something changes unexpectedly, we’ll send you home in the morning.”

  Leland smoothed his blanket across his chest. A strand of yarn had snagged free, three or four inches of it. Twisting it around his finger, he looked up. “Are you sure? I mean, totally sure? Everything felt muddled all day today. I couldn’t seem to keep my head on straight. It’s not—? It wasn’t—?”

  But Ramanujan was already shaking his head. “A stroke? I don’t think so. We did a CT scan, and there’s no sign of any bleeding. We’ll do another one in the morning.”

  The CT scan had been a joy. Leland had had to put on a funny blue hat and lie on a cold slab with his head in a big white tube. It was a pleasure to have another one to look forward to.

  Ramanujan said, “Have you experienced any issues with erectile dysfunction?”

  “Erectile dysfunction?”

  “Can you keep it up? You know, it.”

  Leland’s cheeks flushed. “I understand the question. I just wasn’t expecting to be asked.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not incapable.” Leland licked his lips, swallowed hard, wished he could hide under the blanket. “Slower than I used to be, maybe, if you see what I mean. But not incapable. Not usually incapable, anyway.”

  “How about dry mouth? I see you’re looking a little parched.”

  “Now I am, sure. But usually, or frequently? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “Incontinence? Constipation? Excessive snoring?”

  Leland clutched at the edge of the blanket, until—again—the weakness of his grip worried him, and he had to let go. He said, “You have something in mind, and you’re freaking me out.”

  The doctor pursed his lips and exhaled though his nose. He seemed to be weighing his words—or perhaps he was deciding whether to say anything at all. At last, he said, “I’m almost a hundred percent sure it’s nothing. I’d call it idiopathic hypotension. Your blood pressure dropped and you fainted, and we don’t exactly know why. It happens in older people.”

  Older people, Leland thought. I’ve become older people.

  “But you’ll follow up with your family doctor,” Ramanujan said. “There are some long shots we want to rule out. There’s Parkinson’s, for example. There’s also a degenerative disorder called MSA, which starts out like Parkinson’s, but has— Well, it’s one of the Parkinson’s-plus syndromes.”

  Leland knew next to nothing about Parkinson’s disease, except that it was a horrifying guest all on its own, without inviting any plus-ones to the party. He was just about to ask exactly how long these long shots were, when Ramanujan said, “I’m kind of a fan, by the way.”

  “What?” Leland said. “A fan?”

  “Of your writing. I just finished your history of the Preservation Society.”

  A rarish thing—meeting a stranger who’d read one of his books. There must be some perfect way to react, some optimal blend of humility and aplomb, but Leland had yet to find it. It was especially difficult to talk about this book, his latest. Of the seven he’d written, it was his least favorite. He’d been so anxious about offending anyone in either the Preservation Society or the Historical Society that he’d ended up with a series of hagiographies rather than a decent history. It would have been better not to have written it at all. And it would be better now, he thought, to keep his mouth shut. Better not to solicit opinions he’d rather not hear. But he lifted his head again and said, “And?”

  “I just picked it up because it was yours. But it was good.”

  That word, good, said in just this way—an upward inflection, a roughness of tone—could sound as if it meant almost anything. It could even, conceivably, mean good. Leland felt no particular hankering for clarification.

  “What are you working on now?” Ramanujan asked.

  The question wearied Leland unutterably—though it might only be that his head had never stopped pounding and the wound beneath the bandage itched and his right eyelid was dragging itself downward. “I thought, this time, I’d try fiction. Some German scientists came here to study the transit of Venus in eighteen eighty-two, so I’m basing a novel on—”

  Ramanujan was looking at his watch. “Shit. I have to run.” He looked at Leland over the top of his glasses. “Rest up. We’ll get you on your way tomorrow. Sleep if you can.” He switched off the overhead light. With a thumbs up, he left the room and swung the door shut behind him.

  Much of the afternoon had vanished from Leland’s memory—the evening, too, given that it must be after seven o’clock by now—but he remembered waking to find EMTs in his kitchen. There’d been two of them, two serious-faced men with starched blue shirts and high-and-tight haircuts. They’d brought a scuffed oxygen tank and an intricate gurney with a fat-barred frame, objects that weren’t much needed in the presence of robust good health. And they’d spoken to Leland—though one of them had spoken barely at all—in deep-throated voices, with exaggerated calmness, as if his hearing and intellect might be impaired. People talked that way in times of crisis, not routine.

  Still, it was interesting—was interesting the right word?—that Leland had felt so little fear. In the kitchen, in the ambulance, in the ER, he’d felt no panic, no worry. Even now, he felt strangely untroubled.

  Death was—for this moment, at least—something he could explore in wonder rather than terror, as if he were discovering a new room hidden in some corner of his house. A library—why couldn’t it be a library? On one side there’d be books he wanted to reread. On the other side there’d books he wish
ed he could burn. With any luck, the numbers would be about equal.

  In a corner—behind something, out of sight behind a hanging tapestry, maybe—there’d be an unlit closet, and in it all the things he’d gotten from his father. A mishmash, a clutter of objects he’d once treasured and had since forgotten, mixed in with trash he’d meant to discard but had inexplicably kept. The manner and method of the old man’s death. The funeral and the strange preacher’s ghastly eulogy. Grief, guilt, fear. His mother’s terrible, terrible silence. The set of her jaw. The sickening smell of rum and Dr Pepper. Leland pictured a series of lidded containers—matryoshka boxes, all stacked together, each one somehow larger than the one that enclosed it. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply.

  When he opened his eyes again, the room was less dim than before: The door stood open, and light from the corridor cast a broad yellow parallelogram across the floor. Corinne and John Carter stood shoulder to shoulder, hanging over the bedrail like a pair of morose vultures.

  “Morning, Pop,” John Carter said.

  Leland struggled to sit up, but the slant of the mattress worked against him. “Is it morning already? Shit. It can’t be morning already, can it?”

  If death was a library full of books and tapestries—just another room, nothing to fear—then mental impairment was the deepest dungeon of the coldest, loneliest, remotest prison on earth. The possibility that he might someday be unable to reason and remember was unbearable. The prospect of recent days leaking away through some cranial fissure, leaving him with an ever-shrinking collection of decades-old memories—that was intolerable. Terrifying.

  What would he do, anyway, if he had Parkinson’s? Clear his browser history and drive his car into an embankment? Could he leave his children fatherless if it meant sparing himself the humiliation of diapers and aphasia?

  Corinne patted his shoulder, gentling him. “It’s almost eight o’clock on Friday night.”

  Practically gasping with relief, Leland fell back against the pillow. He’d lost barely any time at all—a half hour or so at most, and possibly as little as five or ten minutes.

  His mouth was still dry. “Is there a pitcher of water around here anywhere?”

  “Sure, Pop,” John Carter said. He stepped away for a moment and returned with a mauve carafe and a translucent plastic cup.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Leland said. He’d called in a favor and gotten the boy a job at a tour company—answering phones, sweeping floors, handing out leaflets, that sort of thing. This was his first evening on the schedule.

  John Carter handed him a cup of water. He and Corinne cut their eyes at each other.

  “No call, no show,” Corinne said. “He got fired.”

  “By text message,” John Carter said. He pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen. “Somebody named Doris. Do you know her?”

  Leland shook his head. “Never heard of her.” He emptied the cup in two gulps. John Carter refilled it, and Leland drank again.

  John Carter gazed at his phone again. “I don’t know if this is really legitimate, you know? I mean, it’s from this person named Doris, whoever that is—”

  “What does it say exactly?” Leland said.

  “‘This is Doris at Truluck Tours. Denny says you’re fired. Direct quote but I’m leaving out the cuss words.’”

  “Knowing Denny Truluck,” Leland said, “I’d say it’s legit.”

  “It was unavoidable,” John Carter said. “Wasn’t it? You were here, so I had to be here.”

  John Carter, having refilled the water cup again, held it out, but Leland waved it away. “Did Andrei make it back?”

  Corinne shook her head. “Tomorrow.”

  “Where’s your mom?” he said.

  “She’s at home,” said Corinne. “The party must be—”

  Air passed noisily through Leland’s throat. He said, “She’s having my birthday party without me?”

  “So I’m not just imagining things?” John Carter said. “That’s weird, right?”

  Weird, yes, Leland thought, but not unprecedented. All through their first brief marriage she’d managed to surprise him, practically every other week, with similar little acts of negligence and abandonment. Not once but three times, she’d called him from some distant city, having gone there to sing without having bothered to tell him beforehand. She spoiled his plans for their first wedding anniversary by accompanying her two best friends on a cruise to Cozumel and the Grand Caymans.

  He’d never gotten used to the sting of it. Even now, thinking of these things he’d long ago forgiven and tried to forget, he felt wounded all over again. Luckily, for the much longer stretch of their second marriage, she’d been dutiful, if not always perfectly solicitous.

  “Didn’t she tell you herself?” Corinne said.

  “What? When?”

  “When I talked to her on the phone, she said she was the one who found you and called nine-one-one. She said she came with you to the ER.”

  “I can’t remember.” Closing his eyes, Leland tried to picture the scene in the kitchen. EMTs. Oxygen tank. Gurney. No Anna Grace. He couldn’t place her there. But his head was hurting again. His wound pulsed. The very sutures seemed to throb. With a sigh, he said, “I’m sure it’ll be a beautiful party. I wonder what kind of cake she ordered.”

  A woman’s voice warbled from a speaker somewhere behind the bed. Unintelligible, mostly. Hospitals were bizarre places. A magical clothespin could shine a light through your finger and report the oxygenation of your blood on a monitor the size of a cigar box, but a simple loudspeaker could only transmit a garble of consonants.

  “What was that?” John Carter said. He looked at his phone again. “End of visiting hours?”

  Corinne said, “They don’t do that any more.”

  “What?” John Carter said.

  “Shoo people out when visiting hours are over.”

  “So do they still have visiting hours or not?”

  “I don’t know,” Corinne said, touching John Carter’s elbow, “but Daddy looks pretty worn out. We should go anyway.”

  Leland was sure he’d never loved her more than at that moment. She kissed the bare side of his forehead. John Carter leaned over the bedrail for mostly unsuccessful attempt at a hug. “Happy birthday, by the way,” he said.

  “Oh!” Corinne gave a start, as if someone had poked her in the small of the back. “That reminds me.”

  With some difficulty, she took a package from her purse. It was wrapped in plain red paper, and it was clearly a book. A corner of the paper ripped away and fluttered to the floor. “We all chipped in. Even Ben.”

  Leland took the thing from Corinne and weighed it in his hands. Yes. Definitely a book. He tore away the paper. The Transit of Venus. A novel by Shirley Hazzard. He stared at the image on the cover—Mars embracing Venus.

  “Signed first edition,” Corinne said.

  “Because of your book,” John Carter said. “Since it’s about the transit of Venus and all. This book…and your book. Both books.”

  Leland didn’t think of himself as a writer, per se, not in the way that Shelby Foote was a writer, or E.L. Doctorow—or, presumably, Shirley Hazzard. But he wondered if Shelby Foote’s kids, in the run-up to Shiloh, had given him a copy of The Red Badge of Courage. Intended message: We pay attention to what you do. Unintended message: Somebody else did it better a long time ago.

  His children turned to leave. When Corinne reached the threshold, something else apparently occurred to her, and she turned back. “Red velvet,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The cake. John Carter told me he heard Mama ordering a red velvet cake.”

  “Oh,” Leland said. “Interesting choice.”

  Corinne blew him a kiss, waved, and went out. He watched the open door, half-expecting her to return, having remembered something new: The Post and Courier had just run a rapturous review of a new book about the Preservation Society, twice the lengt
h of Leland’s. Both the author and the critic would be at the party. And the mayor. There’d be plenty of red velvet cake for everyone.

  Red velvet was everywhere now—Starbucks, the Barnes and Noble Cafe, every bakery and grocery store—and Anna Grace had probably thought only that it would be a hit at the party. Leland could hardly blame her for choosing it. She wouldn’t know, of course—couldn’t know—that red velvet cake reminded him of madness and grief.

  In the eighties, his father had become obsessed with the stuff. He’d baked dozens of cakes, emptied dozens of bottles of red food coloring, tinkered with dozens of recipes. Once, once only, an aunt or great-aunt had baked him a perfect red velvet cake. All his efforts were aimed toward recreating it.

  When he died, a cake—half consumed, never finished—stood for weeks under the crystal dome of the cake stand, the oblong cross-sections of its four exposed layers reminding Leland of raw meat. Smears of buttercream frosting and pastry cream filling even, in a way, resembled the marbling of fat. It had fallen to Leland, eventually, to scrape the sticky, dried-up mess into the trash.