Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  The nurse, glossy-faced and blubbery, with a neck the size of a wheelbarrow tire, replied, “All your stuff, man.”

  “What stuff?”

  “That stuff.”

  “That’s not stuff.”

  “Whatever. All ’em papers.”

  Elwin’s father hadn’t seemed to notice his son, leaning against the file cabinet and breathing way more heavily than his cardiologist would deem appropriate. Up went Elwin’s hand, for a meek wave that his father also didn’t register; at this he felt a negative tingle. His father’s doctor had warned Elwin that it might happen one day: You’ll walk into his room, and he’ll ask who you are. He won’t recognize you. “You need to be prepared for that,” the doctor had said, neglecting to explain how. But surely . . . not yet, Elwin thought, staring solidly at his father as if to transmit some kind of telepathic introduction: Hey Pop. It’s me. Don’t you dump me too.

  “Put it over there, Boolah,” the elder Cross told the nurse, and in the same flat executive tone said to his son: “How was traffic?”

  The negative tingle vanished, deactivated by relief. “Fine,” he said, far too brightly, and for that matter inaccurately: At the mouth of the Holland Tunnel he’d been trapped inside that blue egg for forty-five minutes, the steering wheel wedged hard against his belly no matter how he adjusted the seat. Scanning the radio, he’d discovered a weird surfeit of Billy Joel songs, causing him to conclude that Billy Joel must have just died—a fair hypothesis for why all of radioworld seemed to be paying him sudden and synchronous tribute. This saddened him, not because he liked Billy Joel—he didn’t—but because Maura did, and though their marriage was apparently over, he was still somehow conjoined with her, so that, imprisoned inside the Holland Tunnel, he felt the stab of her grief vicariously, as if some emotional satellite linkage had yet to be disabled. But none of the DJs mentioned any death, and neither did the cycling newscasts on the AM dial, so after a while Elwin realized he’d conned himself into mourning Billy Joel for Maura while both of them—albeit separately—were probably off somewhere giggling, as alive and vital as ever, while his poor belly flesh was slowly enveloping the base of the steering wheel in the manner of a white blood cell engulfing a pathogen. Another forty-five minutes in that tunnel, he felt sure, and full phagocytosis would occur, with the steering wheel becoming an indelible fixture in his gut.

  “Boolah, meet my son.” A brusque wave. “Dr. Cross the Junior.”

  Boolah, who’d been introduced to Elwin a hundred and thirty times before, said hidy.

  “He’s an expert on dead languages.”

  Boolah nodded like he always did. Like most of the world’s peoples, he had no response to that, even with practice.

  “Boolah,” Elwin’s father said to his son, “is an expert on the New York Giants.”

  Now it was Boolah’s turn to brighten, if just for a moment. “Played two seasons at Defensive Back, ’88 and ’89,” he said, which actually was news to Elwin. Elwin was about to ask him more about that—Elwin wasn’t a football fan but he was drawn to tragedy, and a former NFL star changing bedpans showed potential for that—when he saw Boolah’s expression darken. “Blew out my knee, y’know, so that was that. Not something I talk about. Ain’t that right, Dr. Cross?”

  “They say he’s famous,” said Elwin’s father.

  “Hush with that already,” said Boolah.

  “But then I must be famous, too—look.” He spread open his hands to reveal the heap of plastic-windowed envelopes splayed atop his bedsheet. “It’s the only way to explain the amount of mail I receive. Junk—all of it junk.”

  “I’ll help you clear some of that,” Elwin said. “But later. I brought you dinner. I just need to fetch it from the car.”

  Boolah protested: “We got turkey today, man. It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “We eat at five,” said his father.

  “Turkey at five,” said Boolah. “With all the trimmings.”

  “I’ll be back in a sec,” said Elwin.

  “He don’t eat turkey?” said Boolah to Elwin’s father.

  “It can’t be five already,” came the response.

  Elwin’s father’s room was on the first floor, four doors down from the lobby where a dozen patients were gathered, in varying models of wheelchairs, around a bulky, low-def television. Not one of them, Elwin noted, was watching the football game on the TV; instead they sat slumped in their chairs, arms hanging as loosely and slack as their lower jaws, as if in the late stages of carbon monoxide poisoning. One woman was wearing an XXL sweatshirt emblazoned with a gleeful turkey and the word GOBBLE! A taut plastic sack of urine, dark as lager, peeked out from beneath a man’s gym shorts. Some were asleep, or if not quite asleep in a state much like it: eyes closed, heads comfortlessly lolling, consciousness cranked down to a low sludgy stasis. Others appeared to be scrutinizing the walls, which were painted the pale sulfurous yellow of a banana’s flesh. Their eyes rolled toward Elwin as he passed, but blurrily—as if an instinctual response to perceived movement, like the reaction mechanism of sea urchins. He was merely a sudden dark break in the wall color, for some of them—a flickering anomaly, an unmoored memory sinking too swiftly to rescue. He felt their failure as he went by, and felt guilty, as if just by his passing he’d bullied them into futile exercise—reminding them that he was no one they knew, because they no longer knew anyone.

  Elwin couldn’t help himself, he hated this gauntlet: It was like wading through death. Or near-death: death’s waiting room. The women were almost bald, their crusted lipstick askew and their hands pre-curled for the rosary that a mortician would equip some of them with, and the men tremulous and incontinent, their faces saggy and mole-splotched. But then it wasn’t their decrepit physicality, their exteriors, that repulsed him—not primarily anyway. Elwin was hardly without his own sags and splotches; in fact, an honest appraisal in the mirror (something he’d avoided for years) would reveal him as mostly sags and splotches. Rather, what repulsed him—no, frightened him; suffused him with dread and pity—was the blankness of their interiors: the stale pudding he saw in their eyes, the larval lethargy that was either the cause or the result, the chicken or the egg, of their confinement here. Only scarcely did Elwin ever hear them speak, and, even then, it was usually in confounded response to a nurse’s shouted inquiry. When visitors came—which to Elwin, who saw his father twice a week, seemed scandalously rare—the scene often evoked bad community theatre: synthetic grins, bellowed lines, squishy sentimentality, and unimpressed children made fidgety by their yearnings for a digital screen. No wonder his father barricaded himself in his room, Elwin thought, almost proud of the old man’s cantankerous vanity (unlike Jane, naturally, who claimed their father was “antisocial” and “retreating inside himself”).

  He was not unaware that this admiration might be filial vanity on his part. On his first visit here, recoiling from this same dread gauntlet, he’d immediately phoned Jane to protest. “It’s a human junkyard,” he told her. “We can’t stick Dad in here. Have you seen these people? There must be scads of better places over in New Jersey. Places with . . . activities or something, maybe a Ping-Pong table, I don’t know, a coffee lounge. A library larger than what could be contained on a steel pushcart.” “A Ping-Pong table? For God’s sake, El. That’s the only nursing home left south of 86th Street,” said Jane, who was complicating matters by singlehandedly funding the portion of the nursing-home bill that the remainder of their father’s pension didn’t cover—as an unspoken penance, perhaps, for her husband’s squandering of most of the elder Cross’s retirement. Or, in a less generous interpretation, as a means of exerting control. “I’m not going to drive to fucking Jersey once a week so that he can have access to a goddamn Ping-Pong table,” she said. “He’s never even played Ping-Pong.”

  “I meant that . . . symbolically,” Elwin said. “I retract the Ping-Pong table. But can’t we ever be civil about this? Why do you have to talk like that?”

  “You’r
e the linguist,” she replied. “You tell me.”

  Outside, on Henry Street, he discovered that the snowball-wielding children had turned against his loaner car. The little blue egg was dotted with the cold crusted whorls of a snowball ambush. He didn’t blame them; he’d grown to hate the car, too, and not just for the hilarious practical joke it had played on him by suggesting the untimely death of Billy Joel and thereby conning him into an odious bout of pity for poor Maura. How could his insurance company deem his Jeep “totaled”? Elwin knew what “totaled” meant: mangled, upside down, charred, gutted by the Jaws of Life. Not deer-dinged and operable, like the Jeep. Didn’t anyone use Bondo anymore? So his Jeep had a broken nose; that wasn’t grounds for dialing the mortician. Elwin was fond of his insurance agent (she was the only person who sent him a birthday card every year), but this was an outrage. If he wanted to save the Jeep—which was still running strong, after 110,000-plus miles—he’d have to fund the bodywork himself. To the Consolidated Mid-Atlantic Insurers Co. of Morris County, New Jersey, it was scrap metal, its death sentence determined by some sort of actuarial calculus that didn’t allow for a bit of old-school, pinch-and-tuck repair work, or for that matter take into account the Springsteenian affection a man can develop for a car after a dozen years of driving it, even on the Turnpike. By that metric, his dog Bologna should have been put down four years ago, when a Pacific Gas & Electric truck had backed over Bologna’s leg and Elwin had paid $4,000 to have a titanium rod installed between Bologna’s already arthritic joints. By that metric, maybe Elwin’s father was totaled, too—the cost of his care outweighing his value, as his memory further blackened.

  Elwin fetched the two plastic-wrapped plates from the passenger seat and walked back to the Roth Residence. Boolah opened the glass doors for him again, directing him to the nursing station, where he heated the plates in a microwave while the desk nurse argued with someone—presumably a lover of some kind—on the phone. “What’d you think flowers was gonna do?” she hissed. “Who you think paid for those flowers anyway?”

  Trying not to eavesdrop, or to appear to be eavesdropping, Elwin studied an array of motivational sayings pinned to a corkboard between studio portraits of kittens: RN means Real Nice. Nurses are IV Leaguers. Patients Require Patience. When the microwave beeped its finale, he waved thank you to the nurse, who didn’t respond, then cruised past the clutch of wheelchair patients, this time without looking, or at least appearing to be looking.

  “I didn’t say they warnt nice, fool,” he heard the nurse say behind him.

  “They’ve got turkey here, you know,” his father said, when Elwin set one of the plates on the tray. “Boolah said so.” He flicked the rim of the plate with a fingertip. “What’d you bring me, anyway?”

  Unlike Elwin, with his forty-eight-inch waist and stovepipe-thick ankles, Cross Sr. was thin to the point of scarecrow. As a child, Elwin had never graduated from drawing stick-figure portraits of his father, even as breadth and curves had blossomed in his portraits of his mother—the accuracy of the stick figures had always sufficed. Add a bowtie and you were verging on photorealism. He’d filled out, just slightly, since moving into the Roth Residence, but his appearance was still dominated by bones: from those of his long narrow fingers to the craggy heights of his cheekbones. He was unshaven today, a paltry scruff of white brightening the sharkskin color of his jaw—a lapse that he blamed on the nurses. But if the nurses hadn’t groomed him, that meant he’d combed his own hair, with a wavy if considered part on the side, which Elwin (always on the lookout) deemed a good sign; his dad hadn’t given up. He was still trying. His eyes were still exuberantly blue, his hearing still crisp, his movements still coiled and twitchy like those of a schoolchild monitoring the classroom clock. He still looked—physically, anyway; to Elwin, anyway—like an inappropriate candidate for forced bed rest.

  “It’s venison,” said Elwin.

  His father harrumphed. “I thought you quit all that years ago. The Davy Crockett act.”

  More to the floor than to his father, Elwin said, “My new neighbors are big-time hunters.” A curl of steam—rich and faintly sweet-smelling, like the odor of a scabbing wound—rose from his own plate.

  “Well,” said the elder Cross, obviously uncharmed by his Thanksgiving supper. “They do have turkey here.”

  “This is more authentic,” Elwin countered. “It’s what they ate at the original Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh goody,” said his father, fumbling at last for a fork. “A history lesson.”

  “Please don’t start, Dad,” Elwin said, girding himself for the standard-issue laments: the word history triggering Historical Studies, as in the New School’s Department of Historical Studies, which Jane, in overselling the Roth Residence and Manhattan to her father, had said would welcome him as an adjunct instructor. (“Might welcome him,” is what Jane later told Elwin she’d said. “As in, the Nobel committee might award you the prize in linguistics. Come on. I had to tell him something.”) His father felt he’d been hornswoggled, whether by his children or the New School or both; he’d even planned the course he wanted to teach (“Genocide: Historical and Cultural Frames”) and had drafted a loose syllabus, which he was still revising.

  Except, this time, the laments didn’t come. Perhaps the mental cue wasn’t strong enough, or perhaps that particular grudge—which had lodged in his otherwise fenestrated memory the way a shard of roasted meat gets lodged in one’s teeth—had finally shaken loose. Instead of kvetching, Elwin Sr. was chewing, with his head cocked to the left and one eye partly closed: his thoughtful expression, Elwin noted with pleasant surprise—the way he used to look when a clever graduate student asked his opinion on, say, the effectiveness of cavalry charges at the Battle of Hastings.

  “You know,” he said, two pink specks of meat tumbling symmetrically from both edges of his mouth, “we shot a deer one winter. One of the best meals of my life.”

  Elwin froze, his own forkful of meat a mere inch from his lips. “You did?”

  “No, not me. A kid from Kentucky. Jenkins, or something like that.”

  “When you were . . .” A pause. “When?”

  “Christmas Day, 1945,” his father said. He sawed another bite from the venison, dipping his head down, almost ravenously, to meet the fork. “Kid shot it with his M1 and cleaned it and cooked it himself. Some kind of stew, I think. Two corporals went and raided the basement of a beer garden, too. Filled up a Jeep with beer. Camp heroes, those guys. How was the traffic?”

  “Fine,” Elwin lied again.

  “Still blowing out there?”

  “Not as much. Where was this?”

  “What?”

  “The deer.”

  “The deer? Austria. On the Enns River, near Steyr. The Russians on one side and our boys on the other. We were always trading rations. You could get just about anything for a can of Spam. They loved that Spam.”

  As casually as he could, because his father had always refused to discuss his wartime service, Elwin said, “You’ve never mentioned that before . . .”

  “The deer?”

  “No. The war.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.” At this Elwin’s father glanced off to the side and skewed his mouth in the way he’d always done when telling a lie. His incapacity to lie smoothly was the stuff of family legend: surprise parties blown, secrets fumbled. Elwin registered this, but just briefly, because it made no sense. The war was a long time ago. In any case, his father was quick to swerve the conversation: “So what’s new?” he said. “How’s my sweetie?”

  “Maura?”

  Slyly, “You got another one?”

  “We’re separated, Dad. You knew that.”

  “Oh Christ. I guess that’s right. Why?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You know I forget things sometimes. It’s the medicines.” Ribot’s law, Elwin reminded himself: The dissolution of memory is inversely related to the recency of the event. Christmas
memories from 1945 remained tightly glued. The recent totaling of his son’s marriage, on the other hand, wouldn’t stick.

  “She moved out,” Elwin said flatly. To explain, as he felt obligated to do, he went with an old standby, the geographic gloss: “I don’t think Jersey agrees with her.”

  “Jersey doesn’t agree with anyone,” said his father. “That’s its charm. Why the hell would she leave? You’re a big shot now. The director.”

  “It’s complicated, Dad. Eat your supper.”

  “Complicated, how? She didn’t run off on you, did she? With someone else?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . yes. This isn’t news. You’ve known all this.”

  “With who?”

  “A chef.”

  “A chef? Why? You’re a great cook.”

  “I don’t think it was strictly a dining option. Can we not have this conversation?”

  “Well, I think she’s a fool. You’re a good catch. A big shot. She’ll be back.”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” said Elwin, testing a bite of the venison. Reheating it in the microwave had cooked it past medium-rare; it was gray in the center, and tough. The portion he’d cooked for himself the night prior—his first homecooked meal, he realized, in more than a month—had been pleasantly and not quite expectedly tender, though the circumstances of the deer’s death had cast an uncomfortable pall over the meal. Whether from the lack of fair chase, or the broader symbolism of its killing (the eternal whoops that defined man’s relationship to nature), he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it, and rushed through the meal while distracting himself reading the portions of the Times he’d skipped that morning. Enjoying it felt immoral, not unlike the way he’d once felt eating a spider monkey—tasty, but repellently infant-like—during his fieldwork with a tribe in the Amazon basin. The deer was what commercial fishermen called bycatch—the accidental and unwanted victims hauled up in their nets. Seahorses, dolphins, that sort of thing. And yet the clear virtuousness of eating bycatch, rather than abandoning it, didn’t seem to offset, for Elwin, the melancholy of its blundered presence on his plate. This struck him as irrational—the less moral tack would have surely been to cede the deer to the buzzards and landfill-fillers—but then the dams and dikes of rationality were usually powerless to withstand emotion. On a somewhat related track, he wondered if his father’s dentures would be able to withstand the meat’s sticky toughness.