Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  This was, of course, a bunch of baloney. Dr. Cross didn’t like lying down, never had. Sleep just left your thoughts unsupervised, a terrible danger. He did, however, like bologna, which reminded him—well, it reminded him of something, but something that couldn’t possibly matter at the moment, because here he was, at his desk that was really a table in his room that was really a cell in this “assisted living facility” that was really a hospital in this hospital that was really a hospice, on page 235 of the book he was writing, the book he was too modest to call his “masterwork” aloud to anyone but his eldest son and maybe his wife (though she’d stopped listening to his shoptalk years ago, nowadays given to murmuring uh-hmmmm, uh-hmmmm from behind the veil of her Time magazine). He was midway through a chapter on the destruction of Melos by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, more precisely about whether or not the terrible massacre as described by Thucydides was in fact an instance of genocide as Chalk and Jonassohn had semi-convincingly argued five or was it twenty years ago, and, at present, he was sifting through the books on his desk in search of a note he remembered scratching in a margin. It was a penciled note—this detail he remembered—and would, if he could find it, lead him sideways to a quotation whose source and subject he couldn’t quite recall at this moment. Yet he could, with photographic clarity, remember the note itself, scrawled three-quarters of the way down a densely printed page with tight acid-brown margins, a curlicue of graphite scrawl that read . . . baloney. Except: no. He scowled. Not baloney. Where had that come from? He would never have written baloney in the margins of anything. Dubious, maybe. Questionable. Arguable. Unlikely. At worst, pshaw! And in any case—now he was really frowning, scratching at the side of his nose—there’d be no point in searching for a quotation he’d deemed baloney since baloney wasn’t quotable except in instances of scholarly aggression, something he’d outgrown decades ago.

  He set the book down and craned his head forward to meet his hands, rubbing his temples and thereby dislodging his reading glasses so that one side fell dangling to his lips like collapsed scaffolding. Catching a reflected glimpse of himself in the window glass, a Jerry Lewis skit gone awry, he cursed, feeling faint twinges in his chest that if revealed would be cause for stethoscopes, diodes, flurries of tsk-tsking from the nurses, a compulsory prescription for horizontal torpor. Readjusting his glasses, he straightened his back into his chair and emitted the same classroom-volume ahem with which he’d shamed generations of whispery undergraduates. The ahem rang hollow, however: a bum tuning note, a failed engine crank. It occurred to him that he’d lost the ability to shame even himself. Suppressing another attempt, he thought: I can’t go on like this. He needed to focus, he thought—pay heed, “show a little ginger” as his father used to say. He had too much work left to do.

  In the same brand of leather-bound legal notebooks he’d used to write his four previous books (notebooks he continued to order by mail from a legal-supply wholesaler in Newark, Mr. Teague was the wholesaler’s name, Dr. Cross could rattle off the address—115 Norfolk Street—like an old song lyric), page 235 of the new book lay open before him. The page was blank aside from the handwritten “235” in the bottom right corner and at the top left corner three words: “prosperity or ruin.” With a muddled squint he examined the words, struggling but failing to place them in context, then with a lick of his index finger he peeled back page 235 to see from page 234 what could have led to this grave-sounding polarity of prosperity or ruin. “Ah,” he said aloud, with a mixture of relief and self-abasement, as when a search for misplaced keys ends in their most obvious resting place. The words were part of a quotation from Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, when the Athenians were threatening the unsubmissive Melians with complete annihilation: “You have not more than one country, and upon this one deliberation depends its”—depends its what?, he wondered, turning back to page 235—oh: “prosperity or ruin.” He picked up a pencil and hovered it over the page until gravity, rather than inspiration or just plain yeoman will, drew its point to the page. The pencil stayed motionless as he returned his eyes to the window, his attention drawn beyond his sour reflection to the sidewalk one story down where a woman in a short pleated skirt with a phone pressed to her ear drifted past, her right arm swinging in fierce gesticulation, her head bobbing as she paused beside a mailbox to drive home some essential and boilsome point—telling a tale of amazement he would never chance to hear. It wasn’t this last realization, however, that provoked the sudden suck of melancholy he felt: a quick and desolate sense of a stopper being pulled so that his daily supply of lightness and energy—already meager—went circling a drain. It was the skirt, and the yellow light reflected on the sheen of her bare legs. He hadn’t known, until that moment, that it was summer. No one had told him. All they ever told him was to lie down.

  Summer! That meant Alice was in the backyard garden in Montclair. There was long-distance comfort in this image, a mental railing for him to grasp. He wondered how high the tomatoes were, and if the hornworms had assaulted them yet, and if so whether David had dropped one down Jane’s shirt and whether Alice had punished him for it, which she rarely if ever did because David, as she was so incautiously prone to stating publicly, was her favorite child. Dr. Cross had never been fond of Alice’s garden—he’d never understood her desire for all that grimy fuss, for the pruning and staking and kneeling and mulch-schlepping, or the way Alice would return from an afternoon’s digging and weeding with the sated pink-chested glow of a woman fresh from a tryst with her Mediterranean lover—but now, in the ammonia-scented dimness of his room, he was overcome with the uncharacteristic desire to deliver her a glass of lemonade, to see her rise smiling and startled from the soil to accept it, smearing her forehead as she wiped the sweat from it with her arm, him leaning on the opposite side of the picket garden fence, the two of them talking of—of what? Of the children, of neighborhood or campus gossip, or of beautiful sunlit nothingness—the nothingness that comes after two people have co-existed for so long that nothing new can ever be spoken, nothing save goodbye.

  The desire gripped him on an almost cellular level—he could feel his leg muscles twitch in preparation for movement, his weight shifting on the chair, his body poised to rise—before the realization swamped him: Alice was dead. Of course. His cells went slack, his bones folding back into the seat. Alice was dead. At least, that’s what everyone told him. He didn’t remember Alice dying, not the how of it nor the funeral nor the eulogy he was accused of having delivered, which was suspicious; sometimes he wondered if his children had concocted the story to protect him from some greater sadness, such as Alice having deserted him for some actual Mediterranean lover. Yet that scenario struck him as even more improbable and absurd than him forgetting her death. For one thing, Elwin Jr. was as shoddy a liar as his father, and as for Alice, well—Alice had always been faithful. So had he, though not without struggles he’d prefer to forget. Alice made fidelity look easy, like walking or drinking lemonade or the way your unmonitored heart beats on and on in your youth and middle years: like an instinctual response to love.

  Had made it look easy, that is. It was so hard to keep the tenses right without any evidence.

  He drew his gaze back down to page 235 and its prosperity or ruin. The words appeared to need a question mark, so he penciled one. Then he pondered it for a while as though he’d written himself an essay question. He looked up, down, around, surveying the room before deciding in a bout of Spenglerian gloom: Ruin. Ruin’s what we get, ruin’s all we get. Prosperity is just a phase, like childhood, and like childhood it lasts longer for some than for others—for people and civilizations, the same. If he’d concluded anything from sixty-some years of reading history, it was the absence of any unifying theory save transience: We come and we go, as we came and went. Greatness, however broadly or narrowly you defined it, was no defense or insulator against ruin; its bones and scraps were indistinguishable from those of mediocrity or worse. He lowered his pencil to transc
ribe this last thought before half remembering the front end of the quotation back on page 234. Damn it all, he thought. I’m wandering again. He slammed down the pencil just as a faint mewing sounded behind him.

  The cat’s name was Jack, or maybe John—possibly Joe. Not that it mattered. He was a small tabby Manx, with a rumpy riser for a tail, whose swirled black-on-gray fur patterns called to mind an oil slick or the sort of unctuous curbside puddles Dr. Cross recalled from his childhood in Brooklyn, gruesome-looking puddles he was never tempted to go splashing in. The cat was sitting in the doorway, studying him in a vaguely predatory manner. “Go away, cat,” Dr. Cross said. The cat glanced around, yawny and unaffected, then returned its stare to Dr. Cross. “Shoo,” he said.

  The cat was death. That was the rumor around the Roth Residence, anyway. When the cat chose you, death followed quickly—someone clever had calculated six months, tops. Mrs. Odenkirk down the hall, for instance, had awakened to the sight of the cat lying at the foot of her bed; for three weeks the cat returned nightly, purring by her feet, until Mrs. Odenkirk passed in her sleep and the cat went on its way. After her it chose Fred Something-or-Other on the third floor; same outcome, a stroke felling him five weeks after the cat’s first visit. Once word got around that “pet therapy” was in fact a death warrant, a few of the more despondent patients tried luring the cat into their rooms by leaving smuggled bits of fish from Friday dinner under their beds. Those of an opposite bent barricaded themselves in their rooms at the first sight of the cat roaming their floor. One fellow managed to score a water-pistol from his grandson, taking desperate potshots at the cat whenever it passed his doorway, while a woman three rooms down, halved by a stroke seventeen years before and unable to speak or feed herself, was somehow able to procure catnip from her daughter and went about sprinkling it on her comforter every night. Dr. Cross did not believe in any of this voodoo, of course, but he was nonetheless a cautious sort who’d never been keen to tempt fate, as in his boyhood when he’d avoided those poisonous-looking puddles all the other boys dared one another to leap during the walk to school. “Shoo,” he said again, with a backhanded whisk of his arm. The cat either blinked or winked; Dr. Cross felt certain he’d seen the latter but had doubts cats could wink.

  Grunting, he turned in his chair to face the cat, and was staring it down High Noon–style when appeared behind it two enormous blue legs. These belonged to Boolah, the nurse, who was carrying a small pink plastic tray and had a thin sheaf of envelopes tucked beneath his armpit. Dr. Cross looked away, embarrassed to have been caught in a staring match with a cat that might or might not have been equipped with the ability to wink and/or incite a tranquil death. With a toneless expression, Boolah glanced down at the cat between his feet, up at Dr. Cross, then down at the cat again. He pursed his lips. Somberly, he said, “Yo. Kitty.”

  “Get that cat out of here,” said Dr. Cross.

  “You don’t like cats?”

  “I don’t like that cat.”

  “That’s all b.s., you know.” Boolah sighed. “Miss Snyder been sleeping with that cat for three years now. Ain’t nothing wrong with her and Lord help me ain’t nothing going wrong with her.”

  Dr. Cross said, “I just don’t like him.”

  Boolah returned his gaze to the cat, which was more than small enough for him to step over or around or even, for that matter, on. Instead, though, he spoke to it: “Go on now. You heard the man. Pussy, move.”

  The cat gave no indication it had even noticed Boolah behind it, an impossibility given Boolah’s seismic presence. With his crepe-soled shoe Boolah gave it a gentle giddy-up, kitty-up nudge, eventually—gingerly—lifting its rear end with his toe and rotating it on the glossy tiled floor so that the cat was facing the hallway. The cat stood up, twitched its little bump of a tail, and plopped itself down in the doorway so that Dr. Cross was once again in its whiskered crosshairs. “Uh-oh,” Boolah said.

  “Cut that out.”

  Cringing, Boolah stepped over the cat and set his tray on a bedside cart along with the envelopes. “Truth is,” he said, counting pills into his hand, “I don’t like that kitty much either.”

  “I don’t know why they allow it here. It’s a health hazard. Cats are dirty.”

  “He ain’t dirty.”

  “He’s for rats, isn’t he? I’ll bet he’s for rats.”

  “Naw, supposed to make it feel like home here.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Cross, and guffawed. “It doesn’t.” The word home went ricocheting through him. Home: of course. That was it, the answer to a question he hadn’t quite formulated. He needed to go home. Yet another question, this one fully formed, came thumping along behind: Where was home? Was it Brooklyn? He saw the puddles: yes, Brooklyn, the pavement glistening in the aftermath of a springtime rain, the sight of his two-tone school shoes navigating the sidewalk cracks, the storefront windows filled with faded Ex-Lax placards, Fatima signs, rubber baby-pants, antique displays of antipasto and halvah and chocolates, down Carroll Street the steam gusts of a tailor shop exhaled onto the sidewalk like the breath of some great polar beast. But then, wait—

  “I’m just reading from the script, my man,” said Boolah. “You understand?”

  Foggily, Dr. Cross said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m going home tomorrow.”

  Boolah ignored this. “I got your ’roids here, and grabbed your mail for you, too, ’cause I’m so nice.”

  “My what?”

  “Your steroids. Your vitamins.”

  “My vitamins?”

  “Your pills, man. I got all your pills.”

  Dr. Cross grunted. “I don’t need those pills.”

  Boolah ignored this too, standing beside Dr. Cross’s shoulder with a multicolored assortment of medicines on his wide expanse of palm, a glass of water in his other hand. He said, “Shoot ’em down for me.”

  “Blech,” said Dr. Cross afterwards. “That big orange one—it’s like swallowing a golfball.”

  “That one make you strong, man.” Boolah curled his fist and leaned forward, flexing his bicep. “Put that ol’ tiger in your tank.”

  “Huh. I don’t need any tiger.”

  “Everybody need some tiger.”

  The sight of the cat sprawled in the doorway distracted Dr. Cross. Was this the tiger Boolah was talking about? “I don’t like that tiger,” he whispered.

  “Say again?”

  “That—tiger,” said Dr. Cross, pointing to the cat.

  “That ain’t no tiger.”

  “But it . . .”

  “What?”

  “You said . . .”

  “You want your mail?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dr. Cross, with a sudden swerve of brightness.

  Boolah laid the envelopes on the desk. “All yours, tiger,” he said, and gathering up the tray headed toward the door. He paused at the cat, and offered it a respectful nod before stepping over it with calculated stealth.

  “And could you make that cat go away?” Dr. Cross shouted after him.

  From down the hallway he heard Boolah shout back, “Pussy do what pussy want,” which brought forth a yawp of old-lady objection from a neighboring room.

  After turning his chair, with an exaggerated harrumph, so that his back was to the cat, Dr. Cross went sifting through the envelopes in his standard way, as always looking first for a personal letter—anything hand-addressed. There was, of course, nothing of the kind, and excepting the annual trickle of Christmas cards there hadn’t been for years. This was partly due to email—Dr. Cross had once tried to use the computer in the common area, at Elwin’s urging, but found the machine entirely unlikable—but more to do with all the crossed-out entries in his address book. Put plainly, almost everyone was dead. They’d all gone extinct. The only friend who still wrote him was Ted Blundell, but Ted wasn’t really a friend—rather an ex-friend whose letters were all depressingly apologetic, a paragraph of wan news floating atop a ten-ton anchor of regrets. Back in the ’80s, when Ted had b
een a rising star in the Montclair State history department, he’d borrowed $15,000 from Dr. Cross for a down payment on a Brookdale Park Tudor. Six months later, however, he’d ditched his wife, three-year-old twins, tenure track, and the handshaken loan agreement with his department chair to go gallumphing after the bass player in an all-female Hoboken New Wave band. (Until he resurfaced eighteen years later, the last Ted sighting, reported by a grad student, had been of him working the door at a Newark lesbian bar, collecting the $2 cover charge in an upturned Montclair State baseball cap with an expression of squirmy indigestion, as though this fat slice of life he’d bitten off had yielded him a case of existential dysentery.) Bathetic letters of remorse had started flowing from Ted in the late ’90s—one of them ran to eleven damp pages—but for all their pleas for forgiveness they were notably devoid of checks. Still, Dr. Cross wouldn’t have minded seeing one of those letters now—anything from a familiar voice, even a piteous one.

  Yet there was nothing of the kind. He tore open the topmost envelope—something from the Veterans Administration. For sixty years he’d used an ivory-handled letter opener but letter openers weren’t allowed in the Roth Residence and his had been confiscated by who-knows-who to who-knows-where for who-knows-what-reason. Perhaps to prevent him from eviscerating that cat whose sniper eyes he could presently feel between his shoulderblades. In those same sixty years he’d grown more than accustomed to VA mailings and the like, yet even now the familiar micro-shiver ran through him, a quick shudder of unsolicited memory: Here was his war, come back to him in a four-by-nine-inch plastic-windowed envelope. True, he’d made a life’s work out of studying war, but for whatever obscure psychological reason these tangible reminders of his own relationship with it tended to unsteady him, as if they exposed the blood ties between the observer and the observed, between the historian and history, or revealed the first-person subjectivity hiding beneath the cool third-person veneer, casting doubt on the affirmed—or were they over-affirmed?—facts. But then, no, that wasn’t quite it—or even it at all. That was just the story he told himself. The truth was that a gulf of difference lay between war and his war. One he understood, or had tried to understand; the other was incomprehensible, as even his quaking limbs knew.