by Alex Shakar
It was a fancy kind of sleeping bag with a built-in air mattress, which Fred had spent hours researching. George had never gotten to use these gifts, either the bag or the tent, Fred was pretty sure. Fred himself had, though, once, on the second anniversary of his and Mel’s first date. They’d talked at first about going somewhere exotic, an African safari being their main idea. As the anniversary approached, they’d downgraded the ambition to going somewhere rustic and out of town for the weekend. But Fred begged off of even this plan, too wrapped up with work. Mel was disappointed with him, and when he told George this, George came to the rescue, hatching the scheme on the spot. Within the hour, Fred and George were setting up the tent in Fred’s living room, putting a few potted plants around the entrance, affixing some glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling, and setting an MP3 of nature sounds playing on the stereo. The night turned out to be a success, despite Fred and Mel tripping the building’s fire alarm trying to roast marshmallows over the gas range. The next day at the office, when he told George that all was well, his brother gave him a pitying look.
“Freddo,” he’d said with a sad shake of his head, “how are you ever going to get by without me when I’m gone?”
Years before George got sick. Just a joke. But even so, even then, it had given Fred a chill.
A sparrow flitted down in front of him, just long enough to fix him with an inky eye and deposit a glistening white turd.
Monday afternoon. Two full days now since Fred had been to the hospital. George’s breathing had failed shortly after making that all-toofamiliar sound, and, for the first time since those first days, the ventilator had to be brought in. At which point, Fred had locked himself in a bathroom and proceeded to have what he thought must have been a coronary, or a lung collapse, or a stroke, or all three simultaneously—chest pounding, no air, walls going dark, muscles too weak to hold him up. It occurred to him that he was in a hospital and thus had the option of seeking medical attention, but the thought of the additional bills and hassles for everyone surpassed even the fear of death, so he simply gave up and waited to die. A classic panic attack, an online diagnostic tool later helped him confirm. When he managed to get on his feet, he found Vartan and Holly in the hall with Drs. Papan and Chia, neurologist and oncologist, the first time Fred had seen the two men in one place. Now it was the doctors who seemed in denial, ordering more tests in the upcoming week, though they also took turns underscoring that Fred and his parents needed to be thinking about withdrawing the life support and switching to end-of-life treatment only.
In the van, Holly sat rigidly, one fist clutched in the other. Vartan, for the first time in months, stabbed the F and U keys with his thumb when a student driver ahead of them stopped at a yellow light—it was pretty clear he hadn’t taken the opportunity to toke up before bringing the van around. Nobody spoke on the ride home, but their thoughts, Fred knew, were running in parallel. For the past seven months, as George increasingly seemed to be beating the cancer, they’d been willing him back. But that sound had changed everything, their whole conception of what was going on inside of him. For George to regain consciousness now, with an end-stage cancer, and have to confront death all over again, would be the worst thing imaginable. Vartan parked the van. No one got out.
“We’ve got to get this over with,” Vartan said, his voice hollow.
Fred was remembering the way his father had brought the flashlight into position over George’s eye. A fluid motion, with a slight flick of the wrist at the last moment; the way, in the magic shows, that he cast spells with his star-tipped wand.
“Next weekend,” Vartan said.
From the backseat, Fred watched Holly’s fists tightening. They already knew what to tell the nurses, in the event George started breathing on his own again. That he was in pain and needed a morphine drip. This was the code, disclosed to them through family friends who had friends who were doctors or nurses. In pain. Needs morphine. Everyone would know what it meant, and no one would stand in the way.
“A week from Monday,” Holly said, her tone severe enough to cut off any argument.
“A good day for a hanging,” Vartan somberly agreed.
Once inside, Fred’s parents went straight to bed, without a look his way. He wanted to do the same, but no sooner was he standing in that bedroom than the air was gone again and the walls were pressing in. He took the tent and sleeping bag from the closet and hauled them, along with his laptop, the alarm clock, some extension cords, some food, and a plastic jug of water, into the hall, up the ladder, and out the hatch. On his first trip back down, he added the pillows and a second half-gallon jug, this one empty, for urine, to minimize the necessity of future trips. Then he climbed into the tent, sat on a pillow, and proceeded to take stock of his existence.
In front of him on the sleeping bag, he’d placed his cell phone, which hadn’t sounded again since that second time in the hospital. Two text messages, the same exasperating instruction to “CALL GEORGE,” but each followed by a different phone number—neither one in service, as it turned out, when Fred dialed them. The numbers listed in the messages probably weren’t the ones from which the calls had originated, which the cell phone only listed as “unknown.” The first of the out-of-service numbers had a 404 area code, the second a 740. Atlanta and central Ohio, he determined on his laptop, places that had no particular significance to him, nor any connection to George that he could fathom. There didn’t seem to be any obvious commonalities or patterns or mathematical relationships within or between the two numbers, but in truth he couldn’t even make his mind focus on them in any coherent way. The strange thing was, now that he had cause to suspect George himself had been a part of this conspiracy, Fred was even less sure he wanted to know about it. The other night, he’d been drunk enough, and hopeful enough, to read good intentions into that angel gift to Mira. Then again, there’d been a certain darkness in that reference, on the card, to the twin jams of the needle from the nurse. He didn’t want to believe this, didn’t want to believe that those statues might have been just one more attempt to fuck with his head. But how could he know? George’s conspirators would probably be in touch again, anyway, Fred thought, if he didn’t respond. The fact that his phone could assault him with another beep again at any moment certainly wasn’t making him feel any more inclined to play along from his end. He wouldn’t have the service much longer—his credit card had shut down before the automatic payment could go through; he hoped the phone would get cut off sooner rather than later.
In any event, the cyberstalking was the least of his problems. It barely registered amid the shock of George’s decline. Beyond losing George, which Fred still couldn’t get his mind around after all these months, there was his parents’ disillusionment, and his own culpability in the whole situation. The one noble thing he had thought he’d done in his adult life was to fight and fight for George’s survival, to sacrifice everything he had for it. But even this had been little more than selfishness—to make amends, to feel good about himself, to be a hero—and all it had done was prolong everyone’s suffering, George’s included. This whole long interlude had been for nothing, for no purpose whatsoever. It wasn’t merely the futility, it was the utter meaninglessness of all this waiting and pain that sickened and confounded him.
Then there were all those other dead-ends, all those other little decorative filigrees in the mandala of unsmooth moves that was his life—his lost career, his Florida crime spree, getting the boot from Mira’s study, and from her bed. Maybe he was just in a pit so deep he couldn’t stop digging. But what else could he do? The one tool he had left was a shovel, that idiot mantra, Manfred’s maddening mu.
The Mumonkan, the primary collection of Zen koans and commentaries, which he’d accessed online later that first night on the roof, read like a book of puzzles, full of unanswerable questions, questions that weren’t even questions, yet which the practitioner was expected to answer. The compiler, the monk Mumon, had appended a commentary to e
ach koan. In his remarks on the first, “Joshu’s Mu,” Mumon said that when one passed through this barrier, all illusions and delusions would be shattered, internal and external would unite, and one would perceive There was more along these lines, talk of explosive conversions, of intertwining one’s eyebrows with the patriarchs’, of astonishing the heavens and shaking the earth, of commanding perfect freedom. It was a hard sell, and Fred was leery of it. Didn’t he have enough puzzles in his life already? He was leery as well of that stupefying instruction on how to proceed, how, in reciting the mu in one’s mind, one was supposed to summon a spirit of tremendous and all-pervading doubt, just as Manfred had said. How, Fred asked himself, was one supposed to find faith through doubting? He’d been doubting all his life. Where had it ever gotten him?
And yet, it was at least a skill well within his competence. He might not be capable of sitting like a pretzel in an oven, puffing up all golden with faith and bliss. But doubting? If that was the game, couldn’t he win? Hadn’t he been training for it all his life?
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …
The doubts came immediately. He didn’t have to go looking. He doubted meditation would do him any good, doubted he was doing anything at all. Every minute on the mu was a minute squandered. How much time did he have left to turn things around for himself? Why wasn’t he with George at the hospital? His brother might be dying this minute. How selfish could he get? Every mu-laden breath was like taking a million dollars and setting them on fire.
He did it for half an hour and collapsed, putting the pillow over his face and screaming. He lay there waiting for himself to do something else, something other than meditate or vegetate, to do any one of those infinite number of arguably more useful things he might do. He did none of them. He sat up and started again:
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …
His nerves ached with frustration. His legs ached from the halflotus position. He doubted the aches. He doubted the very muscles and nerves. He thought of George, unable to move, unable to do anything but breathe (and now, not even that unassisted). Maybe this sitting here aching and unmoving was a taste of what George felt like. Maybe this was what Fred had been putting him through.
Just about always, there was the urge to give up this accursed mu-ing and lie down, an urge which, as long as possible, had to be resisted. The minute he did, the sleeping bag’s soft lining would have him drifting back to the softness and heat of Mira when he’d caught her on the steps. And from there to the childlike delight he’d felt at those too-happy, too-intimate, postcoital kisses. To the sick, sinking feeling at their explanation. And the sorrowful sight of her balled up in that chair, in that room full of pictures.
He’d sat nearly until dawn that first night, slept until late morning, then sat sweating and breathing through the day, unwilling to go to the hospital, unable, despite the imagined sound of the mu, to ever fully get that other sound, that cancerous, gurgling hiss, out of his ear. At the first sign of dusk, he took his water and urine jugs downstairs and found his parents already home from the hospital and back in their bathrobes. They were in the kitchen, fixing dinner, or rather, breakfast, the same meal Fred had spied them through the skylight eating earlier in the day, Vartan doing the eggs and hash browns by the stove, Holly buttering toast with a shaky hand—her tremors were back, looking worse now than they had in a long while.
Fred stood there holding his jugs behind him. There was nothing necessarily shameful about shuttling a half-gallon of one’s own urine past one’s aging, grieving parents, he was eager to remind himself; nevertheless, he left the jugs outside, and set the table the way it had been at the first breakfast, bringing out the salt and pepper, water and juice, and the mug of tea Holly had made, adding a setting for himself. He hadn’t noticed much of an effect from all the meditation when he’d been doing it, other than pain and intermittent bouts of creeping desperation, but now that he was back in the apartment, he was noticing perhaps a slight change, an intimate quality to the things around him, as though a layer of plastic wrap had been peeled away from it all. The smell of the orange juice was as bright and sharp as ground glass; its sunburst color, its soursweet taste, its coldness in his throat were almost too much to process. Vartan plated the eggs and potatoes with loud chops of the spatula, the terrycloth collar of his robe turned up like some spy-novel overcoat. From its pocket, he produced a handful of forks and knives and tossed them beside the plates. Holly, her hand trembling, set down the quaking plate of toast and gave it a shove so that it slid to the center of the table. There was something unconstrained, and faintly disdainful, about their movements.
The three of them sat down. Vartan studied his food. Holly sipped her tea, the mug barely making it to her lips. Fred chewed, the buttery, faintly sulfurous eggflesh springing in his mouth.
He asked how George was. Her tone too casual, Holly told him that every time the nurses tried unhooking George from the ventilator, that sound came back and his breathing started to fail. And a CT scan was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.
Vartan picked up his battery-powered pepper mill, held it a full foot over his plate, and depressed the button overlong, watching, expressionless, as his eggs and cottage cheese turned gray.
Fred assured them he’d be there for the scan. They hadn’t asked about his relocation to the roof, hadn’t even seemed surprised, perhaps because it was always where he and George had gone as teenagers to get some space and sort things out. Nor had it seemed to matter to them that he hadn’t gone with them to the hospital today. They had cut back on their hours, too.
“You’ll have to stand guard by the door next time, Vart,” Holly said.
Vartan nodded vaguely.
“Why?” Fred asked.
He could tell she didn’t really want to talk about this, either. She bunched her bathrobe tighter around her neck, despite the summer heat. It was her goose-down robe—a long-ago Christmas gift she usually reserved for winter.
“Those patients keep wandering in, wanting Reiki,” she said. “I had to sit there with my hands tucked under my armpits, talking about how tired I was, until they finally took the hint and left.”
It wasn’t just embarrassment about having to hide her tremors. She sounded disgusted, with the patients, with herself. Fred wondered if she’d stopped even doing Reiki on George.
“Manny wants to come up,” Vartan announced.
“Oh God no.” Holly aimed a trembling fork at her eggs, inadvertently sawing them. “What, does he want to film it?”
She and Vartan, to Fred’s surprise, shared a smile. The joke made him smile as well, though neither of them was looking his way.
“He doesn’t think he’s staying here,” she said, “does he?”
Vartan palpated his beard, almost as thick as his mustache now. “Knowing him, he probably does.”
“Hey,” she said, doing a reasonably good impression, bobbling her head, flinging out her arms. “Where can I get a baked ziti around here?”
“Try a restaurant,” Vartan said, playing his part. His beard had ticked to one side, but there was something missing behind his eyes.
“He actually found one! A frozen baked-ziti dinner in our freezer! Do you remember that?”
Holly’s pale face shone. The puffy skin beneath her eyes had the bluish hue of bruised meat. She and Vartan were both smiling, or almost, as they relived this scene with Manfred from before Fred’s and George’s birth, and Fred felt himself to be just outside their circle. When Holly brought her tea to her lips, her hand shook so much that globules of liquid hopped over the rim and onto her plate, and without drawing attention to the act, or even seeming to notice, Vartan reached into his robe pocket, brought forth a straw, and dropped it into her mug.
The phone started ringing, over at the desk. Neither of them moved.
“Should I get that?” Fred said.
His parents regarded their plates. They probably thought it was the hospital.
The machine picked up. It was D
ot, the elf, sounding effervescent as usual. She said they were planning a Street Reiki session at the Empire State Building tomorrow at five.
“They’re doing it as a group now,” Holly exclaimed, in the same faintly overwhelmed and mocking tone she’d employed to talk about Manny. “They want to do all the landmarks.”
“You’re their high priestess,” Vartan observed.
Holly shook her head, as if she’d never had anything to do with the lot of them. “They say it feels like the old days at the relief tent.”
Holly had gotten her first Reiki attunement in late August of 2001, just in time, as it turned out, for her to join the group in one of the relief tents for 9/11 recovery workers that had been erected outside the medical examiner’s office, right down the block from the NYU Medical Center. The tent, divided down the middle by a flap, was half church, with an altar and a priest and a few rows of folding chairs, and half something else—wellness and alternative healing center: a space filled with massage tables and chairs, and staffed, variably, with Swedish and deep tissue and Shiatsu masseurs, reflexologists, Jin Shin Do and therapeutic touch practitioners, Barbara Brennan aura healers, Kabbalah healers, and Reiki healers. When the motorcades would roll in from the main site and the Staten Island landfill, the healers and the priests, along with workers from the cafeteria tent and fire commissioner’s tent and the other tents down the block, would all step out and stand at attention until the body parts were taken from the ambulances and deposited in the morgue. Afterward, people would begin to trickle into the healing center, occasionally family members who had been called in to identify remains, though for the most part the recovery workers themselves. Those firemen, cops, and medical examiners, of course, had had no idea what Reiki was—they’d lie down on the tables expecting some type of massage—though, apparently, most hadn’t been disappointed. After an eight-hour shift digging through wreckage, digging through the flesh, more than muscle relaxation, what they needed may well have been the charged warmth of a pair of hands, hovering yet abundantly near, just sensuous enough to recall them to the blessings of the living, just nonphysical enough to suggest the workings of a higher law.