The Visibles

by Sara Shepard

  It was the day after my father’s first treatment. We had come home from the appointment in a cab—I didn’t want to subject him to the subway. At home, he lay on the couch, staring at the wall. After a while, he started crying. “I can’t think,” he kept saying. “This is horrible, I can’t think. What the hell happened to me?”

  I tried to tell him what happened. He’d signed the papers, I said over and over. He’d agreed to this. “But I can’t think,” he kept repeating. “I can’t feel.” In the end, I called Dr. North; he prescribed a sleeping pill. I begged the pharmacy to send someone to deliver it; I was afraid of leaving my father out of my sight, but also knew he wasn’t capable of leaving the house.

  If I went to Ireland, I could study genetics with Dr. John Shea. He was working on finding genetic markers for all the important things in the world, or at least was linked to those who were. He was looking for links to certain cancers, multiple sclerosis, ALS. He was associated with those who were looking for a link between our genes and depression. I could study that. I could study whatever I wanted.

  But if I went to Ireland, my father would be alone.

  I didn’t know if he was supposed to be left alone; doctors hadn’t told me one way or the other. Perhaps there were terrible side effects of ECT that hadn’t shown up yet—other than, of course, the memory thing. Something else I’d learned: doctors were often loath to mention the staggering side effects of medications. They said, Just take this, it might help, but they so rarely explained that you might not sleep or you might see things or that it might make you more depressed or gain weight or lose weight or stop eating or not be able to produce natural tears. There were no instructions that came with ECT, just a pamphlet, What Is ECT? featuring a smiling blond woman in a pink sweater, proffering a teapot to the camera. Just do it! her smile said, but it seemed coerced, like someone was pushing a gun to her back. Your life will be as carefree as mine, really, honestly! Would you like some tea?

  I picked up the phone and called the number I’d written on the little slip of paper last week, the number from the flyer in the East Village. It rang a few times, and a woman answered. “Learning Annex.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hi, I was calling about the talk that’s in two weeks, the one with Meredith Heller at the Mayflower Hotel? Acting for Beginners?”

  “Yeah. And?”

  I gripped the phone. I hadn’t rehearsed past this point; I’d expected them to say, Meredith Heller? Who? “What will Miss Heller be speaking about?”

  She flipped some pages. Sighed. “Um, acting?”

  “Right. And…is she around forty?”

  “I don’t know. Harold?” She moved her mouth away from the phone. “Do you know anything about Meredith Heller?…I don’t know, she’s speaking next week, or…Yeah. That’s her. Yes. How old is she, roughly?”

  There was mumbling. “Harold says she’s fortyish, yeah. If you want to buy tickets, though, you should call back tomorrow. I’m just manning the phones because the regular person is sick.”

  “Okay,” I said weakly.

  “You can buy them at the door, too, Harold says. The day of.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. I held the phone at arm’s length, worried for a moment that it had recorded the conversation in its little plastic fiber-optic parts, storing it for a later time when my father could rewind it and hear everything. Did my mother have any idea what things were like with us? Surely she assumed we might find out about this lecture and come to see her. It was possible—it was very possible—that she had no idea what had happened to my father. Perhaps she thought we would show up, happy and well adjusted and completely forgiving, ready to hum or pantomime or pretend we were dead or whatever it was people did in acting classes. But all this was waiting for her. She didn’t even know it.

  It was late afternoon; the sky had faded from gold to lavender. I sat on the back of the couch, rubbing one foot against the other. After a while I looked up the Mayflower Hotel on a map of Manhattan. I imagined us walking into the lobby and seeing my mother. I imagined my father healthy and my mother dumpy and silly, teaching a Learning Annex class to make ends meet. We wouldn’t want her. We’d laugh. We’d leave the lobby without taking the class, without paying the twenty bucks.

  fifteen

  As we were pulling into the Brooklyn Bridge station on our way to my father’s fifth appointment, a 6 train had already pulled into the station across the platform. A good sign, I decided—my father hated waiting on the platforms lately, as they were too hot or smelly or loud. Lately, I’d been looking everywhere for good signs. I enlisted the documentary voice again: On the fifth appointment, Richard Davis is showing marked improvement. He has moved off the couch and back to his old bed, and he has started eating with vigor, amazed because food suddenly has taste again. Dr. North said this was very, very encouraging, very positive progress.

  After we found seats on the train, my father glanced at me sideways, like a fish. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

  “Dad!” I exclaimed, instantly embarrassed.

  “What? You’re pretty enough.”

  I immediately thought about Philip. Which was silly—that was four years ago. There had been crushes here and there, but I’d never had a real boyfriend. No one felt right. I always gravitated to Philip, the fleeting kiss in his backyard. I liked to think that some of Philip’s skin cells fused with mine, that even for a moment, a little bit of his DNA was mine and a little bit of mine was his. But it was embarrassing. It reminded me of the Missed Connections ads on the back page of the Village Voice, a boy longing for the girl who smiled at him on the crosstown L train, a girl eagerly wanting to reunite with the boy who stood in line in front of her at the bank, certain that they’d shared a special moment.

  “I can’t remember the names of the layers of skin,” my father suddenly said.

  “What?” It was hard to switch gears, especially from Philip.

  He held his palm outstretched. “Wait. So. It’s the stratum corneum, then the stratum lucidum, the stratum granulosum.” He lowered one finger with each layer. “But then what?”

  Even I knew this. The stratum spinosum. Then the stratum basale. Then the dermis. I waited a few seconds, but he still couldn’t think of it. Doctors said memory loss was a common side effect, the documentary voice intoned. The patient forgot words, details, what day it was, what had happened the day before. Sometimes Summer would come upon him and he’d just look so lost, a stranger in his own skin. She made a list of the words he forgot: orange, handkerchief, Broadway, place mat.

  I’d begun to be able to sense when he was struggling with his lost memory, trying to hide what he had forgotten. Yesterday there had been smoke coming out of the window of an apartment building across the street. “It looks like it might become a fire,” my dad said, turning to me. “Do you think we should call that number?”

  “What number?” I asked.

  He snapped his fingers, trying to tease it out. “You know. That emergency number.”

  “You mean 911?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He always acted like it was something on the tip of his tongue, simple things everyone forgot. But I knew it bothered him. Each time, a flare of worry passed across his face.

  “So what do you think your mother would think of all this, if she were still here?” he asked, the subway jerking forward.

  I sat up straighter. “Why are you asking that?”

  He looked away. “No reason. It just makes me wonder. I don’t know what she’d say.” He chuckled. “She’d probably just throw me into an institution.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was funny.”

  “You shouldn’t think about her,” I said angrily.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe this treatment is working. I don’t feel so bad about her. I don’t mind thinking about her. What would I say if I could talk to her right now? I would probably tell her about you. Not about me.
”

  I faced him. My father in his pressed chinos, his scraggly, tawny hair, that crazy beard. “You wouldn’t tell her anything about…this?”

  “That’s a big bomb to drop on someone, Summer, don’t you think? If I had cancer, do you think that would be the first thing I’d tell someone on the phone? How are you? Well, I have cancer, how are you?”

  I narrowed my eyes, angry at his sarcasm. “You wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret. I know you.”

  Surprise flashed across his face. I clamped down hard on my tongue. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, even though I knew it was true.

  He crossed his arms over his chest and did the thing he always did when he was upset: pulled at the loose skin on his elbows, stretching it out. “This is my fantasy, Summer. Don’t go and ruin it.”

  My fantasy. He was fantasizing about her.

  Only, we could get real answers. The acting class was only a few days away. Our mother might open her arms, overjoyed to see us. Or she might take one look at my father, horrified, and cancel the class entirely.

  The subway stopped and the doors opened. People bounced around the platform like electrons. A large black woman sat on a bench, a baby carriage next to her. Except there wasn’t a baby in the carriage, there were newspapers.

  My father snapped his fingers. “Stratum spinosum!” he cried, loud enough so that everyone else in the subway car looked up. “I just remembered! Stratum spinosum!”

  As if he’d just split the atom.

  A couple sat in the waiting room. I only saw the man briefly before the nurse took him back, but I could tell he was youngish, perhaps in his thirties. The woman stayed behind, sitting in the chair, knitting.

  She noticed me and smiled. “Hi.”

  The receptionist picked up her phone and dialed.

  “Hot outside, isn’t it?” the girl pressed.

  “Uh-huh,” I muttered.

  “The air-conditioning in the subway car I was in was broken, too,” she added.

  “It’s nice and cool in here, though, isn’t it?” the receptionist chirped, hanging up the phone, not having said anything into it.

  “Sure is.” The girl’s needles were metal, and they clicked together when they touched. The conversation was so small and mundane it made me itchy. It was as if we were waiting for a bus. As if near-death experiences weren’t happening just a few feet away.

  The door opened. Dr. Frum stood in the hallway, staring at me. He moved forward without picking up his knees, and then his hand was on my arm.

  “Your father is still in the recovery room,” he said quietly. “He had a bit of a bad reaction this time. So it’ll be a little longer before you can see him. He’s resting.”

  I shot up. “Bad reaction…how?”

  “Some patients are fearful when they wake up.” He smiled at me kindly but absently.

  It broke my heart to hear he was fearful. I imagined him curled up in the fetal position, thinking the jar of cotton swabs was a monster. It’s because of our argument on the train, I thought. He had entertained the idea of talking to my mother again, and I’d fought him on it. It’s because of something I’ve done. The doctor slipped back into the hall, and I clutched the arms of the chair and lowered myself back down.

  The silence settled back into the waiting room, like a parachute that had been momentarily airborne but was drifting back down to earth. When I looked up, the knitting girl’s eyes were on me, a simpering, pitying smile on her face.

  “What are you making?” the receptionist called to her.

  “A sweater,” she answered sweetly.

  “In this heat?”

  “I know. But the speed I’m going, I’ll be done by December.”

  They both laughed.

  I couldn’t be in the room anymore. I stood up and staggered to the door, my arms outstretched like a mummy. I walked to the end of the hall for the stairwell and descended one flight. Doctors whirled by. Some of the doors to the patients’ rooms were open; I looked in and saw a woman lying in a bed, picking at her lunch. There was a man sitting on an orange plastic chair next to her, quietly talking. In another room, there was a whole group of people laughing, inspecting someone whose leg was in traction. “I can’t go back to work for six fucking weeks,” the patient whined. “Don’t worry,” his mother, sister, girlfriend, some anonymous family member, said. “We’ll take care of you.”

  Ahead of me was a closet marked Janitor. I fumbled for the closet and wrapped my hands around the cool metal doorknob. It opened, amazingly. Inside were a bucket, a few brooms, and some cleaning products. I stepped in and bent down, curling my knees into my chest. Then I closed the door. It was so dark in here. Quiet.

  He was fearful. I put my head down on my knees.

  Suddenly the door whipped open. A man was standing there, staring irksomely at the broom and the mop. I screamed. He looked down, not having at first noticed me, and jumped.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I thought this was the bathroom. What are you…?”

  He squatted down. He was dressed in brown pants, work boots, and a brown work shirt. It wasn’t until he got very close that I realized it was the loudest basketball player from the court across the street, the one with the greasy blond hair and mustache. The one I was sure harassed women just for the hell of it.

  A small smile appeared on his face. “Are you stuck?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  I couldn’t answer. His smile grew larger, more sinister. It occurred to me that he was a dangerous man, capable of violent things. During my father’s last appointment, I’d watched him and another basketball player get into a shouting match. It had quickly escalated into grappling on the pavement. I watched this man clench his jaw, the cords of the muscles ropy and straining. He hit the other man again and again and again. People just walked by. It both thrilled and disgusted me that rage could be so plain and obvious, in the middle of public, genteel York Avenue.

  Now here he was. He stood back. “You want to come out?”

  “I guess.”

  He held out his hand. There was dirt caked into his palms. As I took it, my ears started to ring. He pulled me up fast and with so much force that I tipped the other direction, staggering into the hall. He wrapped an arm around me to help me catch my balance.

  “Thanks.” I dropped my hand from his.

  “You’re welcome.” He paused, looking me over, starting at my feet, then to my knees, then to my skirt and shirt and breasts and neck and head. My heart pounded.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  I frowned. Could he have seen me watching, eight flights up? “No.”

  “You sure? You look familiar.”

  He looked at me carefully, with certainty. Perhaps he was able to see deep inside me, under my skin and muscles. Maybe he saw everything I wanted, everything I felt, even things I didn’t want to admit to myself.

  “I’m not familiar,” I insisted.

  He shrugged. Then, right in front of me, without breaking eye contact, he reached down and rubbed his crotch. Up and down. Cupping it completely. Scratching sounds. There was nowhere else for my eyes to look. It was like the hall had lost air pressure. His eyes danced, enlivened.

  “I should go,” I said, taking a step backward.

  “Bye-bye,” he teased.

  But he was the one who turned and walked away. As he glanced over his shoulder, my mouth dropped open. It wasn’t the basketball player anymore. It was some other guy, a man with straight, limp hair and a wide, pear-shaped ass. A hand had come down and switched them. I rubbed my eyes, not believing it.

  And then I bounded up the steps, passing a window that overlooked York. The basketball court was empty. When I turned a corner and burst into the ECT hall, there was my father, standing in the middle of the corridor. His face was so pale, his expression so lost. His gown gaped at the back.

  “Dad!” I bleated.

  He looked through me.


  “Dad.” I took his arm. “Why are you out here?”

  His mouth parted. Little strings of saliva hung between his lips. “Where’s Dr. Frum?” I cried. “I thought you were supposed to be resting.”

  My father blinked. He registered me, finally, his eyes fixing on my face. “There’s a secret I never told you,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I hid it.” His voice was half an octave lower than normal. “I hid it so you won’t find it.”

  “Oh Jesus, there he is.” The overweight receptionist burst out the door, followed by Dr. Frum. “He ran through the waiting room before I could stop him.” She looked at me. “I think he was looking for you, but you weren’t there.”

  “Richard?” Dr. Frum said loudly into my father’s face, as if he were deaf.

  “You let him walk off?” I asked them.

  Now a nurse was behind the receptionist. “You should have been waiting.”

  I looked back at my father. He had a secret he never told me? Was that true or…not true? He’s so sick, I thought. And he might not get any better. What if he never gets better?

  My father put his hand on my arm. “Summer!” he cried, as if I’d just arrived. “Oh, Summer, Jesus. What’s going on? Where the hell am I? Am I dead?” He slurred his words.

  “Dad.” I took his hand. “You’re in the hospital. You just had a treatment.”

  His eyes widened. “A treatment? Do I have cancer?”

  “No…”

  “What treatment, then?”

  I told him.

  He ripped his arm from me. “No. No. Who’s making me? Why?”

  “Dad, you signed the papers.”

  “Mr. Davis.” The nurse took his arm.

  “Leave me,” he screamed at her.

  I looked pleadingly at the nurse. She pressed her lips together but didn’t look that surprised. This wasn’t even unusual to her.