Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Sometimes when Ajay arrived his mother was on the phone, telling his father that she missed him and was expecting to see him on Friday. His father took a Greyhound bus most Fridays from Queens to Arlington, returning on Sunday night in time to work the next day. He was a bookkeeper for a department store. Before the accident, Ajay had thought of his parents as the same person: Mummy-Daddy. Now, when he saw his father praying stiffly or when his father failed to say hello to Aman in his hospital bed, Ajay sensed that his mother and father were quite different people. After his mother got off the phone, she always went to the cafeteria to get coffee for herself and jello or cookies for him. He knew that if she took her coat with her it meant that she was especially sad. Instead of going directly to the cafeteria, she was going to go outside and walk around the hospital parking lot.

  That day, while she was gone, Ajay stood beside the hospital bed and balanced a comic book on Aman’s chest. He read to him very slowly. Before turning each page, he said, “O.K., Aman?”

  Aman was fourteen. He was thin and had curly hair. Immediately after the accident, there had been so many machines around his bed that only one person could stand beside him at a time. Now there was just a single waxy yellow tube. One end of this went into his abdomen; the other, blocked by a green bullet-shaped plug, was what his Isocal milk was poured through. When not being used, the tube was rolled up and bound by a rubber band and tucked beneath Aman’s hospital gown. But even with the tube hidden it was obvious that there was something wrong with Aman. It was in his stillness and his open eyes. Once, in their house in Queens, Ajay had left a plastic bowl on a radiator overnight and the sides had drooped and sagged so that the bowl looked a little like an eye. Aman reminded Ajay of that bowl.

  Ajay had not gone with his brother to the swimming pool on the day of the accident, because he had been reading a book and wanted to finish it. But he heard the ambulance siren from his aunt and uncle’s house. The pool was only a few minutes away, and when he got there a crowd had gathered around the ambulance. Ajay saw his uncle first, in shorts and an undershirt, talking to a man inside the ambulance. His aunt was standing beside him. Then Ajay saw Aman on a stretcher, in blue shorts with a plastic mask over his nose and mouth. His aunt hurried over to take Ajay home. He cried as they walked, although he had been certain that Aman would be fine in a few days: in a Spider-Man comic he had just read, Aunt May had fallen into a coma and she had woken up perfectly fine. Ajay had cried simply because he felt crying was called for by the seriousness of the occasion. Perhaps this moment would mark the beginning of his future greatness. From that day on, Ajay found it hard to cry in front of his family. Whenever tears started coming, he felt like a liar. If he loved his brother, he knew, he would not have thought about himself as the ambulance had pulled away, nor would he talk with God at night about becoming famous.

  When Ajay’s mother returned to Aman’s room with coffee and cookies, she sometimes talked to Ajay about Aman. She told him that when Aman was six he had seen a children’s television show that had a character named Chunu, which was Aman’s nickname, and he had thought the show was based on his own life. But most days Ajay went into the lounge to read. There was a TV in the corner and a lamp near a window that looked out over a parking lot. It was the perfect place to read. Ajay liked fantasy novels where the hero, who was preferably under the age of twenty-five, had an undiscovered talent that made him famous when it was revealed. He could read for hours without interruption, and sometimes when Vinod came to drive Ajay and his mother home from the hospital it was hard for him to remember the details of the real day that had passed.

  One evening, when he was in the lounge, he saw a rock star being interviewed on “Entertainment Tonight.” The musician, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt that revealed a swarm of tattoos on his arms and shoulders, had begun to shout at the audience, over his interviewer, “Don’t watch me! Live your life! I’m not you!” Filled with a sudden desire to do something, Ajay hurried out of the television lounge and stood on the sidewalk in front of the hospital entrance. But he did not know what to do. It was cold and dark and there was an enormous moon. Cars leaving the parking lot stopped one by one at the edge of the road. Ajay watched as they waited for an opening in the traffic, their brake lights glowing.

  “Are things getting worse?” Ajay asked God. The weekend before had been Thanksgiving. Christmas soon would come, and a new year would start, a year during which Aman would not have talked or walked. Suddenly, Ajay understood hopelessness. Hopelessness felt very much like fear. It involved a clutching in the stomach and a numbness in the arms and legs.

  “What do you think?” God answered.

  “They seem to be.”

  “At least Aman’s hospital hasn’t forced him out.”

  “At least Aman isn’t dead. At least Daddy’s Greyhound bus has never skidded off a bridge.” Lately, Ajay had begun talking much more quickly to God than he used to. Before, when he had talked to God, Ajay would think of what God would say in response before he said anything. Now, Ajay spoke without knowing how God might respond.

  “You shouldn’t be angry at me.” God sighed. God was wearing his usual cardigan. “You can’t understand why I do what I do.”

  “You should explain better, then.”

  “Christ was my son. I loved Job. How long did Ram have to live in a forest?”

  “What does that have to do with me?” This was usually the cue for discussing Ajay’s prospects. But hopelessness made the future feel even more frightening than the present.

  “I can’t tell you what the connection is, but you’ll be proud of yourself.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “Do you love me truly?” Ajay asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you make Aman normal?” As soon as Ajay asked the question, God ceased to be real. Ajay knew then that he was alone, lying under his blankets, his face exposed to the cold dark.

  “I can’t tell you the future,” God said, softly. These were words that Ajay already knew.

  “Just get rid of the minutes when Aman lay on the bottom of the pool. What are three minutes to you?”

  “Presidents die in less time than that. Planes crash in less time than that.”

  Ajay opened his eyes. His mother was on her side and she had a blanket pulled up to her neck. She looked like an ordinary woman. It surprised him that you couldn’t tell, looking at her, that she had a son who was brain-dead.

  In fact, things were getting worse. Putting away his mother’s mattress and his own in a closet in the morning, getting up very early so he could use the bathroom before his aunt or uncle did, spending so many hours in the hospital—all this had given Ajay the reassuring sense that real life was in abeyance, and that what was happening was unreal. He and his mother and brother were just waiting to make a long-delayed bus trip. The bus would come eventually to carry them to Queens, where he would return to school at P.S. 20 and to Sunday afternoons spent at the Hindi movie theatre under the trestle for the 7 train. But now Ajay was starting to understand that the world was always real, whether you were reading a book or sleeping, and that it eroded you every day.

  He saw the evidence of this erosion in his mother, who had grown severe and unforgiving. Usually when Vinod brought her and Ajay home from the hospital, she had dinner with the rest of the family. After his mother helped his aunt wash the dishes, the two women watched theological action movies. One night, in spite of a headache that had made her sit with her eyes closed all afternoon, she ate dinner, washed dishes, sat down in front of the TV. As soon as the movie was over, she went upstairs, vomited, and lay on her mattress with a wet towel over her forehead. She asked Ajay to massage her neck and shoulders. As he did so, Ajay noticed that she was crying. The tears frightened Ajay and made him angry. “You shouldn’t have watched TV,” he said accusingly.

  “I have to,” she said. “People will cry with you once, and they will cry with you a second time. But if you cry a third t
ime, people will say you are boring and always crying.”

  Ajay did not want to believe what she had said, but her cynicism made him think that she must have had conversations with his aunt and uncle that he did not know about. “That’s not true,” he told her, massaging her scalp. “Uncle is kind. Auntie Aruna is always kind.”

  “What do you know?” She shook her head, freeing herself from Ajay’s fingers. She stared at him. Upside down, her face looked unfamiliar and terrifying. “If God lets Aman live long enough, you will become a stranger, too. You will say, ‘I have been unhappy for so long because of Aman, now I don’t want to talk about him or look at him.’ Don’t think I don’t know you,” she said.

  Suddenly, Ajay hated himself. To hate himself was to see himself as the opposite of everything he wanted to be: short instead of tall, fat instead of thin. When he brushed his teeth that night, he looked at his face: his chin was round and fat as a heel. His nose was so broad that he had once been able to fit a small rock in one nostril.

  His father was also being eroded. Before the accident, Ajay’s father loved jokes—he could do perfect imitations—and Ajay had felt lucky to have him as a father. (Once, Ajay’s father had convinced his own mother that he was possessed by the ghost of a British man.) And, even after the accident, his father had impressed Ajay with the patient loyalty of his weekly bus journeys. But now his father was different.

  One Saturday afternoon, as Ajay and his father were returning from the hospital, his father slowed the car without warning and turned into the dirt parking lot of a bar that looked as though it had originally been a small house. It had a pitched roof with a black tarp. At the edge of the lot stood a tall neon sign of an orange hand lifting a mug of sudsy golden beer. Ajay had never seen anybody drink except in the movies. He wondered whether his father was going to ask for directions to somewhere, and, if so, to where.

  His father said, “One minute,” and they climbed out of the car.

  They went up wooden steps into the bar. Inside, it was dark and smelled of cigarette smoke and something stale and sweet. The floor was linoleum like the kitchen at his aunt and uncle’s. There was a bar with stools around it, and a basketball game played on a television bolted against the ceiling, like the one in Aman’s hospital room.

  His father stood by the bar waiting for the bartender to notice him. His father had a round face and was wearing a white shirt and dark dress pants, as he often did on the weekend, since it was more economical to have the same clothes for the office and home.

  The bartender came over. “How much for a Budweiser?” his father asked.

  It was a dollar fifty. “Can I buy a single cigarette?” He did not have to buy; the bartender would just give him one. His father helped Ajay up onto a stool and sat down himself. Ajay looked around and wondered what would happen if somebody started a knife fight. When his father had drunk half his beer he carefully lit the cigarette. The bartender was standing at the end of the bar. There were only two other men in the place. Ajay was disappointed that there were no women wearing dresses slit all the way up their thighs. Perhaps they came in the evenings.

  His father asked him if he had ever watched a basketball game all the way through.

  “I’ve seen the Harlem Globetrotters.”

  His father smiled and took a sip. “I’ve heard they don’t play other teams, because they can defeat everyone else so easily.”

  “They only play against each other, unless there is an emergency—like in the cartoon, when they play against the aliens to save the Earth,” Ajay said.

  “Aliens?”

  Ajay blushed as he realized his father was teasing him.

  When they left, the light outside felt too bright. As his father opened the car door for Ajay, he said, “I’m sorry.” That’s when Ajay first felt that his father might have done something wrong. The thought made him worry. Once they were on the road, his father said gently, “Don’t tell your mother.”

  Fear made Ajay feel cruel. He asked his father, “What do you think about when you think of Aman?”

  Instead of becoming sad, Ajay’s father smiled. “I am surprised by how strong he is. It’s not easy for him to keep living. But, even before, he was strong. When he was interviewing for high-school scholarships, one interviewer asked him, ‘Are you a thinker or a doer?’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s like asking, “Are you an idiot or a moron?” ’ ”

  From then on, they often stopped at the bar on the way back from the hospital. Ajay’s father always asked the bartender for a cigarette before he sat down, and during the ride home he always reminded Ajay not to tell his mother.

  Ajay found that he himself was changing. His superstitions were becoming extreme. Now when he walked around the good-luck tree he punched it, every other time, hard, so that his knuckles hurt. Afterward, he would hold his breath for a moment longer than he thought he could bear, and ask God to give the unused breaths to Aman.

  In December, a place opened in one of the good long-term care facilities. It was in New Jersey. This meant that Ajay and his mother could move back to New York and live with his father again. This was the news Ajay’s father brought when he arrived for a two-week holiday at Christmas.

  Ajay felt the clarity of panic. Life would be the same as before the accident but also unimaginably different. He would return to P.S. 20, while Aman continued to be fed through a tube in his abdomen. Life would be Aman’s getting older and growing taller than their parents but having less consciousness than even a dog, which can become excited or afraid.

  Ajay decided to use his devotion to shame God into fixing Aman. The fact that two religions regarded the coming December days as holy ones suggested to Ajay that prayers during this time would be especially potent. So he prayed whenever he thought of it—at his locker, even in the middle of a quiz. His mother wouldn’t let him fast, but he started throwing away the lunch he took to school. And when his mother prayed in the morning Ajay watched to make sure that she bowed at least once toward each of the postcards of deities. If she did not, he bowed three times to the possibly offended god on the postcard. He had noticed that his father finished his prayers in less time than it took to brush his teeth. And so now, when his father began praying in the morning, Ajay immediately crouched down beside him, because he knew his father would be embarrassed to get up first. But Ajay found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into his nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze.

  On Christmas Eve, his mother asked the hospital chaplain to come to Aman’s room and pray with them. The family knelt together beside Aman’s bed. Afterward, the chaplain asked her whether she would be attending Christmas services. “Of course, Father,” she said.

  “I’m also coming,” Ajay said.

  The chaplain turned toward Ajay’s father, who was sitting in a wheelchair because there was nowhere else to sit.

  “I’ll wait for God at home,” he said.

  That night, Ajay watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on television. To him, the movie meant that happiness arrived late, if ever. Later, when he got in bed and closed his eyes, God appeared. There was little to say.

  “Will Aman be better in the morning?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “When you prayed for the math exam, you could have asked for Aman to get better and, instead of your getting an A, Aman would have woken.”

  This was so ridiculous that Ajay opened his eyes. His father was sleeping nearby on folded-up blankets. Ajay felt disappointed at not feeling guilt. Guilt might have contained some hope that God existed.

  When Ajay arrived at the hospital with his father and mother the next morning, Aman was asleep, breathing through his mouth while a nurse poured a can of Isocal into his stomach through the yellow tube. Ajay had n
ot expected that Aman would have recovered; nevertheless, seeing him that way put a weight in Ajay’s chest.

  The Christmas prayers were held in a large, mostly empty room: people in chairs sat next to people in wheelchairs. His father walked out in the middle of the service.

  Later, Ajay sat in a corner of Aman’s room and watched his parents. His mother was reading a Hindi women’s magazine to Aman while she shelled peanuts into her lap. His father was reading a thick red book in preparation for a civil-service exam. The day wore on. The sky outside grew dark. At some point, Ajay began to cry. He tried to be quiet. He did not want his parents to notice his tears and think that he was crying for Aman, because in reality he was crying for how difficult his own life was.

  His father noticed first. “What’s the matter, hero?”

  His mother shouted, “What happened?” and she sounded so alarmed it was as if Ajay were bleeding.

  “I didn’t get any Christmas presents. I need a Christmas present,” Ajay shouted. “You didn’t buy me a Christmas present.” And then, because he had revealed his own selfishness, Ajay let himself sob. “You have to give me something. I should get something for all this.” Ajay clenched his hands and wiped his face with his fists. “Each time I come here I should get something.”

  His mother pulled him up and pressed him into her stomach. His father came and stood beside them. “What do you want?” his father asked.

  Ajay had no prepared answer for this.

  “What do you want?” his mother repeated.

  The only thing he could think was “I want to eat pizza and I want candy.”

  His mother stroked his hair and called him her little baby. She kept wiping his face with a fold of her sari. When at last he stopped crying, they decided that Ajay’s father should take him back to his aunt and uncle’s. On the way, they stopped at a mini-mall. It was a little after five, and the streetlights were on. Ajay and his father did not take off their winter coats as they ate, in a pizzeria staffed by Chinese people. While he chewed, Ajay closed his eyes and tried to imagine God looking like Clark Kent, wearing a cardigan and eyeglasses, but he could not. Afterward, Ajay and his father went next door to a magazine shop and Ajay got a bag of Three Musketeers bars and a bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups, and then he was tired and ready for home.