Machine of Death

by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki ! (Editors)

  James picked the paper from the floor, where it had fallen as they entered the house last night. “No more cheap theatrics. Ready for REAL HEALING?” it read.

  Dad called him from the other room. James put the flyer on the table by the door and ran into the kitchen, where Dad was struggling with the juicer.

  “Mom makes me some of that carrot juice,” he said, holding a bundle of carrots in his hand. James took the carrots and fed them into the juicer, one by one, until he had filled a glass with carrot juice. When he turned around with the glass in his hand, his father was sprawled on the floor.

  “There he is,” Dad slurred, his eyes slowly focusing, urging the doctor to look to the doorway. “This is my son. This is my son, James.”

  James shook the doctor’s hand and hugged his father, his hands recoiling at the spine thin beneath the paper gown, the shoulder blade jutting into his palm, the ribs, each one distinct. Dad’s face was swollen; he worked his jaw like he was chewing taffy. He took a sip of water, and it took him three tries to swallow.

  “I’d like to watch him here for a few days,” the doctor said. “He had another episode last night that required the shock paddles. I think this is some cause for concern.”

  “My...my heart is acting up now,” Dad said, fighting to get the words out. “I never had problems with my heart, never.”

  “It’s possible the medication he’s been taking for the lymphoma may have adversely affected the cardiac system,” the doctor said. “I’m really worried that there is a potential for arrhythmia. I’m going to prescribe some treatment that will hopefully keep his heart running smoothly.”

  “Pills, pills, more pills,” Dad said. “Everywhere you go, they give you pills. One pill for this, one pill for that.”

  The doctor wrote on his prescription pad. “Does he have any history of respiratory or kidney problems?”

  After Mom arrived, James began to wander the hospital’s halls, trying not to glance into open doors as he walked. When he did, he saw the same thing, over and over: death on hold, waiting, biding its time, typically with its mouth open, breathing shallowly, its eyes either closed or open staring at nothing.

  He realized for the first time that he was scared; he did not know if he would have the opportunity to complete his relationship with his father, and it worried him. He didn’t know if he would trust himself to seize the opportunity, even if it presented itself.

  He wondered how long it would be before he would no longer be able to recognize his father in the figure that lay in the bed down the hall, the father that had once hoisted him onto his shoulders, or balanced his tiny body on the palm of his hand. The man in James’ memory was strong and robust, and did not have the dim, sallow eyes that the man down the hall seemed to have.

  James wondered, not for the first time, why his father had read the slip of paper from the predictor box in the first place, and if it would have even mattered had he not.

  “Who is this kid? What makes him qualified to do anything?” James asked, perhaps more bitterly than he meant to. His mother glanced over at the living room where Dad lay sideways on the couch, and gestured for James to keep his voice down.

  “His website says—”

  “His website,” James sneered.

  Mom sucked in her breath, held it for a second. “A lot of people say he’s helped them feel better.”

  “People. What people? People we know?”

  “Sick people. I don’t know. They’re on the website.”

  “His website, of course it’s gonna tell you—”

  “We already went to see him.”

  James stopped short, and closed his mouth.

  His mother turned toward the living room and put a hand on her cheek, and then leaned backward, so that James caught her by the shoulders. She leaned into her son, and James wrapped his arms around his mother, and she sighed, and she spoke softly:

  “We saw him at Dr. Eli’s seminar—the kid sitting with his mother. The, you know, bald head?” James nodded. Mom went on: “His name is Tim and he’s just the sweetest little guy.”

  She leaned her head on James’ shoulder. His own mother was smaller than he was, more frail, tired from shuffling her husband to doctor’s appointments every day, tired from administering pills and treatments and praying late into the night, tired from waking up early to make sure he woke up at all.

  “Tim said he could…reach inside you,” she continued, as she and James watched the softly heaving body that lay on the couch a room, a world away. “He said he could close his eyes and feel inside you, and feel what was wrong, and move his fingers around and fix it, just like running his fingers through your hair, just like untying a tangled knot.”

  “Mmm,” James said, because he didn’t know what else to say, and also because he felt so sad for the woman that he held in his arms, and wished that she wouldn’t believe in things that would just disappoint her, and also wished that maybe it were true.

  “He said he could feel the atoms in your body,” she said, whispering now, still looking away, still watching her husband sleep. “He said he could reach into your dad’s throat and feel the tumors and pluck them off like strawberries.”

  “Did he?” James said.

  “No,” Mom said.

  James’ parents went back to see Tim and his mother with the painted fingernails, even though they didn’t bring up the subject with James again. James found Dr. Eli’s brightly-colored flyer under a stack of unread magazines, and looked it over again and laughed and shook his head and thought of all the people who’d read that tiny, fortune-cookie slip of paper torn from a predictor box and who had never again gone near buses or bathtubs or microwaves. People who’d stopped smoking or drinking or started smoking or drinking, people who knew there’d be no risk in skydiving and so sat there stone-faced as they fell ten thousand feet through the air, never having any fun at all.

  Most of all he thought of Tim, the skinny, bald kid lying curled in his mother’s lap in the back row of the Hilton’s banquet hall. Did he have leukemia or something? What was his game, and what did he want with James’ parents?

  And why couldn’t he heal himself?

  So one night, James stayed up late and confronted his parents as they came home from Tim’s house, and made sure they hadn’t given him any money, and watched his father take slow steps up the stairs. And after they disappeared upstairs, James sat alone on the couch, and exhaled and admitted to himself, well, really, when it came right down to it, what’s the harm?

  The ambulance woke James up. The siren grew louder and then stopped, deadly close, and James was on his feet instantly.

  Mom let the paramedics in the front door and James stood in the hallway as strange men shouted to one another, 100 cc’s of this and that and finally they eased him down the narrow stairs on a backboard and slid him onto a gurney, and James took his father’s hand for a brief second before the red doors slammed and he was gone.

  “It’s his heart,” the doctor said. “He hasn’t been taking his medication.”

  James stared at his mother, who looked quickly away down the hall. “He was worried about the side effects,” she finally said.

  The doctor took a few moments to choose his words. “At this point, I’m not too concerned about the side effects,” he said.

  She looked up at him, and got his meaning, and James felt her weight press into him again.

  “Dad, you have to take your pills.”

  His father looked up from his prone position on the pull-out couch bed, his throat swollen like a bullfrog, his breathing thick and labored, his face drizzled with a week’s worth of downy beard. “Get that junk away from me,” he managed.

  James sucked his breath and leaned back on the recliner, drumming his fingers on the leather arm, and sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you. The doctor says the pills are going to keep your heart strong. You don’t want that to happen again, like the other night.”

  “That doctor is a crook,�
�� Dad gasped. “Those pills are what’s a killer. Worse than that lymph, whatever you call it, lymphoma. The pills are the killer.”

  “Dad—”

  “I never had heart problems,” Dad cried, suddenly strong, fidgeting to get an elbow underneath himself. James leaned over, but Dad struggled, righting himself on the couch. “I never had any heart problems whatsoever. Until that crook gave me those pills. And now look at me. Now look at me.”

  “That’s why you have to take them. Yeah, call him a crook, maybe he is—but your heart will get worse unless you take the pills, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “Nothing I can do,” Dad said, shaking his head, trying to laugh, but it came out a choke. He eased himself back down onto the couch. “Nothing I can do until it wrecks my lungs, my kidneys, right? Same old story. Nothing I can do.”

  James handed him the glass of water, rattling the pills in his hand, but Dad didn’t take it.

  “At least I know this heart won’t kill me,” Dad said. “Whatever that mickeymouse box is good for, at least the heart won’t kill me.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” James said. “It—it’s kind of vague, I think.”

  Dad looked at him, chewing his words, forcing them out. “So what, then? Every day I wake up it’s worse. I can’t talk, I can’t swallow! Now you want me to take pills so I can’t breathe, I can’t take a piss? Isn’t this bad enough?”

  “Okay, Dad,” James said, setting the glass on the coffee table hard enough that it sloshed onto the magazines. “Go and see that kid, Tim, then. Go and see him, is that going to make you feel better?”

  “At least he has some hope for me,” Dad said, and James bit his lip.

  Tim’s house was one-half of a duplex on Brightwood Avenue, a wrongly-named street in a part of town without sidewalks. Brown front lawns ran straight into the cracked asphalt of the road, or at least they would if they were visible: Cars choked the sides of the road, and Mom had to park a block and a half away.

  The people at Tim’s were sadder than at Dr. Eli’s, and some were sicker. Tim’s mother welcomed everyone inside with polite, weak handshakes. James stood in the corner, trying to shuffle as close to the wall as possible, so that everyone had room to sit.

  The air was fogged with incense and something that sounded like Enya being played on a cheap boombox. Everyone kept quietly to themselves, occasionally shuffling one family at a time down a narrow hallway. The CD was on its second repeat when Tim’s mother called James’ parents to Tim’s bedroom.

  Tim’s bed had Snoopy sheets on it, and model spaceships dangled from the ceiling, but there were no video games, no books, no other toys that would suggest that a child lived here. Tim sat cross-legged on his bed, thin and tired in the dimness of a single overhead lamp, and James almost gagged on the incense as he walked through the door.

  He and Mom helped Dad to sit on a mound of pillows, then sat beside him. Tim was quiet, praying perhaps, his eyes closed, and he sat that way for some time before Dad started to moan loudly with discomfort.

  “Thank you for coming back,” Tim said softly, and when he opened his eyes and saw James he froze for a moment, looking caught, looking terrified. Then he recovered, and extended his hands; Mom took one, and James, with some reluctance, the other, warm and wet. They both took Dad’s hands.

  “Do you believe that you have the power to be healed,” Tim said. Dad said nothing until Mom nudged him, and even then he just murmured.

  “Do you believe in the power that God has given to every man of his creation,” Tim said, louder, and Dad said, “Yes.”

  “Do you believe that the power within you is strong enough to move mountains, because it is from God,” Tim said, his voice strong now, and Dad said, “Yes,” and Mom moaned.

  “Remember to keep the flame of faith strong, for there is nothing I can do for you if you do not believe,” Tim said, softer now, and handed Mom’s hand and James’ hand to each other. He rose to his knees on the bed, his eyes closed, and started to flex his hands, as if preparing to play the piano, breathing sharply, quickly.

  “It is your belief that allows the power to grow,” Tim said, “and opens a channel for me to reach into you.”

  James watched his father closely, watching his head bob heavily on his neck as he slumped more deeply into the pillows. Tim’s hands moved deftly around one another, tracing intricate patterns that might have been tying bows with string, and Dad coughed and made a noise and spoke in syllables but not words.

  After ten minutes of this Dad was not healed, but it was time to bring in the next family, so James helped his parents to their feet and nodded to Tim’s mother with a tight smile and concentrated on helping Dad into the car before he said anything.

  “I think that kid is dangerous,” he finally said.

  They drove home in silence. Dad was sleeping downstairs now, on the pull-out couch bed, and James helped him out of his shoes and socks. His feet were swollen, but his legs were as thin as James’ arms. James lifted Dad’s feet onto the bed and covered them with the blanket.

  “How you doing,” he said to his father, because he had so much to say but didn’t know how to say any of it.

  “What should I say,” Dad said. “Should I lie?”

  James asked his mother not to go back to Tim’s.

  “What exactly are you afraid of?” Mom said, brushing her hair in the darkness of her bedroom, as James leaned on the full-length mirror behind her. “That he’ll get better? That he’ll feel better, if nothing else? Like he’s trying to do something, instead of sitting around the house feeling awful, waiting—waiting to—waiting around?”

  “I’m afraid he’ll think it’s his fault,” James said, and his mother stopped brushing.

  When she didn’t say anything he spoke again. “I’m afraid he’ll feel like he didn’t believe enough. Like if only he could have more faith, or something, like if only he’d tried harder then Tim could heal him, and it’s his fault if he doesn’t get better.”

  “I don’t think that,” Mom said, putting the brush away.

  “I know, but does he?” James followed her down the hall, where she took a towel from the hall cupboard.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know?”

  She whirled and faced him, and her voice was strong but he saw that her eyes were very wet. “Because I know him,” she said, and walked back to her room and closed the door and he heard the water come on in the shower.

  “So do I,” he said.

  “Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies,” Dad said, slowly, “and thank You for all the blessings You give us. And I believe that You have the power to heal me, if it is Your will, and I ask that I be allowed to continue in Your service.”

  They sat on the back porch, the sun a red ball on the horizon.

  “I guess this is the end of my rope,” Dad said.

  James thought of lots of things to say.

  But nothing sounded right, so he put his arm around his father, and they watched the sun set together.

  Dad was buried on a tall hill, overlooking the valley where their house rested, and James stayed around his mother all the time for as long as he could, while she took the chance to sleep in late and rest and recuperate.

  The few days before the funeral had been distressing for him, because he found that the truth of Dad is gone had begun to usurp his memories, retroactively erasing his father from his recollections—so he’d had to fight that, with photographs, reconstructing a skeleton in his mind of who his father had been, finding it sometimes not aligning perfectly with what he thought he remembered. And he hated that the sharpest picture he had of Dad was of a weak animal in a hospital bed, and he fought to recall the vigorous, looming figure of his youth. Sometimes, he succeeded.

  The last few days had been the hardest. Mom never left his side in the hospital room, sleeping in the hard wooden chair. After a few days Dad started talking about things that weren’t t
here, and staring off into the distance, and then he would call your name and squeeze your hand and you wouldn’t be able to understand the words through the thickness in his voice.

  On the last day he hadn’t spoken at all, and by the time James arrived in the morning Mom said that he’d stopped squeezing her hand back, and he lay there in the soft white bed sucking air like a fish on land, then lying deathly still; gasping, sucking, wrenching the oxygen from the atmosphere by force, then slumping, spent from the effort.

  After a few hours of this, the gasping became less pronounced, and the hills and valleys of the heart monitor became an undulating stream, and the shrill sound of the monitor’s alarm became annoying, and they turned it off.

  Then there was nothing left to do but watch his face turn yellow and his jaw stop moving and the man who was James’ father become something other than a human being, something that was diseased meat and bone and cloth that there was nothing of Dad in at all. And they cried and held each other and sat very still for a very long time, weeping into each other’s arms.

  And that night, when they came outside to the parking lot, they found that Mom’s car was dead, that its battery had been drained from the lights being left on, and without any further tears they left it in the parking lot, an empty machine, a shell without a driver.

  James wondered if his father had heard him on that last day, whether his unresponsive hand and closed eyes belied some deep consciousness that had survived buried inside the ceasing functions of his body, and if the echoes of his voice had carried all the way to it. For whatever it was worth, he’d told the mute Dad not to be ashamed or guilty; that it wasn’t his fault; that he’d done everything he could. That he was loved.

  He wondered if Dad had been disappointed in him, for not believing in Tim, or for not attending the meetings, or for continuing to push the medication that he so despised. Dad hadn’t taken any pills at all, the last month or so, but his lymphoma by then had spread to the stomach and lungs and bones and so there wasn’t really any point and James felt bad for arguing, for making a big deal about the pills, for causing his father stress about that and Tim and everything, for refusing to just go along.