His father is seated on the couch, in his customary all-purpose midnight-blue suit. Casey is curled up on the love seat, eating cereal from a bowl.
“He’s alive,” she declares dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. Her irony is unintentional, or else she’s so good at it that he’s just a bit slow on the uptake. He can’t begin to remember the last time he woke up to her voice. And the situation is not what you’d call optimal, but still, the happiness he feels at having her in his apartment is so powerful that for a moment he finds himself forgetting that she’s knocked up and he’s down for the count. He wonders why he didn’t fight for this years ago, which triggers a small but intensely powerful spasm of regret. She is wearing boxer shorts, one leg tucked under her, and he can remember watching her at four years old, in a pair of orange shorts, her thin, coltish legs climbing the stairs ahead of him, and wishing she could just stay that way forever. When kids outgrow who they are, you don’t mourn them, but you should. That four-year-old girl is as lost to him as if she’d died, and he’d give anything to have her back.
“Are you crying, Silver?” she says.
“A little.” He wipes his eyes and turns to his father, who is looking at him with unmasked concern.
“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” Silver says.
Ruben gives him a funny look. “When?”
“I don’t know. Always.”
“Silver.” There is a great warmth in his eyes. Silver wishes he knew how he did that. He would look at Casey like that, and then she’d just know.
“Know what?” Casey says.
“What?”
“You were saying ‘Then she’d know.’”
Shit. He has to get a handle on this.
“I’m sorry. Just thinking out loud.”
They’re both looking at him funny now.
“Are you having another stroke?”
“Hard to say.”
His father stands up, taking charge. “Do you own a suit?”
“No.”
He nods, as if his worst fears have been confirmed. What kind of life requires no suit?
“I have some band tuxes.”
“That will have to do, then.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
“Can I come?” Casey says.
“No.”
“Come on, Pops,” she pleads.
Her grandfather looks at her fondly, and if there’s sadness in his gaze, he hides it well. “One train wreck at a time,” he says.
* * *
In the driver’s seat, Ruben looks over at the ruffles on Silver’s tuxedo shirt and grins.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Can you tell me where we’re going?”
“To a funeral.”
“Who died?”
“Eric Zeiring.”
“I didn’t know him.”
“Me neither.”
Outside, the sky is cloudless. It’s another scorching day. Silver turns up the Camry’s air-conditioning, and it starts to whine a little. Ruben absently turns it back down. Silver can’t remember the last time he was in a car with his father.
They pass Kennedy Park, where Silver watches a tall guy in gym shorts pushing his kid in a stroller and walking a large golden retriever. He looks totally cool with it. Silver pictures the guy’s wife back at their house, in paint-speckled shorts, her hair up in a bandanna as she paints a mural on their little girl’s bedroom wall. Her husband has gotten the baby and the dog out of the way so she can work. Later, he’ll drop them off so he can get to his regular basketball game, and on the way home he’ll pick up a nice bottle of wine, which they’ll drink in their claw-foot bathtub after putting their daughter down for the night. They’ve given up nothing in their marriage. His athletics, her art, it all merged effortlessly when they came together. Silver is happy for him, for the life he’s made, for the little girl who will grow up in that home.
“. . . position on suicide?” Ruben is saying.
“What?”
“I was wondering if you were aware of the Jewish position on suicide.”
“I’m guessing they don’t come down in favor of it?”
He nods. “No, they don’t. It’s a grave sin. The tradition is that for a person who kills himself intentionally, there should be no mourning rites, no eulogy. None of the honors of burial.”
“Is that supposed to be a disincentive?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to know. In the entire Bible, there are only two instances of suicide. The most famous one, which has greatly influenced Jewish law, is the suicide of King Saul on Mount Gilboa. You remember that story?”
“He fell on his sword. They were losing to the Philistines. He knew what would happen to him when he was captured.”
Ruben smiles, clearly happy that Silver has retained some element of Jewish knowledge. When they were little, every Friday night Silver and Chuck would walk home from temple, holding their father’s hands. And as they hopped and zigzagged to avoid any sidewalk cracks, he would tell them a story from the Bible, a different one each time. Silver favored the miracles—the splitting of seas, manna from heaven, water from rocks, the ten plagues. Chuck loved the battles. It was either a testament to Ruben’s storytelling skills or simply a function of the Bible’s aesthetic that he could usually incorporate both.
“That’s right,” he says, now in full rabbinic mode. “The sages used Saul’s suicide as a qualification, a separate status. If there were mitigating circumstances that distressed a person, then the rabbis could take a more lenient approach.”
“And you can apply that to pretty much every suicide.”
“That’s true. I think that was the point.”
“A loophole,” Silver says. “Nice.”
“Compassion,” Ruben says.
“You say tomato . . .”
His father shakes his head, frowning. This is why they don’t discuss religion. “The point I’m trying to make is that suicide is, both morally and spiritually, a very tricky area. Forget religion, forget God, for that matter.”
“Done.”
Ruben flashes him an annoyed glance. “This is serious.”
“Sorry. I know.”
“You have a family. You have a daughter. And regardless of how lousy things have been, Casey is still quite young. You have a lifetime to be the father you want to be to her. To be the person you meant to become before . . .” His voice trails off. This is the closest he has ever come to acknowledging his view of Silver’s life.
“Before what, Dad?”
“Before you got lost.”
Silver wants to get angry, but the anger won’t come. Instead, he finds himself fighting back tears. “I don’t know what happened,” he says weakly.
Ruben nods and pats his knee. Silver sees the age spots and wrinkles on his father’s hand. We’re all aging, he thinks, coming apart cell by cell at an alarming rate.
“Cheer up,” Ruben says brightly as they turn into the cemetery. “We’re here.”
“Yeah, about this. Why are we here? I didn’t know this guy.”
“How do you think I feel? I have to give the eulogy.”
“That is rough.”
Ruben shrugs. “Could be worse.” He looks over at me. “I could be wearing a tuxedo from the eighties.”
Silver laughs. They both do. They have the same laugh.
* * *
Eric Zeiring was twenty-eight years old and lived alone in some shithole in Brooklyn until he died of a drug overdose. No one tells Silver this, but he infers it from the things people are not saying, from the way everyone who speaks is carefully couching their words. His father makes reference to Eric’s struggles, to his parents’ unwavering love and n
umerous attempts to help him. To the elusive peace he has now finally found.
A single, enormous white cloud unfurls out across the sky with enough texture to see any shape you’d like: a woman’s boots, a weeping clown, Sigmund Freud in profile. It’s a small funeral, maybe thirty people gathered graveside, mostly friends of Eric’s mother. Eric’s father, balding and featureless, stands off to the side, looking impatient and out of place. Silver’s guess is they’ve been divorced long enough to be strangers. Eric’s mother, petite and pretty, weeps and nods emphatically at everything Ruben says. He talks about Eric’s mop of curly blond hair that made him look like a cherub when he was a boy, about how Eric loved to visit his nana in Key Biscayne, about what an athlete he was. He evokes the boy Eric was for his parents, to help them forget about the sorry man he became. No parent should ever bury a child, Ruben says.
It makes Silver wonder about his own funeral.
Because pretty soon, in a matter of days or weeks, his father will have to bury him. And maybe no parent should bury their child, but it’s really a question of value. His father has a wife, another son, grandchildren, and people like the Zeirings who count on him for comfort and perspective, to put a spiritual spin on things when the darkness invades their ordered lives. His funeral will be crowded, but not with his people. The entire community will come out to comfort his parents, which is what they deserve.
But who will be there for him?
Casey, of course. She’ll be there, maybe even shed a tear, he hopes, but the loss will be more theoretical than real, since she lost him years ago, really. Denise will be there, the self-conscious ex-wife, looking much sexier than she needs to. Definitely a low-cut dress and a push-up bra, stiletto heels that will punch small wormholes in the grass around his grave. Will she cry? For Casey, maybe. She’ll stand between Rich and Casey, and they will leave the graveyard a whole family, no longer complicated by the phantom limb that was him.
Who else? Some of the guys from the band? Maybe. Dana? Depends on how empty her life really is. Do you go to pay respects to the drummer you occasionally hook up with? It’s a judgment call. Jack and Oliver, certainly. Jack will be restless, scanning the crowd for sad, desperate women and saying inappropriate things too loudly while Oliver shushes him, also too loudly. Maybe a few other guys from the building, hoping for a similar courtesy if they too should die before getting their sad lives back on track.
Everybody dies alone. That’s a fact. Some more alone than others.
He looks at Mrs. Zeiring. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She loved this fucked-up junkie with her whole heart, breast-fed him, carried him, celebrated his first words, his first steps, overlooked his flaws, wiped his tears, and lived for his smiles. Then something in him broke, something she couldn’t see, and she watched her boy die slow and hard, and probably with a good deal of shouting and nastiness as he went. Her marriage is over, her boy is gone. There was a time when they all lived together, like Denise, Casey, and Silver, a time when she never could have seen this coming. He feels her pain.
Ruben finishes speaking and nods to the funeral director, who moves forward and flips a switch, and the coffin slowly begins to descend into the grave. The only sound is the small motor of the coffin-lowering device, and that shouldn’t be what Mrs. Zeiring hears as her son is taken away from her. Someone should sing, Silver thinks, and then someone does—a low, somewhat hoarse man’s voice singing “Amazing Grace” quietly but with great sincerity. Ruben’s eyes grow wide, and almost in the same instant that it occurs to Silver that “Amazing Grace” is not sung at Jewish funerals, he recognizes the singing voice as his own.
But Mrs. Zeiring is looking at him, not with anger or surprise, but a strange half-smile, and he decides that the only thing worse than spontaneously breaking into a Christian hymn at a Jewish funeral while dressed for a wedding would be to not finish it. So he does, slowly, and with feeling, while Mrs. Zeiring closes her eyes and thinks some secret truths to herself, and up at the lectern Silver’s poor father somehow achieves some measure of dignity as he quietly shits a hard square brick.
* * *
The sky turns threatening on the drive home. In this heat, quick, random thunderstorms are a daily occurrence.
“So,” his father says, “what did you think?”
“I don’t know. What was the desired result?”
“I’m not going to paint a bull’s-eye for you.”
“I thought maybe you wanted me to see what it looks like for a parent to bury a child.”
He scratches his beard thoughtfully. “That would have been petty and manipulative of me, but I won’t rule it out.”
He sounds weary; not generally, like it’s been a long day, but specifically, like Silver is sapping his energy.
“Are you mad about the ‘Amazing Grace’ thing?”
“Of course not,” he says, and even grins a little. “But really, what in the world possessed you?”
Silver doesn’t really know how to explain it. It’s like he’s been inexpertly rewired. Signals are being mixed, relays being tripped, power surging and waning, and he’s acting on impulses before he knows he’s had them.
“Me,” he says. “I possessed me.”
“Some might say it was God.”
“Yeah, people are always getting us confused. I’m taller.”
Ruben turns into the driveway of the Versailles, pulls over, and throws the car into park. “I have a plan,” he says.
“Do you?”
“You’re going to come with me to one of every life-cycle event I’ve got on my calendar. A bris, a bar or bat mitzvah, a wedding, a death.”
“And we just covered death.”
“Right.”
“OK.”
He gives Silver a tender look. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’ve been better.”
Ruben smiles sadly, then leans forward and kisses his forehead. Silver can’t remember the last time he did that. He feels his father’s stubble scratching his forehead, can smell his familiar aftershave, and in that instant, he experiences the sense memory of the boy he once was, safe and loved, who somehow managed to grow into this mess anyway.
His father doesn’t seem to be in any rush to go anywhere, so they sit in the car in silence, looking out the window, waiting for it to rain.
CHAPTER 25
He wakes up paralyzed, his arms and legs frozen. For a few minutes he lies there, convinced that he’s died, that this is what death feels like, that the mind stays alive longer than the body, trapped inside, going slowly mad until its life force is completely drained. There was a Twilight Zone episode about this. He remembers watching it with his parents in their bed, tucked between them under their comforter, the familiar smell of his mother’s lilac-scented moisturizer filling his nostrils. The man in the episode, unable to move, was pleading in a terrified voice-over as they pronounced him dead.
He hopes that his own brain dies before they put him in the ground, because he has never done well in enclosed spaces. He starts to panic at the prospect, and then gets angry at how unfair it is to have to be scared of anything after you’ve already died. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the perks? No more fear and worrying, no more lugging around all the shit that got tangled up in your mortal coil over the years? That’s kind of what he’s been counting on.
And that’s when he realizes that he’s been scratching his chest. He does the math, a bit slower than one might think, but ultimately reaches the inescapable conclusion that he’s not dead, and not even very paralyzed. He wiggles his toes, bounces his knees, and whistles the theme from Rocky, which he mistakenly attributes to Star Wars for a few minutes. When they were kids, Chuck and he would play the Rocky theme on the living-room turntable and conduct fake boxing matches, hissing out their own sound effects with each blow. He’d forgotten about that, about Chuck, about h
ow it feels to be brothers. It’s been a long time since he’s thought of himself as someone’s brother. He should drop by there like he used to and see how he’s doing. He doesn’t remember when he stopped.
When he stands up, he briefly goes blind. Everything goes white, and he loses his balance, crashing into the wall before he trips over his sneakers and falls on his face. When he rolls over, his vision has returned.
This is getting tricky.
Casey sticks her head into the bedroom, sees him lying on the floor. The alarm that spreads across her face is both validating and heartbreaking, so he clasps his hands behind his head and attempts a look of casual repose.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“I thought I was dead.”
“That’s how it looked for a moment there.”
She comes over and lies down on her back beside him. They stare up at the same cracked ceiling.
“You thought this was what death looked like?”
“Well, I couldn’t see for a little bit.”
She appears a little worried about that, and he hates that he’s enjoying her concern. “Do you want me to call Rich?” she says.
“I absolutely do not want you to call Rich.”
“You sure? If you die in an hour and I didn’t call, I’ll be traumatized.”
“You’re already traumatized.”
“A little,” she admits. “So, what are we doing down here?”
“Just, you know, considering the universe.”
“That isn’t the universe. It’s your ceiling.”
“Don’t be so literal.”
“The universe is one fucked-up place.”
“That seems to be the consensus.”
He watches her as she traces the long cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Her horizontal profile makes her look much younger, like a little girl.
“What would you like to do today?” he says.
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