by Philip Smith
All night I paced around my apartment hoping for a sign, something that I could do. If I had died, my father would have known exactly what to do. But no, I had to smoke pot and run around with bad kids when I could have prevented this from happening if I had only paid attention. I was so stupid. In fact, I was the stupidest person on the whole planet, in the whole universe, and in all dimensions. Ever.
As Lisa requested, I took the first flight the next morning to Miami. When I stepped off the plane, the sun hurt my eyes, and the humidity made me nauseous. My native weather had suddenly become hostile and unbearable. Even though my world had completely collapsed, I looked around and saw cars moving, people talking, yelling, smoking, eating. Didn’t they know what had just happened? The world had just ended, and all these people acted as if this was just like any other day.
As my taxi approached his house, I saw that a crowd had gathered in front. Some of the people were talking, some were crying, while others just stared into space, their faces filled with pain. I sensed that they were waiting for my father to appear, just like I was, to disprove the unbelievable news they had heard.
When I got out of the cab, they rushed up to me and begged for me to heal them and their loved ones. Crying with pain, they said, “Please, please, my daughter is in the hospital and needs your help! Your father said you had the power.”
“My sister has breast cancer. You can save her!”
“My father has had a heart attack. We need your help!”
In that brief instant, I now saw what my father went through twenty-four hours a day. It was overwhelming—a responsibility I could never have handled. Being a doctor, where you see sick people day in and day out and helplessly watch them die, is bad enough, but having to be a nonstop miracle worker would have been impossible.
This was now the moment to become my father, to make him happy, to continue his work. Somewhere inside of me, I knew that even though I was a bit rusty with my healing techniques, I probably knew enough to help these people. Whatever I did, no matter how clumsy, it would be better than doing nothing. Even though I didn’t listen or really pay attention whenever he tried to teach me, I had watched thousands of healings. I knew the drill backward and forward, but I had never done it on a real person. This is what Pop had always wanted. He knew he had a once-in-a-trillion-lifetimes gift, and he wanted me, who carried his DNA, to continue his work. It was as if my father’s sudden death was preordained to create this succession. I could feel invisible hands pushing me to start healing immediately, while I, Philip, wanted no part of this. I knew that once I performed just one healing, it would open the floodgates. Just as they had for my father, they would line up around the block, call at all hours of the day and night from around the world to be freed from the pain, ravages, and threat of disease. What I really wanted more than anything was for these people to go away. How could they bother me now? I had nothing to offer them. Certainly there was someone else they could call to remove the tumor or stop the bleeding. That’s what the yellow pages are for. Look up “Twenty-four-hour Tumor Removal” or just call “1-800-TUMOR.”
The truth was that there wasn’t anyone else to call. Besides, these people had already seen every possible doctor, who had told them, “I’m sorry, but there is nothing else we can do.” That’s why they were now willing to trust the lives of their loved ones to someone like me. My father was dead, and I was in no mood to assume the position of chief of psychic surgery at the Lew Smith Supernatural Hospital.
Without much, if any, thought, I made the definitive decision: I knew nothing about healing, and I didn’t want to know anything about healing. As far as I was concerned, my father’s powers died with him. There would be no passing the torch and no inheriting the mantle. As I made my way through the crowd, I muttered vaguely, “No, sorry, call someone else; sorry, come back tomorrow.”
Once inside the house, I started to worry about practicalities. Was there a will, burial instructions, or some psychic message waiting for me? For my father there had always been a sign or an indication as to what the next step was. When he was alive, the universe was more than happy to reveal its inner workings, to answer his questions to point him in the right direction. The universe was his ally. Now that door had been slammed shut and the plug pulled on the ever-present blinking neon sign that said Welcome, Open All Night.
I realized that there was another matter I had to deal with: no one had told me where the body was. Was he still at the hospital, the morgue, or the police station? All this happened without me, and now I was supposed to fix it.
I walked into his healing room, hoping that I would find detailed instructions not only for the burial but for the rest of my life. The room looked as if he had just stepped out for a moment to go to the post office. An air of suspended animation pervaded it. I wanted to find the “on” switch so that I could make time move forward or backward—anything but this awful pause that I experienced. It felt as if he had been kidnapped. There was no note, but perhaps there was a secret cassette tape that once I played it would self-destruct. Nope. Nothing. No father, no instructions, no tape. I was definitely on my own.
The light on his answering machine was blinking impatiently. I started to listen, hoping that there would be a clue. Maybe someone from the hospital had called, maybe the funeral home had called—or maybe my father had called. Instead there were endless calls from endless strangers requesting endless healings. Everyone on that tape was sick or dying. Impatient, I fast-forwarded through the tape, making them all sound like cartoon characters leaving cartoon messages. I didn’t want to hear any of the details. Each one of these messages was about someone’s life in need of immediate assistance and repair. Were they all going to die without my father around to help them? I didn’t want to know the answer. My attitude was, “Sorry, too late, you should have called yesterday.”
Lisa was hiding out in their bedroom. We had not formally met yet. I walked in and thanked her for letting me know that my father had died. She didn’t quite know how to deal with me. Our initial discussion was awkward. I was not prepared to ask the details of what had happened. She muttered something about being sorry. I told her I needed to make some coffee.
In the kitchen, I saw that she had a white plastic Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. This told me everything about her that I didn’t want to know. Having grown up on Cuban espresso, or at the very least coffee made with a Brazilian colador that looked like a white cotton sock stretched over a wooden handle, I felt that Mr. Coffee was appropriate only in the domain of the unenlightened. Mr. Coffee had no place in my father’s house. This woman had to go. I certainly didn’t like her before my father died. But now, having seen the Mr. Coffee, I blamed her for my father’s death. I’m not quite sure why, but I felt that she’d killed him.
I refused to drink from Mr. Coffee and made some ginseng tea instead. While it brewed, Lisa mentioned that she would like to continue living in the house and continue my father’s work. “Fat chance,” I thought. If anyone carried on, it would be me, and I didn’t think that would be happening anytime soon. I think she’d known my father all of about six months. There was no way that she could have learned about healing or anything else about his work in that amount of time.
While I drank my tea, she handed me a large, ugly blue plastic bag as if it were some kind of peace offering. It was a horrible blue; the kind of thoughtless blue that they might use in making potties for the infirm or rubber sheets for the gurney. I couldn’t stand touching the bag; it felt hot and dirty. There was something profoundly unpleasant about it.
As I opened the bag and peered in, my face was hit by an exhalation of warm, humid air. I blinked to protect my eyes. It was as if this bag held my father’s last breath. When my eyes refocused, I was looking at the remains of my father from his ride to the hospital. His glasses, his watch, his ring, his crucifix with a Star of David superimposed on it, his wallet, and a dental bridge—all lying in a jumble at the bottom of this ugly blue bag.
That was it? That was all I got? This was all there was of my father? His whole life added up to an indecent blue plastic bag filled with trinkets? The objects felt contaminated, as if they had touched something bad, something not my father. Something called death. I lifted my head, looked at Lisa, and said nothing.
She now volunteered, “All I know is that I was watching TV, and your father was in his study on the phone with one of his students, Ray. For no apparent reason, he began to have shortness of breath. He asked Ray to send him a certain kind of healing energy to open up the air passageways. They were on the phone for about forty-five minutes. Afterward, your father came out to the living room and began nervously pacing around. He was very agitated and said he wasn’t feeling well. You know your father never got sick. I offered to call the paramedics, but he said no. When he collapsed, that’s when I called. They got here as soon as they could. When they began to work on him, I saw your father leave his body. He was standing there watching everything that was going on. His expression was ‘So this is how this is done.’ Then they took him to the hospital. He died on the way.”
I didn’t believe anything she said to me. None of this made any sense. Something was very wrong with her and her story. How could my father be so stupid as to spend forty-five minutes on the phone with one of his students and not get to the hospital? Who was this Ray person? I had never heard of him. Forty-five minutes is a long time to be on the phone trying to get one of your students to relieve your chest pain—and not one of your stellar students, at that. Ray was clearly incompetant when it came to his basic healing skills. My father must have known he was having a heart attack. I know he always told me that a healer could never heal himself, in the same way that a surgeon could not operate on himself. But still, he could have done something, called someone. Something didn’t add up.
My father had devoted the last years of his life to healing people, to picking them up after the medical profession had dropped them. Unfortunately, I also knew that he would never have put himself in doctors’ hands and asked them to save him. Most likely he would rather die. And he did.
The phone had not stopped ringing. Each time the answering machine picked up, it repeated the same haunting message: “This is Lew Smith…” I didn’t want to listen to the callers or the messages they were leaving. I thought about all these people who were home waiting for my father to call them back, to save them, to heal them. With my father gone, the funeral homes would probably notice a sudden uptick in business.
Back in the kitchen, I spotted a small orange prescription bottle on one of the shelves tucked next to my father’s vitamins. I had never seen a bottle of drugs in his house, ever, and was surprised. Under no circumstances would my father have taken a prescription medicine.
I picked up the bottle and noticed that it belonged to Lisa. I read the label. One hundred tablets of Synthroid that had been filled two days earlier. When I opened the bottle, only three of the original one hundred tablets remained. Where did they all go? I needed to know more about Synthroid. I immediately went into my father’s study and pulled out his Physicians’ Desk Reference. Synthroid was normally prescribed for low thyroid condition. However, there was a small warning that adverse reactions could include hyperactivity, nervousness, heart failure, and cardiac arrest.
Where were those missing ninety-seven pills? I couldn’t ask Lisa; she would lie to me anyway, so what was the point? Increasingly, it seemed that this woman who had suddenly appeared in my father’s life was somehow involved in his sudden death. Was it for money? Or was it to take over his healing practice for the power and the glory? Or was she one of those female serial killers who preyed on elderly men in the hope that they would leave everything to her in their will?
Since childhood I had always been comfortable with conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable. I’m not talking about those general mass-market theories that implicated the U.S. government or the Communists in the killing of JFK, but rather the more esoteric ones such as the use of magnetic waves by the Soviets to control our minds to create a sympathetic environment for them to assume control of America. My father’s death created an ideal situation in which to manufacture reams of mental documentation to explain his mysterious expiration. How could there be any other reason for his demise other than by nefarious means? Perhaps Lisa had won over Arthur through some strange psychic/tantric/sexual initiation, and he had turned on my father and assisted in his killing. Or maybe Lisa had poisoned my father and discouraged him from calling the paramedics while she watched him pace nervously around the living room as the poison constricted his arteries. This way he would die, leaving her what she imagined to be his millions. Or how about this: Chander Sen decided that he urgently needed my father on the other side for advanced healing instruction and accidentally ripped his astral body from the physical body? As a result, my father was unable to reunite his bodies and disappeared from the physical realm. I was comfortable with any of these theories. Given time, I would continue to build much more elaborate explanations for his sudden death.
In an effort to play detective, I copied down all the information on the prescription bottle and drove over to the supermarket, where I could use the pay phone without Lisa listening in. My first call was to the pharmacist at Super X drugs. “Can you tell me when prescription number 794627481 was filled?” I asked.
“December eleventh, two days ago.”
“And was it filled for one hundred tablets?”
“Yes.”
“Um, I have this bottle, and now there are only three tablets remaining. I think my father may have been given these pills or something.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my father’s dead, and all these pills are missing. Maybe he was killed with these pills.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. The pills could be anywhere. Someone could have put them in another bottle or poured them down the drain or—”
“But I read in the PDR that this could cause a fatal cardiac event.”
“I’m not sure. I can look that up. Just a minute, please…”
“Thanks for your help. Bye.” I was afraid he was going to put me on hold and call the cops. Lisa had probably called him by now and told him not to say anything. I’ll bet she knew what I was up to. She was probably busy covering up her trail fast.
Next I called a friend’s father and asked for the name and number of an attorney. When the attorney answered, I gave him my name and began my story. “I think my father has been murdered. See, there were all these pills, and now there are only three left, and this pill can cause heart attacks, and there is this woman in the house who I don’t know, and I think she wants his money because she says she’s going to live in the house and—”
“Did you have breakfast?”
“No.”
“I think you’re just upset and need some food. Go get some pancakes. It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Click. As usual, I was having trouble getting people to believe me. This was no different than the rare occasions when I mentioned to someone that my father had this dead friend named Arthur. I was always met with the same wall of disbelief. My murder theory was not playing well either.
After the pharmacist and the attorney, I called directory assistance and asked for the number and address of the medical examiner’s office. I pretended that I was in a movie and doing exactly what the son of a murder victim would do. I was writing the script as I went along.
“County medical examiner’s office.”
“Hi, my father has just been murdered, and I need to get an autopsy.”
“Yeah, just a minute.” The operator barely covered the phone when she yelled out, “Jorge, I got one for you!”
“Detective Perez.”
“Yeah, my father’s been murdered, and I need to get an autopsy done before this woman leaves town.” Perez took a deep breath filled with annoyance. I was obviously disturbing his cafécito break. I continued, “Well, there were all these pills,
they were just filled a few days ago—one hundred tablets—and now there’s only a few left, and my father’s dead. And I read that these pills can give you a heart attack, so that’s what happened. Now I need to get an autopsy before—”
Perez wasn’t buying. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Smith. Philip Smith.”
“Okay, Mr. Smith. Here’s what I think: I think you’re overreacting a little bit, and you need to calm down and maybe think this thing through a bit more.”
“Yeah, but I need an autopsy, because I know you’ll find the drug in his body.”
“But we’re not going to do that. See…” Detective Perez was determined not to be helpful at any level. I hung up and got in the car and headed to police headquarters downtown.
At the police department, they just shuffled me around. I had already told the receptionist that I had a murder on my hands and needed to talk to the chief detective. All I got was an “uh-huh.” The receptionist pointed me to a room with scuffed-up bitter green walls and gray furniture to just sit and wait. There were another six people waiting along with me. Just one look at them, and I knew they had much worse problems than I did. About an hour later, Detective Gonzalez appeared—a compact guy with a crisp white shirt who didn’t like to get his hands dirty. I pitched the Synthroid story one more time. He nodded. “We got one little problem here. Synthroid is instantly metabolized by the body, and the autopsy isn’t going to show anything. Bury your father and call it a day.”