Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  Who do you think you are?, she said. And he went back to chopping the parsnips for the roast.

  But he knew who he was. He was Johann Beringer, son of Johann Beringer. Johann Beringer, who had slipped through childhood like a drop of water, barely detectable among the other children as one who would rock the foundations of their understanding of life, now entering their collective consciousness like a grim reaper, gathering their faith to his emaciated ribcage and crushing it ever so slightly, with a beard like welded bees, like Greek ornature, barely moving, not even when he spoke. He was Johann Beringer, the father of dragons, the most famous geologist and de facto historian of his time, who had retraced the maps of Europe, who had crept into their minds like a colony of giant insects and set up nest, who was about to be remarried, as was right and fitting, to the rest of the world, and as he discovered several days later, the proud victim of a horrible ruse, as Beringer’s flaking hand flipped the stone bearing a smiley face and his own name.

  And he rushed back home to find Rio in bed with Amalia, the two of them painting stones they’d dug out of his garden.

  ***

  It wasn’t enough to make him a cuckold, they had to make him a laughing stock. And Beringer spent the rest of his life circling the globe in search of every single copy of his book his publisher had ever sold so he could destroy them. In 2000, Chris Eaton discovered a ninth edition as part of a book-by-book auction of the library of an eccentric Welshman who, although he had died decades earlier, it had taken this long merely to sort through and catalogue his entire collection. Chris Eaton had flown to London to be at Christie’s when it all came down, where he managed to snatch it up for next to nothing, as other collectors were more interested in the complete works of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, including one of his earliest, Traite de chapon hors var (1737), on the particular castration techniques of Bresse roosters outside of Provence and the Riviera, written before he was contracted to investigate a disease that was destroying the saffron plant in Gatinais and he began devoting his life entirely to subjects of agronomy and silviculture; other early texts in the lot covered botany and agriculture by Theophrastus and Aristotle, Dīnawarī, Aria von Crestahd and Aimé Bonpland; and the star of the show, an original double-elephant folio of Audubon’s Birds of America.

  It was one of two books that Julie found on Chris Eaton’s desk when she came to find him for breakfast and discovered he was gone.

  When her husband died, it was like nothing she had ever been forced to deal with. She’d seen death before. Starting with her grandparents, and then her parents, and then her husband’s mother and grandfather. But even before that, before them, there was the man named Jeffrey Miller, who she saw hit by a car outside La Cave, run over on purpose after an argument inside the venue over a girl, perhaps even her or, depending on which political spectrum of newspaper you happened to read, over who had won the televised town hall debate over Vietnam, the new Republican Governor of California or the new Democratic Senator from New York, or if you were into politics of a different sort, over which band was going to have the greater longevity, The Velvet Underground or The Heroin Cats. And then, naturally, since she’d been a nurse long before everyone in California started dying, there were countless patients, dying left-and-right, up-and-down and side-to-side, from simple intestinal obstructions to things that sounded like Dr. Seuss animals (gangrenous gut, fibrous stricture, pyloric stenosis), or even simple errors by surgeons, perforating a colon while sewing someone up or, depending on your susceptibility to conspiracy theories, closing up the wound with a watch inside, or a fishing lure, or an after-dinner mint. People died as they were being admitted on the gurney, in the operating room, as they were leaving. Once, she came into a room and it was clear that the man on the bed was just moments away. He’d been so close for weeks, suffering from an ailment no one could identify, and though both of his children lived in the city, neither had ever come to visit. It was near the beginning of her rounds and she knew she was in for a long day, so she turned around immediately and left. But in the hallway she was struck with a bout of conscience, that it was wrong for someone to die alone. So she returned to his side and didn’t say anything, just stood in the room until she could no longer hear him breathing, then pulled up the sheet, made a note on his chart and left for her next patient.

  For days after the virus first broke out, the news reporters talked about it pretty non-stop. There were profiles on the initial victims, stories on whether or not health insurance providers would cover medical expenses, whether or not they could survive financially if they did, who cared whether the insurance companies survived or not. They also focused on the growing list of celebrity illnesses, with shots of a sallow film star apparently trying to drown himself in The Chester and Portia Havro Memorial Fountain in downtown Los Angeles, which was used in many films including Pretty Woman. Because it was him, people initially assumed the virus was sexually transmitted, a gay disease, but after Oakland Raiders hero Rich Gannon was admitted to hospital with pains at his sides below the ribcage and a headache, only to die five days later, the director for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) enforced a mandatory call for all Californians to be immunized. Less than three weeks later, they’d completely run out of vaccine. Aventis and Chadarro, the two pharmaceutical companies who were licensed to manufacture it, issued quick press releases deflecting any blame from their decision to produce fewer doses this year because of the significant waste in expired stocks from the previous year, but added that there should be enough vaccine for everyone in the closets and cupboards of hospitals and general practitioners across the country. Even with the urging of the CDC and the White House, several states refused to comply. After all, it took six months to produce vaccines in numbers like this. What if the disease were to spread? Would they be saving the citizens of California only to damn themselves?

  Thank goodness she had her children for support. And her sister. And all of her husband’s friends. He’d had so many friends. He was very popular. In fact, he had more friends than she had even met, like the ones he had for dinner parties when she was away on speaking engagements, or who accompanied him to movies, which she despised, or with whom he went fishing. Several of them even offered to help write his obituary for the local paper, but Chris Eaton insisted on doing this herself. There were so many accomplishments to choose from, so many acts of wonder, so many stories she could tell, and she wanted to include them all, as if missing one detail might make him seem like less of a human being. But after sleeping on it, she suddenly felt very protective, and anxious, and mad, that someone’s life could be so easily reduced to a list of dates and names, like the accounting ledger at his first store, or the back of a library book. Plus, would anyone really understand, anyway? They had shared so many private things, how could they possibly make sense to another living person? Would people understand, for example, their joke about buying the abandoned old hotel in the middle of nowhere and populating it with children, naming them not after family ancestors but with numbers and letters, randomly selected by choosing the license plate of the next car to drive through? She wanted no room for error so she began to cut, as if all of these memories were hers alone and she were suddenly unwilling to share them, not even with friends and family, especially the most private ones, like how they’d never used each other’s name in public, just called one another lover; the things that made him cry; and where he liked to be touched; savoring each memory like chocolate on her tongue, for a moment, then striking it from the document she had created, hoping to settle on the one remaining truth that would perfectly capture the whole, until all that remained was one line: He was my husband. As if all that mattered with him was how he was related to her. As though, if they had never met, that his life and his dreams and his achievements would have meant nothing. And it made her feel selfish to write it. Here, she thought, was the most important man to have ever lived. Here was the person with whom she had shared everything. And all she cou
ld do was reduce him to a possession. As if the story had never been about them at all but only about her, lying to herself for years that they had completed each other when all he did was give her someone to feel loved.

  Though sadly perhaps, when she considered how he had worked to support her while she pursued her music, then moved back to California with her for her new job, and eventually dropped his own career because she thought their kids needed a parent at home, she realized this may have always been true.

  Sometimes the city planner would come home from work and work some more, and later she’d crawl into bed after Chris Eaton had already gone to sleep and try to wake him up by touching him. Once his eyes were open she would roll on top of him and put her arms around his neck. But he would say he was too tired, night after night, until he felt as though he were letting her down, not wanting to let her down, not wanting to say no but also unable to switch between roles of father and lover, so just the proximity of her would cause him to uncontrollably tense up, and gradually his stiffness turned her off so much that she stopped trying.

  One night she started crying. It wasn’t enough for her, she said, to be just the boy’s mother. She needed to be a lover, too, she said. She needed to feel loved. It hadn’t been like this before, she said. He said he would try. But he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. And eventually she left him, taking their son with her.

  She woke up in the hospital and reached immediately for her children. They were not there. No matter what happened later in life, it all came back to this, with Walter telling some boring story to the kids about Loch Ness, or Ogopogo – which was far away in Canada but had somehow struck on the same gimmick for drawing tourists – neither eye on the road; the youngest, Dorothy, in her lap; the other two fighting over some travel books in the back that used invisible ink to reveal secret messages and jokes, no clue that more than half of the car had only a few more seconds left to live.

  There was the car crash, with the sound like her children being shot in the back seat and her body going so rigid she couldn’t turn quickly enough to see what was happening. Sometimes she remembered it one way. Other times, another. But every time as her forehead connected with the dash, the occipital nerves went to the muscles for comfort and the muscles, unaware of their own strength, hugged too hard. She felt like she was growing horns, that there were fires behind her eyes.

  And everything changed. It was as if she were suddenly someone else. Some other Chris Eaton. And the people who came to visit her, whom she knew to be well-meaning, only served to remind her of that life she no longer had. So she asked the nurses to tell visitors she was sleeping. Indeed, she spent most of her time with her eyes closed, but also humming softly to herself, in an effort to shut out the beeping machine, and the IV tube, and the flowers, and the lack of mirrors, dismantling the “reality” of it piece by piece until she was just lying there in the darkness, the silence, the emptiness, which took years to perfect and several books on yoga and Sufism and brain waves and quantum physics before she could do it without crying. Of course, it wasn’t the emptiness she was looking for but something else. Something from her past. Those perfect moments right before the crash. Neutralizing the present just seemed the first step because it had such a firm grip on her. Then she might go anywhere. Along with most of her face, the accident seemed to have shattered the linearity of her past. And sometimes, even thirty years later, her husband and children would be alive again, sitting beside her, perhaps even driving in the car, and then, again, they were gone.

  It took very little time for the sickness to spread from its original epicentres in Oakland and San Diego, where it was thought to have crossed the border from Mexico until they narrowed it down to a flight from Central America. When cases started popping up in Washington and Oregon, the White House shut down all travel to and from the West Coast. Anyone approaching the border into Arizona, Nevada or Idaho was to be shot.

  When things became more desperate, intrepid business people started selling flu shots on the street for thirty dollars a pop. The injections were nothing more than a saline solution. But by this point the local police constabularies had other things to worry about. Or, as was the case in most communities, the police were either too sick, had walled themselves up in their bomb shelters to wait everything out or they had joined the millions of others crawling past and over the long lines of gridlocked cars on their way to the border.

  If one person’s ability to monopolize on another’s misfortune and gullibility was not unimaginable enough, how those crooks intended to get the money out of California was an even larger mystery.

  The main thing she had hoped her children would learn from her was to make room for people on the sidewalk, to be aware of other people in general, to be conscious of others in need and to serve them, in whatever way they could. This would be good. She had hoped, in general, that they would learn to be good people, but more specifically that they would learn to hold doors, and offer seats, to love in the face of hate and have patience in the face of ignorance, to understand their own feelings, to share them, to be liked, but only for being themselves and not for doing things against their nature because they thought it would make them liked, to not make the same mistakes she did, to learn from her mistakes, to love, to accept being loved, to accept not being loved, if that were the case, to respect a hot stove, to admire a lit candle, to properly cleanse and protect their skin, using a light moisturizer when needed, to enjoy healthy food and exercise, to understand the value of money, right from wrong, not to sacrifice long-term gain for immediate gratification, but to also stop and smell the flowers occasionally, knowing all choices have repercussions, and all decisions have consequences, this, that, infinity, to remember all the math shortcuts, and that math is important, to love reading, to read “good” books and not just that nonsense that everyone else reads, to read philosophy, like Goethe, or Voltaire, to enjoy music, and to enjoy making it, but also not to try so hard to be different, because they’d be happier without the struggle of trying to be unique and accepted at the same time, better to be the same as everyone else.

  Of course, it is with death that all learning comes most difficult.

  Autopsies – in the beginning, when time could be found to actually perform autopsies – showed a peculiar growth in the back of the nasal passage, effectively closing off access to the pharynx (which explained the difficulty patients had with breathing) and creating a useless u-tube nostril that examiners were sure would even prohibit smell. This could have explained the patients’ ability to eat – and sudden attraction to – things we would mostly find distasteful, like flies and silverfish. Their eyes were so vacant, reacting to only the shiniest stimuli. So she shook her keys in front of them and tried to at least keep them entertained. They were so much more mobile than her husband had been, especially when they were first admitted. At that point, they were really only suffering from dry skin, which began in small, itchy patches but spread quickly to cover most of the epidermis. It almost seemed like they were allergic to the air, as if the air itself were making them dehydrate so quickly. After a few days, which was generally the point where patients were actually admitted, the skin began to develop rough shingles or scales, hard to the touch and yet oozing an oily mucus that made the surface extremely slippery. No treatment, including healthy doses of antibiotics and flat soda, seemed to work. In fact, the antibiotics only seemed to induce extreme weight gain, which was even more strange when you considered how little they were keeping down. Even the children were clocking in at over two hundred pounds, floundering about their beds like injured seals, staring at her with a directionless, all-encompassing ambivalence, bottom jaws pawing helplessly at the air, eyes swollen out of their sockets like straight-legged kneecaps, held down with nylon straps so they wouldn’t pop a seizure and flop onto the floor. No one had cleaned the floor in weeks. No one had done laundry, either, and the sheets were crusted and glistening with an iridescence that would have been quite b
eautiful, given other circumstances, as their situations worsened, the scales progressively taking over, until the only thing she could do was try to ease the pain by rubbing them with water. At first, with such severe dehydration, the doctors were concerned that too much water ingested directly through the mouth might induce more vomiting and actually be counterproductive, so everyone was placed on an electrolyte IV in priority of severity. All faucets in room bathrooms were turned off to remove the temptation. Then she found one of the children lapping frantically from the toilet, her face practically buried in it. After that, she fetched it for them by the pitcher and they gulped it down like flies.

  It appeared to help.

  The same child died two days later, tossing so violently on her bed that they had to strap her down, her jaw gone slack and her throat and chest heaving with exertion. Her eyes veered towards the outside as if she were trying to see behind her. Like a gecko. And she never made a sound. Not even a whimper.

  By the end of the third week, the whole hospital was a graveyard of sound.

  No one even bothered to cry. Or pray.

  When we grow older, we become more sentimental, more challenged by artistic depictions of death, depravity, travesty, tragedy, horror, sadness. As children, death is something we don’t even understand, something we watch like a ceiling fan then forget, something we long to put in our mouths. As adolescents, we are trained to be more cynical. Awkwardness teaches us to laugh at these things. But as we grow older, we become more affected, by these films, these stories, because our experience has shown them to be true. All of them. Each horrible event in our lives makes us realize that anything is possible.