“Have you had your visit?” asked Diebenkorn.
I remained standing. I guess I didn’t want to stay any longer than I needed.
“We spoke. He’s sleeping now.”
“And? Do you see what I’ve been saying?”
“He wants to die,” I said. “He says he’s finished. He’s tired.”
“So you see what I mean. Were concerned for his quality of life.”
“He has no quality of life. He doesn’t want to be here.”
“My point. If we treated his depression, he might come round to participating in some of our activities here. The staff tries very hard to match activities to residents’ interests. But none of that is of any use if the resident is suffering from depression.”
“Who do you like in the Super Bowl?” I asked him.
“Pardon me?”
“My uncle was a football fan all his life. Now he doesn’t care enough to mention the game on Sunday.”
“A deep depression can do that. The bottom line is that depression can be life threatening. And then there are his terrors, his sundowning. As I said, I think we can alleviate his suffering if you’ll help us.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No. I’m not authorizing any pills.”
“No no, it’s not just pills. The medication is only a part of the overall treatment plan.”
“No.”
“You could be saving your uncle’s life. Lets give it a try at least.”
I excused myself. Diebenkorn rose behind his desk but did not come around. He asked me to think it over and call him if I changed my mind.
In the hall, Jorge and another aide were trying to get a group of elders to play a game that involved keeping a pink balloon in the air. The ceiling speakers showered Sister Sledge on everyone.
Uncle Danny was still asleep, his jaw slack, tongue resting on his lower lip. I stood by the bed and stared at his momentary peace. The pillow was still on the bookcase. I could hear Jorge in the hall, “Tap it! Tap it! Up! Up! Aw. Okay, we’ll try again!” The whole time I kept looking at Jesus adrift and off his cross.
As I left, the broken white-haired woman was still in her wheelchair by the door, her useless hand above her head. “Hello dear,” she said.
“Hello.” I smiled at her, and then I bent down close to her and whispered in her ear. “Colonel Mustard,” I said, “with the pillow. In the library.”
GUY LOOKS FOR WORK
Guy scanned the want ads. He was supposed to be looking for a job, of course, but as his eyes moved down the columns, the question of how to make some money quickly swelled into the panicked demand for the missing explanation for his life. Where did he fit? What was he supposed to do with a PhD in ethics?
He continued to scan the page. What the hell was an Assembler? What did an Assembler assemble? What did an Auditor listen to? An Estimator estimate? An Expediter expedite? And what in the name of God was an Oracle Developer?
Guy felt misunderstood. Well, not misunderstood, exactly, so much as not understood at all. As he went about his day, busy with first this and then that, so he went about his trackless life. On a good day he felt the equanimity of the disinterested spectator, bemused by the looks on peoples’ faces, the intensity of their exertions, the occasional grace and justice of their actions. On bad days it was as if he were trapped in a meandering joke.
“Quit staring!” said Guys wife.
Gazing into the middle distance, Guy was out of it again, as ifhed passed through a cognitive one-way door and couldn’t get back in. His wife, Wanda, was at the table making a list on a special pad of paper with “TO DO” across the top and a vertical row of boxes inviting emphatic checkmarks. Guy understood that her list-making was a kind of prayer, an alignment of her intentions with her energy. One day he spent about half an hour looking at one of her checkmarks: it was, up close, a gorgeous bit of thoughtless grace. In the way it began, downward, hard, and then changed direction, gaining lift and velocity until it vanished, implying itself into the invisible, it was as perfect as any Zen masters brushwork O. Guy’s heart swelled with love and appreciation.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Wanda when he tried to tell her, but he could see she was pleased. Wanda had half a dozen items on her list. She paused the slightest moment, never looking up from her paper, then wrote down half a dozen more to fill the sheet. “I’ll be gone at least three hours,” she said to Guy as she paused in the doorway. “You have any interviews today?”
Guy looked at her.
“Any prospects?”
“We’ll see,” he said.
Prospects, prospects. Anything was possible. Maybe a new species, the next evolutionary tsunami, was swelling in his consciousness even then; maybe there, in the middle distance, the utterly transforming notion of the next, the new, the unforeseen (though perfectly foreseeable in retrospect) Homo contemplatus would come to birth among the dust motes glittering in the sun: the pollen, the cat dander, bird down, occasional mosquito, and airborne viral life, all charged with the same command to mutate toward perfection that had long ago inspired that first ancestral ape who, sucking on his fingers and scratching his ass, first glimpsed there, three or four feet from his nose, the irresistible idea of the human. Who could say?
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Wanda finally said. She turned and harrumphed down the walk, her high heels clicking on the pavement.
Guy watched her behind and thought how lucky he was. He’d had the best education other peoples’ money could buy, and he felt some responsibility to all the people who had contributed to his development as a thinker. That responsibility included the commitment to use his gifts responsibly, to “first, do no harm,” and to exercise restraint. To Guy this clearly meant not doing anything at all when he was unsure what to do; not making things worse was, after all, as important as making them better. If he was patient, what he should do would come to him. He felt sure of that. He had determined a long time ago that no matter how many opinions there were about any course of action, no matter how many schools of thought, there was always another, not under discussion, that involved going back to bed.
He went back to bed.
HOW THE DEVIL GOT HIS HORNS
A jackass, his long ears lying back flat and his big teeth clacking with every word, was preaching a sermon to the assembled creatures. His post as preacher had been acquired by virtue of his loyalty to his master, whose cart he drew wherever he was told; in fact, his loyalty, much remarked upon, was really an abiding hunger for carrots, bunches of which were his for merely going where he was directed and pulling this or that load no questions asked.
He cleared his throat: Ggrhawwwwwwww!
A pig in the first row farted, loudly.
“Pew!” said the hyena behind him, shrieking with laughter. “Get it? Pew!” and he cracked himself up again, along with all the young nearby whose parents shushed them with stern looks.
“Today,” said the jackass, “it is my sad duty to chastise you, my congregation, for your lasciviousness, your licentiousness, your concupiscence, and … and … and your scriptural, that is to say doctrinal, theological rebelliousness made manifest, shall we say, in the near catastrophic rise in the numbers of you who seem to believe that simply because spring has arrived you are free to frolic and to gambol, that is to say, to fornicate with abandon and at every opportunity!”
The rabbits bowed their heads self-consciously, wrinkling their noses, trying to muster some shame, some remorse, each of them? becoming very quiet and inward-looking, listening for the still, small voice of self-correction, reform, and spiritual renewal, but all they could hear were their own horny little hearts thump-thumping in their soft delicious chests. To a one they resolved to look contrite until the service was over when they could head for the hedgerow lickety-split.
Not so the goat. He curled his lip and snorted; he stepped into the center aisle of the chapel and stomped the hard polished floor with a forehoof.
The pig let out a long, almost musical belch, echoed soon after by the mockingbird in the choir loft. The goat brought up some cud and chewed it, mulling the preachers words.
“Ought there not to be in this world a race of creatures disciplined to restrain themselves, to submit to law and reason those bestial appetites that drive the merely pleasure-seeking weaklings among us? You know who you are, my brethren, stunted in your spiritual growth—you fornicators, lotus-eaters, profligates!”
The goat gulped back his cud and stomped the floor again. “You carrot-chomping, bucktoothed hypocrite!” he said. “You cannot, so you preach that we shall not. Your father was a horse, your mother a mule, and you are worse than a gelding, you bio-engineered hack! You cannot mate! You cannot reproduce! He begrudges us, dear friends, what he cannot have. I’ll have no more of this garbage!” And with that, the goat clomped down the aisle and out the doors of the chapel.
This was news to the congregation and set them to mumbling and fumbling from the pews, filing out of the place and looking for places among the shrubs and tall grasses where they might take their private pleasures guiltlessly.
The jackass, from his pulpit, brayed and brayed to the empty pews.
When the jackasss master heard the story of that Sabbath morning, he did what all masters do—he thought about how to turn the situation to his own advantage. First he set about buying all the available carrots, lettuce, radishes, and what stores of nuts and apples had been laid by. Then he bought whatever property, especially tillable land, that he didn’t own already.
Soon everyone was mighty hungry. Those few heads of lettuce that anyone might grow, those few hidden nuts wrapped in a rag in a drawer, became as precious as gold and nearly as expensive to buy. And of course with all that procreation going on, soon there were many more mouths to feed. The situation became desperate. Luckily, the jackass’s master had been watching closely for the moment when his philanthropic impulses might be exercised to the greatest good and to his greatest advantage. The word went forward across the land that plenty of lettuce, radishes, seeds, apples, nuts, fruits, and hay were to be distributed after the services at the chapel each week, right after the sermon, and that all—pigs, cows, horses, sheep, all manner of birds, squirrels, and rabbits—were welcome. Everyone but the goat.
Little by little, those who meant never to set foot in the chapel ever again came back, bringing their hungry offspring. Soon, as the master had predicted, there was a whole new generation of devout creatures who listened, intent on not repeating the lecherous mistakes of their parents which, as they were told repeatedly, had brought about great misfortune.
Even the goat returned, but not in the flesh. No, he was represented everywhere, in story and painting, in song, in stained glass windows and pictures in prayer books: he became the tempter, the angel of darkness, the evil one. Even today you can see these representations of the archfiend with his goat’s beard, cloven hooves, and horns.
As for the jackass, he is braying from the pulpit still. If you don’t believe me, go and hear for yourself!
THE WRONG SUNDAY
Marty woke, sat up, and untangled the white rosary from the fingers of his left hand. His mother had given him the rosary for his nightmares. Now when he woke up frightened, he prayed to Our Lady to help him get back to sleep instead of waking his parents because his father needed his sleep to go to work at the truck plant in the morning. Mostly his nightmares were about things falling and crushing him. His mother said Our Lady would protect him, and his father told him that you can never dream you died because you always wake up right before.
He put the rosary on his night table, swiveled off his bed, and knelt to say his morning prayers. He looked up sideways at the plastic crucifix above his bed with the two brittle palm leaves thumbtacked below it and said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be.
His fathers shoes were outside his bedroom door as they were every Sunday, and Marty, still in his baseball pajamas, came downstairs to work on them. He could never get them to shine “bright enough to see your face in them,” which was how his father said he wanted them, but it wasn’t because he didn’t try.
First, he spread newspaper on the floor as his father had shown him. “You don’t want to get shoe polish on your mother’s carpet,” he’d said. Then he took an old sock, slipped two fingers into the toe, and used it to get out a good-sized wad of black polish from the flat can. He placed his other hand deep in his fathers shoe and applied the greasy black polish thickly all over, taking special care to cover around the heel and along the sides of the sole. Then he put the shoe aside and did the other one. “YouVe got to let the goop dry on them a few minutes. That’s the secret.” After the other shoe was smeared with polish, Marty waited an extra couple of minutes before working on the first one, just to be sure. When he could wait no longer, he got down to the hard work. He balled up the sock and wiped off all the extra polish. Then he got up on one knee and put his foot in his father’s shoe to keep it steady so he could work with both hands. The shoe was almost big enough for both his feet. He took another sock, a clean white one with a hole in the heel, and rubbed hard at first to work the polish in, then gradually more softly until he was lightly and swiftly drawing the sock back and forth over the shoe and around the back of the heel. Finally, he spit on it—all over, not just on the toe—and rubbed that in. Then the other shoe.
The shoes were old and had been resoled. On the left one there was a bump from his father’s little toe and the leather was cracked there.
He had to give up again. Was it really possible to get them so shiny you could see your face in them? His father had told him that in the army, if the sergeant couldn’t see his face in your boots, you had to clean the toilets for a month. Marty’s mother always cleaned the toilet; she didn’t seem to mind, but he didn’t think he would like that job.
Not that his father ever complained. He always told Marty that he had done a good job, and he always handed him two nickels then, one for himself, and one for the collection basket at Mass.
Marty loved the smell of the shoes when he was through with them. He held them up to his face and rubbed the side of the heel against his cheek. Smooth. He put them at the bottom of the stairs and went back to place the socks and polish back in the shoebox and put it away in the closet; then he folded the newspapers and took them out back to the trash can.
He never got dressed for Mass until his mother told him it was time, so now he had a few minutes to himself. He could hear his father upstairs in the shower. He was singing:
Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?
Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?
She can bake a cherry pie
quick as a cat can wink its eye.
She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.
Marty got his baseball glove from the back porch and practiced his windup in front of the full-length mirror in the hall. This was the second year his father had been coaching him. “Nah, cripes, you throw like a girl, Marty,” he’d said. “Now watch. You throw from the shoulder, hard, and use your back, strongest muscles in your body in your back, that’s where you get your power, and follow through, follow through!” So Marty leaned forward and made believe he was chewing tobacco and looked into the mirror for the catcher’s sign. He nodded, spit to his right (although he only made believe, he would never spit on his mother’s carpet) and went into his windup. “Rock back, rock back when you get your arms up,” his father had said, “then shift your weight when you throw. You can feel it. Feel it? That’s when you kick your leg out. Bring it over from the shoulder. Follow through, follow through!”
The phone rang, as Marty finished his windup and delivery, ending with his right hand almost touching his left knee, back bent but with his glove up in case the batter hit a line drive to the mound. He answered it on the third rin
g. It was his Aunt Elizabeth.
“I’m fine,” said Marty to her question.
“Good. Now let me speak to your father, Sweetheart, okay?”
His father came down the stairs holding a towel around his middle. He took the phone, and Marty went back to the hall mirror.
After a short time, his father hung up the phone. “Hey. Dad. Watch!” said Marty, and he went into the stretch position his father had shown him and turned to his left to pick off the imaginary man at first base.
But Marty’s father was standing naked, the towel on the floor, and Marty watched him slowly, very slowly, sit down on the floor and put his head down and cover his face with his hands.
Marty’s mother had been coming down the stairs and now she went to his father and knelt beside him. She put her arms around him and he looked up. “My father is dead,” he told her. Marty saw that something had happened to his face. It looked like it was melting like a candle. Marty’s mother covered his father’s lap with the towel.
Marty stood with his fist in his baseball glove and remembered that his father had a daddy too, and he thought about how he would feel if his daddy died. He thought about what he had just seen happen to his father’s face, which was now hidden in his mother’s hug. Was his daddy going to die too? What if God had decided to make today the day when everybody’s daddy died? And then he understood, for the first time, that it was his grandfather who had died.
He threw down his baseball glove, ran upstairs to his room, and dove into his bed, crying now. He chewed on the corner of his pillowcase, and when he was quiet for a moment, he could hear his father moaning downstairs; then he stuffed his head under his pillow and cried again because it was a sound he could not stand to hear.
Interference & Other Stories Page 8