by Joan Opyr
The nurse on duty was a large-breasted bleach blonde with nails that looked too long and too red to be efficient. The nametag clipped to the lapel of her floral print lab coat said she was Marilyn Case, R.N. She looked like a Marilyn. She also looked like a Shirley or a Judy or a Peggy, a short fat woman in her middle forties, a little blowsy and hard-bitten around the edges. Abby and I stopped in front of her desk and she smiled, displaying a mouth full of large crooked teeth.
“May I help you?” She pronounced help as hep, the true mark of the North Carolina native. She’d also say cain’t instead of can’t, call lunch dinner, and use words like haint and nary and twern’t. I smiled back at her and then surprised myself by answering in kind, stretching and flattening my vowels.
“I’m here to see Mr. Bartholomew. Would you please tell me his room number?”
Abby gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. It might have been, “Why the hell are you talking like that,” or “Scratch the surface, find a redneck.”
Marilyn stood up. “Why don’t I show you? I was just fixing to check on him.”
We followed her down a short hallway that seemed too quiet and ill-lit for a busy city hospital. We turned left and then right, winding up in a small alcove with four rooms. Directly in front of us, suspended from a metal arm above the first door, was a computer monitor, on the gray screen of which were four names in yellow followed by four electrocardiograms flashing in green. Bartholomew was the third one down, below Mallard and Bridges.
On the acrylic sleeve marking my grandfather’s room number, someone had written Bartholomew DNR in heavy black marker. I followed Marilyn in, but Abby paused in the doorway.
“I’ll wait out here,” she said.
“You don’t have to. I mean, I’d rather you . . .”
“I’m going to talk to the nurse when she comes out. I’ll find out what’s going on, and you can just concentrate on your visit.” She reached out for a moment and squeezed my arm. “Go on,” she said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll be here when you need me.”
The room was much darker than the hallway, lit only by the glow of medical equipment and a muted television set. My grandfather was lying on a pile of white sheets, his green hospital gown hitched up above his hips. Marilyn quickly tugged it down, but not before I got an unseemly glimpse of his penis and testicles. It wasn’t, however, his genitalia that I found shocking—it was his knees and feet. The muscle and flesh had withered away, making the bones and joints seem huge.
As Marilyn moved around the side of the bed to check the IV monitor, I tucked the blankets in tightly around those terrible legs and feet.
“Is it all right if I switch on a light?”
“Yes,” said Marilyn. “I don’t think it will bother him.”
The skin on Hunter’s face was a mottled yellow, and the hollows beneath his eyes looked bruised. White stubble covered his cheeks and chin. I wished someone—my mother or one of the nurses—had shaved him. The only time he’d ever allowed his beard to grow was once when he had shingles. He couldn’t stand having hair on his face. He said it was nasty. In the summertime, he shaved his armpits as well.
“Deodorant won’t work with all that hair,” he said. “That’s why men stink—men and damn dirty hippie women, off living in the woods.”
For some reason, I thought seeing him would be a kind of formality—if not easy, then at least not especially difficult. My grandfather was eighty-two years old. He had multi-infarct dementia, chronic lung disease, and a host of other opportunistic illnesses, the general wear and tear of a long life lived hard. And he’d left us a long time ago, my senior year in high school. He was a ghost from my past. He’d run off with the Avon lady, proving himself no better in the end than Lucky Eddie. I told the story now as a joke. I told it to friends at parties, and they all laughed and said I was making it up. Not your father and your grandfather, they said. It was the old door-to-door salesman tale with the genders reversed.
It was also funny at the time it happened—I could see that, I could appreciate the irony—and yet it wasn’t funny at all. It threw my life into complete chaos. He never understood why I was so angry with him, why I couldn’t forgive and forget, even long after he’d settled into his new life. I never told him exactly what he’d done, why it had such a profound effect on me.
He reached a reconciliation of sorts with my mother. They’d never entirely lost touch. At first he called regularly, usually drunk. My mother hung up on him. When he called sober, she talked. They began meeting on neutral ground, at Cooper’s Barbecue for lunch, or he’d stop by the library during working hours. Five years after he left, Hunter’s girlfriend, Jean, was killed in a car wreck. My mother agreed to visit him at home then. Years later, when he needed to go into a nursing home, she made the arrangements. He gave her his power of attorney. She said he’d been a good father to her. Way back when.
Nana had never been as angry as my mother and I were. She’d been disgusted but resigned and, in a way, grateful. She’d grown tired of living with a drunk, but she’d never have left him for that reason. Their divorce became amicable when the Avon lady died, and it fell into casual friendliness as his dementia took hold. She visited him in the nursing home, and they talked about people they’d known and friends they’d shared. They were like old acquaintances. It was as if they’d never been married, as if he’d become just another one of the many unfortunates she visited with her Sunday school class.
I looked at him now, surprised in a way that he was still alive. Except for the jagged, irregular breathing, I’d have thought he was dead. He looked pale and otherworldly. It was hard to reconcile the body before me with what he had once been—a small, lively man with amazingly strong forearms, arms like Popeye the Sailor complete with a couple of homemade tattoos. He was handsome in a rakish sort of way, ready with a joke or a funny story. When I was a child, I thought he knew everyone on earth. He’d strike up a conversation with a stranger and discover that they were distant cousins or that they knew someone in common. Most people liked him. He was a loyal friend, a Good Time Charlie, a hail-fellow-well-met.
He was also ignorant, bigoted, and occasionally violent. Sometimes he went wild with rage. One night I watched him take his fist and smash a windshield in the parking lot of the Jones Street Tavern. My mother thought he was an undiagnosed manic-depressive. My grandmother just thought he was crazy. I never knew what to think. I lived with him for four years. He seemed to be sane when I moved in. Three years later, he was threatening to commit suicide on a regular basis, and threatening to kill other people just as often. Sometimes, I threatened to kill him. One time, I tried. I threw him through the back door and down the concrete steps. I hoped he’d broken his neck, but he just laid there on the ground and cursed at me. His hold on life was tenacious. Despite all the late night phone calls when he said he was going to hang himself or blow his brains out, despite the reckless behavior and the fighting and the bad company he kept, he had no intention of facing God one moment sooner than necessary.
“God is a son of a bitch,” I could hear him say. “Goddamn him.”
I watched Marilyn change the IV bag and punch buttons on the various machines.
“How long has he been like this? When I talked to my mother—I mean, I knew he was bad, but I didn’t know . . .”
She nodded. “My shift started at three. He’s opened his eyes a few times since then but that’s about it. He still reacts to light and noise. Do you see? His eyelids are fluttering. He hears us talking.”
“But he’s not really conscious. Is he in a coma?”
Marilyn shrugged. “Not officially. You’ll want to talk to the doctor, of course.”
“My friend in the hallway, she’s a nurse. Would you answer any questions she has? She’ll be able to understand the technical stuff and then explain it to me.” I smiled, hoping to curry favor. “So, you think he can hear me, then?”
“I believe he can,” she said. “Go ahead and talk to him, anyway.
It cain’t hurt. I’m going to shut this door now and give you some privacy. Leave it open when you go out.”
As she pulled the door to behind her, I was suddenly sorry to see her go. There was something reassuring about her bleached hair and red nails, something fat and brassy and alive.
I pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat down. There was a local news alert. I didn’t recognize the anchor. I missed Charlie Gaddy and Bobbie Battista. She’d gone on to bigger and better things at CNN. He’d retired. All of this had happened since I’d left North Carolina. I switched over to a channel playing country music videos and turned the sound up a little.
“Imagine,” I said aloud. “Being nostalgic for old news anchors. Who cares? It’s always the same news, a basketball scandal at one of the universities, a wreck on I-40. What was the name of that meteorologist on Channel Five? Bob something.” I thought for a moment and then it came to me. Hunter was saying, “If you want to go to the beach tomorrow we’d better check out Bard DeBobeladen. I’m not going if it’s raining.”
I laughed. “That’s it. Bob DeBardelaben.” Hunter screwed up names on purpose. He liked movies with Gregory Pecker and Frank Snotistra. He called the Angus Barn restaurant the Heifer House. He called me Popeye the Half-assed Polack.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “I should have knocked your block off.”
A woman appeared on the television and sang a song about breathing. I didn’t recognize her. She looked like a supermodel.
“Whatever happened to Brenda Lee? She looked like a monkey in a four-foot wig but she could sing the pants off of this hussy.”
My grandfather twitched. Was he laughing? I wondered.
“Hunter,” I whispered, leaning close to his ear. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot. It’s going to be my job to send you to perdition; you know that, don’t you? This is it, this is the end. You ready to meet that God you’ve been pissing off for eighty-odd years?”
“Might as well,” my grandfather’s voice whispered back. “Don’t mind if I do.”
It was late and I was dopey. I knew he hadn’t spoken and yet I was sure he had.
“Coma, my ass,” I said. “If you can hear me, I’ve got no intention of wasting this opportunity. Just what were you thinking when you ran off with that woman? Can you tell me that? Jesus Christ, why did it have to be her?”
“Do you know what I told your mother when she was pregnant with you?” he whispered.
“Of course I know.”
“What was it?”
“You said, ‘I don’t care what it is as long as it’s a girl.’ I’ve heard this story a million times.”
“A million and one now, you ill-tempered jackass.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Don’t get sassy with me, you old bastard. I flew all the way from Portland to see you. Drove straight from the airport. Ma and Nana don’t even know that I’m here.”
“Did you come in on the Durham Highway?” he said. “Too many lanes and too many cars. Driving it’s like trying to angle a worm up a wild cat’s ass.”
“Is that really what you want to talk about? Don’t you want to know . . .?”
I heard the murmur of voices outside the door.
“Listen,” I said quietly. “I don’t want to talk about now. Now isn’t going very well for me or for you. I want to talk about yesterday.”
“Why? Yesterday was a son of a bitch.”
He was right, of course. Images from the past flashed by in no particular order, college, junior high, senior high. I’m thirteen again and my grandfather is fifty-nine. He sits at the kitchen table, pouring beer into a glass of tomato juice. He’s wearing red-and-white striped pajamas and gesturing broadly as he holds forth about God, the universe, and death. His hair falls forward in a white curtain across his forehead. He looks like a cross between Hitler and Otis Campbell, the drunk on The Andy Griffith Show.
“God,” he says, “is a lying bastard.”
“Really,” I reply. “What makes you say that?”
“He told me I was going to live forever.”
“Is God a bartender?”
“You blasphemous devil. God said I’d live to be a hundred.”
“That’s not forever.”
He shakes his head sadly. “I’m fifty-nine goddamn years old. Do you know that? Look at my hands, look at them. Do you see it?”
His fingernails are clipped and clean—remarkably clean for an auto mechanic. He scrubs them with Borax and a fingernail brush. On his left hand is a wedding band, on his right, a Masonic ring with a half-carat diamond.
“What am I looking for?”
“That,” he says, pointing at a mole about an inch down from the wedding band. “That’s goddamn skin cancer.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a mole. You’ve had it forever.”
He holds his hand up in front of his face, moving it back and forth to keep it in focus. “I have, haven’t I? Who told me it was cancer?”
“Jehovah,” I say. “He was tending bar at the Jones Street Tavern.”
“No, he didn’t. He said I was going to live forever. You wait and see.”
I opened my eyes again and saw him lying there, shrunken and pathetic.
“It’s funny,” I said, reaching out to squeeze his cold fingers. “I thought I’d be angry with you forever. I thought I’d be the worst person in the world to decide what happens to you, but that’s what I’m going to do. That’s why they wanted me to come home, to pull the plug, if necessary.”
I looked at the clock on the wall above the sink. It was half past nine Eastern time; I’d been up since four a.m. Pacific. I longed for a hot shower and a warm bed. Abby was waiting for me in the hallway, probably more tired than I was after our harrowing drive from the airport. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t seem to move. I wanted something else—I didn’t know what. I closed my eyes and it came to me. I wanted to go back to 1979. I wanted to materialize over that kitchen table and show my grandfather a picture of himself, a cadaver in a hospital bed with tubes hanging out of his arms. I wanted to say, “This is what will happen if you don’t stop drinking. This is what will happen if you keep running around.”
But I know he wouldn’t have listened. If the ghost of Christmas Future had stopped by our kitchen table to take him on a tour of the future, my grandfather would have called him a son of a bitch.
I stood up to leave. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “I’m sorry nothing turned out like it was supposed to.”
“That’s all right,” said the voice in my head. “Everything turns from sugar to shit.”
Chapter Six
When I was a teenager, I thought the Velvet Cloak Inn was the zenith of luxury. Forget the Ritz and the Waldorf—I’d never seen them. The Velvet Cloak had valet parking. You pulled up to the front door and one man in a red velvet jacket took your luggage from the trunk while another climbed into your car and drove it off to some hidden parking place; it didn’t matter where he parked your car because when you were ready to leave, another man would go find it for you. Sometimes, my mother and I took one-day vacations at the Velvet Cloak. She read books and I swam in the pool and we ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. I imagined I was John Lennon, living on the top floor of the Dakota. It was still a very nice hotel. I liked the location, on Hillsborough Street, a few blocks up from the bell tower at N. C. State University. I could wax nostalgic about my campus days without having to put up with the campus noise.
Abby and I checked into our room at a quarter past ten.
“Dibs on the first bath,” she said.
“Dibs on the bed by the window,” I replied. I threw myself down on the mattress and tested the pillows. Too soft. I stacked one on top of another and tried again. Not perfect, but it would have to do. I should have packed my own pillow.
Abby kicked her shoes off. “I’m not going to call my mom until tomorrow morning. I didn’t tell her I was coming,
so she won’t know I’m blowing her off.”
“Lucky dog. I’ve got to call my mother tonight. Nana’s going to be pissed that I went to the hospital first.”
“Go on,” she said, stripping down to her underwear. “Pay your penance.”
“First,” I replied, fishing my cell phone out of my hand luggage, “I have to check my voice mail. There might be something urgent. Perhaps George Bush called to ask my advice on Iraq.”
“Perhaps Saddam Hussein called to ask your advice on his mustache.”
“Close. I have four calls—the first is from Dolores.”
“So are the other three.” Abby went into the bathroom and turned on the water. “What kind of cop is named Dolores, anyway?”
“A cop in her thirties with a name from the fifties who has five cats, a nicotine habit, and an inability to take no for an answer.”
“What?” Abby called over the roar of the bathwater. “You’ll have to speak louder.”
“She says she knows I’m dodging her and she thought she deserved better than that. She says she’s through with me.”
“Hooray. She’s a lying sack of shit.”
“She says this is the last phone call I’m going to get.”
“Barring the three that come after this one.”
But the next three calls were not from Dolores. The second was from my boss, Clark Hauser of Hauser Designs, an innocuous name for the manufacturer of computer games like Piping Hot Death and Mortuary Mayhem. I was Hauser Designs’ technical writer and editor. I wrote game manuals, translating geek to English, and edited press releases and marketing materials. My favorite were the marketing materials. We had a contract with an advertising agency to write the commercials, but I wrote the copy that appeared on the box.
You’re Jack Ripper, Mortician Extraordinaire. You take pride in your work. You can take the hamburger from a car wreck and make it look like Grandma. You make the dead look lifelike. Too lifelike. State-of-the-art graphics and stab and slab action.
We also produced nice, boring stuff like architecture programs and three-dimensional room design suites. I’d taken a six-week leave of absence for my surgery, but I knew I wouldn’t be spending those six weeks unmolested by the call of duty. Clark Hauser couldn’t write a birthday card to his wife without running it by me.