Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  His fingers pulled the smile from his lips and pressed it out of existence.

  They wheeled into a waiting room recently renovated to look like an insurance office, with beige floors and walls and a receptionist penned within a single office cube. Unlike the rest of the hospital, the waiting room smelled like new carpet.

  Billy gave Bo a dollar for the soda machine. The kid grabbed Einstein and sprinted off for sugar.

  A door opened and a young tech in a sea green hospital smock appeared, holding a clipboard and a tiny pencil that looked like he had taken it from a golf course. The tech was midtwenties, tall, with a five o’clock shadow over his shaved scalp, and an ear pierced with a big brass hoop, like a pirate. He brightened when he saw Billy and the old man. “Perfect timing, Mr. Povich,” he gushed. “I’m Matthew. Do you remember me?”

  Billy watched the old man’s face sour. “Why wouldn’t I remember?” the old man said. “I got bad blood—I wasn’t hit on the head.”

  Checking his clipboard, the tech asked, “On a scale of one to five, with five being the best, how are you feeling today?”

  “Shitty.”

  The tech didn’t flinch. “Call it a one,” he said merrily, scratching a note. “And again, on a scale of one to five, how have you been sleeping?”

  “Shittily.”

  He frowned in sympathy. “A one—well, that’s no good.” He sighed dramatically and said to Billy, “Maybe the doctor will want to increase him to three treatments a week.”

  “I’m down here,” the old man said. “Why are you talking to him? Did you get hit on the head or something?”

  The tech took a half step backward. “Oh, Mr. Povich, it’s just that—”

  “Would you like to get hit on the head?”

  “Pa,” Billy said, cutting off the old man before he took on a six-footer one-third his age. To the tech, Billy nodded and mouthed, We’ll talk later.

  The contraption that cleaned the old man’s blood reminded Billy of a robot from a 1950s science-fiction movie. The dialysis machine was boxy but roughly human-shaped, with a flat-screen monitor for a head, which showed statistics that meant something to the doctors, but nothing to Billy or the old man. Plastic tubes snaked through the robot’s chest, and when these tubes surged with blood the machine took on a lifelike quality.

  The old man had moved from the wheelchair to a medical lounge made of squishy memory foam; even Billy’s father had to admit the chair was comfortable. The old man’s left forearm, brown and spotted like an overdone chicken, lay flat on the armrest. The first needle, angling through his skin about midway on his forearm, took the blood out. The dirty blood passed through a skinny tube that lay across the old man’s lap, and then flowed into the machine. There, it squeezed through the filters. The cleaned blood flowed the other way through another tube across his lap, and reentered his system through a second needle set just six inches from the first.

  The room held six dialysis machines. They were all busy—always were. Billy noted that kidney disease did not discriminate, neither by class nor by race nor even by age; young people waited here, too, for their blood to be scrubbed. The patients read magazines, watched TV on screens at each station, napped, whispered into cell phones, stared at the sprinkler heads in the ceiling.

  “I got two movies,” Billy said, fanning the DVDs in his fingers like two-fifths of a poker hand. “The library was a little low on variety, but I found Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

  The old man squinted, as if into a bright light. His heavy black-framed eyeglasses magnified the disgust in his eyes. “Say who?” His bottom lip puffed out. “I wanted a relationship movie, like from the olden days.”

  “And that’s exactly what this is. It’s about the relationship between a boy and his mom and the robot sent backward in time to kill them.” Billy frowned at the disc. “But I think this is the Spanish version.”

  “I don’t know Spanish!” the old man cried.

  “Okay—the dialogue is English,” Billy said. “Only the subtitles are Spanish.”

  “I said I don’t know Spanish!”

  Bo chugged Sprite and then pulled the can away with an exaggerated, Ahhhh! “Let’s watch the robot movie!” The boy had not been allowed to see sci-fi when his mother was alive; now he wanted to watch nothing else. For an instant Billy tried to recall the moment when his eight-year-old had graduated from love of dinosaurs to this obsession with robots and Albert Einstein, the world’s greatest scientist; it seemed like some kind of boyhood milestone. Soldiers would be next, probably. G.I. Joe with the kung fu grip. Then the kid would fall for Marcia Brady.

  “Any soft core?” the old man deadpanned.

  “I got these at the library, Pa.”

  “That’s why I asked for soft.” He dropped his head back and sighed hard at the ceiling, his thoughts someplace else.

  “I also got The Third Man, an Orson Welles movie. He’s from your era, Pa. It’s about a guy who might be dead, might be alive. Seen it?”

  The old man’s blue eyes, the part of him that seemed the most alive, shot for a moment to the boy, then back to Billy. “I’m in that movie right now, Billy,” he said. “I’m like the star, but I don’t like the script.” He grinned. Old age had inserted stripes of darkness between his teeth and turned a once perfect smile into a mockery of itself.

  He wants to quit. He wants to die.

  A bulge of fear squeezed down Billy’s throat. He casually pinched his Adam’s apple.

  Bo held the soda can to his lips but did not drink. He watched them. It seemed the boy had caught the scent of some grown-up thoughts passing overhead.

  Billy wanted to protect the boy. He would speak in code. Holding up the two movies but staring at his father, Billy said, “You have a decision to make. Not one you ought to make on impulse, or when you’re feeling low. We should talk it out.”

  “Albert and I say the robot movie,” Bo offered tentatively. He rubbed a hand through the jungle of golden cowlicks on his head, and then brushed Einstein’s hair with a finger.

  “Will you support what I choose?” the old man said. He glanced to Bo with a pained look—the old man wanted to protect the kid, too. “Or will you force me to … ah, ah … watch the movie that you want me to watch?”

  Billy licked his dry lips. “This isn’t something I can force, Pa.”

  “You can.” The old man tilted his head slightly, almost imperceptibly, toward Bo. “By guilt and by pity.”

  They stared at each other.

  The old man’s right, Billy thought. He could force his father to stay on dialysis by using the old man’s grandson against him. Just tell Bo: Grandpa will die without his treatment. The old man would suffer anything to stop the child’s tears. By guilt and by pity, Billy could force his father to live.

  “I can count to eight in Spanish,” Bo said. He no longer sounded tentative. The adult conversation had grown too abstract for him, and he had given up on learning its meaning.

  Billy glanced from his father to his son, noticing how alike they looked. Mostly in the striking blue eyes, serious and sad and with a mythical quality, like the eyes of a wizened old leprechaun.

  “Okay, Bo, it’s the robot movie.” Billy poked the buttons of the DVD machine, slid the disc inside, and started the film on the twelve-inch screen.

  The subtitle said: Terminator 2: Día del Juicio.

  “I can’t read Spanish!” the old man cried.

  “Don’t read it,” Billy said. “Just listen to the dialogue in English.”

  “But the words will keep popping up when somebody says something! How do I not read them?”

  “You can’t read Spanish,” Billy reminded him.

  There was no answer to that. The old man wrinkled his brow and shoved his thick-framed glasses higher up his nose. The corners of his mouth drooped in defeat.

  “I gotta run an errand on the other side of the building,” Billy said. “You two keep an eye on each other, okay?”

  The ol
d man gathered himself and huffed. Billy expected a wisecrack. But William R. Povich Sr. just said in a hollow voice, “I’m tired, Billy.”

  “He hardly looks like our son,” the woman said in a gasp. Her shoulders heaved and she cried into her hands, outside a hospital room. Billy looked her up and down. He noticed the cheap tin cross around her neck, her unpainted fingernails, the frayed laces of her white tennis shoes. She did not notice Billy, who was in plain sight but in something of a disguise. “Will he ever see again?” the woman cried. “Oh, goodness, Michael, will he ever walk?”

  “Easy now,” the man told her gently. “We can’t ever let him see us this way. We need to keep his attitude positive. Don’t scare him.” The elevator button was already lit, but he jammed his thumb violently against it, as if to show the machine how urgently they needed to leave the trauma wing.

  “He barely knew who we are,” she said.

  The man took her in his arms. “He’s drugged,” he told her, “for the pain.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but Billy saw him press his eye to her shoulder for an instant, to crush his tear into her cotton shirt. “We’ll know more when the swelling goes down, but the X-rays told them a lot, and they wouldn’t have moved him from intensive care if he were in danger of …” He paused a moment to edit a grave thought, then said: “If he were in danger.”

  They were in their late forties, Billy guessed, judging by the lines in her face and the gray whiskers on his, though they could have been younger people who had not slept well in a long time. The elevator yawned open, then gobbled them up after they stepped inside. Their desperation for their son to survive clashed in Billy’s mind with his old man’s desire to die. He pushed the thoughts from his head and slipped into the room the couple had exited. The name on the door tag said: Tracy, Stuart M.

  The room was dark but for a bleak white light, above a lump on the bed.

  Jesus Christ, look at him!

  four

  Before he heard the door click shut, Stu had sensed he was not alone. He marveled at how quickly his other senses had sharpened to compensate for what he could not see. Just one week since the crash, five days since Stu had woken up. Could his senses have grown more acute so quickly? The ability of my other senses must have always been there, he thought. I just didn’t notice them. Perhaps the subtler signals from his ears and his skin had for decades been squeezed to the edge of his bandwidth by the flood of information from the eyes. But now, as he lay blind, the weaker signals had a clear path to the processor. In his time of need, his ears and his skin were doggedly serving him, despite all those years he had failed to appreciate them. Such loyalty! He felt a warm column of pride in his chest for body parts that were so faithful.

  Wow, I am so stoned!

  “Mom? That you? Pop?” Stu’s mouth would open just half an inch and made him sound like he was a hundred years old.

  “Excuse me, Stu … uh,” said a voice from the other side of the bandage over Stu’s face.

  “You a doctor?”

  “No, no. I’m—are you okay to talk?”

  “It only hurts when I exist.” Stu smiled at his best line. That joke had cracked up the nurse with the cool, dry hands—Angela—the second-shift angel who smelled of Calvin Klein’s Obsession. Mmmmm. Stu slid out of the moment, and smiled at the recollection of her scent … that time she had leaned over him. She must rub the perfume on her neck … .

  “Stu? Stu?” The voice rang with agitation. Or was it worry?

  “Sorry,” Stu said, not really sorry at all. “I drifted.”

  “Not a problem, I understand,” said the voice; it was a man’s voice, low and a little nasally. A pleasant voice—clean, with no scratchiness or crackling. Stu had auditioned dozens of men for his band and could identify a great singer by the way he said hello. This voice speaking to him couldn’t sing “Yankee Doodle.” But this was a voice for fine speechmaking. The words came at Stu from a low angle, just above the bed. Was this man four feet tall?

  “My name is Povich,” the man said. “And I am, well, I guess I’m an investigator, for lack of a better term, working for the lawyer that represents Judge Harmony’s estate, and I want to ask you a few questions.”

  A barrage of yellow fireworks exploded on the inside of Stu’s eyelids. “They told me this was a private floor,” Stu said. “Only family is allowed in here.” His fingers felt for the call button that would bring the nurse.

  The man who called himself Povich paused for a second. Stu heard his shirt ruffle and the cartilage click in his shoulders. Amazing. I can hear a shrug!

  Povich said, “Sure the room’s private, it just ain’t impenetrable.”

  “You snuck here? How?”

  “I’m using my old man’s wheelchair right now. He had a stroke some years ago, and doesn’t walk more than a few steps at a time. He’s downstairs getting dialysis, so I borrowed his ride. Comfortable. Low miles. Handles like a dream. And I borrowed a white smock from the laundry room.” He made a long sniffing noise. “Smells unwashed, so I hope whoever wore this last was here for something like a broken ankle, not the Ebola virus.”

  Stu laughed. He felt a stabbing in his ribs. He groaned, stiffened against the pain until it passed, and then chuckled. Not so bad. The laugh was worth it.

  “You’re an honest dude, Povich,” Stu said.

  “It’s Billy.”

  “I think you’re the first honest person that’s come see me, Billy.”

  What had been worrying Stu was not the pain that raked him from the inside, like a trapped animal trying to bite its way out; it was the awkward distance he sensed from his parents and the hospital staff—an odd formality, as if nobody dared get too close, because Stu might not be here much longer. He sensed it in the pauses between his questions and his parents’ answers. When he asked about his prognosis, he got encouragement in response. When he demanded answers, they gave him drugs. He could not see his parents exchanging glances but he could feel it. Their secrecy terrified him. What is wrong with me?

  Stu said, “I know I’ve been hurt bad, but nobody will tell me how bad.”

  Povich paused a moment. “They don’t want to worry you.”

  “Everybody says I’m gonna be fine, and they can’t wait for when I get home and we play touch football in the snow this Thanksgiving, and all this happy horseshit. Nobody will tell me the truth.”

  He heard Povich smack his lips, then a light scrape as Povich passed a hand over the stubble on his chin. So he’s unshaven but doesn’t wear a full beard. Stu tried to picture him, but his imagination produced only a silhouette.

  “What do you look like, Billy?” Stu asked.

  “Huh? Me?”

  “I can sorta tell when the lights are on or off in the room, but that’s all I can see at the moment. My world is opaque, dirt-colored. I’ve been burned, battered. I hope to recover my sight, but who knows? How will my eyes work once the swelling goes down? For now, I have nothing to see but my imagination. Tell me—what do you look like?”

  “Like a bodybuilding anchorman,” Povich said, “but with a better tan.” He chuckled. Stu grinned, as wide as his swollen lips would stretch. Povich confessed: “Actually, I’m a tall, skinny Polack, with a face full of triangles—nose, chin, the hairline around my cowlick.” He laughed. “My teeth are real straight—too straight, maybe—because they aren’t real.”

  “What happened to the real ones?”

  “Punched down one storm drain or another, a tooth or two at a time, by the impatient men who collect overdue bills in this town.”

  “So you know hospitals.”

  “I got a bump on the bridge of my nose, right where it always breaks—there’s another triangle for you, though more like a pyramid with round edges.”

  Stu moaned happily. He could see him, floating in front of Stu like a character projected onto a dark screen. There was no wheelchair in the image. As Stu stared at the man his imagination helped create, Povich’s head sprouted a tall, pointed magician’
s hat, blue and covered with yellow stars. “Man, I don’t like being so wasted,” Stu said, more to himself than to Povich.

  “It’s for the pain,” Povich said. “You must have a lot of it.”

  “Billy, you have to help me. Tell me, how do I look?”

  A pause. “Well, shitty.”

  Stu laughed until the pain shocked him like two hundred volts, seizing his body for a few seconds of torture, and then dropping him limp. Okay, that time the laugh wasn’t quite worth it.

  “Your face is bandaged with white gauze, stained pink a couple places,” Povich said. “The skin that I can see is swollen, raked with scabs and scratches. Your arm is hooked to an IV hanging on a silver hook. It’s dripping a liquid the color of chamomile tea into you.”

  “Is that decaf?”

  “Probably would be, if it was actually tea. Jeez, you are wasted.” Povich chuckled. “Both your legs are encased in soft casts; the left cast is more complicated and rugged than the right. Makes sense—the police report I’ve read said you nearly lost your left leg. It broke a couple places, apparently, when you got thrown from the wreck.”

  Povich paused, breathed deep, and Stu thought he could also hear the wet click of his eyeballs turning in their sockets, but that had to be the drugs. Povich said, “There’s a sheet over your midsection that I don’t dare lift, with some tubes coming out from under there. And there’s, ah—hmm, a bag of urine hanging from under the bed.”

  “Got it,” Stu interrupted. He couldn’t believe nobody had told him he’d nearly lost a leg.

  “I know you had internal injuries, spent nearly a week in critical,” Billy continued. “I heard you’re going to need a few more operations on that left leg. You’re supposed to make it. But when you fly, the metal detector at the airport will ring like a slot machine.”