by Greg Sisco
I lied to him. I said I thought we did. But the truth is, even if we don’t get to know, it might be even nicer not to care, and I’m sure we at least get that.
I stand up in a rage. I have spent my life fighting against what I do not understand, and I will damn well finish it.
I waddle out into the garage and find my gas can. I take it out back and grab the matches off my barbecue.
I don’t care what the sycamore represents. Whatever it is, it’s on my shitlist. I’ll take a stand against the infinite.
I drench the trunk in gasoline. I splash the fuel on its branches and let it run down those knots and holes that used to taunt me with their beauty. I soak that majestic expression of beauty in the piss-colored liquid until it’s dripping from the branches and there isn’t a drop left in the can.
For ages I try to dig matches out of the box with my branches, but it’s hopeless. I end up firing up the propane grill and dropping the box of matches on the flame long enough to turn it into a bright brick of fire. I snatch it up with both hands and hurl it at the base of the tree, starting my branches on fire in the process.
I wave my hands and beat them against my body to kill the flames as I watch the fire climb the sycamore’s stump and extend into its branches. In a minute the whole tree is one mushroom of fire and smoke and I’d love to sit there watching it until the fire department arrives to stare at me in horror.
But I have more to do.
I lumber through the house and into the garage. I dig through the shelves until I find the big, white jug I know is in there somewhere and I clamp my branches around it and haul it to the backyard in front of the burning tree.
Arthur follows me through the house saying, “You’ve really lost it now. It’s just a tree, Casey. Anything else was perspective. You can torch a tree but you can’t torch your perspective.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Holding it between my left and right branches on the back lawn and steadying the base with my roots, I manage to twist the cap off the big, white jug.
My father stands next to Arthur. He asks, “What are you planning on doing with that weed killer?”
I smile.
This won’t help me, not in any meaningful sense, but it is the right thing to do.
The sycamore seems to stare at me through the flames. So does Dad. So does Arthur. And the fetus. And my grandparents and the dog I had when I was a kid. They’re all here on my back lawn. They’re all watching me. And in every one of their eyes…
Jesus. Couldn’t they scream at me to stop? Or beg me to come to them?
Pure indifference. They watch me like they’re watching a movie. Not even a good one. Like Martin and me watching this week’s creature feature.
I hoist the jug over my head and pour it down my naked body. Over my head, across my leaves and branches, running down my flowers, my foliage, pooling at my roots. I guzzle the bitter liquid hungrily.
This is what I am. A weed. And the world is more beautiful when the weeds cease to be.
The heat from the sycamore burns my skin, my bark, whatever I have now. I drink and shower. Sirens wail somewhere in the distance. As the jug burps out its last, my roots dry and shrivel and I fall on my knees in the heat of the sycamore’s flame.
I smile up at my audience of dead loved ones and acquaintances, and for the first time I notice Elaine among them.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her, holding back tears. “I’m so sorry.”
Her eyebrows tighten in a baffled expression. “For what?”
The lion’s weary eyes grew heavy. The light at the end of his cave hurt them. He found himself blinking slower, dozing off, ready to wake in a better world.
“You don’t get to know what it all meant,” says Dad. “You never learn.”
“I know.”
I am the universe expressing itself for an instant.
The heat from the sycamore becomes overwhelming. A burst of light hits me. The sound of an explosion. I shield my eyes until the night is no longer blinding.
The sycamore is gone, a blazing crater of fire where it used to be. Flaming leaves rain down around us. They set my dried roots and branches ablaze and it seems almost immediate that I’m engulfed in flames.
And as the lion’s eyes flickered open one last time, the light at the mouth of the cave was darkened by a shadow.
He lifted his chin from his paw.
Where the tree used to stand, the figure of a child now stands. He steps out of the fire, out of the light, out of the smoke, to stand in front of me.
Martin.
A sound I’ve never made before escapes me. I don’t know if I’m laughing or sobbing. My son smiles down at me and runs a hand across my cheek.
I raise my arms, my branches, my hands. I hold them out for him to take.
“Androcles,” I say. “I need help. I need so much help.”
Martin laughs as he takes my hands in his.
“You over-dramatic lion,” he says. “This isn’t so bad.”
And he reaches down and plucks the thorn.
ACT III
That Thing We Don't Quite See
Sunday, September 19th
I think Mom’s got one foot in that other world these days.
It’s a shame. Seems to happen a lot. A long, loving marriage where two people get so attached to each other they can’t live any other way, then one day one of them hits the end of the line and the other follows right over the edge.
Fifty-five years of marriage though. That’s something. How many people these days even make it to seven? The so-called “copper anniversary.” Mom and Dad took home the gold. People talk about a diamond anniversary at sixty or seventy-five, but I don’t know. I think if you hit half a century it’s pretty clear nothing can stop you but death.
Aristotle said: “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”
I guess I understand. When you’ve spent twice as much time living for another person as you ever spent living for yourself, it has to be different. Arthur and me, we’re only up to twenty-six, just hit our silver anniversary last year, but already I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to him. I feel for Mom.
One soul inhabiting two bodies. When one slips away, you’re not just losing a loved one, you’re losing half of your soul. I can see how that pulls the life force out of you. I understand. It makes sense.
Still. It’s weird. The little details.
Dad wouldn’t let anybody leave him alone the last few months. His dementia had gotten so bad he wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone. Somebody needed to sit on the bathtub and talk to him. Or when he showered, somebody had to sit on the toilet. He wouldn’t be left alone in a room. The thought terrified him.
Now it’s Mom. Behaving the same way. The same bizarre symptom of dementia. Monophobia. Refusing to be left alone. Not for a second.
After Dad passed, Mom asked me to sleep with her. When I go to work Arthur has to stay with her. She says she can feel it, the other world preparing to take her. She says as soon as she’s alone in the house, it will take her. The house. The world. I don’t know.
At Dad’s funeral she was the picture of health. She cried and she spoke about him and I held her, but she told me she’d be okay. She said she knew he was in a better place and she’d see him again soon. In spite of everything, I thought she’d be all right.
And then a few days later, all of a sudden, it’s “Don’t leave me alone” and “I’m not ready to go yet.”
Neither one of them would leave the house. Dad said they would be angry if we left. Who they were he never answered. He screamed about them all the time. Sometimes he told stories about his family growing up and it made me think he was talking about them. All dead relatives. Doctors and priests both say it happens, they just can’t agree on why. Old memories of people from the past that spring up. But usually they’re nice memories. That would have been a bit of a comfort, I think. I wish Mom and Dad at least got tha
t.
“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”
Leonardo DaVinci said that. I learned it in college.
What they didn’t teach me in college is what to say to someone to help them die.
Nine years. Nine years studying literature to get my doctorate only to find out no college in the country needs another professor of literature and the high school students who care to learn about it are few and far between, and somehow I ended up a second grade teacher with thirty thousand dollars in student debt, waitressing in the summers at fifty years old, with a husband on disability and one dead parent and another on the way out, with dreams of writing a novel that never came to fruition.
Most people, their most expensive possessions are their houses or their cars. I rent my house, but that degree on the wall in my living room is more expensive than my car and Arthur’s combined. That’s my most expensive possession. A framed piece of paper certifying my memorization of about a billion nuggets of wisdom from celebrated thinkers and an absence of thoughts of my own.
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
That’s Harriet Beecher Stowe. Do as you will with it, and hopefully it matters because the class I learned it in cost five hundred dollars. It might sound like a lot of help, but when your Mom tells you her dead husband has been calling to her all night and you’re wishing you had a credit card that wasn’t already maxed out so you could charge more sleep aids for her and vodka for yourself, dollars to donuts you’d rather have the five hundred dollars and the hell with Harriet Beecher Stowe.
There’s an empty lot next to Dad’s for Mom. They bought the two of them together so they could know they’d be next to each other even as they rot in the ground and feed worms. That should be a sad thought for me, the woman who raised me with a grave all picked out and ready to go, but it’s actually soothing. It lowers my stress-level to know at least that one thing is out of the way. That one expense.
Is that awful? I’m pretty sure that’s awful.
Mom calls to me from the dining room as I make her lunch in the kitchen. She asks me if there’s lemonade. I tell her I’ll make some.
It’s funny. Aside from the fear of aloneness and the calls from them, she never shows signs of dementia. She never mistakes me for somebody else, forgets my name, asks how I did on my spelling test or anything. She’s perfectly with it.
And then if I start to walk through a doorway to where we’re out of each other’s sight, she screams.
Funny what the brain can do.
* * * * *
Saturday night Arthur and I go out to dinner. My old friend Ellen watches Mom at home for a few hours so we can be away from her at least for a little while.
“I don’t like to say it,” says Arthur, “but maybe we could put her somewhere, you know? I don’t think it’s helping her any to be with us. If she was in a home, people could look after her all day, professionals could decide whether it’s healthy to leave her alone once in a while, she’d be in a controlled environment, it’s… I don’t know. Would it be so bad?”
“We don’t have the money, Arthur. And even if we did, it would be awful for her. She won’t even go out the front door for a walk around the block. How are we going to get her to get in the car and leave for good?”
“We’d just have to present it to her as the only option. Tell her we need to leave and she can’t be left alone. She doesn’t want to be left alone anyway. I think that scares her more than leaving the house. I know that all sounds terrible but it would be better for her, wouldn’t it?”
I quaff my wine. “No. I don’t think it would, Arthur. I’m sorry, but I don’t. She’s lived in that house her whole life. Even if we’re not doing her any good, the house is. She was a little girl there, she had fifty years of marriage there, and she’ll… die there.”
“But what if she could live longer, and maybe not be so panicked all the time?”
“She’d be more panicked. Do you really believe that? In an unfamiliar place with nobody who knows her around all day? It doesn’t matter if there are professionals who know what drugs to give her. She’s barely clinging to her familiar world as it is. You can’t thrust her into an unfamiliar one.”
“Maybe you’re right. It was just a thought.”
“Well, we can’t do it.”
I know what’s going on in his mind as he stares at me from behind his plate. After twenty-odd years together we can communicate more or less telepathically. He’s saying the reason he really brought it up is because it would be better for us, me in particular. Because the last few months with Dad and now Mom have put so much stress on both of us that we’re losing our love for each other and for everything else in the world. He’s saying we need our time, but he knows it’s a vile thought—a human thought, but still a vile one—and he won’t speak it out loud. He’s arguing for its merits from Mom’s perspective because he can’t say out loud the horrible sentence that’s on his mind, even if it comes from a place of love.
The real sentence is: If you don’t have the strength to keep dealing with this, we can take the coward’s route and I will never judge you.
It’s at least mildly hypocritical for me to judge him for that sentiment, but I can’t help pitying him just a little for suggesting it.
This is a responsibility. It comes with life. Mom and Dad looked after me even when it wasn’t easy. And now I’ve looked after Dad, and damn it, I’ll look after Mom for as long as it takes.
Of course, there’s a vile but human thought in my mind too, and I’m sure Arthur can see it as well as I can see his.
My vile thought is: I just hope it won’t be much longer.
* * * * *
“She’s a sweet woman,” says Ellen. “She’s been nothing but friendly.”
“That’s good to hear. No outbursts or anything, then? No incoherent statements about people watching her?”
“No, no. She’s been the picture of health.”
Ellen has watched Mom a couple of times before. She’s the only friend I have left who is willing to do this sort of thing, a college friend. We went to high school together but never spoke. Then when we found ourselves in a lot of the same classes in university, we started talking.
What is it about those first twenty-some years that they’re always the ones you spend gathering up the friend circle you take with you for the rest of your life? Why is it always the ones who come to us when we’re young who stick around forever? Why, when we lose old friends and find new ones along the way, do we so rarely find one who comes to mean as much as that little girl we met when we were young and hopeful and stupidly optimistic?
Maybe I just answered my own question.
“Age considers; youth ventures.”
Rabindranath Tagore said that a hundred and fifty years ago. He was an Indian poet, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I learned all that in college. Unfortunately I also learned how to stop venturing and start considering, and all it got me in the end was decades of life spent treading water.
College made me old, ended my ability to strike up exciting friendships. At least Rabindranath Tagore told me why, I guess. But not even Rabindranath could tell me how to forget everything I learned and become young and adventurous again.
No, they don’t teach you that in college.
“Did you and Arthur have a good time?” Ellen asks.
“Well, that’s not the way I’d put it exactly, but we had a much needed time. It’s tough when you can’t be in a room together without your mother present for even a minute.”
Ellen laughs. “Say no more.”
I wonder for a second if she thinks I’m alluding to sex, but I don’t care enough to ask. A couple hours a week spent in the company of my husband without my mother present, I wish my life were fulfilling enough to want to spend them in a hotel room like I was twenty-one again, but no. Arthur
and I are of the age where time is better spent arguing over the possibilities of rest homes and avoiding the ugly truth that we’re only on the subject because it’s the closest legal alternative to euthanasia.
So sure, if Ellen wants to think I’ve had Arthur’s wrinkled body between my sagging thighs all night, she can think that. It’s a less disgusting thought than the reality.
Even a friend who’s been at your side since youth doesn’t need to see every despicable detail of you. But I guess that’s old age talking again. Consideration over adventure.
“Well, I should get going if you don’t mind,” says Ellen. “It’s late.”
“Sure,” I say. “She really never talks to you about it? The house? Or people? Anything?”
Ellen sighs. “Not to me. She’s just a sweet old lady and she says at her age you don’t want to be left alone for a second for fear you’ll hurt yourself.” She sees my uncomfortable expression and shakes her head. “I mean, she acts peculiar. She walks through doorways with me like you say, but… I don’t know. Maybe she just trusts you enough to open up.”
“Strange thing,” I say. “Strange thing.”
Ellen smiles and we exchange pleasantries and she heads out the door telling me she’s always there if I need anything or if Mom needs anything and she’s happy to help because she knows I’d help her. But she can’t help with the things that really get to me.
Four or five times now Ellen has watched over Mom for the evening, and every time it ends like this. This conversation. This uneasy feeling. Every time, it bothers me that Mom only acts funny around me and Arthur.
And every time we have this conversation in private while Arthur is in the other room with Mom and afterward Arthur asks why I look troubled and I never answer him. Tonight, more than any other night, I know I won’t tell him. It would only add weight to his thought that Mom might be better in a home.