Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  “Anyway,” his father grumbled, “the doctors say I can’t have the first one anymore, and I’m sure as hell not getting any of the second.”

  He gestured back toward Mother’s bedroom; Kane rolled his eyes. “So you’d rather die, is that it?”

  “I don’t know,” his father sighed, “but I’ll tell you this much. Every once in a while I think to myself: if I could go to sleep tonight and just never wake up at all, that would be just fine.”

  Their eyes met then, for the first time in ages: two souls exchanging glances as they passed in the night; one going up, the other down. Kane didn’t often look at his father anymore. It was too uncomfortable; it was like staring at a ghost. He killed off the last of his beer and took a long deep breath before answering.

  “You might not get off that easy, you know,” he said, very slowly. “You might not get to pass blissfully in your sleep. You might just wind up in Riverdale ICU with a tube up your nose, blinking once for yes and twice for no.”

  Kane stood, surveying the wreckage. Another stray clot had been inspired to fire down that tube and lodge in some dark fissure of the brain. It had happened in his sleep; he woke up, got up, went to the bathroom, and fell over.

  Boom.

  Kane heard about it fifteen hours later. He drove all night, coming down from the rustic little cabin in upstate New York where he’d holed himself up to work on his new book. The whole way down, his thoughts drifted back to that long-ago conversation. The whole way down, one thought kept repeating, over and over again.

  “Nice try.”

  Stroke number three had followed in short order, within hours of being admitted. It sent him into a medically mystifying stupor; they simply couldn’t keep him awake. For two days, he drifted in and out of consciousness.

  On the third day he rose, miraculously reawakened, weak but lucid. The first thing he asked Kane for were his cigarettes.

  By mid-afternoon, the DTs kicked in.

  And the black snow came.

  It fell for four days, a bleary-eyed wash of delirium and sedatives, needles and tubes and canvas restraints. Kane slept very little, poised on the death-watch while his father took many strange journeys.

  By the morning of the fifth day, the DTs had passed. By the afternoon of the fifth day his system had an adverse reaction to the sedatives, and he went to sleep again.

  Two days later he awoke, coughing horribly. Seven days on his back had produced a spectacular case of hospital pneumonia. Again modern medicine came to the rescue, with bronchial dilators and ever more tubes and needles and pills.

  And he just got weaker and weaker, inch by inch, closer.

  To the deadline.

  Kane had been forewarned about the paralysis, and the bilateral swelling of the brain, and the dozen-odd other biological disasters that had transpired. They were all dire, all terrifying.

  But they all paled, next to the look in his father’s eyes.

  The uncertainty was the worst. In a bad movie Kane might somehow know, just by looking at him. Real sad violins and cellos in the background, swelling with passion at that moment of true contact.

  Real life didn’t work that way. Six inches from his father’s grizzled, swollen face, holding the claw of his frozen left hand and staring into those eyes with only the hiss and burble of medical machinery for accompaniment, Kane couldn’t tell if his father even knew who he was.

  Worse still was to consider that Dad might indeed know, and want to react, but not be able to, betrayed and imprisoned by a conspiracy of blood and brain and bad habits.

  Outside, Kane appeared calm. Inside, he felt numb. He was aware of the presence of feelings, in a kind of cold, abstract way. He watched the synapses fly from a great distance, even heard exact replicas of emotional reactions coming out of his very own mouth. But he didn’t really feel attached to them.

  Not that there was any shortage of emotional grist: guilt, anger. Remorse. Rage.

  Pointless rage: at his father for courting misery and death, at his mother for aiding and abetting the cause, at both of them for not having the guts to work it out or the balls to call it quits; at God Almighty, author of this mad melodrama and architect of Original Obsolesence, the only One who would deign to build creatures so terrifyingly fragile that a lifetime of knowledge and experience could be wiped instantly from the face of the earth by a lump of cholesterol no bigger than a goddam booger, for chrissakes, an insignificant speck of matter hurtling through an infinitesimally small space to run amok among even more perilously delicate matter.

  “Do you know who I am?” Kane stared at his father’s eyes. “Can you say my name?”

  Nothing. The eyes stared at him, registering awareness but no emotion. They did not track any movement; six inches to either side and his father was staring blankly at the ceiling. Kane tried to center himself, tried to meet the gaze.

  Finally, he did. Those blue, frozen orbs locked on his.

  And Kane gazed into the abyss.

  His mother and sister were talking to the doctor; it was all a burble of incomprehensible modulating tones, coming from some distant galaxy. Kane gazed into the abyss.

  The abyss, through his father’s eyes, gazed back.

  It held for thirty seconds, give or take a lifetime. Then the old man’s gaze just drifted away, toward some distant inner space, and he was gone again.

  No one noticed as Kane walked out into the corridor, and kept on walking. He found the bathroom with the quiet urgency and aplomb of someone about to be violently, desperately ill. He entered softly. Locked the door.

  And cried. Until the tears wouldn’t come anymore.

  ■

  “I’ve been thinking about your father’s last wishes.”

  Kane sat across from his mother in the hospital cafeteria, a congealed lump of tuna fish salad sitting untouched before him. A glass of iced tea that tasted like runoff from a jersey chemical spill sat next to it. He wanted the food about as much as he wanted to hear his mother’s next words, which was not very. But like the food, he figured he’d better take it all in. So he ate. And listened.

  “He always said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea,” she said. “So I’ve decided that, when he dies, I’m going to take a cruise and do just that.”

  She nodded her head, in complete agreement with herself. The absurdly mercenary logic of her survival instinct was genuinely impressive. Kane looked at her flatly, trying not to react. It wasn’t too hard; he felt as if his heart had scabbed over damned near completely. Bon voyage, he thought. What a great way to start fresh: no plot to keep weeded, no urn to clutter up the mantlepiece, no unpleasant reminders. Just anchors aweigh as we sail into the sunset…

  “Good plan, Mom,” Kane mumbled. Maybe I can bribe the mortician to save a bone hunk for me.

  “Don’t feel bad about your father,” she said, by way of comfort. “He chose to do things this way.”

  Kane nodded. Yeah, he thought. That’s very true. He did choose this fate.

  But he had help…

  It was so perverse. There came a point where it was possible to see one’s parents, not from a child’s point of view, but more as peers: people who grew up, grew older, made decisions, made choices.

  Made mistakes.

  Had they ever really loved each other? He didn’t know. Maybe they didn’t even know. They must have, once upon a time, when they were young and nothing in the world was beyond the grasp of their imaginations. They had it together for a while, anyway; Kane had memories of a happy, stable childhood.

  And then something clicked, like a forgotten land mine waiting years for that one misplaced step.

  Kane’s father had given him some scraps of information, from time to time. Others he had gleaned from his mother, or his sister. But piecing together the story of his parents’ lives made Kane feel like an archeologist deciphering the cuneiforms of a lost civilization. Fragments surfaced. Most were probably lost to him forever.

  It
was during the heady last days of the Big War. He was a lieutenant in the Navy: handsome and cocky, fighting the good fight with the world by the balls. She was a model and a nightclub singer: a flighty, pretty girl with great gams and a gold digger’s streak. She’d married him less for love than for security, thinking him to be better off than he was; at best, she very likely loved him a whole lot less than he loved her. Kane couldn’t really bash her for climbing—from what he knew, she’d grown up working-class poor, abandoned by her natural parents and raised by relatives—but he always thought if she’d wanted to be nouveau riche she should have done more thorough research.

  She accepted her fate like a trooper, and their years together ran the middle class gamut of the postwar years. They begat their fair share of the baby boom—Karen, Kevin and Kane—and juggled kids and careers in a kind of ail-American ascendancy. He studied and eventually went on to become a university professor; not a lot of money but it had a certain class, and it was something he believed in passionately.

  She gave up performing but eventually discovered a talent for art, and went on to become a sculptor. Their social life burgeoned as they worked their way into a lively local art scene, with lots of friends, lots of shows, and awards and parties galore.

  And then somewhere along the way they lost their footing. The parties got wilder. The drinking got harder. Make no mistake; they both drank. But there was a difference, a line crossed, made clearer by the passage of time. Mother had a drinking problem. Dad was an alcoholic. Dad lost his tenure at the university, some terrible scandal the kids weren’t let in on.

  Kane never did find out what that was; another fragment lost in the great excavation. All he knew was that when he was fourteen they moved to a bohunk cowtown ten years behind the times. Dad had secured a position at a smaller, infinitely less prestigious college in a distant state, uprooted the family, vaporized the art shows, the parties, the social whirl.

  She never forgave him.

  They hobbled through the changes, growing ever more depressed and alienated from themselves and each other. He ultimately quit teaching altogether, no longer able to breathe fire into complacent, indifferent students, no longer able to see any reason why he should care. The world was going to hell in a handbasket, and he just didn’t give a shit.

  Kane grew away from them; searching for his own life, determined to define it on his own terms. He was their baby, the youngest. When he left, the remnants of the nest went with him.

  Middle age, when it came, found each of his parents blaming the other for their own unhappiness, until their union ultimately degenerated into a bloody war of attrition, where they punished each other for the things they should have done by denying each other the things each needed most.

  She had always wanted security. He had failed to provide her that. So she punished him, by denying him: her affection, his self-esteem. He punished her back, and himself in the bargain, by ceasing to care: about his life, about his health, about much of anything.

  And he started the serious drinking.

  Not the falling-down drunk kind; at least, not until much later. No, his was the brand that happened slowly, insidiously; a disconnecting process so gradual that you might not even see the change if you didn’t know the man. In the mornings, there’d be the semblance of the father Kane remembered: soft-spoken, though tired. A gentle and intelligent man.

  By afternoon, invariably, the torture had resumed. The voice raised. The temper flared. Everything became an irritant: the dog, the house, his wife, his job, his world.

  Life itself.

  Life irritated him from early afternoon through late evening, and on into the dead of night after night after night.

  And after a while, it never stopped at all.

  Still, they clung to the marriage: working at cross-purposes, antagonizing each other, racking up the years like points of some imaginary scorecard. We might be miserable, but we’d been together three decades and that counts for something, goddammit!

  Eventually, she couldn’t imagine a scenario in which

  she actually felt like she loved him again. She needed him, yes, indeed. In ways that she couldn’t see, which would become very apparent when he was gone. But she couldn’t let that through. She was marking time, she said, waiting for him to die so that she could get on with her life, afraid that if they split up now what little insurance he had would end up in the hands of some twenty-year-old chippie. He was actually worth more dead to her than alive.

  Eventually, she said it so often that she came to believe it.

  Kane couldn’t fathom why his father even remained in the game. Probably because he loved her still, beneath it all. And he needed–desperately, more than he could say—to be loved. By her.

  But he had maneuvered himself into a lose-lose situation: the more he drank, the less he cared. The less he cared, the worse it got. The worse it got, the more she harped. The more she harped, the less She could ever hope to express her love for him. The less she loved, the more he drank. The more he drank…

  And on. And on. It was a downward spiraling vortex, a doomed duet, with death at its heart.

  His.

  You were supposed to be understanding; yeah, sure. You were supposed to forgive, to remember that we’re only human, after all, that each of us has their faults and their shortcomings. Like the saying went, “If you love someone, you don’t expect too much of them.”

  “Fuckin’ aye,” Kane muttered, bringing the axe down with all his strength. Wood cracked like a rifle shot in the cold night air. Don’t expect too much of them. Right. Tell it to the worms. Tell it to the fucking carpet beetles. Kane saw it differently.

  The exact inverse, in fact. If you love someone, you expect an awful fucking lot. More than from anyone else on earth. If you love someone, you couldn’t help but let them in, close to the soft, beating mass of your heart. It was an inescapable risk. You let them in and hoped that they didn’t hurt you. You hoped that, if they couldn’t find it in themselves to live for their own sake, maybe they could get it up for the sake of those they loved. You hoped that there’d be enough time for everyone to work it out.

  No matter what they did, no matter how often they did it, you held out Hope.

  As the death watch ticked, toward its inevitable end.

  You held out Hope.

  Til the end of the line.

  You held out.

  Until you just couldn’t hold it anymore, until you were burned and burned and burned past all hope of recognition. Until something inside you one day just snapped…

  Kane gathered up the load in his arms to carry into the cabin. Inside, he laid the damp wood down on the hearth, laid a fire in the fireplace, and coaxed it to light. Then he sat down at the table that held his Smith-Corona and fed in a clean sheet of paper. He had to get back to work; the chore of cannibalizing his experience for posterity beckoned.

  There was a small bone-dry aquarium among the clutter of the tabletop, with a string of colorful postcards propped up against its glass wall. They were all from tropical ports-of-call in the Caribbean, all postmarked recently, all signed having a lovely time wish you could see this love mother. Lots of beautiful sunsets. Kane stared at their colorful cavalcade for a moment, and wrote:

  I see the deadlines in my father’s face. They grow deeper every day: prominent in the harsh winter light; drawn from the hollow sockets

  of his eyes, sketched in papyrus skin, and sadness, and time. Too much time.

  Too little time.

  I see the walls of his prison. I see the boundary, and the debt to be paid. Though we are close enough to touch, there is no contact. It is as though he has been sealed away, locked in a hell the depths of which I cannot fathom. We look, but do not touch.

  For a long time I wanted only to tear down th walls, to smash those fuckers into dust. I want’ to pull him back from the edge he seemed so determined to cross.

  Now, I welcome his departure. I celebrate his passing from this ve
il of sorrow, that he may join the all-consuming light, embrace his karmic destiny, reflect upon his travails in the sweet repose of eternal Night. I welcome his departure, that I can better get on with the process of honoring his memory.

  So that I can better deny the spark’of him that lies buried within his son.

  There was a small pile of wood shavings filling the aquarium’s center. Nestled on the shavings was a skull. Carpet beetles crawled across its cracks and crevasses, diligently cleaning the surface. Its hair was an ash-white nest of snakes rimming the dome of the skull, the movement of many tiny bodies making the individual strands rustle in the perfectly still air of the tank. They’d been at it for a long time now.

  They were almost done.

  I catch a glimpse of it every now and again; in a cough or a gesture, some nuance or tone of voice. I see my reflection out of the corner of my eye and it’s him, an updated version of the beaten-down man with the sad blue eyes.

  And it frightens me.

  Because there’s a mad rhythm to his, palpable as the tiktiktik of shoes down a hospital corridor, as the clock that runs down a life that lasts too long and ends too soon; a mad logic that says: if we are the younger versions of our parents, are they not older versions of ourselves? Are we as much a product of their struggle as their blood? Are we also doomed to roll over, to murder our dreams one day at a time, to endlessly replicate the sad patterns of this pathetic, genetic code? And are our children, when they come, likewise doomed to repeat our mistakes, as we repeat those of our forefathers?

  I think not.

  I will not.