A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Khemlani, who thought I was applauding her theory. “Hooray! Hooray for history!”

  Better to be a garbageman than a doctor, when your father gets sick. If I were a tree surgeon or a schoolteacher or a truffle-snuffler, or even a plain old junkie, then sickness would just be sickness, just something to be borne and not something I was supposed to be able to defeat. For months my sisters had wheedled me into meddling consults with my father’s doctors, and I had pretended to understand what they were saying to me, and offered ungrounded opinions to them and to my sisters and my father. Even if I hadn’t cheated my way through medical school, the task of recalling the lost knowledge of pathology from second year would have been beyond me. I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine, and that’s really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illness, or really ever wanted to make anybody better, or ever convinced myself that I could.

  But nobody deducts the credit I deserve for being impaired and a fake. The doctors hear you are a doctor and enlist you in their hopeless task, and fork over the greater portion of the guilt packaged up in the hopeless task. The nurses hear you are a doctor and hate you immediately for judging their work and for interfering. And the angel, who has catalogued my every failing and should know better, berated me for failing to save my father’s life as it became more and more obvious day by day that he was going to die. It was the least I could do, she told me, because even this miracle is nothing compared to what I was supposed to grow up to achieve. And if I could do this, then everything else would turn around. It was the first hope, besides death, she’d offered in a long time.

  “He is not an enemy you can outwit,” said Mrs. Scott, one of my father’s Tuesday chemotherapy buddies. He got out of the hospital a week after I arrived home, and for another month I took him every week for his infusions. Lately he was too tired to talk, or else just sick of her. He fell asleep during every infusion, and left me alone to talk to her. He confided that he hated the way she whored after hope—every week something else was going to save her life—and I’d think he was faking it just to escape her if I didn’t know firsthand the beautiful thick sleep that IV Benadryl can bring. Every session they began a conversation about whatever late discovery she had made in the pages of Prevention or Ayurdevic Weekly or High Colonic Fancy, and five minutes into it he would tell her he felt oblivion pressing on his face, and five minutes after that his chin was on his chest and he was snoring softer than he does in natural slumber. And because I could not put a shoe heel deep into her mouth to shut her up, I always suggested a game of checkers or cards or backgammon. Dr. Klar’s infusion salon was packed with those sorts of diversions.

  We played chess, a game that usually generated a lot of thoughtful silence—she’d put a finger to her temple and stare so hard at the board that I expected it to start vibrating in sympathy with the intensity of her gaze—but today she was distracted and a little agitated, maybe because she was getting steroids, or maybe because my angel was sitting so close to her, and despite her optimism she was getting sicker from week to week, and I swear that as they get closer to death people can start to feel the angel’s ugly emanations.

  “It’s not a game of chess, you know,” she continued when I said nothing. “I think I just fully understood that right now.” I put my finger down.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. Like my father, she had lung cancer. “Oncoloquatsi,” she whispered. That was the name she had assigned to her disease, and she always whispered it, as if to speak his name too loud would be to summon strength to him.

  “Oh, him,” I said.

  “I know it suggests a game, how you move and then he moves—you pick a chemo and he counters with a mutation, or you find the perfect herb to overcome him and he produces another measure of resistance, and the doctors play the game from organ to organ until your whole body is a board. They even doodle you up like one.” She pulled down on the neck of her blouse to show a piece of skin below her collarbone—it was just a cross to mark a target for radiation. “But this is only a surface-seeming. Look deeper like I have and you will see the truth.”

  “I think I’ve got you,” I said, moving my bishop illegally. She didn’t even look down.

  “How often have I heard that from him? But he never has gotten me, and it’s not because of my disciplined mind. It’s because I have learned to resist him in the very marrow of my being. The very marrow, Doctor. It’s not a lesson you would have learned in school, but I want you to learn it. I want your father to learn it. I have disciplined my soul against this enemy, and he must do it, too.”

  The angel sidled closer while Mrs. Scott was talking. She leaned over and took a sniff at the lady’s turbaned head. “Three weeks,” she said. And then she put her nose close to the thin, shining skin of my father’s forehead—every day his skin seemed to get a little thinner, or stretch a little tighter, so I was sure that just the faintest rubbing pressure or the lightest scratch would reveal the dull-white bone underneath—and said the same thing.

  “Shut up!” I told her.

  “It’s hard to hear,” Mrs. Scott said. “I know it’s not your common wisdom, but you don’t have to be rude.” Dr. Klar came in before I could answer or apologize.

  “Hallo, everybody!” she called out. Thirty years in southeast Florida had not dulled her accent much. This appealed to my father, who liked that she was German, order and discipline having always added up in his life to success. Her immaculate white coat seemed the least perfect thing about her, but just being in sight of it I felt accused of slovenliness and failure. “Here is the grandma of your better nature,” the angel said the first time she saw her.

  My father woke at the sound of her voice, and smiled at her. “Charlotte?” he said. A week after I took him from the hospital, he started mistaking people and places, thinking a nurse or some solicitous church lady was one of my sisters, or thinking he was in his childhood home in Chicago, calling out for a dog who died sixty years ago. Me he never mistook for anyone else, though he often seemed surprised to see me. “Still here?” he said some mornings.

  “It’s Dr. Klar!” she said brightly. She said everything brightly, even things like What’s the use or If he’s alive in a month it will be a miracle. She was one of those oncologists who speak life out of one side of their mouth and death out of the other. For my father she had only good news; for me only bad. I hated her.

  “Darling,” my father said, closing his eyes again and still smiling. “When is the baby coming?”

  “Soon,” she said. “The baby is fine. Everything is fine!” She reached out to pat his shoulder but I caught her hand.

  “The bad shoulder,” I said. He had metastases all over, but his shoulder and his back bothered him the most. He nodded his head and fell back to sleep.

  “How is the pain, then?”

  “Worse. And we’re out of Percocet. He’s out of Percocet.”

  “Easy enough to fix,” she said.

  “An ounce of meditation is worth a pound of Percocet,” said Mrs. Scott.

  “In certain traditions!” Dr. Klar said, then she beckoned me out into the hall. “I think it’s time to stop,” she said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop hiding!” the angel shouted.

  “Stop the chemo,” said Dr. Klar. We had this conversation every week. “What are we doing? What good is coming of it? Why are you coming here every week, when he could be at home?”

  “He doesn’t want to stop. He wants to keep going.”

  “Just put out your hand to him and he will be healed,” the angel said. “Just put out your hand to him, and you will undo all the pain you’ve caused me.”

  “Does he know what he wants?”

  “He’s always confused here. You keep it too cold. And the Benadryl before the infusion makes him sleepy.”

  “Carl,” she said, putting her hand
on my shoulder the same way she did with him, comfort for a dead person. “It really is getting to be time.” And the angel said, “It has always been time!”

  Things started to go wrong between the angel and me after Cindy Hacklight showed me her pooty in seventh grade. Cindy had made a sort of cottage industry of showing around her pooty to anyone—girl or boy—who would give her five dollars, a large sum back before high school inflation. You got the feeling that she didn’t really care about the money, but sensed that what she had wasn’t something to show for free. She didn’t need to be paid, anyway. There were no poor children at our school.

  “Go not that way,” the angel said. She saved onerous fancy-speak like that for her most serious moments, for things she really meant, for things that really mattered. But I went with Cindy into the forest behind the gym, where she leaned against a narrow poplar and swore me, not to secrecy, but to respect for what she was about to show me. It was one promise I’ve managed to keep all my life, to keep reverence for her bald little pooty, then in seventh grade and ever after, even when I met it again one summer when we were both home from college. “Turn your face!” the angel shouted as Cindy lifted her skirt. And the angel was ugly for the first time ever, having put on the apricot face of our head-mistress, Ms. Carnegie. I looked back and forth between them, startled by the contrast, how beautiful was the one and how ugly the other, until Cindy, keeping her skirt up with one hand put the other on my head and turned my face to her. “If you’re going to respect it you’ve got to look at it,” she said.

  The angel berated me for days afterward—how mild it seems in recollection, compared to what she dished out in later years and decades. “How is a seducing pooty like a grand destiny?” she kept asking me, and then she would answer her own question, and eventually she trained me to give the right answer. “Exactly not at all,” I said. Yet awakening lust wasn’t the problem, though eventually the lust that awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, but never of drugs. I think it was the first time that something so ordinary was as attractive to me as the extraordinary things the angel said I must dedicate myself to. When I lay with Cindy on the scented ground in my father’s orange groves, what I experienced was a very ordinary comfort, and when she raised her skirt in the woods I understood that I could want—so badly—something the angel thought I shouldn’t.

  My father had a little bell that he rang when he wanted something. Mornings, I would hear it and rise from the single bed I’d slept in when I was five and go downstairs to see what he wanted. At first after he came home it was to be helped out into the yard to sit in the sun, and then it was coffee or breakfast when he could not get those for himself, and then it was just to be turned or for help retrieving a blanket that had migrated down past his hips, and then finally he would just ring it and ring it as constantly as a beggar Santa, not knowing what he wanted, in which case I gave him a pain pill (and took one myself, always supremely faithful to my rigorous policy of one for you and one for me), and this would settle him.

  Janie Finn was our hospice nurse. I always hated hospice, and hospice people, nurses with smart heels and smother pillows, and the women in charge of the palliative care programs, who seemed universally to be dark-eyed and dark-haired and very tall. They dress like nineteenth-century Jesuits and cherish crushes on death. But Janie brought me liquid morphine and Ativan—and either of those would be enough for me to forgive anybody the mere crime of being. “Your jab and your hook,” she said in the kitchen the day she met us. She had placed the bottles in my hand—I hadn’t even had any yet and already I could feel a lovely warmth coming out of them, and they seemed to catch the afternoon light in a very special way. Janie set her feet and threw out two quick punches. “A one-two against the pain,” she said. “One-two! Give it a try.” With a bottle in either hand I gave it a try, and, yes, my fists seemed to have a certain heft to them. I threw a punch at the angel and she actually ducked away.

  I made free with the drugs, and made a lot of trips back and forth to the pharmacy, and imagined the little man in the back filling the bottles from two big coolers of bright, pure drug, and dreamed of following him back to put my mouth to the spigots, because I was sure that if I could just take enough, then the angel would be permanently transformed, and if it happened also to be enough to kill me, then all right. I was sure that she would take me someplace bearable. How she hated those little bottles. If I’d had them when I was twelve, I might have made a normal life for myself with their daily medicine.

  “Just put out your hand,” the angel kept telling me. “Touch him and make him well.” Though she hardly ever screeched at me in those last few days, it seemed like a worse torture than ever, to have her demand the impossible of me so consistently, and to blame me like that for how he was getting sicker every day. It made me feel worse than anything she’d ever said to me. I could not ignore a homeless person on the street without her detailing the ways in which I was responsible for his misery, absent policies and initiatives never having established a common weal, as if the hundred thousand sins of omission that were my unfulfilled destiny added up to national and individual catastrophe. It was easier to bear when she blamed me for the woes of strangers, even when they fell out of the sky or burned in their churches. I can make even little children faceless, but my father could never be anonymous to me, and for some reason, as the weeks went by in Florida, I believed her, better than ever, when she told me that every wrong thing I’d done could be redeemed in one miracle, and that if I could make my father well with one hand, then with the other I could do the same for the whole world.

  “Make me dinner,” my father said, so I did. It was only three in the afternoon but no matter what time of day it was, the meal was always dinner, and always it was the same thing, a chocolate milk-shake with a banana and a raw egg and a little Ativan in it. When I brought it to him he took a sip and he was done. He turned his head and opened his mouth like a baby bird—this was the signal for pain medication, so I took the morphine out of my pocket and dropped in a few drops. He smacked his lips and turned back to the television, then closed his eyes. “Now I’ll take a nap,” he said. “Go to your room.”

  I made going-upstairs noises but went outside instead. It was another brilliant blue afternoon. He kept saying he wanted a storm. We mostly watched television when he could stand to have me around in the living room with him, and we always watched the weather. It was hurricane season but all we’d had was near misses. “Look at that!” he’d say, pointing at a gigantic storm swirling across the Atlantic, or he would shout “Fool!” at the hapless reporters clinging to light poles and declaiming the magnificently obvious. Hurricanes were the enemy when I was a child—they tore up trees and scattered fruit. But now he spoke the names of the female hurricanes with great fondness. “I’ve always liked them,” he said when I asked him about it.

  Our nearest neighbor was a mile away, so nobody asked what I was doing when I hung the hurricane shutters on the living room and kitchen windows, and my father asked no questions from inside. He slept so heavily now that a few times, with his arms and legs always so cold, I thought he had already died. I nozzled up the hose and propped it so it would spray on the shutters, and just at dusk I turned it on. The angel was half-ugly and half-kind because I was half-stoned. “You play tricks on him when you should be calling him out of his bed.”

  “It’s not a trick,” I said. I spent another few moments watching the sky and taking just the smallest nip of the morphine and then went in. When I came into the living room with a candle he asked what was going on. “A big storm,” I said.

  “Finally!” he said.

  We had a party during the storm, two more dinners and Ativan and morphine all around, and the storm picked him up, so he was more alert for a while and told me stories of hurricanes past, of rui
ned crops and toddlers surviving miraculously when a tornado stole them from their homes and deposited them in the next county.

  “I know you have secrets,” he said suddenly. And then he said, “Your sister tried to drown you when you were two—do you remember?”

  “No,” I said, and asked him to tell me more. But then he thought I was my sister Charlotte.

  “How could you hurt a little baby like that?” he asked, and I said I’ve done a lot of bad things.

  “Tell me about it!” said the angel. I took another drop of morphine, right in front of him because his eyes were closed, but then as if he could smell it he opened his mouth, so I gave him some, too. And then I took some more, and gave him some more, and then switched to the Ativan. But still the angel was a harpy. “Put out your hand!” she said. “Another angel is coming!”

  “It’s all right,” my father said. And then he whispered, “Your mother tried to smother him once. Just a little, with a blanket, and she told me about it right away. But she was depressed, and that’s what you do when you’re depressed.”

  “If you were a great man,” the angel said, slurring now, “if you were president—and you could have been president—then I would be a national conscience!”

  “Shut up,” I said quietly to her, thinking I had pitched my voice so she would hear it and he would not.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, sassy girl!” he said, and I gave him some more morphine. Though he hadn’t asked for it he sucked at the dropper when I put it in his mouth.

  “You can do it,” she said, her face flashing beautiful for a moment. And she showed me, putting out a hand that was soft and white on one side and hairy and rough on the other. She held it over his chest. “All you have to do is finally stop fucking up.”

  “You’re ruining it,” I told her, and took a swig of the Ativan, just a tiny sip really, but you are only supposed to take it drop by drop and I knew why as soon as I took the swig. It was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate. Even my father’s face became beautiful, still yellow and sunken but now utterly lovely, and how strange to see a beautiful face that looked so much like my own. The room shined with something that was not light, and there really was a thrilling storm blowing outside and shaking the walls. Every so often he would reach blindly for something not there in front of him, and he did this now, so I reached with him, and the angel reached, too, all three of us putting out our hands together.