Betty and I were dry-eyed by the time the next elevator arrived. She wrote down the number of the Oxnard apartment she’d moved into with her cousin. We said our good-byes and I crowded in with people headed toward other sickrooms on other floors. I was eager to reach my father while he was still aware enough to notice I brimmed with appreciation.
I had to wait in the anteroom of the ICU for Lucinda to buzz me in. The door opened on a swarm of sounds. A suction pump wheezed. Beeping heart monitors drifted into and out of synch, strangers’ pulses briefly allied, then divided. Lucinda, every bit as diminutive and efficient as I’d imagined, introduced herself and turned to lead the way. I followed her glossy black hair, the heavy length of it swaying with her gait. We had to dodge doctors and nurses who spoke in code and moved from one curtained enclosure to the next, all of them responding to a set of demands I could percieve only as an overall blur of emergency. We were halfway across the room when Lucinda stopped in her tracks. She explained that my father’s kidneys were failing and warned me that I’d find him unconscious. “From sedation,” she said, “and losing the blood.” She clutched the edge of the curtain and waited until she saw some sign that I’d registered the gravity of his condition. Then, despite my look of dire surprise—had I misunderstood what Betty had told me?—Lucinda yanked the curtain aside.
My father sprawled in the bed as if sinking into his own impression. His eye lids flickered with the urge to open. With his dentures removed, his lips caved into a mouthful of darkness. Lucinda announced that he was being hydrated intravenously and fed through a catheter inserted directly into his stomach. She’d planted the catheter herself, and before I could stop her, she tossed the blanket aside to show me her handiwork, a thin plastic umbilicus trailing from a scarlet incision near his navel.
For the next week, every time I entered the room, I found him sprawled in the same position, jaw lax, lungs heaving. According to Lucinda, he often woke late at night after the sedation wore off, certain she’d stolen his money. Or else he feared he’d forgotten where he hid it, or whether he had money hidden at all. Soon he believed she was stealing his clothes. Stealing the water that filled his glass. Stealing dirt from the potted plant. This endless succession of thefts enraged him, though even he, a former lawyer, could never prove she’d taken a thing. An old hand at dealing with dementia, she took his accusations in stride. Fearing he might harm himself or another patient, Lucinda sedated him when he grew unruly. But even after a dose of morphine he’d try to wrench the tubes from his flesh, claiming he was late for work, and she had to strap his arms to the bed.
When my father took the first wet breaths of pneumonia, sedation was no longer necessary—a fevered weakness kept him in check. I’d squeeze his shoulder: nothing. I’d insinuate my face into his but discover I was invisible, no one’s son after forty-eight years. Now and then a reflex fired down his spine, legs twitching for half a minute.
My father’s hearing aid had been removed, and one afternoon I apologized for my part in the misunderstandings we’d had over the years. There were plenty to choose from, but I mentioned the car and bill in one breath, as if this, at last, confirmed their connection. I apologized for his part too, since I wanted to believe he would if he were able. I had no illusions that my father heard me or understood a word. There had been so many times, especially later in his life, when he gladly switched off his hearing aid; like a child who closes his eyes and believes the world has disappeared, he moved through a hush that silenced the earth. I wished him that muted refuge now.
A month after my father died, I visited the Oxnard branch of Bank of America to open his safe deposit box. I wasn’t expecting to discover much of value; during the last days of his life, he’d been badgered by a small but persistent battalion of bill collectors. “They’re the ones who’re strapped for cash,” he’d told me. “It’s their problem, not mine.” My father had come to believe that paying even the smallest bill might make him appear weak or defeated, whereas debt, rather than humiliating him, proved his triumph over the importunings of authority, and finally over the great green tyranny of money itself. In any case, the contents of the safe deposit box constituted the bulk of my inheritance, and I had no idea what I’d find inside it.
With its decorative borders and official seals, my father’s death certificate bore a remarkable resemblance to money, though of course it was signed by the county coroner instead of the secretary of the Treasury, a document nonnegotiable in every sense. The bank manager checked it against an entry in her ledger, then escorted me though a security door and into the windowless vault, whose walls were like those of a mausoleum, hundreds of numbered cubbyholes reaching from floor to ceiling. Since my father’s box was on the top row, she had to climb a metal stepladder, teetering on her high heels while she inserted the key Dr. Montrose had given me. She slid the narrow safe deposit box from the wall, and as she handed it down to me, I noticed a piece of adhesive tape stuck to the bottom. “Mine,” it read in my father’s crimped, arthritic scrawl, a penmanship that came with old age and bore none of its former flourishes. He must have thought this label would prevent what little he had from being stolen, or prove it belonged to him alone, a hedge against destitution.
The manager led me to a small private viewing room and closed the door behind me. I set the safe deposit box on the table, lifted the lid.
This was my inheritance: $5,000 in one-hundred-dollar denominations. Heaped in a blue velvet jewelry box were a few gold rings my father had bought for my mother, rings she’d worn so infrequently they barely held a sentimental charge. Wedged in the very back I found an old sheet of onionskin stationery from my father’s law office, the same letterhead on which he’d typed my bill. On it he’d made dozens of computations in pencil, numerals meant to figure out, once and for all, how much money he had. Yet my father trusted none of his solutions; the problems were repeated several times, the numbers smudged.
The modest contents of the safe deposit box came as no surprise. Long ago I’d given up on inheriting my childhood house or any portion of the savings my father had squandered on the business schemes and lawsuits—motivated, I understood now, by burgeoning dementia—that left him bankrupt. I stuffed the jewelry into one of my coat pockets and cash into the other, feeling a weight that the things I carried couldn’t quite account for. I left the key inside the empty safe deposit box, the strip of tape still stuck underneath. Soon the manager would slide it back into the wall, my father’s claim forever asserting itself in the Oxnard branch of Bank of America.
Once inside my car, I counted out the cash once again. While thumbing through the money, it occurred to me why, just a month ago, my father had tallied these same one-hundred-dollar bills over and over in Dr. Montrose’s office, why he kept his calculations locked in a vault. Counting can be a form of consolation, a clarifying prayer; you utter numbers and believe in reason, in the steady progression from one thing to another, in the prospect that things will finally add up. That three follows two is a certainty, as inevitable, my father would have said, as taxes and death.
Afterlife
Soon my father’s afterlife began. Which is to say that the repercussions of his death assumed a life of their own.
Late one night, while Brian lay beside me and enjoyed a routinely peaceful sleep, I began to wonder why, according to Betty, my father had regained consciousness in her presence but not in mine. “Dad,” I imagined saying, “maybe there was a reason you didn’t regain consciousness when I came to the ICU. Maybe you were still angry I hadn’t come to get you out of observation. Or maybe you still thought I’d paid Betty to love you.”
Listen to yourself! A person doesn’t decide to be unconscious! You don’t need a motive to go into a coma! Ask your mental-doctor friend!
I’d wrongly supposed that as I went on living and my father didn’t, my tendency to invoke his voice, to engage him in the old heave-ho, would simply fade away. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned
into a longer bunch of months, his brusque rejoinders and knotty logic thrived inside me. Picking up the slack in his absence, I played Dad’s part with increasing conviction. I still thought of him as irrational, but now that I was better at being him, I thought of myself as irrational, too. Thus formed the bonds of father and son. Too late, perhaps, but unbreakable.
* * *
The day Betty had appeared like an apparition in the hospital lobby, tearful over Dad’s sudden recovery, I’d stumbled upon indisputable evidence that she had tried to proselytize him, whether he’d been conscious or not. After Lucinda rushed me through the ICU and pulled back the curtain, I stood immobilized at the foot of his bed, unable to bridge the abyss between the groggy but talkative man Betty had led me to expect and the thin, intubated figure lying before me, gasping for air. Shunts needled their way into his veins. Glucose dripped through his IV tube like sugar water through an eyedropper. Beneath the scent of rubbing alcohol, he exuded a sourness that some animal part of me recognized as the scent of fear. I moved closer, as if he’d called out to me, though he hadn’t made a sound. That’s when I noticed a videotape lying on his nightstand. Addressed to Resident, it had been sent to the trailer park from the Trinity Broadcasting Network, home to Betty’s favorite show, This Is Your Day. How attentively she’d watch the afflicted limp toward the spotlit Reverend Hinn, his hands a conduit for the Lord’s glory. The video, still encased in its cellophane wrapper, hadn’t been opened. The address label obscured its title, though a photograph of orange-and-yellow flames flickered across the box in an ominous conflagration.
Only once, as a young boy, had I stolen something that belonged to my father; I snatched a handful of change from his dresser. He didn’t miss it, though for days the fear of getting caught hovered above me like a thunderhead. Years later, when he billed me for my life, I expected to see that petty theft added to my tab. And yet I stole the video without a moment’s hesitation. Intuition told me not to let him see it, whatever it was, and so, when my visit came to an end, I scooped the box off his nightstand, parted the curtain, and walked away.
Several freeways later, I eased my car into the garage and headed up the back stairs to the kitchen, video in hand, my curiosity mounting. Late morning sun shone through the windows, but I flicked on the glaring lights regardless. I put on my reading glasses, the lenses almost as thick as my father’s, and found myself in a crystal-clear face-off with a man identified on the back of the box as Dr. Maurice Rawlings. In the color photograph, his gray hair was brittle, his skin so wan and chalky he could have passed for a plaster statue. Transparent cellophane provided no protection whatsoever from the doctor’s stony—brimstony—visage. Actually, his gaze was aimed a little to the side, which gave it the menacing potential to shift without warning and incinerate anyone standing in its path. Forget airbrushed authors’ photographs or glossy Hollywood headshots. His burgundy tie and jacket may have matched, but that was his last concession to the camera. He was squint-and-grimace from the Adam’s apple up. I hate to be ad hominem about it, but from every indication, scolding the masses was Dr. Rawlings’s bread and butter, and he’d either been born with, or had earned, precisely the face to get the job done.
Removing the cellophane wrapper required a sharp object. Still dazed by the sight of Dr. Rawlings, I absently reached into the kitchen drawer and pulled out … a potato peeler. An odd coincidence given the fact that a potato peeler had been my father’s weapon of choice when confronting the DWP’s meter reader. I’d never given much thought to the potato peeler’s relative benignity. Gripped in my fist, it weighed next to nothing. Granted, Brian and I owned a really old potato peeler, one so dull it could hardly peel potatoes let alone pierce an enemy’s flesh. It seemed especially flimsy when compared to the handguns and automatic assault rifles that were wreaking havoc on high school campuses across America. The comparison wasn’t meant to excuse my father’s actions, but to acknowledge the possibility that he may have grabbed the utensil as thoughtlessly as I. And if he’d picked it up on purpose, I’d like to think that choosing to defend himself with a potato peeler instead of, say, a twelve-inch knife, was at least an indication of his ambivalence about harming a fellow human being. It’s a stretch, I realize, but isn’t absolution composed of such stretches, such makeshift revisions? I broke the plastic seal and peeled it off the box, revealing the title beneath the address label:
TO HELL AND BACK
Up until now, there have been virtually no descriptions of “bad” near-death experiences. Has anyone ever been to Hell and returned to tell about it?
The answer was yes, and Dr. Rawlings had recruited five unfortunates to tell their cautionary tales. Together, these stories would show that the usual reports brought back from angelic realms of white light and peaceful music gave a distorted view of life after death, a view that had become popular because it gave false comfort to complacent atheists, and also to Christians who resisted the principle of eternal damnation. The copy advised using the video as a “witnessing tool” for unsaved friends and loved ones, and suggested that its message may change viewers’ lives. Their afterlives, too.
That every “Hell” was capitalized spoke theological volumes. For Dr. Rawlings, Hell wasn’t just some five-alarm fire, but a furnace fueled by the flesh and bones of the unconverted. Why should my father listen to a man who thought of him as kindling?
As for the scarcity of “bad” near-death experiences, the two or three people I knew who’d nearly died had nothing but bad things to say about it. The nearer to death they’d come, the worse their experience. In fact, the only thing worse than the near-death experiences I’d heard about were the near-life experiences—merely going through the motions of being alive, every taste and color blunted, libido flagging, zest at an ebb—that were commonly reported in Brian’s consultation room, and in regular rooms across the country.
How had Dr. Rawlings found so many people who had gone to hell and lived to tell about it? Did he cater to a sinful clientele? The mere idea of a doctor who sought out the formerly dead was enough to give me an arrhythmia.
Had you asked me back then if I considered myself what fundamentalists like Dr. Rawlings disapprovingly called “a moral relativist,” I would have said, It depends. I’ve rarely been able to form an opinion without also considering several contradictory opinions until I arrive, through the process of elimination, at another opinion I retain the right to revise at any time. And now I couldn’t help but wonder: if Dr. Rawlings and his patients had read Gulliver’s Travels as devotedly as they read the New Testament, might I have been holding a video entitled To Lilliput and Back? Isn’t one’s vision of the afterlife shaped by the very drives and passions that shape one’s life?
Which brings me to Betty. She’d left the video behind knowing that it might be her last gift to a man she’d loved and toward whom she still felt concern. No doubt she bestowed it with good intentions, specifically those that pave the road to hell. What kind of gift is it to warn a man that the suffering he’s accrued throughout his lifetime will go right on accruing after he’s dead? I don’t know about you, but I’d want my last gift to be soothing and useful, like a pair of flannel pajamas. My father didn’t need a preview of doom. My father needed to yank out his tubes, slip into his jumpsuit, and resume the delusion that, temporarily detained by failing kidneys, he was running late for retirement.
I stared into the flames and dared myself to pop the tape into our VCR. Then I vetoed myself because watching it would remind me of the insidious ways in which people make other people feel like sinners. Then I overrode my veto because I was curious to see a low-budget dramatization of hell that might include, if I was lucky, writhing amateur dancers.
By absconding with the video, I’d hoped to save my father from being saved. He was in intensive care and in no condition to withstand a tongue-lashing from an ashen, wrathful cardiologist. All things being relative, however, I also understood that I’d denied him the opportunity to see the vide
o for himself and make his own decision. In either case, right and wrong were beside the point. He never regained consciousness. At least not with me.
After my father died, I kept To Hell and Back in my desk drawer, but every time I opened the drawer to get a pencil or a postage stamp, the flames startled me as if they’d burst from the box at that very instant, fed by in-rushing oxygen. I winced at the thought of my desk catching fire, computer melted to a bubbling puddle. Still, I didn’t want to throw the tape away. Despite the trouble already caused by writing about my father, I’d begun to contemplate making him the subject of an entire book, and I thought there might come a day when I’d need to refer to Dr. Rawlings’s video, if I could ever bring myself to watch it.
Brian refused to watch it with me. He preferred Jeopardy! He preferred National Geographic specials like The Secret Life of Caves or Galapagos, Land of Dragons. He even preferred talk shows where the guests made shocking disclosures and then ripped off their clothes, private parts censored with flickering pixels. At hell, however, he drew the line.
“Please,” I wheedled. “From a sociological standpoint, it might be educational.”
“Hell isn’t edifying,” he insisted. “You don’t learn from your mistakes in hell. You pay for making them.”
Recruiting a friend to watch it with me proved just as futile. My ex-girlfriend, Lynn, told me she’d had the wages of sin pounded into her during Catholic school. “I’ve had enough hell to last a lifetime,” she said. “I won’t go back unless I’m dragged.” Monica said she couldn’t possibly add Dr. Rawlings’s video to the already long list of films she was obligated to watch for her class. “A Feminist History of Film” was now “A Post-Feminist History of Film,” and it required a whole new syllabus that included recent female buddy pictures, women-in-sports documentaries, erotica written and directed by women, and videos by performance artists such as the Guerrilla Girls and the Lesbian Avengers. “Right now,” she said, “hell is way at the bottom of my list.”
The Bill from My Father Page 21