by Neil Hetzner
And once a person stepped out of the controlled chaos of a lab into the uncontrolled chaos of the natural world, things got harder and harder but curiouser and curiouser.
Lise sat at her kitchen table making Anasazi-like pictographs with aerosol cheese on saltines. She represented Dilly with a question mark enclosed in a pickle shape which was contained inside a heart. Bill’s cracker was divided by a diagonal. In the upper half was a dollar sign; the lower half held an eye with a line through it. Kate’s cracker had a sunburst. For Roger’s she drew a stick of dynamite. Jessica was represented by a purse crossed by a baseball bat. As she absent-mindedly stuck the nozzle of the can of ersatz cheese into her mouth, Lise arranged and re-arranged the crackers like a spread of solitaire. She had invited herself to visit her sister’s family. One of her motivations had been to relieve the guilt Peter had given to her on Christmas Day. A more important reason for going was to collect data on the state of Dilly and Bill’s marriage. There had been something about Bill’s challenge of Dilly over Kate’s spilled eggnog which she had not been able to get out of her thoughts since Christmas.
Lise had wakened early that morning with a sense of unease. She had toyed with calling Dilly and cancelling because of a lab or health or menstrual problem. She had asked Brad if she looked peaked. He had swollen himself to his full size, pointed his finger at the door, and in his lowest voice he had said, “Go, get thee hence. In shame.”
After Brad’s encouragement had propelled her to the car, Lise had been fine until she had crossed the line into Dilly’s town. As she had gotten closer to the house, her car had gone slower and slower as her memories had raced faster. She and Dilly had never been soul-mates. Her earliest memories of Dilly were of being told what to do. Their foundation as siblings had been Dilly giving orders and Lise obeying them. As they had grown older their relation had changed in degree but not in kind. As she had sat in her parked car two blocks from Dilly’s home, Lise had made up a list of things she thought Dilly would tell her to do during their day together.
Lise placed Bill’s cracker next to Dilly’s and shot a caulk bead of orange around the outer edge of both crackers. She looked at the symbols joined inside the orange frame. The juxtaposition looked strange. Brought in close proximity to Dilly, Lise had felt strange. It was not easy to feel a blood closeness to her sister. Lise considered calling Pete, but she knew he would be working. She wanted to call her mother, but her mother had plenty of her own worries and didn’t need more.
Lise laid out a line of crackers and shot cheese on them. She looked down at the message she had sent herself. ????!!!! She wished Brad were there even though it was Brad whom she wanted to talk about. When the can of cheese gave out its death rattle, Lise ran for her coat and sterility of the lab.
Chapter 19
Neil didn’t know whether he felt worse for himself or about himself. Less than twelve hours before, Kenyon had told him that he was being investigated. Neil’s moving his money out of the bank had not gone unnoticed.
So many entities had been formed to investigate the causes of the Rhode Island banking crisis that Neil wasn’t even clear which commission was looking at his transactions. There was a special fact-finding group reporting to the governor. The federal attorney’s office, as well as at least one state grand jury, was looking for indictments. The General Assembly was making its own investigation. And, as could be expected, the newspaper was on a witch-hunt.
The moment after he had made his decision to remove money from South Coastal Neil had felt disloyal, but there had been no question in his mind whether what he was doing was legal. It was only in the aftermath, as the discussion of insiders using restricted information to protect themselves ensued, that he began to have doubts. He wasn’t sure that when the press or one of the many arms of the octopus of the law got to him they would understand the innocence of his actions. He had listened to Brad, read newspaper accounts, considered Bett’s health and made his decision.
Ever since mid-afternoon, when Kenyon had told him of the questions he was being asked about Neil’s accounts, Neil had been fighting off rounds of nausea and anger. He knew he was going to be pilloried; he could feel it. He kept telling himself he had done nothing wrong, but he found he was having a harder time believing it.
It was just. He should be pilloried. He was despicable. He wished there was a way that he himself could be the punisher. Do it. Get it over with. Be done with it…if it would ever be done. He tried to turn a rage onto his smallness, but, instead, he began to weep. He feared his choked-off sobs would awaken Bett. He eased himself from the warmth of the covers into the cold. The darkness of the room was given a silvery gloss by his tears. His feet, scuffling along the edge of the bed like dogs snuffling for a lost bone, finally found his slippers. There was a sharp scraping sound as a foot tried to orient the slipper. Managing to get both slippers on his feet, he stealthily shuffled the short distance between bed and closet door. He found his robe, but waited until he was out in the hall before wrapping himself in the warmth of the thick camel hair. The cold air, which had settled in the black tunnel of the hall, brushed against his ankles like wet weeds. He thought to wait out his tears in the bathroom. It would be warm, but in there it could only be pitch black or too bright. Leaning heavily on the banister to keep the stair treads from creaking, he slowly made his way downstairs.
During the two hours that he had lain in bed listening to Bett’s raspy breathing and avoiding her twitching sleep, Neil’s every joint, nerve and muscle had felt over-stimulated. Yet, now, making his way down the steps, he felt exhausted. He considered turning around and going back to bed, but he feared that if he did his feverish thoughts would return.
After walking through the cinereous shadows of the living room, Neil squinted his eyes nearly shut before turning on a table lamp just inside the den. The low-wattage bulb cleared a space in the thick night just large enough for him to be able to sit and think. He got the ceramic heater from the closet, plugged it in, and pointed it toward his chair. As his refuge was warming, he went to the dining room for a glass and the bottle of brandy from the walnut server. Back in the den the warmth of the heater felt good upon his ankles and the warmth of the brandy, expanding from his throat down and into his stomach as if it were some strange upside down hot air balloon, felt better.
To have and to hold. In sickness and in health. In sickness. He felt tears well up again. They had begun their life together as smooth-skinned youths. As children had come, as gravity had done its work, as the sun had embossed their living leather, as work and play had taken their mite by precious mite toll, he thought he had learned the meaning of the few words he had spoken to Bett in front of an audience of friends and family and some ill-defined God. There had been times—during pregnancies, later times after her never-thin body had thickened, times of early morning when he had looked at her in sleep with a prune’s wrinkles of skin pushed up around her eyes—when he had felt a moment’s loathing for the aging of his wife. He had taught himself to replace those feelings with a sense of well-being and gratitude that each of them was using up the capital of his life in the presence and service of the other. He had taught himself that wrinkles weren’t failings. They were the signposts of their life’s sharing—badges, emblems, symbols, the trail blazes of their marriage. And although there had been the same transitory moments of repugnance when Bett had come home from the hospital, her breast gone and her skin scarred and, later, other quick, unbidden moments of abhorrence they had been just that, moments.
Now, those moments were gone. In the last days those moments had grown and twisted until they were as infiltrative as the cancer itself. Those brief moments of weakness had been transmuted into hours and, then, days of repugnance and, added to those days of horror at what was occurring to Bett, was an equal time of self-revulsion for a betrayal of his vows echoing down from forty years before. He dreaded going to bed with Bett and it. It was a leg that held a bone that was maggoty with a too-virile
life. Each night his stomach revolted against the thought that he and Bett must share their bed with that corrupt limb. Even as he brushed his teeth and dressed in his pajamas, Neil would tense himself against the touch of that diseased leg against his own. He despised himself for his disgust of that estranged stick of now foreign flesh.
Other than for a slight reddening, the slightest swelling and a small patch of flaking skin—all side effects familiar to him from her earlier radiation—her cancerous leg, the right one, looked exactly like the left. Flaccid flesh and mottled skin, mosaiced by varicose veins, it was the same aged leg that had been a part of Bett for many years. It was the same solid structure that had walked children from cries to coos, that had crawled along the narrow paths of decades of gardens, that had canted out under an outthrust hip at the end of a mamba. He had told himself over and over again that it was the same familiar leg. He rebuked himself for thinking it was something separate from Bett herself. It wasn’t some strange third party alienator of his affection. It was Bett. It was Bett. He had repeated his incantations over and over again, but the black magic of the cancer was stronger than what he could conjure up. In the end, it had won. Despite his best efforts, it sickened him to have that leg in bed next to his own. After almost an hour of sitting within the small sphere of warmth and calming noise from the heater, Neil was suffused with the apathy of the half-drunk and too-tired. The waves of spousal repulsion and self-revulsion had ebbed to a distant shore.
Being overly careful to make no noise, Neil put away the heater and turned out the light. Holding as tightly to his small island of alcohol-created unconcern as he did to the banister, he climbed the stairs. Back in bed, he insinuated his fingers under the sleep-formed shield of Bett’s hand to trace the welt of tissue across her chest. He rubbed his leg against her flannel-covered thigh. He prayed a slurred prayer that his moment of grace would last long enough to fall asleep.
As Neil slowly tried to drift along a dark comfort he imagined being free from all that he had been feeling; however, instead, his thoughts conjured an image of himself, in bed, at night, using cat’s eyes, to stare across the pitch black room to a stump of flesh-toned plastic and diamond bright surgical steel screws.
To have. But less to hold. To have. To be held. In love? Or contempt?
As night slid toward morning Bett and Neil both stirred, twisted, turned, sighed and moaned with the plaints of cows in a small stall.
Chapter 20
Bett knew that if the mood she had been in did not lift soon the pressure would squeeze her into hard black stone. The feelings had already gone on so long that it was an increasingly rare moment that she even thought to separate herself from what she felt.
The thin gray light of late winter lacked the strength to make its way much past the drawn lace curtains in Nita’s old room. In the midday twilight it was hard to distinguish between the loose folds of Bett’s jowls and wattles and the rumpled mounds of covers she had drawn tight around her sagging flesh. The narrow bed and the small stand next to it were filled with a sick person’s things—a box of tissues, pill vials, tablet, pens, an uneaten breakfast, unread books, unopened magazines, nearly full glasses of juice and water and soda. The ringer switch on the telephone had been turned to off. The air in the room was clean and cold from the half-open window.
Bett stirred and a smell, not unlike that of grated cheese, drifted out from under the covers. She would have to bathe, but later. She removed a flannel-swathed arm from the bedding’s oven. She rubbed her hand on her itching scalp. She couldn’t tell whether it was the skin of her palm or that of her bald head that was sticky from old sweat.
Before he left for work, Neil had offered to sponge bathe her scalp and face and neck and hands, but Bett had told him to leave her alone. She would do it if and when she was ready.
She spoke aloud the words she had said to him that morning. It was almost as satisfying to hear them a second time as it had been the first. There was something almost sensual in pushing him away. Each time she ventured down the unfamiliar path of cruelty, Bett’s nerve endings tingled at the enormity of what she was doing. Somehow, it was exhilarating to strike out at her husband, her mate, her pash of forty years. He would try to bring light and love into the small darkness that she had made of Nita’s old room and she would repel those efforts. He would come with flowers and she would immediately banish them. Their perfume made her sick. He would come with books. She was ever so sorry but they bored her. He would try to close the windows afraid that she might catch cold and she would forbid him to touch it. Cold was the only healthy thing around her. He came with foods to entice her appetite and she would cackle at his stupidity. Couldn’t he see. How long would it take him to realize that she couldn’t eat. He came in one evening with an end table. What was he doing? He was going to bring a TV in for her. She didn’t want a television. The stories were insipid. The commercials irritating. She had her own insipid irritating life to live out.
Those were glorious moments. She said the sharpest things and then waited, poised in a kind of pre-orgasmic tension, poised knowing that just one more flick would cause an avalanche of feeling to crash between them. She came to believe that anger might be the strongest emotion left to them. His love was garbled with pity and fear. Hers was intertwined with resentment and envy. Anger was something hot enough to burn out any conflicting properties. If nothing else, anger was pure. During most of the days in the last horrid weeks she had savored its untainted heat. She had felt its engrossing warmth spread throughout all the crevices and crannies of her mind until there was not an image nor a memory not infused with its distracting glow. She would stoke her anger until it overflowed its crucible and spilled down her throat and ran red throughout her body. Using unintended slights and unacknowledged and misinterpreted whims as bits of coal, and pain and fear as the bellows, Bett had spent her hours heating hurts until their glow suffused and finally transcended the heat of her disease.
Unlike fire, anger did not burn itself out. Instead, it fed upon itself. A miracle force, anger could raise the hottest flame from the smallest kindling. Bett admired the vitality of her rage. It wasn’t sick. It wasn’t weak. It was so strong it made her pulse race and her skin itch. Its energy would fill her and she would want to flare out at all around her. One morning, a week before, in exquisite experimentation, she had risen from her bed and had permitted the anger to flow down her arms and out through the cracks of her fisted hands.
Books and Kleenex boxes, vials and glasses had gone flying. What a fearsome joy.
Sweet, silent simpering Neil. Weak. Spineless. Sliding down the softest roads. Smiling to all. Kind and caring in a dithery absent-minded way. Colloidal kindness, like a bivalve, able to shape itself to any situation. Except maybe now. Always patting. Backs and arms and children’s head. If asked, would he even know what head was underneath his patting palm? Her patient, plodding pash and pal. Neil. Slow smiling, slow talking, slow moving. Oxen walk. Imperturable. Until now. Until life moved faster than his bovine pace. Until disease outraced his measured tread. Until kindness turned to care and then concern and, now, consternation. Until fear and disgust hobbled his moves. Until it was impossible for him ever to catch up to where she was going. She was flying along, compelled by her disease, impelled by anger and with each moment poor, plodding Neil was left further behind.
What was the matter with him? Why, after forty years, didn’t he know when to steady her and when to move away? Why couldn’t he understand? Where did all of this new stupidity come from? Why couldn’t he figure out how to do something? Whatever it was that she needed. She was the sick one. Why couldn’t he make the right decision for once? Why couldn’t he keep up with where she was being compelled to go? Each day his actions, his demonstrations of concern, his love and kindnesses were less appropriate to where she was. She was accelerating out of any life she had ever known and he clop clopped along like an old field horse.
Disease was running rampant in her. It pus
hed time. The cancer’s speed accelerated her own time. She closed her eyes to allow a spasm of nausea to pass and when she opened them a morning was gone. She moved a hand up over her brow to explore the febrile corrugations where once hair had been and half the afternoon would disappear. During the quickest catnap, an afternoon would age to evening. A bite or two of cooled food, a sip of tepid water, intermittent swallows of the brightly colored orts of medication, a page read, a slow walk to the bathroom, one corner of a crossword puzzle filled, a desultory conversation whispered back and forth with a healthy husband and a day was gone.
Gone.
Lost.
Torn from her.
It was amazing how fast time fled. It rushed past roaring like a waterfall. Swept through her darkened room. Churned up her life. Cascaded through her memories. Poured and powered its way through her days. Her days…just her days. Not always the nights. Some nights, many nights, she had measured time’s indolent passing by the irregular sound of bubbles breaking free from the side of a glass of warming ginger-ale and bursting to the surface. Many nights time was slower and anger was harder. Night seemed to be made of viscid time—thick and slow, the perfect medium for regret and remorse. At night, utter blackness covered enough of the details of her life that Bett could see what remained more clearly. She could see the self-pity that she was molding, like sand castles, into a whimsical shape about her. She could reach her hands out into the night and feel its cool, smooth, slippery clay. Patting, shaping, kneading, pinching, she was entombing herself in a vessel of her own fine making. She was building something to hold her remains. Living remains. Pity and anger were the barriers. Not time.