Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  "How?"

  "I saw a very wealthy person indeed in a park, watching his children being given an English lesson by their tutor, a fat smug fool. I went up to this wealthy man, bowed to him with greatest respect, and said, 'Oh sir, I am normanically gormented by the dumpacity of your genius!' And then I walked away before he could be replying.

  "Before long the wealthy person comes after me. 'My children's tutor did not know half those words you used, so I have fired the fool. Will you tell me, please, what means, "I am normanically gormented by," . . . by . . . whatever you said?'

  "'Certainly, sir,' I say. 'I will tell you exactly what it means. It means that if you hire me to replace that fool, I will teach your children a great deal more than just grammar and vocabulary, all for the same price.'

  "For ten seconds I thought I was a dead man. Then his frown became a smile, and I knew I would be attending college in the United States of America."

  Thinking of Xerox helped. I'd told Jesse about him more than once while he was growing up. Xerox's was just the kind of insane dogged confidence I needed now, all right. I wondered what he was up to now.

  * * *

  Then the pain got bad enough that I started to replay different memories entirely. Like my first hospitalization for a collapsed right lung.

  Spontaneous pneumothorax is not in itself a lethal condition. But being treated for it can be—if you happen to draw dumb enough doctors. They brought me my X-rays, and explained that they were going to have to remove the defective right lung. But, they said, my hippie lifestyle had left me way too anemic to be a good surgical risk, so they were going to spend a week or so fattening me up first.

  I know: I'm asking you to believe an American hospital chose to keep an indigent patient in a bed for a week before surgery, merely because he was too weak and in pain to go home. Even Canada's excellent medical care system might balk at that one, today. All I can tell you is, in 1967 Medicaid had only been law for two years, and still actually worked.

  Fortunately for me, sometime during that week of high-protein diet, some competent doctor (I never got his name) happened to pass through that hospital, glance at my X-rays, and note the proposed treatment. He pointed out to my team that I had just as many blebs on the left lung, and gently inquired what they planned to do when that one let go?

  The operation was scrubbed. The lung had in the meantime reinflated itself naturally; they said I should go home now, and hope it didn't happen again too often. When I finally bullied them into explaining why, in non-doctorese, I tried to hit the roof—you almost took my right lung out by mistake?—but my chest still hurt too much. So I gave up and left quietly, and had just slid into the passenger seat of my mother's clapped-out old Buick when I felt my left lung go.

  None of my doctors ever met my eyes again. But none ever offered a word that even hinted at an apology, either. Two different nurses found occasion to quietly slip me the card of a malpractice lawyer, but I never followed up. It was actually one of my better hospitalizations, in that I came out of it no worse off than I'd been when I went in. Modern medicine is mostly guesswork in a white coat. I'm not saying I haven't met excellent doctors; Susan's happened to be exemplary, thank God. I'm just saying the good ones shine like beacons in my memory.

  I got myself through something like a whole kilometer by fantasizing that I was on my way to punch out all the other ones.

  Then that started me thinking about the last time I'd almost been punched out myself, by a guy from Easy Company, and about what had saved me.

  "Easy Company" was the chosen name of a group of ultraconservative male engineering majors attending William Joseph College who took it as their patriotic duty to support the Vietnam War by putting on army fatigue blouses and ski masks and beating the crap out of any hippies they caught out of doors after dark. They had the ninja power to become invisible to campus security guards—and if the perpetrators could not be caught in the act and positively identified, what was a poor college administration to do? They couldn't very well search dorm rooms for fatigue blouses with blood on them and ski masks, could they? The periodic searches for alcohol and drugs were already controversial enough . . .

  They weren't all that hard to avoid if you were careful. For one thing, they had always been drinking recently. They liked to smoke cigars, because Sergeant Rock, hero of the comic book they'd named themselves after, smoked cigars, and were too dumb not to approach from upwind. And they seemed to find it difficult to resist slapping their bludgeons against their palms as they skulked through the shadows. That they bagged any victims at all was a sort of backwards tribute to the potency of the drugs we used to take back then.

  But one night my own luck ran out.

  Only one, thank Christ. Easy Company must have just dismissed itself for the night; it was way past curfew, so late this joker felt safe returning to his dorm with his ski mask and army shirt still on. I was just sneaking back on campus after an emergency suicide-prevention run—a successful one that time, I'm happy to say. I came around the corner of Nalligan Hall to find him coming the other way. He'd already been hurrying, to get through the lighted area by the entrance, and had just reached the door when we saw each other. Instant mutual recognition occurred.

  I tried to turn and run, corner accelerating, and then bear down: if I could reach and use the dorm's back door, alarm bells would go off . . . but disciplinary probation was better than a broken jaw, and perhaps a collapsed lung. But to turn, run or corner, you needed legs made of something stronger than jello, and I didn't seem to have any. So I stood there and waited, trying to remember even one of the dozens of cool hand-to-hand combat moves I'd read about in books. He reached me before I succeeded, slammed me hard against the dorm wall, and began to position me correctly to beat the crap out of me for as long as possible before I fell down.

  Just above my head, venetian blinds went up, a window slid open, and a voice said, "Oh wow, man."

  "Help," I yelped.

  My assailant paused with his fist—no, I saw, his blackjack—raised high, and stared up at the window, hard. It was a corner window, easy to remember for anyone who wanted to identify the occupants. It slid shut again, and I heard the blinds drop.

  With a chuckle of satisfaction he returned his full attention to me, and chose his first point of impact with some care. "Love it or leave it, asshole," he murmured.

  Another window opened above us. Way above us, all the way up on the third floor. Holy shit—my window.

  "He does, Tom," Zudie called down. His voice was just loud enough to hear.

  Looking back on it, I doubt the guy had ever met Zudie; he was just too buzzed on adrenaline and befuddled by bloodlust to realize it. The voice was friendly, absolutely nonconfrontational; PFC Tom let it distract him, when he might have ignored yells of protest. "Huh?"

  "He really does love it."

  "Huh?" Tom repeated, then added, "Bullshit! Look at him, for Chrissake."

  "Trust me, Tom-Tom: I know that man. He loves America as much as you do. As much as your brother George. He doesn't even believe we should have stayed out of Vietnam. Do you, Russell?"

  "Do you?" Tom asked me, tightening his grip on my shirt.

  I cast my fate to the winds and answered truthfully. "No. We gave our word. Maybe we were stupid to, but we gave our word. I salute your brother for doing what the politicians didn't: for putting his ass on the line so we could keep our word." Embellish the truth? "I might be over there myself right now if I weren't a born 4-F." No—don't try to bullshit an angry drunk. "People who piss on soldiers make me crazy. The only thing I hate about the war is the suits and generals who've fucked it all up so badly there's nothing left to do now but bail out . . . but prefer to keep sacrificing guys like your brother instead, because it's easier than admitting they blew it."

  When arguing with a drunk, give him long sentences to parse. He worked on it for a few seconds, and finally said, "Then you're not one of those fuckin' peace creeps?"

/>   Dodge. "My friend's right: I love America just as much as you and George." It was the truth. I just found America very damn hard to like, sometimes.

  Zudie jumped in. "Your father named you Thomas Jefferson and him George Washington, didn't he?"

  "Damn right." Back then, I took it for a lucky guess.

  "Well, there you go. Russell and I think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are worth fighting for, too. He said to me just the other day, our system may not be perfect . . . but it's ten times better than anything else anybody's ever dreamed up."

  It nearly worked. But saying my name a second time had been a mistake. "Russell? Russell Walker? The folksinger faggot?" He leaned closer. "Yeah. You are a fuckin' peace creep! I heard you sing at that peace rally."

  "No, you must have misunderstood what I was—" I stopped talking as his hands closed around my throat. Tom was so mad, he'd forgotten he held a blackjack in one of them, and it really hurt digging into my neck.

  "You mock me? You mock my brother's sacrifice? You cocksucker, I'm gonna tear your head off and piss down the hole, you—"

  Something hit the ground right beside us with a loud wet splat!

  "Speaking of piss . . . " Zudie said.

  We both looked up to see Zudie balancing a large jar on the window sill. Something sloshed over its sides. A few more little splats landed all around us, like ordnance taking our range and bearing, and one of them, maybe a quarter cup, got me square on my head and splashed Tom in the face. "Hey," he yelled indignantly, "what are you doing? What the hell is that?"

  "This," Zudie called softly, tapping the can, "is exactly what it smells like. Piss."

  Tom let go of my neck. "What the fuck are you—"

  Zudie raised his volume for the first time, overriding him." I promise you this, Thomas Jefferson Mitchell: if you do not immediately let go of him and go home, I will empty this whole thing on your head, so help me God. Russell's a hippie; he won't give a damn. But you'll never live it down. The story will follow you even after you graduate; it'll be too good not to tell."

  Tom was gone from there so fast, the vacuum of his departure tugged at my hair.

  Better yet, when I got upstairs, the jar turned out to be full of water from the shower. He'd even had the sense to make it just a bit warmer than room temperature.

  Thinking about it now, I laughed so hard the pain brought me back to myself again, and I had to stop walking altogether for the dozenth time. Laughter is supposed to be good for pain. I guess nothing is true always.

  Reliving pleasant moments in my past was clearly better than letting the pain remind me of times of terror, though. By the time I was ready to continue again, I'd managed to come up with one more inspiring memory of unexpected good fortune to recall as I plodded: the morning I was led into a judge's chambers and informed that the felony charges pending against me had been dismissed by the county. That I was not only free to go, right now, but was legally entitled to answer "no" any time I was asked if I'd ever been arrested.

  The news was so stunning, it didn't really hit me until an hour later, just as I was walking in the door of my friend Bill Doane's place. Bill was as happy as he'd ever been himself, that morning, and not a little distracted: he'd just gotten married—by the very same judge who'd turned me loose an hour ago, weirdly enough. But he also knew what day this was for me, and saw the grin on my face as I came in the door, and correctly worked out what it must mean. He came over with a grin bigger than my own, and took both my hands, and spoke the memorable words, "My brother, I perceive that a great express train has been lifted from your testicles."

  Susan and Jesse heard the story enough that it became another of our family in-jokes, a catch-phrase that could produce a laugh all by itself, like being normanically gormented by someone's dumpacity.

  It sure would be nice, I thought, if I could somehow uncouple myself from the express train I seemed to be scrotally dragging behind me now . . .

  Let's see now. Happy memories. Happy memories.

  Hell, that's easy. I'll just replay every day I got to spend with Susan. Start with that first day, when she met me as I was sneaking off campus, going down the hill to Wanda's to get in line to Bang the Bunny (a campus legend), and she politely pretended not to know where I was going, and I completely forgot where I had been going, and followed her to an art exhibit in town. She said later she felt rather as though she was being tailed by a dreamily smiling pink zeppelin, that kept its distance but could not be shooed away. I just remember her eyes being remarkably large and bright.

  Then there was the next day—the first time in my life that I ever literally sprang out of bed, laughing with joy. Over breakfast, I had—

  I think I actually came pretty close to doing that comprehensive a review. Everybody has days that are just unmemorable, in which nothing of real interest occurs. There've been periods in my life when I've had weeks like that, and I'm sure the same went for Susan. But she and I as a couple had fewer than average empty days: we found each other genuinely interesting on a day-to-day basis. Even the parts that baffled or repelled or irritated us. And somehow we kept it up for years and years without interruption. We took annual vacations from one another for the express purpose of inner refreshment, but in the nearly thirty years we were granted, neither of us was ever unfaithful to the other, or more than healthily tempted to be. In the last years, I'm convinced we came very close to something like the telepathy I had with Zudie—but it must have been different, because it hardly ever hurt, and it always flowed both ways.

  It had pissed Jesse off a little. No sensible boy finds his parents genuinely interesting, but he could sense that our fascination with each other created something that excluded him, that had nothing to do with love or being loved, but did have something to do with intimacy, with closeness, with surrender—things for which young men are counterprogrammed. Some of them, unfortunately, for life.

  Susan said that only meant that his competititive streak would one day cause him to love someone even more and harder and more totally than I had—a concept I had serious trouble imagining. So far, her prophecy had failed rather spectacularly to come true: so far—as far as I knew—Jesse had never been in love. Even after he grew old enough to start looking outward and ahead, Jesse had just never seemed interested in any relationship deeper than fuck-buddies. Like so many young people nowadays.

  But there was time. And anyway, it was his life. Maybe being raised by two happy loving parents had made him grow up so strong, he had less of that desperate need to touch and be touched by another that had driven both of us. If so, was he better off, or worse? It seemed to me he was worse off . . . but perhaps every junkie feels the same sense of superiority over all those poor fools who've never known what a joy it is to be enslaved, to ease an unbearable need.

  All I know is, casting my mind back over all the many times and many ways Susan and I had eased each other's unbearable needs gave me a large number of happy thoughts to sustain me as I trekked through that eternity in hell. I hope Jesse is banking something that will help him the same way when he needs it.

  Combing my memory for happier times helped, some. For perhaps as much as two thirds of the total distance. After that, all I could do was suffer, and keep alternating feet.

  Longest night of my life, no question.

  14.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Heron Island, British Columbia, Canada

  So much of my energy was going into just staying upright and moving slowly forward that it wasn't until I spotted my mailbox-bank coming, five or six hundred meters up ahead on the left, that I realized I not only was going to make it, but had nearly done so. I lit my watch and saw it was after 1:00 AM. I'd done a twenty-minute walk in a little over three hours.

  Much too late, I put my attention on the question of how I was going to approach Jesse's hiding place in Doug's barn without scaring the mortal shit out of him.

  Then I changed my mind. Reuniting with my son was
second priority. First, I needed to know if he was busy, just now.

  For all I knew, Agent Pitt was even now inside my house or my office, tossing the place, and Jesse was watching from a place of concealment. Or, knowing him, skulking along outside the house, ducking when he came to windows, following the sound of Pitt's footsteps.

  Or Pitt might be sound asleep in a B&B down in the cove, and Jesse catnapping in the drafty barn just ahead.

  Or Pitt might have come, and with the instincts of a feral creature felt or smelt the presence of an observer on the next door property. If so, he'd have emulated a hunted tiger: doubled back on his own tracks, circled around, and come up behind Jesse. Dawn would find the boy either dead or cuffed and ready for delivery to the CIA. Or worse, to the oxymoronic and moronic as an ox, massively overfunded and underbrained Department of Homeland Security.

  The latter wouldn't even be a first: not long before, the American DEA had invaded Canada (with the craven clandestine cooperation of the government and RCMP), kidnapped a well-known Canadian citizen in Vancouver, dragged him back across the border in chains to the States . . . and there charged him, in America, with committing—on Canadian soil, only—an act which is barely a misdemeanour in Canada, but happens to be a felony in America. (Selling high-grade marijuana seeds by mail.)

  Try that from a different angle. Imagine you sell beer wholesale for a living. You'll ship cases of beer to anyone anywhere in the world who meets your price. One day two Saudi Arabian cops break down your door, drag you off in chains to the airport, put you in a small jet and fly you directly to Riyadh, where a mullah explains that you're going to have your head cut off for violating a Saudi law that forbids importing beer. Wait a minute, you cry, I never heard of this cockamamie law! I'm an American, I was in America: I'm only subject to your law if I'm in your country, and I never was until you enslaved me and dragged me here against my will. I demand to see my ambassador! Certainly sir, and in the meantime, would you kneel right here and rest your face in the little face-shaped depression in the top of this tree stump? This won't take long . . .