Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  Next, he bought some clove, Eugenol toothache drops, and Ben-Gay, mixed them in a blender, and applied the anesthetic paste to his stilltender wound. Evidently it burned like hell. And then it hurt like crazy when the saw blade turned. His eyes itched, his nose ran. He tried an application of ice. The same. He got hold of procaine and a hypodermic. But the needle broke on his first stab. Speed was the answer, he decided. He borrowed a Rockwell saber saw from Hervey, who must have taken it from work.

  Pozzo finally broke through, Layla said. There was this gush of blood and this stink of something burning. Pozzo said he could feel his brain pulsing, could hear babbling and gurgling, like everything inside was schlurping around. Layla couldn’t hear anything. She handed him a toy dart with a suction cup at the end of it, and Pozzo wet the cup with his tongue and lifted the plug from his skull. He asked Layla to touch his brain if she wanted to. She didn’t want to. She was afraid by now It was pink, but maybe just from the blood. She couldn’t imagine why they call it gray matter. Pozzo closed his eyes and saw he could still see. Said he could see an angel descending from heaven, leading a great, foul dragon, and he saw thrones and the dead, columns and columns of them, and a vast and bottomless pit, and this was not at all what he had expected, and then he moaned, whimpered, and passed out cold. Layla pressed the skull plug back into Pozzo’s scalp, tamped it with a spoon. Didn’t want his brain getting dirty. She got a baseball cap out of Pozzo’s sock drawer and fit it on his bald head. It said, P&D Sullivan Sand & Gravel. She called 911.

  Arthur Bositis must have caught Richie Muneyhun unawares. The police found Richie hanging upside down in the kill room at Boston Beef. He’d been drilled between the eyes with a single shot from the pneumatic gun that’s used on the assembly line to dispatch steers. He wasn’t dead when they found him, but he wasn’t very much alive either. There he was, hooked by the tendons at the back of his legs, suspended like a sack of laundered overcoats on a dry cleaner’s motorized rack. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. They found Arthur a few feet away, sitting on a metal folding chair, watching Richie’s blood drip into a coffee can. Arthur had called the cops, confessed.

  Judi and I have argued about life, about what constitutes a human being, and we differ on some points, but I think it’s safe to say that we agree on one thing—a person is not a body. There’s something else. Energy soul, mind, spirit, whatever, something other than, or in addition to, the flesh and blood that constitutes the essence of a person. My point here, though, is this: Here at the end of the twentieth century our medical chronic wards have become repositories of bodies, but not of people. Richie Muneyhun, for example. After the violence at Boston Beef, he was taken to Memorial, hooked up to a ventilator, and kept alive on various machines and by the grace of medical technology. His mother wouldn’t hear a word about taking him off life support. He may be a vegetable, Peggy Muneyhun admitted, but he’s a vegetable with a soul. Miracles happen, she said.

  But it would take more than a miracle to remove Richie from his persistent vegetative state. Time travel, maybe. What we know is that a brain begins to deteriorate almost immediately without oxygen, begins to atrophy as soon as the billions of cells begin to die. First the cellular fluid and the mitochondria swell. Mechanisms within the cell dissolve. Loss of energy causes the cell to lose connection with neighboring cells. The fluid expands the walls of the cell further, till it’s like an overfilled water balloon. The nucleus fails, destroyer enzymes are released. Pretty soon what’s left is what’s called respirator brain, essentially a mass of soft, green viscous liquid, a sort of slime pudding. Picture the tomalley of a boiled lobster ladled into a bowl, and you’ll have an image of Richie Muneyhun’s post-abattoir brain.

  But he was alive, as in “not dead,” to those in charge, and that accounted for the initial delay in Arthur’s trial. Prosecutors were hoping to replace the charge of Attempted Murder with simple Murder One. Arthur was pleading self-defense, an argument that was perhaps undermined by the image of Richie’s suspended body that the jury was certain to see. The prosecutors got their wish. Someone pulled the plug on Richie Muneyhun’s carcass in the middle of the night, some two months after the incident. All of this played out while Judi continued the struggle for her life through chemo and what would follow

  The trial resumed with the new charges. Arthur’s lawyer argued that someone on the hospital staff was the murderer, not his client, who was in jail at the time of the death. There was a second delay in the trial, one which would eventually result in Arthur’s release. It turns out that a half dozen of the jurors had taken to hanging around together evenings at the foreman’s home. Eating, chatting, listening to chamber music. After a few bottles of wine, they held a séance and spoke through a channel (the foreman’s sister-in-law) to Richie Muneyhun’s spirit, who identified Arthur as his murderer. As far as these six were concerned, there was no need for further testimony. One of them, however, went and blabbed about the visitation to an uninitiated juror, who spoke to Judge Greenberg, and so on. I guess the judge doesn’t believe in visitations. Arthur was freed on bond, the future of the trial in doubt.

  Richie was buried with his motorcycle. When he died he weighed 150 pounds. All Stoni would say about his death was that it was an act of mercy. I wondered what she thought and felt, not just about the death, but about the whole terrifying love business she’d got tangled up in. Did she feel at all responsible for the killing? Did she feel responsible for setting the inevitable in motion?

  Me, I can’t excuse what Arthur did, but I understand his fear. Arthur’s sin was murder. But it was an aberration. Richie’s sin was his way of life, was himself and his disregard for civility, hospitality, and discourse, his belief that whatever he wanted he would have. Look at Richie, at Edmund, for that matter, and note that desire blossoms into obsession, envy into malice, greed into rage.

  49.

  Sea Monkeys

  IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN I GOT UP. I FED SPOT, WALKED HIM TO THE PARK AND back, told him he was a good boy and I loved him. I got the newspaper off the front lawn and went in to the kitchen. I was in the mood for concertina music. I put a Giulio Regondi tape in the boom box, turned the volume low, closed the door to the living room. I heard the shower clang on. I made coffee, poured a cup, sat down to read the paper. Some Brazilian novelist had written 1,039 novels under thirty different names, as of this week. Hasn’t even read everything he’s written. Judi said, Good morning, sat across from me, yawned, took the Local section. We heard, “Tell Me Heart! Why So Desponding?”

  Ronnie joined us. He wore his blue suit, T-shirt, no shoes or socks. “Morning,” he said. “Hello, Judi.” He sat down beside me, got right up, rubbed his face with his hands, took a deep breath, fished his glasses out of a pocket, and put them on.

  Judi said hello, studied her dad, the crooked glasses, the damp lips, the scar on his left eyebrow, the hammertoes.

  Ronnie said, “I owe you an explanation.”

  Judi said, “At least.”

  I got up to use the phone.

  Ronnie said, “Are you mad at me?” He cracked his knuckles.

  Judi said she was. And hurt. “But I’m glad to see you.” She smiled.

  Ronnie said, “Me, too.” He smiled, sniffled. “Not glad to see me. You know what I mean. You.”

  I called Hervey, told him we’d be there in a half hour.

  Judi said, “Why did you come?”

  “You’re my daughter.”

  “But why did you come?”

  “I’m sorry things had to be the way they were.” Ronnie walked to the fridge, back to the table.

  “Did they have to be that way?”

  “I came to make you breakfast, Judi. French toast with vanilla and cinnamon. The way you like it.”

  “I can’t eat, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie scratched his knees.

  Judi said, “You look awfully nervous. How do you feel?”

  Ronnie said, “Don’t do that, all right?”

  �
�Do what?”

  “Don’t pull that shrink talk on me. You’re not my shrink.”

  We heard the tape click off. I told Judi we should get going. She thanked Ronnie for coming. She went to him, kissed his head, patted his shoulder.

  After we dropped Judi at Memorial, Hervey and I went to the Broadway for breakfast. Judi was in for a CA 125 blood test, a chest X ray, a CAT scan, I think it was. And she was going to tell Dr. Pawlak, No more chemo. We parked in front of Lederman’s Bakery. Hervey let the car run so we could hear the end of “In Dreams.” Hervey said he could remember when Water Street was cobblestoned. Rattle the screws right out of your bicycle, he said. Shimmy the teeth right out of your gums. Hervey turned off the ignition. He pointed ahead. I shook JFK’s hand right there, he said. Used to be Sheppy’s fruit market. I tried to imagine Hervey forty years younger. He’s on a maroon Schwinn, no fenders or chain guard. His right pant leg is rolled up and he has a Lucky Strike hanging out the side of his mouth.

  We sat at a booth. Hervey ordered poached eggs on toast, nice and loose, an egg cream, and a Sanka. I got the French toast and coffee. Hervey talked about the old Worcester, the one they tore down to build the galleria and the glass banks. We used to have a city here, he said. Now we got a shopping district. I don’t even know the place anymore, he said. Do you realize there’s not a single bowling alley left down town? Not one. Used to be, I don’t know, a half dozen candlepin lanes within three blocks of City Hall.

  Hervey went to the register and bought five scratch tickets and a tabloid. I saw one of the Farrells, Bobby, I think, take a seat at the counter. I waved and smiled. When Hervey didn’t win any money, he complained that the lottery was a scam. The waitress freshened my coffee. Hervey perused the paper, shaking his head. Nice fucking world we live in, he said. Here’s a guy puts out a death contract on a five-year-old girl that he raped, so she can’t testify against him. He turned the page. Our food arrived. Hervey asked for ketchup. He went on. Mommies burning babies with cigarettes; daddies stuffing babies under waterbed mattresses. Hervey stopped, salted his eggs, shook his head. He folded the paper and set it beside him on the seat. I’ll tell you what else pisses me off royally, Hervey said. Your veneer. I stopped chewing. Did he say, “Souvenir”? Nothing’s made out of honest-to-Jesus wood anymore, he said. It’s all cheesy particle board and fake laminated façades.

  “Did you cut the Prozac in half this morning, Hervey?”

  He looked at me, wiped egg from his chin with a napkin.

  “Just a joke,” I said.

  I remembered that Bobby Farrell had always wanted to be a priest. He talked about it in the fourth grade. Last I’d heard he was in the sem. I looked up at the counter. Bobby was counting out change. He stood. His T-shirt said, “I Brake for Flea Markets.” He put on his sunglasses.

  Hervey said, “It’s the air.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when they open you up, the cancer starts; when the air gets to it, it spreads.”

  I realized this is what Hervey had been thinking about all along, really. This open-air theory he’d talked about over supper on the deck.

  Hervey picked his teeth with the edge of a matchbook. He has two deep creases by his eyebrows that lead down his nose and then arc out around his mouth so that, when he smiles, it looks like he has pliers on his face. He told me about his union steward, Porky Bourque, who went into St. V’s to get a polyp scraped out of his ass. Just before Thanksgiving. What the hell’s a freaking polyp doing there, anyway?

  I said, “It happens, Hervey.”

  “With those little tentacles and everything?”

  I said, “I don’t think it’s that kind of polyp exactly.”

  “You a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “The good news,” Hervey told me, “is they get the little fucker out. The bad news is they look around. What they find is a million more polyps and all of them malignant as hell. By Christmas, Porky’s dead.”

  I tried not to think about Judi. Tried.

  “You see, they let the air in where it doesn’t belong. My old man, Eustache. Same thing happened to him. Doctors open up his belly and they find all his business slathered with black strap molasses, smells all rank and putrid, like a prison outhouse. All they could do was sew him right up and shake their heads like they had nothing to do with it. Dr. Carriciolo told my mother she should make arrangements.”

  We freshened our coffee. We weren’t going anywhere. Hervey explained his aerogenetic theory of metastasis. Said we all have these dormant cellular cancer seeds in us. Hervey spooned sugar into his cup, searched for a metaphor. “Sea monkeys,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  I did. Feed Them! Grow Them! Breed Them! Train Them! I’d had my own little Ocean Zoo as a kid, full of the cryptobiotic creatures. Beyond the Wildest Dreams of Science! The World’s Only Fully Manmade Pets!

  Hervey said, “Sprinkle your package of sea monkeys into a glass and set the glass on the kitchen table. You could wait till the Red Sox win the Series. Nothing’s going to happen. Right? Am I right?”

  I nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Now, you pour some tap water into the glass, add the water purifier, wait a day, sprinkle in the Instant Life, and bango, you’ve got a universe of sea monkeys eating and screwing their atom-sized hearts out—it’s not even a glass of water anymore, is it?”

  “Not so you’d want to drink it.”

  “No one’s ever cutting Hervey Jolicoeur open.”

  I said, “Not everyone with cancer has had surgery.”

  “And that’s why you see so much more cancer these days. The air’s so full of shit. All the chemical pollution is like fertilizer, you know, makes the cancer bloom. You know what else tees me off?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those low-bred morons that spit out their gum on the sidewalk. Like I need that shit on my shoes.”

  I sipped my coffee.

  “Nobody had polyps in them when I was a kid.”

  I picked up the check, figured the 15 percent.

  I dropped Hervey off at the VA hospital in Jamaica Plain for his annual physical. I drove back and picked up Judi at Memorial. “How did it go?”

  “Pawlak says shell alter the dosage.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know how I feel. One more time. If it’s bad, I wouldn’t blame you for stopping.”

  “That’s what Stoni said.”

  “Great minds,” I said. “So?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “But you’ll do it?”

  “She said she’d put it off another week.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Yes. I’ve got two healthy weeks to enjoy.”

  When we got home, I had a message from my father. His voice was a disturbing squeal.

  Judi said, “Go see him. Now would be the best time.”

  And I saw that it certainly would be.

  50.

  Florida, State with the Prettiest Name

  I TELEPHONED EDGAR AND ASKED HIM TO PICK ME UP AT THE FORT LAUDERDALE airport. He took down the flight information and said, Perfect. I’ll shoot right over from the Rotary luncheon. He asked me to hold on a sec. He yelled at one or both of his boys. Your uncle Laf’s coming down for a visit. I imagined their disinterested faces, their limpid eyes fixed on a television screen.

  I dialed the Maravista to let my parents know I was coming. When Eudine picked up I told her I was coming to visit. She said, Why tomorrow? What the hell did that mean? I said, Mom, why don’t you get a private line so I won’t be interrupting the business calls? She said, Did you just call to complain? I apologized, but I didn’t know why. You can sleep on the couch, she said. Thanks. She said, Well, you know your father’s hemianopsiatic now.

  “He’s what?”

  “Your father has lost half his field of vision. The top half. Hold on and I’ll fetch him.”

  Blaise told me h
e wasn’t so worried about the loss of sight, not after all he’d been going through. He said, “I just lift my head if I need to see the part in your mother’s hair. An inconvenience that will pass,” he said. “But this morning I couldn’t find my left arm.”

  I didn’t respond. I was thinking how you wouldn’t even need to see your arm to find it. I was thinking stroke, paralysis.

  He said, “And then at lunch I was eating your mother’s pea soup, and I lost the spoon in my broth. And then when I found my arm, it wasn’t attached—it was just out there, floating about two inches from my whatchamacallit.”

  “Your shoulder.”

  Blaise did not seem amused by his latest afflictions the way he had been with the other peculiarities. I figured he must be afraid now

  He said, “I’ve seen bread. I’ve eaten bread all my life. I’ve touched bread. I’ve made bread. But I can’t imagine it. I know it when I see it. I just can’t you know, picture it anymore.”

  I said, “I’ll be in town tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You will? That’s terrific.”

  “I’m looking forward. We’ll talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.