by Dave Eggers
She spits into her half-moon and looks at me.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
In the fireplace, the fish tank is still there, but the fish, four or five of those bug-eyed goldfish with elephantiasis, died weeks ago. The water, still lit from above by the purplish aquarium light, is gray with mold and fish feces, hazy like a shaken snow globe. I am wondering about something. I am wondering what the water would taste like. Like a nutritional shake? Like sewage? I think of asking my mother: What do you think that would taste like? But she will not find the question amusing. She will not answer.
“Would you check it?” she says, referring to her nose.
I let go of her nostrils. Nothing.
I watch the nose. She is still tan from the summer. Her skin is smooth, brown.
Then it comes, the blood, first in a tiny rivulet, followed by a thick eel, venturing out, slowly. I get a towel and dab it away.
“It’s still coming,” I say.
Her white blood cell count has been low. Her blood cannot clot properly, the doctor had said the last time this had happened, so, he said, we can have no bleeding. Any bleeding could be the end, he said. Yes, we said. We were not worried. There seemed to be precious few opportunities to draw blood, with her living, as she did, on the couch. I’ll keep sharp objects out of proximity, I had joked to the doctor. The doctor did not chuckle. I wondered if he had heard me. I considered repeating it, but then figured that he had probably heard me but had not found it funny. But maybe he didn’t hear me. I thought briefly, then, about supplementing the joke somehow, pushing it over the top, so to speak, with the second joke bringing the first one up and creating a sort of one-two punch. No more knife fights, I might say. No more knife throwing, I might offer, heh heh. But this doctor does not joke much. Some of the nurses do. It is our job to joke with the doctors and nurses. It is our job to listen to the doctors, and after listening to the doctors, Beth usually asks the doctors specific questions—How often will she have to take that? Can’t we just add that to the mix in the IV?—and sometimes I ask a question, and then we might add some levity with a witty aside. I know that I should joke in the face of adversity; there is always humor, we are told. But in the last few weeks, we haven’t found much. We have been looking for funny things, but have found very little.
“I can’t get the game to work,” says Toph, who has appeared from the basement. Christmas was a week ago. “What?”
“I can’t get the Sega to work.” “Is it turned on?” “Yes.”
“Is the cartridge plugged all the way in?” “Yes.”
“Turn it off and on again.” “Okay,” he says, and goes back downstairs.
Through the family room window, in the middle of the white-silver screen, my father was in his suit, a gray suit, dressed for work. Beth paused in the entrance between the kitchen and the family room and watched. The trees in the yard across the street were huge, gray-trunked, high-limbed, the short grass on the lawn yellowed, spotted with fall leaves. He did not move. His suit, even with him kneeling, leaning forward, was loose on his shoulders and back. He had lost so much weight. A car went by, a gray blur. She waited for him to get up.
You should see the area where her stomach was. It’s grown like a pumpkin. Round, bloated. It’s odd—they removed the stomach, and some of the surrounding area if I remember correctly, but even with the removal of so much thereabouts, she looks pregnant. You can see it, the bulge, even under the blanket. I’m assuming it’s the cancer, but I haven’t asked my mother, or Beth. Was it the bloating of the starving child? I don’t know. I don’t ask questions. Before, when I said that I asked questions, I lied.
The nose has at this point been bleeding for about ten minutes. She had had one nosebleed before, two weeks ago maybe, and Beth could not make it stop, so she and Beth had gone to the emergency room. The hospital people had kept her for two days. Her oncologist, who sometimes we liked and sometimes we did not, came and visited and glanced at stainless steel charts and chatted on the side of the bed—he has been her oncologist for many years. They gave her new blood and had monitored her white blood cell count. They had wanted to keep her longer, but she had insisted on going home; she was terrified of being in there, was finished with hospitals, did not want—
She had come out feeling defeated, stripped, and now, safely at home, she did not want to go back. She had made me and Beth promise that she would never have to go back. We had promised.
“Okay,” we said.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“Okay,” we said.
I push her forehead as far back as possible. The arm of the couch is soft and pliable.
She spits. She is used to the spitting, but still makes strained, soft vomiting noises.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Does what hurt?”
“The spitting.”
“No, it feels good, stupid.”
“Sorry.”
A family walks by outside, two parents, a small child in snow-pants and a parka, a stroller. They do not look through our window. It is hard to tell if they know. They might know but are being polite. People know.
My mother likes to have the curtains open so she can see the yard and the street. During the day it is often very bright outside, and though the brightness is visible from inside the family room, somehow the light does not travel effectively into the family room, in terms of bringing to the family room any noticeable illumination. I am not a proponent of the curtains being open.
Some people know. Of course they know.
People know.
Everyone knows. Everyone is talking. Waiting.
I have plans for them, the nosy, the inquisitive, the pitying, have developed elaborate fantasies for those who would see us as grotesque, pathetic, our situation gossip fodder. I picture strangulations—Tsk tsk, I hear she’s-gurglel—neck-breakings—what will happen to that poor little fo-crack!—I picture kicking bodies as they lie curled on the ground, spitting blood as they—Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ, Vm sorry, Vm sorry!—beg for mercy. I lift them over my head and then bring them down, break them over my knee, their spines like dowels of balsa. Can’t you see it? I push offenders into giant vats of acid and watch them struggle, scream as the acid burns, breaks them apart. My hands fly into them, breaking their skin—I pull out hearts and intestines and toss them aside. I do head-crushings, beheadings, some work with baseball bats—the variety and degree of punishment depending on the offender and the offense. Those whom I don’t like or my mother doesn’t like in the first place get the worst—usually long, drawn-out strangulations, faces of red then purple then mauve. Those I barely know, like the family that just walked by, are spared the worst—nothing personal. I’ll run them over with my car.
We are both distantly worried about the bleeding nose, my mother and I, but are for the time being working under the assumption that the nose will stop bleeding. While I hold her nose she holds the half-moon receptacle as it rests on the upper portion of her chest, under her chin.
Just then I have a great idea. I try to get her to talk funny, the way people talk when their nose is being held.
“Please?” I say.
“No,” she says.
“C’mon.” “Cut it out.” “What?”
My mother’s hands are veiny and strong. Her neck has veins. Her back has freckles. She used to do a trick where it looked like she would be pulling off her thumb, when in fact she was not. Do you know this trick? Part of one’s right thumb is made to look like part of one’s left hand, and then is slid up and down the index finger of the left finger—attached, then detached. It’s an unsettling trick, and more so when my mother used to do it, because she did it in a way where her hands sort of shook, vibrated, her neck’s veins protruding and taut, her face gripped with the strain plausibly attendant to pulling off one’s finger. As children, we watched with both glee and terror. We knew it was not real, we had seen it dozens of times, but its power was nev
er diminished, because my mother’s was a uniquely physical presence—she was all skin and muscles. We would make her do the trick for our friends, who were also horrified and enthralled. But kids loved her. Everyone knew her from school—she directed the plays in grade school, would take in kids who were going through divorces, knew and loved and was not shy about hugging any of them, especially the shy ones—there was an effortless kind of understanding, an utter lack of doubt about what she was doing that put people at ease, so unlike some of the mothers, so brittle and unsure. Of course, if she didn’t like someone, that kid knew it. Like Dean Borris, the beefy, dirty-blond boy up the block, who would stand in the street and, unprovoked, give her the finger as she drove by. “Bad kid,” she would say, and she meant it— she had an inner hardness that under no circumstances did you want to trifle with—and would have him struck from her list until the second he might say sorry (Dean unfortunately did not), at which time he would have gotten a hug like anyone else. As strong as she was physically, most of the power was in her eyes, small and blue, and when she squinted, she would squint with a murderous intensity that meant, unmistakably, that, if pushed, she would deliver on her stare’s implied threat, that to protect what she cared about, she would not stop, that she would run right over you. But she wore her strength casually, had a trusting carelessness with her flesh and muscles. She would cut herself while slicing vegetables, cut the living shit out of her finger, usually her thumb, and it would bleed everywhere, on the tomatoes, the cutting board, in the sink, while we watched at her waist, awed, scared she would die. But she would just grimace, wash the thumb clean under the tap, wrap the thumb in a paper towel and keep cutting, while the blood slowly soaked through the paper towel, crawling, as blood crawls, outward from the wound’s wet center.
Beside the TV there are various pictures of us children, including one featuring me, Bill, and Beth, all under seven, in an orange dinghy, all expressions panicked. In the picture, we seem surrounded by water, for all anyone knows, miles from shore—our expressions certainly indicate that. But of course we couldn’t have been more than ten feet out, our mother standing over us, ankle-deep, in her brown one-piece with the white fringe, taking the picture. It is the picture we know best, the one we have seen every day, and its colors—the blue of Lake Michigan, the orange of the dinghy, our tan skin and blond hair—are the colors we associate with our childhoods. In the picture we are all holding the side of the little boat, wanting out, wanting our mother to lift us out, before the thing would sink or drift away.
“How’s school?” she asks.
“Fine.”
I don’t tell her I’ve been dropping classes.
“How’s Kirsten?”
“She’s good.”
“I always liked her. Nice girl. Spunky.”
When I rest my head on the couch I know that it’s coming, coming like something in the mail, something sent away for. We know it is coming, but are not sure when—weeks? months? She is fifty-one. I am twenty-one. My sister is twenty-three. My brothers are twenty-four and seven.
We are ready. We are not ready. People know.
Our house sits on a sinkhole. Our house is the one being swept up in the tornado, the little train-set model house floating helplessly, pathetically around in the howling black funnel. We’re weak and tiny. We’re Grenada. There are men parachuting from the sky.
We are waiting for everything to finally stop working—the organs and systems, one by one, throwing up their hands—The jig is up, says the endocrine; / did what I could, says the stomach, or what’s left of it; We’ll get em next time, adds the heart, with a friendly punch to the shoulder.
After half an hour I remove the towel, and for a moment the blood does not come.
“I think we got it,” I say.
“Really?” she says, looking up at me.
“Nothing’s coming,” I say.
I notice the size of her pores, large, especially those on her nose. Her skin has been leathery for years, tanned to permanence, not in an unflattering way, but in a way interesting considering her Irish background, the fact that she must have grown up so fair—
It begins to come again, the blood thick and slow at first, dotted with the black remnants of scabs, then thinner, a lighter red. I squeeze again.
“Too hard,” she says. “That hurts.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“I’m hungry,” says a voice. Toph. He is standing behind me, next to the couch.
“What?” I say.
“I’m hungry.”
“I can’t feed you now. Have something from the fridge.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t care, anything.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do we have?”
“Why don’t you look? You’re seven, you’re perfectly capable of looking.”
“We don’t have anything good.”
“Then don’t eat.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“Then eat something.”
“But what?”
“Jesus, Toph, just have an apple.”
“I don’t want an apple.”
“C’mere, sweetie,” says Mom.
“We’ll get some food later,” I say.
“Come to Mommy.”
“What kind of food?”
“Go downstairs, Topher.”
Toph goes back downstairs.
“He’s scared of me,” she says.
“He’s not scared of you.”
In a few minutes, I lift the towel to see the nose. The nose is turning purple. The blood is not thickening. The blood is still thin and red.
“It’s not clotting,” I say.
“I know.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“It’ll stop.”
“Its not stopping.”
“Wait awhile.”
“We’ve been waiting awhile.”
“Wait more.”
“I think we should do something.”
“Wait.”
“When’s Beth coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should do something.”
“Fine. Call the nurse.”
I call the nurse we call when we have questions. We call her when the IV isn’t dripping properly, or when there’s a bubble in the tube, or when bruises the size of dinner plates appear on our mother’s back. For the nose the nurse suggests pressure, and keeping her head back. I tell her that I have been doing just that, and that it has not yet worked. She suggests ice. I say thank you and hang up and go to the kitchen and wrap three cubes of ice in a paper towel. I bring them back and apply them to the bridge of her nose.
“Ah!” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s cold”
“It’s ice.”
“I know it’s ice.”
“Well, ice is cold”
I still have to apply pressure to the nose, so with my left hand I apply pressure, and with my right I hold the ice to the bridge of her nose. It’s awkward, and I can’t do both things while sitting on the arm of the couch and still be in a position to see the television.
I try kneeling on the floor next to the couch. I reach over the arm of the couch to apply the ice with one hand, and pressure with the other. This works fine, but after a short while my neck gets sore, having to turn ninety degrees to see the screen. It’s all wrong.
I have an inspiration. I climb onto the top of the couch, above the cushions, on top of the back of the couch. I stretch out on the top, the cushions shhhing as I settle my weight upon them. I reach down so my head and arms are both aiming in the same direction, with my arms just reaching her nose and my head resting comfortably on the top of the couch, with a nice view of the set. Perfect. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I give her a thumbs up. Then she spits green fluid into the half-moon receptacle.
My father had not moved. Beth stood in the entranceway to the family room and waited. He was about ten feet from the street. He was kneeling, but with his hands on the ground, fingers extended down, like roots from a riverbed tree. He was not praying. His head tilted back for a moment as he looked up, not to the sky, but to the trees in the neighbor’s backyard. He was still on his knees. He had gone to get the newspaper.
The half-moon container is full. There are now three colors in the half-moon container—green, red, and black. The blood, which is coming through her nose, is also coming through her mouth. I study the container, noting the way the three fluids do not mix, the green fluid being more viscous, the blood, this blood so thin, just swishing around on top. There is some black liquid in the corner. Maybe that is bile.
“What’s the black stuff?” I ask, pointing to it from my perch above her.
“That’s probably bile,” she says.
A.H.W.O.S.G. 21
A car pulls into the driveway and into the garage. The door connecting the garage to the laundry room opens and closes and then the door to the bathroom opens and closes. Beth is home.
Beth has been working out. Beth likes it when I am home from college for the weekends because then she can work out. She needs her workouts, she says. Toph’s shoes continue to rumble. Beth comes into the room. She is wearing a sweatshirt and spandex leggings. Her hair is up though it’s usually down.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” Beth says.
“Hi,” Mom says.
“What are you doing on top of the couch?” Beth asks.
“It’s easier this way.”
“What is?”
“Nosebleed,” I say.
“Shit. How long?”
“Forty minutes maybe.”
“Did you call the nurse?”
“Yeah, she said to put ice on.”
“That didn’t work last time.”
“You tried ice before?”
“Of course.”
“You didn’t tell me that, Mom.”
“Mom?”
“I’m not going back in.”
My father, a man of minor miracles, had done something pretty incredible. This is what he did: six months or so ago, he had sat us down, Beth and I—not Bill, Bill was in D.C., and not Toph, who for reasons that are obvious enough was not invited—in the family room. Our mother was not there for some reason, I can’t remember exactly where she was—but so we were there, sitting as far away as possible from the customary cloud of smoke around him and his cigarette. The conversation, if it had followed the standard procedure for such things, would have included warm-up talk, some talk of things generally, and how what he was about to say was very difficult, etcetera, but we were just settling in, kind of well obviously not expecting— “Your mother’s going to die.”