by Paul Griner
Letters
Why aren’t you interested in the police feed showing two nuns and a guy in a ski mask? It was a public school. Nuns would have been out of place. How come they never looked into that?
How come you never looked into that?
Must be because you’re exhausted, keeping all the lies straight.
A Beginning
He’d been bullied, three of his friends talked about it, though his parents never knew. Lots of times, by lots of kids. But one event stood out for them, one he’d brought up again and again. Nash took notes on it and the story was almost always the same, down to the last details.
Slammed up against the lockers by four or five older boys when he was new to middle school and made to smell a girl’s dropped used tampon, their big hands holding his head against the metal and forcing it to his nose and mouth.
He kicked their legs until they stomped on his feet, his wide brown eyes staring at them over the bloodstained tampon until they overflowed with tears.
That’s it, that’s it, they said in the softest voices, once he stopped struggling, as if they were helping him. Breathe it in. Breathe it deep.
Jazz
NOVEMBER 2018
Lamont showed up uninvited and unannounced and as usual with bourbon. It never bothered me. His coat carried with it the scent of the cold, of coming snow.
Let’s eat, I said, leading him through the stacked boxes he’d helped me move.
Here, he said. He stopped and handed me a book, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Should I keep it? I asked. You giving away your books?
All the rest to my church. He kicked a box. You should unpack some. Make the place homey. Get some Seabreeze candles too. Smell the place up nice.
Seabreeze?
Yeah. White people smells.
Wait, we have different smells?
You don’t pay attention much, do you?
What’s a Black smell?
Honeysuckle. He shrugged. Lavender and cinnamon. In the kitchen he blew dust from two glasses though there was none and poured us generous bourbons.
You cook, I’ll watch, then eat, he said. Fair trade. He synced his iPhone with my speaker and thumbed through his music; he was always the aux. Jimmy Garrison on “Crescent,” he said, and raised the volume. Smiling, like he’d just gifted me.
Patient and persistent, he was trying to teach me about jazz, and I was trying to learn. Every time he played something, I heard what he was getting at, but it all leaked out of my brain by the next session; I had to learn the same things over and over again. That was okay. I knew I was getting the band-me-down education intended for Latrell. Lamont said, Listen how Garrison only comes in at the beginning and end. Dude really brings the ruckus.
The scent of prosciutto sautéing in butter as Lamont drank.
Prosciutto? he said. American hams aren’t good enough for you? Use a city ham. Wet-cured, brined. Moister, not smoked. Just like prosciutto.
I kept stirring, and Lamont switched back to talking about music. I sipped and listened. The album was Live in Japan. Coltrane, I said.
You got it! Such a smile. Dude was always in his first heaven with music.
That warmed me. I had the dutiful-schoolboy gene, which I’d passed on to Liam. There was never enough praise. May never understood that.
For a while we were quiet. But, perhaps because the song was recorded in Japan, before long Lamont began talking about his new wife, Akane.
I never knew my house had so much wrong. Drapes, he said.
You have to change them?
I need them. Don’t you remember? I don’t have any.
That’s right, I said, adding a bit of fresh-cracked pepper. The clean look.
He said, The clean look is history. But you know what’s good? She’s not one of those women who eat so little and then brag about it like they’re eating Bible pages.
He fell quiet and I hummed along with the melody as I stirred in the cream and the orange zest. Then I added the freshly squeezed orange juice.
I have to tell you something, he said, sliding his glass back and forth over the counter between his cupped hands like a puck, bourbon sloshing up the sides.
You trying to embroil me with another date?
Ha, no, he said. Learned my lesson with the first one. He drained the glass and refilled it. Though you should have given Palmer a chance. That woman’s for real. Won the top salesperson award this year. Trip to Hawaii.
I gave her a chance, I said. I didn’t say how in my dream of kissing her at the beach, her lips had tasted as sweet as carrots. The pasta was bubbling and nearly done; I scooped out some cooking water with a coffee mug to thin the sauce.
You remember DC? How I was gone for some of that first night, with Latrell? It was because you were going to read The Hardy Boys to Liam. I’d read some to Latrell earlier that year and he liked it okay, despite the prejudice, but after the second one he said he knew the way it would go, so I didn’t want to be rude.
Rude how? Off the heat, I added pecorino cheese to the pasta. Over all the moves I’d lost some kitchen tools, so I used a vegetable peeler.
As if maybe I thought my boy was smarter than yours. Anyway. I felt bad about that so the second night we stayed in and you read more of it. The Mystery of Cabin Island. You were on your bed and Liam climbed down to sit next to you. When Chet saw the ghost on the island, Latrell climbed down to my bed to do the same. We listened. All the chapters you read. Then we turned the lights out and kept quiet just like that, each of us holding our boys until we fell asleep.
His voice had thickened. He drank some bourbon to clear it and said, I just wanted to thank you for that. I remember that night a lot. Before we left DC the next day, I went back to the bookstore and bought The Mystery of Cabin Island so I could read it aloud to him. But you know what? The rest of that book sucked!
I loved his rare bubbling laugh. I poured olive oil on the pasta to make it glisten and handed him his bowl. Eat.
He thanked me. I raised my glass and said, To our boys.
He clinked my glass and said, To our boys, and sat turning the pasta bowl, as if in a different position, it might look more appetizing. He could never eat when lost in thoughts about his dead son.
You talk to Liam today? he asked.
Every day.
He nodded and stared at his food, no doubt thinking he couldn’t talk to Latrell. All the parents have an abiding sadness, combined with a seething anger, usually masked by a passionate commitment. Lamont’s is the antiabortion crusade; May’s the treatment of mental illness, but I didn’t really have one, at least not that I admit, though really it’s Kate. Every morning when I wake, she’s one of the first things I think of. I’d never told Lamont any of that; Kate was mine.
I’d also decided in the aftermath not to waste anything, so, after I finished my bowl of pasta, I refilled Lamont’s glass and patted his back and asked if it was okay if I ate his serving too. Part of my plan to become the world’s fattest human, I said. He didn’t like it if I took a bite of his food without asking.
You know, he said, pushing his plate over to me, three years in? Latrell’s bones now. And if I ever find where the shooter’s buried? His grave? I’m going to go piss on it. Every day until the Second Coming.
Call me, I said. I’ll join you, and ate his dinner in addition to mine.
Mist World
NOVEMBER 2015
The Neuro-ICU ward had fifteen or twenty beds arcing around the floor, with thin sliding curtains between them, and in every one a bad case: strokes, car accidents, victims of beatings, all with neurological trauma, all constantly monitored and frequently tended, many of whom would die. It looked like Liam would be there awhile. They’d missed a single shotgun pellet that had entered just under his hairline and penetrated deep into his brain. Easy enough to do, with all his other injuries, but once you saw it on the X-ray, it was obvious. One day he’d talk, the next he wouldn’t, the one after that he mi
ght be comatose or alert. Some days he walked.
The official diagnosis was damage to the frontal lobes and sub-arachnoid hemorrhages, bleeding between the brain and skull, which can cause a coma, paralysis, or death. A single subarachnoid hemorrhage increases your risk of death by 50 percent; he had three. Somehow, despite X-rays and CAT scans and an MRI, they’d missed them all at first. When I came across that 50 percent number as I did quick research on my phone, I stopped reading, not wanting to know any more.
Other people thought I should. A month into his stay on the Neuro-ICU, one of the residents called me into a cramped office behind the nurses’ station. Trece. Short, with an afro and thick black glasses that magnified his eyes. He’d sat in on many of the meetings we’d had with surgeons and neurologists, pain management and pulmonary care doctors, never saying a thing, always wearing bright blue socks. Now he thought it was time I learned how serious this was.
I’m guessing you’re taking in all this information and trying to process it and probably not really knowing what’s the most important part, he said.
I nodded. It was hard to understand all the jargon and they moved so fast I never had time to ask them to explain. Sometimes I looked up things on my phone, and now I could follow most of it, but a fair amount was meaningless, other than it seemed bad.
He put one foot up on a garbage can and called up an X-ray of Liam’s head on the computer. The gray brain, the white skull. On the left side, between brain and skull, was a sea of black. With the point of his pen he outlined its vast, undulating circumference. That’s the blood, he said. It shouldn’t be there. Those are from the hemorrhages.
Will they have to operate to drain it? I asked.
No. It might drain itself or it might stay there forever or it might go away over time. It’s only if it gets bigger that they worry.
How will they know?
Mapping technology. They have this one as a baseline and others they can overlay, to see any changes.
Lamont probably knew about that. That was the kind of thing he might be involved in. Not for the first time, I wished I was something other than an artist.
Trece ran the pen along the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that divides the brain into its two hemispheres. I thought he was tracking the route of the shotgun pellet.
Normally, he said, it runs in a straight line from the front of the brain to the back. That’s off-center by about four degrees. His brain shifted that much from the impact of the bullet and from falling down the stairs. Maybe a blow to the head.
It was certainly new information, but I didn’t really know what to do with that, either, so I thanked him and went back out to stand by Liam’s bed, to listen to him breathe. It wasn’t a bullet in his brain, it was a shotgun pellet, and the difference mattered, I told myself. I wasn’t sure I believed it, but I wanted to. Why couldn’t doctors be precise?
Two nurses were attending Liam so I stood aside and watched. They both had strong forearms and short fingernails. This might hurt a little, honey, the bigger one said, and rolled him onto one side and pulled the sheet out from beneath him.
And this too, the smaller one said, as they rolled him back.
Liam’s eyelids fluttered but he didn’t open them when he spoke. He said, Who paid your way through nursing school, Einstein?
Both nurses smiled at that one.
The numbers on his monitors were good. The O2 saturation was above 90 percent. The gauze over the exit wound on his shoulder was blood-free, but he had a small red patch on the back of his good shoulder.
We’ll have to watch that, the bigger nurse said. That can lead to bed sores. She spoke very quietly, not wanting to upset him.
She salved the spot and applied a bandage, and when they lowered Liam onto his back, he spoke without opening his eyes. Stop using your whisper voices, he said. I hate that.
Eternal Mysteries beyond the Grave
He left labeled discs behind, and a journal, about what he was going to do, the people he planned to shoot, and why. Nash thought it was fairly standard stuff: the world to blame for his troubles, how the shooting would make people recognize him.
But he’d torn random pages from his journal, one here, two there, twenty-four near the middle; all had vanished. And the discs: Nixon, Bonaparte, Wee Willie Keeler. Why? Bonaparte wasn’t about grandiosity, Wee Willie didn’t mention baseball, Nixon didn’t deal with criminals or eighteen minutes of shooting. He’d planned for fifteen minutes before police arrived; he’d had eleven. Smart that way.
Nash spent a lot of time staring out his office window at rain and snow, at sunshine, at wind bending the pin oaks and pines, making anagrams from the letters, writing the names on index cards and placing them in different orders as the room dimmed and grew brighter from passing clouds, but nothing clicked. Nothing.
He wondered if the point wasn’t to waste his time, one more Fuck you to the world. The shooter was practicing homicidal art, he wrote, and he had admirers, as sick as that sounded. Nash didn’t let anger distract him, and he didn’t stop trying, because he’d promised the parents of all those children he would. He owed them that, especially May.
There was something about her, and he hadn’t told her the complete truth, though she’d asked. So, a touch of guilt, and a bigger portion of attraction, two-thirds of the pie maybe. You weren’t supposed to get involved with victims or survivors, but sometimes these things just happened. Some pies you just wanted to inhale.
Last Will and Testament
DECEMBER 2015
In the Neuro-ICU, you got to know the other occupants if you had someone there for a while. Beyond the shot Uruguayan was a white-haired Ukrainian lady, a stroke victim who took up only a small portion of her bed. The attempted suicide, the man who’d been hit by a hammer after leaving a bar, and the two teen girls in successive bays who’d been driving too fast and flipped their cars.
The Ukrainian had come to America in her thirties as a nanny; her charges seemed to love her. Day after day people streamed in to see her, and gradually I began to recognize them. She’d lived in apartments all over Manhattan and she must have been given bonuses, because it turned out she’d bought property back in the Ukraine. A lot, it seemed. And she had no children. Sarah was the woman there the most. Early thirties with round, sad green eyes. At night before she had to leave, she sang Ukrainian lullabies to Galina.
One I especially liked. What’s the name of that one? I asked. The ward was quiet. Dark outside already and the shift halfway through, most of the visitors gone. Beeping machines, fluorescent lights, I might have been imagining it, but I thought Liam’s heart rate slowed whenever she sang.
Sarah said, I don’t know. I don’t know the names of any of them. I just remember her singing them to me all the time. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing them right or mixing up words from different ones. They’re all rattling about my head, but I may have them wrong.
A week later she was back with a lawyer, who spoke Ukrainian.
Sarah came to get me where I sat sketching beside Liam. I was supposed to be working on CVS, but I was sketching him instead.
Hi, she said, sliding the curtain aside on its clicking runner. Sorry. Could I borrow you for a minute?
I looked at Liam’s monitors. His O2 levels were fine, his breathing. He’d talked to me a bit before drifting back into sleep, stray, unrelated comments, something about a ginger on TV and why I should turn it off, a couple of lines from Goodnight Moon in French. But he knew who I was. Sure, I said, and stood.
Can you be a witness? she asked. To Galina’s will?
Oh. Okay. But whatever it says I can’t read it. I don’t know any Ukrainian.
That’s the thing, Sarah said. She doesn’t have one. We’re making it for her.
She woke up? I was surprised. Since her stroke, she’d been unconscious, twenty-five days and counting; waking up would be a great sign.
No, Sarah said. But under Ukrainian law, this is legal.
We crowded around Galina’s bed, Sarah and me and the lawyer, whose name I didn’t catch. Short and stout and with the glossiest black hair and beard. I wondered if the hair was a wig. He shook my hand and said to Sarah, Ready? His voice so deep it sounded like it came from a well.
He began reading a document in Ukrainian. Now and then he’d look up at Sarah over his reading glasses and she would nod, so when he looked at me I nodded too.
Three dense pages; I must have nodded fifteen or twenty times, wondering each time what I was agreeing to, if they were fleecing this woman or making sure she’d always be taken care of, and whether Ukrainian law held any sway in an American ICU, and how on earth my life had come to this.
Okay, the lawyer said, when he was done. You just need to sign several copies. He put his broad thumb to the bottom of the page where an X had been typed, and I started to sign but paused.
What does all this say? I asked.
That she’s of sound mind and body.
But she isn’t, I said. Is that legal?
He shrugged and pocketed his phone. We’ll find out.
What happens to all her property?
It goes into a trust.
For her?
He nodded. Once it’s sold.
Who runs it? I asked.
A board. Fifteen of the children she cared for.
She doesn’t have any of her own?
No. Nor living relatives. And after she dies, if she dies, the money is disbursed to a fund for indigent Ukrainian immigrants.
The flowers on her bedside table had wilted, their orange petals like crepe paper. I signed all seven copies even though I had no idea if what he said was true or whether to laugh or cry.
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