Heat and Light (29 page)

NUMBERS, ESPECIALLY, are fraught
with subtext.

The ten-year survival rate of papillary thyroid cancer is 93%.

The ten-year survival rate of follicular thyroid cancer is 85%.

The ten-year survival rate of medullary thyroid cancer is 75%.

The ten-year survival rate of anaplastic thyroid cancer is (no data).

None of the film showed unusual fogging. And yet, in Harrisburg, the infant death rate tripled. Hundreds of people reported skin sores and lesions, a metallic taste in the mouth.

SLEEP ELUDES HIM
. He
can't do enough to make himself tired. Late at night, after Jessie is in bed, he creeps downstairs to watch TV. Of the 146 channels, one is as good as another. Sitcoms and infomercials, the Home Shopping Network. He simply wants to hear a human voice.

One night, flipping through the channels, he finds a movie already in progress—one made for TV, in the seventies probably. He can tell this at a glance, without knowing how he knows. The lighting, maybe—like pale, watery sunshine—or the fuzzy resolution of the videotaped image. Was this the way all television used to look? Wesley remembers, vaguely, that fine-tuning had been required. If the actors looked a little green, you fiddled with the
TINT
knob. If the picture jumped, you adjusted
HORIZONTAL HOLD.

This movie he recognizes immediately.
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
conjures, in an instant, the whole of his childhood. For that reason and others, it is nearly too painful to watch.

The film is far, far stupider than he could have imagined, dreadful by every measure: the cheesy sets and insipid music, the acting embarrassingly sincere. Its premise—the child born without an immune system, confined to a sterile wing of his parents' suburban ranch house—now seems ludicrous, though as a kid he'd accepted it without question. Had been, in fact, haunted by it: for months or maybe years afterward, the characters had appeared in his dreams.

What did this say about the boy Wesley Peacock?

Watching, he is haunted all over again, not by the idiotic film but by his young self: an indoorsy boy prone to childhood ailments,
afraid of the larger world and, especially, of other kids. A boy who craved the sober company of adults, his mother specifically. Bernadette had been his best friend and nursemaid, her attention to his colds and earaches well worth the discomfort of a runny nose. Sickness had seemed to him, then, the height of luxury—the cherry-flavored cough syrup, the lozenges. His mother bringing his meals on a tray.

More than anything he'd wanted to be an invalid, to be cosseted and cared for, a horrible realization. To Dead Wesley the irony is nearly intolerable. It is, truly, too sharp to bear.

He forces himself to keep watching. The problem with the acting, he sees now, is the players' great conviction. They seem not to understand that the story is preposterous. Instead of making their performances better, this only makes them seem pathetic, gullible actors fooled by some fast-talking director into embarrassing themselves.

You know,
the Bubble Boy tells his doctor,
I'm not so unhappy in here as all of you think.

He recalls, now, that
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
was also a love story. The teenage Bubble Boy spends most of his time staring through binoculars at the girl next door, until finally—improbably—she invites him to a beach party. The scene is exactly as Wesley remembers it, and no wonder—as a kid, in the age before VCRs, he replayed it in his memory a thousand times: the Bubble Boy wheeled to the beach on a gurney in an airtight glass case; the girl in her bikini riding up on horseback. As a boy he'd found the image electric. It was, in fact, the first erotic fantasy in which he had cast himself: the girl riding toward him, breasts bouncing. Himself safe in his glass box like a giant corsage.

Weird. Beyond weird.

Weirder still is that even now, the scene stirs him. Not the teenage actress, whom he barely recognizes. In his fantasy he'd recast her as Jessie, his own girl next door. The only girl he would ever love.

The beach scene, it turns out, is the highlight of the film. Dead Wesley watches, slightly bored, as the Bubble Boy attends high school, first on closed-circuit television and later in person, wearing a polyester space suit with a battery on his back. The scene is excruciating to watch, the one moment where the film bears any resemblance to actual life. Against his will he remembers the trauma of finding himself, for the first time, in a public school classroom, surrounded by kids his own age—boys and girls in the throes of puberty, buzzing with some strange energy he didn't understand.

He turns off the TV.

He has no desire to relive the film's maudlin final scene, the boy stepping out of his bubble to ride off on horseback with the girl (and, presumably, fuck her before she goes off to college, an implication Wesley was too innocent to grasp at the time). As a kid he'd hated the ending, which struck him as a betrayal, an affront to bubble-dwellers everywhere. To Dead Wesley it is a different kind of outrage.

He turns the TV back on.

The truth is that anger is invigorating. In his final months it is the only emotion that makes him feel alive. The laughable climactic scene—the boy's blithe departure from his bubble—was clearly written by an obnoxiously young and healthy person. Who else could take survival so lightly? Who else could imagine throwing away—for love or sex or freedom; for any reason whatsoever—his precious only life?

EACH DAY AT NOON,
he puts a bathrobe over his pajamas and listens for a car in the driveway, Shelby Vance coming to give him his lunch. Shelby Devlin, now, though Wesley has trouble thinking of her as a married woman, a wife and mother. As an adult of any kind.
She seems a little simple,
Jessie has said more than once, but that isn't it, exactly. Shelby is as unguarded as a child. You never know what's going to come out of her mouth.

“How are you feeling?” she asks when he opens the door. It has replaced
hello
as their standard greeting.

“Fine. A little sunburned.” He is surprised to see her without Olivia, whom she normally hauls along in a bassinet, awkwardly, like a pail of wash water. At first Wesley found the baby's presence irritating. He was—still is—unnerved by infants, their incessant demands. And yet today he is disappointed not to see her. When they run out of words, he and Shelby watch Olivia like television. Without her, there will be even less to talk about.

“It's Rich's day off,” says Shelby. “I asked him to babysit.”

Is it possible to babysit one's own children? Wesley doesn't ask. He has met Shelby's husband only once, and finds them an unlikely couple. Rich Devlin is Wesley's age but seems older, a gruff man who, oddly, reminds him of his own father. Shelby, as far as he can tell, has changed little since age fourteen.

“How hungry are you? I can make two sandwiches.”

“One is plenty,” says Wesley, who hasn't been hungry in months.

He watches her move around the kitchen, locating bread, butter, canned soup. She knows the kitchen as well as Jessie does.

“He can handle them one at a time, just not together. So this is kind of an experiment.” Shelby places his cheese sandwich in the pan. “Of course, in a couple weeks it won't matter. Braden is starting preschool.”

“That will be nice for you,” says Wesley.

“Oh, no,” she says gravely. “I'd keep him home with me forever if I could.”

“Be careful what you wish for. I was homeschooled. I'm pretty sure I drove my mother nuts.”

Shelby looks astonished. “You can do that?”

“Sure. A lot of people do.” He is regularly amazed by what she doesn't know. “For religious reasons, mainly. They don't necessarily agree with what's taught in the public schools.”

“Is that why your parents did it?”

“I guess so.” Oddly, he has never wondered. The flip side of Shelby Devlin: the question that startles. “It was probably my dad's idea. He had opinions.”

“Did you like it?”

He is reminded, again, of the idiotic movie, the Bubble Boy in his ludicrous space suit, tormented by his classmates. Mood swings are a common side effect of Lumox. Absurdly, he is near tears.

“Loved it. Though in retrospect I'm not sure it was good for me. You look nice,” he says to change the subject. Instead of her usual jeans and sweatshirt, Shelby wears a skirt and blouse, her waist cinched by a wide belt of red leather. The belt strikes him as part of a costume, the crime-fighting gear of a cartoon superhero.

“It feels good to dress up once in a while. I never get a chance anymore.”

“Me neither,” Wesley says, but Shelby doesn't even smile. She has no sense of humor, not even a bad one, a quality he finds slightly exotic.

She places his grilled cheese on a plate, the plate on a tray. She pours him a glass of milk and a glass of water, and sets out his Lumox. Her skirt is very short. On another woman it might be sexy. Shelby seems, simply, to have outgrown her clothes.

Shelby plus anyone makes an unlikely couple.

She returns the milk and butter to the fridge. “It's good to see you up and around. Do you want some company while you eat? I have a whole hour. If I'm gone longer than that, Rich panics. He's afraid he'll have to change a diaper.”

“Don't worry about me,” says Wesley. “Tell Rich I said hello.”

He walks her to the door. Her legs are long and skinny; is that a good thing? He has never understood the fascination with women's legs.

“Thank you for coming,” he tells her. “It helped.”

She takes a small step toward him. “Are you sure you don't need me to stay?”

Dead Wesley studies her, puzzled. It is an indicator of his deadness that he does not, at first, understand her meaning.

She takes another step.

I have lost my mind, he thinks as he lets Shelby kiss him. The realization is less troubling than it should be. He has already lost everything else.

They kiss with abandon, an expression that once baffled him and now makes perfect sense. He abandons hope, honor, the illusion of consequence. The doomed boy steps out of his bubble, into the very short future.

They kiss with abandon, as the living do.

He leads her downstairs into the basement office. The futon is piled with documents he will never file. With abandon he knocks them to the floor.

He kisses her with what's left of him. Her skin feels powerfully alive, shockingly warm beneath her blouse.

Their undressing is dyssynchronous. Wesley wears pajamas, easy on, easy off, like a giant baby who requires frequent changes. Shelby's outfit is a gauntlet of complicated fasteners: the Wonder Woman belt with its multiple buckles, the bra and garter stockings. All this takes time.

“What's the matter?” says Shelby.

“Nothing. I'm sorry,” he says. “It's not your fault.”

She flushes nearly purple. “Did I do something wrong?”

“I'm taking a lot of medication,” he mumbles. “Nothing really works anymore.”

“That's okay. I should get going anyway.” Quickly, furtively, she reassembles her elaborate armor. He has never seen anyone dress so fast.

Dead Wesley walks her to the door. When he finishes dying, 122 days from now, the time he failed to make love to Shelby Devlin will be the only secret he ever kept from Jessie.

The dying are not saintly.

In a kind of trance he watches her drive away, Shelby who'd been willing—eager—to lie down with a dead man. Understanding, at last, how truly exotic she is.

An unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. Was there ever a better description of human life?

Based on the assumption of minimal exposure, no ill effects were observed.

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Are you confused yet?

Each revelation is to be acknowledged with applause.

A BELL RINGS
: ten-minute
movement. A ding is escorted to the Ding Wing. Correctional Officer Devlin—now back on day shift—makes his rounds.

Visiting hours begin at 2:00
P.M.
, though for most inmates—resented by wives, abandoned by lovers, scorned by children—this is largely theoretical.
The world goes on without you,
Hops explained to him once.
You been gone so long they forgot you was ever there.

In Devlin's block only two inmates have visitors. He stops first at Wanda's cell.

“Officer Devlin! What a pleasure. I was expecting Officer Mulraney.”

“He's out sick,” Devlin says.

Wanda is looking rough. Literally, in fact. Devlin notices it mainly on second shift: by midafternoon her chin is shadowed with beard. It is said that Mulraney has stopped slipping her birth control pills. Possibly he has other things on his mind: his wife still on disability, plagued by mysterious symptoms the doctors can't make sense of. Losing the baby, it is generally agreed, was a blessing. In her current state she couldn't take care of another one.

Of course, no one has ever said this to Steph.

He unlocks Wanda's cell. She has a new hairdo, a ponytail high on her head like the leafy crown of a pineapple.

“Officer Devlin. You're looking expecially handsome this morn
ing.” She lowers her voice theatrically. “I hope Mrs. Devlin appreciates you.”

“I hope so, too.” It's as close as he will allow himself to banter.

He leads her down the corridor to the visitors' room, where the sister—a pretty, round-faced teenager Wanda calls Ray Ray—is already waiting. She is a shorter, plumper version of Wanda: same high cheekbones, same wide painted mouth. A girl who once had a brother and now has a sister; who makes the long bus trip from Philadelphia (five hours, two transfers) to smuggle in nail polish.

In the world—and especially in prison—love is weird-looking.

“Girl,” says Ray Ray. “What you did to your hair?”

Devlin leaves them, the door clanging shut behind him. He returns to the block and finds Weems lying on his bunk, reading a magazine.

A tip is a gang is a ganga is a clica. A waterhead is an outcast, a guy without homies. A guy who can't or won't tip up.

“Weems. You have a visitor.”

He unlocks the cell and they walk silently down the corridor. Weems is small and slight, a head shorter than Devlin and fifty pounds lighter. Not the sort of guy who fares well in prison, a fact he should have considered before doing dirt that would get him locked up. Devlin came to a similar conclusion some years ago, when his brother was on drugs. Locked in with animals like Offill and Cholley, Darren would have been an easy target, a handful of chum tossed to the sharks.

A hog is an angry hoodlum who won't back down, always looking for a fight.

If I were Weems, Devlin thinks, I would definitely tip up.

“All right, then. Have a good visit.” He unlocks the door and sees, through the Plexiglas, his neighbor Rena Koval, dressed in hospital scrubs.

“Hi, Mom,” Weems says.

HIS SHIFT ENDED,
Devlin
changes out of his uniform—he has taken to showering at the prison—and gets into his truck.

He knows nothing, nothing at all, about his neighbors.

Years ago, the world was different. Pap had been friendly with Pete Mackey, Mack's father. Each winter, at slaughtering time, the Beckers and the Mackeys had gone in together on a beef cow. It was more meat than either family could eat on its own.

Had Pap known Pete's daughter was a lesbian? Is
lesbian
even the right word?

It's hard to think of Mack as female. Last summer, when Rich was building the deck, he twice saw her at the lumberyard, a big snuff-chewing woman in overalls. She acknowledged him with a curt nod, as a man would do.

Years ago, neighbors were neighborly. Rich believes this firmly, though the exact source of his belief is not clear. People pitched in at barn raisings, shared equipment, looked after each other's kids and animals. (Also, they ate a lot of meat.) Pulling into Walmart, he wonders how often Rena visits her son. It's possible she's at Deer Run every week, and Rich, who for years worked mostly night shifts, simply failed to notice.

He can't, without a deliberate and tactical leap of imagination, think of Mack as female.

He ignores the old coot greeting visitors at the door.

At the back of the store Rich loads his shopping cart. The water comes in five-gallon plastic tanks. He pays for his water and wheels it out to his truck, wishing he had a bed liner. Each tank should last two days, by his calculation. And yet—somehow—he was here just yesterday. It's his third Walmart trip this week.

Rena Koval doesn't look like a lesbian. And anyway, you don't expect a lesbian to have a son.

It occurs to him that Walmart is part of the problem. His grandmother bought shoes at Meyer's, furniture at Friedman's, fabric at
the five-and-dime. Pap was a regular customer at the hardware store in town. As a boy Rich had sometimes gone along with him. Pap, a sociable guy, always ran into someone he knew. All those stores are gone now.

Rich is not, himself, a sociable guy.

At Walmart you never run into anyone you know.

He pulls out of the parking lot. His brother has some vague moral objection to Walmart. The actual reason is mysterious, constantly changing: child labor maybe, or sweatshops in China. Like all Darren's convictions, this one falls apart under pressure. It gives like rotted wood.

The water is for drinking and cooking only. And yet the plastic bottles empty at a sickening rate. Rich had to buy an entire extra trash can, for the express purpose of transporting them to the dump.

It's just like Darren to worry about poor people in China while giving no thought to poor people in America, who need Walmart because they can't afford to shop anywhere else—a losers' club Rich feels, eternally, on the brink of joining, if he hasn't already. Financial ruin is the bogeyman of his adulthood, the subject of every nightmare. His wife has never understood this, Shelby who spends his money as though she earned it herself. Once, in the heat of an argument, she called him a cheapskate. She'll never know—he's never told her—how deeply this wounded him, an insult he can't forget.

He pulls onto the highway. The day is unseasonably cool, more like September than August—the afternoon summer-warm, a tinge of mourning in the air. The sky vibrant blue like the day the planes went down.

As everyone does, he remembers the day vividly. He was driving, then, for Miners' Medical, heard the news on the radio as he was making his rounds. He and Shelby—his girlfriend then—sat shoulder to shoulder in front of the TV, staring at the same grisly
footage over and over. The catastrophe seemed far away until one of the planes crashed in Shanksville. Watching, Rich thought of calling his brother, but at the time it was impossible. Darren had been drifting away from the family for years. Even in a crisis, he could not be reached.

A massive tanker truck squeals past in the left lane. It is clearly labeled—
RESIDUAL WASTE
—as though someone is proud of its contents.

The day the planes went down. In some way Rich would have been embarrassed to explain, September 11 changed his life. In October he made an offer on Pap's farm. On the front porch of the farmhouse he proposed to Shelby, ready for his future to begin. They married quickly, which raised suspicions, but Shelby wasn't pregnant. Rich was the one rushing them to the altar. He was—still is—decisive by nature. He knew what he wanted, and saw no point in waiting around.

He couldn't have imagined all the ways she would change, the danger of marrying someone so young. A year later, when she was pregnant with Braden, Rich held her hand during the sonogram, staring at the screen: the unformed mass that would become his son, a swirl of paisley that would, in a few months, resolve into a human shape.

He had married an unformed mass, a swirl of paisley. There was no telling what a nineteen-year-old girl might become.

His mother had tried to warn him—
she's a little young, isn't she?—
but Rich wouldn't listen. His previous attempt at marriage, to a girl his own age, had ended badly. A girl he barely knew and never should have married, a girl who couldn't be trusted. They met in a bar a mile from base and married four months later, a soldier's mistake: you wanted someone on the other end, waiting for your return.

He proposed to Shelby on the front porch of the farmhouse. Three years later, at her insistence, the farmhouse was razed.

Rich pulls into the driveway. In the mailbox he finds bills, a vitamin catalog, and an official-looking envelope:
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

             
Re: Act 223 Section 208 Determination

             
Carbon Township, Saxon County

             
Dear Richard Devlin:

                
The Department has investigated the possible degradation of your water supply, located on Number Nine Road in Carbon Township. Our analysis indicates the presence of natural gas in your water supply. Our findings are enclosed here for your records.

                
Methane is the predominant component of natural gas. Drinking water standard limitations have not been established for methane gas. In general, methane levels in water wells are under 5 mg/L. The level of concern begins above 28 mg/L methane, called the saturation level, at which, under normal atmospheric pressure, the water cannot hold additional methane. At these levels, gas may escape the water and concentrate in the air space of your home or building. There is a physical danger of fire or explosion due to the migration of natural gas into water wells or through soils into dwellings where it could be ignited by sources present in most homes/buildings.

                
Please be aware that methane levels can fluctuate. Even with a relatively low level of methane, you should be vigilant of changes in your water that could indicate an increased concentration of methane.

                
All water wells should be equipped with a working vent. This will help alleviate the possibility of concentrating these gases in areas where ignition would pose a threat of life or property. Please note that it is not possible to completely
eliminate the hazards posed by natural gas in the water supply, simply by venting the well.

                
The presence of dissolved methane in your water supply appears to be related to background conditions. At this time, our investigation does not indicate that gas well drilling has affected your water supply. The cause of the gas migration is currently unknown and remains under investigation by DEP.

A lab report is attached. Rich's eyes slide over the columns of figures, values for methane, ethane, SMCLs. He has no idea what he's looking at. For just a moment he thinks of his brother, who before flunking out or withdrawing or simply wandering away from Johns Hopkins had earned half a degree in chemistry. I could call him, Rich thinks, knowing he never will.

He reads the letter again, then shoves it into his pocket. Inside he finds Shelby standing at the sink. He wouldn't have believed it unless he'd caught her in the act. “What the hell are you doing?”

She turns to him red-faced. “Washing dishes.”

“In
bottled water
? Are you fucking kidding me?” He feels, for a moment, flooded with emotion. Anything seems possible. He could knock Shelby sideways, or have a heart attack, or simply weep.

“Drinking and cooking only,” he says through his teeth. “We agreed.”

“
You
agreed,” Shelby says.

This, he reflects, is how it happens. Deer Run is full of guys who've been slapped with domestics, men who—drunk or drugged or, like Rich, stone-cold sober—simply snapped.

“Jesus Christ, Shelby. I can't be running to Walmart every fucking day.”

“You're the one who canceled Poland Spring.”