All the Lasting Things (27 page)

Benji had, since the fire, set to rereading his father’s books. From beginning to end, first to last. He’d never admitted to Henry that he’d made a first lap with the old man’s oeuvre and now, a quarter of the way into the second, Henry couldn’t understand him if he did. In his twenties, when the exchange of Henry’s infamous birthday books struck his son as especially pointed, Benji secretly dipped into the pages of
Nuisance
and
The Skirmishes
; if Henry had corked a message in some bobbing literary bottle, Benji took his chances on finding it here, in the pages of
Nostomania
and
Derelict’s Fee
rather than anatomies of postwar America or bloated Russian doorstoppers. Perhaps Benji, like the disinherited Dimitri Aster in
Nostomania
, had come to wait for his father’s last words.

For 513 pages, for 212 days, Dimitri stands over his father’s bed, patient for the bastard whose gambling partners have beaten him into a coma to open his eyes and say what he has to say. And then, 212 days after Dimitri’s vigil begins, after 212 days of tortured reflection on Phelan Aster’s paternal shortcomings, the father opens his eyes and says to his son, whose mouth is loaded with the gob of spit he’s dreamt of launching into his failure of a father’s face (no matter what the old man croaks), “And now what?”

Dimitri swallows his spit, sensing in the question the first signs of melting a glacier-size impasse, then looks up at the beeping heart monitor to see the thorny green vine of his father’s sinus rhythm snake into a smooth, straight line. A 513-page joke. And now what? And now nothing. Some joke.

Benji, who’d spent more than 212 days of his life hawking up a final, Dimitri-ish send-off spritz of his own, regarded the absurdity. The more you remember, the more you’ve made up: this, from
The Skirmishes.
The father he’d grown up with differed from the father before him differed from the father as husband or artist or teacher or man. Benji had a death grip on a single part of Henry, a few lines he’d redacted from the whole of the text that made the whole more legible to him. He found it hard to fit that piece into the puzzle that lay before him, to complete the portrait of Phelan Aster or Henry Fisher or whatever enigmatic monster Benji had whittled down from a much longer, more complicated story: he saw no trace of that man in the figure before him (who wasn’t, as Benji expected, raging against the dying of the light but slipping as gently, as slowly into it as one can).

“Pee,” Henry said. The voice, hoarse but coming like a flock of birds bursting from the stillness of a tree, startled him.

“Dad?” he said.

“Pee,” Henry repeated, his eyes not moving from the ceiling, as if aiming the appeal at a higher power. “Pee. Pee.” The word burbled out like water from a fountain, a steady stream of monotonous sound.

Benji rose. He lifted the bed sheet to see the insult of a wet mark blooming along a leg of Henry’s pajamas. He pushed the call button that summoned the duty nurse and went to the door to watch for his approach. But nobody came. Looking over his shoulder, Benji weighed his options. He called down the corridor but didn’t dare jog the short distance to the end of it to find the nurse. Even if he could hear his father speaking the entire time, he could not bring himself to leave his post.

“Pee.”

He turned back into the room as though he knew exactly what to do, stalking into the huge tiled square of the bathroom, where safety bars attached to the wall near the toilet and shower, and a drain (reminder that the entire operation could be hosed down when the time came for the next occupant) took up the center of the slightly sloped floor. Grabbing the round plastic pan that Evelyn used to soak Henry’s calloused feet, he filled it with warm water and a soapy sponge and carried it to the side of the bed.

Benji’s hand found its way to his father’s forehead, and as though it belonged to someone else, he watched it smooth down Henry’s hair. Sweat rose on Henry’s skin from the strenuous work of saying that single word, and part of Benji looked on as another part of him—more present, more suitable, more unafraid—moved through its paces. He pulled the sheet over the end of the bed and undid the buttons of his father’s pajama top. Henry no longer smelled like Henry, and his body had shriveled over the course of a year into a less familiar thing. He looked smaller than he actually was, childlike, as if the man he’d been had slipped inside this loosening skin to hide among the bones.

Benji, shushing Henry’s demand into nothing more than a steady susurration of sound, carefully freed his father’s arms and began sponging them down. The soap belonged to Evelyn, the sweet vegetal scent of lavender that trailed after her showers, which left Benji with the impression that both of his parents were there, his mother’s hands perhaps guiding his. He lifted his father’s arms to wash underneath them, then moved gently down the torso, the skin giving as though it were a suit one size too big, before coming to a stop at the elastic-banded pants where the maroon fabric darkened as the water touched it. These he tugged from Henry without pause, slipping into a rhythm, a pace no longer set by his mind. He rinsed the legs next and then the feet, the pale, smooth skin from which the hair had somehow disappeared, before his fingers moved to the adhesive strips that closed Henry’s diaper. He unstuck the flaps of tape and used them to seal the leaden, urine-soaked pad into an innocuous white ball.

Over the course of a year, Henry’s condition had raced from moderately severe to severely severe like a NASCAR driver shifting into his final laps. Benji paused to take in the whole of his father’s body, the daunting decline made unavoidably real, but he carried on, washing the shrunken gray privates with stoic competence before rolling Henry onto his side and running the sponge up and down his back. He found a fresh diaper in the closet, fresh pajamas in the drawer. His hands smelled like lavender. He pulled the blanket to his father’s chest, leaving barely a trace that he’d been there. Henry stared at the same spot on the ceiling, mouth moving softly, speaking a language nobody but Henry could hear. Once again Benji smoothed his father’s hair. He looked down, wanting his father’s eyes to turn toward his, which they would not do.

And now what?

Claudia stood at the gates of campus, hearing the taxis zip by, and waited for something to move her. A force, a charge to send her coursing through the branching circuits of the city. She walked its length from Barnard to her apartment on Fourteenth Street, passing the dirty-looking dry cleaning shops, the proliferating Duane Reades and flower-fronted bodegas, the uninspired restaurants and bland brand clothing stores, letting the crowd carry her along at its own graceless pace until it delivered her (sore, exhausted, ready to pass out) into Nick’s arms. The route could neither be long enough nor short enough. She found satisfaction in the stab of being alone, in wandering into the used bookshop on Eightieth Street and sitting with a copy of the Mary Jo Bang poem she left on Max’s grave like a Jewish mourner might leave a stone, in looking for a look-alike among the skateboarders gathered in Riverside Park. She wanted to avoid the comforts of Nick and his shared grief and suffer, as much as she wanted him to curl on his side and let her hold onto the trunk of him as she plummeted into a sleep that had yet to give her a glimpse of her son. She dreamt of dogs chasing her through a Home Depot that sold nothing but chandeliers but no Max. No matter how many times she said his name before two Klonopin carried her off to a place she could no longer get to by herself: No Max.

Today, having wrapped up office hours during which she dismissed a doe-eyed sophomore’s project with a few sentences of streamlined imperiousness, Claudia returned to watching the video that played on her screen for the better part of the day. Max wasn’t in the video, but Max was there, in the room, the music his, the concert his, the first concert of a work he thought too shaky and unrealized to share but after which he stood for the briefest of bows. So unnerved he’d been, inviting her to it. So worried, sitting across the desk in that green plastic chair, fiddling with the shiny silver bar that pierced his ear. Of course there were other videos online, a trove of his lionized feats, but Claudia found this the most personal. As if it had been recorded especially for her. She felt the beat of Max’s heart in it, and finally, as he appeared with a mixture of embarrassment and pride at that small gale of applause, she felt hers too. She hit “Play” and, before it could come to an end, stepped out of the office and locked the door.

It was hard, nearly impossible, for her now to make the trek to the Village’s building site without passing by the burned-out shell of the house. With its roof open to the sky, it looked like a great ship, hull rent by a rock, turned belly up on the land. Work felt beyond her; waking to the sun or rain or clouds that insulted her every morning with the start of a new day should have been beyond her. But it wasn’t. She woke. She got out of bed. She worked. She felt broken but not beyond being put back together, even by this, a fact that only broke her more. And yet she moved. Like it or not, she was moving. Were there no emotions—no happiness, no disappointment, no shattering loss—that time would not wash away? Was there no life? It felt like a betrayal—not merely to Max, but to some larger, more fundamental idea of being human.

Once, she stood at the gates until the sky turned purple and a security guard emerged from his little roofed box to ask if she needed help. No, she said. And stepping into the stream of pedestrians, she started on her way.

On the drive back to Cat’s house—already he thought of it as Cat’s house, as someplace foreign to him, as someplace he didn’t belong—Benji snapped their
we
into a
you
and an
I
. It came apart with heartbreaking ease. There was Benji. There was Cat. He let himself into the kitchen, still pungent with garlic from last night’s meal, knowing that she wasn’t home. She was at the gym or dropping boxes by the post office or wherever she had to be before reporting, in another two hours, to the high school auditorium for a student orientation of her own. That morning, he’d sat at the table shaking two packets of sweetener onto his cereal and said, “I’ll see you there.”

Now, he beelined for the hall closet, dragged his suitcase into the bedroom, and flung it open on the bed. If there was a benefit to having accomplished so little in life, certainly it was having so little to pack. His shirts and pants and shoes tumbled in. Sweaters and winter jackets he left behind. He doubted he’d need them, although the desert, he knew, could be cold at night. He walked through the entire house, from the dock she’d soon hire somebody else to draw up for the season, through the bedrooms and dining room and kitchen and baths. Ghosts everywhere. He closed his ears to them and, before leaving, stopped in the downstairs office where Cat paid their bills. It was a task she hated, and usually Benji stood in the kitchen making up pet names to distract her.
Can I call you Boobaker Soufflé? Can I call you McGee McGrutter?

He stole a clean sheet of paper from the printer and wrote,
Cat—
His mind, working like a bellows for the last few weeks, tried to stoke the fire wherein an acceptable good-bye could be forged. A list of reasons, tight as a suit of armor, that Cat would have no choice but to find ironclad, unassailable, no matter how she battled against it. He was a murderer. He was a waste. He tried six times, his pen trembling so much the words looked more like Arabic than English, and wadded his failures into the wire basket beneath the desk.
C—
(he finally wrote)
I don’t belong here. I never did. I love you. —B.
He left it on the counter with his key.

He called Sam Palin on the way to the airport, who laughingly reassured him that “no” and “yes” often lead to the same place. Sometimes you take La Cienega. Sometimes you take the 405. “A little LA humor,” Sam joked. “Don’t worry, you’ll catch on.”

Benji bought his ticket at the counter (and, with his credit card balance reset to zero and $600 calling to him from his new savings account, opted for the upgrade). Ubiquitous white buds planted firmly in his ears, he sat at the gate, stuffing noise into the cracks of every door that he had, in just the last few hours, slammed shut. He didn’t want to see reason shining like a light through the crevices. He wanted oblivion and darkness and mind-blotting sound.