Amp'd (23 page)

At the hospital Dad's doctor is equally stymied, although he's always been skeptical about the restorative properties of a dark closet. He leaves us and I turn out the overhead light, hoping to jolt Dad from dormancy, and Jackie and I sit with him in silence. Suddenly, Dad lets out a short yelp and taps his chest with his fingers, and I know his defibrillator just went off for the second time. His face, no longer blank, turns first to Jackie and then toward me. His eyes meet mine with great clarity, and I see in them the quiet defeat of a vanquished boxer tired of fighting.

“This is no way to live,” he says.

And despite the hospital's best efforts, Dad is true to his word.

 

GONE

Dad has hurtled into the future one final time, having crossed middle age and then suddenly retirement and now even more sudden, vanished, along with all the versions of himself that came before: small boy, eager teen, college roommate, Olympian, newlywed, worker, father, abandoned husband, reluctant caretaker, stroke victim, crippled closet talker. It's our job to mourn him and sum up his life, to send him off and plan life in a world without him. But first, we have to dress him.

Deep inside Dad's walk-in closet are suits I recall from his days commuting to Terre Haute, where this Olympian had found himself brought down to earth and shackled to a desk, although he never once complained. There's nothing here that looks current or would probably fit … although I suspect “fitting” is a problem the undertaker solves by cutting apart the back of jacket and pants with the same benign effort with which he harvests organs for autopsy. I decide to stop thinking about the work of an undertaker and lift a simple, slimming pinstripe suit on its hanger. Jackie approves. It's her idea to add the vintage necktie I wore to the masquerade, the one Dad had saved for a special occasion, although probably not this one.

We've been told he doesn't need shoes—a shame, really, because of the abundance to choose from here, shoes of every variety from loafers to Hush Puppies, black oxfords to white patent leather(!), sandals to snow boots, wing tips and running shoes. I expect to find his baby shoes here, not bronzed but ready to wear as if Dad might try dipping his toes in before giving up and moving on to the next available pair he also kept forever.

Jackie insists we stay with the task at hand and avoid the memory land mines planted all around us, but I can't help but notice a box overhead that I haven't seen before.

“
No
. Do not! I won't. You can't,” Jackie stammers as I lift the top off the box to reveal tiny boxes of old thirty-five-millimeter slides, a hobby of Dad's I never knew he had.

Now hopelessly transfixed, Jackie snatches them from me and doesn't even bother leaving the mustiness of the closet; she just sits on the floor and holds them one at a time up to the light and then passes each along to me, a stretch of Dad's life in tiny colorful rectangles: campus shots, scenics from Innsbruck, his wedding, tiny babies growing to small children—and then they simply stop, skidding to a sudden halt, interrupted by the arrival of his future.

“We should do something with these,” she says sadly.

“We will: we'll fight over them,” I know. “But in the meantime, why don't we blow this one up for the … thing,” I say instead of
funeral.

As the man behind the camera he's in so few of these, but Mom must have taken over for this one, shot on their wedding day in wonderfully archaic Kodachrome color, an image of Dad, resplendent in tuxedo, white tie, and shiny black shoes I have no doubt are somewhere here in the closet with us.

“It's perfect for the thing,” Jackie agrees, and then we cry for a very long time.

*   *   *

Dad is fortunate to have among his mourners those who knew him when it mattered, from his shared boyhood with Fred Weber to a once-devoted wife and, in between, Tommy Baker, who brought a much younger date. Also in attendance is Will—with a prosthetic arm!—who pulls me in for our modified/awkward bro-hug, slapping my back. Then Lilith presses herself against me and retreats to a chair in the back. Also attending is Consuela, who informs me in the perfect English she'd hidden from me that she was not deported after all but instead hired by ICE as a translator. (Apparently what Consuela had been speaking while caring for Dad wasn't Spanish at all but Q'anjob'al, one of about a dozen Mayan languages still spoken across Guatemala, making her of extreme value to protecting our borders from undocumented Q'anjob'al-speaking aliens.)

Further packing the house is the breakfast crowd at the Four Corners and a squad of off-duty firefighters, a kindness courtesy of Mr. February. All sit with respectful passivity alongside forgotten cousins and their unfamiliar spouses, and a dozen or more of Jackie's classmates, once again demonstrating the supremacy of her popularity as I can boast only three unrecognizable high school friends gone fat. I struggle to identify them as each acknowledges my loss with a handshake—an oddly congratulatory gesture given the circumstances—before taking seats far from Mr. Madnick. Jackie sits stroking Dad's hair until Mom coaxes her away to dissolve in quiet tears in a corner, where I join them.

“I'm glad you were home,” I mumble to Jackie, a little too stoned, earning un-Zen-like disapproval from Mom.

“Me too,” she whimpers, and pulls me into their embrace. “We had some nice talks. He was so … just Dad again.”

“I wish I'd seen him too,” Mom regrets.

I shrug, which she reads quite correctly as
Whose fault is that?

“But I'm so happy we spoke on the phone. I remember the last thing he said to me,” Mom muses …

“Was it ‘Sheriff lunch
SportsCenter
fireman divorce'?”

“He told me he was sorry, and that I was right to leave him.”

“That must have been very gratifying.”

“Nothing in my entire life has ever made me feel worse.”

*   *   *

During the service before they take Dad to blast him with flames that will reduce him to ash, Tommy Baker sits between Mom and his date holding both their hands as if they were stage actors before a curtain call. Or swingers about to depart for a three-way at his motel. Tommy remains fit and vigorous and can probably still ski and shoot, and whether aided or not by Cialis still no doubt willing to service a gold-medal winner or a noncompetitive date and/or widow. As the minister does the rote droning required of him, the buzz of four Vicodins does its job of reducing him to a pinhole. But Dad too is farther away than I'd like, and when I'm able to bring him into focus, I lose him again in tears.

By the time the minister starts speaking of Lazarus and the Resurrection and the right hand of God (forcing me to ponder,
What if He's a southpaw?
), sirens blare from the street, getting closer and louder as he tries to shout the word of God over them. The sound suddenly winds down, directly out front, as the minister yells, “For wherever you go, I will go!” and all the firefighters rush from the service, outside, and climb aboard, sirens screaming again as the firetruck roars away. Before the minister can resume his tale of God's magnificent house, I take advantage of the diversion and wobble from the room. Will follows me.

“Haven't seen you since—”

“Busy.”

“Sorry about your father.”

I don't know if I've been mad at Will because he's a liar or because he's a criminal, and now I have a new reason: because he's betrayed our one-armed solidarity with his prosthetic.

“Thanks. You look different,” I observe without looking at him. “Shave your mustache? Put on weight?”

“Just this couple of pounds,” he raises his arm with a
whirr.
“Affects my balance, actually makes it harder to walk after all these years.”

We pass a room packed with mourners and another empty except for the sole occupant reclining at its center. Despite the utter sadness of both, I begin to mentally muse as to the cause of death for each tableau we pass: Murphy-bed accident. Fatal gelato brain freeze. Died laughing.

“You ever wonder how these people died?” Will asks.

“I was just thinking that!” I blurt out, giddy, before I can stop myself.

“This one,” he points,
whirrrr …
“Slipped on a banana peel.”

“Basketball player, stood up into a ceiling fan.”

“Half-price sushi.”

“Texting while bullfighting.”

“Shopping-cart pileup.”

“Drowned bobbing for apples.”

We both stop at the last room, filled with children facing a coffin small enough to convey enormous tragedy, too profoundly sad for comic speculation. I read the name,
Jimmy Ferris,
in white plastic letters on a black grid board. Poor little Jimmy. Then I recognize one of the little girls, and the boy who threw up when I'd showed my nub, the principal who banished me … and then I spot Cancer Boy's mother.

Somehow she sees me through grief-soaked eyes and makes her way over to me. Without a word she grips me, sinks into my chest and weeps, and nothing since the accident has made me wish harder for two arms, so that I might hold her the way she deserves to be held.

 

AFTERMATH

I'd have bet a fistful of M&Ms that Cancer Boy would have lived into adulthood to wonder someday about the strange one-armed man who once spent an inordinate amount of time with the small cancer-riddled boy he used to be. Instead he is buried, or cremated, underground or gone to the sky along with everything he might have been. Extinct. On the plus side he'll never again suffer the pain of surgery, the sickness of chemo and radiation, the ignominy of bare-assed hospital gowns. It's a weak plus side, scales as out of balance as the newly limbless.

That it never occurred to me he might die demonstrates my inability to consider possible outcomes. If Mom can know the future, looking forward I can only see what is certain: which now is a world where Cancer Boy will never grow up to have an ex-girlfriend or Mafia henchman search him on Google, or to feel the tingly goose-bumpy goodness when he locks eyes with the pole dancer to whom he hands his first dollar.

The other certain future I can see is Fat Jackie.

Having remained here at the house after the funeral, she's taken to late-night snacks of Caramel Swirl Crunch in unseemly proportions. It's easy to imagine her, like Alice after heeding the cookie's command, “Eat Me,” filling the house so her legs pop out the side doors and her arms through the upstairs windows, her head squeezed through our chimney. It's equally effortless to imagine her as one thousand pounds of bedridden flesh calling out for more Caramel Swirl Crunch, which I bring her by the shovelful until her heart stops, and Mom's firemen come to take out some walls and remove her to be buried in a piano case.

Perhaps that's unfair, as it's only been three days since the funeral.

My own future doesn't seem much brighter as evidenced by the fact that I've barely left the attic. Jackie's grown tired of waiting on me, carrying up the many Tupperware meals dropped off by friends and neighbors, sympathy food to sustain the bereaved until they decide they are strong enough again to hunt and gather for themselves. If she's thought about it at all, I'm sure Jackie believes I'm at least making the short trip to the upstairs bathroom when necessary. Although I do venture down to relieve my bowels alongside a cooing Ali, I hold urinating to a lower standard, peeing out the south side window (if anyone looks closely, they might wonder as to the cause of a squiggly patch of bleached grass).

Because right now, I'm simply too busy to leave my work.

I've been toiling nonstop to create a
Dad Is Dead
video mixtape, pulling all our photo albums, home movies, videos, clippings, Dad's thirty-five-millimeter slides, and even the pictures that lined our downstairs walls up here to the attic to scan, digitize, collate, label, log. There are thousands of images and a hundred hours of tape, and it would take me years to do this even if I wasn't doing it with great deliberation, dallying over each photo and reading and rereading every clipping and scrutinizing videos so as not to miss some activity in the background at their wedding, or Dad waiting his turn at the Olympics.

Then, there's the careful selection of just the right music, and I listen to all I can think of, from classical (Barber's “Adagio for Strings”) to opera (“Nessun Dorma,” “Musetta's Waltz”), film scores (
Requiem for a Dream,
Kenneth Branagh's
Hamlet
), jazz (“Moon Dreams,” “'Round Midnight”) and blues (“Death Don't Have No Mercy”); artists as diverse as Milt Jackson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Esquivel; “Asleep” by the Smiths, “This Bitter Earth” by Dinah Washington, “100 Years” by Five for Fighting, and an endless stream of musical musings on death: “Knockin' on Heaven's Door,” “Everybody Hurts,” “Time to Say Goodbye,” “Bela Lugosi's Dead,” “(Don't Fear) the Reaper,” “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” “Danny Boy.” Of course I have to lay down each one under some video, which will then have to be reedited for time and to fit the rhythm and punctuated beats of that particular song. This could take a very, very long time. It's a good thing I have nothing else to do, having finally quit Ick Ick.

A week into the project I am impossibly stoned on Ganja Din and “Forever Young” is blaring, and there's Dad on my laptop, alive again and scoring a point at the Olympics and marrying Mom and posing in front of his Lincoln Mark IV and goddamn, I have to piss and I do, out the window, long and hard and in agreement with Steve that
Damn, this does feel fucking good,
then slamming the window shut behind me and I turn to see Jackie and Mr. Weber, their entrance smothered by Dylan's wailing exhortation to “Have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.” And I stand there, unaware of how much time has passed but completely aware of myself—unshaven, ill fed, stinking, bereft, lost, and with my pants down.