Emperor of the Air (17 page)

Medical school was a mountain of facts, a giant granite peak full of outcroppings and hidden crevices. Physiology. Anatomy. Histology. More facts than he could ever hope to remember. To know the twenty-eight bones of the hand seemed to Myron a rare and privileged knowledge, but then there were the arms and shoulders with their bones and tendons and opposing muscles, then the whole intricate, extravagant cavity of the chest, and then the head and the abdomen and the legs. Myron never really tried to learn it all. It wasn’t the volume of knowledge so much as it was the place where he had to be in order to learn it. The anatomy labs reeked of formaldehyde, the hospitals of a mixture of cleanliness and death. All of it reminded Myron of men getting old, and that is why in three years of medical school he made the minuscule but conscious effort not to study enough. He let the knowledge collect around him, in notebooks, binders, pads, on napkins and checks, everywhere except in his brain. His room was strewn with notes he never studied. Once in a letter home he said learning medicine was like trying to drink water from a fire hose.

But that was something Abe would want to hear. Once on a driving trip through the Florida deltas, Abe came upon three men trying to lift an abandoned car from a sludge pit with a rope they had looped around it. Only the roof and the tops of the windows were showing above the mud, but Abe got out anyway and helped the men pull. His face turned red and the muscles in his belly shook so much Myron could see them through his shirt. Myron didn’t understand the futility of his father’s effort, or even know why he helped save a useless car for men he didn’t know, until years later. Abe did things like that; he loved doing things like that.

Myron, on the other hand, just didn’t want to study. His weren’t the usual reasons for quitting medical school. It wasn’t the hours, and really, it wasn’t the studying and the studying. It was something smaller, harder, that in a vague way he knew had to do with Abe. Perhaps he saw his own father in the coughing middle-aged men whose hearts he watched flutter across oscilloscope screens. But it was not Abe’s death that he feared. Heart stoppage or brain tumors or sudden clots of blood were reactions of the body, and thus, he had always believed, they were good. Death, when it was a fast action, didn’t bother him. The fatty cadavers in anatomy labs were no more than objects to Myron, and it meant nothing to him that they were dead. The only time in his life that he had had to really think about death was in his childhood, when the phone rang in the middle of the night to tell Abe about his aunt in Miami Beach. The next morning Myron had found his father downstairs drinking coffee. “Life is for the living,” Abe had said, and even then Myron could weigh the seriousness in his voice. It was plain that death meant only a little if you still had the good muscles in your own heart, and that people’s bodies, once under ground, were not to be mourned. And besides, there really was no blood in the medical school anatomy classes. The cadavers were gray, no different when you cut them than the cooked leg of a turkey. They had none of the pliable fleshiness, none of the pink, none of the smells and secretions that told you of life.

No, it wasn’t death that bothered Myron; it was the downhill plunge of the living body—the muscles that stretched off the bones into folds, the powdery flesh odors of middle-aged men. He longed for some octogenarian to stand up suddenly from a wheelchair and run the length of a corridor. Once, a drugged coronary patient, a sixty-year-old man, had unhooked an IV cart and caromed on it through the corridor until Myron cornered him. When Myron looked at the blood spots that were in the old man’s eyes, he wanted to take him in his own arms then and there, in his triumph. That was why Myron wanted to quit medical school. He hated the demise of the spirit.

So he let the work pile up around him. In his third year he felt the walls of the lecture halls and the sponged hospital floors to be somehow holding him against his will. Fifty-year-old men who could no longer walk, or whose intestines bled and collapsed, Myron felt, were betrayers of the human race. He was convinced of the mind’s control over the flesh.

In the winter of his third year he started jogging. First two, three miles a day, then, later, long six-mile runs into the hills and neighborhoods around the medical school. He left in the early mornings and ran in the frozen air so that he could feel the chill in his lungs. He ran every morning through November and December, and then January after the holidays, until one morning in February, when the grass was still breaking like needles underneath his feet, he realized he could run forever. That morning he just kept running. He imagined Itzhak sitting with two cups of coffee at the table, but he ran to the top of a hill and watched the streets below him fill with morning traffic. Then onward he went, amidst the distant bleating of car horns and the whistling wind. He thought of the hospital, of the arriving interns, sleepless, pale, and of the third-year students following doctors from room to room. He ran on the balls of his feet and never got tired.

When he returned to the apartment Itzhak was at the table eating lunch. Myron took a carton of milk from the refrigerator and drank standing up, without a glass.

“You ever think about passing infection that way?”

Myron put down the carton and looked at the muscles twitching in his thighs. Itzhak lit a cigarette.

“You’re a real one,” Itzhak said. “Where the hell were you?”

“Hypoxia. No oxygen to the brain. You know how easy it is to forget what time it is.”

“Watch it,” Itzhak said. “You’ll get into trouble.”

The next day Myron went to classes and to rounds, but that night he ran again, stumbling in the unlit paths, and after that, over the next weeks of frozen, windless days, he ran through his morning assignments and spent the afternoons in a park near his apartment. There was a basketball hoop there, a metal backboard with a chain net, and sometimes he shot with a group of kids or joined their half-court games. Afterward, he always ran again. He loved to sweat when the air was cold enough to turn the grass brittle, when a breath of air felt like a gulp of cold water. After a while, Itzhak began to ignore his disappearances. One day when Myron returned from running, Itzhak took his pulse. “Damn, Myron,” he said, “you
are
running.” His professors tried to take him aside, and Myron could see them looking into his pupils when they spoke. But he ignored them. One night he returned late from running, still dripping sweat, picked up the telephone and dialed, and heard his father’s sleepy voice on the other end of the line. “Pa,” he said, “it’s
kaput
here.”

So why the quitting now? Why the phone call at ten-thirty on a Thursday night when Abe and Rachel were just going into their dream sleep? Myron could hear the surprise, the speechlessness. He heard Rachel over the line telling Abe to calm himself, to give her the phone. He imagined the blood rushing to Abe’s face, the breathing starting again the way he breathed the morning they pulled him from the frothy water in San Francisco Bay. Rachel took the phone and spoke, and Myron, because he had lived with his father for most of his life, knew Abe was taking black socks from the drawer and stretching them over his feet.

The next morning at seven Myron opened the apartment door and Abe was sitting there in a chair with the black cloth traveling bag on his lap. He was wide awake, blocking the passage out of the apartment.

“For crying out loud!”

“Who else did you expect? Am I supposed to let you throw away everything?”

“Pa, I didn’t expect
anybody
.”

“Well, I came, and I’m here, and I spent like a madman to get a flight. You think I don’t have the lungs to argue with my son?”

“I was about to go running.”

“I’ll come along. We’re going to settle this thing.”

“Okay,” Myron said, “come,” and in his sweatsuit, hooded and wrapped against the cold, he led Abe down through the corridors of the building and out into the street. The ground outside was frozen from the night, the morning icy cold and without wind. Abe held the black traveling bag at his side as they stood under the entrance awning.

“I was planning to run.”

“It won’t hurt you to walk a few blocks.”

It was cold, so they walked quickly. Abe was wearing what he always wore in the winter, a black hat, gloves, galoshes, an overcoat that smelled of rain. Myron watched him out of the side of his vision. He tried to look at his father without turning around—at the face, at the black bruise under the jaw, at the shoulders. He tried to see the body beneath the clothing. Abe’s arm swung with the weight of the traveling bag, and for the first time, as he watched through the corner of his eye, Myron noticed the faint spherical outline inside the cloth.

They walked wordlessly, Myron watching Abe’s breath come out in clouds. By now the streets had begun to move with traffic, and the ice patches, black and treacherous, crackled underneath their feet. The streetlamps had gone off and in the distance dogs barked. They came to the park where Myron played basketball in the afternoons.

“So you brought the ball,” Myron said.

“Maybe you want some shooting to calm you.”

“You’re not thinking of any games, are you?”

“I just brought it in case you wanted to shoot.”

Abe unzipped the bag and pulled out the basketball. They went into the court. He bounced the ball on the icy pavement, then handed it to Myron. Myron spun it on his finger, dribbled it off the ice. He was watching Abe. He couldn’t see beneath the overcoat, but Abe’s face seemed drawn down, the cheeks puffier, the dark bruise lax on his jaw.

“Pa, why don’t you shoot some? It would make you warm.”

“You think you have to keep me warm? Look at this.” He took off the overcoat. “Give me the ball.”

Myron threw it to him, and Abe dribbled it in his gloved hands. Abe was standing near the free-throw line, and he turned then, brought the ball to his hip, and shot it, and as his back was turned to watch the shot, Myron did an incredible thing—he crouched, took three lunging steps, and dove into the back of his father’s thin, tendoned knees. Abe tumbled backward over him. What could have possessed Myron to do such a thing? A medical student, almost a doctor—what the hell was he doing? But Myron knew his father. Abe was a prizefighter, a carnival dog. Myron knew he would protect the exposed part of his skull, that he would roll and take the weight on his shoulders, that he would be up instantly, crouched and ready to go at it. But Myron had slid on the ice after the impact, and when he scrambled back up and turned around, his father was on his back on the icy pavement. He was flat out.

“Pa!”

Abe was as stiff and extended as Myron had ever seen a human being. He was like a man who had laid out his own body.

“What kind of crazy man are you?” Abe said hoarsely. “I think it’s broken.”

“What? What’s broken?”

“My back. You broke your old man’s back.”

“Oh no, Pa, I couldn’t have! Can you move your toes?”

But the old man couldn’t. He lay on the ground staring up at Myron like a beached sea animal. Oh, Pa. Myron could see the unnatural stiffness in his body, in the squat legs and the hard, protruding belly.

“Look,” Myron said, “don’t move.” Then he turned and started back to get his father’s coat, and he had taken one step when Abe—Abe the carnival dog, the buyer of diamonds and the man of endurance—hooked his hand around Myron’s ankles and sent him tumbling onto the ice. Bastard! Pretender! He scrambled up and pinned Myron’s shoulders against the pavement. “Faker!” Myron cried. He grappled with the old man, butted him with his head and tried to topple his balance, but Abe clung viciously and set the weight of his chest against Myron’s shoulders. “Fraud!” shouted Myron. “Cheat!” He shifted his weight and tried to roll Abe over, but his father’s legs were spread wide and he had pinned Myron’s hands. “Coward,” Myron said. Abe’s wrists pressed into Myron’s arms. His knees dug into Myron’s thighs. “Thief,” Myron whispered. “Scoundrel.” Cold water was spreading upward through Myron’s clothes and Abe was panting hoarse clouds of steam into his face when Myron realized his father was leaning down and speaking into his ear.

“Do you give?”

“What?”

“Do you give?”

“You mean, will I go back to school?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Look,” Myron said, “you’re crazy.”

“Give me your answer.”

Myron thought about this. While his father leaned down over him, pressed into him with his knees and elbows, breathed steam into his face, he thought about it. As he lay there he thought about other things too: This is my father, he thought. Then: This is my life. For a while, as the cold water spread through his clothes, he lay there and remembered things—the thousands and thousands of layups, the smell of a cadaver, the footrace on a bright afternoon in April. Then he thought: What can you do? These are clouds above us, and below us there is ice and the earth. He said, “I give.”