Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (18 page)

Good man, John D interrupts.

The second nurse crosses his eyes and fishes out his lips.

The first nurse hesitates, then reads on, The servant said to his master, But, sir, unfortunately it rained yesterday and now all the money's gone.

John D looks at the second nurse, who has resorted to hitting his palm against his own forehead, and tries to laugh. But he is confused. Why is the money gone? What did the servant spend it on? An umbrella? Did someone steal the money while the servant was drying a wet porch or something and the servant didn't want to tell his master because the master, like some masters, is cruel and the servant, like most servants, is afraid?

The first nurse says, I'm mute.

You don't say, says the second.

John D's laugh comes out heh heh heh. Craggy, mirthless. He laughed so little during his working years because he found so little to laugh about. Every story, true or not, hangs bitter with implication, forward, reverse. Every pill is recalled by an aftertaste.

When the nurses leave, the doctor stands up and reaches beneath John D's crinkled vest to check his heart rate, blood pressure, then his ears, nose, eyes, throat, temperature, joints, scalp, spine, and basal metabolism. John D has promised the man fifty thousand dollars on his, John D's, one hundredth birthday.

The doctor jots illegibly into his notepad. His patient has eczema, bad kidneys, pleurisy. The doctor isn't writing this down. He is making notes for a love letter to another patient, an old woman.
You are the worm in my aorta,
he writes.
You are my delirium tremens
.

John D uses a lever to recline himself in the shaded chair. The high sun turns the white sunshade orange. He says, What ails me today, Doctor? Speak to me, tell me my fortune.

On
speak
, his teeth click.

Only good news, the doctor says. The diet seems to be working. Just look at you, sir. You are the living reward of a life well lived.

I am a prize, aren't I? A living trophy.

Exactly.

Nonsense. All these crucifers. This laughing and fitness juice and hanging on. It's ignoble. I might just fall down dead tomorrow and where would that leave me.

Heaven, the doctor says.

But you aren't a betting man, John D says. Ever since that handbill landed in my lap, I've been dreaming of men with wings. Are men ever born with wings, Doctor?

Sure, the doctor says. And tails and fins, gills. Happens frequently in the Orient. It's all the ocean matter in their diet.

John D sighs. Sometimes it sounds like you don't know a heart from a headstock, he says. It used to be my business to fix other people's faulty connections. I was never the smartest man in the room, or the handsomest or the nicest or the meanest, but I was always the least afraid. What are you writing? Are you drawing a picture of me?

No sir, the doctor says. He writes:
You are a terminal condition. My trough has been poisoned
.

The doctor has quick, pristine hands. John D looks at his own hands: pecked, abraded, danced on by age. He says, I'm no more afraid of dying than of being reborn. Do you know that? Would you kindly look at me when I'm speaking to you?

You are my living end
.

The doctor meets his gaze. The old man, fleeced but hardy, looks like some nightmare mascot ready to tunnel to the center of the earth. He looks hungry for a soul.

I am firing you, John D says. You can keep the instruments I bought. Use them on someone else.

The doctor consults his notepad again, as if for a second opinion. Page after page of love notes, of beseeching and woe and heart sauce. He needs a marathon enema and perhaps a vacation in a place where none of the women speak English. He collects his things and zips his bag, brushes the sand from its glossed surface. Is that all? he asks the old man. John D answers, Yes. Until the next thing.

The doctor sidesteps down the dune and nearly bumps into Pica. Aren't you going to stay for the airman? Pica asks him.

There's a woman, another patient, who needs me, he says.

He carries John D's wretched voice with him down the beach. Death, the doctor thinks, is not a thing like birth. Birth is a dream, spontaneous and innate. Death, on the other hand, is a slow, false, divine calamity. It is like love.

A
n opening, an isthmus between clouds. From above, everything on the ground looks precarious. Tiny lakes and streams blend with foliage until the sun catches them and they shiver and glint like mercury. The swampland resembles an old green floor mat, torn and soaked through in places. Tidy farm plots resemble sewn-on patches. In the ocean, past the crowd waiting on the tan belt of beach, past the downy breakers, monsters rove in shipwreck shadows underwater. The airman is ready.

He arrives low and from the west, towing a heavy rumbling sound that causes the crowd to unanimously turn and raise their chins. John D, immobile on the soft sand, watches the crowd watch the sky. For a moment, he thinks they are saluting him, showing admiration, but they are just using their hands to visor their eyes from the sun. Perhaps he would have given them each a dime, had they been saluting him. But they aren't. They are protecting themselves, awaiting their spectacle. He would have told them to line up and receive their reward. He would have loved that.

The airplane streaks by, dips lower, lower, almost kisses the ocean. Just like the hungry bird. The crowd roars. The airplane arcs and corkscrews back, now moving horizontal to the shoreline. It is a snub-nosed biplane painted gunmetal gray, with two letters on the fuselage: AA II. It flies with impossible grace. It rolls and peaks and buzzes and swerves and herds the crowd like wind herds wheat. It is beautiful, it is irrefutable. It makes John D sleepy.

After a while, he stops tracking the plane altogether and is content to watch the crowd. Gathered together, what are they? They are harnessed parts, a machine manipulated by a smaller, more efficient machine. The input is spectacle, the output is laughter, ecstasy.

Here comes the Dead-man Drop! yells a boy in the crowd.

The engine is silenced and the plane flies vertically downward. At the last moment, the engine chugs back to life and the plane pulls up.

Outstanding, Pica says. He's playing a game with us. To be honest, he reminds me of you, Mr. John. How you were able to outmaneuver whole
systems
. Bypassing and circumventing and pulling up just in time. Leaving us all breathless. Even now, especially now. I bet you're enjoying this, Mr. John.

Yes, John D thinks. He has fallen asleep, though, so he does not reply. Beneath the sunshade, his paper vest blows, a dry bug husk clamped to a branch.

The crowd is nearly insane with admiration for the airman. They are having difficulty finding a suitable way to express it. Husbands kiss their wives, a young girl runs around saying, A toast. A toast. A toast.

Pica reclines John D in his shaded chair. On the brink of time, when he stands at last, he sings. When his sun has set, and his work is past.

A minute, maybe an hour later, he is awoken by a gentle tugging on his wrist. There is a phrase on his lips, pulled from a muddled dream. As Pica and a young man in a leather helmet come into focus, standing before him, John D utters it: dead-man drop.

The crowd stands below the dune at a respectful distance while the airman gives his regards to John D. The airman is tall and deeply handsome in his airman outfit. Fur collar, denim pants, twenty-eyelet boots. He looks like someone from the future dressed as someone from the past. He gestures with his hands, laughs, pats Pica on the back. The crowd feels his hand on their backs. He is describing his travels to John D, tailoring his story to what he thinks the old man wants to hear. God, beauty, order, magic. The airman is down to his last twenty-five dollars.

Up there, he is saying, you see the real sense and beauty of the world. Everything's touched by God. Dirt is a hundred different shades of brown. Lakes and rivers, they wink at you. Time stretches, shrinks, loses definition—hours pass like seconds, seconds like hours, but all of it, you know, vaccinates you. Is that the right word? Rebaptizes. Years from now, there won't be any reason to stay on the ground. We'll all be kings of the sky.

John D, groggy from his nap, likes the sound of this. He likes the space this man occupies. When the airman asks if he's ever ridden in an airplane, John D nods and answers, No.

Would you like to? And I only ask because some of the main—

Yes, I would, John D interrupts. Pica, please help me up.

And with that, the decision is made. The airman usually has to do more convincing, has to move from the spiritual to the mechanical to convince would-be patrons to fly with him. But John D is awake now. He is not afraid. He stands up from his chair, ducks nimbly around the sunshade to be next to the airman. He clears his throat.

I will now take to the air, he announces to the men and women below the dune. It is something he once heard an acrobat say before a high-wire act. The crowd is subdued, but once they see the old man and the airman and Pica shuffling down the dune, they begin to cheer. John D reaches into his pocket and scatters the rest of his dimes among the crowd like birdseed, not bothering to wait for an outstretched hand.

Pica gently plucks a sandspur from the back of the old man's vest and drops it into the sand. He whispers, It gets real cold up there, Mr. John. The air, he says, isn't as habitual. It's thin. You sure you want to put yourself in jeopardy like this, undo all your hard work? If you want I can go up there for you.

I need you to watch me from down here, John D says. You will wave and I probably won't see you. Make sure everyone else waves as well.

What if there's an accident? Pica says.

Keep waving, John D says.

Down the beach, away from the crowd, the airman pats the airplane's fuselage and says, Hello, Pearl. He opens the latch under the bulkhead and presents the old man with a jacket, helmet, and goggles. Pica helps him remove his wig and replaces it with the helmet. It feels taut and vivified, like a second skin. He is lifted into the cab, latched tight and tucked in with blankets. He is fiercely content: he is on the cusp of something. He moves his legs to make sure they are still there.

Before going through his preflight ritual, the airman hands John D a piece of candy in a wrapper. For your ears, he says. You chew it.

John D opens the wrapper and puts the candy in his mouth. It is powdery, then sweet, then soft. Involuntarily, he chews, his false teeth clicking with every third or fourth bite. It tastes like a peach's secret seed. He continues chewing, resisting the urge to swallow it.

It's made from trees, the airman says. He starts the engine, slips into his shoulder harness, tacks the aileron twice. He plans to take off, bank right, and make an easy, easy circuit over the ocean. No tricks, nothing more complicated than a staggered ascent. He will land on the hard-packed sand and gently ask the millionaire for a contribution. Make a joke about a sky tax. A sky monopoly.

Chewing the gum, John D remembers a day more than seventy-five years past, when he and his mother took a trip to the doctor. He can't remember why they were there, but he could still envision the brightly colored cuckoo clock in the waiting room and a boy sitting on his mother's lap, greedily licking an amber piece of candy on the end of a small white stick. The doctor kept a jar of them and John D was given one before he left. He saved it until he returned home and then saved it until the following day. He saved it through the next week and through summer and autumn and winter. He saved it until the candy broke into pieces in his bureau drawer. Then he saved the pieces.

You might be the most discreet boy who ever was, his mother used to say.

If he had eaten it, he would have enjoyed it for five minutes. Instead, he enjoyed it for five years.

So went his logic at the time. Now, pinned beneath blankets in the plane, which has begun moving, he wonders what he was saving it for, what squirrel impulse made the idea of eating the candy outrageous. In the cab of the plane, John D feels something like impatience. He chews the gum, which hasn't yet lost its flavor, with more and more fervor.

The plane taxis past and Pica and the rest of the crowd wave. Pica thinks: I will wave until kingdom come. I will be the last thing he sees when his eyes shut for good.

The airman adds and subtracts in his head. The wind has picked up and is blowing the biplane closer to the shoreline. The airplane taxis down the beach, bucking and swaying, and the airman knows he is going to have to tell the old man that they can't risk taking off. For now, he keeps going. From the sound of it, the old man is having a fine time of it.

He is chewing and chewing and chewing, greedily mashing out any patch of sweetness he can find.

It's remarkable. It's the finest thing I have ever tasted, John D says, past the boardwalk, past the dunes, long after it has ceased to be true.

acknowledgments

I
'd like to thank the following for their guidance and support: the National Endowment for the Arts; Fred Leebron and Gettysburg College; Eli Horowitz; Ben George; Jordan Bass; Rob Spillman; Christina Thompson; Brandon Heatherstone; my family; my editor, Tim Duggan; PJ Mark; and Corinna, first and dearest reader.

about the author

K
EVIN
M
OFFETT
's stories and essays have appeared in three editions of
The Best American Short Stories
(2006, 2009, and 2010),
The Better of McSweeney's Vol. 2
, and other publications. He won the 2010 National Magazine Award for his short story “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events.”

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