Imperfections (26 page)

“You're welcome,” Leonard's voice cracked. “Please call me tomorrow.”

I smiled and watched my feet leave craters in the slush on the sidewalk like footprints in moon dust.

“I'll try,” I said.

We hung up.

At the end of time, the air would be free from the clutter of phone signals and radio waves. Music would revert to intimate acoustic sessions. People would leave their cellphones, pagers and email and would talk to each other in person. The $600 billion spent on retrofits to keep the world we built turning wasn't enough. Technicians, not convinced it would work, now sat in the soft glow of computer screens. Alone in windowless rooms, away from their families, they monitored telecommunications, power generation and distribution, water and waste plants, subway and air travel—all of it in an attempt to keep the world's circuits firing and gears turning.

Police were stationed on the corners, waiting. Waiting.

“Let's go, Richard,” Father called. “Donna just had a great idea.”

“What's that?” I said with disbelief. I ran to catch up and almost fell on the slippery sidewalk. I was distracted by my misstep. For the first time, I wondered exactly how death would come. Would I slip in the slush, fall, and have my head bounce a fatal blow off the concrete?

“What's wrong?” Father asked once I caught up.

“Nothing.” I smiled. “What's the idea?”

“We should stock up on supplies for the end of the world.” Donna pointed at a liquor store across the street.

“That is a great idea,” I said. I watched traffic up and down Broadway and thought, would I die crossing the street?

“Let's go.” I leapt from the sidewalk and was assaulted by a barrage of car horns and the sound of rushing engines and squealing tires. There was a blur of blinding headlights and the hell-fire anger of brake lights. Then I was standing in a pile of slush on the opposite side of the street, the liquor store at my back and my heart pounding in my ears. I watched Father and Donna carefully time the gaps between cars.

“You're crazy,” Donna laughed.

Donna and I stood in a trench of light coming from the liquor store window. Father went in, past the flashing neon
Open
sign. His presence was announced to the store by the jangling of bells tied to the door. The sound was cut short by the door closing on the night.

Donna stomped her feet.

“Your dad says I should talk to you,” she said.

“Yeah? About what?”

“He said he's noticed a change in you. He thinks I can help you like I did when you were fat, remember?” Donna's breath steamed out from between her perfect lips. “Are you happy, Richard?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” Donna paused.

“I think so,” I said and then thought for a moment. “No, actually I'm not. But I'm okay though.”

Donna turned and looked through the store window. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wave and give a thumbs-up, presumably to Father. I caught her enthusiastic nod before she turned her attention back to me.

“You need someone. You're sad because you're alone,” she said. “It's okay to tell me, I'm really good with feelings. Jack and I talk about them all the time.”

Donna had feelings?

Father had feelings?

“Like sometimes,” Donna continued, “Jack tells me he feels hungry. Then I usually feel annoyed because it's like, ‘What the fuck do you want me to do about it? Go make a sandwich.'”

“I think alone is okay,” I said. “Really.”

“Sometimes,” Donna continued, “it's hard for me to share my feelings, but I do have them, I just don't have words for them. I am not so elequaint when it comes to talking about feelings.”

“What does that mean? ‘Elequaint?'”

“God, Richard,” Donna sighed a long stream of steam. It glowed fuzzy orange neon as it dissipated under the streetlamp. “Ever read a book? Elequaint means using words that are above, ‘ele' as in elevate, quaint, as in simple words. But Jack and I have been exploring each other's feelings and he's teaching me. He's really great.”

I could see what Father had been talking about earlier. Donna was amazing. She was so secure in the world she created, she never had to question the one she actually lived in. For a moment, I was jealous of the security she had. Maybe she did have the key to happiness.

“Your dad told me he was proud of you,” Donna said.

“He hasn't said it much,” I told her.

“He can't. Boys are so stupid around each other.”

I contemplated. He
had
told me that earlier, quietly and muffled by the traffic noise. Maybe he had been telling me all along and I just wasn't translating the words properly.

“We done here?” Donna asked.

I nodded, not really sure what we had done here.

Donna spun and gave a come hither finger to Father who, presumably, was waiting for a signal before coming out to join us. He smiled sheepishly at me when he did.

Seventeen minutes to midnight and we were back on Broadway, each with a brown-bagged bottle in hand, laughing at how clever we were to have stopped. We had enough whiskey to survive into the new year.

We almost made it to Mother and Dr. Sloane's apartment.
 

It was three minutes after midnight. I was completely aware of each minute that passed. The suspense was killing me. I needed to know how I would die. To me, each minute was a lease, a bittersweet triumph and one more anxious minute closer to the unknown.

We were one block from the apartment.
 

We were walking past Verdi Square, a small triangular park between 72nd and 73rd. Donna was telling me how it was named after a great Italian opera composter, when we noticed our trio had become a duo. Donna and I turned in unison and saw Father lying on the sidewalk. The nearby streetlight reflected in the slushy puddle where he lay.

Donna and I ran to his side, us both falling to our knees, me searching for a pulse and Donna calling 911 on her cellphone.

Five minutes after midnight and the true impacts of the new millennium were becoming known to the world. There had been no sweeping darkness and no planes had dropped out of the sky.

In Delaware, 150 lotto machines went out of service.

In New York, one ticket dispenser on subway platform 56 in Grand Central Terminal stopped dispensing tickets.
 

On Central Park Street, those crowds waiting for the bank machines to spew out their contents went home to their apartments none the richer.

On Broadway, Donna stood in the street and waved her arms in the night. Headlights of passing cars swept across her body. The flashing red light of the approaching ambulance strobed her body.

On Broadway, between 72nd and 73rd, I knelt in the slush. Cold hard concrete pushed a chill deep into my knees. My jeans wicked the melting slush with each passing moment.
 

I compressed Father's chest.

I put my lips to his to blow breath into his lungs.

On Broadway, near the statue of Giuseppe Verdi and between chest compressions, I choked out one phrase over and over again.

“Please don't die, Dad.”

CHAPTER 14

We Have Started Our Descent

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have started our descent…”

Truer words had never been spoken. At twenty-five years old, I was still too young to recognize the captain was talking about more than the airplane I was strapped into.

“The ground temperature is a lovely 82 degrees and sunny. We'll be landing in twenty minutes and will have you to the terminal shortly after that. Right now though, please ensure your seat belt is fastened and your seat back and tray table have been returned to their upright and locked positions…”

Landing is the most dangerous part of flying. It is the only difference between having flown and having crashed. One pilot, one co-pilot, a crew of eight, four hundred passengers, 400,000 kilograms of people, luggage, machinery and the occasional Shih Tzu plummeting toward a very solid tarmac at 450 kilometres per hour, I guessed things should be as tidy as possible in the event of something going wrong. It was only civilized.

I watch my seatmate wrap his earphones around a tiny device he had been listening to.
 

“It's an iPod,” he said and looked at me as if he suspected I was a bit simple.

I nodded and smiled vacantly which seemed to confirm his suspicion.

It was August 2001, a month before those guys flew those planes into those towers. The world didn't know anything in August. After September, we would know the span of time it took a building to fall was the exact time it took to judge an entire people, how long it took for someone to fall in love and how long it took to change the world. Twenty seconds. In twenty seconds, judgments are made. I have said it before. It's all about math and it happens faster than our conscious mind works. We don't even know we do it, but we do.

But then, one month earlier, in a more naive world, the plane I was on bumped into the earth and screamed to a halt. A few people clapped, as if they weren't expecting to make it but somehow survived and thought that subdued clapping was a sufficient celebration of life.

Since New Year's Eve, I'd floated. I had spent most of my life savings. I had turned down shows and effectively snuffed out my career. I said goodbye to my friends and family. I had been ready to die and had been at peace with the fact, maybe I had even secretly looked forward to it.

Then, I lived.

It wasn't the worst thing that ever happened but it took some adjustment. I realized, over my career, I had worked everywhere but had never really been anywhere. So with what little money I hadn't given away or spent, I travelled. I bought a ticket to Southeast Asia.
 

I started writing strange sentences on errant pieces of paper.

I have packed my suitcase with a million of your tears.

On napkins and boarding passes.

On the loneliest night, even the dogs don't howl.

And on menus and receipts.

My heart is held captive in the prison of these ribs.

I littered the world with words as I travelled. My accommodations degenerated from hotel to hostel to tent to street. My mode of travel went from airplane to train to bus to hitchhiking and walking.
 

I got the runs in Delhi.

I got crabs in Thailand.
 

On a prescription for medicated shampoo,
Love is a sexually transmitted disease.
 

I got drunk in Greece.
 

I got lost in Belgrade.
 

On a city map on which all the street names were written in Cyrillic,
I am lost in a city full of people who know exactly where they are.

I went hiking in South Africa.
 

I saw some old ruins in Zimbabwe.
 

On a tourist brochure,
Everything we are has been before and failed.

I made friends, then left them behind.

I left my family behind.

I left my bags behind.

In the end, I was left with nothing but the feeling of being a small man in a gigantic world and anything that I did in life mattered, but only for a short while and only to a few people.

Dad didn't die on New Year's. Donna rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital. I called Mother and Dr. Sloane and we made our way to join them, together but in silence. When we arrived, a doctor pulled us all aside, took us to a private room. He flipped a switch and fluorescent lights tick-tick-hummed to life.

“Jack is doing well. He suffered a heart attack but we think we got to him in time. A full recovery is expected,” the doctor said.

“It sounds like there's more,” Mother said.

“There is. In the course of our tests, we saw something that pushed us in a different direction. There is no gentle way to say this… Jack has cancer.”

Donna held a hand over her mouth and started to cry.

“And,” the doctor continued, “well, there's a lot of it and it's spread. We've located several metastatic tumours.”

After a week of observation, they released Dad into a different world than he had known previously. I had left shortly after.

On my last call to Mother, I was somewhere on the northern coast of Africa, at a dusty phone booth in Tripoli, I think. She said I should come home right away. She wired me money for the next available flight. The airplane home seemed too clean and modern. I had become unaccustomed to soft chairs and fabrics that didn't smell of sweat. The television in the seat back in front of me was a magical mesmerist.