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She wets a swab and inserts it in his mouth. His teeth clamp down on it and he sucks the water.

“It's a reflex,” the orderly says.

After three more wet swabs, Penny marches down to the nurses' station.

“I'm taking my dad home,” she says to the random doctor who is sitting behind the desk, doing paperwork. “I don't care if it's against medical advice.”

“It's normal for patients to say they want to go home,” she says. “It's a universal metaphor for being at peace in God's love.”

“Do you even believe in God? You sound like the hospice manual.”

“I believe there's a higher power.”

A room door opens and a very old man with thick, strong limbs lurches into the hallway, wearing a hospital gown made of paper. He elbows the nurse who pursues him. Penny follows them as far as the glass double doors to the garden. The old man stands next to the birdbath, scanning the parking lot for his car, while the nurse remonstrates with him. He has no keys or clothes. The weather is
chilly. A security guard brings a wheelchair, and three staff members accompany him back to his room.

Penny returns to the nurses' station and says to the doctor, “If there is a higher power, how come it lets people get as weak as my dad and leaves their capacity to feel pain?”

“If he had pain, we'd know it.”

“That's not true,” Penny says. “He's a stoic.”

“We don't know what he's feeling,” the doctor says. “When people are very sick, their cognition is altered. We don't hasten the end of life. Every human being has a right to self-awareness, especially at the end, when we're making our peace with God. You might want to talk with our chaplain.”

She turns away, defeated.

She goes out the front door and follows the concrete walk past the handicapped parking spots until she is off hospice property. She smokes a cigarette by the road. Butts line the gutter. A passing driver slows and raises his eyebrows. She turns back to face the hospice.

PENNY'S DISTRESS AND AGITATION ARE
profound.

Norm built the world she once lived in, calling its entities into being word by word. But his word, which once was law, has surrendered to higher laws. He is so weak that a fly, landing on his nose, would be a higher law. He couldn't swat it away. He and Penny share a world not their own.

When his eyes seek hers, bright with the need to die and hopeful that she will help, she feels love, like a serrated knife, carving out her heart and giving it to her father.

FOUR DAYS LATER, AMALIA COMES
to visit, bringing Norm's pet cat in a travel carrier.

The cat, a neutered male named Schubert, is small and black
with orange eyes, very pretty. He presses his body against the back wall of the carrier. “Look who I brought!” Amalia says, swinging the carrier up onto the bed and knocking it against Norm's hip. “He's sleeping,” she whispers to Penny.

“He could be awake. His eyes are stuck shut.”

Amalia leans closer and sees that Norm's upper and lower lashes are gummed together with dried mucus. “Oh my god! I should have come earlier! I was just so busy.” She places the cat carrier on the floor at her feet and asks, “Did you talk to Patrick?”

“No. Was I supposed to?”

“He said he called you. He can't make it, but he knows Norm will understand. He's hanging a major show of photographs in Jakarta.”

Norm says, “Wah.”

Amalia seizes both his hands in hers. “I'm here, honey,” she says. “Go back to sleep. I love you!”

Norm rolls his right hand from side to side.

“I haven't seen him move his hands in weeks,” Penny exclaims.

“Oh, your kitty misses you, too,” Amalia tells him. She pulls Schubert from his carrier on the floor and seats him on the bedspread facing Norm. Holding his forelegs tight against his rib cage, she shoves him toward Norm's hand for petting.

Very slowly, Norm raises both hands and closes them around the cat's throat as though to strangle him. His thumbs press hard on Schubert's trachea.

The cat snarls and scratches him deeply on top of his right forearm.

“Fuck,” Penny says, moved by her father's display of physical effort and will.

“Oh my god,” Amalia says, moved by the blood that streams from his torn flesh. Norm does not wince or make a sound. His hands drop to the blanket. His right forearm gapes like a split pomegranate, and he seems to fall asleep. Schubert escapes and hides under the bed.

Penny is entirely sure—100 percent certain—that he was trying to communicate to Amalia that she should strangle him. That he does not trust her, Penny, to carry out such a wish, but that he wouldn't put it past her mother.

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” Amalia says, on her knees on the floor. “I should never have put this poor kitty in the car. Now he thinks he's at the vet!”

THE NEXT MORNING, NORM'S WOUND
is badly infected. A spike of sepsis reaches to his shoulder. Under a thick wad of bandaging, his arm continues to bleed.

“Blood poisoning a-going to kill him now,” an orderly tells Penny. “This man got no immune system.” He smoothes a fresh sheet with his hand while two nurses support Norm, who has been rolled over onto his side. His skin, soft as silk and drained of muscle and fat, lies draped over his skeleton like a shroud.

Soon after, the assistant deputy hospice director surprises Penny by inviting her to sit down in the foyer between the baby grand piano and the flickering gas hearth. “I spoke with your mother,” she says, “and we're discharging him to home hospice this afternoon. He's had no events requiring intervention. His vital signs are good.”

“You are kidding me,” Penny says.

“We admitted him expecting a bleed-out. His platelets are minimal, but there simply hasn't been sufficient trauma. He hasn't been eating or getting up. At this stage we anticipate death from kidney failure, assuming he doesn't start drinking again. I would strongly advise against intubation or intravenous fluids.”

“Right, right,” Penny says. “No painkillers because they hasten death, and no fluids because they prolong life.”

The assistant deputy hospice director places a hand on Penny's shoulder. “This must be hard on you.”

“It's harder on him!”

“It gets easier. He's going to die fairly quickly of systemic sepsis, with that arm.”

Norm's advance directive—an end game far too much like Final Jeopardy for comfort—rejects antibiotics.

Penny bites her lip and says nothing.

SHE SITS WITH A SOCIAL
worker in a cramped office behind the reception desk and discusses the equipment and assistance she will need in Morristown.

She will take delivery of an adjustable bed just like the bed in the hospice. Twice a day, a nurse's aide will help her change Norm's diaper. She will learn to administer the “e-kit” in emergencies.

Penny agrees to everything, and the social worker makes a phone call. She asks Penny whether anyone is at home, because the bed is already on the truck.

Penny retrieves her bag and the laptop from Norm's room—he is sound asleep—and drives to Morristown to wait for the bed.

She clears space in his library, the only room on the ground floor that lacks carpeting. The end tables are small, easy to move to another room. She sees the books that will surround him during his last days: Norman O. Brown, Georges Bataille, Jack London, Lévi-Strauss, Castañeda, Teilhard de Chardin, William James. And his own works:
Shamanism: Modern Social and Cognitive Aspects. The Cosmic Snake of Healing. Disengaging Death: From Cancer to Dancer.
If he could express an opinion, would he say he cares about books? She doesn't know.

Late that afternoon, an ambulance arrives, staffed by two burly EMTs. Norm rides his gleaming silver-and-red catafalque into the front hall, wheezing but not groaning as it lurches up the steps. The men heave Norm into the low, heavy bed and cover his body with an
oversize sheet. Schubert curls up on his stomach. Penny prepares a cup of ice cubes and some swabs, in case he opens his mouth. He seems inert. A home health aide arrives to train her. He shows her how to put ointment on his bedsores with rubber gloves and use a hypodermic needle.

THAT EVENING AFTER WORK, AMALIA
rushes to his side and kneels by the bed. “Darling, darling,” she says, kissing him. “I am so glad you could come home.” To Penny, she adds, “He doesn't answer.”

“He's on morphine and Haldol.”

“I wish we could talk.”

“No, you don't! I'm so grateful they finally knocked him out.”

“Stop that. He's just tired. He can hear you.”

AROUND 4:00
A.M.
, NORM HOWLS.
He howls again. He bellows loudly that he wants to go home. Penny finds him asleep, bleeding lightly from the nose, with his left arm over the bed railing. Amalia sits by him until seven o'clock. Then she heads out to work.

Penny spends most of the day perusing social media in the kitchen, drinking coffee with Baileys, smoking Marlboros. She helps the aide with Norm's hygiene and rubs his feet with urea cream.

NOT LONG AFTER—ONLY FIVE
days—Matt drives to Morristown to say good-bye.

For days Norm has done nothing but breathe. Things happen to him, but his own activities are twofold: sonorous intake of breath and stuttered expulsion. Inhalation is shrill. It sounds painful. The home health aide says it isn't painful.

Matt's hair is still full and black, longish and wavy, something
of an art-director mane. His beard, clipped short, is graying. He appears very large and solid, but slim, in a black merino sweater and charcoal gray slacks.

At first he stands at the foot of the bed, hands clasped below his belt buckle. He sits down on a chair by the head of the bed and reaches over the rails to place his hand on Norm's forehead.

Matt's face freezes at the sight of Norm's open mouth. It is a red hole through which his tongue pokes yellow, caked in a giraffe-skin-like pattern of dried mucus. “Jesus, Dad,” he says. “You look atrocious.”

Norm breathes.

“We always spoke our minds, so there's nothing left to say,” Matt says. He waits. He takes Norm's left hand. “Good-bye, Dad,” he says. “I love you.”

He lowers his forehead to the bed railing and remains motionless, dry-eyed, for two minutes. He stands and leaves without speaking to Amalia or Penny.

Penny sits by Norm until deep in the night.

A WEEK LATER, WITHOUT ANOTHER
peep of complaint, Norm stops dying.

Penny is holding his hand. There is no sound. At one moment he is dying audibly, each breath quick, forced, harsh, through whistle-like apertures in the material blocking his windpipe. The next moment he is still.

She glances at the window and sees gratefully that it is open. She becomes aware that humans have souls. These are slender birds like swifts, invisible and made of moist living breath. When a person dies, this bird urgently requires free passage to the sky.

In essence, if Norm hadn't smelled so horrible that she'd had to open a window in summer and let in the humidity, his soul would have been trapped in his library forever, unable to join the other souls.

She doesn't believe in the soul thing at all. She just knows it all of a sudden.

She places his left hand on his chest. She sits and stares at the rotting body in its leaky diaper for a quarter of an hour. She leaves the room and closes the door.

Seeing a flower arrangement on the side table in the front hall, she removes a few flowers. She goes back to the library and lays them on Norm's chest. They help, she thinks. Flowers really help. The dead thing looks a lot better with flowers on it.

She makes herself two espressos in a row, using the ultrafast pod machine, and calls Amalia at work.

“Don't do anything,” Amalia says. “I'll be right there. Call that nurse and tell him not to come anymore. Tell the hospice agency to pick up that nasty bed.”

PENNY DRIVES OUT TO BUY
groceries with altered perceptions. She breezes through a stop sign and almost misses her turnoff. In the store, the very ugliest white people seem beautiful to her, their red noses and inflamed pimples alive with oxygen-saturated hemoglobin. At the deli counter she gets in line for pastrami, but lasts only a few seconds, fazed by cold cuts embalmed in nitrite solution and mummified ham. She pushes her cart to the cereal aisle and buys a box of Post Raisin Bran.

She drives back to her parents' house. She carries the box to the dining room table, where she rapidly spoons cereal into her mouth, savoring the blend of crispy vegetable matter and purest white cane sugar. She enjoys the feel of her own firm gums and smooth teeth.

Amalia comes home from work early—around five—because of the special occasion.

Halfway through the box of Raisin Bran, Penny puts down her spoon and says to her mother, “They could have let Dad sleep
through all that. Everybody knows people are animals, only smarter. It's wrong to torture any animal, even for its own good.
Especially
then. But instead of giving him real drugs, they kept wanting him to be alert, so he could make his peace with God. I always thought religious people were massively annoying. Now I know they're
evil
.” She shovels in a big spoonful of cereal.

Subconsciously—as a secret even from herself—she suspects that Norm wanted to stay awake to see his sons again. Though she doesn't believe it consciously, the suspicion hurts her, because of its extreme sadness. She wipes her eyes, not knowing why.

“Oh, Penny,” Amalia says, hugging her. “You're so like him. Thank you so much for using your free time to care for him. That says so much about you—good, positive things. You're such a caring healer, exactly like your father.”