Nicotine (5 page)

“He never healed anything,” Penny says. “He helped people pass the time and forget. And that is
sainthood
. Dad was a fucking
saint
.”

THAT NIGHT, TRYING TO FALL
asleep, she reviews her father's suffering. If she had tied him to a tree in the yard and left him there, would he have been any thirstier, any more uncomfortable than he was in the hospice? Would he have slept any less, or lasted so many weeks?

She remembers what he said about dying with his boots on. If he had gone to Mexico like Ambrose Bierce to die fighting for what's right, and been captured by
narcotráficos
and hung up by his feet, wrapped in duct tape and plastic sheeting—

She stops the thought right there.

It starts again, with chain saws.

She feels trapped in an abyss of human depravity from which there is no escape but death. Which is actually pretty ludicrous when you're twenty-three, in perfect health with no responsibilities, lying
in a four-poster bed in your own room in a mansion, and for all you know you just inherited a boatload of money!

She thinks of everyone else's relaxed attitude toward Norm's death—sick as a dog, eighty-two years old, no biggie—and their near-universal failure to watch him die. She suspects the two may be linked. She had felt herself defiantly alone among heartless sociopaths, but maybe she was alone among sane, sensible people. Her hands go to her face and genitals as she imagines the Mexican torturers.

Around two o'clock, she gets up and sneaks past Amalia into the master bathroom.

There she finds an amber-colored, twist-top pill bottle of Valium, nearly full, dispensed before she was born, so brittle it cracks when she opens it. She holds one in her hand for a long time. She imagines the comfort it might have brought to Norm and cries. She takes it to bed with her, holding it to her heart like a beloved plush toy.

Norm's death is a runaway train. She boarded of her own free will. She waits for a curve, a bridge, a breakdown to stop it.

A DRIVER AND HIS SON
arrive to pick up the adjustable bed, because other dying people need it right away. Penny's conversation with them is awkward. She refuses to let them in the house.

In the library, Norm still occupies the bed they want, his body now uncovered to the waist, flowers on the floor. His infected right arm, looking ready to burst, protrudes straight as a long balloon, fifteen degrees above the horizontal. The other arm lies heavy. Amalia, taking her leave, holds its dead white hand. Penny's altercation with the deliverymen is cut short when the hearse arrives.

The men who see to the disposal of Norm's body surprise Penny. Somehow she expects a doctor to pronounce him dead. But these are clearly undertakers, with long woolen coats and black hats. “What are they?” she asks Amalia. “Are they Amish? Are they Jews?”

“Norm wanted them,” Amalia says. “They do an old-fashioned burial, inside of twenty-four hours. That was his wish, to rejoin the earth ASAP.”

“Sounds like Dad.”

“They will bury him their way, and we will honor his spirit our way. Forget the body. He's gone. Don't cry for the body.”

The impassive men yank off the catheter without opening the diaper. Brown urine drips on the sheets. They roll the body—floppy again except for that infected arm—first into a black zippered bag, then onto a frail gurney with rusty chrome and tiny wheels. It gets stuck crossing the front hall. Too heavy. The wheels get no traction on the runner and sink behind four insurmountable bow waves. Amalia and Penny anchor the carpet with their weight so the men can back up. They steer around it and bounce tump-tump-tump down the front stairs. Amalia tips them with cash in an envelope. They drive away in their forty-year-old hearse.

Penny goes out into the backyard and sits down under a tree.

Making excuses for her daughter, Amalia overtips the deliverymen still waiting to take away the bed. They take it away. She double-bags the sack of urine the color of kidneys and carries it out to the metal garbage cans by the street. She mops the library floor and dumps the water in a basement toilet no one ever uses.

Penny comes back inside. She airs and dusts the library and carries the end tables back in.

AT DUSK THE TWO WOMEN
meet again at the kitchen table, where they smoke cigarettes.

In the wreaths of ectoplasm Penny exhales, she can see her soul.

She wills her body to be equally wraithlike. Not sodden, not heavy, not dead, but filled with crackling, electric life, like a stale Marlboro on fire.

Turning off the lights, Amalia opens the French doors to the courtyard. They say little—two small women in a huge house, dwarfed by its vastness, its oversize, overstuffed furnishings, its large trees, its chaotic megacity, its largely empty universe.

ON SUNDAY, AMALIA DRIVES PENNY
to the Morristown train station, where she catches New Jersey Transit into Manhattan. From Penn Station, she continues on the subway to the Upper West Side.

Her apartment is on the ninth floor of a modern building. There are many tall buildings like it on every side, most built in the nineteen-fifties. The street outside slopes to the black river. Pale green trees are visible in the park. The mosaic in the long, narrow lobby shows abstract fish and seashells suspended in blue waves.

The building is rent-controlled, with a very stable population. The apartment—Norm's old bachelor pad—has been the family's Manhattan pied-à-terre for many years. It even housed Amalia during her college years.

The doorman, not an immigrant but a local man whose father and grandfather were doormen at the same address, wears a too-large suit with a matching cap, like a limo driver. Penny says hello and picks up her mail. She has not been home since Norm's first weekend in the hospice. She drops the thick bundle of junk mail and bills into her tote and steps into the elevator with an elderly woman.

On the third floor, as her neighbor is leaving the elevator, Penny tells her that her father has died.

“I knew him only in passing, but my condolences,” the woman says. “I'm sure he was a dear soul.”

Penny laughs awkwardly and says, “Yes.”

“Never stop smiling,” the neighbor advises her. “Laughter is the best medicine.”

The apartment is a small one-bedroom with a balcony off the
kitchen where Penny keeps her bicycle. The mahogany-stained bedroom suite remains from Norm's days as a grad student at Columbia: a low desk and dresser, a high wardrobe, and a twin bed with a tall headboard upholstered in brown vinyl with gold buttons. The kitchen table and chairs are chrome, vinyl, and yellow Formica. A framed Ph.D. degree in psychology hangs on the wall. The fridge whirs softly in harvest gold. The cabinets are avocado.

She sits down at the table to sort the mail. One envelope lacks a stamp. Inside it is a letter from the landlord, instructing her to vacate the apartment by the end of the following month due to the termination of the lease of Mr. Norman Baker, occasioned by his death
the day before
.

She calls Amalia.

“I can't believe it!” she cries into the phone. “How in the world did they know?”

“Oh my god,” Amalia says. “I told no one. I was too grieving. But Facebook maybe? I updated my status to single. Maybe I am friends with somebody in your building?”

A brief silence, then Penny says, “They would have found out anyway because I told the neighbor. But you're not single. You're widowed! People are going to think you broke up with him because he was too old for you or something. You have to call and tell people he's dead. Nobody's going to notice an announcement on Facebook. It's going to get crowded out by other stuff.”

“He was too old for me,
nena
. He died of old age. I'm forty-three, maybe younger. He was so old he didn't even have Facebook. How else can I tell people he's gone? I have to invite them to the funeral. I can't call them all. Oh my god, that would take forever.”

The two women stop conversing and tap their phones until Amalia's Facebook page appears.

“Oh, so many consoling words,” Amalia says. “People are very sympathetic.”

“Yes, they love you,” Penny says.

They scroll for a moment in silence.

Seeing condolence messages from coworkers, Amalia remarks to Penny that she hopes to retire young so she doesn't end up like Norm. “He worked until he fell down dead. I want to retire at fifty, fifty-five, tops. Maybe I won't live so long. I never saw old Kogi people.”

“How would that work moneywise?” Penny asks. The question feels heartless, even to her, but she feels no connection between her heart and her mouth. “Do you plan to sell the house, or the clinic?”

The clinic is a sprawling international-style bungalow in an upscale residential section of Manaus, nicknamed (by Matt and Patrick) “the Last Resort.” Norm's terminally ill clients were able to stay there in comfort, convenient to hospitals and air transport, while authentic shamans from the interior treated them using traditional rituals and herbal compounds.

“Norm sold the clinic ten years ago. We pay rent to the new owner. We needed money for taxes. So much interest and penalties. You know the IRS. You can run, but you can't hide! Unless you're a criminal. Then it's easy.”

Instead of laughing at the joke, Penny says, “Oh. I thought I might inherit something.”

“Our money is tied up,” Amalia says. “But you can take anything of Norm's that you need.”

“What do you mean? His orthotics? His didgeridoo? He didn't have a lot of stuff I can use.”

“No, only real estate,” Amalia admits.

“What real estate?”

“Oh, different real estate. You know.”

Penny thinks of the summer place in the Palisades and hopes there are no plans to sell it. She hopes it stays in the family forever.

She isn't worried about money. She just wants a job and a place to stay so she doesn't end up worrying about money.

She doesn't feel guilty for thinking about money. It's the foundation of material existence, at least until the revolution comes and
sweeps it away. Until then, we need to find our place in the money ecosystem, our niche in the money chain. You can't understand the modern world if you can't imagine selling what you love best. You're under no obligation to take part, but you have to understand it. That's what Norm taught her. It's why she majored in business.

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE TAKES PLACE
thirteen days later, on a Saturday in May at the summer place, commencing at 7:00
P.M.
—a potluck and drum circle.

Matt brings Patrick, who is tired out after a twenty-two-hour flight to JFK and a night of drinking in Manhattan with an old girlfriend. He picks him up at Newark Penn Station. They listen to traffic and weather on the radio, and Patrick dozes off.

They are among the first to arrive. Matt parks on top of the Palisades, in a field on the other side of the road, near the mailbox. They walk a quarter mile down to the house on hairpin turns.

The gravel driveway is narrow and not well maintained. When other mourners drive past, Matt and Patrick hold still with their bodies pressed against the basalt.

There is a breeze on the ridge, but down in the woods the hot, still air lets mosquitoes hover. The two men twitch at odd moments, reaching down to slap arms, legs, and their own faces as they talk.

Patrick asks Matt how Amalia is holding up.

“Like you'd expect,” he says. “Doing fine.”

“And Penny?”

“Poor kid's a mess. She spent a month obsessing over Dad. I wouldn't have lasted five minutes. He looked like a zombie.”

“Well, he was dying.”

“He wanted to be alone. You know how a cat will just creep away and die by itself? You were right not to come. I'm sorry now I bothered him.”

Patrick wonders whether Matt is looking for a hug. It seems unlikely. He continues shuffling along next to his brother, hands in his jeans pockets.

He is slightly shorter, lithe and weedy, more graceful in the way he moves, and all in all even handsomer, in a way that's hard to put your finger on immediately; he looks kind. His eyes look concerned and sensitive. He can get any girl he wants, a power he exploits to make desirable women pursue him for five or ten years at a time. At age forty-four, a professional art photographer on a tropical island, he has slept with only nine women, and he has never been alone. His career likewise has never hit a snag. Patrick is all sweetness and decency. But not sweet and decent enough to hug Matt.

“I miss Dad,” Matt says. “I really do.”

Patrick turns away, puckering his lips, as though tasting something sour.

NORM'S ACOLYTES ARRIVE FROM ALL
over—medical students, fans of holistic medicine, fellow practitioners, patients whose illnesses relented, aspiring shamans, veterans and benefactors of the Last Resort. They leave their cars at odd angles, blocking each other's escape. No one will leave until they all leave.

The women carry big pots and bowls of food. The men carry coolers and drums: congas, bongos, tabla, djembe. The dress code is garment-dyed linen in earth tones, tooled leather, and jewelry made of rock. Thin-skinned, thin-haired, physically vulnerable people are one main cohort: Norm's former clients. Another is colleagues and friends, old-school hippies—rude, furious, elderly sensualists channeling Falstaff with all their might while their wives read Isabel Allende. A third is college students: self-styled sixties throwbacks who greet each other with palms pressed together, whispering shyly, “Namaste.”

There is consensus among the hippies that Penny is an “old soul.”
Many have known her since she was a baby playing on the floor of the clinic, back when Amalia was in college and Norm lived full-time in Manaus with a babysitter. Then came his financial breakthrough, the triumphant return to America and his wife, her career, the Morristown house, the good suburban schools for their daughter. The utter estrangement from his sons—but that makes sense to the disciples, knowing their history. They see Penny as the bearer of unique potential.