The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “Ambulance or regular vehicle?” he asked my father.

  “Regular.”

  I called my mother. “You’d better fly out here, Mom.”

  “Let me speak with him,” she said, and I handed the phone to my father.

  “Hello and I’m sorry to put you through this,” he said. A pause. “I know. No. I love you, too, Cynthia.” He put the phone down.

  We walked downstairs and checked out of the hotel. Because he was blind in one eye my father walked a little off balance. We drove to the Stanford University Medical Center, where they had the area’s best resident neurosurgeons. My father, it turned out, had researched the place thoroughly. He was admitted to a wing where they kept terminal patients—cancer and emphysema and AIDS—and they performed tests, scans, and X-rays. He asked me to tape a copy of his living will to his headboard, which I did. “They make more money if they pull out all the stops. Death itself is still free, however,” he said. He refused to wear a gown. The other terminal patients felt uneasy around my father, I suspected. He’d come here to dispense with this troublesome errand, didn’t have time for hospital drills or soft-edged euphemisms. Nobody likes a loose cannon in the death wards.

  My mother arrived within six hours. She kissed my father on the forehead and cheek and said, “Did you find it?” He shook his head and she nodded, grimly satisfied but also heartbroken. The doctor appeared—hair a little long and sun-streaked, not more than thirty-five—and told us what the X-rays and scans revealed. He held the brown celluloid of an X-ray up to a lamp and pointed to the thing itself. An amorphous blob that now resembled a fried egg. The doctor said, “The tumor has attacked the optic nerve. This is definitely in the final stages. He’s not in pain now because it’s also affecting neurotransmission.”

  “You mean I’m in pain but I don’t know it?” my father asked.

  “Something like that. The brain itself doesn’t feel pain, but you may get side effects as systems begin to fail.”

  The pewter lifelessness of the word systems.

  “How long?” my mother asked.

  “Days,” the doctor said. “Days at the most.” He walked out into the white-lit corridor.

  WE TOOK TURNS SITTING BY my father. He was relieved that there was no pain because he didn’t want to spend his final hours in the undertow of morphine or codeine or whatever. There is only so much diversion one can find in a hospital. When it was my turn to wander I walked the wards, past labor and delivery, where I heard the definitive cry of newborns. I passed through the emergency room, where the wounded and sick slumped in chairs and walked out into the bright California day. It was morning again and I had lost all sense of time. I watched a medical helicopter land on a rooftop and they wheeled a patient on a gurney out to meet it. A woman sat half reclined under a white knitted blanket. They put her inside and closed the hatch and the helicopter lifted into the air. The turbine sounded like a confluence of rivers, eddying off the brickwork of the surrounding buildings. I saw coils of silver and turquoise.

  I bummed a cigarette from a guy on crutches and realized I hadn’t smoked since Iowa. I sat on a bench and watched people coming and going, speculating about their illnesses, about their lives. Here people had been removed from the tenure of daily existence, brought down by the body’s propensity to falter or, if you believed Teresa, by the body’s lies and deceits—the unspoken truths, the denied regrets, all of them festering and rupturing beneath the surface. Cancer was an admission of guilt, that was how she saw it. What, then, was my father guilty of? I didn’t want to let him leave us without knowing something secret, some admission that might illuminate who he really was. I persisted in the delusion that the dying are more capable of self-knowledge than the living.

  I sat outside the hospital, watching cars pass by, seeing sick people picked up and delivered.

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  The guy on crutches ambled over to me and sat. He had the jaundiced and unfazed air of someone who’d been in and out of hospitals his whole life. “See that woman that went up in the chopper?” he said. “She don’t look that sick to me. Wide awake, she was, like she was taking a scenic flight over Golden Gate. You ever watch M*A*S*H, when the choppers come in to land?” I nodded. Actually, I had memorized several episodes. He gave me another cigarette and he took my acceptance as tacit agreement that the evacuated lady was really a faker. “My favorite thing about hospitals is the elevators, so spacious for the gurneys. I could ride up and down in those things all day.” I thanked him for the cigarette and went inside.

  Whit prowled the vending machines and the cafeteria. I found him with candy bars lined up on a corridor bench outside my father’s room. He drank from a large Styrofoam cup of coffee. He hadn’t slept well in days and the sugar and caffeine made his hands tremble. “Never can find a Baby Ruth,” he said, staring down at a handful of Snickers. My mother came out and told us that the doctors didn’t think my father would last the night. The tumor was pushing against all kinds of arteries and cortexes and something was bound to rupture. Then my mother told us that my father would donate his body to science.

  I left Whit and my mother and went to take my shift at his bedside. The room was now alive with LEDs and plastic tubing. He was lying in bed, propped by pillows, his knees drawn up slightly. His face had been remade in the last few hours. Something in his talks with my mother had allowed him to let go of the defeat and now there was a look of quiet indifference, a man with nothing left to lose but his body.

  “Will you go to college in the fall?” he asked wearily. “Maybe they’ll invite you to MIT.”

  I nodded. But I didn’t know if I would go. There were probably letters from admissions offices waiting for me in Wisconsin.

  “Be good at something.” He looked at the backs of his hands, and then placed them gently on his lap. Then, “Where did you go?”

  “I’m right here,” I said, moving toward his good eye.

  He shook his head gently from side to side. “No…where did you go when Pop died? What did you see?”

  It was the first time my father had ever asked me what happened during my clinical death. I didn’t know how to answer, because I wanted to give him details that I hadn’t experienced: weightlessness, everything illuminated, a light so white and pure.

  “I fell straight into the coma. I only have before and after, not much during the actual death. I seem to remember a noise. Like a radio between stations. And I felt like I was getting out of water. But I don’t know.”

  “Figures,” he said. “I told your mother about arrangements—remains and suchlike. I’ll haunt all of you if you bury me in the ground. A physicist can’t abide burial. He wants to be combusted, yielded to gas and lighter molecules.”

  “We’ll do what you want.”

  “I remember things,” he said. “The half-life of plutonium and the names of the noble gases, equations…Where does that all go? What use is all that information now?”

  I shrugged. He took a pause and caught his breath.

  We think the moments of truth we seek in death are going to be about the departing, and then they pass before us, simply like clouds, and we realize it’s about us. We want to know about us before they go.

  “Were you ever proud of me?” I asked. The word me floated around the room as a graphite strip.

  My father blinked several times slowly, considering all his options. He unfastened and removed his wristwatch and placed it on the bedside table. The watchband had left his wrist shades lighter than the rest of his arm. He rubbed the mark a little.

  “When you were born I forgot to wear my watch. I didn’t notice time or that small time still existed…you know, hours and minutes time. I took naps with you and your mother…hauled firewood and fixed things around the house. I used to wake up in the night just to watch you.” He looked around the room. “You did that to me. Of course I was proud.”

  I felt the metallic chi
ll of the bedrail.

  He said, “I want you to have my watch. You don’t have to wear it.”

  “I’m going to wear it, Dad,” I said.

  “It runs a little slow…but there’s a jeweler. A fellow in town…Lundberg or Klinberg or something.” He pinched his eyes closed. “What the hell is that man’s name?”

  He opened his eyes and looked out the window. I reached over to the nightstand and put the watch on. The back of the face was still warm from his wrist. Then I heard a slight hook in my father’s breathing and everything went still in the room. His face startled, then relaxed.

  Here it was, the thing he’d been idling for at some 4,500 heartbeats per hour for forty-eight years. He died on the out-breath, with his eyes fixed on a parking garage, trying to remember the name of the jeweler in our hometown. The air simply stopped. A flat green line dragged across the heart-monitoring screen. The machines flashed. An alarm sounded. Rubber shoes rushed the linoleum corridor. I leaned over the bed railing and placed my hand against his stilled chest until the nurses entered the room. Then I moved out of the way, in the direction of the window. My father’s eyes remained open. From where I stood it seemed he was looking directly at me.

  thirty-three

  When did I first realize that time was not just a boundless and abstract invention but also an island prison, a contract between the living and the dead? I can remember, for example, the exact moment consciousness took hold and the exact moment I looked at Samuel and Cynthia Nelson and realized they were my parents. The former took place somewhere between age two and three, as I wobbled in front of a mirror in our hallway. I exist. The latter took place on a sunlit day in the spring of 1974 as my parents held my hands while crossing a suburban street. An approximation of my thought was this: These people own me. They stop me from getting hurt.

  But memory, like light and certain kinds of jazz, also warps time. After my father’s death, I replayed life with him as if it had unfolded in a single afternoon. A solar eclipse above the blue-white snowfields of Manitoba, darkened clouds in a cobalt sky; huddling in the warrens of the Stanford Linear Accelerator as physicists scratched their paunches and called collision variables through the phosphor haze; a procession of dazzling defeats and minor triumphs in school gymnasiums, a blur of chemical flasks, captured chess knights, and metallic trays of dry ice. During all these recalled events, I saw my father standing by himself, aloof in mushroom-colored flannels, a slight air of contempt in his wringing of hands and tapping of feet, as if the tedium of the event or spectacle were designed to hinder his personal progress through the world, as if it were a ploy by the ordinary masses to keep a strand of the subatomic dynasty undiscovered. Yet, he was always there, at every Bunsen burner trial and junior brain match, stuck among the jostling, zealous parents, the shrill mothers, the fathers who talked strategy as if they’d been given a battlefield commission. He’d been determined to wait the thing out. He believed mediocrity, like everything else, had a half-life.

  I didn’t grieve my father so much as waited for his death to make sense. I replayed our life together, looking for clues. Was there a moment he realized who I was? When was the day he began dying? Did the tumor appear that day as we stood on Canadian winter prairie, skirted in snow, sunlight flickering around the dark disk of the moon, and my epiphany amounted to hunger, to a wish for a belly full of pancakes? He must have known I would never be brilliant. And this gift—dice thrown by a convalescing brain—what did it add up to? Had I been resurrected to recite rainfall measurements and disaster statistics? I waited for a sign. I half believed the dead listened, were capable of remorse, and kept a meddling hand in the small affairs of the living. So I kept waiting for him to send me a sign, and eventually he did. But first there was a ghost-life, a period when I was adrift.

  WHIT AND MY MOTHER FLEW back to Wisconsin. I inherited the Oldsmobile and drove it back to Iowa. I hadn’t driven a car since an automobile safety class during my junior year—one of the few Jesuit concessions to the nonacademic and secular world. I was going to spend a final two weeks at the Brook-Mills Institute so they could complete some range studies and videotape one of my sessions for their archives. There was also going to be an informal awards ceremony. I was excited to see Toby and Teresa again.

  I couldn’t escape my father on the drive from California to Iowa. The dash and the seats of the Oldsmobile smelled like stale coffee and talcum powder. I thought about road trips and family outings. The history of my family was trapped in the odometer. The car had done 289,777 miles. It had driven to the moon and halfway back. It was twenty years old; the original motor still churned inside the hood, the dash was sun-bleached, the seats were gauzy and threadbare. The horn sounded like an underwater fog-blast.

  As I drove through highway towns, I sifted through recent events. Then I would catch the image of the Oldsmobile in a storefront window and see my arm limp against the outmoded chassis, helpless as a confession. I was losing track of time. The Stanford teaching hospital had used and cremated my father’s body within a week of his death. I imagined an anatomy class in a bleached room, prone cadavers on stainless steel tables, their bodies partitioned with purple dotted marker lines. My father, now without the beard of a czar, without his speculative air, was simply a specimen for sophomore medical students. Not for the arterial estuaries, not for the alluvial fan of veins in the hand, but for the medical jewel buried inside his braincase.

  We had picked up his remains from the Palo Alto crematorium. A box weighing fifteen pounds, eight ounces, most of that in wood. The body reduced, minus the blood and tissue, is really nothing at all. A few pounds of ash that remind you that we are mostly water and mind. Right now my mother and Whit were shuttling across the Midwest, carrying this oak box. Whit all hushed concern and gentlemanliness, opening doors and guiding my mother’s elbow through the clamor of the airports. I knew my mother was going to be all right. I coldly thought she was going to make an outstanding widow—as if she were preparing to rise, convert her homespun and exotic ways into a kind of resilience. Would she wear foreign mourning garb, the embroidered black shawls of distant women? When we’d said good-bye in California, there was something palpable about her imminent transformation; she wore it as an undergarment to grief.

  Thankfully, there wasn’t going to be a memorial or gathering as such. None of us could imagine anything worse than a den full of the physics faculty from my father’s college, a room of brightly colored socks and mechanical pencils in plaid shirt pockets. What could have been said? These men worked together in the lab, elbow-to-elbow in the mother ship of science, shared their wives’ tuna fish sandwiches and celery sticks like schoolboys, speculated about black holes and the end of time, but never shared a single, frank personal conversation. My father once told me a colleague’s wife had died from cancer two years before any of them knew. And my father’s brothers would have arrived with their buxom wives, orbiting the food table, wringing napkins and offering trite memories of Sammy back in the copper country of Michigan.

  I DROVE THE FINAL MILES to the institute late one night. I crested a slight hill and in the distance the Victorian mansion was lit up, blinking through the prairie dark like an ocean liner. I drove up and parked out by the barn. Inside the house, I went to find Teresa. She’d changed the pictures on her door. Now there were images of radioactive fallout, mushroom clouds, fusion-white explosions, great vistas of disaster-scape. I knocked softly and she appeared in the doorway.

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. She wore an oversize T-shirt and tennis socks.

  “I just got in.” I wanted to hug her but there was something there, some awkwardness.

  “You didn’t call me when he died. Gillman told me,” she said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I should be asking you that.”

  “Still.”

  “Yeah. Lately, it’s been getting to me…all these dying people. Do you want to come in?”


  I entered her room. It was all candles and incense. Her walls were covered in Hendrix posters and magazine pictures, collages with escape and mortality themes: train leapers, cliff jumpers, a woman being sawn in two, her head and feet peeking out of a wooden box. Teresa’s bed lay covered with a patchwork quilt her mother had sent her. We sat on the mattress facing each other.

  “He died the way he lived,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He just slipped away in the middle of a sentence about watch repair.” I looked down at his watch on my wrist. “I’m feeling weird,” I said.

  “That’s okay. Normal, really.”

  She was holding my hands.

  I said, “There’s nobody watching me anymore.”

  “He always expected things.”

  “We gave his body to science. He was cremated. The little box full of ashes, that was the only thing that…I don’t feel much. I wanted to know him, you know, really know him. At the end there, with the tumor, he was different. Approachable.” There was the threat of a tear, but as soon as I was conscious of the sting it went away.

  “Dying changes people. Buried under all that fear, they become…themselves,” she said.

  “What was it like inside his head?” I asked. I looked at my hands inside hers. “One time I remember a salesman came to our door to sell my father life insurance. My father was on his best behavior. He invites the man in, gets him some lemonade, even manages a few remarks about the weather. The salesman launches into his routine. He mentions mortality statistics and the uncertainty of life. This goes on for thirty minutes, my father nodding now and then, until finally my father stands up and walks into his study. He’s in there for fifteen minutes. The salesman’s looking at me, trying to get an in, asking me about school. Finally my father returns to the salesman and says, ‘Sir, I’m writing a paper about the halo effect of certain kinds of particulate matter. Also, I should tell you, I self-insure.’ The man looks white-faced at my father and asks him what he means by the term self-insure. My father scratches his beard and says, ‘My risks are proportional to my expected outcomes. My wife will have some scones for you in the kitchen.’ That’s it. He closes the door to his study and leaves the salesman looking around. He didn’t realize there were things you weren’t supposed to say to people.”