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They drive off, and the kid gives me one final pig-nose-pressed-against-the-window face, fogging the glass until he's out of sight.

 

DUCK

Thanksgiving seems an odd thing to celebrate without the arm that makes carving a turkey possible. A chirpy outsider would no doubt point out
at least you have your father and a roof over your head,
but even that seems more burden than boon, suffering the ignominy of a child's dependence.

They say no matter how bad you think you have it
someone always has it worse.
Of course that's true—I know a kid with cancer. And somewhere there's a man who's lost both his arms, with no one on whom to be dependent. Beyond him, there's someone with no limbs who's also blind. Taking it to its logical conclusion, who's the poor bastard at the end of this line—the person for whom
no one has it worse
? A deaf, dumb, blind, limbless leper, shipwrecked and floating atop the Great Pacific trash vortex as he's slowly nibbled to death by passing seagulls, his open wounds burning in the salt water. It isn't possible to tell that guy
someone always has it worse.

Unless maybe it's Dad, stuck spending Thanksgiving with a mopey, mutilated son sitting across a Peking duck (who also, in its short duck life, had little to be thankful for).

“It's no turkey, but it eats pretty good,” Dad says, crunching some skin.

“If it was good enough for the emperor, it's good enough for the worst Thanksgiving ever.”

“That distinction belongs to the one where your sister told us she was pregnant.”

I'm stunned. “When the hell did that happen?”

“Oh. I guess you didn't know. I sure wouldn't tell you. She was seventeen. She told your mother, and your mother told me. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure if Jackie knows that I knew.”

He shakes soy sauce over his duck with great intent.

“She went away that summer—and then to college!” I remember. “Oh my God, you hid her and she had a baby, and I'm an uncle to some kid somewhere in the world.” Maybe even that poor bastard stuck on the trash vortex.

“There's no kid; it turned out to be a false pregnancy,” Dad laughs. “I can laugh about it now … but at the time, knowing my little Jackie was knocked up? Pretty devastating. I think all firstborns should be male … however terrible the shit they put you through it's never as bad as it would be with a girl, and now as a parent, you're prepared for the next terrible time. Firstborns are the calluses that toughen you for what comes next. Except for that one time, you'd have given me tougher calluses.”

“That was the year no one spoke the entire meal,” I recall. Dad had put his head down to say grace and never lifted it, shoveling food until it was gone and then excusing himself to the football game on TV.

“It was preferable to some of the others. I can still hear the shouting from when your mother's sister and Uncle Ed joined us.”

“So it
wasn't
the worst.”

“And neither is this. So stop complaining and eat. The Chinese have spent fifteen hundred years on that damn duck.”

“Hopefully, not this particular one.”

Dad pays the check and steals the pen. Our first armless Thanksgiving behind us, we leave our fortune cookies untouched, neither one of us eager to know the future.

*   *   *

That night I get an e-mail from Steve containing two links. Steve does not send me e-mails, not since I forwarded one of his hilarious links of interspecies sex to his wife. I click on the first link and am treated to a YouTube video of Steve's narrative tattoo journey that we shot in my attic. I watch long enough to recall,
I've already seen this one,
and I'm about to delete it when I notice the URL of the second link contains the phrase
Sea Serpent.
I click and there's a super close-up of my tattooed nub, along with my narration of the tale of Bob the Sea Serpent, scourge of Vikings, and the galley hero of the
Raging Scallop
.

If, as according to Jackie, Steve's usual cycle of stupidity lasts six months, he's on an accelerated schedule. I can see
The Tale of Bob the Sea Serpent
only has six hits—half of those are no doubt Steve admiring his handiwork—and is unlikely to double that number. Still, it will take only four inspirational words of reply,
What Would Jackie Do?,
to take it offline by morning. I fire up a bowl of Herb Alpert's Tijuana Grass and watch
Steve's Tattoo Tales
again, thinking this can't be that much dumber than a reality show called
LA Ink.

In my sleep I dream about a crew of armless Vikings lined up at the tattoo parlor to get matching Bob the Sea Serpent tattoos where their arms once were—it's an unholy pact with the sea monster that attacked their ship and bit off their arms to remake them, godlike, in his armless image. Displeased that I bear the mark of the sea serpent when I was not, like them, a true victim of Bob, the Vikings surround me, arguing about what should be done with me—although, armless, they don't pose much of a threat. That's when I notice Bob the Sea Serpent in another chair across the room having arms tattooed on his sides. He nods at me, and would give me a thumbs-up if he could.

 

AWKWARD

I'm jolted to walk into Broken Records and find Will and Lilith together, sifting through the classical section. (Immediately imagining their sex together, I surmise that Lilith doesn't have to flip Will onto his back to perform but may in their lovemaking be the flippee.) Lilith is showing Will a copy of “The Lark Ascending,” the torturous equivalent of pouring salt on my nub. I imagine what kind of scene I might make if I were prone to scene making, and what kind of duel might ensue between two one-armed men—I'm supposed to slap him with my gloves, but does one glove constitute a halfhearted challenge? More disturbing is that I can't figure out who I'm actually jealous of, Will for having Lilith or the other way around.

“Hey, look who's back,” Mr. Madnick cheers from behind the register.

“Don't get too excited, Mr. Madnick. I forgot my homework again.”

I walk over to fist-bump Will, our usual greeting, and then I hug Lilith, something I've never done before but am curious if, in pressing against her tits, I might get a rise out of Will. But his face reveals nothing except genuine happiness to see me, while hers bears the usual blank stare of a catatonic.

“Lilith is trying to get me into classical, and I'm trying to turn her on to System of a Down.”

“This is lovely,” I say, plucking the album from her fingers, adding coyly and with my own piercing stare, “I've heard it before.”

“Of course you have. I played it for you in my bedroom.”

So much for coy. Will grins and resists the urge to high-five me.

“It was voted to the top spot of Classic FM's Hall of Fame last year,” she says as she takes it back and examines it.

Mr. Madnick joins us. “How's the arm?”

“Still missing. I was thinking of putting up flyers.”

“Neal Madnick,” he introduces himself, reaching to shake Will's missing hand.

He never noticed. The Will effect.

Will offers his inverted left hand and, startled at how he could miss such a thing, Mr. Madnick clumsily shakes it. Lilith steps in to hug him, as if having just learned what a hug was and deciding to try it out for herself. Mr. Madnick takes the LP from Lilith and looks it over.

“Nice piece. Influential. Did you know it inspired some of the strings on King Crimson's
Larks' Tongues in Aspic
?”

“I think I'd like to hear that,” Lilith thinks aloud, and she and Mr. Madnick head over to the listening station.

“So, are you two a thing now?” I query Will. “You know that means we'll have to call you ‘Wilith.'”

“Nah! Both just killing time.”

“Did you get the full treatment—violin solo and sexy birdhouse talk?”

“She played for you? Now I'm jealous.”

I know he's playing but I'll bank this implausible idea that
Will is jealous of me
to call up and savor in my darker moments.

“We probably shouldn't be talking about her,” I suggest, cowed by the presence of my former teacher. “She'll get a bad reputation and her name in the boys' bathroom, and the bullies will go after her.”

“God help the bullies; she'd eat them alive.”

I'm enjoying hanging with Will at the record store like a love-struck teenage boy when a single furtive sentence starts to unravel everything. “So, I've been thinking about the dam…”

God damn it.

“We're in a position to do something. Doing nothing is the same as doing the wrong thing where I come from.”

And just like that, I take the bait. “Isn't there a happy place in the middle between something and nothing that's less dramatic than blowing up the dam?” I search his face for some sign of agreement to this obvious point. “You know we can't do that, right? And by ‘can't' I don't mean ‘not capable of' but ‘it would be unwise to do so.'”

“What's unwise is building impediments to the natural order of things. Fish got to swim; birds got to fly.”

Tell me I'm crazy,
the rest of the lyrics go. But I'm not the crazy one.

“Ah, ignore me; I'm just talkin',” Will waves me off as Lilith returns from listening to King Crimson.

“Wow,” she says without exclamation. “That was terrible.”

 

BRAIN

In the morning I don't see Dad in his usual morning place hunkered down over a bowl of cereal in front of
SportsCenter
. Peering outside I'm surprised to see him sitting in his van in the driveway. I head outside and pull open the passenger-side door and before I can say anything, I'm pleased to hear Sunny Lee's voice. I sit next to Dad and we listen together as she talks about brains:

We've all heard about left-brained people and right-brained people, the division of labor of separate but exactly equal hemispheres … but the truth, like your brain, is more complicated than that. First of all, on a microscopic level, the architecture, types of cells, neurotransmitters, and receptors of the human brain are markedly asymmetrical between the two sides. Symmetry is
SO
overrated!

Then there's the myth that right-brained people are creative dreamers and artists, while left-brainers tend to be calculated thinkers and wordsmiths. In reality, aspects of language and calculation occur on both sides of the brain, communicated to each other … and it comes out
HERE
. The job of all this cross-communication belongs to the corpus callosum, the band of white matter connecting the hemispheres. Without it, you might function like “Rain Man”: great at counting cards, but not so great on social occasions.

“Isn't she great?” I ask rhetorically. “Wait for the blow…”

With so much going on, it's no surprise the human brain is the most overworked organ this side of a hockey game: Da da da
DA
da
DA
! Cha-arge! I'm Sunny Lee, with
The Sunny Side.

“Well, they can't all be gems.”

Dad continues to stare straight ahead.

“Are you coming or going?”

He sits there unmoving, and it's only when I feel how cold his hands are and he still does not budge, that I realize something is very wrong.

“Dad!” I shout, holding his freezing cold hand—he must have been sitting here like this since late last night—and when he still doesn't respond I run inside to get a blanket to throw over him. He remains motionless as I swaddle him like a shipwreck victim. Panicking, I attempt to shove him over to the passenger seat and, failing that, tip him onto his side so I can drive, dangerously one-handed, to the hospital.

*   *   *

At the hospital I'm told Dad has definitely suffered a “neurological incident,” the eight-syllable way doctors say “stroke.”

He's admitted and it's a very long time before I'm able to see him, and I'm not sure he can see me. Lying in bed he stares straight up at the ceiling and makes no acknowledgment of my presence. I take his hand in mine, and it's like holding something inert.

“Dad, can you hear me?”

No answer.

“If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

Nothing.

“Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

No response.

“If you're there, pick up.”

I wonder if I'll ever hear his voice again, the one that challenges me with kindness masked as gruffness and shouts at
SportsCenter
. Or if he'll ever look at me and recognize who I am. Or walk—or piss—by himself. I pray that he's not “locked in,” frozen in place but completely aware of the world around him as he's poked and prodded and stabbed with IVs and inserted with catheters and spoken of in the past tense as if he's already gone, or worse, still here but useless as old meat. Just then, he closes his eyes, and I hope he hasn't died and wish in the same moment that he might have.

I'd give anything for him to start punching channels on the remote and complain about his inability to find ESPN. Mom shows up only long enough to make it clear that this is beyond her, that her early exit from their marriage absolves her from this unhappy turn of events the same way walking out of a movie in the middle spares you from suffering its crappy ending.

“The reason I left your father,” she explains right in front of him, defenseless, “is because he refused to take care of himself. The cigars, the bad food. Do you know the last time he went for a walk? Only as far as the backyard, to feed peanuts to the squirrels. Even then it was one for them, one for him.”