Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (9 page)

E
ventually the cancer in my father's lungs moved into his brain. He wasn't thinking right all the time, and his hands grew weak and he couldn't feel his feet and so he had to give up driving. He and my mother arranged to trade in his truck, along with the old Mercury Grand Marquis she drove, in exchange for a new SUV that would suit her after he was dead.

My father, present at that moment, was planning quite calmly for when he would, in the near future, no longer be present.

He had always been actual to himself. There had never been a time in his experience when he hadn't existed, and now he was being forced to consider and act upon the impending fact of his nonexistence. Something about that still strikes me as intensely strange and sad, though it's the sort of thing that has to be done, obviously, from a practical standpoint.

But so the day came to trade in their vehicles, and before driving to the dealership my mother and I cleaned the bed of the truck out in the driveway. My father, who was by then too weak to help, sat on a lawn chair in his checked hunting coat, buffeted by an autumn wind that swirled leaves at his feet. It felt like he was watching us clean him out of our lives. Which was in fact what we were doing—kindly, perhaps, regretfully, perhaps, but nevertheless. When we finished, he wanted to take the truck for one last drive. My mother didn't like that idea at all, and frankly neither did I, but the whole affair was sad enough without punctuating that sadness by telling him no, so I helped him into the driver's seat and got in on the other side, belted myself in.

An inauspicious start: he took out the mailbox with the passenger-side mirror before we even got out of the driveway. I would have laughed if he hadn't been dying. We got on the road and he settled down, even stopped for a phalanx of turkeys crossing 201, but all the same it was a lot like being sober in a car driven by a drunk—he weaved and drifted, crossed the center line several times, couldn't maintain speed. For about twenty minutes I tried to make myself tell him to pull over. Problem was, I'd never
told
my father anything. No one did. But I was starting to worry he would kill us, or someone else.

Finally I said it. He looked across the cabin at me, but didn't respond for a minute. He kept driving. Then he said, She treats me like a child now, you know. Your mother.

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded.

He hit the steering wheel weakly with the heel of one hand. I'm not a goddamn child, he said, breathless in his sudden frustration.

I nodded some more.

And then, after another minute or so, he pulled over to the shoulder and put the truck in park. He was no longer angry, just resigned and pensive. I helped him get into the passenger side and arranged his oxygen bottle for him and drove back home, then to the dealership. And while my father admitted to the salesman, by way of signing paperwork, that he was not much longer for this world, I walked laps around a brand-new Mustang in the showroom, and thought of when my father had told me about the Mustang he'd dreamed of buying during the two years he spent getting shot at in Vietnam, the Mustang he'd not, after all, ever been able to afford, and now here he sat at the salesman's sad little desk with his back to this beauty, a Shelby GT, supercharged V8, and even if he'd had all the money in the world he couldn't have driven it even once.

O
ne day while my father was sick, toward the end, I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him at the house while my mother ran errands, and there had been a gap of maybe an hour between when my sister had dropped him off from lunch and when I showed up to take over, an hour during which my father was alone, a casual and honest and heartbreaking mistake on my sister's and my part. When I arrived I looked down the hallway into the bedroom and saw my father asleep on top of the covers. I didn't want to disturb him because sleep came hard or not at all at that point, so I set up my laptop at the dining room table, in a spot where I had a line of sight to the bedroom. I noticed him stir a few times, but he never moved to get up, so I let him be and worked on my first novel. I was there for an hour before my mother arrived home and went to him and discovered what had happened. An hour. That was what I kept thinking about then, and what I think about now. A full hour I let him lie there. An hour, was what I thought, all I thought, as I used an old toothbrush and a bowl of warm soapy water to scrub the shit out of his toenails, shit that had run down his pant legs and settled into his socks when he couldn't get to the bathroom by himself after my sister dropped him off. And then when I arrived I left him like that. For an hour. An hour, an hour, an hour, was what I kept thinking about.

T
he week before my father died he tried to write me a note. I didn't find out about this until after he was gone and my mother showed the paper to me. A single page. Scrawled at the top of the page were the first five letters of my family nickname. That's how we knew he meant it for me. He didn't have enough energy to write the last letter, and gave up in what I imagine was a fit of frustration. He was frustrated by just about everything at that point. His handwriting had always been a bit messy, but now it looked like a kindergartener's first efforts. The lines on the ‘R' didn't quite connect, and the ‘o' was a big bumpy loop, outsized when compared with the rest of the script. That was it: five letters, followed by the silence of blank ruled lines. And so it goes without saying, probably, that whatever he wanted to communicate died with him. All he left behind was five-sixths of my name.

O
n the island, the day after I found it in myself to be tender with Charlotte, I discovered a note of a different kind from Emma in my email. A catalog of data from what had been a very happy trip to Ireland:

I have been meaning to send this to you for a while . . . You may recall that I was making notes on the plane ride home. For me, details like this are better than a narrative for capturing and aiding memories (my poor memory . . .), though I certainly wouldn't call it comprehensive.

9/5

2 matching bruises

1 minor car accident

3 very expensive meals

3 (?) bottles of whiskey

1 bottle of Bailey's

4 (?) nights of hot-tubbing

5 days of driving (or was it 6?)

2 pairs of shoes

2 bus rides, 4 flights, 2 boat rides

very little email

2 dreams about Matty; 1 dream about Mr. Harvey [from
The Lovely Bones
]

no naps; 2 very good nights of sleep

2 nights of difficult conversation

crepes for breakfast

carton+ of cigarettes

3 showers together

1 extra day

lots of laughter

So needless to say, both the timing and the content of this . . . what do you say about any of it, really? Comings and goings, the way we all drift into and out of each other. There are times when I feel I can't take these inevitabilities, though I always manage it, with the emotional equivalent of bubble gum and chicken wire.

A
fter that email, I drank and drank. I did away with the pretense of ice and mixers, and shortly thereafter with even the rocks glasses, eliminating all mediation between myself and the lip of the bottle. The local garbagemen, unreliable as any other service on the island, could not keep up with my Medalla consumption; trash bags full of empty cans piled up at the foot of the stairs outside, baking sour in the heat and attracting flies. I swept the rum shelf clean at the supermarket, literally swept it with one arm, as though my life were a movie, consequence-free, nothing but entertainment, and two or three pints detonated in my cart and coated the floor with distilled sugarcane. Gringos shot me frightened glances, then looked quickly away when I met their gazes, and even the locals stared.

Charlotte tried to keep up, to her detriment. She was twenty-two but could have passed for thirty after just a couple of weeks. Reversible damage, but damage nonetheless, and when on most afternoons she retired to the bathroom to vomit, I sat on the tile with my back against the door frame and asked her, not unkindly, to consider what she was doing to herself.

You should be at school, I told her. You should be finishing your degree, breaking boys' hearts, vomiting only on the weekends.

She tried to respond, but retched instead.

This is advanced drinking, Charlotte, I said. It looks a lot like what you saw at college, but it's different. You have to work your way up to it. It takes years. Drinking this way at your age is like plucking a toddler off her big wheel and giving her the keys to a bulldozer.

Whatever she was trying to say before, she apparently thought better of it. She flushed the toilet, let her head hang for a minute while water and vomitus swirled in the bowl, then crawled across the bathroom floor and put her arms around my neck. I let her hold me, and rubbed my hand up and down her back, and thought about Emma, far north in her wool toggle coat, bent to the wind, an angled slash of green and auburn against a white-gray landscape.

W
ith my heart squashed again like a kitten in a crush video, and my head on the briny, I began to notice small strange inexplicable things around the casita. Usually in the mornings. I'd wake with a head like a toothache and emerge from the bedroom into unbearable sunlight and find something not just strange and inexplicable but also
sinister
in some exquisite way.

First I discovered a dead cat on the porch just outside the back door. Its insides had liquefied and run out of both ends, forming gray-orange pools that had, in the cool of the overnight, grown skins like cups of pudding.

The very next day I walked into the bathroom and found the sink painted with drips and drabs and fingered smears of blood. I had a terrible thought and went to check on Charlotte, found her unmarked and snoring softly in the bed, just as I'd left her.

Later that week I noticed that the picture frame Emma gave me for Christmas had moved from the end table to the coffee table, and the picture of us on the Cliffs of Moher, which had come with the frame, was missing. I knew I hadn't moved the frame, or removed the picture. I drink a lot but I'm not like your average drunk—my recall is pretty ironclad.

I asked Charlotte if she'd done it. She said no, and I believed her. By now she'd read my book, really read it, and loved me because of how I loved Emma. This came as no surprise; it had always been this way, with each of the hundreds of women I'd fucked and been kind to. They loved me for the way in which I loved, despite the fact that my love was not directed at them. It made no sense. It made perfect sense. It simply was, sense or no.

I love you, Charlotte said to me, her breath redolent of Bacardi and bile, and when I smiled kindly and nodded and did not respond she said, I know you don't love me. I know you never will.

And I was reminded of the many times I'd told Emma I loved her, and how she'd smile kindly and nod and not respond.

I
would have believed Charlotte about the picture even if she didn't love me, because she was one of those people for whom liquor is like sodium pentothal. Get her drunk, and she'd make immediately clear why as a species we're hardwired to avoid absolute, comprehensive truthfulness. She'd told me many things about herself, in the few weeks since abandoning her act of nonchalance, that I could have happily spent the rest of my life not knowing. I learned, for example, that often her menstrual blood issued as a sort of gritty sludge. I learned that when she was eleven and her brother ten, they had, on several occasions, in the provocative quiet that followed bedtime, ‘touched' their genitals together, and that while this repeated act fell short of full coitus it nonetheless produced such a riot of Catholic shame within her that to this day she often flashed back to it when she had sex, felt herself transported to that time and place, and sometimes even saw her brother's face in those of her lovers. I learned that she once slept for three straight days, waking only long enough to gobble handfuls of Halcion, after suffering the sudden and immutable realization that she had the desire to create art, but not the ability. I learned that riding the bus in junior high had been a daily ordeal, because she'd suffered from chronic and apparently incurable foot odor that would fill the bus's interior and become the subject of loud speculation among the other students, while she sat there tense and silent, hoping no one would trace the smell back to her Topsiders.

And so, knowing all this and more, I also knew that when Charlotte was twelve fingers into a bottle of Don Q and said she had no idea what had happened to the picture, she was telling the truth.

I
tried for two weeks to locate the photo—Emma and me arm in arm, smiling at the camera, our faces shadowed by the hoods on our rain slickers—and never did find it.

P
eople often dismiss the idea of the Singularity as science fiction, of course. A wild fantasy that could never make the leap from drugstore paperbacks to their everyday lives. They smile indulgently at talk of reverse engineering the human brain, shake their heads in a pitying way. People believe that what makes them uncomfortable about the concept of the Singularity is that we will lose something essential and ineffable that makes us human. But they're wrong. What makes them uncomfortable, whether they recognize it or not, is that we will lose our gods irretrievably, and that we will do so by becoming them ourselves.

In the beginning, the child's play stuff: neurological implants will circumvent all manner of damage and malfunction, and like Jesus before them, doctors will tell the crippled to rise, the blind to see, the mad to be still.

Eventually they will move beyond this, and tell the dead to come forth. If my mother chooses and can afford it, they will be able to remake my father out of the same dirt from whence he came originally.

Soon after that, there will be no more dead, for the rest of time. No one will die, and no one will grieve, ever again, until the universe collapses upon itself.