Pharmakon (36 page)

Knowing I didn’t want to talk to her, that I’d feel worse no matter what my mother said, that I wanted to stay and talk to a stranger because there was no history to come between us, the cozy feeling I had found in that basement flew out the window. “Go on, talk to your mother; she misses you.” Zuza patted her stomach. “We’re not going anywhere.” She made it seem like she and her baby were one person.

My mother and I were separated by more than a few hundred miles of long-distance static. She did miss me. I could hear her sniffle and imagined the tears running down her cheeks as she told me, “It’s going to be okay, Zach. We know where he is now.”

How? I wondered. I overheard my sisters talking about how weird it was that my parents went to a medical conference. Were they tracking Casper down?

As my mother reassured me, I began to worry that they were going to do something bad. “He’ll be caught in a day or two, and then we’ll be home, and everything will be good again.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”

I said nothing and handed the phone to Lucy.

Zuza was waiting for me. She put me to work, helping to knead all the air bubbles out of the clay. But it wasn’t the same. I felt guilty for not wanting to talk to my mother, and, worse, angry at her for asking me a question I had to answer with a lie.

I tried to imagine my mother happy to have me in her stomach the way Zuza was. But all I could think of was the way she cried at my birthdays, and how she got sad when she looked at me because she didn’t see Jack, which seemed doubly unfair, because I was part of her, too. Struggling to find a way to shape all these thoughts that seemed wrong into something that would feel right, I asked Zuza, “Can you show me how to make something for my mom?”

And so I learned how to make a bowl. Her hands on mine, Zuza taught me to roll the clay into long snakes, then coil them around a circular base. Each one slightly longer than the last, to give it shape. She made one for herself along with me, so she could show me each step but not take over and end up making it herself, the way my father would have. And when the curve of my bowl suddenly turned wobbly, and I hit it with the mallet and shouted “Shit!” in English, she laughed.

“Now you know how hard it is.”

“What?”

“To make something out of nothing.”

And so I started at the bottom again and again and again, and by the next afternoon, I had a bowl my mother and I could both be proud of. And the day after that, she showed me how to paint it with glazes that all looked like shades of gray, but which Zuza promised would come alive with color once it was fired.

Around the outside of the bowl I painted my family holding hands. Stick figures, but I knew who they were. And Zuza kissed the top of my head and called me
drágám
when I included her stomach and Lazlo in the chain of my life. And as she fired up the kiln, I added one more person, and then I was ready to hand it over.

“Who’s that one?”

“Jack.”

When Lazlo came home from work that night, he called Zuza and me upstairs and announced, “Tonight, we all go out to dinner and celebrate.”

We all knew what that meant. Fiona and Lucy and Willy cheered and jumped up and down like the home team had just won a football game. “Did they hurt Casper?” I asked.

“No more than they had to.”

The next day, Lazlo took off from work and drove us home in his convertible Mercedes Benz. Top down, radio blaring, Fiona and her guitar squeezed in the front. I sat in the narrow backseat between Willy and Lucy, clutching the bowl I’d made for my mother with both hands as if it might blow away in the excitement of our return. Zuza had wrapped it in blue tissue paper. It was my mom’s favorite color.

My parents were sitting on the front steps holding hands when we drove up. My mother was resting her head on my father’s shoulder. They looked nervous when they saw us and jumped up, like we’d caught them doing something they didn’t want us to see.

Willy leaped out of the convertible first, shouting, “Did you get me a microscope?”

Fiona held her guitar aloft and announced, “I wrote a song.”

Lucy laid claim to newfound sophistication. “Lazlo took us to the Plaza for dinner. And I drank champagne.”

They were all hugging and kissing as I walked toward them with the bowl. My mother pulled herself away from the reunion and ran down the walk to greet me. “It’s all over, Zachy.” I was glad because she was glad. Mostly, I was looking forward to surprising her with the bowl.

She missed me so much, she didn’t hear me when I said, “You’ll never guess what I made,” as she pulled me into her arms. Hugging me to her chest, I shouted, “Don’t!”

It was too late. I was the only one who heard the crack. My mother pulled back from me when instead of “I love you,” I shouted, “stop!”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

The bowl fell from my hands onto the sidewalk and shattered inside the blue tissue paper. I wept as she unwrapped the disaster and collected the pieces. “It’s beautiful. We can put it together again. We’ll get glue. We can fix it.”

“No, we can’t.”

We had supper early in the dining room. Normally, we only ate there on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. My mother said this was a kind of Thanksgiving. She prepared our favorite meal: roast beef, mashed potatoes, fresh corn on the cob, and apple brown betty, a feast to welcome us home from our time in the wilderness and celebrate the incarceration of our oppressor.

The typewriter that usually sat at the head of the table had been excused, and the papers and manuscripts and abstracts and stacks of computer printout that normally monopolized the tabletop and sat in the chairs had been hidden out of sight and mind. As my mother and Lucy billowed out a tablecloth that had been embroidered by her great-aunt Minnie, Fiona and Willy and I set the table with china and silverware that were traditionally only brought out to impress strangers.

And just as we were about to dig in, my mother did something else she didn’t normally do. She said, “I want us all to say a prayer.”

From the expression on my father’s face, you would have thought she’d requested a blood sacrifice. He gave us a look that begged us to do whatever she asked. Then she made everyone hold hands. There was a long moment of silence. I wasn’t sure whether she had forgotten how to pray or was uncertain what she had to say to God. “Dear Lord, thank you for giving our family this chance.” Everybody closed their eyes, except for me and Lazlo. “And forgive us if we have offended you.”

“Amen” was followed by a serious silence.

Then Lazlo solemnly raised his martini glass and toasted,
“L’chaim,”
adding sarcastically, “Whatever the hell that means.” Which made my father laugh. Then he lit up a Lucky and announced, “I hope you don’t mind, I taught all your children to smoke this week.” He even began to pass out cigarettes, which my mother thought was funny until Lucy lit hers up.

“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood, young lady.” My mother snatched the cigarette from her hands and smoked it herself.

Willy spooned a crater into his mashed potatoes, then reached across Fiona for the gravy. “Dad, why didn’t the police just shoot Casper?”

My father had already told us how the police had tracked Casper to Baltimore and arrested him in a medical library in Johns Hopkins. “He surrendered, Willy.”

“If you were there, would you have shot him?” Willy emptied the gravy boat, turning his crater into a greasy brown lake.

“Hey, Willy, thanks for saving some gravy for the rest of us.” Fiona was big on manners.

“We’ll talk about it after dessert. Right now, I’d like to enjoy my meal and not have to think about anything having to do with Casper.” My father pushed his hair off his forehead and asked me for the salt.

“What happened to your head?” There was a crescent-shaped scab just at his hairline. Still unconvinced they ever really went to Philadelphia, I imagined Casper and my father fighting on the edge of a cliff, like they were in a cowboy movie and one of them was a bad guy and had to die.

“I hit it on the door of the medicine cabinet getting some Pepto-Bismol for your mother in the middle of the night.”

“You had diarrhea?” Willy was always getting diarrhea.

“Yes, if you must know. Now can we change the subject?”

“I had diarrhea for six months after the war.”

“Lazlo, don’t encourage them.”

“What’d you do?” I asked.

“I found an apartment with a bathroom that had the most beautiful view in Prague. Sometimes I’d eat my dinner there, invite my friends over, play cards . . .”

“Gross.”

“Once, I won thirty thousand ducks on that toilet.”

“What’d you want ducks for?”

“
Ducks
is Czech for how you say bucks. Greenbacks, dollars. Only by the time I tried to spend them, they were worth like three cents.” Lazlo worked hard to keep us from thinking about Casper.

After Lazlo left for New York, and the plates were cleared and the leftovers were divided between the fridge and the dogs, my mother got out a tube of Duco cement and put newspaper down on the table, and we began to try to piece the wreckage of the broken bowl back together. My mother did most of the gluing. Her fingers weren’t as clever as Zuza’s, but there was a grace in her determination to make things whole.

And as I watched her struggle to figure out how the pieces fit together, I listened to my father in the adjoining living room reassuring my sisters and brother that Casper would never bother us again: “Casper Gedsic is in a place he can never escape from.” My father’s voice was tired. He sounded like he was reading from a script.

“That’s what you said back in Hamden.” Fiona looked up as she tuned her guitar.”

“He’s not in Townsend anymore.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“In a high-security facility at Needmore Mental Hospital.”

Lucy stopped studying her split ends. “He’s in New Jersey? That’s just great.”

Then Willy chimed in, “Whose dumb idea was that?”

“Mine. He’s in a special new kind of cell. Monitored twenty-three hours a day by TV cameras.”

“Why not twenty-four?” Willy didn’t feel sorry for Casper.

“He gets an hour of exercise in a yard enclosed with a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.”

“What’s razor wire?”

“It cuts you if you touch it.”

“Cool.” That was Willy.

“On the way to and from his exercise session, his ankles and wrists will be shackled.”

“What’s he going to do all day?” I asked.

“He’ll have a television he can watch, radio, books to read.”

“He doesn’t get to see or talk to anybody?” I could tell Lucy felt sorry for him, too.

“Outside of the psychiatric staff? No.”

“He’ll go crazy,” Fiona said matter-of-factly.

“He is crazy, stupid.”

“I would rather be dead than locked up like that.” Lucy began to pick ticks off the dogs.

“If he can’t get out, why watch him with the TV cameras?” That was Fiona.

“There are new drugs we’re going to try on him, and we need to watch to see if they work.”

“You think you can cure him?”