Prodigals (24 page)

There was another flight and a long ride in a hired car and then a ferry crossing before I saw Misty at the terminal, leaning against the dock's weathered wood and smoking a cigarette while she waited. She didn't move or wave as I walked over to her. Our eyes merely met, and I smiled at the struck pose, which was her way of joking and of telling me we would always pick up just where we'd left off.

“You missed it,” she said when we'd hugged.

My heart skipped a beat. “Missed what?”

She tossed her cigarette in the ocean. “Game night last night. I taught everyone Celebrity.”

“Jesus, Misty.” I threw my bags in the backseat. The fishing boats in the cove shimmied in an echo of the ferry's wake. “How's the old guy doing?”

“Better, we think.” She started the Subaru, gunning the engine needlessly. “He's quoting poetry—in Latin.”

“He knows Latin?”

She honked a greeting at someone on foot I didn't know. “Are you listening to me? Look, prepare yourself. The house is a zoo.”

I don't know why, but I had been expecting to find the house draped in a somber pall, the days drifting melancholically between the unplaceable moment an afternoon becomes sad and the cobalt fullness at dusk's last breath. What I walked into, however, more closely resembled a Great War hospital established in some British country manor. There were maids and nurses and respect payers and well-wishers. It took me a long time to get everyone straight. For a while I had to approach each conversation with the ecumenical delicacy of a store clerk. I failed—wildly, you might say—to calibrate my answers to the questions I got about who I was and what I did and where I lived, questions to which I had no good answers anyway. After half an hour, and asking after the family of a man who turned out just to be making a delivery, I found my way to the bayside veranda where my grandfather was set up looking out to sea.

I bent to kiss him.

“You made it,” he said in a voice that somehow, at once, conveyed both boyish gratitude and a faint sense of betrayal.

“I wouldn't have missed it.”

My grandfather ignored the innuendo in this, the sort I am helpless to make, wincing all the while. Perhaps he didn't catch it. He raised a quivering finger to point out a passing schooner making its way up the bay on a reach. An osprey scrutinized the stretch of coast a few hundred yards out, and at the foot of the porch flowers in the parterre had the full lavish beauty of their high summer bloom.

“Not too shabby,” I said. And because I had been here every year since my birth, it was simply not possible to say how deep an impression this one bit of extravagant and stern beauty had made on my psyche, my longings, my fury, my hope.

It took my grandfather a while to collect the words on his tongue, but he managed finally, shrugging with a feigned cool. “If you like that sort of thing,” he said.

Misty and I had the third floor to ourselves, a suite of seaward garrets out whose windows we smoked, monitoring the comings and goings below. There was a rotation of nurses, daily shifts and weekly substitutions; as we were on an island, they stayed with us and slept in the house. The stream of visitors my grandfather received was unending, social acquaintances from half a century of summers here, people committed to making an appearance but with little idea, finally, what you said to a ninety-seven-year-old widower in manifest pain, for whom speech had become an unpleasant game of recollective hide-and-seek. Cynthia had set up her easel on the back lawn, painting for hours with the imperious, imperturbable air of a cultist. Ruth, as far as I could tell, spent her days with a cordless phone wedged in the crook of her neck on calls to New York, holding up an index finger and walking away from anyone who talked to her. I loved my aunts, and beyond that I liked them, but I did not at heart understand what had come between them and their father, the irritations that had grown with age and then mapped themselves onto dynamics of grievance, of insufficient or misapplied love, rooted somewhere deep in the past. Perhaps nobody can respond to you exactly the way you want. Family is no doubt a pier glass for one's own self-contempt. But for all my regret that this should happen now, for all my frustration and incomprehension, those feelings, I knew, had to be set next to my own meager participation in these lives, the implicit idea that it was enough for me to show up now and again for a few days and assume the unencumbered neutrality that may, in fact, have been no different from my habitual absence.

“Do you like what we've done with the place?” Cynthia asked.

I had wandered over to her easel barefoot with a mug of coffee.

“I like that you've found a way to live together under one roof,” I said politically.

“I wish your mother were here.”

“She wishes that too, I'm sure.”

We looked at the bestrewn islands of the bay, the mainland hills beyond, which at twilight took on the glaucous sheen that gave them their name. Although it was morning Cynthia was painting a night scene, bright buoys and ship lights overexposed on a dark sea.

“Do you know why I paint facing east?” she said.

“Because it's the direction with the view?”

She looked at me until every last bit of levity had drained from my remark. “Because that is the direction the Vedas designate for the gods.”

“Ah.”

“Where the sun comes from.
Dawn Land
. That's what indigenous tribes called this region.”

“I didn't know.”

“Yes,” she said. “Ancient people all over the world knew that everything begins in the east. I find myself wanting to focus on beginnings.”

I had dealt with death before, of course, but I had been younger then—more certain, that is, that the important experience being undergone was my own. I couldn't and wouldn't have wanted to summon this illusion now, and still I had only my own subjectivity to refer to. If I tried to imagine my grandfather's first-person experience of his own enfeeblement, helplessness, and mortality, I could do this only through an awareness of myself making the effort,
choosing
to make the effort, and so with a trace of self-congratulation spoiling the act. Nor was I even certain that this kind of transpersonal projection made up a worthy or compassionate goal. It verged on pity, and pity looked an awful lot like just the displaced fear of the same happening to you. My grandfather and I were separated by the impregnability of two skulls. I had taken to kissing him, more than I had ever kissed any relation of mine, his balding head, his sallow, sunken cheeks, but even I knew this was no more than symbolic pretense to the notion that we were of the same flesh and that nothing would undo this. He was my last living grandparent; I watched daily as he shrank into himself, able only to wonder, from my remove, at the indignity and terror of having your body desert you, of finding yourself trapped in the play and apperception of a still-lively mind while the words that gave thought form floated beyond your reach. I read to him mornings and evenings about Galileo and Janet Yellen, the plump little gibbous moon where our spheres of interest overlapped. He tired quickly following the movement and subordination of the written word. He tired when we spoke too. And through it all he groaned as waves of a great, unnameable pain came over him, saying merely “I'm fine, I'm fine” when we asked, bouncing a hand to shush us, like we'd grown histrionic.

The worst was at night. My bedroom was right above his, and he seemed no longer to sleep but to drift in states of an unpleasant semiconsciousness, moaning with a periodicity just irregular enough to keep me on edge. When I couldn't take it any longer, I wandered into Misty's room to drink her vodka out of a red-wine glass and share a smoke above the moonlit sea.

“Denise's husband is dying,” Misty said. She made a fishlike face, letting the smoke float out of her mouth. “I don't know if you knew.”

“I didn't,” I said. Denise was the chummiest of the nurses and had a way of speaking, a delicate soprano whisper, that after having spent a good portion of the afternoon just fucking
rapt
as she described the uses and pitfalls of a medication called Coumadin I had begun to worry she was giving me ASMR.

“He has cancer,” Misty said. “Lung that spread to the brain.”

“Christ, and she's looking after Granddad.”

“And we're smoking.”

“Same guilt,” I said, hating myself for smoking and smoking mostly out of self-hatred. “Thumbing our nose at the metanarrative, you know. The stupid tax we pay on how loathsomely important our privilege asks us to take ourselves.”

Misty explored the offensive possibilities of literal nose thumbing. “What's the metanarrative?”

“Oh, this thing Gaby and I were throwing around. The narrative logic that sits behind a story, I guess. Whatever distinguishes narrative from, like, litany. Or accident.”

Misty ashed out the window. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“You are too young, my dear. I shall tell you when you're older.”

She looked at a make-believe watch on her wrist for a few seconds. “There,” she said. “I'm older.”

When I had asked Misty whether she was all right, the two of us drinking on my first night up, she said she was, why did I ask? I don't know, I said, the grad-school thing. First of all, it was summer, she explained, and her apparent listlessness was an insufficient ground to assume she'd dropped out of school; but yes, as a matter of fact, in the second place, she
had
left urban planning behind because, well, it was your typical M.A. utopianism, without the faintest hope of meaningful praxis, preparing you for little more than the enviable future of fighting starved pit bulls for jobs in municipal administrations that amounted to years of testing a brick wall's material durability with your head. I told Misty I'd never known her to let practical considerations get in the way of a rash decision. She sighed. “I guess I'm looking for love,” she said. And I was about to say, Sure, but do you think it's just going to walk in the door one day? But what did I know. In my own way I was waiting for love too—not an object of love, not an instance of it, but perhaps love itself.

It was bright and sunny the next morning when Misty and I took the whaler out to the islands to hunt for chanterelles. On the way we passed skerries of sunbathing seals, as dun and tubular as slugs. They turned their heads to regard us. Misty sat up front and by the time we arrived the cigarette in her lips was wetted to extinguishment in the spray. I told her to throw the anchor in, and we watched as it sank into the emerald murk. The rope uncoiled, chasing after it, then slipped discreetly over the gunwale and disappeared itself.

“Whoops,” Misty said. “
Shiiiiiit
.”

We regarded the traceless surface of the ocean for a minute, then we sat there and laughed. We laughed for a good long time. Finally we dragged the boat up onto the beach, tied the painter off on a large rock, and did our foraging.

Later, when I told Ruth what had happened, she said, “So we lost an anchor. Forget it.”

“I think we can find it,” I said. “Wait till it's low tide, you know.”

“Okay. But why?”

She was right, of course, in the sense of prudence or necessity, but I felt a poignancy about the anchor, a desire not to let things slip away. I can't explain it. I couldn't quite bear to think of our trusty nine-pound Danforth lying there for centuries, millennia—
forever
perhaps—wondering when we were coming back for it.

I thought Cynthia might understand, but when I told her she just said, “You're an idiot.”

And yes, she wasn't wrong, but where would we be without idiots? When would we laugh?

By evening, when the bats emerged, Misty had organized a betting pool in the house. You could bet on our finding the anchor or our not finding it. Everyone wanted in on the action. “Your grandfather's doing a little better tonight,” the nurses would tell me before slipping five-, ten-dollar bills in my hand. “Against,” they said.

Percy, the longtime gardener and groundskeeper, said, “There's no way to orient yourself. You're not going to know where to look. Shore's night and day at different tides.”

“Care to make it interesting?” Misty said.

“That's all right,” he said. “It'll be plenty interesting when I have to fish you out.”

In a subtle way the house, which had been merely busy, came alive at the prospect of this unnecessary act. We had something to talk about, to grin about, something to anticipate that in its silliness, the pointlessness of its derring-do, resisted the seriousness of death. I told my grandfather about the endeavor and he nodded a little, like what I was saying made sense, but then, as comprehension set in, he raised his eyebrows and shook his head, echoing Cynthia's verdict in his way.

“Why?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said. Why anything?

The issue with the bats was that we had no idea where they were getting in. That and they upset the nurses. You could track their progress through the house by listening to the nurses' screams, then judging the direction and the muting interference of the walls. They seemed to know when we ate dinner too, for it was most often then that Misty and I had to excuse ourselves, dabbing mouths with napkins, and cross into the old wing, where a nurse would stand pointing dumbly to the site of our present visitation. They must have been coming in during the day, hiding themselves in curtains and crown moldings until it was dark and the time had come for them to cast about the house like inebriate demons.

The bats were one more act in the circus our lives had become that summer. A fey carnival cast in shadow. The particularity of moments, the deceits of memory. A Chris Marker mash-up.
Cirque Sans Soleil
. There would be emus in the zone. I am sure it was only me who felt this. I had a way of digressing into minutiae, fixating on the feel of confluent ephemera while the world moved on. Ruth correcting the newspaper in red pen; Cynthia video-Skyping with her dogs in L.A., neurosis-ridden rescues who suffered crippling and dysphoric separation anxiety (or so she claimed); Misty's habit of hiding framed pictures, marshmallow men, and beetle carapaces in my bed. I relished missing the forest for the trees; it was a significant part of why I had become a writer, all the stillbirths of pregnant moments. And yet in the weightless disconnection I felt that summer from all we have been taught will sustain us, I saw this tendency of mine achieve a kind of apogee, this inability or refusal to distinguish between
studium
and
punctum
, until all I saw everywhere were the dissipating freeze-frames of life, instants of salient and perverse meaning, of felicity, contradiction, the inexhaustible poetry of juxtaposition, the eclecticism that with acts of curation becomes sensibility. Sitting on the stone wall below the crab apple trees, the pale decaying fruit scattered at my feet, in the right light, the sun still crisp but low enough to sieve through the west-lying trees, I could convince myself, for instance, that I was not a person, or rather not the specific person I enacted within a web of expectations and memories, that Cynthia was not an “artist” or Misty a soul adrift, that the present did not situate itself inside a time or date, that these were instead phantoms imposing themselves on the ceaseless flux, the
ever-becoming
, and that my grandfather was not dying but simply living another, different day, was not
my
grandfather, was not who I believed him to be, certainly, but was also an elusive quantity to himself—that, in short, all the words we had for everything added up to a catalogued death sentence of the discrete, turning the raw matter of experience transactionable at the cost of making experience itself inaccessible.