So Much for That (20 page)

“Anyway, a long time ago Shep named all the obvious supposed benefits of this, like,
industrial agriculture
, and one of the first ones he came up with was the police. They protect us from the scumbags, they keep us safe. Uh-huh. Sure, that traffic cop was preying on me to meet his ticket quota. But did my parking ticket make anyone
safe
? And just try to get any joy from our boys in blue if you tell them you were stuck up on the
street or your house was burgled. They laugh in your face. That’s just paperwork to them. They never catch those guys and they don’t even try. They’re way too busy going after drug dealers—who in a truly ‘free society’ would be your regular businessmen, retailing a product that didn’t hurt anybody but your fully informed consumer. Selling heroin to junkies is no different from selling booze to drunks or butter to fatties or cigarettes to anybody. But no, we pay these guardians of pinky-raised propriety to enforce some moralistic, totally hypocritical 1950s bullshit, which takes up all their time, and meanwhile makes billions,
billions
for the criminals they’re pretending to fight. It’s symbolic…I mean, what’s it called,
symbiotic
,” he corrected himself, briefly flustered. “The cops and the drug barons are actually on the same side; they need each other. They both earn their dough from the same racket.

“I mean, think about it—what’s your first reaction when you see a cop drive by? ‘Gosh, I feel so well protected’? No! Anybody in their right mind is panicking, ‘Am I doing anything wrong?’ Or more like it, since chances are you’re way too freaked out to be enjoying a moment of soul-searching, ‘Could I be
perceived
to be doing anything wrong?’ The police are just one more predatory species, another dangerous animal in the environment, and the fact that you are personally paying for their damn donuts and refueling their damn cars the better to stalk you and filch your wallet just adds insult to injury.”

Jackson peered over at the pillow, and sure enough his lullaby had soothed her soundly to sleep. He pulled the covers to her chin. The red fleece was becoming, but he was no longer envious of Carol’s flair for presents. He knew what Glynis wanted, and what to give her for many visits to come:
fury.

B
ack home after another visit to Glynis, now discharged but still abed in Elmsford, Jackson strode into his house on a roll. Some people might dread encounters with the gravely ill, but for his own part he’d begun to enjoy them. Now up to speed on what Glynis considered a proper convalescent present—perfectly distilled rage, which he pictured like crude oil: thick, viscous, and tarry, a substance that would stick to your fingers and stain your clothes and leave ineradicable prints on doorknobs—he stored up consternations from earlier in the day. Thus on arrival in Elmsford after work he had prepared a crescendo of acrimony that built like a stand-up comic’s routine, save for the fact that as far as he was concerned none of this stuff was funny. Did Glynis realize that if you
win
a car on a game show, you have to pony up a percentage of its sticker price to the feds
in cash
? Did she know that so many Americans are now getting caught by the Alternative Minimum Tax that a flagrantly unscrupulous regime that levies, for example, taxes on
taxes
, is now
becoming
the tax code?

“In 1969, AMT applied to only two hundred families in the entire country!” he’d railed, pacing her bedroom. “Since they’ve barely moved the bracket to account for inflation, it now applies to nearly half the population. So it’s like we have this really fair, decent, pro
gressive system, although it happens to be a decoy—like one of those wooden ducks you put on the mantel. Looks nice, but you can’t eat it. The
real
tax system is a scandal, but we don’t take responsibility for that, since it’s
alternative
. Ditto this bullshit ‘mansion tax’ in New York State. They haven’t moved that bracket, either. So you’ve got all these one-family dumps all over Brooklyn, with weedy backyards the size of bath mats, thin cat-pee carpets, and mildewed basements. But because of this lunatic property boom, they’re selling for a million bucks. At which point, abracadabra! It’s a
mansion
, and the State takes three percent. This whole property thing, I swear the government itself could be behind it. You can’t say it’s in the larger social interest for your basic place to live to turn into a luxury way beyond the means of ordinary people—like glasses of water going for a hundred bucks apiece. But it
is
in the interests of the State. They’re making a mint! It’s so bad in New Jersey that you’ve got these old couples, own their home free and clear, been there for fifty years? They’re having to move out. Can’t afford the property taxes. Same poky three-bedroom they’ve always had, where they raised their kids, and suddenly these pensioners are supposed to fork over twenty-five K a year for the privilege of living in their own fucking house!”

Having gained an increment of strength, Glynis had sometimes coughed up her own sputum of spontaneous revulsion from the sidelines. He’d left the bedroom on a queer sort of high, apparently the kind of buzz you might get from chewing khat, the bitter leaves that Shep had explained underemployed slackers in East Africa ground between their molars all day long. Khat was a mild amphetamine, and Shep had tried it once. He said it left you edgy, jittery, annoyed for no especial reason, and primed for something that probably wasn’t going to happen. He said it reminded him of Jackson.

Pausing at the entrance to the kitchen, Jackson assessed that Flicka was only medium miserable—meaning, as ever, that she couldn’t walk properly or talk properly or breathe properly or even cry, aka business as usual—so he was not, for once, entering into the midst of a calamity, only into the slow-motion disaster of what they had learned to re
gard as normal life. Flicka’s glower sufficed for hello. Other members of the FD support group described their disabled kids as all sweetness and light—as taking suffering in stride and lighting up whole households with gratitude for survival into each glorious new day—and he’d always suspected the parents were lying. Yet even if this gratingly chirpy, accepting type wasn’t a myth, Jackson was relieved to have been awarded a sullen, aggrieved, precociously misanthropic kid instead.

Flicka was crooked at the kitchen table over her homework, a trickle of drool drizzling disdainfully onto the page. She could have wiped it away before it hit her algebra equations, but she let the saliva blot the numbers on purpose. “I wanna know why I have to learn factoring when I’m never gonna live long enough to use this junk,” she grumbled.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said Jackson, “your classmates who live to ninety-five won’t ever use factoring either.”

“Seems to me if I could drop dead at any time I should be able to do whatever I want. This is hardly making the best of a lifespan the length of a dog’s.”

“If we let you live like a dog—and not get an education—you wouldn’t even know what you wanted to do.”

“I’d rather watch
Friends
.”

“You’re a smart cookie. You’d get tired of
Friends
.”

“It’s all a farce,” Flicka insisted. “And it’s not for me, it’s for you and Mom. I’m supposed to go through the motions of being a regular kid who goes to school. So you guys can pretend you have a regular family. So you can pretend I’m gonna graduate and go to college and get married and have kids, too. As if I’d want the little brats, which I don’t. It’s all a lie, and I’m sick of it. I’m warning you, too. I may stop playing along.”

The trouble was that Jackson agreed with her. Maybe it would have been easier had they preserved Flicka’s “innocence”—translation: ignorance—but you couldn’t keep anything secret from kids these days, what with the Internet. He and Carol had signed up with their first dial-up service provider back in 1996, and the decision had been fatal. Flicka had readily figured out the drill, and her very first input into one
of those early search engines—Northern Light or AltaVista—was the name of her disease. She’d stormed downstairs (which is to say, bounced down from wall to banister) and promptly vomited in a projectile spew of vengeful indignation. Their daughter hadn’t been offended so much by the prognosis itself as by the fact that her parents had kept it to themselves. She’d been eight years old.

So tonight he resisted the prescribed theater. He was supposed to chime in that
new therapies for managing symptoms are being developed all the time
and that she had
no idea
how long she might live. He was supposed to remind her that most FD kids would have been dead by Flicka’s age in the past—when she was born, her life expectancy was only about five years—
but many now lived to as old as thirty
. He’d heard this last figure touted out earnestly in meeting upon meeting of the support group, but Flicka knew full well that if you parsed this company line you figured out that just about all of them died
before
thirty. Flicka didn’t want a cheerleader for a parent, and he didn’t want to be one.

“Think of it this way,” he said lightly. “If your days are numbered, you might as well be able to count them.”

“Ha-ha. By the way, Mom left you some chorizo and chickpea mush on the stove.”

“Is it any good?” he asked distractedly, poking a fork in the pan.

She snorted. “How would I know?”

Jackson scraped some of the red stew into a bowl and slipped it into the microwave. “Anyway, Flick, we have to send you to school. It’s the law.”

“I can’t believe my dad is dragging out
the law
. ‘Arbitrary tyranny,’ I quote. Anyway, we could do homeschooling.”

“Your mother has to work to cover your health insurance. She wouldn’t have the time—”

“She wouldn’t have to do squat. I could hang out and read—on the few days I can see anything and I’m not spending every minute wearing the Vest, grinding up meds, practicing my swallowing so I can eat food I don’t want, doing those boring physical therapy exercises, and squitzering Artificial Tears.”

“
Squitzering
? And you think you don’t need an education.”

“I don’t. There’s no point training me to be a
productive member of society
when I’ll barely make it to being a grown-up. My having to go to school at all just exposes the whole thing as a big baby-sitting service. I don’t need to learn about the causes of the Civil War, and you know it. What’s gonna happen to all those facts? They’ll be cremated. They’ll literally go up in smoke.”

Having successfully taught Flicka the proper meaning of
literally
gave Jackson a profound sense of achievement. Curious how most of the time he was able to keep her indeterminately terminal status at bay as an abstraction, or as material for easy father-daughter banter—as theoretical as his own death. For that matter, his personal mortality had become a comfort. It kept them both in the same boat. “Don’t you like being able to meet other kids and make friends?”

“Not really. I’m more like their mascot. Being nice to me makes them feel better about themselves. They can show off to their parents by dragging home this stunted, scrawny kid who walks like she’s about to fall off a brick wall, and look all
tolerant
. Then when I drool all over the couch the parents think twice. They’ve done their bit. I don’t get invited back.”

The bell rang on the microwave, and he sat across from her with his dinner. He’d over-zapped it, and the chorizo on the edges had gone hard. “All your teachers and classmates seem to be in awe of you.”

“The only reason everyone thinks I’m so smart is they assume when I first open my mouth that I’m an idiot. I sound like an idiot. If my voice wasn’t all strangled and I was taller and had breasts—not that I give a shit about breasts, Dad.
Please
don’t go out and buy a stuffed training bra or something, ’cause I’m never gonna have a boyfriend even if I liked some creep. Which I don’t. The point is, everyone thinks it’s amazing I can string a sentence together. And I cash in on Stephen Hawking. I can’t tell you, Dad, how many times I’ve been told I sound just like him. As if that’s a compliment! He sounds like a dork.”

“You could do worse,” said Jackson, blowing on his fork and mentally apologizing for having drawn the parallel himself. Of course, this
line about not being exceptionally smart was a load of hooey. She was showing off how really, really smart she had to be in order to realize that in the grand scheme of things she wasn’t really so smart.

“I get better grades than I deserve. My papers suck. I can’t type. But none of my teachers have the nerve to fail me. They think they’ll be arrested. It’ll seem like
discrimination
.”

Since her papers tended, if in cryptic and sometimes unsettlingly parodic form, to reiterate her father’s ebullient anarchism, Jackson took offense. “Your papers may be short, but they’re more original than most of your classmates’ work, I guarantee.”

“Maybe,” she admitted. “Not that any of those retards know the difference. They’d ooh and ah if I turned in copy from a box of cornflakes. The whole faculty at Henry Howe is scared of me. They’ve all been warned I can’t be ‘upset.’ You know, like Mom. Her calm, quiet, happy thing when really she wants to belt me. If they’ve ever seen me have a crisis, they’re
really
terrified. Like that
Twilight Zone
episode, when the creepy little boy turns anyone who talks back into a jack-in-the-box, or sends them to the cornfield. So nobody will tell me to shut up or give me a hard time for not doing the reading. If I don’t do this homework, nobody will say a fucking thing.” Flicka scrunched her worksheet into a feeble ball and tossed it toward the bin.

She missed.

“So much for your career in basketball,” said Jackson, retrieving the wad from the floor. He considered smoothing it back out and returning it to the table, but what was the use? He tossed it in the trash. Because she was right, on every score; she was already brilliant at factoring the variables of her life that mattered. He was supposed to be stern, to insist that like every other kid she had to master the basics. He was supposed to admonish her not to use bad language, too, but he hated parental priggishness, and she was only using the same language he did. On the other hand, letting her get away with not doing her math and saying “fucking” to her father’s face was part and parcel of letting her get away with pretty much everything else. He loved her, but she was obnoxious.
He loved her for the very fact that she was obnoxious, which only encouraged her to be more obnoxious.

Nevertheless, Jackson did believe in education, because he hadn’t believed in it when he was getting one. He’d had contempt for his teachers in high school, sure that he knew more than they did, and only years later did he speculate that they might have been able to pass on a thing or two when he was still young enough for the knowledge to stick. In adulthood, he’d tried to make up for that misguided sense of superiority by cramming whatever information he could get his hands on, but it tortured him that he lacked a framework; he couldn’t sort this grab bag into neatly labeled cubbyholes but could only throw stray facts willy-nilly into a mental cardboard box. Much of what he gleaned online seemed tainted with dubiety, for the Net was like the Bible: you could find ironclad support for any old position if you snuffled around in it long enough. Forgoing college had seemed savvy at the time, when Knack of All Trades was inundated with more jobs than it could handle, and, hey,
Shep
didn’t need a degree, right? A university education was probably full of shit anyway. Still, that was only an intuition, and if he’d got one, then he’d have
known
it was full of shit.

What may have bugged him the most was words. In his early thirties, Jackson had made a systematic effort to improve his vocabulary, earning himself no small amount of ridicule at Knack, where he was razzed for referring to the “happy homeowner” as an
oxymoron
: “
Oxy
my ass, professor; our customers are morons, pure and simple.” (With the new wave of handymen, this was ridicule that he now rather missed. Practicing
imprimatur
on a wetback from Honduras would have been perverse.) But none of the words he’d learned as a grown man had ever taken the way they had when he was a kid. Their meanings stayed beside them, and he’d have to recite a little definition to himself of
hegemony
(and was that a hard or soft
g
?) before employing the term with any confidence, by which time often as not the opportunity had passed. Whereas
cow
was so perfectly synonymous with a big dumb farm animal that the word itself didn’t really exist. If he’d
known what was good for him, he’d have memorized the dictionary when he was ten.