The Book of Joe (5 page)

“How's he doing?” I say, indicating the room.

Brad frowns. “No change.”

“What do his doctors say?”

The frown deepens. “Not much. They should be along soon, though, and you can ask them yourself.”

I nod and look again at the door to the ICU. “Why don't you go in and see him,” Brad says, glancing over at Cindy and the twins. “I'll join you in a few minutes.”

         

It takes a few seconds to locate my father through the morass of tubes and wires that have colonized his supine form, entering and exiting his limp body at every juncture. He is intubated through his nose and mouth, has an IV line descending into his arm, a catheter hose poking out from under the blankets near his hips, and various wires attached to electrodes on his chest that feed unchanging data to the beeping heart monitor to the left of his bed. He lies there, dehumanized, like something out of Isaac Asimov, all of his deeply personal living processes now co-opted by the machinery, which breathes, farts, shits, and swallows for him, the tube in his mouth robbing him of even the illusion of expression.

I look above the tubing at his hair, which has changed from the jet black I remember to a charcoal flecked with silver highlights. There are small dark patches of stubble on his chin, forming like poppy seeds in odd patterns that remind me of Homer Simpson. My father lies in critical condition while his estranged son thinks of cartoon characters. His eyebrows have grown bushier, but I'm still able to locate the scar above his left eye, the badge of honor from the elbow he took in the '58 state championship game. He tells the story often, to anyone who will listen, about how they came back in the fourth quarter from sixteen down. With less than ten seconds to go, he went up for the tying layup, got elbowed in the face, and still managed to finish the play. They won on his foul shot, which he sank with blood dripping down into his left eye from the gash on his forehead, all but obscuring his vision. The story, and a grainy picture of his bloody visage, appeared in
The Minuteman,
a framed yellowed copy of which hung conspicuously in the den of our house.

There is no sound in the room save for the beeping of monitors and the steady, mechanical hiss of the respirator. I sit in the chair beside his bed, not sure what to do with myself. Small talk is clearly out of the question. If he were conscious, that would no doubt be my defensive weapon of choice, but the coma puts me at a distinct disadvantage. I consider talking to him anyway, the way they always do it on television, in a low, trembling voice fraught with emotion, exhorting the patient to just hold on. Because he will hear me. Somewhere in the haze of his coma, my voice will circulate through his benumbed mind, images of me will flash in rock video fashion behind his eyes, and some as-yet untried combination will open the lock on his brain and his fingers will twitch in mine as his eyes tentatively blink open, and his first word, uttered in a hoarse, dry whisper, will be my name. But I know I don't have it in me. His hand lies by his side on the bed, and I reach out furtively and wrap my own around it. It's much larger than mine, hard and callused on the edges, but surprisingly soft in the center, like a slice of toast pulled out of the toaster just as it begins to burn. I can't remember ever having felt my father's hand before. I squeeze it lightly. It doesn't squeeze back. I hear the door behind me and quickly retract my hand, like a shoplifter.

“Hey,” Brad says, coming up behind me.

“Hey.”

“How have you been?”

“Pretty good. And you?”

He sighs. “Been better.”

“I guess so,” I say. We both turn and looked at our father's unconscious form. Brad walks past me and gently straightens the blankets on the bed. He does it slowly, with a good deal of tenderness. As I watch him, it occurs to me that Brad is devastated. In my ambivalence over my own feelings toward my father, I've forgotten that he is someone else's father, and grandfather, and that he is loved. I turn away as Brad finishes straightening the covers, feeling ashamed and more than ever like an interloper.

Brad steps back from the bed and grins at me uneasily. “So . . .” he says.

“What's the prognosis?” I say.

“Pretty lousy. They don't know that he'll regain consciousness, and even if he does, there's no way to know what shape his brain will be in.”

“How long do they think he can just hang on like this?”

“They don't know.”

“They don't know much, do they?” I say.

I look at my father again. He seems drastically reduced, his frame smaller and his color duller than I remember. We've seen each other very infrequently over the years, and I haven't thought to age my mental picture of him. There is no way, in his current state, to assess the natural toll the last seventeen years have taken on him, to see how he's aged up until the stroke. It occurs to me that even though I am finally in the same room with him, I will probably never really see my father again.

Brad sits down on the windowsill, and I take the chair beside the bed, the vinyl cushion emitting a whistling sigh as my weight descends into it.
What happens now?
I wonder.

“How long do you plan on staying?” Brad asks after a bit.

Staying?
“I don't know.”

He nods, as if this is what he expected, and then clears his throat. “I'm glad you came. I wasn't sure you would.”

“I had to come,” I say vaguely.

He looks at me. “I guess so.”

We sit quietly as the conversation limps off to wherever it is that conversations go to die.

“Where's Jared?” I say.

Brad frowns and looks away. “I told him to stop here on his way to school, but he's not what you would call reliable these days.” Jared is Brad's son, my nephew, who by my calculations should be sixteen or seventeen by now. I figure this because he was fourteen when he ran away from home, took the Metro-North into Manhattan, and showed up at my apartment at ten-thirty that night, hungry, out of cash, and simmering with righteous anger at the unspecified offenses that had led to this defiance. We ordered in some sandwiches and I made him call his father. Then we watched Letterman, and the next morning I put him on a train back to Connecticut, and that was pretty much that. Brad left me a message the following night thanking me, but I was out, and although I distinctly recall wanting to call him back, I never got around to it.

“What's he, seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” my brother says. “He's a senior.” So much for my math.

“Is he captain of the Cougars?”

Brad looks away. “Jared doesn't play ball.” Those four words, layered with the grist of untold tension and regret, indicate that my lame efforts at innocuous chitchat have nonetheless managed to zero in on what is clearly a sore topic, and I resolve from here on in to let Brad steer the conversation. Brad, though, seems perfectly content to sit back and crack his knuckles as he watches the drip of fluids in and out of the beeping and hissing mess that was once our father.

“I read your book,” he finally says, effectively ratcheting up the tension a few notches.

“Really,” I say. “Did you enjoy it?”

He frowns, considering the question. “Parts,” he says.

I shrug noncommittally. “Well, that's something, I guess.”

He looks at me thoughtfully, as if debating whether or not to say something. Finally he sighs and looks away. “Yeah,” he says. “Your book made quite a little splash around here.”

I wait silently for him to elaborate, but he appears to have said all he plans to say on the subject. Between us, my father suddenly shivers, his entire body vibrating in a wave from his chest to his toes. I jump up, startled, but Brad puts his hand out, beckoning me to relax. “It's okay,” he says, leaning forward to fix the corner of the blanket. “He does that.”

seven

1986

In Bush Falls, the vast emptiness of suburban night led to all manner of delinquency and sexual advancement. We were bursting with the preternatural angst and boredom that coursed through our throbbing teenaged veins, keeping our blood at a constant simmer. There were only so many nights you could hang out at the mall, so many new releases to see at the Megaplex, so many cheeseburgers and tuna melts you could scarf down at the Duchess. Beyond that, all we had left was drinking, fucking, and random acts of senseless vandalism.

Sammy, Wayne, and I developed the habit of occasionally sneaking over the chain-link fence of P.J. Porter's vast corporate campus at night and hot-wiring the electric golf carts left charging overnight near the loading bay doors. The carts were used by executives to traverse the acres of perfectly manicured grass between the main building and the distribution center on the far side of the campus. Working there as an intern, Wayne had learned that in lieu of a key, all you needed to do was lift the driver's seat, under which the battery was cased, and use a paper clip to close the crude circuit and start the cart. There was something pleasantly surreal about piloting those silent carts across the grassy back acres of the Porter's campus in the dark of night. We would race each other all over the campus, first driving forward and then in reverse, or attempt half-baked movie stunts like jumping from one moving cart to the other. Afterward, we would hang out on the manicured bank of one of the artificial ponds that glistened in the shadow of the office complex, lazily skipping stones at the spotlit automated geyser that shot fifty feet into the sky from the pond's center, while we chugged discounted beer purchased over in New Haven with Wayne's fake ID.

We were sitting on the lawn by the pond one hot, muggy night, buzzed on beer, staring at the kaleidoscopic spray of the geyser, when Wayne suddenly got clumsily to his feet. “I'm too damn hot,” he said. “I feel like I'm on fire.”

“Just like the Boss,” Sammy said, singing lazily in his high-pitched voice.
“At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head, only you can cool my desire. Whoa, oh, oh, I'm on fire.”

“He's singing Springsteen again,” Wayne complained.

“I thought we discussed this, Sammy,” I said.

“You sound like the Bee Gees covering Springsteen,” Wayne said.

“You guys know you love it,” Sammy said good-naturedly.

“You manage to come up with a Springsteen quote for every possible occasion,” I said.

“I can't help that. It's a function of his genius.”

“Whatever, man,” Wayne said, climbing drunkenly to his feet. “I'm still boiling.” He pulled off his T-shirt, upon which was emblazoned the phrase
BIG IN JAPAN
in large black letters, and threw it to the floor. “I'm going for a swim.”

“We can go back to my pool,” Sammy said.

“Why bother?” Wayne kicked off his high-tops and waded into the pond and then, with no hesitation, plunged headfirst into the dark, shimmering water and swam out with long, powerful strokes toward the geyser.

“Drunken night-swimming,” I said. “Now there's a brilliant combination.”

“And god only knows what the hell's in that water,” Sammy said disapprovingly. “Microorganisms, parasites.”

“Radioactive nuclear waste.”

“The Loch Ness monster.”

“The Porter family's personal sewage.”

“Come on, you guys,” Wayne called to us from the pond. “It's beautiful in here.”

“Isn't this how the
Jaws
movies always start?” Sammy said.

“Sharks don't live in ponds,” I pointed out.

“That's exactly what the chick in the bikini says before she gets eaten.”

Out in the water, Wayne had reached the geyser and was now clinging to some unseen piece of its apparatus, his form lightly obscured by the thick residual mist of the water's spray. I closed my eyes for a second, feeling bloated and dizzy from the cheap domestic beer we'd been guzzling. When I opened them, Wayne was gone. “Where'd he go?” I said.

“I don't know,” Sammy said, craning his neck to see.

We shouted his name as we got to our feet, scanning the dark water for where his head would surely break the surface at any second. “Where the fuck is he?” I said, alarm like an icy balloon inflating in my belly. I looked over to Sammy, who was already pulling off his sneakers, and quickly did the same. We charged madly into the cold water, calling out for him between frantic strokes as we swam desperately out toward the geyser, which was much louder up close than I would have thought. I reached the center first and quickly performed an awkward surface dive, my outstretched fingers scraping bottom and coming away caked in grimy pond scum. I resurfaced, panting, and was about to try again when there was a loud whoop and Wayne suddenly came flying through the glowing geyser's spray above us, his knees pulled up to his chest, flecks of luminous water trailing behind him like a comet's tail. He flew through the air in slow motion, framed in the backlit water like some mythical god rising from the depths, before landing in a perfect cannonball between Sammy and me. He surfaced a moment later, pulling his wet hair out of his face and laughing at us.

“Asshole!” Sammy shouted, splashing at him with disgust.

“What the fuck's wrong with you?” I said, choking on a sour mixture of relief and pond scum.

“It was the only way to get you guys in the water,” Wayne said, still grinning.

A furious splashing fight ensued as we tried unsuccessfully to dunk him, his long, sinewy arms easily fighting us off. Afterward, he showed us the small maintenance platform on the side of the geyser that had facilitated his ambush, and we took turns jumping and diving through the geyser spray into the pond.

I was the first to eventually climb out of the pond, my stomach churning spasmodically from the injudicious combination of beer and pond water I'd imbibed. I leaned against a large sycamore for a few minutes, taking shallow breaths until my innards succumbed and I vomited violently, the hot acid of my puke burning my throat, filling my eyes with tears. I pulled on my T-shirt and lay down on the grass, feeling unsteady and light-headed. When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, Sammy and Wayne were still in the pond, their voices echoing eerily across the water, muted by the soft rumbling of the geyser. I propped myself up on my elbows and could just make out their shadowy forms in the darkness, bobbing up and down in the thick mist that floated around them. Their outlines blurred as my drunken, weary eyelids began to close, and their profiles waxed and waned like a throbbing pulse as the world around me began to spin at a dizzying speed. Just before I passed out, their fuzzy silhouettes appeared to touch in a tentative embrace, but I'd barely noted the illusion when unconsciousness dispensed with the foreplay and hungrily consummated our union.