Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (13 page)

A
fter the initial radiation and chemotherapy treatments, the offending lung was removed from my father's body during an eight-hour procedure at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

We sat in a lounge for families of surgery patients. Nauseating green carpet, the eggshell walls one always finds in hospitals. My mother and oldest sister played cribbage and flipped through back issues of
Ladies' Home Journal
. I reread
Cat's Cradle,
Vonnegut having long been a sort of literary comfort food for me. In between pages I thought about my father's lung, and how as I sat there people were carving it out and placing it in a bag and sending it to the basement to be incinerated. This was back when I still had a reverential sense about our bodies, and I couldn't shake the conviction that something as critical as a lung deserved a better send-off. That lung had gone to seminary with him, had breathed the sodden air of Vietnam for two tours, had kept him supplied with oxygen at every one of his children's births. Sure, now it was trying to kill him, but like any faithful companion that suddenly goes rogue, it deserved some regard before being dispatched. It was owed some note for its fifty-five years of service. It had earned a little ceremony. What it got, instead, was dropped into a biohazard bag like so much offal.

Night had fallen by the time my father was moved from surgery to the intensive care ward on the eighteenth floor. We made the slow trip up in the elevator, visited him in shifts. I stroked his head, much as I would in the moments after his death. Above the oxygen mask that covered his mouth and nose, his eyes blazed at the world. He looked surprised, more than anything. He kept blinking rapidly, as if trying to figure something out. I wondered in a distant way if he was simply reeling from the trauma thrumming through his body, or if he was trying to reconcile somehow the fact of his continuing existence.

For lack of anything better I asked, How are you feeling? The recovery-room version of small talk.

He bounced the question back at me. How am I
feeling
? he said, incredulous even through the lingering fog of anesthesia. And then, once more: How am I
feeling
?

D
id you know that Ray Kurzweil, the man who borrowed the word ‘singularity' from physics to coin the phrase Technological Singularity, appeared on the Steve Allen game show
I've Got a Secret
when he was only seventeen?

Actually, it's the author Vernor Vinge who is credited with first using ‘singularity' in reference to artificial superintelligence. But Kurzweil has become the celebrity face of the theory, the one who gets interviewed in mainstream media like
Time
, while Vinge has remained, for the most part, a peripheral figure.

In any event, the point is that Kurzweil's slot on
I've Got a Secret
, like Watson's triumph on
Jeopardy
and Deep Blue's dismantling of Kasparov, was a seminal moment in the march toward artificial intelligence. Because the reason Kurzweil appeared on
I've Got a Secret
in the first place was because he'd invented a computer that wrote music for the piano. A machine that created art, in other words.

But people missed the point altogether. No one on the show found it all that noteworthy, let alone arresting, that a nonorganic entity had composed a melody. They were more impressed with Kurzweil having invented anything at all at such a young age. They got it completely backwards. A bright young man building a computer in 1965, while impressive, was nothing compared to what the computer itself could accomplish.

But in fairness, I doubt that at the time even Kurzweil understood the significance of what he'd done. He was just a boy, after all.

A
few months after his diagnosis my father went to Boston for radiation and chemotherapy treatments, the idea being to shrink the tumor in his lung and then remove the lung itself in the hope that this would leave him cancer-free. It was beyond a long shot; all the other doctors he'd seen had told him he was finished, and no surgeon would touch him for fear of pointlessly swelling their mortality stats. But the team in Boston was working at the outer edge of treatment, where medicine and cruelty meet and mingle, and they were the only people offering even a whiff of hope. So Boston it was, where for two months my parents stayed at a Hampton Inn while smart, kind people poisoned and irradiated my father.

I spent some time there with them. I went to appointments and treatment sessions because I wanted to hear firsthand what the doctors were saying, and not receive this information through the sieve of desperate hope my mother had become, filtering out all information that pointed to anything but a positive conclusion. We had a lot of downtime between hospital visits, which we filled with shopping and eating and trips to the aquarium and the natural history museum and most of all Fenway Park, where we took in more games in that brief period than we'd seen together in the thirty years previous.

After one of these games I was standing outside Fenway with my mother, waiting for my father, who'd peeled off to buy a sausage toward the end of the ninth. We waited outside gate C while a couple of street kids who'd committed the great offense of sitting on the sidewalk against the park wall were being rousted by half a dozen police officers.

Boston cops being the Mick thugs that they've always been, even if they happen to be black, or Portuguese, or whatever.

I watched the cops surround and holler at the street kids, who to their credit kept their heads down, eyes trained on the pavement, faces locked in expressions of calm disdain, not pretending that the cops weren't there, merely letting the cops know they didn't
care
that they were there.

And into this, from the far side of the confrontation, strolled my father, his own head down, munching on the second half of a messy sausage, dropping bits of sautéed onion and dribs of mustard on the sidewalk as he went. Oblivious, he stepped between the Boston PD and the street kids, and made it three-quarters of the way through a gauntlet he wasn't aware existed before one of the cops, a hulking white dude with a baby face that was nothing short of shocking attached to such a huge body, seized him by the arm.

I stiffened and stepped forward, my hand cocked in a fist at my side.

What the hell's the matter with you? the cop screamed at my father. Can't you see there's something going on, here?

There were so many things wrong with this one moment that my mind seized up at the sheer incongruity of it—which was fortunate, because otherwise I probably would have hit the guy. Here was a man easily five years younger than me, little more than a child himself, no matter how big, who had my father by the upper arm and was scolding him—not instructing, not issuing directives, but
scolding
. Add to this the fact that the cop was obviously a bully, maybe even a sadist, his reaction to my father's modest and unintentional violation of his work space hideously overblown.

But the worst thing, the unforgivable thing, was my father's own reaction.

Because in his illness, in his sudden debility, weakened by poisons meant to cure him, he stood playing the part of the chastised schoolboy: head down, shoulders sloped, arms extended pleadingly, one hand still holding the soggy remnants of the sausage.

And he was
apologizing
to this cocksucker. Even now, I can't believe it. Apologizing over and over, not meeting the cop's gaze. I'm sorry, he said. I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know. I'm sorry.

In my momentary paralysis, looking at my father, I could think only of Mercutio, hissing through clenched teeth, on seeing Romeo plead with Tybalt: O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!

But then I snapped out of it and stepped forward and yelled at the cop, a move both reflexive, the product of rage, and calculated, a gambit to transfer the cop's attention off of my father and onto myself. Which worked.

It was the first time I'd ever had to protect him from anything. Turns out, though, that all it takes is once. Nothing is the same after that.

R
ay Kurzweil's dearest hope, incidentally, is that on a bright and cheerful morning shortly after the Singularity, while overhead, obscured by a cobalt summer sky, the heavens spin invisibly, he will collect DNA from his father's grave and use it to resurrect the man he'd called Aba.

His father's real name? Fredric. My father's name? Frederick.

O
ne of the things Emma wanted to start putting in order, with me gone to the island, aside from finalizing her divorce and finding traction at work, was figuring out a way to have some semblance of a relationship with her mother, who was now mostly housebound. But despite the long episode of silent treatment Emma had subjected her to, and despite the penitent Christmas card, despite years of apologies and promises to be better, to be a mother, to stop being the only person on Earth who could really break Emma down, the woman, nothing if not consistent, tried to kill her again.

It started when Emma, against her better judgment, drove north two hours to pick her up and take her to lunch. Things began well enough—talk of Emma's work, discussion of her mother's myriad medications, including one that she blamed for an assault at an AA meeting that had earned her a weekend in jail.

And this was the thing with her mother. It was never her fault.
She
didn't knock the lady into the coffee urns at the AA meeting—the medication made her do it.

But so anon the nice stuff came to a close, and her mother began asking questions about what had happened to Emma's marriage, and implying that it was all Emma's fault, going so far in fact as to suggest that the reason Matty left her was because she'd been unfaithful, though this was not the case and her mother had no reason, outside the delusion factory of her own skull, to think that it was.

Her mother's getting worked up, angry now as if it were her own marriage Emma had sabotaged—and here's a detail worth noting, that there was and remains a decided lack of boundaries when it comes to where Emma's life ends and her mother's begins, in the woman's mind—and Emma's growing more and more nervous as she drives and her mother's ire rises, remembering the last time she had her mother in the car and she got pissed off and tried to steer them into a gulley at fifty miles an hour.

Emma's gripping the wheel hard, to keep from shaking, and her eyes are welling up, and her mother sees her weakness and goes for the kill, tells her only daughter that that which she fears most will in fact be Emma's fate: she will be alone for the rest of her life, and she will grow old and angry and bitter and hateful and eventually go crazy. That in other words, she will become her mother.

And then the bitch goes for the steering wheel again.

I
was sitting at Duffy's when I got the call.

I asked Emma why she'd let her mother steer them into the tree. Emma was much stronger, after all, and could have overpowered her easily.

She was lying on a bed in the ER, and she said, But I wasn't stronger than her. I was ten years old again. I wasn't even old enough to have a license, all of a sudden. I had no business driving that car, with her screaming at me like that.

I told her I knew exactly how she felt. I was my father's son, after all.

And then, after a pause, Emma asked if it was okay for her to come to me pretty much the moment they let her out of the hospital. No questions, and no discussion. The first flight she could find.

S
ix months after my father's diagnosis, after the lungectomy, after a good amount of time during which the cancer had been polite and stayed put in the neighborhood in which it had started, one of the lymph nodes under his jaw started to swell with the stuff.

We didn't know yet that the cancer had spread—the last set of scans had come back clean—and despite what we'd been told about my father's prospects we had all, I think, settled into the comfortable delusion that perhaps he would be given a respite, perhaps he would defy the laws governing malignancy and the cancer would halt where it was and he would live for many more years and die comfortably in his sleep at a proper age, a medical miracle. These things happened; one heard about them from time to time. But then one night I noticed my father worrying something on his neck while we watched television. I could see a mass rolling under his fingertips, stretching the skin as it moved back and forth, and in that moment I felt the distance between what I suddenly knew, looking at that evil lump, and what I wanted to believe, a distance I could not reconcile. And of course he must have known, too, at the moment his fingers brushed against the offending node and then paused, doubled back, palpated more carefully. Here was proof that his proverbial goose was cooked, just as the doctors had been telling him this whole time.

During the few months remaining he played with the lymph node compulsively, kneading it between his fingers while he stared out the window or listened to the Beatles. As it grew to a grotesque and disfiguring size and made the left side of his mouth look like it was full of jawbreakers, I could see the tumor become a sort of talisman in his mind. Maybe he thought if he touched it enough, learned its contours by heart, he would gain some understanding of what was happening to him. But I don't think it worked. Its contours kept changing, moving outward, consuming all. I think in the end that murderous node didn't help him comprehend anything. I think like most of us, he didn't understand much more than he had in the beginning, at the moment they'd spanked and swaddled and lowered him, screaming, into my grandmother's arms.

A
fter I hung up with Emma, knowing that Charlotte would not seek me out at the bar, I finished my Medalla at a pull, got up off the stool, and sought her out instead.

Drunk, and in shock at Emma's imminent arrival, I slalomed across the island, drifting over the center line once and again, accelerating into blind turns, scattering roosters and dogs and the occasional bicyclist before me. I came to a full stop only once, waiting while a group of wild horses made their languid way across the main road. I practically leapt from the driver's seat when I got to the casita.

Charlotte looked up from her book—a leather-bound copy of
Don Quixote
discovered at the used-book store—and before I'd even opened my mouth she said, Well I guess that's it, huh?

Taken aback, and drunk besides, I was silent.

She continued: Because I'm guessing there aren't too many things that could have you screeching down the road like that, and running up the stairs two at a time.

She dog-eared her page and stood up, set about gathering her things. Won't take long for me to clear out of here, she said. There was no obvious anger or resentment in her voice. She stuffed several T-shirts and a bikini into her tote bag. Maybe an hour to pack, she said. Is there another plane off the island today? Can you pay for it, by the way? I'm pretty broke.

There's a 5:20, usually. I hesitated, then said, Don't you want to talk about this?

Charlotte stopped packing and looked up at me. No, she said. I don't want to talk about this. What I want is to see her picture.

Her picture?

Yes. I want to see her picture.

I looked at her a minute, then fished my phone out of my hip pocket. There are a few on here, I said.

Okay. She resumed packing. Balled-up jeans and T-shirts joined the signed copy of my book in her knapsack. Find a good one, she said. Make it count.

What I found was a shot, from the previous summer, of Emma in the garden of her old house. This was before the place burned down, of course. She had her back to the camera. You could tell from the angle of the light that it was early morning. Emma's shoulders, clad in black, slumped forward sleepily. She'd just become aware that I was taking her picture, and she'd turned her head toward me in profile, an indulgent smile playing on her lips. In front of her, in the picture's background, was a rosebush in full bloom.

It was a favorite of mine. I'd consulted it many times, there on the island.

I handed it over to Charlotte. She dropped her knapsack and took the phone in both hands. She ran one finger down the side of the screen, slowly.

She's beautiful, Charlotte said, then added: Older, obviously.

I nearly laughed at this. Everyone's ‘older,' of course, when you're twenty-two.

But beautiful, Charlotte reiterated. There's something about her eyes.

There is, I agreed.

Charlotte handed the phone back to me. Still, she said, she's no Helen of Troy. But I suppose it's like Jay McInerney said: taste is a matter of taste.

He didn't say that, I told her. One of his characters did.

What's the difference? she asked.

But I was tired, and thrilled beyond language, and explaining the difference didn't seem important enough to warrant the effort, right then.