Read I Thought You Were Dead Online
Authors: Pete Nelson
After writing down Olmstead's number, he was about to log off and rejoin his family downstairs when he saw an icon on Carl's computer desktop marked “PINs.”
Paul couldn't believe his brother would be so stupid as to write down his PINs and keep them all in one place. A quick click, though, showed that Carl had multiple PINs. Paul had only one personal identification number, 7285, which was his name if you dialed it on a telephone, and he used that PIN for all his various accounts. Carl's PINs, his ATM password, his AOL password, others that Paul didn't recognize, were listed alphabetically, including, after Citibank but before Discover, a PIN labeled “Dad's Online Portfolio.” It was a relatively simple matter to hit the Print button and make a copy of the list. The bottom
line, he'd reasoned, was that if he decided later that it was the wrong thing to do, he could always tear up the copy and undo the transgression, but if it was the right thing to do, he'd never get another chance.
“He said I was free to examine his records anytime I wanted to,” Paul explained to Stella.
“That may be what he said, but I doubt that's what he meant,” Stella replied. “If you're asking my opinion.”
“I didn't exactly think it through,” Paul said.
“Well. You had a lot of other things on your mind,” Stella said. “With your dad in the hospital. You know that in a way, you're lucky.”
“How am I lucky?”
“Not everybody knows who their father was,” she said. He looked at her.
“German shepherd,” Paul said. “Pretty sure.”
“So you've said,” she replied. “I would have liked to know more.”
“I think you put your finger on it,” Paul told her. “I'm not saying I'm not lucky, but I think the hardest part was that I always had this fantasy that one day my dad and I would go fishing or something, and then we'd sit around the fire and drink fifty-year-old Macallan and have some big heart-to-heart. I know who he is, but I don't feel like I know him. Or actually, it's more like he doesn't know me. And now I won't get another chance.”
“I thought your father doesn't drink.”
“It's just a fantasy,” Paul said.
“Are you glad you went home?”
“I suppose so. I couldn't say for certain if he even knew I was there,” Paul said. “I think I went so I'd get credit for going. Like how you go to funerals because you're afraid if you don't, the dead guy's ghost is going to point his bony finger at you and say, âWhy weren't you at my funeral?' ”
“Well, that's just silly,” Stella said. “Of course he knew you were there. He'd know it even with his eyes closed.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well,” Stella said, “I know you're there when my eyes are closed.”
“How?”
“I don't know,” Stella said. “I just do. Pheromones. But I'll bet you if I know, he'd know too. He's your father.”
He picked up her paw and squeezed it three times.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked her.
“That's my paw,” she said. “Are you going to tell me another word for part of a chicken?”
“I mean the three squeezes,” Paul said. “It's a secret signal my mother taught me when we were at the hospital. Three squeezes means âI love you.' I guess they've been doing it with each other all their lives, waiting in lines in airports or sitting next to each other at weddings. They'd hold hands and give each other three squeezes. He did it in the hospital, right there while I was saying good-bye. The doctors said it could be a sign that he's getting better.”
Paul tried to remember the moment he'd held his father's hand and felt it twitch. Had it twitched once? Twice? Three times perhaps? He couldn't say.
Pain is the primary negative reinforcement nature uses to teach the lessons all species need to learn to survive. In a study done at UCLA and at Macquarie University in Australia using brain-scanning technology to observe activation in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex or pain center, human subjects confronting loneliness or heartache resulting from being excluded from a social group or network experienced pain as real as if their skin were being burned. In other words, the need to belong to a group or to be connected to someone else is fundamental to our survival, so that it is the very pain of heartache that keeps us coming back for more, to make the pain go away.
At the same time, the endorphins released when we're in love, affecting the pleasure centers in the brain, are known to lower our IQs and inhibit long-term objective memory. Thus we are hardwired to fuck up again and again. Species known to aggregate in social groupings, canids or ungulates, for example, show similar releases of pleasure-giving hormones â endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, and the like â when aggregated, and similar activities in the anterior cingulate cortex during periods of isolation or
separation. Members of the canid species, including dogs and wolves, are second in this regard only to humans. Social animals also tend to exhibit greater temerity and are built more for endurance than nonaggregate species. Dogs and wolves, for example, are believed to have the most efficient cardiovascular systems of all mammals. Wolves regularly hunt down prey faster and stronger than they are simply by outlasting them over great distances, often running up steep hills through heavy snows without tiring. Canadian researchers studying sled dogs attached heart monitors to a team of malamutes and discovered that sled dogs running at top speed could sustain heart rates exceeding 300 beats per minute for hours, a rate once believed possible only in shrews. This does not come as news to dog owners, who already know that no animal has a heart quite like a dog's. Social animals therefore have high tolerances for both pleasure and pain and can abide fluctuations between the two for long periods of time.
â Paul Gustavson,
Nature for Morons
P
emmican!” Stella said. “My favorite. Thank you.”
He'd given her the present he'd brought her. The pickin's for dogs at the Minnesota-themed gift shop at the airport were beyond slim. Every time he flew home, he brought Stella back a bag of Chippewa pemmican, meat cut in strips and dried Native Americanâstyle. He'd brought her Slim Jims once but they hadn't agreed with her. He'd remembered at the last minute to pick up a gift for Tamsen too, rushing through the airport gift shop with five minutes to spare before his flight boarded. Everything on the shelves screamed “I meant to get you a real gift but actually I forgot until I got to the airport.” He had to choose between a ceramic loon, a bottle of maple syrup (but bringing maple syrup home to New England was like carrying coal to Newcastle), a Kirby Puckett bobble-head doll, or a snow globe with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox inside. He'd settled on the snow globe as having the highest kitsch value.
He showed Stella the snow globe, turning it upside down, then righting it.
“That's lovely,” she said. “How does it do that?”
“There's water inside,” he told her.
“Why doesn't the snow melt?”
“It's plastic or something,” he said.
“Can I have my pemmican now?”
“Let's bring it to the Bay State,” he told her. “I'm meeting Tamsen there. You can eat it in the doorway. Just don't let people see or everybody is going to want some.”
The Bay State Hotel bar was listed in the American Registry of Seedy Dumps, which gave it five stars for having everything a true derelict might want â dollar beers and two-dollar whiskeys, skanky urinals and wet bathroom floors breeding all kinds of molds and fungi, dim lights and dirty mirrors behind the bar so you didn't notice how old or bald or fat or drunk you were getting. The jukebox featured George Jones drinking songs, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Otis Redding, Miles Davis's “All Blues,” Frank Sinatra's
Songs for Swingin' Lovers
. The walls were wood paneling, decorated with clown portraits and beer mirrors and Toby mugs on a plate rail just below the ceiling, and a couple of dozen ceramic busts of sailors and leprechauns realistically rendered in porcelain at about a third of actual scale. The dour bartender, Silent Neil, hadn't spoken or even turned around to look at the television since Bill Buckner let the ball dribble through his legs in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Stella took her customary post just inside the Bay State's front door. She was allowed inside but preferred the doorway, explaining, “I'll roll on a dead carp, I'll even eat cat turds, but that place grosses me out.”
During his separation and divorce from Karen, and in the détente that followed, the Bay State had become his sanctuary, literally, a place she'd promised not to frequent so that he could feel secure, knowing he wasn't going to run into her there. He'd reciprocated by giving her the bar at the Hotel Northampton as a safe haven, though she didn't seem nearly as bothered by the whole situation as he was. Of course, that meant if she went on a date, she'd go to the bar at the Hotel Northampton, which had floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, not that Paul ever
parked across the street and spied on her with his binoculars ⦠or anything.
“The traveler returns,” Doyle called out as Paul walked in.
Paul regarded his friends. Doyle was a drummer in a blues band. Brickman was a sandy-haired, Kennedyesque stockbroker. Bender was a photographer. McCoy was a jazz piano player who got asked on a regular basis, “You're really talented â why don't you move to New York?” Yvonne ran the computer lab at UMass. D. J. and Mickey taught psychology, he at UMass, she at Amherst College. The code of conduct at the Bay State was that nobody judged anybody â live and let live, and accept people for who they are. Paul found it easy to live by such rules. It felt good to be home.
He raised his beer to O-Rings, who didn't do anything for a living, as far as anybody knew. Nevertheless he somehow always had money for pinball and owned four of the machine's top five all-time record scores. O-Rings lived with Marie, a sweet woman, and they'd just had a baby, but somehow it hadn't cut into O-Rings's pinball schedule or reduced the number of pints of Guinness he downed every night. He'd been called O-Rings ever since the space shuttle
Challenger
blew up, for reasons that were no longer clear.
“So how's your dad?” Doyle said. “Do they know how bad a stroke it was?”
“He can't walk and he can only move his right hand.”
“I get like that,” D. J. said.
“On a good day,” Mickey added.
“So what's the prognosis?” McCoy asked. “Can he talk?”
“Nope,” Paul said. “I think I'll be able to get online with him and he'll be able to answer yes-or-no questions by clicking the mouse, but that's about it. We haven't got it all set up yet.”
“Bummer,” Doyle said.
“How old is your dad?” McCoy asked.
“Seventy-two,” Paul said.
“When's his birthday?” Yvonne asked.
“I don't know. It's in July.”
“You don't know when your own father's birthday is?” she chastised him. “What kind of shitty son doesn't know when his own father's birthday is? I'll bet he knows when yours is.”
“Well, he was there when I was born,” Paul said. “If I was there when he was born, I'd probably remember too.”
“Let's drink to Paul's dad!” Doyle proposed. Everybody raised their glasses and said, “To Paul's dad!” Paul joined them.
He found a stool open at the bar next to his friend Bender, the photographer, and asked him how he was.
“I suck,” Bender said. “I shot a wedding four years ago but I never got around to printing the pictures. Now I just heard they're getting divorced, but I can't find the negatives.”
“They still want the pictures?”
“Go figure,” Bender said. “I just want to get paid.”
“I have a question for you,” Paul said. “You're a fitness guy â what's better exercise, running or bicycling?”
“Better for what?”
“For getting in shape. Losing weight.”
“Well,” Bender said, “running burns more calories, but cycling is easier on your body. Especially your knees. Why?”
“I took a vow,” Paul said. “Seeing my dad inspired me. Maybe
scared
me is a better word.” He considered telling Bender about the fortune cookie and his fight with Carl but changed his mind.
“If you're only going to do one, you should run,” Bender advised. “Running is a four-season sport. If you want to cycle, you probably have to join a gym in the winter. Or get a good stationary bike. I don't have room for one in my apartment.”
“You ride a bike at the gym? You like it?”
“It depends on who's ass I'm staring at on the bike in front of me,” Bender said. “You have to take what you get â passing's not an option. You get behind a fat guy and it sucks, but if it's a tight little Smithie, you can get a Lycralock that's transcendental. Running is also cheaper.”
Paul resolved to purchase, the next day or as soon as possible, a pair of running shoes and get started on a new regimen. A glance in the mirror mounted on the wall behind the bar only strengthened his resolve.
He had his eyes closed, listening to the jukebox, when someone approached him from behind, put her hands over his eyes, and kissed him on the top of his head.
“Knock it off,” he said. “My girlfriend's going to be here any minute.”
He opened his eyes and saw Tamsen. She turned him to face her and kissed him again, briefly, breaking it off with a subtly arched eyebrow that said there was more where that came from.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too,” she said. It was about a two-hour drive from Providence to Northampton, through what Paul considered to be the least scenic part of Massachusetts, relatively flat and with few roadside attractions.