Safe Passage (13 page)

    
Enough. Simon put the afghan over him, thinking he was cold. He was not cold. He was concerned about his lack of concentration. Even when they weren't talking about Beirut, he kept waiting for the newscast to come on, and then he couldn't think about anything else.
Important to keep things in perspective.
Blindness under control, then
Beirut
.
But the two kept getting jumbled up.

    
Head throbbing. He put the afghan aside, rose from the couch, felt his way around the coffee table.

    
"You need something, Dad?" one of the twins asked. He couldn't tell which one but would not resort to feeling for the mustache.

    
"More cold water on this washcloth," he said.

    
"I'll get it."

    
"Thanks."

    
He turned, took two steps back toward the couch, tried to be careful of the coffee table. He had a bruise on his shin from bumping into it the other day. Easy does it …sliding his foot around the table leg, sitting down again.

    
"Here, Dad." He was always amazed that the twins had exactly the same inflections in their voices….

    
Washcloth in his hand, closing his fingers around it.
Lying down, he put the cloth back over his eyes and felt the cool dampness, something he could pretend was closing him in deliberately—something he himself had chosen—and not that he was trapped inside himself by forces outside his control.

    
The Keys…focus on the Keys. Usually that helped. Replace every visual sensation with a sensory one…go where it was hot enough to feel the sun, let it replace the light; feel sand, water, the tug of fish on his line—keep so busy with the other senses…. But each time, on the edge of blindness, he understood how much world his eyes let in. Only Alfred seemed to sense how he felt. He could stand everything except the feeling of being trapped in his own head. In the Keys, where the heat would be strong enough to hold his attention, to overpower his need to see, he could be practical. Swim. Fish. Maintain a little dignity.

    
Imagining sunlight on his skin now. Warmer. Not shivering so much. He breathed slowly through his nose to calm himself. It only reminded him that the passage of air into his nostrils during these episodes made his eyes hurt as if his sinuses were infected. Actually, a sinus infection was one of the theories the doctors at Hopkins had embraced and later discarded after they'd given him antibiotics. They'd rejected it the way they'd rejected the brain tumor theory, the virus theory, the exotic disease theory (had he traveled in the past year, say, to
Africa
?), the nerve disorder theory. But surely some bacteria were resistant to the drugs they had tried. Very likely that.

    
In the Keys he could work on his problem. Get out of the house, away from Maryland. Away from pollen, mold, dust, even the carpet swatches and vinyl at work; you could be allergic to those things as well as to beer.
Mag
said no; at Hopkins the tests showed he was allergic to most everything but not enough to close down his eyes.
Some seasonal thing, then?
The eye problem had started last fall and now it was fall again and it was worse. If he could just gain the proper distance …He had changed his diet, started taking vitamin pills. Sometimes you waited. You took aspirin till you had a cure. You broke problems down into logical components and didn't try to tackle too much at once. He had taught
Izzy
this method, and look how well
Izzy
had done. You suggested alternatives to the doctors. You assumed your son was all right until you heard otherwise.

    
Your son?

    
Enough.

    
Concentrate. You could break things
down,
you could change your physical location. But first—oh, shit—you had to convince your wife that going was a good idea.

    
Mag
was rarely impressed by logic, but in this case it seemed so obvious…. If he went blind permanently, who did she think would support them? Who would keep his business going, to pay the bills for five boys still in college or high school? Did she think they would live on the little pittance of money she made working for the county, taking a different job every year? She said: "Why waste the
RipOffs
money on
a sunburn
?"—but the truth was, winter was the only time he could get away from the plant for any length of time. It was the off-season, and the foreman could take charge. In spring they would be swamped with vans to upholster.

    
"Why Key West? So you can learn to live like a
blindman
in some strange place while Alfred is enjoying your house?"

    
"That isn't the point," he'd told her. He would not consider the possibility of living like a
blindman
. If you did not have a retreat plan, you did not retreat. But nothing was resolved.

    
"For all we know, Percival could be lying under that building and it'll be three or four days before we hear about it," Simon said.

    
That jolted him back to the present. "Simon, what did I tell you this morning about imagining things?" he asked.

    
"Isn't that exactly what they're saying on TV and at that hot-line number?"

    
"It could also very easily be true that he's perfectly all right and would not admire our imagining him otherwise."

    
"I think he'd like knowing someone was thinking about him," Simon said.

    
"Thinking about him, yes. Not falling apart over him whether it's necessary or not."

    
Hear me, Simon. You do not crumble because of blindness, or even because of a death. You concentrate on whatever's left. He had learned that after his father died, and he had shivered a few moments ago because when Alfred said the Marines would send a chaplain to announce a death, he'd gotten a perfect rerun in his mind of Father James, the priest, coming to tell him about his father the year he was nine.

    
He'd been in school that day. This struck him as odd suddenly, because hadn't Simon delivered papers this morning, under the same conditions? But no …this morning he'd wanted Simon to get on top of the situation; forty years ago there was no possibility of that. He'd gone to school because no one told him to stay home. His father, William, had been in and out of the hospital so many times that Patrick had gotten used to it—a short stay for transfusions and tests, a quiet homecoming. William had looked gaunt but remained cheerful toward Patrick, so nothing had forewarned him of a death. He did not know his father had one of those violent, acute forms of leukemia for which, in those days, there was no cure. But when Father James appeared in the door of his fourth-grade classroom, whispering to Mrs.
Treadmore
and looking in Patrick's direction, he understood completely. When a priest came, it always meant bad news.

    
Watching Father James's lips moving close to Mrs.
Treadmore's
ear, Patrick had felt as if time had slowed down. In a strange, detached way, he knew absolutely that his father was dead. Two nights before, William had hugged him before leaving for the hospital, saying, "Take care, boy," in his usual way. He'd ruffled Patrick's hair and given him a kiss. Patrick had smelled illness and aftershave and felt the rough beginnings of his father's whiskers against his face. That would never happen again. In the slow, creeping passage of time in that classroom, Patrick remembered that when people died, their whiskers grew. A gray, gritty light came through the window. His father was dead at that very moment. It had happened while Patrick was reading and doing math. He was
not inside his body anymore
. But still his whiskers were growing. The memory of his father's living,
stubbled
face became sharp and painful. A sob formed in his chest and finally lifted and burst from his throat.

    
With the same slowness with which he had imagined his father, Patrick watched his classmates turn to stare at him. The children seemed to move and fix their eyes on him in unison. In the skewed passage of time, there was opportunity to look at each of them through the blur of tears. Some wore curious expressions, others seemed uncomfortable. A few of the boys shaped their mouths into tight smiles.

    
Father James walked toward him. Patrick's father had not liked the priest, who always said, "I hope we see you in church next week with the rest of your family, William." But his father never went to church. Once he'd replied, "I was raised Methodist and I didn't like that much, either, Father James," and he had winked at the priest, who then jumped away a little, barely perceptibly, as if William had slapped him or spit.

    
Patrick did not mean to let the priest touch him. The children were watching. If his aunt Kay had come, he would have been all right, but he knew she was probably home with his mother. Patrick rose from his seat. He could not stop the tears. Father James was beside him, talking. Soon he would say William could not go to heaven. Only the faithful went to heaven. That was so crazy. He did not mean to let Father James get too close. Someone giggled. Patrick felt Father James's sleeve against his shoulder. Father James's arm went around him. He had no power to stop it. The tears came harder. He walked out of the classroom with sobs breaking from him, and his head buried in the black, black, black of Father James's suit.

    
Everyone in the class had witnessed this. His humiliation was absolute. When he'd finally summoned the strength to pull away from the priest, Patrick vowed never again to feel so helpless. It seemed to him that now, blind and with Percival unaccounted for …perhaps this was the ultimate test.

    
"Well,
fuck
that—not hearing for a couple of days," Simon said. "Just fuck that."

    
"Simon, don't,"
Mag
began.

    
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," he said. "If he's okay, I'll have my ear fixed. If he's not okay, I won't."

    
"I thought you'd decided definitely not to do it," Alfred said.

    
"I changed my mind," Simon told them. "Is it such a crime to change your mind?"

    
"It sounds to me like a bargain with God," Patrick said. "Always a dangerous kind of bargain."

    
"Percival said it'd look better fixed, but I should make up my own mind—that's all. What difference does it make?"

    
"None, except that I have to believe God would concern himself with larger issues than your ear and
Percival's
well-being," Patrick said. He knew his voice sounded calm, but his heart thumped in his chest. He would not allow this.

    
"If Percival comes home, he'd probably like to see me with an ear, right? But if he's dead, there's no point having it fixed for him to look at because he's not going to be around to see it."

    
"Oh, I see," said Patrick. "The Angel Solution."

    
"Come off it, Dad."

    
"Well, it is, isn't it?" The term Angel Solution had been derived from Patrick's mother's name—Angela—and the way she always lit candles in church and struck other religious bargains to ensure the safe passage of Patrick's family from Maryland to Maine, as they drove the perilous roads north every third summer. Patrick had always pointed out that it was his good driving that got them there safely and not Angela or her angels—and hence the Angel Solution, which he always felt was a disrespectful term to use with regard to his mother, but useful to prove his point. He wanted the boys to understand that you yourself, not God, were responsible for getting you there.

    
"This has nothing to do with Grandmother Singer," Simon said.

    
"I still don't like to see you making rash decisions based on something that may or may not have happened four thousand miles away," Patrick said.

    
"I can't argue with you about it," Simon said.

    
"No, I can see that. That's because there's no logic to it."

    
Simon sighed in a dramatic, irritated way. Then he sat back down on the couch on top of Patrick's feet. Patrick was flattered that he'd turned to him for solace in the middle of a reprimand, but he felt it was no more constructive than the Angel Solution, especially since he was sure this wasn't the end of it.

    
"Simon, if you think numbing my lower extremities by sitting on them has taken my mind off my headache, you're mistaken," he said. "Now get up and make yourself useful. Get a decent channel on the TV. Then make sure the room is picked up so when people start coming, they won't think we've lost it."

    
He did not think he sounded convincing, but he could hear everyone picking up papers and rearranging things that had been displaced. He was disturbed that Simon would be ready to trade off his ear for
Percival's
life. It was too much like what his mother had always done, the joke about the Angel Solution aside. After Patrick's father died and for the rest of her life, Angela had become so helplessly religious that she couldn't take care of herself, and this is what Patrick had tried to avoid in his own life and to teach his sons to avoid.