The Great Perhaps (25 page)

A
T A HALF HOUR
past midnight the nursing home is eerily quiet. Between waking and sleeping, between memory and dream, Henry’s eyes slip open, a startled breath escaping from his lips, a single word appearing along the brine of his teeth:
Moon. Moon. Of course
, he thinks. He is falling, falling, falling, the moon slipping farther and farther away. He is drifting helplessly toward earth. Henry struggles for a second breath, unsure where he is exactly. His arms and legs feel cold and stiff. He turns and sees someone sitting in a chair, breathing deeply beside him. Henry does not recognize the other man’s face. He begins to panic, stirring beneath the stern white sheets, but no sound escapes his mouth. He cannot talk. He cannot yell. All he can do is blink.

B
ESIDE HIS FATHER,
Jonathan has fallen asleep. At first he does not notice that he is still holding his father’s hand. The television is still flickering silently. Jonathan squints, placing his palm against his eyes, and then he looks down at his father’s tiny, wrinkled hand. He kisses it. His father is not quite awake, not quite asleep, his eyes blinking nervously, his breath slow, aggravated, but deep.

“The moon,” his father suddenly whispers, sure of the importance of these two final words. The old man’s eyelids twitch a little, the lashes short, his father’s lips muttering, murmuring oblique words as he dreams.

“The moon?” Jonathan asks, but his father does not respond. He watches Henry’s face, his lips, for another word, another sign, but nothing else comes. Finally, Jonathan stands, yawning, then switches off the television. He stretches, pulls on his jacket, whispers goodnight to his father, and steps quietly out of the room.

J
ONATHAN FINDS HIS
Peugeot parked in its spot at the far end of the empty nursing home parking lot and sits in the driver’s seat, silent, tired, more sad than he has ever been in his adult life. He looks up at the glare of the yellow streetlights, rising there just above his car. There is something moving there, a flash of something that appears and then disappears just as quickly. Jonathan blinks, leaning over the steering wheel, staring up toward the small circles of fluorescent illumination, and there, there is actually something moving up there: moths, dozens of them, a cloud of gray and brown, the dust from their wings making tiny flecks of darkness somewhere among the bright shape of white and yellow light.

O
N
T
HURSDAY MORNING, ONLY A FEW HOURS LATER,
Jonathan awakes to find his daughter Thisbe standing over him, crying. Lying on the sofa, Jonathan is incredibly confused at first, looking up into his daughter’s wide, panicked eyes, her small pink mouth slightly agape. When Jonathan sits up, asking her what is the matter, he is aware of the world spinning, the entire den trembling, his daughter’s face slipping out of focus, becoming soft and fuzzy.

“It’s Mom,” Thisbe says again. “She left us. For good.”

Jonathan scratches at his beard, sighs, and then tries to understand.

“What time is it?”

“Six. In the morning. I got up because I heard Mom’s car leaving. You know how it makes that one sound?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it made that sound. And when I got up, she was gone.”

Jonathan nods. “Let’s not get excited. Let’s take a look around first.”

Together they climb the stairs, then walk quietly down the hallway. They stare into the master bedroom without saying a word. Both of the bedroom closets are standing open, as are a few of the dresser drawers. Most of Madeline’s clothes and shoes are gone, plastic hangers lying on the floor or resting uselessly on the bed. Her suitcases have been taken as well. Jonathan stares at the empty space where his wife’s clothes should be, at the spot where the suitcases ought to be standing, his eyes trembling with tears, his pulse pounding loudly in his head.

“What are we going to do, Dad?” Thisbe asks. “What are we going to do?”

At first Jonathan does not answer. He only stares at the unmade bed, at the empty dresser, at the bedroom which he has not slept in for almost three weeks now, and finally, finally his heart decides it has had enough.
Enough
. Jonathan throws on some clothes, grabs his keys, hurries out to the garage, gives the car a start, backs up, and decides he is going to do something about what is happening to his life. You bet he’s going to do something: he is going to find his wife. He is not going to wait around, hiding. He is not just going to sit there and watch things fall apart anymore. Where can she be? Logically, there’s only a certain number of places. He drives down the Midway, then to Lake Shore Drive. His first thought is Madeline must be at work and that the Volvo has to be parked in the lot at the research facility, but when he arrives there, he finds it is not. At this hour of the morning, the lot is empty. He thinks about heading inside, down to her lab, to try to talk to a few of her colleagues, but the doors are locked and no one seems to be around. He knocks on the glass doors once, then twice, then hurries back to his car. The Peugeot speeds away, or as close to speeding as it can go, back onto Lake Shore Drive, circling the shady streets of Hyde Park, looking for the familiar-looking Volvo in the parking lot of any restaurant that might be open this time of the morning—maybe the Pancake House—but there is nothing. He travels past a few motels, then a hotel, but again, there is nothing. Nothing. Jonathan searches alone in the early morning light, until the sun begins to travel past the clouds of the easternmost sky. It is now glaringly obvious to him that Madeline is not, will not be returning.

B
Y THEN IT IS
almost nine a.m. At this time of the morning, there is an unbelievably long line in the drive-through of McDonald’s. Jonathan waits patiently, wondering how much longer all of this can go on, how much longer before he decides to just give up and disappear as well. When it is his turn to pull up to the plastic brown speaker, a tinny voice asks, “Welcome to McDonalds’s, may I take your order?” but Jonathan has no idea what he is even doing there. He orders a number three breakfast meal and pulls up to the drive-through window, staring up at the early morning sky, the clouds like mountaintops, like a vast and rumbling sea, the view from the Peugeot’s window exactly like a map of oceanic topography. The kid from the drive-through window, the same kid with his abundance of unhealthy purple zits, announces the amount due. Jonathan searches in his wallet, hands the boy a few bills, collects his change, and waits for his meal. The tiny glass window of the drive-through swings closed and Jonathan glances up at the sky again. Suddenly a switch is thrown somewhere in his brain. His heart immediately reacts. The clouds overhead, white, stunning, slowly moving, have begun to sharpen, the inexact edges become angles, the feeling, the awful stuttering of his heart, his hands now going numb. He tries to tap on the drive-through window but no one is there. All of a sudden his legs have disappeared, his toes going cold, his feet, his breath is now far away, a distant sound beneath the rapid, upset beating in his chest. A cloud seems to separate itself from all of the others at that moment, and Jonathan is unable to fix his sight anywhere else. He cannot remember the last time he took his phenytoin. As he struggles to breathe, a car behind him begins to honk. In this moment, a flash of single images echo in his brain: Madeline, his daughters, his father, the empty lecture hall, the model of the squid at the museum, his father, who would tell him exactly what to do at this moment, Madeline, whom he would like to cry to, to ask forgiveness from, to be saved by, his mother, his daughters, then Madeline again. Jonathan begins to cry in desperation, twitching, his tongue curling up into the back of his throat. He falls forward against the steering wheel, the scream of the Peugeot’s horn the uninterrupted message of his terrified heart.
Madeline
, he thinks, reaching for a hand that is not there.
Where are his arms now? Why can’t he say anything? Where are the girls? Why doesn’t anyone hear him?

Jonathan, adrift in that unquestionable profundity, can taste salt in his mouth. He struggles to stay awake but, seeing the great cloud bearing down upon him, he knows there is no escape. As its enormous shadow falls upon his face, he tries to shout, but the cars honking their horns are much too loud. The pimply-faced boy leans out of the drive-through and taps on Jonathan’s window. Jonathan can see the boy’s fingers there, separated by the thick pane of glass. He can even make out the boy’s greasy fingerprints, which are now smudged along the Peugeot’s window. A stranger’s fingerprint, that small detail, that impractical, momentary beauty, makes Jonathan smile. The boy from the drive-through window is now dialing 911. He is tapping on Jonathan’s window and telling him this, but Jonathan cannot hear anything but his own heartbeat. He has collapsed now, lying sideways, falling into the emptiness of the passenger seat. The cloud hangs there in the air, crossing the seam of the old windshield as Jonathan does his best to keep breathing. As he loses consciousness, Jonathan begins to recall the dull words of Dr. Roberts—the discouraging neurologist from his childhood, the gray-bearded specialist whose aversion therapy was so painfully unsuccessful—attempting to explain his incredible findings in a 1961 article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
:

The emergency room is mostly empty at this time of day. The paramedics—young handsome men in blue jumpsuits—joke with Jonathan, who has begun to recover. They ask him if he has taken any narcotics recently. Jonathan tells them he wishes he had. His heart is still beating much too quickly. He adjusts the oxygen tube that they have inserted in his nose, trying to breathe deeply. The paramedics roll him on a gurney through the automatic sliding glass doors, leaving him in a little curtained bed in the back of the emergency room. A young nurse with cold hands takes his pulse and his vital signs and says everything looks pretty normal. Someone is screaming behind another curtain nearby. Jonathan closes his eyes, his heart slowly returning to its usual beat, his breath coming easier. He begins to feel the blood in his hands and feet again. His legs do not feel so distant. Before a doctor can come in and evaluate him, Jonathan stands, buttons his shirt back up, finds his brown jacket lying on the floor, and quietly exits through the sliding glass doors. He unsnaps the plastic bracelet from his wrist and puts it in his pocket. He hails a cab and takes it back to where the Peugeot is parked in the McDonald’s parking lot. He sees he has been given a ticket for leaving his car unattended, abandoned there by the paramedics in a corner of the lot, but he does not remove the orange paper from his windshield. The radio in the car crackles with static and Jonathan switches it off, preferring the sudden silence and his own labored breathing.

W
HEN
J
ONATHAN GETS HOME
and pulls the car into the garage, he sees the Volvo is still gone. Backing into the garage beside Madeline’s empty spot, he holds his hand over his heart and finds a white EKG tab left stuck to his chest, then another, then another. He sits there, holding the steering wheel in his hands, and thinks,
I have ignored everything important around me. I have made my life a stupid, empirical, factual thing. I’ve forgotten what it means to be happy or unhappy. I have been so narrow-minded that I’ve forgotten to look around at the rest of the world: I’ve been in a kind of fog for years and years.
He climbs out of the car and goes to find his wife, knowing what he wants to say to her now, how badly he wants to apologize, to convince her of his love for her, knowing none of it will be easy.

O
F COURSE,
Jonathan does not find Madeline. She has vanished completely: no note, no sign, no message to be read in the arrangement of her shoes near the back door, because all of her shoes are gone. Jonathan sighs aloud into the empty stillness of the house. Where are the girls? Certainly they should be home by now. But no. It’s four p.m. and there’s no one. Nothing. Jonathan retreats to his bedsheet tent in the den. He climbs inside and stares at a black and white wedding photo of his missing wife. In the photo, Madeline is wearing a strapless dress that does not exactly fit, the cut a little low along the bustline, but she looks elegant, with tiny flowers in her hair. She is laughing at something, holding her dress up with one hand and her bouquet in the other. Madeline. She is smiling a smile Jonathan does not quite remember, a smile before a certain kind of impatience set in, a certain kind of frustration, a certain kind of indifference. The smile, in its perfect lightness, with her one dimple on her left cheek, is the most lovely, unfussy thing Jonathan has ever seen. Its shape, and the whole of the rest of Madeline and Madeline’s face, are now gone, somewhere else: missing. Where is she right now? Where has she gone? It is Thursday, October 28, 2004, 4:35 p.m., and it feels like the world is ending.

A
S THE EVENING
wears on, Jonathan climbs out from the fort and decides, fuck it: he will get high. His daughters are still not home. And there are some rolling papers in the drawer of the oak desk, and a little baggie of very dry weed, hidden in a dense volume of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Madeline’s idea of a joke. Jonathan does a terrible job of rolling a joint, it looks bunched up at one end and the paper keeps coming unwound. But, finding an old blue plastic lighter in his desk, he lights it anyway and inhales deeply. His lungs contract and expand, his heartbeat slowing lazily. Uncoordinated thoughts drift through his head. He finds himself sitting on the floor in front of the television, eating a bowl of frozen strawberries, flipping through the channels with the sound off, admiring the shape of everyone’s mouths. When he gets to CNN, what he sees nearly causes him to choke.

It is footage of the prehistoric giant squid:
Tusoteuthis longa
. Floating in an enormous blue tank, the creature looks pale white, its innumerable tentacles reaching out, drifting behind it like listless seaweed. The animal does not look well. In fact, it looks terrible. A close-up reveals its huge, alien eye, bubbles hurrying past as the squid drifts aimlessly in its tank. Jonathan grabs the remote control and turns up the volume.