THE LOGIC WAS faulty: expressing his resentment of having to take this trip by leaving late for the airport. Dropping everything to fly to RDA was only worsened by traveling under stress. That foot-dragging in his Clinton Hill walk-up—clearing off coffee mugs that would have waited for his return—had merely ensured that Peter Dimmock would agitate in the taxi en route, shooting glances at the time blinking on the sedan’s dashboard while glaring at the congestion on Atlantic. The jittering of his knee was probably driving the cabbie nuts. It would have been one thing to have announced firmly to his father’s live-in home health aide—an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, paid in cash; this was America, after all, rich in its unique cultural traditions—that he had heard this death’s-door business before, and this time he wasn’t coming. To instead merely cut it close on catching the flight was like being passive-aggressive with yourself.
“When you fly?” asked the driver.
“Eight ten. JetBlue, terminal five.” It was a stupid departure time, putting him smack in rush hour on the way to a stupid airport. But mid-evening from JFK was the only semiaffordable ticket he could scrounge at the last minute. “I’m running late, obviously. But with this traffic, there’s no point in telling you to step on it.” It was already nearing six o’clock, and they couldn’t have gone more than half a mile.
“You go to …?”
“Raleigh-Durham. Grew up there,” he added gruffly, grateful that a Pakistani wouldn’t have the ear or the interest, and so wouldn’t comment on his passenger’s lack of a Tarheel drawl. It was a boring conversation.
“This is warmer—than in New York?”
That was an even more boring conversation, earning only a grunt. “My father’s dying. Supposedly. One more time.” Having undercut the violin section, not wanting to be misread as bidding for sympathy, Peter added wistfully, “Although eventually it really is a wolf, isn’t it?”
Silence seemed to indicate that the cabbie didn’t get the allusion. For all Peter’s skepticism, something told him that this time it was the wolf. If he hadn’t left for the airport so late, he might have afforded a little reflection on how he felt.
“I am so sorry,” the driver remembered to say at last—with a surprising passion.
IN HIS HEYDAY, Daniel Dimmock was the acknowledged Father of Modern Dialysis. Working circa 1960 at the embryonic form of what was now the vast and internationally acclaimed Research Triangle Park, he designed the revolutionary Dimmock Shunt—a mechanism that Peter still didn’t understand, at fifty-eight. (Peter wasn’t that dumb. He had failed to understand it on purpose.) Had the shunt been developed and patented through a commercial company rather than at a publicly funded nonprofit, Dr. Dimmock would have become a wealthy man—which the august medical researcher had noted himself a few hundred times. These many years after the man’s retirement, Peter still couldn’t assess with any confidence his father’s importance in the wider world. In the small pond of renal research, his father had been a whale. Whether that made him a guppy in the ocean of human achievement or more like a grouper was anyone’s guess.
In any event, Peter had been awed as a boy. He felt wistful about the adoration now, which he wouldn’t have wanted to sustain through an unbecomingly fawning adulthood, but might have liked to revisit—like sampling one sumptuous bite of a cream bun otherwise sickly sweet for a mature palate. He’d boasted to third-grade classmates that his father wasn’t a plain old doctor, but “more like a mad scientist.” (Maybe it was the post-A-bomb paranoia, but in those days all scientists were “mad.”) His father was lean, vigorous, and busy, and when you were a kid, or at least back then, nothing made grown-ups more impressive than the fact that they ignored you.
See, Dod hadn’t been a cruel father. He was oblivious, which was worse. Cruelty at least entailed paying attention of a kind.
Funny, that Dod—the tag still cheered Peter up. All three kids had been schooled to call the guy “Father,” a formal, old-fashioned term of address for the 1960s whose associations were too reverent, as in “Father of Modern Dialysis.” “Father” was what bedraggled, brow-beaten children called their stern, religious-fundamentalist poppas in grim black-and-white art movies: “Yes, Father.” “No, Father.” “Of course you’re right, Father, this dress is much too bright and whorish, what was I thinking.” His older brother started it. Since Daniel Oliver Dimmock signed cryptic, bossy notes to their mother DOD, Luke appropriated the acronym, which outsiders often misheard as a snooty pronunciation of “Dad”; confronting paternal obstruction as a teenager, the eldest elongated the handle to “Department of Defense.” An early discovery of childhood is the power of naming, one of the few weapons at the disposal of short people in the absence of capital, clout, or brawn. For Peter and his siblings, the rechristening of “Father” was a rare victory for their team, an impish pushback that Dod had never quite decided was insolent or affectionate, when it was both.
As a son, Peter had traveled an arc from awe to disenchantment that probably wasn’t yet complete, with Dod on the cusp of oblivion at ninety-two. The filial disillusionment wasn’t sourced in parental neglect, which was standard for family men married around 1950. It wasn’t as if his father turned out to be a rather bad researcher, either, who did flawed work that killed people or something. There was no scandal, no embezzling of funds. No grievous private shortcoming like a gambling addiction or propensity for domestic violence fatally offset Daniel Dimmock’s public accomplishment.
Be that as it may, the man often stayed late at the lab without bothering to pick up the phone, while his wife’s lovingly prepared dinners would dry and char. He treated his children like annoyances, whom their mother hurriedly issued out of his way when he did come home. Conversation was dominated by which prestigious journal had accepted a paper, which colleague had cited his research, which medical conference had invited the great man to speak. He was competitive with his lab partners, and shamelessly voiced satisfaction when their experiments failed. If grant funding fell through, he didn’t mourn the fact that a vital line of clinical inquiry would now not be pursued, but raged back and forth in the living room at the personal affront: “Would I have signed off on that application if it didn’t have merit? Did those pinheads at the NIH ever notice whose name was on the title page?”
Thus by his latter teens, Peter began to register the real reason that his father wasn’t a “plain old doctor.” The revered MD might have had a taste for protégés, acolytes, and subordinates, but he’d little time for needy, smelly patients, much less for people as a broader class. The development of effective dialysis that could be repeated year after year was a technical challenge, likewise the refinement of a smaller, more portable machine that could be employed in domestic settings. What mattered to Dod was not the alleviation of suffering, but that if suffering was alleviated, Daniel Dimmock would get the credit. Renal research was of value only because he was good at it. In sum, the man was driven solely by self-aggrandizement. If by his own middle age Peter had tried to gentle the harshness of this assessment—most high achievers he’d encountered by then were powered primarily by narcissism, varying only in their capacity to conceal it—a boy’s disappointment that his father was not, after all, a life-saving crusader but a self-serving egotist had never quite lost its bitter bite.
You’d think that at some point someone would have told a megalomaniac like Peter’s father to stuff it. But no: the more egregious his behavior, the more the God’s gift convinces the people he treats like dog shit that he must really be extraordinary, or long ago someone else would have told him to stuff it. Pricks get away with acting like pricks because they’ve always gotten away with acting like pricks, and no one wants to interfere with the natural order of the universe.
The same natural order was duplicated in the domestic sphere. Dod wasn’t one of those pushy fathers who drove his children to succeed and so to manifest his hopes for them—a cliché that would surely have improved on a father who had no hopes for his children. For Daniel Dimmock had never displayed an appetite for passing on the generational baton. Though all three kids had the grades and test scores to make a bid for the Ivy League, he’d encouraged Luke, Esther, and Peter to take advantage of in-state tuition at local public colleges, when he himself had gone to Stanford. He didn’t urge any of them to take on the big professions—law, the sciences—but promoted community service jobs like nursing or schoolteaching. Even these days, with so little to occupy his time, he never watched Luke’s news packages online, checked out clients’ enthusiastic reviews on Peter’s webpage, or saved Esther’s full-page profile in the business section of the News and Observer to boast about to friends. The good doctor had no intention of abdicating his position as the center of the familial universe, at however advanced an age. It couldn’t have been coincidental that both boys were baptized with New Testament Christian names. They were raised to be apostles.
PETER HAD UNDERTAKEN the first of these missions of mercy to North Carolina after their father, then eighty-six, had fallen from a ladder while cleaning the gutters and broken his hip. This hackneyed beginning of the end presented an opportunity to make settling the estate after the inevitable occurred as graceful as possible. Once Luke had flown in from Portland and Esther from Beijing, the siblings conferred back at the house in Woodrow Park while their father was laid up in Rex Hospital. Peter’s brother and sister were in accord: in order to oversee their father’s finances during a convalescence fated to end badly, Peter should get power of attorney. Esther was a poor candidate for the post, having moved to China. A television journalist who covered quirky, uplifting feel-good stories for local news in Oregon, Luke was often on the road, and was eager to avoid the aggravation of managing bills and investments. Besides, Peter had already been named the executor in their parents’ will.
Like the decision to dub him executor, the fact that their father proved willing to give his youngest access to his accounts was a compliment, theoretically. A thriving consultant who helped American companies negotiate a foreign and no-little-devious business culture, Esther had further anchored herself to Beijing by marrying a native entrepreneur, thereby consigning herself to irrelevance in Raleigh. As the eldest, Luke might conventionally have stewarded their surviving parent’s affairs, despite living farther away; in the online world, Portland and Brooklyn were right next door. Yet from childhood, Luke had exhibited a chameleon side, an unsettling capacity for being all things to all people—which is how he got away with presenting doggy, Pollyanna features about the finer side of human nature rising in the face of adversity when in private he was a cynic. He wasn’t precisely a pleaser, which would have entailed actually pleasing people; he was a manipulator, which entailed seeming to please people. Given this lifelong slipperiness, neither their father nor their late mother entirely trusted Luke. Both parents regarded Peter as the moral anchor of their triad—the decent, dependable, faithful one, to whom it would never occur to take advantage of power of attorney by charging personal expenses to his father’s credit card, or to discreetly siphon off a couple hundred grand in executor “fees,” about which his siblings would never be the wiser.
Glowering at the haloed taillights of the sedulous traffic on South Conduit—it had started to sleet—Peter wondered whether being anointed as the trustworthy one might be a shade unpleasant. If he really wouldn’t abuse his legal position to self-deal—and he hadn’t—the bovine rectitude suggested a lack of imagination. The expectation that of course little Peter would unerringly toe the line imputed to the youngest a cowed quality—if nothing else, a paralytic dread of being caught. In pictures of Peter as a boy, his mouth dropped tremulously open while his eyes widened, their pupils cast upward at an imploring tilt. He’d been the weakest of the litter, the momma’s boy, the crybaby on the first day of school. The older two were always more rebellious, more mischievous, less respectful (God love them)—and therefore, it didn’t take a psychological genius to decode: more independent, more visionary, and less bludgeoned into submission to the Father of Modern Dialysis. So his parents had chosen their last-born to execute their will because he was the tractable one, and would do their bidding. Too timid to stray from the path of righteousness, Peter wouldn’t have the moxie to write himself checks on his father’s account, lest lightning strike him dead.
Being trusted was an insult.
Yet Peter Dimmock was fifty-eight years old, and that quivering portrait from first grade, which had mocked him from the frame on his parents’ buffet for decades, was out of date. He was a larger, more muscular man than his older brother, who didn’t work out, and was starting to look puffy on camera. In adulthood, Peter had developed a temper that sometimes got him into trouble, though it was the return of his primary-school timorousness, not wrath, that he blamed for the recent demise of his second marriage. June had steadily lost respect for her husband the longer he step ’n’ fetched for her father-in-law. Or maybe that wasn’t the main reason she walked out, but it hadn’t helped.
When first awarded power of attorney, Peter felt a quiet sense of victory. In running his father’s logistical life, he could turn the tables, take control—all in preparation for receiving a baton that at last the man couldn’t withhold. At the time, Peter had estimated that his ailing father would last six months at the outside, just long enough to get the old man’s affairs in order—to consolidate his assets, locate the house deeds and car registration, learn his passwords, and solicit a list of the music he preferred for the funeral in a spirit of discomfiture and sorrow.
It had now been six years. Apparently, the aged usually don’t recover from broken hips, just as it’s usually the daughters who squander their primes caring for elderly parents—and tell that to Esther the Wheeler-Dealer in Beijing. Dod was Peter’s problem, and his siblings were ever so keen that he remain Peter’s problem.
When first embarking on his fiduciary duties, Peter had been intent on demonstrating his competencies, in hopes that his father would be impressed. After his mother’s death three years earlier, he’d lost his champion, who had long claimed that her second son’s problem was having “too many talents.” (Perhaps she was right, since you were far better off with only one talent.) His mother had encouraged her youngest to nurse all manner of arty, unrealistic ambitions, although he was also, of the three, the least likely to develop the resilient ego that pursuing arty ambitions with any success required. He tried acting at UNC Chapel Hill, where he was easily crushed by failed auditions; he’d hoped that his performances were subtle, but in retrospect a better word was flat. Doing wedding gigs after college with a killing barbershop quartet hardly paved the way to a career. When he turned to screenwriting, his dialogue was sharp, or what a hired editor called “clever,” but he never registered that film was a visual medium in which something was supposed to happen that you could see.
Finally in his thirties he converted ignominy to enterprise. Having been cured of a childhood lisp by a sympathetic young man trained in the field, Peter qualified as a speech therapist. It was a humble occupation, which didn’t transform renal medicine for all time, but did make a difference to individual stutterers and stroke patients. For a sense of importance, he leveraged his small usefulness by plying his trade in what, for a self-exiled North Carolinian, was still the greatest city in the world. Dod had never acted overtly disappointed by how Peter turned out, but he wasn’t exactly wowed.
Furthermore, you don’t readily impress as an underling. Power of attorney hadn’t conferred conquest of any sort. It had designated Peter his father’s errand boy. Daniel Dimmock had been accustomed to secretaries and lab assistants his whole professional life, so ordering around his son instead came naturally. Peter’s position as paternal flunky brought out the timidity threaded through in his DNA that he most despised about himself. Overcompensating, he’d pick fights with June, shouting and breaking things. That didn’t impress, either.
The near invalid didn’t have much to fill his day, and thus spent much of it hectoring Peter from command central, a grand leather-inlaid desk in a study plastered with framed degrees and commendations. When Dod ran him ragged with demands—for a stair lift repair, a more adjustable shower chair—Peter swallowed his impatience and thanked God for online shopping. Many of Dod’s requests were pretextual. Outliving multiple friends and colleagues, having avoided the “drooling imbeciles” of a nursing home, and tended by aides who barely spoke English, he had few people to talk to. By a good measure, then, Peter spent more time speaking to his father than keeping in touch with his own two kids. (One price when the calls were protracted: the pernicious return of the up-lilting southern accent that this proudly re-conditioned New Yorker had shed. So contaminated, Peter had actually addressed the family of one Upper East Side client as y’all.) While not clinically demented, Dod did relentlessly repeat himself, and he would get exercised about the loss of small objects, blamed on sticky-fingered caretakers, that he’d merely mislaid. Why in this day and age would a semi-illiterate steal a fountain pen? When Dod alienated still another live-in aide by being accusatory, dictatorial, and unappreciative, Peter would numbly contact the Latino community center on New Hope Church Road, where another off-the-books unfortunate could be found. Meanwhile up in New York, each new medical crisis involved rescheduling a raft of appointments with clients whom a freelancer could not afford to lose, in order for Peter, who was also his father’s health care proxy, to streak down south on flights like the one he was now in danger of missing.
He hadn’t been running things; he’d been run. He did his father’s taxes. He hired his father’s gardener. If only to service his father’s vanity, he kept the retired medical researcher’s AMA membership paid up. He ordered his father a crate of ruby-red grapefruits from Florida every Christmas. He’d put his own personal life and career on hold, while his siblings got off with rare, distracted Skype chats. For all his manly biceps, Peter remained the little boy in that first-grade photo: meek.
ARRIVING AT TERMINAL five by 7:05 p.m. was little short of a miracle. He had twenty-five minutes before the flight would board, and he’d checked in online. Rolling only carry-on, Peter should squeak onto the flight, just. It all depended on security.
The line wasn’t bad; February wasn’t a month for heavy travel. He made a futile effort to repress his compulsive incredulity that every day millions of people were forced to go through this elaborate tedium of queuing, disrobing, and being X-rayed because of the freakishly high likelihood—any likelihood being freakishly high—that passengers will blow up their own planes. (Don’t say “blow up.” Not even in a mumble.) In other walks of life, the same assumptions about humanity’s poor sense of self-preservation would dictate tall fences along every curb, lest pedestrians hurl themselves en masse into oncoming traffic. Or you wouldn’t even allow such a thing as cars, lest drivers plow blindly into concrete stanchions the moment your back was turned.
Enough. For the rest of this journey, he should focus on its purpose. False alarms had inured him to this errand, but this time it was pneumonia—or “ammonia,” as Dod had croaked on the phone, one of the several recent slips. If by now he might find in his father’s passing an element of relief, ample time remained to admit as much in the years to come. Just now, he should prepare for grief.
In a line full of seasoned fliers, there’s always one moron who waits until the last minute to pull all the crap from his luggage and holds everyone up.
Before he’d any firsthand experience of the parental fade to black, Peter would have imagined a softening, a rounding of edges, on the part of both parent and erstwhile child—as if both parties were scoops of ice cream placed for a benedictory moment in the sun, and all the rumples, ridges, and rills smoothed to leave uniform balls of benevolence. To the contrary, the aged seemed to seize only more stiffly into who and what they had always been—their rumples got bumpier, their ridges peaked, their rills ran deeper—so that if you could compare them to ice cream, it was more to the sort so hard that you couldn’t ram a spoon into the carton. Into his dotage ever more vainglorious, Dod was bafflingly unembarrassed by neighbors bringing pies, church congregants doing his grocery shopping, and volunteers from age-related charities replacing the rotten floorboards on his porch. He took the obeisance as his due. These many gestures would have constituted karmic goes-around-comes-around had the imperious codger ever done for others himself, but Daniel Dimmock had never in his life run chores for the elderly, much less baked anyone a pie.
More disconcertingly still, far from “softening” himself, far from gaining a sense of perspective on a father’s minor failings, which he might soon recall with a backhanded tenderness, ever since intuiting during yesterday’s phone call from Raleigh that this time his father wasn’t planning an encore, Peter had flushed with waves of rage. It was as if in the next day or two he had to fit in all the pique he’d suppressed for decades, because once his father was dead there’d be nothing to do with it—the way you scurry about duty-free spending the last of your foreign coinage on chocolate. There wasn’t any earthly point to fuming at a corpse.
Given that he had been through this dash to bid farewell several times, with its customary saying of last things, it would seem unlikely that there were any last things left to say. Nevertheless, Peter’s head roiled with speeches, and they resembled nothing like, Father, you’ve set such a fine example of a life well lived, and Esther, Luke, and I have always been grateful to enjoy such an accomplished, brilliant, distinguished, formidable … WHATEVER, since the one thing that fathead didn’t need was another compliment! Instead, Peter pictured railing at his father’s bedside, How come you think you’re so special? You never batted an eye at the hours and hours I spent—days, weeks even—arranging for your whole ground floor to be wheelchair-ramped in preparation for your return home with that hip, and getting the master bathroom ripped out, railed, and installed with a roll-in shower. I still have a life, or I did—I have kids who are young adults and need my counsel, but no! I have to fly back to RALEIGH.
“Sir—you’re up,” nudged the woman behind him, not unkindly.
“Oh, sorry!” Peter placed a premium on competent air travel, and hurried to remove his tablet, per usual providing the iPad its own separate, giant gray tray. He fished out his cell, change, and keys. He removed his overcoat, folding his sports jacket neatly beside it. Though its modest buckle shouldn’t have set off the detector, he slid his belt through the loops, and nestled it by the coats in a tidy coil. From the same prudence, he unstrapped his slender watch. He tugged off his shoes, ruing the second-day socks. He pulled out his Ziploc, no larger than one-quart size, containing shampoo, deodorant, and toothpaste, no more than three point four ounces or one hundred milliliters, making sure to put the baggie, in accordance with the standard specifications, on top of his overcoat, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE STUPID BAGGIE IS GOING INTO A GODDAMNED X-RAY.
Okay, yes, true—during this calm, methodic execution of his duties as a responsible flier, who completely understood that all these precautionary imperatives were contrived only for the safety of himself and his fellow passengers, he did feel a teensy-weensy twinge of irritation. The liquids protocol was inane. It had been roundly demonstrated that determined malefactors could concoct a successful science fair project with miniatures. Worse, the tiny bottles so consumed TSA agents, who took a malicious pleasure in confiscating costly moisturizers of three point five ounces, that they forgot entirely to look for detonators wired to big wads of Semtex. That was why the agency finally lifted the ban on cigarette lighters in carry-on luggage. In test runs, its officers had found the lighters all right, veritably every one, but had left the guns.
Peter scanned the signage—no sharp objects, explosives, or firearms—to confirm he’d been fully compliant. It was a creepy word, beloved of authorities everywhere, who treasured its ambience of simpering eagerness to please, spineless groveling, wormlike subservience, and pants-wetting terror. Compliance admitted of no resistance; if you pictured the word as a thing, it was floppy and flaccid and on the floor.
Raising a hand to the folks behind him in apology that he hadn’t initiated this striptease in more advance, Peter rushed his four plastic trays down the rollers, while opposite a languid TSA agent with bright green nails looked on sullenly, blah-blahing in a monotone about liquids and gels. Once the last tray got traction on the rubber belt, he gave his pockets a nervous extra pat for a nail clipper or stray quarter. Another agent waved him wordlessly to the scanner—the guy’s only job. Nice work if you could get it.
The curved clear plastic doors opened, à la Star Trek elevator—this whole clunky pod thing had that cheap, knocked-together look of a set for 1960s television—and he assumed the position, fitting his socks into the blobby footprints, lifting his arms in submission. He’d read in the Times a while back that these machines were rarely serviced, and the quantity of whatever carcinogenic rays they shot through you was frequently off the charts. For a short while thereafter he had insisted on being a “male opt-out,” delighting in putting staff to the extra trouble of a pat down. But the thrill wore off. They’d snap on latex gloves as if he carried some disease, clearly put out by this asshole who couldn’t get with the program, the while feigning all that respectfulness: “Now, I’m going to run only the back of my hand down your inseams.” At some point, a bubbly TSA officer had assured him that all those old health concerns had been seen to, and now Advanced Imaging Technology was perfectly safe. He had no reason to believe her. Yet from laziness, as well as resignation, because in the end the tyrants of antiterrorism would always triumph, ever since he’d been compliant.
You know, I finally looked up the Dimmock Shunt online— Peter’s bedside tirade had meanwhile resumed—and it turns out that nobody uses it anymore! So you did your part for renal medicine back in the day—a day over fifty years ago—what of it? Esther learned Chinese. CEOs of massive American companies ask your daughter for her advice. Esther is important. Luke is on TV. For that matter, why was it always so important to you to be important? Me, I may not have changed history or pulled in big bucks, but at least I have a feel for other people, don’t I? Since it’s hardly a surprise that as an MD you never worked with flesh-and-blood patients, more “drooling imbeciles” you might actually have had to talk to. And my clients like me, believe it or not—and they get better, they learn to speak more clearly, they remember more words or get them out without sputtering, and afterwards they’re thankful—
“Over here, sir.”
“What?”
The African American agent who issued him off to the side would not have looked nearly as fat if her pants weren’t so tight. Their waist bit at an unflattering point, cutting under rather than containing her stomach. The uninflected flatness of her voice reminded Peter of his “subtle” acting in college. Had his mind not been clamorous with that saying of last things, he might have noticed: perhaps far enough into her shift that the time had started to drag, yet not so advanced into her workday as to be buoyed by the proximity of its conclusion, this youngish federal employee exuded the kind of boredom that is dangerous.
“Raise your arms, sir?”
Peter was stymied. He’d taken out his tablet, removed his coats and shoes and change and keys, put his dinky toiletries in that insipid baggie, surrendered in stocking feet in their unconvincing plastic pod, and now there was still more procedure, more insincere suspicion, more Mother May I. Fair enough, he duly thrust out his arms on either side, as if to do that minute arm-circle exercise that looked lame but made your shoulders ache like a bastard. Yet he also allowed himself to say aloud, along with the suggestion of an eye roll, albeit brief and certainly not overdone, “Oh, for pity’s sake.”
And that was a big mistake.
For two reasons, the first being obvious, since the cardinal rule of air travel was Keep Your Head Down. It was as if he’d barely survived a mass murder, and had been lying motionless amid the bodies. But rather than continue to play dead, in emitting Oh, for pity’s sake, he had effectively jumped up and shouted, “Wait! Over here! You missed one!”
The second reason Peter knew the grumble would prove a grave misjudgment was neurological: it connected mind with mouth. At airport security, your sole protection from capricious persecution, arbitrary search and seizure, and indefinite detention without charge was the privacy of your head. An eternal infuriation for enforcers of every sort, a riot of apostasy, sedition, and mutinous insult—your pants make you look fat—was more than possible to entertain with disgraceful impunity just so long as these unacceptable sentiments were hermetically contained between ear, right, and ear, left. But to continue to provide a bouncy castle where a host of emotions lethal in the open air—disgust, contempt, derision—could imperviously leap, carouse, and interplay, this small, rounded safe house couldn’t have any holes. Where the brain most commonly sprang a leak was around the upper and lower jaws.
With a warning glare after that for pity’s sake impertinence, the TSA agent began tracing his spread legs and outstretched arms with a black plastic wand, which like all their other kit looked phony. It recalled those IED-divining gizmos some shyster had sold to the Iraqi army, in which its soldiers continued to place a superstitious faith at checkpoints even after the implement had been exposed as containing nothing but an unactivated credit card.
Alas, once mind was fatally connected with mouth, it was the dickens to close the valve. So the self-preservational part of Peter—which kept him from, say, hurling himself into traffic—tried frantically to summon his mental plumbers: Hurry, this is an emergency, I need to shut the fuck up. But until his cranial tradesmen answered the call, the back-sass percolating through his skull would dribble right into terminal five.
“But I already took out all the coins, the keys,” Peter objected, his tone perhaps not overtly hostile but certainly a tad testy, when it should have been obliging, obsequious, sniveling even, and a far better line of attack would have run something like, I’m so sorry, Officer, I seem to have made some grievous error that is all my fault, and I deeply regret putting you to any unnecessary extra trouble.
“This scanner isn’t a metal detector,” she droned.
Which he knew, really, he supposed, he hadn’t been focused, and getting that wrong was flustering, vexation being the very antithesis of what was required: perfect self-control. So when she ordered, “Empty your pockets, sir”—there was no please—he didn’t say, Oh, yes, certainly, sorry, whatever did I forget about? Why, you poor officers, you must get so tired of us scatterbrained passengers never getting the procedure right no matter how many times we go through this, but:
“I did everything I was supposed to. If on top of the iPad and the shoes and the coats, the keys and the change and the belts, you’re also supposed to completely and utterly empty all your pockets of absolutely everything—down to the fluff, and the threads, and the grit—the signs, or at least one of the officers out front, should have said so.”
In concert with this inadvisable disquisition, Peter was indeed emptying his pockets; he was complying. But within reach, there was no table or surface of any sort on which to pile what little he could scrounge from his jeans: a crumple of dollar bills; a used tissue; a plastic unbreakable comb, bent by the curve of his buttock; in the watch pocket, perhaps having gone through the wash, an individually wrapped, long-forgotten cool-blue mint, soft and turning white; a to-do list (“take out trash”; “check in online”; “pick up and freeze small Junior’s cheesecake for Dod, even if he won’t live to eat it”); two tablets of Tylenol in a scrap of Saran Wrap in case of a headache now a virtual certainty. So he put the detritus on the floor. Since there really was nowhere else to put the stuff, the functionary might plausibly have forgiven his depository of choice, if only he had stooped to display these miserable wares in a suitably cringing spirit. While he certainly wasn’t acting cowed, Peter would still have characterized himself as merely “placing” these offerings at the official’s feet. Yet perhaps an observer who described him instead as “slamming” the wad of singles onto the linoleum would have been exaggerating only by an increment or two.
Her boredom moderated by a hint of relish, the plump overseer cried, “Supervisor!”
Just then, Peter made a connection between a last lump at the very bottom of his right front pocket and the scanner’s output screen—on which a bland outline of a figure in a posture of surrender was accented by a single red spot on one thigh, like a child’s representation of a boo-boo. His fingers closed around the source of this nonsense: a Chap-Stick. That was the boo-boo.
By the time the supervisor showed up—a swaggering thirtyish black guy in dreadlocks; oh, great, this encounter had every capacity to escalate into a race matter—Peter had placed the offending item amid the sad little pile of paper and plastic wrap on the floor, which looked so like trash that next he’d be accused of littering. He’d resumed his feet-spread stance and—because, after all, he had never been given permission to put them back down—thrust his arms back out, fingers outstretched, once again in seeming preparation for arm circles.
“You got a problem, mister?” the supervisor challenged, coming an intimidating inch or so too close. “You gonna be my problem?”
“No, sir,” Peter said, jutting his chin but not in the man’s direction. Avoiding the superior’s gaze, he trained his own at a forty-five degree angle to the agent’s face. Absurdly, he kept his arms extended. Bend-over-backward obedience could double as defiance. “I’ve done everything that was asked of me, sir.”
“You gonna pick that stuff up off the floor?”
“Yes, sir. If you say so, sir. But I was ordered to take everything out of my pockets, sir.” Peter had seen enough boot-camp movies to bark rigidly at attention like a green recruit.
“You in my house,” the man purred, taking another half step into Peter’s personal space. “Don’t disrespect me in my house.”
Peter couldn’t help it; the mental plumbers had never shown up. “Begging your pardon, sir. With all due respect, sir. This is not your house. This is a public airport, sir.”
So that was that. Allowed to scoop up his Kleenex, his to-do list, his ChapStick, his Tylenol, Peter was issued off to the little white room.
IN THE ISLAMIC State not long before, several women of Raqqa had been whipped for cladding themselves in abayas that were too tight and wearing Western makeup. But more than one immodest captive was given five extra lashes for “not being meek enough when detained.”
Thus any agitation, or even the very fraudulent deference of which TSA agents themselves were masters, had now given way to a rueful, solitary repose.
Holding the specimen between thumb and middle finger, Peter Dimmock contemplated the source of his undoing. The ChapStick was the original kind, whose black-and-white wrapper had not changed appreciably in his lifetime. He never bought the brand’s more innovative lip balms—not even tame variants like spearmint and strawberry, much less candy cane, or cake batter—because his father always used the original flavor, and he liked the smell. Peter associated that almost medical waxy plainness with his boyhood, when Dod was still “Father,” and would lean down and smack his youngest on the cheek, leaving an invisible smear. He never wiped it off. It emanated a residual waft of unadorned masculinity, of a piece with his father’s folded, freshly laundered cotton handkerchiefs, starched white shirt collars, and cool-blue-mint breath. Self-respecting men of Daniel Dimmock’s generation would never be caught dead with cake batter lip balm.
Older and rechristened, Dod stopped kissing his sons, settling for a shoulder clap, or a handshake once they were grown. Thus Peter associated the smell of that original-flavor ChapStick with the unabashed adoration of a little boy, not yet compromised by the curse of mature clear-sightedness. If only because it was one of the sole props in his possession—they said they’d retrieve his tablet, coats, and carry-on, but no one seemed in any hurry—he ran the balm around his lips, which were dry. The smell was the same, and recalled his father in sharp relief, with a rush of affection this time, and then he knew he would never wish to launch into a harangue at the poor man’s bedside about how the Dimmock Shunt was obsolete.
The officer who eventually grilled him about “making a scene” in airport security, “refusing to obey an officer’s instructions” (flagrantly untrue), “flying into a rage” (TSA-speak for becoming mildly irked) and “endangering his fellow passengers” was visible for half an hour through the crack of the office door, exuding that time-killing idleness that in an earlier era would have expressed itself with a cigarette. Foolishly, Peter had committed the one unforgivable crime in the world of air travel—which wasn’t, of course, holding a box cutter to a flight attendant’s throat, but having a bad attitude—for which he had to be made an example, lest other fliers come to imagine that they were within their rights to get annoyed. Thus this wait was deliberate, its length carefully calculated to make him miss his plane.
Peter was raised in a family that taught him a great deal about power, especially about not having any—which should have been ideal training for flying from any airport in America in the twenty-first century. TSA agents were deputized with the kind of petty power that was especially horrifying because it wasn’t really petty. They could ensure that you would be a no-show at a lecture you’d been engaged to give all year, damaging your professional reputation and having what would have been a lucrative honorarium withdrawn. They could make you sacrifice your hotel deposit or miss your own wedding. They could keep you from being present at the birth of your grandchildren. And they could most certainly guarantee that you would not see your father one last time before he died.