HE SKIPS THE movie premiere. He uses a trick remembered from his childhood, heating the thermometer on the bedside lamp lightbulb while his wife’s back is turned.
“A hundred and nine!” she says. “That can’t be right.”
“Regardless,” the funny man replies, “it’s a fever, and honestly, I feel like shit. Is it okay if we don’t go?” His wife sits on his side of the bed and pushes his hair clear of his forehead.
“You don’t feel that warm.”
The funny man chokes up a cough. “Maybe if I sleep a bit I’ll feel better and we can go.” He can see the disappointment in her eyes. She has been saying for the past week how much she is looking forward to the premiere. So exciting and glamorous, an excuse to dress up, real show business, not all the nastiness in the clubs with the drunks. The studio has reserved a suite in the city and they would stay overnight and order pancakes and waffles in the room in the morning and not worry about it because Pilar is taking care of the boy. At the same time the funny man knows she is worried about his fragility, the potential for events to tilt him off course. He would like to tell her that they won’t be missing anything anyway by explaining the whole crazy prank, but in the moment, even though he wasn’t sick in any real sense of the word, he doesn’t have the energy to get into it.
“No,” she says. “I’ll call, say we can’t make it.”
Forced into staying in bed all day by his ruse, he is unable to check any news reports to see if the event actually goes off without him as its target. The next morning at first light, with his wife still asleep, the funny man makes a show of stretching and rubbing his eyes as though he’s emerging from a hibernation before easing out of the bed to retrieve the paper from the front porch. There it is, front cover below the fold of the arts and entertainment section, the love interest throwing her head back, showing all her teeth as she pauses for the paparazzi on the red carpet. The article makes no mention of the movie itself, just the event attendees, including the “notable absence” of himself.
“They could’ve faked the paper,” he thinks. If they were being especially clever they could dummy up a copy and replace the real one at his door with this one. People did that kind of thing all the time for birthdays and anniversaries. Excited at his theory, he rushes to the computer and searches the news and there’s more than thirty stories about the event. Surely they couldn’t all be faked. But looking at each article closely he notices that they are basically the same, the kind of thing a computer program could generate from an initial template.
So tricky they are. They would be one step ahead of him if he weren’t one step ahead of them.
Wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, the funny man drives to the nearest convenience store and scrounges enough change out of the ashtray (he never carries a wallet anymore; it’s someone else’s job to worry about that stuff) to buy copies of every paper he can find, some of them not even in English. In one of the papers he finds an actual review of the movie, someone claiming to have seen it. The funny man recognizes the name of the reviewer. Surely this person would not compromise their professional integrity just for the sake of a television prank show. The words seem to swim around the page, making it hard to read and grasp the full context, but phrases like brilliant stupidity and sidesplitting idiocy float up and into his brain. He is pretty certain that the review is positive, that the movie is being recommended.
“Impossible,” the funny man thinks.
He drives home, scattering the newspapers out the window as he goes, and upon arrival splashes down into his bed next to his still-sleeping wife. This time, he really is feeling ill.
Throughout the week there are near-hourly texts from the funny man’s agent and manager updating him on the “expected gross” for the movie’s opening weekend. They tell him to get ready to “blast off” because he’s heading for the “stratosphere.” Each text reports a higher number than the last until the funny man flushes his phone down the toilet and that is the end of the reports. His wife (wrongly) reads his obvious distress as nerves. He wonders how they can be so out of sync, how she cannot detect the soul dread that is creeping through his body, threatening to consume him. There was a time where they were linked perfectly, where one could read the other and deliver the exact word, the exact touch, the exact gesture necessary in the moment.
He is thinking of when his father died. As the baby grew inside of his wife, the funny man’s father seemed to shrink. Right after the wedding, his father thought he’d thrown out his back taking the garbage to the can, but the X-rays showed something more serious, a tumor eroding his spine and another in his lung, the likely original culprit. His father had never smoked (not good for the nut to spend so much on cigarettes), but there it was. “Sometimes we don’t know why these things happen,” the oncologist with the beard that went too far down on his neck said. No shit. Through the chemo his father had to wear a hard, plastic, clamshell brace because the wrong move would snap his spine. There was almost no bone left. They called it a miracle that he even walked into the hospital for that first X-ray. What a dumb use of the word miracle. The brace ran from his groin to his chin and cinched down with Velcro in front and back. It took two people to assist him into it and it was only tight enough once the breath grunted out of him. When people would ask how he was doing, invariably the funny man’s father would say, “I can’t wait to get rid of this brace,” his only complaint, and the funny man’s mother would make agreement noises; what an improvement that will be, and all the while the funny man is thinking very loudly, so loudly that his thoughts seem to be screaming around the inside of his brain, that that brace is never coming off.
The funny man was right and he was wrong. The brace came off, but only once his father was in hospice, a well-tended midrange hotel room for the imminently dying. They’d been moved there from intensive care after the oncologist showed them the three-dimensional image of his father’s torso on the computer monitor. The doctor used a track ball to scroll from head to bottom, each image a slice of his father, collectively producing something with space and volume. The tumors scattered through every organ started as specks, then swelled in size as the technician scrolled through the body, before receding again. The chemo had had no real shot. Liver, pancreas, one of the kidneys, spleen, both lungs, all “compromised.”
His father was unconscious throughout his hospice stay. The funny man’s wife was in her eighth month with the boy, constantly uncomfortable, but still she was there, with the funny man and his mother in the hospice room, monitoring his father’s death. The caretakers at the hospice were lovely, like angels on Earth, knowing exactly when they should or should not do something, keeping them informed on the progression of things, having hot or cold beverages ready at just the right time, and still the funny man had the urge to punch each and every one of them in the face. His father’s head had been shaved bald for the chemo and blue veins traced across the skull. His skin was a sack for his bones. Dry, white crud collected in the corners of his lips. His breath smelled rich, earthy, elemental. All of the hospital monitoring machines were stripped out at hospice so the only sound was his father’s breathing: slow, shallow gasps.
Until the girl with the harp knocked softly and introduced herself and explained her purpose, how she was both a harpist and a researcher investigating the effect of music on the terminally ill. She looked like a harpist to the funny man. Odd. Harpists are odd, because what kind of person chooses to play the harp? Impractical, flaky people. Harps are both gigantic and fragile. Only people with station wagons or cargo vans can play the harp. People who burn too much incense in their crummy apartments, annoying their neighbors who do not enjoy the smell of hippie, play the harp. And additionally, what kind of person chooses to play the harp for dying people? Absurd. The moment you make a fan they are meeting their maker. No percentage in that.
She had long, impossibly thick hair that hung like black ropes and wore a dress that looked almost medieval, bunched and gathered velvet. She wore heavy wool stockings and flat, elaborately strapped sandals. She explained that she recorded the pulse and respiration of the dying person before and after she played and even though they were almost always unconscious and seemingly insensible, the vast majority of the time the music brought beneficial effects.
“We find,” she said, “that it brings them ease.”
The funny man was ready to send her on her way, to tell her to get the fuck out of there with her stupid instrument and her dumb clothes, when his wife gripped his wrist and said, “that sounds lovely.”
And it was. Boy, was it. The woman started by introducing herself to the funny man’s father, using his name and explaining what she wanted to do for him. She touched him softly on the temple and then the slack skin at his arm before laying two fingers on his wrist to gauge his pulse.
Who knows what she played? The funny man had not heard harp music before and has not since. The funny man and his wife sat together on a couch near the window, his mother next to the bed, opposite the harpist, holding her husband’s hand. The notes sounded so warm to the funny man, soft and tangible, and he laid his head back and shut his eyes and the tears streamed from beneath them. But this was not sobbing. The funny man’s breaths remained easy, regular, slowing even as the music continued. It’s just that his eyes would not stop unleashing the tears like they had been made for this very purpose. After awhile the harpist began singing along with her playing. No words, just sounds. The word contralto emerged in the funny man’s head and he knew it was right in describing her voice and that felt like a little miracle because no way did he know that word. His wife reached for his hand and held it and he had no idea how long the woman played and sang, but it felt endless and too short both, this overwhelming feeling of peace, and when the woman finished the music still seemed to linger in the room as she touched his father again at the temple and chest and wrist and finally wished him “farewell.”
His father died a couple of hours later, peacefully, the blue veins on his head flushing red briefly before going pale. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to the funny man and his wife understood, letting it be what it was: terrible, earth-shattering, not minimizing or reducing, even though their child was due imminently and he was going to have to pull it together for that. She trusted he’d be there and he was.
That was really something, the funny man thinks.
On the eve of the movie’s worldwide release, the funny man looks at his beautiful wife in their beautiful kitchen, spreading peanut butter on stalks of celery, a snack for the boy. He can hear Pilar bustling upstairs, running the vacuum in the hallway. There is a window above the sink that overlooks the back yard, where there is a creek that gives up little toads for the boy to collect. They are no bigger than a man’s thumbnail and their colors blend with the mud, but the boy is patient and therefore good at catching them and placing them in shoeboxes with holes punched in the top. Come evening he always releases them back to the wild. The yard is so spacious it takes half a day for a team of three to tend it. Light comes through the window and strikes his wife’s hair, making it shine. They are surrounded by abundance. He is rich in every way imaginable. He should be the happiest motherfucker in the world.