CHAPTER ELEVEN

47.

Dr. “You-can-call-me-Josh” Weinstein scheduled Operation Sawdust for the first day of Sara’s spring vacation, a date I asked for specifically, telling Dr. Weinstein that that way, if I died, she could save the plane fare. Weinstein raised his eyebrows less in surprise and more in an attempt not to grin. Recognizing with doctorly insight that I was one of those patients who’d be debilitated by false confidences and frightened by half-truths, he had been direct and honest with me. With a 50/50 chance, I had better odds than Harrah’s, Lake Tahoe.

It wasn’t the raw hardiness of ‘Give it to me straight, Doc.’ Rather, my attitude was formed by my old familiarity with Death. Having seen something of Death himself, Josh Weinstein understood my attitude. After explaining the possibilities in detail, he joked with me about the things he wouldn’t know until I had journeyed halfway into the Absence of Angels.

I liked him. “You’re the best, Josh,” I’d say.

“That, I am,” he’d reply. In an age when being good enough was an aspiration, it was refreshing to meet someone whose goal was to be the best at what he did, and I would grin a grin as big as a Bentley.

Sara didn’t want to talk about it and she took my playful references to Operation Sawdust like vicious personal criticism.

“Death is strange,” I’d say, and she’d look stung, distrustful and hurt as though I’d confessed to having an affair, as meaningless as it all might be, ultimately.

“I would appreciate not hearing about it,” she’d say. “I do not want to talk about it.”

But I needed to talk about it, not out of some morbid desire to reap sympathy or tolerance, but out of a need to know and understand everything I could about how I felt, which I could get only by trying to describe it.

“When I was little, the first time I flew in a plane I was frightened by the way the wings moved up and down like a pterodactyl’s. My uncle taught me about stress and flex and I learned that the time to be afraid was when the wings stopped flapping, not while they were.”

I told her this in an attempt to explain how knowing made me unafraid; all I feared was the vague discomfort of not knowing.

“I was quite the fun child to fly with, after that. I’d make sure everyone saw how the wings were flapping. I thought that if they learned what I’d learned, they’d be unafraid, too. Mostly they ignored me, looked away from me, pretended they didn’t hear me, lit cigarettes and ordered thirds on drinks.”

“I would’ve, too,” she said.

With the permission of the Tompsons, Sara moved into the apartment above the garage. When Delia worried about what her father might feel, Sara laughed and said that being a hard-line liberal was almost as hard as being an orthodox Jew.

“There are rules you have to follow consistently, whether you like them or not. Dad will work it out. Besides, his defense of his dissertation is coming up so I doubt he’ll even notice that I’m not around.”

In happy moments, when Sara and I were lying awake together in bed, I’d forget how upset she could become when I mentioned dying and I’d slip and say something like, “At least I’ve been in love once in my life. That’s more often than …”

“Stop it, Albert,” she would say. “If you don’t, I’m going to move out. Stop seeing you, and move home. Seriously, Alley, I mean it. Promise.”

“I promise.”

It wasn’t easy. It had begun to seem to me that it was not Death alone who was boring, but what people did with Death. To me, He seemed comical, like the fool in Lear; and like King Lear, I was almost grateful to have Him around. He touched everything. Even the aftermath of lovemaking was like a small death, and it was that which made making love with her so much fun. After each subsequent time, I felt like a virgin again, reborn, clean and fresh and unburdened by the worries so many men have about what to say in the harsh morning light to women they don’t love. Oral sex still embarrassed me slightly, especially when it was Sara’s oral and my sex. True, too, too much touching—hand-holding, hugging, squeezing, caressing—made me feel not embarrassed but slightly foreign. But I was learning to enjoy it; I even looked forward to the day I might be able to give Elanna a real brotherly hug. True to my nature and race, despite these small quirky feelings, I soon began to feel comfortable wearing only a T-shirt in the privacy of the apartment over the Tompsons’ garage.

Sometimes, though, I’d look at my life, at the miracle of love, and think, “No young man deserves this happiness. I don’t deserve such happiness, anyway,” and I’d slip again and mention that Death had the viscosity of a bad fart in a vacuum chamber, telling Sara what disguises I’d seen Death wear, trying to make her laugh, to feel with me how laughable Death really was.

“I told you,” she would say, sighing past her threat to leave me and move out if I mentioned it again. “You are not going to die.”

“You’re probably right,” I’d say, feigning disappointment. “After all, Death still owes me one.”

Sara would slam out of the room and go for long walks on which I would follow her at a distance, shouting apologies.

I was not trying to be cruel. Laura P. had once said it was a miracle that I was still in two pieces. Now, during those months, faced with the potential of Death, with an inward assurance the origins of which were as difficult to discover as the origins of sawdust, I felt as though the two pieces were becoming one.

At the beginning of spring term, I had attended classes with Sara, reading her assignments in history and art, and often studying with her late into the night. A few of the lectures were worth the walk to campus, but some of the teachers seemed to be unnerved by the presence of an auditor who listened and thought about what they were saying instead of taking down notes as though they were the words of the prophets. Other teachers were just plain boring, producing old ideas like magicians extracting planaria from a top hat, seeming better suited to professions as keypunch operators. Gradually, though I went on doing the homework with Sara, I stopped attending the lectures, choosing to spend my time the way people faced with the potential of death do, getting things in order. Since I didn’t have many of my own things to order, I painted the Tompsons’ porch, mended window screens, replaced and puttied panes of glass, mowed the lawns, or read. Whereas I had hated mowing lawns as a boy, I now found that even a task as mundane and sneezy as that gave me a certain pleasure and that pleasure was increased when neither Delia nor the Proctor redid what I had finished; they always appreciated what I’d done as though it were really something important. Given those feelings, along with my increasingly cheerful mood, it was no accident that when I repointed the bricks on the chimney, I buried the top-of-the-line Swiss Army knife in a hollowed brick like a time capsule.

“It belongs there,” I told Sara, who surprised me in the act.

“The joy of daily tasks,” she said.

“I feel like Wonder Bread,” I said as I cleaned up. Sara was already into her class work. “Vitamin enriched and puffed full enough with air to float.”

“Thanks a whole lot,” Sara said, looking over the covers of the book resting on her lap. “What’s that make me, Skippy?”

This joy kept increasing, the nearer the operation came, and when I wrote Elanna, downplaying the upcoming operation, telling her it wasn’t much more serious than having a mole removed, I said I was happy. In fact, I was, with an elation and exuberance that made Death seem smaller than ever before and that made unhappiness seem only a bad dream. I began writing happy letters to nearly everyone I could think of, letters that some readers might think mad instead of happy because of the way everything related to anything else—in other words, because of the endless metaphors. Saguaro Cactuses were billboards if you looked at them without undue reverence; a hawk was an X-15.

Sanchez wrote back, happy for me and so infected by the exuberance of my long letter that his letter seemed entirely composed of verbs. But then Sanchez was happy, himself. Rachel’s pregnancy was coming along without complications.

“Soon, there’ll be one more red bogger interfacing with this patchwork world of ours.”

The trading post had flourished since I’d left, which Sanchez attributed to Johnny Three Feet having been carted off and imprisoned. While Sanchez didn’t dare to say that Johnny had kept the post from doing well, he did suspect that Johnny had been just weird enough to disrupt the consumption of goods by tourists, as though Johnny gave them indigestion. The post had expanded. There was a paved patio area in front and a parking area for cars and buses enclosed by a curb, and during the summer, they could count on a dozen or more tour buses a day stopping to dump money into the tills on their way to the Grand Canyon or London Bridge or Zion National Park. He ended by paying lip service to the disappointment of not having me return to work with him the next summer, yet, as he said, it was probably for the best.

“Given the torture of time, Rachel’s feelings towards you may atrophy if not change, and then we can all visit happily together.”

In a postscript he added that he knew he’d like Sara when he met her, and enclosed in the envelope were some Polaroids of the post—one with Grandfather perched on the seat of his Raleigh out front.

Elanna didn’t write back. It wasn’t because she didn’t think of me; nor was it because she hadn’t gotten my letters. Maybe she hadn’t received all of them, but I’d heard the sounds of envelopes being torn open above the low-ratio growl of a jeep as it wound into the hills behind Iraklion and odds favored some of those envelopes being mine. One day, after I got a letter from father saying he had written Elanna, I realized what Elanna was doing, and when Sara got home from classes she found me trimming the Tompsons’ hedge back to the size of an incipient bush in my distress.

“Shit,” I told Sara. “Elanna’s flying home for my operation.”

“How do you know?”

“I phoned TWA. They said seat 17-A had been booked from Athens to San Francisco on a flight that arrives the day before Operation Sawdust.”

“So?” Sara said.

“I phoned Pan Am first. Row 17 is unbooked on their 747. Elanna always flies either Pan Am or TWA, and she always sits in 17-A when she flies west.”

“She’s got a right to be there,” Sara said. “Don’t you want her to come?”

“No. It’s a waste of her time.”

“Don’t lie to me. You’ll be glad to have her there. Besides, you can’t keep her away any more than you can me.”

“Huh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Sara was right. I was always glad to see Elanna.

Mother even responded to my increasing exuberance, writing me formal letters interspersed with dialogue from T.V. westerns. Not unsurprisingly, mother’s favorite programs and movies were about cowboys and Indians, and sometimes she rewrote the scenes to make the culprit Indians allegories of evil. Mother never would forgive father for marrying her.

I worried most about father. He typed me letters, photocopied them, and mailed me the photocopies, sometimes forgetting to sign them.

“What’s he doing, collecting an archive?” I asked Sara, showing her the letters.

They were long letters. Instead of delineating the mowing of lawns or washing of cars or installing of ceiling fans and solar hot-water heaters—the normal fatherly tales—they were about the Lord God (never God, always the Lord God), retirement, or the circumstances of my birth. Addressed to “Dear Son Albert,” his letters were trying to tell me something in a very unfunny way, and it was then that I began to understand how my birth had skewed father’s emotions and bruised his sense of humor. Remembering the time when my uncle had thought father was morally angry at him for shacking up with Karen Manowitz, it dawned on me that father preached at moments Grandfather would tease, not because he liked preaching but because his sense of humor had been stolen from him the day I was born.

“No wonder father’s jokes were never funny,” I said to Sara.

“What’s wrong?” Delia asked that evening around the fireplace.

“Alley’s just realized that his father loves him,” Sara told her.

“Elanna used to tell me that father was a happy-go-lucky man, a boisterous man, before I was born,” I said. “It seems strange that it’s taken this long to connect the father I know with the one Elanna knew. I guess finding Death loitering about your son’s crib like a sleazy dope dealer would murder your sense of humor.”

Later, as Sara was falling asleep and I was lying with my hands clasped beneath my head staring into the monstrous dark, I said, “The world’s a funny place, you know?”

“Not exactly funny,” Sara said, yawning, her head sinking farther into the two pillows she slept on. “More a crazy place. Humor is just your way of describing it.” She rolled over on her side and tucked her hands under her head.

“That,” I whispered, “is a lot like what Grandfather might say.”

“Ummm.”

Sara and Delia and the Proctor fought valiantly against the glowering mood that descended upon each of them as Operation Sawdust approached. It was a contrast and contradiction to my own mood, which kept getting more amused. I understood and forgave, though even the Proctor heaved out sentimental statements about “finding one’s true children”—by which he meant Sara and me. I tried to convince them—despite Sara’s threats to wire my jaws shut—that while I could die, I wasn’t going to. I tried to make them believe that the tumor was not malignant, but I was left feeling, most times, like a baby in an oxygen tent looking out, raising his fists to show mother that he had it. They were unconvinced, and by the time I was to leave for Palo Alto, I felt like I was freeze-dried, crystals of myself that needed tears to make me real.

The weekend before I left, Delia and Sara cooked me a special dinner of my favorite food—green enchiladas, refritos, tostadas, chile rellenos.

“In case the plane needs help getting off the ground,” Sara said, doing her best to joke.

“I may not even need a plane. Just a soft place to land when the rocket fuel is spent,” I said.

Dinner was a quiet affair during which the scraping of forks and knives punctuated the erratic spatters of conversation. If I felt freeze-dried earlier, I began to feel as though I’d grown a large oozing pustule, Cyclops fashion, in the center of my forehead. I understood, at moments, that the silent heaving of conversation was for me as well as because of my leaving, and I forgave them. Other moments, I felt like a stranger on a subway, them looking at me only to look away when I looked back, pretending that I wasn’t really there and I was disappointed, angered, wanting to make them realize their proximity emotionally if not geographically, and then less angry at them and more at myself for not being able to make everything all right for each of them. “People have disappeared on me all my life,” I thought, pitying myself. “They are trying to make me not here.”

By the time dinner was over and we’d moved to the living room for brandy, I felt like a black Mormon. Against that feeling, I excused myself and went to the apartment over the garage, and wrote a note to Grandfather. When I returned, I brought with me a pot thrown and signed by Laura P. and a kachina of Water Coyote. The pot, its spiral designs spinning east and west on opposite sides, I gave to the Tompsons; the kachina to Sara; and only then was I satisfied that they weren’t disappearing on me but were only saddened by the possibility that I might disappear on them.

They understood the gifts without my having to explain, without me having to tell them that these were to be kept for me, not in remembrance of me, unless.… “But,” I reminded myself, “Death does owe me one. So, if ever, then now.” I said that as much to myself as to the luna moth beating against the window of the living room, as Proctor Tompson stirred the embers of the fire, refilled brandy snifters, and then stood, gazing meditatively into the middle distance.

People came by. Even though the Proctor was wise enough to foresee Sara’s wanting to spend most of the evening alone with me, he also knew that if we were to be alone too much she and I would only be sad, and I did not want sad. So he’d gone ahead and invited a few people by for drinks.

Doctor—“Professor, as yet,” he reminded me—Quinin dropped by to give me a leather-bound copy of The Scarlet Letter and an up-to-date authoritative bibliography of Hawthorne scholarship.

“I’m touched,” I said.

“It might benefit you to investigate some of the work on Hawthorne,” he said, accenting the second syllable of Hawthorne’s name in imitation of the way other scholars accented the first syllable of Thoreau’s name. As if it mattered.

“I doubt I ever will,” I whispered to Sara, who grinned courageously as I handed the books to her to set aside. “Still, I am touched.”

Captain Morrisey, bringing a six-pack of Dos Equis, arrived while Joanne and Woody were hanging their jackets in the entry hall closet. Sara was cool to Woody; but even he looked good to me, and I was happy to see Joanne. She had shared the first faint beginnings of my love for Sara and, though she had not entirely found love, she was as happy for me as when I’d passed German with her help. If that meant having Woody’s polyester smile sliding around the room like oil on the water, so be it.

“Hey,” Captain Morrisey said.

“Captain,” I said, giving him a salute less out of respect for his uniform and more out of friendship and gratitude for the evenings he and I had spent talking over pitchers of beer. The Captain had been the only one in town who understood how I felt as Operation Sawdust pulled me into it. He knew about facing Death, and he knew what it felt like to lose someone close to him to Death. Unlike my uncle, the Captain never imagined that his buddy, blown away by the Claymore, wasn’t dead. But then, the Captain had seen his buddy die, and the effects of a Claymore don’t leave much for the imagination to work with. I respected, more and more as the time had passed, the Captain’s pain, his way of keeping his friend’s memory alive. He could have been Indian, the way he could talk with his dead friend, know what his friend might have said—but for the fact that the Captain was Scotch Irish.

Morrisey was nervous, following me into the kitchen when I went for ice.

“Listen,” he said. “I wanted you to have this.” He handed me a box the size and shape of a jewelry box for a necklace.

“Before you open it, I want to explain. It may seem strange. But I looked around for something to give you to, well, wish you the best. Something to remember me by …”

“Besides my I-O from the draft board?”

He laughed. “Yeah. Besides that. Anyway, I did some shopping and nothing seemed to be the right thing. The other day I was sitting in my office after showing training films to some new cadets, thinking back on how we met, et cetera.” Morrisey said, “et ke-TER-a.” “The way you are, the way I am. What might mean something to you. I thought of Clarence and, well, I figured this might be something you would value.”

I opened the box. Inside was a jagged sliver of metal, shrapnel, I guessed, from a Claymore Mine.

“It’s …,” the Captain began.

“I know. Thanks. Thank you. I know what it means to you.” I tried to grin. Reached out to shake his hand and spontaneously gave him half a hug.

“Best of luck, ex-Cadet Hummingbird,” the Captain said.

“Ugh,” Sara said, when I showed the shrapnel to her later, alone in our apartment. “Do you think that it’s actually one of the pieces …?”

“I think so,” I said, laying the shrapnel beside the gifts my friends had given to me—the book from Sara’s father, the sliver of metal shaped like the blade of a knife, the E.P. Curtis photograph of Wichita Walter Ross the Tompsons had given me. Looking at these odds and ends, I knew how truly funny Death was, for certain and for sure, in the way his presence made people try to tell you that they loved you, and I realized that I loved all of them, at least in part because of Sara. When you love one person as completely as I did her, you discover that love is the one feeling that is not only infinite but self-perpetuating and self-increasing. Loving her made me able to love the Tompsons, Captain Morrisey, Joanne, and it allowed me enough good will not to hate Woody but only find his actions at times hateful.

“What are you thinking about?” Sara said.

“Nothing.”

“You sure? You looked so sad for a second. I thought maybe you were thinking about why David didn’t bother to come by tonight. Have you talked to him lately?”

I shook my head, no. “Seriouser and seriouser,” I said, smiling. David had grown more and more serious and not, in my opinion, in a good way. Heavy described it best. He and I had fought over beliefs: He maintained that my beliefs made me flip; I maintained that his ought to lift him up not sink him in the quicksand of depression like a dinosaur. I still loved him, missed him; loved him enough to let our former friendship become a thing held in the mind like a relic that could be dusted off from time to time, even invoked as exemplary, but alive only in memory. I assumed he missed me as well, equally, which was why he would not have come by tonight to say farewell.

“I wasn’t thinking about David,” I said.

“What, then?”

“About how funny …,” I began. The look on Sara’s face made me stop and, my eye spotting the shrapnel which I would hang around my neck on a chain like the other talismen I bore with me, I said, “How funny it is that people keep giving me sharp objects, like knives.”

Sara’s foreboding expression became a smile. Relieved. “Come here,” she said seductively, patting the bed. “Maybe I could have you in my mouth tonight?” she whispered, her eyes glittering with that special sprightliness she could have.

“No. Not tonight. If you don’t mind. Tonight I’d like to be inside you.”

Afterwards, as I lay awake staring up into the Absence of Angels through the roof of the garage, counting the stars like sheep, Sara turned to me, running her fingertips lightly over my chest.

“Promise me one thing, Alley?”

“Sure,” I said, expecting it to have something to do with loving her forever.

“Don’t ever give up laughing.” Her fingertips slowed, becoming heavier as they caressed. Rubbing me always put her to sleep; were I to rub her, she’d stay awake all night, mostly because I rubbed her so rarely.

“I’m a lucky man,” I said, unwilling to be seduced by satisfaction into sleep. I wanted to stay awake all night long, to talk, to hold.

“You’re a wonderful man,” Sara said, doing her best to stifle a yawn. She began to breathe heavily, a sure indication that she would soon be drifting towards the Absence of Angels.

“Sara?” No answer. Watching her even rhythmic breathing and the depression of the dimple she had on her right cheek when she smiled gently I thought, “I am I.”

Drifting down from the Absence of Angels, Grandfather’s voice said, “It happens. Especially at times like this.”

48.

Father met me at the Pacific Southwest Airlines gate beside the metal detector where the security guards were hassling a dark man in a blue turban and gray beard, who was wearing a large button that read “Allah is Greater.”

“Than what?” I said to father.

“Oh. Hi, son,” father said, as though he hadn’t seen me walk up to him.

He drove me straight to the Stanford Hospital. His pauciloquence made me wonder if I had a dog I didn’t know about which had just died.

“So, how’s tricks?” I said as we cruised the Bayshore freeway.

“Huh? Fine,” he said. “I phoned the trading post. He’s on his way. Alone. Your grandmother just isn’t up to the trip.”

“Besides, Laura P. hates Grandfather’s driving. She says he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him.”

“Hmm. Fine,” father said.

“Did you know that the wings on planes actually flap up and down like a bird’s?”

“Fine.”

“Our pilot was stinko, though,” I said. The blank look on his face made him look, strangely, ageless, as though he might have been twenty-five as easily as he was forty-nine.

“Yes,” he said. “Fine.” He riveted the speedometer on fifty-five, obstinately staying in the middle lane despite the cars and trucks roaring past us on either side. Father had slowed down, some. “How was your flight?” he asked as we entered Palo Alto.

“Fine,” I said, laughing.

Father checked me into the hospital while I put my street clothes and my getaway tennies in a thin locker in my five-man ward, and changed into the backless shift that would be my costume for the next few weeks. Then he came down and sat beside the window, next to my bed. His head hung above his hands, which he kept opening and closing like a book he didn’t want to read but believed he should.

“Maybe you and I should go fishing, after this?” I said.

Father looked up from his hands. His lips were moving ever so slightly. “I’m not much of a fisherman,” he said quietly. “As you know.” He went back to lip-reading his hands.

I was almost grateful when the hard heels of mother’s flats could be heard clicking down the linoleum corridor.

“I knew he’d do something like this!” she shouted at the nurses working the nurse’s station. “He and his father. Just as I get everything back on track, they come up with something like this! Where is he?”

I could hear the tone of a nurse’s voice trying to calm mother’s hysteria, asking who he was, and then escorting her to the ward. The nurse gave me an oriental look and quickly disappeared.

“There you are,” mother said. Seeing father, she added, “Did you help him plan this?” Father just stared at her; his lips ceased moving. “Let me tell the both of you right this minute, I’m not about to let either of you destroy my life anymore.” Her head wavered back and forth like summer wheat.

“I’ll wait in the dayroom at the end of the hall,” father said, getting up and leaving without speaking to mother.

Mother clomped over beside the bed and opened her mouth. “Boom!” I shouted as loudly as I was able. She jumped. Boom did the trick, and her body relaxed like a tire punctured by a sixteen-penny nail.

“Hello, mother,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were frightened, pink around the edges like a rabbit trapped by a predator it doesn’t see clearly, and I realized that mother’s hysteria was not a form but yet an expression of love, concern. For a woman whose baby son was not supposed to have lived in the first place and whose eldest daughter had died by pregnancy, handling the forms of love would be nearly impossible. Where one time I might have been embarrassed or angered by mother’s behavior, I felt now very little but pity.

“Hey,” I said. “You don’t need to worry, mother. Everything will be all right. I promise.”

“Promises!” she said, the hysteria beginning to resurface. “Promises, promises …”

“I swear to you, mother. Tell you what. Why don’t you go on home and I’ll give you a call when the operation’s over. I’ll even come by your house when I’m released. In the meantime, try not to worry?”

“Well,” she said. She thought it over. Cautiously, as though avoiding dog-do on the floor, she tiptoed closer and touched my shoulder lightly with her fingers. “Well. Are you sure, Albert? You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

I reached up and patted her hand. “Yes. Now you go on. I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” she said. She tiptoed away from the bed toward the open door of the ward, looking a lot like a child whose balloon has just separated from its string and flown away. In the doorway she turned. “By the way. I nearly forgot. How was college?”

“It was great, mom. I did very well.”

After she left I was quiet, thinking about the things I might have said to her and wondering if any of them would have done any good. My ward mates tried to pretend as though they weren’t in the room and hadn’t heard the exchange between mother and father and me. The air hung humid with embarrassment. I didn’t care. Sara had long ago convinced me that a person can only embarrass himself, not the other person. Or was it Grandfather who taught me that? It was Sara who’d said once, after I’d misbehaved at a party and was apologizing for embarrassing her, “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the others. Or to yourself. I still love you.”

Father returned and sat on the empty bed across from me, silenced, I assumed, by memories which could never be anything but private. Watching him, his shoulders rounding over a body that was just beginning to slump with the first manifestations of age, noticing his high forehead rising above high but flat cheekbones, I was struck by the resemblance he was beginning to bear to Grandfather. “Father has large pores, too,” I thought.

I was in the process of hoping that I, too, would look like Grandfather someday—which meant looking like father—when father raised his head with a willful determination and, keeping his face blank and unemotional, said, “Would you be quiet? You’re always shooting your trap off,” thus overcoming the barrier of silence mother had left behind her in the room.

The man in the bed to my right chuckled.

To his right, another man of about the same age dropped the magazine he had been holding up in front of his face and smiled, grateful that some one had said something. The dark-skinned boy across the room looked over without smiling, his eyes searching out everyone else’s reaction to father’s words as though he not only did not understand English but had failed to understand the attempt at teasing in father’s tone.

Outside the window, beyond the screening wall, was a fountain in the center of a lawn.

“This is a great hotel,” I said to father, pointing to the fountain. “Hotels always make me feel right at home. Even the decor’s familiar.”

“So,” he said, getting up off the empty bed. “You’ve got books and magazines enough? Is there anything else you want before I take off?”

“I’ll be fine, Pop,” I said.

“I’ll be here tomorrow. After work,” he said, shrugging as though to apologize for the fact that he would wait until after work to come by when I was scheduled for early morning surgery.

“No rush,” I said.

With the same deflated look mother had had, he approached the bed and took hold of my left foot beneath the sheets. I could tell he was going to be sentimental, if I let him. ‘What the hell,’ I thought, ‘let him. Let’s see what the old guy has got to say.’

“You know, I remember the day you were born. The doctor phoned me at work and even before he said it I knew he had bad news. He said he was sorry, but that you were not going to live. He said you wouldn’t suffer any pain; that you were in an oxygen tent and that you would just slowly go to sleep. I remember going to the hospital and looking at you in that oxygen tent and all I could feel was grateful that you weren’t going to suffer any pain. Strange,” he said, “your Grandfather showed up, took one look at you, and told me and the doctors you would live. Son of a gun if you didn’t do just that. Two weeks later, you were still in that oxygen tent, and starting to look like a human being and not a baby newt. A month later, you were out of the tent.”

There was a look in father’s eyes I’d never seen before, even though he had told me this same story, ending it at the same place. This time he added, “I’ve got to tell you.”

“What?” I said, intrigued.

“You got any idea how long it took me to pay back your mother’s family for all that oxygen?”

I began to laugh. “Be a real waste, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t make it through this? Not to worry, Pop, I’ll do my best.”

He nodded and squeezed my foot. “That’s all I ask.”

The fellow in the bed beside me was British and he was named Eric. He had had nine operations already on tumors that kept growing back on the bottom of his feet.

“Guess you won’t be entering any 10K races,” I said.

“For now,” he said. One thing about the British is that their stiff upper lip attitude, while frustrating in the normal intercourse of daily life, is pleasant in abnormal or frightening circumstances, and I was grateful for Eric’s good humor in the face of nine operations with local anesthesia—which meant spinal taps, one needle at a time until the body is deadened from the waist down.

“Sure it hurts,” he said. “Each bloody needle hurts as they work in closer to the spine. Hell, if it didn’t, I’d think I wasn’t obtaining my shilling’s worth.”

The man to Eric’s right, beside the hallway wall, was named Duwayne, and from what Eric whispered to me when Duwayne was across the hall in the lavatory, he had a disease that didn’t bode well.

The boy—he must have been about sixteen—across from Duwayne was “Malaysian or some such,” Eric said. We didn’t know his name; he didn’t speak a word of English. He had a medical problem which was unique enough for the Stanford Medical Center not only to provide treatment free but also to pay for his flight into the United States. Both he and Duwayne would disappear between the time I went up to surgery and the day I awoke, but we didn’t know that, and we spent the time between father’s departure and dinner teaching the boy to speak English—at least teaching him to say our names, “hello,” and making him laugh at the way we pronounced his name (which sounded like “Choyswan”).

After dinner, Dr. Weinstein came in with my anesthetist to introduce him, and to check out blood pressure, et cetera, all ploys to let him talk to me and find out how I was doing.

“This is Dr. Green,” Weinstein said. “He’ll be the cowboy in the mask beside me tomorrow who puts you to sleep.”

“So you’re the druggist, huh?” I said. “You a good one?”

“Give you ten to one odds,” he said, “that when I tell you to begin counting backwards from 100, you won’t make ninety.”

Dr. Green explained the procedure to me, beginning with a wake-up call at five a.m., when I’d be given an injection. At six, I’d be wheeled up to surgery on a gurney, and he figured that at about ten or so, I’d be wheeled down from the recovery room. “By tomorrow night, we might even be able to feed you some chicken broth and Jell-o.”

“Galloping gourmet,” I said. Neither Dr. Green nor I, nor Weinstein for that matter, had any idea that he was off by several days.

“So, Alley,” Dr. Weinstein said when Dr. Green had left. “You seem in pretty good spirits.”

“I am,” I said as he loosened the velcro on the blood pressure band. “I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

“What do you mean?” he said, beginning to push and measure the outside of the tumor.

“Well with everything that could happen tomorrow, I thought I’d be worried. I mean I could die, right?”

“There’s a chance,” he said. “The best we can hope for is a minor paralysis of the right side of your face. Make you look as though you’re always half-laughing, though some people may mistake it for a sneer.”

“So why do I feel so calm and cheerful? I mean, I don’t want to die. I don’t plan on dying. But it could happen and thinking about that makes me say, well, what the hell, the time I’ve had has been good and if I get more it’ll be better.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but I have noticed in a few of my patients a similar sort of … what?… elation, cheerfulness the night before an operation. They are always the ones to whom I’ve felt free to even use the word ‘death’ and not some euphemism; the ones I’ve been able to be honest with, like you. And I’ll tell you something else. All, without one exception, have lived through some very serious operations.”

“Statistics are on my side, huh?” I laughed. “I’ll bet the control group was a downer. They must have been as much fun as the opening of The Seventh Seal.”

“There wasn’t a control group, of course.”

“You know what I mean.”

“All the people who are so afraid of dying, they never live.”

“Sort of,” I said. “I think of them as the people whose death wouldn’t affect the amount of laughter in the world one whit. Maybe that’s just another way to put it.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Okay, I’m through with you for now. You can eat or drink up until midnight. At eleven, a nurse will come around with a sleeping pill for you, if you want it. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you a Jew?”

“With a name like Weinstein, you ask me that?”

“I mean practicing.”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. I’m not sure. Maybe because it means you’re Real People, at least in part. Anyway, I’m glad.”

He gave me a quizzical look and then smiled kindly. “So am I, Alley. Oh,” he said, looking back from the doorway. “I’ve arranged for you to be allowed visitors up until midnight, as long as you don’t disturb the others in the ward.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I doubt I’ll have too many.”

“There are a couple here, now. I’ll send them in.”

Grandfather had arrived virtually at the same moment as Elanna. He’d driven the Plymouth in his usual tortoise fashion and, though he looked as ancient as his race, having aged greatly since I’d last seen him, I was glad he was there. Elanna had flown Trans World Airlines halfway around the world from Athens, and their coincident arrival seemed to reaffirm Grandfather’s faith in concentration.

Elanna brought me an ancient scarab mounted on a simple silver backing that hid the lucky inscriptions on the beetle’s belly, and hung it around my neck on its chain. Another charm against the sawdust of the world. It made me think of Rachel. I could hear her already criticizing my wearing it as I lay there on the starched sheets of unknowing.

Grandfather brought me a large bag of candied orange slices which I consumed with an almost sexual determination, slowly sucking off the sugar coating and then chewing the slices with my front teeth.

“You’re going to be sick!” Eric kept telling me. “When you wake up from the operation tomorrow you’re going to feel as sick as a toad in the hole.”

“No,” Grandfather told Eric.

“He’s got a cast-iron stomach,” Elanna said. Her voice was high and thin like a kitten up a tree looking about herself and wondering how in hell she had come to be there. She was frightened and a bit pallid; she felt helpless; and she was exerting every ounce of her energy trying not to show it.

“You all right?” I asked her. She nodded nervously. “You know you didn’t have to come.” Instantly, I felt as stupid as I had that day in the graveyard when she was talking to mother’s mother and I had said that mother’s mother wasn’t buried in that particular cemetery.

“I couldn’t not come,” she said. “Could I?”

Grandfather settled into a chair on the other side of my bed and began watching the television program Duwayne had turned on. Every now and then, the channels would change and Duwayne would say, “Hey, who …?” and the channel would change back and Grandfather would grin.

“You know who I miss,” I said to Elanna, “is Pamela.” For a moment, Elanna seemed to share my feeling. It was as though both of us felt that Pamela was separated from us only by an argument, and a phone call and an apology could bring her back.

“Me, too,” Elanna said. “I don’t know what I’d do now, if …” She stopped herself and drew herself up. It wasn’t her way. Nor was it mine.

“A closet isn’t big enough for all of us, anyway,” I said, and we both tried to laugh.

That was how we spent the time, trying to joke with each other, teasing each other about the past we held in common and yet envisioned with the difference of brother and sister, while Grandfather gazed at the television, speechless for the most part, yet lending a solidity to that corner of the ward. Eric chatted with us or read Pogo comic books, which he claimed were his favorite. I was glad not of the company but of this company.

By nine, I’d finished half of my orange slices, still to the dismay of Eric, when Sara entered.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, outwardly angry but inwardly overjoyed.

“Visiting. What are you doing here?”

“I told you not to come.”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said, introducing herself to Elanna and Grandfather. “Here, I brought some things.” From her shoulder bag she took out three wrapped boxes.

“You’re going to bury me with gifts,” I said.

“This one’s from me,” she said. “Open it.” It was a blank book of fine paper bound between upholstered covers.

“It’s beautiful,” Elanna said.

“This one’s from the Tompsons.” She handed me the second, which I opened to find a Montblanc fountain pen and a bottle of ink. “This last,” she said, “isn’t much. But I thought you might appreciate it.”

“Ding-dongs!” I said, tearing off the wrapping paper to find a baker’s dozen of those Hostess cakes filled with cream and iced with chocolate.

“He’s happier about them than the other two presents,” Sara said to Elanna.

“Mother’s cooking made all of us chipmunks,” Elanna said, smiling.

“Oh, bloody heavens!” Eric said. “You Yanks refuse to accept good advice, don’t you?” I began to eat the first of the Ding-dongs, offering the box around to Grandfather, Elanna, Sara, and him. “You are going to enjoy those things twice, once going down and once coming up.”

“Have you ever seen me throw up?” I said to Sara. She shook her head. “You?” I asked Elanna.

“No.”

“You’ll see,” Eric said.

“All plastic parts,” I said to Eric, biting into another Ding-dong and patting my stomach. “They replaced everything with plastic when I was born. I don’t get sick to my stomach.”

“You’ll see,” Eric said again, having no idea what it was I would see when I didn’t wake up the following day but slalomed through the gaps in the dotted line between coma and consciousness, stirring enough after five and a half hours under the knife to speak to the nurses in the recovery room (they tell me) before slipping down the backside of the mountain toward the valley of the shadow. Whatever I said could only be surmised from the looks the nurses gave me after I was finally awake. Even what I said after being moved from intensive care back to my original room in the brief moments of consciousness that began to occur more frequently had to be repeated to me later.

What I had seen in the 96 comatose hours of floating along the FM wave between the realities of life and death mystified me. Slugged by anesthesia and shock, I had followed an old man up canyons of red rock etched by Gilas and climbed an umber cliff, the ropes anchored by the pitons of Rachel’s petulance, the carping of Laura P., and the carrot-like coaxing of Elanna and Sara Baites.

It struck me as odd that it was women’s voices and not the symbolic commentary of Grandfather that pinned the ropes to the face of the rock. Even in my dream of a dreamer dreaming, Grandfather had receded to a shadow on top of distant mountains. But I knew he was there as well as I knew that Death was sniggling about in the shadows of the valley below.

Then, too, there were images of a butterfly and a rock with another pebble lodged in its middle. Those existed on a level similar to the image of the night nurse whose face was the first I remember seeing, and whose compassion was so warm that it wrapped me back into sleep. Gradually, I awoke, and spit out hatred and rage released by the sodium pentothal and aimed at people like Mrs. DeForest, shedding the weight of it and rising one foot closer to what Sanchez had felt in the desert, and one foot nearer Grandfather’s shadow, which hovered, watched, and saw—and yet refused to speak, lacking the judgments that people like to call morality.

“But there was something else,” I told Sara after I awoke and could recognize her. She sat on my bed haggard and worn from the worry and waiting of the past five days. Sara held cherry Jell-o in front of my mouth on a spoon. The machine I dubbed “Harry,” which sucked fluids from the tube sewn into the side of my head, blipped out its purple light with the regularity of a lighthouse.

“Can you recall any of it?”

“Red rock,” I said, “like the Sonoran desert. Canyons. An old man like Grandfather. The rest keeps swimming in my head. It’s there and I feel it and know it, but I can’t say it.”

“Maybe it’s not important?”

“Maybe. But it has to do with me. Me. And with life and death.”

“Maybe it will come to you,” she said. “Maybe one day it will all come to you. If you can’t say it, then maybe you should try to write it down.”

“Those are pretty big maybes,” I said.

“This,” she said, handling the blank book she’d given me, “is a pretty big book.”

49.

The day came that Sara and Elanna had to check out of the motel room they were sharing and leave, Sara to return to Clearmont and Elanna to return to finding and dusting and cataloguing the shards of ancient Greece. Elanna was scheduled to leave that evening; Sara was catching the Red Eye late that night. Though it meant spending several hours alone in the San Francisco airport, they’d decided to share a limo in time for Elanna’s departure at nine. They liked each other, for which I was glad.

Off and on over the past few days there had been as many as eleven visitors in my room at a time, including Allison and Mrs. DeForest, who hung about uncomfortably in the immediate present, having deleted the past they shared in common with me. I abided them as well as Sara did, both of us grateful that cousins and family friends were in the room buffering what could have been either an awkward or hilarious situation. They left, and we were content to have only the four of us—Grandfather, Sara, Elanna, and me (father had come by before work)—when we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of my uncle, bringing along with him the ghost of my cousin and the Vegomatic.

Uncle’s former exuberance, out of which came the singing of popular songs, had become a morbid sentimentalism in which his fleeting happiness with Karen Manowitz struggled against his discomfort with his present materialism.

“Maybe when you’re out of here,” uncle said, “you’ll have time to take a ride on the river in my new Chris Craft.” Having scuttled his sailboat, he had purchased—with the serene approval of the Vegomatic—a Chris Craft.

“Power boating is where it’s at,” he said. His voice sounded hollow like a confirmed bourbon drinker forced to turn to vodka or gin who tries to convince you of his pleasure in drinking those pale, tasteless liquids. It required a false belief in effect (“You can get from point A to point B without wind,” he said) and a suspension of the memory of his pleasure in process (“Boating,” he ought to have said, “is boring”).

In the same way, when he told us about my cousin, he imagined that his militant son had entered the Soviet Union for no other reason than to learn a new language. “You know how good he is with languages,” uncle said. “The son of a gun will be able to travel anywhere in the world, pretty soon.”

If the Russians ever let him out, I—we all—thought.

Elanna’s eyes had always been sharp, cutting. But in Greece they’d acquired a lightness as though bleached by the unyielding sun. The lightness turned dark and as sad as Sara’s eyes, both as sad as Grandfather’s, when uncle proclaimed that once again I had beaten Death. The four of us knew that no one beats Death. All one could do was try to score in the final minutes and force the game into overtime.

“Mighty white of you,” I muttered.

“What?” uncle asked.

“Nothing.”

Coming closer, he whispered in my ear, “Sara reminds me of a girl I once knew.” He meant she reminded him of Karen Manowitz, and it was only the regret I’d once felt for telling him I had not kept the lucky penny he’d given me that prevented me from saying that we have to live with our choices. “Because you feel sorry for someone,” I would say later to Sara, “doesn’t mean you have to excuse him.”

The Vegomatic, dressed in a blue-gray suit, her hair rigid with spray, sat crisply on the edge of the empty bed across from me. Every quarter hour, she rose and went down to the nurses’ station and took several deep breaths, before returning to the room and taking root on the bed again.

Grandfather posed quietly beside my bed-head, where he had been for most of the last several days—except when Elanna or Sara were shoveling Jell-o and broth at me. He had left only to shower, and once to go out and buy white construction paper and magic markers which he used to entertain himself, making “For Sale” signs for the Plymouth. Every time I had tried to say that I would buy the Plymouth, he had interrupted me with a slow and convincing shake of his head.

I didn’t resent uncle’s intrusion into this last afternoon. I didn’t even resent the wordless intrusion of the Vegomatic. But needless to say we were all relieved when, after her fifth trip to the nurses’ station, the Vegomatic stood and adjusted the huge bowtie of her blouse and walked to the door, where she waited a few moments for uncle to notice that the visit was over. Finally, she uttered a syllable which sounded a lot like “Hilt” and, though reluctantly like a recalcitrant puppy, uncle left with her. Only after she left did I realize what had been making my head sting and my eyes dizzy. It was the invisible but palpable cloud of her perfume.

“Boy,” Sara said. “Now I know why you always called her the Vegomatic. She could slice you up quicker than a carrot.”

“She’s about as much fun as a Treaty,” I said to Sara.

“That’s cruel,” Elanna protested. “Her life with him hasn’t been exactly what you would call easy.”

“Maybe,” I said, “But it’s the plain and simple truth.”

“There,” Grandfather said, holding up the “For Sale” signs.

That evening, Louis Applegate came to fetch Grandfather, staying long enough to watch the fluid sucked from the side of my head by “Harry” drip into the tank on the machine. Elanna and Sara left with them. Eric was upstairs for the eleventh attempt at removing the growths on his feet; Duwayne and Choyswan had vanished; and I felt a profound emptiness invade the room. Yet I also felt profoundly contented. Maybe it was because the emptiness was only temporary—soon enough, I’d be able to rejoin the Tompsons and Sara, sooner than expected, according to Dr. Weinstein, who was pleased with the way my will to get out of the hospital had accelerated the rate of healing.

“Never,” Weinstein had said more than once, “have I seen anyone who healed as quickly as you. Are you sure you’re not a lizard?”

Maybe the contentment was due as well to the feeling that Elanna and Sara, like Grandfather, were still there with me and would always be there when I needed them whether they lived or died. I don’t really care how it’s put. Contentedness, unlike pain, doesn’t need analysis because you don’t need to get over it.

After Grandfather left to return to Chosposi, I sat propped up in my bed, my blank book and Montblanc in my hands, and wrote. I could not yet remember all I’d seen in the land of sodium pentothal, but I didn’t worry. I simply enjoyed the feel of the pen’s nib on the paper, the same way I enjoyed the colored lights that began to play on the fountain outside as the sky darkened, or the food when dinner was brought round, and even helping the nurses spoonfeed Eric when he was brought back to the ward.

Dr. Weinstein came early the next morning to check the amount and color of the fluid in “Harry’s” tank.

“Feeling lonely?” he asked, wrapping the blood pressure gauge around my bicep and pumping it up.

“No.”

“Fine,” he said, releasing the pressure. “I think in another day or two we’ll consider releasing you. I had honestly expected you to be here several weeks, but there’s no real reason.” He poked and adjusted the bandage that covered the right side of my head, into which the tube attached to “Harry” disappeared. “So what are your plans after you check out?”

“I thought I’d visit father for a day or two, drop by mother’s, and then head on back to Clearmont. If that’s okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “Any doctor can change the bandages. You know a doctor in Clearmont?”

“Dr. Satherwaite at the college’s clinic.”

“Good. I’ll have the nurses draw up a schedule for checking and changing the bandage. You can give a copy to Dr. Satherwaite.” He stood up. “Guess I won’t be seeing too much of you unless some problem crops up. You’ve been a good patient, Alley, and considering the fact that the tumor was the size and shape of a pear, you’re coming along very well. We won’t know how badly the nerves in the side of your face were damaged for at least five or six months. I’d like you to drop in for a quick check around next October, if you can. I like to see the results of my work.”

“I’ll make a point of it.”

“Any Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, at my office. You don’t need an appointment. I can fit you in for the time it will take.” He rolled the curtain separating my bed from Eric’s back. “I have to tell you, Alley, that I’ve rarely seen love and concern expressed so many different ways for one human being. Did anyone tell you that Sara was so frantic by the fifth hour of the operation that we had to sedate her and send her back to her motel with your sister? Partly our fault, I guess. We had no way of knowing it’d take that long.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And your aunt. The nurses tell me she used to be a nurse, herself?”

“Yeah, in a V.A. hospital.”

“When she saw you yesterday, what with the pump and the bandages, she was so upset that she kept going into the restroom and throwing up.” He laughed. “I tell you, you’re a lucky man,” he said, “in case you don’t already know that.”

“It can happen that way,” I said.

“Well. See you.”

“Take it easy,” I said, feeling my former contentedness begin to expand to incorporate the novelty of the Vego … my aunt … caring so much about what happened to me.

50.

If I suffered pain during that time, it was only twice, and in retrospect even the pain felt good in its way. It let me know I was alive. The first time was when, after waking up, the nurse had breezily brought in a bedpan and the lingering effects of mother’s toilet training made it impossible for me to pee into it while I was in bed. Like all institutions meant to serve people and not human beings, hospitals cannot tolerate a change of the rules. So the nurse gave me a shot that made the muscles around my bladder contract. Though the cramps hurt, I still couldn’t pee. Three shots later, convulsed by cramps that could bend the fender of a car, I was writhing about, hoping for something fun to happen—like the nurse bringing in leeches to bleed me. Finally, while the nurse was out preparing a fourth shot, I unplugged “Harry” and wheeled him like a robot to the bathroom where I relived all the pleasures in the history of pissing.

The nurse was furious, chasing me down as I took “Harry” for a brief stroll down to the day room. Only after I loomed over her, threatening to wreak havoc on the hospital, did she agree to telephone Weinstein and obtain his permission for me to unplug “Harry” and wheel him around with me when necessity called. “Harry” and I stood beside the nurse’s station as she phoned, and I could hear Dr. Weinstein laugh.

The second painful moment was the day the doctor released me. Early in the morning, as planned, he came to sever the umbilical cord between me and my pal “Harry” by pulling out the hard plastic syringe on the end of the rubber tubing around which the flesh had begun to heal. First, Dr. Weinstein raised and fixed the metal railings on either side of the bed.

“What are those for?” I asked.

“I’ve been straight with you up to now, haven’t I?” he said. “There’s only one way to remove the tube and that’s to yank it out. I’ll tell you, it is going to hurt, probably like nothing you have ever felt before. It won’t hurt a long time, but you’re going to feel it since the tissue has grown attached to it.”

“As long as you don’t make me use a bedpan,” I said.

Lacking his usual good humor which he had used with me, he said, “I want you to roll over toward the window and take hold of the bars with both hands and concentrate on something pleasant.”

I rolled over and put my hands on the bars and thought of Sara.

“You ready?” he asked. Before I could answer, he had taken a good grip on the end of the tube and yanked it out and then grabbed my waist and held it down on the bed. He waited as my knuckles turned pale and I tried to tear the bars from the bed. A collage of yellows and reds and purples pasted on the back of my eyeballs.

It seemed minutes before he said, “Well?” and I could answer, “You really know how to grab a guy’s attention, don’t you?”

“Look at it this way,” Dr. Weinstein said, “now you have an absolute by which to measure all other pains.”

“What,” I asked, “is pain?”

It felt wonderful to be outside the hospital. Hospital air is sterile and filtered, and for a boy raised in the City of Angels where the air has tangible mass it’s a little like trying to breathe at 20,000 feet. So, as I climbed into father’s car, the air was heady and intoxicating and I felt as though I was learning to breathe all over again.

I stayed on father’s hide-a-bed for three days. During the day when he was at work, I began to try to write down what it was I had seen in the dark interiors of my semi-coma and, failing at that, took long walks with Sabina, the puppy he had purchased to replace Running Dog, whom I renamed Spotted Tail because of her markings of an Australian Shepherd. Palo Alto had changed in the short time I’d lived away. The Tall Tree, its landmark near the park, was little more than an upright trunk, its branches withered and its needles thinned by the exhaust from the cars that went to and fro on the main road nearby. On the second day, I answered the phone while father showered, and a woman’s voice began to talk to me as though I were my father, asking how his son was. It was a pleasant voice, even though she was not a little embarrassed when I explained that I was the son.

“Nice of you to ask, though,” I said. “I’ll have him call you when he’s out of the shower.”

Father wanted to explain when I told him his lady friend had called, even though he needn’t have. I was happy that he had someone. His inability to say whatever words he felt were needed brought him to the old recollection of how we’d never been able to talk to each other.

“It’s all my fault,” he said. “I was always too busy while you were growing up. And your mother …”

“Dad,” I interrupted him. “I’ll make a deal with you. Let’s go fifty-fifty on the blame bit, okay?”

On the third day, I screwed up my humor and went by mother’s house. Pressing the buzzer on the intercom speaker outside the door caused a set of spotlights to flash on, blinding me. I waited.

“Who goes there?” a voice said over the speaker. It wasn’t mother or even a feminine voice. Neither was it convincingly masculine, but more generic like a monk’s or priest’s voice after years in the cloister, and I spoke to the speaker as I would have to a priest, with a certain formality.

“It is I,” I said. “I’ve come to visit my mother.” I could feel the cover on the peephole slide back and I knew I was being observed.

“Well, so it is,” the voice said. “You.”

Absurdly, the door’s hinges imitated a low-grade horror film, squeaking slowly as the door was opened. Short, with tiny sandled feet, and pale to the point of translucence, He stood there in a brown robe tied at the waist by a cord.

“It’s you,” I said. “What are you doing here? Where’s all your Indian jewelry? Where’s your hardhat with the light on the front?”

His voice was higher than over the speaker but still without gender as He said, “I live here, now.”

“You’re mother’s lodger?”

He nodded, grinning that toothy grin of his. “So what are you doing here? You don’t belong here. We’re even Steven. I don’t owe you a thing, anymore.”

“I told you, I came to visit my mother,” I replied calmly, beginning to recall just the sketchiest details of what I’d seen in the womb of sodium pentothal.

“She’s not home. And I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“Do you know where she is?” He nodded, but said nothing. “Well, where?”

“With her lawyer.”

“Changing her will again, huh? May I leave her a message?”

“If you wish,” He said. Behind Him in the hall I could make out the winged figure of Mercury that He had removed from the hood of His customized van.

“I see you still have Mercury,” I said.

“Is that your message?”

“You know it isn’t,” I said. “Tell my mother that I am all right. Tell her I’ve gone back to Clearmont to the Tompsons’ and if she wants, she can reach me there.” I started to go and stopped. Whether I was jealous of Him or merely unwilling to concede to Him easily, I don’t know. “What the hell,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell her I love her for me.”

“Will do,” He said, “if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“Enjoy her cooking,” I said as maliciously as possible.

“I like it,” He said.

“You would.” I could feel the points of His beady little eyes on my back as I walked away down the driveway. When He called out, “Hey, Albert! See you soon!” I didn’t even turn around. I didn’t need to see His expression to know what He meant and to connect it with the “For Sale” signs Grandfather had so carefully made.

51.

Pamela used to say to me, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” and even as a child I knew she was wrong. Not knowing worried me much more than knowing and ignorance had contained the constant threat of injury since the day I unscrewed Grandfather’s power saw looking for the baggy containing the sawdust. Not knowing seemed to be a raw wound that only needed to be touched accidentally to hurt. What I didn’t know as I returned to Clearmont was what I had seen in the five post-operative days of bobbing between life and death. It would take the death of Grandfather before I would be able to take proper stock of that.

At first, both the Tompsons and Sara were disturbed by the way I looked. With a large bandage covering my head from jaw to crown and cheek to nape and the paralysis which made me look as though I was sneering or that my face was asymmetrically lopsided, I was even a bit frightening to myself. The tumor had lodged below the focus of nerves entering that side of my face, and the nerves had been so damaged as to make my eyelid remain open while the eyeball rolled back and up whenever I tried to close my eyes—giving me a one-eyed stare of whiteness.

Nonetheless, they all became used to it. The Tompsons chuckled when I drooled like someone overdosed on novocaine. With a humor that I appreciated, Sara liked to have me “close” my eyes at parties, after people were inebriated enough fully to appreciate the effects of my stare. I obliged. Even after the bandages came off and my head simply looked as though it were listing to one side, the stare remained available for our mutual entertainment.

After several months, the nerves recouped enough to half-close the eyelid. In doing so, however, the nerves seemed to confuse themselves and with a playfulness of their own decided that the right side of my face should sweat profusely whenever I chewed food or gum. Sweat dripping from my chin was less amusing, and I gave up gum.

By that time, Sara and I had moved into a studio apartment in the married students’ housing of the college (the power of the Proctor helped, as we weren’t yet married) with the blessing of both the Tompsons and Professor Quinin. I had gotten a job setting type for the local paper. Actually, it was the third of three successive jobs. Each of the first two I lost because of my efforts to unionize non-union shops.

“Proof positive,” Proctor Tompson said proudly, “that failure is often a better teacher than success. I wonder if you didn’t learn more from me in that class than the rest of the students combined.”

I had. But then unions to me were a lot like tribes and, though I lacked a specific tribe, the instinct for them was fierce in me.

The jobs supported us while Sara finished out the term. We enjoyed having the Tompsons to dinner and despite the lists of equal chores that some women made men read and sign like the Magna Carta, Sara became an excellent cook. I, preferring to stay behind the scenes, became a fair dishwasher, and I took pleasure in finding a new wine or cognac for the Tompsons to try when they came.

In June, we had a party for Doctor Quinin. He had successfully defended the footnotes of his dissertation and received the college’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, which meant there would never be anything at all offensive or thought-provoking in his lectures. It was at the party that I realized that Quinin had already set his sights on being a Dean and I told Sara that he would succeed because of his adroit way of mindlessly conforming.

“He only needs tassels on his loafers, argyle socks, and a pink shirt and he’s there,” I said.

That led to our first fight, during which I explained that to me it seemed odd how white people were promoted in direct inversion to their wisdom. Sara accused me of being white, which I ignored. She only said it to wound me.

“Have you ever seen an Indian Dean?” I asked her, laughing, and she said no, but she’d seen Indians be chiefs, and I said that was the point, that chiefs were such because the tribe respected their wisdom, which wasn’t true anymore for Deans or Majors or Senators or Presidents.

She countered by trying to hurt me through Grandfather, asking why he hadn’t been a chief, then. She was assuming that wisdom meant that one would want to be a chief, whereas wisdom does the opposite.

“I don’t agree,” she said, becoming adamant.

I tried to explain. “Wisdom means that if leadership is thrust upon you, you may accept it even though you don’t want it; not wanting it means you will accept it with a sense of the responsibility and care thrust upon you. Whites seem to have become just the opposite. Every little boy dreams of becoming president, doesn’t he?”

She still didn’t buy it. I was beginning to wonder where her insistent refusal to entertain the idea came from.

“A chief must be wise,” I said, “but not all wise men have to be chiefs.”

“Well,” Sara said petulantly, “maybe you should marry an Indian,” and in the illogic of her petulance I saw what was bothering her.

“Oh, Sara,” I said, trying not to laugh, “this has nothing to do with you. With us.”

She wanted to know why not. “After all, I’m white, as well as the daughter of an unwise man.”

“True,” I said laying my hand on her shoulder. “But you have a good heart.”

The way she looked at me out of the corners of her eyes as though suspicious of whether or not to take me at my word, wanting to believe that I believed that a good heart outweighed silly computations of blood, made me shake my head and laugh at her.

“My unfeathered friend,” I said. “You are wise. Don’t you see that that makes you Real People? Don’t you know already that I’d rather be a Real People with you than anything else?” I tucked her into my arms and hugged her, feeling her suspicious body relax, disbelief draining away like untapped electricity. “Being human is hard enough,” I said softly. “Besides, you can’t help it if you’re a honky.”

“You …!” she cried, pushing me away—and then we laughed together for a long time before returning to her father’s party.

The summer passed quietly. Sara and I kept pretty much to ourselves, content to work and save for the fall term when we’d return to school, spending our evenings with each other or the Tompsons for the most part, during which time everything became subject to humor.

Late at night I would often awaken as from a dream that was actually no dream but a memory, sneak out of bed without disturbing Sara, and write. I managed in this way to fill up the front sides of five hundred pages, and I turned the half-blank book over and began filling up the verso pages. I was increasingly obsessed by the need to write that dream-vision down, but each time I tried, conventions like naturalism got in my way, hanging around the edges of the manuscript like doodles. Worse, if I did write a good paragraph I was susceptible to tin-plated delusions of someone reading it and even taking it seriously. At first light, I would sneak back to bed, lying awake, concentrating on ways to hide my growing obsession from Sara.

Father married his lady friend, and I managed to meet her when I flew north to have the bandages removed for the last time by Dr. Weinstein.

Weinstein was pleased with his work and even more pleased that the nerves he had feared were irreparably damaged seemed to be regaining a good bit of function, and he took me to a quick lunch at the Stanford Student Union, where we sat and ate out on a broad circular deck. At one point a wild-looking man of about sixty in a tweed jacket with ragged suede patches on the elbows wandered past us on the asphalt path below. He carried a placard that read “REPENT!” and towed a small red wagon filled with pamphlets behind him on a leash. Students and faculty alike passed him by as though he were nothing more unusual than an unmowed lawn or covert action by the CIA.

“Is the world ending?” I asked Weinstein.

“I wish I could remember the joke my mother used to tell about the world coming to an end,” he said, gazing pityingly at the man. “He used to administer intelligence tests. The story goes that he began to frazzle 15 or 20 years ago. He doesn’t teach anymore, for obvious reasons. He went mad when they decided that his I.Q. test measured nothing more than the middle-class upbringing of white kids. The university gives him a stipend, ostensibly for research but really because the university hasn’t figured out what to do with him yet. He’s harmless enough.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” was all I could say.

After lunch I went by father’s new house to meet his new wife. The way she treated me pleased me so much that when Sara asked me what she was like after I got home, I said, “She’s as nice as her voice.”

“Did you see your mother?”

“No,” I said in such a way as to let her know I didn’t want to talk about it. I had planned on stopping by, but I’d dropped by William the Black’s fraternity house and had been so discouraged by the way he kept me outside on the stoop, the way in which he and I had moved down forking paths away from each other, that I’d driven straight to the airport and returned the rental car and then sat facing east-southeast watching planes land and take off.

About the time Sara and I were married with only the Tompsons and her father to witness, Sanchez mailed me a set of snapshots. I was amazed at the size of the Trading Post. It seemed to stand like an oasis of commerce beside an enlarged road. An entirely new building from what I could tell, it was simple and plain, flat stone and adobe with a broad wooden porch in front, the roof of which was supported by stripped logs. Gone were the American flag and the wooden Indian and instead there was a simple sign above the porch: “Ayawamat Trading Post.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“What does that mean?” Sara asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Grandfather had taught me a little of his language; Laura P. none of hers. We had to resort to the library to find out it meant “Man who follows orders.”

Another photo had Grandfather sitting astride his Raleigh outside the mission building, Laura P. at his side, both of them looking like doughy lumps on the landscape.

Then one of Rachel holding what looked to be a small litter—explained by the following picture of the baby inside. Sanchez’s note with the photos told us that the baby was a girl and that they’d named her Rachel Laura, aged four months. She was beautiful. Despite the realities, looking at the small round brown face and the little clenched fists, I couldn’t help but feel hope.

I wrote not Sanchez but Rachel, this time, daring to ignore all that had passed between us and simply tell her how beautiful Rachel Laura really was. A week later, I told Sara that Rachel had gotten my letter.

“How do you know?” she asked.

Not many weeks passed before Sara had proof that I had been right. Sanchez, Rachel, and the baby arrived for a visit. While I would have expected Sanchez to roll up in the tinted luxury of a Mercedes, they appeared one mid-morning in a battered Volkswagen van loaded with Pampers and jars of that vacuum-sealed strained mush people call baby food.

Rachel Laura was a high-tech kid, as Sanchez called her, and she proved it by regaling us with five variations on a theme during their two-day stay: She cried and ate, cried and was changed, cried and burped, gurgled happily, and then performed her piece de resistance by sleeping soundly, bathed in the warm rain of Rachel’s and Sara’s motherly attentions.

Sanchez and I played manly roles during all of this, pretending that all their doting over the baby was silly—and then doted ourselves when Rachel and Sara were not around.

Both Sanchez and Rachel had changed. Rachel was shy and quieter; less aggressive as though some of her rage had become determination. Still angular and bony in body, her grace and calm seemed a contradiction, and it took some getting used to. When she spotted the scarab I wore hanging around my neck, she only smiled and said, “Laura P. told me you had acquired more weight.”

“Elanna brought it to me,” I said by way of explanation.

“Wear it well,” she said.

Sanchez, though still with his former lightness of heart, revealed a seriousness of mind that I’d never have dreamed of. He still sold souvenirs and sodas, but now the souvenirs were authentic Kachinas and jewelry crafted by the Indians of the reservation. His mark-up was still four hundred percent and his profits were as huge as always. But where he had once derived pleasure from inventing gadgets that were useless and pocketing the profits, now the excess money went into the pockets of the reservation and his pleasure was in his dreams of scholarships, a clinic to be built behind the trading post, investments in shopping centers in Phoenix and Tucson.

“How did this happen?” I asked him. “What made you give up the Vegomatic and cookie cutters?”

“It just came to me,” he said.

“Like a vision?”

“Like the stomach flu,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he becomes a chairman,” I said to Sara after they had replenished their store of Pampers and baby food and driven off.

“Are you jealous?” Sara asked.

“Not in the way you might think.”

“No?”

“No.”