A FARFETCHED POSSIBILITY

I saw a sign today. Someone had slapped a bumper sticker over the word Drive, leaving a terse rhyme: 55 Stay Alive. Because that’s my age, and because I’d been thinking, once again, of letting go and being done, I took the slogan as a personal exhortation from the cosmos.

The bumper sticker, however, said, El Decapitán—a garage band, I’m guessing—which diluted the message somewhat.

On my way to interview Ellsworth Bardo this morning, I called Bob. Pulled off the road, stood pensively above a narrow canal while a gargantuan orange grasshopper traversed the gravel by my feet, and wished I had a friend. A surprising wish—I thought I’d outgrown the need long ago. Why do others have friends, but not me, not for years? You could say I lack patience for their annoying habits (the whinny, the thrice-told tale, the affected ascot)—or maybe I’ve got it backwards, maybe they couldn’t stand me anymore. It may have to do with my preference for solitude, which doesn’t require a false front. Still, sometimes you wish you had someone to talk to.

“Peace, brother,” I said to Bob.

He’d been meditating, and sounded a thousand miles away. “You made it down there all right?”

The impulse to confide collapsed at the sound of his voice. “Yup, I’m here.”

While I studied the alien grasshopper’s painted armor, he told me, “Eka called just before.”

I won’t list the hopes this unleashed.

“And she said?”

Long-distance static.

“Why did she call?”

“Just to say hello. I told her you’d gone to Florida for a new job.”

You moron! I thought. Now she thinks I’m trying to forget her.

“What did she say to that?”

He couldn’t remember, exactly.

“What was the gist—the upshot—the general idea?”

“I think she said something like, ‘It happened so fast.’ ”

I parsed those words for hidden meanings. She would have come back to me if I hadn’t left. She hoped I would pine for her. I’ve let her down again.

“Did she say how she’s getting along with the doctor?”

A small clearing of the throat. “I don’t want to depress you.”

“Go right ahead.”

As he delayed, the flecks of sunlight on the muddy canal bank resolved into an alligator’s scales. The predator basked ten yards away, but there was no room for fear with this greater terror hanging over me.

“I’m waiting.”

“This is going to hurt.”

“Tell me.”

“She said he wants to marry her. Soon.”

Save me—that’s what she called to say. I don’t need this luxury. Take me back.

Or, she wanted to say a last good-bye.

Which?

The grasshopper probed my shoe. The alligator grinned lazily. I had stepped out of civilization, onto prehistoric terrain. From this remote vantage point, I viewed my former life with aching nostalgia. Not so long ago, I presided over a household of four: my brother, my beloved, and her son. I could have kept it all, but chose not to.

Incomprehensible.

That scheduled interview with Glen Geduld never happened. He called this morning to say that the guy who writes the Sunday religion roundup is in the hospital with a ruptured spleen, i.e., he’s in crisis mode, and to give me contact information for a Hendricks House client named Ellsworth Bardo. He also sent along a social worker’s case summary by e-mail, and said there may be more work for me than he’d thought.

I’m his trusted pinch hitter now. When I promised him his profile by five, he actually thanked me.

Ellsworth Bardo’s phone has been disconnected, so I came unannounced. He rents a gray hut west of I-95, behind a cement plant—as far from the ocean as you can get and still be in Fort Lauderdale. There was an old box fan on the front steps, presumably kaput, and a milk crate full of empty diet soda and Glucerna cans. Music was playing inside, Miles Davis, I think. Though he hadn’t been expecting company, my story matched what the social worker had told him, and he let me in.

A retired algebra teacher and, until recently, an amateur sports photographer, he may be a light-skinned African American, an olive-skinned white man of Mediterranean descent, a mulatto, an octoroon, who the hell knows. I couldn’t tell by staring, though his near-blindness gave me all the time in the world. What intrigued me about Mr. Bardo was that, in some ways, he could have been my fifteen-years-older twin. It was like gazing into a magic mirror at my future, if I’m still alive by then, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I don’t mean just his physical state, I’m talking about the whole crusty habitat—the peas on the carpet mashed by his wheelchair, the finger-size water bug strolling across the kitchen floor.

After settling me on his couch (draped with a frayed bedspread), he offered me a Coke, by which he meant my choice of orange soda or Dr. Pepper. “I’m happy to serve as a poster boy if it helps Hendricks House,” he said. “They’ve been like family to me.”

“Actually,” I explained, “the donations will go to you, not Hendricks House.”

He’d been wheeling his way along the kitchen counter toward the fridge, but now he stopped. “They didn’t make that clear,” he grumbled, apparently reconsidering.

The social worker’s report had included a catalogue of his unmet needs, including cash to pay for the 20 percent of his diabetes supplies not covered by Medicare, and the copays for his frequent doctor visits. I pointed out that his situation seemed a bit more difficult than the average Hendricks House client’s. He admitted this might be true.

Here are the notes I took while he poured my soda:

• old LPs make bottom shelf of bookcase sag.

• silver Xmas tree, red garlands.

• snapshots of EB + wife at Bryce Canyon, the Parthenon (sunglasses), and Windows on the World (bridges in background below).

• gray dust on horiz’l surfaces, from cement plant.

• 8-lb. hand weights.

• gray rubber wheelchair wheels speckled w/crumbs. Sticker on back of seat: Ignorance Is the Worst Disability.

He confirmed the catalogue of sorrows I’d been given. He’s losing the vision in the eye that still sees, due to temporal arteritis, which has blocked the flow of blood to his optic nerve. (Hendricks House has referred him to the Lighthouse; he’ll start learning Braille next week.) Eight years ago, a drunk in a Jeep crashed through the window of the Bob Evans Restaurant where he was dining; he never regained the use of his legs. His wife, a school nurse, died of ovarian cancer two years later, and the two medical calamities consumed all of their savings. Long ago, in 1983, a school-bus accident claimed the life of their thirteen-year-old son.

He answered my questions tersely, but relaxed when we moved from past to present. He tutors the kids next door in math and anything else they need help with. In exchange, they wash his dishes and bring him dinner each night. The tutoring has gotten harder recently, since he can’t read their textbooks even with his magnifying bar, but he won’t stop because “it helps me more than it helps them.” Though his home reeked of fried fish (a microwaved lunch), and though I doubt I’d have survived the blows he’s endured, other evidence suggested a happy life. His walls are covered with photos he took of the Yankees at spring training, including faces even I can recognize. A former student had autographed an eight-by-ten of himself in a space suit, To Mr. Bardo, Thanks for the lift! And a framed newspaper picture showed some local dignitary shaking his hand while a gym full of teenagers in caps and gowns stood and applauded.

A leaning stack of Scientific American magazines threatened to come crashing down on us. During the hour I spent there, he told me about the quest to reach absolute zero (did you know that, as you get close, particles of matter behave like waves?), and that, Darwin to the contrary, some species have recently been observed to evolve within the span of a human lifetime.

Unlike my past profilees, he showed not a glimmer of self-pity. He finds endless fascination all around him, and is too busy to mope.

For my own murky reasons, I asked how he proposed to his wife. He had just brought me a plate of key lime cookies with green icing, and he snickered. “That’s a funny story. I didn’t think she’d accept. I’d been trying to get up my nerve for weeks. I lived up north back then, near the state line, and had a canoe. We used to explore the swamps and creeks off the Apalachicola River every weekend. I asked her while she was paddling, with her back to me. But the blackbirds were making a racket, and she thought I’d asked her about carrying me. She said, ‘No way, not till you lose weight.’ I just about died inside, but she had no idea, not till she glanced back. She said, ‘Honey, what’s the matter, I was just teasing.’ So I said, ‘You mean you will marry me?’ She came close to tipping the canoe over, she was so surprised.”

I suspect the story has been polished and perfected over the years, but who cares? I wish it were my story, my memory, my life.

An urge came over me: to tell him about Eka, and ask what he thought I should do. It took stern self-control to suppress the urge. I wish now that I hadn’t.

He insisted on showing me home movies of his wife and son, transferred to videotape. When he turned on the TV, before he inserted the cassette, Jimmy Stewart showed up, leaping through snowy Bedford Falls like a merry madman. My host squinted at the screen. “I used to love that movie when I was young. Now I hate it.”

I asked why.

“They engineered it for maximum lump-in-the-throat. I can’t tolerate that anymore. Just a matter of taste.”

A moment later, we were watching his son swing a plastic bat at a Wiffle Ball on a tee. His wife, in a one-piece bathing suit, hid her face from the camera. He knew from memory which images came when, though he could no longer make them out clearly. The furrows in his brow were deep enough to plant seeds in. Talk about maximum lump-in-the-throat.

“Right now,” he said, “my main goal is getting Jihan into college. I’ve been tutoring her since she was twelve—no one in her family ever went past high school before.”

I confess: I cracked, then and there. I admired Ellsworth Bardo the way a boy admires an Olympic champion.

Before leaving, I offered to help clean up in the kitchen. He asked, without irony, “Does it need cleaning?”

I didn’t want to shame him. “Just a few crumbs here and there.”

“That’s par for the course. The kids’ll take care of it.”

I didn’t want to leave, but had no excuse to stay. We shook hands at his front door. I told him I’d enjoyed meeting him. Intuiting, perhaps, that I needed more help than he did, he said, “Good luck to you, young man.”

I wrote the profile at a diner on Andrews Avenue. Concentration didn’t come easily. I kept imagining how Ellsworth Bardo would have answered the question, What should I do about Eka? I saw him smiling like the Dalai Lama and saying, in various ways, Haul your ass up there and beg her to come back, before she marries the wrong guy.

To do my subject justice, I resisted the usual tear-jerking. Each sentence required vigilance against sleazy habit. Interestingly, I found that the more adjectives I deleted, the more dignity I conveyed. Because he can only see out of one eye—and the light is fading there as well—the floor is littered with crumbs he’s not aware of. Offering a visitor a soft drink, he placed the can and a glass of ice in a homemade caddy on the arm of his wheelchair, and rolled himself back to the living room.

Simple and unadorned. I’m almost proud of it.

Maybe I’ll mail a copy to Eka.

There’s an unpleasant matter I haven’t mentioned.

As I emerged from the guest room this morning, my father summoned me into the kitchen. Mother retreated to their bedroom—sickly and decayed without her makeup, a bird plucked bare. I was still in boxer shorts and undershirt; my father had already dressed, in a wrinkle-free white shirt and gray slacks. We sat at the small table, boxes of Grape Nuts and Fiber One forming a barricade between us.

“You’re falling apart,” he informed me. “It’s disgraceful, how you’ve let yourself go.” He wiped his leaking red eyes—morning blear, not emotion. “Babying you won’t help. You’ve got to knuckle down and pull yourself together. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, at your age. You’re your own responsibility, not ours. You can stay here two nights, no more. We’re too old for this.”

His speech split me down the middle. One side asked, Who is this man? The other, scolded like a child, responded like a child. I imagined buying a small pistol—something you can still do at any Florida gun shop—and blowing my brains out in their guest bathroom. A small thank you for the hospitality.

He always wished he could throw me back, like a misshapen fish. And I’ve tried to grant his wish, by making myself scarce for decades at a time. It was a mistake to swim back here.

A memory: as Armstrong and Aldrin flew over the moon, searching for a place to land and running low on fuel, my father paused to watch with us and muttered, “I don’t see the point. Why go there?”

That was his attitude toward other men’s achievements: All that effort, for what?

And I learned it from him.

To think that one of my quintessential traits comes straight from him. It’s as if the prime minister of Israel found out that his transplanted heart came from a cryogenically preserved Hitler. What do I do, claw the loathsome organ from my chest?

Figuratively, yes. Get rid of it. At least try.

The concrete bunny, blind in one eye, sits at my feet like a loyal pet. I can smell Mother’s smoke even out here tonight.

If I were a man of discipline, a hundred pounds lighter and gainfully employed I would have asked Eka to stay, because I would have had a right to ask. To this extent, my father has a point.

Can I change? Slim down, keep this job, ask her to join me?

Possibly.

I’ll move to a hotel in the morning. Perhaps look at apartments, with room for Eka and Davit. Find a place they’d be happy to live in—near the beach. Then I’ll call her.

But she’ll have grown accustomed to wealth by then. I should call sooner, not later.

Right now?

(A fantasy: we share a small Florida bungalow. There’s no shortage of jobs for home health aides here. Every day at five fifteen, when she comes home from work, we head over to the community pool, where I carry her, weightless, her arms around my neck, her side warming me in the cool water.)

If I call, though, she may say, Angus, I am so sorry.

Doomed.

Glen Geduld on the phone just now—dissatisfied, harassed, barely containing his anger. I have one hour to turn Ellsworth Bardo into a standard sob story, just like the clips I sent, because I didn’t hire Hemingway, I hired you.

Poor Angus. As soon as he resolves to improve himself, the god of Oh-No-You-Don’t shoves a hot spear between his ribs. A man can’t live like this.

Can’t. Must.

Now what?