ABSENCE

Here’s one for the absence-of-God argument, for life as absurd and lacking in all evidence of divinity and never adhering to a tidy plot. Here is the kind of narrative curve, lachrymose and violently cruel, that makes me doubt.

My father had been having pains in his side for some time. He had been so preoccupied with Michael that he hadn’t gone to the doctor in years. Now, since Michael’s life was in a temporary lull because of the near-toxic dose of antipsychotics he had been prescribed after leaving the state psychiatric hospital, my father visited a physician, who listened to his raspy chest, and sent him on to a specialist.

There were X rays, blood tests, MRIs, CAT scans, stool samples, a complete physical. What they found was a death sentence: a grapefruit-sized tumor in the lower lobe of his left lung.

He went into the hospital immediately for an emergency operation to remove the mass, and spent several weeks there recuperating, my mother, Ron, and I beyond shock now—feeling jinxed, hexed, at the wrong end of some karmic debt, three sad Jobs waiting for the next pestilence, the next wrath—sitting in my father’s hospital room until late every night, and the strange thing—strange to me, considering the rage I felt—is that I bowed my head and prayed.

My father was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer caused by asbestos, that brilliant and cheap American industrial insulation of midcentury used so generously in our “strategically sound location” for a home. He had contracted the disease while working at the Newport News shipyard for thirty years, punching a clock to pay our bills, to support me, watching his life slip past.

He'd probably inhaled the toxic fibers sometime in the seventies. Sometimes, doctors said, the disease sits dormant for years, until very old age (my father was fifty-one and in good physical shape); stress, though, brings down the body’s natural defenses. Do you live under much stress, Mr. Bottoms?

My father went home from the hospital to die. While he still had strength—the first six months or so—my parents forgot about Michael, or tried to (they had relatives come by to talk to him while he sat and smoked, to make sure he took all of his new, stronger pills), and took a couple of short trips, blowing money on fancy restaurants and fine wine. But malignant mesothelioma is inevitably fatal.

My father had, the doctors said, maybe two years to live. The approach to this kind of thing was mainly pain management and containment. My mother and I bought him shark cartilage and bottles and bottles of pills—supplements, root extracts, condensed herbs, anything we heard about. We read every book on the disease, rented videos, investigated highly experimental procedures and checked about centers for last-chance patients, but those places are for charity cases or for the wealthy, and we were middlebrow, middle American, middle class. We had to solve our own problems.

After the short trips during the time when he still had a little strength, he became so sick that mostly he sat on the couch and whispered, stopped eating, and stared at the TV. He had a box on his hip and a catheter stuck through his side and into his lung that pumped a light dose of chemo through his body at regular intervals. After a few months he began to react to this medicine as if it were poison.

I’ve mourned my father a great deal over the six years since his death, though our relationship, during his life, was strained. I didn’t really know him, the way I know my wife or good friends, the way I know my mother.

He took care of me, loved me as his son; I loved him as my father. And I believe these different loves, his and mine, were absolutely sincere and real, if perfunctory and distant and safe. But they existed within rigidly defined parameters. To reveal your true feelings was a breach, a way, he remembered from his own father, of opening yourself up to unbearable assault (he could still hear his father’s voice some nights when he couldn’t sleep, telling him how stupid his ideas were, how he got the son he deserved). We got along like colleagues working on vaguely the same project—our life—but at different ends, to stretch the metaphor, of the office. I learned how to stay out of his way. We acted as if we were both afraid of being rejected by the other, and acting this way meant that on some level we had been rejected by the other.

Four years after I watched my father die on morphine in his own bed, my mother gave me several letters he had written me through my life but had not given me. Most of them were dated in the mid-eighties, when I was a teenager. She had found them in a drawer. They were written in faded pencil, on yellow legal paper, with formal beginnings: Dear Greg, or, Dear Son. Many of the words were misspelled, sentences ran on. He told me in writing how proud he was of me, how I was a goodhearted person, smart, special. He said he worried that I thought about the bad things too much, that I was “too soft,” too contemplative, spent too much time quiet and alone. He wrote in big, blocky letters, like a schoolboy sending a secret to a friend, that he loved me very, very much, always had and always would, that he saw good things in me, that if I worked I could probably go to college and have opportunities he never had. In a couple of the latest letters, he said to try to avoid thinking about Michael (these were dated long before the false murder admission), that he would be out of our lives soon enough, one way or another.

He implied that to live any kind of life I had to get away from here, away from all this accidental wreckage. Look forward, he wrote; don’t dwell on all this. Never squander your dreams. Since I’ve squandered mine, sometimes I'm hard on everybody else’s. I don’t mean to be, he wrote. He loved me so much, he wrote. But he hated saying things like that because he “sounded like a jerk!” It was weird to say something like that to another grown man, or almost grown man. It was just easier to write things down and never show them to anyone. Like me, my father knew that the most dangerous thing was to love openly.

My father’s illness more or less sent me over the edge. He was at home now, there was nothing more the doctors or a hospital could do, so I fled, which has always been my impulse, though I never completely succeed at doing this. At twenty-two, I decided I wanted to quit life. I had recently read Walden, and most of the curmudgeonly books of Edward Abbey, and the idea of living alone, away from everyone, away from these highways and shopping malls and suburban homes and kids and families, was alluring.

A friend from college was working for a guy outside of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a couple of hours away, restoring a nineteenth-century plantation house. He asked, because of my brother and the whole fiasco, if I wanted a job for the fall and winter, wanted to get away from it all, live in a tent, get high and scrape old paint and sand boards and caulk windows. I would have said yes to anything. It gave me an excuse—work—to leave all my problems, to abandon my dying father and my brother, whose manic behavior seemed temporarily controlled, or almost controlled, by the new medications.

North Carolina was a haze. It was long days of work through cold, blue mornings and crisp, sunny afternoons, stoned, standing up on makeshift scaffolding made of aluminum ladders and bungee cords, pliant and unstable, holding a heavy sander to blast lead-based paint off a giant, old house, the owners of which were absent. By midmorning each day I was white with paint dust, as if dipped in flour, needing to change the filter in my respirator.

The work was hours disappearing, the sun sliding like a drop of water down the sky. I spent whole days performing the same motion: a sander back and forth, a paint scraper hacking away at what seemed like the same shutter, though by nightfall I'd have finished them all, without remembering exactly when one ended and the next began. I was thankful to have somehow missed a whole day.

At night, which fell like a stage curtain at five in those cold months, we slept in separate high-tech Arctic tents set up in the empty living room of the giant house, among boards, wiring, stacks of wallboard, tools, and rodent turds.

When my friend and I received a payment—a lump of cash, maybe a hundred bucks for my friend and me to split while the “boss” went to Greenville to stay with a girl he knew who kept breaking his heart—we'd go to a Mexican restaurant, drink margaritas and beer and laugh and make a commotion and I'd look at other families and feel like fucking crying. We'd blow all but gas money for the next week, and I didn’t care. We'd wake up with hangovers like a ballpeen hammer to the forehead. Once we got tattoos. Another time we bought two ounces of pot to make sure we'd have weed to smoke (we decided it was better to be broke with pot than have money without it). We talked about Darwin and the Big Bang and God and the stranger fundamentalists in the news and how we both viewed organized Christianity as based upon the repression of pleasure. We spoke like the high, half-intelligent pseudo-bohemians we were.

I realize that it was here, on a plantation in the middle of endless North Carolina fields and farms, that I truly hit bottom, that the pressures of life began to seem too ridiculous to continue dealing with. It felt as if this was the beginning of the final act of some drama I could not control.

The most important thing for me in those months, after my brother left the state psychiatric lockup and my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, was to be numb at all times, drunk or high and alone as much as possible. I thought of killing myself, pondered it in a philosophical way—weighed its pros and cons—but my aversion to violence, my astounding cowardice in the face of all physical pain, kept me from making any rash decisions. I was just so tired. I wanted to sleep and never wake up. I wanted to vanish and never be heard from again.

When the boss came back from the girl-who-broke-his-heart’s house on Monday morning, February 22, 1993, he told me that my mother had called. Usually I called home on Sundays, collect from a pay phone outside a Rocky Mount Piggly Wiggly grocery, where I imagine the locals thought I was a hitchhiker, a vagrant. I had given my mother my boss’s girlfriend’s number, in case of emergency, which seemed, given the circumstances at home, always likely. My boss didn’t know the details or the degree of damage, but there had been a fire. Everyone was okay. That was all he knew.

I borrowed five dollars for gas, got in my old station wagon, and left. My car shimmied along highways cutting through East Carolina fields that stretched out, golden and dead, to the hem of the sky. By the time I got home, late that morning, my brother Michael was in police custody.