I’M DYING, A. N. Dyer thought, lying in bed, arms crossed, staring up at the ceiling, which, he swore, was slowly lowering, now only a few cranks from his nose. It was strange being back in this bed, a citizen again of this super-king-size island. As boys Richard and Jamie were awed by its expanse and would jump on board and play games of stuntman, tossing and leaping and tumbling. Isabel never cared, though all the roughhousing tightened Andrew’s nerves. He constantly heard screams in their laughter. Split skulls. Blinded eyes. Stitches and scars. Please stop, please stop, he would whisper, begging for safety from all this spirit. Last night they brought him up here. They cleaned him. They tucked him in. The sheets on his left were still sealed, like a half-opened envelope. Seventeen years without Isabel but yesterday was on repeat in his head and how wonderful she looked and how seeing her reminded him how alone he was. His arm reached over. I’m dying, he told the chilly linen. This will be my deathbed. Articulo mortis. Richard and Jamie pooh-poohed him when he informed them of this last night—perhaps it was the extra tremolo in his voice and the vomit on his breath—the two of them looking down like death was a splinter and tomorrow they’d get the tweezers. In the middle of the night Andrew startled awake and tried to grab whoever was tasked with tending to his bedside—Richard, he believed—to pull him close, but it was just a sympathetic shadow, likely the curtain, the morning sun presently curling around its edge. We are all born twins, Andrew thought, wondering if the line was his, twins we only meet on the day we die. At least there’s a companionable form in the end. The ceiling now seemed ready to squeeze. Andrew closed his eyes and attempted to swami his body toward that introduction, his pulse tapping softer and softer on that door until the door would finally open. I am dead, he thought.
And then he got up.
He still needed to type the epilogue for Ampersand. That would be his final act, his last words, Edgar Mead after college, a successful lawyer in the making, his future bright. A man spared. It was only a page and a half and it would take maybe an hour, including his patina of edits and scrawls, his illusion of life. Andrew was determined to change the tone so that when Edgar bumps into Timothy Veck in New York, he would at least reveal his eternal shame rather than express his glib apology, effectively splitting himself between the then and the now. “Christ, we were a disturbed lot, weren’t we.” That’s what he said, smiling and shaking his head, a master of rhetoric. But this time pick up a damn spear, Andrew thought, and start poking. Put some blood on the page. Let sorrow run its endless course and try to wrestle that twist into a unity. “Not a day has passed …” Once this revision was done, Andrew would swallow every last Vicodin and exit either by razor or by window. Maybe that would set Andy free. So inspired, Andrew grabbed from his closet a bathrobe, paisley silk, circa unknown, and shuffled from bedroom to hallway to stairs, gimping carefully, desperate not to die until he had managed this last bit of creative reverie. None of his ailments mattered anymore. There was something to write. It was like he had stumbled onto a mysterious relic from his younger days and he cradled the charm close to his chest.
Near the bottom Andrew was struck by a thought: I haven’t had sex in a very long time. This detour surprised him. Was it the feel of silk against his skin, its vaguely biological fabric? The bathrobe, tight and harboring a better quality of smell, seemed a stowaway from Isabel’s wardrobe. But whatever the synaptic path, the above statement was true, and below loomed an even larger truth: I will likely never have sex again. This was no loss on the carnal front. Andrew would need multiple medications to merely consider a woman’s hands in prayer. But it did strike him as metaphysically sad that he had no more of that game in him. Only doctors and dental hygienists and barbers touched him now. Sex had never been a huge focus for A. N. Dyer. Sure, his characters got caught up in the great congenital churn, but for Andrew personally it always played as too intimate, too clumsy to impose on anyone but his wife. A climax was more purge than pleasure, a banishment, and when finished, he wanted to apologize, like he had spilled something and sorry it’s sticky. That’s not to say he was a hundred percent faithful. I mean, who was? No matter how conservative a person might be, the seventies were the seventies. Funny, Andrew had no dream of ever being with another woman, yet he had his dalliances, while Isabel probably often dreamed of being with other men, more loving men, easier men, yet she never touched a soul. But occasionally Andrew could still park in fantasy. There was that particular bank teller he liked, her index finger ribbed in rubber. And there was a moment where he considered Gerd as a possible partner, but he could never muster the necessary energy. His bathrobe seemed to press harder. When was the last time? He remembered those wicked blue pills, diamond-shaped, like he might reclaim something.
Andrew opened the door to his study and headed right to—Richard, standing by his desk, papers in his hand, not papers but manuscript pages. “Is this the original?” he asked, his being caught red-handed shading toward innocent daybreak.
“What are you doing here?” Andrew’s voice choked on outrage.
“I spent the night,” Richard said. “I’ve never seen—”
“In here?”
“No, no, in the living room, on the sofa. I’ve never seen—”
“Couch,” Andrew corrected.
“What?”
“It’s a goddamn couch, and if you slept in the living room, why are you in here now?”
“I woke up early.”
“And decided to peek into my study.”
Richard squinted. “You feeling okay?”
“Do not patronize me. I will not have that. Not from you.”
“Patronize? You were in pretty rough shape last night, Dad.”
“I get dizzy, that’s all. They think I might have Meunière’s disease.”
“Meunière? Are you seeing a doctor or a French chef?”
A grimace at this blunder. “Oh, aren’t you clever?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I meant the other one.”
“Ménière’s,” Richard said.
“Yes, yes, Ménière’s. Are you happy now? Anything else you’d care to mock? My labored breathing? My poor digestion? Trust me, the life inside this body is a laugh riot.”
“Look, I’m sorry—”
“I’m in pain.” A crack of emotion, as if forecasting tears.
“I know, I—”
“In constant pain,” Andrew said, curious if he would tear up, “so much pain,” but after the third try, he hobbled over to his desk, tearless. “You have no idea.”
“It was a bad joke.”
“It was a decent joke, cruelly timed.”
When had he cried last?
“Okay, Dad, I’m a cruel bastard.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Richard kicked the ground with his breath. “Whatever.”
Andrew looked for his Vicodin on his desk. It was normally right next to his typewriter, a small brown silo, V for Vicodin, ever stalwart but now gone. He opened drawers and moved aside papers, and finding no sign, opened the same drawers and moved aside the same papers. Where are you? You must be here somewhere. He was like a giant fee-fi-foing for a pill-popping Jack. He started to search in absurd places, as if this bottle had the wherewithal to hide. Under the phone. Inside the pencil holder. Within the antique inkwell. Once more with the drawers and the papers but this time with more flinging involved, and with nowhere else to go, Andrew went on all fours and investigated the clutter beneath his desk. It was a goddamn mess down here. All evidence of civilization had been lost below the knees.
“Is everything okay?” Richard asked.
“I’m looking for something.”
“You need help?”
A quick “No” as Andrew panned through royalty statements and balled-up Kleenexes and mounds of opened and unopened mail, newspapers and magazines, haphazard socks, dozens of cast-aside books, piles of index cards with random jottings, some with enigmatic words or phrases—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; the new Adam; the tonic key—others with a sentence or two seeking a home—This is not a story, this is a life—one sheet of typescript giving him a minute’s worth of pause:
On a flat green stretch of hard-tru the armies slowly amassed. There were only a few roads and they rippled white in the high summer heat, their route long and straight except for a few intersections where, as always, the greatest blood would be spilled. Only the weakest, most beaten-up stuck to the road; they had been kissed by other wars, wars that fathers and uncles lived through, grandparents mourning the cost. It was said that an older cousin once commanded a great deal of these assets, but nobody talked of those battles. War has its own mute nostalgia. The rest of the vehicles were relatively unscathed. Tanks and front loaders and bulldozers and police cars and fire engines and ambulances and a rag-tag collection of civilian cars, mostly slick and sporty, though a few taxis were thrown in as well as a stagecoach, none of these transports had a need for the civilized path. Not even the ridiculous limousine obeyed the road, its tinted windows hiding a squat billionaire who insisted on fighting. Nobody yet knew his car could turn invisible. And fly. The traffic was awful and the combatants were getting upset. Even before the war officially started there was a nine-car pile-up, an unexpected calamity. And a Tyrannosaurus Rex mauled a knight in armor. The uneasy truce between cowboy and Indian was almost lost when a Mexican bandit gunned down a Cherokee warrior, but luckily a spaceman stepped in and saved the day with his advanced knowledge of medical care. But this was only the beginning.
Andrew had no idea when he wrote this, for what purpose. There was a brief doubt that he was even its author since he liked the writing so much. Were there more pages like this floating around? It could have been a year old or thirty years old, a random start folded up and forgotten. Whatever its origin, its quality unnerved him. It was like coming across a photograph of a happy memory you don’t remember, like your dad on the beach holding you upside down, your smile reflected in his face. Was that really you? Was that once your life? When did you become so dispossessed from yourself? Andrew tossed aside the sheet. Everything old seemed a rebuke. And with all that was lost and all that was unknown, goddamn if his big toe wasn’t beating a war drum against his foot.
“You find what you’re looking for?” Richard asked, peering down.
A tired sigh. “Why are you here?”
“You were in bad shape last night.”
“As you can see,” Andrew said, crawling toward the couch, “I’m fine.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“You can go home, my prodigal son. I thank you for your concern.”
Richard stiffened. “I’m not prodigal.”
“Don’t be so literal.”
“If anything Jamie’s the prodigal son.”
“Fine, fine. Then return to your hoeing, my bitter eldest.”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I heard you the first time.” My goodness, Andrew thought, when did Richard become so straight and sincere, unlike the son of his memory who rubbed their noses in his foul behavior and had the frightening air of murder-suicide, a phrase Andrew almost used as the title for Percy, By Himself. This change in Richard seemed almost untrustworthy. In the good old days Andrew would have had confidence that Richard had stolen his Vicodin.
“Andy’s not here, by the way,” Richard informed him. “Don’t worry, he’s okay. He’s with Emmett. The two of them spent the night somewhere without bothering to call. But they’re both fine. I talked with them about forty minutes ago.”
“Aren’t you the universal father?” Andrew said from the vicinity of the coffee table.
“Just thought you’d want to know. He was pretty upset with you last night.”
“Who?”
“Andy. But he was drunk, so was Emmett.”
“Who’s Emmett?”
Richard nocked a grin. “That would be my son.”
“That’s his name. Emmett. Emmett, Emmett, Emmett.” Feeling embarrassed and defeated, Andrew gave up on the Vicodin and climbed onto the couch, allowing pain its full rout. The comfort of soon dying was replaced with the palpable unpleasantness of Richard staring at him. “He’s sick, right?” Andrew said.
“Was sick, and that was a while ago.”
“What was it again? Jamie told me but I forget. A kind of cancer.”
“Leukemia.”
“Right. Leukemia. That must’ve been hard.”
“You could say that.”
“But he beat it.”
“So far so good.”
Andrew grabbed a ratty throw pillow and placed it on his stomach for support. “Of course, avoid the definitive,” he said, and then he coughed for a bit, trying to dislodge a hunk of awfulness from his lungs. “You know when you were, well, struggling, I used to have these fantasies—not fantasies, but daydreams, thoughts really, that flashed in my head, of you dead in a gutter somewhere, murdered, overdosed, another grim New York story of a wayward son, and I am the one tasked with identifying your body in that place where they keep bodies cold, not a mortuary, but a, a, a—anyway, I go and see you—morgue, a hospital morgue—I go and see you at the morgue and you’re all ravished, no, I mean ravaged, and in that moment I truly love you, seeing you laid out on that slab, I can finally love you without complication, even though it’s too late. But still I’m glad for the feeling, glad that I can, if this makes sense, mourn you for the rest of my life without guilt. How’s that for insanity. I can only be a good father to a dead son.” Andrew wiped the perspiration from his forehead, checking his hand as if there might be evidence of blood. “I don’t think I ever wrote that anywhere. Did I?”
“Don’t think so,” Richard said.
“Good. But you never did die.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t be like that. I was going to add ‘Thank God.’ ”
“Dad, I didn’t—”
“I’m trying to tell you something, I’m not sure what, but it is something, and I would think you’d want to hear it, that this is what you want, Richard. I’m so easily overwhelmed by the basics of how to live and I think of you as being a tremendous adult.”
“I hear you and I appreciate the honesty,” Richard said.
“God, no validation, please. We’re not in therapy.”
“I’m just saying I can relate to being scared about your sick son, I know that feeling. It’s miserable. Maybe I never really appreciated what you and Mom went through with me and my problems, but with Emmett I have those same exact flashes but instead he’s dangling over an abyss—I know, crazy—but he’s dangling and I’m holding him by the arm and trying to pull him up, but I’m not strong enough, and the horror in his eyes, it stops me cold, he’s begging for me to make things all right, please, Dad, make it all right, and I can sense his hand slipping, I know he’s slipping, I know my grip is loosening, I know that things aren’t going to be all right, that it’s about to get unspeakable fast, and even though I know it’s just the normal craziness running around my head, thinking it I get a full panic attack.”
Andrew considered his son. “This isn’t a competition,” he said.
“What?”
“Dueling dying-son stories.”
“I was just telling you my version.”
“Your version?”
“We all have our version, or I think we all do.”
“Well in my version you’re already dead, and in yours, you’re doing something with your son, you’re outdoors, in the mountains, rock climbing for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re trying to save him.”
“Please.”
“I’m serious. No doubt about it, your dead son wins.”
“Dead is dead,” said Richard.
“Dead is dead,” Andrew agreed.
Whatever the path, they had landed on a shared belief, after which they became quiet, the silence giving weight to the air, the seconds growing burdensome until they seemed to drop and cover every surface, including Andrew and Richard, who huddled against this increasing accumulation. Neither noticed the other, though there was the quality of mutual perseverance. Then, in a low tone, “Do you believe me?” and Richard knew that his father was asking about Andy and more than anything right then he wanted to please him, like a boy again, wanted to offer him his absolute blessing and atone for his part of the past. Why not let him believe what he wanted to believe? Where was the harm in that? And regardless of the facts, young Andy put a sweeter spin on the old man, especially seeing him last night with Emmett. Richard tried to tuck his father within that awkward adolescent shell, those milky eyes taking on the more identifiable gleam between desire and scorn, ignorance and certainty, the need to be loved and the need to be left alone. In that shudder Richard saw his son, saw himself. “I do believe you,” he said.
“You think I’m telling the truth then?”
Was this a trick question? “Yes.”
His father puffed his upper lip, testing its cubic limit, and Richard was ready for the final release, where forgiveness is exchanged with a simple gesture, apologies brushed aside, the mantle of father and son melting and leaving behind two flawed men trying to stay warm. But instead all he got was “Bullshit.”
“What?”
“I think you’re just amusing me.”
“Dad—”
“I think you think I’m lost, that I’m a goner, in another world.”
“Dad—”
“What’s the harm, that’s what I think you think.”
“Were you just setting me up?”
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said, as though vengeful of Richard’s faith.
“I want to believe you,” Richard said.
“That’s not the same as believing.” Andrew sat up, newly energized. “I’m a pretty good reader of people and I think you think if you say yes I’ll let you have Ampersand. I remember things about last night, Richard, the angling and the flattery, the downright sorcery. And when I walked in here, you were practically drooling over the manuscript. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Mostly I was excited to see the original, that’s all.”
“I had more respect for you as a crack addict. At least it was your own pursuit. What’s next, Mr. Hollywood, Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men? You could turn Eloise & Tom into a sitcom.”
“Dad, I swear I’m on your side.”
“My side?” said with a smirk.
Richard could sense the hopelessness of answering.
“None of what I’ve said is true?”
So instead he just pulled back—
“I’m out of bounds? You have no ulterior motives? Your intentions are pure?”
—and hoped he might retain his dignified whole, like a soul sacrificed to appease a greater irrational force. It was a thankless nobility. But rage would have only added to the show and he realized whatever he said could well be the last thing he ever said to his father, so best say something charitable, something worth remembering. “I like Andy,” Richard started, surprised by his own calm. “And no matter the logic I like the idea that maybe that’s you before whatever happened happened. To you. To all of us. You don’t have to worry about him being alone.”
“After I die.”
“Yes, after you die.”
“You’ll take care of him?”
“He is almost eighteen.”
“But you’ll be there for him?”
“In whatever way he wants, sure.” Richard shrugged at the uninspired view from the high road. “And I could give a shit about Ampersand. Honestly. I like the book and I’m proud I’m related to the man who wrote it, but I could give a shit about turning it into a movie. Those are other people’s dreams.”
“I think you mean you couldn’t give a shit.”
“What?”
“If you gave a shit, that would mean you cared.”
“It’s a shit we’re talking about.”
“Yes but—”
“And who cares about a shit except a lesser shit?”
“But it’s still something.”
“Something as seen by a turd.” Richard rubbed his face instead of screaming. “I need to get back to the Carlyle and check on everyone. Really need to give Emmett an earful. But Dad, regardless of everything, I’m glad I came back.”
“Regardless of what?”
“Regardless of your fucking insanity.”
Andrew clapped. “Finally a straight answer.”
“Glad I got one right.”
“When are you leaving?”
“We’re going to Mom’s tomorrow in Connecticut.”
“That’s right, she’s a country girl now.”
“And after that, back to L.A.”
“A Sharon girl.”
“Litchfield. I could come over with the kids this afternoon for a goodbye.”
Andrew frowned. “No, no, no, I have work to do.”
“Really?”
“I’m close to finishing. Then I’ll be done.”
Richard was amazed but also thankful for the man’s consistency. “I guess this is so long then.” He went over and patted his father on the shoulder. “Silk,” he commented playfully, “very nice. I’ll call you next week.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Fine.”
“And maybe we’ll visit again, over the summer.”
“The house in Bellport is small, not like the Southampton days.”
“Okay.”
“I couldn’t put you all up, even if I tried.”
“That’s okay,” Richard repeated. “Seriously.” He stood there and stared at his father. His face was no longer the fruit but the remaining pit. And Richard understood that his father, his dad—Didi, he used to call him when he was eight—was incapable of reaching across that divide, the distance simply too frightening, the chance of slipping too great, and to blame the man for this, to hate him for this, would be like blaming or hating someone because of what they feared. So Richard spared him the discomfort of his overflowing sentiment and just said goodbye with a neutral smile, closing the door behind him, which he did quietly and as a favor.
Where was I when all of this was happening? Walking back from the Hotel Wales, where I had spent a Dyer-free night. The police report puts the time at 9:12 A.M. when all that occurred occurred, which incidentally is my birthday and is a detail I didn’t notice till now. Perhaps my role has been fated from the beginning. A dozen September twelfths have passed since the officer scribbled pen to paper, and while there is little joy in getting older, there is an appreciation of letting go and giving in. The cop was probably guessing the time, checking his watch ten minutes after the fact and approximating the chronology. That puts us in the same boat. Either way, on the sixth floor of 2 East 70th Street, in the Dyer residence, specifically the study, Andrew sat on that couch and suffered the aftereffects of Richard’s departure. It was roughly the size of a fist in his stomach. He leaned back and pitched his mouth open, like a baby bird. Feed me, feed me. So helpless. So far removed from soaring. I’m an awful man, he thought from his nest, even though in terms of being truly awful he knew he was minor-league, which made him an imposter, which only reconfirmed his overall sense of bogusness. Except for the books. The books were real. Andrew bent forward and rocked. Those goddamn books. The reflection had replaced the man. How could he have crammed Charlie Topping into Timothy Veck? And Charlie never said a word, just played dumb. We are connected, intertwined, a whorl endlessly repeating. It came from love, this impetus to fashion a place in which they might belong, in which they might confirm their humanity by invention. It was meant as a kind of apology. How’s that for failure?
Andrew wished he had a shotgun here.
He dragged himself over to his desk. The draft of Ampersand was nearly two pounds of paper and still in need of an epilogue. Fifty years ago there was the original and the corrected proofs, which Random House had returned in two boxes. Back then this apartment was pristine and entirely too big. “This is not for you right now but for you in the future,” his mother had told him, and Andrew joked with newly-wed Isabel that they were living in pure speculation. “This is where we are heading,” he told her, his arms spread wide. Those boxes sat in his study for weeks until he heard the heartbeat, cribbed from Poe, and one night when drunk and ashamed and frightened, when life could no longer be undone, he opened those boxes and started to stack the paper in the fireplace, first with care but soon just dumping it all in. He knew he was slumming in gesture, but sometimes you have to give in to your baser symbolic impulses. When finished, the fireplace looked snowbound. Andrew pulled one of those red petals from the bloom of extralong matches and struck it against the bottom, the phosphorous sparking—at least it sparked the first time, but fifty years later the match snapped near the middle and Andrew had to pull another, which snapped as well, Andrew gripping the third closer to the top and flicking it more directly, skidding one … two … three times before snapping. “Fuck,” he muttered. By now his younger self was back on the couch and watching the fire cradle the paper in a weird kind of nativity. There it goes. But the older Andrew tried another match, then another, then another—“C’mon!”—the two dozen matches remaining like years in non-fire form. Heat rose on his forehead. He remembered how the Eaton twenty-pound stock burned and let loose wisps of black ash that took flight up the chimney as if commanded to give chase. It was easier back then. Of course. Finally a match—miraculous!—lit! Andrew noticed how badly his hand shook, a possible sabotage, so he used both hands to reach forward and carefully touch the front and back corners of the manuscript. The flame seemed to consider the prospect of its own combustion before nodding with agreement. There was no snap of wood, only the whoosh of industry. Maybe it was the cockled finish that gave it a blue-green hue. Maybe it was the ink. Andrew didn’t recall the smoke from the first time, the speed of the blaze, sure, but not the smoke, which spilled up from the fireplace like a waterfall turned upside down. Rather than thinking this undesirable, Andrew thought it beautiful. A visible suspension of carbon, an entraining drift of warmth, from sierra to echo, pooling across the ceiling. Andrew breathed in without coughing. His respiration seemed rejuvenated. He breathed deeper. Who needed Vicodin? He lifted his hand and brushed at the smoke as if trying to glimpse the bottom. Or maybe the surface. It was everything but the epilogue. That would have to do. Another deep breath. Nearby a fleck of ash floated, its motion in league with his lungs.