What do you think about as you lie in darkness? How do you keep your mind from eating itself? Hugh examines the corners of the room. The corners of his eyes. Not weeping, good. Yesterday, he didn’t go to Mimi in the evening. Again tonight. First time in—oh, in the whole of life’s great pageant. You could get dressed and go over now, 4 a.m. Hospice hours.
She’ll be asleep, drugged out for the night.
It’s not that. Can’t bear to, that’s all. She is the complicated bane of his entire existence; any day, any moment, she will have the final gall to die. Hugh can’t bear to look at her.
You can stave things off with music. Sometimes. The Mist Covered Mountains used to work pretty well on a dark and rainy night. The Knopfler version, starting with a long, winding scree-whine of tide and squeeze-box. Local Hero. A movie probably nobody remembers. Ivy might. They could watch it again. He looks the DVD up on Amazon—$154.39! Okay, soundtrack on iTunes, $9.99. His Visa might not let even that go through. He’s not allowing himself to buy anything online anymore. Just the one song, then. The waves pounding the shore.
Could have made a dent in the Visa with the ten thousand you gave Jasper. Should have.
A tear drifts down his cheek, catching the light in his reflection on the dark computer screen. His father’s money doesn’t matter because soon he will have his mother’s. If she’s got any left. The tear slides into his mouth. Behind the tear he can still taste mango ice cream.
The Mist Covered Mountains is now unbearably drawn out and boring.
Okay, okay.
He stands up, pulls on yesterday’s clothes. One decision not needing to be made.
The streets are black-wet: more water in the basement. Change the bucket when you get back. Check the messages upstairs too, for Della, for Ken. Hugh blinks light rain out of his eyes and refuses to think about Ken—it’s painful to know when Della doesn’t. Ken’s probably not serious about quitting anyway. He’s just in a slump, in a slough. Like you, Hugh.
One acquainted with the night. With the luminary clock on the Hudson Tower.
The stairs seem steep at the hospice. Too early/late for his legs. Kelly is on the desk, tubular and calm. She walks over to fasten the lock behind him, but doesn’t bother with small talk. Something comforting and kind about the hospice in the middle of the night; even the staff seem meditative, close friends of death that they are. The air is still, the stairs to Mimi’s room uncreaking; the door opens with proper weight, with gravity. Oiled hinges.
“You came!” Her voice as he enters, not a beat wasted.
“Of course I came, sweetheart,” he says.
She is sitting up in bed, awake in the dark. Alert. Hands folded at the sheet’s edge. Her reading glasses flash, bug-eyed, as her head turns. The curtains are open, clouded moonlight coming in; a nightlight somewhere low down gives the floor a pale glow.
She doesn’t have the energy to speak again. He sits on the bed, takes her eggshell hand and talks about nothing. What he did all day, the rainy weather, the grass still green even though the leaves are going, gone … leaf-shadows falling across her eyes.
Go away from that: “I came in early, before all hell breaks loose today. That crazy Lise Largely—she did your lease, remember?—is trying to buy Jasper’s place and mine. We have to turn her down. Did Della come in today? Ken’s in a state, can’t stand his life—he borrowed a cabin out by Bobcaygeon and went away to think for a few days. I don’t know whether to tell Della where he is, or leave it the hell alone.”
She turns the big glasses to him. Has she been listening? Hard to tell. She says, “Joseph said he had to tell me that heaven is real. Isn’t that a strange thing.”
Joseph. A chaplain? Hugh made sure not to tick that box on the visitors-allowed form. Hating anything that smacks of visions, or imaginary friends, or what might come next.
“The little boy said it was real, he died, and it was real, he went, it was real.”
Hugh feels the same sick desperation, revulsion, the longing to go, from childhood. That hatred coming up in his throat like bile. He lowers the bed for her to sleep, until she puts her hand on his. Papery pale, silky with sickness and age, still her hand.
She looks at him, looks, looks. Forgive me forgive me forgive me, it’s all your fault. Eyes monstrous behind the magnifying lenses; pale, frail moonface.
“I’m afraid.”
“I know you are,” he says. “I know.”
“I’m afraid.”
It is never less than terrible to hear. Now she will say it, over and over, for a while. He sits back in the bedside chair and listens.
Walking home, Hugh wonders where he should live when she dies. And why.
Man, have to start getting more sleep. Man.
Because his mother is pretty honourable, or is afraid after their last big fight, and no longer comes in here unless he asks her to—and he will not ask her to—
Because of all that, his bed is an armed fort, a rat’s nest, barricaded by towers of empty cans and bottles, chip bags, pizza plates, bowls with last curls of macaroni fossilized where they died.
One of these days the metabolism will give up and he’ll get fat, look at Burton. And it will all be his mother’s fault.
Orion stands in front of his closet mirror, comparing himself to naked photos of Prince Harry on Twitter. Heavy, swinging, a nice silky giant of a thing. Mouth on mouth, mouth on cock, everything rising. Everything that rises will converge.
The virgin convergences. He is sick of AP English and Honours with Distinction and scholarship apps, the constant yearly tide of this and that, then the paper to prove it. Why not just leave this place, leave school, go straight to GO and do not pass Jail?
He turns, he sways. Arms up in the mirror.
Handsome man looks good in anything.
He falls to his knees, falls flat on the futon, sets the alarm for 8:30, and slides instantly into sleep.