Another Broken Wizard Page 8

  20.

  Back in the waiting room, Olive and I passed the hours looking at each other and pretending not to. It was the sort of petty and ridiculous thing that living people do. My surgeon came back before theirs did. He was an Indian guy, just a couple years older than me. His eyes were sober and competent, like he could do three more of the same surgery that day. From what Dad told me, he might.

  “The surgery went well. We removed the mass. And looking at it, I don’t think it was malignant. But we’ll know more after we run some tests,” he said in the middle of a lot of words that disappeared.

  “Can I see him?”

  “I think the nurse will let you know when. We’re moving him to the ICU. It should be another hour or so before you can go in.”

  After he left, Olive made a not-too-furtive gesture asking “What did he say?” I gave her a quiet thumbs-up. Between meeting her, and Dad’s good news, the next hour passed faster than I probably deserved. In the surgical ICU, Dad could have passed for dead if not for all the machines and beeping screens to say otherwise. The room had glass walls and a huge sliding glass door. The patients on either side of it were ministered to in identical fashion in a long row of high-tech sarcophagi. I tried just to look at his face, which seemed neglectfully unshaven around the breathing tube. But he had too many tubes and wires going into and out of him.

  “Hey, Dad. How are you doing?”

  In a movie, this is where I would say my soliloquy. But I was too tired to even be pissed off, never mind philosophical. I watched him breathe and beep for a few minutes. I stepped outside at the same time as the nurse who was checking on the young black man in the glass sarcophagus next to him.

  “How long is he going to be like this?”

  “Which one? Monaghan?”

  “Yes. My father. The man who is lying over there,” I said, perhaps with too much pepper on it.

  The nurse, a tall blonde with a cold manner to her, walked with me over to his bed and took his chart from the foot of it. She was wearing scrubs, which negated any sex appeal she might possess in the outside world. She spent a minute looking it over and probably an extra minute killing time just to let me know she was in charge.

  “He’ll be intubated for at least the next three days, and mostly unconscious. But you’re free to stay with him as long as you want.”

  “So, would he be upset if I just came back tomorrow? I mean, he’ll be pretty doped up between now and say, like, noon tomorrow. It won’t mess up his recovery, will it?”

  “He’s pretty stable. We like to say that sitting and talking helps the patient. But he’ll be out of it for the rest of the night,” she said, looked me over and moved on.

  My exhaustion had become a dark curtain lowering over everything. I did the math and decided the coming weeks scored me dutiful-son points out the ass, and left. I gave whiskeynose the ticket and four bucks and drove back to Dad’s apartment building.

  The dome lights and pale blue doors in the apartment hallways repeated into distances obscured by plain disinterest. I was so exhausted and out of my head that the Fountainhead actually felt like my natural habitat. In the apartment, I put an action movie on the TV, loud. I was all alone, and started looking for porn and pills, because I felt I was owed that much. I found some blood-pressure prescriptions and some old Tramadol, but nothing that would get me high or put me to sleep.

  I pulled the blinds away from the sliding glass door that opened onto the narrow balcony. Beyond the parking lot and the street was a low hill that used to be a landfill. I remember driving by and seeing the bulldozers work a corkscrew up and down the pile of mottled dirt there. After a decade of letting it settle, they covered the mound with sod, parking lots, a Wal-Mart, a McDonald’s and a Friendly’s. Beyond the stores and restaurants, a wooded hill hung over the Route 9 traffic like a wave that would never crash.

  On TV, the hero realized, with rage and horror, the terrible truth about the corporation that manufactured the robots in the movie’s idea of the future. I was asleep on the couch before he could make things right.

  21.

  After a few hours, the phone in my pocket rang.

  “Jim, what are you doing, like, right now?” Joe asked.

  “Sleeping, why?”

  “Because that plan we talked about—I did some asking around and I thought about what you said. I think I found a way to get out of here faster. But I need help. Could I borrow, like two or three hundred dollars tonight? An opportunity came up that I need to jump on like immediately.”

  I paused while I remembered Joe’s plan. From my pause, Joe took as read whatever I was supposed to have said and continued.

  “My brother, don’t worry. Seriously. I have this so under control you wouldn’t believe it. But I need your help to make it happen. I can even pay you back, say, four hundred next week, if you loan me a whole three hundred,” Joe said.

  I stood up to clear my head and took a deep breath. Walking over to the big glass door, I stared out into the night.

  “I don’t want interest. I just want you to be careful. It’s one thing to be a drunken yahoo about town. What you’re talking about is something different.”

  “Like I said, everyone involved is a friend. This is about as safe as this kind of thing gets. I just really need your help with the money part of it.”

  “Fine. But I do need this money back, and sooner rather than later.”

  Even against my better judgment, tired and disoriented, on an errand with no possible reward, on a pain-in-the-ass cold night, I was glad to go see Joe. When you saw him, he was always there, almost too there. He might run out on you to get high or laid, but he never ran out into the automatic conversation of the recap, the recited anecdote, or the well-manicured opinion. Unlike so many people, I never felt lonely talking to him.

  The cold in the parking lot woke me. Crossing out of Westborough on Route 9, I passed a glorious set of bright white lights set atop high poles, as if a visiting platoon of gods had made camp at the foot of a massive rampart. But it was just a Honda dealership, new and pre-owned. I pulled into a bank branch in Shrewsbury and went to the ATM under a cloudless sky. The sand on the parking lot crunched under my sneakers. The concrete seemed especially hard from the cold. My neck itched because I hadn’t shaved. Every detail of the walk to the ATM became especially vivid, the way things do when you suspect that you are making a sizable mistake.

  At the ATM, I checked my balance. It still looked like a lot of money. But it had to last into an unforeseeable future. The severance from Bigelow was a good dose for six months. Not long after that, it would come time for hard decisions. I could afford the three hundred if it would help Joe. I took out a full five, to dilute the egregious fee the machine charged. I met Joe at the Bean Counter on Highland Street. He was engaged in a debate about the Iraq war with a hippie girl and a scruffy guy in a long, black overcoat, who had paused their chess game for the argument.

  “What you refuse to see is that this is a war that goes back to the mid ‘70s in Tehran, when the Ayatollah took our people hostage …” Joe said. Then he caught sight of me and got up to let the couple discuss among themselves how much they disagreed with him.

  “Jim, what’s up? Let me buy you a coffee.”

  I demurred and we walked down Highland, past a cluster of businesses, restaurants, liquor, record and clothing stores, past the Store Twenty Four, toward Elm Park, where Highland Street is just three-deckers remodeled in a Victorian style. Once there, I handed Joe the fifteen twenties folded in half without breaking stride.

  “Thanks. Where are we going?” Joe said.

  “I don’t know. Just out of the way.”

  “Nice tradecraft. But you could have just given it to me in the coffee place,” Joe said and started laughing. I couldn’t help but laugh too.

  “I don’t know. I was never good at this stuff. You remember when I sold off that half-sheet of acid? I had that poor kid follow me into a swamp in Holden to make the deal
. How that reduced the suspiciousness, I’ll never know.”

  “I remember that. It was Freddie Ostrowsky. You scared the crap out of him. He told me he thought you were going to rob him or something,” Joe said, the momentum of the hilarity rolling over us, two maniacs laughing alone in the cold as the cars rolled by. We collected ourselves and walked back.

  “What are you up to tonight?” he asked.

  “I am still beat; I’m going back to Dad’s to get some more sleep. How’d it go with that girl the other night?”

  “Who, Monique? It was cool, I mean weird. I got her shirt off and she had all these scars on her stomach. I asked her what they were about and she just shrugged and said ‘things happen,’ then we started getting it on.”

  “Scars?”

  “Like a lot of them, and not like surgery scars, well, maybe some of them.”

  “Jeez. She let you turn off the lights at least?”

  “Nah. She actually insisted on keeping them on. It was almost kind of hot. Almost.”

  We made plans for New Year’s Eve and I left. Back at the Fountainhead, Dad’s bed was empty. But I opted for my inflatable bed. Call that what you will.

  22.

  Wednesday, December 31

  I woke early and called back the people who had left messages on Dad’s answering machine. The conversations with the people who picked up were pretty much the same as the voicemails I left. Some offered whatever help I might need. I said thanks. That was all there was to say. Only one guy, Gerry, kept me on the phone any longer than that. He had a thick New England accent. Dad had worked with him. Now they played golf together.

  “Your dad told me you were staying up for his recovery.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re doing the right thing. When my mother was dying, she was down in Cranston, Rhode Island. I let my sisters handle it. I just wrote the checks, paid for the hospital, the at-home nursing, everything. It wasn’t even an hour away. I said I was busy. I got down there a few times, but that was it. I said, ‘she’s a proud woman, she doesn’t want me to see her like this.’ You know how I found out she was dead?” Gerry asked and let the pause hang in the air. It was a dramatic pause I could imagine him using on a sales call. I didn’t feel like playing along and let the silence go on a minute.

  “I was on vacation in Hilton Head. I got a phone call from my sister’s husband that she had passed. And I’ll tell you something. There’s not a day, not an hour, really, when I don’t regret I wasn’t there.” Theeya.

  “Well, I don’t have any sisters and he’s not dying. But if you want to stop by, I’ll give you the number for the hospital,” I said, not being in the market for a pep talk or a life lesson.

  The hospital was emptier than the day before. Walking in, I wished for the hundredth time since the divorce that I had a brother or a sister. I asked directions to the ICU from the nurse at the front desk, which had a sparkly boa and party hats taped to it. It was New Year’s Eve and some of the patients in the ICU were going to die that day. You could tell from the families. They clustered in the ICU waiting room, spoke in low voices and took turns visiting the glassed-in room. I saw Olive’s red-haired mother, sitting alone, exhausted, but dry-eyed in the ICU waiting room, which was like the surgery waiting room, but bigger. I assumed Olive’s father would live. At the ICU’s front desk, a big nurse with an old-fashioned pill-box hat said I could see Dad. The door opened with a whoosh when I pushed a button. And there was Dad, his story now told by the unfurling of colored lines on eight different screens. The door whooshed shut behind me. A breathing tube was taped to his stubbly mouth. His face looked gray.

  I tried to regard the situation as strange instead of horrible. I’d read once that bees, because only a fraction of them can actually procreate, shouldn’t be considered organisms. Rather, the hive was the organism. I imagined Dad as being part of a larger organism, sustained by it. But it wasn’t the happier thought I was looking for.

  “Hey Dad, it’s me, Jim. How are you doing?” I said, just to be polite, in case.

  Neither the jagged lines on his unshaven face nor the jagged lines on the many little screens responded. I watched him for a moment, then opened my book about Worcester.

  Cracking the spine, I hoped for a good creation myth for the city—something that placed Worcester in the flow of dramatic historical events, or a poetic early scene that would give an insight into the nature of the place. The world, especially in the ICU, could always stand to make more sense. But there was no sense to be found in the book. Worcester was born like a headache on the land.

  The first colonists abandoned their homestead because of rattlesnakes. And after they found a new site, they only stuck around for about seven years. Then they fled back to Boston and other better-fortified towns when an Indian rebellion, called King Philip’s War, swept the state. After that, Worcester was only sporadically and sparsely settled for the next forty years. It had nothing but enemies in those days—Indian attacks, a proxy war with France, rocky soil for farming and a long, hilly trek to the sea. Even Britain opposed Worcester’s existence for a few years.

  “It is not in His Majesty’s interest you should thrive,” read one official communiqué to settlers in Massachusetts at the time. Here in the 21st century, we don’t have real kings and we barely even have a God left. But in the ICU that day, it appeared that whatever seat of Majesty still held sway was saying much the same thing. A mysterious and fickle hand inflates or depresses the stock market, assigns sicknesses, reroutes highways and changes the priorities of the masses. And it was not concerned that Dad or me should thrive.

  I put down the book and flipped through the handful of TV channels they gave Dad’s room.

  “Can I get you something from downstairs—a magazine, a snack? Just let me know.”

  With no answer, I wandered past the dying and the on-the-fence to the cafeteria. It was all but deserted there. I got an egg sandwich and a coffee and took the same table as before, watching whiskeynose in the morning light. He was watching a tiny television in his booth. I wasn’t hungry and Olive didn’t come by. At the gift shop, I picked up a Sports Illustrated. The cover showed a young quarterback, mouth agape, in the middle of some fist-pumping celebration. I left it on the wheeled table by Dad’s bed, where he did not stir. Nurses cycled in and out, some offering little quips that passed for friendliness. They asked what I was reading about and turned back to their work when I told them Worcester. Someone came by with flowers from Gerry. A doctor came in for a minute and told me Dad was recovering according to schedule, and that they’d have the mass biopsied by the 2nd or 3rd. Around seven, I decided I’d done enough for the day.

  “See you later, Dad,” I said, expecting and receiving no response.

  On Route 9, the supermarkets and the liquor stores buzzed with last-minute shoppers. Even the mall was full, its parking lot a buzz with people gathering items against the coming year. My back and shoulders were so tight they stung as I drove. It felt like my body was pulling itself apart. I passed Mom’s apartment building on the hill and wondered what she was doing for New Year’s Eve. Turnpike Liquors shared its sign with the blue outline of the state of Massachusetts—elongated enough to hold all the letters of the word LOTTERY. The old clerk inside turned the sign to closed just as I got in the door.

  “Looks like you got in under the wire,” he said. Wiyah.

  I picked up a bottle of whiskey and an eighteen-pack of Coors Light cans and put them in the back of the SUV, under a fleece Dad kept back there. I thought about grabbing a swig from the bottle to ease my shoulders for the drive to Worcester. But I imagined the jack-booted state troopers manning checkpoints in their effort to bring the whole state to heel, and refrained. I called Serena.

  “Hey, hold on one second while I go in the other room,” she answered, sounding a little tipsy.

  “Getting started a little early over there, no?”

  “You know us gals. We’re just getting dolled up at my place,
and having some drinks.”

  “Oh yeah, you have a whole pack over there?”

  “Just me, my cousin Jessica, my friend Jessica, Amanda and Davida.”

  “And where are you going tonight, looking so good?”

  I passed the huge, blinking radio towers in front of the state police barracks. I checked my speed and tightened my grip on the wheel.

  “Davida’s cousin is deejaying at a club in midtown—Bubble or Shampoo or something like that, so we get in for free. How about you?”

  In the background, I could hear the busy laughing and yelling of her friends. Picturing her apartment on the upper west side, with its wood floors and low ceilings, I remembered how it felt going home with her to it that first night. It was a single girl’s apartment disheveled with all the busy-ness and distraction of her life, but homey still. I wondered what it might look like to the next guy she took there.

  “Well, I’m on the road right now. I just left the hospital. And I figure I could get down there to see you by midnight, if I put the pedal to the metal in Dad’s old car.”

  “But what about your dad?”

  “I could go down, see you for a bit, crash for an hour or three, then drive back.”

  “You’re such a romantic. But my cousin Jessica is staying over at my place, and I don’t know what the deal is with bringing more guests to the club. Plus, it’s impossible to get to it in a car because it’s near Times Square. Maybe tonight isn’t the best night.”

  “Okay, just thinking out loud.”

  “Anyway, you always say New Year’s Eve is just a hype.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I guess I’ll just hang out with Joe and them in Worcester. Don’t you go kissing some scummy club dude at midnight. They have the internet now. I’ll find out.”

  “Never. And don’t you go native with one of those Worcester ladies you talk about.”