“In certain traditions!” Dr. Klar said, then she beckoned me out into the hall. “I think it’s time to stop,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop hiding!” the angel shouted.
“Stop the chemo,” said Dr. Klar. We had this conversation every week. “What are we doing? What good is coming of it? Why are you coming here every week, when he could be at home?”
“He doesn’t want to stop. He wants to keep going.”
“Just put out your hand to him and he will be healed,” the angel said. “Just put out your hand to him, and you will undo all the pain you’ve caused me.”
“Does he know what he wants?”
“He’s always confused here. You keep it too cold. And the Benadryl before the infusion makes him sleepy.”
“Carl,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder the same way she did with him, comfort for a dead person. “It really is getting to be time.” And the angel said, “It has always been time!”
Things started to go wrong between the angel and me after Cindy Hacklight showed me her pooty in seventh grade. Cindy had made a sort of cottage industry of showing around her pooty to anyone — girl or boy — who would give her five dollars, a large sum back before high school inflation. You got the feeling that she didn’t really care about the money, but sensed that what she had wasn’t something to show for free. She didn’t need to be paid, anyway. There were no poor children at our school.
“Go not that way,” the angel said. She saved onerous fancy-speak like that for her most serious moments, for things she really meant, for things that really mattered. But I went with Cindy into the forest behind the gym, where she leaned against a narrow poplar and swore me, not to secrecy, but to respect for what she was about to show me. It was one promise I’ve managed to keep all my life, to keep reverence for her bald little pooty, then in seventh grade and ever after, even when I met it again one summer when we were both home from college. “Turn your face!” the angel shouted as Cindy lifted her skirt. And the angel was ugly for the first time ever, having put on the apricot face of our head-mistress, Ms. Carnegie. I looked back and forth between them, startled by the contrast, how beautiful was the one and how ugly the other, until Cindy, keeping her skirt up with one hand put the other on my head and turned my face to her. “If you’re going to respect it you’ve got to look at it,” she said.
The angel berated me for days afterward — how mild it seems in recollection, compared to what she dished out in later years and decades. “How is a seducing pooty like a grand destiny?” she kept asking me, and then she would answer her own question, and eventually she trained me to give the right answer. “Exactly not at all,” I said. Yet awakening lust wasn’t the problem, though eventually the lust that awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, but never of drugs. I think it was the first time that something so ordinary was as attractive to me as the extraordinary things the angel said I must dedicate myself to. When I lay with Cindy on the scented ground in my father’s orange groves, what I experienced was a very ordinary comfort, and when she raised her skirt in the woods I understood that I could want — so badly — something the angel thought I shouldn’t.
My father had a little bell that he rang when he wanted something. Mornings, I would hear it and rise from the single bed I’d slept in when I was five and go downstairs to see what he wanted. At first after he came home it was to be helped out into the yard to sit in the sun, and then it was coffee or breakfast when he could not get those for himself, and then it was just to be turned or for help retrieving a blanket that had migrated down past his hips, and then finally he would just ring it and ring it as constantly as a beggar Santa, not knowing what he wanted, in which case I gave him a pain pill (and took one myself, always supremely faithful to my rigorous policy of one for you and one for me), and this would settle him.
Janie Finn was our hospice nurse. I always hated hospice, and hospice people, nurses with smart heels and smother pillows, and the women in charge of the palliative care programs, who seemed universally to be dark-eyed and dark-haired and very tall. They dress like nineteenth-century Jesuits and cherish crushes on death. But Janie brought me liquid morphine and Ativan — and either of those would be enough for me to forgive anybody the mere crime of being. “Your jab and your hook,” she said in the kitchen the day she met us. She had placed the bottles in my hand — I hadn’t even had any yet and already I could feel a lovely warmth coming out of them, and they seemed to catch the afternoon light in a very special way. Janie set her feet and threw out two quick punches. “A one-two against the pain,” she said. “One-two! Give it a try.” With a bottle in either hand I gave it a try, and, yes, my fists seemed to have a certain heft to them. I threw a punch at the angel and she actually ducked away.
I made free with the drugs, and made a lot of trips back and forth to the pharmacy, and imagined the little man in the back filling the bottles from two big coolers of bright, pure drug, and dreamed of following him back to put my mouth to the spigots, because I was sure that if I could just take enough, then the angel would be permanently transformed, and if it happened also to be enough to kill me, then all right. I was sure that she would take me someplace bearable. How she hated those little bottles. If I’d had them when I was twelve, I might have made a normal life for myself with their daily medicine.
“Just put out your hand,” the angel kept telling me. “Touch him and make him well.” Though she hardly ever screeched at me in those last few days, it seemed like a worse torture than ever, to have her demand the impossible of me so consistently, and to blame me like that for how he was getting sicker every day. It made me feel worse than anything she’d ever said to me. I could not ignore a homeless person on the street without her detailing the ways in which I was responsible for his misery, absent policies and initiatives never having established a common weal, as if the hundred thousand sins of omission that were my unfulfilled destiny added up to national and individual catastrophe. It was easier to bear when she blamed me for the woes of strangers, even when they fell out of the sky or burned in their churches. I can make even little children faceless, but my father could never be anonymous to me, and for some reason, as the weeks went by in Florida, I believed her, better than ever, when she told me that every wrong thing I’d done could be redeemed in one miracle, and that if I could make my father well with one hand, then with the other I could do the same for the whole world.
“Make me dinner,” my father said, so I did. It was only three in the afternoon but no matter what time of day it was, the meal was always dinner, and always it was the same thing, a chocolate milk-shake with a banana and a raw egg and a little Ativan in it. When I brought it to him he took a sip and he was done. He turned his head and opened his mouth like a baby bird — this was the signal for pain medication, so I took the morphine out of my pocket and dropped in a few drops. He smacked his lips and turned back to the television, then closed his eyes. “Now I’ll take a nap,” he said. “Go to your room.”
I made going-upstairs noises but went outside instead. It was another brilliant blue afternoon. He kept saying he wanted a storm. We mostly watched television when he could stand to have me around in the living room with him, and we always watched the weather. It was hurricane season but all we’d had was near misses. “Look at that!” he’d say, pointing at a gigantic storm swirling across the Atlantic, or he would shout “Fool!” at the hapless reporters clinging to light poles and declaiming the magnificently obvious. Hurricanes were the enemy when I was a child — they tore up trees and scattered fruit. But now he spoke the names of the female hurricanes with great fondness. “I’ve always liked them,” he said when I asked him about it.