About a week later, in the late afternoon, we found him in the backyard of the row house. He was sitting on his rear in the grass; apparently he’d fallen. He was lightly bucking himself forward, then waiting, then bucking again, as if that might somehow help him up, and the thought occurred that he had momentarily forgotten how to go about getting back on his feet. He wasn’t in the least frantic or distressed. And for a few long seconds we let him keep trying, despite the fact that he would obviously not succeed, and not because we thought he would eventually figure out a better way. He was stuck in a rut of wrong thinking, or no thinking, whatever you wish to call it, and was never going to break out.
We lifted him up — he was as light as a child — and brushed the dirt off his cotton trousers, which hung loosely about his hips. With a stammer, he thanked us, patting us on the cheek like we were children, when we noticed that the back of his hand showed a pattern of perfectly round burns, as if a lit cigarette had been pressed against it. The wounds were smooth and reddish and just now beginning to heal.
What happened here, venerable cousin? we said, clutching his narrow wrist.
What? he mumbled, suddenly very confused. He thought we were asking about his having been on the ground.
We nodded to his hand.
He pulled it back. For a second his eyes flashed. And then they were distant, his mouth pinching up, his face flushed with bitter shame. He huffed and bit his lower lip, suppressing a cry. He didn’t say anything else and he seemed stuck in place so we pointed him toward the house, watching as he shuffled inside in his poky, inching way.
Who could do this? Could it be his seemingly too-contented wife, or the son who was always too quiet, or another cousin, whom we saw coming up with Gordon from the basement the other day for no apparent reason? And for goodness sakes, why? Good Cousin Gordon had never been mean or cruel to any of us. He did not owe money. He had not crossed or let anyone down. By every measure, he was harmless, a complete innocent, a fellow who should rightly live out his waning days free of untoward attention or circumstance; and yet here he was, ill equipped to defend himself or even to understand what was going on, his mind likely growing ever more bewildered by the assaults, retracting into its muddied depths. And what disturbs one most is the idea that in a densely inhabited household, one in which he had resided nearly all his life with a sense of sanctuary and succor, he now felt utterly alone.
Perhaps the rest of us, too, are experiencing a similar feeling. Do we not pause the slightest bit as we pass one another in the hall or on the stairs, checking each other’s eyes? Do we not scuttle a bit more quickly into our beds at night? Do we not brace ourselves and listen, when the house is silent, for the squelched bleat of an old man’s cry? We wait and wait but somehow it never comes.
Then tomorrow, or some other day, in a moment that catches us by surprise, the poor fellow will limp down the front stoop in his shower slippers, his big toe gnarly and black from being smashed. And a startling thing happens, on having to see this kind of thing once again. We get a quickening in the gut, a vestigial node glows hot behind the eyes. And though we betray nothing, we’re suddenly enraged, our fury hurtling and bounding but no longer for the person or persons responsible, or even for ourselves, but finally, at the pitiable fellow himself. We can understand better now: how when your hand on his neck means to comfort, when it hopes to assure, its grip only kind, can another impetus breathlessly arise, a strangely related volition that craves witness of the most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.
16
We are the sinister and the virtuous and most everything in between, and we know too well that in their visitations the fates appear to pay us scant attention. One might ask our good Cousin Gordon how he thinks of his current affairs. Or in a certain frame of mind, perhaps Quig would offer some thoughts on the wayward procession of his life. Or if we were put on the spot to take a philosophical stand, we might well decide to no longer demur and full-throatedly say, We do welcome our turn.
That it may never come only prepares us more.
And things can change. We don’t fret so much, despite what is occurring. Instead of anxiety we have discovered, in the face of alarm, a burgeoning hope. Hope that if our livelihood dwindles we will learn to do something else. That we can remake another place. That we have one another and always will. And in certain rare moments, we think, we feel as free as Fan.
This may sound strange, given where we last left her, barely delivered from the most vile of clutches. But she was free, wasn’t she, and maybe well before she left us? For we must now realize how even in the confines of the tanks, Fan had begun to understand the true measure of her world.
Of her control, however, there is a different story. That night in Mister Leo’s house she was terrified, as anyone would be, and we shudder to consider not just what would have happened right then but on subsequent nights, and for a lengthy, miserable epoch. We would like to think that we or our loved ones or especially Fan would have somehow repelled the assault and immediately ended any further terror; but then certain cruelties have a way of engendering compliance, which only feeds the hideousness, the sequence cycling on. Poor Gordon knows this, as no doubt did the girls on Mala’s viewer, and the reality is that Fan might have had to know it, too, for the rest of her days.
Instead it was Mister Leo who was trapped in a dark equation, slackly sitting in the sunroom most all of the day as Mala brought him food and drink and, when necessary, called over Tico, the new home nursing aide. Tico was there to lift him up from his wheelchair and onto the toilet basin, or to hold him up so that Mala could change his pajama bottoms. At supper Tico rolled him into the dining room, where Miss Cathy was already eating. She was still fragile but the incident sparked something in her now, a new savor or hunger piqued each time she looked across the table at her husband slumped before his bowl of blended food, waiting with a blank face for Mala to come and spoon it in. Sometimes Miss Cathy rose and helped him herself, took the spoon and gently nudged it in between his resistant lips, patiently waiting for his tongue to remind him what to do, her hand prickly with the memory of how she struck him, just once, at the base of his skull, with the head end of a stone statuette, the bulbous nude on display in the hall. It must have left no mark. After they followed the ambulance to the Charter health center and waited around, the doctor woefully informed her that Mister Leo had suffered a massive stroke, which they’d treated just in time to save his life. He woke up like this in the health center bed, wholly palsied and mute. He could no longer write or read or do his minerals trading, but of course, they had enough money to live several lifetimes, even Charter ones. Now, Miss Cathy missed him and also didn’t. When he gagged on the spoon, she awoke from her uneasy reverie, but try as she might she didn’t relieve him right away, keeping it there and maybe pushing it in just until he made a funny sound she never heard before he was stricken, this wan, alto squeak.
Fan would be a witness to these dispositions, but not Quig and Loreen; they left soon after coming back from taking Mister Leo to the hospital, Loreen anxious to bring Sewey his treatment. Quig and Loreen bid Fan good-bye, and she bid them well, and they drove off in the old car after a quick embrace. No one seemed to be much bothered by what had befallen Mister Leo, or even to wish to comment on it. Miss Cathy honored the deal her husband had with them, promising to send the drill, as well as giving Loreen a second, equally necessary set of vials her husband had been holding back (in case they’d balked at leaving Fan). She handed them a wad of money, too, for the purchase of another geno-chemo round, if they so needed.