There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter — to inflict that version of himself on other people — was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.
He was also afraid that it might hurt.
And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.
And the question was:
The question was:
Enid hadn’t felt ashamed at all, not the tiniest bit, when the warning horns were sounding and the Gunnar Myrdal was shuddering with the reversal of its thrusters and Sylvia Roth was pulling her through the crowded Pippi Longstocking Ballroom, crying, “Here’s his wife, let us through!” It hadn’t embarrassed Enid to see Dr. Hibbard again as he knelt on the shuffleboard deck and cut the wet clothes off her husband with dainty surgical clippers. Not even when the assistant cruise director who was helping her pack Alfred’s bags found a yellowed diaper in an ice bucket, not even when Alfred cursed the nurses and orderlies on the mainland, not even when the face of Khellye Withers on the TV in Alfred’s hospital room reminded her that she hadn’t said a comforting word to Sylvia on the eve of Withers’s execution, did she feel shame.
She returned to St. Jude in such good spirits that she was able to call Gary and confess that, rather than sending Alfred’s notarized patent-licensing agreement to the Axon Corporation, she’d hidden it in the laundry room. After Gary had given her the disappointing news that five thousand dollars was probably a reasonable licensing fee after all, she went to the basement to retrieve the notarized agreement and couldn’t find it in its hiding place. Strangely unembarrassed, she called Schwenksville and asked Axon to send her a duplicate set of contracts. Alfred was puzzled when she presented him with these duplicates, but she waved her hands and said, well, things get lost in the mail. Dave Schumpert again served as notary, and she was feeling quite all right until she ran out of Asian and nearly died of shame.
Her shame was crippling and atrocious. It mattered to her now, as it hadn’t a week earlier, that a thousand happy travelers on the Gunnar Myrdal had witnessed how peculiar she and Alfred were. Everyone on the ship had understood that the landing at historic Gaspé was being delayed and the side trip to scenic Bonaventure Island was being canceled because the palsied man in the awful raincoat had gone where nobody was supposed to go, because his wife had selfishly enjoyed herself at an investment lecture, because she’d taken a drug so bad that no doctor in America could legally prescribe it, because she didn’t believe in God and she didn’t respect the law, because she was horribly, unspeakably different from other people.
Night after night she lay awake, suffered shame, and pictured the golden caplets. She was ashamed of lusting for these caplets, but she was also convinced that only they could bring relief.
In early November she took Alfred to the Corporate Woods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who’d signed Alfred up for Axon’s Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed “demented.” Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred’s periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer’s or Lewybody dementia — at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred’s dopamine-boosters were causing his “hallucinations.” Hedgpeth couldn’t deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day “drug holiday.”
Enid, in her shame, didn’t mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn’t mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers and of wheeled IV-drip stands, until Alfred was sedated. She didn’t mention that Alfred had requested that she shoot him before she put him in a place like that again.
Nor, when Hedgpeth asked how she was holding up, did she mention her little Asian problem. Fearing that Hedgpeth would recognize her as a weak-willed, wild-eyed substance-craver, she didn’t even ask him for an alternative “sleep aid.” However, she did mention that she wasn’t sleeping well. She stressed this, in fact: not sleeping well at all. But Hedgpeth merely suggested that she try a different bed. He suggested Tylenol PM.
It seemed unfair to Enid, as she lay in the dark beside her snoring husband, that a drug legally purchasable in so many other countries should be unavailable to her in America. It seemed unfair that many of her friends had “sleep aids” of the sort that Hedgpeth had failed to offer her. How cruelly scrupulous Hedgpeth was! She could have gone to a different doctor, of course, and asked for a “sleep aid,” but this other doctor would surely wonder why her own doctors weren’t giving her the drugs.
Such was her situation when Bea and Chuck Meisner departed for six weeks of winter family fun in Austria. The day before the Meisners left, Enid had lunch with Bea at Deepmire and asked her to do her a favor in Vienna. She pressed into Bea’s hands a slip of paper on which she’d copied information from an empty SampLpak—ASLAΝ ‘Cruiser’ (rhadamanthine citrate 88 %, 3-methyl-rhadamanthine chloride 12 %) — with the annotation Temporarily unavailable in U.S., I need 6 months supply.
“Now, don’t bother if it’s any trouble,” she told Bea, “but if Klaus could write you a prescription, it would be so much easier than my doctor trying to get something from overseas, so, anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time in my favorite country!”
Enid couldn’t have asked such a shameful favor of anyone but Bea. Even Bea she dared to ask only because (a) Bea was a tiny bit dumb, and (b) Bea’s husband had once upon a time made his own shameful insider purchase of Erie Belt stock, and (c) Enid felt that Chuck had never properly thanked or compensated Alfred for that inside information.
No sooner had the Meisners flown away, however, than Enid’s shame mysteriously abated. As if an evil spell had worn off, she began to sleep better and think less about the drug. She brought her powers of selective forgetfulness to bear on the favor she’d asked of Bea. She began to feel like herself again, which was to say: optimistic.
She bought two tickets for a flight to Philadelphia on January 15. She told her friends that the Axon Corporation was testing an exciting new brain therapy called Corecktall and that Alfred, because he’d sold his patent to Axon, was eligible for the tests. She said that Denise was being a doll and offering to let her and Alfred stay in Philadelphia for as long as the testing lasted. She said that, no, Corecktall was not a laxative, it was a revolutionary new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. She said that, yes, the name was confusing, but it was not a laxative.
“Tell the people at Axon,” she told Denise, “that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are probably drug-related. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop.”
She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and The Nutcracker, tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn’t used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.