“No,” he said, “no breakfast this morning.”
“Let me make you some breakfast, Dad.”
“My iPod is a wasteland,” he said. “I wondered if you could give me some new music.”
She took his iPod and walked over to the computer with it. For the tenth time he requested her new CD but she wasn’t completely satisfied with the production and didn’t want to give it to him until it was perfect. He said she was acting unconscionably toward her biggest fan. He threatened to get down on his knees. He had every intention of getting that album before leaving. She gave in finally and uploaded it. He took off the backpack — to store the iPod, she thought. But then he put the iPod in his pocket. He put his arms around her. He went over to the crib where Jack was now lying contentedly on his back. He picked the baby up and held him above his head and brought his exposed belly down to his face, breathed in his baby’s scent, and kissed his smooth skin.
The phone was ringing when he shut the door behind him.
He crossed the George Washington Bridge and an hour later turned off the primary road and walked the sidewalk past the day-care center and the library that were nestled inside the residential neighborhood. The road dipped and came to a second primary road where he turned left and the traffic picked up again. Past the gas stations he walked to the overpass and followed the shoulder down the on-ramp to the divided highway where the cars washed past with an old familiarity that quickly settled back in his ears.
He regained an eye for those locations that best served his needs for rest and renewal. He landed on a final redoubt of trees, he slept behind deserted buildings. There were occasional run-ins with unsympathetic authorities who pressed on him their provincial dogmas of safety and propriety. People did not like him on their private lawns or inside their public parks. He made no appeal to their sympathy. He simply packed up and moved on. He had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it.
He never returned to New York. Months passed before he could even bring himself to call home again.
Three years after leaving, he drifted into a community library in what remained of central Louisiana to use the free computers alongside the homeless and the refugees. Becka had sent him an email that had languished in his inbox for over a month. She told him of test results that confirmed with near certainty that her mother was no longer in remission. What Becka did not mention was that those tests had come in months ago and that Jane had asked Becka to wait until the end to tell him, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to return to her bedside.
He called that afternoon. He stood on the exposed side of a gas station as a heat wave issued from an incinerating and merciless sun.
“Why do you put any stock in those test results?” he asked Jane. “What are your symptoms?”
“My symptoms?” she said.
“You’ve already proven it was bogus, Jane. The whole thing was bogus.”
“It’s different this time.”
“What are you saying? That you’re dying? Who’s telling you that you’re dying?”
“Nobody needs to tell me,” she replied. “I’m dying. They tell me I’m dying because I’m dying.”
He had to inform her that she wasn’t dying. She simply wasn’t trying hard enough to overcome the nihilism of the body. The soul was inside her doing the work of angels to repulse the atheistic forces of biology and strict materialism and she needed to do her part to show God which side she was on. He suggested going for a jog or cooking a large meal.
His medication required tweaking from time to time, and then the clarity would come flooding back to him. He spoke a mile a minute. She could hardly get a word in. She asked him if he was taking his medication and he became furious. The obnoxious certainties of some people! The rigid orthodoxies of cause and effect! Whenever anyone was presented with the one true eschatology and the work of the divine, they wanted to drag those verities through the rivulets of shit dug and tended to by Western medicine. They were the drugged zombies, not him. He wasn’t crazy. He just saw things others could not see.
A week later he sat weeping in the waiting room of a psychiatrist he had seen on two other occasions. The doctor had been closing in on setting the cocktail straight again when Tim failed to return, clear-eyed once again to the bullshit and the lies. He wept because in the midst of such lucidity, he could only be confounded by what mysterious force had compelled him to return now, by the layers and layers of complexity in a war he would never comprehend.
He called home again within the month. The phantasmagoria of heaven and hell that had whipped him into a frenzy the last time he spoke to her had been replaced by the cool and measured assessment of someone observing the objective differences in a before-and-after picture. Gone was his manic pace. The soul was once again unlikely. It was despairing news. It meant that he would not see her again, not here, not in any afterlife.
He would tell her anything, of course. Yes of course he would tell her that he loved her and that the soul was vibrant and real and death only an interlude. His banana, how she had taken care of him. She had come to him in far-flung places no matter the time of day or night. Of course he would give her every reassurance, he would say anything.
But Becka answered and told him that she was already gone.
He maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, and keeping at bay to the extent his mind allowed it a grim referendum on life, and he persevered in this manner of living until his death, which took place in the far north on a day of record snowfall, during a morning blizzard.
By then he was something a passing car couldn’t resist. Gaunt and weathered, limping sturdily, he walked the shoulder of the highway like a wasted beggar moving between two ancient persecuting cities. The driver turned to look at him as he blurred past, then picked the sight back up in the rearview mirror. There he receded slowly into a terrible smallness, into nothing, not even memory.
By then he was paying attention, as Jane had taught him, and had learned to distinguish between a hundred variations of unnamed winds. He couldn’t name the twitchy burrower with the black-tipped tail that scanned an upland prairie for danger, but he knew it as well as the raspy grass with the flowering spike that left soft yellow pollen on his pant legs, and he knew it as well as the bright constellation that suddenly resolved itself out of a confusion of stars. He knew fee-bee fee-boo, fee-bee fee-boo came from a small bird with brushed gray wings and a tail as firm as a tongue depressor, and he knew the sharp clear whistle of set-suey, sedu-swee-swee of a scythe-beaked bird he saw often in winter, and he knew the French-inflected call of a small stately black and white bird who sang teehee tieur, teehee tieur— though he knew none of them by name.
By then he had stood on the riverbank and watched men shoot into the running water. He was startled by the echo. He watched them pull their mauled catch from the water to the parched rocks. Half the meat was missing. He had to wonder the point, if it was a matter of sport, or a supply of bullets greater than hooks and nets.
By then he had remembered the morning he returned to her hospital room to tell her he worried about the insufficiency of the final words they would say to each other. They had an awkward ceremony that made her laugh. “Good-bye, then!” she had said to him. He could not forgive himself that he had urged her to cook a meal as she was dying, so he clung to the memory of that morning.