Justin Cronin - The Twelve

To look at him, you’d never know he was dying.

He showered and changed into a clean suit. His closet contained almost nothing else; an understated two-button—dark navy usually but sometimes gray with a subtle pinstripe, occasionally khaki poplin in summer—paired with a shirt of powder blue or starched white and a tie as neutral as Switzerland was so closely aligned with his sense of himself that he felt naked without one. Minding his balance, he descended the stairs to the living room, where the television was dutifully barking out its parade of bad news. Though he possessed no appetite, he heated up a frozen lasagna in the microwave, standing before it as the seconds ticked away. He sat at the table and did his best to eat, but the diazepam made everything taste bland and vaguely metallic, and the tightness in his throat had not abated, as if he were wearing a collar two sizes too small. His doctor had suggested he try milk shakes, or something soft like macaroni, but resorting to kiddie food was nothing he could face. From there, everything would go downhill.

He dumped the unfinished lasagna down the disposal and checked his watch again. A little after nine. Well, whatever was happening in the middle of the country was happening. Nelson would call if he needed him.

He left the townhouse and drove to McLean. What lay ahead was a grim duty, but Guilder was the only one to do it. The facility was set back from the road behind a sweeping green lawn; by the driveway a sign read, SHADOWDALE CONVALESCENT CENTER. At the check-in desk, Guilder presented his driver’s license to the nurse, then proceeded down the medicinal-smelling hallway, past its mass-produced paintings of green fields and summer sunsets. The place was quiet, even for the hour; usually there were orderlies around, and patients in the common room, those who still got some benefit from human company. Tonight the place was a tomb.

He came to his father’s room and gently knocked, opening the door without waiting for an answer.

“Pop, it’s me.”

His father was propped in his wheelchair by the window. His jaw drooped open, the muscles of his face as slack as pancake batter. A pendulum of spittle dangled from his mouth to the paper bib around his neck. Somebody had dressed him in a stained sweat suit and orthopedic shoes with Velcro tabs. He gave no sign of recognition as Guilder stepped into the room.

“How you doing, Pop?”

The air around his father tanged of urine. The Alzheimer’s had progressed to a point where he recognized no one, but still one had to go through the motions. How terrifying it was, Guilder thought, the solitude of the mind. Yet his father’s silence, the feeling of absence, was nothing new. In life—as now, in death—he had been a man of almost reptilian coldness. Guilder knew that this was just the way his father had been raised—the son of small-town dairy farmers who’d attended church three times weekly and slaughtered their own hogs—yet still he couldn’t bring himself to put aside his resentments for a boyhood spent hoping to win the attention of a man who was simply incapable. It had been a small thing, a natural thing, what he’d asked of his father, simply by being born: to treat him like a son. A game of catch on a fall afternoon, a word of praise from the sidelines, an expression of interest in his life. Guilder had done everything right. The good grades, the dutiful performances in auditoriums and on athletic fields, the full ride to college and swift ascent into a useful adulthood. Yet his father had had virtually nothing to say about any of this. Guilder could not, in fact, recall a single instance when his father had told him he loved him, or touched him with affection. The man just didn’t care.

Hardest of all had been the toll it had taken on Guilder’s mother, a naturally sociable woman whose loneliness had driven her to the alcoholism that eventually killed her. In later life, Guilder came to believe that his mother had sought comfort elsewhere, that she had had affairs, probably more than one. After his father had been moved to Shadowdale, Guilder had cleaned out the house in Albany—an absolute mess, every drawer and cabinet crammed with stuff—and discovered, in his mother’s dressing table, a velvet Tiffany box. When he’d looked inside he’d found a bracelet—a diamond bracelet. Probably it had cost as much as his father, a civil engineer, had made in a year. It was nothing he could have afforded, and the box’s location—concealed in the back of a drawer beneath a pile of moldering gloves and scarves—had told Guilder what he was looking at: a lover’s gift. Who had it been? His mother had been a legal secretary. One of the lawyers at her firm? Somebody she had met in passing? A rekindled romance of her youth? It had gladdened him to know that his mother had found some happiness to brighten her lonely existence, yet at the same time this discovery had sank him into a depression that had continued unabated for weeks. His mother was the one warm memory of his childhood. But her life, her real life, had been a secret from him.

Always these visits to his father brought these memories to the surface; by the time he left, he was often so dispirited, or else seething with unexpressed rage, that he could barely think straight. Fifty-seven years old, yet still he craved some flicker of acknowledgment.

He positioned the room’s only chair in front of his father. The old man’s head, bald as a baby’s, was tipped at an awkward angle against his shoulder. Guilder retrieved a rag from the bedside table and wiped the spit from his chin. An open container of vanilla pudding sat on a tray with a flimsy metal spoon.

“So how you feeling, Pop? They treating you okay?”

Silence. And yet Guilder could hear his father’s voice in his head, filling in the spaces.

Are you kidding me? Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even take a proper shit. Everyone talking to me like I’m a child. How do you think I am, sonny boy?

“I see you didn’t eat your dessert. You want some pudding? How would that be?”

Fucking pudding! That’s all they give me around this place. Pudding for breakfast, pudding for lunch, pudding for dinner. The stuff’s like snot .

Guilder tucked a spoonful between his father’s teeth. Through some autonomic reflex, the old man smacked his lips and swallowed.

Look at me. You think this is a picnic? Drooling on myself, sitting in my own piss?

“Don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately,” Guilder said, delivering a second spoonful into his father’s mouth. “There’s something I thought you should know about.”

So? Say your piece and leave me alone .

But what did Guilder want to say? I’m dying? That everyone was dying, even if they didn’t know it yet? What purpose could this information possibly serve? A chilling thought occurred to him. What would become of his father when everyone was gone, the doctors and nurses and orderlies? With everything that had happened in the last few weeks, Guilder had been too preoccupied to consider this eventuality. Because the city was emptying out; soon, in weeks or even days, everyone would be running for their lives. Guilder remembered what had happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes, first Katrina and then Vanessa, the stories of elderly patients left to wallow in their own waste, to perish slowly of hunger and dehydration.

Are you listening to me, sonny boy? Sitting there with that big dumb look on your face. What’s so all-fired important that you came here to tell me?

Guilder shook his head. “It’s nothing, Pop. Nothing important.” He spooned the last of the pudding into his father’s mouth and wiped his lips with the rag. “You get some rest, okay?” he said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”