David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

With the pump removed from his chest, everything out in the hall became amplified by the silence. He didn’t know it, but the prayers were in Hebrew, mainly, although some were in English, and some of what he heard was just talking, and crying, and emotive phrases such as how can it be? and why why why and if only and oh God . And a rocking motion verbalized in a kind of cantorial singsong — and even a little actual singing from one of the really little kids who didn’t know what was going on, a rapturous little tune with senseless lyrics about a goat and a shoe and the Fourth of July.

Just before he dragged himself up, decided to shut them up out there, he remembered there had been a night right after that night upstate, with the wonderful breeze through the screen, when he and Angela had sat on the end of the dock drinking beers and watching the stars clarify and listening to the fish rise, splashing, mostly bluegills but some pretty good largemouth bass he was sure. (He’d spent that afternoon casting a huge spoon, loaded up with worms, to no avail.) Up and down the shore the fish were leaping like mad while behind Angela, in the thick darkness under the trees, firefly light was being exchanged in frantic waves up and down the beach.

“What’cha thinking?” he asked her.

“I’m just thinking, you know, about all we’re gonna do and how good it’s gonna be and all that,” she said. It was a song she was singing, her own little hymn to the portents the future held.

“Hummm,” he said, taking a huge slug of his beer, a sizzle down his throat.

“And what’cha thinkin’ yourself?”

“About nothing, nothing at all except being here and how good it is here, with you, now.” And he meant it. His middle brother Gary had died a year before working a roofing job, and shaking the grief of that loss, the recurrent image of the idiot slipping on a loose slate and falling two stories, breaking his neck, had until that very moment seemed impossible; now something was lifting, or at least that’s what he felt, recalling that night on the dock with Angela while he, in turn, lay flat on his back in the hospital with his blood pumped full of morphine; the same bright lifting, like he was flying up over the lake. Some kind of grace, a moment of it, on the end of the dock with the shore webbed in the light of fireflies.

One might hope for some kind of divine justice. An amazing feat how he got himself up and dragged himself into the hall to scream at them, considering the odds, the wires and tubes and warning beeps, the very low flow pressure his heart offered. He spoke his mind out there in the hall, shouting at them. If God had been just, he would’ve slammed him with an occlusion; a major, major infarct that locked his heart into a knot, a clench of fibers so tight, a fist in the center of his rib cage, a burst of blinding pain that sent him stumbling, gasping for the last. Instead he had a minor event — one he hardly felt at the time.

He did die. He died a few days later, alone, in the middle of the night, when a series of infarctions began and he went into a major arrest and the staff came in and performed heroic measures (because he said hell no to that living will crap. No way. No how am I gonna sign that? You’ll put me under for Christ’s sake. Why should I trust you morons after the way you jerked that fucking balloon out of my leg?), giving him a zap with the jelled electrodes, pumping him full of anticoagulants, working a sweat up over the guy.

Seven days of mourning without the hard leather of shoes, and during Shiva only once was the crazy guy mentioned; brought up by Stanley — who in his grief had gone downstairs twice, out onto the sidewalk along Riverside Drive to take in the fresh air off the Hudson and to sip single malt from one of those little bottles he’d bought on the flight over; he was on his third bottle. He was back inside the apartment, on the floor, talking softly with Saul, a buyer for the hardware chain, and in passing other subjects, sliding through them in his buzz, he sadly mentioned the Gentile who’d stumbled out into the hallway half alive, filling the air with his foul curses; it was the way he leaned into Saul; it was the way he tried to flatten his voice out from his Hebraic to an Ohio twang (and trying to whisper at the same time, too)— Shut the fuck up for Christ sake you babbling idiots; go back to where you came from. It was the form, not the content, that got the men laughing, just as Tara’s father came down the stairs, arm in arm with his wife.

Out the tall windows the Hudson glinted flecks of white light, and spread before them was a view embracing New Jersey across the river all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. When Tara died, the word went out via optical fibers, calls made to Israel, making sure everybody who had to mourn knew of her death so that no one would be called upon to begin mourning later, because from the moment the news was heard, those so obligated had to observe the laws and customs as set down in the Talmud. The ritual washing of the body, Tahorah, had been performed because none of her injuries, all internal and concussive, had drawn enough blood to soak her clothes, in which case she would have been buried in the bloodied garments. After the funeral they went to the cemetery, pausing the seven times to recite Psalm 91,

He that dewlleth in the secret place of the Most High

Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

before spreading the dirt over the coffin.

While Stanley recounted the story of the crazy man in the hosptial, upstairs in the bedroom her father had been been ripping up all of his ties, one by one, and piling them aside. He rent each one apart, yanking hard and wide, skinny narrow ones from back in the early eighties, wide ones from the sixties with huge stripes, and semi-wide ones from the nineties. He tore them down the middle, if he could, and he tore them apart from the center, opening them up, plying apart the silk backing and ripping down the sides. His hands were dry and cracked and caught the silk. When his wife went up to see where he was, he was nearly finished, seated on the side of the bed next to a jostled pile of twisted fabric spilling over the edge of the poplin bedspread, doing one last tie, a Calvin Klein with deep blue triangles set in a lighter blue background beset with swirls and splats à la Jackson Pollock that Tara had given him for the holidays two years ago. Pollock had been her favorite artist. Maybe once every couple of weeks, for a year, he wore it, and then put it aside in favor of ones he had picked out himself, more conservative patterns. He had performed the standard Qeri’ah at the funeral, rending the tiny strip of ribbon pinned to his left lapel, but apparently that act hadn’t been enough. Stop, his wife said. Stop. Stop. Stop. And he did, bowing his head into his palms and heaving out a long cry, kicking his heels into the carpet, cradling what was left of the tie up to his lips.

“Come downstairs with me,” she said, placing her hand along the curve of his neck.

“All right. For you, I’ll go downstairs,” he cleared his throat and got up and slowly lifted a few strands of neckties onto the bed.

The faces seemed to have answers for him as he walked down the spiral stairs into the Shiva; people hunched down talking softly, moving food up to their mouths; he would remember seeing each face in turn: the tight lips of Erma, his wife’s best friend, holding a sob; his business associates looking away, casting glances out over New Jersey; the kids obliviously playing with dolls near the entrance to the kitchen. But what he would remember the most, what he centered on later, was the strange, twisted smile on his brother’s face, a blessed smile that seemed to go way back to their childhood secrets; it was the way Stanley smiled when he was trying not to smile, the tightness in the corners of his mouth that led to two half-moon dimples; a wonderful grimace and smirk combined; and seeing it, something lifted slightly. It was only the first bit of weight off of his grief but it was significant in that it was the first; he went over and the two men held each other, tighter and tighter.