Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

We played chess, a game that usually generated a lot of thoughtful silence — she’d put a finger to her temple and stare so hard at the board that I expected it to start vibrating in sympathy with the intensity of her gaze — but today she was distracted and a little agitated, maybe because she was getting steroids, or maybe because my angel was sitting so close to her, and despite her optimism she was getting sicker from week to week, and I swear that as they get closer to death people can start to feel the angel’s ugly emanations.

“It’s not a game of chess, you know,” she continued when I said nothing. “I think I just fully understood that right now.” I put my finger down.

“What’s that?”

“You know,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. Like my father, she had lung cancer. “Oncoloquatsi,” she whispered. That was the name she had assigned to her disease, and she always whispered it, as if to speak his name too loud would be to summon strength to him.

“Oh, him,” I said.

“I know it suggests a game, how you move and then he moves — you pick a chemo and he counters with a mutation, or you find the perfect herb to overcome him and he produces another measure of resistance, and the doctors play the game from organ to organ until your whole body is a board. They even doodle you up like one.” She pulled down on the neck of her blouse to show a piece of skin below her collarbone — it was just a cross to mark a target for radiation. “But this is only a surface-seeming. Look deeper like I have and you will see the truth.”

“I think I’ve got you,” I said, moving my bishop illegally. She didn’t even look down.

“How often have I heard that from him? But he never has gotten me, and it’s not because of my disciplined mind. It’s because I have learned to resist him in the very marrow of my being. The very marrow, Doctor. It’s not a lesson you would have learned in school, but I want you to learn it. I want your father to learn it. I have disciplined my soul against this enemy, and he must do it, too.”

The angel sidled closer while Mrs. Scott was talking. She leaned over and took a sniff at the lady’s turbaned head. “Three weeks,” she said. And then she put her nose close to the thin, shining skin of my father’s forehead — every day his skin seemed to get a little thinner, or stretch a little tighter, so I was sure that just the faintest rubbing pressure or the lightest scratch would reveal the dull-white bone underneath — and said the same thing.

“Shut up!” I told her.

“It’s hard to hear,” Mrs. Scott said. “I know it’s not your common wisdom, but you don’t have to be rude.” Dr. Klar came in before I could answer or apologize.

“Hallo, everybody!” she called out. Thirty years in southeast Florida had not dulled her accent much. This appealed to my father, who liked that she was German, order and discipline having always added up in his life to success. Her immaculate white coat seemed the least perfect thing about her, but just being in sight of it I felt accused of slovenliness and failure. “Here is the grandma of your better nature,” the angel said the first time she saw her.

My father woke at the sound of her voice, and smiled at her. “Charlotte?” he said. A week after I took him from the hospital, he started mistaking people and places, thinking a nurse or some solicitous church lady was one of my sisters, or thinking he was in his childhood home in Chicago, calling out for a dog who died sixty years ago. Me he never mistook for anyone else, though he often seemed surprised to see me. “Still here?” he said some mornings.

“It’s Dr. Klar!” she said brightly. She said everything brightly, even things like What’s the use or If he’s alive in a month it will be a miracle . She was one of those oncologists who speak life out of one side of their mouth and death out of the other. For my father she had only good news; for me only bad. I hated her.

“Darling,” my father said, closing his eyes again and still smiling. “When is the baby coming?”

“Soon,” she said. “The baby is fine. Everything is fine!” She reached out to pat his shoulder but I caught her hand.

“The bad shoulder,” I said. He had metastases all over, but his shoulder and his back bothered him the most. He nodded his head and fell back to sleep.

“How is the pain, then?”

“Worse. And we’re out of Percocet. He’s out of Percocet.”

“Easy enough to fix,” she said.

“An ounce of meditation is worth a pound of Percocet,” said Mrs. Scott.

“In certain traditions!” Dr. Klar said, then she beckoned me out into the hall. “I think it’s time to stop,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Stop hiding!” the angel shouted.

“Stop the chemo,” said Dr. Klar. We had this conversation every week. “What are we doing? What good is coming of it? Why are you coming here every week, when he could be at home?”

“He doesn’t want to stop. He wants to keep going.”

“Just put out your hand to him and he will be healed,” the angel said. “Just put out your hand to him, and you will undo all the pain you’ve caused me.”

“Does he know what he wants?”

“He’s always confused here. You keep it too cold. And the Benadryl before the infusion makes him sleepy.”

“Carl,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder the same way she did with him, comfort for a dead person. “It really is getting to be time.” And the angel said, “It has always been time!”

Things started to go wrong between the angel and me after Cindy Hacklight showed me her pooty in seventh grade. Cindy had made a sort of cottage industry of showing around her pooty to anyone — girl or boy — who would give her five dollars, a large sum back before high school inflation. You got the feeling that she didn’t really care about the money, but sensed that what she had wasn’t something to show for free. She didn’t need to be paid, anyway. There were no poor children at our school.

“Go not that way,” the angel said. She saved onerous fancy-speak like that for her most serious moments, for things she really meant, for things that really mattered. But I went with Cindy into the forest behind the gym, where she leaned against a narrow poplar and swore me, not to secrecy, but to respect for what she was about to show me. It was one promise I’ve managed to keep all my life, to keep reverence for her bald little pooty, then in seventh grade and ever after, even when I met it again one summer when we were both home from college. “Turn your face!” the angel shouted as Cindy lifted her skirt. And the angel was ugly for the first time ever, having put on the apricot face of our head-mistress, Ms. Carnegie. I looked back and forth between them, startled by the contrast, how beautiful was the one and how ugly the other, until Cindy, keeping her skirt up with one hand put the other on my head and turned my face to her. “If you’re going to respect it you’ve got to look at it,” she said.

The angel berated me for days afterward — how mild it seems in recollection, compared to what she dished out in later years and decades. “How is a seducing pooty like a grand destiny?” she kept asking me, and then she would answer her own question, and eventually she trained me to give the right answer. “Exactly not at all,” I said. Yet awakening lust wasn’t the problem, though eventually the lust that awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, but never of drugs. I think it was the first time that something so ordinary was as attractive to me as the extraordinary things the angel said I must dedicate myself to. When I lay with Cindy on the scented ground in my father’s orange groves, what I experienced was a very ordinary comfort, and when she raised her skirt in the woods I understood that I could want — so badly — something the angel thought I shouldn’t.