Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“You have to be ready at any time to have the conversation,” Janie Finn told me, meaning the conversation where you sorted everything out and said your goodbyes, and the dying person sorted everything out and lost all their regrets. “You talk about things and then you let go,” she said, making an expansive gesture with her hands, as if she were setting free a bunch of doves or balloons. It was just the sort of thing that hospice people always say, and it’s because they say things like this that I think they should all be put slowly to death, half of them ministering to the others as they expire by deadly injection, having their conversations and dwindling, half by half, until there are only two, and then one, and a little midget comes in and shoots the last one in the face.

But suddenly I thought that this must be the conversation, as we opened our mouths in turn and shared something wordless and important and lovely, and the whole room seemed like a great relief to me, and I knew it must to him, too. The angel was struggling, though, seeming to wrestle with herself. Her face was beautiful but then her body was ugly again and my bottles were almost empty. My father’s mouth was open but I took the last of the morphine myself and gave him a drop of water. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said it again, “You!” and he shook his head, then closed his eyes again. But when I put my head on his chest he didn’t push it away, and though one hand was reaching out blindly above him, he let me put the other on my neck. “I want a better angel, Dad,” I told him. “That’s all I need.”

“I’ll take a nap now,” he said. “Batten down the hatches and go to your room.” But I stayed where I was, and took a nap myself. I woke up the next morning on the couch, the fake rain still drumming at the shuttered window, with no recollection of how I got across the room. The angel was in the corner, her face ugly again, but only in that way that all weeping faces are ugly. I sat down next to my father, who must have died sometime very recently, because though his face was cold and his open eyes already had the look of spoiling grapes, his chest and his belly were warm. I put my hands on his chest, and my head on my hands, and stayed that way for a long time before I called Janie to tell her that it had happened.

My father and I stand in the kitchen, staring at the toaster and waiting for the waffles. Since my son became ill, we have been taking turns with the meals, so he handles breakfast and I do lunch and then we both take care of dinner. We have a waffle iron, but the prospect of making the batter was somehow too much this morning, and though I believe that waffles made from scratch would carry some premium of affection, I know once-frozen waffles won’t matter to Carl, and I recognize my father’s exhausted posture from the latter days of my mother’s illness and my divorce, and I know better than to suggest that frozen waffles will somehow work against us today. Our stretched and inverted images look back at us from within the toaster-chrome.

A spring is broken inside the toaster, so nothing jumps up like it should. The waffles rise slow and stately. Carl used to say that the toast looked like it was rising from out of a grave, and made jokes about zombie-strudel and vampire Pop-Tarts. He wasn’t an entirely normal kid, even before he got sick. My father takes the waffles out, butters them up, and puts them on a plate, then puts that on a gigantic silver tray of the sort a butler would carry around, complete with a handled silver dome. “Get the syrup,” he tells me, and starts upstairs.

He pauses outside the door and knocks. He always knocks; I never do. He says it’s important to treat Carl with respect, and I agree, but the thing presently in his bed could care less if we are polite toward it. It asks of us a specific set of behaviors and everything else is superfluous. “Who is it?” comes the reply. The voice sounds like dozens of voices speaking at once. Sometimes I convince myself that I can hear Carl’s voice in there, sounding very small and incredibly far away.

“Who else?” my father says as he opens the door.

“I was hoping for satisfaction,” Carl says from the bed. He is restrained there by soft straps that we took from the hospital. They are called posies and bring to mind the image of someone tied down with flowers, but they are not so benign as that. We only tie him down at night, and only because if we didn’t he would wander into high places, the tops of bookshelves or the roof or a tall tree in the yard, to shout out requests for justice and vengeance and satisfaction. Aside from the restraints, it is his same old bed, done up in baseball sheets, and his same old room, covered with pictures of historical personages and dams and bridges and other engineering marvels, except that we have had to take down every picture of an airplane, because these made him cower and cry out in fear.

“Behold!” my father says, after I’ve undone the straps and shifted Carl up into a position he can eat from. My father takes away the silver dome with a flourish. He can manage the flourish even when he is dispirited and tired. “Waffles!”

“We are not satisfied with waffles,” Carl says, his face drawn up in a look of haughty disapproval, but despite that look and his words his mouth snaps at the fork when my father brings it close, and chews and swallows eagerly. Though his words and his expressions seem to have passed into the possession of another, Carl’s appetites remain his own and have become more childish as the weeks have passed. The mouth spews complex obscenities and harsh judgments but is partial to waffles and cheesy mac and vienna sausages. “Waffles are not justice,” he says with his mouth full.

“But justice isn’t delicious,” says my father, though he is always telling me not to talk to “It,” especially when we are trying to get Carl to eat. “And justice will never be the most important meal of the day.”

“We are the dead,” Carl says. “Where is our blood sacrifice? What have you done for us today?”

“Every good boy loves waffles,” my father says, and shovels them in. I dart in with the napkin between bites, and catch the bits and half-chewed pieces that fall out of Carl’s mouth. It’s always easier to keep him clean during a meal than it is to clean him up afterward. He fought like a cat the one time we tried to get him in the tub, and even a sponge bath makes him wriggly and abusive. I keep my eyes down and try to tune out the noise Carl is making, bits of song in a dozen voices, and noises that are not words. But just as we are finishing up I look too long on my son’s face, and his eyes, which have been rolling every which way in his head, following the action in some waking dreamscape, suddenly lock on to mine. It is always very hard to look away when this happens.

“Do you love your son?” the voices ask me.

My father hisses at me in an unnecessary warning. I know I am being baited but can never be silent in the face of that question.

“You know I do,” I say.

“Well, what a way to show it, to abandon him. Abandonment is practiced in degrees, and you have gone beyond the pale, it’s true. He is practically one of us now.”

My father is shaking his head. “Breakfast is over,” he says. He puts the lid on his Jeevesy platter and walks toward the door. “Come on,” he adds, because I am still sitting on the bed.

“I’ll be right there,” I say.

“It’s not going to help,” he says. “It’s not. .” He doesn’t finish, just shakes his head again. He looks terribly sad, and Carl is smiling quite fiendishly.

“I’ll be down in a second,” I say.

“Goddamn it,” my father says, and shuts the door.