Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

At the beginning of the end there were moments when she was wide awake, and miserable, tired of antibiotics pumped into her through one of many stents, tired of being a body connected to technologies, and she complained mightily and she reminded me that I needed to lose weight or no one was going to take an interest in me after she was gone, and, she said again, I shouldn’t look at her with those mooning eyes, and I replied, “If you think I am hanging around here thinking about what’s going to happen after you are gone, you certainly don’t know me very well. My kind of steadfastness, let me remind you, Tara, is the kind that doesn’t waver, the kind that is true , even when it is wrong to be so steadfast, or even if I am harmed in the process. Even if steadfastness is unfashionable, or not borne out by the facts, I will be steadfast. I believe that you are going to get better, and if you want me to lose weight because you want me to look better for you , then I will lose weight to look better for you , but not for whoever comes after you are gone, if anyone comes at all, which I doubt.”

Tara was weeping, I remember, after I spoke, and she apologized, even though she said that I wasn’t taking seriously what the doctors were already telling her, and the oxygen tank wheezed, and Tara wheezed, inhaling from the oxygen tank, and she coughed up something that must have had some blood in it, because of the awful color, and I wiped some of this away.

Accordingly, Tara came to inhabit a space that was between the bright, airy consciousness that is central to human life, and the dark, opiated abstraction that is close to death, in which Tara was known only to Tara through the mechanism of nightmare. I no longer appeared to have complete conversations and interactions with her — there were just excisions from time and life, after which she vanished intermittently. What happened in her middle place? What did Tara think of then?

In the supposedly real world, things around the Crandall abode fell into disuse, and their gears and mechanisms were ruined by the elements. Advertising circulars amassed on the front doorstep, and one of the wall monitors in the living room, on which I had presumptuously kept a still from The Crawling Hand , went on the fritz, so that there was only white noise upon the screen. A scorpion was given free rein over the expanses of the kitchen counter, and these things went on this way, and the fungus in Tara’s lungs got a little bit worse, and another square inch of tissue gave up processing the air in her very expensive oxygen canisters, and perhaps I can be forgiven the feeling that all the world was behaving as Tara was behaving, that is, as though it were succumbing to infection, dwindling into moments of incomprehensibility that were the moments of the dream world. I got up and called the flea market and told them they could put someone else in my stall because I wasn’t going to make it in, and the guy on the other end, Tim, who was in charge of licenses, forbore to charge me the twenty dollars I owed, because he was a good man, and I can’t exactly remember how that conversation ended, because next I was asleep for some hours, and it was the afternoon, and I had had such fits of crying, whenever I felt I was out of earshot of my sick wife, that I couldn’t stay awake for long, but nor could I sleep for long, and I wondered if there was some chance that my unconsciousness and Tara’s unconsciousness would find a place where they could meet and enjoy each other in the remaining time. But in our next conversation I had no choice but to say, “I would like to take you back to the hospital now.”

And she said, “Monty, there’s no point in going back to the hospital.”

“They can help.”

“They can’t help.”

“But you are in pain.”

“I’m not.”

“They can keep you breathing.”

“Please stop saying this!”

Then she said I could take her to the hospice, if I wanted, which is also known as the place of death, which is also known as oblivion, which is also known as the end of hope, which is also the place where love founders, which is also the place where many people go and many people pretend they are not going to go, which is the place of witless intoxication, which is the place of life that is not life , and the place of all horrible smells, and the antiseptics that cover up the horrible smells, which is the place of faint smiles, and then the place of no smiles, and which is the place of pains that cannot be remediated and futures that go unlived, which is also the place where I did not and would not go with Tara, and as soon as the word hospice was pronounced, I began thinking, as would a child, of ways to scuttle any plans that involved hospice, and so I said that I wouldn’t discuss hospice with her, and to this Tara said, “That’s fine with me, because I’m happy to die here, Monty, but I just want you to promise me that you’ll be here either way.”

That thing

On the beach—

I just can’t get it

Out of my mind.

There must have been more to it than that, or maybe there were several conversations of this kind, and hours and hours that went on in this way, and some of these conversations were during the day, even though the curtains were drawn, and some of the conversations were in the middle of the night, and there was no one there to hear them, only Tara and myself, and so now there is only me to speak of them; I know that at some moment I suggested that we go on one last drive in the desert, that I absolutely wouldn’t take no for an answer, the two of us had to go on a drive, and I would borrow an electric car, because I knew a guy who knew a guy, even though I wasn’t at all sure I knew such a person; about the only person I knew with a car was the blackguard called D. Tyrannosaurus, and I wasn’t sure if I was willing to ask; there was only the illness, and the space between when she was conscious and when she was unconscious, and there was the illness that was now the third person in our marriage; the illness, that is, had volition and personality, so that I could feel on occasion as if I had spoken to the illness, or that the illness was talking through Tara, and so I wasn’t sure if I should always tell her the truth, or even tell her what I was doing, because if the illness was giving the answers, through her, then why bother to tell her the truth, because the illness wouldn’t convey the truth to Tara, except in those moments when I could do no better than speak to the events, those moments when even a man like myself, who was not always so good at evaluating the truth, could see that things were not going as he would have liked them to go; still I felt that I had some leeway in this space between consciousness and unconsciousness, and if I could borrow a car, then I could just pick her up, because she didn’t even weigh what a pillow weighs, and I could carry the last of her out into the car, which is what I did, and I got one of the Rodriguezes to help me, after the nurse who came a couple hours a day had left, and Maria Rodriguez said, Mr. Crandall, this is liable to be a little dangerous , and I said no, no, and probably everyone knew that I wasn’t taking her to the hospital, everyone being defined on this day as myself, Tara, the illness, and Maria Rodriguez; still, I put her and her machines in the back of the car belonging to D. Tyrannosaurus, to whom I had offered no reason for needing to borrow his vehicle, but I simply asked, and he agreed, and I poured a month’s profits into the fuel tank, some algae-based fuel mixture, and then I took a generator, and I took the oxygen tank, and I took all kinds of monitors, and I spent half an hour loading all this equipment into the car, and then I bore up my lightweight wife, whose eyes had rolled into the back of her head, and I lurched with her out to the car, shuffling, stumbling, saying, as I carried her, Please don’t leave yet, please don’t leave me yet, please don’t leave, please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me yet . There was more that I wanted to show her, I said, and I could put her in the back of Tyrone’s car; we would go at this leisurely pace, and we would watch the way the sun fell across the Catalinas, and the way the decrepit buildings crumbled into the desert again, and I pointed all of this out to Tara in the car; it improved things so much when she was here with me, and it was all because of you , I told her, how much we loved this place, because under my own steam I just ran myself into the ground, did nothing, never going outside, just sitting around checking baseball scores online and eating the same thing every night, but your excitement made me excited about this place, the taco stands, the old movie palaces, the used-media stores, all empty, like the shopping centers were all empty, I loved it because you loved it, and the dream of being able to understand a place by driving through it, I said, this was what you gave me in this place, and it was a place of ruins, and somehow the ruins made me feel alive; it was all about death, I said, the indigenous people who got run out of here, the ruins of what the Americans brought here, all ruins, and the ruins were what made me love it; nothing can last here for long, not without effort, but that doesn’t mean that I can take the idea of your being a thing of the past in this place, that doesn’t mean I can take that, I can take all the fires and all the floods, and all the poisons, but I can’t take this place without you, I don’t want to live in this place without you in it, I don’t want to stay behind, if staying behind means the memories of you, every corner where I turn, where you were, every wisecrack that you uttered, every middle finger you thrust at some other driver, I don’t want to think of this place, but I offer you this one last trip, and maybe, before I leave here, as I will surely have to do, I will at least have this memory.