Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I didn’t know what to say back. I hadn’t had “a procedure” since once in the Marine Corps on my ailing pancreas, which got me out of Vietnam. I knew what was going to happen — the BBs, etc. — and figured the biopsy had already been worse. I wasn’t scared till I found out I shouldn’t be. “Most things that happen to me anymore happen in my mind,” I said pathetically. My knees were shaking. I had on red madras Bermudas and a Travel Is a Fool’s Paradise tee-shirt to try to look casual. I’m sure he knew what was happening.

It was a sunny, humid Minnesota Friday, last August. I’d watched the Olympic 4x100 relay that morning at the Travelodge. “Procedures,” it seems, only take place on Mondays. But terrifying doctor chats are all slated for Fridays, to ensure that the maximum stomach-churning, molar-crunching jimjams will fill up your weekend.

“I’m just an ole surgeon around here, Frank.” Psimos held his antique reel away from his jowly, mustachioed Walterish face and frowned at it through his magnifiers. “They don’t pay me millions to think, just cut ’n paste stuff. I’ll fix you up Monday so you’re back firing. But I can’t help what goes on in the brain department. That’s over on West Eleven, across the street.” He gave his heavy Greek brows a couple of insolent flicks.

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said idiotically, my asshole as hard as a peach pit.

“I bet you are.” He smiled. “I bet you really are.”

And that was that.

A ll this woolly, stinging, air-sucking breathlessness inhabiting my Suburban is about nothing but death, of course — big-D and little-d. The Permanent Period is specifically commissioned to make you quit worrying about your own existence and how everything devolves on your self (most things aren’t about “you” anyway, but about other people) and get you busy doin’ and bein’—the Greek ideal. Psimos, I bet, practices it to perfection, on the links, at the streamside, in the operating theater, at the Suzuki and over lamb patties on the Weber. Surgeons are past masters at achieving connectedness with the great other by making themselves less visible to themselves. Mike Mahoney would love them.

Still, too much death can happen to you before you know it, and has to be staved off like a bad genie and stuffed back in its bottle.

I motor slowly past the trudging, bescroffled, pre-Parkinsonian Bud Sloat, just crossing Willow in the mist, head down in his Irish topper and sad toupé, heading toward the back lot of the CVS and Seminary Street, where his lamporium sits next door to the Coldwell Banker. I have a thought to shove open the passenger door and haul him in out of the rain, put a better end to things between us. He’s possibly as death-daunted as I am (even assholes get the willies). A moment of unfelt fellowship might be just the ticket to save us from a bad afternoon. But Bud’s intent on missing the puddles and saving his saddle oxfords, his hands down in his topcoat pockets, and in any case he’s the sort of jerk who thinks every unrecognized vehicle contains someone inferior and worthy of disdain. I couldn’t stand the look on his face. In any case, I have nothing I could even lie about to make him feel better.

Though Bud’s question about the real estate business has set off belated silent alarms, and I feel a sudden cringe up near my diaphragm, brought on by the thought that real estate might be my niche the way undertaking’s Lloyd’s and Bud’s is lamps. A strangled voice within me croaks, Nooo, nooo-no-no, no. I should know that voice, since I’ve heard it before — and recently.

Tell a dream, lose a reader, the master said (I do my best to forget mine). But you can’t un-know what you know, as attractive as that might be.

In two consecutive weeks now, I’ve twice dreamed that I wake up in the middle of my prostate procedure just as the BBs — which in the dream are actually hot — go rolling down a lighted slot into my butt, a slot that looks like a pinball-machine gutter that Psimos, dressed in tails, has moved into the OR. In another one, I’m shooting baskets in a smelly old wire-windowed gym and I simply can’t miss — except the score on the big black-and-white scoreboard doesn’t change from 0–0. In a third, I somehow know jujitsu and am boisterously throwing little brown men around in a room full of mattresses. In another, I keep walking into a CVS like the one on Seminary, asking the pharmacist for a refill of my placebos. And in still another, I wake up and realize I’m forty-five, and wonder how I managed to fritter so much of my life away. And there are others.

Life-lived-over-again dreams, these are — no question; and the little no, no, no anti-Permanent Period voice, an alarm bespeaking a sharp downturn in outlook, for which I have God’s own plenty of excuses these days. When you start looking for reasons for why you feel bad, you need to stand back from the closet door.

However, one of the pure benefits of the Permanent Period — when you’re as nose-down and invisible to yourself as an actualized unchangeable non-becomer, as snugged into life as a planning-board member — is that you realize you can’t completely fuck everything up anymore, since so much of your life is on the books already. You’ve survived it. Cancer itself doesn’t really make you fear the future and what might happen, it actually makes you (at least it’s made me) not as worried as you were before you had it. It might make you concerned about lousing up an individual day or wasting an afternoon (like this one), but not your whole life. I try to impart this hopeful view to oldsters who wander down to the Shore in their blue Chrysler New Yorkers to “look at houses,” but then get squirrelly about making a mistake, and end up scampering home to Ogdensburg and Lake Compounce, thinking that what I’ve told them is nothing but a sales pitch and I won’t be around when the shit train pulls in and the house market bottoms out just as their adjustable mortgage starts to steeple (I certainly won’t). But once I’ve explained that it’s seashore property I’m showing them and God isn’t making any more of it, and you can get your money out any day of the week, I just want to say: Hey! Look! Take the plunge. Live once. You’re on the short end of this stick. He isn’t making any more of you, either.

What I usually see, though, is nervous, smirking, irritable superiority (like Bud Sloat’s) that’s convinced there’s something out there that I could never know about — or else I wouldn’t be a know-nothing real estate agent — but that they goddamn well know all about. Most humankind doesn’t want to give up thinking they can fuck up the whole works by taking the wrong step, by shoving the black checker over onto that wrong red square. It makes them feel powerful to believe they own something to be cautious about. These people make terrible clients and can waste weeks of your time. I’ve developed a radar for them. But in fairness to these reluctant home-seekers — their chins on their chests the way Bud’s is today — and who’re thinking more positively about having that aluminum siding installed instead of paying for a whole new place, or about buying that new pop-up camper or checking fares on Carnival Lines (however they can throw some money away, but not too much): There are legitimate downsides to the Permanent Period. Permanence can be scary. Even though it solves the problem of tiresome becoming, it can also erode optimism, render possibility small and remote, and make any of us feel that while we can’t fuck up much of anything anymore, there really isn’t much to fuck up because nothing matters a gnat’s nuts; and that down deep inside we’ve finally become just an organism that for some reason can still make noise, but not much more than that.