Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“He’s had a stroke. Well, a series of small strokes. His speech is impaired but his hearing is perfect,” the woman said at the door. “His eyesight is challenged too, so please read to him — or tell him a story.”

When she stepped out and shut the door I put my face close to his.

“Remember me?”

He heard me. He seemed to strain, to focus his yellow eyes on me, his mouth gaping. His hands were folded on his chest, claw-like fingers, and a needle was inserted into the back of one hand, taped flat and attached to a clear plastic tube.

“I was your student. Jay Justus.”

In a measured set of whispered gasps that I had to translate, he said: “Had so many students.”

“You told me I was special.”

This took a moment to register, but when it did he seemed to smile, as though I’d teased him, and he opened his mouth wider, showing me what remained of his teeth, discolored stumps and raw gums. He was ill, but I could see that there remained in his shrunken body a distinct intelligence that was like an intimation of heat. I was convinced of it when he became impatient, and that spark kept me resolute.

“Story,” he said, and, urgent, working his dry tongue, he looked reptilian, as corpses often do.

“You were always a reader. You used to loan me books.”

Impatience surfaced on his bony face again, twisting his features at me, his bulging yet unastonished eyes.

“You went to Mexico one summer. You told us all about it. How the Mexican children called you Papacito and followed you everywhere.”

He lifted his head as though to bat away my talk, and, slurring, he said, “Story.”

His saying the word gave me so much pleasure I hesitated until he repeated it two more times, chewing it in his insistence.

“This is a story about my friend in San Francisco,” I said, and Murray Cutler smiled and looked content. “He was lonely, he lived on his own, he worked in a cubicle, he found it very hard to meet people. One day there was an earthquake, which they get now and then in San Francisco. His office was evacuated. He ran into the street and found a doorway for protection. A young woman from his office dashed in and cowered next to him. Can you picture it, the doorway framing them? As the tremors continued he put his arm around her, not saying a word. She welcomed it — she was terrified by the earthquake, the screams of the people on the street. My friend began kissing her, and, in her fear, she accepted this. When the whole business was over she still clung to him, and instead of going back to work, he took her to his apartment and assaulted her.”

Murray Cutler seemed to listen with his open mouth, widening it as if to understand better. When I finished he grunted with dissatisfaction.

“More,” he said.

“Another man, another time, another story”—and Murray Cutler looked bewildered. “During a fire alarm at a hotel, a man in his pajamas and robe found himself standing next to a woman who was clearly very frightened. Firemen, hoses, sirens, men with axes, men in rubber boots. The woman recoiled from them. The man took the woman’s hand and drew her close, and he spoke to her in a reassuring way. She too was in a single room in the hotel. An hour of this, and then the all clear — a false alarm. But the elevators weren’t working. The man helped her find the stairs and led her to her room. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said as she opened the door. He still held her free hand. He wouldn’t let go. He kicked her door open and said, ‘But I do.’”

I stopped talking, and in the silence I created so that this might sink in, Murray Cutler said, “Why are you telling me this?” in his gargly voice.

“I’m Jay,” I said. “Remember me?”

I was not sure it registered, nor was I certain he knew who I was. I said, “I’ll be back.”

But two days went by, the days of the wake at Gaffey’s. I tried to stay in the background as relatives filed in to greet my mother, to embrace her and remind her that she was a widow, to tell Rose and the rest of my siblings, Fred and Floyd and the others, what a great man their father had been.

My cousin Eva came up to me and said, “I dated a guy, Charlie Saurin, who was in Africa like you. Middle of nowhere. He was a medic in one of those jungle clearings. No roads. The only way in was by small plane. He said visitors made him feel lonely. Know how he survived it? He said, ‘When you don’t think about leaving, a place seems bigger.’”

“I used to fantasize about being in the bush like that, isolated and in charge. The solitary bwana.”

“So where were you in Africa?”

Standing near enough to my father’s casket, I could smell the heavy perfume of the flowers. He lay with his face lightly powdered, his cheeks rouged, his pale hands crossed over the handle of his Knights of Columbus sword. His presence, and that sword, cautioned me. He was a practical man who believed in the economy of the plain truth, that fiction was folly, and only jackasses and liars made up stories.

“I lived in a friendly city — Kampala. I was a teacher at a good university. I had a nice house and a lot of friends. I had a cook from the coast who was full of Swahili wisdom.”

“Sounds wild to me.”

“It was pretty tame.”

After they closed the lid of the casket and the last mourner had left, my mother went silent, looking shrunken and depleted. Rose sat next to her and bent to whisper something, but this seemed to provoke tears and Mother’s clotted voice saying, “I don’t know if I can handle this.”

I went over to them. I said, “I just remembered Eddie’s other story. He found another woman online who said she was single and looking for a date. They texted back and forth, sent pictures, and made a plan to go out to dinner.”

“Eddie’s a game guy,” Rose said. “You could take some tips from him, Jay. What’s his thing?”

“Maybe he’s lonely,” I said.

Mother said in a clear voice, “Did it work out?”

“He washed and waxed his car to make a good impression,” I said. “Then he drove to her house. But as he entered her driveway a man jumped out of the bushes, yelling at him — a little guy, going ape.”

“Who was he?” Mother asked.

“Ex-husband. He’d been stalking her. The woman came to the door and screamed at her ex. He threw his shoe at her. Eddie said to her, ‘Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. Call him off.’ The guy rushed at him. Eddie told me, ‘I punted him into the next yard and drove off.’”

Mother was smiling. She said, “Good for him,” as Rose took her by the hand and led her away.

When I returned to the hospice the next morning Murray Cutler looked weaker, vaguer, but hearing me speak he became attentive, as though the sound of my voice woke a memory in him. If he did not remember me, at least he remembered my stories.

“Earthquake,” he said. He raised a skinny finger and poked it at me. “False alarm.”

In English class, if any of us pointed at him, or pointed at anything, he said, “Be careful. There’s a nail on the end of that thing. That’s not ambiguous — what is it?” And he’d answer, “That’s transpicuous.”

But I was also thinking, Wonderful, he remembers what I told him.

“Story,” he said, slurring the word.

“Okay. I was in Africa, in a place so remote I could only get there by small plane in the wet season. I ran a clinic. This was in western Uganda, near the Congo border, the Ituri Forest. We were so far in the bush and so neglected that we had to be self-sufficient. The people grew cassava and maize. I ate the local food, ugali and beans, and occasionally we killed a chicken. No one thought of leaving. Apart from the clinic there was nothing, not even a school, and no church. The nearest mission was at Bundibugyo — and most people regarded that as the end of the earth. It was not a happy village, but it was settled and resigned to its solitude. We never got visitors. My contract at the clinic was for two years, but I agreed to another two. I liked being in the middle of nowhere, a clearing in the bush. When you don’t think about leaving, a place seems bigger.”