Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

So I said, "It's early. She's not due for a while."

"Well, I decided if it's a boy I'd like him to be named Henry.

Or Hank. Tell her that. I don't care if he's got hardly any Battle in him. Jesus. How did our family get so damn Oriental? I guess you started it. Even Jack's kids — you'd think with that Nazi wife of his they wouldn't look like such little coolies."

As usual I didn't say anything to this, because there's no point, no point at all, though in truth I've thought the same basic thing countless times, if in somewhat more palatable terms, merely to muse upon the fact and not at all to judge, though whether that makes it generally acceptable or not I'll never be sure.

"I'll swing by later."

"Don't do anything on my account."

"Come on, Pop. Cut me a break, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

"Tell me you're going to be okay."

"Tell yourself," he growled, and he clicked off before I could say anything else — our customary truncation, which is necessarily fine with me.

But I am bothered, and worried. I'd like to think that part of Pop's swift turn of sentiment is just a self-defense stratagem, or that it's because he doesn't have a long history with Bea, but to be honest I know of course Pop is right, that he has already dug right down to the core of the matter, as he does, alarmingly, most all of the time, for Bea as is — her limbs wooden and immobile, her pupils coal blue and unfixed, completely speechless and soundless save for the feeble high-pitched wheeze she'll make when the nurse shifts her in the bed — is really nothing but precisely unequivocally herself, the same "ain't nobody else" that Pop and I and you and yours will turn into (if even by a senseless accident) and instantly, wholly, embody.

Naturally, by any standard, Bea deserves better from him (and certainly from her daughter and grandchildren, who just departed on a monthlong Maui vacation, according to the Ivy Acres scuttlebutt), not to mention the fact that none of us really knows the full extent of her sentience, what she might be taking in. But at the same time I can't blame Pop for moving on, if that's what he's really doing. What concerns me is that as dis-traught as he was when it happened he's definitely being a bit too dispassionate now. Right now, whether it was for Bea's sake or not, he would normally be railing against our society's urgent program to isolate its old folks in air-conditioned corporate con-centration camps, to expunge all signs of disease and disability from public view, to sanitize not only death but the conspiracy to deny its existence, all his archly negative highfalutin notions that remind me where in fact Theresa comes from. Instead, he is sitting alone in his room with a dismal thump to his shoulders, his toenails hoof-like with neglect, not even bothering to watch the logorrheaists on the Fox News Channel.

In fact, I'd trade this lingering quietude for an angry jag or two of paranoid bombast, just to know he's still there. I'm worried about him as I've never worried about him. Not to mention that he's sounding slightly short of air, emphysemey, which is not like Pop at all, who has always been the free-breathing type, having spent most of his life outdoors in the superfertile waft of suburban gravel and loam. This last little detail had a sneaky effect on me, and when a little while later I called him and he answered again in the same existence-weary tone, I actually hung up on him. I couldn't quite bear to hear it, though I wanted to confirm, too, that he wasn't just doing it for me, the broken-down geezer act.

I almost called him again, given my habit/condition of disbelieving the Real. The fact is, I don't think I've ever seen him seriously sick or injured. Maybe once or twice, when I was a kid, he had a bad enough headache after work that my mother had to prepare a bowl of ice-cold compresses to place over his eyes as he lay down on the living room sofa, and another time at an extended-family picnic when his cousin Gus accused Pop of screwing his second wife (smoldering Aunt Frannie, of the perky sky-searching tits) and attacked him with a bat during the traditional softball game, knocking him out cold for ten scary minutes. Other than that, Pop has been as physically solid as the masonry work he and his brothers used to do at the big North Shore mansions, artisan-perfect brick walls and slate patios and Carrara marble pillars and stairs that will probably last five hundred years as long as there's no asteroid strike or polar ice cap melt or some other civilization-ending event. So perhaps it's also my disbelief. in the Real that leads me to think and hope — and ultimately, truly, believe — that all this cruddy rime will soon slough off and that Bea will rise up from her broccoli dreams to once again give Pop tender dentureless head in the moonlit corners of the dayroom after everyone's been medicated for another passage through this world's turn. And that he himself will remain exactly as is, in his costume armor of crazy old titan, while the universe trembles through and beyond him in its darkly incessant expansion. And yet, voila, non mirabile dictu (as Paul or Theresa will sometimes sigh, I think unironically), the Real insists, it heeds no time or other cosmic dimensionalities, brooks 110 terrestrial dissent, it ignores even the poignant majesty of our noblest human wishes, which are like ground mists to the hot morning sun, lingering as long as they can before being almost instantly transmogrified, dis-patched, forgotten.

Ask Sir Harold how quickly things can fall apart.

Which is why, with no one to call, Theresa and Paul gone out on an errand somewhere, and Jack on the road to present another bid, and feeling distinctly outside of things, I have given in to what is my most accessible trouble and driven over to Muttontown, where I am now, parked outside of Richie Coniglio's brick Georgian-revival mansion. The house is from the 1920s or so, the last time in our history when they really did build it right, with its glossy black shutters and white window trim and tendrils of ivy curling up over the patinaed copper gutters, the muted, multihued slate roof a stolid, stately cap over it all, bespeaking (or bellowing, more like) a hushed rampart of the Establishment. The rest of the neighborhood is of similar scale and order, the houses and properties prixnped and manicured enough but not so much as to seem nouveau, and some aspects of me must look the part, as the private security guard drove past and slowed and then gave me a toadying salute. The gleaming car, no doubt, helped do the trick — it's just the kind of nostalgic set of wheels the salt-and-pepper neighborhood fellows (or a visiting friend) would tool around in on a fine summer Sunday.

I've guessed right, because Rita's yellow Mustang is parked in back by the five-bay carriage house (going back two cars deep), along with another dusty not-so-late-model coupe, which is probably the housekeeper's car, and one of Richie's Ferraris, the other six or seven new and vintage no doubt tucked neatly inside. Richie is somewhat famous in the area as an avid collector (being featured in full-color spreads in local periodicals like Island Lifestyle and Nassau Monthly), and even races'a couple of specially tuned models at rich-guy rallies in California and Italy. Out front, on the semicircular drive, are two BMW sedans and a Range Rover, and it's not hard to figure that the Rabbit is entertaining guests, which in another circumstance and time might have dissuaded me from inviting myself in, but today feels like no big thing at all.

At the door, a portly older black woman dressed not in a uniform but in a dark, severe housedress that might as well be one asks if she can help me.

"I'm a colleague of Rita's," I say, hoping that she'll assume I'm some kind of doctor or hospital administrator. "She asked me to drop by."