David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

What started as a rambling six-page admission of and apology for burying the bones of her daughter’s history — a truth Evelyn felt compelled to offer in a sort of tribute to Max — had swelled, in the weeks following his death, into an imprecation of her very own existence. It was her fault, she said, rejecting the comforting thought that Henry shared (and possibly deserved even more of) the blame. It was all her fault.

But who was her admission for? The further she read, the more she wondered who stood to benefit from what she had to say. Was it for Max, who was gone? Was it for Claudia, who had the rest of her life to live? By confessing her heart, Evelyn alone stood to feel lighter. Claudia had lost Max. Claudia had lost Henry. And now Evelyn stood ready to take away what was left. She read the letter through to the last words. Love, your mother . Your mother: what was left after that for Claudia to lose?

Evelyn gave no more thought to tearing up those pages than she would about pulling her hand away from a flame. She did it instinctively. She shredded the letter, bit by bit, her eyes spilling over at the sight of the awful confetti raining down into the trash. How could Max forgive her? Tired, she shifted her position on the bed until she was lying by Henry’s side, her head pressed to Henry’s head. He looked at her then, and she wondered who he thought he was looking at. If he realized he was looking at anyone at all. Maybe she was, in Henry’s mind, his wife. Maybe she was Jane. Maybe she was a girl he never thought to mention, a girl who lived in his mind eons before she walked into that apartment off the garage and met the boy with the suitcase full of books. But no. Evelyn wasn’t Jane. She wasn’t even Evelyn. She was nobody, just as Henry now was nobody. She curled next to him and drew his arm around her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as if readying for sleep. Now perhaps, at last, they could rest.

By the time Benji arrived, his mother was gone. He stood in the doorway, stunned by a smell that made his stomach lurch every time: floor cleanser and beige food and, somewhere deep underneath, the dark offense of human shit. He closed his eyes and opened them again, as if this brief respite might make the yellowish light oozing from blister-like sconces less terrible and the man in the bed, nearly unrecognizable to him under his thin white sheet, more like his father. He’d spent his lifetime wishing his father would disappear, and now that Henry had, Benji wanted little more than to get him back. He didn’t like coming here, so it surprised him to find that, lately, here was one of the only places he could stand to be.

Once Benji overcame his body’s reflexive response to the indignities of dying in a leased room with lemon-colored linoleum, he found himself sitting sentinel over his father, in the vicinity of a precious calm. He stepped forward and peered down from Henry’s side into a face washed clean of recognition. Gone, the disappointments. Gone, the wit. Gone, the sharp-toothed eminence. All the lasting things, it turned out, did not last. His father’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a fish mouthing clear, silent bubbles into the air. Benji pulled up a chair and sat. This was the vigil he never dreamed of keeping. And this was the last.

Benji had, since the fire, set to rereading his father’s books. From beginning to end, first to last. He’d never admitted to Henry that he’d made a first lap with the old man’s oeuvre and now, a quarter of the way into the second, Henry couldn’t understand him if he did. In his twenties, when the exchange of Henry’s infamous birthday books struck his son as especially pointed, Benji secretly dipped into the pages of Nuisance and The Skirmishes ; if Henry had corked a message in some bobbing literary bottle, Benji took his chances on finding it here, in the pages of Nostomania and Derelict’s Fee rather than anatomies of postwar America or bloated Russian doorstoppers. Perhaps Benji, like the disinherited Dimitri Aster in Nostomania , had come to wait for his father’s last words.

For 513 pages, for 212 days, Dimitri stands over his father’s bed, patient for the bastard whose gambling partners have beaten him into a coma to open his eyes and say what he has to say. And then, 212 days after Dimitri’s vigil begins, after 212 days of tortured reflection on Phelan Aster’s paternal shortcomings, the father opens his eyes and says to his son, whose mouth is loaded with the gob of spit he’s dreamt of launching into his failure of a father’s face (no matter what the old man croaks), “And now what?”

Dimitri swallows his spit, sensing in the question the first signs of melting a glacier-size impasse, then looks up at the beeping heart monitor to see the thorny green vine of his father’s sinus rhythm snake into a smooth, straight line. A 513-page joke. And now what? And now nothing. Some joke.

Benji, who’d spent more than 212 days of his life hawking up a final, Dimitri-ish send-off spritz of his own, regarded the absurdity. The more you remember, the more you’ve made up: this, from The Skirmishes. The father he’d grown up with differed from the father before him differed from the father as husband or artist or teacher or man. Benji had a death grip on a single part of Henry, a few lines he’d redacted from the whole of the text that made the whole more legible to him. He found it hard to fit that piece into the puzzle that lay before him, to complete the portrait of Phelan Aster or Henry Fisher or whatever enigmatic monster Benji had whittled down from a much longer, more complicated story: he saw no trace of that man in the figure before him (who wasn’t, as Benji expected, raging against the dying of the light but slipping as gently, as slowly into it as one can).

“Pee,” Henry said. The voice, hoarse but coming like a flock of birds bursting from the stillness of a tree, startled him.

“Dad?” he said.

“Pee,” Henry repeated, his eyes not moving from the ceiling, as if aiming the appeal at a higher power. “Pee. Pee.” The word burbled out like water from a fountain, a steady stream of monotonous sound.

Benji rose. He lifted the bed sheet to see the insult of a wet mark blooming along a leg of Henry’s pajamas. He pushed the call button that summoned the duty nurse and went to the door to watch for his approach. But nobody came. Looking over his shoulder, Benji weighed his options. He called down the corridor but didn’t dare jog the short distance to the end of it to find the nurse. Even if he could hear his father speaking the entire time, he could not bring himself to leave his post.

“Pee.”

He turned back into the room as though he knew exactly what to do, stalking into the huge tiled square of the bathroom, where safety bars attached to the wall near the toilet and shower, and a drain (reminder that the entire operation could be hosed down when the time came for the next occupant) took up the center of the slightly sloped floor. Grabbing the round plastic pan that Evelyn used to soak Henry’s calloused feet, he filled it with warm water and a soapy sponge and carried it to the side of the bed.

Benji’s hand found its way to his father’s forehead, and as though it belonged to someone else, he watched it smooth down Henry’s hair. Sweat rose on Henry’s skin from the strenuous work of saying that single word, and part of Benji looked on as another part of him — more present, more suitable, more unafraid — moved through its paces. He pulled the sheet over the end of the bed and undid the buttons of his father’s pajama top. Henry no longer smelled like Henry, and his body had shriveled over the course of a year into a less familiar thing. He looked smaller than he actually was, childlike, as if the man he’d been had slipped inside this loosening skin to hide among the bones.