Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

I drove through the familiar towns, places with names like Philo, Crothersville, and Kalona, places I knew from Little League games and 4-H fairs; easy enough back then for me to imagine the lives there, but now they seemed little more than electrified ruins, amid which an outlier species of human dwelled. It was hot, but I was driving with the window rolled down, and the dry air and dust were getting to me, so I stopped at an IGA for a pop. While the cashier, a girl of about twenty, was ringing me up, we both noticed simultaneously a five-dollar bill on the floor behind the counter. She discreetly placed one of her feet on it.

“Your lucky day,” I said. She blushed slightly.

“Well, we’ll see when I do the register tonight.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Don’t matter. Tape’s got to match the drawer.”

“Good luck,” I said. She turned to peer through the big plate-glass windows overlooking the parking lot and evidently spied the license plate on my rental, which was from Colorado.

“You’re from a long way off.”

“Denver,” I said. I opened the pop and took a drink from it.

“Here for a visit?” she asked.

“Business. At the U,” I said. “I sell copy machines.”

“My cousin repairs them down to Ash Grove.”

“That’s a real good job,” I said, “so’s selling ’em. People have to make copies, good times or bad times. They want those words copied for other people to read. Get ’em right.” I leaned on the counter. Why not? Why baffle her with the truth? Brightly lettered signs in the windows, announcing the specials, London broil and pork chops. Why remind her that we would all end up as cold meat? Besides, it was a distraction.

“You know, they used to in the olden days hire people to sit there and copy documents all day long with a pen. Can you believe it? And you know what they made?”

“No,” she said. “What?”

“Mistakes. They made lots of mistakes. But who wanted to go back and copy a document by hand all over again? They would prefer not to, I’d say. So they’d let the thing go out with mistakes all over it. Caused the outbreak of the Civil War, in fact.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes. Some papers went back and forth between north and south and one copy said one thing and the other said another thing and before you knew it the states were at each other’s throats. You don’t hear about that too much but it’s a documented fact. So I kind of tell people that copy machines help keep the world a little more civilized. Whether it’s a newspaper article, or a term paper, or a contract, or a memo, every document’s a story, and everybody wants the story to be right. Everybody wants the story to be accurate. Everybody wants the same story. You yourself were just talking about it.”

She looked a little blank. I couldn’t blame her.

“The drawer, the tape. Tape’s a story. Tape’s not lying. Tape says there’s supposed to be five dollars more in that register than there is, you know you’re going to have to go and put that bill right back in the drawer. If not, well, it’s yours.”

I was enjoying myself. I felt a reedy, Midwestern Plains twang enter my voice, a slight syntactical rearrangement impose itself on my sentences, a type of linguistic code-shifting that I often unconsciously, or unselfconsciously, adopted when I was back home. She nodded. Another customer had come up to the checkout stand and was beginning to place her groceries on the conveyor belt. “That’s interesting,” she said, and, wishing me a great day, dismissed me. I was a salesman, after all. I had nothing left to say anyway, my vapid creativity having fizzled as I became faintly aware that I was making fun of this poor girl.

THE NEXT WEEKundid whatever salubrious effect the Truro vacation had had on me. I was initially reassured to be in the presence of my father, who looked tired and a little thin though otherwise much the same as ever, but it quickly became obvious that he was simultaneously very ill, fearful, and determined to do things his way: that very first night we disagreed about whether he should allow a neurosurgeon to operate immediately to remove the tumor, which the MRI had indicated was at risk of “imminent herniation,” which itself could lead to massive stroke or permanent neurological impairment. He wanted to wait through the weekend, to “think about it,” and although I couldn’t see what there was to think about, I refrained from badgering him — it wasn’t my head that was going to be cut into like a cantaloupe. Periodically, I repeated my strange and unaccustomed weeping routine, remembering all the spots around my parents’ place where I could hide to do it. Behind a dilapidated shed, I found an old rubber ball, faded and pebbly in texture. It still smelled of rubber, but it crumbled in my fingers. I must have belted it back there about thirty years ago, and this introduced a new dimension to my grief, which, I was learning, shuts down all possibility of liberation from it. The present was all anxiety, the future was unthinkably imminent pain, and now the past became salient in its irretrievability.

The surgery was finally scheduled to take place six days later, the day before I was to return to New York, and during that interval I had a chance to see exactly how poorly my father had been functioning: his appetite had disappeared, he quickly grew impatient with the book he was reading, he was irritable, and he tired easily. He became confused in conversation even as, with almost desperate urgency, he retailed anecdotes that he had told me a hundred times: he knew that 101st opportunity might not come. (And he wanted to know what was to come and what wasn’t — this was, in its way, the worst week. Once he abandoned any hope of recovering, he chugged toward death as if it were any ordinary deadline he was determined to meet.) My mother, meanwhile, seemed slightly off the air throughout: having become accustomed to the behavior that was so startling to me, she now was absorbing the implications of what it all had turned out to mean. She became angry at me only once, when she learned that I had called my father’s doctor to quiz him from a long list of questions I’d prepared.

“Dr. Leung says that you contacted him.”

“That’s right.”

“Why did you need to call him?”

“I had questions.”

“Ask us.”

“I wanted to hear the doctor’s answers.”

This was only partly true. What I wanted to hear was the doctor himself, to get a sense of the person in whose hands my parents had placed my father’s life. The answers themselves were perfectly frustrating. Apparently my father’s primary care physician was exactly the wrong person to ask about his health: he couldn’t say. He didn’t know yet. Cases like these could differ greatly, as could their prognoses. Recommendations for postoperative treatment would be made by the neurosurgeon, and that treatment would most likely involve an oncologist, or maybe a hematologist, and most definitely a radiologist. I could almost hear Leung, a cardiologist, sidestepping any knowledge of the case, as if I might accuse him of deliberately implanting the tumor in my father’s brain. In a way, I felt that his evasive hesitancy was denying me the dismal prognosis I required.

I needn’t have worried: the neurosurgeon, a man about my age named Suresh, who exuded all the assertive confidence one would hope to find in someone who opened people’s skulls and cut into their minds, was as blunt as Dr. Leung had been noncommittal: “Surgery’s finished. It was successful; the tumor was well defined and close to the surface, and your dad’s recovering in the ICU. But you should know that from the look of things it’s likely a metastatic tumor, from cancer cells originating in the lung. I’ve sent a frozen section to the lab for analysis but I ordered a chest X-ray before surgery because I had a hunch. There’s a shadow there, definitely. My guess, adenocarcinoma, but we’ll see.”