Eating Memories (6 page)

Instead of answering like I should have, I sort of started to cry.

He didn’t touch me or nothing, not like a human might have. Didn’t say nothing, neither, least not for a while. Didn’t say as how the Lord works in mysterious ways or how it was a blessing she was took so quick. Or how she was in some better place. He just stood there. But, you know, it was kind of funny how comfortable he made me feel. Maybe his just standing there made me know death was a natural thing and not nothing to go excusing away.

After a while he asked if I wanted to stay for dinner, and I said no. He asked if I had other plans, and I said no. Then he said as how if I didn’t have no other plans, it didn’t make sense to go back to the house cause I probably wouldn’t eat. I said I wasn’t hungry. He said I probably was, I just didn’t know it yet.

So I come on in. He got out two frozen Mexican-food dinners and popped them into the microwave. By the time they were ready I was hungry. Ate all of mine and half of his, too. He built a fire in the fireplace and I stayed so late and got so drunk: that about three o’clock in the morning he threw a blanket over me and told me to spend the night. I stayed at his house for two days.

All that winter, seemed like we was joined at the hip. I’d go over to his place, but most times he’d be over at mine. Started knocking on my door, too. If I didn’t answer right away, he’d barge right on in. I figured he’d got over thinking bothering people was a sin; but he hadn’t. Wasn’t till six months later he got up the gumption to tell me he’d been afraid I’d kill myself.

Got to telling me a lot about their way of death, too. Blamed if I didn’t start understanding. He started borrowing Maxie’s cookbooks and making stuff from scratch, and we’d sit all warm in his kitchen, the smell of fresh baked bread and cookies around us and talk and eat until the thin hours of the morning.

Spring planting come, and I was busy. Helped him get in a garden; he helped me get in mine. When we seen each other, he let me go on and on about Maxie. Never told me to shut up. Never seemed like he was bored. Knowed it must have been tiresome for him, but he hung on every word and never once interrupted. I’ve had some good neighbors in my time. I’ve had- some good friends. But of all of them, God, wasn’t he the best.

* * *

In November some four years later he told me to go home and not come back for two weeks. I knowed right then what it was about.

“God damn you to hell,” I told him, “I won’t do that.”

“Billy, you have to,” he said.

“You got that wrong. I don’t have to do nothing I don’t want to.”

“No. You really don’t. I’m sorry, but I had to ask. You’re the only one I have.”

That made me mad. “Should have more’ n me, after all this time. You been here some fifteen years working for your people and working for ours. Should have more’n me. It just ain’t fair.”

“I’m not going to debate the unfairness of it with you.” He had an elegant way of talking like that, so that sometimes you didn’t know if he was mad nor joking till he said something else. “Unfairness has nothing to-do with it. Besides, it’s unimportant. You’re all that I need.”

That sort of got to me. “You tell me what to do,” I said then. “You let me know if you need anything.”

“Just don’t forget to check on me. Please don’t forget.”

I kind of looked at him. I was a little put-out. “You think for one goddamned minute I will?”

“No,” he said real soft. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said that, but I’m frightened.”

Him frightened. That took me back. Didn’t know he could be upset nor angry nor scared. “Then I ain’t gonna leave you. I’ll just stay right here. Ain’t gonna let nothing happen to you. You’ll see.”

“You can’t stay,” he told me. “It’s a private thing with us. I have to have time. Give me two weeks.”

“Two weeks,” I told him. “Not a minute more.”

Two weeks later, I was the one who found him. I was the one who cut him down. When I picked him up in my arms there wasn’t much left of him, and what was left didn’t have no more weight than paper. The cocoon was so dry and fragile that I broke part of it accidental-like against my chest. I could see some of him inside. Just a glimpse ’cause I didn’t want to look too close. But what I seen made me know he hadn’t been able to change. Death. It looks the same. No matter what creature it takes, death looks the same.

I done what he expected of me. Took him out and laid him on the grass, real careful so he didn’t break. The ground was wet, but I dug a hole, anyways. I laid him down inside and set fire to him like he wanted me to. He’d told me enough of what to expect if he’d made it and what to look for if he hadn’t. If he’d made it, I would have lost him the same. If he’d made it, he wouldn’t have remembered nothing.

He burned fast. There was something pretty about it, too. The edges of the brown cocoon caught first and spread, sort of curling like dry leaves do. The wind caught at him and lifted bits of him up in the blue dusk. I could see the ashes as they spread along the pasture, with embers falling to the ground, like he was part of the air and the earth at the same time.

Then I called up to their embassy. He’d taught me something to say in his own language, and I said that. Never told me what it meant, but the ambassador on the other end of that phone was quiet for a long time before he put the receiver down. He put it down so soft I didn’t never hear the click, only that hum of the empty line.

I went through his house and mine trying to find something that suited him, but I couldn’t. I thought of the Oreo jar, and that wasn’t him. The vodka and Dr. Pepper wasn’t really him, neither. He was a complicated man, and not so easy to sum up as Maxie.

So I wrote this. Talked to Harry Jacobs and his folks over at the paper and they promised to print it. He’d think it didn’t matter; but I want people around here, the people who always stared at him, to understand.

Tomorrow morning when that paper’s thrown, I’m going to go over to the hole where I burned him. I’m going to sit by that hole for five hours like he done for her. I’ll probably read this out loud. He’d tell me that was silly, that he’d been made part and parcel of all that is, but you cain’t never tell.

Anyways, if he’s still here and feeling lonely with all them human souls around him, I want him to remember the human who cared. He was a hell of a good neighbor.

Author’s Note:
This is one of the few stories of mine which has anything to do with Brazil, why didn’t I use Brazil as a setting more often? My novel Cradle of Splendor took place there, but that novel is dark and concerns ugly truths, things I really don’t associate with that bright and happy country. Lord knows Brazil had a powerful impact on me; and given the right story, I intend to write about it again.

Looking back over this particular work, I found that I was delighted to see that it is now so dated. Being a child of the ’50s, I remember “Duck and Cover” and the terrors of nuclear war. After all, San Antonio, Texas with Fort Sam Houston and its three large Air Force bases was considered a prime Russian target. I see now how that early fear bled into my subconscious. It’s a relief to be able to read this now and see it as quaint.

They were playing catch, not with a flashby, but with a beach ball that had an afterthoughtish look. I decided it had probably been borrowed from Pediatrics. Rarely do such parents come prepared. When parents come empty-handed, as I imagined these had, they are frightened by the empty silences that fester between them and their children. That’s when they look for props.

The ball was a cheap, plastic thing with longitudes of primary colors and poles of red. A small, happy planet for small, simple people.

The father was doing fast sprints, feinting to his right and then to his left. Sometimes he tossed the ball overhead, sometimes underarm; but always athletically, His smile was fixed and determined, a glued-on smile.

Four yards from the father the son stood, a fat post, catching the ball only if it came directly into his hands. Otherwise he would let it go past him and then amble, not jog, after. The boy’s face was utterly somber, more
an expression for school-work than for games.

The mother sat in her long, white dress as if she were attending a social day at the races. It was a family painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Only the boy seemed sane.

The father’s smile failed, becoming the grin of a man who was weary of pumping gladness into a leaking container. He tossed the ball to the boy’s right, just far enough so that his son would have to jump to catch it. The boy didn’t. He stood, his sorrowful eyes following the ball’s bright path. After it had stopped, he trudged towards it, picked it up, walked back to his prescribed place and took up the game again.

The father’s frown came on with the menace of a spring squall. With a snap he flung the ball hard into his son’s moon face.

The boy never put up his hands to ward it away. He never ducked. The ball hit with a smack that I imagined I could hear even through the double-paned windows.

And time paused.

The three became statues of themselves. Rage and hot blood drained from the father’s face. The mother hesitated, her iced tea glass halfway to her perfect lips. His hand to his nose, the boy stood, stunned. In gay bounces, the ball dribbled away across the jade green lawn.

Then time resumed. The boy turned to follow the rolling ball. Reaching it, he picked it up carefully. He walked back to his spot, crooked his awkward elbows and tossed the ball in a gentle, high rounded arc back into his father’s hands as if nothing of importance had happened.

* * *

“Did you enjoy the visit?” I asked the boy.

He glanced up, his neck craning. Tall and stooped, I towered over the boy like a recombinant vulture.

The boy’s eyes fell, “Sure.”

“We need to talk about it. How do you feel about your father? How do you feel about your mother? It’s important if you ever want to get well.”

“I don’t know them well enough to feel anything,” he said.

There is a residual effect from the Thanapeline, an odd one that makes the boy seem like an adult. When he died the last time, he’d been fifty-three years old.

“Can we have some ice cream now?” he asked.

And then, sometimes, he acts like ten.

* * *

“That’s him?” Carleton asked as he looked through the one way glass.

I nodded. Bobby was intent on a game of War. His thumbs pressed manically and with an exacting rhythm on the pads. The speaker was open, and I could hear the BEEP-BEEP as he scored. Average juvenile hand-eye coordination. In a moment, the game won, he put the unit down. Average juvenile attention span. He looked over at us and I imagined he could see me. I wondered what he was thinking. Not much, apparently. He began to pick his nose.

Carleton glanced away. “As far as I’m concerned, the eating disorder’s caused by the parents. The father is disappointed in his son, his son sees it, the son overeats.”

“It’s not just overeating,” I told him. “He ravishes his food. Sometimes he puts so much into his mouth that he can’t chew. When he eats we have to station someone in the room with him that knows the Heimlich maneuver. In the two months he’s been in the hospital, he’s choked twelve times.”

Carleton shrugged. “Food’s always been symbolic of love. Ask any fat man.”

I put my palms to the glass. It was cold and hard and insensitive. Bobby was listlessly picking through his toys. High normals usually had a problem with boredom.

“The eating disorder dates from infancy. Check with the pediatrician if you don’t believe me,” I said.

After a moment Carleton sat down in one of the institutional mauve chairs. His fingers tapped the folder absently. “People say you’re in love with PLT, Harry. They say it must come from your culture.”

I glared at my reflection. A thin gargoyle stared back. “I’m third generation. My mother and father were Lutherans.”

“I know.”

“Do you imagine I practice Past Life Therapy because of something Hindu in my DNA?”

“Don’t get stuffy with me. PLT’s fine, but it’s not the only therapy we have. Granted, we have an interesting situation here, but I’m not certain your data are valid, In the meantime, you have a patient who needs you, Treat the past life, but don’t forget the present.”

Bobby was kicking one heel of his sneaker into the linoleum, an expression of other-worldly sorrow on his face. He broke my heart. “I never forget the present, Dr, Carleton.”

I studied the faces of the two QM physicists as they watched the films of Bobbie at dinner. Harold Moss, from MIT, winced and looked away from the screen as if we had shown him pornography. In fact, that’s what it was. Bobby ate with all the decadence of an aging lecher.

Burton Stengler, professor of applied mediumship from the Kardeckian Institute in Atlanta, watched doggedly, his eyes narrowing in disgust.

Carleton turned the film off just after the denouement when Bobby vomited out the contents of his engorged stomach, paused for a moment, and then calmly began to eat again.

“Just so you see what the problem is,” I told them. “Some background.”

The ascetic Stengler nervously ran a finger along his upper lip. The rotund Moss seemed more than simply nervous, and I wondered if the film had given him the impetus to begin a diet.

Then Carleton slipped the July 21 tape into the VCR. The monitor lit up.

I was looking at myself: a graying Indian with hollow, dark eyes and rumpled lab coat, Bobby sat across from me, pumped full of Thanapeline, his head lolling on his neck:.

“Quero um cigarro,
” he muttered.

Reaching into my pocket, I got him one, lit it and passed it across. He took it, pressing the filter between two fingers. After breathing in a deep drag of smoke, he plucked at his tongue. Gilberto Soares would be a poor man, and he would be used to rolling his own.

Bobby regarded me, his eyes slitted and tired from the drug.
“Brigado.”

Moss turned from the screen to me, “Do you speak Portuguese?” he asked hopefully.

“Direct Translation Feed,” Carleton answered. “Notice the pink button on Dr, Patel’s right ear.”

On the monitor the dot of pink erupted from my brown skin like an infection. The Translation Receivers, like bandaids, were advertised as being “flesh colored.” The pink would have clashed with no one else in the room but me and the artificially tanned Dr. Stengler.

Looking disappointed, Dr, Moss turned away.

“Where do you live, Gilberto?” my image asked. Because of Bobby, Soares understood English. He could speak English, too, when he wanted. But Soares would be a difficult, a stubborn, man. After knowing the easily intimidated boy, that cheered me. I loved Bobby for his gentleness, but gentleness is a hard thing to bear. Its burden was heavy on Bobby, and it weighed down the people around him. Sometimes they hated him for that.

“Aqui.”

“And where is that?”

Bobby, his face drawn up into an expression of amusement that looked out of place on a child, said,
“Aqui, pô: Manaus.”
Then he asked me in that crude Portuguese of his if I didn’t know where I was.

“Quero uma cerveja.”

“I don’t have a beer. Would you like a Coke?”

“Não.”
At this point he stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and crossed his arms. His movements were clumsy.

It was coming. I knew it was coming. I’d seen the tape dozens of times. My hands dug into the armrests of my chair. On the monitor a placid, innocent me went on, a smile of encouragement on my face.

“Okay, Gilberto. I’m going to take you forward five years. Five years. Tell me what you see.”

Why hadn’t I noticed the look on Bobby’s face? On the monitor I could see it so clearly: The way the eyes narrowed, not from sleepiness but from pain; the way the mouth grimaced as if he had tasted something spoiled.

“Frio,”
he said.

“What’s cold?”

“Estou com frio.”
Bobby’s oversized body was trembling in its oversized knit shirt. Ashamed of his belly, he hated clothes that fit him. An active ten year old, he hated long sleeves.

“‘Would you like for me to turn the air conditioning down?”

A cry came from him, wrenched from his beefy chest.
“Ai. Jesus! Jesus! O
ceu esta quebrada!”

On the monitor my face showed alarm. I leaned forward, grasping his hand. He pulled away with such force that my arm recoiled like a spring. “What do you mean, ‘The ski is broken?’ Gilberto? What is it?”

“O ceu. O
ceu .
. .”

The sky.

His voice went high, shattering like glass on the peak of his terror.
“O ceu esta preto!”

“The sky is black? Is it a storm, Gilberto? A bad storm?”

Bobby’s eyes turned inward to the bleak landscape only he could see. “
O
ceu esta preto e neve cai no mato.”

“What?” I asked with disbelief. “What did you say?”

“
O
neve.”
His eyes seemed blind. “
O
neve cai no mato.”

The tape ended.

Carleton switched on the ceiling lights. Blinking, Moss and Stengler turned towards me, “What was it?” Stengler asked.

I relaxed my grip on the aims of my chair. “Snow,” I said. My hands had cramped into claws. “Snow fell in the jungle.”

* * *

Bobby watched as I shaved his ankle. “I don’t want to,” he said.

Taking up the Thanapeline pump, I attached it to his leg. “It’s something that they have to do, Bobby,” I explained without looking up. I knew his face too well. I knew what fear looked like in it.

“Why do you always put it there?”

I began to tape the pump to his leg before answering. “So you won’t snatch it out. The ankle is harder to get to. Sometimes things get pretty hectic, you know.”

He knew.

“It scares me to go back.”

“I’m sorry.” Therapy, for Bobby, appeared to have backfired. He was eating more and eating faster, driven by urgency. At age fifty-three, Soares would die of starvation and be buried in the jungle’s white, cold tomb,

“What you see when you go back is very important, Bobby, It’s something we don’t understand. Maybe if we understand it, we can prevent it from happening.”

“But I’ll die, anyway,” he said.

I looked at him then. He was somber as an adult. The Thanapeline’s residual effect confused sexes sometimes. Sometimes confused ages. I’d always considered that a side effect I could live with. Now I wasn’t so sure. “We all die,” I told him. “Past Life Therapy helps you deal with that.”

“But I’m not remembering a past life, am I?”

I busied myself with the tape. Over, under. Over, under. I ran my hand across the bulge of the pump to see that it was secure. “No. We don’t think you’re remembering a past life.”

“I don’t like those men.”

“I’ll be in there with you,” I said as I helped him up. “Just in case you need me.”

He clung to me, a hot, fleshy bulk that was part child, part dying man. He was too heavy to carry. Taking my hand he walked down the long hall.

* * *

“Hello, Bobby,” Moss said. The researcher looked as if he wasn’t sure whether or not to shake hands. In the end he didn’t. Most adults have difficulties relating to children. Stengler was worse than Moss; and Moss at best was awkward. At last he motioned the boy to a chair, deftly wrapped a bit of rubber tubing on Bobby’s upper arm and tapped his forefinger on a likely vein.