God's Gym (8 page)

The riot of pain the doctors promised doesn't scare him. Drugs will dull most of it, won't they. He just hates the anticipation. Always prided himself on being the kind of guy who liked to bull-rush the enemy, get it on, get it over. As long as he had a chance to fight back, he could handle whatever. From day one, his color plus a jock mentality had turned every encounter into a contest. Even the smallest choices. For the past year he'd believed the tremor in his hands a symptom of his crazy habit of always needing to win. You reach for the pepper and at the last instant, because your mind's still debating the pluses and minuses of whether to sprinkle pepper or salt on your pasta, your hand hesitates, flutters in the air above the nearly identical shakers. Sometimes you knock over stuff. Sometimes you laugh at yourself. Sometimes you want to scream. To kill. Or die. Each decision a drama. Your fate and the future of Western civilization hinge on whether you top your coffee with a dab of half-and-half or a dollop of skim milk.

Now it turns out the problem not indecision, not fear of doing the wrong thing and losing. No. Not his wacky mind causing his hands to tremble. His body's wacky. Loose connections in the circuitry of nerves. Connections blocked by inflamed tissue and arthritic bones. Simple motions frustrated by lack of information. Muscles atrophying because they don't receive enough love from the brain. They forget how to contract or stretch. All the switchboard operators sprawled dead or dying after a terrorist raid.

When his eyes slink open in the morning he tells himself, You're still here, nothing's different. Nothing to worry about, anyway. Over is over. Once gone, you're really gone. It's the air conditioner, the fridge, stupid, not death droning in your ear. Crowds amaze him. Busy swarms of people who haven't heard
the news. Hey, he wants to shout. Listen up, everybody. It ain't just about me. Each and every one of you has got to go. For sure. Damned sure. Maybe the woman scowling into her paperback or that guy propped half asleep against the pole will be gone before this year's up. How would the others packed at this particular moment into this particular subway car behave if they knew what he knew. Knew their score. A week, ten days, a long or short year. Would their hearts beat faster when they tried to figure out what to do next, tried to figure out what this time means, this minute or day or month remaining. Everything and nothing. Would they hear each click of a faceless clock counting down what's left of their lives. Would they understand they'd never understand. Not even this simplest thing about being on the earth. Caught in a net that's nothing but holes.

The doctors say his time's almost up and suddenly he's old, just about as old as he'll ever get. An old man, all the people who once mattered long gone so the death sentence a fresh start too. He owes nothing to anyone. Owns the little time left. Though he can't afford to waste a second, no rush either. Size doesn't matter. Everybody gets a whole life—beginning, middle, end—no matter how quickly it's over. Like those insects
ephemerids
he'd read about, their entire life cycle squeezed into an hour of a May afternoon. Like his siblings, the twin boy and girl who couldn't stick around long enough to receive names, dying a few hours after birth, taking his sweet, sweet mother with them.

How long does it take to die. Well ... that, of course, depends on many factors ... He watches the doctor's face, watches himself lean forward, and in a weird way he's watcher and watched, patient and doctor, weather and weatherman. The doc's gleaming brow reassures, sleek flesh befitting his whopping fees, the location of his office, the trust you must invest in his words, healthy sheen, vacation tan. Tiny ellipsoid spectacles slide down his nose a smidgen as he closes a smidgen the distance between you, kisser and kissed. He's seen the same commercials you have, represents just this side of convincingly the actor acting like a doctor, this doc with big hands and big face and a habit of staring offstage at the imponderably heavy-duty shit always lurking just beyond the high-definition scene in which the two of you are engaged in delicate conversation about fate—your fate, not his, because this doctor's a permanent member of the cast, always available to move the plot along, advise, console, subtle as a brick revealing the brutal verdict. I've never figured out how to inform the patient, he confides. Fortunately, I don't see cases like yours very often. What can I say, except it's one of those things in life we must adjust to as best we can. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. It's a job and somebody has to do it, somebody's got to die. Did the doc really say that. Was he complaining about his tough job or commiserating with his patient. Does it matter. He steals the doctor's voice again, pipes it through the plane. This is your captain speaking ... We are experiencing an emergency. Please remove the oxygen mask of the helpless passenger beside you before you remove yours.

He'd begun compiling a list of chores, necessary things to do to prepare for the end. A notebook page full before he realized the list was about expecting time, using time, filling time, about plans, control, the future, wishful thinking, as if time were at his disposal. As if he possessed the power to choose—blind or deaf—as those silly scare games proposed. As if he weren't already eyeless, crippled, helpless, just about out of time. Next move always the last move. When he switched the list to
must do,
he was relieved by its shortness. Only two items: he must die, and before his time's up he must end the bad ending of his father's life. Couldn't leave his poor daddy behind to suffer any longer—how long, how long. He must take his father's life.

An unimaginable thought at first. How in hell could you kill murder whack terminate snuff your own father. Ashamed of the thought, then guilty when he doesn't act. If he loves his father, why allow him to suffer. Somebody needs to step up to the plate. Who, if not him. In the limbo of the veterans' hospital his father's shrinking body, in spite of its skinny frailty, of the burden of its diseased mind, might not fail for years. Meaningless years in terms of quality of life his father could expect, meaningless except for whatever it means when a fatally wounded animal suffers, means when an intensely proud, private man whose major accomplishment in life was maintaining a fierce independence winds up on display, naked, paddling around in his own shit. Cruel years of pointless hanging on. Years the son does not have now, thus different now, on his mind daily, monopolizing the little time, his only time remaining.

The father so present dying, so absent alive. For years, decades, starting even before his daddy had passed him to his grandmothers and aunts to raise, they'd been losing touch, becoming two men who see each other infrequently, not exactly strangers, more like longstanding acquaintances who hook up now and then in restaurants or bars, talk ball games, politics, an easy, no-strings-attached fondness. They observe an almost courtly politeness and restraint, as if questions about the other's personal life would be not only prying but breaking the rules, a kind of betrayal even, an admission of desiring more than the other so far had given and thus a rebuke, whiny dissatisfaction, after all these years, with an arrangement formed by mutual consent that had seemed to serve them both well enough.

Since he wasn't God and couldn't simply will his father's death and be done with it, killing his father necessitated tending to messy details. A weapon, for instance. And words, his unreliable weapon of choice, wouldn't suffice in this crisis, either. Wouldn't buy more time. Or finish his father's time. Yet a word,
hemlock,
popped into his mind, clarified options. A quick, lethal does of poison no doubt the most efficient, practical
means of accomplishing the dirty work. Hemlock shorthand for his plan, code word for whatever poison he might procure. Hemlock certainly sounded nicer than strychnine, anthrax, arsenic, cyanide, cyclone B—poisons he associated with murder mysteries, pest exterminators, concentration camps. After repeating the word to himself many times, it took on a life of its own: Hemlock, a cute, sleepy-eyed little turtle. Hemlock finally because it reminded him of the painting.

During its first year, when the veterans' hospital was overstaffed and underused, only a small group of patients occupied the locked-down seventh-floor ward, and walking the brand-new halls with his father, he'd been reassured without realizing it by an illusion of spaciousness and tranquillity some clever architect had contrived with high ceilings, tall windows, gleaming floor tiles, unadorned planes of wall like a gallery stripped for the next exhibition. Almost as if he strolled with his father through that familiar classic painting, the one whose tide he couldn't recall then or now,
The Academy of So-and-so at Somewhere,
he thinks, remembering a slide from a college survey of art, philosophers in togas, their elegant postures, serious demeanors, a marble dome, sky-roofed arcades, a scene, said the voiceover, embodying intricate thought, calm speculation, the slow, careful accumulation of beads of truth on invisible threads connecting Socrates to Plato, Plato to Aristotle, Aristotle to Virgil or Dante or the pope, whoever these bearded, antique figures populating the painting were supposed to depict, wherever the idyllic version of Greece or Rome was supposed to exist, living and dead in earnest conversation—maybe it's heaven, the strollers immortals, maybe he had needed to flee that far away from the nearly empty, spic-and-span scrubbed corridors of the seventh-floor ward to feel what he felt then and wishes he could feel again: the peace, false or not, of those first walks now that everything has changed, very aware now, mainly because it's missing and irretrievable, of the comforting illusion
he'd once enjoyed, the sense of order and safety impossible today beside his father in a traffic jam of shambling, drugged, dull-eyed, muttering men in aqua pajamas, father and son slowly shuffling back and forth along corridors where windows begin above their shoulders and ascend to the top of high off-white walls, giant glass panels cloning light but allowing no one to see in, no one to see out.

Did the building in the painting have a basement, underground kennels the artist chose not to include. Where were the people who clean and polish the marble. Where were the sick and dying. The maimed in body and spirit. Where were the good citizens with brown faces who look like us, Daddy, who are doomed like us, Daddy.

Are dreams faster than the speed of light.
Should he ask his father. Wouldn't his daddy know all the answers now, the whole truth and nothing but the truth tucked away in his silence, silence deep as the painting's, his father mute like those white-robed sages frozen beneath a canopy of marble arches, all the time in the world on their hands, the ever blue Mediterranean sky at bay above their heads.

He stands pressed into a tall corner watching his father, a brown, wooden man on the barber's wooden stool. Next to his father on a folding chair another aqua-pajamaed man, face pale as the ghostly philosophers', a dentist they say in his other life, babbles nonstop, cracking himself up, ha-ha-ha-ha as if he's still the life of the party, entertaining a captive audience of dental technicians and patients in the tooth-pulling parlor where he reigns until it's his turn on the stool.

The barber, who comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the VA hospital and sets up shop in an alcove near the nurses' station so he can holler for help if a patient gets unruly, snips, snips, snips, scissors snipping like a patient swarm of insects darting around his father's head. A crown of snips if you drew lines from one snip to the next. The black-handled scissors restore the handsome, well-groomed man his father has always been, disguise the madness lying in wait to seize his features. Scissors snip, snip, snipping, the barber intent as Babo in Melville's
Benito Cereno,
as Michelangelo coaxing the sleeping David from a block of marble, like the voice trimming and snipping these words, these words words words snipping, killing, drifting away, white hairs, brown hairs, gray hairs, little commas and tightly curled spirals that accumulate on the cloth draping his father's shoulders, hairs that have grown too long and wild, telling tales
Beware, beware, his flashing eyes and floating hair
on the tight-lipped, vacant-eyed man shuffling toward you in one of the corridors radiating like spokes from the panopticon hub of the nurses' station.

His father's face looking good, holding on in spite of scalding daylight powering from the window above the alcove. Still a striking face, a brown-eyed, handsome man, uh-huh,
he was a brown-eyed handsome man,
this pretty daddy who stares without blinking at a landscape only he's able to see, a place elsewhere demanding more and more of his attention until one day his father had shrugged his shoulders and let the weight of this world slip off his back. As simple as that. As simple and quick as standing up when the barber finishes and letting the white cloth drop behind you onto the empty stool.

Are dreams faster than the speed of light.
He had asked himself the question after Lisa related a story about a Chinese physicist at Cal Tech or Berkeley or UCLA, he doesn't remember which university, just the fact it was a West Coast school because he recalls imagining out loud a life for the scientist, how the guy winds up in charge of a world-class experimental physics lab after being born in an internment camp out West. Would a spotless lab coat, a droptop BMW erase memories of almost starving to death, a nisei father killed defending American interests in the Pacific, the bittersweet day of release from the camp, his mother's tears, her brown hands eternally cracked
from trying to grow food in Arizona sand, wait a minute Lisa interrupts in the middle of my riff,
Chinese
not Japanese, she says, but who cares about such fine distinctions when war fever's high, he says. A chink's a chink. Yellow peril. Yellow menace. This article's about today, not World War Two, stupid, so stop raving, she says, waving in his face a clipping from the
Times
that describes an experiment a Chinese scientist conducted and experts from around the world either hailed enthusiastically or dissed as a crock of inscrutable shit, the division of opinion duly noted and quoted so discriminating readers of the science section could decide for themselves.