Know Your Beholder: A Novel (36 page)

I called Julie Pepper and set up an appointment to come in and see Dr. Hubie.

“The back’s finally better?” she said over the phone.

“Finally better, yeah,” I replied.

The appointment was in the midafternoon and I was determined to have a positive experience. I’d spent a long night awake, convincing myself that fixing my bad molar was the first step toward a new beginning, both dentally and mentally. A successful visit would put me on a new path away from my dark thoughts.

I explained to Julie Pepper that I needed the whole thing done in one visit, that my time was limited, that in the coming weeks my calendar was full.

“Dr. Hubie is prepared to do it in one shebang,” Julie Pepper told me.

And that’s exactly what Dr. Hubie did. He stuck my jaw full of novocaine, drilled the bejesus out of the molar, extracted the dead nerve, inserted a titanium post, bonded and crowned it to rebuild the structure of the tooth, and completed the root canal—all in less than three hours.

Dr. Hubert Dembrow, lovingly known as Dr. Hubie, has tan, hairy hands and likes to talk about his golf game even though he clearly knows you have no interest in golf. You could be a side of grade B beef with no ears or other human sensory characteristics and he’d still regale you with his various tee drives, fairway shots, and long putts from the fringe.

After the golf disquisition, he poked and prodded me with dental instruments. He told me he liked my beard. He told me he thought I’d been doing a fair job of flossing. He told me my breath had a nonoffensive peaty scent and asked if I was taking vitamins.

“Vitamin V,” I told him.

“V?” he said. “What’s that one?”

“Vinyl,” I answered.

He laughed like an old family friend who knows too much about your parents’ marriage.

I cited the favorites from my record collection: the 13th Floor Elevators’
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators
; Stevie Wonder’s
Innervisions
; Prince’s
Sign o’ the Times
; Steely Dan’s
Aja
. The best part of the day was the laughing gas. I asked for the “extra help,” as Julie Pepper calls it. I had explained to the ageless beauty with the dyed strawberry blond hair and spectacular legs that I was incredibly anxious about this particular tooth, that I couldn’t really articulate why, but that I was feeling a terrible sense of panic.

“Don’t worry about that,” she’d said. “We’ll be sure to give you some extra help.”

Nitrous oxide. God bless nitrous oxide.

I became warm all over. My brain turned into a loaf of angel food cake. My eyes into daisies. I generally felt like I was being cradled in the arms of an enormous mother panda bear. The word
fluffy
comes to mind.

While Dr. Hubie ground out the broken, decayed material, I could see smoke rising out of my mouth, I could smell calcium burning, but I was in those mother panda bear arms and everything was right in the world of Francis Carl Falbo of Pollard, Illinois.

Before I left his office, in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, I asked him how much laughing gas it would take to render someone unconscious.

“Not a lot,” he said. “Too much—more than a fifty-fifty mixture of gas and oxygen—and you risk asphyxiation, even death.”

I imagined pilfering a tank or two of laughing gas from his office. I’d sweet-talk Julie Pepper, tell her she has legs like one of the Rockettes. She’d show me some calf and twirl and curtsy and I’d swiftly grab a tank and fox-trot my way out of the office and into the Olds.

“Who are you trying to pull a prank on?” Dr. Hubie asked.

“Oh, just random friends and neighbors,” I told him.

I must have been smiling through the whorls of my beard because he took my comment as a joke and laughed like a jolly small-town mayor.

When I got home early that evening I called Haggis and asked him if he could get me some nitrous oxide.

He said he could procure a tank for me. “There’s a dependable dental assistant over in Decatur,” he said. He told me it would run me a few hundred bucks. “But I’ll throw in some ventilator tubing for good measure.”

Several hours later he stopped by with a heavy cardboard box, and I met him at the front porch.

He wore flip-flops and a blue T-shirt with Woody Woodpecker on it. “You’re wearing clothes,” he said.

“Everything’s been different since the tornadoes,” I said, taking the large box into my arms and handing him three hundred dollars cash.

“The back is better?” he asked.

“So much better,” I said, and twisted my trunk a few times, à la Chubby Checker. “Starting to feel like new.”

“There’s a small tank of oxygen in there, too,” he said. “Use both tubes. Make sure to mix. And enjoy this lovely May weather.”

I thanked him and headed upstairs.

With duct tape I was able to effectively rig the two ventilator tubes from Haggis’s box to the snout of a gas mask I’d procured from the bomb shelter. From the box I also removed the two tanks—gas and oxygen—and joined the ventilator tubes at the other end to the nitrous oxide and oxygen tanks. I placed the gas mask over my head and turned the nitrous oxide valve maybe twenty degrees to the right. I matched it with the oxygen. I inhaled deeply three or four times and removed the mask.

I started laughing hysterically.

It might have been the best feeling I’ve ever had. Better than sex or theft or apple pie. Pure love. Pure hilarity. The absence of sadness, ache, confusion. And then the floating. That silly, expansive, slow elevation of my head and lungs and limbs. A feeling like your soul is just centimeters ahead of your body, directionless, undulating.

Just as I went for another round, when I was prepared to really open up the valve of the nitrous oxide and reach for the clouds, my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket.

It was Emily Phebe, the screen showed.

I closed the nitrous oxide valve and answered the phone. “Emily!” I said, practically singing her name like a summer-camp song. I felt like the giant balloon version of whomever I was becoming, about to float endlessly over the Francis Falbo Parade of Immanent Darkness.

“Hi, Francis,” she said, but she was far less enthused and entertained than I. In fact, she sounded downright glum.

Hearing her say my name pulled me back to myself a bit. I asked her how she was and she said she’d had better days.

I told her I was sorry to hear that. It wasn’t easy to work against the gas, to act mature and even-keeled. I was mostly in the mood to see how much gas it would take to render myself deeply unconscious, but I said, “Anything you want to talk about?”

And then she launched in:

Only a few hours earlier, her father, my favorite tenant, whom I hadn’t spoken to in days, had suffered a massive heart attack and died on the stage of Bicentennial Theater. It purportedly happened during one of the final scenes of the play, when Willy Loman, beset by some form of high-stakes dementia, is speaking to Biff, who is not even present. Willy is counseling him as if in the past, egregiously out of time and place, encouraging his oldest, most painfully failed son to execute a flawless kickoff and run downfield and make the perfect tackle. Soon after Willy’s exit we learn that he tragically takes his own life by crashing his car, in his mind securing a life insurance windfall for his family. This action happens offstage, and as a bitter turn of poetry, Baylor Phebe had, in fact, been seized by his heart attack just as he was stepping offstage. A strange confluence of art and life, and one real man’s dream coming true as his character’s dream is tragically ending.

Apparently the company of
Death of a Salesman
finished the final scene of the play, the requiem, not even remotely aware of what Baylor was going through. He was in the dark, in the wings, probably swimming his arms out, clutching at his shoulder and neck as angina gripped his giant chest. I imagine him going to one knee, perhaps shattering it, then the other, pitching forward and floating on the ocean of his belly while his soul wrests itself from his flesh, passes between the wings of his shoulder blades, and rises through the walls of the theater and into the calm, starlit night.

He never made it to the curtain call.

As reported to her by the assistant stage manager, Emily said that the audience—a full house—was collectively on its feet, calling for her father to take his bow.

“Apparently it was very sudden,” Emily said. “The paramedics believe it was relatively painless. He was likely unconscious before the worst of it took hold.” She was surprisingly calm and spoke through restrained sniffles. Her voice was deep and dry and tired.

I told her I was so sorry.

“I’m on my way down now,” she said. “I’m actually at a diner in Joliet, just off of I-Fifty-five. Can I see you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll be at the house?”

I promised her I would be here.

“Good,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

“Me too,” I replied. The laughing gas was wearing off and a headache was forming in an orbit around my left eye. After we ended the call I took the gas mask in my hands and simply held it. I’m convinced that there are two lives that we get to live: an A Life and a B Life. They are presented to us by a whimsical universe at critical junctures when we least suspect this arrangement. This is not Fate I’m referring to. The concept of the A Life and the B Life is far trickier than that. What I mean is the life you’re living and the life underneath the life you’re living. One is polite, expectant, moral. The other is depraved, carnivorous, lustful, perhaps even homicidal. I’m not sure how often they intersect, or if one eventually takes over, but this is what I think I was experiencing as I sat there with the nitrous oxide—a strange, spiritual cloverleaf of my A Life and B Life—until I received that call from Emily Phebe.

Later I woke with a start.

I checked my phone. Emily had texted three times. She was waiting outside, parked in the front of the house.

We embraced on the front porch for several minutes. She smelled warm and sad, like fast food when it’s left in a car, and I could feel my heart filling up.

We spent the next two hours in Baylor’s basement apartment, sitting among his things, arranging them in prefabricated boxes that Emily had brought with her from Milwaukee. I built the boxes and secured the bottoms with a tape gun while Emily rummaged through her father’s possessions.

Glose’s bearskin was still on the floor, in front of the flat-screen television. After scanning it for bugs, I rolled it up and left it alone. It makes me sick to think that Glose could have taken advantage of Baylor. I guess bitterness can persist even during elegiac moments. It’s a tenacious, angry dog with sharp teeth that won’t die no matter how many times you kick it.

Emily packed all of her father’s clothes in three suitcases, as if she were helping him prepare for a voyage by ship. She wept quietly, almost invisibly.

At first I thought it odd that we were packing up Baylor’s things in the middle of the night, but I got the sense that Emily simply needed to do something practical, anything to keep her busy.

I took down the taxidermy, covered each piece with a plastic bag. I was careful not to touch any items that looked too personal. I left family pictures or favorite fishing lures for Emily. I cleared out the shower and the medicine chest, surprisingly bare for a man in his sixties. There was a bottle of Bayer aspirin, a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste, individual foils of Alka-Seltzer Plus.

When I was finished I joined Emily in the kitchen, where she was clearing out Baylor’s refrigerator. I asked her what was next, meaning next in her life. She said she needed to visit the morgue in the morning and then bury her father.

“Bury him in town here?” I asked.

“Down in Cairo,” she replied, “next to my mother’s grave. I’ll have to arrange a funeral. There’s not much family left, but there are plenty of people from the junior high. They’ll want to pay their respects.”

I asked her if I could come with.

She asked me how I was doing with my condition.

“I’ve been venturing out,” I told her. “Some days are better than others. I’m willing to risk it.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

“I’m positive,” I said. And then I admitted I was afraid of being alone. “I’ve been feeling far away from myself lately. Being near you would be good for me.”

“Me too,” she said.

Three days later, after Emily had taken care of various arrangements related to her father’s death, we attended a small memorial service in the garden of a nondescript cemetery in Cairo, Illinois, where a few dozen people had shown up. The service was held in the afternoon, and following a brief rain the blue of the sky was eerily bright and the cloudless firmament seemed endless.

I wore a white button-down shirt and black suicide tie and a pair of wing tips that Lyman had given to me some years back. Emily introduced me to her father’s colleagues as her friend and we held hands the entire day.

Ernie Glass, Baylor’s old dove-hunting partner, the sturdiest seventy-year-old I’ve ever seen, shook my hand and said, “You’re good.”

I thanked him, although I had no idea what he was referring to. I took it to heart nevertheless and I think somehow that I needed to hear it.

At the burial, once the pastor had finished offering his blessings and various platitudes about Everlasting Life and Being with God and Passing into Heaven, Emily spoke on her father’s behalf, thanking everyone for coming. We were all encircling his modest gravestone. Emily wept a bit but held firm and clutched my hand throughout. When she got to the part about Baylor being buried beside her mother, she lost it, but in a way that didn’t ask for pity, and when she regained her composure, she recited a Yeats poem that her father loved, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.” She told those assembled that he used to read this particular poem to his junior high school students at the end of the year as a kind of blessing to them: