Nicotine (2 page)

Norm dribbles water from a ladle over the stones in the cauldron. “Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me why you won't start a family.”

“Because I'm happy,” Matt says. “I have a fulfilling career, and I'm financially and emotionally independent.”

“I think you miss out, not having a community of any kind.”

“And I think you miss out, depending on community for your sense of self. Those clients, man. You're out there milking the most vulnerable people in the world, so don't tell me it's your community.”

Norm says softly, “I help heal souls when bodies can no longer be healed.”

“When they won't be needing the money anyway. I'm not here to take life lessons from you. I have my own life. I make an honest living, and I'm proud of what I do.”

“Design garbage trucks.”

“Designing prototype mobile waste compactors that are changing people's lives. While you're telling them life is fine the way it is—that it's fine they're dying, because they rode the cosmic snake. Teaching them resignation. You know why I don't need a community? Because garbage trucks are necessary. I don't have to sell anybody on garbage trucks. And don't tell me your drug dealing paid for my education. I could pay off anybody's student loans ten times over with what I've made with creativity and working my ass off. So don't tell me I design garbage trucks. I am literally saving people's lives, increasing landfill capacity so we don't have to burn that shit and fill the air with dioxins until everybody gets terminal cancer and has to come to you for a trip to Brazil and ride the cosmic snake. Or would you rather we dump that shit in the ocean?”

Norm dribbles more water over the stones, and visibility in the tent drops to near zero. The steam hides his look of profound distress. Matt, stretched flat on his back, suddenly snores. He is sleeping.

The other men—including Norm's younger son, Patrick—return as well and take places on the furs around Matt, careful not to wake him. They sit cross-legged, and Norm leads them on a spirit journey.

APRIL 2016. ELEVEN MORE YEARS
have passed.

A hospital towers above a river that flows through a large city in northern New Jersey. Its facade is white, with long, curving ribbons of blue reflective glass. The architecture echoes the forms of the river below, but not its colors, which are pale green with black banks.

Penny sits in an armchair upholstered in black plastic, surrounded by dull beige walls. She wears red ballerinas, shiny black leggings, and a white cotton sweater that is falling off her left shoulder. No makeup at all, but clear skin and thick, dark lashes. Her bra strap is showing, a half-inch strip of black satin. Her hair hangs to her elbows. Sometimes she looks out over the river. The arms of the chair creak when she shifts her weight.

She reads aloud to her father, who sits propped up in a hospital bed. Hardwood veneer clothes his headboard in a warm color like champagne. Steel spigots, labeled
OXYGEN
and
SUCTION
, are set neatly into recesses in the wood. The book is Norman O. Brown's
Life Against Death
.

He laughs at a turn of phrase in the book. He coughs. Blood begins to flow from his mouth.

Still holding the book, she runs out of the room. She stands outside the door, looking both ways. There are many people in the hallway, but she doesn't know who is responsible. “Help!” she says.

A nurse abandons her cart stacked with medication in paper cups. Another nurse abandons her desk behind a counter. They run past Penny and into the room.

While Penny walks unsteadily to a waiting area with potted plants,
the nurses place a dark blue towel under her father's chin. The bright, glassy blood turns his beard pink and the towel almost black.

He coughs, his mouth full of blood, and says, “No. No.”

“Tell us what we should do, Mr. Baker,” a nurse says. “Remember your advance directive. A transfusion now would set you back two weeks.”

He shakes his head and croaks, “I don't want to die.”

The nurses stand upright, touching the bed rails. “Whole blood and platelets,” the first nurse says. The other nurse rushes out the door.

Blood runs from his mouth. He breathes noisily through his nose. The color of his face changes from beige to gray. He inclines his head to the left to let blood flow to the pillow, breathing with great effort. His hands, hidden under blood-soaked blue towels, never move. His bare arms are spotted with subcutaneous pools of purple.

He has some kind of acquired hemophilia, and his bone marrow is not keeping up.

Penny, light-headed, sits on a sofa in the waiting area. She calls her mother and says fearfully, “Dad's going to die.”

“Bring him home,” Amalia says firmly. “Let him die here at home.”

A SOCIAL WORKER ON THE
hospital staff, a handsome, curly-haired woman in a navy blue blouse, invites Penny into her office. “You look exhausted,” she tells her.

“It's been busy,” Penny says. She pulls her legs up under her on the sofa, discarding her shoes askew on the floor. The pose makes her body seem child-size. Her hair shades her eyes and covers her bare shoulder.

She does not see herself as adequate to the task at hand. She knows dying is natural and universal and that anyone can do it.
That everyone
will
do it. Not a challenge, but child's play. Having subtracted her doubts and fears, she is left with nothing. Her gaze is empty as a pigeon's.

“From here on out we're going to hospice care,” the social worker says. “No more interventions. We keep him comfortable. He'll have another event like he did this morning, and bleed out. It's a gentle way to go. Most likely he'll bleed from the rectum in his sleep.”

“We already talked about it.”

“His wife told me she wants to care for him at home. Is she your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she work?”

“She's an HR manager at an investment bank in the city. I'm between assignments, so I'm completely free.”

“You have any siblings?”

“I have two brothers. One lives on this South Pacific island. But the other one is in Fort Lee, and he's his own boss, so he can swing by Morristown during the day to help me out. Then Mom will be there at night.”

The social worker touches her on the knee. “You want to take responsibility. You're a good daughter. But my task here is to make a judgment call. You say your mother is a professional and your brother in Fort Lee has his own company. Those sound like busy people to me. Your father needs attention and care twenty-four seven, and you need to get your rest. If he starts bleeding, he's going to need somebody with steady hands to administer a sedative. Of course it could be a professional. Would that be an option for you, financially?”

“I would need to ask Dad. I can ask Mom when she gets out of her meeting.”

“Okay,” the social worker says. “From the way this sounds, given your father's condition, I'm going to work on a referral to inpatient hospice.”

“But what about taking him home?”

“If you can line up the caregivers. But for now, to be on the safe side, I'm going to knock on some residential hospice doors. What religion is he?”

“Shamanist.”

“I mean the one he was baptized in.”

“Jewish.”

“Hmm,” the social worker says. “They have a long waiting list.”

ANOTHER DAY PASSES.

“I want to die with my boots on, like Ambrose Bierce,” Norm tells Penny, his voice thin and dry. He is still lying in the same position in the same hospital bed. His hands, also in the same positions, are now adorned with tiny translucent pipes and green plastic valves. His hair, beard, and the sheets are all the same shade of white. His eyes are gray flecked with red.

“He went to Mexico to join Pancho Villa, and you can't even sit up,” she says, standing at the foot of the bed. She reaches down and strokes his pink left foot. Friction with bedding has made the outer skin peel away. His toenails are striated, thick and brown as hooves.

“I waited too long,” he says.

“You were bleeding out the day before yesterday, and you made them give you a transfusion,” she reminds him. “Maybe if I stayed put, and held your hand, you could do it?”

She feels how sharp her tone is. She wants to be gentle. She wants to feel close to him. But she is trapped in an emotional paradox: his condition means they have nothing in common. Every time they speak of his dying, they become more alien to one another.

“I need to say good-bye to Matt and Patrick. That's what's stopping me. Have you talked to either of them?”

“I know Mom did,” she says. “I follow them on social media. That's how I know they're alive.” (The intrusiveness of ringing
phones is something only older people arrogate to themselves. The younger generation is more considerate. Norm knows this. It's why he doesn't call Matt or Patrick.) “I could set up your phone to read their feeds aloud, if you want.”

“No thanks,” he says. “But get them to come see me in the hospice, okay?”

“Mom wants you to come home. She wants to do home hospice.”

He shakes his head. “I saw what it did to you when I started bleeding out. I don't want you anywhere near me when it all goes down.”

His reference to her fear makes her afraid. The strength and courage they desire—and lack, both of them—are the strength and courage never to see each other again. Fear is something they have in common. The fear breaks the emotional paradox. Her soft heart floods briefly with love, and she says, “Dad.”

“Go home. I need to rest up. They're going to move me soon. But first give me a sip of water.”

She picks up a plastic cup full of ice cubes and holds the straw to his lips. He says, “Ugh. I'm nauseated,” and she puts it back down. He closes his eyes and his face goes slack. The dark color of his eyelids, matching the purplish circles under his eyes, makes them seem to recede, like eyes on stalks being retracted into a shell.

She thinks for a moment that he looks already dead that way. She anticipates that when he dies, all her shaky bravado will crumble. She will let out her suppressed love in a fury of crying, and everyone around her, even strangers, will understand and respect her desolation. She envisions herself a mourner in a long line of out-of-control female mourners, going back to the Greek tragedies.

“I'm heading out, Dad,” she says.

He opens his eyes again and says, “Wait. There's a favor I want to ask you for tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

“I want you to bring my laptop from home. There's some dictation
software on there that I never use. Maybe I can get it trained and dictate some things. My confessions.”

“I would love that,” she says brightly. “I have so many questions, especially about before I was born. Stuff like Matt and Patrick's mom. I know everything there is to know about your Philip Roth childhood and Mom's crazy-ass village, but I don't even know her name!”

“What I need is a time capsule. There's so much I want to tell you. But when you're an old lady. After the others are gone, like in that poem—‘When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book—'”

Penny's throat constricts.

“You'll be all that's left. You and your children. You're twenty years younger than the boys and your mother, and you're going to live for seventy years after I die. The eggs of your children are already right there, inside of you. I can almost see them. It's like knowing my own descendants who can see into the future. I'll never be prouder of anything than I am of you. I was so lucky to get you.”

Penny stands there with tears in her eyes, too upset to speak.

“Hey!” Norm says. “Don't cry, koala girl. Everybody dies.”

Her voice is an elfin squeak. “I love you so much, Dad.”

NORM GROANS AS A GIGANTIC
ambulance driver and his slightly smaller assistant move him from a high, heavy gurney into his new bed at the Anglican hospice in North Bergen.

The room is spacious. It has an upholstered bench where family members can sleep, two armchairs, and four straight-backed chairs around a big table. The morning sun comes drilling through the windows bright as an atom bomb. The bed is wide, of heavy construction, like something manufactured to the highest specifications. The vase on the table holds a bouquet of birds-of-paradise—green, orange, and blue. The card from Amalia says, “Love you, darling!”

After the emergency medical technicians leave, Penny sits down in one of the armchairs. She sets the laptop case at her feet with her bag. At Norm's request she lowers the blinds. Sitting in an armchair facing him, she plays with the controls for the bed, resting her feet on it and letting the bed pull her into a slump.

He smiles and says, “Leave it like this for a while. I like this position.”

“How are you doing?”

“Not perfect. I have this god-awful crick in my neck. Maybe it was the ambulance ride. I felt like I was going to get bounced right out of that thing.” He moves his head from side to side and sighs.

She offers to do acupressure. She positions her hands and finds a certain spot between two cervical vertebrae.

“That's the spot,” he says.

Three minutes later, he says it's not helping. When she releases her hold, she is dismayed to see that the pressure has caused a dark bruise. She asks, “You want to do the dictation software thing?”

“Not right now. I had a busy morning. You could read to me a little. Maybe I'll fall asleep, and then I'll see you tomorrow when I'm awake. Don't forget to take the laptop when you go.”

“Nobody's going to steal it.”

“What makes you think that? You see any expensive equipment in this place?”