The Bill from My Father (28 page)

Several freeways later, I eased my car into the garage and headed up the back stairs to the kitchen, video in hand, my curiosity mounting. Late morning sun shone through the windows, but I flicked on the glaring lights regardless. I put on my reading glasses, the lenses almost as thick as my father's, and found myself in a
crystal-clear face-off with a man identified on the back of the box as Dr. Maurice Rawlings. In the color photograph, his gray hair was brittle, his skin so wan and chalky he could have passed for a plaster statue. Transparent cellophane provided no protection whatsoever from the doctor's stony—brimstony—visage. Actually, his gaze was aimed a little to the side, which gave it the menacing potential to shift without warning and incinerate anyone standing in its path. Forget airbrushed authors' photographs or glossy Hollywood headshots. His burgundy tie and jacket may have matched, but that was his last concession to the camera. He was squint-and-grimace from the Adam's apple up. I hate to be ad hominem about it, but from every indication, scolding the masses was Dr. Rawlings's bread and butter, and he'd either been born with, or had earned, precisely the face to get the job done.

Removing the cellophane wrapper required a sharp object. Still dazed by the sight of Dr. Rawlings, I absently reached into the kitchen drawer and pulled out … a potato peeler. An odd coincidence given the fact that a potato peeler had been my father's weapon of choice when confronting the DWP's meter reader. I'd never given much thought to the potato peeler's relative benignity. Gripped in my fist, it weighed next to nothing. Granted, Brian and I owned a really old potato peeler, one so dull it could hardly peel potatoes let alone pierce an enemy's flesh. It seemed especially flimsy when compared to the handguns and automatic assault rifles that were wreaking havoc on high school campuses across America. The comparison wasn't meant to excuse my father's actions, but to acknowledge the possibility that he may have grabbed the utensil as thoughtlessly as I. And if he'd picked it up on purpose, I'd like to think that choosing to defend himself with a potato peeler instead of, say, a twelve-inch knife, was at least an indication of his ambivalence about harming a fellow human being. It's a stretch, I realize, but isn't absolution composed of such stretches, such makeshift revisions? I broke the plastic seal and peeled it off the box, revealing the title beneath the address label:

Up until now, there have been virtually no descriptions of “bad” near-death experiences. Has anyone ever been to Hell and returned to tell about it?

The answer was yes, and Dr. Rawlings had recruited five unfortunates to tell their cautionary tales. Together, these stories would show that the usual reports brought back from angelic realms of white light and peaceful music gave a distorted view of life after death, a view that had become popular because it gave false comfort to complacent atheists, and also to Christians who resisted the principle of eternal damnation. The copy advised using the video as a “witnessing tool” for unsaved friends and loved ones, and suggested that its message may change viewers' lives. Their afterlives, too.

That every “Hell” was capitalized spoke theological volumes. For Dr. Rawlings, Hell wasn't just some five-alarm fire, but a furnace fueled by the flesh and bones of the unconverted. Why should my father listen to a man who thought of him as kindling?

As for the scarcity of “bad” near-death experiences, the two or three people I knew who'd nearly died had nothing
but
bad things to say about it. The nearer to death they'd come, the worse their experience. In fact, the only thing worse than the near-death experiences I'd heard about were the near-life experiences—merely going through the motions of being alive, every taste and color blunted, libido flagging, zest at an ebb—that were commonly reported in Brian's consultation room, and in regular rooms across the country.

How had Dr. Rawlings found so many people who had gone to hell and lived to tell about it? Did he cater to a sinful clientele? The mere idea of a doctor who sought out the formerly dead was enough to give me an arrhythmia.

Had you asked me back then if I considered myself what fundamentalists like Dr. Rawlings disapprovingly called “a moral relativist,” I would have said,
It depends
. I've rarely been able to form an
opinion without also considering several contradictory opinions until I arrive, through the process of elimination, at another opinion I retain the right to revise at any time. And now I couldn't help but wonder: if Dr. Rawlings and his patients had read
Gulliver's Travels
as devotedly as they read the New Testament, might I have been holding a video entitled
To Lilliput and Back
? Isn't one's vision of the afterlife shaped by the very drives and passions that shape one's life?

Which brings me to Betty. She'd left the video behind knowing that it might be her last gift to a man she'd loved and toward whom she still felt concern. No doubt she bestowed it with good intentions, specifically those that pave the road to hell. What kind of gift is it to warn a man that the suffering he's accrued throughout his lifetime will go right on accruing after he's dead? I don't know about you, but I'd want my last gift to be soothing and useful, like a pair of flannel pajamas. My father didn't need a preview of doom. My father needed to yank out his tubes, slip into his jumpsuit, and resume the delusion that, temporarily detained by failing kidneys, he was running late for retirement.

I stared into the flames and dared myself to pop the tape into our VCR. Then I vetoed myself because watching it would remind me of the insidious ways in which people make other people feel like sinners. Then I overrode my veto because I was curious to see a low-budget dramatization of hell that might include, if I was lucky, writhing amateur dancers.

By absconding with the video, I'd hoped to save my father from being saved. He was in intensive care and in no condition to withstand a tongue-lashing from an ashen, wrathful cardiologist. All things being relative, however, I also understood that I'd denied him the opportunity to see the video for himself and make his own decision. In either case, right and wrong were beside the point. He never regained consciousness. At least not with me.

After my father died, I kept
To Hell and Back
in my desk drawer, but every time I opened the drawer to get a pencil or a postage stamp,
the flames startled me as if they'd burst from the box at that very instant, fed by in-rushing oxygen. I winced at the thought of my desk catching fire, computer melted to a bubbling puddle. Still, I didn't want to throw the tape away. Despite the trouble already caused by writing about my father, I'd begun to contemplate making him the subject of an entire book, and I thought there might come a day when I'd need to refer to Dr. Rawlings's video, if I could ever bring myself to watch it.

Brian refused to watch it with me. He preferred
Jeopardy!
He preferred
National Geographic
specials like
The Secret Life of Caves
or
Galapagos, Land of Dragons
. He even preferred talk shows where the guests made shocking disclosures and then ripped off their clothes, private parts censored with flickering pixels. At hell, however, he drew the line.

“Please,” I wheedled. “From a sociological standpoint, it might be educational.”

“Hell isn't edifying,” he insisted. “You don't learn from your mistakes in hell. You pay for making them.”

Recruiting a friend to watch it with me proved just as futile. My ex-girlfriend, Lynn, told me she'd had the wages of sin pounded into her during Catholic school. “I've had enough hell to last a lifetime,” she said. “I won't go back unless I'm dragged.” Monica said she couldn't possibly add Dr. Rawlings's video to the already long list of films she was obligated to watch for her class. “A Feminist History of Film” was now “A Post-Feminist History of Film,” and it required a whole new syllabus that included recent female buddy pictures, women-in-sports documentaries, erotica written and directed by women, and videos by performance artists such as the Guerrilla Girls and the Lesbian Avengers. “Right now,” she said, “hell is way at the bottom of my list.”

And so the video stayed in my drawer.

Brian and I drove out to the trailer one afternoon to sort through what was left of my father's possessions. Once we entered Oxnard,
the sky turned misty from sprinklers dousing rows of green crops on either side of the highway, an occasional stunted rainbow hovering in the spray. I'd loaded the back of my car with cardboard boxes and garbage bags and, in case those weren't enough, an empty suitcase. Since I'd last been to the trailer, his small chaotic office pushed at the edges of memory, growing steadily larger and more promising until I thought of it as an unexplored geological site that might yield torn ticket stubs, stereopticon slides of the grandparents I hardly knew, a sheaf of old letters he'd sent to my mother, rich with the endearments I'd never heard him utter aloud. These finds were unlikely, but some unconditional wishfulness, some hunger for history, made me eager to search through the rubble for clues to my father's lifelong silence.

Motley dogs, timid in the daylight, watched from a distance as we unloaded the car. Balancing boxes in our arms, Brian and I mounted the metal steps. I was too encumbered with stuff to turn around and check, but I heard what sounded like screen doors creaking and window blinds raised in the nearby trailers. The Siesta's residents must have been accustomed to the sight of neighbors vacating the premises at all hours of the day and night—these were homes on wheels, after all—and here we were, two strangers with grave faces come to strip the trailer of everything but echoes, then pack up the salvage and drive away. As I bent down to find the key Betty left for us beneath the mat, aluminum siding shimmered in the periphery of my vision, as if the last place my father called home was built from a substance as fugitive as dew.

He'd amended his will with handwritten codicils nearly a half a dozen times in the month leading up to his hospitalization. Either Betty or I would be named as beneficiary—until the next pendulum swing of his allegiance. One of us always loved him more, and thus the other, loving him less, proved themselves undeserving.

Because he and Betty had argued about the missing salad tongs on the day he made what turned out to be the last revision to his will, her name had been stricken and replaced with mine. I became my father's heir by default, though I'd done nothing special to earn my position as beneficiary apart from being too far away on a certain day to be fingered
for stealing the family silver. Betty
had
been there, and I thought it only fair that she receive compensation for sticking with my father during a period when he most needed, and was quickest to challenge, her sincerity, a test of endurance even for a woman devoted to ailing bodies and lost causes. I phoned Betty at her cousin's and offered to sign over my father's share of the trailer; as the sole owner, she could either move back there or sell it and keep the proceeds. I was certain that my father, in his right mind, would have wanted me to do this for her. Betty thanked me, her throat clenched against welling emotion. “It's sad,” she managed to say, which just about said it all. Eulogies tend to idealize the dead, and I'm not about to gild my father's flaws, but in the pause that followed, I pitied the man his alienating rage, a burden he'd been helpless to temper or change, and I looked back on his outbursts with a mixture of awe and fondness.

“This is silly,” said Betty, “but I still expect him to come walking through the door.”

I know, I wanted to say. I still expect him to push me through it.

“I'm starting to see how moving here was a mistake God wanted me to make. He's led me to a whole new life! Not that your father was a mistake. I didn't mean it that way. No, your father was … he was my …”

“The two of you were like husband and wife.”

“
Like
is right,” she sighed. “Living in the trailer would be hard after all that's happened. If I sell it for a fair price, I can afford an apartment sooner than I thought!” One blessing begat another, and Betty happily counted them aloud. Just when it had seemed she couldn't generate new clients through word of mouth, the home care service she'd worked for in Los Angeles was able to assign her a number of jobs in and around Oxnard, where an influx of retirees and the construction of low-cost convalescent homes had invigorated local growth. “Old folks go for trailers in a big way. Less rooms and doodads. Let's face it,” she added cheerfully, “the Golden State is aging!”

At several points during our conversation, I was tempted to ask her about
To Hell and Back
. Had she really expected my father to switch lords at the last minute? By now, though, it seemed small-minded
to express my displeasure, especially about a gift I made sure he never received.

I'd like to claim that my call to Betty was inspired by sheer generosity. In truth, I was glad to get rid of the trailer; once I signed it over, there'd be no reason to visit the dusty, somnolent land of Siesta ever again. I'd come to think of Oxnard as the seat of my father's undoing. As far as I was concerned, his destitution's one and only saving grace lay in the fact that its prominent landmarks—the hospital, the trailer park, the fields through which he'd wandered to prove his independence—were a far cry from the city where he'd made a living. Los Angeles would always represent his years of striving, whereas Oxnard would always be the wall against which his years of striving collided. I hoped that some unruined version of him might be easier for me to preserve at a geographical distance, his bankruptcy and madness kept separate by ninety miles of seaside towns and inland counties, gas stations and fast food franchises growing like reeds along the banks of the interstate.