The End of the World as We Know It (6 page)

Judy Judy, who was later to go crazy in her own particular way, imagining a ravaging breast and/or cervical cancer she didn't actually have, even going around the country giving brave lectures about living with a deadly cancer, driving her perfectly ordinary,
nice husband to fall to pieces and hate her and, finally, to leave her, was then a blond, amusing woman with enormous breasts who adored butterflies. She was covered in butterfly jewelry, some costume and some real; all the magnets on her refrigerator were butterflies; the paper napkins had butterflies on them. The plates had butterflies on them. The sofas and chairs were covered with needlepoint butterfly pillows. In the bathroom, the toilet paper was covered with little butterflies. I'm not kidding. Aunt Minnie Lee Lee, who before I met her I had assumed was Chinese but who in reality had married silent Mr. Lee twice, said she thought Judy Judy and the butterfly thing were strange, although she was just being conversational. For a Methodist, she was not afraid to express her opinions.

Aunt Minnie Lee Lee had the habit of saying, whenever anything had pleased her particularly, or even when she just felt like being cordial, “Well, now, my, that was a refrasher.” She thought Judy Judy's chicken casserole was a real refrasher.

But nobody in the South ever thinks that anything done by a family member is really strange, or rather, their strange deeds are merely more endearing. Judy Judy called everybody
dawlin'
as though she really meant it, and she probably did, and she just said the butterfly was her personal symbol. It gave her hope.

As dinner parties on the night before your brother's brain operation go, it was a huge success. My parents had their bourbon. The teetotalers had their soft drinks and iced tea. Judy Judy had her butterflies. Everybody got along. The chicken casserole gave cornflakes a whole new and magical aspect. We knew that tragedy had struck. We couldn't escape the image of my sedated brother lying over there at DeKalb General in head restraints. You don't
forget that kind of thing just because the chicken casserole was yummy and nobody screamed at anybody else about religious issues and burning in hell for drinking bourbon whiskey. We knew that by the next night it could all be better or it could get a lot worse and there was the camaraderie of the terrified to hold us together. I was so afraid.

The operation was on Memorial Day. It was decided, since the hospital was less than a mile away, and because waiting in the waiting room with the Methodists was so grim, that my family would wait it out at my brother's place, where they could smoke and have access to the bourbon. I drove to the hospital early in the morning, the warm early summer breeze blowing through the Alfa. I had the top down, feeling smart. In the parking lot, I saw his surgeon's stainless steel gull-wing DeLorean. Brain surgeons think they're God. So did DeLorean. I once saw him try to cut in line at the movies in New York, only to be shouted down by the angry crowd. It seems sort of quaint now, waiting in line for a movie. Kind of sweet.

My function was to run back and forth all day, carrying news from the hospital to my family. At the hospital, the surgeon came out and told me and my brother's wife that the operation should take about three hours. It took eight and a half. It was a disaster. I guess he wasn't God after all.

The brain doesn't feel any pain. Getting through the skull hurts, although my brother was out, but once in the brain, the brain tissue itself doesn't feel pain.

As soon as they bored the hole and got into his brain, the aneurysm burst open, and he began hemorrhaging massive amounts of blood. The aneurysm was right at the base of his
skull, where the artery divided, carrying blood to the left and right side of his brain.

It was interminable. The Methodists were mute or locked in silent prayer. My sister-in-law was distraught, so we sat in the chapel, reading more poems about dead people. We knew nothing about what was going on, only that it was going on for a very long time.

I ran back and forth to my family, six or seven times, carrying the no news there was, and they just waited. My sister made lunch for everybody: cold roast beef sandwiches that went uneaten.

When it was finally over, the surgeon came out and told us matter-of-factly that my brother had lost such massive amounts of blood that he was going to die. He was going to die in the night, before the sun came up. His brain was ruined, and he was going to die in the night. My sister-in-law behaved better than I thought she might, although she was, of course, inconsolable and talked about suicide again. I drove back to my parents to report the news. They had broken out the bourbon by that time and they were deeply, deeply moved. Stricken, as though by a snakebite. I then drove back to the hospital, where the surgeon came out again and told us that my brother had made a miraculous recovery in the last half hour, and that he would live, but he would be brain damaged and he was paralyzed on his left side and he was in a deep coma. There was no way of knowing how deeply his brain was damaged, or what form the damage would take.

The brain is a funny thing. If you're right-handed, they know where everything is—short-term memory, long-term memory,
anger, patience—everything. There's even a microscopic pinpoint area that is your personality, and they know where that is.

If you're left-handed, they don't know anything, the surgeon explained. It's all helter skelter, so if you lose a lot of blood, and your brain is certainly damaged, there's no way to tell what functions of the brain will be affected. My brother is left-handed.

My sister-in-law behaved pretty well about all this, and she retired into the arms of her family, and I drove back to the town-house to tell my family the change in prognosis, and they sort of collapsed in grief and joy; having prepared themselves for his death, they weren't quite sure how to deal with his prospects for a limited life.

Then I went back to the hospital, where the gull-wing surgeon spoke to us one more time and told us my brother was resting in the recovery room and then he would be moved to the ICU, while we waited for the swelling in his brain to go down.

I fed everybody dinner, and then my sister and brother-in-law went back to Judy Judy's to collapse. By ten o'clock, my sister-in-law asleep on her cot at the hospital, the stiff-backed Methodists gone home to their cold suppers, I managed to get my parents to bed, and then I sat down on the sitting room floor to have a drink and watch the news. I was exhausted, tired from the driving and the caretaking and the awfulness of the day in general. I was immediately drunk on one drink. I was so tired of taking care of everybody. I was so tired of being positive and polite to gull-wing and polite to my sister-in-law. While the news was going on I started crying. I cried so hard the tears shot out and ran down the inside of my glasses.

Then the phone rang. It was the husband of the couple who were taking care of my niece. His name was Teddy. Every man in the South is named after a four-year-old boy long dead. They have names like Zeke or Skip or Topher, as though leaving the frat house was the end of life's possibilities. He said he needed to speak to my brother-in-law. It was urgent. It was an emergency, he said.

I answered that if anything was wrong with my niece, if something had happened to her, he should tell me, and I would relay the news to my brother-in-law and my sister. They were staying somewhere else, I explained, as though that mattered.

“No, no,” Teddy said. “It's nothing like that. She's fine. It's just that, well, their house burned down.”

“What?” I said.

“Their house burned down. Some kids broke in and set it on fire and it burned down.”

I started laughing hysterically. I couldn't help it. It was like something out of a Gothic story and it seemed so unreal it was comical. I leaned against the refrigerator and laughed until tears ran down my cheeks.

“No,” said Teddy. “Maybe you're not getting it. Their house burned down.”

“I got it,” I said. “It's terrible. A terrible terrible tragedy. I'll tell them.”

Suddenly my mother appeared on the stairs. She was wearing a flimsy blue nightgown and I could see her thin arms. She was so afraid she sat down on the steps and gripped the banister with her hand. I couldn't stop laughing.

“Their house burned down,” I choked out, still roaring with laughter. “Somebody broke in. It burned up.”

“What? What?” She kept saying. She was both drunk and exhausted from anguish. She had thought it was a call from the hospital saying my brother had died. She couldn't take the change in direction.

“He's fine,” I said. “It wasn't the hospital. It was Teddy. Their house burned down.” I was gasping with laughter. My mother slumped against the banister, like a child waiting for Christmas morning. I thought she was going to faint. I led her back to bed, where my father was snoring and gritting his teeth. He could make the most remarkable noises. He also talked in his sleep. I remember one night, after we had gotten back from two weeks at the beach, I woke up to hear them talking in their bed.

“I do everything for you,” he said. “I buy you things. I take you for a nice vacation at the beach. The Golden Strand. What do I get? Not a word of thanks.”

“Buy me things?” my mother said. “All you ever bought me was a goddamned Coke and a pack of Nabs.” Our Nash Rambler always broke down with some terrible ailment, usually the generator, on the way to the beach, and one time we waited so long in this woebegone gas station in Coinjock that the gas station owner's wife took us into the back where they lived and made us sandwiches. But it was true we drank a lot of Cokes and ate a lot of Nabs in those gas stations.

I crept into their room. They were both totally asleep, facing away from each other. The next morning, neither one had the slightest recollection of the conversation.

When my mother was asleep again, I went to call my sister.

I pulled myself together enough to dial Judy Judy's number with a sense of serious purpose, even tragedy. As soon as I got my brother-in-law on the line, I started to tell him the news, but I started laughing and I couldn't stop. He finally got it, and he said, “Well, as long as your brother's OK, the rest doesn't matter. It's just stuff.” Although I had known him all my life, I was struck with admiration, and my heart filled with love for him, for the first time since he had married my sister. He had a child's name, too.

I drank Tanqueray out of the bottle until my nerves turned to jelly and I hardly knew my own name, not that I thought of trying to think of my own name, and I laughed and cried in the night and I finally went to sleep on the sofa.

The next day, my sister and brother-in-law, in shock, went to the ICU to see my comatose brother for two minutes, which was all they were allowed, and then they came over before they started to drive back home. My sister said the most extraordinary thing. She suddenly looked up and said, “Gosh, all week I've missed my soaps.”

“This
is
a soap opera,” I said.

Then they got in the car and drove home, to start picking through their ruined things. They never caught the boys who did it.

The swelling in my brother's head didn't go down. They were afraid that the swelling would cut off the blood supply to his brain, leaving him a vegetable. So the surgeon came back and operated again. He patiently explained to my sister-in-law and me that he was going to go in and remove small parts of the
frontal lobes of my brother's brain so it would have room to swell and not cut off the oxygen.

“He's having a frontal lobotomy,” said my mother. “He'll be a zombie.” I guess she was right, as I understand the term, although it didn't turn him into a zombie.

The operation took place, the surgeon said it was successful, and my brother went back to intensive care. He was still in a coma. He was still paralyzed, and there was an empty space in the front of his skull where part of his brain used to be.

The intensive care unit was an awful place, filled with little cubicles in which these horribly sick and wounded people lay, mostly waiting to die. We were allowed in twice a day for fifteen minutes.

There was this one guy who had had the most unusual accident imaginable. His name was Eric. He looked like Elvis Presley, just a Georgia redneck, but as handsome as a Greek god, black hair and blue cheeks and a finely chiseled nineteen-year-old face, and we had to pass him every time we went in to see my brother. He had been riding his motorcycle and he had lost control and run into a light pole and the gas tank of his bike had gone up his rectum and then it had exploded in flames. He sort of won the sweepstakes for the weirdest accident. There was a tent over his middle section, and all his organs, his vital organs, were hanging in little bags off the side of his bed. His face was totally calm and composed, not slack, just sleeping and handsome. You figured there was no way this guy was going to live, what with his liver and kidneys dangling in baggies off the metal rails of his bed, and he had nineteen operations, but somehow he lived through it.

His family waited in the waiting room with all the grim Methodists, even a minister came to wait and pray, and they were all beautiful. His fiancée looked like a runway model. Like a biker's wet dream.

Then we just waited while my brother did nothing. I took my mother swimming at a rich friend's mother's house. We drove out to Buckhead, to West Paces Ferry Road, in the Alfa Romeo. It was really hot, and it was barely summer. It was the kind of pool that only really, really rich people have, with flowers and vines and a changing house and falling water and nothing turquoise or vulgar about it anyplace. I swam, while my mother sat on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water. She was the kind of woman, even in her late fifties, who looked very good in a one-piece bathing suit. She always said she only went in the water once a year, at Nags Head. She wore a bathing cap when she went in. But being there on West Paces Ferry Road seemed to make her feel better, and I loved swimming in a rich woman's pool.