The Postmortal (17 page)

“So, what do you do?”

She finished the bottle. “I don’t know. That’s the worst part of it.”

Alison turned to me in bed. I gently pressed my nose against hers, so her face occupied my entire field of vision. I stared at her intently, trying to take in as much of her as I could. I studied her eyes and her cheeks and her pores, as if I were looking through the porthole of a wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to see into her.

“Do you ever regret not marrying Sonia?” she asked.

I kissed her. “No. Not really. She’s happy with Nate. Our son is happy. Everything seems to have worked out.”

“Would you ever get married?”

“Is that something you’d like?”

“No, I think I’ve had enough of marriage for a little while. I don’t know if anyone will ever get married again.”

“I’d marry you.”

She laughed. “I’m not talking about one of those forty-year things.”

“No, I mean it. Real marriage. The whole thing. Forever and ever. Death do us part. No sleeping with other people, blah-blah-blah. I’d do it.”

“Why are you so certain about getting married now, when you weren’t back then?”

“Different people. I love you more than I ever loved Sonia.”

“Ah, but how do you know you won’t find someone after me who is even
more
appealing? How do you know that I’m the apex of what you’re looking for? That you can’t love anyone out there more than you love me?”

“Because I know. There’s no one else out there but you. I know it.” I sat up. “Is this some sort of test?”

“No,” she said. “I’m genuinely curious about this. You loved Sonia, but you were afraid that at some point you’d stop loving her. You wanted a chance to find someone even
better
, particularly given your pleasant looks and your ability to remain ageless, right?”

“I guess. But I don’t think I thought it out as articulately as you have. I just didn’t want to marry her.”

“But why? You loved her.”

“I guess I knew I’d stop loving her at some point.”

“How can you really love someone if you know it’s got an expiration date?”

“Because most things fade,” I told her. “I’m old enough now to know that sometimes I go really gaga over someone or something but that eventually the euphoria wears off.”

“That’s what I’m curious about. I’m wondering if now the euphoria’s always going to wear off. I had a friend once whose parents were genuinely in love. I mean, wild about each other. Even when they were fifty, they were still kissing in public and giggling and doing all those things. It was disgusting, but it gave me hope. It made me think, yes, this whole big love ideal is really out there. It can really happen to people.”

“What happened to them?”

“They divorced a year ago. No warning. Just over, like that. It all came apart so easily. It made me think, Jesus, everyone’s gonna grow bored of each other now, and everyone
knows
it. That’s so odd. Because here we are, in bed. We’re happy, right? Are you happy?”

“Oh, I’m ecstatic.”

“Me too. But I can’t seem to settle in the moment right now. There’s always that strange new vanishing point on the horizon. I can’t get it out of my mind. I can’t stop worrying that . . . that love is bullshit now.”

“You’re not going all mopey on me, are you?”

“No. I just want to be able to believe in something.”

She ran her hand over my scar. The plastic surgeon said the procedure would wipe out the birth brand entirely. But I can still see it there, barely discernible in a little speed bump. No one will ever notice, except for me, which makes it doubly haunting. It’s a thin bubble of tissue, a membrane that appears to be in constant danger of bursting wide open. The doctor said the slight swelling would reduce over time. I almost want the trolls’ handiwork back.

Alison glided her fingertips along the bubble. She looked up at me. The thing that had never changed about her, in all this time, was her genuineness. Cynicism was still something completely alien to her. She wasn’t asking me these questions because she was growing bitter. It was because she was fearful. She wanted to see good things in the distance.

“Love is not bullshit,” I said.

“You can’t know that. No one can. There are things that will happen that you can’t possibly expect. Maybe love could survive them when the end of your of life was only decades away. But not now. Not with centuries ahead. Not when everything is so fucked up.”

“But everything’s always been fucked up. Since the dawn of time. That’s why people find each other. For comfort. For shelter. They find their own little crevice in the world, shielded from all the horror. We can do that, Alison. When I got cured, I didn’t know why I was doing it. I just knew I wanted it. But now I know. I know precisely why I want to live forever. It’s you. Things may be fucked up and may get even more fucked up. But it never has to touch us. Ever. We can find our little niche, and we can hide there. We can find our own little perfect slice of eternity. We can. That’s everything. The rest doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t work that way. You can try to avoid the world for as long as you can, but it will find you.” She tapped my scar. “The world will come for us.”

“Then let it. Love is not dead, Alison. Not in this room. People have been getting married for a very long time. Even before the cure, a lifetime was still a hell of a commitment to make. And that was back when you knew the person you loved would grow old and ugly and sick. That won’t ever happen to us, Alison. We don’t ever have to fear that.”

“But how do you know that isn’t why people love each other to begin with?”

I climbed on top of her. “It’s not that I don’t know. It’s that I don’t care. Because right now I’m enjoying myself way too much to give a damn.”

◗ The U.S. Army desertion rate has increased over 104 percent in the past year alone. (
The New Yorker
)

 

◗ Detailed analysis of why Russia finally invaded Ukraine yesterday. (
Lisbian
)

 

◗ Users in tiny Santa Claus, Indiana, are finally getting a Wi-Fi signal, giving the National Satellite Wi-Fi Initiative 100 percent coverage. (
IndyStar
)

 

◗ Betty Hathaway, star of the latest
Guys and Dolls
revival, was murdered by her understudy, who was apparently not interested in an eternal apprenticeship. (Dora Smith’s feed)

 

◗ Senator Conrad Kenny (D-MA) has proposed reducing the number of allowable dependent-child tax credits from two to zero. (C-SPAN)

 

◗ A census study found that only around thirty-five million true organics remain in the United States, many of them sick or elderly. (
USA.gov
)

 

◗ Oil prices soared over $1,200 a barrel after a leaked memo from an Exxon executive divulged that only 1.2 billion barrels of oil remain in the recently tapped Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I thought that sounded like a fair amount. I was incorrect. (
Washington Post
)

◗ Newly coastal McComb, Mississippi, was recently named the best new party town in the nation. Expect Jackson to hold the title a decade from now. (
Maxim
)

 

◗ Tap-water fees at city restaurants are now regularly hitting the five-dollar mark. (Bruno Ili’s feed)

 

◗ Another day, another homeless person preying on someone I know. My friend Jeff had a burrito snatched right out of his hand as he was walking down Eighth Avenue. I’m told the contents of the burrito included carnitas. (Jeff ’s feed)

 

◗ City orphanages are now waiving all adoption fees in hopes of getting more people to adopt abandoned children. Maybe if that tax credit is still around . . . (also from Bruno Ili’s feed)

 

◗ My friend Juri’s cousin had his Jerusalem cheese shop bombed yesterday. He didn’t seem to care. This is what he told Juri: “Two thousand years from now, we’ll still all be here in the Middle East. I promise you. We’ll still be fighting, of course. We’ll still be killing each other. But this is what we do, you see? We’re very good at fighting and killing each other. We know how to do this without going overboard. The cure changes nothing. They’ll make more Arabs, and we’ll make more Jews. They can kill as many of us as they please. We’ll never die completely. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go clean Gorgonzola off the toilet.” (Juri’s feed)

 

Dad was slipping away faster than I had anticipated. Three weeks ago we had to arrange 24-7 nurse care. I came up all three weekends to help, despite pro-death extremist threats against the trains. Two days ago one of the nurses called and told me that my sister and I needed to come and stand round-the-clock vigil, to wait for the end. Alison and I rented a plug-in, went to Sonia’s apartment, grabbed little David, and drove up as fast as we could.

As we pulled into the driveway, I saw the nurse through the big kitchen window. She was a slender black woman named Toni. It used to be that I’d arrive home and Dad would have food and drinks ready and waiting. That isn’t ever going to happen again. But Toni, who over the past few weeks had proven adept at making us feel comfortable in the face of unrelentingly grim circumstances, had put a small bowl of Goldfish and two glasses of water on the kitchen counter for us. I hugged her for that. Toni is quite used to being hugged by people.

She led us over to Mom and Dad’s room, which is on the house’s main level. I say “Mom and Dad’s room” because it still very much feels that way. After my mom died, my dad preserved their room exactly as it was. He left her toiletries by the sink, sometimes replacing them if they started to look old or rusty. He cleaned the room on Tuesday mornings, just as she did. He kept the numerous throw pillows on the bed, even though he spent the majority of my mom’s life bitching about them. And he still slept on the left side of the bed, leaving her spot unoccupied. He said he tried sleeping spread-eagle once, but it just wasn’t comfortable.

That was the driving force behind his upkeep of the room. It wasn’t to keep Mom’s spirit alive, though that was an unwitting side effect. It was because that’s what made him most comfortable : to live the same way he lived when she was still breathing. He liked the room that way and had no intention of ever changing it.

Alison and I came into the room. Toni went to Dad’s bedside to awaken him. He had to get up for a moment to take his pain medication. I had seen him just a week ago, yet the change was drastic.

He was on his side. A thin, blue waffle blanket stretched over his body from the neck down. He was curled up, his back hunched into a crescent and his legs bent at the knee, turning his entire body into the shape of a question mark. His torso looked slight, as if the lump under the blanket had been caused by a fold and nothing more substantial. His legs, once sturdy, had dissolved into the kind of spindly appendages you’d see on a newborn foal. Under the blanket, they gradually faded down to nothing. You couldn’t even make out his feet. It was like he was slowly being erased from the bottom up.

Toni patted his shoulder, and he stirred. He smacked his lips. Little flecks of dried yellow mucus surrounded his mouth. Toni took a damp cloth and wiped some of them away. She turned to me.

“He’s not producing a lot of saliva now,” she said, “so we have to keep his mouth moist.” She took out a small squirt bottle filled with water and drizzled some into his mouth. He recoiled, like a toddler tasting spinach for the first time. “His gums and sinuses are inflamed, so the water causes lots of irritation.”

He looked up at Alison, David, and me. His face was noticeably thinner, making him look oddly younger—like a sickly person twenty years his junior. He tried to reach for his glasses, but he was too weak. Toni took them off the nightstand and gently slipped them on for him. He looked at Alison. His voice was very faint.

“That’s a pretty lady,” he said.

“Thank you,” Alison replied. She barely whispered the words to him, fearing anything louder would cause him to shatter into a thousand pieces.

I took Dad’s hand. “We’re thinking about getting married,” I told him.

“Good. That’s good. Where is your sister?”

“She’s an hour behind us. She’ll be here soon.”

“Okay. I can wait.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“Are you happy?”

He licked his lips. “Oh yes. This is good, John.”

I placed David at the edge of the bed. The baby stared at Dad as if he were a new stuffed animal that he didn’t quite know if he liked or not. Dad said hello to him. David said “baaaaaaa” and looked up at me.

He’s going to turn one soon. When I picture David, I can only see him as he is. I can’t summon an image of how he looked two months ago without consulting a photo. The memory of what he was is replaced all too easily by what’s directly in front of my face.

I turned to Dad. I saw him as he was now: gaunt, frail, dying. I tried to envision his face four months earlier, a face so familiar to me that it may as well have been a monument. But I couldn’t picture it. I could only see the atrophying man before me. The cancer had wiped the old him—the
real
him—away entirely.

Polly arrived. Alison took her boys and David out for pizza while we stayed at Dad’s bedside with Toni.

My sister patted Dad on the shoulder delicately. “I’m here, Dad.”

“Good.”

“Can we get you anything?”

“No. I’m fine. You’re all here. That’s plenty.”