Independence Day

11

Irv-the-solicitous is concerned with how to keep my mind off my woes and so drives us back down Route 28 as slowly as a funeral cortege, trusting to cruise control in his blue renter Seville and talking about whatever would take his mind off his woes and turn anyone like him toward the bright side. He is wearing big rattan sandals which, with his swarthy balding head and gold cardigan over his hairy chest make him look like nothing as much as a Mafia capo out for a drive. Though in truth he’s in the simulator business out in the Valley of the Sun, his particular mission being to design flight simulators where the pilots for all the big airlines learn their business, a skill he acquired along with aeronautical engineering at Cal Tech (though I’m sure I remember him being a Boilermaker).

Irv, however, doesn’t want to get into “six-degree freedom, or any of that,” which he lets me know to be the high and guiding principle of the simulator racket (roll, pitch, yaw, up, side, backward). “It has to do with what your middle ear’s telling you, and it’s all pretty routine.” He’s interested instead in him and me “getting back on track after lo these blows,” which involves telling me unexpectedly what a wonderful woman my mother was and what a “real character” his dad was, too, and how lucky they were to find each other in their waning years, and how his dad had confided to him that my mother always wished she could be closer to me after she remarried, but Irv figured she understood pretty well that I could take care of myself and that I was over in Ann Arbor preparing for a damn good career in whatever walk of life I selected (she might be surprised today), and how he’d tried several times over the years to contact me but had never “gotten through.”

It occurs to me as we’re cruising airily along by the factory sweater outlets and undercoating garages on Route 28, and farther yet past the sugar houses and corn patches and pristine hardwood hillsides rememberable from our trip up yesterday, that Erma, Irv’s lady friend, has somehow disappeared and hasn’t even been mentioned. And indeed she is a palpable loss, since I’m sure Irv would drive faster if she were in the back seat, and they would talk to each other and defer to my particular woes in silence.

Irv, though, starts spieling about Chicago, which he pronounces Shu-caw-guh, telling me he’s giving some thought to moving back there, possibly to Lake Forest (near Wally Caldwell’s relations), since the aircraft industry’s about to take it right in the center hole, in his view. He, along with every other licensed and still-breathing engineer in the world, is a Reagan man, and he’s right now expecting to “go with” Bush, yet feels Americans don’t like indecisiveness, and Bush doesn’t seem much good on that front, only to his mind he’s better than any of the “mental dwarfs” my party’s currently sponsoring. He hasn’t, however, totally ruled out the protest vote or an independent candidate, since the Republicans have sold out the everyday wage earner the way the Nazis sold out “their friends the Czechs.” (He does not strike me as a likely Jackson supporter.)

I basically stay silent, thinking sorrowfully of my son and of this day, both of which seem bitter and bottomless losses with absolutely no hope of recovery. There is no seeming now. All is is. In a better world, Paul would’ve snagged a line drive bare-handed off the bat of one of the ersatz A’s, gone trooping off to the Hall of Fame with a proud, satisfyingly swollen mitt, had a satisfactory but not overly good time nosing around through Babe Ruth’s locker, taking in the Johnny Bench “out at second” video and hearing the canned crowd noises from the Thirties. Later we could’ve walked out into the shimmery sunshine of Sunday, caught-ball in hand, gone for a Gay Nineties malt, found some aspirin, had our caricatures drawn together wearing vintage baseball suits, had some well-earned laughs, played Frisbee, set off my bottle rockets along a deserted inlet of the lake and ended the day early, lying in the grass under a surviving elm, with me explaining the ultimate value of good manners and that a commonsense commitment to progress (while only a Christian fiction) can still be a good, pragmatic overlay onto a life that could get dicey and long. Later on, motoring south, I’d have turned off on a back road and let him practice driving, after which we’d forge a plan, once his legal problems are settled, for his coming down to Haddam for school in the fall. A day, in other words, when the past got pushed further away and neutralized, when a promising course was charted for a future based on the postulate that independence and isolation were not the same, when all concentric rings would’ve snapped down and into place, and a true youthful (barkless, eeeckless) synchronicity might’ve flourished as only in youth it can.

But instead: Remorse. Pain. Reproach. Blindness (or, at the very least, corrective lenses). Gloom. Tedium (involving lengthy, lonely drives up to New Haven and the final failure of progress to mean more than avoidance and denial) — nothing we couldn’t have accomplished by staying home or revisiting the fish elevator. (He’ll never come to live with me now, I’m sure of it.)

Irv, grown mute out of respect or boredom, crests the last hill above I-88, and through the tinted windshield I can see a long, river-sinuous cornfield opening down the narrow valley of the Susquehanna just where the two roadways meet. There a pheasant bursts out of the high green stalks, flashes just above the tassel tops, sets its wings at a fence row and sails halfway across the four-lane and settles into the median-strip grass.

Who or what scared it, I wonder? Is it safe there in the middle? Can it possibly survive?

“You know, Frank, you can get hooked up to too commanding a metaphor in my business,” Irv says, finally sick of being silent and just starting in on whatever he happens to be thinking about as we turn west toward the bricky old town of Oneonta. It is the habit of a man too much alone. I know its symptoms. “Nothing else seems as interesting as simulation when you’re in it. Everything seems simulatable. Except,” he adds, and looks at me for serious emphasis, “the people who do it best are the people who leave their work at the office. Maybe they’re not always the geniuses, but they see simulation as one thing and life as another. It’s just a tool, really.” Irv gives his own tool a little two-finger nudge inside his sweatpants for comfort’s sake. “You get in trouble when you confuse the two.”

“I understand, Irv,” I say. Irv, who has traveled to Cooperstown for one of O’Malley’s Fantasy games tomorrow (with the ’59 White Sox), is, in fact, a good and sweet man. I wish I knew him better.

“You married, Frank?”

“Not these days,” I say, feeling my arms and shoulder joints already stiffening and getting sore, as if I’d been in an accident or had aged twenty years in an hour. I’m also grinding my teeth and will, I’m sure, lose more precious angstroms of enamel by morning. I point out to Irv the important blue sign with a white “H,” and we begin following its direction down into town, where church is in session everywhere and few cars are on the move.

“Erma’s trying out as my third wife,” Irv says soberly, seeming to reflect conscientiously on the whole concept of wives (though not on Erma’s whereabouts). “You see a big ugly guy like me, Frank, with a pretty gal like Erma, you know everything’s just luck. Totally luck. That and being a good listener.” He slightly pooches out his thick smooth lips like Mussolini, giving the impression he’d be willing to start listening now if there was anything worth listening to. “Did you guys get a chance to get into the Hall of Fame?”

“We were about to, Irv.” I’m watching for another “H” sign but not seeing one, and am nervous we’ve passed it and will end up at the other end of town and back out on the interstate headed the wrong way, just like in Springfield. Precious time lost.

“You really oughta get back there when this is over. It’s a treat. It’s an education in itself, really, more than you can take in in a day. Those guys, those early guys, they played because they wanted to. Because they could. It wasn’t a career for them. It was just a game. Now”—Irv looks disapproving—“it’s a business.” His voice trails off. I know he’s heard himself doing his level best for his long-lost not-quite brother, whom he may remember now in finer detail and have figured out he never liked much and would be happy never to see again, though he still can simulate good cheer and be of service in the way he would to a crippled hitchhiker in a snowstorm, even if the hitchhiker was a convicted felon. “Incidents we can’t control make us what we are — eh, Frank?” Irv says, changing subjects as he suddenly takes a sweeping left straight into an unnoticed but landscaped driveway that leads back to a crisp new three-story glass-and-brick hospital building with blinking antennae and microwave dishes on top. The A. O. Fox Hospital. Irv has been paying careful attention; I have been lost in a funk.

“Right, Irv,” I say, not catching it all. “At least you can see it that way.”

“I’m sure Jack’s fine,” Irv says, guiding us one-handed through a circular, shrub-lined drive, following the red EMERGENCY signs and stripes. The yellow Cooperstown Life Line ambulance is just swaying back out the drive, its flashers off, its cargo hold dark, as though something deathly has occurred. Ms. Oustalette is at the wheel and talking animatedly while smoking a cigarette, her nameless male partner barely visible in the shadowy passenger’s seat.

“Home sweet hospital,” Irv says, as he pulls alongside a bank of sliding glass doors designated simply as “Emergency.” “Just hop on in, Franky,” he says and smiles as I’m already leaving. “I’ll park this beast and find you inside.”

“Okay.” Irv is radiating limitless sympathy, which has nothing to do with liking me. “Thanks, Irv,” I say, leaning a moment back down into the door, where it’s cool, and out of the hot, gunmetal sunlight.

“Simulate calm,” Irv says, hiking one big blue-clad knee up on the leather seat. A tiny bell starts gonging inside.

“He’ll probably have to wear glasses, that’s all,” I say. I shake my head at these wishful words.

“Wait and see. Maybe he’s in there right now laughing his ass off.”

“That’d be nice,” I say, thinking how nice it would be and how, if so, it would also be the first time in a long time.

But that is not the case at all.

Inside at the long apple-green admissions desk I am told by the receptionist that Paul has “gone right in”—which means he is out of my reach behind some thick, shiny metal doors — and that an ophthalmologist has been “called in specially” to have a look at him. If I would take a seat “over there,” the doctor will be out pretty soon to talk to me.

My heart has begun whompeting again at the antiseptic hospital colors, frigid surfaces and the strict, odorless, traffic-flow yin-yang of everything within sight and hearing. (All here is new, chrome-looking and hard plastic and, I’m sure, owes its existence to a big bond issue.) And everything’s lugubriously, despairingly for something; nothing’s just for itself or, better, for nothing. A basket of red geraniums would be yanked, a copy of American Cage Bird magazine tossed like an apple core. A realty guide, a stack of Annie Get Your Gun tickets — neither would last five minutes before somebody had it in the trash. People who end up here, these walls say, take no comfort from grace notes.

I sit nervously midway down a row of connected cherry-red high-impact plastic chairs and peer up at a control-less TV, bracketed high and out of reach and where Reverend Jackson in an opened-collared brown safari shirt is being interviewed by a panel of white men in business suits, who’re beaming prudish self-confidence at him, as if they found him amusing; though the Reverend is exhibiting his own brand of self-satisfied smugness plus utter disdain, all of it particularly noticeable because the sound’s off. (For a time this winter I considered him “my candidate,” though I finally decided he couldn’t win and would ruin the country if he did, and in either case would eventually tell me everything bad was my fault.) His goose is cooked anyway, and he’s only on TV today to be humored.

The glass doors to the outside sigh open, and Irv strolls casually through in his blue sweats and sandals and yellow cardigan. He looks around without seeing me, then turns and walks back out onto the hot sidewalk as the doors shut, as if he’d come in the wrong hospital. A ticker running under Reverend Jackson’s shiny brown mug reveals that the Mets defeated Houston, Graf defeated Navratilova, Becker defeated Lendl but is losing to Edberg, and while we’re at it that Iraq has poisoned hundreds of Iranians with gas.

Suddenly both metal ER doors swing back, and a small young lemon-haired woman with a scrubbed Scandinavian face and wearing a doctor’s smock comes striding out holding a clipboard. Her eyes fall directly on my worried face, alone here in the red relatives’ alcove. She walks to the admissions desk, where a nurse points me out, and as I stand already smiling and overgrateful, she heads over with a look — I have to say — that is not a happy look. I would hate for it to be the look that spoke volumes about me, though of course in every way it does.

“Are you Paul’s father?” she starts even before she gets to me, flipping pages on her silver clipboard. She’s wearing pink tennis shoes that go squee-kee-gee on the new tiles, and her smock is open down the front to reveal a crisp tennis dress and short legs as brown and muscled out and thick as an athlete’s. She seems totally without makeup or scent, her teeth as white as brand-new.

“Bascombe,” I say softly, still grateful. “Frank Bascombe. My son’s Paul Bascombe.” (A good attitude can oft-times, Gypsies believe, deflect bad news.)

“I’m Dr. Tisaris.” She consults her chart again, then fixes me with perfectly flat blue eyes. “Paul’s had a very, very bad whack to the eye, I’m afraid, Mr. Bascombe. He’s suffered what we call a dilation to the upper left arc of his left retina. What this essentially means is—“ She blinks at me. “Was he hit with a baseball?” This she simply can’t believe; no eye protection, no helmet, no nothing.

“A baseball,” I say, possibly inaudibly, my good attitude and Gypsy hope gone, gone. “At Doubleday Field.”

“Okay. Well,” she says, “what this means is the ball hit him slightly left of center. It’s what we call a macula-off injury, which means it drove the left front part of his eye back into the retina and basically flattened it. It was a very, very hard blow.”

“It was the Express cage,” I say, squinting at Dr. Tisaris. She is pretty, svelte (if short) but sinewy, a little athletic Greek, though she’s wearing a wedding ring, so conceivably it’s her husband the gastroenterologist who’s the Greek and she’s as Swedish or Dutch as she looks. Anyone but a fool, however, would feel complete confidence in her, even in tennis clothes.

“At the moment,” she says, “he has okay vision in the eye, but he’s having bright light flashes, which are typical of a serious dilation. You should probably have a second doctor take a look at him, but my suggestion is we repair it as soon as possible. Before the day’s out would be best.”

“Dilation. What’s a dilation?” I am instantly as cold as mackerel flesh. The nurses at the admissions desk are all three looking at me oddly, and either I’ve just fainted or am about to faint or have fainted ten minutes ago and am recovering on my feet. Dr. Tisaris, however, model of rigorous antifainting decorum, doesn’t seem to notice. So that I simply do not faint but grip my ten toes into the soles of my shoes and hang onto the floor as it dips and sways, all in response to one word. I hear Dr. Tisaris say “detachment” and feel certain she’s explaining her medical-ethical perspective toward serious injury and advising me to act in a similar manner. What I hear myself saying is, “I see,” then I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste dull, warm blood, then hear myself say, “I have to consult his mother first.”

“Is she here?” Clipboard down, a look of unbelief on Dr. Tisaris’s face, as if there is no mother.

“She’s at the Yale Club.”

Dr. Tisaris blinks. There is no Yale Club in Oneonta, I think. “Can you reach her?”

“Yes. I think so,” I say, still staggered.

“We should try to get on with this.” Her smile is indeed a detached, sober, professional one containing many, many strands of important consideration, none specific to me. I tell her I’d be grateful for the chance to see my son first. But what she says is, “Why don’t you make your call, and we’ll put a bandage on his eye so he won’t scare you to death.”

I look down for some reason at her curving, taut thighs beneath her smock and do not speak a word, just stand gripping the floor, tasting my blood, thinking in amazement of my son scaring me to death. She glances down at her two legs, looks up at my face without curiosity, then simply turns and walks away toward the admissions desk, leaving me alone to find a telephone.

At the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue, Mr. or Mrs. O’Dell is not in. It is noon on a bright Sunday before the 4th of July, and no one, of course, should be in. Everyone should be just strolling out of Marble Collegiate, beaming magisterially, or happily queuing for the Met or the Modern, or “shooting across to the Carlyle” for a Mozart brunch or up to some special friend’s special duplex “in the tower,” where there’s a hedged veranda with ficuses and azaleas and hibiscus and a magical view of the river.

An extra check, though, uncovers Mrs. O’Dell has left behind a “just-in-case” number, which I punch in inside my scrubbed, green-and-salmon hospital phone nook — just as stout-fellow Irv wanders in again, scans the area, sees me waving, gives a thumbs-up, then turns, hands in his blue sweatpants’ pockets and surveys the wide world he’s just come from through the glass doors. He is an indispensable man. It’s a shame he’s not married.

“Windbigler residence,” a child’s musical voice says. I hear my own daughter, bursting with giggles, in the background.

“Hi,” I say, unswervingly upbeat. “Is Mrs. O’Dell there?”

“Yes. She is.” A pause for whispering. “Can I say who’s calling, plee-yuzzz?”

“Say it’s Mr. Bascombe.” I am cast low by the insubstantial sound of my name. More concentrated whispers, then a spew of laughter, following which Clarissa comes on the line.

“Hel-lo,” she says in her version of her mother’s lowered serious voice. “This is Ms. Dykstra speaking. Can I be of any use to you, sir?” (She means, of course, Can I be of any service.)

“Yes,” I say, my heart opening a little to let a stalk of light enter. “I’d like to order one of the twelve-year-old girls and maybe a pizza.”

“What color would you like?” Clarissa says gravely, though she’s bored with me already.

“White with a yellow top. Not too big.”

“Well, we only have one left. And she’s getting bigger, so you’d better place your order. What kind of pizza would you like?”

“Lemme speak to your mom — okay, sweetheart? It’s sort of important.”

“Paul’s barking again, I bet.” Clarissa makes a little schnauzer bark of her own, which drives her friend into muffled laughter. (They are, I’m certain, locked away in some wondrous, soundproof kids’ wing, with every amusement, diversion, educational device, aid and software package known to mankind at their fingertips, all of it guaranteed to keep them out of the adults’ hair for years.) Her friend makes a couple of little barks too, just for the hell of it. I should probably try one. I might feel better.

“That’s not very funny,” I say. “Get your mom for me, okay? I need to talk to her.”

The receiver goes blunk onto some hard surface. “That’s what he does,” I hear Clarissa say unkindly about her wounded brother. She barks twice more, then a door opens and steps depart. Across the waiting room, Dr. Tisaris emerges again through the emergency room door. She has her smock buttoned now and baggy green surgical trousers down to her feet, which are sheathed in green booties. She is ready to operate. Though she heads over to the admissions desk to impart something to the nurses that makes them all crack up laughing just like my daughter and her friend. A black nurse sings out, “Giiirl, I’m tellin’ you, I’m tellin’ you now,” then catches herself being noisy, sees me and covers her mouth, turning around the other way to hide more laughter.

“Hello?” Ann says brightly. She has no idea who’s calling. Clarissa has kept it as her surprise secret.

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Are you here already?” Her voice says she’s happy it’s me, has just left a table full of the world’s most interesting people, only to find even better pickings here. Maybe I could cab over and join in. (A conspicuous sea change from yesterday — based almost certainly on the welcome discovery that something has finally ended between us.)

“I’m in Oneonta,” I say bluntly.

“What’s the matter?” she says, as if Oneonta were a city well known for cultivating trouble.

“Paul’s had an accident,” I say as quickly as I can, so as to get on to the other part. “Not a life-threatening accident”—pause—“but something we need to confer about right away.”

“What happened to him?” Alarm fills her voice.

“He got hit in the eye. By a baseball. In a batting cage.”

“Is he blind?” More alarm, mixed with conceivable horror.

“No, he’s not blind. But it’s serious enough. The doctors feel like they need to get him into surgery pretty quick.” (I added the plural on my own.)

“Surgery? Where?”

“Here in Oneonta.”

“Where is it? I thought you were in Cooper’s Park.”

This, for some reason God knows but I don’t, makes me angry. “That’s down the road,” I say. “Oneonta’s a whole other city.”

“What do we have to decide?” Cold, stiffening panic now; and not about the part she can’t control — the unexplained wounding of her surviving son — but about the part she realizes, in this instant, she is accountable for and must decide about and damn well better decide right, because I am not responsible.

“What’s wrong with him?” I hear Clarissa spout out officiously, as if she were accountable for something too. “Did he get his eye blown out with fireworks?”

Her mother says, “Shush. No, he did not.”

“We have to decide if we want to let them do surgery up here,” I say, peevishly. “They think the sooner the better.”

“It’s his eye?” She is voicing this as she’s understanding it. “And they want to operate on it up there?” I know her thick, dark eyebrows are meshed and she’s tugging the back of her hair, picking up one strand at a time, tugging and tugging and tugging until she feels a perfect pin-stick of pain. She has done this only in recent years. Never when I lived with her.

“I’m getting another opinion,” I say. Though of course I haven’t yet. But I will. I gaze at the TV above the waiting-area chairs. Reverend Jackson has vanished. The words “Credit No Good?” are on the screen against a bright blue background. Irv, when I look around, is still inside the sliding doors, Dr. Tisaris gone from the admissions desk. I’ll need to find her pronto.

“Can it wait two hours?” Ann says.

“They said today. I don’t know.” My anger, just as suddenly, has gone.

“I’m going to come up there,” she says.

“It takes four hours.” Three, actually. “It won’t help.” I begin thinking of the clogged FDR, holiday inbounds. Major backups on the Triborough. A traffic nightmare. All things I was thinking about on Friday, though now it’s Sunday.

“I can get a helicopter from the East River terminal. Charley flies down all the time. I should be there. Just tell me where.”

“Oneonta,” I say, feeling strangely hollowed at the prospect of Ann.

“I’m going to get on the phone right now on the way and call Henry Burris. He’s at Yale-New Haven. They’re in the country this weekend. He’ll explain all the options, tell me exactly what’s wrong with him.”

“Detachment,” I say. “They say he has a dilated retina. There’s no need to come right this second.”

“Is he in the hospital?” I have the feeling Ann is writing everything down now: Henry Burris. Oneonta. Detachment, retina, batting cage? Paul, Frank.

“Of course he’s in the hospital,” I say. “Where do you think he is?”

“What’s the exact name of the hospital, Frank?” She’s as deliberate as a scrub nurse; and I a merely dutiful next of kin.

“A. O. Fox. It’s probably the only hospital in town.”

“Is there an airport there?” Clearly she has written down airport.

“I don’t know. There should be, if there isn’t.” Then a silence opens, during which she may in fact have stopped writing.

“Frank, are you all right? You sound not very good.”

“I’m not very good. I didn’t have my eye knocked out, though.”

“He didn’t have his eye knocked out really, did he?” Ann says this in a pleading voice of motherhood that can’t be escaped.

From the door Irv turns toward me with a worried look, as if he’s overheard me say something bitter or argumentative. The black admissions nurse is looking at me too, over the top of her computer terminal.

“No,” I say, “he didn’t. But he got it knocked. It’s not very good.”

“Don’t let them do anything to him. Please? Until I get there? Can you?” She says this now in a sweet way that is tuned to the helplessness we share and that I would improve if I could but can’t. “Will you promise me that?” She has not yet mentioned her dream of injury. She has done me that kindness.

“Absolutely. I’ll tell the doctor right now.”

“Thank you so much,” Ann says. “I’ll be there in two hours or less. Just hold on.”

“I will. I’ll be right here. And so will Paul.”

“It won’t be very long,” Ann says half brightly. “All right?”

“All right.”

“Okay then. Okay.” And that is all.

For two hours that turn into three hours that turn into four, I walk round and round the little color-keyed lobby, while everything is on hold. (Under better circumstances this would be a natural time to make client calls and take my mind off worrying, but it’s not possible now.) Irv, who’s decided to toss in the afternoon “drinks party” with the ’59 Sox and keep me company, heads out at two and forages a couple of fat bags of Satellite burgers, which we eat mechanically in the plastic chairs while above us on TV the Mets play the Astros in audio-less nontime. Now is not an action period for the ER. Later, when the light fails and too much beer’s been guzzled on the lake, an extra base attempted with bone-breaking results, or when somebody who knows all about Roman candles doesn’t quite know enough— then resources here will be put to the test. As it is, one possibly self-inflicted minor knife wound, an obese woman with unexplained chest pains, one shirtless, shaken-up victim of a one-car rollover come through, but not all at once, and without fanfare (the last chauffeured in by the Cooperstown crew, who frown at me on their way back out). Everyone is eventually set free under his or her own power, all emerging stone-faced and chastened by the sorry outcome of their day. The nurses behind the admissions desk, though, stay in jokey spirits right through. “Now you wait’ll tomorrow ‘bout this time,” one of them says with a look of amazement. “This place’ll be jumpin’ like Grand Central Station at rush hour. The Fourth’s a biiig day for hurtin’ yourself.”

At three, a fat young crew-cut priest passes by, stops and comes back to where Irv and I are watching silent TV, asks in a confessional whisper if everything’s under control, and if not, is there anything he can do for us (it’s not; there isn’t), then heads smilingly off for the ICU wing.

Dr. Tisaris cruises through a time or two, seemingly without enough to do. Once she stops to tell me a “retina man” from Binghamton who did his work at “Mass Eye” has examined Paul (I never saw him arrive) and confirmed a retinal rupture, and “if it’d be okay we’d like to prep him for when your wife gets here, after which we can shoot him in. Dr. Rotollo”—the Binghamton hired gun—“will do the surgery.”

Once again I ask if I can see Paul (I haven’t since the ambulance left Cooperstown), and Dr. Tisaris looks inconvenienced but says yes, though she needs to keep him still to “minimalize” bleeding, and maybe I might just peek in unbeknownst, since he’s had a sedative.

Leaving Irv, I follow her, squee-kee-gee, squee-kee-gee, through the double doors into a brightly lit, mint-colored bullpen room smelling of rubbing alcohol, where there are examining bays around on all four walls, each hung with a green hospital curtain. Two special rooms are marked “Surgical” and have heavy, push-in doors with curved handles, and Paul is housed in one of these. When Dr. Tisaris cautiously shoves back the noiseless door, I see my son then, on his back on a bed-on-wheels equipped with metal sidebars, looking very bulky with both his eyes bandaged over like a mummy, but still in his black Clergy shirt and maroon shorts and orange socks, minus only his shoes, which sit side by side against the wall. His arms are folded on his chest in an impatient, judicial way, his legs out straight and stiff. A beam of intense light is trained down on his bandaged face, and he’s wearing his earphones plugged into a yellow Walkman I’ve never seen before, and which is resting on his chest. He seems to me in no particular pain and to all appearances except the bandages seems unbothered by the world (or else he’s dead, since I can’t detect rise or fall in his chest, no tremor in his fingers, no musical toe twitch to whatever he’s tuned in to). His ear, I see, has a new bandage.

I would of course dearly love to bound across and kiss him. Or if that couldn’t be, at least to do my waiting in here, unacknowledged amongst the instrument trays, oxygen tubes, defibrillator kits, needle dumps and rubber glove dispensers: sit a vigil on a padded stool, be a presence for my son, “useful” at least in principle, since my time for being a real contributor seems nearly over now, in the way that serious, unraveling injury can deflect the course of life and send it careering an all new way, leaving the old, uninjured self and its fussy familiars far back in the road.

But neither of these can happen, and time goes by as I stand with Dr. Tisaris simply watching Paul. A minute. Three. Finally I see a hopeful sigh of breath beneath his shirt and suddenly feel my ears being filled by hissing, so much that if someone spoke to me, said “Frank” again, out loud from behind, I might not hear, would only hear hiss, like air escaping or snow sliding off a roof or wind blowing through a piney bough — a hiss of acceptance.

Paul, then, for no obvious reason, turns his head straight toward us, as if he’s heard something (my hiss?) and knows someone is watching, can imagine me or someone through a red-black curtain of molten dark. Out loud, in his boy’s voice, he says, “Okay, who’s here?” He fiddles sightlessly with his Walkman to kill the volume. He may of course have said it any number of times when no one was present.

“It’s Dr. Tisaris, Paul,” she says, utterly calm. “Don’t be frightened.”

All hissing ceases.

“Who’s frightened?” he says, staring into his bandages.

“Are you still having flashes of light or vivid colors?”

“Yeah,” he says. “A little. Where’s my Dad?”

“He’s waiting for you.” She lays a cool finger upon my wrist. I am not to speak. I am the virus of too much trouble already. “He’s waiting for your Mom to get here, so we can fix your eye up.” Her starchy smock shifts against the doorframe. I catch a first faint scent of exotica from underneath its folds.

“Tell my dad he tries to control too much. He worries too much too,” Paul says. With his warty, tattooed hand he gropes down at his pleasure unit and gives it a delving scratch just like Irv, as though all lights were out and no one could see anyone. Then he sighs: great wisdom conferring great patience.

“I’ll see he gets that message,” Dr. Tisaris says in an echoless, professional’s voice.

And it is this voice that makes me wince, a not-small, mouth-skewing wince up from my knees, sudden and forceful enough that I have to clear my throat, turn my head away and gulp. Here is the voice of the outer world become primary: “I’ll see he gets that message; I’m sorry, that job’s filled; we’d like to ask you some questions; I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now.” And so on, and so on, and so on all the way to: “I’m sorry to tell you your father, your mother, your sister, your son, your wife, your dog, your- anybody-you-might-ever-know-and-love-and-want-to-survive has left, disappeared, been called away, injured, maimed, expired.” While mine — the silenced voice of worry, love, patience, impatience, comradeship, thoughtlessness, understanding and genial acquiescence — is the small voice of the old small life losing ground. The Hall of Fame — impersonal but shareable — was meant as the staging ground for a new life’s safe beginning (and nearly, nearly was) but instead has had itself preempted by a regional hospital full of prognoses, voices without echoes, cheery disinterest, cold hard facts impossible to soften. (Why is it we’re never quite prepared, as I’m not now, for our plans to work out wrong?)

“Do you have any kids?” Paul asks sagely to his tanned doctor in a voice as echoless as hers.

“Nope,” she says, smiling jauntily. “Not yet.”

I should stay now, hear his views on child rearing, a subject he has unique experience with. Only my feet won’t hear of it and are inching back, shifting direction, then shoving off, getting out of range fast across the bullpen, headed for the doors, much as when I heard him years ago conferring ardently with his made-up “friends” at home and couldn’t bear it either, was made too weak and sick at heart by his inspired and almost perfect sufficiency.

“If you have any,” I hear him say, “don’t ever—“ Then that’s it, and I am quickly out through the metal doors and back into the cool watery room for relatives, friends, well-wishers, where I now belong.

By four Ann has not arrived, and Irv and I elect a walk out of the hospital, across the lawn and onto the summery afternoon streets of Oneonta, a town I never once for all my travels imagined myself in; never dreamed I’d be a worried father-in-waiting in, though that has been my MO for moons and moons.

Irv has blossomed into even wider good spirits, the net effect of awaiting dire events that aren’t truly dire for him, that will make him sorry if things go bad but never truly bereaved. (Much like your Aunt Beulah’s second husband, Bernie from Bismarck, who takes it on himself to tell jokes at your grandfather’s funeral and in doing so makes everyone feel a lot better.)

We troop purposefully out across the tonsured Bermuda grass and onto the warm sidewalk where hilly Main drops quickly toward town and is now much busier than when church was going. Here great shagbark hickories and American chestnuts, descendants of our central hardwood forest primeval, have bulged their roots through the aged, crumbly concrete and made strolling a challenge. Ranked along the descending street are old sagging frame residences built on the high ground above retaining walls, going gray and punky from the years and soon to be settling (if work’s not done and done soon) into perfect valuelessness. Some are deserted, some have American flags flying, a couple show familiar yellow ribbons, while others show signs that say FOR RENT. FOR SALE. FREE IF YOU MOVE IT. In my trade these are “carpenter’s specials,” “starter homes for newlys,” “not for everyone” homes, “mystery abounds” homes, “make offer” homes — the downward-tending lingo of loss.

Irv, being Irv, means to take up an issue, and in this case the issue is “continuity,” which is what his life at least seems to him to be “all about” these days — recognizing, he willingly admits, that his concern may be “tied to” his Jewishness and to the need to strive, to the pressure of history and to a certain significant portion of his life spent on a kibbutz after his first marriage went down the tubes and wrecked continuity big-time, and where he harrowed the dry and unforgiving Bible land, read the Torah, served six nerve-racking months in the Israeli army and eventually married another kibbutznik (from Shaker Heights), a marriage that also didn’t last long and ended in scalding, vituperative, religiously dispiriting divorce.

“I learned a lot in the kibbutz, Frank,” Irv says, his rattan sandals slapping the split pavement as we head down Main at a good clip. We seem by no particular design to be aiming toward a red Dairy Queen sign below on the Oneonta strip-commercial, a neighborhood where the houses stop and possibly it’s unsafe for strangers (a neighborhood in transition).

“Everybody I know who went over there says it was pretty interesting, even if they didn’t like it much,” I say. I actually know no one but Irv who ever admitted to living on a kibbutz, and all I do know I read in the Trenton Times. Irv, though, is not a bad advertisement for the life, since he’s decent and thoughtful and not at all a pain in the ass. (I’ve now recalled Irv’s boyhood persona: the exuberant, accommodating, gullible-but-complex “big” boy who needed to shave way too early in life.)

“You know, Frank, Judaism doesn’t have to be practiced just in the synagogue,” Irv says solemnly. “Growing up in Skokie, I didn’t always have that impression. Not that my family was ever devout in any way.” Slap-slap, slip-slap, slip-slop. Local toughs with local sweethearts notched under their bulging biceps are cruising East Main in hot-looking Trans Ams and dark, channeled S-10s. (No Monzas.) Irv and I stand out here like two Latvian rustics in native attire, which isn’t that uncomfortable since it’s our own country. (A common language alone should assure us entry-level acceptance anywhere within a two-thousand-mile radius of Kansas City, though pushing your luck could mean trouble, just like on a kibbutz, and we are now and then glared at.)

“You have any kids, Irv?” I say, not at ease — continuity aside — with religious talk today, happier to be led elsewhere.

“No kids,” Irv says. “Didn’t want kids, which is what shot my deal with the second wife. She remarried right away and had a bunch. I don’t even have any contact with her, which is too bad. They shunned me. You wouldn’t think that would happen.” Irv seems amazed but sorrowfully willing to accept life’s mysteries.

“Self-sufficient thinking’s always in short supply in those kinds of places, I guess. Just like with the Baptists and the Presbyterians.”

“I guess Sartre said freedom isn’t worth a nickel unless you can act on it.”

“That sounds like Sartre,” I say, thinking all over again what I’ve always thought about hippie communes, Brook Farms, kibbutzes, goofball Utopian ideals of every stripe: let one real independent emerge, and everybody turns into Hitler. And if a good egg like Irv can’t make it work for him, the rest of us may as well stay where we are. I don’t know what this has to do with continuity, though I’m sure I should.

We pass along by an old building with a dirty junk-store window display piled and jumbled with dented teakettles, wooden hotel coat hangers, busted waffle irons, bits of saddlery, snow tires, empty picture frames, books, lamp shades, plus a whole lot more crap heaped back on a shadowy concrete floor — stuff the last owner couldn’t give away when he went bust and just left. In the glass, though, I unexpectedly and unhappily see myself, in brighter colors than the junk but still dim and, to my surprise, a good half a head shorter than Irv and walking along in a semi-stooped posture, as if grasping forces were tightening strings and sinews in my gut, causing me to bunch up, humping my shoulders in a way I sure as hell never imagined myself and, now that I see, am shocked by! Irv, of course, is oblivious to his reflection. But I sternly brace back my shoulders and stiffen up like a clothes dummy, take a deep chest breath, give myself a good erective stretching and work my head around like a lighthouse (not very different from what I did standing on the wall overlooking the Central Leatherstocking Region yesterday, but now with more cause). Irv meanwhile goes back to elaborating on his continuity concerns as we reach the bottom of the hill, passing a low-rent, two-desk real estate office, City of Hills Realty, whose name I don’t recognize from the signs I saw farther back.

“Anyway,” Irv says, tramping right along, not noticing my furious stretching, opening a button on his gold cardigan to cool off in the warm afternoon. “Do you have a lot of friends?”

“Not too many,” I say, my neck worked back, my shoulders squared.

“Same here. Simulators only socialize as a group, but I’d rather take off for a long walk in the desert alone, or maybe go camping.”

“I’ve become an amateur trout fisherman.” I walk a little faster now. Moving my shoulders and neck have also awakened an achiness where I was whacked by the baseball.

“See? There you are,” meaning what I’m not sure. “How ’bout a girlfriend? You fixed up there?”

“Well,” I say, and think an awkward thought about Sally for the first time in too long. I should definitely call South Mantoloking before she gets on the train. Recalculate our plans; aim for tomorrow. “I’m pretty set there, Irv.”

“How ’bout marriage plans?”

I smile at Irv, a man with two wives down and one on deck, a man who hasn’t seen me in twenty-five years yet who’s trying hard to console me against bad events by the honest application of his simple self to mine. Much of human goodness is badly undersold, take it from me. “I’m a bachelor these days, Irv.”

Irv nods, satisfied that we’re in the same semi-seaworthy boat. “I didn’t really explain what I meant about continuity,” he says. “It’s just my Jewish thing. With other people it’s probably different.”

“I guess so.” I’m picturing the ten separate digits of Sally’s phone number, counting the possible rings and her sweet voice in answer.

“I’d think in the realty business you’d get a pretty good exposure to everybody’s wish for it. I mean in the community sense.”

“What’s that?”

“Just continuity,” Irv says, smiling, sensing some resistance and maybe considering just letting the subject go (I would). We’re across the street from the DQ now, having homed in here through some mutual understanding we haven’t needed to voice.

“I don’t really think communities are continuous, Irv,” I say. “I think of them — and I’ve got a lot of proof — as isolated, contingent groups trying to improve on an illusion of permanence, which they fully accept as an illusion. If that makes any sense. Buying power is the instrumentality. But continuity, if I understand it at all, doesn’t really have much to do with it. Maybe realty’s not that commanding a metaphor.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Irv says, pretty certainly not buying a word of it, though he ought to be satisfied since my definition of community fits right into a general notion of simulation as well as his personal bad experience on the kibbutz. (“Community” is actually one of those words I loathe, since all its hands-on implications are dubious.)

I am braced up straighter now, almost as erect and tall as Irv, though he’s meatier from all his months with a Galil strapped to his back while hoeing the dry ground and keeping an eagle eye out for murderous, uncommunity-oriented Arabs.

“Does that seem like enough, though, Frank? The illusion of permanence?” Irv says this committedly. It is a subject he no doubt wrangles over with everybody, and may be his true interest, one that makes his happy life a sort of formal investigation of firmer stuff beyond the limits of simulation; rather than like mine, a journey toward someplace yet to be determined but that I have good hope for.

“Enough for what?”

We’ve crossed to the DQ, which true to the old town is an “oldie” itself, in lackluster disrepair since Oneonta has yet to blossom into a destination resort. It’s nowhere as nice as Franks, though there are enough similarities to make me feel at home standing in front of it.

“It’s still all tied up in my mind with continuity,” Irv says, arms folded, reading the hand-lettered menu board from where we’re stopped at the back of a short queue of native Oneontans. I scan down for a “dipped” cone, my all-time fave, and feel for just this fleeting moment incongruously happy. “I was remembering while I was waiting for you at the hospital”—Irv allows a look of good-willed perplexity to pass over his big Levantine mouth—“that you and I were around Jake’s house together while our parents were married. I was right there when your mother died. We knew each other pretty well. And now twenty-five years of absence go by and we bump into each other up here in the middle of the north woods. And I realized — I realized it pacing around up there worried about Jack and his eye — that you’re my only link to that time. I’m not gonna get all worked up over it, but you’re as close to family as anyone there is for me. And we don’t even know each other.” Irv, even as he’s making his ice cream choice, and without actually looking at me, lays his big, fleshy, hairy, pinkie-ringed hand heavily onto my shoulder and shakes his head in wonderment. “I don’t know, Frank.” He looks at me furtively, then stares hard at the big menu. “Life’s screwy.”

“It is, Irv,” I say. “It’s screwy as a monkey.” I put my smaller hand on Irv’s shoulder. And though we don’t splutter forward and glom onto each other at the end of the DQ line, we do exchange a number of restrained but unambiguous shoulder pats and glance squeamishly into each other’s faces in ways that on any other day but this odd one would set me off up the hill at a dead run.

“We’ve probably got a lot of things to talk about,” Irv says prophetically, keeping his heavy hand where it is, so that I feel forced to keep mine where it is, in a sort of unwieldy, arms-length non-embrace. Several Oneontans waiting in front of us have already cast threatening now-just-don’t-get-me-involved-in-this frowns our way, as though dangerously unsuppressed effusions were about to splash on everybody like battery acid, with violence a likely outcome. But this is as far as it’s going; I could easily tell them as much.

“We might, Irv,” I say, not knowing what those things could be.

A shadowy someone inside the Dairy Queen slides back the rickety glass on the SORRY CLOSED window and says from inside, “I can help you down here, folks.” The Oneontans all give us a hesitant look as if Irv and I might suddenly rush the other window, though we don’t. They turn back toward their own original window, consider it skeptically, then as a group all shift over to number two, giving Irv and me a straight shot to the front.

On our way back up the hill we walk side by side, as solemn as two missionaries, I with my fast-dissolving “dip,” Irv with a pink “strawberry boat” that snugs perfectly into the palm of one big hand. He seems to be elated but containing his feelings of transcendence owing to the sober protocol of Paul’s (Jack’s) injury.

He explains to me, though, that lately he’s been going through an “odd passage” in life, one he associates with getting to be forty-five (instead of being Jewish). He complains of feeling detached from his own personal history, which has eventuated in a fear (kept within boundaries by his demanding simulator work) that he is diminishing; and if not in an actual physical sense, then definitely in a spiritual one. “It’s hard to explain in literal terms and make it seem really serious or clear,” he assures me.

I look upward when he says this, my sticky napkin squeezed into a tight dry ball in my palm, my jaw beginning to ratchet tight again after our respite. High above us, sea gulls circle dizzyingly and in great numbers on the clear afternoon air waves, framed by the old green hardwood crowns up the hillside, high enough to seem to make no sound. Why gulls, I wonder, so far from a sea?

Fear of diminishment of course is a concept I know plenty about under the title “fear of disappearance,” and would be happy to know not much more. Though in Irv’s case it has occasioned what he calls the “catch of dread,” a guilty, hopeless, even deathly feeling he experiences just at the moment when anyone else in his right mind might expect to feel exultation — upon seeing sea gulls in dizzying great numbers on a matte of blue sky; or upon stealing an unexpected glimpse down a sun-shot river valley (as I did just yesterday) to a shimmering glacial lake of primordial beauty; on seeing unreserved love in your girlfriend’s eyes and knowing she wants to dedicate her life only to your happiness and that you should let her; or just smelling a sudden, heady perfume on a timeworn city sidewalk as you turn a crumbling corner and spy a bed of purple loosestrife and Shasta daisies in full bloom in a public park you had no reason to expect was there. “Little things and large,” Irv says, referring to whatever has made him feel first wonderful, then terrible, then lessened, then potentially canceled altogether. “It’s crazy, but I feel like some bad feeling is sort of eating away at me on the edges.” He jabs with his plastic spoon at the bottom of his corrugated pink boat and furrows his big-lug brows.

To tell the truth, I’m surprised to hear this kind of dour talk out of Irv. I’d have guessed his Jewishness plus native optimism would’ve sheltered him — though of course I’m wrong. Native optimism is that humor most vulnerable to sneak attacks. About Jewishness I don’t know.

“My view of marriage”—Irv has earlier admitted a strange unwillingness to tie the knot and make little hard-body Erma Mrs. Ornstein #3—“is that I’m still ready to go whole hog and lose myself in it, but really since about ’86 or so I’ve had this feeling, and this goes along with the dread, of just losing myself period, and in Erma’s case of maybe losing myself into the wrong person and being eternally sorry.” Irv looks over at me to see, I assume, if I’ve changed in appearance, having now heard his bitter admissions. “And I do love her, too,” he adds as a capper.

We are nearly back to the hospital lawn. The old, settling houses up above the sidewalk behind aged hickories and oaks seem less decrepit now for having been viewed twice in different moods and lights. (A cornerstone principle for your hard-to-sell listing: make ’em see it twice. Things can look better.) I turn and gaze back down the hill and over town. Oneonta seems like a sweet and homey place — admittedly not a place I’d want to sell real estate, but still a fine place to live once your family has gone off and left you to your own devices for combating loneliness. The gulls I’ve seen have suddenly vanished, and the afternoon air above the treetops is now swept through by evening swifts, taking insects and filling the sky like motes. (I should call the Markhams, as well as Sally, but these needs recede, each as they are counted.)

“Any of that stick to your wall?” Irv says earnestly, knowing he’s blathered on like a mental patient and I’ve said zilch, except it’s allowable now since we’re brothers.

“All of it does, Irv.” I smile, hands down deep in my pockets, letting the warm breeze lave me before I turn back toward the hospital. Naturally, I’ve felt what Irv is feeling five hundred times over and have no single solution to offer, only the general remedies of persistence, jettisoning, common sense, resilience, good cheer — all tenets of the Existence Period — leaving out the physical isolation and emotional disengagement parts, which cause trouble equal to or greater than the problems they ostensibly solve.

Someone from a passing pickup, a tee-shirted white kid with a mean red mouth and a plump, sneering girlie with her hands parked behind her head, shouts out his window something that sounds like honi soit que mal y pense but isn’t, then floors it, laughing. I wave at him good-naturedly, though Irv is captained by his probs.

“I guess I’m sort of surprised to hear you say all that, Irv,” I resume, to try and be a help. “But I think a small act of heroism might be to go ahead and try saying yes to Erma. Even if you get whacked. You’ll get over it, just like you got over the kibbutz.” (I’m a big talker when it’s somebody else getting whacked.) “How long ago were you over there, by the way?”

“Fifteen years ago. It left a major impression. But that’s interesting for the future,” Irv says, nodding, and meaning again that it’s not interesting at all but the goddamn craziest thing he’s ever heard of, though he’ll pretend it isn’t because he feels sorry for me. (I’d have thought the kibbutz experience was last September, not 1973!) Irv sniffs the air, as if seeking a fragrance he recognizes. “Now’s maybe not the time to take that kind of chance, Frank. I’m thinking about the continuity I was boring you with, about getting a clearer sense of where I’ve come from before I try to find out where I’m going. Just take the pressure off the moment, if you see my point.” He looks at me, nodding judiciously.

“How’re you going to do that? Get some genealogical charts made up?”

“Well, for instance, today — this afternoon — this has meant something to me along those lines.”

“Me too.” Though again I’m not completely sure what. Possibly it’s something on the order of what Sally said about not ever getting to see Wally and having to get used to it, only in reverse: I am getting to see Irv, and I like it, but it doesn’t have a profound effect.

“But that’s a good sign, isn’t it? Someplace in the Torah it says something about beginning to understand long before you know you understand.”

“I think that’s in Miracle on 34th Street,” I say, and smile again at Irv, who is kind but goofy from too much simulation and continuity. “I’m pretty sure it says it in The Prophet too.”

“Never read it,” he says gravely. “But let me just show you something, Frank. This’ll surprise you.” Irv goes groping in his sweatpants’ back pocket and comes out with a tiny wafer wallet that probably cost five hundred dollars. Concentrating downward, he thumbs through his credit cards and papers, then fingers out something that appears softened by time. “Take a look at that,” he says, handing it forward. “I’ve carried that for years. Five years now. Tell me why.”

I turn the card and hold it so the daylight’s behind me. (Irv has gone to the trouble of laminating it as a seal of its importance.) And it’s not a card at all but a photograph, black and white, encased in layers and re-layers of plastic and for that reason is fogged and dim as memory. Here are four humans in a stately family pose, two parents, two adolescent boys, standing out on some front porch steps, squinting-smiling apprehensively at the camera and into a long-ago patch of light that brightens their faces. Who are these? Where are they? When? Though in a moment I see it’s Irv’s once-nuclear family in the greenage days in Skokie, when times were sweet and nothing needed simulating.

“Pretty great, Irv.” I look up at him, then admire the photo again for politeness’ sake and hand it back, ready to re-commence my own parenting tasks, put the pressure back on the moment.

Not far off I hear the wet thwop-thwop-thwop and realize the hospital has a helipad for such emergencies as Paul’s, and that this is Ann arriving.

“It’s us, Frank,” Irv says, and looks at me amazed. “It’s you and Jake and your mom and me, in Skokie, in 1963. You can see how pretty your mom is, though she looks thin already. We’re all there on the porch. Do you even remember it?” Irv stares at me, damp-lipped and happy behind his glasses, holding his precious artifact out for me to see once more.

“I guess I don’t.” I look again reluctantly at this little pinch-hole window to my long-gone past, feel a quickening torque of heart pain — unexceptional, nothing like Irv’s catch of dread — and once again proffer it back. I’m a man who wouldn’t recognize his own mother. Possibly I should be in politics.

“Me either really.” Irv looks appreciatively down at himself for the eight jillionth time, trying to leech some wafting synchronicity out of his image, then shakes his head and re-snugs it among his other wallet votives and crams it all back into his pocket, where it belongs.

I survey the sky again for a sight of the chopper but see nothing, not even the swifts.

“I mean, no great big deal, of course.” Irv is squaring up his expectations to my rather insufficient response.

“Irv, I better get inside now. I’m pretty sure I hear my wife’s helicopter arriving.” (Is this a sentence one usually says? Or is it me? Or the day?)

“Hey, don’t be crazy.” Irv’s heavy hand is again right up on my shoulder like a gangplank. (My heart has in fact gone rapid with its own thwopetty-thwop.) “I wanted to show you what I meant about continuity. It’s nothing dangerous. We don’t have to cut our arms and mingle blood or anything.”

“I might not agree with you about everything, Irv, but I—“ and then for an instant I lose my breath entirely and almost gasp, which makes me panic that I’m choking and need a quick Heimlich (if Irv knows how and would oblige). I’ve done wrong by taking this Dairy Queen walk and letting myself be hoodwinked just like Paul, by cozy, small-town plenitude, lured to think I can float free again against all evidence of real gravity. “But I want you to know,” I say just before a second, less terrifying gullet stop, “that I respect how you see the world, and I think you’re a great guy.” (When in doubt fall back on the old Sigma Chi formula: Ornstein = Great Guy. Let’s pledge him, even if he is a Hebe.)

“I don’t think I’ve miscalculated you, Frank,” Irv says. He is the stalwart project leader over in the yaw-pitch-and-roll lab now: always flying level even if the rest of us aren’t. Though I’ve been him (more than once) and won’t be caught again. Irv is entering his own Existence Period, complete with all the good and not-so-good trimmings, just as it seems I’m exiting it in a pitch-and-tumble mode. We have passed in daylight; we have interfaced, given each other good and earnest feedback. But ours is not life coterminous, though I like him fine.

I start off then toward the hospital doors, my heart popping, my jaw going stiff as an andiron, leaving Irv with my best words for our future as friends. “We’ll try to go fishing sometime.” I look around for emphasis. He is poised, one long, sandaled foot on the edge of the grass, one off, his bright cardigan catching the sunlight. He is, I know, silently wishing us both clear sailing toward the next horizon.