Lithium for Medea

13

“It’s not healing,” Francine said. “The radiated tissue won’t come together. It keeps opening, toward the artery.”

“What?”

I stopped in the middle of the corridor. I thought of my father lying still in his white bed while his artery burst. It would be a sudden red dream, his last. Perhaps he would imagine himself a young boy again, running fast in a Yankee T-shirt, blinded by a red sun. His ears would fill again with the red wail of childhood, sirens and whistles, slap of bat against ball, the ice cream wagon, children screaming into sun, a special eruption.

“The surgery isn’t healing,” Francine repeated. “He wants to die. He can’t stand the tubes. If it doesn’t heal, they can’t remove the tubes. He’s got no way to eat.”

“The tubes could be permanent?” I asked, gasped. I thought of my father with a red plastic tube positioned securely in his nose, a red tusk, an experiment, part elephant.

“Or worse.”

Francine lit a cigarette. Two orderlies pushed a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. The man was screaming. Blood had collected in a perfect red puddle on his thigh. The emergency room door swung shut.

“He wants to commit suicide. Death with honor, he called it.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, die? How can you die? You want me to bring you sleeping pills for an OD number? You’ll have to get rid of the feeding tubes in your nose first. Maybe that will give you something to live for.”

“What do you think?” someone asked. It couldn’t have been me. I was gone. Something remained behind, white and numb, asking questions as if they mattered, as if explanations mattered, as if the horror could be labeled.

“He’s in a bad depression,” Francine said. “If the tubes don’t come out, do you blame him?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I saw the surgeon twice,” Francine said. “He’s going to try a skin graft. Take skin from his legs and shoulders. Hope the new skin will grow over and close the wound. He called it a patch.”

“Quaint,” I said. I thought of patchwork quilts. I thought of warrior tribes that skinned their enemies alive.

“Patch, my ass,” Francine said. “I told him to get the old man out of bed.”

I thought of something terrible. When my mind touched it, my mind emptied and went blank. It was like waking up and staring at an enormous white iceberg. I felt cold, disoriented and strangely small. I sucked in my breath.

“What if the skin graft doesn’t work? If he doesn’t get the tubes out he can’t commit suicide.”

“I’ve considered that,” Francine said. “Worse comes to worse, we pick the old man up and throw him out the window.”

There was no time in my father’s room. The blinds were drawn. The air seemed a special glistening gray, seasonless, the color of waiting.

AM A LEMON, my father had scrawled on his pad. He picked the pad up and waved it in my mother’s direction. “Stop it,” Francine told him. AM A LOSER. ITS HOPELESS.

Francine walked to the window. “Look,” she screamed, pointing at the windowpane. “A private room with a view. The most technologically advanced conditions. Five hundred forty dollars a day. A day.”

My father closed his eyes. He turned his face away from the window.

“Hold your ticket,” Francine said to my father, her voice softer. “It’s a photo finish. Anything can happen.”

CANT STAND TUBES.

“The tubes are temporary,” Francine said quickly. She began to pace.

WHAT IF????

“If the tubes stay?” Francine stared down at my father. “If the skin graft doesn’t work? If they can’t make a new throat for you? Then we’ll pick you up and throw you out the window.”

Something was struggling near my father’s lips. I think he was trying to smile.

“Are you in pain?” It was the first thing I had said. “I’ll get you morphine.”

NO FRIGGIN DRUGS, my father wrote. He looked at me, his eyes black pits, the gateways of deep tunnels. He seemed to think of something and forget it, all at once. He sank back small and coiled, a white bundle in a white crib.

Francine pulled the blinds open. Overnight the lawn below had erupted with small star-shaped white buds and yellow daisies. There was a sense of dew in the new shoots.

“Can’t you take some joy in spring?” Francine asked.

FUCK SPRING.

“Not in your condition,” Francine assured him.

WANT 2 DIE.

Francine glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a budget conference in Century City. A whole day of wall-to-wall assholes. I’ll come back later.”

She bent down and kissed my father on a small corner of unbandaged skin, just to the side of his red plastic feeding tube. She pointed to me. “Read him the newspaper. Find something grotesque. Mass murders, a 747 collision. Something to give him a sense of perspective.”

My father had closed his eyes. He didn’t open them until Francine left the room.

I searched the front page for something exciting. An earthquake in South America killing twenty or thirty thousand and leaving a million starving and homeless. A train plowing into a stalled school bus. A hurricane, a drought. I found a story about a twenty-one-year-old college football star losing his fight against cancer.

AGAIN.

I read the story again. I glanced at my father. He was staring at the ceiling.

AGAIN WITH DRAMATIC EMPHASIS.

I read the story a third time, taking appropriate pauses, making certain sentences leap out of my mouth, small plumed birds with a life of their own. And I thought, go fly off, find treetops, build strong nests, drift intoxicated eating berries and blue air.

KID PULLED A BAD HAND, my father wrote. He paused, the pen gripped between his fingers. like me. He dropped his felt-tipped pen to the floor. A tear slid out of his eye and careened down his cheek. It disappeared in the cotton wrapped around his neck.

My father was lying very still. Outside the window the lawn nodded rows of small white heads, sun-dazed buds, petals intricate, looking knitted.

“You know, you’re betraying your own philosophy,” I began, searching for and somehow finding Francine’s tone. I felt myself almost assuming her stance, legs planted wide apart, one tapered arm on her hip. “All those years after the first cancer. The twenty years I was growing up. You always said life was a grab bag, a sweepstakes. Live every minute because there are no guarantees.”

My father seemed to be watching the sunlight reluctantly dragging itself through the Venetian blinds. I thought he was listening.

“You taught me that, Daddy. I remember. We still lived together. We had just come out here, the same time as the Dodgers. It was before Chavez Ravine. Remember? We watched them play at the Coliseum. I remember the whole team, Daddy. Snyder, Hodges, Wally Moon, Gilliam, Charlie Neal, Roseboro. We had Koufax and Drysdale then.”

NOTHING TEAM.

“I know. I’m just remembering when we lived together. You sat in the backyard at night, watering the peach tree and listening to the blue jays. You were always out there watching something. The yard. The sky. You were just glad to be alive. You took a joy in everything.”

THOUGHT I HAD IT LICKED FOREVER, my father wrote. I held his hand. After a while he closed his eyes.

I walked into the corridor. I needed a cigarette. I usually smoked in an alcove directly across the corridor from where the morphine was kept. Whenever I lit a cigarette, a nurse or doctor would suddenly appear at my shoulder and tell me no one on the third floor smoked, from the head doctor through the floor sweepers. They saw what cancer was, saw it every day.

What was cancer, anyway? It was ancient as the hills, the stones, original sin. It spawned in the morning of factory whistles, iron and coal and steel and gray stone blocks, streetcars, black scars of train tracks like black rows of stitches.

Perhaps the wild cancer cells had taken for their pattern the spoiled horizon, the low thick banks of poisonous clouds, the slow rivers absolutely dead beneath soap bubbles, rusting tin cans and old bottles. Perhaps it was the final legacy of generations born with chips of bronze in their lungs, the soot from chimneys and city curbs. Was it surprising that the body erupted, spewing contagion?

I lit a cigarette. I imagined the disease blowing like a red volcano in the center of my father’s throat. It grew like the sagebrush and yucca, the natural vegetation of the Los Angeles basin. Perhaps it gained entry through pores and pushed roots in, tentative at first and then taking hold, gripping the soft flesh linings and opening buds. The doctor said it was growing inside him for two years. Two years he walked with it, slept with it, ate and fed it. For two years he lived with a seedling death crop pushing up stalks inside him. Two years of it spewing cells in a mad fuck of death.

Suddenly I realized that he must have sensed it, some faint taste of webbing, some shadowy perception of inhabitation. He hid it. He wore it like a special jewel inside, a small sun, a tight little secret that warmed him. He must have felt the thorns in his cheeks and tongue and the splinters as the seedling pod exploded. Perhaps he sensed the invasion and bent into its special warmth and radiance after a decade of loneliness.

Once the gray-haired man was sage. But my father spent his gray-haired years alone. I went to Berkeley with Gerald. I crouched half dead in Venice with Jason. And my father turned gray as the storm that spends itself above a gray sea, two hundred miles from landfall spilling its promise into indifferent gray waves. He aged. His tribe disintegrated, savaged by the place called Los Angeles and the events that just happened, the things called fate and chance.

“I’m hip to Francine,” I remembered my father explaining. It was the night before he went to the hospital. It was the night I found him collapsed on his kitchen floor. “We were both hipsters, your mother and I. She was some kind of sixteen-year-old street bum. I was thirty-five. I knew it couldn’t go on forever. The cancer blew it. Upset the balance.

“And she was crazy. I always knew that. Like uncentered, out of kilter. She picked me up on a street corner, hustling dinners. I told her you’re one tired kid. You’re six months out of a whorehouse. She believed me. She saw I had savvy. I said, I’ll marry you, kid. What the hell? Any port in a storm, right?

“She had a father thing, a complex from being deserted. When I got sick the first time, she had to quit being a kid. That’s what she was, too. A kid. Playing house with you all day.

“She took it personally when I got sick. I can see her point. We were gamblers. She took a flier and won big. Still, for such a big winner she’s really pathetic,” my father said that night before he entered the hospital, the night he was drinking bourbon from the bottle, the night the world began crashing down.

“I’ll never forget the first time,” Francine told me once. “They were wheeling him into surgery. He looked up and said, sorry, kid. Don’t look back. Keep your shoulders squared and keep going. As they pushed him into the operating room, he reached out and grabbed my ass. They wheeled him in laughing.”

I began walking down the corridor. Everywhere a muted insistent humming clung to the layers of slow-moving fluids drip, drip, dripping through bottles and tubes. Patients were hidden behind greenish shadows, their blinds pulled closed. The slow fluids oozed. The televisions stuck high in the walls leaked their soft radioactive blue glow, a kind of death lash.

I could almost understand their dreams. They lie plugged in, rooms dim, and imagine their poor ruined flesh has finally fallen off and they are at last dry of all the human rot. They wish to dry even thinner, thin as the skin of fish, but something catches them. They fight back then, fight the taut string and the sensation of hanging. They taste salt and a terrible yearning for the cracking spines of waves poised like sentries guarding the sea gates and chimes, the soft channel down into spinning purple. Finality. The sea floor.

I peeked into my father’s doorway. He was sleeping. I crossed the corridor quickly, trying not to look into the room where the morphine trays sat. I told myself I could pass the room and feel nothing, feel nothing.

In the hospital cafeteria the light was sharp and white and the whole world was a kind of bas-relief. A large round clock was fastened to the wall above my shoulder, a device implanted surgically in plaster. I heard it ticking/breathing. Hours passed.

Francine walked in. She had changed clothing. She was wearing a white tennis skirt. Her legs were long, tanned. A doctor watched her walk. A busboy froze as she passed.

“You look at my tennis racket like a personal offense,” Francine observed. She sat down. She brought her face very close to mine. Her eyes were agate, flecked and somehow windy.

“You don’t know anything, kid. One thing I’ve learned from all this is to live while you can. Fred knows that. He’s a very vital man. He should be. He’s only forty.”

I was thinking about the clock embedded in the wall, permanently wide-eyed and somehow accountable.

“You look terrible,” Francine observed.

I almost smiled. Our interaction had become stylized. We spoke by analogy, by nuances so coded and odd we reinforced our alienation with each breath. We spun in the same old cruel circles.

Once I left Gerald during a particularly virulent period of our life. The National Guard was stationed on the street corners of Berkeley. They slept in tents three blocks from our apartment. The men wore uniforms. They carried rifles with bayonets. They rode in special army trucks. The city resembled newsreels of World War II in Europe. A banner saying WELCOME TO OCCUPIED PRAGUE was strung across the front of our apartment house.

Gerald and I had been fighting all week. I think we still slept in the same bed then. I seem to remember his back, white by the streetlamp glow.

“Is it me?” I kept asking him. I was sitting up and rocking myself in the darkness. “Why don’t you go to a doctor? Why don’t you just try?” And rocking in the darkness thinking he should do it, why isn’t he doing it, trial and error, the scientific method, what the hell was the matter? Gerald wasn’t even playing by his own rules anymore.

“You don’t fully appreciate cosmic rhythms. Be patient,” Gerald said to the wall. He sounded disappointed and tired.

Patient, I thought. Patient? And I walked into the living room. Slowly, deliberately, as if dusting, I picked up our lamp and let it fall to the floor. The pottery base shattered.

Gerald stormed into the room. He was wearing white jockey shorts. He always wore white jockey shorts like a white bandage. He looked somehow antiseptic, protected from thighs to waist. His hidden parts were safe, coiled tight, a small white secret. A secret that no longer seemed to matter.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded. He was staring at the fragments of what had once been our lamp. He touched the splinters with his foot. His lips twisted, as if tasting something terribly sour. Gerald hated waste.

Gerald was studying anthropology then. He was sitting on the brown sofa reading Claude Lévi-Strauss. I was interrupting him, placing obstacles in his path, the sacred quest for knowledge.

He ignored me. His white fingers moved slowly along the edges of the white pages. He was telling me silently with his shoulders and hands to leave him alone, just leave him alone. I watched his shoulders slump further into shadow. His left hand curled into a fist. Trembling and breathless, I persisted.

“There’s something wrong with you,” I screamed finally, feeling hollow.

Gerald let his book shut. Flap. A small white bird. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make love with me, his Las Vegas Palace of Marriage certified lawful bride, he explained. It was that he didn’t want to. There was a vital distinction there. It wasn’t a case of physical or emotional illness or weakness. There was no mind-body dichotomy.

It was a philosophical issue, a matter of his right to exercise free will. I was wrong. I had no sense of the ebb and flow of things. And who ordained that sex be a primary part of a relationship, anyway? I insisted only because of my middle-class American orientation, the Madison Avenue constructs that littered my brain like rat droppings.

I thought of my brain as an empty gray corridor strewn with land mines and hand grenades, fragmentation bombs, napalm. Gerald was still talking. It was late at night. He was facing the wall, his back to me, a white slab, a cliff, icy, untouchable. Americans made a mania of a simple inconsequential biological function. The Trobriand Islanders and Samoans weren’t like that. The natives of Saturn weren’t like that. Where was my anthropological sense?

“I thought you had potential once,” Gerald pronounced sadly into the darkness. “But you’re just like the others, waving their fat ugly breasts like leeches. You have to know the sand in order to exhaust it. Deaf men don’t retreat.”

I tried to get to the airport in the morning. I tried to get to the airport again in the afternoon. Each attempt left me exhausted. Classes had been suspended. I didn’t know where Gerald was. There were curfews. Six people had been shot. Helicopters were dropping clouds of CS gas. I was carrying my suitcase through streets blocked by the National Guard, through troop trucks and demonstrators, police, paddy wagons and dazed housewives. Parts of the city were sealed off by soldiers marching shoulder to shoulder, like a gigantic gray sausage slowly undulating forward, bayonets jutting from their rifles. I could see the sunlight glancing off their bayonets.

“You look terrible,” Francine told me at the airport. “And those shoes are a bad joke.”

I stared at my feet. I had never seriously considered the topic of shoe styles. I thought about primate social behavior, kinship designations and creation myths. I started crying.

Now I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria. The Formica tables were a pale yellow. We were drinking coffee from styrofoam cups.

“You hate my tennis racket, I can see that,” Francine said. “Do you want me collapsed? A hag in black? You got black in your eyes, kid. I got news for you. I keep going. I do more in a day than you do in a year.”

“What are the odds on the skin graft?”

“Good,” Francine said. “If the graft works the tubes go out. Then he gets to go home at some point.”

Home was the pastel house in West Los Angeles, the rooms sturdy, purposeful. Home was the black grapes growing wild at sunset in the shadows along the bamboo gate. Home was six P.M. Time for a shot of bourbon with the news.

I looked at Francine. She was balancing a hand mirror in her palm. She was putting on a reddish lipstick. I realized my head was nodding slowly, back and forth, making a kind of circle. I touched my forehead. I felt I needed a big white bandage wrapped across my head. A bandage to keep the jagged pieces from pushing out.

This is real, I thought, jolted by it. This is actually happening. It begins without warning. One lives as one has always lived, waking to an empty yellow morning, the sun a hammer. One pokes a dull head through a gray haze. A call is made. Someone says, Go to your father. He’s sick. He needs you. And suddenly there are two of you. One is small and terrified, a child who cries, don’t leave me, Daddy, I’m only six, Daddy, still sweeping leaves off the fall pavement in front of the gray stone house waiting for your car, waiting with Mommy. And you are waving, back again from building houses, paint spots on your pant legs, your toolbox full.

And there are two of you. Two of you sitting under a strange gouged metal eye planted in the wall. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. One is small, coiled up inside, hiding, screaming, Don’t die, Daddy. Don’t die. They’ll call me a woman if you die, not a little girl.

And the other body moves. The other finds the father slumped in his kitchen crying, angry and bitter, already half broken. It’s cancer, he says. It’s cancer again. And the whole world stalls.

“Fred and I really connect. I mean this guy is something else.” Francine leaned toward me. “He’s got a faster recovery rate in bed than a twenty-year-old. Meanwhile I’m letting him put me into energy.”

“Energy?”

“Alternative fuel sources. You know, Colette got very rich at the end. Stock tips. She knew certain men in government,” Francine mused.

“The skin graft,” I began. “Maybe if he sees the skin graft is working. Maybe he’s just preparing himself to die. Maybe he doesn’t believe he’s going to live.”

“Maybe,” Francine said cautiously.

Things lay unanswered between us. Debris collected in the small corridor of white air where our shoulders almost brushed. Something hung suspended. Three floors above, my father lay suspended, undecided about living or dying.

“Let’s look at the babies,” Francine suggested.

We rode the elevator to the fourth floor. We stood in front of the viewing window where the daily crop of newborn infants were displayed, wrapped in white and perfect, their tiny fingers curled like the petals of certain utterly white orchids.

“Your father and I wanted this for you,” Francine said. She looked sad. “Was it such a terrible dream to have? That you’d marry someone? Form bonds with meaning? Let a child grow from your love?” Francine studied me. “I loved being a mother, remember?”

And it was Philadelphia in winter. Snow fell soft, crystalline, a fine layer of white gauze sealing us together. Logs burned in the fireplace. Francine was reading poetry out loud. She was baking an apple pie. I was given my own slab of dough, my own small pie tin. We made a big pie and a little one. Sometimes Daddy ate mine. Mother was ironing. I ironed handkerchiefs and napkins while she ironed Daddy’s shirts. We were waiting for Daddy to come home, to make the house warm, make Mommy laugh, make us safe for the night. And Daddy was pulling off his dark wool winter coat. He was standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing his hands, the room smelling of turpentine and soap, a dash of hand lotion, a sense of meat in the smoke.

“Your father would have liked a grandchild. He would have been good with a kid. He loved children, remember?”

When I remember my childhood it is always winter. My father is shoveling snow. My father is a big dark bundle in the center of the blizzard-sheeted street. We are dragging my sled through the snow. The sky is a net of whittled branches. My father is pulling me to the top of hills. In a vacant lot we find a stream. I dream rafts, barges, harbors. And I’m sliding through snow and laughing.

Beyond the viewing window the babies were slowly swaying in their identical white cribs, responding to an inner tide. First one, and then another, like a row of white dominoes. Francine was tapping her hand on the glass.

“You probably can’t even have one now, after all the drugs,” she said. She let herself shudder.