Lithium for Medea

17

“You better get here fast.” Francine’s voice was tight and absolutely sober. I was seized by a sense of horror. The horror was a pile of enormous bricks. The bricks were falling on my head.

“Tell me.” I was already looking on the floor for my jeans. I willed my legs to keep moving, just keep moving while I paced the small hallway in front of my bedroom. Morning was a blank haze. I had gray pebbles for eyes. I didn’t think I was going to make it. The cliff ended, a sheer drop.

“He’s in terrible pain. Terrible. They can’t even pour water into him. He’s crazy from the pain.” Francine paused. Then she said, “They put him in a strait jacket.”

I felt something like an electrical shock. It began at my toes and surged through my entire body. A cold rush. A mainlining of ice. A sensation of small things crawling and hopping in my bloodstream. Goose bumps appeared in a sudden flush across my arms. I felt my hair rising from my scalp. Then I screamed. The scream began somewhere in the blank hazy distance. It took a long time to weave from my toes and finally tumble out black from my mouth. After a while I realized I had dropped the telephone. I picked it up.

All I said was, “What?”

“They don’t know what the pain is from. But he pulled out the tubes. Yanked them out. They found him in the middle of the night. He was shadowboxing in the corridor.” Francine lowered her voice. She took a deep breath. “It took four nurses to put him back in bed. In restraints.”

Dogs were barking on Howland Canal. I heard a man shouting, “Did you hear it? Some lady screaming?”

Francine began to cry. “It’s horrible. He’s slipping. He’s dying. Help me, please.”

“I’m coming.”

Jason was sitting up in my bed. “I demand an explanation,” he said, angry and still half asleep.

I was looking for my car keys. I moved towels and skirts from one corner of the floor to another with my foot. I was pulling on a blouse. I realized that somewhere along the line I must have lost my incentive for keeping a house neat and sparkling clean. I found my car keys on the floor under my shoes. My shoes were under a beach towel and an overturned ashtray. I paused in the bedroom doorway.

“I need you tonight. I haven’t asked you for anything in a long time. Wait for me at your place. Promise me.”

Jason stared at the sheet over his feet. “Give me an explanation first.”

“I can’t now. Just be there.” I looked directly at him.

Then I was walking into the blank early morning haze. The grass in the front yards along Eastern Canal seemed damp. The air was pale and thin. Not the air of earth at all but some other, smaller world with an ancient decaying sun. A world where it was always a stripped dawn. A woman stood on a porch near the alley. “You hear that screaming?” she asked me.

I shook my head no and walked to my car. The rush hour traffic engulfed me like a cold gray wave.

The hospital loomed enormous, five stories of neo-Spanish grayish walls poked into the blank morning. The building itself looked cold. The morning seemed fragile, somehow slippery.

Francine met me in the parking lot. She was sheet white. Her hands trembled. I suddenly realized that the woman who was my mother smelled somehow old, vaguely dusty, musky. Beyond the flush of youth a sense of something else, a kind of ripening. Or more. A sense of decay?

“He was shadowboxing in the corridor,” Francine began. She stopped. “This is the worst thing that’s happened to me since the mice fell on my head. I lived in a foster home where they locked the refrigerator. I was only allowed in the kitchen to clean. I slept in a room where I knew there were mice. I could hear them in the sewing machine. Then one night the ceiling fell down on me. Pieces of plaster and mice. Mice running all over my head, the bed. I wasn’t really surprised.” Francine smiled. “I knew all along there were mice in that room.”

We were riding in the elevator. We were walking down the gray expanse of narrow corridor on the third floor past the portals where the dying lay in fine greenish layers of shadow while the fluids slowly bubbled and oozed and the sunlight fell slow and measured through Venetian blinds and the philodendrons dreamed dark green dreams on the nightstands, dreams of impossible stalks, vines winding into cloud, the sky green, green.

“He says he can’t go on. The tubes. The pain. He told me, wrote me on his pad, he was going to jump off the balcony.”

I noticed a certain chill in the corridor, something cool clinging to the tiles and enamel walls. I shivered.

It was important to be precise. “What did the doctor say?”

“He’s staying pat. Says the skin graft is going to work.”

“What about now?”

“We give him the will to go on,” Francine answered immediately.

She stopped near my father’s room. The door was closed. A sign had been taped to the wood: no visitors. I had seen that sign on the doors of the half-dead, the pasty skeletons curled in greenish shadows while their life ebbed. I saw the no visitors sign tacked to doors just before the chaplain came. Just before the whole family suddenly appeared out of nowhere with the last bouquets, enormous arrangements featuring carnations and roses. Just before families appeared laden with grotesque baskets of fruit and boxes of chocolates. My mother’s hands were shaking.

“I asked him what kind of funeral he wanted. He said just bury him with his spikes on. He also wants to wear a 1927 Yankee baseball cap. He’s got one somewhere. You go in,” Francine said. Her eyes were very dark, very wide. She seemed to be gasping for air. “Maybe he’ll be better with you.”

I opened the door. My father was hooked up to oxygen again. The IV was back, taped and embedded in his hand. The skin on his arms was an unusual mottled yellow, his twenty-year California suntan collapsing in uneven streaks. The blinds were drawn. He was back on morphine. He watched me approach his bed through pitch-black too wide eyes.

DONT WANT THIS. He wrote the note with his left hand. His right hand had the IV. The note was an ugly black scrawl.

“You don’t want the hospital?” I was terrified. “Are you in pain? Do you want a shot?”

DONT WANT THIS STINKING LIFE. My father shoved the note at me.

I was standing near his bed unmoving, oddly frozen. I was a slab of ice bobbing in a cold empty stretch of too blue too deep sea. I felt my mother enter the room. Somewhere through a cold haze I saw my mother square her thin shoulders. She glanced down at my father’s notes. Then she walked across the room and pulled the blinds open. My father averted his face from the sudden rush of sunlight as if the sunlight hurt, a kind of yellow slap.

“You don’t want life?” Francine demanded. “Some example you set for your daughter.” My mother was pacing the small room. She crossed it, touched the window with her fingertips like a swimmer making contact with the poolside, and crossed the room again, another completed lap.

“You should have thought of that sooner. You wanted life plenty before the operation. What is this? A suicide threat?” She leaned over. She picked up my father’s note and studied it as if it were written in code. “Suicide? After the mice jumped on my head? After the things that happened to me? And her?” My mother pointed to me. “You would set that kind of example for your daughter? You know this kid is sick already.”

CANT STAND THIS. My father handed me the note. For a moment I considered the possibility that he might be talking about Francine.

“You weren’t expecting a picnic, were you? Remember the first time?” Francine asked. “It was worse. The cobalt. Remember? You don’t remember. The mind forgets. You’ll get better. Trust me.”

My father pointed at Francine. Then he pointed at the door. My mother stared at him.

“I think he wants you to leave,” I suggested. “Get some coffee downstairs.”

I sat down lightly on my father’s bed. I could see the outline of his body beneath the sheet. His legs were thickly bandaged where skin had been removed from his thighs. The red plastic feeding tube was still attached to his nose. Three times a day a nurse held the feeding tube in her hand and poured in a thick brownish liquid from a jar. They didn’t even call it eating. “Time for your feeding,” they would say. Feeding, as if he were a dog or a plant.

My father was looking down at the gray tiled floor. Maybe he was tracing the pattern the sun made spilling lazy, slowly swaying and uncurling. My father closed his eyes.

“Daddy, what happened? They said you were shadowboxing in the corridor last night. They put you in a strait jacket?” I handed my father his pad. I handed my father his felt-tipped pen.

DONT REM. FRIGGING DRUGS? SAW DEATH GOT UP?

“You saw death? You got out of bed?”

FIGHT BASTARD BIG.

“Death’s big?”

My father nodded his head. His eyes seemed a kind of black liquid.

“But you saw death before. The first time around. You lived through it, remember?”

He had lived twenty years waiting for it to recur, waiting for the black ambush.

But he had found a way of coping. He played horses in the sunlight. He sat near a water fountain in front of the outside odds board, mountains in the background, Santa Anita. He watched the odds board lights flicker and the water falling, butterflies brushing their wings against the spray, the odds changing, a bed of orange and purple pansies like a circle of bruises around the round fountain with the names of the champions engraved on the sides. Native Diver. Round Table. Swaps. Omaha. Man o’ War.

The sun would be setting above the bamboo garden gate. My father would read the form sheet for the next day. He sat on a chaise longue at dusk with the form sheet across his lap and the wild black grapes rustling, slowly growing near the side of the house. The house would be a pale yellow pastel lost in the pastel twilight. He would bring out the radio. The Dodgers would play while he hosed the apricot tree and the lemon tree and the orange tree. And they would breed for him.

And his daughter? In the distance, through pastel layers, his daughter grew into a strained and crippled womanhood. A senseless womanhood. My life was a stain. Did he see it as a retribution and blame himself?

I picked up his hand. I wanted to say forgive me for failing you. Forgive me for giving you no grandchildren, no son-in-law. My father had longed for a son-in-law, a regular guy, he called it, a regular guy who would call him up to go for a pastrami sandwich and watch a fight. Instead I gave him Gerald. Instead I gave him Jason.

I gave my father nothing, not even the sense that he could leave me safely flowing in time, once a daughter and then a mother. I had spent my girlhood wearing a secret sneer inside. No one came with corsages. No crisp introductions to fine upright young men who knew how to bring a fifth of Scotch with them and planned on becoming dentists or building contractors and marrying me.

I brought him the blue denim brigade. I brought him foot soldiers from the revolution, the crusaders of the new order. They were scarred by visions of irredeemable hells. Or the other, some green-wooded Mendocino paradise of redwood branches and leaves falling across the insides of their eyes and remaining embedded there forever.

I had ignored his firm history. I had labeled his experience irrelevant. It meant no more to me than the rubber plants growing along the back gate or the shower of bougainvillaea above the barbecue. And he watched in the pastel distance as I slipped away into my darkness and wild manias. My teen-age years were a blood clot of savage unnecessary rage. He must have sensed this.

My father’s hand was thin, sculpted to the bone. What was he thinking?

“You got up to fight death off?” My father nodded. “I’m proud of you, Daddy. You fought death off man to man. You did the right thing. Primitive people, people in tribes, get up to shout and jab out the evil spirits. You did a natural thing. Don’t be ashamed.”

AM DYING.

I had never seen him so pale. His hands, suntanned from years of sitting at Southern California race tracks, where it is always hot and sunny and the track is always fast and even cripples run six in 1:10 and change, were ashen now. His chin was a frosted gray. White hairs pushed out from the bandages between the feeding tube and the green tube attached to the metal thing embedded in his throat.

I remembered that my father had boxed as a young man. It was before he married my mother. It belonged to the time when he rode trains around the country, working a few months in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and pushing on again, searching for something. Did he ever find it?

“I don’t think you’re dying,” I said softly. “I believe that you had your confrontation with death last night. You got up on your feet and fought death off. I think you beat it.”

WAS STUPID. STATISTICALLY HAD LIVED ALMOST FULL LIFE. WAS STUPID 2 SUBMIT 2 THIS. SHOULD HAVE ENDED IT ALL MYSELF.

Slowly, he closed his eyes and sank back against the pillow. He seemed to drift and doze.

There was a smell in the corridor. It was chilly but stale. There was a sense of something sweet slowly rotting. The chill. I thought of the rusty hull of a burned and abandoned ship. I thought of furnished rooms with threadbare brown rugs stained and stinking of old cigarette butts and whiskey. Rooms with the windows shut and bolted for weeks. I thought of drought air, a hot swirl across brittle dirt.

I walked quickly. I did not let myself look through the doors into the green cubicles, the human aquariums where vines twisted in the shadows and built slow webs with clawed fingers and called to them, Come down, come down. Surrender. It’s cool and green here. It’s better. Be one with the green vine and green shadow. Be one with the gouged hole in the earth. It’s better. Your skin is illusion. You can shed it like an old coat. Come to me. Be one and cool and green with me. It is your bone I want.

I did not turn around. I knew death was standing in that corridor directly behind my left shoulder.

“He’s dying,” Francine said.

I sat down at her side in the cafeteria. My mother’s yellow-brown eyes were filled with tiny black flecks. Now the black lines in her eyes seemed to be blowing. She was wearing the debris of a terrible storm inside her.

“He’s dying,” Francine repeated. “The room smells of death,” she said dully.

“He’s not dying. That’s why he got up. He fought death off. The crisis is passing.” Francine did not answer me. She looked unconvinced. I went on. “There are forces that can be tapped. He plugged into one when he fought death off.”

Francine studied me. “Your timing is way off,” she noted. “Settle down. You’re in this one. You’ve been dealt in. You got in when I decided to make you born. Are you following me? He didn’t want you.” Francine lit a cigarette. I stared at her. “He wanted to live that crummy life style forever. Riding trains. Wake up in Baltimore. Get on a train. Ride to Belmont. Go to a fight at the Garden. Get on a train. Wake up in Philadelphia. Go to a baseball game. Eat lunch in Washington.” Francine shook her head from side to side.

“He thought I’d go on like that forever. Like my childhood wasn’t bad enough. Like I needed more dislocations. I never had a home.” My mother studied me in the sharp white hospital light. “I’d already had two abortions. He thought kids would slow him down, cramp his style. He thought I wasn’t ready to be a mother. That’s what he kept saying. I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t grown up enough, he used to say. He said I didn’t know how to be a mother. So I finally said it’s this kid or I’m walking. He knew I meant it by then. You taking this in?”

I nodded my head. I was thinking about my father shadowboxing death in the corridor. He must have felt death leaning over. He must have felt the cool green breath. And he stood up. He squared up against it, man to man. Death was big. But my father was still breathing.

“You’re in this one no matter what,” Francine was saying. “I mean you’ll bring his food to him, if he ever eats again. If they build him a new throat. If he lives through this. If he gets the tubes out. If the skin graft works. Are you following me?”

“Yes.”

“I mean you’ll sit by his bed. You’ll talk to him. You’ll do whatever it takes. We will give him the will to go on. So I’m telling you straight. Pick up your cards and play.”

I was six years old. I took piano lessons after school. I collected clay models of dinosaurs. I collected butterflies. I was fascinated by transformations. But something terrible was happening. My father spent entire days in bed. She brought him lunch on a tray. I had a sense that my father, that big man, was turning back into a little boy. He wasn’t talking right. He was whispering. He was thinning. He didn’t drive his car anymore. He sat in mother’s seat while mother drove the car. He went away every day for the cobalt treatment. And what was cobalt? Why, cobalt was blue, a kind of blue machine, a sort of gun they aimed at my father’s throat. It made him throw his food on the floor, rasping, It tastes like garbage, garbage.

And Mommy was leaning against the front door crying. She was watching the strangers walk across the street, the strangers who came and carted away her brass lamps and the new china plates. The sofa was gone. The big glass and wood cabinet in the dining room where she kept the plates was gone. In school I was learning colors. Nobody had time to look at my red apples, my yellow bananas and green trees. Daddy wore an old gray wool bathrobe. He was cold all the time. Mommy was crying.

“Something has happened to Daddy,” Mommy said. We were in her bed together. Daddy was gone. Mommy’s eyes were stained red from crying. “Daddy’s gone to the hospital.” Did I know what a hospital was? “When he comes back he won’t be the same,” my mother told me. “He’ll have to rest for a long time. He will talk funny.”

“Funny?” I asked. I was lying in bed with my mother, in the big bed Mommy and Daddy slept in together. Funny? Daddy was always funny. He watched me play with my clay models. He came into my bedroom and pretended to be a dinosaur. He hunched his shoulders and swooped me up. He watched me study my butterflies. He spread his arms wide and pretended he had wings. We both spread our arms and pretended we had wings and ran down the street breaking fallen red leaves with our feet. We were laughing.

“Funny,” Mommy said again. “Like Billy.”

Billy was twelve. He lived across the street. He had been born deaf. When he talked the words sounded painful and deformed. Everyone said he talked like that because he ate worms. I thought about my father talking like Billy. Would everybody say my father ate worms? I stood up. I stared at my mother. She was watching me from the bed. She was reaching out her arms for me. I thought about my father talking like Billy. Then I fainted.

“We’ll get the tests back today. It might be his gall bladder,” Francine said. “He can’t take another surgery now. We may have to make a decision.”

“About pulling the plugs?”

Francine stared down at the table. She nodded her head. She was biting her lip.

Slowly I managed to stand up. The world had broken down into still frames.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I’ve been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem. “I want to go home now,” I tell my father. He is looking down at the big green field. “But the game hasn’t started yet,” he says. Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. “O.K., kid. O.K.” And he takes me by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

I sit under a tree. Horses pass in front of me. It is Delaware Park. My father is whispering to me. “Pick one,” he whispers. I watch the horses pass, enormous near my face. I point to a gigantic grayish beast. My father tells me to sit by the tree. “Just a small flier,” he tells Francine. She is angry. In the car on the way home she doesn’t speak to my father. She leans against the car window, crying. From time to time she says, “Jesus Christ. A hundred bucks. Jesus Christ. You went for the whole goddamn hundred.”

My father goes away on the train. It’s a holiday. He doesn’t have to go to work. He waves to me from the train. He’s going to the race track in New York. He comes back late at night. He is laughing. He walks into the old kitchen. He takes out a pocketful of green bills. He throws them on the table like cards. My mother and father are laughing. “Buy a hat,” my father tells my mother. “Buy that coat you saw downtown.” My father puts his arms around both of us. He hugs us so tight I think we’ll break.

He hunches up his shoulders and swoops me up. I ride on his shoulders. He makes his arms go out wide at his sides like wings. He carries me that way all through the house.

“Where are you going?” Francine asked. Her face seemed broken, pale, unsolid.

“To take my best shot,” I said. I kept walking.

It was morning, still before noon. The sky was a sheer blue. The haze had lifted. The day was becoming strangely hot. It seemed a wind was somewhere beginning. I had a sense of being watched.

When I came home, Jason was gone. I could still smell my father, the chill, the sense of rotting fibers in the cobalt-scarred flesh refusing to heal on my father’s butchered neck. I could still breathe in a sense of blood, contamination and evil, evil.

The telephone rang. “The doctor just left his room,” Francine whispered. “He brought in a heart machine.” My mother took a deep breath. “The doctor said he may be slipping.”

“He’s going to live,” I told her. “The crisis is passing.”

I still felt chilled inside, felt my bones branching out in cold spokes sharp and blank as twigs in winter. Philadelphia in winter. The whittled branches. The mounds of soft snow pressing against the front door. Daddy finds his shovel and digs us out. A new channel. We are saved again. We are grateful. We watch Daddy drive away.

I sat down on my front porch. It was time to consider death. Death was clever. Death was a taker who left nothing, who even hid the bone. Death had great shadowy arms and shale breath. Death was big. It had teeth and wings. It left claw marks in the skin, torn-out flesh pockets and rows of black stitches, black stitches like train tracks in snow. It could make a big man into a boy. It could make a big man talk funny, talk wormy. And death would have to be considered now, in the slow noon before the world began to spin again into the black, sky filled with ink-squid blood stinking, seething and hungry to bury someone.

My father had pulled out his tubes. He had shadowboxed death in the middle-of-the-night hospital corridor. He had done battle alone. A force had been tapped into, a passageway perhaps inadvertently etched out. It still stirred. It stretched out enormous scale-encrusted arms. It had talons and fangs. It took bites out of the sick and helpless. It stank. Its breath was a dull wind on cobblestone alleys cut between ruins of buildings, narrow ruts of stone streets smelling from the piss of a thousand generations of beggars and cripples and lepers.

A door had been opened. It would have to be closed.