No, he told himself. The man was done.
He took ten dollars out of his thin wallet (a monumental sum from the pocket of a pauper), folded it against his railing conscious, and slipped it gently underneath the sleeping man’s palm. And even though Ebenezer never stirred, his hand clutched instinctively at the money. Then Billy turned and walked out the door, trying to beat the morning home.
Chapter 5
Billy went to his mother’s house the next day. It was the first time he’d graced her entrance in over four months. Their relationship had always been stormy and when Bill Sr. died five years ago, Billy had found it increasingly hard to be alone in the house with her. It brought back too many memories: the smell of his father’s pipe when he was a kid, before Nora had steadfastly beaten the man of the habit; the warm cordiality his father had shown both family and friend, regardless of his mood or an earlier tongue-lashing dealt out for some supposed lapse of judgement. And, of course, there was always the last memory: standing at the foot of his father’s bed, scarcely believing the enormity of the moment, staring at the calm, dead face before him as Nora continued with her endless chatter. Dead of a heart attack while napping during a college football game. He had been fifty-six years old.
But Billy had not gone to see Nora; Elizabeth was the reason for the visit. She’d checked herself out of the hospital the day before and paid for a cab to bring her home; their mother continuing to follow her usual course in hard times by professing some undisclosed ‘illness’. Over the phone that morning, Nora had tried to explain to Billy how the shock had simply been unbearable, and surely no one would expect her to risk an accident with Elizabeth. “’I called your apartment,’” he recalled her saying, a faint brisk callousness weaving through the phone line to his ears, “’but you weren’t in. Where were you?’”
Billy had avoided the question with silence. It was just another attempt by Nora at righteousness, but now, especially now, her quota had been used up. Billy knew it and he felt Elizabeth did too. And Billy felt somewhere deep inside, Nora knew it also because she’d sufficed to let the silence stand torture enough, no longer willing to pursue the forbidding trail with her former dogged persistence.
But the seeds she’d planted and tended carefully over the years proved nonetheless persistent. Their poisonous insinuation of his own neglect brought to his mind an image of himself sitting in the bar, drinking with the old man until the small hours of the morning, and even upon reaching home how he’d unplugged the damned phone because he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed. Again and in familiar form, the guilt eased forward, taking the old, ingrained steps. He’d been trained well, but what he’d accomplished in his silence after his mother’s barbed question was a savage, logical counter-attack. He just could not give his mother the satisfaction she’d sought.
As he’d made his way over, he placated his guilt by reminding himself each person dealt with grief in purely individual ways. And there was still the reassuring fact that Elizabeth knew him; she would hold nothing against him as their mother would. This line of thought suddenly brought back the memory he’d experienced when Nora told him of Elizabeth’s prognosis; she’d called him ‘Billy.’ With his mother it had always been and would always be ‘William’ in any situation. Never ‘Billy.’ The way she used his formal name was intended to snap his backbone straight, to outright deny any attempt at rebuttal or opinion he might have or form. When she’d called him ‘Billy’ it threw him off. Suddenly her voice had been as devoid of power as a fading corn husk left to dry in the sun. And with this knowledge came the well-known accusatory finger pointing rakishly at his bare soul, asking in a voice oddly akin to the one that had raked him through all manner of coals with unfounded opinions over the years, why at the moment when his sister’s illness had been revealed had he instead come immediately, full-circle, back to himself and his own concerns? He had no answer.
He snuck into the house, using the key he’d carried since childhood, careful not to disturb his sleeping mother (he’d made a point to come at her prescribed and ritualized nap hour) as he crept down the hallway. He stood before the familiar closed door for several minutes before turning the knob and quietly slipping inside. He found Elizabeth asleep too, and oddly, Billy noticed how immaculate she looked. Almost like a child again, an unfinished script. Even in their early years together it had always been mystifying (perhaps something in her skin or the way her muscles relaxed) how much more pronounced her beauty was while she slept. Now in her twenties it was impossible to deny.
He stood at the foot of the bed, staring silently as her eyes flitted in dream behind closed lids. Then they parted and slowly focused on the room. It took a moment for her to compose herself, and then she stretched broadly, her clenched fists drawn up to her chin. She yawned a smile in his direction. With this simple gesture Billy knew everything was all right between them, regardless of Nora. “Billy,” Elizabeth said. With her it was always ‘Billy’.
He walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed. Then he reached over and touched her leg beneath the covers. There were no reasons to skirt the issue; they had never been much on mincing words.
“Mom told me yesterday afternoon. I just left work and started walking. Ended up in this dive drinking all night and listening to an old man telling stories…” he said monotonously, looking her straight in the eyes while he said it. She smiled and scooted up in bed, reaching for his hand. It was warm from the covers and Billy squeezed back. “Hope you’re not mad I didn’t—“ he started, stopping abruptly when her scared, imploring eyes dug deeper. Masks would never work. Billy leaned forward and hugged her close, his vision swimming. “I really can’t believe this…” he whispered. She put her head on his shoulder and he felt tears soaking through his shirt as he rocked her back and forth. Moments later his own tears began to flow as they held each other tightly and passed through the moment together.
Chapter 6
Later that night Billy sat alone in his apartment, but not because he hadn’t tried. Elizabeth had declined his invitation, saying she wanted to stay put. He’d played the conversation over many times since.
*
“But why here?”
“Because this is my room, Billy. I just want to think for a while, remember things that happened before I went off to school. I told the Dean at Phillip’s I won’t be back. I’ve missed too many classes, anyway, since I got sick. They’re shipping my stuff here next week.’” She held up her hand when she saw his pained expression. “I’m not giving up, Billy. I just don’t need that now.”
His voice very low, he said, “I don’t want you giving up, Liz. It’s not like you.”
“I know, Billy, and I’m not. I just want to stay here awhile. Everything’ll be fine. Anyway, Mom’s cooking tonight and I told her I’d eat.” The dramatic change of subject cut short their previous route. “Why don’t you stay too?” she asked anyway, fully expecting him to turn down the invitation which he did. Hours later, he still kicked himself for not meeting her eyes when he’d given his own lame excuse.
“No, not tonight, Liz…work and everything tomorrow, you know…” he’d said lamely.
“Okay.”
*
Now he sat on the couch thinking. Granted, she’d looked sick but she hadn’t looked like she was dying. That was the worst. She sounded like she had no more than a head cold, only…
Only if...
…he hadn’t known what he knew. The chemo treatments would begin soon, and Billy knew what those did to people, even strong people: people like Elizabeth. He gazed through the gloomy light at the white walls, seeing through them to a future when this new-found knowledge would cement itself into reality. Many pictures, some from the past but many more from the possible future, rained into his mind as he sat and stared. And as he unwillingly made his way through this dark realm of disquiet, the hours continued their ceaseless roll.
Chapter 7
Elizabeth lay in her old, familiar bed watching
the ceiling fan whirl in its lazy circle. Around and around. Just like our lives, she reflected. Her throat hurt a little when she swallowed so she massaged it gently, trying not to give voice to the agonizing question circling, also, in her head. How will it be? For the better part of three hours she’d been contemplating these four words, amid bouts of forcing her eyes closed and pleading for peaceful dreams to take the overwhelming sense of emptiness away.
Because emptiness was really all she felt. All through dinner Nora and she had hardly spoken, her mother hiding behind another improvised malady and the fried chicken. They’d not spoken of Billy who’d left shortly after Nora woke from her nap. Elizabeth had been surprised she’d not hounded him to remain; Nora had simply asked and let it go with his declination.
And now, with the oppressive full night cloaking the room, Elizabeth again felt fear: the old specter come to prey, dressed in different regalia than the unseen boogyman underneath the bed from her childhood. The only difference this time was the fear was real, not something that feinted in the corner, or under the bed, disappearing when you worked up nerve enough to investigate. Now she knew it was real. All the aches and unexplained lumps and weaknesses, the nights sweating alone in the dorm bunk trying to convince herself it was only nerves or hypochondria. But no, the manifestations had been real. Echoing her worst fears, magnifying them.
The fan continued its ceaseless whirling.
She brought her hand from beneath the covers and held it in front of her face. She clinched it into a fist, loosened it and wiggled her fingers. This is me, she told herself. I am real. Lying here, taking up space and time, occupying myself with thoughts. My memories holding childhood, and school; dates, and sex, and misunderstandings. Triumphs and losses.
Don’t these things matter?
What will happen to me? Am I here one moment and a figment the next? Any meaning I might have pulled from this fabric snuffed out and forgotten?
How can this be when I feel so alive inside? I’m only ready to experience more and more. Because if not, what the hell’s the use of learning in the first place? If a blank slate greets you again in the end what’s the use? What’s the point being born unknowing and unaware, to progress through life attempting to rectify that initial ignorance; soaking up knowledge, experiences, love and hate, only to have them equal nothing in the end?
Elizabeth had always been a contemplator: a steadfast pursuer of things she didn’t understand. Always full of questions and always so short on answers. She remembered once when she must have been no more than ten years old. The memory concerned one of the few field trips she could still recall; they had usually been such trivial matters: a trip to the zoo, a walk through a library. But this one had been different. Her school group had taken a bus ride out to the farm of a classmate’s uncle for a day of horse riding. Up until that day the only horses Elizabeth had ever seen were the ones in books or on TV. The first surprise had been the fear she felt at the pure immensity of the creatures, but this was quickly replaced by the wonder of the eerie docility they also possessed.
Some strange intimation had suddenly caused her to slap her hands together sharply while standing near one, and the horse’s subsequent, startled reaction had been one of those seemingly mundane but nonetheless telling impressions that Life visited at unexpected times during the run of years. The picture was as clear now as if it had happened only yesterday: the instantaneous jerk, a sudden elevation from dull stupidity to instinctive action, a sudden rearing head and surprisingly wild, reactive eyes. Then, immediately following (as if nothing had ever happened) an immediate readjustment back to its former condition: standing, silent, dull.
For some reason this previously unknown quality had disturbed her. Because even as a child she had suddenly known that horses held no conception of themselves. Her rudimentary, unplanned experiment had proved it. Their huge stature gave them no rank or privilege because they possessed no recognition of it. And somehow the horse’s lack of recognition had set off some trigger within her own mind. Their dullness had somehow created the spark which led to her own inquisitiveness.
How could we be, she thought, apparently, so far removed from these simple natures, yet doomed to suffer the same uncompromising fate? Why a grinding urge to learn and pursue ultimate questions if there were, in fact, no satisfactory answers?
Lying in bed, the moonlight filtering its influence upon the walls, Elizabeth’s body began to shake in a peculiar claustrophobic reaction brought about by another voice in her head (one that was neither abusive nor callous; only curious and quiet) which had asked:
Does there really have to be an answer for anything?
Chapter 8
Billy’s apartment was uncomfortably warm when he awoke later that night. This was because frugality was his unwritten rule, more by paranoia than necessity. He obsessed over the impossibility of knowing when an emergency would require extra cash, so he squirreled it away like a dirty mountain redneck—some hairy recluse who hid money in Mason jars and dug it up to gloat over beneath every full moon. There was something like that in an old song he’d heard, and even though Billy recognized the analogies’ negativity he felt it more important to acknowledge somewhat eccentric caution than to go unchecked. One never knew when a giant scroll would suddenly unfurl with a bottom line demanding immediate payment.
The humidity wrapped him in sweat, not overtly oppressive, just an annoyance. He considered turning down the thermostat, but was stymied by the possibility that the temporary pleasure might prove to be unworthy of the bill. Therefore, he lay awake, sweating, witness to a picture of Liz passing through his muddled mind, an increasingly taunting image that had begun surfacing lately during any intermingling thought about his own, tawdry problems. Christ, it was always on his mind now: Liz lying alone in her bed. Literally and figuratively.
He guessed trivial inconvenience like sweating through a sheet held little importance for his sister now. Her worries would be more inclusive, more devastating. Suddenly and probably soon, the life she’d known would cease. And here he lay, fussing over whether or not he should turn down the goddamn A/C.
The heat isn’t what woke you, a voice suggested.
Billy tried to blink the pest away. Not tonight, he pleaded. He was too scared now. On some basic, primitive level he was somehow afraid of her, wanting to help of course, but also powerfully distanced by what he saw and feared. He had to admit to himself, at least, that never in conscious thought could he imagine a world without himself in it. History seemed like vague movies and folklore made up to entertain the living, mere meaningless board games worked out by scholars who simply had nothing better to do with their time. He didn’t believe people could conceive of their own deaths, or at least not many. And even those few who did could hardly sound objective in his own ear. Most seemed possessed of some agenda. Being faced with such an impasse shook him deeply.
He loved Elizabeth like a part of his own being, had always known her because what the hell was four years difference when lifetimes were concerned? Many of the things that encompassed her life encompassed his also: shared memories, clandestine experiences, a few old cars, and scattered discussions of boyfriends and girlfriends, their gifts and idiosyncrasies. The only other person whom he’d had honest knowledge of beside her was his father. Their father, he corrected himself mindlessly. He attempted to count the months since he’d moved out of the family home. God, almost four years now, almost forty-eight months scratching around. His father had been dead for five in April. How many times had Billy thought about him? He couldn’t honestly recall, but it didn’t seem enough. Time had a way of clouding things, leaving just odd assorted reels of time gone by, things forgotten. Or, of course and wrongly (it seemed) leaving behind great chunks of dissention or conversations you wished you had back.
But his father’s memories… Is that all that existed of the man now? Only the residue of whatever he had been encapsulated within the daughter and son who’d loved him. And now E
lizabeth. This distance, this gulf. His perspectives folded upon themselves, turning darker.
He’d never entertained any real serious conviction of spiritual reality (his mother’s fanaticism had killed that possibility), but this situation put a new, unwanted plate before him. And the taste was bitter indeed, like powdered aspirin. How do you lose someone like yourself? it asked from its place there. A person of moralities and expectations that echo your own being? How do you do that? Because in so doing, wouldn’t the other die a little also, and hear the approaching footsteps all the rest of his life of his on approaching death? Dogma had never sufficed to placate this.
So as Billy lay in bed, his sweating grew heavier to match his thoughts, and eventually he did get up to turn the thermostat down.
Chapter 9
Ebenezer Holgren walked Corondolet Street reminiscent of a sage poet, barely threading the line between street urchin and tired old age. It really surprised him sometimes, getting old, even though his mind felt no change. Or at least none he was willing to admit. Already sixty-seven, sort of a twilight zone for those wanting to hang on tenuously to ‘middle age’ but a sure beginning of the short side of life. Of course (he liked to admit, if only to himself) he still had a twinkle in his eye that could draw fifty-plus-year-old widows, and even a matching vitality which sustained him through such infrequent carnal encounters. Even if in the last few years such meetings had dwindled appreciably.
His clothing was such that, if he happened to doze off in Jackson Square after a small meal or feeding the scavenger pigeons, he might awake to find several dollars in loose change scattered about his lap. This had disconcerted him the first few times, but after reflection (oftentimes taking place while gazing off his balcony as the sun dipped behind the CBD) he figured that he still had purpose. People paid off their small sins on him; with their paltry gifts they wished themselves absolved somehow, and in turn their money served a dual purpose. For Ebenezer gave it away to the young, black, tap-dancers on Bourbon Street. But never to the filthy derelicts who infested dark hovels within city doorways, letting themselves rot away in either contempt or sullied failure to sustain or cope with society. Ironically, he detested the very group many mistook him a member of, but oddly enough, because of this he became a sort of ghost, a fly on the wall of the city. Nobody seemed to pay him much mind, but he did everything else.