“Sort of. I haven’t—experimented much. It’s too painful.”
“It’s so puffed up it’s hard to tell what it’ll look like when the swelling goes down. But this is badly infected. You could get sepsis. Have you been taking antibiotics?”
“One course, but it’s finished. I’ve applied Bacitracin.”
She touched his cheek, and he could smell the infection on her fingers. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
Jackson looked away. “I’m too embarrassed.”
“Better embarrassment than blood poisoning. And if you let that get any worse, it’s going to fall off. Honestly, I’d go to New York Methodist right this minute if it weren’t for the kids. Once they’re off to school tomorrow, you’re taking a day off and we’re heading straight to the emergency room. I’ll go with you. Even if you don’t deserve it.”
“Carol, it’s really important that this doesn’t get out, okay? Don’t tell anyone, please. If they find out at Knack, I’ll never live it down.”
“Does Shep know about this? What you did?”
“No! Especially don’t tell Shep.”
“Men’s version of what it means to have a ‘best friend’ totally bewilders me. What’s the point of having one?”
“Just promise me.”
“The last thing I’m about to advertise is that I married a fool. Besides, you’re the one who can’t keep your mouth shut. You’re the one who told everyone in the office about Glynis, when Shep told you not to.”
“It was for his own good. They kept making fun of him about Pemba, and for a little while Pogatchnik’s pretending to be sympathetic got the asshole off his back.” He didn’t care if she was castigating him; talking about anything else besides his penis was a relief. After they’d brushed their teeth, Carol removed her robe and slipped under the sheets naked.
“At least now that you know,” he said, thinking that a bright side was hard to find, “I don’t have to sleep with you wearing boxers.”
Carol turned on her side, facing away, and switched off the light. “Actually, my dear, I’d really rather you put them back on.”
Chapter Ten
Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
April 01, 2005 – April 30, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $571,264.91
He knew it was wrong. But all his life he’d kept an eye on the future—naïvely, on the assumption that there would always be one. So as stringently as he tried to forbid himself, to draw a line in the sand, his mind shuffled forward and past a certain advent, crossing blithely into no-go territory that should have been intolerable to contemplate. That sand metaphor was peculiar anyway; whatever dire consequences you may have been warned will follow, crossing a line in the sand is a cinch. Moreover, the sand he compulsively pictured was white, knotted intermittently with mangroves, dotted with beached hand-carved canoes, scored from the wheels of ox-drawn carts, and bright with variegated kangas. If Shep Knacker was drawing any line in the sand, it was on the coast of Pemba.
He was upstairs in his office writing checks. Though the room was really, really a home office and nothing but, his accountant had warned him off claiming it as a tax deduction. It was a red flag, said Dave, and sent your chances of being audited sky high. Every April—last month being no exception—Jackson railed about the fact that the feds put that box “Did you deduct for a home office?” high up on the front page of the 1040, virtually the first thing they wanted to know after your name and address. “Do they ask specially on page one if you deducted for rubber bands?” he fumed. “Do they ask right after your fucking Social Security number whether you deducted for donating your old winter coat to the Salvation Army? No! With that we-dare-you, just-try-it tick box, they’re bullying you into omitting the one legitimate deduction that might keep more than the cost of a jelly donut out of their hot, thieving little hands.” Well, if it was intimidation, it worked.
Given the monies flying out of this room the last few months, a few grand more or less on his taxes had hardly mattered: dinners with that Arizona crowd on the nights he hadn’t been able to concoct yet another meal without carbohydrates; astronomical fuel bills, because Glynis got cold easily and during an unusually frosty spring he’d been heating the house to seventy-eight, even higher when she got chills; lab bills for the blood tests whose needles still made her lightheaded; and of course, dwarfing the rest to spare change, the surgery, gouging a meaty chunk from Merrill Lynch as if to fiscally mirror the violence inflicted on his wife’s abdomen, and then chemo, each administration of which was over forty thousand dollars a throw. Once such a niggler about buying store-brand mustard, these days Shep was growing careless about money, almost indifferent to it. Something in him would walk out on the street tomorrow and foist a wad into the hands of the first stranger he encountered. Take it, take the works. Spare me the agony of parting with it drib by drab. This was a kind of torture, really, a death by a thousand cuts, and he would rather a dagger in the gut—an overnight worldwide economic collapse that turned his dollars into neat rectangular sheets for wiping his ass.
He’d left the door ajar to keep an ear out for Glynis, and sure enough he could hear her beginning to prowl. It was after 1:00 a.m., but the insomnia that had plagued her in the hospital was also one of Alimta’s side effects (or what Glynis had taken to calling special effects, a term that lent the fallout from chemo an element of the spectacular). Which seemed so unfair, given that another of the drug’s special effects was fatigue. Soon he’d go keep her company, but not just yet. He first had to get a hold of himself, to rein in the awful recognition that though it had barely begun, he was already waiting for all this to be over.
One whole shelf over his desk was lined with notebooks, hardback Black n’ Reds that for years he’d special-ordered from a stationer in London—a rare indulgence. The spines were neatly labeled in fine felt-tip: Goa, Laos, Puerto Escondido, Morocco … Each was full of handwritten notes: the price of staples—butter, bread, milk. Average prices for two- and three-bedroom homes. Laws on foreign acquisition of property, and in more restrictive countries the susceptibility of officials to persuasion. Reliability of telephone service, electricity, and the mail. For the reconnaissance missions of the last ten years, Internet access. Target towns and neighborhoods. Crime rates. Weather. Especially meticulous in the older notebooks, detailed checklists on the availability of metalsmithing supplies—silver, solder, rouge, flux—and on how far they’d need to travel to refill Glynis’s acetylene tank for her torch. As her productivity back home had dwindled, these latter notes had grown less thorough, for they serviced an increasingly tenuous myth: that his wife would get only more serious about her craft in a foreign outpost, where her materials had to be imported and prized from the hands of corrupt customs officials, when she would rarely venture upstairs to her attic studio with all that she needed at her fingertips in the Jewelry District of Midtown Manhattan.
The handwriting was his own: the neat, rounded script of a diligent student, the tails of g’s and y’s looping loyally back to the line, the tops of a’s and o’s painstakingly closed. His cursive had never lost a schoolboy’s desire to please, a nervous determination to copy correctly from the blackboard. In addition to logistical notes, those pages were pasted with photos: once modestly priced coastline bungalows in Cape Town, Glynis posing before a pile of fiery rambutans in an outdoor market in Vietnam. Cards from guesthouses, restaurant menus. The addresses of newly made friends, usually members of the small English-speaking communities of British and American expats whose existence they had agreed at the outset was a requirement. He and Glynis were, so the catechism had run, adventurous but realistic; they would crave the company of their own kind. Yet no matter how well met the acquaintance, they had lost touch with virtually all these local contacts, who no longer enticed with dinner invites, the shared smugness of having built a world apart, the inevitable shared wistfulness of having lost a world as wel
l. Indeed, once Glynis had put the kibosh on the country, thus dooming the exercise to mere reminiscence, he hadn’t opened its Black n’ Red again. The tops of the volumes on the left had grown dusty.
Since they had never been there, the final notebook on the right marked “Pemba Island” was nearly blank. Against it leaned a folder of printouts. In the absence of his own notes and snapshots, the Pemba file on his hard drive was full of hyperlinks to travel sites and other people’s holiday photos posted online. With little patience for research that wasn’t three-dimensional, Shep had mastered just enough background to fill out a third-grade presentation to the class. Pemba was fifty miles north of Zanzibar. The island having been colonized by Portugal, locals still staged a bullfight every year. Plantations grew not only cloves, but rice, palms, coconut, and mangos. Local wildlife included flying foxes, the marsh mongoose, coconut crabs, and the red colobus monkey. Naturally, the cuisine was heavy on seafood: octopus, kingfish, prawns.
He had never eaten kingfish, and would like to try it.
The population was 300,000, though that census was dated. Mostly hoteliers, the number of resident expats numbered only a handful. Yet the longer The Afterlife had stewed in his mind, the fewer of his “own kind” Shep imagined he’d require; perhaps one crusty neighbor up the beach would do to help him remember the English word carousel without wracking his brain. Keeping the tourists to a mere smattering at any one time, the fact that the island was hard to get to had suited his purposes. If the island was hard to get to, it was hard to be got at there, and equally hard to leave.
He’d transcribed the names of towns, that he might try out the feel of them in his mouth: Kigomasha, Kinyasini, Kisiwani. Chiwali and Chapaka. Piki, Tumbi, Wingi, Nyali, Mtambili, and Msuka. Or Bagamoyo, a village whose name meant “keep your heart cool.” He loved the notion of living in a place that his spellchecker didn’t recognize—that leapt from the screen underscored by alarmed red squiggles. He loved the merry prospect of flying into an airport in Chaka Chaka. He had memorized a few phrases while getting up the nerve to announce his intentions to Glynis, and had already come to relish the bouncy jubilation of Swahili. He’d always been intimidated by foreign languages in the past. Of all the tasks that The Afterlife might present him, he’d been leeriest of having to learn Bulgarian, or worse, one of those subtle tonal tongues like Thai. Yet Swahili was a toy language, full of silly repetitions of the sort that toddlers invent: polepole, hivi hivi, asante kushukuru. The language didn’t frighten him. It seemed like play.
With the surreptitiousness of loading Internet porn, Shep shoved aside his checkbook and narrowed the crack of the study door. He booted his computer and sought out the hyperlinks. The screen blued with water that looked clean. The sand was not only bright and fine but more marvelously deserted. He was not naïve about beaches. He did not idolize beaches, their blaring, unrelenting white. He was well aware of how hot they got, how monotonous; of the unpleasant crinkle of skin once saltwater had dried; of how the sand buried in your scalp, creviced into the spines of paperbacks, and followed you inside. He was aware of the flies. But nothing about living near one obliged you to park on a blanket in stupefaction from morning to night. At sundown the heat would die, the colors deepen. And however inured you might get to the view, the birds, the coconut crabs scuttling at low tide, none of the vistas in these photos could possibly grow as wearing as the strip malls in Elmsford, New York.
“Shepherd?”
Glynis was slumped against the doorframe with a tissue pressed to her face. Blood was running down her arm. In his distress, Shep took a beat too long to minimize the beach. Though her head was tipped back, her yellowed eyes were open. He would indeed have been less embarrassed had she glimpsed bare breasts or an open beaver.
“Another nosebleed,” he said, stating the obvious to distract from what she might have seen. With a hand under her elbow, he hustled her to the bathroom down the hall. She had dripped down the beige carpet. He didn’t notice the trail in a remonstrative way; it was just that he was responsible for running the household now, and he would need to scrub the stains before they set. “Keep it tipped up.”
He grabbed a washcloth, moistened it, and drew it down her arm. Removing the streaks of blood, he revealed the pinprick red dots on her skin that would not rub off, like the halo around spray-painted graffiti. As if she’d been basking along that on-screen beach, her skin was dark for May, almost the color of a good tan but not quite—grayer, yellower, more sullen. The hue put him in mind of those wipe-on artificial tanning products that weren’t fooling anybody. And he was sorry to note that, despite the dexamethasone, patches of red, scaly rash had returned. They were inflamed: she’d been scratching again.
“I would have to be wearing this sweater.”
He helped her out of the floor-length cardigan of cream cashmere, a wrap of which she was inordinately fond. The luxurious sweater had the warmth and comfort of a bathrobe with none of the depressing I-can’t-be-bothered-to-get-dressed connotations, and now it was drizzled with blood down the front. So for now her bathrobe would have to do, and he fetched it while promising to rinse every drop from the cardigan. Anything that roused affection in her, that infinitesimally increased her attachment to the flotsam and jetsam of this earth, would have to take precedence over the carpet.
Bringing a box of tissues, he settled her downstairs on the pillowed love seat he’d moved permanently into the kitchen, that she might bundle there while he prepared their meals. Or meals loosely speaking. He’d had better luck with multiple snacks than imposing spreads. Because she often hadn’t the energy to get up and sit at the main table, beside the love seat he’d moved in a small coffee table, from which he also took his dinner, to keep her from feeling exiled. Shep arranged a fleece blanket around her shoulders. At least the nosebleed seemed to be subsiding.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” she said as he took the cardigan to the sink. “I’d have caught it better, but this neurotic antipathy thing”—she meant, of course, peripheral neuropathy—”it’s made me a klutz. I can’t quite feel the Kleenex, so I think I’m holding it, but I’m not and I drop it. It’s so weird. Almost like not having hands. Like being an amputee.”
Rinsing and squeezing out and rinsing again, Shep tried both to be vigorous about removing the blood yet also to move casually, routinely, as if the task were no trouble. Of course it was no trouble, but there was an extra art to making it seem that way.
“They’d better be right about these symptoms going away after the course is through,” she added. “If I can’t feel my hands, I’m hardly going to be hacking away with a jewelry saw.”
“As I understand it, the only special effect they’re worried could be permanent is the hearing loss.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
He raised his voice. “That as I understand it—”
“Shepherd. I was joking.”
Of course she was joking. He would usually have been able to tell. It took concentration to remember that Glynis was still Glynis—that tautology so beloved of Pogatchnik—and he shouldn’t treat her too gently or like a child. Yet what he said next was indeed parental, and fostered a familiar discomfort, the same sense of conniving complicity he’d first experienced with Dr. Knox.
“You have to focus on the fact that all this is temporary,” he said. “I know it seems like the longest nine months of your life. But out the other side, the rashes, the sores, and the neuropathy will all clear up once you flush the drugs from your system. Try to keep your mind on the finish line.”
“All I can say is, if this is tolerating A Lift into Manhattan ‘incredibly well,’ I’d hate to learn what it felt like to tolerate it badly.”
A Lift into Manhattan meant, of course, Alimta and cisplatin. Seditious rechristening provided his wife not only a running source of entertainment, but ownership, a fragile feeling of control. Pharmaceutical companies would not tyrannize her with their perky nonsense trade names, whose sublimin
al positivism about the corruptions of the body she mercilessly mocked: Emend (Amen), Ativan (Attaboy), Maxidex (Maxipad). Yet Glynis herself had a knack for hijacking the heavy, forbiddingly multisyllabic generics into deviations that were harmless or even pleasant: lorazepam sweetened to marzipan, domperidone fizzed into Dom Pérignon, and lansoprazole lilted into lamzy divey, from the chipper gibberish ditty of the 1940s. The abundance of these drugs were to counteract the special effects of the chemo; these drugs, too, had special effects, counteracted with still more drugs, with perhaps still more special effects, so that the number of pills and potions she downed was potentially infinite. Thus none of her lighthearted nicknames compensated for the fact that her body had become, as Glynis would say, “a toxic waste dump.”
“At least the nausea in your case doesn’t seem to last more than a couple of days,” Shep pointed out. “A lot of folks puke their guts out for weeks.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
Shep held the cardigan up to the light. There were still pale purple shadows. He would take it to the dry cleaner on his lunch hour tomorrow. He had to get “up” in three hours, although the preposition implied getting to bed first, which looked dubious. “Did you talk to your mother today, or abandon her to voice mail again?”
“No, I didn’t talk to her. Why should I? What’s there to say? Yes, I took my folic acid and pterodactyl?” (Even for Shep, it was now taking work to remember that the real supplement was called pyridoxine.) “Nothing ever happens to me anymore. I never do anything but watch TV. We can’t even talk about the weather. If I never leave the house, there is no weather. We end up talking for half an hour about what I ate.”
“I.e., not enough.”
“Don’t start.”
“I never stopped.” Shep left to search out a hanger, and draped the sweater carefully so that it wouldn’t dry with extrusions poked in the sleeves. While upstairs, he rinsed out the washcloth and went at the drips on the carpet. He managed only to turn the discrete droplets into large pink patches. It was the kind of damage that in times past he would have tried to ameliorate with obsessive scrubbing and violent cleaning products. He’d have been anxious that their security deposit was at issue, that the landlord might dock them for the cost of the carpet. Now he thought, fuck it, I’ll throw a little salt on it later. There was something to be wrested from this mortality business, something more illuminating than mere perspective: apathy. He did not care about his landlord’s carpet. He did not care about their security deposit. Ergo, he did not care about the stains in the hallway, and he tossed the wet washcloth in the sink. He could see how this liberating condition could grow progressive. How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter.