With a reluctance I identify, now, as shameful, I returned to Darcy where he lay on the floor still conscious and still peering straight upward. He wore gray sweatpants and one slipper, the other foot bare, and he wore no shirt, though he’d pulled his lab coat and covers from the bed down onto himself and got some protection from those. I recalled an exchange from The Reason I’m Lost between Gabe Smith and Danny Osgood—and here, stretched out on the floor with his eyes moving back and forth, poring over the ceiling as if it were a problem in math, was the real, the original, Danny Osgood—this exchange:
Gabe: “How old is that old guy?”
Danny: “Something short of dead.”
I went from kitchen to hallway with bath towels and dish towels and a quart pan spilling tap water, cursing out loud, I’m sure, the whole time, and bringing no real comfort to the old guy on the floor. My heart ached, I tell you, and it’s likely I shed some tears, but within half an hour I felt convinced Darcy wouldn’t die, and I was going back and forth from the living room window to the hallway, reporting to him on the somewhat comical progress of an ambulance careering toward us over the prairie with its red-white-and-blue lights revolving and the we-you, we-you of its siren rising and vanishing in the empty morning and finally cut short with a yip as the van lurched over the creek (not quite sideswiping my Subaru) and a generation of medically trained people hatched out of it and cartwheeled into the house—only four such people, it turned out, but with their equipment, and the scene they created, the ministrations and communications, the gurney and the portable defibrillator and ventilation pump and the blood pressure devices, the fixing of electrodes and the clearing of airways and the search for a useable vein, all accompanied by syncopated cries and whispers, the loud voice of the man on the walkie-talkie and the lower tones of the man and woman establishing intravenous hydration and fitting the oxygen mask, which descended like a judgment to cover Darcy’s liverish mouth, and the silent fretting of the fourth technician, a petite baldheaded man, who did nothing, I have to say, but move from one to the other of his cohort, looking over shoulders—they multiplied and magnified themselves. Meanwhile, I used Darcy’s phone to call Jerry Sizemore, and by the time I’d filled him in, the ambulance had fled across the creek again toward the ranch road, spinning water from its tires, leaving me alone in the kind of silence following a slap in the face.
I reached the hospital within forty-five minutes—a time nearly doubled while I searched for a parking space—and the ER’s doors parted before me with a groan and a sigh and then a thump, and I entered the waiting area. At this moment I had no thought for anyone but Darcy—I was concerned that we were separated, and that without an advocate he’d end up sidelined in a hallway or even a storeroom or a loading dock; I wanted to find Darcy and had no time for comparing this experience with any other—but now, in my pajamas, with the coffee, looking back, I see that the Parkland Community Hospital’s emergency room doors opened onto a new phase of my own life, one I can expect to continue until all expectations cease, the phase in which these visits to emergency rooms and clinics increased in frequency and by now have become commonplace: trips with my mother, my father, later my friend Joe, then of course with my friend Link—and eventually me too—the tests, forms, interviews, exams, the journeys into the machines. By the time I reached the hospital, Darcy had been taken well in hand and begun going through all of these things, and probably more. I’d expected to wait in the anteroom among the sick and wounded and their loved ones bent over mystifying paperwork or staring down at their hands, beaten at last not by life but by the refusal of their dramas to end in anything but this meaningless procedural quicksand…No, between his visits to the technicians, the staff let me wait with Darcy in the realm behind the veil, in the Trauma Theater, a vast area cut up by moveable white partitions screening my view of the surrounding moaners and weepers and their powerless comforters. Whom I obviously heard.
From time to time as the morning turned to afternoon they wheeled Darcy away on his gurney, leaving me to sit in a three-walled cell in a collapsible chair that was now its only piece of furniture, among all the equipment from which Darcy had been disconnected before his disappearance into the rest of his adventure.
After he was taken away several times and brought back each time, they left us together for a long interval. The 3-to-11-p.m. shift came on and the sun crossed the parking lot and it got half dark outside. Darcy wanted something cold on his tongue. I fed him some pink ice cream from a cup because he didn’t seem able to control his fingers. Nobody came. On the back of Darcy’s head a patch of scalp had been shaved bald and a square inch of white bandage planted in the middle of it. Every so often—every three or four minutes—he pointed at his head and said, “They gave me a couple stitches.” He made errant remarks—they weren’t remarks about anything around here. “Nice day with the rain in your face,” is one I remember verbatim.
A nurse turned up around 7 p.m., an older woman who carried an air of competence, authority, and goodwill. Darcy’s focus seemed unblunted as she began describing the tests he’d been given, and he cut her short—“What’s wrong with me?”
“We’re going to have to admit you. You’ll talk to the oncologist on Monday, but right now—maybe you’d like your friend to leave while we go over the results in privacy.”
“He can stay.”
“We have some serious information to go over here, is why I suggest—”
“Then go over it, okay? My friend can stay. What’s going on here? What is happening to me?”
“The cancer in your lungs has spread, and we’re seeing tumors in your brain. A whole lot of tumors, Mr. Miller.”
“Cancer in my lungs? What cancer?”
“Were you not aware you have Stage Four lung cancer?”
“I guess I am now. And brain tumors—is that cancer too?”
“Yes. The lung cancer has metastasized. The condition is very advanced.”
“So this is the end.”
“This is metastatic cancer, Mr. Miller, yes.”
“How long? And please don’t shit me.”
“You can ask the doctor about that. Monday, the oncologist—”
“Nurses know more than doctors.”
She looked at me, and then again at Darcy, and then paid us both, I believe, a great compliment by her candor: “A month. A few weeks at the most. But probably not even a month.”
Silence while she held Darcy’s hand. After a few minutes she left us without a word.
Darcy went on staring upward. I must say, he had the kind of stoic poise I’ve always felt, personally, would lie far beyond my own reach in such straits. I had no idea what thoughts might be tumbling among the tumors in his head until he frowned at me and said, “Well, hell…I might’ve known. It was Andy Hedges all along, the whole time, from the start to the finish. Andy Hedges.”
“Who’s Andy Hedges?”
His chest ballooned, and he heaved a sigh. Then—“What?”
“Who’s Andy Hedges?”
“I don’t know.”
Long after night had fallen, Darcy was wheeled on his gurney into an elevator to be taken to a private room. As he traveled, he was sleeping. I tagged along as far as the doors to the elevator. He was still unconscious as I wished him well. The doors closed, and I didn’t see him again ever. He became the charge of Jerry Sizemore, who arrived in Austin late the following afternoon. I left Austin on a plane that morning, and Jerry and I didn’t quite overlap. These long years later, I still haven’t met Jerry Sizemore in the flesh.
Darcy died on the twelfth of June, exactly one month from the time he was admitted to the Parkland Community Hospital and the nurse with the kind face and sincere touch held his hand and predicted that very outcome. Jerry Sizemore, I guess, would have been the one to see to Darcy’s affairs and effects, which in the course of Darcy’s travels had bled away to nothing. Here in Northern California fifteen years later, in this house where Link has died and where I’v
e stayed on—not only out of exhaustion but also because I’ve grown stuck in my role, it’s become my religion to carry things to and fro in the temple, and I find no reason to adjust right away to the demise of our god—here in this house not haunted, but saturated through-and-through with the life of its dead owner, it falls to me to sort through Link’s aggregations of rocks, bricks, broken seashells, tools, books, medicines and medical supplies, firewood, driftwood, lumber, cartons of Quaker Oatmeal, cases of Ensure meal-supplement drink, frozen foods dating back, at least in one of his freezers, eighteen years to 1997, smashed appliances, exploded vehicles, incomplete, irrelevant, or incomprehensible documents, and “parts”—that is, agglomerated nuts, bolts, shafts, gears, belts, bearings, all on their way from rust to dust—and small, delicate, though casually handled boxes holding the memorabilia we call “odds and ends” because their attachment to any human personality has been annihilated: an old tintype portrait of a darkly wooden face neither male nor female, an acorn encased in a cube of clear Plexiglas, medallions and badges in plastic envelopes, other such things—a snow globe, its surface so worn you can’t see what it holds, but by its heft you know the water still submerses the wintry scene inside, while nobody who ever beheld it remains alive.
I came across a scarf among Link’s things, a gift he’d intended for Elizabeth, his former wife, a yellow silk scarf folded up in soft white paper and laid in a small red box with a card bearing two words—
For Liz
Liz was the only woman Link had truly loved, he confided in me many times, as his body and mind failed him in his deranged bedroom with the dangerous wood-burning stove surrounded by the tottering stacks of flammable publications…I often observed him lying in bed, holding his cellphone in one hand and in the other a can of charcoal-lighting fluid—his little trick was to stretch his long left leg out and hook the stove’s door handle by his toe, flick it open with a simian flair, and train an incendiary stream into the flames within to produce a small-scale explosion followed by five minutes of hard, bright burning (poor circulation gave him cold extremities), meanwhile yacking on the phone with Liz, who lived in San Mateo a hundred miles away. She and Link had been married and parted decades before.
The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Liz, a black-haired beauty even now in her sixties, had become in recent years a physically quite tentative and cautious person, with a ceremonious, exploratory footstep, because she no longer had any idea where she was going or where she’d been as recently as two seconds ago, her memory and identity wiped away by Alzheimer’s disease. But she stayed serene and cheerful, and greeted everyone, whether a lifelong acquaintance or a brand-new face, with a hug and a smile, saying, “Hello, stranger.”
Of the scores of family and friends who adored and supported Liz—in fact, of all the human beings in the world—Link was the only person she recognized. And in this world, which is only Now, she knows him perfectly, as if they’ve just risen from their custom-made king-plus-size waterbed—have I mentioned he was six foot nine, a sliver over two meters tall?—the two of them beautiful and young, and rich from his many business enterprises. Liz doesn’t know her husband Malcolm, a retired U.S. naval captain who sees to her every need and even calls Link’s telephone number for her nightly; and nightly Liz and Link talk on the phone and she pledges her love, and Link, who has never for a minute considered, in his own heart and mind, the marriage ended, drinks in these declarations and answers them with his own in the midst of a world without forward or backward, without logic, like the world of dreams, thanks to Liz’s dementia and to Link’s opiated vagueness and diabetic spikes in blood sugar, his occasional insulin psychosis, and the cycles of delirium driven by the ebb and flow of toxins, mainly ammonia, in his bloodstream.
Liz rarely left her own home in San Mateo, but Malcolm was willing to bring her north for a visit. She knew Link’s voice, and we hoped she would recognize Link’s face too, though they hadn’t been physically present to one another for many years. Link vowed to me he would live to see Liz again. Liz, of course, had no idea any of this was being considered. Because taking her places was a matter requiring a lot of care and strategy—and time—Link was forced to count the days and hang on.
For more than a week at the start of April, while he lay finally unable to leave his bed, stretched out to his full six feet nine inches diagonally across his mattress with his orange tomcat Friedrich asleep on his chest, a succession of storms, three of them, all of tropical origin, had swept in from the ocean to do violence, and now a fourth disturbance, not the worst of the crop, but impressive enough, had the crowns of the hundred-foot redwoods churning in the gulley behind the house. At least a couple of times each day the house lost electric power, and in the chair by the stove I would have to stop reading my book and listen to Link and his cat snoring between thunderclaps.
In the middle of one of these outages, about three in the afternoon, Link called me to his bedside and demanded to be brought to his room. I told him that’s where we were—in his room.
“It looks like my room,” he said, “but this is not my room.”
Link…except for the eyes peering out of his hairless skull he looked no different than a corpse, but his thoughts were alive. And he wasn’t always appropriately oriented. You had to be careful with him.
“What does your room look like?”
“It looks a lot like this one, but this room isn’t the right room. Do you understand? This is not my room.”
“So—you want to go to your room.”
He saw I didn’t get it. As if translating each phrase for me into my hopeless foreigner’s tongue, he then said: “I wish…to proceed…to the chamber…which is mine.”
“First of all,” I said, “I don’t know where you want to go. Second of all, there’s nobody here but me. How am I going to get you on your feet all by myself?”
As if gravity had been revoked, he rose to his full height and took three strides to the sliding doors of his bedroom.
“Link. Link. Where are you going?”
With a sweep of his arm he pushed aside the glass pane, and the outdoors rolled into the room. He stood for a few seconds with the rain spitting in his face, then stepped into the storm.
Should you ask—it never occurred to me to prevent him. I followed him into the dark afternoon. He stood swaying in the yard, which sloped gently for a hundred feet before plunging into the mile-long gulley that ran down toward the ocean, or rather down toward the roaring extinction into which ocean, earth, and sky had disappeared. For a moment Link took the measure of something, perhaps of this shot of strength he’d received, then like a performer on stilts he set his distant feet walking, steering himself through three kinds of thunder, that of the gusting wind, that of the drunken ocean, and the thunderclaps following the lightning. I described the redwoods as churning, but their motion better resembled a towering shrug—in a storm the redwoods seem to me punished, resigned, while the cypress trees seem out of their minds, throwing their limbs around hysterically. As I trailed Link closely through this flickering chaos, he in a Peruvian herder’s cap, pajama bottoms, barefoot, barechested under a long ragged bathrobe open and flapping in the gusts, it seemed to me inescapable that he meant to stumble-march down into the gulley, the sopping brambles and tangles, the thunder, the sea’s embrace, and never come back. I was mistaken. He soon banked left, and circled around the corner of the house to balance in front of his bedroom’s back door—situated about sixteen feet diagonally across this bedroom from the sliding doors he’d walked out of. The journey had covered thirty or forty paces and lasted under ninety seconds. The weather was more wind than rain—Link was spattered, but not soaked, as he sloughed off his robe, lay down in bed, thanked me for my help in getting him to his proper room, and immediately began dying.
Until the consummate couple of hours, Link was able to hear me and talk to me. I asked him if I should kill him with the morphine, and he said no. He preferred to wrestle with his torment,
sitting up in bed, pivoting right and left, putting his feet on the floor, hunching over and rocking, curling into a ball, straightening out on the bed, lying east, lying west, no position bearable for more than a few seconds—more active in this single afternoon than I’d seen him in the last two months put together—and he wanted no help with this. As Link understood it, the doctrine of his spiritual teacher nine thousand miles away in India required him to live each incarnation to the last natural breath, which came for him about nine o’clock that night in a long, gently vocal sigh. But before that, around seven, he spoke to me for the first time in an hour or so—“Is Liz coming?” “I think she was coming about eight,” I said. “What are you doing?” he asked me—“sitting shiva?”—his last words. His fight gave out and for the rest of it he lay on his back breathing like a sump pump with lengthy stops and convulsive, snorting resumptions, terrible to listen to, but only at first, and after that a sort of comfort.
An hour into this phase, almost exactly at 8 p.m., Liz arrived. She entered Link’s bedroom by the back door, as mindful as a tightrope walker, measuring her steps against the void, assisted by her husband Malcolm. As Malcolm continued through the kitchen to join me in the dining room, Liz went down on her knees at the bedside with her arms stretched out straight across Link’s breast, her face pressed into the mattress.
Malcolm sat beside me at the cluttered dining table, some distance from the bedroom but with an angle of view on his wife. Even here on the other side of the house, and despite the dull booming of the weather all around, we could hear Link’s respiratory system at work. In the high winds the house seemed similarly unconscious but alive, the walls and windowpanes trembling. Malcolm had gone to generous lengths in order to get Liz here for this last meeting and parting with Link, just as he not only enabled but encouraged their telephone conversations, pressing himself into these services out of some poetic inkling, I’m willing to assume, some unbearable intuition of the rightness and even the beauty of the facts. He had a round, clean face drained long ago of any sadness or happiness. We sat side by side and said nothing, did nothing.