A Brilliant Novel in the Works (13 page)

“Your novel has gone off the tracks,” Shmen says. He mumbles
this to me.

It’s been a half hour and he is just coming off the sedative.
He has dropped his hospital robe on the floor and even though
he hasn’t put on his pants or his shirt, he is fixated on getting
his socks on, and insisting on standing up without help while
doing it.

“What do you mean?” I say. “Why don’t your socks match?”

I catch him when he loses his balance and he just keeps at
it like it’s part of his putting-on-clothes plan.

“Dark blue is close enough to black,” he says. “Be careful of
saying too much in that book of yours.”

“How is your anus?” I ask him.

“It aches,” he says. He closes his eyes and takes a deep
breath before opening them again. “Let’s go.”

I hate to be the one to spoil the pantsless party, but I say,
“Don’t you think you need pants first?”

Even though that first sock takes forever, things move
pretty quickly after that. Pretty soon he has all his clothes on
and his eyes actually seem to focus on real things around him.

“Should I call a cab?” I say.

He nudges me out of the room. “No, let’s walk. I have some
ideas about your book.”

“What did the doc say?” I ask. “Are you getting better?”

“Yes,” he says. “Better. But too much scar tissue. They want
to perform surgery to cut some of it away.”

As we make our way out of the hospital, Shmen explains to
me what they want to do. The problem is that the scar tissue
from his many surgeries can cause infection and even close off
the anus. The shit needs a clear path. I think to say, “That’s just
like my novel,” but I stop myself. And I state my real concern:
“Doesn’t another surgery just create more scar tissue?”

“Of course,” he says to me.

It’s awfully sunny and there is a breeze and we’re both glad to
be out of the hospital. I want to ask him more about what the
doctor said. I want to know more about this surgery. I want
to ask him about Ally. I wonder how many hats she can knit
in a year. And I want to ask about Maddy. She had a piano
recital Shmen missed because of this procedure, and Shmen
nearly canceled the procedure because of it. I want to tell
Shmen about the charming Palestinian man I just met in the
waiting room. I want to suggest we could all meet for coffee.
But instead, Shmen insists on talking about my broken novel.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “I haven’t even shown you my
novel. How do you know it is off the tracks?”

“It’s in your eyes,” he says. “You give away everything. Your
novel needs something else. You need to take it further. Have
some testicles for God’s sake.”

“Oh,” I say. I have trouble knowing whether his insights are
brilliant, or whether they are a side effect of the anesthesia.

“Another thing,” he says. “You told me that you were
writing about me getting a colonoscopy, but that’s impossible
without me even having a colon to oscopize!”

“Oh,” I say. I had forgotten that I told him so much about
my novel. But he’s right just the same.

“You can call it a scope of some kind, but without a colon,
they aren’t going to get much further than my J Pouch without
some real damage to my small intestine.”

“Oh,” I say.

He looks at me for a little too long. It reminds me of how
my first therapist looked at me on my first visit. As if she were
digging deeper into my heart with each breath.

“You know,” Shmen finally says. “You look different.” He
takes a deep breath. “What happened to you?”

“I’m going to need to think about all this,” I say. “Maybe we
can talk about something else.”

I put my hand in my pocket and hold onto Yousef’s
business card. I wonder if we’ll really catch up again someday.

A Jew and a Palestinian walk into a bar…

“Okay,” he says. “But remember that it can sometimes get
worse before it gets better.”

“What does that even mean?” I say.

“Nothing…yet.”

We come around to the block where the pianos attacked
us, but all the crushed pianos are suspiciously gone—not
even one piano key on the ground. I look around, expecting
to see a sad grandmother or a camera crew or a crime scene
with piano-shaped chalk drawings on the ground, but there’s
nothing, no proof it ever happened.

After a long period of silence, Shmen says in a whisper,
“Did you think about your father while you were in the
hospital?”

I don’t say a word.

He puts his arm around my shoulder. “It’s okay,” this man
with no colon and a sore anus says to me, “you’re just having
a rough day.”

It was two in the morning and I was staying at my folks’
place when my father called from his hospital room. My mother and I each picked
up different telephones at the same time to hear my seventy-five-year-old
father cry out, “I farted!”

Although my family is not shy when it comes to the various forms of potty
talk, this announcement was more serious than usual. My father was in the
hospital after his prostatectomy, in pain, waiting for his digestive tract
to restart after the shock it had experienced from having a nearby organ removed.
I empathized with his traumatized organs, but I couldn’t bear to watch how
my father squeezed his eyes shut and made fists while waiting for the pain
to go away. The nurse finally convinced me at midnight that there was nothing
to be done, that he would get through this period, that it wasn’t so risky
even if it looked bad, and that I should go home and get some sleep.

I was thirty years old and still living in Atlanta, my hometown— my parents
were in the suburbs (near all the best hospitals) and I lived in town (near
all the best bars), except around the time of my father’s surgery, when I
stayed in my childhood bedroom with the Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd posters
still on the wall. But now they were next to piles of my father’s surplus
of chemistry books—after a fifty-year career as a chemistry professor. At
night, I thumbed through his pile of books. The books were in order of when
he used them, from what I could tell.

On the day he told me he had cancer, I was over at their place doing
a load of laundry. I was walking through the living room when I saw him quietly
sitting on the couch with a three-olive martini and a big smile. He spoke
about the cancer as if he were talking about candy.

“You’re fucking with me.”

His smile was too large and too genuine for any kind of joke.

When my father had heart surgery, twenty years prior,
I was at sleep-away camp. They didn’t tell me about the event until after
it had happened. I pretended to be upset they didn’t tell me in advance, upset
they didn’t pull me out of camp, worried about my poor father. But I was secretly
glad to have missed the show. After all, I got a chance to make out with a
girl for the first time at that camp. It would have been somewhere between
boring as hell and terrifying to be in that hospital eating stale tacos from
the cafeteria while they cracked open my father’s ribs and re-plumbed his
heart with veins from his legs. But as it happened, with my parents not telling
me about it in advance, they relieved me from having to confront this truth.
And besides, I’d never again get a chance to kiss a girl with a glass eye
and the most beautiful fake green iris.

My father sipped his martini nice and slow. Like he had
all the time in the world, like he was proud of himself for getting cancer,
like he had gotten the Nobel Prize in chemistry. I stepped over my dirty laundry
and sat on the coffee table, facing my father.

“When did you find out? How big is it? What are they going to do?” I
wanted to know numbers and stats.

“Today,” he said slowly. “They told me in the morning.”

“My God,” I said. “How bad is it?”

“It’s bad,” he said. “It’s the fastest kind.”

So much pride about his precious uncontrollable cell growth.

“But,” my father continued, “they’ve found it early. So they’re going
to rip out my prostate while they can.” He made a clawing gesture.

What I did at that moment was get on the floor and begin folding my clothes.
I folded my dirty underwear while my father spoke with fascination about the
procedure.

“Aren’t you scared?” I asked without looking at him, speaking more to
my dirty underwear.

I could hear my father chewing an olive, as if my question were meant
for another man, but he wasn’t scared at all. In fact, he took it as great
news. At least now he knew why he was pissing in his pants at night, why it
hurt to piss during the day, why he ached so badly in his gut. He said that
after the heart surgery he felt like he was living on borrowed time. He had
recently been feeling like his time had come.

“Time has come?” I yelled at him. “What kind of attitude is that?”

“Yuvi,” he said in the sweetest possible way, “calm yourself. This thing
is inside of me. Not you.”

The night before the surgery, he walked into my room while
I was trying to write a story about him. I had gotten past the point of resenting
my father for any mistakes he made as I was growing up. But I hadn’t yet filled
that resentment with something else. So I sat there alone with no idea what
I wanted to say.

“What are you writing?” my father said.

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.” I instinctively covered my page with my hand,
as if there were something bad on the page. As if there were anything at all
on the page.

“It gets easier,” he said.

“The writing?” I said.

“ No.”

“Life?” I tried. I don’t know if I was serious or joking.

“Not that either,” he said. “Life just gets worse.” My father stared
at his fingers as he spoke to me. He looked at the front and then the back
of his fingers like he was unfamiliar with them. I pictured this as a habit
of someone getting old, something that only a baby or an old man would take
the time to pay attention to. “You’ll learn to handle things better,” my father
said to me. “Even the messy stuff you’ll appreciate.”

He laughed for a while, I don’t know exactly why, and I think I even
laughed too. “Well, I’m glad we had this awkward little talk,” he said, and
he patted me on the shoulder and walked out of the room.

I didn’t sleep even a moment that night. I read sections from about twenty
of his books—some of the books I recognized and some were completely unfamiliar.
The newest books strayed pretty far from his area of expertise. They weren’t
your traditional textbooks on biochemistry and organic chemistry, they were
more like a study of the world cultures—books about Native American medicinal
compounds and Chinese healing techniques and diseases that Eastern European
Jews were genetically predisposed to and a book about the mushrooms consumed
by the Inuits.

As I drove my father to the surgery the next morning—my eyes burning
from such a long night—he told me that he’d slept better than he had in years.
I told him that I read some of his books during the night. I asked if he had
lost interest in his chemistry studies.

“It’s all chemistry,” he said.

We were quiet for the rest of the drive, but just as I was pulling in
to the parking lot, he said, “Oh!” I was afraid that we had forgotten something
critical for the surgery, like his health insurance suddenly expired or he
forgot his lucky fly fisherman pendant, but then he said, “I got something
for you.”

He opened the bag he was holding—the bag that I thought had a change
of clothes in it—and he pulled out a book: Best Short Stories of 1997. I looked
at the book for so long I nearly rolled right into a parked car—not that my
father was concerned.

“I hope,” he said, “you don’t mind that it’s used.”

The instant my father was wheeled off to surgery, I started
getting stomach cramps and felt a bout of diarrhea coming on. The instant
my father was wheeled off to surgery, my mother whipped out a deck of cards
from her purse and started playing solitaire on the waiting room table. I
always envied how my mother dealt with stress through games while I dealt
with it through my gastrointestinal tract.

Fifteen minutes of silence went by, the two of us the only ones in the
room. My mother played solitaire like that was her main reason for coming
to the hospital—Kings in the Corner, Klondike, Freecell, Pyramid, Black Widow.
I began reading the book my father had gotten me. My dad was into giant books,
giant books with scientific formulas and well-researched studies and historical
facts, so it was flattering to think he had gone out of his way to get me
this collection of little stories. It was full of odd tales, mostly interesting,
about drunk acupuncturists and talking buildings and edible mushrooms. And
then I got to a cancer story, an old man that dies of prostate cancer, and
I got stuck. I had read the same paragraph forty times without comprehending
a word.

“Mom?” I said as I sat at the table next to her.

The sound of her cards slapping the table didn’t stop. “Yes, mameleh?”

“What would you do if Dad died?”

“Chas vi-cha-lee-lah!” she said to me, and she put the cards down on
the table. She closed her eyes. This phrase comes from the Bible. I looked
it up after my mother admitted one time that she had no idea where it was
from. Abraham used these words when he was arguing with God. He told God that
he shouldn’t destroy the city of Sodom, that it would be unjust to kill the
innocent.

My mother opened her eyes again and before she started playing with her
cards again, she looked directly at me. I could see in her eyes the prayers
that she had recited, the quiet bargains she was making with God to save her
husband. There was a whole world my mother never spoke about.

“But what if it happened?” I said to my mom. “What then?”

“Mameleh,” she said. “Let’s talk about then then. Okay? It is bad luck
to talk about then now.”

I had one hand on the table and she put her hand on my hand like she
was trying to pick up a card and put it in the right place.

My mother thought you could cause death by talking about it. I thought
you could cause death by not talking about it.

After the surgery, they wheeled him into a recovery room.
He was still under the influence of the anesthesia and his false teeth were
not in his mouth and he barely had his eyes open. As two nurses wheeled him
into place, he reached his hand out in my direction and with the driest kind
of whisper he said, “Yuvi?” He said it like he wasn’t even sure who I was.

My mother held his hand and I pressed ice cubes against his dry lips.
My mother blessed God, and I blessed the doctor. My father looked so thirsty
and it seemed the water evaporated the moment it touched his lips. So I kept
applying the ice, and I got wrapped up in it, like this task was pivotal in
saving my father. Whether or not my father was ready for his time to come,
I wasn’t. I didn’t want to have to learn about my father through his piles
of chemistry books. It took the nurse to finally come in and tell me to stop.

“Enough,” she said. “You’re only making things worse.”

My mother and I took care of my father during the two
weeks he was recovering from the surgery. Every minute, I had part of my attention
on that tube coming out of him, terrified someone would step on it by mistake.

This was the last time I ever stayed with my parents for several weeks
at a time. I moved to Portland shortly after the surgery, and my visits back
home never felt long enough. When the doctor finally removed the catheter
two weeks after the surgery, my father and I were both a little disappointed
that our time together was over.

“You’re lucky I got cancer,” my father said to me. He was wearing a diaper
at that point, because it takes time to regain bladder control after two weeks
with a catheter. My incontinent father was right. And for years, he threatened
to get another disease so that we could spend more time together. “I’ve already
done cancer and heart disease,” he said. “Maybe this time I’ll do diabetes.”

And he said it with such joy. He loved the big diseases.

Sometimes, when I don’t know what to write, when I feel
too naïve to come to any insight or conclusion, I write down the raw details
I learn in a day or a week or a year. Here are some of the details I wrote
down during the month of my father’s surgery:

1
. My father loves to watch and rewatch
the first Godfather movie, and my mother is attracted to Al Pacino.

2
. 240 milliliters of urine can fill a pretty large
container.

3
. My mother, when she was a child, slept in a small
bed with her three sisters and she had nightmares about cats and rats.

4
. In 1936, when he was seven years old, my father tried
to dig a hole to China.

5
. The human penis, when it has a catheter going through
it, looks as helpless as a crushed mushroom.

The digestive system freezes up as a defense tactic. Once
it decides everything is safe, it will start up again. But this transition
period can be awfully painful. That’s what they told us and that’s how it
went for my father right after the surgery. And then my father farted and
that was that. He told me that when he farted, it felt like the whole world
opened up for him. It felt like the pain in his gut had been with him forever.
Even though he never kept kosher (a bacon lover from the beginning), he said
it was like every un-kosher thing he had ever eaten in his life was stuck
inside of him, every resentment and nasty feeling. And then he farted. And
the fight was over. He told me he farted so loud that the nurses on duty asked
for his autograph afterward.

But before this fart, he was an unhappy man. He pressed on his gut and
his eyes were shut tight and he was groaning in a way I couldn’t stand to
hear. He had a little button to release morphine into his blood and even though
the drug affected him, his pain didn’t go away, it just got more abstract.