Big Fish (9 page)

My Father's Death:
Take 3

I
t happens like this. Old Dr. Bennett, our family doctor, comes out of the guest room and gently shuts the door behind him. Older than old, Dr. Bennett has been part of our lives forever, he was even there when I was born, at which time he had been asked by the local medical board to please retire, soon—that's how old he is. Dr. Bennett is now too old for almost anything. He doesn't walk so much as shuffle, doesn't breathe so much as gasp. And he seems unable to deal with the consequences of his patient's terminal condition. As he comes out of the guest room, where my father's been staying the last few weeks, Dr. Bennett breaks down in a storm of tears, and for some time can't speak he's crying so much, shoulders heaving, his crumpled old hands cupped over his eyes.

Finally, he's able to look up and gasp for breath. He looks like a lost child, and he says to my mother and me, we who are now prepared for the very worst, “I don't . . . I don't really know what's going on. I can't tell anymore. He seems pretty bad off, though. Best go see for yourself.”

My mother looks at me, and it is that look of final resignation I see in her eyes, that look that says she is ready for whatever awaits her beyond the door, however sad or horrible. She is ready. She takes my hand and holds it tight before standing and going in. Dr. Bennett falls into my father's chair and slumps there as if emptied of the will to go on. For a moment I think he's dead. For a moment I think Death has come and passed my father over, and decided to take this one instead. But no. Death has come for my father. Dr. Bennett opens his eyes and stares into the wild, distant empty space before him, and I can guess what he's thinking.
Edward Bloom! Who would have thought! Man of the world! Importer/exporter! We all thought you'd live forever. Though the rest of us fall like leaves from a tree, if there was one to withstand the harsh winter ahead and hang on for dear life we thought it would be you.
As though he were a god. This is how we have come to think of my father. Although we have seen him early in the morning in his boxer shorts, and late at night asleep in front of the television after everything on it has gone off the air, mouth open, blue light like a shroud over his dreaming face, we believe he is somehow divine, a god, the god of laughter, the god who cannot speak but to say,
There was this man . . .
Or perhaps part god, the product of a mortal woman and some glorious entity descended here to make the world the kind of place where more people laughed, and, inspired by their laughter, bought things from my father to make their lives better, and his life better, and in
that way, all lives were made better. He is funny and he
makes money and what could be better than that? He even laughs at death, he laughs at my tears. I hear him laughing now, as my mother leaves the room shaking her head.

“Incorrigible,” she says. “Completely and totally incorrigible.”

She's crying, too, but these are not tears of grief or sadness, those tears have already been shed. These are tears of frustration, of being alive and alone while my father lies in the guest room dying and not dying
right.
I look at her and with my eyes ask,
Should I?
And she shrugs her shoulders as if to say,
It's up to you, go in if you'd like,
and seems to be on the verge of a kind of laughter herself, if she weren't already crying, which is a confusing sort of expression for a face to have to bear.

Dr. Bennett seems to have fallen asleep in my father's chair.

I stand and go to the half-closed door and peer beyond it. My father is sitting up, braced by a load of pillows, still and staring at nothing as though he were on Pause, waiting for someone or something to activate him. Which is what my presence does. When he sees me, he smiles.

“Come in, William,” he says.

“Well, you seem to be feeling better,” I say, sitting down in the chair beside his bed, the chair I've been sitting in every day for the last few weeks. In my father's journey to the end of his life, this chair is the place I watch from.

“I am feeling better,” he says, nodding, taking a deep breath as if to prove it. “I think I am.”

But only today, for this moment on this day. There is no turning back now for my father. To get better now would take more than a miracle; it would take a written excuse from Zeus himself, signed in triplicate and sent to every other deity who might lay claim to my father's withered body and soul.

He is already a little bit dead, I think, if such a thing were possible; the metamorphosis that has occurred would be too much to believe if I hadn't seen it myself. At first, small lesions appeared on his arms and legs. They were treated, but to no real effect. Then they appeared to heal on their own eventually—not, however, in a way we might have hoped for or expected. Instead of his soft, white skin with the long black hairs growing out of it like corn silk, his skin has become hard and shiny—indeed, almost scaly, like a second skin. Looking at him isn't hard until you leave the room and see the photo sitting on the fireplace mantel. It was taken six or seven years ago on a beach in California, and when you look at it you can see—a man. He's not a man in the same way now. He's something else altogether.

“Not good, really,” he says, revising himself. “I would
n't say
good.
But better.”

“I just wondered what bothered Dr. Bennett,” I say. “He seemed really concerned when he came out of here.”

My father nods.

“Honestly,” he says, in a confidential tone, “I think it was my jokes.”

“Your jokes?”

“My doctor jokes. I think he'd heard one too many,” and my father begins to recite his litany of tired old jokes:

Doctor, doctor! I've only got 59 seconds to live.
Hang on, I'll be with you in a minute.

Doctor, doctor! I keep thinking I'm a pair of curtains.
Come on, pull yourself together.

Doctor, doctor! My sister thinks she's in a lift.
Tell her to come in.
I can't. She doesn't stop at this floor.

Doctor, doctor! I feel like a goat.
Stop acting like a little kid.

Doctor, doctor! I think I'm shrinking.
You'll just have to be a little patient.

“I know a million of 'em,” he says proudly.

“I bet you do.”

“I give him a couple every time he comes in here. But . . . I guess he heard one too many. I don't think he has a very good sense of humor anyway,” he says. “Most doctors don't.”

“Or maybe he just wanted you to be straight with him,” I say.

“Straight?”

“Straightforward,” I say. “Just be your normal average guy and tell him what is bothering you, where it hurts.”

“Ah,” my father says. “As in, ‘Doctor, doctor! I'm dying, please cure me.' Like that?”

“Like that,” I say. “Sort of, but—”

“But we both know there is no cure for what I've got,” he says, the smile diminishing, his body falling deeper into the bed, the old fragility returning. “Reminds me of the Great Plague of '33. No one knew what it was, or where it came from. One day everything seemed fine and the next—the strongest man in Ashland: dead. Died while eating his breakfast. Rigor mortis set in so quick his body froze right there at the kitchen table, spoon lifted halfway to his mouth. After him, a dozen died in an hour. Somehow, I was immune. I watched my neighbors fall to the ground as though their bodies had become suddenly and irrevocably vacant, as if—”

“Dad,” I say a couple of times, and when he finally stops I take his thin and brittle hand in my own. “No more stories, okay? No more stupid jokes.”

“They're stupid?”

“I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

“Thank you.”

“Just for a little while,” I say, “let's talk, okay? Man to man, father to son. No more stories.”

“Stories? You think I tell stories? You wouldn't believe the stories my dad used to tell me. You think I tell
you
stories, when I was boy I heard
stories.
He'd wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me a story. It was awful.”

“But even
that's
a story, Dad. I don't believe it for a minute.”

“You're not necessarily supposed to
believe
it,” he says wearily. “You're just supposed to believe in it. It's like—a metaphor.”

“I forget,” I say. “What's a metaphor?”

“Cows and sheep mostly,” he says, wincing a bit as he says it.

“See?” I say. “Even when you're serious you can't keep from joking. It's frustrating, Dad. It keeps me at arm's length. It's like—you're scared of me or something.”

“Scared of you?” he says, rolling his eyes. “I'm dying and I'm supposed to be scared of you?”

“Scared of getting close to me.”

He takes this in, my old man, and looks away, into his past.

“It must have something to do with my father,” he says. “My father was a drunk. I never told you that, did I? He was a terrible drunk, the worst kind. Sometimes he was too drunk to get it for himself. He had me get it for him for a while but then I stopped, refused. Finally, he taught his dog, Juniper, to go get it. Carried an empty bucket to the corner saloon and had him bring it back full of beer. Paid for it by sticking a dollar bill into the dog's collar. One day he didn't have any ones, all he had was a five, so he stuck that in his collar.

“The dog didn't come back. Drunk as he was, my father went down to the bar and found the dog sitting there on a stool, drinking a double martini.

“My dad was angry and hurt.

“‘You never did anything like this before,' my dad said to Juniper.

“‘I never had the money before,' Juniper said.”

And he looks at me, unrepentant.

“You can't do it, can you?” I say, voice rising, teeth grinding.

“Sure I can,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “Do it. Tell me something. Tell me about the place you come from.”

“Ashland,” he says, licking his lips.

“Ashland. What was it like?”

“Small,” he says, mind drifting. “So small.”

“How small?”

“It was so small,” says he, “that when you plugged in an electric razor, the street light dimmed.”

“Not a good start,” I say.

“People were so cheap there,” he says, “they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”

“I love you, Dad,” I say, getting closer to him. “We de­serve better than this. But you're making this too hard. Help me, here. What were you like as a boy?”

“I was a fat boy,” he says. “Nobody would ever play with me. I was so fat I could only play seek. That's how fat I was,” he says, “so fat I had to make two trips just to leave the house,” not smiling now because he's not trying to be funny, he is just being him, something he can't not be. Beneath one facade there's another facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place, his life, something that neither of us understands. All I can say is, “One more chance. I'll give you one more chance and then I'm leaving, I'm going, and I don't know if I'm coming back. I'm not going to be your straight man anymore.”

And so he says to me, my father, the very father who is dying here in front of me, though today he looks good for someone in his condition, he says, “You're not yourself today son,” in his best Groucho, winking just in case—and this is a long shot—I take him seriously, “and it's a great improvement.”

But I do take him seriously; this is the problem. I stand to go but as I stand he grabs me by the wrist and holds me with a power I didn't think he had any longer. I look at him.

“I know when I'm going to die,” he says, looking deep into my eyes. “I've seen it. I know when and how it's going to happen and it's not today, so don't worry.”

He is completely serious, and I believe him. I actually believe him. He knows. I have a thousand thoughts in my head but can speak none of them. Our eyes are locked and I'm filled with a wonder. He knows.

“How do you—why—”

“I've always known,” he says, softly, “always had this power, this vision. I've had it since I was a boy. When I was a boy I had a series of dreams. They woke me up screaming. My father came to me on the first night and asked me what was wrong and I told him. I told him I'd dreamed my aunt Stacy had died. He assured me that Aunt Stacy was fine and I went back to bed.

“But the next day she died.

“A week or so later the same thing happened. Another dream, I woke up screaming. He came to my room and asked me what had happened. I told him I dreamed Gramps had died. Again he told me—though with perhaps a bit of trepidation in his voice—that Gramps was fine, and so I went back to sleep.

“The next day, of course, Gramps died.

“For a few weeks I didn't have another dream. Then I did, I had another, and Father came and asked me what I had dreamed and I told him: I dreamed that my father had died. He of course assured me that he was fine and to think no more of it, but I could tell it rattled him, and I heard him pacing the floor all night, and the next day he was not himself, always looking this way and that as if something was going to fall on his head, and he went into town early and was gone for a long time. When he came back he looked terrible, as if he had been waiting for the ax to fall all day.

“‘Good God,' he said to my mother when he saw her. ‘I've had the worst day of my entire life!'

“‘You think
you've
had a bad day,' she says. ‘The milkman dropped dead on the porch this morning!'”

I slam the door behind me when I leave, hoping he has a heart attack, dies quickly, so we can get this whole thing over with. I've already started grieving, after all.