It wasn’t even that smelly of an operation, Frank learned (although sometimes it was); and then they would hustle off with backpacks full of half-frozen steaks or big bags of lettuce, or potatoes, really almost all the raw materials of the wonderful meals all the restaurants had not made and could preserve no longer, and by the time they got to the meeting house, its kitchen would be powered up by a generator in the backyard, or the fireplace would be ablaze with a big fire, and cooks would be working on a meal that would feed thirty or forty people through the course of the evening.
Frank floated through all this like a jellyfish. He let the tide of humanity shove him along. This way or that. Billow on the current. He was grunioning in the shallows of the city.
Then it came time for the last of Rudra’s major funerals. Frank was surprised to see the date on his watch. Well, that was interesting. Forty-nine days had passed and he hadn’t quite noticed. Now it was the day.
He didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to admit Rudra was dead, he didn’t want to feel those feelings again. He didn’t want to think that Rudra was alive but in some horrible netherworld, where he was having to negotiate all kinds of terrors in order to get to the start of some putative next life. It was absurd. He didn’t want any of it to be real.
He sat there at his desk in his office, paralyzed by indecision. He
could not decide
.
A call came on his FOG phone.
It was Nick Quibler. “Frank, are you okay? Did you forget that it’s the day for Rudra’s funeral?”
Nick did not sound accusatory, or worried, or anything. Nick was good at not sounding emotional. Teenage flatness of affect.
“Oh yeah,” he said to the boy, trying to sound normal. “I did forget. Thanks for calling. I’ll be right over. But don’t let them delay anything on my account.”
“I don’t think they could even if they wanted to,” Nick said. “It’s a pretty strict schedule, as far as I can tell.” He had taken an interest in the supposed sequence of events Rudra had been experiencing during these forty-nine days in the bardo, reading the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
and telling Frank too many of the details, all too like one of his video games. Suddenly it all seemed to Frank like a cruel hoax, a giant fiction meant to comfort the bereaved. People who died were dead and gone. Their soul had been in their brains and their brains decomposed and the electrical activity was gone. And then they were gone too, except to the extent they were in other people’s minds.
Well, fair enough. He was going to the funeral now. He had decided. Or Nick had decided.
Suddenly he understood that he had been sitting there about to miss it. He was so incapacitated that he had almost missed a friend’s funeral. Would have missed it, if not for a call from another friend. Before leaving he grabbed up the phone and called up the neurologist’s office. “I have a referral from Dr. Mandelaris for elective surgery,” he explained. “I’d like to schedule that now please. I’ve decided to do it.”
E
VERY SUMMER CHARLIE FLEW BACK
to California to spend a week in the Sierra Nevada, backpacking with a group of old friends. Most of them were high school friends, and some of them had gone to UC San Diego together, many years before. That they and Frank Vanderwal had been undergraduates at UCSD at the same time had come up at dinner one night at the Quiblers’ the previous winter, causing a moment of surprise, then a shrug. Possibly they had been in classes together—they couldn’t remember. The subject had been dropped, as just one of those coincidences that often cropped up in Washington, D.C. So many people came from somewhere else that sometimes the elsewheres were the same.
This coincidence, however, was certainly a factor in Charlie inviting Frank to join the group for this summer’s trip. Perhaps it played a part in Frank’s acceptance as well; it was hard for Charlie to tell. Frank’s usual reticence had recently scaled new heights.
The invitation had been Anna’s idea. Frank was having an operation on his nose, she said, and if he didn’t go away afterward he would not stop working. He did not particularly like the move from NSF to the White House, she felt, but he certainly worked very long hours there. And since Rudra’s death, he had seemed to her lonely.
This was all news to Charlie, despite his kayaking expeditions with Frank—although anyone could see that the death of Rudra Cakrin had shaken him. When he showed up for the forty-nine-day ceremony, quite late—most of the gazillion prayers over, in fact—he had been obviously distressed. He had arrived in time for the part where everyone there took bites out of little cakes they had been given, then turned the remaining pieces back in, to help sustain Rudra’s spirit—a beautiful idea—but Frank had eaten his piece entirely, having failed to understand. It was always a shock to see someone one regarded as unemotional suddenly become distraught.
So, soon after that Frank had had the surgery to correct problems behind his nose resulting from his accident. “No big deal,” he described it, but Anna just shook her head at that.
“It’s right next to his brain,” she told Charlie.
They all visited him in the hospital, and he said he was fine, that it had gone well, he had been told. And yes, he would like to join the backpacking trip, thanks. It would be good to get away. Would he be okay to go to high altitude? Charlie wondered. He said he would be.
After that everyone got busy with summer daycamp and swim lessons for Nick, the White House for Charlie and Joe, NSF for Anna; and they did not see Frank again for a couple weeks, until suddenly the time for the Sierra trip was upon them.
Charlie’s California friends were fine with the idea of an added member of the trip, which they had done from time to time before, and they were looking forward to meeting him.
“He’s kind of quiet,” Charlie warned them.
This annual trek had been problematized for Charlie on the home front ever since Nick’s birth, him being the stay-at-home parent, and Joe’s arrival had made things more than twice as bad. Two consecutive summers had passed without Charlie being able to make the trip. Anna had seen how despondent he had gotten on the days when his friends were hiking in the high Sierra without him, and she was the one who had suggested he just make whatever kid coverage arrangement it would take, and go. Gratefully Charlie had jumped up and kissed her, and between some logistical help on the Nick summer daycamp front from their old Gymboree friend Asta, and extended White House daycare for Joe, he found they had coverage for both boys for the same several hours a day, which meant Anna could continue to work almost full-time. This was crucial; the loss of even a couple of hours of work a day caused her brow to furrow vertically and her mouth to set in a this-is-not-good expression very particular to work delays.
Charlie knew the look well, but tried not to see it as the departure time approached.
“This will be good for Frank,” he would say. “That was a good idea you had.”
“It’ll be good for you too,” Anna would reply; or she would not reply at all and just give him a look.
Actually she would have been completely fine with him going, Charlie thought, if it were not that she still seemed to have some residual worries about Joe. When Charlie realized this by hearing her make some non sequitur that skipped from the one subject to the other, he was surprised; he had thought he was the only one still worrying about Joe. He had assumed Anna would have had her mind put fully at ease by the disappearance of the fever. That had always been the focus of her concern, as opposed to the matters of mood and behavior which had been bothering Charlie.
Now, however, as the time for the mountain trip got closer and closer, he could see on Anna’s face all her expressions of worry, visible in quick flashes when they discussed things, or when she was tired. Charlie could read a great deal on Anna’s face. He didn’t know if this was just the ordinary result of long familiarity or if she was particularly expressive, but certainly her worried looks were very nuanced, and, he had to say, beautiful. Perhaps it was just because they were so legible to him. You could see that life
meant something
when she was worrying over it; her thoughts flickered over her face like flames over burning coals, as if one were watching some dreamily fine silent-screen actress, able to express anything with looks alone. To read her was to love her. She might be, as Charlie thought she was, slightly crazy about work, but even that was part of what he loved, as just another manifestation of how much she cared about things. One could not care more and remain sane. Mostly sane.
But Anna had never admitted, or even apparently seen, the Khembali connection to the various changes in Joe. To her there was no such thing as a metaphysical illness, because there was no such thing as metaphysics. And there was no such thing as psychosomatic illness in a three-year-old, because a toddler was not old enough to have problems, as his Gymboree friend Ce-celia had put it.
So it had to be a fever. Or so she must have been subconsciously reasoning. Charlie had to intuit or deduce most of this from the kinds of apprehension he saw in her. He wondered what would happen if Anna were the one on hand when Joe went into one of his little trances, or said
“Namaste”
to a snowman. He wondered if she knew Joe’s daytime behavior well enough to notice the myriad tiny shifts that had occurred in his daily moods since the election-day party at the Khembalis’.
Well, of course she did; but whether she would admit some of these changes were connected to the Khembalis was another matter.
Maybe it was better that she couldn’t be convinced. Charlie himself did not want to think there was anything real to this line of thought. It was one of his own forms of worry, perhaps—trying to find some explanation other than undiagnosed disease or mental problem. Even if the alternative explanation might in some ways be worse. Because it disturbed him, even occasionally freaked him out. He could only think about it glancingly, in brief bursts, and then quickly jump to something else. It was too weird to be true.
But there were more things in heaven and earth, etc.; and without question there were very intelligent people in his life who believed in this stuff, and acted on those beliefs. That in itself made it real, or something with real effects. If Anna had the Khembalis over for dinner while Charlie was gone, maybe she would see this. Even if the only “real” part of it was that the Khembalis believed something was going on, that was enough, potentially, to make for trouble.
In any case, the trouble would not come to a head while he was out in the Sierras. He would only be gone a week, and Joe had been much the same, week to week, all that winter and spring and through the summer so far.
So Charlie made his preparations for the trip without talking openly to Anna about Joe, and without meeting her eye when she was tired. She too avoided the topic.
It was harder with Joe: “When you going Dad?” he would shout on occasion. “How long? What you gonna do? Hiking? Can I go?” And then when Charlie explained that he couldn’t, he would shrug. “Oh my.” And make a little face. “See you when you back Dad.”
It was heartbreaking.
On the morning of Charlie’s departure, Joe patted him on the arm. “Bye Da. Be
care
ful,” saying it just like Charlie always said it, as a half-exasperated reminder, just as Charlie’s father had always said it to him, as if the default plan were to do something reckless, so that one had to be reminded.
Anna clutched him to her. “Be careful. Have fun.”
“I will. I love you.”
“I love you too. Be careful.”
Charlie and Frank flew from Dulles to Ontario together, making a plane change in Dallas.
Frank had had his operation eighteen days before. “So what was it like?” Charlie asked him.
“Oh, you know. They put you out.”
“For how long?”
“A few hours I think.”
“And after that?”
“Felt fine.”
Although, Charlie saw, he seemed to have even less to say than before. So on the second leg of the trip, with Frank sitting beside him looking out the window of the plane, and every page of that day’s
Post
read, Charlie fell asleep.
It was too bad about the operation. Charlie was in an agony of apprehension about it, but as Joe lay there on the hospital bed he looked up at his father and tried to reassure him. “It be all right Da.” They had attached wires to his skull, connecting him to a bulky machine by the bed, but most of his hair was still unshaved, and under the mesh cap his expression was resolute. He squeezed Charlie’s hand, then let go and clenched his fists by his sides, preparing himself, mouth pursed. The doctor on the far side of the bed nodded; time for delivery of the treatment. Joe saw this, and to give himself courage began to sing one of his wordless marching tunes, “Da, da da da, da!” The doctor flicked a switch on the machine and instantaneously Joe sizzled to a small black crisp on the bed.
Charlie jerked upright with a gasp.
“You okay?” Frank said.
Charlie shuddered, fought to dispel the image. He was clutching the seat arms hard.
“Bad dream,” he got out. He hauled himself up in his seat and took some deep breaths. “Just a little nightmare. I’m fine.”
But the image stuck with him, like the taste of poison. Very obvious symbolism, of course, in the crass way dreams sometimes had—image of a fear he had in him, expressed visually, sure—but so brutal, so ugly! He felt betrayed by his own mind. He could hardly believe himself capable of imagining such a thing. Where did such monsters come from?
He recalled a friend who had once mentioned he was taking St. John’s wort in order to combat nightmares. At the time Charlie had thought it a bit silly; the moment you woke up from dreams you knew they were not real, so how bad could a nightmare be?
Now he knew, and finally he felt for his old friend Gene.
So when his old friends and roommates Dave and Vince picked them up at the Ontario airport and they drove north in Dave’s van, Charlie and Frank were both a bit subdued. They sat in the middle seats of the van and let Dave and Vince do most of the talking up front. These two were more than willing to fill the hours of the drive with tales of the previous year’s work in criminal defense and urology. Occasionally Vince would turn around in the passenger seat and demand some words from Charlie, and Charlie would reply, working to shake off the trauma of the dream and get into the good mood that he knew he should be experiencing. They were off to the mountains—the southern end of the Sierra Nevada was appearing ahead to their left already, the weird desert ranges above Death Valley were off to their right. They were entering Owens Valley, one of the greatest of mountain valleys! It was typically one of the high points of their trips, but this time he wasn’t quite into it yet.