Javitz is downstairs as soon as he hears the front door close. He doesn't say anything, just stands there looking at me. Poor guy: he feels miserable, I can tell, and here I am, yet again in the throes of a personal crisis. “Are you all right?” I ask.
“I came down here to ask the same of you,” he tells me.
“I'm
fine
.” I approach him, studying his yellowed eyes, the sudden gauntness of his face. Something is wrong; something is happening. “You need to promise me one thing,” I tell him.
“What's that, darling?”
“You're going to let me take care of you for a change.”
He smiles. “I gather that I have no choice.”
“Oh,” I say, laughing a little bitterly, “we
always
have choices.”
We embrace each other. “Yes, we do, darling,” he says. “Yes, we do.”
DEATH
Boston, November 1994
Katie Haaglund was the first person I ever knew who died. She was a little girl with a flat face and freckles, whom I played with once or twice and who died when I was still just a little boy.
“Katie Haaglund has leukemia,” my mother told me one rainy afternoon.
I stood there in our kitchen, shuffling my feet back and forth on the red-and-blue speckled linoleum floor. A rerun of
Gilligan's Island
was playing on the TV in the living room. I was on my way out to watch it when my mother gave me the news.
“She's in the hospital,” my mother told me.
“Really?” I asked, betraying little concern. I was eight, maybe a little youngerâbut certainly at the age where showing concern for a neighborhood girl was considered silly.
“They're going to ask us to pray for her in church,” my mother said.
That's what I'm telling Javitz now, trying to make him laugh as the nurse wheels him down the corridor of the hospital. I'd forgotten how bright hospitals are. So much artificial light. My eyes blink against the whiteness. “Don't worry,” I say to Javitz, averting my eyes. “I'll have Father McMurphy pray for you in church.”
But he says nothing in reply.
I try to goad him into laughing. Lloyd, walking on the other side of the wheelchair, looks over at me and scowls. He's not in the mood for levity. Javitz's sudden illness has scared him, thrown him for a loop. Javitz begins coughing.
“Here's your room, Mr. Javitz,” the nurse says, abruptly turning him at an almost ninety-degree angle into a small, private room. He hacks in reply.
It's been some time since Javitz was in the hospital. The last time was several years ago, and we thought he was going to die. He didn't, of course, so I'm less frantic this time. But Lloyd hovers around Javitz like a nervous butterfly, and Javitz, of course, consumed by the pneumonia, is convinced this is the end.
And maybe it is. I look at him as the nurse and two orderlies settle him into the bed. He looks like a little old man, or a little boy. Or both. They've got him in one of those johnnies, and his legs look as spindly as a bird's sticking out from under the white cotton. Lloyd arranges the sheet up around him. Might this be it, then? Might this finally be the end of it all?
“Let us pray,” the old priest had said, and that Sunday he had indeed prayed for Katie Haaglund. It seemed everyone in our neighborhood was Catholic, and we all went to the same church. When someone was prayed for from the pulpit, it was serious. It meant the person faced deathâand usually, that it was imminent. Death was something dark and mysterious for me back then; I couldn't imagine ever knowing someone who'd died. All four of my grandparents were still living then; even Junebug was still a frisky kitten. I'm pretty sure that
Gilligan's Island
was effectively ruined for me that afternoon my mother told me Katie Haaglund had leukemiaâeven if it was the one where Mary Ann thinks she's Ginger or the one where a ghost haunts the island (my two all-time favorite episodes). I'm pretty sure all I did was think about Katie, lying there in that hospital bed, and the fact that they were going to
pray for her in church.
When the annoying little cold Javitz developed right after Halloween was still hanging around a week later, he called and said, “I think I'm getting pneumonia again.”
I hurried over to Cambridge, made him a big pot of steaming chicken soup (elbow macaroni and leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken), and ordered him to bed. “You're not getting pneumonia,” I said. “We'll knock this out of you.”
But by the next day he was too weak to even lift the spoon to his mouth, so I fed him. “Here,” I said, wiping his chin. “Eat up. This is my magic recipe. It'll make you better.”
“No, Cat,” Lloyd said. “We've got to take him to the doctor.”
So here we sit, each of us on one side of his bed, and he looks so weak, so drawn, so yellow. Like Gordon had in those last couple of weeks, that eerie shine that emanates from the skin just before death. Lloyd stands up, edgy, places his left hand just a fraction over Javitz's forehead and begins to chant. He closes his eyes to hide the terror in them.
I close my eyes too. And I see Katie Haaglund, a stern little girl, the daughter of Swedish immigrants with blond hair and broad faces. Katie, however, was dark, with a flat face and freckles. Her death shocked the neighborhood. My mother and all the other ladies brought cakes and pies and casseroles to the Haaglund family the day Katie died. “How are they going to eat all that?” I asked, but I was merely shushed.
For some reason, my mother had thought Katie and I should play together. Once, she took me to Katie's house. She and Mrs. Haaglund drank coffee in the kitchen and watched Katie and me play in the backyard. I don't remember now what Katie and I played, but I'm pretty sure I told her that day a riddle my mother had once told me, a silly little ditty she must have heard on the radio. “A girl is put in a room with no windows and only one door ...”
When my mother first told it to me, I thought and thought, determined to come up with the answer. “What happened to the girl?” my mother asked.
She slipped out when they opened the door. She was hiding in a secret passage. She drank an invisible potion.
But my mother just grinned.
“The radiator,” she said. “Get it, Jeffy? The radiator! The radi
ate
her!”
I hated that answer. “No, no,” I protested. “She was okay. She got out. She found a key and opened the door....”
My mother just laughed.
Katie didn't like the answer any better than I did. “That doesn't make any sense,” she said, frowning.
Funny how I'm thinking of Katie Haaglund, standing over Javitz's hospital bed, Lloyd trying to heal him with psychic energy. Javitz has fallen into a steady breathing rhythm. He licks his lips as if he's trying to say something. Lloyd stops chanting and bends down.
Javitz rasps, “What was the name of that guy in ACT UP, the one who had the cross tattooed on his forehead?”
“Why?” Lloyd asks.
“Justâwhat was his name?”
Lloyd looks over at me. “Wasn't that Todd?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Javitz nods. He can barely speak. “Is he dead?”
“Why don't you just rest? Stop trying to talk,” I tell him.
“He's dead,” Javitz whispers, and closes his eyes.
Lloyd gets up and moves into the doorway, staring out into the hall. I come up behind him. “You okay?” I ask.
“This is absurd, you know. Nobody gets pneumonia anymore.”
“That's not true. We just don't hear about it like we used to. Javitz just refused the Bactrim.”
Lloyd hangs his head. “This is it for him, you know,” he says, very, very quietly. “Last week, at my meditation group, I had a vision of Javitz. It was like he was an angel.”
“Javitz?” I ask. “An
angel?”
“It was like he was dead.”
We're silent a minute. Behind us Javitz has drifted into sleep. His chest heaves in rattling snores. We step outside into the bright fluorescence of the hallway.
“It's hard for us to understand,” Lloyd says, “but death has its place in life.”
“Sure,” I say. “At the end of it.”
He grimaces. “No, I mean, death is a part of how we live. It has its purpose, its place. Death is not a bad thing, not something to fear.”
“It sucks,” I say plainly.
“That's the wrong attitude, Jeff,” he scolds.
“How about if we just call it
my
attitude instead of âwrong'”
“Part of the reason I'm exploring my spiritual path is because of Javitz,” Lloyd offers.
“As if I couldn't figure that out. Lloyd, you're scared shitless about him dying. Admit it.”
“I'm not sure I'd say âscared shitless.' ”
“Well, then, whatever. All I know is death scares the hell out of me. It always has. Always will.”
We hear Javitz coughing again inside the room. We both head back to his bedside.
“You want some water?” Lloyd asks. The fear is right there on his face, no matter how much he may try to deny it. I watch as he holds the cup of water to Javitz's lips, cradling his head in the crook of his arm. I watch Javitz's lips drink as if he were an invalid cat. Then he starts barking again, spewing the water over his bedsheets.
And suddenly I wonder if they might be right, if this is indeed the end. I wonder if I too am denying my fear by the very act of acknowledging it. But how will I react the moment Javitz's eyes turn glassy, the second his cough stops, the first time I touch his hand and find it cold?
After Gordon died, I thought nothing could be more horrible than seeing his gray body exposed on the white sheets, his shriveled dick mocking the passion we once felt in the front seat of his mother's car. But seeing Stick was worse. The second of the Three Musketeers put up a longer fight: kicking and thrashing in his sheets, cursing me for coming before he lost his voice to the morphine. “Look at you,” he spat. “Pitying me.”
“I don't pity you,” I said.
“Well, I pity you,” he said. “I pity all of you who are left.”
I tried to calm him but he was in pain, twisting under that thin film of sheets, the dark contours of his body clearly seen through the fabric. He had always been tall and thinâhence his nickname âbut now he was something obscene, a sideshow attraction, the Living Skeleton. His sunken face stared at me with hatred, his eyes shining with the power of his pain. This was death. This. Not the beautiful death of Garbo in
Camille,
gently coughing into a lace handkerchief, propped up by pillows, her deathbed hair and makeup provided by the best MGM technicians. Not the noble sacrifice of Bette Davis at the end of
Dark Victory,
turning calmly to Geraldine Fitzgerald to say, “Is it getting dark?” No, death was Stick writhing in his bed. Death was poor Aunt Agatha rotting for days on her living-room couch. Death was little Katie Haaglund in her tiny white coffin.
I never went to Stick's funeral. I'm not even sure if he had one. But I went to Katie Haaglund's all those years ago. My mother thought it would be good for me, as Katie had been “my friend.” I disputed the designation. “We only played together
once,”
I said, dreading the idea of the church and the mourners and the baby casket, but I was taken anyway. I kept my eyes on the floor the whole time.
Actually, there was one other time Katie came over to play, and it's that time that catches me in the throat every time I think about it, even now. It was maybe a few months after she and I played in her backyard. This time, I was at my house with another friend, a boy, a faceless, nameless child lost in the swirls of memory. But for whatever reasonâmaybe because she was a girl and this is how boys behave, or maybe because I was a kid who did terrible, senseless thingsâI decided I didn't want Katie to join us.
“Katie's a baby! Katie's a baby!” we chanted gleefully, and whether she cried because we called her a baby or if we called her a baby because she cried, I can't remember. But we ran after her, and she cried buckets. God, how she cried. All the way back up the street, her little flat face spitting out tears right and left, while inside, unbeknownst to any of us, those little leukemia cells were doing their horrible handiwork. My buddy and I turned to each other like victorious warriors, having saved our precious little male games from the female intruder. We slapped our hands high over our heads, laughed at how hard we made Katie cry.
But by that night, I'd already begun feeling guilty. The worst horror came just weeks later, the day my mother told me about Katie's leukemia. Somehow those two events linked themselves forever in my mind: I was mean to her, and then she died.
“It makes no sense,” Lloyd says, startling me.
“What makes no sense?”
“How he keeps asking if people he knows are dead.”
“Nothing makes sense,” I say.
Least of all death. When Katie died, I showed little emotion. But at night, in my bedroom, after Kevin had fallen asleep and would begin to snore, I'd cry my tears for Katie Haaglund. She had been my friend, even if for just one day, one day out of the thousands of my childhood. The neighbors all said things like “Poor little girl” and “Makes no sense at all” and “Here today, gone tomorrow.” Leukemia became that dreaded harvester of children, and there was a part of me that waited alone in the dark for it to claim me, too. But more than that, I feared it would claim all the other children around me, and everyone in my family, and that I'd be left alone.
“Katie is with God now,” my mother told me, but I wasn't sure if I believed her. After all, she had told me that riddle, too, that stupid, terrifying, goddamnedâ