The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (8 page)

battle of the blur

N
one of my zippers work anymore, which must be some kind of metaphor. Listing ever so slightly before the urinal, I'm not surprised to discover that my fly is already open. Tonight is Max's birthday. We're having a little party at the Grill, where happy hour ended some two and a half hours ago. I'm wearing my blue cords for the occasion (in spite of the lazy zipper) because they're the only pants I own that still manage to achieve some kind of slimming effect, an illusion, I fear, that's beginning to lose its crisp edges with every cheeseburger.

Th
is evening is sure to end badly. Already, I can feel hints of the old blur coming on: the dull throbbing in the chest, the thick, slow coursing of blood behind the temples, the heaviness of limb which signals my approaching oblivion. Zipping my fly up futilely, I'm determined to fight the blur this evening, determined to feel and remember, to walk among the living, even though I have nothing to hope for.

Rejoining the party to the tune of Motorhead's
“Fast and Loose,” I see that a second larger table now abuts our own. We are being joined by five of Max's Bremerton friends.
Th
e tall guy with the trench coat and the dirty glasses is vaguely familiar.
Th
ere is a short, ample redhead dressed like a witch. Her black leggings fit like sausage skins—which is appropriate because this is basically a sausage party.
Th
e other two Bremerton friends are also dudes, skinheads dressed like rappers, with tattoos above the collar, both of them with initials for names, not J. J. or B. J. but awkward-sounding ones: G. R. and C. L. or P. K. and K. W.

Full introductions are made, shots are procured, and the bar is soon abuzz with our chatter.
Th
e jukebox cycles more Motorhead, Bon Jovi, the Boss.
Th
e tables get stickier by the minute.
Th
e world is still tactile, still memorable. I'm winning the battle.
Th
e tall guy is talking to me about Atlantis, the Pillars of Hercules, ziggurats in pre-Columbian South America. I wish he'd clean his glasses—it's all I can do to resist leaning over and doing it myself. Teo is arm wrestling a skinhead who keeps calling him “bro,” while Max appears to be making headway with the redhead, who giggles more than you'd expect for a witch. She's unwittingly slopped a big gob of nacho cheese on her cape.
Th
ese people are slobs. I'm beginning to feel superior this evening in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

“Your fly is open,” says Forest, nudging me.

“Dude, what about the Olmecs?” says Dirty Glasses.

Big Red giggles as Max leans over and shovels the cheese off her velour cape, licking his finger. A little orange string of it still dangles from his mustache but not for long. Big Red leans over and licks his mustache clean.

“I'm out, Holmes,” Forest says, clapping my back as he stands. “I wanna see the girls before Mel puts them to bed.” He looks around the table and back at me a little uneasily, as though he can see my future. “You sure you don't need a ride?”

“I'm good.”

“He's goin' to a party with us,” Max says.

And sure enough, twenty minutes later, after we've cleared the big tab with the usual confusion, the whole group of us arrive at a house party out near the Olympic College campus in a sagging green craftsman with a dead lawn. No sooner have I mounted the front steps than I'm accosted on the porch by a ruddy little pug-faced man who pulls me aside and starts breathing a fog of Jägermeister into my face. He's totally gooned, his eyes lolling around in his head.

“Dude, dude, check this shit out,” he says.

“What?” I say.

He wrestles clumsily with his open cell phone until his eyes light up, and he thrusts the phone up into my face.

“Dude, check it out.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Wait, wait, this way,” he says, tilting the phone horizontally, and pushing it even farther into my face.

Squinting, I still don't know what I'm looking at, but it's fleshy and hairless.

“Is that your baby?” I ask.

“Dude, that's my dick!”

I push past him, and he slaps me on the back.

“Aw, man, we're cool, right?” he calls after me. “We're cool?”

Dirty Glasses Dale and I help ourselves to a beer and settle at the kitchen table, vacant but for a jumble of empties. A pair of short girls sashay into the kitchen, also talking loudly. One of them, the blonde, has the most vivid fake tan I've ever seen. She's perfectly orange. Her eyebrows are albino blond.
Th
ey look like they might burn your fingers if you touched them.

“Hey psst,” I say to Dale. “Look, an Oompa Loompa.”

But the reference is lost on Dale, who is in earnest, still furrowing his brow at the inexplicable development of the water clock in a culture that couldn't grow beets a hundred years prior. “Gotta be Atlantis,” he says. “
Th
ere's no other explanation for the widespread development of technology that quickly.”

“Is anyone sitting here?” says Oompa Loompa.

“Go for it,” I say.

Construction cone orange or not, Oompa Loompa is smooth-faced and kind of cute. Her friend, not so much. She's got a big overbite. From the side she looks like a bottle opener. But I'm guessing she probably looks better through Dale's smudged glasses, because he's all over her right from the get-go.

“So, do you live here?” Oompa Loompa says to me.

“Nah. We're here with Max.”

“Max just left,” she says.

“Oh. Well, I guess we're here by ourselves.”

“I'm Cindy,” she says.

“I'm Ben.”

Suddenly, there's a bloodcurdling scream from the bathroom down the hallway, and the pug-faced kid with the cell phone bursts out the door clutching his groin with both hands. He slumps in the threshold of the kitchen with everybody staring at him.

“Dude,” he says. “Come here, come here, you gotta help me.”

“Me?” I say.

“Dude,” he pleads. “You gotta come here, man, you gotta.” Waving me onward over his shoulder, he begins shambling down the hallway, clutching his abdomen and moaning like Tina Turner as he goes.

Warily, I follow him to the bathroom, and he shuts the door behind us.

“What's the deal?” I say.

He corkscrews his face and fresh tears stream down his cheeks. “I was smoking,” he moans, releasing his crotch to expose his wrinkled red member.

“Jesus!” I say, recoiling.

“It huuurts,” he says.

I reach for the doorknob, but he grabs my arm pleadingly. “Dude, what do I do? I'm serious, what do I do? It huuuurts.”

“Hell if I know, put a Band-Aid on it.”

He looks up into my face with the most desolate and apologetic of all expressions: the expression of a guy who just burned his penis with a cigarette and wants you to put a Band-Aid on it.

“Dude, I can't do it,” he says. “I'll pass out.”

I heave a long sigh. Rifling through the medicine cabinet, I wonder why it is that the winds of fate have blown me here. Why in a house full of people did the little pug-faced man choose me to minister to his injured penis? How did he know?

“Hold still,” I say.

He winces at first, but then sighs with relief as I apply a curlicue of Neosporin to the popped blister. His dingus feels like a salamander between my fingers, though nothing in my manner suggests that I am disgusted. I am, after all, a pro.

“You're not a fag are you?” he says.

“Nope,” I say, smoothing over the Band-Aid and releasing his penis.

“
Th
at's good.” He gives me a pat on the shoulder. “Hey, man, seriously, thanks.”

“No problem,” I say, rinsing my hands. “Do me a favor, though.”

“Yeah, dude, name it.”

“Stay away from me.”

I can see the hurt in his little pug face. But you know what? I don't give a damn anymore. I'm developing a taste for superiority.

Rejoining Dale and the girls in the kitchen, I see that Dale is making headway, talking some crap about the Phoenicians owing their ancient trade routes to the Atlanteans.
Th
e Bottle Opener is either smitten with Dale or she's from Atlantis, because she's eating it up.

“What was that all about?” Oompa Loompa wants to know upon my reappearance.

“Guy hurt his thumb,” I say, reaching into the fridge for a beer, popping it, and guzzling a third of it in one motion

“
Th
at guy's a freak,” she says.

Look who's talking
, I want to say.
You look like a fucking jack-o'-lantern.
“Yeah,” I concur. “Total freak.”

“Your fly's undone,” she says.

“Yeah, I know.”

Dale has produced a pot pipe from the depths of his trench coat and begins loading it. I don't know how he can see what the fuck he's doing through those glasses. He sparks the pipe and passes it around.
Th
e conversation becomes hopelessly stilted. Even Dale can't seem to string together sentences. Cindy is changing colors like a lava lamp.
Th
e tentative emergence of a freakishly overweight tabby from behind the dead ficus near the head of the hallway ultimately provides the group with a much-needed focal point. For three or four minutes we sit stupefied, sipping our beers, observing the beast's every movement without comment as it licks and circles and runs its spine along the bottom of the refigerator. I can feel my jaw slackening. I'm drained of all my drunken swagger, all my superiority. I begin to wonder if there's anywhere I belong or anyone to whom I could ever belong again—a trapeze artist, a sword swallower, Janet. Certainly, I don't belong here. A small part of me—perhaps the hopeful part or maybe the courageous part—wants to suggest that we all pile into the Suburu and go buy Slurpees. But then I remind myself that I'm a would-be divorcee, who used to be a father, and most of me wants to run from this house as though it were burning.

stations

E
lsa is around the house again Monday morning, having cleared her schedule of all lessons for the third day in a row.
Th
e house is immaculate: no stacks of mail, no heaping recycle bin, no dishes glutting the sink.
Th
e carpets have been vacuumed, the pillows aired, the fishbowl cleaned. Everything smells of citrus and pine. And still, Elsa circles and sweeps and dusts.

In the three hours since I arrived with my sack lunch and my crossword, I've yet to be called into service. I've scarcely moved from my station on the sofa. How long before Elsa runs the feather duster over me? I feel obligated to stay alert on the sofa, poised for action should my assistance be required in lifting Trev or warming up the van or hauling out the recycling.
Th
ough this last task is nowhere in my service plan, today I'm willing to test the boundaries, willing to throw all those mnemonics out the window for a little occupation.
Th
e Monday crossword was a pushover.
Th
e cat is presumably out roaming the farm and can offer me no company. I've already eaten my banana and half of my tuna sandwich. And to make matters even more excruciating, the face of the dining room clock is in full view as the minutes crawl by. Somehow I can't bring myself to turn on the television. It's one thing to sit around being useless and another thing to watch television. Instead, I gaze at the darkened screen and wonder if it's another scorcher in Miami, whether it's raining in Davenport.

I should probably be thinking about the job market, as Trev's condition has only worsened over the weekend. While I was out bandaging penises and spilling beer in people's laps, the virus settled in Trev's lungs. While I was nursing my hangover on Saturday, Elsa took Trev to Harrison once more for chest x-rays and a CT. He's been on the respirator full-time ever since. Since the machine makes sleeping on his side difficult, Trev's even more restless than usual in bed. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he calls for his mother, and they talk softly as she tends to his itches and clears the sweat from his watering eyes. On those frequent occasions when Trev needs the toilet, it's Elsa, not me, who lifts him out of bed and onto the toilet, Elsa who awaits his call outside the bathroom door.

Around 12:15 p.m., Trev's cell phone starts ringing from the pouch of his wheelchair.
Th
ree times the ringing is cut short by voice messaging. When the cell finally relents, the house phone starts ringing almost immediately, and Elsa picks it up.

“What is it, Bob? . . . Yes, Bob . . . No, Bob . . .”

She waves to me across the dining room to indicate that she's taking the call outside.

I wave back, at the ready should Trev require assistance.

“Bad idea, Bob,” Elsa says, closing the back door behind her. I can still hear her muffled voice as she passes below the window. “It's a little late for that now, don't you think? . . . I'll tell you how I know, Bob. Because for the past four or five . . .”
Th
en I lose her as she drifts deeper into the backyard, though I can still see her as she begins pacing with the cordless beneath the big maple.

Poor Bob will never have closure. He'll never live down his mistake. What does he hope to accomplish with this phone call? And what is his bad idea, anyway? Does he simply want to talk to Trev, to run into the same brick wall over and over, to be judged for his failings yet again? Maybe he wants to fly out from Salt Lake City and sit at the bedside of his son, or what's left of his son, to plead his case. I can't help but wonder whether Trev might secretly relish his father's testimony. Who is to say that deep down Trev's little boy isn't still fighting to win approval? But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trev will permit no such drama, and probably, in his position, neither would I. Trev will hoard his advantage until the very end, withholding the one piece of evidence that might ever absolve his father, namely, that he still loves him.

As Elsa continues her pacing in the front yard, Trev beckons her, and it is I who answer his call.
Th
e bedroom smells of sweaty feet and turning fruit and the inside of an aspirin bottle.
Th
e shades are drawn against the sunlight, and the respirator hums on the nightstand beside him. A few dusty shafts of light cut across the foot of the bed. On the sill above his head, stuffed animals are lined shoulder to shoulder: a bear, a penguin, one of those singing grapes from the old commercial. On the wall at the foot of the bed is a Misfits poster, right beside a Nike poster that proclaims, “We are all witnesses.”
Th
e low dresser is completely bare on top but for a plastic box of pushpins and a folded black T-shirt.

“What's up?” I say.

His eyes sit deep in their bruise-colored sockets. His lips are cracked. I see no evil genius flashing in his blue eyes. I'm disgusted by the sight of him, repelled not by his condition but by a complex stirring of emotions I can't process.

“Where's my mom?”

“Outside on the phone.”

“My dad?”

“Yeah.”

He rolls his head heavily to one side, away from me, then rolls it heavily back until he's staring at the ceiling.

“Dude,” I say. “Check it out: I banged an Oompa Loompa this weekend, swear to God.”

Trev doesn't offer so much as a smirk or the bat of an eyelid. “Could you go get my mom?” he says.
Th
ere's a rasp in his voice eerily like a death rattle.

“Do you want any water or anything?”

“No. Could you get my mom?”

“I can turn you.”

“I just want to talk to my mom,” he says, unable or unwilling to mask his impatience. “Could you get her?
Please
.”

He lolls his head back toward the wall again, looking agitated.

I know that I shouldn't take it personally. Somewhere in the
Fundamentals of Caregiving
textbook there's a whole paragraph devoted to such matters. But Trev's dismissal stings like a betrayal. Already I regret the impulse to sting him back.
Th
is is not about me, I remind myself.

“You sure you don't need to go to the bathroom or anything?”

“Yeah, I'm good.”

I turn to leave, then turn back. “Oh, and I was lying, you know. I didn't fuck shit.”

“I know,” he says.

From the dining room window, I wave to Elsa, and she begins making her way toward the house. I catch the final snatches of her conversation as she clomps up the wooden ramp and through the back door.

“Yes, I promise, I will.
Bob,
I'm hanging the phone up now.”

And Elsa makes good, at least on her final promise, replacing the phone in its cradle with a sigh.