Mourning After

       See the boy. He has thick blond hair cut in a buzz, which he hates. It is a haircut that has strange powers over other people, particularly adults. They see it and somehow feel obligated to touch it, rubbing their hands across it, forward and backward, jerking his head with their rough petting, making him pop with static. They usually accompany this with bubbling, nonsensical remarks like, Oh, how cute! or, Fuzzy wuzzy! It is amazing to him how unintelligent adults can be.

        This revelation slightly eases the other feeling he has when his hair is rubbed: that people are not taking him seriously. He wants to be treated like an adult. He feels ready for life. He is ten.

        He also hates his haircut because it makes his ears stand out. They are not particularly obnoxious ears, but lack of covering makes them the focal points of his head. His head is a little big, a bit too large for the rest of him, which is, in his opinion, embarrassingly skinny. It is a good thing he does not give up easily; if the fights at school were a matter of muscle alone, he would always lose.

        She tells him that his head is large because his brain is large. She is the only reason he consents to the haircut. When she touches his head, he does not mind. Only when she touches it.

        In the last few weeks, he has noticed something: everyone is very nice to him. He does not know why. He is not sick. He is not sick. Lately, he finds that he is treated with a certain deference, as if he is made of the delicate membrane of a bubble. If they touch him, he might pop, and everything of him that is trapped inside the membrane will gush out black and searing, screaming into the room, staining and infecting everyone. Perhaps they are wise to avoid me, he thinks.

        The whole family is in town. The adult portion, anyway: uncles, aunts, grandparents. They have left the cousins behind. When he asks why, they say, They have to go to school, Honey. But he knows that this is not the reason. He sees the true reason in their eyes, reads it in their avoidance of his own wide blue ones, as if he knows more than they want to see, more than he should. They do not want their children to know what he knows.

        He has to go to school, too, like his cousins in other states. Or at least he should. But he doesn’t, and no one makes him. No one seems to have the energy. This is fine with him; school is merely a purgatory of spit wads, taunts, and fights on the soccer field, all thinly veiled under a glossy foil of ribbons, stars, and meaningless, over-positive stickers. YOU’RE #1. ALL STAR STUDENT. GRADE A+ KID. He finds the education ridiculous anyway – long division, cursive handwriting, the capital of New Guinea. He is four reading levels ahead of the fifth grade class. Judy Bloom is the writer-in-residence of Thousand Oaks Public Elementary School #4. Shel Silverstein is Poet Laureate of the California school system. But the boy has read The Grapes of Wrath and understands it.

        The suburban stucco house is silent, pensive, the still air like water in the deep end of a pool. The ventilation system dares not come on. It is holding its breath, he thinks. He runs around, waving his arms and shouting a little in each room, trying to wake the house from its slumber. His efforts have no effect. No wind touches his arms as they flail around and eventually fall to his sides. His shouts soak into the white paint of the morning walls without echo.

        A row of windows overlooks the back yard, blithe sun reflecting off the cracked purple seats of the swing set, the ladybug-shaped sand box. Outside, his sister plays on the grass with Aunt Coral. I’m glad I’m not two anymore, he thinks. It would suck to be clumsy and have to wear diapers. His sister does not seem to mind. She beams and shrieks merrily as she chases a ball across the lawn, tripping every five yards on her own tiny feet. Falling. Picking herself up again without stopping to consider her mistake. For the goal is everything, and the toddler mind cares only for its achievement, and not for any impediments along the way. He was once perfect like her before he realized that the journey could ruin him.

        The aunts, uncles, and grandparents are at the hospital. They are spending the day. This makes him jealous because he never gets to spend the day at the hospital.

        The last time he went was a week ago. His father had picked him up at school, and they had driven to the huge white building, her new home, a marble mansion for very privileged guests. At the pink gift shop near the entrance, he bought, with his own money, a small glass vase of flowers. He picked it out because the vase was plain and the flowers were not wilting. Not yet. On the attached card, he wrote, Dear Mom, Get well soon. Love, Sean. As he walked through the Byzantine hallways, reeking of gallons of Lysol barely masking the smells of decay and suffering, old people in wheelchairs, shadowed by lanky, stick figure IV stands, eyed his flowers like candy or money. Whenever one of the wrinkled, yellow-eyed trolls leered too closely, he held the flowers in front of his body like a shield.

        Of course she loved the flowers. She was propped on the bed like Buddha on a crash diet, arms outstretched above sterile blankets, wide smile refusing to sag like the rest of her face. When she hugged him and kissed his cheek, he blushed because his silent father loomed behind him, but the boy lingered for a moment against her warmth behind the papery hospital gown. He closed his eyes and smelled her – cinnamon and raisins – the smell he had always known still existing beneath the cloud of disease that hovered around her.

        She had given up on the wig, and a blue bandana covered her baldness. He told her she looked like a biker. She laughed, her voice soft and raspy, and then the coughing began, a sound like she had traded breathing air for breathing water, a fish somewhere between river and sky. He stepped back and handed her a Kleenex. She held it to her mouth, doubled over on her bed, and when she finally stopped coughing and took it away, she could not hide the clump of blood before she crumpled it up.

        They talked for a little while. She asked, How’s school going?

        Okay, he said. He failed to mention that he’d been caught trampling Erik Straddle’s class president posters and had gone to the principal again.

        After about fifteen minutes, a fat nurse lugged into the room and told them that visiting hours were over. He turned around and looked at her pug face, wide upturned nose, squinty vacant eyes.

        He said, I guess you’ll have to leave, then. His father grabbed him hard by the arm and apologized to the nurse. Then they said their goodbyes, and he promised to come back and see her soon.

        That was the last time he went to the hospital.

        To drown ancient history of a past week, he turns on the TV on the counter between the dining room and the kitchen. He watches TV frequently now. Generally, he was not allowed. The stuff on TV is all trash, she would say. She would make him read instead – books of her choosing, that she would buy and lay before him like fine entrées before a king. Treasure Island for an appetizer, she would say. The main dish, To Kill a Mockingbird. Things Fall Apart, the dessert. And, she would proclaim, he could have The Sun Also Rises for an after-dinner cocktail. She would laugh at this, but he would not get it, and would ask her what it meant. When you’re older, she would say.

        She had not allowed him to watch TV during the day. But the rule went to the hospital with her.

        It is Saturday, and there are cartoons on – cartoons in which large, well-muscled heroes conquer their sharp-fanged foes with magical spells or swords or guns, cartoons in which the villains are tangible and can be defeated. He has lost his taste for these because they are unrealistic. They don’t make cartoons where the villains are both invisible and indestructible.

        He finds a mediocre made-for-TV movie that rivets him. It is about a family similar in makeup to his, except the boy is a little older than he is, and the girl is much older than his sister. For an unspecified reason (he missed the beginning), they happen to be very unlucky. As he watches, the boy in the movie climbs onto the roof of their two-story house to retrieve a frisbee. The movie boy walks along the slanted tiles very slowly and carefully. But as he approaches the frisbee, one of the tiles gives way and he slips. As he slides toward the edge of the roof, the camera cuts to the mother, who opens the refrigerator, letting a large watermelon fall out. It splatters pulpy and red on the cream colored tile. A little while later, the movie father takes a bath. A small radio is propped on the edge of the tub. When he turns around to pick up the shampoo, he hits the radio with his elbow. There is another quick cut to the mother, whose vacuum abruptly shuts off with the lights.

        There is a funeral scene next – a flash of two walnut coffins, one half the size of the other, the cliché overcast sky in the background, too-green Astroturf trampled below the black shoes of the mourners. The boy turns the channel and drums his fingers on the counter. He does not want to watch the funeral scene. When he flips back to the movie, the little daughter is running into the street for a ball without looking, and as she squats to pick it up, the blare of a horn turns her head as she faces the vast silver grill of a semi-truck. Once again, the camera cuts to the mother, weeping in her living room with the shades drawn, looking up at the shrill scream of brakes and her daughter’s louder one, which cuts off with a thud.

        The mother in the movie is the only one left of her family, sentenced by the whim of a Screenwriter God to suffer alone in upper-middle-class isolation, wandering the silent halls of her tract house without resolution or deliverance. The boy turns the knob to OFF.

        Aunt Coral and his sister come in from the back yard, their cheeks flushed with the day. Coral asks, Honey, do you want a fried taco? I’m gonna make one for Beth.

        No thanks, he says.

        But you haven’t eaten anything all day, Sweetheart.

        I know.

        He gets up from the table and walks into the living room. The Nintendo beckons. His sister toddles in and plops down next to him. Finger in mouth, she looks at him with hazel eyes revealing as much concern as a two year old can muster. They regard each other silently. Eventually, she reaches out a chubby hand and pats him on the knee. Satisfied with her therapy session, she gets up and toddles back to the kitchen.

        Ordinarily, he loves Nintendo. He loves it because he is not allowed to play it most of the time. He has a half-hour-per-day allotment of electronic bliss. Over time, he has invented clever ways in which he can duck around this rule, like turning the sound off and playing in ten-minute spurts, in between which he leaves the game on pause and the TV off. He can make a single round of Super Mario Bros. last all day. But now, even as he looks furtively over his shoulder every couple of minutes, no one comes in to catch and punish him. His aunt and sister talk and giggle in the kitchen over tacos and Sesame Street, unaware of his sin in the next room.

        He can usually beat the game without really thinking about it. But not today. Today the game is in charge, he is master of nothing; his tiny mustached disciple succumbs to every pitfall and hidden trap, running and jumping and avoiding nothing but his own cartoon mortality. The boy’s fingers fly over the rectangular controller until they cramp; his eyes burn and tear from their unblinking fix on the scenes of his defeat. At every demise, he pauses to wipe his sweaty hands on his jeans, take a deep breath, and resume his flight from the inevitable. When he tries moving cautiously, death overwhelms him, so he runs – his silent pursuer untiring behind him – until he is able to neither see what is before him nor remember what he has passed. In the end, although he burns through lives and resurrections like a soul damned to endless repetition, finality catches up to him in that simple, infuriating phrase: GAME OVER.

        He drifts down the hallway past the bathroom and his sister’s tiny palace of pink cherubs, heart-shaped pillows, and quilts hand-sewn by an obscure spinster aunt from Minnesota. The door to his parents’ room hangs ajar at the end of the hall, across from his room. He slips inside. It is obvious that his father has been running things for a while. The bed is unmade, blankets unwashed. Shirts and socks dangle from the edge of a wicker hamper like old bandages. Papers fall around the bedside table, on strike against tidiness. Dirty towels repose on the yellow bathroom tile, as if fallen asleep from their hangers. Tranquilizers adorn his father’s chest of drawers.

        But she is not gone from this place. She lingers in the Kleenex boxes assembled around the room, in the self-help books stacked waist high, in the mind-over-matter tapes strewn around the radio. A faceless Styrofoam head flaunts a dirty-brown wig, a terrible approximation of the auburn velvet of her real hair, remnant of her earliest desperation over the destruction wrought by chemotherapy.

        Mostly she remains in medicine bottles – small, opaque, brown-orange testaments of faith in modern science. First, there is the dreaded chemo, fighting the cancer by killing the patient, coming alone or in extravagant combination depending upon the doctor’s whim: Carboplatin, Paclitaxel, Docetaxel. The boy picks these up and studies their names. They remind him of other words. Carbohydrate. Peaceful. Docile. Everything they are not. Then comes Ondansteron, which should be the hero of a Carl Sagan story, claiming proudly on its label to be an anti-emetic drug, a serotonin antagonist, covering up the debilitating nausea and pain left by the chemo. Then the third wave, the ones he’s heard of – Excedrin, Extra-Strength Tylenol, Immodium – assigned to mop up the side effects of the other two, destroying headaches and dizziness, fevers and chills, constipation and diarrhea. All are involved in a complex dance of dosages and warnings, all inhibiting or antagonizing something, their names as inscrutable and dubious as their functions. Take with plenty of water and food. If they’ll stay down.

        He turns around and walks into his room, a smaller imitation of his parents’. The carpet is invisible. G.I. Joes and Star Wars figures tread water in a sea of dirty clothes, or cling helplessly to scattered floating puzzle pieces, their plastic jets and spaceships having been abandoned on crumbling Lego castles and chessboard islands. Books crowd his small bookshelf like Manhattan subway passengers, stacked this way and that, pushing and being pushed by their peers. He crawls up to his elevated bed and lies on his back. His current book, Through the Looking Glass, lies dejectedly on his pillow. He picks it up and looks at the words for a while, but none jump off the page into his consciousness. Instead, he resorts to staring at the cottage cheese ceiling. If he stares long enough at the miniature mountains and canyons, the shadows deepen and the indiscriminate landscape coagulates into a relief of patterns and creatures, a sprawling tranquil world.

        Last year, when he lay in his bed paralyzed with scarlet fever, the world on his ceiling came to life. Little horses ran in races around the light fixtures, dogs chased cats and rabbits from one end to the other, and whales swam through turbulent waves. In the hallucinatory grip of one-hundred-and-four-point-three-and-rising, he saw a giant dragon appear from the closet at the opposite end of the room and fly toward him, feline eyes fixed on his, open mouth revealing rows of white shark’s teeth, its yawning throat a pure white oblivion.

        At his scream, she came running. She picked him up and carried him in her arms to the bathroom, where she undressed him and laid him gently into the bathtub, one soft, fragile hand on his back and the other over his nose, leaning him backwards and plunging him into the lukewarm water. He closed his eyes and did not struggle, feeling the assurance of her hands, hearing the contralto melodies of her lullaby: just let go, just let go. He knew in his delirium that he need not fear any longer, as long as she would come to carry him in her arms, to snatch him away from pain, and wash away his sickness with her baptism of cool words.

        But when he awakens to the smoggy half-light of dusk spilling through the windows onto his face, he knows that there will be no more comfort, no more baptisms. And the realization burns in his throat like acid.

        The front door slams. He hears the aunts and uncles talking in the entryway at the end of the hall, the cadences of their voices whispering what he already knows. He sits up, dizzy with the head rush, climbs down the end of the bed, and walks out of the room. At the end of the hall, they are standing in overcoats, hugging each other. Crying. His father appears from the middle of the group, shoulders slumped. Sometime during the day he has become an old man. His eyes slowly meet Sean’s. Neither of them speaks. No one notices that in their silent exchange they suddenly look incredibly alike, this father and son, as if each one is seeing a reflection of himself aged thirty five years younger or older, each realizing that the other understands far too much of the world and wanting to protect him from the immeasurable sadness of it all.

        The boy’s father walks forward and puts his hand on his shoulder. Sean, come into my room with me, he says. They walk into the room and sit on the edge of the chenille bedspread. After a moment, the old man sighs. Mommy didn’t make it, he says.

        I know, the boy replies.

        The tears are immediate and automatic. They have merely waited for their cue, and having received it, free at last, they jump forth from his face in eager mobs. They sting his cheeks in their hot rush, but he does not wipe them away. He does not bother. The tears gather on his chin and plop onto his Levis, which accept them as the earth does rain after a great drought.

        He stares straight ahead at the open closet. Her jackets and shirts droop on their hangers like soldiers in a line of surrender, arms limp at their sides, shoulders dusty from the long wait for a sentence or an absolution. Silk scarves hang limp from the door like flags at half-mast. Shoes lie heaped and crumpled like tiny, empty coffins.

        They sit for a long time, not talking. The boy leans against his father’s scratchy polo shirt. Why her? He thinks. Why me? He closes his eyes. Maybe it’s not real. It can’t be real. It’s all a very lifelike dream. But when he turns his nose into his father’s chest and smells the Clorox-and-flowers hospital residue mixed with his father’s talc deodorant, he knows that denial will not work here. Finally, he stands and walks to his room, throwing off his clothes and climbing into bed. Truth is all around him, brushing his skin with its scales, blowing the hot stench of its breath in his face. He can taste the truth in his mouth, rank and sour on his tongue. But when he shuts his burning eyes tightly and covers his ears with his palms, he can neither see nor hear it. And that is almost enough.

        The next night. Clusters of legs and bellies like a roaming forest, moving out of his way only when he shoves, reaching down to pat his head. He walks through this forest lost and directionless, always in a hurry to be somewhere other than where he is at any given moment, chasing something and running from something at the same time. The forest mills around him, constantly shifting, jabbering in the foreign tongue of adulthood. Or not foreign, rather, but only hollow.

        It’s such a tragedy.

        Yes. A terrible tragedy.

        A terrible awful tragic tragedy.

        The poor children. What will they do?

        I don’t know. God help them both.

        The boy looks up at these intruders, these relatives whom he suddenly does not know at all, their red-rimmed eyes and strained smiles wavering behind opaque whiskey and vodka lowballs. He stares at them and they avoid his eyes; he talks and they pretend not to hear him. After a while he tells them to leave. Get out, he says. She was mine, not yours. They ignore him. He yells, Get out of my house! He runs to the kitchen table, picks up a plate of cold cuts and cheese, and throws it down as hard as he can. It smashes against the hardwood floor in a cymbal crash. They turn and stare at him, mouths agape, blurred in his tears. He stares back.

        His father steps forward and leads him by the hand to his room. The boy climbs up to his bed and lies facing the wall. After a minute, his father says, Sean, I’ve got a question to ask you. The boy rolls over. His father says, Uh, tomorrow, there’s gonna be a memorial service for Mommy.

        What’s a memorial service?

        Well, before the funeral, everyone goes over to a church, and we talk about Mommy.

        About what?

        About her life, I guess. What she meant to everybody. People give speeches.

        The boy says nothing. His father continues, Anyway, you have a choice. You can go to the service or you can go back to school if you want. It’s up to you.

        You’re not making me go?

        Nope. It’s up to you.

        Is there gonna be a coffin?

        Yeah.

        Will it be open?

        Yeah.

        The boy considers this for a few minutes. I don’t wanna go, he says.

        So you want to go to school?

        Yes.

        Okay, Buddy.

        The old man leaves and shuts the door. The boy lies in his bed, listening to the muffled din of the wake down the hall. As the hours roll by, the din grows louder and louder. To the boy, it is a sound like demons cackling over a pit of lost souls, stirring the melting pots of damnation, laughing shrilly as they stab and rend and crush their victims. He hums a song to drown it out. Later, the cackles give way to sobs – the dove-cooing of angels mourning after every ruined fruit of their labor that shot through seraphic wings on the frantic plunge outward past all that was childlike and all that was just. The sobs recede with the angels in their cars, engines floating away into breathless night. By midnight, the house is quiet.

        The boy rises and walks down the hall to the dining room. Flowers are everywhere, sitting in shiny tin-wrapped pots, in plastic wrappings, in glass vases; standing on the floor, the chairs, the table, the windowsills, the fireplace mantle; dangling from the kitchen counter and the crystal chandelier. They exist in endless combinations of style and color: roses, tulips, baby’s breath, chrysanthemums, violets, and carnations in red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, blue, and white. Fresh this morning, they have already begun to wilt, their tiny heads drooping like tired supplicants in prayer. They fill the room with the sweet stench of their deaths. Fallen petals, brown at the edges, litter the floor like dirty tears.

        He walks into the living room and stands in front of the TV. A home video flickers a twelve-year-old morning onto the lightless room. His father stands thin and fidgeting in a gray tuxedo with a pink fluffy shirt and a blue bow tie. She beams in a simple pink dress with lace at the hems. Her bare feet stand out pale against the brown rug. Her hair curls only slightly, refusing to let go of the bone-straightness of her hippie past. The church around them is bright drab tan and yellow.

        The boy stands before this grainy memory that doesn’t belong to him and searches the faces of two young people who will eventually become his parents. He studies their bright eyes, wide smiles, strong young bodies. Their faces are both similar to his own and extremely different at the same time. The difference, he realizes, is that he seems older than they are. They are bursting with dreams of their life together, unconcerned with the complexities and downfalls it will hold, unburdened by careers and children and sickness. They know nothing of death, do not believe it can touch them, do not see it waiting for them in the ashen folds of time.

        They murmur their vows, exchange rings, kiss. They turn and come down the aisle, arm in arm, people standing and applauding around them. As they walk toward the camera, it zooms in on her face until her rosy cheeks occupy the entire frame; and she suddenly turns her head and looks directly into the lens, her brilliantly deep hazel eyes locking with Sean’s for an endless split second in which she mouths the words, I love you; and then with a wink she is past the camera and gone down the rice-littered aisle, gliding through the huge wooden doors into the day like a blinding fantasy.

        Wake up. Breathe. Open eyes. Sit up. Get out of bed. Stand. Dress. Breathe.

        The kitchen, white and yellow, mocks him as he enters. The sun shines insolently through the windows onto the tile floor. He fixes some toast, his first meal in almost two days. He has to choke it down. The comics on the placemat laugh.

        His father comes into the room wearing a blue ratty bathrobe, hair disheveled and very gray, dark circles under his eyes, unshaven. He walks to the boy and puts his arm around his shoulders. Old Spice, Irish Spring, and Listerine. He says, You ready to go back to school, Bud?

        Yeah.

        Okay.

        Without talking, they climb into her silver Porsche. The old man drives very slowly, stopping for long intervals at intersections. He does not race people at the lights as he usually does when his son rides with him, and the boy does not mention this. When the car turns into the circular driveway of the elementary school and the boy gets out, his father says, Your teacher, Mrs. Gimmel, will be there today.

        Why wouldn’t she be there? The boy asks.

        She would have gone to the service if you had gone, but she wants everything to be as normal as possible for you. So she’s staying here.

        Normal, the boy says.

        He looks around at the children pouring in cheerful waves from Volvos and Suburbans. The boy hates them and envies them simultaneously, how they run and skip, smiling, holding sack lunches and backpacks, greeting and yelling and singing to each other. He slams the door.

        His father waves once and drives away. The boy turns around and walks toward his classroom, his Keds moving firmly, methodically, one foot in front of the other, the smell of dew and concrete in his nose, oblivious to the clamor of children around him, through the cool diffused California sun beaming casually off asphalt and swing sets, the shimmering morning air making him feel like he’s plunged into blackest space of a parallel universe, falling outward past Earth and satellites and Mars and Jupiter, past stars burning out or exploding in solitude, finding silence beyond, hurtling through rings of frozen dust and gas, the scattered remnants of life suspended in eons of galaxies wheeling in the heart of an alien God, within whose hands he is permanently trapped, moving nowhere and sliding hopelessly off kilter.