Are Dreams faster than the Speed of Light

He'd played those idle whistling-in-the-dark games with friends. If you had to choose, which would you rather be--blind or deaf. Lose your arms or legs. With only 24 hours to live, how would you spend your last day. Well, someone not playing games had turned the games real. The doctors couldn't tell him exactly how long he'd live but could estimate plus or minus a couple of months how long it would be before he'd want to die. A long or short year from today, they said, he'd enter final storms of outrageous suffering, and the disease he wouldn't wish on a dog that had just bitten a hole in his ass, the disease he calls X 'cause its name's almost as ugly as its symptoms, would shrink his muscles into Fritos corn curls. One by one, millimeter by millimeter--with excruciating slowness--it would saw through all the cords stringing him along with the illusion he's the puppet master of his limbs and dry up his lungs so they harden, burn and crumble, and he'll cough them up in great heaving spasms of black-flecked phlegm. No one knew the precise day or hour, but sure as shit, given his symptoms--the jiggle in his legs, spiraling auras wiggling through the left side of his field of vision, numbness of tongue, fasciculation everywhere rippling like a million snakes under his skin, bone-aching weariness and fatigue totally out of proportion to the minimal bit of physical activity required to survive the day--the specialists agreed unanimously his ass was grass; maybe he'd last one more Christmas, if lucky, just in time to beg Santa for death, if death hadn't already come creeping and smirking into his room.

The riot of pain the doctors promised didn't scare him. Drugs would dull most of it, wouldn't they. He just hated the anticipation. Always prided himself on being the kind of guy who liked to bull-rush the enemy, get it on, get it over. As long as he had a chance to fight back, he could handle whatever. From day one, his color and a jock mentality had turned every encounter into a contest. Even the smallest choices. For the past year he'd believed the tremor in his hands a symptom of his crazy habit of always needing to win. You reach for the pepper and at the last instant, because your mind's still debating the pluses and minuses of whether to sprinkle pepper or salt on your pasta, your hand hesitates, flutters in the air above the nearly identical shakers. Sometimes you knock over stuff. Sometimes you laugh at yourself. Sometimes you want to scream. To kill. Or die. Each decision a drama. Your fate and the future of Western civilization hinge on whether you top your coffee with a dab of half-and-half or a dollop of skim milk.

Now it turns out the problem was not indecision, not fear of doing the wrong thing and losing. No. Not his wacky mind causing his hands to tremble. His body's wacky. Loose connections in the circuitry of nerves. Connections blocked by inflamed tissue and arthritic bones. Simple motions frustrated by lack of information. Muscles atrophying because they don't receive enough love from the brain. They forget how to contract or stretch. All the switchboard operators sprawled dead or dying after a terrorist raid.

When his eyes slink open in the morning, he tells himself, You're still here; nothing's different. Nothing to worry about anyway. Over is over. Once gone, you're really gone. It's the air conditioner, the fridge, stupid, not death droning in your ear. Crowds amaze him. Busy swarms of people who haven't heard the news. Hey, he wants to shout. Listen up, everybody. It ain't just about me. Each and every one of you has got to go. For sure. Damned sure. Maybe the woman scowling into her paperback or that guy propped half asleep against the pole will be gone before this year's up. How would the others packed into this particular subway car this particular moment behave if they knew what he knew. Knew their score. A week, 10 days, a long or short year. Would their hearts beat faster when they tried to figure out what to do next, this minute or day or month remaining. Everything and nothing. Would they hear each click of a faceless clock counting down what's left of their lives. Would they understand they'd never understand. Not even this simplest thing about being on the earth. Caught in a net that's nothing but holes.

The doctors say his time's almost up, and suddenly he's old, just about as old as he'll ever get. An old man, all the people who once mattered long gone, so the death sentence a fresh start too. He owes nothing to anyone. Owns the little time left. Though he can't afford to waste a second, no rush either. Size doesn't matter. Everybody gets a whole life--beginning, middle, end--no matter how quickly it's over. Like those insects, ephemerids, he'd read about, their entire life cycle squeezed into an hour of a May afternoon. Like his siblings, the twin boy and girl who couldn't stick around long enough to receive names, dying a few hours after birth, taking his sweet, sweet mother with them.

How long does it take to die. Well... that of course depends on many factors. He watches the doctor's face, watches himself lean forward, and in a weird way he's watcher and watched, patient and doctor, weather and weatherman. The doc's gleaming brow reassures, sleek flesh befitting his fees, the location of his office, the trust you must invest in his words, healthy sheen, vacation tan. Tiny ellipsoid spectacles slide down his nose a smidgen as he closes the distance between you, kisser and kissed. He's seen the same commercials you have, the actor acting like a doctor, this doc with big hands and big face and a habit of staring offstage at the imponderably heavy-duty shit always lurking just beyond the high-definition scene in which the two of you are engaged--the delicate conversation about fate, your fate, not his, because this doctor's a permanent member of the cast, always available to move the plot along, advise, console, subtle as a brick as he reveals the brutal verdict. I've never figured out how to inform the patient, he confides. Fortunately, I don't see cases like yours very often. What can I say except it's one of those things in life we must adjust to as best we can. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. It's a job, and somebody has to do it, somebody's got to die. Did the doc really say that. Was he complaining about his tough job, or commiserating with his patient. Does it matter. He steals the doctor's voice again, pipes it through the plane. This is your captain speaking.... We are experiencing an emergency. Please remove the oxygen mask of the helpless passenger beside you before you remove yours.

He'd begun compiling a list of chores, necessary things to do to prepare for the end. A notebook page full before he realized the list was about using time, filling time, about plans, control, the future, wishful thinking as if time were at his disposal. As if he possessed the power to choose. Blind or deaf. As if he weren't already eyeless, crippled, helpless, just about out of time. Next move the last move. When he switched the list to must-do, he was relieved by its shortness. Only two items: He must die, and before his time's up he must end the bad ending of his father's life. Couldn't leave his poor daddy behind to suffer any longer--how long, how long. He must take his father's life.

An unimaginable thought at first. How in hell could you kill murder whack terminate snuff your own father. Ashamed of the thought, then guilty when he doesn't act. If he loved his father, why allow him to suffer. Somebody needed to step up to the plate. Who, if not him. In the limbo of the veterans' hospital, his father's shrinking body, in spite of its skinny frailty, of the burden of its diseased mind, might not fail for years. Meaningless years in terms of quality of life his father could expect, meaningless except for whatever it means when a fatally wounded animal suffers, when an intensely proud, private man whose major accomplishment in life was maintaining a fierce independence, winds up on display, naked, paddling around in his own shit. Cruel years of pointless hanging on. Years the son did not have now, on his mind daily, monopolizing the little time, his only time remaining.

The father so present dying, so absent alive. For years, decades, starting even before his daddy had passed him to his grandmothers and aunts to raise, they'd been losing touch, becoming two men who saw each other infrequently, not exactly strangers, more like long-standing acquaintances who'd hook up now and then in restaurants or bars, talk ball games, politics, an easy, no-strings-attached fondness. They observed an almost courtly politeness and restraint, as if questions about the other's personal life would be not only prying but breaking the rules, a betrayal, an admission of desiring more than the other so far had given, and thus a rebuke.

Since he wasn't God and couldn't simply will his father's death and be done with it, killing his father necessitated tending to messy details. A (continued on page 154) Dreams (continued from page 88) weapon, for instance. And words, his unreliable weapon of choice, wouldn't suffice in this crisis either. Wouldn't buy more time. Or finish his father's time. Yet a word, hemlock, popped into his mind, clarified options. A quick, lethal dose of poison no doubt the most efficient, practical means of accomplishing the dirty work. Hemlock--shorthand for his plan, code word for whatever poison he might procure. Hemlock certainly sounded nicer than strychnine, anthrax, arsenic, cyanide, Zyklon B, poisons he associated with murder mysteries, pest exterminators, concentration camps. After repeating it to himself many times, the word took on a life of its own: hemlock, a cute, sleepy-eyed little turtle. Hemlock finally because it reminded him of a painting.

During its first year, when the veterans' hospital was overstaffed and under-used, only a small group of patients occupied the locked-down seventh-floor ward. Walking the brand-new halls with his father, he'd been reassured without realizing it by an illusion of spaciousness and tranquility some clever architect had contrived with high ceilings, tall windows, gleaming floor tiles, unadorned walls like a gallery stripped for the next exhibition. Almost as if he strolled with his father through that familiar classic painting, the one whose title he couldn't recall then or now, the academy of so-and-so at somewhere, he thinks, remembering a slide from a college survey of art, philosophers in togas, their elegant postures, serious demeanors, a marble dome, sky-roofed arcades. A scene, said the voice-over, embodying intricate thought, calm speculation, the slow, careful accumulation of beads of truth on invisible threads connecting Socrates to Plato, Plato to Aristotle, Aristotle to Virgil or Dante or the pope, whomever these bearded, antique figures populating the painting were supposed to depict, wherever the idyllic version of Greece or Rome was supposed to exist, living and dead in earnest conversation. Maybe it's heaven, the strollers immortals. Maybe he had needed to flee that far away from the nearly empty spic-and-span scrubbed corridors to feel then what he wishes he could feel again--the peace, false or not, the comforting appearance of order and safety impossible today beside his father in a traffic jam of shambling, drugged, dull-eyed, muttering men in aqua pajamas, father and son slowly shuffling back and forth along corridors where windows begin above their shoulders and ascend, giant glass panels cloning light but allowing no one to see in, no one to see out.

Did the building in the painting have a basement, underground kennels the artist chose not to include. Where were the people who clean and polish the marble. Where were the sick and dying. The maimed in body and spirit. Where were the good citizens with brown faces who look like us, Daddy, who are doomed like us, Daddy.

Are dreams faster than the speed of light. Should he ask his father. Wouldn't his daddy know all the answers now, the whole truth and nothing but the truth tucked away in his silence, silence deep as the painting's, his father mute like those white-robed sages frozen beneath a canopy of marble arches, all the time in the world on their hands, the ever-blue Mediterranean sky at bay above their heads.

He stands pressed into a tall corner watching his father, a brown wooden man on the barber's wooden stool. Next to his father on a folding chair another aqua-pajamaed man, face pale as the ghostly philosophers, a dentist they say in his other life, babbles nonstop, cracking himself up, ha-ha-ha-ha as if he's still the life of the party, entertaining a captive audience of dental technicians and patients in the tooth-pulling parlor where he reigns until it's his turn on the stool.

The barber, who comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the VA hospital and sets up shop in an alcove near the nurses' station so he can holler for help if a patient gets unruly, snips, snips, snips, scissors snipping like a patient swarm of insects darting around his father's head. A crown of snips, if you drew lines from one snip to the next. The black-handled scissors restore the handsome, well-groomed man his father has always been, disguise the madness lying in wait to seize his features. Scissors snip, snip, snipping, the barber intent as Babo in Melville's Benito Cereno, as Michelangelo coaxing the sleeping David from a block of marble, like the voice trimming and snipping these words, these words words words snipping, killing, drifting away, white hairs, brown hairs, gray hairs, little commas and tightly curled spirals that accumulate on the cloth draping his father's shoulders, hairs that have grown too long and wild, telling tales. Beware, beware, his flashing eyes his floating hair on the tight-lipped, vacant-eyed man shuffling toward you in one of the corridors radiating like spokes from the panopticon hub of the nurses' station.

His father's face looking good, holding on in spite of scalding daylight powering from the window above the alcove. Still a striking face, a brown-eyed, handsome man, uh-huh, he was a brown-eyed handsome man, this pretty daddy who stares without blinking at a landscape only he's able to see, a place elsewhere demanding more and more of his attention until one day his father shrugged his shoulders and let the weight of this world slip off his back. As simple as that. As simple and quick as standing up when the barber finishes and letting the white cloth drop behind you onto the empty stool.

Are dreams faster than the speed of light. He had asked himself the question after Lisa related a story about a Chinese physicist at Caltech or Berkeley or UCLA, he doesn't remember which university, just the fact it was a West Coast school because he recalls imagining out loud a life for the scientist, how the guy winds up in charge of a world-class experimental physics lab after being born in an internment camp out west. Would a spotless lab coat, a drop-top BMW erase memories of almost starving to death, a nisei father killed defending American interests in the Pacific, the bittersweet day of release from the camp, his mother's tears, her brown hands eternally cracked from trying to grow food in Arizona sand--wait a minute, Lisa interrupts in the middle of my riff, Chinese, not Japanese, she says, but who cares about such fine distinctions when war fever's high, he says. A chink's a chink. Yellow peril. Yellow menace. This article's about today, not World War II, stupid, so stop raving, she says, waving in his face a clipping from the Times that describes an experiment a Chinese scientist conducted and experts from around the world either hailed enthusiastically or dissed as a crock of inscrutable shit, the division of opinion duly noted and quoted so discriminating readers of the science section could decide for themselves.

Something about light waves behaving weirdly when superheated in a bath of cesium. Light wave/particles accelerated till they're simultaneously here and there, present and absent, moving faster than light's supposed to move, faster than 186,000 miles per second, the speed everybody agreed till now nothing can move faster than. About kung fu a Chinese physicist performed with microwaves, mirrors and lasers, a trick comparable to marking and releasing a rat before it's been captured. The scientist proving with measurements of before and after that no reliable measurements of before and after exist, since the rat/light breaks free on the far side of the labyrinth at precisely the instant it's about to enter. One impossibility--motion faster than the speed of light--proving another impossibility possible. You know, like a unicorn's mother appearing on Oprah with a photo of the son she's begging viewers to help her locate.

Wow. Flying faster than the speed of light, you could travel through time, Lisa hollers through the bathroom door.

A person could be in two places at once, she shouts, as if the news too urgent to wait till she finishes showering.

I'm always in two places, he almost shouts back. Too goddamned many different places at once, thinking of himself dispersed as data on some marketing consultant's spreadsheet or as a blip on a Pentagon doomsday planner's screen estimating acceptable first-strike losses. His mom in heaven, smiling down on him. Hungry worms slithering in the mud smiling up. Here. There. Everywhere. In a different place than Lisa, as usual. Locked up in one of America's concentration camps while she hitchhikes through history.

Do you think this advance in science will prevent roundups of civilians, rape, torture, mass exterminations in the next world war, my sweet. Maybe the next goddamn big war's already here, maybe it's learned to be many places at once, no place and everywhere, like the rat, the particles. Like me.

C'mon. Stop being a grouch, Lisa says. And he decides to let her enthusiasm infect him, especially since she's standing beside the bed naked.

He intended to keep the clipping, can't remember if he did or where he might have stashed it, but recalls they made love not war that night. Lisa moist and warm from her shower, his hand running up and down her thigh, fingertips tickling her hip bone, the smooth hollow of her flank, his hand sliding around and up to sample the flat, limber strength above her butt's mmmmm good, buttery curve.

Your father's a fine-looking man, sir, the barber says, stepping back from the stool to admire his handiwork. Does he expect a tip. Where's the motormouth dentist who was next.

No sign his father heard the barber. No sign his father still on the planet except for the shell of body abandoned on the stool.

Hey. Yo. You. Mister brown-eyed, handsome Bojangles man, the barber turned you into a movie star, mister. All the ladies swoon, they see you struttin' down the avenue.

Does the man on the stool respond with the slightest of twinkles, a tiny, teasy pursing upturn of one corner of his mouth, Daddy's way, his way. Do the man's eyeballs roll toward the ceiling because his son's talking trash or is he remembering scissors, remembering he must sit very still to avoid danger in the air above his head, the helicopter blades still up there snip-snipping, clipping away hair, bone, brain if you're not careful. If you make a sudden, wrong move.

Later, walking the ward, fingers pinching his father's blue-green sleeve, he thinks you could call it a freak show--that one's glaring, this one's wailing, that poor soul sitting on the side of the bed diddling himself, pajama bottoms down around his ankles--or just concede craziness its due, let craziness convince, let it suck you in before the effort of resisting makes you crazy. When it comes to reality, one man, one vote. Purest democracy on the seventh floor. Equal-opportunity votes for men who believe they're women. Only the doctors and staff try to convert. But no sudden turnabouts here. No compromises, deals, consensus. Each aqua fish swims a different sea. Even when they bump or fight or scream at each other, the water's different for each one. Different bumps, different fights. Real craziness is believing otherwise.

On the seventh floor the sensible question always--why not. Why isn't his father's tale of a nurse fondling him a possibility. Not a tale exactly. His father couldn't string enough words together to construct a tale. A kind of sweet wonderment, a bedazzled grogginess in his father's voice and movements, pleasure expressed with body language, winks, sighs, exclamations, his large, knotty hands eloquently molding shapes out of thin air. Signs of an intimate encounter a slightly embarrassed son must witness. Maybe an incident earlier this morning. Or days before or weeks or never. For sure it's happening now. A minidrama staged on the screen of his daddy's face. Is his father frowning because he's been suddenly deserted by his angel, required to speak to the figure beside him, a figure bewildering till it morphs again into a woman with soft, curious hands, her warmth, her perfume melting him, lifting him. Then the beam of her dissolves to his son and he wants the son to meet this nice lady, the pretty woman he can't describe with words, who breaks apart and floats away when he reaches for her, for the next word, for a way to keep her or let her go while he explains her to this ghost who claims to be his son.

As if I know. As if I'll ever know. As if anybody ever knows. Hard enough to live in his own dreams. A nightmare of emaciated naked people passing by in an endless line. His job hosing them down before they vanish in roiling clouds of disinfectant and poisonous gas. Then he's knee-deep in piles of bloody, contorted corpses he must untangle, arrange in neat rows according to gender color age size. A nightmare equal parts Holocaust and Middle Passage and him equal parts victim and executioner. The whole evil concoction like a program he's watching on the History Channel, safe until it snatches him inside and the images on the screen are his memories, his heart pounding because he knows his father's lollipop head will scroll by on one of those stick people, his father's face, his own, face after familiar face asking why, why, why are we here and you there, why are you combing through heaps of mangled dead bodies searching for us when we're beside you, right here in front of your eyes.

Maybe a routine washup his father is embellishing. An aide's daily chore to change the soiled diaper, scrub the old man clean, shave him, perhaps oil and talc his skin. A particularly kind nurse reminded of a father or husband or son or lover by this good-looking, helpless brown-skinned man, gentle, gentle as a newborn on his good days. An extra portion of TLC administered. Her soft, firm hands massage bare shoulders and back. His father amazed. Reminded of the truth of himself. Of desire belonging to him, the terrifying, demanding return of focus when the fog is pierced and a bright, solid world of haunting clarity streams through the needle's eye faster than the speed of light.

Tell me again, son. I hate to keep asking you to repeat things, but it's getting harder and harder for your old father to keep it all straight. Play my numbers in the tobacco shop over by where Sears used to be, you know, over there on Hi-land Avenue. Walk out the tobacco shop and half hour later can't remember whether I played my goddamn figures or not. It's vexing, vexing. Standing there on the sidewalk not knowing what I did or didn't do. Come next morning I think about putting my numbers in and damn, realize I ain't checked what hit yesterday. Forget to check, forget if I played or not, forget there's a goddamn lottery, forget all that money white people owe me. What I'm trying to say is I know you already told me once, but I can't keep nothing straight in this feeble-ass mind of mine anymore. So tell me again, son. Why do I have to die. Why you have to kill me.

The academy's retractable roof opens, and warm starlight bathes father and son. Lutes strum just loud enough to be heard, not exactly breaking the silence, more a reminder of silence, a pulse within night's quiet, this night with qualities of day exhaling the freshly scrubbed breath of dawn. His father's face glows. A zigzag vein pulses in his temple. His proud, high forehead imposing as the brows of Benin nobles sculpted in bronze.

Levitating like Yoruba priests he'd read about, they float two or three inches above the treadmill looping of a path contrived to convince you you're strolling or running or flying faster than the speed of light, and the sham works until a moment like this one beside his father, when he peers down and observes the peculiar laxness of their ankles, their dangling feet not quite brushing the path that revolves beneath them, feet supple as fins, as the naked, boneless feet of blonde angels hovering and strumming lutes in the ether of medieval illuminations. Not very high but sufficiently high to understand they are being taken for a ride, each step forward on the rotating path also a step in place, a step backward, the world surrounding them a painted backdrop or dancing shadows on a screen. You know, the way a filmstrip projected behind stationary actors animates Hollywood scenes, just mirrors and shuck and jive. The son understands, gazing down past his father's mashed-back slippers, his own clownish, overbuilt, winged sneakers, shoes tied to feet tied to ankles limp as a lynched man, shoes freed of the body's weight, trussed-up feet going nowhere fast, a mountain of empty shoes, shoes, shoes, late and soon.

It's about me, Daddy. Not you. Something awful's happening to me. The doctors say I have just a little time left. And some of it will be bad, very bad. The disease killing me will kick up its heels and party hearty. Oh-la-la, Daddy. I'm not scared for myself, but I'm scared for you. Don't want to leave you behind to suffer.

His father's head droops. Perfect haircut, courtesy of the state, intact. He could be nodding, or he could be ratcheting down one notch further into Zombieville.

Why his father and no one else. Why did he confess the dirty secret of the disease only to his father. If Lisa were as helpless as his father, would he have shared the news of his death with her. The huge, trifling news. All these years assiduously looking out for himself as if he'd been entrusted with a project of cosmic significance. Hmmmm. Not much to him, after all. Maybe that's why he hoarded his news. No news, really. No big thing. Everyone dies sooner or later and oop-poop-a-doop, surprise--surprise--one less monkey don't stop no show. Did he believe withholding his little secret would inflate it into big news. Wasn't he like those homeless particle/waves flying faster than the speed of light--gone, gone before he even got here.

Only once, when she was leaning over the sink, intent on cleaning up a mess they'd made, her thin back looking even smaller with her shoulders hunched forward, armless from where he sat, only that once had he almost said to anyone else other than his father, I'm going to be very sick and soon after that I'll die. Dressed for court in elegant business suits with short skirts and double-breasted jackets, shiny panty hose encasing shapely legs, black hair precisely bobbed, Lisa could transform herself into a cartel-busting, justice-for-the-wretched-of-the-earth, petite Abrams tank. He'd feel proud of her glamour, her gleaming impenetrability and incorruptibility. When she smiled at him, testing him one last time on the intricate maneuvers required to mesh and unmesh his sloth with her complicated schedule that particular day, he loved her, loved how full of herself, how undaunted, she could be, marveled at the distance between them, distance they sometimes miraculously closed, but distance that also stunned him each morning. Would he matter enough to woo her back. Slouched in the fat chair, staring at the stalled novel in his notebook, he'd exhale a sigh of relief after the door closed behind her slim, perfect hips, hopelessly missing her but also glad she was gone so he could get on with the rest of his life.

After the phone rings, in the instant between recognizing Lil Sis's voice and listening to what Lil Sis is saying, he wonders why he hadn't thought of her. Isn't Lil Sis the perfect person to tell the news of his death, this stranger, this half-sister, strangely closer now because the father they share, a stranger during his life to both of them, is dying. Should he tell her about hemlock, too.

Hate to call with bad news, but Daddy's had a fall. Doesn't sound too good. The doctor wants to operate right away.

A fall.

That's what they claim. But you know as well as I do the rough stuff goes on at the VA. They say one of the nurses found him lying on the floor and Daddy couldn't get up. Sounds like his hip busted up really badly. In splinters, they say. Lots of bleeding inside the joint and that's why they have to operate quick, before it gets infected. I want to know how in hell he wound up on the floor. But Daddy can't tell us, so I guess we'll never find out, will we.

Operate how soon.

If we say okay, they'll try to schedule him for tomorrow morning.

After he hangs up the phone, he thinks he should have said no. Let nature take its goddamn course. Out of it as his father already is, he'll be worse after surgery. Old people can't deal with anesthesia. His grandfather never the same after they knocked him out and cut on him.

But you can't just let a person rot. Surgery or not, his own rot--smart bones whisper, This mugging will finish off your father. Is he just a tiny bit disappointed he's lost the chance to play hero. After all the agonizing, rationalizing and fighting with himself, finally, a rush of cool determination. Clarity at last. Yes, yes. Ready to purchase poison, activate the plan. A hemlocked vanilla milk shake the final solution. A special treat he'd bring to the hospital next Sunday. Vanilla milk shake my dad's favorite thing, folks. Sharing one with him for old time's sake. Father and son on the last train out of Dodge. A carefully drafted note in plain view on the bedside table explaining everything so nobody gets the wrong idea.

To top off the plan, he'd prepay a double funeral. Ride off with his daddy in a horse-drawn black hearse. A glorious New Orleans good-bye parade winding through the streets of Homewood. The Pittsburgh Rockets drum-and-bugle corps leading the march. Shiny trumpets and tubas. Umpah-umpah. Ratta-tat-tat-tat. Tease of jive and boogie in their mournful playing, their precise high-stepping. Barbecued kolbassi with red-hot sauce. Coolers full of icy Iron City. Hmmm. Oh, didn't we ramble, Daddy. Oh, didn't we.

You never know, do you.

The big-eared retro phone smirks at him. So much ado about nothing. No opportunity, after all, to play God. Game called on account of rain. The coy, old AME Zion deity working in his own good time, his wonders to perform.

At the hospital, not counting his father, three of them in the room when a nurse breezes in to brief the family. Very sound reasons not to count his father, but how could you ever be sure. Introducing himself as Clarence, folks, the nurse flashes a silver-starred front tooth. In six months, if he lives that long, would his eyes still be able to read the tattoo on the nurse's hairy forearm. A posse of needles, tubes, gauges, pumps, suction, drips protects the bed. Virtual life puttering on forever in printouts, on screens, in beeping monitors, whether or not a glimmer of vitality in his father's eyes.

Of course even now at his dad's direst moment, at this sad, affecting denouement, the son flies elsewhere, faster than the speed of light, father forgotten, son dreaming ahead to what it will be like at his own miserable countdown. Shit, he's thinking. Shit. What's the point. What's the horseshit stinking point.

The nurse updates them.

We can't get Mr. Wideman to eat. Goes on to explain why it's important for patients to eat. Explains that patients die if we don't manage to start them eating post-op. Explains the options, mouthwise or IVs, folks, and how the mouthwise method is much preferred by doctors, staff, studies, you know. And next thing I know, after Lil Sis's husband and I crank up the bed, I'm standing beside my father waving a spoonful of vanilla ice cream (go figure) I'm supposed to coax, wheedle, beg, sneak, lever, ram down his throat. I try to steady my shaky hand. Inch the spoon closer, closer to cracked lips the exact shape and color of mine, lips I swam through like a fish when I was birthed a second time John Edgar. John my dead mother's dead father's name, Edgar my father's, both names chosen by my mother to bind me to the men she'd loved most in the world. Entitles, my South Carolina grandfather would have called the names my father whispered to Reverend Felder and the good reverend's bass intoned loudly to family and friends gathered around the baptismal font of Homewood AME Zion.

And dead as he is, as I am for all intents and purposes, I find myself touching my father's mouth, prying open a space between what dwells outside him and all that's indwelling, and then into the passage propped open by thumb and finger, I attempt to slip in a spoon, ease a spoon, pray a spoon the way I'd heard my mother on her knees pray, the entire congregation of Homewood AME Zion pray and chant Sunday mornings to a God I never could love, not even then, long ago when I was a boy--only fear, only address when I desired something very badly I knew I wasn't going to get anyway, so why not ask, why not believe a different life possible, joining the other lives I daydreamed daily. Lives not in my father's house nor my mother's bosom nor God's bosom nor the streets of Homewood. Made-up lives like this one I try to save holding open my father's mouth.

His teeth chatter, his jaw twitches as uneven surges of air enter and leave. Losing most of the load maneuvering the spoon through a broken fence of snags anchored in corpse-foul gums, I keep Lil Sis busy wiping vanilla drool from our daddy's chin as I ladle what I can into him, down him, and nothing, nothing else matters.

An unimaginable thought at first. How in hell could you kill murder whack terminate snuff your own father. Somebody needed to step up to the plate.

He stands pressed into a corner watching his father, a brown wooden man on the barber's wooden stool.