by

James Shankman

copyright © 2003

    When the nurse came out he would have to go in. A long pause in the downpour of words that flooded the earthen cellar of his soul. The drumming sound on the windowpane, impatient fingertips. The whooshing sound. The gray sheets of mist that hung in the air and then dissolved in the space of a breath. Then words again: this ruinous rain.
     Rain washed the oxygen out of the sky and drowned it at the bottom of a muddy shallow sea four stories down. Rainwater seemed to rise over his face. Nothing left to breathe here. He'd had that dream. Fighting to get to the surface. Never make it in time. Waiting for the bursting poison in the lungs, the explosive suffocation.
    Billy stood before a large square window threaded with wire in a diamondshaped pattern and watched the pouring rain. He was four stories up, but the hospital windows needed reinforcement from the penetration of death, from the rock hurled down from the heavens at a sick old man in a narrow bed with threadbare sheets, looking to take him out with a cheap shot while modern medicine was concentrating its defenses on a more scientific level. Or maybe the the angry rock was intended for some pompous doctor to catch him unawares as he ambled from bed to bed. Who would throw it? No one. It would just be thrown.
    He walked down the hall and came to the door. It was a color on which the eye could not rest. The walls had the texture of mud. He reached for the doorknob. In the dark his bare feet on the wooden floor, the hallway narrow in the night but glowing from somewhere. He grasped it in his hand and turned it, but his hand froze. No twist, no click, no giving way. It seized. It stopped. It grabbed his hand, his whole arm, his entire body. His breath stopped. The door was locked. He couldn't get in. He tried to open his mouth and call. Mommy, Daddy. The words did not come. His chest seized up like the doorknob. He backed up from the door. It was locked. They locked it. He couldn't go in. He backed away, went back upstairs, climbed into bed and tried to go to sleep after the tears. He remembered that. He’d scared the lights out of Billy. Even when he didn't know Billy was there, he scared him. He didn't scare him anymore. He would just go in. He hated this.
    Billy glanced one more time at the window at the end of the hall, at the great reefs of rain that cut through the sea of air and sank all ships that dared to sail. He opened the door with the length of his arm as if he were shoving his way anonymously through a crowd. Mel Paradise lay on the bed in his white boxer undershorts and a thin white tshirt. He ran a gentle hand over the top of his head to feel for the missing matt of hair, to calm the shiny pate that seemed to sweat nonstop since this whole goddamn freakshow began. His penis lolled out of the fly of his boxer shorts, his testicles peeked through the leg hole. He met his son's gaze with a surprisingly soft slant in his eyebrows.
    Billy thought he had caught his old man offguard. Or was the old man pleased to see him? Was this what it took to finally get him on even terms? He looked at his father, airing it out like laundry. He must have thought it was some kind of beauty or something.
    Mel saw Billy look down from his face to his shorts. Oh what was his problem now? Hadn't said a goddamn word. Hadn't even said hello yet and the kid was backing off, doing the disappearing act. What was wrong with that kid? Did he have to die before the kid would cut him some slack? Here he is dying, the kid is worried about propriety, that he'd scare the nurse away. He sat in that damn white room with the death ray nudged up against his back burning radiation xrays through him he could feel it killing him swear to god while he was lying there on the table and the doctors watching him in their observation room like he was some kind of lab rat see how much it took to make him curl up and die little spasmodic rat torture never hurt anybody.
    "Billy boy. Good to see you kid."
    "Hey Dad."
   A phone rang somewhere in the room. It was coming from Billy. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open.
    "Hey, put that thing a way, will ya? I want to talk to you."
    "Ok. You put that thing a way, I'll put this thing away."
    "Where do you want me to put it?"
    "Where I don't have to look at it would be nice for a start. I'm sorry but it's a little disconcerting walking in here and ...."
    "What the hell does that mean: disconcerting?"
    "Hello this is William Paradise." Billy gave him a sharp glance then turned away.
     "Ok, ok." Mel pulled the sheets around and over himself so his modesty was restored.
   Billy noticed the difficulty Mel had lifting his body and adjusting his position on the bed, as if he had a painful sunburn, as if his ass was on fire, as if his guts might leak out through an open wound that no surgeon could close.
    Mel felt the pain like rats gnawing at his backbone, their claws scratching along the length of it, the quick nibbling too fast for him to evade. He held his breath in grim respect for the intensity of the hurt and waited patiently for the electric, sparking bites to taper off. That time in Paris that tiny little bistro Stan had recommended it, yelled at the cabbie for thirty-five minutes before the guy finally found it off the Rue de la something, Vert, means green, and the street was so narrow the cabby left him at the corner and he wandered down the middle of the street till he found the maitre d' standing in the doorway smoking, the smell of garlic saturated the air, several scars on his neck, he should of known, the little hoodlum, but the foie gras oh my god and the snails, that bottle of burgundy, that's where the trouble began so smooth everything so nice and friendly till the bill came 'Hey pal this can't be right.' 'Oh, no Monsieur I assure you,' 'No no no I'm telling you this is way off,' 'Monsieur I must insist,' 'Well I'm not paying this bill this is highway robbery,' feeling thick, not sure if he could can stand up, didn't care who heard him, suddenly saw there was no one in the place, what time it must have been, christ these guys were robbing him blind, come on ya little schvanz and two big goons out of nowhere got him in a halfnelson, that spot on his lower back that cattle prod shock down his leg like sparklers lighting up his spine, like hot coals searing the meat in his ass, his tailbone going off like a roman candle, he was a heap of burnt bones on the floor waiting for the fires to go out as they lifted his wallet out examining the credit cards like a poker hand. Thanks Stan you really know how to pick 'em.
    "Look, Billy boy."
    "How are ya, Dad. You look Ok. Mom said they did another round."
    "Yeah, not so bad this time. I must be getting used to it."
    "You coming home?"
    "Yeah, sure. Couple of days he said."
    "Who?"
    "You know. Spiegel."
    "The oncologist?"
    "Yeah, whatever. Him."
    "Good. That's great." Billy didn't want to sit. He wanted to stand toe to toe and give as good as he got. The silence fell through the floor and kept going. He waited for it to hit bottom. Right straight through to China.
    "Look, Billy."
    "What'd they give you for the pain, Dad?"
    "Look."
    "Cause you know you have to make a stink. They always undermedicate with pain."
    "Billy."
    "You have to make a fuss you want to get their attention."
    "Will you listen to me?"
   "No lectures, Dad." He said it softly, but it had a very sharp point, and it found the soft flesh between the ribs.
    "I have no intention . . . . You know you're not making this easy." Mel smiled in spite of himself, the grin that suffers fools. He felt it spread across his face like grease from a baby back rib.
    "Why is that?" Billy could jab for rounds and rounds. I'll wear him out.
Mel ignored it. It wasn't worth the effort.
    "Got a few things I would like to say. About me. About you and me." He swore to God if he cut him off now he would get up from this bed and there would be bloodshed.
    "Dad, I just stopped by to say hello, ok. Market’s down, I got calls to make, I can’t focus, you know. I’ll come back tonight, ok? We'll talk till we're blue."
    "Get out of here, you miserable excuse for a---" The phone again. Billy took it from his pocket and flipped it open. "Get that fuckin' phone out of here. Go back to your vault and lock yourself in with your illgotten gains where you belong."
    "Oh stuff it will ya. Can't even get out of bed and you're giving me orders."
    "Don't you raise your voice to me."
    "The only way I get heard I have to shout you down." Billy felt his neck stiffening, the hard knot of anger at the base of his skull, the gripping asphyxiation under his jaw and chin.
    "Listen to me. I got something to say to you, you can get that chip off your shoulder for five minutes.
    "What, what, what," Billy stopped to feel his ears pounding as his blood pressure skyrocketed. "could you possibly say to me I haven't already heard it a thousand times before."
    "Then get out of here. Go on." He tried to pick up the pole that held the bags of fluid dripping into his arm and swing it like a baseball bat. Laughable. His hands could barely grip. Lou Gehrig, he thought. "Get out."
    "What the hell are you doing, Dad? You're gonna rip the needles right out."
    "Get outta here before I do"
    "Nurse. Nurse. Somebody." Billy slipped on the linoleum as he jerked open the door.
    Mel took a deep breath. It was Tommy Gordon, that pollack kid he married a jewish girl what's her name Jaffe and all his pollack friends and they caught Mel on Racine down by the Ravenswood El and they couldn't hold him down he was so furious, they couldn't get a grip on him but eventually they had him so he couldn't even move like they thought he was gonna yell for help but he wouldn't and he couldn't move and every muscle in him went tense, he thought he was going to explode all over Tommy Gordon but he felt so helpless goddammit to hell he hated that.
    Billy slogged his way home in a heavy rainstorm. The stream of reverse commuters sloshed down the Merritt Parkway like gin and vermouth in a martini glass, never quite overflowing the glassthin margin of safety. He could feel his car hydroplane on the old road. Keep you honest. In the distance the string of car lights seemed not to move. In the foreground the lights seemed to search for and lock onto his face, his eyes, then release him just before the moment of truth.
He felt the thud like a drunk who knows he's been punched but not where. He saw the guy go flying into the grass that substituted for a breakdown lane on the old parkway. What was he doing in the middle of the road? So hard. Must have killed.... Stop. Don't stop. Have to. Stop. Can't stop. Stop. He pumped the breaks and pulled off the road before he could think to look behind him. The car slid on the wet wet grass and came to a stop. His hands clutched the wheel, Ten minutes to two, his knuckles icy white. What was he thinking? How did he miss him? Not his fault. Not his fault. Guy in the road this time of night, this rain. The parkway for godsake. Where was he thinking of?
    Billy sat for a second waiting for the hand of god to smite him, waiting for a slashing strike of lightning to white out the night. He turned off the ignition and watched his hands begin to shake. He opened the car door and felt the rain peppering his face. He slipped out and stood in the rain. He felt the breeze of the cars going past. The wet sucking grass filled his shoes and tugged at his silk socks as he walked around the front of the car.
    Oh fuck that's blood on the windshield. The headlamp cracked, the bumper crushed, the hood crumpled like paper.
    He walked back toward the point of impact looking for the guy hoping for some kind of crazy miracle, what kind of mangled mess, never seen a dead man. On route 33 heading east to the Jersey shore in the midday summer heat with the top down traffic crawling on the twolane blacktop through the country towns not even suburbs rolling joints with Joe in the back seat and stashing them away complete stop by an old red house and a black dog lying in the sandy strip by the side of the road owner coming over in his overalls old man with a shovel in his hand the skin on his face as burnt and weathered as the peeling red wood on his house calling blackie, blackie get away from there blackie get up you dumb old dog walking all the way over stopping still in his tracks I could see it in his face as it hit him and he twisted his face away as his eyes got wet and he looked out dully at the slowmotion creek of cars, which one, which one, like he might pound the killer car into scrap metal with his fat hands if he could just figure out which one but you could see the dog had been dead awhile all stiff and he gazed at the endless stream of cars then the gravelly old cuss bent down and picked old blackie up and cradled him in his arms and carried him away like his dad used to sweep him up and carry him to bed so deft and gentle as he swung through the halls and the doorway to his room and laid him on the bed with the covers pulled back in a triangle for him to slip under.
    The wet grass sparkled as the headlights swept by. He'd been thrown halfway into the woods, his tan overcoat draped about him like a shroud. He was huge and misshapen. As Billy approached he slipped and fell. The guy twitched spasmodically as if to get away, his leg the foot so thin looked like a hoof -- a hoof -- it was -- the shoulders heaved the head lolled back, a deer, his thin flat tongue clamped tight between his teeth like a piece of baseball card bubblegum. The fuck. It's not a guy. A freaking deer. Those eyes staring up. Rainwater tears streaming down its snout. It jerked again -- some residual electric discharge -- the left front leg hung by a thread -- came off -- Billy roared from deep inside his thorax underneath his ribs. The pumping chest soaking with blood like a rich red carpet.
His arm wanted to reach inside, go elbows up in steaming flesh and calm the beating heart with gentle palms.
    One more fluid tremor shook the deer. Fucking Christ it was trying to stand, rolling over on its side and trying to put its legs beneath it. Staggering briefly onto three legs, it seemed to come right at him, like a suicide charge with guns and grenades. Billy barely had time to raise his arms to his face and lean into the impact. The deer leapt and collapsed in one awkward motion, its eyes so wide it saw through the night and into the next animal world. The panting head struck him in the neck. The weight of the animal knocked him back. A searing bleat as the amputated shoulder landed on his chest and they fell to the ground together, the sucking mud beneath him and the fluidpumping deer above. Billy's hands grabbed at the slick wet fur and felt the trembling muscles beneath the surface. His legs kicked violently. His back arched. His shoulderblades clenched his spine. His chin dug into his neck as he yelled. His whole body jerked into action in an effort to get out from under the deer. He got to his knees shaking all over, the sensation of warm -- it must be blood travelling down his neck and in his hair and bathing his hands. The passing headlights strobed over him. The deer lay still. He stumbled back to his car. He sat in the driver's seat feeling the weight of the rain and the blood and the smell of the sweat and the strain and the fear on the outside and the numb fucking calm of adrenaline saying drive man drive coming right from his solar plexus on the inside. He turned the key in the ignition and he was gone.
    That night he couldn't settle down. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to touch it. Finally around 11:30 he jumped his wife while she was watching Ally McBeal reruns. He grabbed her from behind and forced his way in the way she wouldn't say she liked it, held her breasts as his mouth reached down for hers and came just as he got all the way in. Just before he closed his eyes, he saw Calista Flockhart smiling through her tears, her doethin limbs so fetching.
    Early the next morning on his way to work Billy was rolling down the parkway when his head jerked involuntarily to the left and there was the deer lying in the grass on the edge of the forest. He turned around at the next exit, drove slowly back to the spot and parked the car in the grass. Huge black birds with red hanging gizzards and great clawed feet were milling about, maybe ten or so. Two or three were tearing at the deer's flesh with their beaks, backflapping their enormous wings for extra leverage and clawing with their talons. Then another two or three would muscle their way in and slice away at the deer's body. Billy sat in the car watching. Turkey vultures. The words came to him in Ron Ransohoff's nasal voice. "Those aren't hawks. Hawks are grey. And owls. Black ones are turkey vultures. Got 'em in the eaves of my garage. Noisy, filthy, ugly fuckers. Like some bond traders I know. Eat anything." Ron looked down on Wall Street from his lofty perch as an estate planner. The birds hopped and flapped. Some of them chewed into the anus. Just like Edward Albee said they did. Or was that jackals? He watched as they lay bare the entrails and the major organs beneath the rib cage. Thick dead blood pooled up in the grass, some kind of swampy stew.
    The next day there were fewer turkey vultures. Crows milled about on the edge of the action. When they got too close, the big guys threatened to stomp them. The next day the turkey vultures were gone, and the crows went to work. Billy felt no visceral fear of these crows. He came slowly closer to see them work their way into the smaller spaces of the deer's remains: the brain, the eyes. They ate the head in a noisy boiling throng. They tore off the skin and looted the flesh they found beneath it, carrying it not far off to appraise it, devour it and return for more. The sky was flecked wiith latecomers. Impatient onlookers sat in the branches of the nearest trees. A canopy of insistent, throaty cackling like Apache braves ready to descend from their dusty ridge into the cauldron at Little Big Horn. Fattened ones flew off in a drunken stupor of rotting flesh. The biggest and the boldest came hopping in to take their place, walking like demented Grouchos, their arms grasped impatiently behind their stooping backs, their heads bobbing forward with each springy step, the Margaret Dumont of their desires coming apart at the seams on the grassy divan.

    On Sunday Mel was still in the hospital. Billy couldn’t find out why. There were no doctors in the whole freaking hospital. That must be why no one dies on Sunday, he thought. Billy drove into the city to see him. On the entrance ramp to the Merritt Parkway he saw a raccoon twitching and coiling on the dashed yellow stripe, a worm that had been dusted with the salt of death. It was trying to drag itself off the parkway. He stopped the car to the side of the ramp and got out and looked. The ringtail clawed the air as its insides spread out on the pavement. Billy took a step toward it. His hands tensed in preparation for gathering in the hot, wet leaking life on the pavement. He jumped back at the sound of traffic blasting through him. The raccoon 's claws wrenched back and forth across the parchment of the sky, scrawling in the common language of distress. A second time Billy scampered out from the exit ramp. A hunter green Jag swerved into the passing lane. Billy swerved back from the road. He saw the driver's jaw working hard and tense as he passed, his eyes wide, his teeth bared. Couldn't have been too concerned if he had time to curse like that. Anti-lock brakes, computer controlled differential: those things drive themselves, evasive action on demand for the discriminating driver.
    From a crouch he watched the drivers swerve to avoid the criminal strapped to the parkway electric chair. They were going to fry him on a trumped up charge. Billy's knuckles went white as he clenched his hands like a rheumatoid arthritic. A moment in the clear. He dashed out onto the highway. His bloodpressure rose til his neck ached. He reached for the raccoon. The hot wet fur settled into his hands and forearms as his fingernails scraped the road, but the animal came apart as he lifted it up. Billy gasped and choked. He flung himself to the meridian and slung the two halves into the grass. Like the Levites of old. Examining the entrails for signs of God's will. What the hell was he doing there?
     "Dad," he asked as came into the bright afternoon room. "do you want me to lower that shade?"
    "Yeah, lower the shade. That would be nice."
    "How are ya, Dad?"
    "Billy." Mel pursed his lips. "Billy, Billy, Billy." He lifted his eyebrows and his forehead unfolded into a map of creases. "Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy."
     "What, what, what?"
    "Do you have any bedside manner? Don't you know you're not supposed to ask a sick man direct questions like that? What am I supposed to say? I'm fine? I'm not fine. You want me to say I'm fine when I'm not?
    " Ok."
    "You want me to compain? I don't want to complain. I'm sick of it.”
    “Ok, ok.
    “I’m sorry. I’m a little grouchy today.”
    “Yeah.”
    “We never talked,” said Mel.
   Drop dead silence.
    “I want to talk, Billy.”
    Oh christ, he thought. “We are talking, Dad. You say something. I say something. We’re talking.”
    “You’re pissing me off already?”
    “Ok, ok. I just don’t want to get into a deep philosophical discussion is all.”
    “You dance around like a prizefighter,” said Mel. “You think I’m trying to hit you?”
    “And you just barrel straight ahead, don’t you.” Billy felt his breath starting to flutter. He was not going to lose his composure.
    “Ok, Bill. Hey how about we do the numbers? And then we’ll talk.”
    Billy felt the energy surge throughout his body. His fists clenched. His arms curled inward. He wanted to jump up and holler. He wanted to pound his feet into the floor. The goddamn numbers. The riotous, feral, malicious, cells of cancer, stripped for speed and streamlined for stealth, like schools of sharks in a sea of fish, a kind of life designed to eat up anything it encountered, were running rampant throughout his father’s body, feeding til they killed the thing they lived in. How could he devote his dwingling energy to counting his pennies, however many he might have?
    Billy had to wait. His breath was featherlight. It would not support the words. It would give way and leave them to collapse on the mat. He took a moment to regroup.
    "Yeah, let's do the numbers,” he said, coming out of the corner with his gloves high.
    Billy handed his father a pad of paper and a stub of a pencil from the nightstand. He picked up the New York Times from the end of the bed. Mel ticked off a list of stocks from memory. Billy looked them up in the stock tables and reported their prices. Mel licked the pencil lightly with his tongue, multiplied each price by the number of shares he knew he held, and wrote the results down on the pad. Each time Billy read off a number, Mel paused and shook his head before he did his calculation. With each multiplication the simple precision of the algorithm seemed to calm him more deeply. After he wrote down the result he looked at it and humphed a barely audible humph. The numbers on the pad made him thoughtful beyond all measure, as if they reminded him of numbers he had known in earlier days, numbers from a fine, exotic language he had learned and since forgot, numbers that reeked of bars, cigars and fancy broads, numbers that had made a promise he was only now discovering they had never meant to keep.
    Mel totalled the numbers up, drew a line beneath the result and circled it. Then he tore the page off the pad, crumpled it up offhandedly and tossed it away.
    "Good or bad?" Billy asked.
    Mel looked at him and sighed. "Good or bad? What is that? People are good. Times are bad. Numbers are just numbers."
    "Since when?"
    "I don't know. Who knows?"
    Billy examined the skin on his father's arm. It was very tan with huge black freckles like ink blots. His fingernails were cracked and yellow. When did that happen? Mel's hospital gown was twisted at the torso so that the bare stripe at the rear ran down his side facing Billy. Billy could see the blackink crosshairs branded into his father's hide where the radiologist had drawn his target.
    "What are you looking at, Billy?"
    "Nothing, Dad. I'm looking at you. I came to visit you in the hospital. I'm     looking at you."
    "Don't look at me. That's what I pay the doctor for."
    He felt his breathing pulse and throb. He tightened his inward grip and changed     the subject.
    "I hit a deer on the parkway going home a couple of days ago."
    "What happened?"
    "He jumped right out of nowhere. I thought it was some guy at first. But it wasn't. It was this deer, great big deer.
    "Antlers?"
    "No, I don't think so, no antlers.
    "A female."
    "Yeah, I guess it was."
    "What about the car?"
    "The car is covered."
    "Good, that's good. " Mel looked out the window. "I hate that goddamn sun." He wanted to feel it on his face and on his bare chest. He wanted to sense the raw spot on his neck where the sunburn was beginning. Somewhere there was a beach with barbecues and beer and great kidding going on. He needed to be a part of it, but his skin was paperthin now. It might catch fire in the afternoon sun or dry up     like dust and blow away.
    "I'll pull down the shade," said Billy.
    "No. Leave it open." Mel coudn't let it go just like that.
    "Well make up your mind, Dad."
    "I'm telling you leave it open, goddammit."
    "Here's a crazy thing," said Billy. "I went back. I went back and found the deer.     I've been going back every day to look at it."
    "What are you talking about?"
    "It's fascinating. Watching it decompose. Watching the scavengers take it apart."
    There was a brief silence while Billy waited for Mel to return the ball. Mel's face went very tight. His eyes locked. He was looking in not out.
    "Dad." Billy realized his mistake. What was he thinking? Where did this hostile gesture come from?
    Mel couldn’t look at him. "Go decompose somewhere else."
    The next Saturday Billy drove to the deer's resting place. Field mice scattered on his approach. Black flies were beginning to collect in various crevices. The deer's upper thigh bones had been stripped down to the delicate articulation of the bones. Beneath the knee joints, the skin and hoof seemed to be intact. The deer was being laid bare like a less fortunate Fay Wray in the massive hand of her dark admirer, slowly but surely stripped of each covering by the curiousity and hungers of her attentive lovers; her chalk white bones gleaming like Fay's thighs, her bodice as shamelessly inviting, as powerless as Fay to resist, and to the eye of the casual observer equally erotic in her complete surrender.
    By Monday morning the field mice had done a thorough job on the body of the deer and were attacking the head. Flies buzzed in the eyesockets. As he was about to leave Billy realized that the deer's carcass was moving. Maggots had hatched and begun the final process of digesting the rotting mass the earlier scavengers had created in their feastings.
    That evening Billy came in while his father was sleeping. He pushed against the doorknob with the heel of his palm and walked into the old man's deathchamber, the room wherein the world curled up and died around him, slowly growing more and more indistinct, losing color, sound and smell, the four corners of the realm retracting claustrophobically around him, strangling him, asphyxiating him, crushing him beneath the dead weight of his retreating. ceasing life. Oh, god. Why was he thinking like this?
    He listened for a long while as Mel muttered, grunted softly and smacked his lips in what seemed to be great satisfaction. When he awoke Mel stared at Billy in a haze of disbelief and disorientation caused by the tailings of the place from which he had so quickly and abruptly come, a medicinal drowsiness which seemed to prevent him from ever waking up completely. "You got a lot of goddamn nerve."
    "What were you dreaming about, Dad?" David asked.
    "Same as always. Same old dreams. They never change."
    "Like what?"
    "I took the snap, dropped back. Linemen coming at me from every direction. Threw a pass, incredible long bomb. Touchdown. Bears win."
    "You've been throwing that pass for as long as I can remember. Ever miss?"
    "Very rarely. Very rarely."
    "How do you do that. I mean . . . "
    "Is there something wrong with the way I dream?" Irritation rose quickly in Mel's voice.
    "No, Dad," Billy replied as softly as he could without obvious pretense. "I just find it utterly amazing that your dreams are so positive, so totally devoid of neurosis and anxiety."
    “I have no explanation for it. Now will you sit down. You’re making me nervous again.”
    Billy sat and looked out the window into the cracking bright light.
    “Now what’s on your mind, Billy?”
    “Nothing, Dad.”
    “You look like you’re a million miles away.”
    “No, I’m right here,” Billy said. A rueful smile passed quickly across his face. Then he grimaced into the sun.
    "Yeah, lower the blinds, would you" said Mel. Billy lowered the blinds and twisted the glass rod so that some light could enter between the metal slats. Parallel rays of light shot through the room. A galaxy of dust motes whirled and surged through the air. A clockwork procession with eddies and streams and an overall rotation like a milky way of dust mote suns shone in this newly discovered corner of the universe, each mote glinting like a distant star. Billy and his father sat in the halflight. Billy watched an eddy of motes twirling smoothly, noiselessly, calmly, unendingly. He picked out a single dust mote as it flashed its tiny light and followed it with his eye. It sped up, slowed down, changed direction. It even stopped. He never lost sight of it. He blew a gentle breath of air and watched the cloud of motes scatter, watched his private mote move slowly away and suddenly down as if the hand of God had reached out and moved it from beyond the world of cause and effect. He saw it twirling slowly end over end, felt as if he could hear it whooshing rhythmically through the air. He could even make out the opposite ends, one brighter than the other like a world at sunrise. He saw the sharp, rhomboid shape of the mote as it hung unmoving in the fragile air. When he looked up his father was resubmerged in the medicinal refuge of sleep.
    On Sunday Billy went out to mow the lawn. Rain had left the ground so wet the wheels of his oversized power mower sunk into a muck and threatened to tear muddy ruts in the grass. He went back for the old rotary mower he had never thrown out. It was a bit rusty, but the blade still turned. It sat up nicely on the grass as he tried to make it cut. He started by the flowerbed his wife had planted by the driveway. He noticed several worms on the driveway coiling their way back to the earth. In the drowning wetness of the storm they had come up from the ground in search of oxygen and wormed about on the the wet pavement, unmindful of the danger that awaited them when the sun returned to dry the blacktop. Billy picked up a worm between his fingers. The slimy writhing reflex of the creature caused his hand and arm to curl in response. He placed the worm in the flowerbed and watched as the writhing action became a digging, boring operation. He watched the head sink into the wet soil and the long tube follow after. For one unceasing second he could see all the way into the earth, see the tunnel the worm was engineering, see the earth being moved away. He could see the worm breathing, sucking the molecules of air from the soil, sensing where the water table lay. As if he were seeing a multicolored schematic drawing in a scientific journal, he could see the worm ingesting tiny bits of life. He saw through the brown translucent skin of the worm to its gut where a gastric assault dissolved and digested the worm's food. He saw the organic molecules in their curious rings of carbon floating in an exotic steaming soup. He saw the enzymes breaking down the molecules, adeptly splitting off the famous nitrogen molecules, each one a mini-universe with its seven electrons spinning gracefully around a muscular, bubbling nucleus of protons and neutrons. He saw the nitrogen combine with oxygen, gather in clumps that worked their way through the hind end of the worm to be expelled and deposited in the earth as natural fertilizer. He held this entire montage called up from the dark unconscious of highschool biology in his mind for an awestruck second. Its piercing truth made him shiver with an uncanny recognition of the great engine of life that spread out from his fingertips on the neverending, neverbeginning surface of the earth. It was an engine that responded to laws of nature simple and precise at the bottom, but it created phenomena complex and unfathomable on top. It was a teeming, surging engine of great complexity that seemed to beat at his breast in an effort to get inside and unlock the part that lay within him.
    The grass was still too wet for the rotary mower to cut. It made its clattering, scrissoring sounds, but very few blades of grass succumbed to its machinery. Billy put away the rotary mower and went to the hospital for his Sunday visit.
    On his way into the city Billy went back to visit the deer. He found nothing but the skull wiped clean of every covering. The bony crown of the head lay delicately in the grass. The teeth were bared and the eyesockets peered in a fixed gape. The bones of the jaw seemed to hunger for flesh. He wanted to take it home to his son and tell him about his observations. He wanted to present it to his father as a gift. But when he bent down to reach for it, he sensed he was disturbing the dead, desecrating a grave for his own selfish anthropological insights, insights which were inferior to the inherent spiritual intimations of the remaining artifact itself.
    Billy found Mel looking very pale and drawn. The whiskers on his face had reached the length where a blade would not go through them easily. It gave him a hint of wino chic, stumblebum panhandler pathos. Mel spoke first. "You know I did a crazy thing. I tried to drink a scotch and water today. Tried to drink it. Couldn't stand the taste. Awful. How do people drink that stuff?" Billy felt a tightening in his chest. Mel's speech was slurred. What the hell was going on? When did this happen? What did it mean? Who could he grab by the lapels and shout at about this?
    "Dad, you've been drinking scotch and water for sixty years, and now you can't stand the taste? That is very weird."
    "Well, that is what I am saying. I cannot stand the taste. Do you want to get into argument about what I can or cannot taste?"
    "No, Dad I do not want to get into an argument. I want to get into an agreement."
    "Agreement?"
   "Or whatever you would call it. The opposite of an argument."
    "How about something a little bit more substantial?" asked Mel
    Billy looked down at his shoe and picked a long blade of wet cut grass off of the laces of his sneakers. As he held up the blade of grass he considered the tiny pattern of striations running up and down the blade. He could even make out tiny tiny branches splitting off of the from the main vertical veins. He imagined he could see the individual cells of the blade of grass, each filled with a spot of green chlorophyl chugging away as it converted oxygen into carbon dioxide or was it the other way around? Yes the other.
    "How about a nice friendly chat?" asked Billy.
    "About what?" That was Mel's gruffest voice.
    Billy thought of the millions of cells each operating in the exact same manner to make oxygen, each processing one molecule at a time, one electron at a time, oxygen flowing out of the blade into the air, carbon flowing down through the stem to the roots in the earth.
    "Like this blade of grass, Dad."
    "You want to talk about a blade of grass? Are you serious?"
    Billy noticed an ant crawling on his jeans. He placed the blade of grass in the ant's path. The ant scrambled onto the blade. Billy picked it up. The ant walked up and down on the blade, topside and underside not knowing how to get off. Billy watched the delicate, thin legs of the ant. He watched its head swivel about. How could something so small have the spark of life in it? How could something so simple be alive? How could it have a brain? How could it do things? Accomplish tasks? And yet how maniacally complicated were the processes which led it to take each step, to cling to the blade, to eat, to chew, to talk to other ants.
    "Or we could talk about this ant?" He placed the blade of grass and the ant on Mel's bed beside his hand where the morphine drip was taped to his forearm. Mel started to swipe it away instinctively, but he stopped. He looked Billy directly in the eyes, his mouth open, his tongue lolling ever so slightly out of the left corner of his mouth.
    "You are a very strange kid, you know that. You always were."
    "Dad, I'm not trying to be difficult here. I'm just trying to talk."
    “Well, so am I, Billy. So am I.”
    Billy sat slightly forward in his chair. He hunched his shoulders and clasped his hands together between his thighs as if he were trying to warm them.
    “What are you afraid of, Bill? You think I’m going to ask for your forgiveness? You think I’m expecting you to ask for mine?”
    Billy turned and quickly wiped the tears out of his eyes like a pitcher on the mound wiping away the stinging sweat.
    He noticed the ant was chewing on the blade of grass. It took a huge chunk in its mouth, an impossibly huge chunk and started to whirl around looking for the way home.
    Billy had a very clear and quiet thought: at every moment, in every corner of the world on every level of reality the world cohered and made sense; the laws of nature were being fulfilled in every cell of every petal of every flower in every meadow in the world, in every structure, every fluid and every cloud of gas, in every nucleus of every atom, in every electron passing through every wire, in every electromagnetic wave wandering up and down in the earth and to and fro upon it.
    "I don't know," he said finally. "You want to do the numbers?"
    "Yeah," said Mel. "You want this scotch? I can't do anything with this."

The End