“Denise, he’s crawling across the floor. Rather than sit in a nice, comfortable straight-backed chair which the doctor says it’s important that he sit in, he crawls across the floor. He shouldn’t be sitting so much to begin with. Dr. Hedgpeth says his condition is not at all severe if he would just get out and do a little. Use it or lose it, that’s what every doctor says. Dave Schumpert has had ten times more health problems than Dad, he’s had a colostomy for fifteen years, he’s got one lung and a pacemaker, and look at all the things that he and Mary Beth are doing. They just got back from snorkeling in Fiji! And Dave never complains, never complains. You probably don’t remember Gene Grillo, Dad’s old friend from Hephaestus, but he has bad Parkinson’s—much, much worse than Dad’s. He’s still at home in Fort Wayne but in a wheelchair now. He’s really in awful shape, but, Denise, he’s interested in things. He can’t write anymore but he sent us an ‘audio letter’ on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he’s started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don’t speak any English and Gene wants to be able to talk to them a little. Can you believe? Here Gene is in a wheelchair, completely crippled, and he’s still thinking about what he can do for somebody else! While Dad, who can walk, and write, and dress himself, does nothing all day but sit in his chair.”
“Mother, he’s depressed,” Denise said in a low voice, slicing bread.
“That’s what Gary and Caroline say, too. They say he’s depressed and he should take a medication. They say he was a workaholic and that work was a drug which when he couldn’t have it anymore he got depressed.”
“So drug him and forget him. A convenient theory.”
“That’s not fair to Gary.”
“Don’t get me started on Gary and Caroline.”
“Golly, Denise, the way you throw that knife around I don’t see how you haven’t lost a finger.”
From the end of a French loaf Denise had made three little crust-bottomed vehicles. On one she set shavings of butter curved like sails full of wind, into another she loaded Parmesan shards packed in an excelsior of shredded arugula, and the third she paved with minced olive meat and olive oil and covered with a thick red tarp of pepper.
Enid spoke—“Mm, don’t those look nice”—as she reached, cat-quick, for the plate on which Denise had arranged the snacks. But the plate eluded Enid.
“These are for Dad.”
“Just a corner of one.”
“I’ll make some more for you.”
“No, I just want one corner of his.”
But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.
“Something to tide you while I get lunch,” Denise said.
Alfred gazed with gratitude at the snacks, which were holding about ninety percent steady as food, flickering only occasionally into objects of similar size and shape.
“Maybe you’d like a glass of wine?”
“Not necessary,” he said. As the gratitude spread outward from his heart—as he was moved—his clasped hands and lower arms began to bounce more freely on his lap. He tried to find something in the room that didn’t move him, something he could rest his eyes on safely; but because the room was Chip’s and because Denise was standing in it, every fixture and every surface—even a radiator knob, even a thigh-level expanse of faintly scuffed wall—was a reminder of the separate, eastern worlds in which his children led their lives and hence of the various vast distances that separated him from them; which made his hands shake all the more.
That the daughter whose attentions most aggravated his affliction was the person he least wanted to be seen by in the grip of this affliction was the sort of Devil’s logic that confirmed a man’s pessimism.
“I’ll leave you alone for a minute,” Denise said, “while I get the lunch going.”
He closed his eyes and thanked her. As if waiting for a break in a downpour so that he could run from his car into a grocery store, he waited for a lull in his tremor so that he could reach out and safely eat what she’d brought him.
His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.
If thy right hand offend thee, Jesus said, cut it off.
As he waited for the tremor to abate—as he watched his hands’ jerking rowing motions impotently, as if he were in a nursery with screaming misbehaving infants and had lost his voice and couldn’t make them quiet down—Alfred took pleasure in the imagination of chopping his hand off with a hatchet: of letting the transgressing limb know how deeply he was angry with it, how little he loved it if it insisted on disobeying him. It brought a kind of ecstasy to imagine the first deep bite of the hatchet’s blade in the bone and muscle of his offending wrist; but along with the ecstasy, right beside it, was an inclination to weep for this hand that was his, that he loved and wished the best for, that he’d known all its life.
He was thinking about Chip again without noticing it.
He wondered where Chip had gone. How he’d driven Chip away again.
Denise’s voice and Enid’s voice in the kitchen were like a larger bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen. And his moment came, the lull that he’d been waiting for. Leaning forward and steadying his taking hand with his supporting hand, he grasped the butter-sailed schooner and got it off the plate, bore it aloft without capsizing it, and then, as it floated and bobbed, he opened his mouth and chased it down and got it. Got it. Got it. The crust cut his gums, but he kept the whole thing in his mouth and chewed carefully, giving his sluggish tongue wide berth. The sweet butter melting, the feminine softness of baked leavened wheat. There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system…
The betrayal had begun in Signals.
The Midland Pacific Railroad, where for the last decade of his career he’d run the Engineering Department (and where, when he’d given an order, it was carried out, Mr. Lambert, right away, sir), had served hundreds of one-elevator towns in west Kansas and west and central Nebraska, towns of the kind that Alfred and