His father had had a heart attack, Matt was told, and was being operated on as they spoke. A quadruple bypass. Could he come to the hospital? He could. I know now what he saw on arrival — the treetop angiogram of Mr. Mazoch’s X-rayed veins — but at the time all he mentioned of his visit to the hospital was what the cardiologist had told him: (1) that it had been ‘this close’—accompanied by a hair’s breadth of air between two demonstrating fingers — that if Mr. Mazoch had arrived ‘even ten minutes later’ he’d be dead; and (2) that when asked for his son’s cell number Mr. Mazoch had instructed them to tell the boy, not that he’d be okay or that there was no need to worry, but that he loved him, last-words words, just that he loved him and nothing else. Matt’s tone spiked when he related these two things, in his voice a little anger flashed like mica.31 And it was here that I backed off from what struck me as a sore subject. Today, when he remarks the birch’s resemblance to the angiogram, I can hear the slightest echo of that anger, and so I refrain — for the time being — from asking him what Rachel asked me to. I wonder how long he has been brooding over this association: whether the shadow could have reminded even earlier of the heart attack (of all the excesses that led up to it: the obesity and the greed and the sheer ignorant gourmandism), and whether it was out of anger that Matt attacked the double doors. At this thought I imagine him battering the façade itself (swinging that bat like an ax into the shadow, as if chopping into the trunk of the tree of the veins of his father’s heart), and at this thought I imagine him battering Mr. Mazoch, beating on his undead body, just as Rachel fears.
Mazoch is finished with his apple. He has eaten the entirety of the core with grim efficiency, and I watch as he spits the dark seeds out of the driver-side window, where they patter onto the gravel of the parking lot. How far from the tree the fruit falls, it occurs to me! The father ashes a cigarette onto the gravel, the son spits out apple seeds. Is this what the heart attack meant to Matt, in the end? A memento mori, spurring him to eat an apple a day? Was Mr. Mazoch’s incised chest, bloated and vulnerable on the operating table, Matt’s own archaic torso of Apollo, exhorting him to change his life? Probably not. Matt, with his wrestler’s build and workout regimen, has likely been eating an apple a day for ages, and he definitely didn’t need his father’s brush with death to scare him off Snickers bars and greasy hamburgers. If anything, Mr. Mazoch’s heart attack would have only confirmed Matt in his habits. But I’d still be willing to bet that those habits — the bookishness no less than the bodybuilding — were formed in direct contradistinction to Mr. Mazoch. That is, I’d be willing to bet that Matt styled himself consciously as his father’s opposite.
It can’t be an accident that the fruit has fallen as far off as it has. Indeed, it’s as if Matt’s entire life has been engaged in this one Sisyphean task: to roll the fruit as far uphill from the tree as possible. That Mr. Mazoch was a college dropout and plumber, Matt should graduate summa from LSU’s English department; that Mr. Mazoch preoccupied himself with the most quotidian artifacts from the past (lamps and church hats and farm tools, interesting only secondarily, for the dust of history they were coated with), Matt should devote himself to books, the past’s loftiest artifacts; that Mr. Mazoch held his gut in his hands before the mirror every decade, his expanding gut, and appraised the deep concavity of his belly button (like a prostate it had enlarged! Big as a grape now, so unbelievably extended from the tight punctum it had made in his washboard stomach when at twenty he was slim as Matt!), and that Mr. Mazoch, staring each decade at his widening, worsening reflection, had the naivety to ask (his wife, Matt, the reflection itself), ‘Why do I keep putting on weight? Plumbing is such physical labor. I’m out there sweating every day, working with my hands, but I can’t seem to keep the pounds off!’, that as his wastebasket brimmed with Snickers wrappers he had the naivety to ask why he couldn’t keep the pounds off… Matt should do weighted pull-ups from the bar suspended in his doorframe,32 and each morning complete a set of one hundred elevated pushups (his feet propped on the cushion of an office chair), and hold his body horizontal to the ground for quivering, minute-long sessions of core-strengthening planks, and not only that, but should also mind his diet, eating organic apples whole for lunch, and spitting the seeds out hard, the way cartoon characters spit bullets, as if each ballistic spat black apple seed were itself the force that was keeping the doctor away.
What an antonymic existence Mazoch’s led! The wage laborer inverted as the scholar; the car cluttered with bronze lamps and landscape paintings inverted as the car cluttered with OEDs and usage guides (or, to put it another way, junk in the trunk inverted as Strunk in the trunk); the three hundred pounds of the quadruple bypass inverted as the three hundred pounds of the all-time bench max.
It has been a noble effort on Matt’s part, but, of course, no son can succeed in such an antonymic project. No matter how differentiated the son thinks he’s become, in actuality he has never left, never escaped out from under, the law of patrimonial synonymy that this whole time has been mastering him. The father’s habits, gestures, and ways of being end up predetermining him, such that even as he ‘differs’ from his father, he’s nonetheless bound to the man by some common denominator.33 Matt crouching in a dank aisle, browsing the spines of secondhand novels; Mr. Mazoch crouching in a dank aisle, browsing a Depression-era child’s doll set. Matt unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his apartment to capacity, stacking long-dead authors’ books in teetering hoodoos on the bedroom floor; Mr. Mazoch unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his dilapidated house to capacity, ranging a long-dead child’s dolls across the seat of his living room couch. Matt living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his library; Mr. Mazoch living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his antiques. Two collectors, two hoarders, casting a wide net over the past tense and trawling its goods into their rats’ nests. No, so far from being antonyms, there could be nothing more identical than Matt the scholar of dusty sentences and Mr. Mazoch the scholar of dusty whatever else. Even the bodybuilding, so ostensibly oppositional to everything Mr. Mazoch’s dietetics represented, is just one long way around the barn among others. For once Matt is his father’s age (once his slowed metabolism renders weighted pull-ups and pushups insufficient exercise, and once he aches too much or is too tired or weak to do even them as regularly as he’d need to, and once his lifelong disregard for cardiovascular exercise starts catching up with him), all this otiose muscle that he’s spent his youth building up will gradually atrophy and sag, deteriorating into so much fatherly fat. Then the symmetrization will be finished. Surely Matt is aware of this! At least subconsciously, he must appreciate the fact that this final symmetry between him and his father is preparing itself even now in his body, latently stored there like the heart disease that he’s probably inherited as well. He must understand that if I were to submerge him in the antiques store’s stale miasma, aging him, he’d come out in minutes resembling Mr. Mazoch.