Hecker looked. The dark area, as far as he could tell, ran all the way from one side of his skull to the other.
“We’ll have to run some tests,” said the doctor. “Do you want to let your daughter know?”
Hecker hesitated. Did he want to tell her? No, he thought, but he wasn’t certain why. Did he want to shield her or simply shield himself from her reaction? Or was it simply that he didn’t trust words anymore, at least not when they came out of his own mouth? Maybe someone else could tell her. Maybe he would figure out what to do when he had to.
“Perhaps no need to frighten her until the results are back,” said the doctor, watching him closely. “There’s no reason to panic yet,” he said. He turned and began to write on his chart. “Any difficulties? Loss of motor skills? Speech problems? Anything out of the ordinary?”
Hecker hesitated. Was there any point trying to explain? “Speech,” he finally tried to say, but nothing came out. Why nothing? he wondered. Before, there at least had always been something, even if it was the wrong thing. Frustrated, he shook his head.
The doctor must have taken it to mean something. He smiled. “That’s good, then,” he said. “Very good indeed.”
A few days later, waiting for the results of the tests, he began to panic. First, he thought, I will lose all language, then I will lose control of my body, then I will die.
He tried to push them out of his head, such thoughts, with little success. Now, having resigned from teaching, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat around the house, read, watched his daughter out of the corner of his eye. He had a hard time getting himself to do anything productive. He felt more and more useless, furtive. She was oblivious, he thought, she had no idea that she would watch him first lose the remainder of his speech, then slowly fall apart, waste away. Having to live through that, she would probably pray for his death long before it actually arrived.
And so will I, he thought.
Better to die quickly, he told himself, smoothly, and save both yourself and those close to you. More dignified.
He pushed the thought down. It kept rising.
His daughter was trying to hand him the telephone. It was the doctor calling with the test results. “Standish,” Hecker said into the receiver. But the doctor was apparently too worried about what he had to say, about saying it right, in the kindest way possible, in the most neutral words imaginable, to notice.
The tests, the doctor claimed, had amplified his concern. What he wanted to do was to recommend a specialist to Hecker, a brain surgeon, a good one, one of the best. He would open Mr. Hecker’s skull at a certain, optimal spot, take a look at what was really going on in there, and make an assessment of whether it could be cut out, if there was any point in—
“I didn’t mean that,” said the doctor nervously. “There’s always a point. I’m saying it wrong.” The proper terminology to describe this was exploratory surgery. Did Hecker understand?
“Yes,” Hecker managed. “Was fish guillotine sedentary?”
“Hmmm? Necessary? I’m afraid so, Mr. Hecker.”
How soon, he wanted to know, could Mr. Hecker put his affairs in order? Not that there was any serious immediate risk, but better safe than sorry. When, he wanted to know, was Mr. Hecker able to schedule the exploratory surgery? Did he have any concerns? Were there any questions that remained to be answered?
Hecker opened his mouth to speak but felt already that anything he said would be wrong, perhaps in several ways at once. So he hung up.
“What did he say?” his daughter was asking him.
“Nobody,” he said. “Wrong finger.”
First, he thought over and over, I will lose all language, then I will not be able to control my body. Then I will die.
All he could clearly picture when he thought about this was his daughter, her life crippled for months, perhaps years, by his slow, gradual death. He owed it to her to die quickly. But perhaps, he thought, his daughter’s suffering was all he could think about because his own was harder to face. Even as he was now, stripped only partly of language, life was nearly unbearable.
First, he thought. And then. And then.
He remembered, he hadn’t thought about it for years, his own father’s death, a gradual move into paralysis, until the man was little more than rattling windpipe in a hospital bed, and a pair of eyes that were seldom open and, when they were, were thick with fear.
Like father, like son, he thought.
First, he thought. Then. Then.
He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. When it was very late and his daughter was asleep, he got out of bed and climbed up to the attic and took his shotgun out of its case and cleaned it and loaded it. He carried it back downstairs and slid it under his bed.
No, he thought, No first, no thens.
He was in bed again, staring, thinking. The character of the room seemed to have changed. He could not bear to kill himself with his daughter in the house, he realized. That would be terrible for her, much more terrible than watching him die slowly. And too horrible for him to think about. No, that wouldn’t do. He had to get her out.
But ever since he had been to the hospital, she had been sticking near him, never far away, observing him. She kept asking him what exactly was wrong with him, what had the doctor told him, why hadn’t she been allowed to hear? And then, what had the doctor said on the telephone? She was always giving him cups of soup which he took a few sips from and then left to scum over on the bookshelves, the fireplace mantel, the windowsills. It wasn’t fair, she said, she had only him, they had only each other, but the way he was acting now, she didn’t even feel like she had him. What had the doctor said? What exactly was wrong with him? Why wouldn’t he tell her? Why wouldn’t he speak? All he had to do, she told him, was open his mouth.
But no, that wasn’t all. No, it wasn’t as simple as that. And yes, he knew he should tell her, but he didn’t know what to say or if he could say it. And he didn’t want her pity — he wanted only to be what he had always been for her, her father, not an old, dying man.
But she wouldn’t let up. She was making him insane. If she wanted a fight, he would fight. He turned on her and said, utterly fluent, “Don’t you have someplace to be?”
“Yes,” she said fiercely. “Here.”
“Fat cats,” he misspoke, and, suddenly helpless again, turned away.
He made a grocery list, a long one, and offered it to her. She glanced at it.
“Groceries, Daddy?” she said. “Since when did you have anything to do with groceries?”
He shrugged.
“Besides,” she said. “We have half this stuff already. Did you even open the cupboards?”
He was beginning to have trouble with one of his fingers. It kept curling and uncurling of its own accord, as if no longer part of his body. He hid it under his thigh when he was seated, felt it wriggling there like a half-dead worm. He and his daughter glared at each other from sofa and armchair respectively, she continuing to hector him with her questions, he remaining silent, sullen.
He ate holding his utensils awkwardly, to hide the rogue finger from her. She took this as an act of provocation, accused him of acting like a child.