“Tell me you missed me,” Jason breathed behind me, husky, a kind of wind, a May wind, a spring wind, stinging with promises of gardenias and marigolds, fat red buds poised on emerald vines, dew in the new shoots, the air steaming with jasmine, the streets sinking bewitched by rushing bluebirds.
“I missed you, yes,” my voice said. My voice was wind. My voice was a dark brown of just plowed earth. I was the smell of fresh brown bread steaming on a wooden shelf. My hair was wet. Jason pulled it like a rope, hard, jerking my head back. Why, I was a horse and he was riding me. I breathed through my mouth.
“Tell me how much you missed me,” Jason coaxed.
He held my waist. My forehead was pressed into the tile. My mouth was opened. I tried to speak but my mouth simply drank the night. I was a river swollen and squeezed through a cliff’s eye. The sky was empty. Jason parachuted down. I waited. The parachute opened magenta and red folds, billowing down like gigantic petals. He was lava. I was melting into thin strands of gold. He was breathing and pushing behind me. His breath was the wind in late May, a wind tinged with strawberries, cherries, all the pink tongues pushing up from hillsides. Jason was the storm, pressing and pumping electric.
We didn’t have bodies in the conventional sense anymore. There had been some evolutionary adaptation, a sudden accelerated mutation. We were part porpoise. We could live beneath the great churning sheets of sea water. Our flesh was too thin, too pale and soft. It wasn’t even the skin of fish. It lacked all substance. It cast no shadows. We had become dream creatures.
The dream was enormous. I had been someone else. And Jason had recreated me. I was his invention. He had painted me in the beginning. There had been an unexpected sharing and merging. I had been subtly altered. If painting began as a religious ritual, a part of the hunt, wasn’t it possible that the magic still stirred? Hadn’t Jason tapped into that other realm when he painted me onto canvas?
And the man with me was no longer the Jason he had once been. This man too was subtly altered. He was in part my creation.
The dream had a fragile domed shell. The dream was encased in a glistening hard enamel. But it could be punctured. It could be opened and closed like a fist, like my fist pumping open and closed, open and closed, waiting for the one small stab into blue vein, blue, blue as the sky, my mouth, the tides and Jason behind me, hard, invisible, the wind.
Now it was seven years later. It was the table my father had stripped and sanded down for me. Jason and I were sitting together. Jason was grinding cocaine with a razor blade. Picasso his cat sat near his leg.
“You know what I heard today?” Jason pressed the needle against his arm. “All over the country white toilet paper is the big seller. But not in L.A.” Jason stuck the needle in. Blood jumped. He let the tie drop. “Here, the more ornate the paper, the bigger it sells.” His eyes were wild. “Doesn’t it figure?”
I said nothing. I let Jason shoot me.
“You look sick,” Jason noted.
I walked to the bed, near the far wall. I could hear the goldfish swimming in the fountain. I could hear the sea breeze rustling the thin curtains, taking the curtains like a pale pair of wings. I curled into the shadows and waited for Jason and for the night to wrap its fine black claws around me.
9
“Don’t go up there yet,” Francine said. She was waiting for me in the hospital lobby. “It’s bad.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Of course I’ve been there. I was here at six A.M.” In the hospital light she looked white and shaken. Her smooth face was somehow chipped, creased and broken.
“How bad?”
“Bad.” Francine lit a cigarette. “He’s hooked up to oxygen and IV tubes in his nose and throat. They’re pouring liquids into him like a plant.” Francine took a deep breath. “They had to cut more than they thought.” She let it sit there.
“What did they cut?” I was terrified.
Francine looked down at the floor. “Everything,” she whispered. “The whole throat. Vocal cords. Parts of his mouth and tongue.”
“God,” I began.
“There’s no God, kid. You’ll see that when you go up there.”
We took the elevator to the third floor. The corridors were glistening and dim. The walls were the color of enamel mud. The ward was a damp shadowy green. The corridor opened to identical small green rooms where the Venetian blinds were drawn and the sun fell measured and tamed through their slats.
The sounds were muted. The nurses scraped by in soft shoes. There was the hushed bubbling of fluids moving through nose and throat tubes, the hiss of oxygen and the softer, more insistent humming of the life-support machines.
I glimpsed bodies absolutely white and emaciated. Flesh hung to the bones, pasty, already unnecessary.
Suddenly I thought of fish. The cancer ward was a kind of human aquarium. Here the almost dead lay in their own slow bubbles. So this is how it ends. It dries in silence. It dries in an afternoon the color of a childhood memory of an aquarium. The flesh dries. Finally the flesh is shed.
I kept walking. On each nightstand in each identical pale green room a philodendron sat with a red or pink ribbon wrapped around its green neck, its fat dull leaves blending into the greenish shadows. I thought of algae and sea plants.
My father’s face was terribly swollen. His face looked dark and angry between the layers of white bandaging. The gauze formed a thick collar around his neck. The collar sprouted tubes. He was bleeding. He was draining. He was hooked up to oxygen. My father was curled small in his bed, so small that at first I thought they might also have amputated his legs.
The blinds were drawn shut. My father reached for a writing pad. IV dripped through a needle taped to a vein in his hand.
WHATS THIS. He gestured toward the oxygen hissing through a thick green plastic tube. The tube was attached to a hole they had punched through his throat. A round metal disk was embedded in the center of his throat and hooked up to the green plastic oxygen tube.
“It’s oxygen. It’s temporary. They’re taking it out in a few days,” Francine said.
My father’s eyes filled with tears. He turned his bandaged face away from me and slowly, painfully tugged the edge of the blanket closer to his chest. He closed his eyes.
“He’s dying,” Francine said. She reached across the bed. She searched his wrist for a pulse. I stared at her. I felt an enormous scream building up somewhere inside of me. My lips trembled.
“I’ll get a doctor,” I said after what seemed like a long time. I rushed into the corridor. The green shadows were thick like sheets of greasy oak leaves across my face, a forest collapsing, a green storm, suffocating, blinding.
“Is he going to make it? Ultimately?” Francine asked, her words precise, her eyes amber lights, her breath grazing the doctor’s flesh. The doctor couldn’t inch away. His back was already against the corridor wall.
“There’s no way to say yet. Hemorrhaging and infection are possible. And there’s the matter of motivation.”
“Don’t give me that Marcus Welby shit. Who do you think I am? Some intimidated welfare case?” Francine grabbed his arm. “I’m asking you for the odds.”
The doctor considered his response carefully. “It’s completely undecided,” he said finally. “Fifty-fifty.” The doctor edged away.
We walked back into my father’s room. There was the smell of something terrible, dark and rotten, rancid plant fibers. The smell was thick and black, overpowering. The smell was coming from my father’s flesh. It was the smell of decay, of death.