The Lights in the Sky Are Stars
1997
I’d been intending to stay a few more days but, that afternoon, something changed my mind. It was the sight of myself in the mirror in my brother Bill’s bathroom. Stark naked, dripping wet, standing on one leg because I have only one leg to stand on, water running noisily out of the tub behind me, I decided to leave that very night.
Time was running out of me like the water out of that bathtub. The sight of myself in the long mirror on the door showed me that, all too clearly.
A mirror doesn’t lie to you. If it tells you that you look your fifty-seven years, then by God you do. And if there’s something you want to do, somewhere you want to go, then you’d better start the doing and the going. You’d better start using the time that’s left in you, because you can’t stop it from running out. You can stop water from running out of a tub by putting the plug back in, but there isn’t any plug that can stop time from running out of you. Oh, you can slow it down. By living right. By letting the medics give you the works in geriatrics you can baby yourself past the century mark, but brother you’re still old at seventy.
In thirteen years I’d be seventy, I thought. Maybe I’d be old sooner than that, what with the way I’d lived most of the time, what with one foot—hell, one leg up to the knee—in the grave already.
It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length minors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old.
After I dried myself and before I put my prosthetic leg back on, I hopped up on the bathroom scale and weighed myself. A hundred and twenty-six. Not too bad, I thought; I’d gained back seven of the fourteen pounds I’d lost. If I took even reasonable care of myself I’d have the rest of it back in another few weeks and I didn’t have to stay here until I had all of it back.
I looked at myself in the mirror again and this time it wasn’t so bad. It still had strength in it, that body, the wiry strength that’s better in the long run than heavy musculature. And now that the magnelite leg was back on it was a whole body, or looked like one.
The face above it wasn’t bad either; it too had a kind of strength in it.
I dressed and went downstairs, but I didn’t tell them yet. I waited until after dinner, until after Merlene went upstairs to put Easter and Bill Junior to bed. I knew there’d be an argument and I didn’t want the kids in on it. Bill Senior and Merlene I could handle; I could just agree with everything they said but tell them I was leaving anyway. But what can you do with Uncle Max, please don’t go stuff from kids.
Bill sat watching the viddy.
My kid brother, Bill. My kid brother with graying hair and a bald spot and no imagination. But a nice guy. Happily married, although he’d married late. A good steady job, good steady opinions.
But no taste whatsoever. He liked cowboy music. He was sitting listening to it now.
Out of space it came, that program. From Earth’s second artificial satellite, from the telestation twenty-two thousand miles out in empty space, revolving around Earth once a day as Earth turns once a day under and with it, staying always over Kansas, always twenty-two thousand miles over the tall com of Kansas.
In full color, that program, tri-dimensional and out of space to Earth. And it was a man in a cowboy hat strumming a guitar and singing in a Texas accent:
Give me the lone pray-ree,
And a stallion wild and free …
I’d rather have given him a gelding than a stallion, but I’d have given him anything to shut up.
Bill liked it.
I wandered over to the picture window and stood looking out into the night. A fine view of Seattle, Bill had, from this window facing it and thirty miles away, atop a hill. A fine view especially on a clear night like this one, one of those rare but wonderful warm, bright evenings that can happen in the fall of the year.
Below, the lights of Seattle; above, the lights in the sky.
Behind me, a cowboy singing. Then the song ended and Bill flicked the toggle switch on the arm of his chair, that cut off sound while the commercial was on.
In the sudden and blessed silence I said, «Bill, I’m leaving.»
He did what I’d hoped he wouldn’t do, but had known that he would. He walked over and shut off the viddy completely.
Cowboy music he was giving up. Just to argue with me, to try to talk me into staying longer.
To make it worse Merlene came back into the room just then. The kids must have gone to bed without putting up even a token battle about it. I’d counted on having Bill worn down by the time Merlene came downstairs to reinforce him. Now I had both of them at once. And Merlene had heard what I’d said.
She said «No.» Firmly. She sat down on the sofa and looked at me.
I said «Yes.» Mildly.
«Max Andrews, you’ve been here less than three weeks. You’re about halfway well now. You need at least another two weeks of rest and you know it.»
«Not full time rest,» I said. «I’ll take things easy for a while.»
Bill was back in his chair. He said, «Listen, Max—» I turned toward him but he bogged down. He turned to Merlene and I turned too.
Merlene said, «You’re not well enough to leave here yet and you know it.»
«Then I’ll no doubt fall down just outside. If I do, you can drag me back in and I’ll stay. Okay?»
She glared at me. Bill cleared his throat and I looked at him. He got as far as «Listen, Max—» and bogged down again.
Merlene said, «You and those itchy feet of yours.»
«Just one of them itches,» I told her. «Now, children, if this argument must continue, will you please sit together so I don’t get dizzy turning around to face whichever one of you is talking. Bill, will you please sit on the sofa by your wife?»
He got up and moved over. Not gracefully; he stumbled. But grace has never been one of Bill’s strong points. Opposite of Merlene; she’d been a dancer before they were married and every movement she made was graceful. She could change Easter’s diapers as though it were part of a ballet—and with no conscious knowledge that she was making a dance out of it; that was what made it so wonderful to watch.
Merlene said, «Please understand this, Max. We like having you here. We like you. It isn’t as though you are imposing on us, or anything like that. And you’re paying your own way, which helps the budget a lot.»
«It can’t help your budget,» I pointed out, «when you insist on charging me cost only and figuring it down to the penny. If you’d let me pay you a flat fifty a week, as I’d suggested—»
«Will you stay two more weeks if we let you pay it that way?»
I’d walked into that one. I said, «No, darling, I’m sorry.» I counterattacked. «Listen,» I said, «you’re only two to one against me, but you can increase the odds. You know I’m crazy about Easter and Billy, and they can’t possibly be asleep yet. Why don’t you get them here too and tell them I’m leaving so they can cry about it and soften me with their salty little tears?»
Merlene glowered at me. «You—you—»
I grinned at Bill. «The reason she’s speechless is that she was thinking about doing just that and now she can’t. She was probably wondering already what pretext she could use for bringing them back downstairs.» I looked at Merlene. «But it really wouldn’t be fair, honey. I don’t mean to me—that doesn’t matter. I mean it wouldn’t be fair to them. It might disturb them emotionally, and to no purpose. Because no matter how much it disturbs either them or me I’m leaving tonight. I’ve got to.»
Bill sighed. He sat there looking at me sadly, my kid brother with his temples turning gray. He said, «I don’t suppose, then, that it’ll do any good to tell you I’ve been working at wangling you a job with Union Transport. A good job.»