He didn’t even hear him when he came in.
“Hi, toots,” the fellow said, “been waiting long?”
If you tried to guess what annoyed Noah Cloth most about having to die, in all likelihood you’d have been wrong. His parents, trying to guess what went on in their little boy’s head, trying to poke past his terminally ill child’s view of things, suspected it was pain or the flat-out fear of death itself, sensibly reading the fierce denial of his condition as simple terror but, with it, some sense of ideal justice insulted, sullied, outraged, his shortchanged, short-circuited life a smear on his values, some ultimate slur of the ought, an aspersion on the otherwise. They saw him, that is, as noble, reading his reluctance to acknowledge symptoms or admit to pain as the reaction of a gentleman to that which was grossly one-sided and indefensibly unfair. They prized this in him, and though by keeping his complaints to himself for as long as he could he probably stymied their own and the doctor’s best efforts to help him extend his life, they cherished this aspect of their child’s character and doubled up on their losses, grieving an ever-escalated, ever-escalating grief, although they determined that when the time came they would try to be, must try to be, as good as their son, his match, for his sake his match. They would not be the sort of parents who turned their home into a shrine, preserving his pathetic bits and relics, his clothes, his pictures, his toys and braces and canes. It was their pledge to him — what they whispered in his ear when he boarded the plane at Heathrow — that they’d try to survive him with style, with tact and honor and class and grace, assuring him too that he’d not been wrong, that his fate was a quirk, almost apologizing, almost begging his pardon if it looked otherwise (indicating to Noah the line of wheelchairs, the special boarding procedures the airline insisted upon), assuring him that most children grew up to be adults, that most adults had children of their own and, after a reasonably long and happy life, did not survive them. Seeing his need and trying to comfort him. “It’s a blot, Noah,” his father said. “It’s a slip-up, son.” Noah, looking up at them from the wheelchair the airline would not allow them to push, trying to grasp his father’s words as he walked along beside the boy being rolled down the jetway. “Dad’s right, Noah,” his mum said. “What’s happened to you is a crook go, but in the long run, in the long run…” “Things average out, she’s trying to say,” his father finished. “They do, Noah,” his mum said, “so you mustn’t think it’s not a democratic business. Because it is, ain’t it, Dad?” “Oh, aye,” the father said, “turn and turn about. It really is. You’re the exception that proves the rule.”
In some ways they were right about their son: the pain, the fear, the outrage. But it was more complicated than that.
In a real way it came down to the fact that he would not live to make money.
He was almost unschooled (the woman at the hospice, who was good, not a psychiatrist or even a psychologist but a grand listener, a genuine death expert, interested in all the messages of death, would have been able to explain it even to unschooled Noah, would have been able to give back his reasons to him, not to reconcile him, never to reconcile him, but to sharpen his rage); even for an eleven-year-old — so much time in hospital, so much time blasted by radiation and smothered by chemotherapy, so much time sedated, so much confused by painkillers — he was unschooled. He didn’t read right, could barely follow the plot when people read stories to him, and looked for diversion in newspapers and their colored Sunday supplements, in the advertisements in magazines and on television shows, in the fat illustrations of picture books. It was this which had set him to drawing in the first place. He was not a natural artist or even a very dedicated one. He traced his drawings or copied them with a care that was literally painstaking, the crayons and drawing pens squeezed against his wounded joints, putting pressure on his decomposing wrist. Had he been more mobile he would have taken snapshots of the toasters and estate cars he drew, of the houses and cameras and lounge furniture, of the stocked shelves in the supermarkets, of the gas ranges, fridges, and central heating systems, of the coats, shirts, dresses, ties, and television sets, of the stereos, flatirons, cosmetics jars, of the boxes of candy and bottles of gin, of the computers and shoes, of the packets of cigarettes and tubes of toothpaste and all the other consumer goods that so fascinated him. Because what he could follow who could not follow a simple story line was the news on television, the bleak steady theme of growing unemployment, redundancies, angry men laid off, entire shipyards shut down, assembly lines, factories shut, services reduced and the people who supplied them sent home, and feared first for his father’s job, then for his father, because he was mortal too — gravestones he drew, monuments, wreaths — and then, because he was unschooled, couldn’t read well, do his maths, wasn’t getting the technical training so important to the current generation of workers and so, as the news reader told him almost every evening, absolutely indispensable to his own. Because where would he get money who couldn’t read, do his maths, had no skills? Because where would he get money for the foodstuffs he traced, for the fridge and cabinets which stored them, for the range on which they were prepared? Because where would he get money for the luxuries, the big-ticket items of consolation? So he drew them, copied them down from advertisements. By magic homeopathy to have that which he would never live to earn. “So,” the lady in the hospice — who really was good — would have comforted, “it isn’t really death you fear. It’s getting well.” “No,” unschooled Noah, the easing cosmetics of morphine withheld during these times when they spoke, would have answered, all the acuity of his stiff, unblurred pain on him like solid facts lined up and marshaled as the packages and canned goods on those stocked supermarket shelves he used to draw. “Not anymore. I hurt too much. The stitches from my first operations, that finger they cut off, my bones and my buttons, the stuff drying in my handkerchief. The light that falls across my sheet from the bed lamp, the shadows. All, all of it hurts me. I’m not afraid,” he would have said, “I’m not. May I please have my morphine now please?”
But that would have been then. An aspect of the conditional. Alternative time. But now, in the here-and-now of Disney World, he is perfectly delighted with the shops. It is, for him, rather like being plunked down in the very center of those colored supplements in the Sunday paper. (Because he has been rarely to shops. Even his clothes — it would have been too much of an ordeal for him to undress in changing rooms — have been first brought home by one of his parents for him to try on. He has been to the gift shop in hospital, of course, and has often enough been visited by the cart volunteers — he supposed they were volunteers: nurses laid off, people in maintenance, the National Health having no money to pay people to push the cart; he supposed they were volunteers — have brought to his ward with its meager inventory. He could count on his remaining fingers the times he has ever actually bought anything and to this day does not remember, if he ever knew, the correct posture for giving money or accepting change. Even in Heathrow, his first time in an airport, they hadn’t let him browse W. H. Smith’s immense stall and hustled him past the duty-free shop. Though he had his look, of course, spied in passing the window displays, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of liquor he recognized from the adverts, cameras he’d drawn the like of in his sketchbooks.)