Читать книгу Planet Claire - Jeff Porter - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWOCHARON (THE BORDERMAN)

Charon, foul and terrible, his beard grown wild and hoar, his staring eyes all flame, his sordid cloak hung from a shoulder knot. Alone he poles his craft and trims the sails and in his rusty hull ferries the dead.

—Virgil

It was the surly Romans who named the first five planets (those visible to the naked eye) after their gods. Modern astronomy continued doing so long after. And so in June of 1978, an American discovered Pluto’s first moon and named it Charon. Charon is the ferryman who conveys the dead across the River Styx on their way to the underworld. This bleak journey actually costs money, and so the ancients buried their dead with a coin in the deceased’s mouth to pay Charon his fee (Charon’s obol). Nothing’s free.

On the day Charon was discovered, June 22, you were touring Corinth in Greece, snapping a photo of the hilltop acropolis. Just a kid, twenty-four years old, but one who loved to fly across the sea. An astute classicist, you traveled to Europe and Greece nearly every summer. I’m peeking at your photo album from that trip. You began in Munich, then on to Venice, Florence, and finally Greece. Your photos are organized meticulously, each one labeled with a typed caption on green paper. Here’s a photo of the ferry that took you, Toni, and David Price across the Corinth Canal, says the caption. Another one of sheep by the road in Mycenae. How come I never saw this photo album until now?

I myself am in the middle of the book Triste Tropiques on this same day in June. Here in the rainforest of the Northwest, I’m a long way from home, surrounded by tall, blue-eyed blondes. Tristes Tropiques provides some relief from the Nordics, but I keep nodding off. On every other page, Claude Lévi-Strauss crawls into his hammock and wraps himself in mosquito nets. He’s somewhere in sultry Brazil. The air is so languid. I feel drowsy. It’s only the piranhas, dangerous to the unwary bather, that keep me turning the page. This is what I do in Oregon, get lost in books. But you’re in Corinth, you lucky ducky, where the sky is pellucid, the air dry. Little do we know what awaits us. Me you, you me. And so much more.

I’m getting used to the intensive care ward. I know exactly where to park and how to find my way through the medical maze. I’m right here beside you now. I trust you hear me, my never-ending voice. As I watch the respirator raise and lower your chest, I wonder what you’re thinking, wherever you are. Are you grieving too? The lead doctor drops by and rehearses his Grim Reaper spiel. Your wife lacks brain stem reflexes, is suffering from severe intracranial bleeding, and has no respiratory drive, he says without intonation. But you look fine, I think. You are warm to my touch, breathe regularly, have a good pulse. I can’t reconcile these two things in my mind, and mining your body parts—they are waiting for you more impatiently now—sounds so gothic to me. Organ donation is lifesaving, I am reminded, so I should be less morbid. The folks here think I’m a brooding husband who won’t face reality. But I’m a Sicilian, I’m tempted to say out loud, and don’t forget these things lightly. Lucky for them I’m not from the old school, like my grandfather. By the way, the etymology of the word hearse has something to do with wolf teeth—go figure.

Mike the undertaker keeps dropping by, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s good business to keep an eye on survivors. I’ll soon be part of his trade. The undertaker is robust; I’m sure he’ll outlive me. Robust is a word that has fled from my vocabulary, like entirely. Anyway, Mike knows you’re on life support and feels obliged to run by me the worst-case outcome, which is really the most likely scenario. We both know this but pretend otherwise. Your body will be stored in his mortuary refrigerator. I should tell you that transferring your body from the hospital in his death wagon will cost five hundred dollars. That’s about a hundred dollars per mile. I don’t mean to sound cheap, but golly.

Then again, the work of fetching and moving a dead body is more elaborate than many think. I looked it up. You need a vehicle with an airtight compartment and a stretcher. You need to select the correct body—check those name tags—and make sure the appropriate paperwork is complete. Who knows how many corpses lie waiting in the hospital morgue at any point. There could be fifty or more. Is the paperwork filled out properly? Has it been signed? Is the name of the deceased spelled correctly (Claire with an e)? You will be zipped up in a body bag, which will be placed on a stretcher and moved into the back of the van. That’s as far as this thought can go. My mind will not let me think of you as that corpse in a blue body bag zipped tight, even though my fingers are typing this sentence. I close my eyes and see stars in a dark universe streaming backward toward a starting point.

It took four days but I gathered a hundred photos snapped since we married. Photos from the Yukon, Santa Fe, Portland, New York, southern France, Tokyo, Rome, Sicily, London, Dublin, Melbourne. Photos of yard work, with the dog, beside the mother-in-law, at family events, in arroyos, up mountains, along fast-running rivers, above the sea, in medieval churches, raking leaves, grooming Milo, reading the Times—photos neither of us ever saw, scattered across acres of disk space. What good is an unviewed photo? Does it even exist? I printed each photo on four-by-six glossy paper. A photographic chronicle of our life together emerged with surprising clarity. I’m looking at these now, photos that each tell a different story, but how can I not tear up? Roland Barthes wrote that death haunts every photograph of a loved one. But that isn’t so here. No forewarnings of your death in any of these pictures, no lingering shadows, just the simple ease of someone so at home in her life.

In this one, you are standing in the Yukon near Destruction Bay, just off Haines Highway, beside a rocky stream that runs into Kluane Lake. Snowcapped Dalton Peak looms up in the near distance. You are running your hands through your hair, grimacing slightly from direct sunlight. Sunshine is not your friend, you of the northern clime. A mild frown on your face. You have on olive-green khakis with a drawstring and a black long-sleeve crewneck T-shirt. Your right foot levitates above the smooth round river stones. Dwarf fireweed shoots up between the rocks, behind you the gray bubbling stream running toward the lake. Boreal Blue spruce. The magenta flowers. Summer in the Yukon—such a vast space—and just the two of us alone with eagles, bears, and prairie dogs. What are you thinking along Quill Creek? For the life of this photo, you will always be floating above the fireweed with the beauty and grace that came so naturally to you. In my besotted mind, there is a hush as each element of the scene composes itself around you. How I long for that presence.

That summer, we drove up the Haines Highway across the Canadian border, up along the Chilkat River, following the trail through the Chilkoot Valley used by the Tlingit long ago. The ruin of the bark beetle was everywhere, the yellowed-out Sitka spruce trees, the pale needles, the beetle-killed forests nearly as spectacular as the high peaks, glaciers, rivers, lakes, and ice fields, as we meandered—all by ourselves—through the wide alpine valley. At Haines Junction we stayed at the Raven Hotel, owned by a German couple who arrived years ago but never left. A strange place, filled with dour middle-aged Europeans. You had scallops, me pasta with bison meatballs. In the lobby was a life-size porcelain great heron. I later ran frantically after a brown grizzly bear swimming across the lake—it’s a bear!—snapping pictures with my camera (all of them out of focus), you behind me with a forgiving smile. Ever the keen teenager, your eyes said. You the shrewd adult. The Raven Hotel is for sale, by the way.

On a ferry, we coasted back to Juneau down the Gastineau Channel, like crossing over into another realm. Who knew we had reached the midpoint of our marriage already? It seemed we had only started. In another photo, you are looking out the ferry window at the Chilkoot range, enchanted by the fantastic seascape. You turn to me suddenly with a far-reaching look in your eyes. I feel as though you are looking at me across time, between worlds, here in this moment, in my space-time. The clarity of the photo is startling, if not disturbing. But who in love doesn’t think this? Who in love does not see continuity where this is only empty air? On the other hand, you may simply be showing annoyance with my pestering camera.

They tell me your body is scheduled for organ donation soon. Your brother and sister came to say goodbye, Beth and Jay. There were tears of sorrow and disbelief. The tubes, the wires, the partly shaved scalp frightened them. You seemed centuries older. They hadn’t expected this. You were young and sprightly just two months ago, but now you seemed stricken, as though racked by pestilence. How can I console them? We hug. It’s lame but it’s all we can do. I try to see you as they do but can’t. You are glowing. Why can’t they see it? Your lovely body all alone—abandoned even by you—drawing on a reserve of poise, as if the body knew all by itself, without any help, this untimely end was not just that but some inscrutable change that only now, in life’s final breath, began to flower.

I apologize for the lyricism. It’s like a virus. You’re rolling your eyes, wherever you are, I can feel it. It’s time for your fluids and neuro assessment. Everyone has left but me and the nurse, who bends over your face and lifts your left eyelid, shining a light into your pupil. I blink rapidly myself. The pupil should constrict, she says. Fixed pupils are an ominous sign. She repositions your ventilator tube in a painful way so as to cause gagging. She says this is a noxious stimulus. She is looking for any kind of response that might suggest you are still in there. If you gag you are there. But no gagging. I could have told the nurse you weren’t here. I’ve known this for two days. You’re just not here. That your body persists without you astonishes me.

On a walk I came across a cicada lying on its back, its arms folded. It seemed to be dead, but given that a black and yellow wasp was perched on its belly it may have only been paralyzed. Cicada-killer wasps are known to paralyze the insect with their venomous sting and then carry the crippled bug to a burrow. The female wasp lays her eggs just under the second leg of the cicada. Once the egg hatches, the larvae begin eating the cicada from the inside, but taking care to keep it alive. Matt brought by homemade bread this morning. Yesterday, Gemma dropped off a pan of enchiladas. I babble on when friends come by with meals. Must be fear of silence, having no one to talk to. When your partner goes, there’s nothing between you and the void. Silence means that.

If truth be said, I don’t want to let you go. Maybe this is a kind of madness. We are both possessive, me and the IC doctor. We want your body, as though you are a Hollywood hottie: he to harvest your organs, me to rub your toes. I’ve held firm, like Antigone. I won’t abandon you. The IC guy is stubborn. We are locked in some ancient battle over your comatose body.

I’m rattling on now—can’t help myself. Remember the rainbow over Dublin Harbor? It was our last week in Ireland. We had joined friends at the Pakistani place across from Bull Island. Walked all the way from the Clontarf train station to the Wooden Bridge in the pouring rain. My feet were soggy—I was a mess. The umbrellas weren’t much help. I wanted to duck into the coffee shop but you wondered what the point of that was. We still had a mile to go, and the rain wasn’t letting up. I just wanted out of the bloody downpour. Water, water everywhere. The Woodenbridge seemed miles in the distance and I was exhausted. But you soldiered on, always, never gave up. No one perseveres like you. Such a fighter—how can you be silent now?

By the time we left the restaurant the rain had finally stopped. And over Dublin Harbor, reaching from beyond Bull Island past the Pigeon House, was a colossal rainbow, the largest either of us had seen. Our first rainbow. It was too much for my phone camera and left us mostly speechless. It lingered for almost thirty minutes. At the end of every rainbow sits a pot of gold. Not this one. Maybe rainbows are just tricks of light and moisture. Still, it seemed like the end of something, our summer in Ireland maybe, and the beginning of something else. I don’t know if you felt that way. We never talked about the rainbow. There was too much on our minds. Birds fly over the rainbow, why then oh why can’t I? Happy little bluebirds.

Mike the undertaker will transfer your body from the hospital morgue to his facility. He has the appropriate refrigerator. Mike does not come cheap, however. I can’t quibble with him, of course, because no one wants to be trite at a time like this, when death in all of its grandeur has slipped onto the stage, cape and all, as they say. All of these thoughts are wearing on my mind the way wind, rain, and snow batter a headstone. And that is why I won’t let go of your body right now. The stillness of your warm toes, how your fingers curl around the glowing red LED—these are the signs of life I can touch, caress, rub, massage, hold between my nervous fingers. Time is running out. The organ snatchers are watching me secretly as I speak to you, and Mike the undertaker is warming up his doomsday van.

But here I am all alone again. You are here too, that’s true, cute as ever, no matter the twisted tubes and wires and partly shaved scalp. I see you as you are, in all of your heartbreaking beauty. And even though I know your mind is gone, has taken leave of this place, I won’t let go, which is totally perverse. The presiding doctor keeps looking at me like I’m a nutcase. Funny how you had what Poe called a sense of strange impending doom. It lasted all year. You even had panic attacks—ever since Milo died. Doting dog owners we were, but his untimely death unsettled us, as if Milo had been a lucky charm against disaster. Now that he was gone, we were vulnerable. Catastrophe lingered around the corner. The fact that I had a premonition of his death didn’t lessen the sense of doom. I’ve inherited your dread, a ground-rumbling sensation that my existence is so temporary I might not make it to the weekend.

On my walk today, I couldn’t help but notice an old Honda motorcycle resting in a driveway on Davenport. It was a black and candy-gold 1972 CB350, one of Honda’s best-selling models. In 1972, over sixty-eight thousand were sold in America. We were still under the influence of the Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper movie, when the idea of sheer motion seemed radical. I was one of those sixty-eight thousand American kids who purchased a café racer, as they were called. Mine was burgundy and black and I bought it brand new, squandering my graduation money. It cost $833. It was an impulsive thing to do, especially just before going off to graduate school. A year of tuition! I can’t imagine you throwing caution to the wind like that. I could be reckless. But being a daredevil—remember Evel Knievel jumping across the Snake River Canyon in his rocket-powered bicycle—was part of our zeitgeist. With a CB350 Honda of his own, Knievel staged the oddest stunts during his heyday, leaping over rattlesnakes, mountain lions, pickup trucks, double-decker buses, crazy deep canyons, and broke every bone in his body in the effort. Still, he outlived you, the most cautious person on the planet, by seven years. Of course, I didn’t leap over any canyons or save the day. All I got were hemorrhoids from motoring up and down I-95 at eight thousand rpm. What a grind that was. Should have taken a bus.

Every time I hear the sound of your desperate gasping for air, I lose another part of my brain. I’m slowly giving myself a lobotomy. Little chunks of gray matter falling on the hardwood floor. It’s thundering violently outside. It remains obnoxiously warm. More hard rain. I’ll have to check the basement for pooling water. This has always been my job, to keep alert for home disasters. It’s something I do well. I think our oven is on the blink. With the broiler on, I melted the plastic coffee press on the stove top. Too much heat was escaping. Google says this is normal. I can’t imagine how terrible it would be if Google were the only contact I had with the world, but it would be easy to lose touch. Loneliness, the New York Times just said, has become a quiet devastation. Emily Dickinson is oft quoted in such conversations: as when she calls loneliness the Horror not to be surveyed but skirted in the Dark. She reserves the upper case for her big themes. Henrik Ibsen too: The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. That sounds a little silly, frankly, but it’s Ibsen. And Tennessee Williams: We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. None of this is true.

Death is coming and I need to speak with more urgency—against your encryption. The dead are always encrypted, buried deep in the ground, sealed up, cast out, unattainable, barred forever from the loving touch, from these fingers that tickle your feet. How can I prevent this? I may fall into fits of melancholy—it can’t be helped—but please understand there’s a method to my delirium. I need to whisper these thoughts in your ear one last time, and I know you can hear me, because we have come to this baffling moment, so utterly unthinkable, when I must say goodbye to your body. The presiding doctor has built a case against you, and the neurologist will soon be here to sign the certificate. They have clear etiology of brain dysfunction, as these people say, and will test one more time your failure to respond to painful stimuli. Next, you’ll enter the organ-donation phase, as you requested, but I’m sure you’re not sticking around for this. Mike the undertaker will then come for you, and I’ll next see your body at his place. It won’t be the same. It’ll never be. But I promise to keep talking, endlessly, if that’s what it takes. I’ve read that death means you are in the third person. I won’t let that happen.