The Death Bed
“I’m your brother and I’m only trying to help you,” Luke said with an exaggerated calmness that infuriated Peter all the more. “You need to pull yourself together.”
“You need to let me see my son! I didn’t leave him here with you so you could hide him from me!”
“Nobody’s hiding anyone. If you want to see your son you’ll have to go to the pizza place on Third Street. That’s where he went with Hannah to get lunch.”
Peter didn’t know if he believed his brother, but turned around and stomped back to his car all the same. He heard the front door open behind him and figured that Debra had just stepped out onto the porch. He heard her calm condescending voice ask, “Should we let him drive in this state?” He wanted to turn around and say something but restrained himself. He slammed the car door and backed out of the driveway in such a hurry that he almost hit the trash bag filled with freshly mown grass.
* * *
“My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.” Julia stopped reading the flood story that had seemed so preposterous to her months ago and casually wiped her eyes, trying to conceal from Abraham the mist that had filled them. Her grandfather lay motionless with his eyes half closed listening to her read.
“What’s the matter? You cryin’?”
“I’m sorry I got a little teary eyed thinking about,” she began. “I’d heard all this before, but never really heard it. Thinking about it in a different sense it meant something different to me, that’s all.”
“I never knew nobody ta get teary eyed over a bunch a’ bad men drownin’ in a flood. They’re gettin’ what they deserve.”
“That’s not it,” Julia said.
“Well what is it then?”
“It’s the number. Their days were numbered.”
“What ‘bout it?”
“It made me think about,” Julia hesitated.
“Well out with it.”
“It made me think about you. About how you’re stuck here and everyone’s just waiting for you to die, and we all know that it’s coming and all the doctors are trying to figure out when and why it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to happen.”
“Don’t you cry fer me. I don’t deserve ta be cried fer any more than those men you’re readin’ ‘bout, who’re ‘bout ta get what’s comin’ ta ‘em.”
“That’s not all I was thinking about,” Julia added. “I started thinking about you and how you know that you’re time’s coming, but none of those people in the story had any idea, and that made me think that maybe my time might be coming because of what I’ve done. But I wasn’t upset for me because, like you said we’ve all got it coming to us.”
Abraham listened with the patience of a man who knows exactly how the story ends but doesn’t say anything because he knows the teller has to voice the words.
“Grandpa, I still think about him.”
“Him?”
“Maybe her, I don’t know why but I always think of it as a he. I try not to remember, but I can’t ever forget. I was thinking about why his years were numbered, and if it was me that numbered them. I look at everything around me, and I try to tell myself that I only spared him a life of hurt because that’s all that really comes to people anymore but,” Julia stopped for a moment. “I listen to people say that it’s my body and I want to believe them so much and maybe I do believe them because it was my choice; it was my decision and I made it, but for me I made the wrong one. I’m not saying it’s wrong for everyone, but I know it was wrong for me because I can’t live with it. And reading this story I started thinking that maybe it isn’t my body because my body’s time is numbered too, and I don’t have any control over how long it’s going to keep on living. If there is a God then he gave us our choice, not just about our body, but about someone else’s too. Why couldn’t he see that we don’t deserve our choices, because everyone always chooses wrong?”
Abraham smiled in an attempt to set her at ease as he took her trembling hand in his own. “But he gave us our choices all the same, an’ we still have ‘em. If I’d known half a’ that when I was your age I think I’d a’ lived a better life,” he said soothingly.
“I never thought about it before I went in and did it. Why didn’t I at least think about it?”
“Everybody does things without thinkin’, an’ when it’s all said an’ done everybody who takes the time ta think ‘bout all the things they’ve done ends up by askin’ the same question your askin’ now, an’ I don’t know a single man that’s ever figured out the answer.”
“But why are we allowed to make these decisions? Why doesn’t the rain come now and wash us all away? Why doesn’t it rain and wash away all this mess we’ve made of our lives?” Julia didn’t know to whom she was addressing these questions but she waited as if expecting an answer.
“I think the rain is already fallin’ on all a’ us. The difference is you want it ta come an’ drown you ‘cause you know it’d wash away everythin’ your feelin’,” Abraham said. He closed the book that still lay open in her hands and added, “We don’t have ta read anymore today.”
Chapter 6
“Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful.”
-Nietzsche
On Monday morning Thomas got out of bed the first time his alarm went off—something he’d grown accustomed to doing every other day of the week. He brushed his teeth and got dressed with a vigor that had been completely foreign to his morning routine before he’d enrolled in Dr. Bowman’s 8:30 class on nihilism. He stuffed a notebook and The Will to Power in his backpack and completely forgot about everything that had transpired over the weekend, as if everything that had happened had been experienced by someone else.
If he had experienced everything that he remembered happening during the weekend, it was at least part of a different life, completely separate from the one to which he’d woken up that morning. Now he was back in that life in which he lived in a leaky apartment, a life that had its own set of problems and expectations. He couldn’t help feeling that the life he’d woken up to was the real one and that all of those messy family issues had only been a bad dream, something he’d made up in his head while he was asleep to give himself an escape from everything that was waiting for him in his real world. Now that he was awake he had ideas that needed to be developed and tested.
Something from the people living above him still leaked from his ceiling, and the buckets in the living room were getting full from the constant dripping. But he had more important things with which to concern himself. First came his class, and then he had to finish the essay—it was a brilliant essay, perfectly thought out. He’d gone over it five times already, but he still wasn’t satisfied with his last two paragraphs. With all of that messy family business over the weekend he’d forgotten all about those paragraphs, but they were the most important. They had to be perfect on paper first, before he could implement any of it. If he could implement it then he’d have already found his idea that would change the world and make it a better place, though he’d already given up on the notion of better in the strictest sense of the word as it would completely contradict everything he’d come to believe.
By the time he arrived at his 8:30 class he was overcome with pride. He, a freshman, had already found his idea, his purpose, something most people spend their lives in search of. He took his seat in the front row and waited for class to begin, oblivious to the other students who filed in behind him. Of course it wasn’t his idea, it was the idea of a myriad of men who had lived before him, but he’d embraced it to such an extent that he couldn’t conceive of anyone else having ownership of it. It couldn’t have been formulated by anyone other than himself because it touched him so personally; how could someone else’s idea be so personal, so specific, to him? It was impossible, and so it had to be his idea and no on
e else’s, and even if it wasn’t, what he was going to do, the way he would implement it, would be completely original.
Dr. Bowman made his entrance from the back of the room. He had loose papers stuffed under his left arm and The Will to Power in his right hand. The chatter that had filled the room slowly died down as he organized the papers on the tiny podium that stood in the front of the room. Thomas waited patiently in reverent silence, which he felt was due to such a great man despite his ragged appearance. Dr. Bowman wore his tattered brown corduroy jacket, as was his custom, this time with a plain green tee shirt and blue jeans. His clothing, combined with his wispy hair, which did little to cover the bald spot on the top of his narrow head, made him seem ridiculous to most of the students. Thomas had overheard more than a few snide comments while waiting eagerly for class to begin. The ridiculous looking man adjusted his glasses and then looked out at the classroom that had fallen silent.
“I hope you all had a good weekend,” he offered awkwardly. Nobody responded. “It’s back to Nietzsche now. I trust that you’ve all finished the reading and have started on the essays that are due on Friday.”
Thomas thought he could make out a snicker mixed in with the sound of bodies shuffling uneasily in their seats.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Bowman continued. “I didn’t bring a pop quiz.” He chuckled as if he’d intended to say something humorous. The room remained silent. Dr. Bowman looked down at the podium and began to read, “‘Fundamentally, it is only the fear of punishment that keeps men within bounds and leaves everyone in peaceful possession of his own.’ We see here that in Nietzsche’s worldview that punishment in itself does not serve society in the least, but only the fear of punishment. And further on Nietzsche states that,” he paused to flip through the book on the podium. “Here it is. ‘Punishment does not purify, for crime does not sully.’ So the question remains, why do we have punishment in our society today? Why do we have prisons and lethal injections if they don’t serve to purify society?”
“Because Nietzsche was wrong,” a voice exclaimed from the back. The snickering that ensued didn’t seem to bother the professor in the least.
“Let me ask that question in a different way. What, according to Nietzsche is the function of punishment?”
“To instill fear in others,” Thomas said.
“Exactly. But to those who aren’t afraid of punishment what reason do they have for not stealing and murdering?”
“It’s wrong,” said another voice from the back of the room and several other voices muttered agreement.
“Nothing,” Thomas contradicted boldly. He could feel their searing gaze on the back of his neck. He knew that half of the class hated him for agreeing with Dr. Bowman, or with Nietzsche, or with both, and the other class despised him for caring at all. But that didn’t matter to him anymore. All he cared about was his idea.
“Exactly,” Dr. Bowman said again. “Crime does not sully, and so those who are above fear are above the standards imposed on them by society. You see, everything is permitted to those who aren’t afraid of punishment because right and wrong are just like pleasure and displeasure. They’re all,” he paused as he looked down at the book and finding his place continued, “They’re all ‘accidentals, not causes; they are value judgments of the second rank, derived from a ruling value.’ And where does this ruling value come from? Since we concluded earlier in the semester that there is no ‘ruling value’ thus all value judgments are negligible.”
Thomas scribbled in his notebook as fast as he could, not wanting to omit a single point. It was all necessary for his theory, for his idea. He wrote furiously, not like the other students who were only trying to accumulate enough information to do well on the exam, but as a man whose very existence hinged on those words.
* * *
Lewis woke up in a soft bed, in a room that had been prepared for him, in a warm house, a real house, not a temporary apartment or townhouse. It was the same bed he’d woken up in every morning since the night he’d tried to cook pancakes. His parents had decided that it was best for him to stay in a home with some stability instead of moving him all over while they sorted out the mess that their lives had become. It never occurred to him that the reason he’d stayed with his uncle that night, and the reason he was still there, was that neither of his parents had considered it their obligation to pick him up the next day.
He hadn’t been forgotten, in fact both Peter and Hannah had wanted to pick him up, but they were both so busy with their own affairs and neither knew exactly what to do with him. As soon as Hannah moved in with Abigail she suggested to Peter that Lewis come to stay with her, but Peter had objected on the grounds that it was better for Lewis to stay with Luke and Debra than to get shuffled from one temporary home to another. As a result he didn’t even suggest taking Lewis when he signed the lease on his apartment, knowing that if he did Hannah would only throw his own argument back at him. They each came to the conclusion that leaving him in a home was best for Lewis, and since Luke and Debra were only too happy to have him, the arrangement had been finalized.
Lewis had no understanding of this when he got out of his uncle’s guest bed on Monday morning and walked into the dining room where Debra was setting waffles on the table. The aroma filled the room, and a pang of joy struck Lewis as he sat down at the table next to Luke, who put down the paper to ask him how he’d slept last night. The feeling of joy passed as it gave way to the gloomy pessimism that nagged at Lewis every time he should be most happy. The fresh waffles smelled something like pancakes, and the family breakfast didn’t make him feel at home, but reminded him that he wasn’t in his own house. It wasn’t that Lewis didn’t prefer waffles with maple and raspberry syrup to warmed up Pop Tarts on the run, but Pop Tarts in the toaster was his life, and the enormous waffle on his plate only served to remind him that everything around him was somehow false, a life that wasn’t his own but forced on him as a punishment for his secret. He told his uncle that he’d slept okay even though he’d spent most of the night tossing and turning, and he ate his waffles slowly.
Debra dropped him off at school on her way to work and he made his way to his classroom. He was in no hurry. When he walked in his eyes instinctively fixed on Summer’s desk. But this time, instead of fixating on an open book, her eyes were fixed on him. He immediately turned away and clumsily sat down at his desk. He felt a poke in the back and turned around to see Tommy leaning over his desk.
“Are you gonna ask her what her mom said?” he whispered in Lewis’s ear.
“No!” Lewis replied. His voice was hushed but desperately firm. He turned back around so that Tommy couldn’t say anything else, something that Summer might overhear, and to his horror she was standing next to his desk. His body reacted the same way most people’s do when they’re nervous, but Lewis didn’t notice his sweaty palms, pounding heart, or the way his leg shook and made his entire desk vibrate. He did notice that her presence terrified him. He didn’t understand how the embodiment of everything he’d desired for so long could produce such fear. The fact that he had to look up at her because she was standing and he was sitting in his desk only increased the awkwardness.
Lewis tried to get out of his desk, not that he was consciously trying to put himself on the same level, but he didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to step out of the desk because that would put him too close to her, and in trying to stand up without sliding out from his seat he almost knocked the entire desk over. He knew that the commotion had caught the attention of the entire class.
“Hello,” he managed to say when he’d finally gotten to his feet. Her face was as flushed as his, and she looked over her shoulder as if she were also worried that Lewis’s clumsiness had caught the eye of everyone else in the room.
“My mom said,” she began. She looked around the room one more time and then in a quieter voice continued. “My mom said I should tell you yes.”
Lewis didn’t know what to make of her answer.
On one hand she’d said yes. But what did it mean? Did it mean she liked him? And if it did then what came next. He’d prepared all weekend for her to say no, he was ready for rejection. But this answer, this unexpected and ambiguous yes, he didn’t know how to deal with. He wasn’t even sure it was a yes. What if her mom said she should tell him yes, but she wasn’t going to? Lewis’s hesitation gave Summer’s face time to turn crimson, but he couldn’t consider the possibility that she could be blushing from embarrassment. In fact he hardly noticed her flushed complexion because he was so preoccupied with what he should do or say next. He had to say something.
“Okay class take your seats,” Mrs. Puckett announced.
Summer turned around and sat in her desk. Lewis followed suit. His moment had passed, and he still didn’t know what its passing meant. He knew that his inability to respond meant something important, something life changing, but he didn’t understand how. Mrs. Puckett began writing out the morning’s math problems on the dry erase boards. Lewis forgot that he was supposed to be copying them in his notebook. He forgot everything else except her. But it wasn’t even her that he was really thinking about. It was himself, his future, what he hadn’t done. His eyes fixed on her beautiful brown hair and the way she was scrunching her forehead and wrinkling her nose as she worked on the math problems that he’d completely forgotten.
He’d looked in that direction every day since school had started, and he’d daydreamed about what it would be like to have her as his girlfriend. He’d admired her and been terrified that she would never say yes, but now that she’d said yes a new fear emerged, a greater fear than anything he’d known before. It wasn’t like the fear of rejection or the fear he’d felt when he had hid from his father in the attic. Those fears had been exhilarating, they made his heart beat faster; they made him feel more alert, more alive. This fear was new and completely different. If he’d only said something he could have mastered it, even if he’d said the wrong thing. The most wrong thing in the world would have been infinitely better than nothing.
But he hadn’t said anything, and this new fear swept over him like the cold winter wind had done the night he’d stood outside his house, watching those flames consume his old life. He didn’t understand this new fear, but he knew it was justified. It was more justified than anything else he’d ever been afraid of. Why hadn’t he been able to say anything? Would he ever be able to say anything? If he couldn’t then nothing else in his life would ever have any meaning.