The Death Bed
Peter’s last sentence seemed to have had more of an effect on himself than on Thomas.
“But in the empty moments a man doesn’t have any of the jumbles that keep him from seeing clearly,” Peter continued. “I know jumbles isn’t a word, it’s not a word is it? Anyway I do know that you don’t think that I’m seeing clearly, but I am. I see everything for the first time, because I don’t have a house or a car or a future to mix me up. All the jumbles are gone, and I understand the world perfectly, but I can’t do what I want to do. I’ve got the vision, but I can’t act on it. No conviction. But you’ve got conviction. That’s all you are. That’s why you have to believe me when I say that I see everything. Do you believe me?”
“Okay.” Thomas answered only because he saw no way around the question.
“You don’t sound like you’re convinced. But I still believe that you’ve got conviction. That’s my problem. You see I’ve been given a gift. How many people can know everything that they should do, and see into the future to know how everything will work out? I know how to turn this run down life of mine into a paradise. But my curse is that I can’t act on my knowledge. It’s too late to change. I tried so hard to change, at first for Lewis, then for myself, and in the end simply to spite your mother. But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t break free. I always ended up back here. That’s why I’m giving you everything.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re saying,” Thomas said, still hesitant to trust anything his father was telling him.
“You have to have faith. I know you can’t understand because you haven’t hit the bottom yet. But one day you will, because we all hit the bottom someday, because even if we know how to act none of us can break free. Now here’s the account number and password.” Peter handed Thomas a crumpled sheet of paper. “The banking is all electronic. You just need to change the password and it’ll be yours.”
“Dad I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love me more than your mother despises me?”
“Sure.”
“Then take it now and go. Go ahead and get out of here. A son should have the decency not to look at his father when he’s in this state. Turn your head out of respect for your father and go.”
Thomas didn’t object but took the crumpled paper and turned to leave the room.
“And tell Julia that I’m sorry,” Peter said to his son’s back. “Tell her that I’ve always wanted to love her like a father should, and that I would have loved her if I hadn’t been so weak. The weakness is all my fault, but I wanted to love her. Ask her to forgive me. I know she already has. She hasn’t marred her soul so she can still forgive. Yes, she forgave me a long time ago, but ask her anyway. She deserves to know that I asked for her forgiveness. Maybe one day you’ll forgive me too, and everyone else, and I’ll forgive all of them. Isn’t it possible for all of us to just forgive? If only I wasn’t so weak. Don’t turn around! Don’t look at me! Just go.”
Thomas obeyed, and left his father alone.
* * *
After school Lewis had gone back to Tina’s house with the same group who had been there before. Johnny, the grave faced boy, hadn’t objected this time, but Lewis still felt uneasy around him. Everyone else, however, seemed to have accepted him as one of their own, and Lewis felt like he’d always been a part of the group. This time when it was his turn to inhale he didn’t hesitate. He also managed to suppress the fit of coughing that had escaped from his unaccustomed lungs the time before.
“You’re already a pro,” one of the boys said when he exhaled the smoke smoothly from his lips.
“Are you convinced that he’s not a spy now?” Tina asked Johnny.
“Maybe he’s just going along with it because I’m on to him,” Johnny answered.
“It’s cool man,” one of the other boys said to Lewis. “He’s just trying not to look stupid.”
“Hey Lewis,” Tina said, obviously ignoring Johnny’s remark. “Can you show us that magic trick you were talking about last time?”
Lewis felt the weight of everyone’s gaze descending on him, but he didn’t feel pressured. Instead, something inside of him came alive.
“I need a quarter,” Lewis announced. “Any quarter will do.”
“He’s just trying to get someone’s fingerprint,” Johnny said, but nobody paid any attention to him. The girl sitting next to Tina gave Lewis a quarter, and he thanked her as he took it.
“Now watch carefully,” Lewis said. He stood up in front of the group and placed the quarter in the palm of his hand.
“Now I’m going to rub my hand and make this quarter disappear,” he announced. He closed his hand that held the quarter into a fist and rubbed away with the other. Then he held up both hands to show them that the quarter had, indeed, vanished.
“That’s pretty cool,” one boy stated emphatically.
“Now I’ll make it reappear,” Lewis announced.
He closed his hand and rubbed again. When he opened it he held the quarter, which he promptly returned to its owner.
“That’s cool,” one of the boys remarked.
“Hey Tina, why don’t you take him up to your bedroom and show him some real magic,” Johnny suggested.
“What if I do want to take him up to my bedroom,” Tina shot back. “Would you be jealous?”
Lewis tried not to show his discomfort. He could see that everyone had fixed their eyes on Tina and Johnny, but he couldn’t help feeling that he was the center of attention. Soon the whooping died down, and it was Lewis’s turn to inhale again. He took a deep breath and relaxed as he exhaled.
* * *
Julia noticed a slight pause between the moment Sara’s mother had opened the front door and her enthusiastic greeting. During that caesura Julia felt certain that the woman wore a scowl, but she said nothing about it to her friend who had come bounding down the entryway to greet her. Julia found herself being ushered to Sara’s room where she sat patiently and listened to an incoherent stream of ramblings that ranged from how happy Sara was to have stayed home for college, to how little she regretted missing out on campus life activities, and then to how much freedom her parents had given her now that she was a college student.
“I’m so happy for you,” Julia answered when her friend paused for breath.
“You don’t sound happy,” Sara said.
Julia could see the realization that something was wrong creeping over Sara’s face and wondered if her feelings were so transparent.
“I’m sorry,” Sara said finally. “I went on and on about me and didn’t ever stop to see that you were,” she broke off. “What is it?”
Julia looked down at the floor and Sara waited.
“Last night,” Julia began, “I was giving a guy a ride home, and he got on top of me and he,” she didn’t finish. She could see the blood emptying from Sara’s face.
“No,” Sara said in a whisper, as she shook her head in either disbelief or denial.
“He almost,” Julia clarified. “There was a knife, and Thomas came out and, well it’s all over now, and everyone’s okay.”
“Thank God!” Sara exclaimed.
The words pierced Julia, and she couldn’t help thinking of everyone who wasn’t as lucky as she’d been. But somehow she had been spared. She rubbed her wounded palm and thought about the journey that knife had taken before it had found its way into her hand. But how many others hadn’t been spared, and how many of them deserved to be spared more than her? If the intervention was divine, where was justice?
“But like I said, there was a knife, and Thomas came out,” Julia said again aloofly.
“Is he?” Sara asked without looking directly at Julia.
“Thomas?” Julia asked.
“The man who tried to,” Sara prompted.
“I think he’s okay.”
“And you?” Sara kept her eyes from meeting her friend’s.
&nb
sp; “I’m fine,” Julia answered. “The knife didn’t cut me as deeply as I thought at first.” She knew that Sara didn’t want specifics, and that the question had only been asked to show concern. She could have said more; she could have explained everything that transpired that night in vulgar detail. “I’m really okay,” she added, shielding her friend from the previous night’s events.
“I’m glad,” Sara responded. “They need harsher laws for people who do that sort of thing. They should take all of them and,” Sara stopped when she looked back at Julia. “I guess that’s not what you need to think about now.”
Julia exhaled in such a way that it could have been mistaken as an exasperated chuckle, and Sara’s face lightened a little. Sensing that her friend needed more assurance, Julia let her lips curl into as much of a smile as they could manage, and she explained that she really was okay. But she could tell by Sara’s face that her friend was still thinking deeply about the issue. “You don’t have to dwell on it,” Julia insisted.
Sara looked at her guiltily. “I just can’t help thinking that if there were more severe laws, then maybe last night wouldn’t have happened at all.”
“Laws wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“But he would have thought about the consequences,” Sara insisted.
“He wouldn’t have. Nobody ever does.”
“But what he did is the kind of thing you could lose sleep over for the rest of your life. Even if he didn’t succeed.”
“I have better things to lose sleep over,” Julia said reassuringly. She could tell that this statement had prompted another question, but her friend remained uneasily silent. “Go ahead,” Julia said after a few moments.
“Like Jason?”
“I’ve lost sleep over him,” Julia answered.
“And the,” Sara began, but pointed at her stomach instead of finishing the sentence.
“Most nights when I don’t lay in bed wishing I were more like Jason, I lay awake in bed hating that icy, formal, inhuman way they process people through their doors as if it were just their job.” Julia could tell that either her answer, or the forthrightness with which she’d delivered it, had shocked her friend, but she continued. “They never quite look you in the eye and all the people that come through those doors and all their problems don’t ever seem to faze the workers. I think it’s because they’ve learned not to see people anymore, just clients. I hate them and I’m tired of hatred keeping me awake at night.”
“He’s lost sleep over that too,” Sara said.
“I wish he hadn’t.”
“If you called him he’d be happy to talk to you.”
“I know,” Julia said with a sigh. “And I will one day. I don’t know when, but one day when I’m ready I will.”
“Can I tell him you said that?” Sara asked.
“You can tell him that one day I’ll call him.”
“Do you know when?”
“No.”
“But you will call him?”
“Yes, I will call him some day,” Julia reiterated.
Sara’s face beamed and Julia could tell that she didn’t know quite what to say. “You do know that I love you,” Sara said finally, “Maybe not like Jason, but as best I can.”
“I know. The two of you love me better than anyone else because you know me best. You can’t love something fully until you know it fully, and I can’t think of anyone who knows me better than you and Jason.”
“Thanks,” Sara said bashfully.
“And you’ve both got every reason not to love me,” Julia mused.
“We were about to sit down for dinner when you came. I’ll go tell Mom to put another plate out for you, and we can all eat together,” Sara offered.
“I’d love to, but I’ve got to get back because Thomas is waiting on me.”
“Oh,” Sara said as if remembering past incidences between Julia and her family.
“But I really would have loved eating with you. Your parents wouldn’t have made me the least bit uncomfortable.” Julia spoke plainly to alleviate the worrisome suspicion that had crept into her friend’s expression.
“Then some other time,” Sara said.
“Of course,” Julia answered, and she let Sara walk her to the door.
As Julia left she wondered how Sara’s parents would react when they found out about last night. She reasoned that they’d shake their heads and comment on how horrible the whole scenario was, make a comment similar to Sara’s about needing better legislation, and then shake their heads again before changing the subject. She also reasoned that just behind the façade they would be thinking that she’d deserved even worse for being a person of such low moral fiber. But as she left the house, she said goodbye to them cheerfully, not out of politeness, but with a genuine love for them both.
She couldn’t explain this new sensation that had been creeping up on her throughout the day and now enveloped her completely. She didn’t try to dissuade herself from the speculation that Sara’s parents would secretly judge her in their lofty religious hypocrisy; in fact the love that had welled up for them allowed her, for the first time, to be fully convinced that those speculations were an almost certainty. It was as if all the vileness she saw in herself, and all that was despicable in human nature in general, had mixed together and given birth to a genuine love for humanity, not a love for some vague notion of what humanity ought to be, but humanity itself, as it appeared before her in its grittiest moments.
“You can’t love something fully until you know it fully.” The words she had only recently spoken to her friend played over and over in her mind, and their deeper meaning began to take root in her as she headed back to her father’s apartment.
* * *
When Julia pulled into her father’s apartment complex, she found Thomas sitting at the curb in the parking lot. He had a crumpled piece of white paper in his hand, which he folded and put in his pants pocket when she pulled the car into the open space next to him.
“What was that?” she asked, stepping out of the car.
“It was just something that Dad gave me, nothing really,” Thomas answered. Then he added, “It might be better if you didn’t go up there. He’s not feeling well.”
Julia turned away from her father’s door and looked again at Thomas. “I see,” she said. “Then do you want to go home?”
“I think that’s best. I’ll drive if you want me to.”
Julia didn’t object and walked around to the passenger side.
“I’m dropping the experiment, at least for a while,” Thomas told her as he turned onto the street. Julia didn’t say anything.
“And I called and made an appointment for tomorrow while I was waiting for you.”
“An appointment?”
“To get some help,” Thomas answered. “I’ve made a mess of things lately, but you should know that I meant well, at least in the beginning.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, Thomas. It’s in the past; let it all stay there. We can go back home and start all over.”
“So the house we’re going to is home now?”
“I guess it’s the closest thing we have to home these days,” Julia answered.
“Then let’s go home.”
Chapter 8
“To sleep, to dream, —but what dreams may come?”
-Shakespeare
“Thomas,” Julia said from the passenger seat. “Can you pull over? There’s something I want to talk about.”
Thomas didn’t ask what would be so important that they couldn’t talk about it while he drove, but humored his sister, mostly because of everything that had happened recently. He pulled the car off of the sleepy highway and onto the wide grassy shoulder next to it. Julia stepped out of the car and he followed her out into the crisp night air.
“I’ve been thinking a lot today,” Julia said, “and I feel almost certain that there is a God.”
“Today?” Thomas asked. “After everything you’ve been t
hrough how could you?”
“Because I know that I’m loved. If there is no God then this whole world is one big deathbed, and if that were true nobody could love me. That’s as close as I can come to rationalizing it, and I know that doesn’t mean much to you, but I wanted you to know that I’ve made up my mind.”
“And if there is a God?” Thomas asked.
“Then the world might still be a deathbed.” Julia answered. “But there will be something else that comes afterwards. There is something beyond us, something infinite and unknown, and just the thought of that comforts me somehow. Look up at the sky. It’s so big and empty, except for a few specks here and there. Those dots of light against all that vast black nothing might be as close as we’ll ever come to understanding infinity. It’s beautiful isn’t it?”
Her voice seemed surreal and dreamy to Thomas, and he wondered if his sister had begun to go crazy trying to cope with everything that had happened.
“Whenever I think about infinity I’m terrified,” Thomas admitted. “If I’m right and there is no afterlife, then everything stretches out into an infinite cold sterility, and if there is an afterlife that lasts forever, even if it were the paradise you want to believe in, then eventually you will have lived every possible day a hundred times over. You’ll wake up and know that no matter what you do or say, you’ll have done it all before. I can’t think of a worse fate.”
“I’ve thought about infinity quite a bit,” Julia countered in a more grounded tone, “but it’s always inspired awe and confidence. If there is an infinite being and an eternity, then there should also be something else that is infinite that we would step into after death, an infinite change, maybe even an infinite progression. Of course we couldn’t understand that now, but I believe that it has to be true.”
“A progression? Towards what? That all comes back to progress, and the concept of good versus evil and, but I don’t want to talk about infinity any more.”