A couple of months before my father died, after it became clear that the surgery hadn’t worked and the doctors gave up on chemotherapy and radiation and his body sagged and protruded with unchecked tumors, he went to Boston for what at that stage could have fairly been considered a pointless examination. I imagine machines spinning and analyzing my father’s blood and urine samples, CT and MRI and ultrasound units bouncing X-rays and magnetic fields through his body and compiling, byte by byte, visual proof of what everyone already knew, what one could literally smell on him at this point, and I imagine heart and blood pressure monitors beeping and whirring as they transmitted, moment to moment, evidence of his continued existence—all these machines working tirelessly, with absolute dedication, despite the futility of their task.
Then I imagine my father’s doctors and nurses, the actual human beings involved in his care, spending less and less time on him, knowing that he was the very definition of hopelessness, and that all this testing was little more than the formal constraints of care continuity. Maybe even, at their team meeting, giving his charts a perfunctory riffle, saying, This one’s a goner, what’s next, and casting his paperwork aside.
In other words, the doctors were unwilling to waste their own time on the myriad tests they’d wasted my father’s dwindling time with. The machines, though, remained uniform and unflinching in their dedication.
So anyway he’d gone to Boston for these pointless tests, and started to have trouble breathing in one of the exam rooms at the cancer institute, so they called an ambulance to take him around the block, to the ER of the hospital next door. Where they discovered, after yet another series of tests, that his one remaining lung had become choked with blood clots.
They administered Alteplase, without much hope given how weak he was already, and told my mother to call whoever should be around in the event that he died.
My phone rang around nine that night. I’d been drinking, but I took a cold shower and threw a few things in a backpack and drove to my uncle’s house. He looked at me and suggested he drive, and we got in his car and headed south on the mostly empty highway.
We talked about my father, but we talked about other things, too, and not without good humor. One of the peculiar aspects of ushering someone you love through a long illness is that everyday life, dull and unimportant though most of it is, inevitably intrudes upon and somehow obscures the high drama of looming death—so that you find yourself, at a bedside in a sick room, talking about last night’s American Idol, for example.
And as we drove through the night toward what we believed and acknowledged out loud could be my father’s corpse, my uncle and I discussed high gas prices, and the oddly warm October we’d had, and the Red Sox, who were blazing through the postseason on what would turn out to be their second world championship in just three years.
And I said, in reference to my father, You know, he could have waited to die until the playoffs were over.
These things come out of your mouth, sometimes. You get tired, or dumb, or just plain angry at someone for dying on you, though they obviously have no choice in the matter.
When we got to Boston just after one in the morning my father was still alive but sleeping, and we joined my mother and my aunt in the waiting room. None of my sisters, scattered about the continent, could get there in time. We sat for hours, talking in fits and starts but mostly quiet, listless. We flipped through old magazines, watched the sky brighten from black to a stolid autumnal gray outside the windows. Paced the ghastly fluorescent-lit halls. Received periodic non-updates from the nurses: Still sleeping. Doing okay. Seems to have stabilized.
Finally, after nine, we were allowed in to see him. He sat up in bed in a private room, some network morning show on the television, and I was struck by a plain and unmistakable fact: for the first time since he’d been diagnosed, my father looked happy. His eyes shone soft and peaceful, and while he wasn’t smiling, exactly, relaxation had settled around his mouth in a way I’d never witnessed in thirty years of knowing the man, giving him a contented, sage look.
I sat there all day. My father talked in a gentle, friendly voice I did not recognize while doctors and nurses and family wandered in and out. I only rose from the chair at his bedside twice before sundown, both times to use the private bath attached to his room.
Who was this gregarious dying man, I wondered, and what had happened, while we sped down the highway and sat up in the waiting room all night, to create him from the raw material of the man I’d known before?
And then, during the Red Sox pregame show, it struck me: acceptance, was what had happened. His was the relaxed, friendly manner of one who has come to truly accept his own doom. The sort of enlightenment that dedicated Buddhists strive after their whole lives and often never achieve, right there in front of me, clad in a hospital johnny with graying mustache askew and eyes warm and calm.
Before the first pitch his dinner showed up, a dry greenish slab of something the attendant claimed was meatloaf, and my father was about to dig in happily (this was another sudden change, as weeks beforehand his appetite had abandoned him and more than once I found my mother in tears after trying and failing to get him to eat) when I stopped him.
There’s a food court downstairs across the street, I said. Let me get you something edible.
He asked for a steak and cheese sandwich from Subway, and I left and went down in the elevator, feeling strangely light and happy as I jaywalked over to the Longwood food court. The place was filled with people in scrubs and white lab coats, sitting at plastic tables in groups of three and four, scarfing the same McDonald’s burgers and Chinese takeout that had delivered many of their patients to them across the street.
I ordered a footlong from a plump, surly Puerto Rican girl in a mustard-stained Subway polo. My father had asked for nothing but the meat and cheese, no vegetables, and I watched as the girl plopped two tiny microwaved dollops of stringy beef into the hollow she’d cut from the bread. It didn’t look any better than the meatloaf, and I thought to ask her to work on the presentation a bit, maybe add more meat, or at least spread it out in a way that didn’t make so obvious it had been dropped out of a plastic cup—in short, to try a little harder—but then I didn’t. Though I’d given myself the assignment of finding something good for my father to eat, at that moment I kept my mouth shut.
And then carried that limp, lukewarm bag back across the street and up in the elevator and into my father’s room. He sat upright still, his eyes trained on the television. In the fourth the Sox were up 1–0.
I handed him the sandwich, feeling as though I’d failed in some small but vastly important way, and he smiled and said thank you—understand, again, that the warmth, the smile, were just this side of a shock coming from him—and unwrapped the sandwich, dug in with delight.
Later, after he’d fallen asleep during the seventh inning and I’d switched off the television and the light over the bed and gone out, I sat at a nearby bar thinking about how I’d never expected to learn something about joy, how to create and sustain it, from my father of all people.
And then smiled into my beer as one of my mother’s favorite chestnuts came to mind: miracles, she liked to say, never cease.
True to the Bedouin custom of unflagging hospitality, Suleiman often invited me to share dinner with his family at their home, a mud-brick structure squatting gloomily amidst the dirt and broken rocks of the Sinai foothills. The invitation, however, was where many of the customs ended. His was a family of all women—a plight I could sympathize with, having grown up with three sisters in a house where even the cat and dog were female—and so, as Suleiman told me himself, even with a strange man in the house his wife and daughters had to appear at dinner, otherwise he and I would be dining alone. They ate not with their hands, but with a set of pearl-handled silverware given to Suleiman by a longtime client. The soles of bar
e feet were on constant display, both during the meal and afterward; the younger girls most flagrantly violated this normally sacrosanct rule, but did not once earn a rebuke for it from either of their parents. Suleiman’s wife spoke openly and at length with me, smiled at my jokes, even ventured the occasional friendly grasp of my forearm. In these ways and others, Suleiman’s was an extremely progressive household, by Bedouin standards. The fact that they had an actual household, rather than a tent, being yet another liberal deviation from custom.
One custom the family did observe, though, was an overwhelming interest in who I was, where I came from, what I did for a living, who I loved, etc. When asked these and other questions, I lied without hesitation. I started the ruse with a name: Henrik. This construct hailed from Minnesota, specifically that convergence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers known as St. Paul. He’d been a chef and sometime professional snowboarder, a detail which at first baffled the girls and then, once explained, fascinated them.
Lies all, of course. My name, obviously, was not Henrik; only in the Sinai could I, a swarthy Canuck of southern French descent, have used a Scandinavian handle and gotten away with it. I was from the Northeast, not the Midwest; in fact, I had never even set foot in Minnesota. And while I’d slung slop in more than a handful of kitchens before selling my first novel, I’d never been anything resembling what one thinks of as a chef.
The snowboarding? Please. I’d been tobogganing, two or three times, as a kid.
When the girls pressed me on the last question—who I loved—I formulated a lie to go with the others, but then this lie stuck in my throat. So instead, after a minute of obfuscation, I told them the truth about Emma. I figured, where’s the harm? I laid it on pretty thick, too, and the girls were rapt, smiling and dreamy, adrift in pre- and mid-adolescent reveries of idealized romantic love. Their parents, side by side on cushions behind them, smiled indulgently beneath a cloud of smoke from Suleiman’s cigarette.
For whatever reason I did not anticipate the obvious follow-up question: where on Earth was this Emma, light of my life, yin to my yang, the very purpose for which I’d been snatched from the black nothingness of pre-existence? How could I bear to be apart from her, if I loved her so?
I thought for a minute, gazed at the girls’ expectant faces, their almond eyes intent and unwavering, and this time the lie came easily: She died, I told them.
The girls accepted this news with less sadness than I expected. But then, they’d seen two of their siblings go straight from their mother’s womb into the stony ground; death here in the desert was neither surprising nor unbearable, even to children.
When I was a kid, one of the only things my father and I did together on a regular basis was have our hair cut. An old Marine my grandfather’s age ran a barbershop the size of a broom closet in our neighborhood. He always smelled of whiskey and had an actual working barber pole out front. My father had been going to him since he was a boy. We’d walk in together, and my father would sit down under the Marine’s scissors first while I perused back issues of Field and Stream and listened to them talk about the things men talk about when their wives aren’t around. The place had one mirror, adjacent to the barber’s chair, and on the wall beneath the mirror was a shelf crammed with containers of strange blue fluid, where plastic combs and clipper attachments floated in stasis. The floor was always littered with multihued piles of clipped hair, no matter the time of day.
I was thinking about that barbershop one afternoon, maybe a week before my father died, as I sat in the living room with him watching television. His eyesight and hearing had begun to fail, which made him easy to observe for long moments without him noticing your gaze, and I considered him as he stared at the TV. I noticed suddenly how unkempt he was. He hadn’t shaved for days, and the hair on his head, which had come back spottily after the chemo, shot up from his scalp in ugly, uneven tufts.
On impulse, I asked if he wanted me to clean him up a bit. We’d gotten used to his bad hearing, and I knew that the first time I asked he would only hear that I was talking to him, but not the particulars of what I said, so I waited for him to turn his head and ask, What? I repeated myself, forming the words carefully, and smiled in a way I hoped was encouraging rather than condescending. He thought for a minute—everything with him was so slow now—and then, as if realizing suddenly that he still occupied a world in which people cut their hair and shaved and felt good about it, he nodded with all the vigor he could manage, gratitude splashed across his face like some kind of abstract art.
I draped a towel around his shoulders, tucked it tight into the neck of his shirt. I oiled the clipper blades and set them to his scalp. I used my free hand to turn and tilt his head gently, this way and that, and for a few minutes we talked about the things men talk about when their wives aren’t around.
In a moment of bold inappropriateness that even in Suleiman’s progressive household would have earned her severe punishment, his oldest daughter Noora came to me alone in the yard post-dinner, while I stood gazing into the hills and smoking.
She was sixteen. I was a grown man, no relative to her, and a Westerner to boot. We stood without chaperone in the near-dark. I wondered frantically at Noora’s intentions, felt the sudden suffocating danger when a girl is still young enough that everything is play, but old enough that she’s eager to play with people instead of toys.
Emma is not dead, Noora said. She smiled and pressed a hand to my shoulder, a gesture so unspeakably improper that it sent a reflexive thrill of excitement through me. I don’t know why you lied, but you lied. She is alive somewhere.
Then Noora was gone as quickly as she came. And I was left with concurrent waves of fear, one receding, the other cresting: that Noora meant to seduce me, and that she would somehow find me out.
Around the time my suicide note was going viral, Emma attended a fund-raising reception for Planned Parenthood of Maine on an August evening thick with humidity and, it would turn out, fate.
She stood in the ballroom at the Hilton drinking rum and tonic, draped in a thin black cotton dress that clung where indicated and flowed where indicated and dropped away in the back to showcase her strong, elegant shoulders, a dress that I can to this day close my eyes and conjure a dulcet vision of. I can hold that vision as long as I like, as though the image in my mind were in actuality a photograph in my hand. I do so more often than is probably good for me.
And on that evening, another man shared my appreciation of this image.
But because playing pick-up artist at a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser was bad form, and because Peter Cash was quite shy besides, he did not approach Emma directly, or send a waiter over with a drink. Instead he situated himself near where Emma stood among colleagues from her office, and made sure he had a line of sight to her.
Emma was easily distracted—when we ate dinner she always sat facing the wall so as not to have her attention sapped by compulsive people-watching—and her eyes wandered the room as she talked. Eventually they settled on Peter Cash, who had been waiting for just such a moment, and he held her gaze for as long as his bashful nature would allow, which was about two seconds.
The moment repeated itself several minutes later, and again Peter held her gaze, for a bit longer this time.
Emma, who’d been repelling the overtures of bolder men for months, but who’d by now had three drinks and found herself amused by Peter Cash’s timidity, sought him deliberately the third time.
I know how he must have felt when those eyes, full of intent, fell on him.
Much later, Emma herself would tell me that though Peter didn’t remember it, or even necessarily realize he’d done it, the thing that really grabbed her the third time their eyes met was the way that, now suddenly emboldened, he smiled and cocked his head to the side in slight inquiry, reminding her of the hundreds of times she’d seen me do the very same thing.
Many believe the Singularity will take place when the Internet becomes self-aware. Some even think that the Internet already possesses a version of what we think of as consciousness: the ability to store, process, remember, and convey information with a degree of autonomy.
If you’re skeptical about what the Internet will do in the future, though, consider what it could accomplish even back then, while I was erased in the Sinai and, as simply as the universe itself began one day, Emma met a shy but kind man named Peter Cash: it took an obscure American novelist, a writer whose level of fame lay somewhere between that of the shortstop for the single-A Hickory Crawdads and the Rotato Express Potato Peeler, and based on the dissemination of a mere five thousand words or so of his writing made his name more recognizable among certain demographics than that of the current U.S. president.