“How’s she going to do that now?” asked Ruby softly.
Shep pushed his con leche away. “There’s the chemo … We don’t know. Maybe it works. Otherwise, why would they do it?”
It was a sensible conclusion.
The group trudged back toward the hospital. As they waited at the light, Deb asked if she could log on to Shep’s computer back in Elmsford. She was a member of a national prayer group holding an online vigil for Terri Schiavo, who was barely hanging on without life support. “They unplugged her like a toaster!” Deb despaired.
“I guess this idea you’ve always had,” said Ruby at Shep’s side, “of moving abroad … It must have been put on hold.”
“Well, your whole family has thought the notion was harebrained from the start,” said Shep.
“I guess we never totally understood it,” Ruby said cautiously. “I didn’t say you didn’t understand it. I said you all thought it was harebrained.”
“Eccentric, maybe. Although this idea that there’s some other country, some Valhalla out there—not always a different place, but a different job, or the perfect marriage, or if only I could get pregnant, something that’s an answer … I can see the appeal, but I’m not sure there’s ever an answer. Like, I saw a production of Chekov’s The Three Sisters at the Temple last month. These women in the sticks pining away about how if only they could get to Moscow. And the audience knows full well that nothing would be any different for them in Moscow. So in a way, they’re lucky not to go. Maybe you are, too. You get to keep the illusion, that somewhere there’s a solution, a resort.”
“But this is another country of sorts,” Shep observed pleasantly as they entered through the hospital’s double doors. “You know how in some economies you can live for a month on what it costs to buy a box of paper clips in the West? Well, you can work for a month to buy a box of paper clips in here.”
Shep had picked up the tab at the coffee shop before Jackson could grab it, and though the amount was small the gesture was emblematic of a much larger assumption that all bills led to Shepherd Armstrong Knacker the way roads once led to Rome. Jackson knew for a fact that Shep had paid his mother-in-law’s freight out, reasoning that her teacher’s pension was pretty paltry, and that it was “hard enough” for a woman at her age to suddenly have a daughter she might survive. He’d paid for Deb’s flight, too. The born-again had all those homeschooled kids, and a husband who worked fulltime for Raytheon Missile Systems—how was that for Christian?—so she had to pay for childcare while she was out East; buying her plane ticket was “the least he could do.” Since this crowd had arrived, you could bet that he was covering the groceries, the gas, and the booze people suck up like lemonade at times like these. Once Glynis came home, he was planning to put her relatives up in a hotel (having eavesdropped on those family visits, now Jackson knew why). His hands full with Glynis, Shep hadn’t been able to help Beryl move her crap out of her no-longer-practically-free apartment on West Nineteenth Street with the physical brawn he’d usually have volunteered, so he’d given her—even Beryl was starting to relinquish the pretense that the monies she took from her brother were loans—the couple of thou it took to have the stuff moved up to Berlin in a professional van. He was still subsidizing Amelia or she’d never have been able to afford to work for that circulation-ten-people journal of hers, and Zach’s school fees were as high as sending him to a private college. Shep’s father had no idea how high his winter fuel bills were running, since he hadn’t paid one in years. None of this stuff was tax-deductible.
All that on top of the usual nonnegotiable expenses that would-be immigrants didn’t take into account when viewing the United States with dollar signs in their eyes: the stiff rent (okay, Shep had been stupid, but if he’d bought in Westchester there’d be a mortgage, maintenance, and property taxes—aka renting your own house—so the difference was more negligible than you might think). The home insurance. The car insurance and rip-off repairs. Gas, electricity, and water charges, each escalating apace. The E-ZPass account, made seductively effortless so that you wouldn’t notice every time you drove through the Holland Tunnel it was eight bucks a pop. The cell phone bills that could come in at hundreds a month when you had kids texting every citizen of China. The Social Security (ostensibly saving for your old age for you, but earning zero interest, and by the time he and Shep were sixty-five bound to be “means tested,” ensuring they’d never see a dime of “their” retirement savings because the system was going broke). Not to mention nearly half of your earnings every year for sidewalks. So if in addition to all that the poor fuck was also getting reamed for forty percent of every three-hundred-dollar aspirin in this cathedral of health care, Jackson figured that once-untouchable Merrill Lynch account was starting to shrink.
When they returned to the eighth floor, Hetty was standing in the hall, still holding the tin she’d held carefully level all evening. Her eyes were puffy, and she looked bewildered.
With her free hand, Hetty clutched her son-in-law’s arm. “Sheppy, you dear man, thank heavens you’re back. Honestly, I know she doesn’t feel well, and isn’t quite herself. But I spent hours on those Chunky Chocolate Brazils. Shuttling the cookie sheets in and out of the oven, making sure each batch didn’t burn, sliding them onto racks to cool, greasing the pan again … Just so my daughter could have something home-baked, a little reminder at her bedside of her mother’s love and care. I could see if maybe she didn’t want one right this minute. But why would she get so angry with me? Whatever did I do wrong? It’s so hard for me to be strong for her when she’s so terribly thin, and so terribly pale, and I just want to take her in my arms and cry …”
Shep put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Trust me. Glynis got more pleasure out of having a problem with your cookies than she’d ever have got out of eating them.”
“Content,” said Jackson.
“Listen,” said Shep, “I’m going to take these guys out for some chow.” (And pay for it, Jackson thought reflexively.) “You want to say hello to Glynis? And keep it—”
“Don’t worry.”
Jackson’s mind clamored with admonitions: don’t make her repeat details of her surgery when you know them already just to sound concerned, don’t bring up the biphasic cell discovery unless she brings it up herself, try not to stare because she looks like death and equally don’t avoid looking at her because she looks like death. Yet the barrage of negatives was paralyzing. As he walked in, he remembered noticing how even her own sisters had kept a queer little distance; nothing drastic, but they’d both situated themselves subtly too far away. Though everyone knew that cancer wasn’t contagious, avoidance of disease was born of a deep biological terror. He felt it himself and fought it, forgoing the chair and sitting on the edge of the bed by her knees. He expected nothing from her. Since the Tylenol was making as much difference as a handful of peppermint Altoids, he had a better appreciation than most of her visitors for the way pain wasn’t just distracting; it exercised absolute veto power and, even at low levels, could so perfectly eliminate every other competitor for your attention that there was nothing else in your head to be distracted from.
“Hey.” He worried that the fact she immediately closed her eyes meant she was too tired for this, although it might be a compliment; she felt sufficiently at her ease with him to do what she felt like. He rustled the passion-fruit juice from his pack and slid the carton onto her bedside table. He decided against calling her attention to it; he didn’t want to seem like Hetty. The point was to give her something she might enjoy, not to get credit.
They stayed like that for three or four minutes. Jackson was manic enough by nature that keeping her still, wordless company was probably as good for him as it was for her. He took the time to study the bedside table’s kooky homemade fountain; from the hallway, he’d unthinkingly mistaken that steady trickle for life support.
It was crude but cute. The basin was a bedpan. A pump pushed the water up a piece of m
anila rubber tubing and into an upright wide-bore syringe (so that’s why Shep had asked for one of Flicka’s old plungers from her g-tube equipment), to burble in a tiny plume peaceably out the top. All around the sides of the bedpan he’d glued latex surgical gloves stuffed with cardboard hands; the cardboard was curved, so the hands around the sides cupped the fountain protectively, somehow managing to convey safety, tenderness, and refuge. The workmanship was rougher than usual—it was obviously an epoxy job—and how the poor son of a bitch had found the time to knock this whacky thing together was anyone’s guess. But if he were Glynis, Jackson would have found it comforting.
Glynis’s eyes slit open. “I don’t have the heart to tell him that it constantly makes me feel the need to pee.”
“It’s so—Shep.”
She smiled, and closed her eyes again. “Shepherd as can be.”
When you didn’t know how to please, sometimes the best thing to do was ask. “What would you like, Glynis? I’m happy to just sit here. You don’t have to talk. Or if you’ve had enough and would rather I beat it, I’d be glad to leave you in peace.”
“No, stay a bit.” Her head fell to the side, and she said dreamily, “Why don’t you rant.”
“Rant?”
“Yes, rant. You know, the way you do. About anything you want. Anything that makes you mad. That would be like music to me. Like playing a favorite song.”
Jackson was not, for once, especially irate, and he felt the butterflies he associated with the rare occasions he got into bed with Carol and she was in the mood and he wasn’t. Performance anxiety, they called it. “Well,” he said, stalling. “I thought of a new title.”
“Shoot.”
“SOAKED: How We Wet, Weak-kneed Wusses Are Taken to the Cleaners, and Why We Probably Deserve It. I was putting in a load for Carol, so I was working on a laundry theme.”
“Mmm. That’s a start. Keep going.”
“And, uh … I got a parking ticket yesterday.”
Glynis tsked. “You can do better than that.”
“It wasn’t the usual losing track of the time, though. I was picking up some Häagen-Dazs for Heather at the Key Food just up from Knack, right? Flicka isn’t allowed ice cream—no liquids, and it melts—so naturally Heather loves eating it in front of Flicka with a lot of mmm-ing sounds. Still, we keep it on hand so Heather knows we go to extra trouble for her, too.”
Jackson rose from the bed. Ranging the room and gesticulating were wasted on Glynis with her eyes closed, but this was a package deal; antics came with the show.
“So I pull up to a meter and stuff in a quarter, enough for half an hour, okay? There’s nobody in the express line at Key Food, and I guarantee you that I’m back in five. Only to find one of our local public servants writing me up. I say, hey, I’m here, I’ll move it, and of course that doesn’t make any difference, since this ticket shit’s got nothing to do with fair and equal access to communal resources. It’s a lucratative … like, money-making scam for the State, and it’s a form of mugging. So I say, Look, I put in a quarter literally five minutes ago. Then this smug, officious twit points to the meter window, and he’s right, it’s showing a red flag. I’m so incredulous I put in another quarter to test it, and sure enough I turn the handle and the window keeps flashing red. So the fucking meter is broken. But get this: that is my personal fault. That is legally my fault, that I parked at a broken meter, even though by now I’ve paid for an hour’s worth of parking and not even used ten minutes. The fucker finishes punching in the details and tears the ticket off his computer with a flourish and a sly little smile, and then I get it. That fucker knew the meter was broken. It’s probably been broken for weeks. He hangs out by that meter, lying in wait for some sucker like me in a hurry who doesn’t double-check that the damned thing is functional. I know it’s pricey, but sixty-five bucks for a pint of Häagen-Dazs is pretty steep.
“Now, what is the logic of that?” Jackson glanced at Glynis to confirm that she still had that serene expression on her face; she could as well have been purring. “I pay taxes to have those meters maintained, since—the ultimate indignity—we’re expected to finance the instruments of our own oppression. But if they can’t get their act together, if they don’t use the money I forfeit for that purpose, that’s my fault, and I pay twice. The State rigs everything in its favor, and don’t imagine reason or fairness or even common sense ever comes into it.”
He had rounded up pretty well, he thought, but after a moment or two Glynis’s eyes fluttered open again, and she scowled. “You piker. That’s barely a start. Go on. Rev it up. Give it all you’ve got.”
“All right,” Jackson said with an uncomprehending shrug, figuring it wasn’t his business to tell the immortally ill what she wanted to hear. “You know I play this game with Shep—Mr. Upstanding, Mr. We All Have to Do Our Part, aka Mr. Prize Chump—and he tries to come up with what, exactly, we personally get from our taxes. This bogus fees-for-services model supposedly keeps the exercise from being pure thievery, pure dogs licking their balls because they can. Me, I think they take our money because they can. They take more of it every year because they can. When you think about it, the absolute power is terrifying. With ‘eminent domain’ they can steal your house. They can pass any laws they want, and nothing actually stops them from changing the tax rate to 99.9 percent tomorrow. You realize that the IRS can reach in like the hand of God and simply clean out your bank account? Not only without asking, but without even telling you. One of the guys at Knack went to an ATM last year and the screen gave him this ‘insufficient funds’ error message. Checked the balance, and instead of several thou it said zero. He couldn’t buy a single beer. Took days to track down it was the feds. Turned out his ex-wife owed back taxes. Though they’d been divorced for years, their having filed jointly for a single year, ever, way back when, meant that when she couldn’t cough up the cash they went straight to him. And took it, just took everything. Can you believe it? When he didn’t owe the assholes a dime! I’m telling you, the only thing that protects us from being robbed of every cent is that these fuckers are dependent on the slaves continuing to produce. If they take everything, they kill the golden goose. So fixing tax rates is all about figuring out how much they can thieve while still leaving us poor wretches enough to keep working so that there’s more to thieve the next year. The government grows citizens like crops, and you have to leave a handful of seeds for the next planting.
“Anyway, a long time ago Shep named all the obvious supposed benefits of this, like, industrial agriculture, and one of the first ones he came up with was the police. They protect us from the scumbags, they keep us safe. Uh-huh. Sure, that traffic cop was preying on me to meet his ticket quota. But did my parking ticket make anyone safe? And just try to get any joy from our boys in blue if you tell them you were stuck up on the street or your house was burgled. They laugh in your face. That’s just paperwork to them. They never catch those guys and they don’t even try. They’re way too busy going after drug dealers—who in a truly ‘free society’ would be your regular businessmen, retailing a product that didn’t hurt anybody but your fully informed consumer. Selling heroin to junkies is no different from selling booze to drunks or butter to fatties or cigarettes to anybody. But no, we pay these guardians of pinky-raised propriety to enforce some moralistic, totally hypocritical 1950s bullshit, which takes up all their time, and meanwhile makes billions, billions for the criminals they’re pretending to fight. It’s symbolic … I mean, what’s it called, symbiotic,” he corrected himself, briefly flustered. “The cops and the drug barons are actually on the same side; they need each other. They both earn their dough from the same racket.
“I mean, think about it—what’s your first reaction when you see a cop drive by? ‘Gosh, I feel so well protected’? No! Anybody in their right mind is panicking, ‘Am I doing anything wrong?’ Or more like it, since chances are you’re way too freaked out to be enjoying a moment of soul-searching, ‘Could I be perceived t
o be doing anything wrong?’ The police are just one more predatory species, another dangerous animal in the environment, and the fact that you are personally paying for their damn donuts and refueling their damn cars the better to stalk you and filch your wallet just adds insult to injury.”
Jackson peered over at the pillow, and sure enough his lullaby had soothed her soundly to sleep. He pulled the covers to her chin. The red fleece was becoming, but he was no longer envious of Carol’s flair for presents. He knew what Glynis wanted, and what to give her for many visits to come: fury.
Chapter Nine
Back home after another visit to Glynis, now discharged but still abed in Elmsford, Jackson strode into his house on a roll. Some people might dread encounters with the gravely ill, but for his own part he’d begun to enjoy them. Now up to speed on what Glynis considered a proper convalescent present—perfectly distilled rage, which he pictured like crude oil: thick, viscous, and tarry, a substance that would stick to your fingers and stain your clothes and leave ineradicable prints on doorknobs—he stored up consternations from earlier in the day. Thus on arrival in Elmsford after work he had prepared a crescendo of acrimony that built like a stand-up comic’s routine, save for the fact that as far as he was concerned none of this stuff was funny. Did Glynis realize that if you win a car on a game show, you have to pony up a percentage of its sticker price to the feds in cash? Did she know that so many Americans are now getting caught by the Alternative Minimum Tax that a flagrantly unscrupulous regime that levies, for example, taxes on taxes, is now becoming the tax code?
“In 1969, AMT applied to only two hundred families in the entire country!” he’d railed, pacing her bedroom. “Since they’ve barely moved the bracket to account for inflation, it now applies to nearly half the population. So it’s like we have this really fair, decent, progressive system, although it happens to be a decoy—like one of those wooden ducks you put on the mantel. Looks nice, but you can’t eat it. The real tax system is a scandal, but we don’t take responsibility for that, since it’s alternative. Ditto this bullshit ‘mansion tax’ in New York State. They haven’t moved that bracket, either. So you’ve got all these one-family dumps all over Brooklyn, with weedy backyards the size of bath mats, thin cat-pee carpets, and mildewed basements. But because of this lunatic property boom, they’re selling for a million bucks. At which point, abracadabra! It’s a mansion, and the State takes three percent. This whole property thing, I swear the government itself could be behind it. You can’t say it’s in the larger social interest for your basic place to live to turn into a luxury way beyond the means of ordinary people—like glasses of water going for a hundred bucks apiece. But it is in the interests of the State. They’re making a mint! It’s so bad in New Jersey that you’ve got these old couples, own their home free and clear, been there for fifty years? They’re having to move out. Can’t afford the property taxes. Same poky three-bedroom they’ve always had, where they raised their kids, and suddenly these pensioners are supposed to fork over twenty-five K a year for the privilege of living in their own fucking house!”