Driver's Education Page 3

  I looked through the thin window in the door that separated me from my father, me from Finn. Finn still slept, though now he was dreaming. Reflexively, a foot kicked out, scattering the Jell-O cups in four different directions.

  “And he’ll learn to speak again?” I asked.

  “Really, Mr. McPhee. Look into it.”

  • • •

  “Coooooooooollllllllliiiiiiiiiiin!!!!!!!!!”

  When he calls my name, I hear it in two places: first, through the floorboards, in those spaces where the carpet’s peeled away; his voice hits my feet and reverberates through my shins. Then, through the open door of my office, after it’s traveled through the house’s diagonal corridors, picking up dust and other bits of life.

  He calls again, this time louder, both voices hitting me almost at once: “COOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIN!”

  I drop to my hands and knees and crawl to the northeast corner of the room, where the hole in the floor is the largest. “Jesus, Dad.” I have my mouth pressed against the floor. It tastes new, but also very old: industrial musk. “WHAT?”

  “IT’S STARTING, COOOOOOOLLLLLIIIIIIIIIN!!!!”

  I scramble to my feet and arch my back, feeling the hinged pop of my spine cracking. There’s a single round window in this room, cut in quarters by four wood beams. Outside, there are two clouds, one to the west of the bridge, and one to the east; they cast shadows onto the bay. At my desk I check the time: 12:27. I’ve been slumped here, folded over myself for three and a half hours. I’ve pulled up a fresh page on the computer, but I’ve yet to write a goddamned word.

  Downstairs, in the den, the blinds have been pulled shut, the light pushing through them in aggravated spits. I carry in two highball glasses of Lowland scotch. If he had his choice he’d start drinking at eight; I insist he wait till after noon.

  I find him sprawled in the middle of the couch, his loose skin spreading out, blending into the beige leather. As he’s sunk down within the cushion, the belt he has to wear has crept up his torso. It sits uselessly now. It hangs from his chest, where it’s bunched his oxford, the collar now clinging to his ears, like a hood. His white hairless stomach lifts, falls, exposed.

  “Dad.” I flip on the lights, raise open the blinds. “Let’s get you up. Let’s fix this thing.”

  “I’m fine. We’ll miss it.”

  “Knock it off, we’ve got two minutes.”

  I crouch before him, planting my heels on either side of his feet. I try to remember what the nurses told me: Slip both hands upward, under the belt. Lift, don’t lean. Use your legs, not your back. His head to your chest as you pull upward; hoisting sloshing buckets of water from a well.

  “Press into me, Dad.”

  “I told you I’m fine.”

  “You’re not making this any easier.”

  People always say that the old have a distinct scent. Cough drops, I’ve heard. Or vitamins. Also cucumbers. And as his chin dissolves into my chest, as his arms hang limply to the middle of his thighs, I wish that was the case. That he smelled like an accumulation of all those things, instead of like me. Just like me.

  “Okay,” I say. “Now—set your hands on my waist.”

  He presses his lips together and then curls them inward toward his teeth; they vanish into each other, lineless pockets of skin. He mumbles, but without making any sounds.

  “Dad, please—just put your hands on my waist so you can steady yourself.”

  “We’re missing the start of it,” he says.

  “We won’t miss anything.”

  His hands don’t move. They continue to hang, but now with added weight and defiant girth. He won’t look at me.

  “Fine,” I tell him. “Try not to fall.”

  I pull the shirt down first, releasing it from his neck, adjusting its collar so it sits squarely on his breastbone, buttoning the flaps over his exposed flesh. Then, the belt: I twist the canvas as I lower it to his waist. He yelps as it pulls against his skin; I go tense.

  “Shit. Shit, I’m sorry, Dad. Just one more pull.”

  When I’ve lowered him back to the sofa, and when I’ve taken my place next to him, he says, “We’ve missed it.”

  “We haven’t missed anything. It’s twelve thirty-one.”

  “Then.” He lifts a chin toward the television, where there’s an infomercial for a pillow that changes temperature as you sleep. “Then the television is broken.”

  “It’s not broken. It’s just on the wrong station. Let me change it.”

  I find the remote control wedged between two cushions. I scan upward, pass network television, basic cable, basic premium, the various stations I can’t afford but have bought since his arrival, for his entertainment; I climb to channels that are higher than I believed channels existed. I stop when I see the girls: padded knees and stickered helmets. Painted roller skates.

  Watching Derby Death Match 2000: I’d say that it’s one of the more beguiling rituals we’ve accidentally adopted over the past fifteen months. I can’t remember how it started. Did I, during one of my panicked fits to entertain him, think that girls in skates, bludgeoning one another into a pulp of tits and ass, might serve as some sort of balm? Or was it him? When he could still operate the controller, before the damned thing became some tormented maze, was it then that he stumbled upon channel 378? When he called me down anxiously and said, Colin, look. Look at this.

  The two teams competing today are the ShEvil Dead and the Wrecking Belles. On the screen, the rosters: names like Angel Maker and Astronaughty; Edith Shred and Sugar Pusher. The pivots and the blockers align themselves in packs—slender, beautiful, wicked—while the two jammers square off behind them. Then, once the referee has blown his whistle, and once the first pivot has been slammed to the track, we begin our separate game.

  “That one,” he says. “The lady who just fell—she has the cheekbones.”

  “Windigo Jones? Her nose sits too high on her forehead.” I lean forward. “The Wrecking Belles jammer, though. She’s about her height.”

  “She wasn’t that tall.”

  “The helmet adds a few inches.”

  As the girls fall down, we speed up:

  “That one.”

  “Or that one.”

  “Or that one.”

  But the fact is none of them look like Mom.

  • • •

  He entered Phelps Memorial’s stroke recovery clinic forty-eight hours after Finn found him. He stayed there for two weeks before it was suggested, or encouraged—by doctors, nurses, therapists, administrative assistants, men in plain clothes on the streets—that he either move into a home or, alternatively, to San Francisco to live with me.

  Neither of us could afford a home—so. Well—yes. So.

  I remained in Westchester for the entirety of his rehabilitation: I stayed at a Howard Johnson Inn a half mile from the grounds. Each afternoon, when Finn had completed his vague work in the city, he’d take the 5:27 Metro-North to Tarrytown. We’d eat burgers, or chicken fingers, or—once—fish sticks at one of those nameless restaurants that populate the strip malls along the lower Hudson.

  As we folded ketchup-stained wax wrappers in our fists, he’d say, “If I hadn’t missed my train, I would’ve gotten there sooner.”

  I’d tell him, “Oh, Finn. These things just happen.”

  And he’d answer with, “But still.”

  Then, if it wasn’t snowing—or even if it was—we’d walk to see him.

  The recovery center itself was brief and unimpressive: a two-story wing tagged onto the hospital’s administrative hub. An afterthought, if anything, whose thin grey corridors played stage to the choreographed movements of halted walkers and slippered, shuffling feet. It faced directly west, so the individual rooms were flooded with too much light in the afternoons—or, in the mornings, none at all.

  His rehabilitation therapist was a blond woman named Christie, who had a soft, Judy Garland disposition couched within a runner’s sinewy build. She was tireless
in her efforts; she’d point to his left hand and say, Now, move these three fingers, good, good, while I wanted to scream, Oh, come on, just lift the damned things. She instructed him in these movements—shifting in bed, sitting up, swinging his legs to one side—and, when he couldn’t accomplish a task on his own, she’d place a hand on the small of his back, guide him through it.

  She taught Finn and me how to handle him and bear his weight.

  “This is called a guard belt,” she said one day, unraveling a strap of milky-grey canvas three inches wide. “Fasten it above his belt line. The top of the belt should hit the bottom of his rib cage.”

  “What’s the purpose?”

  “It’ll give you something to hang on to.”

  “And he’ll need to wear it—”

  “Always.”

  He was perched on the bed, facing us, and we talked about him as if he weren’t there.

  “When you lift him, rope your arms under his and take hold of the belt’s back strap,” Christie said. “Give him a count, then pull him up and into you.”

  We watched as she performed. As she raised him—him, weighing nothing at all—from the bed and into her arms.

  “Have him rest against you as you both catch your breath.”

  His head lodged and snuggled between her breasts as she spoke. The corners of his mouth twitched up in a smile.

  I told her, “Christie, maybe show us how you did that again.”

  Finn bit and tore at his nails. He said, “I’m just afraid I’m going to break him.”

  • • •

  “Where are you going?” he asks when the match has ended; the Wrecking Belles have taken it by twelve.

  “Just upstairs, Dad. To work.”

  “What if the television stops working again?”

  I look toward the screen. Purple-haired girls are sweaty, high-fiving, hitting helmets as the production credits roll.

  “It’s not broken,” I say.

  “And you’ll just be upstairs?”

  “Just upstairs.”

  Here’s another change: when he first came here—when he was still able to complete a crossword puzzle, when he was still indignant and irritated by California—he wasn’t like this. The idea that his survival hinged on my aid infuriated him. He wouldn’t call for me when he should have: more than once, I found him sprawled in a pile of limbs on the floor, his hand gripped desperately around some table leg or chair or lamp as he tried to lift himself. And when I did help him, I could feel the reluctance in his muscles each time I’d lift him, how they’d tighten and strain, and resist my pull.

  He’s still stubborn like all hell. But now, as his mind has fogged over, he’s started to panic whenever he’s alone. Doors aren’t doors to other rooms, they’re doors to some total disappearance. It started about six months ago: I had left to run an errand, maybe, or to take a walk, to remember there’s something beyond this house, only to return and find him trembling, sweaty.

  “Where the hell were you?” he shouted.

  “Jesus, Dad.” I lowered him to a chair. “Out. Walking.”

  “To where? TO CHINA?”

  “What? No.” I brought him some water. “Would you just—Christ, would you just calm down?”

  I started, then, to leave the portable phone in his lap whenever I left the room, the house.

  “Who am I supposed to call?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Finn?”

  So, he did. Often. Twelve times before noon, according to one phone bill. But he dialed other places too: numbers that no longer existed, people who’d long since died. Occasionally, strangers. He’d press the receiver to his ear, holding his breath as they repeated Hello, as they said, Who is this? Then, when he’d run out of people to call, when he’d exhausted his catalog of numbers, he’d listen in on my conversations. I’d be pleading with a producer, with an agent, and there it would be—his smothered cough. “Dad,” I’d say. And then: “Excuse me, I’ll have to call you back.”

  After that pattern repeated itself enough times, after I’d lost enough jobs, failed at enough pitches, I bought him a mobile phone. One of those hulking devices designed specifically for people who’re too old to operate them: numbers the size of half dollars; screens as big as picture frames. A red button in the dead center of the keypad that reads EMERGENCY.

  “It’s not for me, obviously,” I’d told the young salesgirl at the electronics store. “I mean, ha ha, have you ever seen anything so big? It’s for my dad. Can’t get the guy to stop listening in on my calls, ha ha. Old people, though. What’re you going to do?”

  She’d asked, “Would you like your receipt?”

  On the way to my office, I make it through the kitchen and to the first creaky stair before he yells, “Colin?”

  “I’m still here.”

  The blank page on the computer is still taunting me, flashing about its plainness, its unwrittenness. Downstairs, through the holes in the floor, I hear him coughing again. Hesitantly, almost as if the keyboard in front of me is painful to touch, as if it’ll reach out and claw my fingers if I get too close, I begin to write.

  HOW TO MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL

  Finn

  It’s 7:30 on Monday morning and I’m doing 360s in my swivel chair at work. I still have my granddad’s map in my pocket.

  After I stop spinning, I shove a pen into my mouth and chew, leaving tiny craters in the black plastic. I’ve had a nagging difficulty sleeping during the past year, ever since my granddad moved in with my dad. It’s not that I’ve been plagued with horrible dreams, I don’t think. Like the sort of nightmares involving death and forgetting and disease? It’s more the fact that I’ve been having no dreams at all. I’ve only seen the back of my eyelids before I fall asleep, and I’ll see them and only them again as I awake: I see exactly nothing in between. These periods of nothingness will last sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for two hours—but always, always it’s the absence of something, as opposed to the presence of it, that jolts me back to consciousness again.

  The phone on my desk rings. I look at the number displayed on the caller ID screen, and I see that it isn’t my granddad or Karen, who always calls when she has some extremely urgent crisis that she needs my help fixing, so I let it go. I just watch it till it shuts itself up.

  The headquarters of the network that airs the reality program on which I work is located in Times Square. But our offices—the show’s writing and production offices—are farther south near Thirtieth Street, carved out of the fifteenth floor of a building along the west side of Seventh Avenue. It’s a crowded section of the city if for no other reason than it acts as a corridor to more desirable places. We’re south of Penn Station, but too north to be considered part of Chelsea proper. We experience all the annoyances generated by the mobs in Times Square and Herald Square, though none of the fleeting benefits of being positioned in either of the two. (Street food! An abundance of take-out coffee places! So many nine-story candy megashops!) We’re in an infertile urban valley, we say, because occasionally we’ll say things like that, a valley whose arid grounds are stampeded by tourists and salesmen and lawyers and God-knows-who-else every single day.

  And like I said: the show itself is very famous, or at least used to be, though—again—for professional reasons I’ll refrain from mentioning its name now. Just know that each season chronicles the lives of a handful of youngish adults (youngish being qualified as eighteen to twenty-four, though casting will make exceptions to this rule, particularly if someone is thought to have television potential) for roughly six months while they live, together, in a very expensive house in a very expensive city.

  I was hired two years ago—when I was twenty-one and when I had first moved to New York—as a production assistant for this particular show, and then was promoted to the position of assistant story editor once Karen returned from Toronto, after she bought her large dog, after the gay Israeli waiter had finally come out of the closet. Most people argue th
at having a story editor guide the action of a reality show makes that reality inherently untrue, which I’ll concede is a solid (but totally unoriginal) point. What you’ve got to understand is that we are more interested in massaging the order in which certain events happen as opposed to creating new events entirely.

  But sometimes, ha, sometimes we do that too.

  Because as Karen describes it to me: Reality is a perfectly fine concept, but in our line of work it’s entertainment that’s crucial. And you can’t expect—you can’t just hope—that beginnings, middles, ends, that sympathetic characters and goals, conflicts, and resolutions; that soul-lifting, heart-wrenching entertainment will somehow magically mold itself from hundreds of hours of footage of reality. Particularly, I think, when that footage is of youngish adults.

  And so anyway that’s what we do; we are diviners. We sift through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage, deciding what is interesting, what isn’t, who makes things works, who doesn’t. We work backward to link together sequences of events and plot twists; we massage and rub and pull and stretch; we cut, zoom, pan, and recut our narratives. We do all these things until we turn reality into what everyone wants it to be, until we turn it into something sculpted and spectacular.

  I enjoy it and I’m good at it, I’d like to think. During these mornings, when I come to work early, or during nights when I stay at work late, I’ll sit at our editing bays, surrounded by logged tapes and the vacant cubicles of our empty office. I’ll sit alone with the overhead lights off and I’ll watch them, the tapes, so many times over again.

  I’ll slow down the footage of the cast members; I’ll speed it up. I can tell you who looks the prettiest when she cries, or the most terrifying when he laughs. I can tell you whose smile is real, and whose is fake, and what percent of the time. I can tell you that when he’s nervous, or uncomfortable, he’ll start grinding his teeth. I can tell you that she peels away her cuticles when there’s something or nothing to do. I can tell you which sort of men find her lack of beauty appealing.