Suffer the Echoes
Nostalgia comes imprinted on stones.
This is the most personal fictional piece I've ever written. It may be disingenuous to label it as fiction, as their are numerous factual instances throughout. It's about my grandfather and how deeply life experiences impact our perception of death, how it affects those around you. Published in 2006 by "Peaks and Valleys" literary magazine.
The first time I saw him he had hair.
Well, sort of. Not like hair hair. Random patches more or less, like some reject cheetah, soft and puckered and gray, on pale, tissue paper skin. It’s different now.
If we’re going to stick to the animal analogies, and I guess we could, I’ll say that those patches have either gone extinct or migrated to other pastures, leaving a shiny mound with a light slather of sweat and dime-sized freckles behind them. These freckles look like melanoma, but they’re not.
He’s shrunk, too. Significantly, in fact. Before he came here, he’d remarked to me that his ass felt like a couple of deflated balloons, withered and stretched. He told me he’d lost thirty pounds. Maybe 35. I can never remember. Seems to me he never can either, especially lately.
His skin sags in doughy clumps, collecting at the ends of his fingers, and around his wrists and elbows, mashed together. They move if he swings his arms when he walks. They’re like tiny New Years Eve parties, all going on at once, but only if he’s moving that glass of vodka to his lips, or laughing at some story he’s telling about the 40s. It did it once when he cried, too. That was at my high school graduation. I hugged him then, big, sharp tears belching from his eyes. In truth, I cried a little, too. No one saw it, though.
When I cry, its quick. A couple tears and I bounce back.
With him, it’s different. That day, I wanted to ask him if he wouldn’t mind never crying in front of me again. Some days I have to resurrect that whole day just to reassure myself that I never actually said that.
"During the war, I got shot in the ass," he says.
My arms are folded, running creases into my white dress shirt. My tie has Dilbert characters on it; something I got from my brother as a joke. I wear it because I’m too lazy and tasteless to go buy a decent one. My shoulder bag rests on the tiled floor, propped against the far wall, perpendicular to the bathroom.
I’m flipping through a two-week old edition of Time, skipping over world events and scientific studies about sleep to get right to the entertainment reviews. I freeze in mid-page turn and glance up.
"Excuse me?"
He nods, his eyes front, staring at some Friends rerun on the TV. He’s drawn the blinds because he hates the rain. Its more than enough that he can hear it, that damp pitter-patter of tiny, aqueous farts. He turns his head sideways, peering through the octopus tangle of tubes and catheters, all of them dodging around each other like tiny roller coasters.
Most men this age will talk about the war for hours. They still have their uniform, adorned with patches and pins. The fabric is frayed and old, but they wear it anyway. To their grandkids graduation. To church. A lot of them demand to be buried in it. They choose to define themselves through an event that capped 61 years ago. After the end of the war, life didn’t begin. It stopped. Its like those former jocks that pump gas or bag groceries and wear their letterman’s jacket to bars, "Class of 1980" stitched beneath their school mascot on the back.
Grandpa is of a different breed. In fact, he doesn’t talk about those years at all. While fortunate men were getting shot, priests donning helmets praying over their dying bodies, he was the one pulling these twitching, bloodied corpses to safety. He pulled their dog tags.
Collected their belongings.
Wrote to their families.
You know those people that apologize for everything? My grandpa has been the exact opposite for 2/3 of his life.
"Yeah," he says. "I forget where it was, exactly. Libya or something. The Italians wanted Crete really bad. I don’t remember if the Nazis were there or not. Anyway, it was a grenade. Shrapnel went right up my ass. So you can imagine that was pretty much it for me."
I turn back to my magazine and pretend to read.
And I wonder why I’m so afraid.
It doesn’t matter where you are when you hear someone in your family’s dying. Nothing prepares you for it.
I was at lunch. Some foo foo Greek place if I can remember. Great gyros. My phone rang, and I answered it.
"Hello?"
It was my mom. I could tell even though I hadn't seen the caller ID. Whenever it's her, and something happened, there's always a five-second pause. I can set my watch by it. That day, she did it again.
"What's going on, Mom?"
There was a sigh.
"Your grandfather had to go back to the hospital."
I bit into my gyro, chewed it. I looked at a homeless man across the street, an ancient cardboard sign propped against the wall next to him. He had a dog, too, I think. Some kind of lab, dirty as hell. Even from this considerable distance I could tell how malnourished it was.
"Uh huh," I said.
"More bleeding again," she said. "It was really bad this time."
"How's Gram?"
"Calm," she said. "As usual. Her voice never even cracked when she was on the phone with me."
A waiter came by and refilled my water glass. I nodded, and made a sign for writing with my left hand. He nodded, and left to get my check.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
That pause again. Sometimes, like this time, it was insufferable, like being last in line at college to see what you got on a final exam.
"It looks like this might be the one," she said.
"You said that last time."
"Well," she said. "That was just me preparing for the worst."
"How do I know this one's different?"
"The doctors said they can't really do anything else."
Then it was my turn to pause. Then it was my turn to...be insufferable.
"Does he know?" I said finally.
"Yeah," she said.
"And?"
"He kind of was expecting it,"
I looked at the homeless guy and his dog again; my silent denial. My proof that I cared more than I wanted to. Like my buying some diseased, filthy stranger a sandwich and a Coke would somehow grant me a few more hours with my dying grandpa. My own shameless way of pleading with God.
"When?" I asked.
"They think probably a week," she said.
The waiter came back and set down that black booklet. I glanced at it, but my eyes returned to the homeless man. I pictured him in a pressed pinstripe suit, with a haircut and a shave and a briefcase. I pictured his dog as fat and hyper, the kind that begs at the dinner table with small whines. Spoiled all to hell.
"You should probably go see him," she said.
"I know," I said. "I want to."
"Are you okay?"
"No," I said.
"Religion never made sense to me," he says. "If I was to believe in a system that incriminated me as a failure from the beginning, it would mean that nothing I did was ever good enough."
There's a Bible in my bag, and it's like part of me has forgotten about it. It's become a genie, only coming out when I want it to.
Instead: "Huh?"
He chuckles, and hits mute on the remote. The show's right in the middle of a joke about Chandler being whacky.
"I know what you've been thinking about since the moment you came in," he says.
We all have things we wish we could change about ourselves. Mine is that I wouldn't be so obvious. With everything.
I shrug.
"So," he says. "We haven't had this conversation in a long time."
I feel like I should be wearing a mask. I want a shower. All these damn wires and cords going this way and that around his tissue paper body, the truest spider web I've ever seen, the arachnid covered in black robes and holding a scythe, waiting. At least in all the clichéd versions.
"No," I say. "We haven't."
He sighs, and stares at the wall. "Did your mom put you up to this?"
"No," I say.
"Do you think that everyone who doesn't accept Jesus Christ goes to Hell?" I asked.
I had paid already, but continued to sit, the homeless man (now Homeless Joe in my mind, I have a habit of naming things) my only friend. I called his dog Falcor, like the Luck Dragon from "The Neverending Story."
"No," she said.
"Why not?"
"Well...because the minute that I start making up God's mind for Him, He becomes a serial killer instead of a superhero," she says. "That's not the God I've grown up with."
Someone gave Homeless Joe a dollar, and he tucked it into the worn pocket on the front of his tweed jacket, something that looked like it belonged on a scarecrow in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
"I don't get it," I said.
"If it was up to me, the only people that would go to hell would be murderers, child molesters, and rapists. Oh, the 9-11 hijackers, too."
"Yeah," I said. "Dad said abortion doctors."
"He would."
Divorced parents are funny. They make it a point to illustrate their disagreements on absolutely everything.
"The point is," she continues. "It's not up to me. That's all I'm saying."
"Then I guess..."
"Ryan," she said. "Do you honestly believe that this life is the only place we get a chance for a relationship with God?"
"I don't know," I said. "I mean...I've been taught..."
"By men," she said.
"I guess," I said. "I still don't understand that whole serial killer thing you said."
"Superman saves the lives of those that reject him," she said. "You think that...um..."
"Lex Luthor, mom," I said.
"Right. The bald guy."
"Yeah."
"Yeah, you think he would save someone that doubted him? Even hated him?" she asks.
"Probably not."
"Don't put limits on God's mercy," she said.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Always."
"He's your dad," I said. "And you don't seem worried at all."
"I never really knew him, Ryan."
"What if you had?"
A pause. I check on Homeless Joe and Falcor, and see that they're sleeping. I anticipate my gentle placement of a sandwich and Coke near him, as well as a big can of Chunky Alpo. For a moment, I forget about my grandfather's rapidly approaching death, and think instead of Homeless Joe's stained smile of appreciation. I think about how much better of a person I will be for having helped him. How God will tilt His head to the side and smile, and how He'll grant me my unspoken wish of getting my grandfather to go up instead of down. How He'll make an exception...just this once. How I've earned such a favor.
Talk about putting limits on God. I can be a bastard at times. Really.
"I...I don't know," she said.
The nurse brought him some kind of puree a couple minutes ago. Yogurt and bananas and strawberries. He drinks it through a straw in toddler's slurps, cracking and hollow, almost an echo in the clear glass stained pink from the flecks of fruit and dairy curds. The corners of his mouth are slicked shiny and red. I grab a napkin from his tray and wipe it away. He chuckles.
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
"I just got it," he says.
"What?”
"I know who you remind me of," he says. "I've been trying to figure it out the whole time, and it just came to me."
"Alright," completely unenthused, complete heartbreak trying to mask itself as boredom.
"I haven't thought about Quinn in a long time," he says.
He takes another irritating slurp of his juice, staring at the far wall. I stare too, trying to home in on the particular white patch he's purposely blurring with his poor, gray eyes. A bit of wet starts to crawl out of the corner of his eye, but I make it a point to ignore it. Everyone keeps telling me how his eyes are damn near useless, now just deflating spheres that were once gateways to God's illustrations.
He used to draw me pictures. I doubt he could now.
I was three the first time he drew me a fire truck. I also had stitches. The former resulted from the latter, a present to a stupid kid that thought he was Superman and that clear glass doors were meant to be shattered. Not opened. I remember that day, a cotton, red towel around my neck, warm and fresh from the dryer, clothes pinned in the front. Just that, and a white shirt, and Sesame Street underwear. Truly ready for lift-off. But, all heroes must fall. My Kryptonite came in the form of something invisible, splitting open my chin all the way across, smearing the solid mass a chunky, cherry red.
I got to come home after the hospital. An empty Happy Meal box in my fist that I would undoubtedly turn into a fort for my superheroes, I walked up the stairs. I was halfway past the study when I heard him call me.
"Hey, kid!"
I stopped and looked into the room. He sat there in a leather chair at my dad's desk, a stamp on his forefinger held closely to the underside of a magnifying glass. He was round, and wore a red and black checked sweater vest, gray hair sprouting like so many icy blades of grass on his head.
"And just what in the world happened to you?"
It's funny how learning new things about psychology can completely reshape our memories. Then, he was a genuinely concerned old man, bewildered and shocked and willing to do anything to help. Now, I see him playing coy, knowing all the points of my epic battle with the glass door, but forfeiting a shake of the head to make a toddler feel like a tough guy again.
"I bet you got in a fight, didn't ya?"
I giggled: "Grandpa..."
"Did you win? I bet you did, didn't ya? I'd hate to see the other guy if you look like this!"
I laughed, and ran to his lap, hopping up as easily as if I'd had the assistance of an Olympic springboard. Now looking at the desk, I saw him push aside his stamp and magnifying glass, and pull a blank sheet of paper into its place. Then, with a felt tip pen, he began to sketch an outline.
"What is it?" I asked.
"What do you think it is?"
I stared, taking every line, every nuance in. Eventually, it came to me. What was once a series of rectangles became a...
"Fire engine!" I screamed, bouncing on his knee.
He laughed and continued his drawing. With every part came an explanation. What certain hoses did. What gauges read what on the side. The vehicles top speed. Etc. All these random factoids accompanying my drawing just so it would be all the more real.
At one point, I turned around to stare at him. For a moment, he didn’t see it, his eyes scrunched in concentration, his wrinkled, velvet hands pushing this black felt tip pen across the page. This sacrifice of time for an injured grandson. Even then, I remember thinking how hard it would be to let him go. That thought faded, quickly replaced by naivety. He finished, and handed me the finished project. He pointed down on the page at a stick figure in the cab, hardhat pulled down over its pen stroke eyes.
"That’s you, kiddo," he said.
I took it in my hands and hopped down off his lap, slowly pacing out of the room to the hall. I didn’t even feel my stitches anymore.
"Hey."
I turned. He sat there, a grin creeping across his face.
"Take care of that for me," he said. "I don’t let too many people take it out for a spin."
I left the room, and promptly began my second wind as Superman.
Sans the towel.
"Quinn used to say that God hasn’t ever stopped talking," he says. "That we just can’t hear Him very well because of our contentment with worldly things."
He finishes his puree and sets it aside, wiping the creamed remains from his lips, smearing his wrist and forearm a pale, flamingo pink. He points at his bedpan.
"Bring it closer, will you?"
I bring it to him, and he snatches it from my fingers. Without so much as a blink, he vomits into the receptacle. There is no strain or gagging sound. He simply parts his lips like an opened envelope, and lets a wave of beige colored phlegm slip out. It plops in the pan like pancake batter, bubbly and thick.
I jump to his rescue, my hand flying underneath the pan.
"Are you..."
He chuckles. "I’m fine. It happens sometimes. Better than the other option."
He slides his arm across his face again. When he’s done, he has two different colored smears across his arm, skin hanging like pita dough off his weak and brittle bones.
I take away the filled receptacle.
The doctors say its something called ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that inflames the inner lining of the large intestine. Diarrhea follows, killing skin cells around the colon. Open sores appear in their wake, and usually burst. Then the real fun begins, the excrement a dark, muddy red, camouflaged by blood and pus. You don’t want to eat. You’re always tired, but can never fall asleep. You lose copious amounts of weight. Sometimes, your eyes inflame, just like his are now; useless, jelly orbs. He also has come-and-go rashes. Today’s a bit nicer day.
The disease usually isn’t fatal. That is, unless you’re 93. His body is just too tired, and executing rapid shutdown. Like a failed NASA launch.
"I always used to ask Quinn what Heaven would look like," he says. "I used to ask him all the time."
"What did he say?"
He shrugs. "Nothing. He’d shrug, and look right back down at his Bible. When we weren’t out on the battlefield, dragging stiffs to cover, or sleeping, he was reading that book, completely invested."
"Did you ever read it?"
"I tried," he chuckles. "Quinn used to give me shit for not reading it correctly. Its like…how many different ways are there to read a book?"
He turns to the right, and looks out the window to the rain. It hasn't slowed at all.
"What happened to Quinn?" I ask.
He turns back to face me. His useless, nearly blind eyes, the ones swollen and inflamed by ulcerative colitis, bleed tears, slicking his face like icy sweat. His lip quivers, and his once pale face is flushed a deep red. I think back to graduation, and seeing those big drips of salt water that looked like they were oozing from a leaky faucet.
"Grandpa."
"Quinn," he says. "Quinn almost had me convinced."
The base camp steams with the smells of rotten clothes, sweat, and slightly spoiled meat. They've been choking it down anyway, forfeiting cleanliness and hygiene just so they can keep something in their stomach. Potatoes lie in huge piles, shiny and unpeeled. Sandbags are stacked in the corners, caked with dirt. Some with blood.
Flashes of olive green criss cross the muddy ground, some wearing boots, some stacked on top of grooved, rubber tires. Fire seems to come up from underneath the ground, bursting in hiccoughs of Hell, evaporating in the rain, falling, screams replacing them. The air is a crude mist of blood and moisture and smoke, a chalky familiarity that still renders men bent over and vomiting.
Fires burn inside the camp and out of it, even in the rain, oil and napalm striking back in an unholy war of the elements. Tents flap in the biting wind, tattered and ripped, looking like the garments of a corpse. Gunfire crackles like bubble wrap, quick and sudden. Blood flows through the mud with the rainwater, turning the ground into a swirling, chunky stew.
They huddle in the midst of it, hands over their heads, watching for the fallen.
Quinn points.
"There."
They crawl, the mud/blood paste collecting on their elbows, chests, and legs. He lets Quinn lead because he hasn’t seen who has fallen yet. Quinn seems to be better than he is at finding these corpses that used to be men. Men with opinions, thoughts, families and flaws.
They crawl parallel to the sandbag wall, hearing the mild piffs and whines of bullets as they travel over their head or bury themselves in one of the thin barriers. Quinn is muttering, fingering rosary beads that seem to be surgically fused to his hand. He's muttering something in Latin. Over and over.
"De Profundis clamo ad te Domine," he's almost whispering it, like it's supposed to be a secret. "Sano Domine. De Profundis..."
Gunfire.
Explosions
Screams.
Quinn's icy whisper.
These are the constants of the day, accompanied by the footsteps of rainfall. He'll come to hate the rain after this war. He'll never be able to separate it with those sounds of Hell he heard that day.
The day Quinn died.
They come upon a corpse, almost sinking in the mud. Part of the head is missing, pink and red and white sticking through the hole like a basket of rotten fruit. The mouth is frozen open, as if in the middle of a prayer. The remaining hazel eye stares, unblinking, while raindrops break against it. Quinn looks at the dead man, crosses himself, and starts praying. Quinn's Latin always seem to surface when he's traumatized. It's like his own unique strain of Tourette's.
"Pater noster," he says. "Qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum."
Grandpa doesn't close his eyes, but rather stares at Quinn, this helmet-donning priest. The one whose Bible is soaked, and who mutters Latin when he's scared or talking to God. The God grandpa can't see, especially now, with so many dying in the rain.
And Quinn continues: "Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra,"
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Grandpa sheds his first tear of the day at that line. Crouched in a fetal position against these sandbags, covering his head, breathing the smells of blood and shit and death. Huddling at the side of a dead man, trying to imagine that this is dignified. His eyes lock on the rusty, still dogtags; the ones he'll have to pull later.
"Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris," Quinn says, his breath catching in his throat.
No matter how many times they've done this, Quinn's voice always cracks at this part.
Forgive us our trespasses.
Quinn once told grandpa that God loved the Nazis just as much as he loved the Alliance. That He loved Hitler just as much as He loved President Roosevelt. That it broke His heart to watch His children fight. Like most people, Grandpa can't understand that.
"Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a..."
Quinn's made the mistake of raising one of his hands for the last part. An Italian's bullet finds it, going through his hand, and disappearing into the gray of the camp. In a reflex, Quinn sits farther up, looking at his hand. Grandpa screams.
Quinn's body shudders, bullets from a distant machine gun ripping into him like a hive of angry bees. With every hit, comes a dull thud, accompanied by a spray of red and patches of clothing. They flutter to the ground, slow and spiraling. Grandpa dives, tackling Quinn's seizing body, bringing him down into the mud with a grunting splash. In the middle of this maneuver, a grenade explodes nearby, shrapnel tearing through his clothing, burning the skin of his buttocks and back. He shrieks, smacking his now smoking clothing as rainwater seeps in, cooling the wound and fusing the deli-thin slices of metal to his body.
Now, behind another sandbag barrier, Grandpa lies next to the fallen priest. He looks at his open mouth, and sees his eyes as Quinn turns his head to him. His lip quivers, and his eyes are wide. And for the first time, Grandpa sees something in Quinn he's never seen before.
Fear. Raw and thick.
"P-please," Quinn stutters, blood spurting from his paling lips. "Don't let me..."
His eyes go still, and his body shudders for a final time, leaving Grandpa alone, the echoes of Quinn's prayer now suffocating under a blanket of cold, bloody mud. He lies there for a long time, pretending to be dead, staring at the gray above. For the longest time, he doesn't move, secretly alive, occasionally turning to stare into Quinn's blank, hazel eyes, and wondering where he's gone to.
And wondering why Quinn, of all people, was so afraid to die.
His face is stained, wadded up tissues at the foot of his bed. I gather them up, one by one, and place them in the waste can. I sit and stare at him, my eyes misty, too.
"It just...if Heaven is so great then why..."
My Bible seems buried in my bag now, an artifact of a hopeless, clueless kid.
"I don't know," he says, staring back out the window.
I sit there, my fingers twiddling around each other. I glance at the clock. Nine minutes. Nine minutes until I have to leave this lonely withered man to his thoughts. And you know what? I've got nothing. My mind is bare, and smothered in spider webs.
"I miss him," Grandpa says. "If he were here still, you might be preaching to the choir."
And it's then that a thought occurs to me. I stand, muscle my backpack over my shoulders and walk to his bedside. I take his gnarled, bark-like hand in my own and squeeze it. He turns, and smiles.
"So nothing, huh?" he says.
"Just one thing," I say. "From now on, whenever you think about Quinn, I don't want you to think about him as a man that was afraid to die."
"Oh no?" he asks.
"No," I say. "In your entire life, has it ever occurred to you that maybe Quinn was ust afraid of leaving you alone? That he didn't feel like he was finished with you yet?"
He's silent, but smiles.
"See ya," I say.
I turn and leave the room. And somehow, as I leave, I feel Quinn's whisper finish that Latin prayer, breaking through the years of doubt this ancient man used to carry. And somehow, I feel the roles have reversed between my grandfather and I, if only for a second.
I feel like, for once, I've drawn a fire truck for the little, bleeding boy that only wants to feel like he isn't alone.
The one that's fallen, and only wants to feel like he can fly again.
Well, sort of. Not like hair hair. Random patches more or less, like some reject cheetah, soft and puckered and gray, on pale, tissue paper skin. It’s different now.
If we’re going to stick to the animal analogies, and I guess we could, I’ll say that those patches have either gone extinct or migrated to other pastures, leaving a shiny mound with a light slather of sweat and dime-sized freckles behind them. These freckles look like melanoma, but they’re not.
He’s shrunk, too. Significantly, in fact. Before he came here, he’d remarked to me that his ass felt like a couple of deflated balloons, withered and stretched. He told me he’d lost thirty pounds. Maybe 35. I can never remember. Seems to me he never can either, especially lately.
His skin sags in doughy clumps, collecting at the ends of his fingers, and around his wrists and elbows, mashed together. They move if he swings his arms when he walks. They’re like tiny New Years Eve parties, all going on at once, but only if he’s moving that glass of vodka to his lips, or laughing at some story he’s telling about the 40s. It did it once when he cried, too. That was at my high school graduation. I hugged him then, big, sharp tears belching from his eyes. In truth, I cried a little, too. No one saw it, though.
When I cry, its quick. A couple tears and I bounce back.
With him, it’s different. That day, I wanted to ask him if he wouldn’t mind never crying in front of me again. Some days I have to resurrect that whole day just to reassure myself that I never actually said that.
"During the war, I got shot in the ass," he says.
My arms are folded, running creases into my white dress shirt. My tie has Dilbert characters on it; something I got from my brother as a joke. I wear it because I’m too lazy and tasteless to go buy a decent one. My shoulder bag rests on the tiled floor, propped against the far wall, perpendicular to the bathroom.
I’m flipping through a two-week old edition of Time, skipping over world events and scientific studies about sleep to get right to the entertainment reviews. I freeze in mid-page turn and glance up.
"Excuse me?"
He nods, his eyes front, staring at some Friends rerun on the TV. He’s drawn the blinds because he hates the rain. Its more than enough that he can hear it, that damp pitter-patter of tiny, aqueous farts. He turns his head sideways, peering through the octopus tangle of tubes and catheters, all of them dodging around each other like tiny roller coasters.
Most men this age will talk about the war for hours. They still have their uniform, adorned with patches and pins. The fabric is frayed and old, but they wear it anyway. To their grandkids graduation. To church. A lot of them demand to be buried in it. They choose to define themselves through an event that capped 61 years ago. After the end of the war, life didn’t begin. It stopped. Its like those former jocks that pump gas or bag groceries and wear their letterman’s jacket to bars, "Class of 1980" stitched beneath their school mascot on the back.
Grandpa is of a different breed. In fact, he doesn’t talk about those years at all. While fortunate men were getting shot, priests donning helmets praying over their dying bodies, he was the one pulling these twitching, bloodied corpses to safety. He pulled their dog tags.
Collected their belongings.
Wrote to their families.
You know those people that apologize for everything? My grandpa has been the exact opposite for 2/3 of his life.
"Yeah," he says. "I forget where it was, exactly. Libya or something. The Italians wanted Crete really bad. I don’t remember if the Nazis were there or not. Anyway, it was a grenade. Shrapnel went right up my ass. So you can imagine that was pretty much it for me."
I turn back to my magazine and pretend to read.
And I wonder why I’m so afraid.
It doesn’t matter where you are when you hear someone in your family’s dying. Nothing prepares you for it.
I was at lunch. Some foo foo Greek place if I can remember. Great gyros. My phone rang, and I answered it.
"Hello?"
It was my mom. I could tell even though I hadn't seen the caller ID. Whenever it's her, and something happened, there's always a five-second pause. I can set my watch by it. That day, she did it again.
"What's going on, Mom?"
There was a sigh.
"Your grandfather had to go back to the hospital."
I bit into my gyro, chewed it. I looked at a homeless man across the street, an ancient cardboard sign propped against the wall next to him. He had a dog, too, I think. Some kind of lab, dirty as hell. Even from this considerable distance I could tell how malnourished it was.
"Uh huh," I said.
"More bleeding again," she said. "It was really bad this time."
"How's Gram?"
"Calm," she said. "As usual. Her voice never even cracked when she was on the phone with me."
A waiter came by and refilled my water glass. I nodded, and made a sign for writing with my left hand. He nodded, and left to get my check.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
That pause again. Sometimes, like this time, it was insufferable, like being last in line at college to see what you got on a final exam.
"It looks like this might be the one," she said.
"You said that last time."
"Well," she said. "That was just me preparing for the worst."
"How do I know this one's different?"
"The doctors said they can't really do anything else."
Then it was my turn to pause. Then it was my turn to...be insufferable.
"Does he know?" I said finally.
"Yeah," she said.
"And?"
"He kind of was expecting it,"
I looked at the homeless guy and his dog again; my silent denial. My proof that I cared more than I wanted to. Like my buying some diseased, filthy stranger a sandwich and a Coke would somehow grant me a few more hours with my dying grandpa. My own shameless way of pleading with God.
"When?" I asked.
"They think probably a week," she said.
The waiter came back and set down that black booklet. I glanced at it, but my eyes returned to the homeless man. I pictured him in a pressed pinstripe suit, with a haircut and a shave and a briefcase. I pictured his dog as fat and hyper, the kind that begs at the dinner table with small whines. Spoiled all to hell.
"You should probably go see him," she said.
"I know," I said. "I want to."
"Are you okay?"
"No," I said.
"Religion never made sense to me," he says. "If I was to believe in a system that incriminated me as a failure from the beginning, it would mean that nothing I did was ever good enough."
There's a Bible in my bag, and it's like part of me has forgotten about it. It's become a genie, only coming out when I want it to.
Instead: "Huh?"
He chuckles, and hits mute on the remote. The show's right in the middle of a joke about Chandler being whacky.
"I know what you've been thinking about since the moment you came in," he says.
We all have things we wish we could change about ourselves. Mine is that I wouldn't be so obvious. With everything.
I shrug.
"So," he says. "We haven't had this conversation in a long time."
I feel like I should be wearing a mask. I want a shower. All these damn wires and cords going this way and that around his tissue paper body, the truest spider web I've ever seen, the arachnid covered in black robes and holding a scythe, waiting. At least in all the clichéd versions.
"No," I say. "We haven't."
He sighs, and stares at the wall. "Did your mom put you up to this?"
"No," I say.
"Do you think that everyone who doesn't accept Jesus Christ goes to Hell?" I asked.
I had paid already, but continued to sit, the homeless man (now Homeless Joe in my mind, I have a habit of naming things) my only friend. I called his dog Falcor, like the Luck Dragon from "The Neverending Story."
"No," she said.
"Why not?"
"Well...because the minute that I start making up God's mind for Him, He becomes a serial killer instead of a superhero," she says. "That's not the God I've grown up with."
Someone gave Homeless Joe a dollar, and he tucked it into the worn pocket on the front of his tweed jacket, something that looked like it belonged on a scarecrow in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
"I don't get it," I said.
"If it was up to me, the only people that would go to hell would be murderers, child molesters, and rapists. Oh, the 9-11 hijackers, too."
"Yeah," I said. "Dad said abortion doctors."
"He would."
Divorced parents are funny. They make it a point to illustrate their disagreements on absolutely everything.
"The point is," she continues. "It's not up to me. That's all I'm saying."
"Then I guess..."
"Ryan," she said. "Do you honestly believe that this life is the only place we get a chance for a relationship with God?"
"I don't know," I said. "I mean...I've been taught..."
"By men," she said.
"I guess," I said. "I still don't understand that whole serial killer thing you said."
"Superman saves the lives of those that reject him," she said. "You think that...um..."
"Lex Luthor, mom," I said.
"Right. The bald guy."
"Yeah."
"Yeah, you think he would save someone that doubted him? Even hated him?" she asks.
"Probably not."
"Don't put limits on God's mercy," she said.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Always."
"He's your dad," I said. "And you don't seem worried at all."
"I never really knew him, Ryan."
"What if you had?"
A pause. I check on Homeless Joe and Falcor, and see that they're sleeping. I anticipate my gentle placement of a sandwich and Coke near him, as well as a big can of Chunky Alpo. For a moment, I forget about my grandfather's rapidly approaching death, and think instead of Homeless Joe's stained smile of appreciation. I think about how much better of a person I will be for having helped him. How God will tilt His head to the side and smile, and how He'll grant me my unspoken wish of getting my grandfather to go up instead of down. How He'll make an exception...just this once. How I've earned such a favor.
Talk about putting limits on God. I can be a bastard at times. Really.
"I...I don't know," she said.
The nurse brought him some kind of puree a couple minutes ago. Yogurt and bananas and strawberries. He drinks it through a straw in toddler's slurps, cracking and hollow, almost an echo in the clear glass stained pink from the flecks of fruit and dairy curds. The corners of his mouth are slicked shiny and red. I grab a napkin from his tray and wipe it away. He chuckles.
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
"I just got it," he says.
"What?”
"I know who you remind me of," he says. "I've been trying to figure it out the whole time, and it just came to me."
"Alright," completely unenthused, complete heartbreak trying to mask itself as boredom.
"I haven't thought about Quinn in a long time," he says.
He takes another irritating slurp of his juice, staring at the far wall. I stare too, trying to home in on the particular white patch he's purposely blurring with his poor, gray eyes. A bit of wet starts to crawl out of the corner of his eye, but I make it a point to ignore it. Everyone keeps telling me how his eyes are damn near useless, now just deflating spheres that were once gateways to God's illustrations.
He used to draw me pictures. I doubt he could now.
I was three the first time he drew me a fire truck. I also had stitches. The former resulted from the latter, a present to a stupid kid that thought he was Superman and that clear glass doors were meant to be shattered. Not opened. I remember that day, a cotton, red towel around my neck, warm and fresh from the dryer, clothes pinned in the front. Just that, and a white shirt, and Sesame Street underwear. Truly ready for lift-off. But, all heroes must fall. My Kryptonite came in the form of something invisible, splitting open my chin all the way across, smearing the solid mass a chunky, cherry red.
I got to come home after the hospital. An empty Happy Meal box in my fist that I would undoubtedly turn into a fort for my superheroes, I walked up the stairs. I was halfway past the study when I heard him call me.
"Hey, kid!"
I stopped and looked into the room. He sat there in a leather chair at my dad's desk, a stamp on his forefinger held closely to the underside of a magnifying glass. He was round, and wore a red and black checked sweater vest, gray hair sprouting like so many icy blades of grass on his head.
"And just what in the world happened to you?"
It's funny how learning new things about psychology can completely reshape our memories. Then, he was a genuinely concerned old man, bewildered and shocked and willing to do anything to help. Now, I see him playing coy, knowing all the points of my epic battle with the glass door, but forfeiting a shake of the head to make a toddler feel like a tough guy again.
"I bet you got in a fight, didn't ya?"
I giggled: "Grandpa..."
"Did you win? I bet you did, didn't ya? I'd hate to see the other guy if you look like this!"
I laughed, and ran to his lap, hopping up as easily as if I'd had the assistance of an Olympic springboard. Now looking at the desk, I saw him push aside his stamp and magnifying glass, and pull a blank sheet of paper into its place. Then, with a felt tip pen, he began to sketch an outline.
"What is it?" I asked.
"What do you think it is?"
I stared, taking every line, every nuance in. Eventually, it came to me. What was once a series of rectangles became a...
"Fire engine!" I screamed, bouncing on his knee.
He laughed and continued his drawing. With every part came an explanation. What certain hoses did. What gauges read what on the side. The vehicles top speed. Etc. All these random factoids accompanying my drawing just so it would be all the more real.
At one point, I turned around to stare at him. For a moment, he didn’t see it, his eyes scrunched in concentration, his wrinkled, velvet hands pushing this black felt tip pen across the page. This sacrifice of time for an injured grandson. Even then, I remember thinking how hard it would be to let him go. That thought faded, quickly replaced by naivety. He finished, and handed me the finished project. He pointed down on the page at a stick figure in the cab, hardhat pulled down over its pen stroke eyes.
"That’s you, kiddo," he said.
I took it in my hands and hopped down off his lap, slowly pacing out of the room to the hall. I didn’t even feel my stitches anymore.
"Hey."
I turned. He sat there, a grin creeping across his face.
"Take care of that for me," he said. "I don’t let too many people take it out for a spin."
I left the room, and promptly began my second wind as Superman.
Sans the towel.
"Quinn used to say that God hasn’t ever stopped talking," he says. "That we just can’t hear Him very well because of our contentment with worldly things."
He finishes his puree and sets it aside, wiping the creamed remains from his lips, smearing his wrist and forearm a pale, flamingo pink. He points at his bedpan.
"Bring it closer, will you?"
I bring it to him, and he snatches it from my fingers. Without so much as a blink, he vomits into the receptacle. There is no strain or gagging sound. He simply parts his lips like an opened envelope, and lets a wave of beige colored phlegm slip out. It plops in the pan like pancake batter, bubbly and thick.
I jump to his rescue, my hand flying underneath the pan.
"Are you..."
He chuckles. "I’m fine. It happens sometimes. Better than the other option."
He slides his arm across his face again. When he’s done, he has two different colored smears across his arm, skin hanging like pita dough off his weak and brittle bones.
I take away the filled receptacle.
The doctors say its something called ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that inflames the inner lining of the large intestine. Diarrhea follows, killing skin cells around the colon. Open sores appear in their wake, and usually burst. Then the real fun begins, the excrement a dark, muddy red, camouflaged by blood and pus. You don’t want to eat. You’re always tired, but can never fall asleep. You lose copious amounts of weight. Sometimes, your eyes inflame, just like his are now; useless, jelly orbs. He also has come-and-go rashes. Today’s a bit nicer day.
The disease usually isn’t fatal. That is, unless you’re 93. His body is just too tired, and executing rapid shutdown. Like a failed NASA launch.
"I always used to ask Quinn what Heaven would look like," he says. "I used to ask him all the time."
"What did he say?"
He shrugs. "Nothing. He’d shrug, and look right back down at his Bible. When we weren’t out on the battlefield, dragging stiffs to cover, or sleeping, he was reading that book, completely invested."
"Did you ever read it?"
"I tried," he chuckles. "Quinn used to give me shit for not reading it correctly. Its like…how many different ways are there to read a book?"
He turns to the right, and looks out the window to the rain. It hasn't slowed at all.
"What happened to Quinn?" I ask.
He turns back to face me. His useless, nearly blind eyes, the ones swollen and inflamed by ulcerative colitis, bleed tears, slicking his face like icy sweat. His lip quivers, and his once pale face is flushed a deep red. I think back to graduation, and seeing those big drips of salt water that looked like they were oozing from a leaky faucet.
"Grandpa."
"Quinn," he says. "Quinn almost had me convinced."
The base camp steams with the smells of rotten clothes, sweat, and slightly spoiled meat. They've been choking it down anyway, forfeiting cleanliness and hygiene just so they can keep something in their stomach. Potatoes lie in huge piles, shiny and unpeeled. Sandbags are stacked in the corners, caked with dirt. Some with blood.
Flashes of olive green criss cross the muddy ground, some wearing boots, some stacked on top of grooved, rubber tires. Fire seems to come up from underneath the ground, bursting in hiccoughs of Hell, evaporating in the rain, falling, screams replacing them. The air is a crude mist of blood and moisture and smoke, a chalky familiarity that still renders men bent over and vomiting.
Fires burn inside the camp and out of it, even in the rain, oil and napalm striking back in an unholy war of the elements. Tents flap in the biting wind, tattered and ripped, looking like the garments of a corpse. Gunfire crackles like bubble wrap, quick and sudden. Blood flows through the mud with the rainwater, turning the ground into a swirling, chunky stew.
They huddle in the midst of it, hands over their heads, watching for the fallen.
Quinn points.
"There."
They crawl, the mud/blood paste collecting on their elbows, chests, and legs. He lets Quinn lead because he hasn’t seen who has fallen yet. Quinn seems to be better than he is at finding these corpses that used to be men. Men with opinions, thoughts, families and flaws.
They crawl parallel to the sandbag wall, hearing the mild piffs and whines of bullets as they travel over their head or bury themselves in one of the thin barriers. Quinn is muttering, fingering rosary beads that seem to be surgically fused to his hand. He's muttering something in Latin. Over and over.
"De Profundis clamo ad te Domine," he's almost whispering it, like it's supposed to be a secret. "Sano Domine. De Profundis..."
Gunfire.
Explosions
Screams.
Quinn's icy whisper.
These are the constants of the day, accompanied by the footsteps of rainfall. He'll come to hate the rain after this war. He'll never be able to separate it with those sounds of Hell he heard that day.
The day Quinn died.
They come upon a corpse, almost sinking in the mud. Part of the head is missing, pink and red and white sticking through the hole like a basket of rotten fruit. The mouth is frozen open, as if in the middle of a prayer. The remaining hazel eye stares, unblinking, while raindrops break against it. Quinn looks at the dead man, crosses himself, and starts praying. Quinn's Latin always seem to surface when he's traumatized. It's like his own unique strain of Tourette's.
"Pater noster," he says. "Qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum."
Grandpa doesn't close his eyes, but rather stares at Quinn, this helmet-donning priest. The one whose Bible is soaked, and who mutters Latin when he's scared or talking to God. The God grandpa can't see, especially now, with so many dying in the rain.
And Quinn continues: "Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra,"
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Grandpa sheds his first tear of the day at that line. Crouched in a fetal position against these sandbags, covering his head, breathing the smells of blood and shit and death. Huddling at the side of a dead man, trying to imagine that this is dignified. His eyes lock on the rusty, still dogtags; the ones he'll have to pull later.
"Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris," Quinn says, his breath catching in his throat.
No matter how many times they've done this, Quinn's voice always cracks at this part.
Forgive us our trespasses.
Quinn once told grandpa that God loved the Nazis just as much as he loved the Alliance. That He loved Hitler just as much as He loved President Roosevelt. That it broke His heart to watch His children fight. Like most people, Grandpa can't understand that.
"Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a..."
Quinn's made the mistake of raising one of his hands for the last part. An Italian's bullet finds it, going through his hand, and disappearing into the gray of the camp. In a reflex, Quinn sits farther up, looking at his hand. Grandpa screams.
Quinn's body shudders, bullets from a distant machine gun ripping into him like a hive of angry bees. With every hit, comes a dull thud, accompanied by a spray of red and patches of clothing. They flutter to the ground, slow and spiraling. Grandpa dives, tackling Quinn's seizing body, bringing him down into the mud with a grunting splash. In the middle of this maneuver, a grenade explodes nearby, shrapnel tearing through his clothing, burning the skin of his buttocks and back. He shrieks, smacking his now smoking clothing as rainwater seeps in, cooling the wound and fusing the deli-thin slices of metal to his body.
Now, behind another sandbag barrier, Grandpa lies next to the fallen priest. He looks at his open mouth, and sees his eyes as Quinn turns his head to him. His lip quivers, and his eyes are wide. And for the first time, Grandpa sees something in Quinn he's never seen before.
Fear. Raw and thick.
"P-please," Quinn stutters, blood spurting from his paling lips. "Don't let me..."
His eyes go still, and his body shudders for a final time, leaving Grandpa alone, the echoes of Quinn's prayer now suffocating under a blanket of cold, bloody mud. He lies there for a long time, pretending to be dead, staring at the gray above. For the longest time, he doesn't move, secretly alive, occasionally turning to stare into Quinn's blank, hazel eyes, and wondering where he's gone to.
And wondering why Quinn, of all people, was so afraid to die.
His face is stained, wadded up tissues at the foot of his bed. I gather them up, one by one, and place them in the waste can. I sit and stare at him, my eyes misty, too.
"It just...if Heaven is so great then why..."
My Bible seems buried in my bag now, an artifact of a hopeless, clueless kid.
"I don't know," he says, staring back out the window.
I sit there, my fingers twiddling around each other. I glance at the clock. Nine minutes. Nine minutes until I have to leave this lonely withered man to his thoughts. And you know what? I've got nothing. My mind is bare, and smothered in spider webs.
"I miss him," Grandpa says. "If he were here still, you might be preaching to the choir."
And it's then that a thought occurs to me. I stand, muscle my backpack over my shoulders and walk to his bedside. I take his gnarled, bark-like hand in my own and squeeze it. He turns, and smiles.
"So nothing, huh?" he says.
"Just one thing," I say. "From now on, whenever you think about Quinn, I don't want you to think about him as a man that was afraid to die."
"Oh no?" he asks.
"No," I say. "In your entire life, has it ever occurred to you that maybe Quinn was ust afraid of leaving you alone? That he didn't feel like he was finished with you yet?"
He's silent, but smiles.
"See ya," I say.
I turn and leave the room. And somehow, as I leave, I feel Quinn's whisper finish that Latin prayer, breaking through the years of doubt this ancient man used to carry. And somehow, I feel the roles have reversed between my grandfather and I, if only for a second.
I feel like, for once, I've drawn a fire truck for the little, bleeding boy that only wants to feel like he isn't alone.
The one that's fallen, and only wants to feel like he can fly again.
