Thursday – 8:15 A.M.
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When the morning arrives, it comes with light sun showers and a dull pain that starts in the pit of your stomach and seems to wrap its way around your ribs to the small of your back. You choose to ignore the rain, which you know will subside before it’s time to leave the house, though you can’t quite dismiss the aching–not because it’s any more intense than the weather, but because you can’t be so sure that it will pass. You don’t recognize this feeling.
You make your way to the shower and as the water runs down your head, you run your fingers over your belly, tracing the tendrils of this unfamiliar tenderness. You think that perhaps you pulled a gut muscle moving books in the back room or maybe you ate a bad oyster for dinner. But try as you might, you can’t identify the source, not with any certainty. You knead the area with the heel of your hand, lubricating it with a froth of castile soap that fills the foggy bathroom with the smell of peppermint but does little to alleviate the soreness. After rubbing the wetness from the rest of your body, you dab the towel around your abdomen gingerly, telling yourself that the heat has helped, that surely the pain, like the rain, will pass any time now.
Dressing for the day, you sense it flaring like light in a furnace as you lift your knees and lower your feet into each pant leg, an unsavory warmth that blossoms when you bend at the waist to tie your shoes. Your wife observes that you look pale and flushed at the same time and asks if you’re feeling alright. You blame the oysters and eat an antacid along with a handful of expired ibuprofen. She cares for you in a way that you are not accustomed to. Her affections are attentive, and even after all these years, it still seems a bit easier for you not to be concerned. But you don’t take the care for granted. You tell her not to worry. You tell yourself not to worry. You would like to believe the sound of your own voice.
It’s quiet in the newsroom. Nothing is breaking and several staff writers have called out with the sort of excuses that sound like vague fabrications: flat tires and family matters and stomach bugs. It occurs to you that you might have done well to take a sick day yourself. After all, you’ve accumulated far more time off than you’ve taken and as the morning crawls towards midday, you find yourself squirming in your chair, struggling to find a position that’s comfortable. You also find yourself struggling to concentrate on weekly newsletters and deadlines in the middle distance. Every time you start a sentence, the words veer away from the thought on the page as your thoughts veer away from the words. Instead of thinking about storm names and saltwater intrusion and the poisoning of the aquifer, your mind keeps wandering toward the unknown name of this intrusive sensation.
Your editor informs you that an artist you interviewed earlier in the year has died and asks you to write up an obit. You ask who and when she tells you that it was Christo, there is a momentary wrenching beneath your ribcage that you try to chalk up to the sadness of losing a stranger you admired. You ask her if it can wait until tomorrow, telling her you can have the copy ready before the Friday edition goes to print in the morning, and she offers a pointed finger and a pithy response. Death doesn’t wait, she tells you, and neither does the news. She has become fond of pithy enumerations of all the things that have as little patience as the news ever since the website was overhauled. She tells you to have the piece ready for digital before she gets back from lunch.
This is fine, you think. The summation of a man’s life, even if he wasn’t a man you knew very well, should be a simple enough task to focus your attention and rein it in from meandering much further. You start with cobbling together a note that holds all the practical details of his existence—or at least all the ones that spring to mind and come to populate a quick search of his name online. This means laying out the facts and figures, numbers and names, honors and failings that serve to create a readily, if not somewhat hastily, sketched outline of a man. After this is complete, you begin the work writing sentences that will connect one end of his life to the other, a ring for these faceted stones of data to sit in.
Several hundred words later, you have a closed band of base metal fitted with a piecemeal of gems that feels complete but incomplete. As you read over your work about his work, there’s a twinge like a hand wringing out your insides and you question whether it’s because these gemstones lack the luster you saw in his eyes. You think that perhaps this is too sparse a semblance of a life to live up to the man who lived it. What was it that pulled his eyes away from the blackboard as a boy and made them see monuments wrapped in great sheets of silver fabric, that drew his hand to sketch vast swathes of pink and gold stretching out over the water? What made him dream the dreams that set him apart, that set him on a path from the dreary streets of Romania, shrouded by an iron curtain, to the lights of Paris and the snows Tokyo and the gentle breezes of Miami? What must it have meant to not only see those dreams realized, to see them welcomed and applauded by the world, but to have realized them with the woman who shared those dreams and that life for decades? And what will the world be like now that their dreams will only remain in the memories and lithographs and obituaries they leave behind?
You answer these questions as best you can and allow the ones you can’t to add complexity to this rendering of a life, adorning a ring that feels a bit brighter, a bit less bare. Reviewing your notes from that first interview and listening to the tape, you hear a lightness in your voice that feels unfamiliar as the weight in your abdomen seems to pull you deeper into the too thin cushion of your office chair. A lighter version of your voice recounts seeing the sheets of pink polypropylene fabric floating around the islands in Biscayne Bay as a little boy, and in a moment of curiosity more personal than professional, that voice asks why pink? That same voice recalls how the color made the everyday seem special, how it made your father’s eyes widen and look different. And after a brief silence, the other voice, which sounded like it had come from some place far away and now sounds like nothing after going somewhere much farther, says the color was a gift. He says that pink was his lover’s favorite and he wanted to show her that she was his favorite.
When your editor finds the obituary in her email, she replies that these sentimental details are superfluous. She reminds you that you don’t get paid by the word or the inch but agrees to publish it as is online—she’ll cut it down for the print edition in the morning.
You choose not to argue and instead recognize your efforts to do justice to a stranger’s legacy, to honor all the meaning a life can have beyond the facts and figures and hasty sketches. You know you should feel proud, and you do, but the pride isn’t as strong or as loud as the worry that has been stalking you since morning, growing noisier as periodic pangs of discomfort have become less periodic. Now it has become a steady drone, still dull but always there, a hard hum fluctuating occasionally into high notes of sharpness accompanied by the bright clarity of fear. You wonder whether the drone will become a siren, blaring and constant and undeniable. You decide to ask for the rest of the day off.
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Friday – 4:55 A.M.
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You can’t sleep. When your alarm sounds in a little over two hours, you won’t need it. Partly this is because the pain has radiated into agony. It no longer pulses, it simply is, and it no longer seems to have a source in your midsection, it’s filled your body with something akin to heat, something that pours out of you and into the sheets even while it makes your teeth chatter. Partly it is because when you got up to relieve yourself three hours ago, gasping when the effort of sitting up made you double over, made you stumble to your knees, bracing yourself on the floor with an elbow as you went momentarily blind, you did not find relief. Instead, you found yourself staining the toilet with a color that was not really blood red, but closer to the hue of a cheap garnet, the foggy, hazy sort that nobody wants to buy, and nobody wants to be gifted. And partly it is because you cannot forget what your wife has forced you to remember.
In the dim scrape of moonlight that filters between gaps in the blinds, you can still hear her telling you to remember your father after asking you to think about seeing a doctor. In truth, you spent much of the preceding day remembering him in flashes, each memory coming like an aftershock to a tremor in your midsection, an echo that appeared suddenly and dissipated just as abruptly. You saw his eyes turning yellow in your rearview mirror as the engine idled on the way home. You knew you should be watching the lights, waiting for them to change color and tell you to move on. Instead, you watched the disquieting color seep into his skin. You remembered how little comfort it brought to see him smile, how much less reassurance there was to be found in that smile after the gums had turned the dark amber of the streetlights, the overripe goldenrod of warning. And then came the trumpeting of angry horns behind you and he was gone again.
But eventually these remembrances began to linger. Now they float like dust particles in the dying light.
You hear the pleading words from your mother, who tells your father to remember his son. You hear the desperation in her voice and the calm in his and you remember wondering if he was as calm as he sounded. You remember him saying the name of the sickness flatly, a name that is known to you but feels perverse and alien in his mouth and in his blood, and you remember the voices going still. You see his smile wear down into a grimace as the calm is replaced by confusion. His half-lidded eyes search the room for a reason, for an explanation of the peaks of bone that have begun to reveal themselves behind his sunken cheeks, for the sudden rasp of his breath, for the tepid film of sweat that stains his sheets the same color your sheets have started to take on in the night.
He never says the words, but his eyes ask why this is happening. They do not widen with wonder anymore, but with something else. They wander between faces and across walls, sluggish yet frantic. You don’t have an answer for the question they beg and perhaps this is why you have trouble meeting his gaze there in the shadows before the dawn, just as you had trouble then and there in the fetid dankness of his bedroom. Or perhaps it’s because he does this silent beckoning with a look of betrayal that you can’t bear to be on the receiving end of—even if it isn’t you he suspects of betraying him. His Judas is the body that’s been with him so much longer than you have and that will follow him into a fire that you cannot. Perhaps it’s precisely because you can’t follow him, because you know you will soon send your father to face the fire alone, that you can’t find it in yourself to face his eyes.
But as the moonlight begins to dwindle between your blurred vision and your crystal-clear hallucinations, you know it isn’t the fire you’re trying to avoid but the fear. You remember seeing your father afraid, something you can’t remember ever having seen before. And even though you never say the words, not then and not now, part of you cries out questioning why. Why do your father’s eyes, the ones that raised you and watched you and made the horizon feel realer for you because he knew, somehow, that it would be okay—even when he couldn’t see the horizon, even when it was wrapped in impossible colors—suddenly look like eyes you’ve never seen before? Why do the knowing eyes of a parent look like the eyes of a child who can’t explain why it hurts or a dog who can’t explain anything at all? Why do they appear so uncomprehending, so lost, so unrecognizable? Why are they screaming?
You can hear your eyes screaming. Your wife stirs next to you and you’re almost certain she can hear it too, just like your mother could hear your father screaming, just as you could hear the screaming even after you stole away from the silent cacophony at his bedside and his burial day to bury yourself in your books and your bylines, in your desire to drown out the answers you could no more deny than he could. You tried for so long not to think about death, about the dying of the ones you loved. What’s the point in dreading the inevitable, you would tell yourself. But now, surrounded once more by that too familiar screaming, you find it difficult to think about life—life beyond this pain, beyond this room of ghosts and shadows, beyond this night that is both fleeting and intractable, all at once too short and too long. What’s the point, you ask yourself, in dwelling on something that doesn’t belong to you?
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Saturday – 6:37 P.M.
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Hands pull at the lungs of an ornate bandoneón, a pulling you cannot hear but can only feel. An arm draws a bow across a cello in time with the somber tango and strings you can’t quite perceive vibrate with longing, with grief, with release. There is an inaudible song playing somewhere, a piece of music you first heard in your father’s study. It was written, he told you, with a degree of hesitation, as a dirge for a child the composer had lost. There are fast measures and slow ones, fierce sections and meditative passages, but all of the notes are melancholic—not simply sad but resigned to an acceptance of what has gone and what’s to come. The notes themselves are far from the suite you find yourself in, starkly lit and strange and awful cold, and yet the melancholia of what’s gone and what’s to come pulls you.
The pointed nose of a butterfly needle pulls another draw of scarlet from your veins as the catheter continues to pour a solution of saline and ciproflaxin and morphine back into your arm. You wonder if this solution is going to lead to a solution. A nurse with a face you think you should recognize but can’t asks if you’d like something to eat and you wrack your brain to remember your last meal. When was the last time you were hungry? While you’re lost looking for last suppers, a candle comes to mind, along with a rose, a perfectly ironed tablecloth, and a regal old waiter with cantilevered posture, a taut bowtie and a mirror-polished scalp. You celebrate your first anniversary by the water. Eleven anniversaries past, you share a porterhouse for two and creamed spinach and a bottle of Bordeaux with a view. Still, your last meal escapes you.
Your wife pulls the nurse aside, asking questions that she doesn’t have the answers to. So many words have passed between you and now, as she speaks words you’ve never heard her use, words like “amyloidosis” and “sepsis” and “multisystem failure,” the sound of her voice pulls you back to words shared over a white tablecloth by the sea.
Then the fingers attached to your wife attach themselves to yours, pulling them gingerly toward her cheeks, wet and trembling. You struggle to focus your eyes and see that she does not look like herself, but rather like a beatified image of the person you have shared the best and the worst parts of a life with. She is not a woman wearing stained sweatpants and worn down by too few hours of sleep, red-eyed and raw-nosed from the roughness of hospital tissues. She is the personification of years shared, of their preciousness. She is so beautiful. You will yourself reflexively to wipe away the tears, to pull the anguish from her face, but none of the tendons you need seem capable of doing your bidding anymore. You try to form a lie and tell her that it’s OK. You try to speak the truth and tell her how grateful you are to have held her hand and to have her holding yours. You try to tell her she is your favorite. But you cannot pull the words up from your chest. You are the one being pulled now.
She tells you not to talk, even if she wants to hear your voice, and she tells you not to fight, even if she aches to see you win. And then all she can say is that she’s sorry, so sorry. You want to tell her there’s nothing to apologize for and nothing to forgive, but you know now that you cannot. Instead, you beg every bone and blood cell and fiber of muscle in your body to force a smile and you hope she sees it. You can tell she does, her eyes treading water that spills over your knuckles with a warmth that breaks your heart. She pulls her eyes from yours and buries them in your palm, forcibly, like a child hoping to disappear under the blankets, like she hopes that she will be able to disappear into you. Then she pulls your hand over her lips, kissing it. It is a long, fierce kiss, so hard it almost seems angry, but you know better. You know she wishes she could pull you into her lips forever, just like you wish you could pull that long moment out into eternity. And you know that this kiss is so hard because you can’t.
Because you are being pulled away. If you had to describe the feeling to her, if you still could, you think you would tell her you are wading, deepening into a gentle river. You don’t know where the river leads or how wide or how long the river is. You don’t know what might be on the opposite bank, though you’ve begun to think you can make out hills in the middle distance and figures waiting beyond the water. You can’t see their faces and there are no voices being carried over the water to you, but still, you get the distinct impression they are waiting. You wonder if they are waiting for you and find the thought comforting.
When your eyes open, one of them, the one that can see, brings you back to an adjustable bed that is bent around your body. You lie limp and see your body as it is, wrapped in plastics and polyester sheets that are devoid of color. You see the details of faces you wish you could comfort. Your wife paces the patches of checkered linoleum, holding a phone in one hand and the vestiges of hope in the other. Her taut posture mirrors the severity in her voice, wound like a wire of braided steel on the verge of splintering. You hear her beckoning, pleading for someone, you do not know who, to save you, to save her, to save the tether between the two from being severed.
Slowly, as if in a dream you can experience but cannot control, you let your head fall towards the corner where your mother sits near a window. Her body is languid, her voice silent, her face vivid in the blood orange of a sunset. She is caught in a distant memory. She recognizes this room and the gauntness of your flesh. The room is different, but the flesh is the same. It is your father’s flesh, her flesh. She does not look back at you.
You wish you could remind her to drink in the warm light that washes over her face. You wish you could still your wife’s footfalls and unwind the steel in her voice and remind her that you don’t need saving because she has already saved you. You wish there was a way to help them understand the river. Your eyes close and behind the darkness, you search for a way to explain that the waters are no longer lapping between your knees but passing through your breast, which itself seems to be made of wind and not bone. You want them to know that the current feels less like it’s pulling, dragging, tearing you away, and more like an embrace. The embrace of the river is not unlike your wife’s or your mother’s, except that it’s like both and like every other embrace you’ve ever missed all at once. And as the water rises and the embrace tightens—not alarmingly, but easily, even affectionately like a hug from your father when you would come home between semesters—you hear voices calling from the other shore.
You wish they could hear the voices, too. If they could, you think maybe they’d know it’s all going to be okay, that the lie you’ve longed to tell them is the truth. You wish they could hear your voice as it joins the others. It sounds lighter.
Then your legs, once again your own, step onto the shore. You can feel a carpet of smooth grass cushioning your feet. Instead of crushing the verdant blades, your soles seem to caress the riverbank with the tender weightlessness of the sun, which you can remember falling across your mother’s cheeks, but can no longer see. Somehow, you know the sun continues to set itself softly upon the opposite edge of the waters.
Travis Cohen Acosta is a Cuban American author and poet born and raised in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Florida International University and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, The South Dakota Review, Litro Magazine, and Slag Glass City, among other publications.