Absolute Zero

A bad move that almost alienated Milt, which she could not afford to do. Now she was smoothing that over; in the meantime, until Milt put Hank in a fancy nursing home, she was working round the clock, playing nurse. And while she was sure that Milt worried about her not sleeping, the real reason he wanted Hank in that home was so he could check on him without running into Earl, whom he despised.

Riiiinggg.

An alarm went off. Every two hours alarms went off. Feeding alarms, turning alarms, range of motion alarms, bathing alarms. She heard Earl coming up the basement stairs.

“Great. Another nice guy who just wants to help out. Oh, I can drop off the Ford, no problem,” Earl said, mimicking Broker’s voice. “I hope him and Allen don’t trip all over each other.”

Earl wore an electric-yellow T-shirt with a War Wolf logo in Day-Glo blue. He’d scissored out the sleeves to show off his biceps. The shirt was a size too small and clung to his torso and wadded around his hips, clearly revealing the deep-cut ripple of his abdominal muscles and the curve of his belly above the tops of his jeans which he wore without underwear and very low on his hips, with a shadow of pubic hair peeking up and over.

Earl was unshaven and his hair was moussed and he was into looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club this week. The stud in his ear and the cannabis shine to his blue eyes had the same tight sparkle. Jolene didn’t really care for Earl swinging his abs back and forth in her kitchen. “You’re losing your pants,” she said.

Earl smiled. “You didn’t used to mind that.”

“Why don’t you grow up,” she said.

“Aren’t we sounding grandiose today,” he quipped back. He knew all the AA jive and where all her buttons were. He’d started patrolling the house, peeking in cabinets and drawers, looking for hidden bottles of vodka.

A static sound between a dry-heaving pant and a raving growl shushed their little spat. The sound came from a white plastic baby monitor on the counter. The monitors were Jolene’s idea; she had placed them throughout the house to help her keep track of Hank.

Earl said, “C’mon, it’s feeding time.”

To him it was a fairy tale. He was Jack and he’d climbed the beanstalk and had stumbled on the mythic goose and now all he had to do was keep the goose alive until it squeezed out the golden egg. Hank’s care and feeding were a serious, round-the-clock commitment.

They went down a flight of circular stairs, through the bedroom, and out on the full-season porch that ran most of the length of the back of the house.

Hank was pink-cheeked and clean shaven, with spittle drooling down his chin. He wore a pair of diapers and a hospital gown and was propped up in a railed Hil-Rom hospital bed, fidgeting slightly back and forth. His neck twitched, his eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. He could move his lips and tongue. The feed bag hung on an IV tree above him and a strap buckled his chest as a precaution against pitching off the bed. Allen said the movements were just spasms, involuntary. Sometimes Hank’s eyes would burn on her so intensely that she was sure he was in there, watching.

Jolene squared her shoulders and went into the room.

Actually, it was good that he lurched around; it gave him a fighting chance against the bedsores. For the last five days she had followed a strict schedule that included turning and repositioning Hank side to side every two hours-feeding and hydrating him, manipulating his arms and legs in passive range-of-motion exercises twice a day, bathing him, constantly swabbing his mouth and gums with a suction wand, and changing his diapers, which Allen referred to as adult pads.

First she wiped his chin and checked his throat. She picked up the electric suction wand and cleaned away excess saliva and mucus from his teeth and gums.

Earl took a can of Ensure from a case of the product, opened it with a church key, and dumped it in the continuously running gravity drip which spiked off the bag that connected to his stomach tube.

He tossed the can at the wastepaper basket by the door. Missed. The empty clattered on the hardwood floor. Earl licked a finger. “Yum, yum. Prune dip, my favorite.”

“Knock it off, Earl,” Jolene said. “And pick up the goddamn can.”

Earl grumbled and retrieved the can and tossed it in the basket, backhanded. “He scores.”

She cut him with a stare.

He sneered back. He didn’t like it when she’d sheared off her hair. Or when she’d brought in the single bed to sleep next to Hank at night. He thought the hair and the single-bed routine were overwrought theatrical gestures.

“Hey, c’mon; we need a little gallows humor to break the mood around here,” he said. Laughing, he backed off and then, goddamn him-just to be coarse, he tipped a few books from the bookcase as he was going out the door, like a mean little kid.

Jolene smoothed a hand through her shorn hair, took a deep breath to steady herself, and, as she swung her eyes around the room, she met her reflection in the mirror framed in the bookshelves. She was sunken-cheeked, haggard. Red around the eyes like a speed freak on a long burn. Still. .

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

She’d known she had it when she was about seven. By the time she got to high school it could ripple over her face like a dark wind.

Even now, strung-out exhausted, she had it. For half a beat she engaged the rare expression before it sparked away. It was something a good photographer had to sneak up on because she couldn’t duplicate it on cue. This was America-so the way you really knew you had it was if you could sell it.

She had logged some shoots and she had a portfolio. She’d been told that, if she put in the work, she could give New York a try. But she kept waking up in cheap rooms with a hangover and Earl in the bed next to her.

And then she met Hank.

Jolene turned from the mirror and studied the wreckage of her husband.

Once she’d thought the worst thing in the world could only happen directly, physically, to her. Now it had happened to someone else, and she was definitely feeling it. She’d cut her hair to honor the emotion.

“That’s a change. You taught me that,” she said under her breath.

As she reached over and eased the sweaty mop of hair away from Hank’s wild eyes she wrinkled her nose. She was getting used to the diaper smell. Dutifully, she changed him, and, as she wiped him clean, she noticed how the muscle tone was already turning to taffy. Her hard old Hank was spreading into a puddle of flesh.

She deposited the diaper in the diaper caddy and kneaded the residue of white talcum powder between her fingers. One of life’s safe things. For a moment, she almost remembered the fragrance from infancy, from before walking and talking. She pursed her lips. “Hank, you tough old fart, now that you’re not here anymore I think I’m starting to appreciate you.”

Chapter Eighteen

He’d grown up fascinated with the war-soaked fiction of Hemingway, James Jones, and Norman Mailer; so, like many wanna-be writers out of that tradition, he’d conducted a love affair with near-death. He’d hung it out there more than most and returned from the edge with a fair scrapbook.

Now he knew he’d just been a tourist.

There was only so much of him left. Left here at least. Portions of him were missing and sometimes he suspected they had moved on to somewhere else.

All he could manage now was the sensation that the inside and the outside were merging; that the things he thought were him were blending slowly with the things that weren’t. He had the distinct feeling that he’d been wearing his skin like a blindfold all his life.

Storms of human weather still took the form of shadows that brought food and nourishment. He vaguely knew the slosh was being inserted into his feeding tube. Inside, he felt his stomach ripple in anticipation and the drool beaded on his tongue but he couldn’t control his tongue, it just crawled around in his mouth, wagging at nothing.