With one finger, Sasha pushed my sunglasses back into place. “Don’t be foolish.”
I’m human. Foolish is what we
If I were to go blind, however, her face would be a sight to sustain me in the lasting blackness.
I leaned across the console and kissed her.
“You smell like coconut,” she said.
“I try.”
I kissed her again.
“You shouldn’t be out in this any longer,” she said firmly.
The sun, half an hour above the sea, was orange and intense, a perpetual thermonuclear holocaust ninety- three million miles removed. In places, the Pacific was molten copper.
“Go, coconut boy. Away with you.”
Shrouded like the Elephant Man, I got out of the Explorer and hurried to the hospital, tucking my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.
I glanced back once. Sasha was watching. She gave me a thumbs-up sign.
3
When I stepped into the hospital, Angela Ferryman was waiting in the corridor. She was a third-floor nurse on the evening shift, and she had come downstairs to greet me.
Angela was a sweet-tempered, pretty woman in her late forties: painfully thin and curiously pale-eyed, as though her dedication to nursing was so ferocious that, by the harsh terms of a devilish bargain, she must give the very substance of herself to ensure her patients’ recoveries. Her wrists seemed too fragile for the work she did, and she moved so lightly and quickly that it was possible to believe that her bones were as hollow as those of birds.
She switched off the overhead fluorescent panels in the corridor ceiling. Then she hugged me.
When I had suffered the illnesses of childhood and adolescence — mumps, flu, chicken pox — but couldn’t be safely treated outside our house, Angela had been the visiting nurse who stopped in daily to check on me. Her fierce, bony hugs were as essential to the conduct of her work as were tongue depressors, thermometers, and syringes.
Nevertheless, this hug frightened more than comforted me, and I said, “Is he?”
“It’s all right, Chris. He’s still holding on. Holding on just for you, I think.”
I went to the emergency stairs nearby. As the stairwell door eased shut behind me, I was aware of Angela switching on the ground-floor corridor lights once more.
The stairwell was not dangerously well-lighted. Even so, I climbed quickly and didn’t remove my sunglasses.
At the head of the stairs, in the third-floor corridor, Seth Cleveland was waiting. He is my father’s doctor, and one of mine. Although tall, with shoulders that seem round and massive enough to wedge in one of the hospital loggia arches, he manages never to be looming over you. He moves with the grace of a much smaller man, and his voice is that of a gentle fairy-tale bear.
“We’re medicating him for pain,” Dr. Cleveland said, turning off the fluorescent panels overhead, “so he’s drifting in and out. But each time he comes around, he asks for you.”
Removing my glasses at last and tucking them in my shirt pocket, I hurried along the wide corridor, past rooms where patients with all manner of maladies, in all stages of illness, either lay insensate or sat before bed trays that held their dinners. Those who saw the corridor lights go off were aware of the reason, and they paused in their eating to stare at me as I passed their open doors.
In Moonlight Bay, I am a reluctant celebrity. Of the twelve thousand full-time residents and the nearly three thousand students at Ashdon College, a private liberal-arts institution that sits on the highest land in town, I am perhaps the only one whose name is known to all. Because of my nocturnal life, however, not every one of my fellow townspeople has seen me.
As I moved along the hall, most of the nurses and nurses’ aides spoke my name or reached out to touch me.
I think they felt close to me not because there was anything especially winning about my personality, not because they loved my father — as, indeed, everyone who knew him loved him — but because they were devoted healers and because I was the ultimate object of their heartfelt desire to nurture and make well. I have been in need of healing all my life, but I am beyond their — or anyone’s — power to cure.
My father was in a semiprivate room. At the moment no patient occupied the second bed.
I hesitated on the threshold. Then with a deep breath that did not fortify me, I went inside, closing the door behind me.
The slats of the venetian blinds were tightly shut. At the periphery of each blind, the glossy white window casings glowed orange with the distilled sunlight of the day’s last half hour.
On the bed nearest the entrance, my father was a shadowy shape. I heard his shallow breathing. When I spoke, he didn’t answer.
He was monitored solely by an electrocardiograph. In order not to disturb him, the audio signal had been silenced; his heartbeat was traced only by a spiking green line of light on a cathode-ray tube.
His pulse was rapid and weak. As I watched, it went through a brief period of arrhythmia, alarming me, before stabilizing again.
In the lower of the two drawers in his nightstand were a butane lighter and a pair of three-inch-diameter bayberry candles in glass cups. The medical staff pretended to be unaware of the presence of these items.
I put the candles on the nightstand.
Because of my limitations, I am granted this dispensation from hospital rules. Otherwise, I would have to sit in utter darkness.
In violation of fire laws, I thumbed the lighter and touched the flame to one wick. Then to the other.
Perhaps my strange celebrity wins me license also. You cannot overestimate the power of celebrity in modern America.
In the flutter of soothing light, my father’s face resolved out of the darkness. His eyes were closed. He was breathing through his open mouth.
At his direction, no heroic efforts were being taken to sustain his life. His breathing was not even assisted by an inhalator.
I took off my jacket and the Mystery Train cap, putting them on a chair provided for visitors.
Standing at his bed, on the side more distant from the candles, I took one of his hands in one of mine. His skin was cool, as thin as parchment. Bony hands. His fingernails were yellow, cracked, as they had never been before.
His name was Steven Snow, and he was a great man. He had never won a war, never made a law, never composed a symphony, never written a famous novel as in his youth he had hoped to do, but he was greater than any general, politician, composer, or prize-winning novelist who had ever lived.
He was great because he was kind. He was great because he was humble, gentle, full of laughter. He had been married to my mother for thirty years, and during that long span of temptation, he had remained faithful to her. His love for her had been so luminous that our house, by necessity dimly lighted in most rooms, was bright in all the ways that mattered. A professor of literature at Ashdon — where Mom had been a professor in the science department — Dad was so beloved by his students that many remained in touch with him decades after leaving his classroom.
Although my affliction had severely circumscribed his life virtually from the day that I was born, when he himself was twenty-eight, he had never once made me feel that he regretted fathering me or that I was anything less than an unmitigated joy and a source of undiluted pride to him. He lived with dignity and without complaint, and he never failed to celebrate what was
Once he had been robust and handsome. Now his body was shrunken and his face was haggard, gray. He looked much older than his fifty-six years. The cancer had spread from his liver to his lymphatic system, then to
