Greetings, yogi, my father said.
I still didn’t open my eyes. I’m watching stars, I said, the galactic firmament exploding on the backs of my eyelids. Also, I said, it’s snowing.
On the stars? my father said.
Outside, Daddy. Outside it’s snowing. The stars are shooting around.
You remind me of someone, he said.
I opened my eyes just a bit and observed him. I was used to being talked to this way and knew to wait for the punch line.
Yeah? I said, yawning out the word.
One of the popes. Pius the Twelfth. This was in 1958, my father said.
Were you alive then? I said.
I was, but you weren’t.
I know I wasn’t alive then.
Pope Pius had been kept awake for days and days by a strange ailment, and when he found himself unable to address the papal audience, he took to his bed.
And he finally went to sleep?
Nope. Couldn’t sleep.
How come?
The strange ailment.
What’s an ailment?
A sickness. He had a debilitating case of the hiccups.
What’s debilitating?
Means he couldn’t walk or talk or eat or sleep. He was sick from hiccups.
Hm, I said.
It’s true. It’s a documented case.
No he wasn’t, I said. My eyes were wide open.
He made a motion to indicate that he was about to return to his office to locate supporting materials.
No! I said. Really? He couldn’t stop?
Couldn’t stop. And you know how they tried to cure him?
They tickled him, I said. They tickled him until he peed!
They should have. Instead they hung him upside down.
No they didn’t, I shouted. They did? Did they?
They really did. They strapped him in and hung him like a bat.
And it cured him?
Nope, he said.
What happened?
He died.
Nooo, Daddy, no, he didn’t! I was laughing, sputtering, gasping for air, my face flushed, my body shaking. The laugh transformed into a rasping sound that pitched up into a shriek as my fingers slipped. My head struck the bench before my father had even coiled to leap, my body crumpling as my hands scratched at the wood, twisted, unable to grip. My back ratcheted over the bench’s lip. He managed then to dive for me, flat-out, making a play for a grounder, getting to me just in time to be of no assistance whatsoever. Kneeling on the floor, the rug a bulldog wrinkle beneath the bench, he gathered me up in his arms, and my first gulp of air gave me strength to land a fist on his cheek, a shot at the injustice of my fate, ejecting a lumpy silver crown from his molar.
Mah! he said.
The crown went skittering across the floor toward the heating grate, an ornate grille underneath the bench, which in the winter was hot as a waffle iron, a year-round consumer of marbles, pennies, walnuts, whatever the young residents of the Apelles found to feed clankingly to the furnaces.
Now it had got his crown. I hadn’t meant to hit him, only to thrash against the embarrassment and the pain in my head, and I tried to restrain my sobs, fighting against my lungs, hitching for air in an attempt to silence myself so I could hear his silver tooth’s plinking descent to the furnace. Struggling free, I wriggled across the floor and laid an ear close to the grate.
I can hear it, I said.
You hit me, he said—louder, he claimed later, than he’d meant to. But he hadn’t meant to be gentle about it.
I curled up under the bench and started to cry again. I want Mommy, I wailed, covering my face and crying into the grate, my voice joining the murmur chorus living in the vents. Sometimes, in a coincidence of pneumatics and logistics, a wife on the seventh floor would hear her husband call, I’m home! only to find the foyer empty when she arrived bearing his tumbler of scotch, while a husband on the eleventh stood alone in his, raincoat draped over his arm, briefcase in hand, wondering where the hell his drink was.
Mothers on four adjacent floors snapped to attention.
Come here, kid, he said, pulling on my ankle. His hand was cold against the band of exposed skin between frilly white sock and blue cotton legging, and entirely encircled my ankle. I kicked as I slid across the parquet toward him.
You’re going to burn your face off.
No, I’m not, I said. My chest was full of folded blankets. I sucked in a hitching breath.
Handkerchief, I heaved. Even at six, I was anything but a savage. Logical as an equation, I wouldn’t sacrifice my dignity on the altar of self-pity, a characteristic my father claimed to admire. He extracted the handkerchief from his pocket and I took it from his hand. The cloth was embroidered on three corners with blue hearts, a gift from my mother, a coded message only three cryptologists in the world could ever have deciphered. Red thread ran from each corner and met at the center. The summer before, we’d stood at the vertex of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona beneath a sky the exact color of indigo she’d chosen for the hearts. We’d taken the train because my father had refused to fly.
I blew an oyster into it.
What happened? My mother had appeared silently behind him, crouching down, laying a hand on my head, the other on his shoulder.
Daddy made me fall down, I said.
Bad Dad, she said, pulling at my limbs. Your bones are still there. I don’t see any blood. No blood, no Band-Aid.
The presence or absence of O negative was the yardstick by
