I’m told it’s liberating, relieving oneself of the burden, Erwin.
You’re selling me the cure?
I haven’t spent my life in courtrooms without learning a thing or two about a man’s conscience.
No one’s ever accused me of having one of those, my father said. Why don’t you have a neurologist administer the test?
A neurologist would want clinical justification, and they’d just put me in front of some standardized test, anyway. More importantly, a neurologist would inform my family, and that can’t be allowed.
And why don’t you just write up a multiple-choice test and grade it yourself?
You don’t think that’s my preference?
So?
Have you listened to anything I’ve said? When the mind starts to go—when it’s hurtling downhill faster than I can run—I won’t be able to keep the schedule. I won’t remember to stay within the time limits. I don’t trust that I’ll even remember to do it in the first place. I need an interrogator.
I see, said my father.
I am your way out, Albert said. I will be the bottomless hole you can pitch your transgressions into. You can confess the sin without confessing the sin.
Why don’t I just go down to the coma ward and tell a vegetable? my father said.
You know that won’t work, Albert said. You need a living, breathing, conscious human being to react. You need the reaction. If I am horrified, if I am shocked by the depths of your depravity, then you’ll know you’ve told the truth. You’ll have dug right down to the root.
I’d rather you just give me a six-pack and thank me for my time.
That’s an option. But out of balance.
Because you need commitment that goes beyond my desire to do a good deed.
Yes.
And once you’ve reached a state of incapacitation and I tell you all my little secrets, then what?
Not complete incapacitation. Incipient incapacitation. When I reach the cusp of forgetting my grandson’s death and my role in it, that’s where we end.
And then what? my father said.
Then your work will be done. The weekly tests will end.
For Christ’s sake, Albert. And then what?
Then I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil. Clear enough? You’ll be legally protected, if that’s what you’re worried about. If I behave in an unusual manner after the evaluation period ends, you’ll have nothing to concern yourself about. You’ll have done nothing more than proctor a test.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, Albert. You can’t be serious.
Albert shrugged. Arguably, it’s the only sane decision available to me. And you have the stomach for this sort of thing. I know that much, he said.
My father looked back at him.
Generally, you hear that boys aren’t a gentle species, Albert said. Girls are more perceptive, even when they’re small. You know this. Your daughter’s a sharp one. But my grandson didn’t fit the mold. He was small—even for a little boy, he was small. And he was gentle. I don’t know that he would have been able to make his way in the world. You worry about children when they show no inclination toward cruelty, don’t you? You think, How will they survive? We had little talks, he and I, about dolphins and starfish. His very existence was steeped in innocence. For me to do less than attend to his memory in this way … I might as well piss on his grave.
Albert said, At the very end, after he became an innocent, my father went through one final transformation. He became an animal. Raving, calling out to phantoms, throwing punches at anyone who came near him, and two seconds later wailing like a lost lamb, holding his arms out, begging for us to embrace him. Save me, he’d cry. Save me! Then, just before he died, he became peaceful. The demons vacated his sorry corpus and left behind nothing but an empty sack.
I understood, eventually, that all along he had been concealing wild terrors of the mind. Some kind of waking nightmare, fighting to understand what before him was real. It was night; he slept; he woke; it was night again. Or was it? Surely divisions between day and night dissolved. His existence made as much sense as in a dream. He had no past and no future. There was a dinner roll on the plate, and then there was not. Had he eaten it? His wife was by his side, and then she was not. Where was his wife? Who was she, for that matter? His own being was mutable, a pappus pushed this way and that by the breeze, rising and falling, a being of immaterial lightness, an observer without sentience. I know what the end holds, Albert said. Oh yes.
Until the very end, Albert worked to maintain his ability to slip in and out of that day in Florida, and he experienced his memory of it with unusual lucidity. He heard the water that ran up over the coping in sloshing jolts and hit the concrete with a chirping sizzle. He smelled the billowing chlorine and the concrete. The wind that day was onshore, holding back the gnats, but the horseflies had come in powerful numbers and there were a couple of their finely figured bodies floating near the skimmer port. Tad, Tracy’s husband, was in the water. Through the glass he had seen the distended shape refracted on the surface and shot through the sliding door. His drink, iced tea, was on the counter where he had left it. That was his way, controlled, steady even in the nexus of a storm. He had been a football player at North Carolina, a massive man, the embodiment of everything John was not and so desperately wished to be. Useless miracle, Tad had trained as a paramedic in the off-season.
Tad’s mass had set the water rolling over the coping, where it was in rhythmic recoil by the time Albert, with the rest of the family, emerged, the concrete dark, the humid sear of hot chlorine everywhere. Tad had the boy clutched to his chest and he was plowing
