Читаем Fall and Rise полностью

“You should’ve,” I yell and he gives me the finger as he runs. “At least get a bell. And if you do, ding the damn thing, you dumb id—,” because he still has his finger in the air, but forget it. In one and out if he can even hear me and why start trouble? He could come back, but being a runner I doubt it, as others have when I went on too long. Light’s green. What was it I dreamed? Seemed important, one with both my folks. Jolted me out of sleep and kept me sitting up and thinking about it till I thought it had seeped in deep enough for me to go back to sleep and bring it back easily when I woke for the day. Often told myself to keep a pen and pad — Anyway, the dream. She’d locked herself in the bathroom. “My hair is white,” she said through the door, “overnight,” when in real life it’s steel gray. And something about her bones pushing through her face. “My weight’s down to seventy-eight”—her age? “My back’s so bent I can never again stand straight. I just saw my image in the light.” Apartment was dark. Crack under the door showed the bathroom was black. “Don’t stare at me,” she screamed from behind the closed door. Maybe she was talking to herself. “I’m ancienter and mangier than our goldanged race,” though at the time I felt she was talking to me. I said something like “Get yourself something to read, Ma, that’s all you need. I’ll find a good book if you open the door.” Good book could be the Bible but what would that or the rest of what I said mean? We were never a religious family. Ceremonial dinners once or twice a year and inexact observances of the high holy days. They let me fast for a day and skip school those holidays because the other Jewish kids did. But it wasn’t till my sister got very sick that she put a cloth napkin on her head once a week and lit memorial candles and mumbled a prayer. Bible at funeral? I tried the doorknob but it was locked. “Don’t! I’ll open it at my own speed.” Knob turned from the inside and door creaked open an inch. Creaking part from old ghost movies I saw as a boy and radio mystery shows. Suspense Presents — one of those. “Not yet,” I said. “Wait till I get you that book.” Said that because I was afraid to see her so old, decrepit and sick. In another room my father rose from a coffin on his hospital bed and stretched. He was naked and scrawny, his room dark and stuffy, only a little light from somewhere on him and his hair hung as it never did over his shoulders from only a few places in his head. He released the railing, climbed out of bed and lumbered to me dragging strung bones and a long iron chain. “Drag something imaginative,” I said. “And put something on, for crying out loud,” and covered my eyes and opened them on him wearing a loincloth opened at his genitals and dragging the bones and chain. In real life he died in his sleep in a hospital gown in a hospital bed in the apartment my mother lives in now. In the dream his testicles were twice their normal size and low-slung and swung as he walked and his penis peed like a horse’s. “Come quick,” my mother said when I came into their apartment as I did almost every morning to see them and give him his shot and help her in any way I could, “I can’t get from dad a single heartbeat or breath.” Bathroom door was wide open and there was daylight on her from a bathroom window she doesn’t have. Rattling and clanking from the bones and chain got louder. My mother looked as she’d said she would and said to me “Where’s your book? Don’t lose your eyes. If anyone should be reading,” pointing to my father coming into the room completely naked but done peeing, “It’s him. Sol, you need a cover. I love you. Sol, you need to be fed and dressed. Your son will assist you, but come to me first, you big clown,” and she went to him with her arms out. He spun around once, looked lost, dropped the bones and chain, defecated as he stepped toward her but the excrement which had smeared his thighs and was heaped on the floor, disappeared, fell to one knee and she took him into her arms. His eyes stayed shut through all this. I sniffed hard and wondered how come no shit smell. He was wearing an old bathrobe that I now own. It was open below the waist and his testicles rested on the floor. Scrotum, my thought then, looking like a sleeping white Chinese-porcelain cat squeezed up for warmth. She smiled when she first hugged him, was crying, lips on his brow. His hair was now thick, bouncy and brown. That’s all I recall. It could have ended then. Awoke in a sweat, sat up fast. If my mother ever got, how should I put it, incapacitatingly sick or was declared terminal, if declared’s the term medical people use, and asked me to take care of her or her doctor did and it was possible for me to, I think I’d do it till I couldn’t anymore at her apartment or mine, with a visiting nurse or without, depending what the governments could afford, because what else could I do? I’d work at home while I nursed. Live partly off her Social Security if I couldn’t earn enough on my own. That wouldn’t be wrong, since I’ve nothing but a few hundred saved. Maybe for the first time look for book reviews to do if it took that to manage it without dipping into her funds, but ones that pay reasonably well. So it’s all resolved? “Mothers grow old and sick, fathers die, I don’t like it one bit,” Hasenai says in a poem I chose, “but I’ll try.” I know what he means? Thought so then. If I’m still uncertain tomorrow I’ll write Hasenai for advice, since I always make sure to get the author’s meant intention if it’s anything but pure sound, which in his case I’ve tried but can’t duplicate.