Richard hackler

The Ineffable Everything

Raymond was sitting on a hard plastic chair, looking out the window at the greening lawn, still islanded by patches of dirty snow. The lawn here was enormous, canopied by old aspens and white pines, and it rippled away from Raymond, away from the window of his mother’s room, and into a line of shrubs marking the beginning of a rocky beach. It was April. Cool air and a soupy haze clung to the shoreline of the lake, but sometimes the sun would push through, sift through the trees, and fall on the lawn in great honeyed splotches. And it was in these moments—the lake blinking at him through the gaps in the shrubs, the yard gleaming with snowmelt and thick with squirrels careening through the light—that Raymond would feel as though a bucket of some stinging liquid—electric soda water, or a sort of caffeinated syrup—had tipped over inside of him. He would gnaw at his lip until he tasted blood; he would knead his hands together until they cramped; he would stand up, raise his hands to touch the ceiling, and walk past his mother out into the hallway, where he would smile at the nurses and aides and say giddy things about the spring and melting snow and warming breeze and summer that would be here soon, soon, soon! He would walk back into the room, back to where his mother lay dying, past the end table on which rested an Easter lily, a vase of weary daffodils, stacks of pastel greeting cards signed in looping script by out-of-town aunts and uncles, a palm-sized pamphlet, facedown, that explained what would happen to his mother’s body as it “turned off,” a stuffed bear holding a plush pink heart against its chest that some cousin had sent up from the Cities, and, hovering over it all, two collapsing Mylar balloons, which sank a little each day like failing moons. He would stand next to the table, next to his mother, next to the machines that measured her decline and blunted her pain. The skin on her face was thin and yellowed, pulled tight around her skull, a crepe paper mask of his mother’s face. The machines sighed and chirped like friendly animals.

What would you say about this place? he wondered, staring at her empty face. If his mother were awake—if she could still speak—she would survey the turquoise walls, the framed gauzy seascapes, the crown molding, the lace curtains that stirred when the heat kicked on, the nurses who shuffled in and out, their faces serene and lovely, all of them looking as though they should be holding a baby or clutch of daisies, and say—what? He tried to think of how his mother would describe this, the room in which she would die, her words gilded by that special intensity or irony or delight that filled her speech when she wanted to be showy. He settled on “swank,” said in a clipped, mid-Atlantic accent. As in—Say, son, this room’s pretty suh-wank. How’d you get it for me?  

He sat down again, looked out the window at nothing, jiggled his knee. His mother had been dying for so long. He’d already cleared the space in his thinking where she used to live, and now there was only this in-between person, this sleeping ghost surrounded by flowers and balloons. He turned to face her. He thought of how she would cry during thunderstorms, how the undersides of her fingernails were always raw and black with dirt, how she would sit on her porch when the weather was finally warm, blow at her coffee, and mimic the calls of the morning cardinals and crows. He thought of sneaking with her into the old hotel downtown to sing Paul McCartney songs while she accompanied him on the lobby piano. He thought of the books that littered the floor of her station wagon: field guides to mushrooms and berries and freshwater fish. He conjured all of this, line by line, as though he were outlining a character for a novel (“be specific,” he imagined his old writing teacher saying. “What makes this person this person?”). 

He turned back to the window. The trees were bending in the breeze, and the squirrels were flinging themselves across the sky. The truth was that the people you loved would die in unspeakable ways, and the world—with its lakes and squirrels and lawns and trees—would whir madly on, battering you with senseless beauty. He wanted to spend one more afternoon by the lake with his mother. “Look at the lake,” he said, in a soupy voice. He stood up, pattered his hands against his thighs, sat back down. “It’s finally spring,” he said to the body that used to be his mother. He felt a fierce and impotent love for the world; he felt love for the world like a plague. It was a feeling, he sensed, that would live in his body like a virus, falling dormant beneath a bland accumulation of days and then flaring up whenever he was made to remember, again, that he was going to die, that everyone he loved was going to die. It was obscene, ultimately, and astonishingly cruel, and there was nothing to make of any of it. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, to the room, to his mother, to himself, to no one. “Just look at how beautiful it is.”