Mount Pleasant Read Free Page A

her brassiere?” his father said.
    “What?”
    “Who’s that? Who’s there?”
    “It’s me. Harry. Your son.”
    “Teachy preachy.”
    Harry could see his father’s thin, hairless calves, his lengthy white feet through the partly opened door. They were separated by six feet. “Dad, do you know where you are?”
    There was a flatulent blast, then a high, piercing sigh. After two minutes, his father said, “She moaned and she meant it.”
    Harry stared upward, looking for guidance. His father’s mind was increasingly erratic. Wild thoughts burst forth during these visits, followed by moments of cruel lucidity. Harry imagined a landed trout inside his father’s head, flippingstupidly on the dock. After another five minutes, Dale said, “I’m finished here.”
    The last month had been the most time Harry had ever spent with his father. His parents divorced when Harry was sixteen, but Dale had pulled away long before that. He worked in wealth management and disappeared into money, and then into another marriage (and another divorce). After the divorce from Harry’s mother, Dale was supposed to take Harry and his sister, Erin, for two weekends a month, but that arrangement petered out, and Harry rarely saw him for more than the odd afternoon.
    Harry accompanied his father on the early visits to doctors, had sat as a witness while a serious woman with the pinched face chronic pain sometimes produces (a professional tic perhaps, Harry thought, a pre-emptive solidarity) explained the specifics of his father’s brain cancer. Harry jotted notes as she veered into jargon (“anaplastic astrocytoma”), ascribing human qualities to the cancer (“tendency to infiltrate”). At first she lightly disguised its fatal nature (“excision may discourage but not eradicate”), then punctured any hope even for experimental treatments (“gene therapy converting adenoviruses in Russian subjects has not yielded …”). Dutifully searching the Internet, Harry discovered that five television series had used this cancer to kill off unwanted characters.
    The curious effect of the ensuing medical sessions was that his father’s cancer became more vivid to Harry than his father himself. Dale had never come into focus, a distant, silent, unsupervising figure. But his disease was visceral. Harry became acquainted with the expensive machines, the heavy artillery used in what was usually described as a battle. He examinedthe positron emission tomography of his father’s brain, which looked like a psychedelic walnut, and wondered what it now contained. Several million memories that had been arranged by priority (the hand on the neighbour’s thigh, the martinis made with mannered precision) now randomly scattered like a filing cabinet overturned by thieves.
    Now Harry led him back to his bed and helped him lie down, covering him with the hospital sheet. The destruction of his father was precipitous. He didn’t always recognize Harry when he visited, he spoke less, his body a venous network of atrophied limbs, the skeletal core trying to surface as his brain flailed. His face was taut, his arms laid out beside him like a child’s, thin and guileless, floating through an OxyContin landscape.
    Harry looked at his father and pondered what was effectively gone. He wondered if Dale pondered Harry’s life as well, staring through eyes dulled by painkillers, enlarged and extruding as the rest of him retreated; what did he see in this fifty-two-year-old man? But if Dale was pondering anything in the withered prison of his head, it would be his ill luck; he would calculate the odds of his own cancer (12.8 per 100,000, thirty-two percent survival over five years) the way he had calculated bond yields. His sister, Erin, and his father’s girlfriend, Dixie, hadn’t been involved much at first, but they now visited regularly. Dixie was only a few years older than Harry, a handsome woman with sun-damaged skin, long-legged and purposeful, her smile