* * *
—
And she read my journals and I read the other Salingers and we watched TV and ordered food and played with Kablankey and played gin rummy and listened to the Beatles. I don’t mean to suggest I was always on the couch with her, though I was there for a lot of the first couple days, til she asked for my journals. As the week wore on, I was with her less and less, in my bedroom more and more. I don’t remember her in pain. I only remember knowing she was. I remember knowing I should leave the room and let her be in pain because she didn’t want me to see her in pain, and I remember thinking I should check on her at least once an hour so she wouldn’t think I was leaving because I couldn’t stand her pain.
* * *
—
I don’t remember interacting with my father that week, but I don’t remember thinking we were interacting any less than usual, or more than usual, or thinking anything between us was any more or any less out of line than it had been of late, and I know he went to work, and I know he must have fed me, and I know that in the mornings before he went to work, and then in the evenings when he came home from work, I’d go to my room so he could be alone with her.
* * *
—
I have only one memory of crying that week. I was up in my room, and I don’t recall what exactly set me off. What I remember’s that Kablankey, sitting upright on my pillow, went into a handstand, performed a box step in the handstand while whistling a waltz, then stood on its leg, clutched at its throat, stuck out its tongue, and fell on its face. My crying stopped at once. In the little time they’d spent together in the shoebox—ninety minutes total—Zappy’d taught Kablankey to do the dance of death. Or, at the very least, Blank had learned the dance of death by watching Zappy. This seemed a big deal. That it could learn anything so complex so quickly, let alone from another Botimal. I hugged it to my chest and went downstairs to tell my mom, and she was in a kind of trance—pain or drugs or sleep deprivation, probably all three—and she didn’t hear, and since I’d said the word “death,” as in “dance of death,” without any forethought and only just realized that that’s what I’d done, I was glad she hadn’t heard, and I sat down beside her, put Blank on the couch, pretended to cry, and Blank did the dance. Then my mom pretended to cry, and Blank did the dance, and the rest of the week, whenever anyone would cry or pretend to cry while Blank was around, it would do the dance. I tried to teach it other dances by doing them in front of it, but it didn’t seem interested. My mother, however, taught it its name. “Kablankey!” she’d say, and when it turned to look at her, she’d scratch it on the head.
* * *
—
I don’t remember bedpans, and I don’t think there were bedpans, but I don’t remember her vomiting, and I know that she did no small amount of that. I know I saw her have a seizure, or possibly a small stroke, and I do remember that, but all it was was I noticed that she looked a little distant; I was saying something prolix and she was staring past my face and I thought I was boring her or the pills were kicking in and then her eyes regained focus, and she touched me on my cheek and said that something happened, a seizure or a stroke, but she was fine now, though she’d missed what I was saying and I should say it to her later, and right now all she wanted was for me to make the promise that I’d never again destroy property that didn’t belong to me, and I said I’d already promised that twice, and she said she remembered, but she wanted me to promise one more time anyway, and so I did. Then she said she wanted to be alone, and to leave the room, and she asked me to help her go down to the basement. I said I’d leave the room, and she said I could do whatever I wanted, but that what she wanted was to go to the basement, so I took her to the basement and let her be alone there. After that, she wouldn’t use any stairs without my dad or me there to hold her elbow.
* * *
—
Saturday morning, I went back to Hyde Park. My parents said it was best for me to go. We needed the study to keep paying for my treatment, they wanted the house to themselves for a while, and I hadn’t gone beyond our driveway in a week. I complied without protest.
Rick and Jim drove me. Jim called me “Duke” a couple of times. I thought he thought it was my name, and I didn’t correct him. Rick didn’t either. I don’t recall having cared, but I must have a little; otherwise, I don’t know why I’d remember it.
At the study, I told Manx that the sleeve worked well. He said never mind the sleeve and he asked about my mom, and I said she was dying. He said I didn’t have to be there, and I told him it was fine. In the middle of the lab, poised for a backflip, stood Lisette, who I found myself urgently wanting to confide in, get saved by, be told I was liked by. I almost said her name, but then she did the backflip, and I lost my nerve.
For most of the morning, she wouldn’t look back at me, much less come near me. Approaching her seemed increasingly screw-uppable. To begin with anything other than a basic hello would have sounded unnatural, but by the time that occurred to me, we’d been in the room together for almost an hour without greeting each other, and if I just went up and said, “Hello, Lisette,” I’d need to account, I thought, for the delay, and I didn’t know how to account for the delay without being straightforward (e.g. “I was afraid to look dorky”) and thereby losing the tiny edge I’d believed I’d acquired (however accidentally) the previous week.
So I sat there, alone, on one of the couches, scheming weakly, saying nothing, trying via posture and facial expression to send intriguing messages about my state of mind til, sometime close to the end of session 3, Lisette crossed the lab and sat beside me and, just like that, laid her head on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said.
I laid my cheek on her head, and I said, “Excuse me.”
“My rat is dead,” she said. “I’m sad. It’s my fault.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you had a rat.”
“Misty Cunningham. That’s what I called her. She was piebald and small-eyed, and her name had no meaning. I was holding her, you know. I was holding her up in front of my face, saying, ‘You’re Misty Cunningham, and I do not know why, but that’s who you are, you adorable rodent,’ and I know that she didn’t understand what I was saying, but I thought to myself, ‘She understands I’m saying something, and she wants to understand what it is that I’m saying,’ and something about that, it made me so gushy, Belt. I was sad because I knew she could never understand my words, but at the same time happy because I knew we both wished she could. And that was a kind of understanding, you know? Maybe the most important kind of understanding, and we shared it. And I got so gushy, so filled up with love, real love for her—this whole other animal that before that moment I thought of like more as a toy—and I squeezed her too hard, and her ribs…cracked. And she twitched, and she bit me, and it hardly even hurt, but it surprised me, and I dropped her, and she landed weirdly on her side on the carpet, then scuttled up onto her feet and ran, but didn’t get far before she had to stop to gasp and cough and she looked so afraid and by the time we got her to the vet, she was dead. Her ribs were in her heart and in her lungs, the vet said.”