They put my dad in the hospital last night. I saw the missed calls on my screen before breakfast. It was our last morning at Cousin Brad’s Mammoth house which is closer a chalet, the kind of ski cabin the 1% enjoy. After seven days of snowboarding and ignoring such things as messages on screens, we had been slated to stop by Dad’s house on our way back to L.A. before our flight home to Kauai. His new wife was to make sandwiches. Dad was getting up in the years. And the kids hadn’t seen Grandpa in longer than I care to admit. And though spending the last day of our Christmas holiday at his and his new wife’s house was my last idea of fun, I chalked it up to one more task in the tall pile of things one must do.
I woke to bluebird skies, a gleaming ball of fire cresting an untracked ridgeline to the East, its million reflections like unclaimed diamonds in the sleeping crusted snow. The wind that had whipped the mountain for days lay tucked beneath its blanket of needles and cones. And something unfamiliar marinated in whispers, the slowing of Winter, the Earth as She sleeps. I curled my feet beneath my body’s warmth, felt the plush cushions of the sofa’s embrace, the weight of my own mass pressing down. Moments such as these are rarities. Tracey and the kids were still asleep. As were Cousin Brad and Finn, the dog. I watched the steam from my tea as its spiral corkscrews reached upwards in the stillness, thick at their birthplace then fleeting, fading, gone. Through the dawn’s pink windows, the behemoth of Mammoth Mountain whispered, beckoned, dared. Empty chairs inched toward the summit with no riders. Tree lines drew shadows. The call of birds on mute. I clicked the silver button on the phone’s edge. 3 missed calls and a voicemail. I thought to call her back, imagined her Transylvanian accent that would cut its jagged flint through this before. I clicked the phone off. It was a five-hour drive to L.A. There would be a time for such things as Dad’s and new wives and news.
The boarding would be good today. I shook the thought from my mind — the swooshing rails cutting snow, the slap of frozen wind on blood-filled cheeks, the shifting weight across the fall line, the rush of life that speeds by. Instead I zipped up suitcases, toasted waffles, shook the kids from their world of dreams and swapped their comfort for belts that strapped and tight backseats. They had grown used to the good life too quickly, the indoor pool and bubbling jacuzzi, the three stories of Alder and Ash. Like me, Cousin Brad was a doctor. But while he filled his days slinging Botox and plumping beauty, I navigated the waters of human suffering and contagion on the spectrum’s other end. I was happy with my choice. Mostly. I’m not sure the kids would agree.
It took four tries and some restacking of suitcases to close the hatch of the rental car’s trunk. There was some fighting about who would sit in the way back. I took one last look at the mountain, tried to forget my season pass zipped deep within the pile of dirty clothes and boots and bibs. I backed out of the driveway and shifted to drive. Tracey would want a coffee. The tank would need more gas. The next five hours hung like a Reaper’s scythe. But the freedom of choice had run out. And so instead I weaved my way down through the soggy streets, waiting for lights to turn colors and then watching the town dispensaries and breweries . Then, arcing a final sweeping turn South onto the 395, I stepped hard on the gas and reached for my phone. Tracey played with the radio. In the mirror, three cherub angels in the blue light of shifting screens. The flint-sharp voice voice in my ear, the fear and fatigue that churned beneath. There would be no sandwiches by the pool at my Dad’s wife’s house. I opened maps on my home screen, punched at the screen with my arthritic thumbs. Northridge Hospital. A depressing replacement to the Mammoth Lakes I had ex-ed out. But such was our fate. Unless…
Fossil Falls. Cousin Brad had told me about it, a midway point not too far off the highway between here and there. Just after Lone Pine and before Independence, two round mounds of auburn hillsides, like the perfect round humps of an Indian squaw’s tight ass. That’s how Cousin Brad had described it. Turn east off the highway between the humps for no more than a couple miles and the trail head would make itself obvious. I told the kids they could search for fossils in the dirt, shards of pottery or maybe arrowheads used by the natives who lived there 80,000 years ago. They complained, as did Tracey, their minds already settling into the numb. But I held firm. There was still hope for the day. And maybe more than opportunism, something less innocent at play. To delay the inevitable. I, more than most, knew the suffering at destination’s end.
Turns out the only fossils at Fossil Falls are the falls themselves. In ancient times, a river had cut East from the melting snowpack and glaciers of the Sierra Nevada to the 395’s right. It carved a gouge deep and raw through the belly of dirt and Earth that spread from here to Mojave. Standing where eons ago an 80 foot cascade fell weightless, I imagined it’s ripping roar and swirling foam, its fists of rapids and tearing currents, its hungry tongue like a vacuum that sucks and swallows time. Yet, at our feet, only dust and dirt and rocks. The only hint of the power that once ruled here was a narrow gorge of boulders and granite, their glossy surface smoothed like blown glass, tunneling caverns beneath the impact zone where before the world had roared. Everywhere I looked, evidence of so much change as the years they stack to gone.
We took a photo on the ancient Fall’s pinnacle. Snow-capped ridgelines framed the background. Somewhere tucked within, Cousin Brad carved his playful will on white walls. In the foreground and everywhere else, stark and naked Earth like the surface of Mars. A solitary Sun beat down. It sliced diagonally at our backs, bleeding the photo with too much light, casting our faces in shadow, and, maybe, regret. There was no life left in this place. Too much time had passed. I felt her hand heavy on my back. Time’s massive weight pushing so hard. Maybe we’ll find some fossils at our next stop, I said. Let’s keep moving, south to L.A. We loaded up. We pressed on.
Could it be only six months ago? My year sabbatical and its end? With nothing but time, a continent like a canvas, the world and its horizons stretched out, the sweeping hands of time congealed to kind. During our sojourns across Iberia, I had grown to love the GPS feature that lives in a colored square on my phone. It knows the path to everywhere, guides without hesitancy or flaw, forgets quickly the footprints of the past.
My thumbs like the twin beaks of woodpeckers. Fossils Falls gone. Northridge Hospital. Return. 2 hours and 27 minutes. The voice of a tiny familiar God. For 78 miles, continue straight.
Straight we sped, asphalt cutting earth. The frosted silhouette of the Sierra Nevada bled from white to brown. The Los Angeles basin spread open like a sleeping whore’s thighs, an ancient sea so parched it had turned to desert before man glassed it concrete and filled it with racing, shriveled lives.
All the while, the steady voice of non-judgment, acceptance, even, perhaps, love. In 2 miles take the exit. Use the two lanes on the right.
In times like these, I fantasize of a life in which every destination can be plotted, coordinates like numbers on a screen. In times like these, I imagine the ease of obeying a voice from without instead of searching, finding, questioning the voice that speaks in silence and lurks within. What a miracle of the Gods, this solid blue line that leads us where we’re going, its fading history that’s swept clean in the moment’s instant past. And through it all, that seductive voice and it’s reassurance, it’s sage wisdom without question, the shirking of responsibility, the peaceful reassurance, the deep and calming knowledge that we are on the right path.
At the parking structure turn left.
We circled three times in the curving ramp’s tight ascent, inside the bowels of this concrete block of man.
Arrived.
The engine turned quiet. The phone’s screen to off. Seatbelts click. Doors open. Doors close. Tiny shoes on Earth. Or man’s approximation of the same.
Like a pack we descend the stairs, the spiral chirality as it unwinds. Gravity’s pull makes our efforts minimal. There is something close to playfulness in hurried steps as they fall down, down. I recognize the various castes as they pass us upstream, on their lunch breaks or perhaps off their shifts. The short coats of labs techs and students, the starched collars or pant suits of administrators, the pastel scrubs of nurses with their playful prints and changing faces. And right there, midway between the parking structure and the glass doors, a reflection of myself. He wears a long white coat, a stethoscope in its pocket, a kyphotic weight that bends his spine. His pace is hurried. In his eyes, fatigue.
The doors slide open. Broad striped leaves of philodendron but reaching up, grown to trees. A glass arboretum. An antiseptic wind that’s sterile, cold. I skip the line of visitors waiting to check in at the welcome desk. I won’t be treated like the rest. My family hesitates but follows. Room 3104 is what the operator had said. I had called ahead. Hi this is Dr Rogoff. I had played the card. My dad was admitted last night. 3104, she had said. I could find my own way. GPS is for the unfamiliar.
I was 10 paces ahead of the kids. The elevator doors nearly closed before they got in. They still seemed giddy, cooped up for too long and still just kids. I cursed my wife’s hand as it separated the doors and they reversed their closing. Another ding. A pause. Their sliding closed again. I felt myself longing to be distanced from this tribe. Too much happiness. So much ignorance. How could they not know what waited two floors up?
The kids had to pee. I left them at the bathroom on the third floor, near the elevator’s sliding walls that sealed us in. 3109, I said without looking back. Meet me there. It was foolish not to wait. But a voice inside was whispering. You may lack the strength, it warned. This is not the same. It was funny, that voice and what it said. This being here. A place I well knew. A sterile fortress whose emotion was bleached with the bugs. No different than the one that forged me back in residency, no different than the ones I still ruled where I would meet eyes so full of hope with a slow and shaking head. Perhaps better if no witnesses see you buckle, the voice again, else the visions of youth may turn to stone.
Hey dad.
Hello. A weak and empty smile.
Do you recognize me?
Of course I do.
How are you?
I’m good, son.
But he wasn’t. I could tell. It looked like my dad. The same skin and eyes and bones. But the meat was gone. The pulp that puffed him up. Like the footballs we used to throw back and forth in the front yard but half deflated. This man was that man’s shell. I recognized the gown, the tie at the neck, the open back, the skin that sagged like sheets of pale on sharpened chiseled bones. When was the last time? Could it be three years? I recognized the reclining bed, the shared TV, the tiny box of treble and intrusion with its buttons up and buttons down, the blaring voice of distraction that goes with the box of light on the wall. I only half recognized my dad. But this place, this place I know too well. It’s where they come to die.
There were two men here before. They know how to work the machines.
I reached for the box with the hollow sound. My finger on the volume button, the one that pointed down. The TV fell mute. Peace where before lived chaos. It was an act of practiced habit, done countless times in countless rooms, at every hour the clock knows. But the other rooms were different. This room had my Dad.
How are you? Before it was merely a means to an end. Something to write in the chart in the part that didn’t matter. Above the vital signs and sounds of lungs and hearts and numbers black and white like Xrays, labs. How are you. I didn’t care then. Just get me through to the next one. Some days I had 20 or more to round on, before writing my notes, admitting more in the ER, ordering the medicines and labs and testing for the day. 20 TV’s and their personal boxes and their blaring. 20 bags of bones and sagging skin. 20 volumes turned down, 20 stethoscopes on keratotic skin, lungs that stretched, hearts that thumped. 20 times 365 times too many years to count. But this was different.
The machine is easy, Dad. Just push up or down. This side is for channels. This side is the volume. Don’t worry about the other buttons.
I handed the box of controls to my Dad. He took it, seeming for a moment happy, to have regained control. I stared at his fingers on the buttons. How they hesitated and then let go. I stared at the black hairs between his knuckles. His tiny forearms that once held strength. I followed them up to where his shoulders lay bare under the fluorescent glowing light. I followed the monitors’ wires to the pads stuck to his chest of grey hairs. I remembered that same chest carpeted in black. His braided 14 karat chain. His buttons relaxed and loose. His swagger, his smile, his charm. He used to be a hero. Not to me, but to the ladies he convinced to sleep with him. He used to harness power. And now, he seemed so weak. I saw it in his eyes. They seemed lost. Stranded. Alone.
All those buttons will confuse you. Best to just go forward or backward from wherever you’re at.
They didn’t belong there. On that face that, if inflated, would be my dad’s. Lost eyes. Scared eyes. On the face that was my Dad’s.
I brought the family here on our way to the airport. The kids will be here in a minute. They had to pee. We were snowboarding for the week. Stayed with Cousin Brad.
Cousin brad. His eyes thinking, searching, guessing. How’s Brad? Is he happy?
I think so. Though how can one tell. He brought his boxer. The kids loved him so much they wanted to trade our new puppy for him.
Boxer huh.
We used to have a boxer. Do you remember?
Of course I do. But did he? Who can tell?
Brutus.
Yes! I felt such joy he knew the dog’s name. It was 1974 when we moved to L.A. from St. Louis. I was two. Brutus was our boxer. I don’t remember him. He was gone before my first memory was etched in stone. But I remembered the pictures. And Dad was here. This proved it. Brutus. Yes, that’s right.
In a silence that felt uncomfortable, I thought of my Dad in his youth, cycling through every name before finding mine. David. Brian. Brutus. Steven. The absent-minded professor. My Dad served as the mold. So much excitement when he finally stumbled upon the right answer. I imagine my celebration was not unlike his.
I took out my phone to break time’s warping, as has become the custom in such moments of unease. My voice in the silence. His empty smile that, thinking back, I quite liked. Broken pixels of a moment. Words cloud the beauty of simply being, sharing, watching the world and time as it unfolds and falls apart. I have some pictures.
I scroll through memories on a screen we both stare at, looking for images to fill the vast gap of space and time between. So much left unsaid. So many disappointments. So much blame.
This is Siena on a snowboard. And this is Sawyer doing at 360. Do you remember the time you taught me how to ski? Up in Big bear? When I was 12?
Those eyes again, into mine. I’m not sure. The pleading eyes. Clinging eyes. Slippery eyes. So desperate to hold fast. The kids like the snow?
They do. They do.
But somewhere on the heels, the same voice from within, churning thoughts, bubbling up. Our plane would leave in three hours. There was the rental car to return. The snowboards to check in. The phone my son had lost in the last rental car. So much to do, so little time.
I clicked the screen off. The twin reflections of its light snubbed from his clouded eyes like a crushed flame. In their place, a deep and knowing sadness. The white gown hung crooked off his shoulders. His brown eyes were being swallowed by his dilated pupils that brimmed like flooding puddles. They stared thoughtlessly at the shapeshifting muted TV. There was a growing unfamiliar in those eyes that I never really knew. The groaning sounds of another human behind a curtain. It hung on stainless steel clips on a sunken track, bisected this room like the second hand divides after and before. Every detail became instantly precious. This could be all we had. I clung to the potential that seemed infinite as my Father’s eyes did to the images turned to mute by the machine that had slipped just out of reach. A terrifying thought consumed my being, larger than a hundred mountains and their Winter’s long snow.
I slipped the phone in my pocket. I held his pale and hairy fingers in my hand. His skin felt clammy. His fingers were still fat.
How old were you when your dad died?
36,37?
Were you there?
I think so.
Was it in the hospital or at home?
I don’t remember.
Discomfort like a tidal wave. The ocean rising up. Fear and terror as it thickens, not in me, but in my dad. And then I realized what I was doing. How selfish I had almost become.
We had some good times didn’t we.
I think so.
I looked at my dad. He looked at me. A moment stretched longer than it could. A moment with no words.
I sensed another presence in the room. It was my family. My loving wife. Our three kids. They huddled around her, fidgeting, tiny planets around their heavy sun.
Like rain and its swollen puddles, discomfort spreads. It leaks. It soaks.
Say hi to grandpa kids.
Hi grandpa. Hi grandpa. Hi grandpa. Three toads that croak.
Hi Don, my wife, sweet comfort, smiling.
Hi kids. Hi Tracey.
It was the first time he got it right. I would’ve bet my house and career he would call her Stacey
How are you Don, Tracey asked.
I’m okay.
It’s hard to lie to my wife.
Tell grandpa about the snow. Or about Finn, I tried.
And then Cassie performed as she loves to do, told her stories about the boxer named Finn and how he really loved food. Broccoli stalks and pizzas. Cured meat and rotten cheese. Siena clung silent and close. Sawyer turned 13 a few months back. He was becoming a man. He sees more than the others. He looked at Grandpa. He looked at me.
As for me, I found myself overwhelmed, despite the familiar, all but lost. Thoughts so far away. Thoughts in parallel. Thoughts like chords that hung with no hope of resolution. They stacked too high, cut too deep. Storage Wars was on the TV just past the curtain. I couldn’t see the human, but I could see his TV. The afternoons in the driveway tossing the baseball back and forth. The heat of the Valley in July. The slap of the mitts. The times he missed my throws and the ball got lost in the junipers. You get it. No you. My shins scratched by the pokey green needles as I bent my back ached and flexed, my arms combing through the thicket. So much blame that marinates in misunderstanding, like flames through dried tumbleweeds, pumped through two hearts in crimson blood close to the same.
Time passed.
His new wife arrived.
For the first time, relief in my Father’s face. Only now did I understand the burden of her absence, of my presence.
She pressed her face into his. Her long nails combed his thin strips of hair. Her jagged accent professed how much she loved him. She hugged and kissed the kids, breathed her smells into their nostrils, squished their cheeks between her palms. You look like your brother she said. And you are an angel. And you will need braces for your teeth.
My older daughter laughed. Tears welled up in the crescent envelopes around her eyes. Tears of laughter. Tears of pain.
And you are more handsome than I remember. You look like your father.
His eyes on me. His eyes on grandpa. His eyes on me. He sees it all. More than I did. I fear for him, the poor boy.
Well we should be leaving. I said.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, 300 miles back. Before Fossil Falls. Before the omniscience of the Maps. Before my spiraling corkscrews of steam that lifted up and faded away. And there was still the gas to fill. And the phone to find. And the boarding passes to print. And luggage tags. The TSA.
I love you dad.
The skin of his neck and back felt warm against mine. Brown seborrhea like dried crusts of corn flakes pasted and peeling. Cherry hemangiomas like stars across a sky with no moon. They swelled like tiny sunsets ready to dip beneath the horizon line, ready to pop and drip down.
I love you too son.
The smell of ammonia and gauze, antiseptic hand wash and the beeping of machines.
My fingers searching in my pocket. The spiral concrete ramp of the garage. The ticket to get ou. Do hospitals validate?
You’re gonna he okay, Dad. But my voice lacked the authority of a physician’s. This was a different voice in a different room.
I hope so. He said. His eyes seemed less empty. But not because of me.
Son?
I turned.
Ya?
If you see those guys, the ones that know how to work the machines.
It’s easy dad. Just push up and down. One step forward. One step back.
Start from where you’re at.
I smiled.
But if you see them…
The guys that know how to work the machines.
He smiled.
I walked away.
And then the fluorescent lights of the hall, the doors’ metallic vacuum opening, the sealed silence that surrounds, the floor as it drops, lighted numbers as they take turns, the broad leaves of philodendrons with yellow veins and pointed tips, the fresh breath of Earth’s outside, the body as it leans unconsciously inward toward the center point as our shuffling feet wind 3 circles up the stairs. The click of the lock. The loading of kids. Seatbelts. Chatter. A new destination and its coordinates. The patient and confident voice from my phone.
At the light up ahead, turn right.