Dian, the checker at Pronto Convenience Store, asked, “Are you all right, Albert?”
“No, I’m not all right,” I said. “I think I’m having a stroke. I need to cash a check before I call EMS.”
“Well, you look terrible,” Dian said. “Do you want me to drive you home?”
“No, I can make it,” I said. “I just need to get some money in case they keep me at the hospital.”
I was leaning on one of the stick crutches I’d kept from fifteen years ago when I had back surgery. I kept listing toward the left and when I started to fall, I’d catch myself with the crutch. I’d walked all the way here like that, over a block, crossing Duval St. heavy with traffic, leaned on my crutch waiting for a break in the flow, mind coming and going, thinking to myself, “Keep thinking what you’re doing. Don’t cross till it’s clear.”
Somewhere time had expanded. It was like on grass. I felt I’d lived half my life walking from my apartment to Pronto, crossing Duval, the river Styx maybe, and I’d live the other half walking back. But it had to be done. You don’t just check into a hospital without any money.
I managed to write a check for $35, the maximum amount, and handed it to Dian who counted it out. Then I got my billfold out, put the money in it, put my checkbook in my hip pocket and turned to the door.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m O.K.,” I said, drifting toward the door, slanting left. “I’m going right home and call EMS.”
I went out the door, stopped once more at Duval St., stood leaning on my crutch, drifting left, till the traffic thinned, then scuttled across crab-like, still drifting left, ever left, the direction in which I’d been floating ever since I’d felt the first dull pain in the left side of my head and, knowing already what it was, gotten up from my chair in the bedroom and started into the kitchen, just walking to see how it felt, what had happened.
If you drift left, lean right.
Did I say it was lonely on that street? Did I say that I was the only person visible, that there was a grey sheen over the neighborhood, a fog that had devoured all the occupants but me, that when I walked out the door of my apartment, I had entered another world, a world as devoid of inhabitants and comfort, of warmth as a world can be? A grey world, a world of ghosts, a world of burdens where each step was the labor of a lifetime and there were no rewards.
But of course all we’re really talking about is waking with a dull headache and trying to walk and finding that you lurched wildly to the left and you knew you were having some kind of stroke and decided that you had to get some money before calling EMS to take you to the hospital and digging your old stick crutches out of the closet and propping yourself up with the left one to keep you from drifting and walking out the front door to go cash a check. That’s all that was happening.
Somewhere deep inside me, a cold hand had wrapped itself around my heart and started squeezing. “This is it,” a voice was saying, “you got out of the others but you’re not getting out of this one. You’re going to die or be helpless. Take your choice.” And then feeling the color seep out of my world, feeling everything settle into grey even tones. So that when I opened the front door of my apartment, having decided to lodge my protest against this condition by walking to the Pronto and cashing a check, I opened it to a grey world, a cold world, a world without hope or love. That was the world I had to walk through. There was nothing to do but set out. And Time expanded.
Besieged by interruptions. I won’t say that my whole life passed before my eyes walking back from the Pronto. Certain parts of it rolled sedately past my vision – rolled then staggered in rhythm with my rolling, staggering gait. Mostly the parts I wanted to forget. I lurched on.
Passing the Fresh Plus grocery, I noted my son, Joe, my oldest son, 45, mentally ill, lost since the 60s, leaned against the building staring off into that infinity that he called home. I thought he was in California, I knew he was in California. But there he leaned. I thought he didn’t see me but as I scuttered past, he asked, “What’s up?”
“I’m having a stroke,” I told him.
“Well, that’s a stroke of luck,” he said.
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a nice solid response to what’s going on around you. You could be where I am – stuck out beyond hope or famine.”
“I could be paralyzed too,” I said.
“What do you think I am?” he countered.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said.
He was standing by the pay phone. He dropped in a quarter, dialed a number and stood listening attentively for a long time.
“I don’t have time for this,” I repeated.
Joe spoke into the phone urgently. “Operator, I’ve been cut off –” He listened again then said, “How do I know when? When I was five or six years old. Do you have to have the whole story? Yes, I know it’s my quarter –”
“I’m bankrupt too,” I said.
“Don’t you hang up on me, bitch!” Joe screamed. I could see that I was forgotten and scuttled on. It felt dark around me. I was afraid it would be night before I got to shelter.
A chorus of large, middle-aged women were dancing naked on the parking lot while a small combo played 40s tunes, “Dipsy Doodle,” “In the Mood.” The women’s breasts sagged, their thatches were dark and thick between heavy, veined thighs. They touched themselves suggestively. “In the mood,” one of them sang, skipping up to me. There was a ring of dark hairs around each nipple. “I’m in the mood,” she crooned. “I’m having a stroke,” I told her. “Well, different strokes for different folks,” she said. “Maybe you’re just a little bit queer.” She reached down to grab me between the legs but I lurched forward and, drifting left again, resumed my journey. “What you need is a good fuck!” she yelled after me. I stopped and looked back at her and she turned her back, displaying hefty hips, then bent and pulled them apart, exposing the dark little pit of her anus as though this were the final temptation. “Last chance!” she yelled and the combo broke into “Hold that Tiger,” and I turned once more and stumbled on.
Stars were flashing before my eyes. A part of me felt infinitely distant. I was out at that point where the universe was recreating itself moment by moment. But of course I wasn’t. I was hobbling across the parking lot on the way back to my apartment. I had 35 dollars in my pocket and when I got home I was going to call EMS and they would take me away. I gritted my teeth and stumbled on. Something was in the balance. I had to get back on my own two feet or surrender my mobility forever. My sight blurred a moment. I stopped, leaned on my crutch to halt my drifting, blinked rapidly three times then peered ahead. Hazel my first wife was standing under the pecan tree across the street from my apartment. Her eyes were sad.
“You never came back,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “I had so many things to do. I couldn’t stop.”
“We all loved you,” she said.
My eyes blurred again – with tears this time. I felt my heart expand till it forced its way through my rib cage and exploded. The fragments rained down around my head. I dropped my eyes, unable to look at her.
“We all loved you,” she said again.
I couldn’t think of an answer. Sorrow locked in my throat. I gasped for breath and stumbled past her.
A beautiful lady with a beard grasped my arm firmly. She had dark, lovely eyes. “Just take it easy,” she said, holding me firmly as I started to drift.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Someone who knows you,” she answered.
That felt both comforting and disturbing at the same time. I felt my eyes tear up.
“I have to get back,” I said. “I have to call EMS.”
Her breast was warm against my arm. I wanted to crawl inside it and lie down. I kept forgetting she had a beard.
“It’s not your pain you feel,” she said. “It’s the pain you caused.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I’m someone who knows you?” she said again. “Confess. You were glad when you got sick. All those times when you thought you would die – you were glad, weren’t you? Because you thought you were paying off a debt in pain.”
I struggled to get away from her, drifted left again and she held me fast.
“True?” she asked.
“True,” I admitted. “Now can I go?”
She brushed her beard against my cheek. It felt velvety and feminine. “And if you die today?” she asked.
“Oh, but I can’t,” I said. “I’m not finished. If I die today, it will all be for nothing.”
On that, she dropped my arm abruptly. “Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever learn.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “All I know is there’s something I have to do. And I can’t do but one thing.”
“Then you’d better get on with it,” she said and walked away.
I stood there looking after her a moment, feeling rejected and sorrowful. Then, with a shrug and a dip left I turned back. Ahead of me through a mist, I saw my apartment. It was right across the street. I was standing under the pecan tree where I had seen Hazel standing. I started to cross the street.
But now a parade was passing. First a military band went by playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a remembered song from my childhood when I’d watched my father, the soldier, parade on Saturday mornings. The band was followed by an honor guard bearing a coffin. The coffin was draped in a flag as was typical at military funerals. I had attended a hundred of them as honor guard in Puerto Rico. It was a detail you pulled – like K.P. Across the street, I saw my mother. My brother was standing on one side of her and my sister on the other. They were holding her by the arms as she bent over sobbing into her clenched fists.
I started toward her but a hand grasped my arm, holding me back. I turned. My father was standing beside me in full dress uniform.
“Let her be,” he said.
“But she needs me,” I told him.
“She doesn’t need anyone,” he said. “She needs to be in her grief.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling very small suddenly. I wanted to take his hand. He looked so splendid in his uniform and his eyes – the same pale blue eyes I remembered as a boy, glistened like stars.
“But who is the funeral for?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” he asked.
I thought I did but was afraid to say, afraid I’d get it wrong – the way I always did with him.
“I need to get back to my apartment,” I said. “I’m having a stroke. I need to call EMS.”
He was silent.
“I have $35 in my billfold,” I added.
But he wasn’t listening. The band had come to a halt and was playing the national anthem. My father had come to attention and was saluting, his eyes straight ahead, staring past the band, past the apartment house, all the way out to infinity. I could feel his soul still beside me. “It’s about commitment,” a voice said in my ear.
The honor guard lowered the coffin to the ground and lifted the lid. I stepped forward and looked down into it.
I had known, of course, that the face I saw would be my own. What I wasn’t prepared for was how peaceful the face looked. It looked as though he had finished everything he had set out to do in this lifetime and was perfectly content to leave. I stood staring down into my own face for a long time, looking deep into the closed eyes. For an eternity, we hung balanced like that. Then the eyes opened, saw me, blinked once and closed again.
The honor guard replaced the lid on the coffin, raised it to their shoulders, the band struck up a new tune, and the parade moved on, leaving me standing in the empty street. I stood looking after it a moment and then moved forward, drifting left, crossed the street and I was back at my apartment standing leaned on my crutch on the front porch.
I stood there looking off, past the pecan tree, the empty parking lot, the Fresh Plus Grocery. My mind swirled with images then grew still. I thought back over my journey, the long trek to the Pronto Convenience Store, the first part of my journey, a long lurching trek through grey cold air, forcing my way along, driven left by a wind that howled with fury, a cold wind, cold as my loneliness. I thought of all the years I’d spent walking this neighborhood to the Sundae Palace, my writing place, and it seemed that the trek from my apartment to the Sundae Palace all those years was the same journey I had just taken, forcing myself against the wind of my fate, trying to put myself together, trying to make something that would last. I had thought the journey would never end just as this morning I had thought that long cold trek to the Pronto Convenience Store would never end.
I stood there letting this all drift through me thinking randomly of things from the past as one pores over discarded treasures, thought of how I had come to love the broad Texas evenings in San Marcos when I’d first come back to Texas and gone back to school, how I had decided that I’d never seen skies so wide, decided that I could never live anywhere with narrower skies.
And I thought of the faces of the women I had loved and watched them move past me one at a time and blessed them and was glad they had been there.
And I thought of the darkness and the torment of my days and thought of how the mind creates traps for the soul and springs them when it’s least aware. And of how the soul has to continue anyway, from one trap to the next, from one day to the next, from one broad evening …
And I thought finally of the faces of my neighbors in this neighborhood where I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life – the first neighborhood I ever had, transient that I am, army brat. And I thought how I would like to live here till I die among these faces. And as I thought of all these things, a peace came over me and it seemed to me then that my journey had ended.
And standing there on my front porch, leaning left, I lifted my arm and looked at my watch. 9:30. It had been 9:15 when I started out. Not bad. I’d crossed the universe in fifteen minutes. I turned, walked into my apartment, dialed 911 and sat down to wait.
