THE HOLE

by
George Sparling

I'd never seen my father helpless before, dependent on doctors and nurses for everything. Clark's illness equalized us, aligning him with my past and present deficiencies. His new status as a sufferer meant he'd joined humanity. Or, at least, my kind of human being. I'd always assumed he'd separated himself from the normal laws of biology. Long denying emotional attachments, I accepted that he as a thorough-going, American, Midwestern trait, unique among our species. In fact, I'd that affliction, not Clark.

Standing near Clark's bone-thrusted body, tubes, needles, monitors, oxygen, and intubation intermeshed with a once proud and sovereign man, I felt oddly comforted. The future maimed and killed. I flew from the West Coast to see my father in the heartland.

"He's in room 527." I walked slowly, figuring if I killed time, he might die before I arrived. Or maybe I was plain scared of him, postponing my worst scenario. Yeah, I was one twisted son.

"Is he conscious? Can he speak?" I asked the doctor. He answered affirmative to both questions.

My thighs pressed against the bed. An English major, my literary aspirations, how I wanted to write about my suburban upbringing, exposing it as fraudulent. Updike, Roth, Cheever, Yates, Salinger: many had already covered that territory. I proved only that I was an artist manque, a failed writer. I wrote occasionally, whenever I felt like it. I preferred sitting in a lounge chair, drinking beer or green tea, reading, listening to music.

"Sometimes he talks about your mother," the doctor said. "He's on lots of pain medication, which cause hallucinations."

"Does he make sense?" I asked. Clark had always made sense.

"You'd know better that I," the doctor said, leaving us alone.

Great, now Clark and I could swap drug tales. I'd tell him about acid trips, the vibrating, cosmic mandalas i'd seen while sky-high. Maybe about shooting crystal, crashing, and almost hanging myself. Or about the time, high on cocaine and mescaline, alone in a SRO hotel, a borrowed and loaded .357 magnum in my hand, wanting to shoot early morning garbage collectors because their noise inferred with Pink Floyd CD.

"Dad, it's me, Bobby. Can you hear me?"

He showed a Tibetan Bardo state, but I couldn't remember whether Bardo represented sequences after or just prior to death. I'd often shouted in at him that he was a walking dead man. Perhaps if he recovered we could travel to Tibet and learn about Bardo. Maybe that would re-unite us.

I walked out of the room. Connection was impossible. I drank espresso in the nursing home's dining room. Starbuck's has at last come to the Midwest. The New Yorker, People, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and Utne Reader laid on a table. Clark and I had inhabited a closed world. Now, the world opened up for everyone. But too late. After caffeine, my West Coast brain downloaded, and I clicked swiftly back to Clark's room.

"I just saw Clark raise his arm," a nurse told me.

"Must take great effort," I said. She grimaced, and I realized how false that sounded.

"Stay with it. He'll come around," she said, and left.

"Dad? Can you hear me?" He lifted his arm slowly, touching my forehead and hair.

"Death...not for sissies," he murmured. Though a cliche, yet from his perspective it was an original phrase.

"Life isn't for sissies, either," I said. I placed my hand in his, patting it. Physical contact like that was an unspoken taboo. Quickly I removed it, favoring a solid handshake, something we'd done at night before going to bed.

"How you doing back there?" he asked. Couldn't he say "West Coast"? Was that anti-Midwest?

"OK. I own a second-hand bookstore, sell books on the Internet," I said. "I could make good money on a book auction."

"Own a house?" His first home: I had the photograph taped to my wall. Defining success, its glory and pride, something I'd not achieved.

"I rent a Victorian fixer-upper. You should see it." Had that meant I wished him health, getting well and actually sitting in my living room? Or that I'd tell others that Clark should have seen it, but died before he could?

"I loved our home," he said. I barely heard him.

"I hated the linoleum floors, that narrow hallway, the chintzy outdoor furniture in the family room. The high-tech medical equipment blasted like thrash metal vids from soldiers in Iraq. I no longer lived behind the wire, Clark water-boarding me into submission. Get out of the Green Zone I mentally screamed at him.

"Your way never worked," he said.

"I've a B.A. degree, at least. Own a business. Have girlfriends."

"Should be married by now."

"I'm strictly a free-market individualist, your kind of guy." I'm into solo sex, far too much. Sort of neo-con pleasure. But that ain't healthy.

"Anyone serious you could marry?"

"I always had a crush on Mary Tyler Moore."

"People told me you were a Communist...perverted, too." Suspicion always fell upon solitaires. But I never made it into the Hall of Shame, where quiet losers shot as many as possible before they killed themselves. That would've forced Clark to question his life: Had I caused that he'd ask himself. Guilt- dumping - the great revenge.

The doctor and nurse entered. They checked all vital signs.

"Ten more minutes. You may come tomorrow if you like," the nurse said.

"Fine. I've got to return tomorrow because of business." I wanted her to believe Clark and I were both businessmen reliving inter-generational success stories. My paranoid eyes told me her expression found that impossible.

I stood closer to Clark. Green slime drooled from one corner of his mouth. I wiped it away with a Kleenex.

"Not in trouble...loans and such?" he asked, catching his breath.

"No. I just bought two-hundred books at an estate sale."

"No money there..."

"First editions can be like Rembrants, not millions but hundreds sometimes."

"Oh."

"Why couldn't we have had more?" I asked. "Wealthy town, no?"

"Had to save for our retirement."

"What about me?"

"You hated me...why should I?"

"There's still time."

"Too late." I held my ear close to his mouth.

"People live longer now. It's possible to turn lives around."

"Nothing for failures," he hoarsely said.

I once wrote an opinion piece in the high school newspaper against the principal's edict that students not boo or shout obscenities at basketball referees, that students should respect authority. "Doesn't the prinicipal believe in free speech?" I wrote rhetorically. The editor apologized for printing my rant.

"I knew you wanted me to be a sport reporter."

"Yes."

He and my mother argued fiercely over whether I had the smarts to do the complicated mathematics class I took.

"Bobby could do it if he bore down and applied himself," Clark yelled at her.

"Please, can't you see you're killing his soul, " cried my mother, a devout Epicopalian.

From my bedroom closet I pulled out the .16 gauge shot Clark had given me for my sixteenth birthday. I put two shells into it, ran down the hall, and aimed at his heart. He swatted the barrel away, and I fired into the ceiling.

It wasn't about mat at all, not from my perspective. It was about failure. For two years, until I finally left home for good, I sat on his left side, my mother and brother onlookers. On Thorazine and Stelazine: I, felon, inches from Clark, dead man only in my perpetual fantasy world. The drugs blunted and buried the emotional tension soaking up the air. If that piece had been praised for its good writing and strongly worded argument, life would've changed. But regrets were cliches for old men, something I never figured I'd succumb to.

Clark lifted his hands over his head, pushing upward, reaching as high as his arms allowed. His face registered no pain. I buzzed emergency. Two nurses entered.

"What's he doing?" I asked, alarmed at Clark's sudden physicality.

They went to bedside, one placing her hand on his forehead, apparently to steady him. The other nurse pushed her hand gently on his chest.

"Watch and listen," a nurse said.

He kept thrusting his hands high, forcing them to a place he clearly saw.

"Can't you see the glass? Can't you see the hole in the glass?" he asked. His hands targeted what I assumed to be an invisible grid above his head, rhythmically pushing his hands through a zone. The nurses observed me watching him. I stood dazed, awed.

"Bobby...The hole...See it?... In the glass?" He looked at me fiercely.

"Yes. I can." The nurses backed away.

I took off my sport shirt, standing in a sleeveless undershirt. I bent down, the back of my head touching his heart, grasped his hands in mine, and together we put our hands through the hole.

"It's the pain meds," a nurse said.

"Hallucinations are common at this stage," the other said.

Clark and I pushed though the hole a while longer. Sitting together in the Sunday church pew never was a spiritual as this.

"He needs to rest now," the nurse said. I could've stayed another day. The store would manage without me. But I left.

A week later my brother sent an email. Clark had died. My brother said I should've been committed, that Clark feared the attempted homicide would become public knowledge. I e-mailed back, telling him I'd be there for the funeral. I lied.

I began writing, trying to get published online. Some poetry got accepted and that buoyed my spirits, raised my self-esteem. The fiction, which I felt best expressed myself. Soon, I had a personal web page of my published stories.

One night, after a huge consumption of caffeine that day, I wrote, "Putting His Hands Through The Hole In The Glass": I'd never writen iambic pentameter before. I finished after one-hundred and twenty pages. I uploaded it to my web page, linking to many sites. I learned how to do podcasts, reading my book. Eventually, 2,200 had heard it. A literary agent e-mailed me. I signed a contract. I hadn't a title until the agent asked whether I liked, �The Hole�. I agreed.

Schadenfreude: The world never was saturated with enough.

� George Sparling
Reproduced with permission