The One-Eyed Man Read online

  “You could get HIV from that, for sure,” I said.

  Claire took a step toward the two of them, then stopped and looked to me again. “Jesus Christ, K., do something,” she said.

  I got to my feet and waded into the scrum. I’m not always the biggest guy in the room, but compared to Arnulfo I was a titan, and lifting him off his father was not unlike plucking a four-year-old away from the floor.

  I handed Arnulfo off to Claire, who wrapped him in a bear hug from behind and dragged him several steps toward the kitchen.

  “Oxígeno,” Eduardo gasped.

  “Let me clean your face first,” I said, kneeling on the carpet beside him.

  After a moment of looking around for a towel or throw blanket, I pulled my oxford over my head and wiped the bloody goop off Eduardo’s nose and brow, sopped it away from the corners of his eyes. He continued to flail weakly, his hands making stricken little motions in the air above him, like a fussy baby fighting sleep.

  “I’m going to call an ambulance,” Claire said.

  Eduardo shook his head several times. His mouth worked silently.

  “He says no,” I told her.

  “Like I give a shit.”

  “He may have a DNR, sick as he is,” I said.

  Below me Eduardo nodded, his eyes closed.

  “You have a DNR? He has a DNR,” I said.

  “DNR?” Claire asked.

  “It’s an acronym,” Arnulfo said. “Stands for ‘let the motherfucker die.’”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Oxígeno,” Eduardo pleaded again.

  “If we don’t call someone we’re going to be in trouble, K.”

  “We’re probably going to be in trouble anyway,” I said. “But go ahead and make the call, if you want.”

  While Claire directed Arnulfo into the kitchen, I reattached the plastic tubing to Eduardo’s oxygen tank and slid the cannulas into his nostrils. I found a pillow on the sofa and placed it under his head. None of this seemed to do any good. His lips remained alarmingly blue, and the suffocation fear was back in his eyes, burning brighter now that the application of oxygen hadn’t eased his distress.

  “So you have a DNR?” I asked.

  He nodded again.

  “Do you want to die?” I asked.

  Eduardo didn’t respond. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, slowly, still able to muster some balefulness for me despite his distress.

  “I’m just trying to understand what you want,” I said. “Maybe we should sit you up?”

  He nodded. I slid an arm underneath his shoulders, pulling him into a sitting position against the sofa.

  “Better?” I asked.

  He drew a deep, shuddering breath, then nodded again.

  “Ambulance is on its way,” Claire called from the kitchen.

  Eduardo looked at me. “You want to understand?” he said. “That’s what you said, right? You want to understand.”

  “I’m trying to understand everything,” I said.

  Eduardo went into a sudden, explosive coughing fit, a dry hacking that made him list to one side like a crippled ship. When the jag released him he straightened his cannulas with trembling hands and said, “Then let me tell you, cabrón: you’re asking the wrong question.”

  “What’s the right question?”

  He grabbed the sleeve of my undershirt and pulled my face to his. This close I could smell the sickness on him, sour and sharp. “The question,” he said, “is never ‘Do you want to die?’ The question is, ‘Do you want to keep on living?’”

  “I can understand,” I said, “why that distinction might seem important.”

  Eduardo released my shirtsleeve and leaned back against the sofa. “Do me a favor and find my cigarettes, huh?”

  I looked and saw the end table had somehow remained upright in the fracas. Eduardo’s cigarettes and ashtray rested undisturbed on top of it. I retrieved them.

  We sat side by side on the carpet with the ashtray between us. The oxygen tank continued to hiss. We waited: for the ambulance, for death. From time to time Eduardo went into another coughing fit. One of these was bad enough that he dropped his cigarette as though someone had slapped it from his hand. I retrieved it and waited for him to compose himself. After a few moments, Eduardo reached to take the cigarette back.

  “You sure you really want this?” I asked.

  “Just give it to me.”

  I looked at him, then handed the cigarette over. “Addiction is a fascinating thing,” I said.

  Eduardo took a drag. “Family, too,” he said, choking back another cough as smoke surged around the cannulas in his nostrils.

  11

  HEROISM IS A FICTION

  In this particular spot in space-time, Eduardo’s fear of suffocation came to an end five days later at Hoboken University Medical Center. The official cause of death was acute respiratory failure resulting from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. From what Arnulfo told me, it was a postcard afternoon in Hoboken. The hospital room had big westward-facing windows, and the shades were opened at Eduardo’s request—his last request, it turned out. He died bathed in warm red light as the sun retreated slowly toward Allentown. A still, eerie, peaceful death. No thrashing agonal period bridging the Styx; just one last, peaceful exhalation, like in a movie, and exeunt.

  “Which is too bad,” Arnulfo said over the phone. “He deserved to suffer a little more.”

  The news came while I waited for my award ceremony to begin. Even though I didn’t believe Eduardo was any more dead than he had ever been, I told Arnulfo I was sorry for his loss.

  Arnulfo scoffed at this. “Loss,” he said. “Give me a break.”

  Then he started to sob.

  “They’re calling me to the stage,” I told him. “I have to go.”

  The ceremony took place in an old opera house across the street from city hall. I followed an attendant from the greenroom through a series of musty, claustrophobic passageways to the edge of the stage, where we waited for my introduction to conclude. The chief of police stood at a lectern, flanked by Felicia and a pair of men who appeared to be dignitaries of some kind—city councilors, perhaps, or maybe one of them was the mayor, though I wouldn’t have known our mayor from Mayor McCheese. I remained in the wings with the attendant while the chief spoke of my bravery, my selflessness, my heroic observance of the one principle that made civilization possible, to wit: our obligation to take care of one another whenever we could.

  The man he was talking about didn’t sound much like me, to me.

  Eventually the chief ran out of superlatives, and I was introduced to exuberant applause. As I walked onstage the chief made way at the lectern, and I realized suddenly that they meant for me to speak. Not having prepared any remarks, I took my spot at the microphone and, after waiting for the audience to quiet down, said this: “I’m not sure who the chief was just talking about. That man sounds like Jesus Christ himself.”

  Chuckles from those assembled.

  “That wasn’t supposed to be funny,” I said, and then, when the laughter choked off and I noticed expressions of bemusement pocking the crowd: “Though it’s okay. Just because I’m not trying to be funny doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to laugh.”

  The auditorium was quiet enough, suddenly, that I could hear people breathing. Somewhere a cell phone, muffled by pocket or purse, chimed out a snippet of the 1812 Overture. I looked to my right, where the chief of police stood staring quizzically at me.

  “I hope you understand that I don’t mean to be contrarian,” I said. “I often have difficulty, in recent months, making myself understood. This is a very nice thing that you’re doing for me. The point I’m trying to make is, do any of you believe I’m actually the unwaveringly decent person the chief just described? Or is it more likely that I’m a flawed, occasionally petty man thrust by chance into a situation in which he merely appears heroic?”

  The chief of police cleared his throat pointe
dly. I looked over at the sound and saw Felicia had cast her gaze to the floor.

  “I mean listen, if we’re being honest, there’s no such thing as a person who embodies valor,” I said, turning back to the audience. “Heroism is not something you occupy day to day. It’s a moment, at best. You get something right, almost by accident, and then you go back to your bumbling, myopic default setting. So I think about this—about how the vast majority of our lives are passed in a decidedly unheroic way—and I wonder, is heroism measured, then, by account balances? On the one hand, you have my acting in a way that likely saved Felicia’s life. And that is not insignificant. But on the other hand, you have forty years’ worth of the little injuries I’ve inflicted on myself and others. The casual harsh word, or else the kindness I failed to extend. The thoughtless waking hours, the willful stupidity. Garbage thrown on the roadside instead of in a trash bin. Careless lane changes, a vote cast for a man who went on to start an unjust war. The medium-rare steak that tastes like terror and desperation, when I never in this life or any other would raise the butcher’s knife myself.

  “And then there are the little domestic blunders we all commit. For years I hurt my wife a dozen times a day, unthinkingly, and most often without malice—these were failures of ignorance, or workaday negligence, or fatigue. The inevitable result, in other words, of what we often call the human condition. I did not want to injure my wife—I was not actively trying to injure her—and yet I did, over and over. If I cataloged for you all the ways in which I failed in my marriage, I guarantee you would lose interest in celebrating me today.”

  Someone coughed. Otherwise, the auditorium was silent.

  “At the same time,” I said, “I realize hyperbole is de rigueur at events like this. Everyone needs heroes, or at least heroic narratives. There’s a reason The Odyssey has survived for three thousand years. But that reason isn’t what we think. It’s not that we hold Odysseus’s deeds in high esteem, and so want to honor him by remembering them. It’s that we want to be him. Or at least believe we could, on our best days, be like him. It’s the same impulse that sends us flocking to films about decent men who reluctantly exercise their talent for violence in the name of what’s just. So when you get right down to it, this ceremony is more about making you feel good than it is about honoring me.”

  Crickets. I found myself, in spite of myself, growing irritated with their ongoing silence.

  “And also,” I said, “ceremonies like this are about confirming your belief in a just world, which you need in order to assuage a whole host of subconscious fears,” I said. “Fear of existing in a universe that is completely and utterly indifferent to you, your families, whether you suffer or celebrate, live or die.”

  I sensed the chief of police sidling closer to the podium.

  “But this notion of a just world doesn’t withstand even the mildest scrutiny,” I said. “A five-year-old can, and often will, tell you that existence is fundamentally unfair. For the last few months, I’ve been reading pretty much every spare minute when I’m not asleep, and I’ve learned some terrible things. Like, for example, that half of humanity lives on less than two dollars a day. That’s over three billion people. Try to imagine three billion of anything. Pennies. Bottle caps. You can’t do it. I’m not saying I can, either. But still. In the last twenty-four hours, enough children died of hunger to fill Fenway Park, while during that same time people actually at Fenway Park gorged themselves on nine-dollar hot dogs to the point of gastrointestinal distress and, in a couple of instances, probably, brief hospitalization. In the last year, people have been killed by airborne fire hydrants, runaway hay bales, and falling coconuts. Somewhere on this planet, as we speak, a man is being made to squat on a broken bottle for the entertainment of his tormentors, and a woman is being stoned to death for falling in love. Nonsmokers get lung cancer, marathoners drop dead of heart attacks. Murderers and thieves walk free, and the innocent go mad in prison cells the size of broom closets. But you want to believe in a just and orderly world, so you come here to applaud a shiny object being pinned to my lapel.

  “All of which is fine, understand,” I said. “I’m neither judging nor condemning. I just want to acknowledge the reality of what we’re all doing here.”

  Murmuring now. Several people rose from their seats and departed through the large double doors at the back of the auditorium.

  “I can see I’ve displeased you,” I said, “and I apologize. Maybe I could try to explain. What would you think if I told you the thing that makes me not good with people is the same thing that made me cross the street that night?”

  The chief of police drifted into my periphery and addressed the crowd without benefit of amplification. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. And now, with the authorization of our mayor and esteemed members of the city council, I will present the—”

  “Because listen,” I said, “if I were still the man I was before my wife died, I would not have crossed that street. I would have stayed in the shadows a hundred feet away, hidden and safe, under no moral obligation to help in any way, aside from placing a phone call to the police. And in that instance Felicia likely would have died, but not before horrid things, things arguably worse than death, were done to her.”

  The chief moved closer. “Asshole,” he hissed, still facing the crowd and smiling, “shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m being asked to keep my remarks brief,” I said, “so let me conclude by saying that if you really want to honor what I did, then instead of sitting there gape mouthed you should applaud this awkwardness that we’re all experiencing right now. Applaud my complete inability to adhere to the script of this ceremony. Because it’s the very thing that saved Felicia’s life. Thank you.”

  Maybe five or six people clapped, but not loud enough to obscure the sound of the 1812 Overture going off in someone’s pants again.

  It took a long time for the chief to present me with my medal. Several photographers—one working for the city, a couple with local news outlets—wanted pictures of the presentation. We stood there, the chief and I, and held various poses: shaking hands and smiling, standing side by side and smiling, holding a citation from the city and smiling.

  The photographers also wanted several shots of the chief actually putting the medal on me, which he did like a girl pinning a boutonniere on a prom date whom she did not like in the least. I wish I could say that the chief was merely careless, and stabbed me without actually meaning to. But I cannot say that with anything resembling certainty.

  Afterward I met Claire, who’d left at the conclusion of my speech, at a bar down the street from the opera house. Her face came to life when I walked into the room, and as I approached she stood up from her drink and opened her arms to greet me.

  “You were brilliant,” she said, pulling my body tightly against the hard spots and soft swells of her own, making my pierced breast ache.

  12

  THE SECURITY DETAIL AS A KIND OF APOLOGY

  Soon after the award ceremony, Claire and I set to work on the show—now titled (over my objection and to Claire’s great giggling delight) America, You Stoopid—in earnest. We cut seams into the map like traveling salesmen, logging thousands upon thousands of miles in the first month alone, the paradoxical effect of which was to conjure a world that seemed smaller yet ever more varied: distances were made short by air travel, but the philosophical space between people proved infinite. Yet despite the wildly disparate thoughts and opinions of those we met, I was always able to fulfill Theodore’s mandate of finding disagreement, owing to what I came to think of as the Great False Binary. The dominant mode of national discourse, the Great False Binary dictated that a given thing was either entirely right and just and correct and awesome through and through, or entirely awful and evil and wrongheaded and irredeemable through and through. No room existed for considering the moral and legal nuances of, say, abortion, because according to the Great False Binary, those nuances did not exist. As such, even when I agreed w
ith the president of Planned Parenthood that abortion should be safe and legal, I still managed to upset her by suggesting that those who consider abortion to be murder perhaps have a valid point. Ditto a representative from the National Organization to Stop the Proliferation of Immigrants in Confederate States (or NOSPICS), who seemed to suffer a grand mal seizure when I noted that no matter how one felt about Mexicans, it was well-established economic fact that illegal immigrants contribute a larger portion of their income to government coffers than citizens.

  These secular disagreements, however, regardless of how heated or otherwise good for television, presented no physical danger. We argued with Klansmen and New Black Panthers, radical feminists and neoliberals, without injury or threat thereof. It was only when talk veered toward that fogged-in province of burning bushes and giant obsidian cubes that we learned—mostly the hard way—that the more irrational a person’s belief, and the less evidence available to support it, the more likely he is to beat you up for suggesting that belief is wrongheaded.

  I don’t pretend to understand why this is. I’m not an anthropologist, or a neuroscientist, or a man of vestments. Despite all my experience I have no better understanding of people than I did before. I’m merely reporting the facts.

  So: when our discussions turned to religion, I often, if not always, got hurt.

  There was the air force chaplain who slapped me on the ear when I suggested the branch of the military responsible for our nuclear weapons stockpile should perhaps not be promoting end-times evangelicalism at its service academy.

  There was the group of prominent Brooklyn Hasidim to whom I suggested it would be a great mitzvah to offer money for the construction of a mosque in Lower Manhattan (I even used the word “mitzvah,” thinking that might help). They responded by smoothing their white oxford shirts carefully with the palms of their hands before kicking me around in the street like a soccer ball.