The One-Eyed Man Read online

  I talked the clerk down from $150, paid $120 cash, and walked out with the bell wrapped in baby blue tissue paper cinched by white ribbon around the handle.

  “This is for you,” I said to Sarah when I arrived home.

  She sat in a recliner that for years only I had ever used, in an après-work, loosened-tie-and-highball kind of way; if we’d had children both they and we would have referred to it as “Dad’s chair.” Now, with Sarah faltering but not yet bedridden, she’d taken to spending long hours camped out on the velvet cushions, eyeballing daytime television’s endless stream of commercials for disability law firms and feminine hygiene products. In effect, she’d taken possession of the recliner. I had little interest in it anymore, even on the rare occasion when I found it vacant. For that matter, I’d also stopped drinking highballs after work. Eventually I’d stop working altogether, when Sarah’s illness took its long last turn toward the lethal homestretch and she required tending around the clock.

  Now, though, I handed Sarah the package, and her eyes, which as she’d lost weight had grown until they seemed to occupy half of her face, flared with surprise and pleasure. She untied the ribbon, meeting my gaze several times as she did so, gracing me with the warmth of those eyes, the pupils wide as serving plates from oxycodone. She worked slowly, picking at the strips of tape with her thumbnail. I enjoyed the rustle of the paper under her fingers. She did not rip it, however slightly, even once.

  When she’d folded the paper and set it beside her on the recliner, Sarah held the bell in both palms, considering.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Why don’t you give it a ring?” I said.

  She looked at me again, then let her left hand fall away, gripping the bell by the handle with her right. It chimed, high and true: An icy F-sharp, or thereabouts. That, then, would become the note of our torment.

  The thing is: on a long enough timeline, nobody suffers gracefully. Books and movies lie. When someone’s dying they lash out, make demands like a postcolonial despot. This is unavoidable. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but that bell would become a cudgel. Which was hardly Sarah’s fault. She didn’t ask for the bell. She didn’t ask to be dying, either.

  “Why, though?” Sarah said to me, before all that.

  “It’s for you to let me know when you need something,” I said. “A lot more elegant than hollering across the house, right?”

  “Sure, I guess so,” Sarah said. “It’s really beautiful, anyway.”

  “You’ll be like the queen of Sheba,” I said. “And I’ll be your attendant.”

  She rang the bell again. “You’re a strange man, K.,” she said.

  “You knew that when you married me,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she said. “Can’t start complaining now.”

  “Although I guess that to attend a queen in the ancient world I’d have to be a eunuch, right? I love you, but I’m not sure I’m ready to make that kind of commitment.”

  Sarah laughed, gave the bell another shake.

  “What is it you desire, Your Highness?” I asked.

  Sarah blushed with the ridiculousness of it—color flooding her wan face was, by then, just this side of miraculous—but she played along.

  “My desire,” she said, “is for an Orchard Peach–flavored Clearly Canadian. Half a degree above ice cold.”

  “Please forgive me, Your Excellency,” I said, going to one knee and bowing my head in apology, “but I believe it has been many years since Clearly Canadian was available for retail sale, in our realm.”

  “What is this?” she asked, mock-outraged. “Are you refusing to honor my decree?”

  “Never, exalted one,” I said. “I’m simply suggesting that it may prove nigh impossible, even for a servant as dedicated as myself.”

  Sarah dropped the act. “Seriously though,” she said, “I could really go for a Clearly Canadian.”

  And then, in the face of her sudden earnestness: Of course. How could I have forgotten?

  You know how teenagers often will affect some benign idiosyncrasy to set themselves apart from their peers? Mine was a green-and-white polka dot silk shirt, an unfortunate sartorial mistake that I wore pretty much every day from sophomore year on. And Sarah? All through high school, even before we started dating, she carried a sea glass–blue bottle of Clearly Canadian everywhere she went. In classrooms. On field trips. At dances, and illicit parties where the other kids, myself included, were getting soused on Natural Light and Wild Irish Rose. Even at the House of Pancakes, where many of the girls in our class waited tables and where we spent school day afternoons nursing cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, she would bring in her own bottle of Clearly Canadian.

  I kissed her forehead, the skin hot and dry like a warming plate someone had forgotten to turn off. “Your wish,” I said, “is my command.”

  It was, however, a command that proved difficult to obey, even in a hyperconnected global marketplace where one could order shark fin soup from Hong Kong on Monday and sit down to eat it Tuesday afternoon. Near as I could determine, Clearly Canadian, which when we were teenagers seemed to rival Coke and Pepsi in its ubiquity, had last been produced in the early years of the new millennium. And apparently soft drinks don’t keep very long, because there were no old cases of Clearly Canadian available on eBay or Craigslist. Hours spent searching online yielded all manner of Clearly Canadian merchandise—beach towels, Tshirts, golf visors, even salt and pepper shakers crafted from the original bottles—but no soda. I missed, with agonizing closeness, a limited-edition run of the original Country Raspberry flavor, which sold out two weeks before I called, according to a nice woman at a specialty beverage distributor in Vancouver who apologized so profusely when she learned my circumstances that I ended up feeling worse for her than she possibly could have for me.

  Meantime, the sterling silver bell chimed and chimed, pulling me away from the computer and telephone. I went to Sarah and counted out her pills, helped her to the bathroom, injected Coumadin into a pinch of her belly to ward off blood clots. I went to her with soup and ice chips and meal-replacement shakes formulated to keep octogenarians from dropping weight. I went to her with heating pads and hot water bottles, extra blankets, pen and paper. I went to her with everything she needed, never with the one thing she wanted.

  One afternoon I went to Sarah empty-handed, with nothing to offer but the stupid mute warmth of a fellow mammal. This was an afternoon dusk in the deep freeze, a time of day and year when sorrow settles into and permeates everything even in the best of circumstances. I held Sarah while she watched snow fall outside the window and wept for her last winter on earth. I could not speak; I could barely even breathe. I was helpless, here in this room with my wife, but not so helpless, I hoped more and more desperately, to find that soda. It had to exist. The world was too big for it not to be out there somewhere, like the treasure of the Knights Templars, or those missing Fabergé eggs.

  There is, of course, always a painful irony. In this case it’s that over the next few months Sarah forgot all about her request for the soda. By then the cancer had crowbarred its way into her parietal lobe, and she began transposing words—“Did you leave the car in the groceries?”—and forgetting the difference between left and right, so Clearly Canadian was not the first thing on her mind. Eventually she took to sleeping nineteen, twenty hours a day. While she slept more and more, I continued to search, working the phones, whispering to store clerks and redemption chain CEOs, even the constituent service staffers of both our senator and congressman. I called the offices of the Clearly Canadian Food & Beverage Company over and over, finally getting something other than voicemail on the eighteenth try.

  I explained my situation to the man.

  “We’d love to help,” he told me. “I hope you believe that. But it’s not like we can just rattle off a single bottle. We’re talking huge production facilities that have to be unshuttered. The original Clearly Canadian teardrop bottle is a
custom job, and the molds would have to be made from scratch. It’s just not possible. We sell baby food now, mostly, you understand.”

  “Baby food?” I said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “But then why are you still called Clearly Canadian?”

  “There are only seven of us,” he said. “We don’t have the time or the money to change the corporation name, even if we wanted to. Which we don’t, since it’s the only thing of real value we’ve got left.”

  So that was it. I’d gone to the wellspring, such as it was, and come back with nothing. Which should have been okay, because Sarah was by now nearly nonverbal, could neither read nor write, could barely communicate at all, and likely wouldn’t have cared a whit about some dumb soda even if she’d remembered her request. Orchard Peach Clearly Canadian could neither save nor redeem us. I knew this.

  And yet.

  What kept me up nights? What had me pacing barefoot at four in the morning, goose-bumped by the cold that seeped up through the floor from the basement, trying all the nonpharmaceutical relaxation aids late capitalism had to offer: melatonin, valerian, chamomile tea, aromatherapeutic balms, even, when nothing else helped, whole milk brought to a steam on the range top? What was it that sent me, eventually, to the liquor cabinet, even though with everything Sarah needed or might need (a brisk trip to the emergency room, for example) I had no business touching even an ounce of alcohol?

  It wasn’t her illness, I can tell you that. It wasn’t the specter of her death. It wasn’t her sadness or fear. It was not any of the things you might expect.

  Deliverance happens, though, on occasion, and often the timing is such that our minds, which are programmed to establish pattern and meaning where neither exists, see this timing as something other than coincidence. We infer the fingerprint of the divine, or at least the benevolent intervention of some force or energy. Karma. Serendipity. Kismet. Back then, even I was not immune to this kind of thinking. So it was that right around the time I started to grow genuinely delirious with fatigue—miscounting Sarah’s pills, dozing off while I administered her nebulizer treatments—I was all too ready to apprehend one phone call as the Universe smiling on us, however briefly.

  The phone ringing, in and of itself, was not remarkable. We got a lot of calls during Sarah’s illness—many more, in fact, than we ever had before. The silver bell was one of my masters, and the telephone the other. There were doctors to speak to, as well as in-home nurses, insurance representatives, hospice coordinators, far-flung friends. Also, of course, Peggy. She didn’t sleep either, so we would talk late. Her sips of coffee brandy, and the muted pop and gasp as she dragged on a cigarette, transmitted to me by satellite, wire, and tower, became the soundtrack of my late nights and early mornings.

  It wasn’t the hospice this time, though, and it wasn’t Peggy. It turned out to be the deeply sympathetic woman in Vancouver.

  “Please tell me your wife is still alive,” she said, her voice tight with anticipation of being answered in the negative.

  “She is,” I said. “She very much is.”

  “Oh thank God,” the woman said. “Listen, I found you a whole case of Orchard Peach.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Oh, I would never,” the woman said. “Not about this. I promise. I’m telling the truth.”

  “But where?”

  “This is the part you’ll have a hard time believing,” she said.

  “I’m already having a hard time believing,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed. I just don’t understand.”

  In the bedroom the sterling silver bell chimed, and for the first time ever I ignored it.

  “Okay so here’s the thing,” the woman said. “There’s this Saudi prince.”

  “There are a lot of Saudi princes,” I said. “From what I understand.”

  “More than five thousand,” the woman said. “That’s one of the things I learned, in all this.”

  The bell chimed again.

  “But so one of these Saudi princes went to school in America,” the woman said.

  “Again,” I said, “many of them do, is my understanding.”

  “But this one, see,” the woman said, “this one happened to be in college in the early 1990s, and he didn’t drink alcohol, because he’s a devout Muslim.”

  “I bet that’s not true of a lot of Saudi princes,” I said.

  “But he liked to be sociable, and so at parties he would always bring Clearly Canadian. When he learned they were going to stop producing it, he bought every bottle of the stuff he could find, so he’d have enough to last him a long time.”

  “And he bought so much that he still has some, all these years later,” I said.

  “He apparently still has quite a lot,” the woman told me. “He’s very strict about his consumption. One bottle a month.”

  “That’s really something,” I said.

  “Which is why it’s such a big deal for him to give you a whole case,” the woman said. “He’s actually a very kind man. Talked to me personally. Not what you’d expect, from a Saudi prince.”

  “What would you expect from a Saudi prince?” I asked.

  The woman paused. “I’m not really sure,” she said. “Just that he’d be sort of arrogant, I suppose.”

  “That’s probably fair,” I said.

  The bell, louder this time.

  “But so I told him your wife is very sick and I didn’t know how much time she had left,” the woman said. “Oh gosh, I apologize for putting it so bluntly.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, though her words had made me wince.

  “And he offered to send it to you overnight. All the way from Saudi Arabia. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “It is,” I said. “Genuinely amazing.”

  The case of Clearly Canadian arrived the next afternoon. To the delivery man it was just the latest in a Sisyphean series of packages that would end only with the hypothesis of his retirement, and though he paid no heed to the “Fragile” stickers on the box, I thanked him three times: once as he approached on the icy walkway, once while I signed, and once as he departed with no understanding of or interest in why I was so grateful.

  I brought the package into the front hallway and ripped at the tape holding the top together. I still didn’t really believe—despite the fact that there was no reason for me to think the deeply sympathetic woman was either a liar or a fool—that a case of Orchard Peach Clearly Canadian lay inside. I expected, right up until the moment I pulled the box flaps aside, that almost anything else would be revealed: a tangle of chinchilla carcasses, a pile of unripe bananas, any manner of inexplicably cruel practical jokes. But then I saw those peculiar blue bottles rank-and-file inside, padded carefully against breakage, and I breathed, finally, and looked to the ceiling as tears stung my eyes.

  I didn’t tell Sarah anything. I wanted it to be a surprise.

  Two bottles went into the refrigerator, which I’d set to precisely 33 degrees, as per Sarah’s original request that the soda be just this side of ice cold. I waited several hours, and then, the next time the bell pealed, I walked in with a bottle of Orchard Peach Clearly Canadian and one drinking glass from the set of crystal we’d been given for our wedding.

  I have never in my life been what one would call euphoric, but in that moment I edged up against it.

  Sarah’s big sad eyes came open slowly, like a lizard’s, as I entered the bedroom. She lay propped against a green husband pillow. There was almost nothing left of her. Her nightgown could have been draped over an empty bed, if not for the fact of her head poking out from the top.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling, waiting for her to recognize the improbability I held in my hand.

  She blinked. “Hi,” she said.

  Nothing. I moved closer, holding the bottle out in front of me to give her a good look.

  “I rang. The bell,” Sarah said. “Because I’m. Thirsty.”

  By this time, when she spoke she
had to pause for breath several times in a single sentence.

  “Well that’s perfect,” I said, “because look what I brought for you.”

  She leaned forward a bit, squinted. “What. Is it?” she asked.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s the soda you asked for.”

  “I didn’t ask. For a soda,” she said. “I didn’t ask. For anything yet. You just. Came in here.”

  “No, I mean you asked for it a while back. Months ago. Remember? The day I gave you the bell?”

  She furrowed her brow, willing the memory to surface. Like everything else, thought was a colossal effort for her now.

  “I can’t. Remember,” she said finally, relaxing back onto the giant pillow with a sound like every cell in her body sighing.

  I was obliged, of course, to reassure her it was fine that she had no idea what I was talking about. But after months of phone calls and vain searching, after the miracle of the Saudi prince, I needed this to matter to her. I needed her to realize our good fortune, to understand my effort and worry. I was, in other words, making it very much about me. God as my witness, I could not, in that moment, have done otherwise.

  “You were the queen of Sheba,” I said. “And I was your devoted servant. You asked me to find you a bottle of Orchard Peach–flavored Clearly Canadian. And here it is.”

  I could see that, for all she understood, I might as well have been speaking Sanskrit.

  “Sarah,” I said, “it was your one true and fervent wish. Remember?”

  She stared at me with those huge eyes, shook her head once, slowly.

  We were quiet for a minute. I sat there still holding the bottle and glass like an idiot.

  Sarah finally broke the silence. “Why,” she said. “Are you. Crying?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I put the glass on the nightstand and swiped at my cheeks. “It’s okay that you don’t remember the conversation. But you must remember Clearly Canadian, right?”

  She scrutinized the bottle again. At first there was nothing, and I felt the ropy tentacles of despair reach for me. But then sudden recognition struck Sarah, and she smiled weakly, gloriously, her ruined face half eyes and half teeth.