UNCA by Steven Schutzman

After Jack Ruvane became so sick and frail and emaciated with the heart ailment that ran in the family, those who saw him couldn’t believe he’d live out the hour much less the day. Yet he did live, barely a hundred pounds of skin and bone; live, live and outlive. Strangely, others in the family began to die. It seemed to his sister-in-law Judith that Jack, the eldest of four siblings, had arrived at death’s door only to hold it open for everyone else and would improbably outlast them all.
Released from the hospital under a crushing debt for the medical care that saved his life, and for the drugs and pacemaker prolonging it, broke again, Jack came to stay in the old family house where, more than forty years ago, he had spent his troubled teenage years. Living there now were his brother Martin, Judith, and his nephew Michael, just graduated from college and scheduled to begin medical school in the fall. It was the end of May, the nicest month of the year, before the humidity took hold.
To watch Jack walk, with barely more meat on him than was on his cane, was as dramatic and undramatic as an event could be.
Dramatic because his trip from the bench in the backyard where he sat on folded blankets to the patio where the family ate supper in the nice May weather would no doubt be cut short by death. Students and other guests tried not to look. Birds went silent. Sadie, the dog, spooked from having been yelled at for going near Jack when he was standing, stayed out of sight. Time seemed to stop for the world like it does sometimes in a theatre when something is imminent.
Undramatic because it took the poor man almost ten minutes to cover twenty feet.
One day Michael suggested to his father that he use the start of his walk as the signal to put his Unca’s filet mignon on the grill.
Unca, that’s what they all called Jack now.
It’s a common thing: To be renamed later in life by the mispronunciations of a grandchild, niece or nephew. In Jack’s case, Michael did it. Because his early efforts to say Uncle made him laugh, Jack announced out of sheer and secret perversity that he wanted to be called Unca by everyone from then on. He persisted, even worked at it and the name took.
Unca, Unca. It sounded to Jack like what he’d been doing his whole life. A drumbeat for his foolishness. Unca, Unca. Going to bed with untold numbers of women. Unca, Unca. The barker at a sideshow. Unca, Unca. Doing whatever it took to make a living. Unca, Unca. Childless, itinerant, half degenerate, willing to try anything, living how he lived to tell the story of how he lived. Jack had been a DJ, a talk show host and gadfly known for word riffs to table hand jive, a weatherman, a voiceover specialist and part owner of the radio station, a part-time drummer and drum teacher and lastly, among many other jobs, a successful part-time salesman of prefab bathtub inserts, in other words a part-time anything that didn’t involve working regularly or too hard. But illness had taken the meat from his bones, taken away his voice, his good looks and good luck, taken everything but his will and turned him into the sideshow itself. A walking skeleton. Still a person wants to live.
“What are we supposed to do, be totally gruesome?” Michael said in response to the profoundly neutral look his father gave him after the crack about when to put his Unca’s steak on the barbecue.
“I really don’t think we should call him that anymore. Unca. There’s a thingness about it now.”
“Thingness? What’s that? He likes it.”
“Really? How can you tell?”
“He always did.”
“Really? Well, things have changed, obviously.”
“If I were him, I’d want whatever could stay the same to stay the same.”
“Really?”
“You start leaving things behind it’s like a trail of defeat.”
“Of a lightening of the load. It’s undignified, Michael, and sort of freakish, to tell the truth.”
“Anyway, Dad, it’s between me and him.”
“I guess so. Yes. You’re right. It’s certainly up to you.”
Martin would say no more. He had already learned from Judith that Michael was leaning toward not going to medical school. But since Michael had not told him directly, Martin would not ask directly in the hope that only the words said out loud, son to father, could make the thing so. He saw it and knew it in his son as he had seen it and known it in his older brother Jack, an addiction to pleasure and an unwillingness to be a serious person.
To watch his Unca chew the blood-rare steak he ate every night, chew minutely like a cat and purr like a cat in pure harmony with its nature, was as naked a view of the human anatomy and will to live as Michael cared to see. How each red morsel seemed so clearly to be the fuel of his next hour among the living. How the color of the meat matched the one staining the whites of his Unca’s protruding eyes. How he felt he could cock his head at just the right angle and almost see through his Unca’s cheeks. How it was just this far from watching a human skull grind and chew.
Will it go down? And if it goes down how will he digest it? Is there really a stomach left inside the thin envelope of his waist?
His Unca’s condition forced Michael to confront the reality that people came to a physician when they were not well, that being a doctor involved treating such debilitation, disfigurement and disease to bodies so unlike his own and Kim’s, the bodies he knew best in the world. He could still swim miles of laps and Kim, well, she was perfect.
Maybe something in urban planning, Michael thought.
The first person to die of his Unca was not a member of the family but a friend they hadn’t seen in years, a woman whose journey of self-discovery ignited by religious doubt ended with a trek to one of the highest places in the world, years of study with a group of smiling Buddhist monks and the writing of a well-received memoir. She was famous in some circles, known in others, and her name seemed familiar to many people without their knowing why.
The woman had come back seeming quite changed to everyone who had known her before as a driven, talkative go-getter, a serious person full of dark, self-deprecating humor. She used to say of herself, when people asked how she stayed so trim, that things gnawed at her. They gnawed. Or: I’m not the burning bush. I burn with thoughts and am consumed. Or sometimes: If you lived in my head, you’d be thin too. They all had liked and enjoyed her before her enlightenment and afterwards, well, they didn’t get the chance.
Having left behind her husband and grown children whose very existence in her life, the woman wrote, came from a mistaken notion about her true nature, she wanted to make peace with them now based on her new understanding of consciousness.
But her husband and children stayed angry and bitter about her abandonment of them so that when she tried to explain that she should have been a nun in the first place, how she was made for the spiritual search, they simply couldn’t forgive.
“So you’re saying, we shouldn’t have been born?” asked one of her twin daughters.
Worn down by disappointment and hurt that what was so important to her was of no importance to her family, the poor woman didn’t survive her first glimpse of Unca.
She was supposed to stay a week in the old house as a haven from her efforts of family reconciliation. The moment Martin saw the dark circles under her eyes and bad skin he knew it was the mistake he suspected it to be on the phone. With a glass of wine he sent her out to Michael on the patio unwarned. Jack had almost reached the patio from his bench when she opened the sliding screen door, came out and caught her first glimpse of him. The old superstitions took hold, she grabbed her heart and collapsed.
Michael was still near the bench under the trees having a familiar argument with himself about whether to go to medical school. A person could do a lot of thinking waiting for his Unca, make hundreds of decisions, change his mind on every one and wind up right back where he started. Not good.
Michael heard the wineglass break, spun and saw the woman facedown on the patio slate. A former lifeguard, a biology major and putative medical-student-to-be, he ran to administer CPR. The taste of the woman’s saliva, a mixture of iron, almonds and burnt coffee was something he would never forget, the taste of a bitter death.
There’s something much worse than dying, he thought after the ambulance left, or even dying young as the people in the family seem to do, and that is living a false life.
Maybe something in public relations. Or I could coach swimming for a few years, to get my bearings.
Michael decided then and there he must tell Kim, who he loved and wanted to marry, the three secrets he had been keeping from her: about the family heart problem, about his decision not to go to medical school and about the frightening condition of his Unca.
He knew it was crazy to have kept these things from her. He knew it meant he was suspicious of Kim’s love for him as he really was. Would she want him if he didn’t become the doctor she was now studying hard to become? Could she love a PR man, swim coach or even peddler of prefab bathtub inserts who might not have that long to live?
Crazy thoughts. But they dogged him.
Going back in time the people on his father’s side of the family lived vigorous lives until just after the age of fifty and then declined precipitously or plain dropped dead. The seed that created them seemed to have just that much life in it. Plus, he had always struck a strong physical resemblance to his Unca so that even now seeing the two of them together might scare Kim about the future. What did they say? Too much information. Was this him thirty years from now? He found it hard to accept that she wouldn’t think this way and, adding things up, take a hike.
And their love was about the future too, wasn’t it? Not just their wild thrashing in bed during which she’d seemed a bit distracted lately what with her lab work and exams and all that. And if he spent the next eight years struggling to become a doctor, what would that leave him in terms of years?
He was living under a cloud.
The truth was his secrets had grown larger in the silence, from the first moment of his passing over them with every intention of saying something later, to the never finding quite the right moment or words to confess, to the growing shame of having kept it unspoken for so long, to the horrible, outsized monster of a secret sucking the lifeblood out of him.
Next to die was Jack and Martin’s estranged brother Allen, a dentist practicing in Oregon, who communicated with the family exclusively through his lawyers; first to pressure them to sell the old house rather than live in it after their parents died and later to come up with a monthly payment reflecting his share. Allen was forty-five. Martin, ever one for appearances, the good son, the good brother, the good husband, able to handle the cross-country trip and still teach an eight o’clock class the next morning, flew out to the funeral. Judith, ever one to call a bastard a bastard and act accordingly, refused to go.
Three months later, Lenore, the only sister, an unmarried high school principal in Philadelphia, who they usually saw over summer, winter and spring breaks, suddenly succumbed to the family weakness.
With the deaths of Allen and Lenore, Judith discerned the pattern and a fate far scarier than the Ruvane heart malady: Jack at death’s door holding it open for everyone else. In her darker moments, she entertained the idea of how simple it would be to cause that preposterous gathering of brittle sticks hung with shredded filet mignon to collapse into a pile of kindling on the floor. The specifics of it wandered into her mind and animated her fingers whenever she looked into the medicine cabinet or chose from among the cleaning solvents on the basement shelf. Or she might encourage Sadie to bound up to him. At the very least, she wanted Jack out of the house but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. A mysterious bond existed between the brothers, shadow opposites to all appearances, like Jacob and Esau, a bond made up of history but also more than history, a struggle of types and natures who needed each other to be complete.
Jack, constantly in trouble growing up, had been the shield behind which Martin developed his own questionable chemical and other interests. Because of Jack nobody suspected much about Martin with his perfect SAT scores and bookish girlfriends. So Martin’s lab in the basement, the products of which Jack sold, provided the money for the sound studio where their rock band recorded demo tapes. And when the police found out, Jack took the fall in solid silence. In that one moment their paths diverged. Martin cleaned up his act and Jack said screw it, just screw it. It was why Jack hadn’t been left a share of the old house by their mother (according to their father’s wishes) and why when Martin offered to split his share with him Jack also said screw it again, “screw the old man.” Their paths diverged but their bond was even stronger.
Jack, back when he could think straight, thought of Martin as a spy, cool, brilliant and self-possessed in a way he himself could never be because he needed people’s bodies and admiration like an actor, only as good as his last performance, needs an audience. He always knew that Martin was bound for success in whatever field he chose while he himself would be subject to the winds of luck, recklessness and charm.
Even when Martin became a full professor at the college, Jack still thought of his brother as an actor who completely disappeared into a role, hiding as Jack never could. Here was the secret between them, the act underneath it all, a conspiracy no one else could reckon: that Martin, the good father, the loving husband, the tenured professor, was also amused deep inside himself at how he was pulling the whole thing off. And only Jack knew how to get to that place. Judith sensed it. Michael wanted in on it.
Michael wondered how his father could so completely burn the bridge between who he had become and who he had been, as his Unca had secretly revealed in stories about their childhood: the drug lab, the petty crime, the rock bands, the older women, the forbidden trips in their parents’ cars. Was his father’s transformation and seriousness based on a strength of character that Michael, like his Unca, didn’t have? Or just plain fear of being caught again? Maybe he had another woman somewhere. No, Michael thought, his father had managed to conquer himself. For him here’s how it was: You achieved, you took care of achievement, you became a man others could respect, a serious person making the world a better place, the rest didn’t matter, your nature, your wants, your weaknesses, don’t be a crybaby.
Michael wondered if, in giving up on medical school, he was acting according to his true nature or succumbing to his Unca’s weakness. Who was he and what was he going to be?
He realized that he had never wanted to be a doctor as much as he wanted to be able to say he was a doctor, or even worse in his judgment of himself, for his father to say he was a doctor. Was this how a person chose a profession? (By locking one’s true self away, just as his father stored his old electric guitars in the attic?) Michael didn’t know what he wanted to be or to do. He only knew that his need to be something far exceeded his need to do something and that the source of his strength to be something had come from the desires of others and not from within himself. These people who were sure of things, his father, Kim, they blew his mind.
There was, however, something Michael did know he wanted: To be able to go to bed with Kim for the rest of his life. To have her with him always. To know one true thing is very steadying, he thought. You know where you’re going and how to get there becomes the problem. Very steadying but also very troubling when you don’t fully trust that thing to stand by you through thick and thin.
After Lenore’s death, Judith, who couldn’t shake the image of the crookedly grinning, emaciated Jack holding the door of death open for her husband, became so distracted by persistent thoughts of doom that she stopped being able to do anything right. If she needed the mayonnaise she’d open the door to the dishwasher; if she wanted to reach into the left-hand drawer, she reached into the right-hand one; if she wanted a fork she’d pick up a spoon; if she was headed out the front door she might wind up on the patio in the back; if she was going food shopping she might find herself at the post office or the bank. Burning things, forgetting things, misplacing things, doing things twice or three times or not at all. And finally, besides freaking with worry about her husband, she started to worry about herself.
And there was Jack on his bench, mute as the wood, without the strength or will to talk so anyone could hear him anymore, not getting out of his pajamas and robe all day, sitting there breathing so loud and persistently, his weak heart having to be reminded to beat. Not fair. Not fair. And she had always liked Jack, his wildness, his stories, his wacky or gothic girlfriends, his failures, his obvious need for love and attention, how he might show up and stay for months and then disappear without a word. She sensed that Jack served as a boundary to the recklessness secretly dwelling inside her husband.
How sad and unlike her not to be able to share her fears with Martin who would have named them superstition, magical thinking, malarkey. That had never stopped her before but this was just too close and horrible and off the wall to be said out loud.
Judith soon became obsessed with the notion that if Michael told Martin he wasn’t going to medical school it might be the end of her husband whose heart was wrapped so tightly around that idea it might just explode. Martin had always been as mistrustful and stern with their only child as she was trusting and easy.
“Sweetie,” she began one day in the foyer where she and Michael had been sitting in silence.
He was at the computer idly searching the Web for an apartment to share with Kim next September. Judith studied him from behind; the hunched Ruvane posture, the concentrated Ruvane stillness of neck and shoulder, the whorl of Ruvane hair like an identifying fingerprint on the top of their heads, one that used to be found on her bald husband and on Jack who was just then taking his mid-afternoon nap, his longest of the day. Perhaps he would not wake. The Ruvane curse.
“Sweetie.”
“Uh? What?”
“We have to . . . Remember that . . . Oh . . .” Out of nowhere she got an idea. “Let’s drive to the high school.”
“Why?”
“The pool is open to the community all afternoon. Remember how we loved to watch you swim there.”
“I don’t feel like swimming.”
“Please. It’ll bring back memories for us.”
“You mean you think Dad will want to come too?”
“What? No. Please. Let’s you and me go.”
“We can drive over. I wouldn’t mind seeing the place again. But I’m not swimming.”
“Who said anything about swimming?”
“Sounds serious,” Michael said.
Meaning to reach for her keys, Judith picked up a package of throat lozenges and considered them for a few seconds. They surely would not start the car. You could not start the car with a lozenge. You could not blow-dry your hair with a date book. You could not watch MacNeil-Lehrer in the pantry or open a bottle of wine with a spatula.
“You drive,” she said with a laugh at herself.
It was certainly terrible, just awful, what was happening to her and her family, though it could very well be far less than the total disaster she sometimes envisioned, aside from poor Lenore and poor Jack, poor Jack, damn that Jack! Martin was physically fit and moderate in all things and Michael still might be persuaded not to kill his father by giving medical school a solid try.
And she, well, she’d become a riot hadn’t she? – a comedian, a walking fruit peddler with stupid mistakes for sale. She never knew what she was going to do next. That morning she had begun a letter to a friend of hers who had been dead for four years. The strange thing was that when she was with other people she was fine. Someone to look at, someone to talk to, someone to care about. It was only when she was by herself that the mistakes flared up because of the never-ending dialogue in her head set off by that ominous bag of bones on the bench.
“Life and death,” Judith said when they were on their way over to the high school in the car.
Michael knew that his mother was picking up on how he had said “sounds serious” back in the house as if no time had passed at all. They had an easy connection so unlike the tense one he had with his father. He considered his mother, the author of thirty-seven published children’s picture books, to be a caring, lovable, uncensored and gifted goofball who he could still flop with on the couch. He felt perfectly comfortable with her, talking or not talking or whatever. While with his father, a man with whom his students felt comfortable and even confided in, who they considered tough but fair, a great guy, who’d invite them to barbecues at his house, a professor who was actually interested in them and fun to hang out with, Michael felt mostly strain and incipient disappointment. What Martin gave to his students, his son got none of.
“You worry too much.”
“We all know that,” Judith said. “What good does it do to say it? You don’t go over and remind Sadie she’s a dog. I worry too much, Sadie’s a dog, and you’re not going to medical school.”
“I’m sorry I told you that.”
“Why?”
“Your hair’s like half red and half white.”
“The directions on the package weren’t clear. I hate packaging. Besides I’m going to get it taken care of tomorrow.”
“You look like a freak.”
“Thank you.”
“Not a problem.”
“Can we stop the joking, please?” she said. “Why can’t you take me seriously ever? I need for you to take me seriously. You think this hair is bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
“See, you can’t stop joking either.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” Judith looked at herself in the sun visor mirror. “Wow. Look at me. I really hate packaging. The directions are never clear.”
Maybe I can write those directions for a living, Michael thought.
“Pull in there,” his mother said.
It was one of the dying strip malls off Route 41; a Japanese restaurant, a sub place, a dry cleaner’s, a massage parlor, and their anchor, a liquor and magazine store with a history of selling winning lottery tickets (folks came from miles around, ate subs and tempura, got massages and hung out reading magazines waiting for the winners to be announced).
Judith had him pull in front of a bar, a karaoke joint at night. People with time on their hands and lottery tickets in them punctuated the long sentence of the bar in the creepy light of half-gone beer signs.
Two drafts. A booth at the back. As her son’s long dexterous fingers pushed lightly and unconsciously on the tabletop like the flexing legs of an insect on a wall, Judith understood something: Michael was scared. His placid, handsome face with its incipient smile and level eyes had always hidden a doubt and fear he would have to deal with sooner or later, an unconscious doubt about himself, the same one her husband harbored about him. Suddenly Judith, who was usually without a strategy, came up with one.
“We haven’t seen Kim in a while. Are you two okay?”
“Sure. She’s just busy finishing up at med school.”
“We should have her over soon.”
“Sure. Okay. I’ll call her and see if she can next weekend.”
“What does she think about your doubts?”
“Doubts?”
“You haven’t told her yet, have you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Shame on you. A person should have the dignity of knowing the truth about the future, about her life.”
“I know, Mom, but it’s always been about both of us being doctors, going through med school together, the whole thing and then being a two-doctor and two-kid family. She even has the names picked out. She likes to have everything in order, out of the way, and decided so she can start doing the work that needs to be done.”
“Like your father.”
“Making the world a better place.”
“It’s admirable. Most people bumble along. I bumbled along a good while.”
“And into something you loved.”
“Michael, what do you want?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“Well, then, what do you want to want?”
Judith was proud of herself at that moment, coming up with this question.
“To be a doctor,” Michael answered truthfully. He did want to want to be a doctor.
“Well, there you go.”
“I do want to want to. I just don’t want to.”
“I want something, sweetie. I want you to promise me that you won’t tell your father about this decision of yours until you discuss it with Kim.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean okay?”
“I won’t tell Dad.”
“You won’t?”
“Mom, I won’t tell him until I discuss it with Kim first.”
Judith distrusted the moment. Strategies weren’t supposed to be this easy to carry out. There was supposed to be resistance requiring new tactics. Accident, the unexpected, was supposed to intervene. She’d always believed, trusted, and did her best with accidents. She never had a strategy writing a book, never had a plan going in. Accident was how she met her husband, seeing her sister off at the Phoenix airport. Accident was how she decided to write her first children’s book. But with that poor man in the backyard, soaking up heat and light and moisture like a poison jungle plant, like fate itself, through no fault of his own certainly, she couldn’t take chances anymore.
“You can do what you want, of course,” she said. “You will do what you want and should do what you want but you should make sure it’s what you want before you cause unnecessary harm. You have the power to do harm Michael, you know that, tremendous harm?”
“What you just said, isn’t fair.”
“I know.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to Dad. He’s as strong as an ox.”
But soon there was a very close call.
Genetics had been kinder to Martin and his heart was strong. He had yearly physicals, exercised regularly, ate and slept well. But there was another problem: Asthma. From out of nowhere. No family history. Asthma. Exercise induced it. Certain pollens intensified it. Inhalers and medicines controlled it.
Out for a jog without his inhaler, Martin had to slow and finally stop under the falling pollen of some tree that had it in for him. He could neither keep going, catch his breath nor cry for help. Little nourishing oxygen could penetrate the swelling fluid in his lungs.
Before losing consciousness, Martin felt a terrible sadness for himself, his earnestness, his efforts, the manly burden of his roles. He thought of how his brother Jack, before his terrible illness, had always made things fun. His last wish was to be able to break into a run with Jack again, starting up for no reason like colts in a field, cutting through yards and backyards, causing faces to appear in windows, whooping, making dogs go crazy, grabbing apples, pears or peaches off trees, taking one bite and flinging them wildly as they ran, their own dog Mitch who lived for this at their heels, until they reached the river where they would shed their clothes and jump in, shocking the life out of the citizens trying to enjoy a picnic on the grassy bank. Life wasn’t much fun anymore.
By the time Martin was found by another runner and rushed to the hospital, the doctors barely saved his life. There were several anxious days. Rest was prescribed, in pollen-free, dry air. Judith, a total convert to calculation now, had him on a plane to Phoenix for a month-long visit to her parents before he could say air conditioning or self-reliance. Martin was ready to put himself completely in his wife’s hands. As for his son: The seed would out.
Michael agreed to stay on alone in the house with his Unca for the time his parents were gone. Well, not alone. He decided to have Kim stay with him since her medical school work was now wrapped up. Here was the way to let the woman of his future understand his past and his terrible secrets, mitigated by a present of complete pleasure in each other. They would have the run of the place, a real luxury of time (a whole month), space (the entire second and third floors, no roommates) and freedom (nothing else to do before med school started) to make love to their hearts’ content. In the bedroom where he’d grown up, in his parents’ bedroom, anywhere at all.
And Kim would see his Unca, live in the house with his Unca, understand who his Unca was and what he had come to signify, the dire nature of fate, that one ought to live for now. This was how it would all come down. If the ax be truth let the chips fall where they may. His father’s favorite expression.
Since his voice was inaudible, no one knew that Jack’s once lively mind was nearly as diminished as his body. He had lost the power to concentrate. He felt there was a fog in him and he was lost in it and that he couldn’t reach himself through the fog of himself.
There were many things Jack tried to think of but couldn’t think of. Whole chapters of his life. Periods of recent history named after presidents. World-changing events. Deaths. Wars. Attacks. Scandals. Cities he’d lived in; continents and countries he traveled to; jobs, drum sets, gigs, famous musicians he’d played with, drum students, friends, girlfriends, flats, cars he’d had. And all the women, their faces, their bodies, their names, the circumstances of how he seduced them, and the one or two things about the way a woman gave herself to him that made her memorable. He knew they all had happened, all still existed somewhere in his memory but he lacked the power to find and illuminate them for himself.
Try as he might to organize his memories by saying to himself, “Today I will think about my New York apartments because thinking about them will help me think of the things that happened in them, especially the women, and during the same period of time. Now let’s start in the East Village. Fourth Street. Where was the bed again?” he never succeeded. Soon his mind would wander off, first toward a blind sadness and then into the sensations of being out there on the bench, of the air against his arms and along his ears, of the birdsong and blurring world.
All the organizing principles of Jack’s memory were weakened to shattering, his memories spread over a vast area of ground where he was lost and wandering. Oh every once in a while the sun, or whatever, would illuminate a shard and he would remember something clearly. But that was rare. Even those strong feelings around which his life had been organized, his hatred of his father, his love for Elizabeth, the one woman he had fallen hard for and who had rejected him, even those things failed to magnetize his mind for very long.
Sometimes it frustrated him almost to weeping, though he did not weep because soon his frustration would be lost to the air, the birdsong and the blurring world.
Once a male cardinal that lived year-round with its mate in a maple tree in the backyard landed on the back of his bench while he was sitting in it. He was so still, so still, still as a tree, that the bird, even with its agitated cardinal energy, its flinching wings and readiness to spring away, stayed, five, ten, fifteen seconds, and Jack desperately wanted to cry out of his stillness and to talk to someone again, wanted someone to understand what it was like to be him these days. He was never one to complain, never one to let others see him sweat, but to be there and at the same time feel himself fading in all possible ways, losing muscle, speech, memory and the power to be who he was even in his mind, as if he was experiencing himself turning to dust, it needed to be fought. He was pissed at being thrown so unfairly into this diminishing prison of himself. But then his anger faded and he’d have a nap or something like a nap during which he could still hear the birds and feel the air.
Then Kim came to the old house after completing her courses for her first year of medical school and things started to turn around.
Kim was a tall, strong filly of a girl, a no-nonsense practitioner of the healing arts, like someone in the movies or on TV who couldn’t possibly exist in real life but there she was. Beautiful, long-limbed, angular. She smelled terrific in the morning. With sure, commanding strength, she took hold of his hands and brought them up and sometimes onto her chest during his arm exercises, to which he was to breathe as she counted. Ah the give of that flesh, so vibrant and alive it broke Jack’s heart and messed with his breathing. It was Kim’s nonchalant confidence in her place in the world and ability to accomplish just about anything that gave Jack hope and reminded him of the one woman he had loved in his life.
“We don’t have it in us for the long haul,” Elizabeth had told him when he asked her to marry him. “We will disappoint each other in the end.”
And by that Jack knew she had spared telling him that it was he who didn’t have it in him or enough of it in him for her, he who would wind up being the disappointment. Over the years he had thought of innumerable things he could have said to Elizabeth that might have changed her mind. But Jack had never in all that time conceived of actions that might have convinced her. He had wanted Elizabeth’s consent and approval before doing anything and when he didn’t get it, he ran to find quick solace with other women. Of course Elizabeth caught him and that was the end of that. He had brought it on. There was a force in him, compelling, undermining, greedy and blind, that never let him get away with anything. Like with the drug lab, he was always getting caught.
For Kim, Jack did his breathing exercises, trying and mostly failing at first to make the little yellow ball move even slightly up its cylinder. For her, he performed arm exercises too, with and without her guiding him, moving his hands back and forth from his chest, up and down from his shoulders, to regain muscle mass, not too much at first, but gradually more and more, until he was doing it with a roll of pennies in each hand. Jack waited for Kim to rouse him on his bed or bench three or more times a day for walks on the slate path that circled the house, one time around, that would help restore his legs to him, strengthen his breathing and his heart. For Kim, Jack ate more than strawberries for breakfast and steak for supper. There were raspberries now and sliced peaches, and chicken breast, oatmeal and mashed potatoes and awful, pasty shakes made of who knew what forms of body-building protein, vitamins, and minerals from the health food store. He started gaining weight.
One morning, ten days after Kim had arrived, Jack went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror closely for the first time. He had to admit he looked pretty terrible, but Jack also saw that his skin though whiskered, sunken and loose, had retained its smoothness and ruddy color and he searched until he found the old glint in his eye and the sure, crooked, complicit smile, a slight tug of who he used to be. He stroked water through his thinning hair which was usually flying up as if blown by a strong wind behind him. Wet, it flattened and darkened to near its original color.
When he reached the kitchen, where Michael and Kim were drinking coffee, Jack performed a small slide step for them and threw his hand open and out a short way from his body, the other hand still on his cane, a jaunty bit. The two of them clapped for him.
“See, I told you. It was depression on top of everything else,” Kim said softly. “Sometimes it takes people longer to recover from the effects of their illness on their image of themselves and that keeps them sicker.”
Kim had taken a course in gerontology and learned how hope was crucial to the success of any therapy for the elderly. Though Jack was only fifty-eight his body needed all the hope it could get.
“It must be even harder on him because of how he lived,” Michael said and winked at his profligate Unca, who had finally sat down across the table from him.
Jack, feeling a newly discovered power in the theatricality of his illness, lifted his hand and signaled them closer.
“Don’t talk about me like I ain’t here,” he rasped.
“What?” Kim asked.
Michael shrugged.
“What did you say, Unca?” Kim asked him.
“Shave me,” he said.
“No one can save you but you,” she said, a tough cookie.
“Shave me. Shave me.”
“Oh. Shave you. Sure I’d love to.”
It was the first time he’d managed to make himself understood. Jack smiled with sure and crooked complicity at Kim who smiled back and rubbed her hand across his cheek and up through his hair.
“We’ll fix you right up.”
“You . . . you . . . you . . . terrific . . . terrific girl . . .” he said.
Whether it was the completion of her first-year exams, their long separation at the end of the term or being in his childhood home practically alone together, whatever had been distracting Kim in bed vanished and she came at him with a sexual savagery and assertion Michael had never experienced before. Not even close. It was as if she wanted to devour him alive because she could, because she was the stronger. He had no say. She wouldn’t let him take the lead in anything. If he fought to, she fought back stronger until she won. To subdue her, Michael felt he would have to tap into a male strength he might not be able to control and turn it into all-out war. Kim was that strong. She could throw him down to the bed or the ground if he let her and he let her. If he didn’t tap into that male strength, she could pin his body and his arms. Her mouth was hungrier, her arching chest more insistent and her hips stronger. They moved together at a beat she determined. He had no say. Once, startled awake to find Kim on top of him like some sort of demon in the searing moonlight, eyes closed, hands pushing forward as if to open an imaginary door, he was certain she was not conscious in any kind of human way. More like a wild animal. But he didn’t speak to her because it was scary and because Kim insisted on silence and liqueurs from the liquor cabinet and no air conditioning and, when they were done, sleeping as far as possible from him on his parents’ bed. She just couldn’t bear to be touched afterwards. Michael’s skin was etched with scratches, and on his chest, thighs and arms sometimes small, yellow bruises appeared.
He had no say. He didn’t exist. He was merely being acted upon and it depressed him almost as much as his secrets from her did. He wondered if he was losing weight but no, the bathroom scale said no. What a ridiculous idea, that this exchange of sexual energy at night and healing energy during the day could actually result in an exchange of weight with his Unca. By the beginning of the third week, Unca was looking a lot better. He had gained almost seven pounds, his walking was stronger, his endurance improved, his voice more audible.
Fighting lethargy every afternoon, Michael forced himself to swim laps at the high school and take care of the food trip for the house and search for an apartment and furniture deals on the Web while Kim kept busy with Unca. He often found himself wishing his mother was there, like a pet to relax everyone, blurt secrets out and take this growing pressure off him. But then he remembered how grave she had become lately and for the first time in his life he felt truly on his own, in the old house without his mother’s indulgence and Kim becoming this strange animal, commanding day and night.
Kim told Jack that he’d never get any better if he kept breathing so shallowly, that he was barely getting enough oxygen to take his next breath much less nourish his cells and reinvigorate his body. She taught him to breathe from his diaphragm. She put her hand on his belly to guide him and when that didn’t work, because her touch made him breathe even more shallowly, she put his hand on her belly to demonstrate how she let it rise as she took air in and fall to let the air out. But that didn’t work either because of her thin cotton shorts and because Jack, when he did take a deeper breath found himself on the verge of panic that somehow his chest would freeze on the uptake and he would never be able to let the air out again. Then Jack would start to fight for breath, scared, as if he was standing before an abyss as wide open as the night sky, an endless space where he would disperse if he didn’t hold on. This was a woman’s trick to disperse him like his own shot seed into the dark mysteries and take away his power. This was her animal revenge for the giving of her body. And the only way not to fall prey to it, Jack knew, was to make a woman fall in love with him first (and to keep moving, and to not stay in one place too long). The only time he hadn’t, he’d been a wreck for years after Elizabeth had broken up with him. That was when he’d learned a woman’s true revenge for the giving of her body, to make him fall in love with her.
“I’ll join a symphony,” he had told her. “How hard can it be to play those little triangle things?”
“You need classical training, dear.”
“Then I’ll go back to school or whatever.”
“We can still be friends. You can be my friend with special privileges.”
“I’ll clean up my act. You watch me.”
“The past is prologue. I’m not going to marry you.”
The woman of a lifetime didn’t find him enough, had found his past wanting (drugs, arrests, hepatitis, wanderlust, promiscuity, a tattered resume) and denied him a future with her.
It was on the morning of the day when Martin and Judith were due home from Arizona that Jack, coming out of his room, heard Kim and his nephew talking at the kitchen table.
“What’s gotten into you at night? I mean, wow.”
“It’s him. It’s him,” she said.
“Unca?”
“Yes. I don’t know. It’s something, a kind of spell. I don’t know. He’s getting better and it’s like I’ve tapped into this energy.”
“What energy?”
“Healing energy. Sexual energy. Or maybe they’re the same thing. I can’t help myself. It’s like he’s close to death where all the energy is and I feel this power in me to convert all the death energy into life energy and make him better.”
“He definitely is getting better.”
“I know. And I think that what’s happening with you at night is helping a lot.”
“How so?” asked his nephew.
“At night. That’s when the energy gets built up or stored or whatever. And I think you’re being great, rolling with it.”
“Not a problem.”
“You roll pretty good. Thanks.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Between the two of us, you’re the roller and I’m the initiator. And that’s good, that’s good. Because when we have kids I think it should be you who takes a break from your practice and stays home until they start kindergarten. Not that I couldn’t or wouldn’t but you roll with the punches better.”
“Okay. That’s cool by me. I’ll probably need a break by then anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I think I’ll go swimming before we go out to the airport.”
Jack retreated to his room and slowly undressed. Once he’d gotten his robe and pajama top off he examined his arms in the mirror. Not what they used to be but not that bad anymore, really. He had always had quick reflexes and a wiry strength and they were coming back, part of his natural blueprint once he started gaining weight again. From lifting and swinging those rolls of pennies for her. From the breathing exercises during which she never broke eye contact as she wanted them to be two people, linked and dependent, with one breath between them. Like lovers.
Jack put up his dukes and feinted with his head behind them like he did when he whipped much bigger men over a girl in some bar. His boxing stance, which had always looked perfect to him in the mirror, looked pretty good to him now. Hiding behind his right he threw a jab, a quick one to his slow eyes. He kept his right back: Oh that feeling of vitality in that hand, drumming, bowling, or loaded like now waiting for an opening this fool was sure to give him if he was patient. He felt a familiar razor awareness, his outlines taut and shimmering, a perfect sense of himself in space.
Jack wasn’t much more than a grotesque stick figure, just this side of death, but he didn’t see himself that way. Time and memory and his befogged consciousness filled his reflection out much more than the few pounds he had gained. He saw himself not as a man sees himself in a mirror but as a man sees himself in a dream, accepting all oddities as givens, obedient to his fascination and his wishes.
Jack washed his upper body with a warm washcloth and let the air dry him. He wet and combed his hair. He shaved. All this took a good bit of time but he had time. He found his melon-orange, rayon bowling shirt in the closet and put it on. A familiar light seemed to emanate from the cloth and his face bathed in the glow like a saint’s face in a painting no matter how old it is.
Jack untied the string of his pajama bottoms and they dropped quickly over his wasp-thin hips and legs to the floor. He looked at his penis. No hope there.
Jack doddered over to the closet, got a pair of pants and strung a belt through the loops. He sat down on the edge of the bed and with great effort managed to pull his legs through the pant legs and buckle the belt. But when he stood the pants slid right off him as if he was a child again trying on his father’s clothes. He wept, a high-pitched whine. He wept not for any profound reason but because he would now have to make the effort to put his pajama bottoms on again. That is what the dreaming man feels, the immediate reasons not the deep reasons, but the dream he is the creature of knows those deeper reasons. He did not want to put his robe back on because it would cover his shirt and its orange light. He would not call Kim in to help him. He would do this himself.
Then Jack thought he could make a knot in the belt that might serve to hold the pants up. After all, his feet were still sitting inside the spilled pants as if they were a puddle on the floor. He reached down again with great effort and slid the pants up his legs and shimmied them back under his backside. A chill shook him. Familiar. Ominous. Ancient. A chill that said it was better not to have been born but it didn’t say it to him.
Jack tied the knot so tight the edge of the leather belt dug painfully into his skin and bones. But when he stood this time, it held. Rather than tuck his shirt in, he let it hang loose to cover the knot. Casual. Confident. An hour had passed. He was dressed in clothes again for the first time in months.
She was at the kitchen table when he came out.
“Hey you look great,” she said as he doddered forward. “Nice shirt.”
No jaunty vaudeville bits now. He came on. When he got to the table, he bent over his cane and focused his gaze.
“I’ll clean up my act,” he rasped. “You watch me.”
“Unca?”
Unca?
“Unca?”
Unca?
“Are you all right?”Unca?
She did not flinch when he reached down for her. She did not remove his hand from her breast. She let him sink slowly onto her, let his head rest on her chest and his mouth graze as it wanted to over her tank top, moving in its blind sadness and ecstasy and weeping.
This time when he wept he knew the reason, that judgment of himself that was not his but had become his and how unfair it was to have been born with such a fragile nature, needing so much, and of such an ungenerous parent, that he had to steal from others, their love, their admiration, their bodies, not sure they would be given to him on their own, not sure he was deserving. Stricken by his own poverty, he wept for that and for that vengeful, undermining, self-mocking force that had made him grope his nephew’s girlfriend’s breast. Caught.
Again he had traded everything for this. The price of his dignity was but a moment of flesh, his life but a moment of flesh. It wasn’t a bad life and perhaps in the darkness of this mystery she was allowing him to enter once again he would find his way back to what had been lost.
“You poor thing,” she said.
Yes, that’s right, Jack thought and died.

Michael, home from swimming, saw everything through the glass of the back door. His Unca’s slow walk. How he had groped Kim and sunk onto her breasts and how she had let him sort of kiss her until he went still. He watched, awed, fascinated, horrified, warned, and never brought up with Kim what he had seen. Nor did he bring up how at the pool his old swimming coach had told him he needed an assistant coach that fall, someone who could also teach a few science classes in the high school. And was he interested?
No. He and Kim would become doctors together.

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Steven Schutzman has published stories and plays in TriQuarterly, Post Road, Poems & Plays, and Cafe Irreal, and one of his stories was selected for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.