then Harvey looked more closely – having realized that he had been focusing on all the last-days’ paraphernalia exactly to avoid doing that – and, indeed, there he was: in the wet, grey clumps of hair stuck to his temples, wisps curling away from his skin like they always did; in the deep trench-like lines on his forehead – the same ones that he has just seen reproduced in miniature on his half-sister’s brow – whose up or down state the child Harvey had desperately relied upon to monitor his father’s otherwise unguessable moods; in the remnants of his beard, its close trimming evocative of his decline like some upside-down Samson, but bringing back to Harvey a distant memory of Eli scraping his emery stubble against the virgin cheek of his son, who would protest, but laughingly, finding the touch both abrasive and delightful, redolent of the rough promise of the adult world; and perhaps most of all in his hands, which were still, despite the pulse meters and the blood clots and the mountainous veinscape rising angrily from their backs, sheathed in the same skin, brown and rough as bark, and still incongruously large, still, even here, suggesting strength, the hands of a labourer, on the end of arms which had avoided heavy lifting their whole life. Harvey, a sucker for comparisons, found himself looking at his own hands by contrast – he’d done this before, of course, but the OCD lizard king in his brain always required new checks – raising his right one a Reiki hover away from his dad’s. It looked small, but Harvey has always known he has small hands, girl’s hands, easy prey for ‘you-know-what-they-say-about’ jokers. He wondered how the DNA divides it up – what fall it is of the cellular dice that has given him his father’s nose, mouth and skin, but his mother’s eyes and hands.
He did not know what to do. He felt that the correct – the polite – thing to do was to speak, as Freda had advised. But looking at his father again – less like his father, and more like a mad scientist had given up halfway through making a robot version of his father – the idea of speaking was clearly ridiculous. He felt not unlike he always did in church or synagogue, fighting an urge, during the endless roll call of praise and plea, to shout ‘No one’s listening! No one’s even there to listen!!’ And what was he supposed to say? Dad: it’s me? Since even those keeping the faith in Eli’s ability to hear did not believe, presumably, that the dying man could see as well, this would then require him to say, in explanation – ‘Um … Harvey’ – like he was on the phone. And then what? How are you? Oh my God, it would just be a fucking phone call. Something more supportive? I’ve just come to say I’m going to be here for you … oh no. No. I am a dual citizen, he thought, but I will never become that American. He didn’t know what to say. He wondered who the people were who did, in this situation. He looked round, as if, at any minute, they might come into the room and tutor him.
Even the first word he might say – Dad – felt weird. It was a word he’d always had problems with. Eli had left Harvey’s mother at a time when his son – six, after all – called him Daddy. There was then a period of some years when Harvey hardly saw his father at all, but still referred to him, in his absence, as Daddy. Thus, when he began to see him again, at increasingly irregular intervals in his teens, he found he had missed out on that poignant slide from Daddy into Dad that marks out children’s first maturity. He addressed him as Dad at this point, but it felt somehow wrong, and he found himself wanting to say Daddy: not in the front of his head – like any other post-pubescent boy, he was keen to avoid any word or deed that might make him seem childish – but in his gut, in the reflex part of his linguistic centre. When he saw Eli, the word that formed in his mind was Daddy. Latterly, a number of different titles for his father were attempted, knowable as the word Harvey used following ‘Hello’ when seeing his father or hearing his voice on the phone – Father; Eli (never comfortable); Dad (still not right); an attempt at irony, Pater. Now, by his deathbed, his mind was saying, again, Daddy.
He decided not to think about it, and just trust what might come out. He coughed, something of a stage ahem. It emerged from his mouth much louder than he had expected, in a weird croak-grunt, shattering the quiet of the room. Freda had taken Colette outside for some form of pep talk, and the doctor had been whispering to one of the nurses, no doubt detailing some complex medical issue, although Harvey had been unable not to wonder if it was flirtation. Both of them looked over, surprised for a moment, before going back to their huddle. And then, at that point, almost as if he had heard, Eli stirred. His hands, one of which was still just underneath Harvey’s, stiffened, the long fingers – whose nails had, Harvey noticed, been neatly trimmed – extending like sickles. His eyes even opened, although the pupils were long gone, high up into his head, revealing just two grey-white ovals, slivers cut from an English sky. Under the oxygen mask, his mouth, previously lopsided into a shape, ironically, like a speech balloon, opened further on that side, and from the weird aperture came a sound that was part-howl and part-yawn, with something oddly synthetic in it as well, not unlike the note produced by a theramin. It was loud, and deeply disturbing: a noise that knew and did not know, like a cow makes at the touch on its temple of the stun gun, a distress call back to this world from the black country.
Immediately, the doctor and the nurse rushed over, in their long coats. Freda burst back through the door, trailing Colette, still sulky. Harvey stared at the blind, raging stump of his father, guilt-stricken, convinced that somehow this atrocious convulsion must be his fault. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is he waking up?’
‘No,’ said the doctor – Indian, Harvey guesses, with short, tufty hair combed forward to cover a receding hairline – ‘he does this from time to time.’
He does? thought Harvey. Over the last few weeks, Freda had somehow implied to him that Eli’s unconsciousness was serene – even, perhaps, that the coma was itself a work of art, a kind of late period ripeness-is-all evocation of tranquillity. Not this – this roaring zombie, this Eli Agonistes.
Freda had taken hold of his hand, clutching it with both of hers. ‘He’s still so strong,’ she said, looking up at Harvey. ‘So strong.’
Freda’s face, constipated with hope, forcing out the positive from this indigestible horror – something pitiful in that, Harvey realized: this woman, for whom it was such a prize, capturing Eli, never quite realizing how much she would have to pay for it, and how soon – it is Freda’s face which seems to reflect back to Harvey from the window of the cab as the light of the Sangster forecourt creates of its glass a mirror. It dissolves like aspirin in water as men in autumnal uniforms come gliding towards the passenger door in order to smooth his passage to the lobby.
* * *
He has spent two days now in his room at the Condesa Inn, going over The Material. He has gone over The Material many times before but he thinks that now, so close to the act, it has a different force. It feels shaping and controlling: it feels as if it’s making clearer what he has to do. The why helps the how, he thinks.
He has not contacted his wives. It has crossed his mind often on his journey to do so. He would prefer to write to them than to telephone. He feels that he could Lie for the Lord – lying to preserve a greater spiritual truth, a Mormon practice that Uncle Jimmy explained to him once – easier that way. But none of his wives are allowed to have a computer, or use email, and, at any rate, the only computer in the family house is the Dell, which sits at this moment on the white sheet of his bed, cradled underneath by his crossed legs. He knows what his absence will have occasioned. Ambree, as the most senior now that Leah is dead, will have called a meeting. It will have been held in the kitchen, because, although the living room is bigger, the kitchen is the enclave of the wives, and they will have found it easier to shut the door to the children, although RoLyne would still probably have brought in Elin, his youngest, to breast-feed her. He is confident that Ambree, the most virtuous of his wives, will have led the meeting to the correct decision – despite protests from, he suspects, Angel and maybe even Sedona – that he was their husband, and he knew best: that if he had taken it upon himself to disappear for days without explanation, why, that was no different from Our Lord deciding to enter the desert for forty days in order truly to understand Himself and His Mission. Our job, he was sure she would say, our job as his celestial wives, is in the meantime to care for his house and his children, and be ready to welcome him on his return.
Having thought this through, the