Instead of watching the TV, Hazel watched him. He was a new species of being, an About-to-Die, which Hazel hadn’t interacted with much. She’d purposely stayed away from her mother during this time; she’d feared what her mother might expect from her. But now she had the reverse problem: Hazel found she expected something from her father, particularly given the fact that he was all she had going at the moment. She wanted an increased profundity in manner, maybe. When were they going to have tearful all-night talks where he spoke of his numerous regrets in parenting her and begged her forgiveness? When was he going to wax poetic about what a celebration her existence, despite her failed marriage and current lack of employment, ignited daily within his heart? When was he going to bequeath her diamonds of wisdom gleaned from a near-full-term life span? Hazel always took a geological approach to epiphany—if she didn’t understand something, it was because she was too new at it; she just needed to get more layers of “experience crust” to put weight on the memories and information she did have so the answers would squeeze out.
Maybe things would get more important-seeming when he grew more helpless. Perhaps it would take the intimacy of crossed taboos—her washing him, changing him—for her to earn any sort of tenderness or gratitude.
It had to feel more worthwhile at some point, because otherwise Byron would win yet another argument. Hazel liked to think that nature must have some wisdom, but Byron felt nature was a series of defects. People want to think of anything in nature as normal, and anything human made as abnormal. Nature isn’t normal, he’d once said. Nature is weak. Dying is normal if nature’s your reference. Why would I want to subscribe to a system whose best-case scenario is decline speeding up into fatality?
If Byron saw her tend to her father until his death and saw that the experience was an empty one, wouldn’t that be an implied I told you so? He’d be more convinced than ever that humanity was a problem to engineer beyond. Hazel wanted her father to affirm that the traditional life cycle held inherent value. The thought that there was a loophole, that soon technology could flatten the circle and make linear vitality go on indefinitely, added a new level of tragedy to every prior death, to Phyllis, to the fact that one of Hazel’s formative Christmases had been ruined unnecessarily. And it increased the wrongness about herself that she felt in the pit of her stomach—if she had a hard time enjoying her natural life span and finding adequate worth inside the experience, how could she hope to make it through an eternity?
Byron’s internal surveillance added a pressure to achieve happiness that was counterproductive to happiness. Every failure she had, emotionally and otherwise, would be amplified by the fact that Byron had watched it play out.
“Dad? You said the other day that you could die at any moment. I mean we all could, but you said it’s pretty likely for you. Which I think was hyperbole—all the more reason to go to the Gogol facility and just see where things are with the cancer. But, let’s say you’re right. The end could come in an hour. Why do you want to spend the last moments of your life watching war movies?”
His face was drawn up in a cringed expression; two soldiers on TV were torturing an enemy POW to try to get information. He didn’t respond.
Her father and Di’s and Roxy’s matched stillness seemed like a trick from a horror movie. What if her father had in fact just died, and his departed soul had entered Di’s body? What if she had to spend the rest of her life living with her father whose spirit was living inside the body of a highly sexualized female mannequin? Or what if Di was secretly possessed by an evil demon—it had been lying dormant inside her, waiting to be awakened by the repeated sound of automatic weapon discharges, and this movie had made it happen? It seemed that if Hazel reached across Diane to place two fingers on her father’s throat to check for a pulse, the doll could spin awake and bite her wrist. Hazel stood over him and slowly began to lean down.
“It’s cathartic!” her father finally yelled; Hazel jumped back. With each word, Diane lifted and fell slightly, awash on the rough seas of her father’s booming diaphragm. “I’m dying of cancer. What do you want me to watch, cartoon kittens? I’m in the trenches, Hazel. I’m in the rabbit hole about to be shot.” He extended an arm to the television. “These are my people. What are you doing, sitting around here anyway? You should be out living. Ideally making a living. You might actually be getting my stink of death upon you. Death does have a smell. It stinks. You think you’re going to be able to pick up a new man smelling like that?”
Hazel told herself to be fair. She hadn’t been able to predict all the bad in life, which meant unpredictable good might unfold too. She wanted to see—But not for you, Byron! she made sure to add inside her head—just what would happen with her father. If there really was nothing, if life really held nothing, then maybe her self-controlled exit could have nothing at all to do with Byron, and that would be a sort of vengeance. She’d be running away from something even greater than him, even greater than a person with a godlike comprehension of her daily life. She’d be fleeing the fact that nothing, in either the natural landscape or Byron’s world of technology, could remedy her despair.
She’d been so worried about Byron putting out a mercenary hit on her. But what he’d done was one better. He’d more or less convinced her to do it herself.
THAT EVENING, LIVER WAS NOT AT THE SPOTTED ROSE. “HAVE YOU seen him?” Hazel asked the bartender. The woman was stretching the side of her mouth flesh out in front of a mirror, seemingly looking for something on the inside of her cheek.
She shook her head. “I have not. Not all evening, and that has never happened. It isn’t unreasonable to think the worst. He’s always here, so the fact that he isn’t means he’s too physically impaired to come. I don’t mean too drunk, I mean too broken limbed or dead. I’d say try the ER, but he’d never go on his own.”
Hazel swallowed. Byron wouldn’t take out such a small fish, would he? “Do you have a car I could borrow?”
Now the woman took both hands out of her mouth and turned around, eyeing Hazel.
“Those are like two different questions,” the woman said. “I do have a car.”
“I slept with him,” Hazel offered.
“What does that have to do with my car?” the woman worried aloud, suspicious.
“Nothing. I just mean my concern for him is real.” Hazel paused. “My ex found out that I slept with him and I’d like to check in. But his dwelling situation is not close by. I think I can remember how to get back to it, but I’d need a car.”
The woman shrugged and reached for her keys. “It won’t go well for you in this car if you get pulled over. And I don’t care if you try to steal it. But care will be given by others, and I mean, woman to woman, you don’t want that brand of justice on your tail. If you do, that is gross.”
“No,” Hazel repeated. She decided this word would be her brain’s new autoreply in uncomfortable situations, or during times when someone asked her a question and she hadn’t really been listening. Social pressure seemed to push her toward the other direction—to want her to nod and agree to everything. Flash a timid smile that could be interpreted however the listener liked. But after her marriage, Hazel found no combination more appalling than the vague with the affirmative. Know the full story; that’s when you get wholly on board. That’s how you avoid becoming an evil tech genius’s science-project wife.
“If you find him please call an ambulance instead of taking him to the hospital in the car,” the bartender said. “Cloth interior. I don’t have time for that.”
To this Hazel said, “Yes.”