Renata holds her breath and waits for the chirrups, sweet as a baby bird calling out to its mother. There is the first one, then the second, the third, and on and on, an unwavering call Renata wants to believe is a sign from her own baby, calling out to his mother. These chirrups she has been hearing since Friday night are a sign of a sort, or at least a sign from the machines attached to him, aural proof of the steadiness, the durability, of Simon’s fulsome heart. How silent he was, alert to nothing, when as a baby he woke to the slightest noise. His naps had required turning the house into a mausoleum. He could hear anything, everything, the neighbor’s cat treading on leaves one house over, a quiet cough from a stranger out on the sidewalk taking an evening stroll, his sisters, before they left home, talking downstairs in the den about boys, when he was upstairs in his bedroom with the door closed. During this week that led up to she and Harry sitting here by his side, Renata had questioned his formerly remarkable hearing. “Simon,” she found herself saying, then calling out more loudly, “Simon!” then yelling “SIMON!” because her son’s hearing had become selective in that teenager way. There was so much before him, Renata had thought, but how would he get ahead if he refused to answer the simplest of inquiries? When Simon would eventually look up, he had said, “Mom, enough, I heard you. I need time to think.” Think about what? Renata wanted to scream, but she had not, she had kept quiet. Now she wondered if she was to blame for this situation they found themselves in; the beckoning summer a misplaced joke, their world suddenly cold and sterile, their son, unmoving, silent, in his hospital bed.
Since Friday night, when her head is not bowed, Renata stares at Simon’s black curls, heavy and lifeless on the pillow. Those curls, inherited from neither Renata’s side of the family, nor from Harry’s, made Simon appear to be running, even when he was still and focused, with an intensity that was stunning: comic books, stamp collections, five-thousand-piece puzzles, the histories of trains, the Southwest, the samurai of Japan, tae kwon do, a year spent writing haiku. Now, nearly every hour, Renata pulls one of his curls straight, then tugs a little too hard, hoping that a bit of pain will jostle loose whatever is clamped shut in Simon’s brain. She imagines her son stuck inside a hole, a big boulder wedged atop, like the one in their front yard, where Nathan Felt had been sitting, waiting to deliver the news, and a mother’s superhuman strength is needed to roll that boulder away, let in the light. She imagines, for some reason, parrots strutting back and forth across that boulder. Each time she pulls, she tells herself to expect nothing. But her heart folds up tighter when Simon’s eyes do not open, when he does not move, reflexively at least, away from the pain. Still, it gives her succor, reminds her that she will always know his scalp intimately, though the days of washing his downy hair in the sink, and then in the tub, are long gone. That instantly recoiling curl shores up Renata’s belief that Simon retains an essential vitality, a life force within, that he will prevail and emerge from this, and she feels her hope renewed. At least for a while. An hour later, when she springs free a different curl, tugs at it hard, she cycles again through fear-hope-fear, and bows her head.
Since Friday night, Harry has watched his wife pull on his son’s curls. He does not understand what meaning the action has for her, or what effect Renata thinks it might have. He, too, has been drawn to physically connect with his son. Every so often, he places a sweaty palm on the sheet that covers Simon’s left calf. The first time he did so, at five in the morning that dreadful first night in the hospital, Harry was startled to find that calf, remembered as matchstick thin, seemed overnight to have turned thicker, nearly muscular. Simon’s failure to fill out had bothered Harry over the last couple of years—he himself had matured early in his own youth—but in that murky early morning hour, there was a new meatiness Harry was certain he would have noticed in late spring, when Simon took to wearing shorts to school. But he had not noticed any such change.
A nurse entered the room with trays of plastic-wrapped hospital food that she set down on the credenza. “In case you’re hungry. You need to eat, keep up your own strength.” Harry tried to thank her, but he was overcome by wracking coughs. Finally, he said, “Thank you, that’s kind,” and the sound of his voice, so thin and high, that voice from his boyhood, came as a surprise, how much he sounded like Simon. The nurse’s smile was tender as she shut the door behind her.
Harry again placed his palm on Simon’s left calf and it felt returned to the form he recalled, pliable and juvenile, and Harry was confused. Which thigh of Simon’s was the real one? The thick or the thin? And he wondered if he had lost true contact with his son during the critical years, closed his eyes, and hoped that he had not.
I was spellbound and rapt, tearing through the pages, through the hours, all the while bringing the book closer and closer to my eyes, until I realized that whatever light there had been in the sky had disappeared behind the black clouds. I leapt up and turned on the lamps in the great room, saw my repeating reflection in the velvety black of my wall of windows.
I had only the epilogue left to read and I jumped into it immediately. The epilogue brought the book around to the start, returning to Simon Tabor as the hemophiliac who lived those other lives, traveled to faraway places.
Some may tussle with these disclosures, certain that these pages contain fabrications, and that I, Simon Tabor, am passing along deliberate mistruths to the na?ve. Who can say what is true or what is false, when all of life filters through the personal. My own experience has taught me there is no golden ticket at birth; the richest life is stitched with thievery. Take what you need from everyone. Just do right by those stolen gifts. Exhaust all to ashes. If you are brave, you too may experience what I have experienced: a transformed life turned extraordinary, miraculous, and singular.
With that coda, Fictional Family Life concluded. When I looked up, I felt myself absent, not yet returned home. As I lived the existences of the hemophiliac Simon Tabor, and his imaginary alter egos, and learned the kaleidoscopic truth about the real Simon Tabor who had thrown himself off a roof, day had turned into night, and I did not remember when I last thought about food or drink, or my mother, or myself. I stood up and tried to rejigger back into my body.
It was four in the afternoon according to the microwave panel. Outside, the world was raw. The trees were stripped clean, branches trembling under the onslaught of water. The gutters were rivers. Across the street, lights were on in the town houses and in the trim row houses. Shadows crisscrossed behind half-opened shutters and shades. No one walked on the sidewalk. Cars did not idle or drive slowly down the street searching for nonexistent parking spots. Perhaps my neighbors had listened to the same Weather Channel report yesterday. Galoshes won’t cut it, better be able to swim, stay home.
The silence settled. But Simon Tabor’s last words in his epilogue were pounding within me. It was nuts to heed the final command of a narrator who had pitched himself out into space, and then reimagined himself as a hemophiliac, as a way to somehow both distance himself from and understand his motivations, who had easily created a host of wild characters living lives he—they—wanted to experience. But there was so much power in the truths underlying Fictional Family Life, and I felt how those truths were arranging my thoughts, how Ashby’s ultimate sentences presented a potential road map to my own future.
In my mind, I suddenly heard Johnny Cash singing in that gravelly voice deepened by hurt, perforated by longing, recorded maybe a year before he died. A line returned to me, Johnny’s tumultuous voice digging deep—If I could start again, a million miles away. Perhaps I was wearing blinders, as horses do, or seeing what I wanted to see, or just confused, but Ashby’s work was leading me toward the path I had long wanted to travel, showing me a way back to my past.
I called Lucky Star again. “Is this Kartar?” I said, recognizing his voice.
“Most certainly. The one and only.”