But now he seemed skin and bones, so much of him wasted away, evaporated into the dry, sterile air of the hospital room. He’d had a flop of gray hair back then, but now it was flat and dead, like he was soon to be. He was already still like death. And his mind was as gone as anyone already in the ground. Alzheimer’s had killed and was killing him.
Yeah, I showed up. I hadn’t for a long, long time. But I showed up because I knew, deep down inside, like animals know another animal is dying, that the end was near.
My grandmother was there and was polite, but I knew that if we weren’t so closed off and reserved she would have been yelling at me, because I worked in disappointing her the way Rembrandt worked in paint. Her good little Bible boy had long ago stopped going to church, and eventually I would stop believing altogether. The one unforgiveable sin. But she was really okay with it because she knew in the end her god was going to burn my ass in my very own eternal prison cell and then I’d be sorry. And that seemed to be enough for her.
Every once in a while there was just the smallest movement of my grandfather’s stomach that showed he was still breathing, but it was so small I had to wonder how the hell anyone could live on so little air. Even with all those tubes running in and out of him.
God had been a major disappointment by not existing, but Science wasn’t making me feel much better – it sure seemed to be keeping my grandfather alive a lot longer than he had any right to be, long after his brain had turned into soggy Rice Krispies that would never ever snap, crackle or pop again.
I went over and brushed my hand through his hair. It felt like dust. He was as dry as my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry. He had already been gone a long time.
His eyes moved under his lids then, like he was dreaming. What the hell can you dream when your mind is gone? What the hell goes on in there? Does it make sense inside there?
Hell, dreams don’t mean anything even when you’ve got a working brain. It’s just your subconscious trying to make sense out of the random electrical impulses as your brain slips into and out of sleep. Our minds are terrific at pretending to make sense out of senselessness. I wondered if in his brain it was senselessness out of senselessness.
“We need to go fishing.”
I didn’t even recognize his voice.
“We need to go fishing,” he said again.
“Yeah, maybe when you get better,” I said to him. My grandmother rushed to the bed yelling, “Praise Jesus!” She was probably thinking he was healed or something.
And then he said, “Crayons.” And then he said, “Look, the cat is dead.”
And then he was asleep again.
Well, I left. He wasn’t there. That was just some kind of echo of him, a sick joke of time that rolls on way too fast and does obscene things to our minds and our bodies, as I knew it would do to me before I was ready for it, and I can feel its creeping fingers even now, longing to molest me and fuck me up for good.
And that night inside my still-working brain my subconscious mucked about with the random electrical impulses, and I was a little bored boy again, in my grandfather’s fishing boat, backing out of the slip but for some reason we couldn’t get the boat moving out into the lake. My grandfather, who was big again, was muttering, “We’ve got to catch the current, we’ve got to catch the current,” and I tried to help, I tried to help, but nothing got us moving. We were stuck. “We’ve got to catch the current,” he kept saying.
And I woke up saying “I’m sorry,” but I have no earthly idea why. And when the phone rang, I knew it was my mom, calling to tell me that my grandfather had passed away last night. “How could we tell?” I wanted to snark, but I didn’t, because I could never catch the current, no matter how hard I tried. That goddamn boat was going to be stuck there forever.
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