Eden

Breath

“I don’t want to talk. Sometimes talking isn’t enough.”

- Joshua Dwyer

“Hey, you coming to see me?”

“Yeah, I’m coming to see you.”

“You coming to see me?”

“I’m coming to see you.”

“You coming to see me!’

“I’m here to see you!”

` They always did this when Pat came into the room.

“Whaddo you got for me?” Mrs. Grimner demanded.

“I’ve got, let’s see,” Pat said pushing the tray before him, “Drugs, drugs and let’s see… More drugs.”

“I know I’m dying, but how quick are you trying to kill me?”

“It’s not how quickly we kill you,” Pat said. “It’s how kindly we do it.”

“Speaking of doing it…?”

“Yes.”

“When you have the time, Joe College, could you pick me up and take me to the commode so I could shit?”

Pat looked at Mrs. Grimner, gave her his cheesiest smile and said, “You don’t want a woman?”

“No. I want you cause I don’t trust anyone else.”

“Well, then alright,” Pat said. “I’d love to help you shit.”

After helping Julia Grimner shit, Pat went to see Florence Rose. As Florence dozed, Pat sat back in his chair and turned on the Grindr app. It was not news that there was no one around here, but it was a comfort to get on there, look up Chicago and see that there his choices were almost as bad. To imagine that there was a place where things were much better would have entailed either travel or envy. The idea that even in Chicago, or San Francisco, the same collection of empty headed twenty year olds, entitled old men along with the fat, the insane, the addicted and the sloppy who were told to love themselves and think they deserved the best, still existed, was a sort of relief. He switched his app all over Chicago, and then to Mesa, Arizona, just for the fun of it, and was sort of relieved that rather than things being wildly different, they were more or less the same. White men looking for big black dicks, black men promising that they had big black dicks, hillbillies on meth, Mexicans on coke barely speaking English and searching for cocks to suck, the same assortment of graduate students making references to The Lord of the Rings who wanted to, in the end, be fucked in back alleys.

Florence was coughing, and Pat put down his phone and looked to the old woman across from him. Couldn’t they get something that would kill off that sharp cough that she said cut up her throat? This was, after all, hospice. This was the place no one was leaving alive.

As she woke herself up, Pat got up and poured Florence a cup of water. He lifted her up and waited for her cough to die down. He wiped her nose, and she shook her head and coughed again before letting him place the cup to her lips.

“Ah, thank you, Pat,” Florence said. “Thank you.”

Then she said, “I got it now. I got that cup’o.”

Pat handed it to her without asking her if she was sure. That would get an earful. She drank it down and held out her hand for another one.

“Fuck,” she declared, taking a Kleenex to wipe her nose, “Dying is a pain in the ass.”

“Why are you here?” Dinah asked.

They were on the porch outside the hospice, and she was smoking a cigarette, but Pat was looking out at the river.

“What does that mean?”

He didn’t quite feel like her today.

“I mean, didn’t you go to some nice school. Couldn’t you be anywhere?”

“I guess you could be anywhere too.”

“Not really,” she said, ashing, and then tossing her cigarette. “It’s a job. It pays the bills.”

“Well, it does that,” Pat agreed.

He didn’t feel like he wanted to talk to her. After she got up and left, Pat still stood outside the back door, looking at the river, his arms folded over his chest. He looked around to see if anyone was out here before he spat. And then he kept looking over the water that was at the bottom of this grassy hill and needed so badly to be trimmed.

“I guess because I like it,” he thought. He liked being here. He didn’t want to go into it, certainly not with Dinah, but that was why.

He shrugged, took out his ID, and put it to the lock. The door clicked and he went back in.

He was going to check on Mrs. Grimner, but when he entered room 148 he saw she wasn’t there.

“Is she in the bathroom?” he asked Naomi.

Naomi was Jewish, and for some reason this meant something to Pat, and he liked her. She looked very sad, and she said, “Oh, Pat. Oh no. She isn’t.”

They left him alone at the bar. They were surprised when he came in. The town was made up of two types of people, the people who sent their kids off to college and worked outside of town, maybe even drove into Chicago. And then there were the farmers and what the not. Pat was definitely from the first class. He had come into Jovi’s last year for the first time, and ever since, it was a good place to be left on his own, to knock back as many drinks as he wanted. He had been told it was sad to drink alone, and he believed it. It was better to have one overpriced, watered down Scotch and then another while country music played in the background, maybe get some beer nuts, than to sit at home just chugging away and pass out on his floor. That was more than the road to being an alcoholic. It was pathetic.

He liked the hospice because it felt right there. He hadn’t understood for a long time, but he was always looking for something real. He’d known he was a fake, and he was looking for someone he wouldn’t have to be a fake with, a place where he wouldn’t be so artificial. He was surrounded at school by people who talked about high purposes and political rights and what a shame the government was this and people in power did that. They talked about essays written in the 1970’s that they had halfway read. But he wanted to do something real, and suddenly, in the hospice, he was doing something.

And it wasn’t that it was effective, or that it was changing the world. It was just real, and it needed to get done. Dying people needed to be picked up and put on toilets so they could shit. Pills needed to be dispensed, backs needed to be washed, the frightened needed to be talked to and all the time, those sad feelings which were underneath, which were shadowy, were no longer shadows. They just were. They were just life.

Everyone he worked with was going to die. Florence was going to die. She could be dead tonight, right now. Mrs. Grimner had slipped away between his time with Florence and his break outside. Still, he’d felt like he had something to tell Julia Grimner, like he couldn’t wait till tomorrow to see her, like he could always wrest from death one more day. But now that was done.

He felt someone sit down beside him, and looked up to see Josh Dwyer.

“Hello, Josh,” he said, wearily, because, why was Josh here? And he hadn’t had good words for or from Josh in a while.

“I saw you in church this morning.’

“Yeah, I saw you too. It means we both have eyes.”

“I just want you to know, I remember what you did to my brother.”

“Josh, I don’t think you even know anything about me and your brother.”

“I know more than you think.”

“Did he send you here?”

“No. He wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s right,” Pat said, running a finger along the rim of his glass, “he wouldn’t. If he had something to say to me, he wouldn’t send you to say it. So, until you have something to say to me, and I have something to say to you…” Pat tapped the space in front of Josh, “why don’t you clear off?”

Josh looked at Pat hard and Pat seemed unmoved, and then Josh said, “You’re the same old Pat.”

“Fuck you,” Pat said, and kept drinking.

* * * *

Isaiah Frey stood over the sinkscrubbing and scrubbing, running more hot water in and coughing a little, before rinsing off his hands and going to sit down.

“You don’t have to stay here,” he said to Rob.

“Do you want me to go? Some people like to be alone.”

“I,” Isaiah said, “have been alone a large part of my life. No, I don’t want you to go. I just thought you might want to go. You might have other things to do.”

Rob Dwyer cleared his throat and sat, wide legged, in the chair across from the sofa where Isaiah had just plopped himself down.

“I actually don’t have anything to do or any place to go.”

“That’s sort of refreshing,” Frey said with a small yawn. “But if you do have things to get done… don’t hang around here just looking at me.’

“You know what?” Rob said, making a face and scratching his thin beard, “what if I lie sitting her and looking at you?”

Frey coughed, covered his mouth and said, “I’d say you need to find better things to look at. Why don’t you turn on the TV?’

“Whaddo you wanna see?”

“I don’t really want to see anything. I’m good with no television, but I thought you might want something. Besides looking at my sick ass on this sofa.”

“Can you turn that radio on? On your phone. We can hear about disasters and feel better about our lives.”

Frey shuffled in his pocket and pulled out his phone saying, “Switch that speaker on, would you?

“I swear,” Frey was saying, even as he pulled a pair of soiled underwear off the ground and dabbed his nose with them, “tomorrow we are going to go out and do some shit. I promise.”

“If you’re better.”

“Fuck better. I want beer. You know, I started smoking again today?”

“You… What the fuck, Frey!”

“Well, with a cold and everything, you stop because you hate coughing, and then you take the cough medicine and you hope it works, but it’s kind of for shit. And then you finally figure, what he fuck, I miss being healthy, and one of the things I miss about being healthy is smoking, and I’m gonna cough anyway, so you just…” Frey turned around and gave a mighty honk into the old pair of underwear and wiped his nose.

“That’s fucking disgusting,” he decided.

Rob, who had watched it and now saw Frey wiping his face, and getting up to go the bathroom, could only agree. Frey took the ill used garment to the sink and put it in the hot water with all the other transformed snot rags.

“See, this is what you get if you stay with me tonight, so I hope you can handle it.

“I’ve put my hand up a cow’s ass before, I can handle it.”

“Did you do it for fun? Cause we might need to have a talk about sexual expectations.”

“I grew up on a farm.”

“Oh,” Frey said, considering. “Well, that almost answers it, then.”

Then Frey said, “Tell me about Pat Thomas.”

“Oh….” Rob looked distracted, “What? No…. I don’t want to talk about him.”

“I’ve told you everything,” Frey said. “Or so close to it. I’ve told you everything. Now, you tell me about Pat Thomas.”

Rob looked genuinely frustrated, but he also looked like there was no good way to get out of this, so he sat back down in the chair and said, “It’s complicated.”

“Is it, really?”

“It…”

“My experience,” Frey said, “is that things are less complicated than you think. Once you tell them.”

“Well, I guess he was my first love.”

Frey nodded.

“My brother thinks he knows everything. He thinks that what happened was that we dated. That I loved this guy, with his shiny hair, and his … you know, he’s half Italian. But I think he’s got some Arab or something in him. And we were friends from sixth grade. He was always around. You know, eventually I started to realize what he looked like. We used to be jealous of him because Pat was so smart, but now I look back. His pants never fit. I mean, when I look back I think I remember how nice he looked, cause his pants were a little tight, and I’d never looked at another guy. But they were short too. You always saw his ankles. He was the oldest of a bunch of kids.

“The first fight we got into we just started slugging it out in class, and then, when we thought it was over, Mrs. Roman led us all down to the bathroom. You know. This was back at Saint Pancras, when we lived in LaPorte. And I remember, I was standing at the top of the steps, and I turned, and there was Pat, running like he was sneaking up behind me with his fist out, and he was going to hit me, and I turned around and popped him instead, and he started crying, and Mrs. Roman came, and she had us make up, and Pat was just like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Rob. You’re my friend. And I hugged him, but I sort of didn’t like him still. But I guess we just still stayed friends.

“But like I said, he did better than me. When we got to high school, he was on swim team and honor roll, and in the special classes when I was doing remedial shit. And then, in the end, my parents couldn’t afford the school, so I went to public school, and Pat kept going to Saint John’s. Eventually I dropped out and got a GED, and then we both went to college. Not the same college, you know. Pat went to Notre Dame, and I was at Valpo. But, we were in college.”

The whole time, with an occasional sniffle and wipe of his nose, Frey was listening, and Rob said, “But at summers and holidays, we came together. Because we were still friends, and probably best friends.

“And then, one night, Pat’s Mom and his sister were killed in a car accident.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. He called me and I came over, and we were just really stunned, and didn’t say a lot. I took care of him. His hair was all wild and crazy, a real mess, and his eyes were spaced out, and I remember he just looked so… beautiful. I made him shower and I fed him and everything.”

“Like you’re doing for me.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“And then he cried and talked about how bad he felt, and I listened. And then, he kissed me.”

Frey waited for Rob to continue.

“We had never done anything like that. I had never said anything about… being gay. I had never said anything like that. We’d never talked about it. But he kissed me real hard and I didn’t stop him.”

“Did you want him to?”

“I don’t know,” Rob said. “I don’t know. But once he’d started kissing me, Pat just, he undressed me, he got undressed, and he had sex with me. That’s… that’s what happened. I didn’t ask him to, but I felt like I couldn’t stop him either, because of what he’d been through. And we did… I mean, we were friends. So I just let him do it to me on the sofa, and then when he was finished, he started crying, and I was… it was awkward. I kept saying it’s alright, and stuff like that. And he got dressed, said he was going upstairs and went to bed.”

“Did you… go with him?”

“No,” Rob, said quickly. “I stayed on the couch, and I just went to sleep.

“The next morning I got up and I thought I’d go upstairs and... check on him. Pat was curled up in a ball and I kept calling him, and he just said, ‘I’m really tired. Do you think you could go?’”

“Are you serious?” Frey said, more for support than anything else, because male bad behavior didn’t surprise him anymore.

Rob nodded.

“So, I nodded,” Rob said. “And I left. And that was the last time I talked to Pat.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time, and Rob finally said, “It’s very quiet in here.”

“I didn’t know what to say.”

“Sometimes I guess it’s best not to say anything, I guess,” Rob said.

“It’s late,” said Frey. “Do you want to go to bed? We can sleep back to back so I won’t cough in your face. If you’d like that. I do miss you.”

“Let’s go,” Said Rob.

Thinking of Rob made Frey think of Jason, made him remember the night he and Melanie had received he news of Elle’s death. He hadn’t told that story, but he would. Right now all that happened was that Frey coughed, and murmured, “Sickness is bullshit .”

* * * *

THEY DROVE ALL night. He called Melanie on the phone, and she said she’d be right there. She left her baby with her mother and they packed a few things then were off. Nothing else mattered right now. Jason was in Mercy Hospital. When they got there he was large and wild haired, gangly and frantic, pop-eyed, unshaved, the love of Isaiah Frey’s life, his truest friend, the thing that needed to be comforted. He came to them both, out of courtesy, Melanie later said. “It was all about you. I was just along for the ride.” He embraced them. Frey smelled fear and grime and sweat, and the ammonia of the hospital on Jason. He smelled other things that he shouldn’t have been able to smell like guilt, like dread. And the intense milkiness of his breath, unbrushed teeth, here all night, rich, rich milk.

“How long have you been here? You shouldn’t be here.”

They had driven to the apartment to learn that Jason was at the family house, only to learn at the Henleys, that Jason was at the hospital. At Jason’s family’s house, Melanie said she had to rest. She had to have a drink. Donald said he would drive Frey, but it was Melanie who said, no it wasn’t necessary, she wanted to. She hadn’t seen Jason in so long. But she was going to rest for a little bit, and she suggested Frey do so as well.

“We’re going to take you back home,” Melanie said.

“Not there,” said Jason. “Not my mother and my father and Don. Not that... And no one knows that to do with DJ.”

“He was at the house,” Frey said.

“His grandparents, Elle’s folks, they don’t want anything to do with him. They were a shitty family...” Jason’s voice drifted off.

Melanie took charge. She told Frey: “We’re taking him to the apartment.”

They put Jason in the backseat of the car where he collapsed on his side in a fetal position. But he didn’t sleep. They acted as if he was, though. Frey said, “Melanie, thank you for everything. Thank you for bringing me here. And thank you for Jason.”

“Look,” Melanie said, “my life is such a fucking wreck right now, and I know I’m a disappointment to everyone. It just feels good to be a little bit in control. A little bit of something right now. So you are more than welcome.”