The Trouble
I held the x-ray film up to the fluorescent light in the kitchen. Tom stirred sugar into the coffee I’d just made. His cigarette burned in the tray.
The x-ray was a picture of his head. There was a dark spot near the front of his skull, an inch or so above his eye sockets. The spot was a blob of tissue which was much denser than everything around it. I was still trying to understand what I was looking at when Tom explained. “It’s a brain tumor.” He tapped his middle finger against his forehead. “It’s up front where all the important stuff is. There’s not a damn thing they can do about it. If they try to cut it out, they’ll turn me into a vegetable. Radiation would do the same thing.”
“Did you…?”
“I’ve had four opinions and they’re all the same. I started getting these headaches, a month or six weeks ago. I didn’t say anything because we’ve been pretty busy lately. You were in Mexico City, then you came back and I went to Tallahassee, then I came back and you went to Vegas. In between our jobs, I had some tests. They found junior on the film there about a week-and-a-half ago.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“The tumor will grow, like tumors do. Everything up front is important, the ‘frontal lobe’ they call it. That’s where all the stuff is that makes you who you are. As the tumor gets bigger, it will damage the tissue around it. In the end, one of two things will happen. The first is that the cancer will cut off the blood supply to the frontal lobe of my brain. If that happens, I’ll be like one of the lobotomy patients from the fifties; docile and stupid and basically brain dead. The trouble with that possibility is that I won’t die, not right away. I could be a drooling vegetable for months before I finally go.
“The other possibility is the tumor will increase the pressure in my skull until my brain suddenly ruptures and fails. It would be like dying of a massive stroke. In the meantime, depending on what the tumor presses on as it gets bigger, I might change. The doc said I will change, but he can’t tell me how. My mind might wander. I might lose my memories. I might see things that aren’t there. I might become violent and hurt the people I love.”
I tried to argue. “You would never.”
Tom picked his cigarette up for one last drag, then he stubbed it out in the tray. “I might. The doctor said I wouldn’t know the difference. He said the synapses, that’s what he called them, synapses. He said that if the signals get crossed up and the synapses misfire, I could look at you and see an enemy. I could have a flashback to Nam. I could kill you. In the next moment, I might be back to normal, or I might never come out of it. There’s no way to know. From now on, you need to be armed all the time.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Why would I need to be armed?”
“In case I attack you.” Tom sipped his coffee and hummed. “I missed your coffee. My God this is good.”
I was stunned by my father’s instructions. “You’re asking me to kill you?”
“I’m telling you to protect yourself. I’m a dead man. There’s no reason for you to risk your life to protect mine. You’re still a kid. You’ve got everything ahead of you. I’m at the end. I’m telling you right now, if it comes down to it, and it’s between you and me, I want you to choose you.”
I paced the kitchen along the row of cabinets. I darted from corner to corner and back again. I stopped in front of the chipped porcelain sink to shout at my father. “I CAN’T!”
He had another sip of his coffee and put his cup back in the saucer. “You may damn well have to.”
I tried to start pacing again but Tom barked to stop me. “MARVIN! Ah, shit…I was afraid you’d react this way. I’m sorry, son. I hate to make it your responsibility to protect yourself from me. When they told me what might happen, I really thought about writing you a long letter and eating a bullet. I didn’t do it because I’ve still got work to do. Actually, we’ve got work to do. I can’t die yet, not for a little while. You and me have one more job to deal with. We’re going to have to work together, like we used to.”
I didn’t want to believe. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“About me?” Tom shook his head and lit another cigarette. “There isn’t.”
“How long?”
He drew smoke into his chest and blew it at the ceiling. “A few months…maybe. Probably less. Maybe only a few weeks before I start to change. The changes might start tomorrow. This kind of tumor grows fast, so they can’t really say what will happen or when. The headaches have been more-or-less constant lately, so I gotta think things are going to happen sooner rather than later.”
The bottom fell out of my life. The foundation I’d built everything on, the Rock of Gibraltar who I always trusted Tom to be, just admitted he was a mortal being who was going to die. I was inconsolable. I fell into my father’s arms and wept my hysterical grief into his chest. He dropped his cigarette into the tray so he could hold me with his big, strong arms.
“I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry for you. The years we’ve spent together have been the finest ones of my life. Until we met, I didn’t care about much of anything. You gave me something to care about. You gave me a reason to live. It breaks my heart that we can’t go on forever like we have these last years. I want you to know, in case you had any doubt, I’ve always thought of you as my son, just the same as if you were my blood. I love you and I’m proud of you and I wish you all the best in life.”
“I LOVE YOU TOO, DADDY!” I wailed.
“I know, son. I know you do. You’re a good boy. I’m glad I got to be your dad.”
I hugged my father and cried my eyes out until I was exhausted, and Tom’s shirt was soaked through. When I recovered some control, I was surprised to find that I was in Tom’s lap. I excused myself and climbed off him. I blew my nose a couple times and set to work cleaning up the coffee things. I apologized for falling apart like I had.
Tom dismissed my apology. He wiped his dry eyes with a paper napkin and blew his nose. “Actually, I’m honored. That was the first time I’ve ever seen you cry. I wasn’t sure you knew how.”
“I never had a reason to before now.”
Tom apologized again. “I’m sorry, son. It’s not like there’s ever a good time for something like this to happen, but this is one of the worst. There’s trouble in the world and you and me have got to do something about it.”
“Fuck the world.”
He admonished my indifference. “Don’t be that way. I know you’re upset. I am too, but this thing that’s happening, if it’s allowed to go on, it could hurt a lot of people.”
I lost my temper because I felt like he was minimizing his own suffering in favor of a bunch of strangers. “I DON’T CARE ABOUT THEM! I CARE ABOUT YOU!”
Tom frowned deeply. He picked up his cigarette pack and tossed it back down. He forced the frown from his face and tried to reason with me. “In 1989, I didn’t care about the world either. One day, completely by accident, I met a little boy who needed my help. Before I knew it, I was a dad to an eight-year-old kid. As a dad, I had to care about my child. I also had to care about the world he lived in. The little boy I adopted made me want to make the world a better place because that’s where he lived. Someday, God willing, you’ll meet someone who will be your partner for this life. Until then, you need to do your best to make the world better, so you’ll have a good place to live when you meet that person. That’s what our work is all about. We take the lives of evil people so we can protect the lives of the innocent.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t find any reasoning to throw back at Tom. He’d beaten me with logic and with the facts of my own story. I had to admit he was right. The natural order of things is that older people die, and younger people live on. It’s also everyone’s business to do their best to make the world a little better. I set my childish tantrum aside and agreed to listen.
“Someone is trying to hack into the nuclear weapons controls system.”
I didn’t see why that was a problem for he and I to solve. “That’s a military issue, isn’t it?”
“It should be, except the hack isn’t coming from abroad. It’s coming from right here on American soil.”
I still didn’t see how that should matter to us. “So, call the Department of Homeland Security.”
“DHS is already on it, but they’re not getting anywhere.”
I started to argue again. Tom put his hand up to stop me. I closed my mouth and waited for him to have his say. “People try to hack the weapons systems all the time. They’re protected by layers and layers of security. No one has ever come close to being successful. This hacker is different though. Instead of a brute force approach, he’s working to slip in like a teenage boy trying to lay his first girl. My DHS contact tells me this new hacker has the softest touch he’s ever seen. It’s like he’s trying to insinuate himself into the system as opposed to breaking in. It’s almost like he’s asking the system to agree to let him in.
“My contact says they likely wouldn’t have noticed it at all except the system started to give into the hack. The security team was doing a routine check when they discovered the outermost layer of security was wide open. They tried to close it, but the computer resisted their efforts. It’s got all the experts going crazy. They’re so worried about a breach, they took all the weapons systems offline. If the Russians or the Chinese hear about this, which they eventually will, we’ll be sitting ducks. We’ve got to find the hacker and neutralize the threat so the US can bring its weapon systems back online.”
“Why us?” I asked.
“Why not us?” Tom countered. “The problem is a domestic one. The Department has all kinds of rules they have to follow, both while they conduct their investigations and to deal with the threat once they find it. We don’t have any of those concerns. DHS is working on the problem. They’ve asked us to work on it in parallel. We’ll share information. We’ll coordinate our efforts, but when it comes time to deal with the problem, we’ll likely be the ones to do it.”
Tom’s explanation sounded as reasonable as any I’d heard at the start of a new job. I went along with it. “Where do we start?”
He checked his watch and compared it to the wall clock. “First, we get some sleep. Tonight, we’ve got some driving to do. You and me are going to Detroit.”
* * * *
I slept through the morning and into the early afternoon. Around one, my eyes opened and refused to close. I knew I would get no more sleep, so I got up and paced my bedroom. I passed the dresser mirror at least a dozen times before I stopped to see what it could show me.
I stood before my own image, naked except for a purple Calvin Klien thong. My body was in excellent shape. I was skinny but toned and firm and very strong for my size. My endurance was excellent. My blue eyes were clear and bright with 20/20 vision. My formerly blond hair had darkened to a sun-kissed brown. I looked damn good.
I turned to look over my shoulder at my smooth, round ass. The purple strap of the thong disappeared between the milky cheeks. Well, one of them was milky, the other was still red from the Mexican stud who’d slapped it raw the night before. I touched the angry skin with a careful finger. The touch smarted, but the pain made me feel naughty. I spread my palm over the whole of the red patch and gripped the flesh. “I wish you and your Papi meat were here now. I could use the distraction.”
I turned to face myself. The only blemishes on my otherwise fit, trim, young body were the cigarette burns. I asked the mirror a series of rhetorical questions. “If not for Tom, how many more would there be? What other marks would I wear? What other horrors would I have suffered? Would I even still be alive? Why did he rescue me? Why invite the trouble into his life? Why bother?”
I realized that in some ways, Tom needed me as much as I needed him. He’d said that his life had no meaning before he found me. He was just existing, going through the motions from day to day. I gave him meaning. I made him want to make the world a better place. I was amazed at the impact we’d had on each other. Tom rescued me, but in some ways, I saved him. And now, he was going to die.
My grief at my father’s approaching death threatened to overwhelm me again. I wrestled control over my emotions and managed to merely look sad instead of cry. I thought about what he’d said early that morning. The main statement which stood out was when he admitted that he considered ‘writing me a letter and eating a bullet.’ He could have done that. It would have been easier. He wouldn’t have had to worry about what might happen to his mind as the tumor grew. He wouldn’t have had to tell me to arm myself against him. He wouldn’t have had to concern himself with this one last job.
“Why bother?” I asked again, even though I already knew the answer. He was doing it for me. Tom was a funny sort of guy with a funny sort of morality. He didn’t give a damn about the whole, wide world, or any of the people in it except me. He concerned himself with the fate of the world because that’s where I lived. If he and I never met, when the doctors told him about his tumor, he would have smoked a cigarette and blown his head off. He likely would have done it right in the doctor’s parking lot. He would have abandoned the world to its fate without a second thought. The whole reason he was willing to put himself through the torture of dying slowly, was to save the world for me to live in.
A heavy fist knocked on my bedroom door. I gasped in surprise at the sound. I hadn’t noticed the creaking of the floor or the sound of Tom’s heavy steps in the hallway. I turned my back to the mirror and ran to open for the knock.
Tom was in his shirtsleeves. His black suspenders threaded over his shoulders and took a wide path around his sagging gut. A cigarette smoldered from the corner of his mouth. He stared for a second, then he took the cigarette from his face to speak. As he did, his eyes shifted to land on something behind me. He smirked. “Don’t look now, but someone’s tanned your hide.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see my own ass in the dresser mirror across the room. I’d been so lost in thought that when Tom rapped on the door, I opened it without bothering to put my robe on. Blood rushed to my face and filled my whole head with the heat of embarrassment. I tried to apologize, but he was too busy laughing to hear me.
I let the door hang and grabbed my robe to cover my nudity. Tom had himself under some control by the time I tied the sash. “Doesn’t bother me, son. Makes me glad I never spanked you as a boy. You might’ve gotten the wrong idea about our relationship.”
I grumbled over being the literal butt of the joke. “Enjoy yourself, old man.”
He tugged at his suspenders and hitched up his pants. “How do you think your old dad would look in one of them thongs? You think they make ‘em in my size?”
I held my stomach and made retching noises like I was going to lose my lunch over the idea of Tom’s fat ass strapped into a tiny thong. He laughed himself silly. I stopped retching and laughed with him.
When we settled, he wished me a good morning and asked if I was ready to get up. I said that I was and I’d be down after a shower. Tom had one more laugh at my expense before he left me to get cleaned up. “I might have some ointment for that red ass of yours.” His face lit up as a fresh wave of humor struck him. “I think I’ve got some of that Ben Gay. What did you say the man’s name was? If he was Mexican, maybe you need some Jorge Gay.”
I pointed down the hall toward the stairs. “Laugh your way into the kitchen, huh? I’ll be down to make breakfast soon.”
Tom laughed all the way to the head of the stairs and most of the way down. I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I loved the teasing silliness I’d gotten to share with my dad. I hated that there wouldn’t be time for much more of it. I shed my robe and went to get cleaned up.
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