The End of the World as We Know It Read online

  When it was finally over, the surgeon came out and told us matter-of-factly that my brother had lost such massive amounts of blood that he was going to die. He was going to die in the night, before the sun came up. His brain was ruined, and he was going to die in the night. My sister-in-law behaved better than I thought she might, although she was, of course, inconsolable and talked about suicide again. I drove back to my parents to report the news. They had broken out the bourbon by that time and they were deeply, deeply moved. Stricken, as though by a snakebite. I then drove back to the hospital, where the surgeon came out again and told us that my brother had made a miraculous recovery in the last half hour, and that he would live, but he would be brain damaged and he was paralyzed on his left side and he was in a deep coma. There was no way of knowing how deeply his brain was damaged, or what form the damage would take.

  The brain is a funny thing. If you’re right-handed, they know where everything is—short-term memory, long-term memory, anger, patience—everything. There’s even a microscopic pinpoint area that is your personality, and they know where that is.

  If you’re left-handed, they don’t know anything, the surgeon explained. It’s all helter skelter, so if you lose a lot of blood, and your brain is certainly damaged, there’s no way to tell what functions of the brain will be affected. My brother is left-handed.

  My sister-in-law behaved pretty well about all this, and she retired into the arms of her family, and I drove back to the town-house to tell my family the change in prognosis, and they sort of collapsed in grief and joy; having prepared themselves for his death, they weren’t quite sure how to deal with his prospects for a limited life.

  Then I went back to the hospital, where the gull-wing surgeon spoke to us one more time and told us my brother was resting in the recovery room and then he would be moved to the ICU, while we waited for the swelling in his brain to go down.

  I fed everybody dinner, and then my sister and brother-in-law went back to Judy Judy’s to collapse. By ten o’clock, my sister-in-law asleep on her cot at the hospital, the stiff-backed Methodists gone home to their cold suppers, I managed to get my parents to bed, and then I sat down on the sitting room floor to have a drink and watch the news. I was exhausted, tired from the driving and the caretaking and the awfulness of the day in general. I was immediately drunk on one drink. I was so tired of taking care of everybody. I was so tired of being positive and polite to gull-wing and polite to my sister-in-law. While the news was going on I started crying. I cried so hard the tears shot out and ran down the inside of my glasses.

  Then the phone rang. It was the husband of the couple who were taking care of my niece. His name was Teddy. Every man in the South is named after a four-year-old boy long dead. They have names like Zeke or Skip or Topher, as though leaving the frat house was the end of life’s possibilities. He said he needed to speak to my brother-in-law. It was urgent. It was an emergency, he said.

  I answered that if anything was wrong with my niece, if something had happened to her, he should tell me, and I would relay the news to my brother-in-law and my sister. They were staying somewhere else, I explained, as though that mattered.

  “No, no,” Teddy said. “It’s nothing like that. She’s fine. It’s just that, well, their house burned down.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Their house burned down. Some kids broke in and set it on fire and it burned down.”

  I started laughing hysterically. I couldn’t help it. It was like something out of a Gothic story and it seemed so unreal it was comical. I leaned against the refrigerator and laughed until tears ran down my cheeks.

  “No,” said Teddy. “Maybe you’re not getting it. Their house burned down.”

  “I got it,” I said. “It’s terrible. A terrible terrible tragedy. I’ll tell them.”

  Suddenly my mother appeared on the stairs. She was wearing a flimsy blue nightgown and I could see her thin arms. She was so afraid she sat down on the steps and gripped the banister with her hand. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Their house burned down,” I choked out, still roaring with laughter. “Somebody broke in. It burned up.”

  “What? What?” She kept saying. She was both drunk and exhausted from anguish. She had thought it was a call from the hospital saying my brother had died. She couldn’t take the change in direction.

  “He’s fine,” I said. “It wasn’t the hospital. It was Teddy. Their house burned down.” I was gasping with laughter. My mother slumped against the banister, like a child waiting for Christmas morning. I thought she was going to faint. I led her back to bed, where my father was snoring and gritting his teeth. He could make the most remarkable noises. He also talked in his sleep. I remember one night, after we had gotten back from two weeks at the beach, I woke up to hear them talking in their bed.

  “I do everything for you,” he said. “I buy you things. I take you for a nice vacation at the beach. The Golden Strand. What do I get? Not a word of thanks.”

  “Buy me things?” my mother said. “All you ever bought me was a goddamned Coke and a pack of Nabs.” Our Nash Rambler always broke down with some terrible ailment, usually the generator, on the way to the beach, and one time we waited so long in this woebegone gas station in Coinjock that the gas station owner’s wife took us into the back where they lived and made us sandwiches. But it was true we drank a lot of Cokes and ate a lot of Nabs in those gas stations.

  I crept into their room. They were both totally asleep, facing away from each other. The next morning, neither one had the slightest recollection of the conversation.

  When my mother was asleep again, I went to call my sister.

  I pulled myself together enough to dial Judy Judy’s number with a sense of serious purpose, even tragedy. As soon as I got my brother-in-law on the line, I started to tell him the news, but I started laughing and I couldn’t stop. He finally got it, and he said, “Well, as long as your brother’s OK, the rest doesn’t matter. It’s just stuff.” Although I had known him all my life, I was struck with admiration, and my heart filled with love for him, for the first time since he had married my sister. He had a child’s name, too.

  I drank Tanqueray out of the bottle until my nerves turned to jelly and I hardly knew my own name, not that I thought of trying to think of my own name, and I laughed and cried in the night and I finally went to sleep on the sofa.

  The next day, my sister and brother-in-law, in shock, went to the ICU to see my comatose brother for two minutes, which was all they were allowed, and then they came over before they started to drive back home. My sister said the most extraordinary thing. She suddenly looked up and said, “Gosh, all week I’ve missed my soaps.”

  “This is a soap opera,” I said.

  Then they got in the car and drove home, to start picking through their ruined things. They never caught the boys who did it.

  The swelling in my brother’s head didn’t go down. They were afraid that the swelling would cut off the blood supply to his brain, leaving him a vegetable. So the surgeon came back and operated again. He patiently explained to my sister-in-law and me that he was going to go in and remove small parts of the frontal lobes of my brother’s brain so it would have room to swell and not cut off the oxygen.

  “He’s having a frontal lobotomy,” said my mother. “He’ll be a zombie.” I guess she was right, as I understand the term, although it didn’t turn him into a zombie.

  The operation took place, the surgeon said it was successful, and my brother went back to intensive care. He was still in a coma. He was still paralyzed, and there was an empty space in the front of his skull where part of his brain used to be.

  The intensive care unit was an awful place, filled with little cubicles in which these horribly sick and wounded people lay, mostly waiting to die. We were allowed in twice a day for fifteen minutes.

  There was this one guy who had had the most unusual accident imaginable. His name was Eric. He looked like Elvis Presley, just a Georgi
a redneck, but as handsome as a Greek god, black hair and blue cheeks and a finely chiseled nineteen-year-old face, and we had to pass him every time we went in to see my brother. He had been riding his motorcycle and he had lost control and run into a light pole and the gas tank of his bike had gone up his rectum and then it had exploded in flames. He sort of won the sweepstakes for the weirdest accident. There was a tent over his middle section, and all his organs, his vital organs, were hanging in little bags off the side of his bed. His face was totally calm and composed, not slack, just sleeping and handsome. You figured there was no way this guy was going to live, what with his liver and kidneys dangling in baggies off the metal rails of his bed, and he had nineteen operations, but somehow he lived through it.

  His family waited in the waiting room with all the grim Methodists, even a minister came to wait and pray, and they were all beautiful. His fiancée looked like a runway model. Like a biker’s wet dream.

  Then we just waited while my brother did nothing. I took my mother swimming at a rich friend’s mother’s house. We drove out to Buckhead, to West Paces Ferry Road, in the Alfa Romeo. It was really hot, and it was barely summer. It was the kind of pool that only really, really rich people have, with flowers and vines and a changing house and falling water and nothing turquoise or vulgar about it anyplace. I swam, while my mother sat on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water. She was the kind of woman, even in her late fifties, who looked very good in a one-piece bathing suit. She always said she only went in the water once a year, at Nags Head. She wore a bathing cap when she went in. But being there on West Paces Ferry Road seemed to make her feel better, and I loved swimming in a rich woman’s pool.

  My parents came to see my brother before they flew back home. My mother put a cross around my brother’s neck and kissed his hand. My brother suddenly said, without opening his eyes, his right hand fingering the cross, “I want to see Stevie Wonder. I have something to tell Stevie Wonder.” Then he lapsed back into silence.

  People who are in comas don’t look like they’re sleeping peacefully. They look inert. They look like a breathing dead person. Everything has gone slack. Whatever self they have has left their bodies. We thought it a hopeful sign that he had said anything, that he had moved his hand.

  Every day the motorcycle guy had another operation, and there was one less baggy hanging off the side of his bed. Sometimes he was even conscious. They wouldn’t even put him on painkillers. He was so close to death they thought sedation would put him over the edge. I don’t know how he stood it. The pain must have been terrible, what with the gas tank up the rectum and all.

  My parents left. There was only so much trauma they could stand, and they’d run out of their bourbon and my brother had moved his hand and talked about Stevie Wonder and so they left. My sister-in-law had taken to coming home for dinner, although she still slept at the hospital. I did her laundry. I cleaned her toilets. I had people over for dinner I thought might comfort her. I had the woman who had said she gauged how much meat to get by the price and not by the number of guests. My sister-in-law was enormously pregnant.

  We took turns going to the ICU. We could only go for fifteen minutes twice a day, even though Elvis seemed to be surrounded by fans and fellow bikers all the time. My sister-in-law would go in the mornings, sometimes we would both go, sometimes I would go and she would rest after a dinner I had cooked, surrounded by friends, and she would wait for news.

  People in comas are not attractive. They have foul breath and yellow cheese between their teeth and they stink. The motorcycle guy was not in a coma, he was just in unimaginable pain, so his lights were sort of always out, but he was gorgeous every time you looked at him. I think his family combed his Elvis hair, black and shiny and pompadoured. My brother, with a cross around his neck, a cheap cross, not even real silver, did not look like somebody your heart cried out to see.

  One night I went alone to see him, while my sister-in-law sat with her best friends at the dinner table. I walked in and started talking to him. I had taken to having these conversations with him, even though there was no indication that he would respond. I told him things that I thought would irritate him, to try to get a rise out of him. I told him our sister’s house had burned down. I told him I had wrecked his car. I told him his wife had told me she would hate me forever.

  This night, I talked about his stereo. My brother had a new stereo of which he was inordinately proud. We had talked about it on the phone, before his aneurysm, and I knew it meant a lot to him. He didn’t want anybody to touch it. I knew he valued his record collection like gold, and I had noticed that, before his head blew up at the party, he had bought the new Paul McCartney album, the one with the cherries on the cover. So I told him I had played the McCartney album on his new stereo, and I had scratched the vinyl on both sides of the album. I was holding his thin right hand, and I told him I’d wrecked his new record.

  He opened his eyes, and looked at me. “I know this is hard,” he said. “I know you take care of everybody, but I want you to take care of yourself. I know it’s been hard on you.”

  Then he closed his eyes, and he sang in a thin, whispery voice, so softly I could barely hear him, “Maybe I’m amazed at the way you’re with me all the time. And maybe I’m amazed at the way I love you.”

  Then he lapsed back into a coma. But I knew he was going to live.

  For the next three weeks, I flew down to Atlanta every weekend. I would leave on Thursday night after work, and come back on Sunday or Monday. They were very understanding at work, although, come to think of it, they fired me six months later, so maybe their patience was more superficial than it seemed.

  I flew Delta F class, saying to myself I was so exhausted, and that was partially true, but also because you could get a lot of free drinks in first, without having to wait for the cart and then feeling guilty when you ordered a double gin and tonic, which was never enough anyway.

  One time, I got so drunk on the plane that I went straight from the airport to a restaurant to meet a friend for Sunday night dinner and passed out on the bar stool. I fell on the floor.

  On one of these trips, I went for a drive in Buckhead with my sister-in-law. It was pouring rain, but we drove on and passed the governor’s mansion, and, across the street, my rich friend’s richer mother’s house. My brother’s wife asked me to pull over; she wanted to talk. She told me that, while it was true that she had always hated me, she had seen in recent weeks that I had a good side and she hoped we could go on to be friends. I was very touched, although it lasted about six months, after which she hated me as much if not more than ever, going around to parties in my own hometown saying horrible things about me, saying that somehow I had robbed my brother of his inheritance—they both seemed to be given to these archaic phrases, as though they were characters out of Faulkner—and trying to turn my own relatives and friends against me. My friends and relatives, of course, immediately reported all these remarks to me.

  She really seemed to have found her element. She was pregnant, her husband was a brilliant comatose journalist, and she was, as she had always been, the absolute center of attention. But never had the focus of solicitude been turned so absolutely and single-mindedly on her. The story of her situation could soften the most jaundiced heart. There was nothing people wouldn’t do for her, run errands, feed her, take her for drives when they knew she hated their guts, and so on.

  After awhile, I didn’t go any more. I meant to, but I didn’t. I said I couldn’t get away from work, but that wasn’t the real reason. I said I couldn’t afford the flight, but I was charging it all anyway, so that wasn’t it. It took me years to pay it off. I was making $75,000 a year, not exactly F-class income. But Delta loved me. Every Thursday night the stewardess would ask me if I wanted the usual, fixing me a stiff gin and tonic in a real glass glass before the plane even took off.

  The truth was, I couldn’t stand her and I didn’t trust her, and I didn’t want my brother to have married
her, but he had, while she was wearing a bias-cut satin dress my mother and grandmother had made, and which she had had them make all over again, stamping her foot because she didn’t like the way it fit, causing her own aunt to warn my mother about her the night before the wedding, saying she had always been selfish. It was sweet Minnie Lee Lee who wasn’t Chinese whispering these confidences to my mother at the rehearsal dinner, while Judy Judy, in a black cocktail dress and a lot of opera-length pearls, flirted and let all the men look down her cleavage. And while I didn’t want my brother to be lying in a hospital room with cheesy breath and thin white arms and the stink of death about him, you can only be so assiduous about even the most terrible grief for so long.

  He was paralyzed and speechless but he wasn’t dying, so he was moved away from Elvis and into his own room. Elvis must have been in excruciating pain all the time. By now he was sedated against the pain. Morphined to the gills. My brother wasn’t in any pain at all.

  My sister-in-law finally had the baby, in the same hospital, and she and the little redheaded girl were taken in a wheelchair down to my brother’s room so he could see his daughter. He didn’t even open his eyes.

  The next morning, the nurse went in to draw the blinds and feed him his breakfast. My brother suddenly sat up in bed and said, “Can you tell me something? I know I’ve been kind of out of it for awhile, and I missed Wimbledon, so there’s something I want to know. Who won the ladies’ finals?”

  The shocked nurse answered him, Chrissie Evert or whoever, Martina, somebody, and then she asked him, “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Sit up in bed. Talk.”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like it was time.”

  “You know you have a baby? A little girl?”

  “I know,” said my brother. “I saw her yesterday.”

  And after that he never went backward. He only got better. He never got worse. But he was never the same again. Ever. Never the same.