Sole Survivor

One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.

One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.

They’re doing bad things to me.

They’re mean to me.

Make them stop.

Are we recording?

Make them stop hurting me.

Are we recording?

Are we recording?

Make them stop or when I get the chance . . . when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

This is fun.

Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Rumlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

Whoooaaa. Are we recording?

Are we recording?

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Now. Look.

Cool.

Joe didn’t see anything new in the material, but something he bad noticed before was more obvious when Blane’s dialogue was

read in this extracted format. Although the captain was speaking in the voice of an adult, some of the things he was saying had a distinct childlike quality.

They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

This was neither the phrasing nor the word choice most adults would use to accuse tormentors or to ask for help.

His longest speech, a threat to kill everybody and like it, was petulant and childish as well — especially when immediately followed by the observation This is fun.

Whoooaaa. Here we go . . Whoooaaa. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.

Blane’s reaction to the roll and plunge of the 747 was like that of a boy thrilling to the arrival of a roller coaster at the crown of the first hill on the track and, then, to the first stomach-rolling drop. According to Barbara, the captain had sounded unafraid; and there was no more terror in his words than in his tone of voice.

Now. Look.

Those words were spoken three and a half seconds before impact, as Blane watched the nightscape bloom like a black rose beyond the windscreen. He seemed gripped not by fear but by a sense of wonder.

Cool.

Joe stared at that final word for a long time, until the shiver it caused had passed, until he could consider all the implications of it with a measure of detachment.

Cool.

To the end, Blane reacted like a boy on an amusement-park ride. He had exhibited no more concern for his passengers and crew than a thoughtless and arrogant child might exhibit for the insects that he tortured with matches.

Cool.

Even a thoughtless child, as selfish as only the very young and the incurably immature can be, would nonetheless have shown some fear for himself Even a determinedly suicidal man, having leaped off a high ledge, would cry out in mortal fear if not regret as he hurtled toward the pavement. Yet this captain, in whatever altered state he occupied, watched oblivion approach with no apparent concern, even with delight, as though he recognized no physical threat to himself.

Cool.

Delroy Blane. Family man. Faithful husband. Devout Mormon.

Stable, loving, kind, compassionate. Successful, happy, healthy. Everything to live for. Cleared by the toxicological tests.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Cool.

A useless anger rose in Joe. It was not aimed at Blane, who surely was a victim too — though he didn’t initially appear to be one. This was the simmering anger of his childhood and adolescence, undirected and therefore likely to swell like the ever-hotter steam in a boiler with no pressure-release valve.

He tucked the note pad into his jacket pocket.

His hands curled into fists. Unclenching them was difficult. He wanted to strike something. Anything. Until he broke it. Until his knuckles split and bled.

Such blind anger always reminded him of his father.

Frank Carpenter had not been an angry person. The opposite. He never raised his voice in other than amusement and surprise and happy exclamation. He was a good man — inexplicably good and oddly optimistic, considering the suffering with which fate saddled him.

Joe, however, had been perpetually angry for him.

He could not remember his dad with two legs. Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance. Joe was not yet three years old at the time.

Frank and Donna, Joe’s mother, had been married with little more than two paycheques and their work clothes. To save money, they carried only liability coverage with their car. The drunk driver had no assets, and they received no compensation from any insurance company for the loss of the limb.

The leg was amputated halfway between knee and hip. In those days there were no highly effective prostheses. Besides, a false leg with any sort of functioning knee was expensive. Frank became so agile and quick with one leg and a crutch that he joked about entering a marathon.

Joe had never been ashamed of his father’s difference. He knew his dad not as a one-legged man with a peculiar lurching gait, but as a bedtime storyteller, an indefatigable player of Uncle Wiggly and other games, a patient softball coach.

The first serious fight he’d gotten into was when he was six,

in first grade. A kid named Les Olner had referred to Frank as a ‘stupid cripple.’ Although Olner was a bully and bigger than Joe, his superior size was an insufficient advantage against the savage animal fury with which he was confronted. Joe beat the shit out of him. His intention was to put out Olner’s right eye, so he would know what it was like to live with one of two, but a teacher pulled him off the battered kid before he could half blind him.

Afterward, he felt no remorse. He still didn’t. He was not proud of this. It was just the way he felt.

Dorma knew that her husband’s heart would break a little if he learned his boy had gotten into trouble over him. She devised and enforced Joe’s punishment herself, and together they concealed the incident from Frank.

That was the beginning of Joe’s secret life of quiet rage and periodic violence. He grew up looking for a fight and usually finding one, but he chose the moment and the venue to ensure that his dad was unlikely to learn of it.

Frank was a roofer, but there was no scrambling up ladders and hustling from eaves to ridgeline with one leg. He was loath to take disability from the government, but he accepted it for a while, until he found a way to turn a talent for woodworking into an occupation.

He made jewellery boxes, lamp bases, and other items inlaid with exotic woods in intricate patterns, and he found shops that would carry his creations. For a while, he cleared a few dollars more than the disability payments, which he relinquished.

A seamstress in a combination tailor’s shop and dry-cleaners, Donna came home from work every day with hair curled from the steam-press humidity and smelling of benzene and other liquid sol­vents. To this day, when Joe entered a dry-cleaning establishment, his first breath brought vividly to mind his mother’s hair and her honey-brown eyes, which as a child he’d thought were faded from a darker brown by steam and chemicals.

Three years after losing the leg, Frank began suffering pain in his knuckles and then his wrists. The diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis.

A vicious thing, this disease. And in Frank, it progressed with uncommon speed, a fire spreading through him: the spinal joints in his neck, his shoulders, hips, his one remaining knee.

He shut down his woodworking business. There were govern­ment programs providing assistance, though never enough and

always with the measure of humiliation that bureaucrats dished out with a hateful — and often unconscious — generosity.

The Church helped too, and charity from the local parish was more compassionately provided and less humbling to receive. Frank and Donna were Catholics. Joe went to Mass with them faithfully but without faith.

In two years, already hampered by the loss of one leg, Frank was in a wheelchair.

Medical knowledge has advanced dramatically in thirty years, but in those days, treatments were less effective than they are now — especially in cases as severe as Frank’s. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, injections of gold salts, and then much later penicillamine. Still the osteoporosis progressed. More cartilage and tendon tissue were lost from the chronic inflammation. Muscles continued to atrophy. Joints ached and swelled. The quality of immunosuppressant Corticosteroids available at the time somewhat slowed but did not halt the deformation of joints, the frightening loss of function.

By the time Joe was thirteen, his daily routine included helping his dad dress and bathe when his mother was at work. From the first, he never resented any tasks that fell to him; to his surprise, he found within himself a tenderness that was a counterweight to the omnipresent anger that he directed at God but that he inadequately relieved on those unlucky boys with whom he periodically picked fights. For a long time Frank was mortified to have to rely on his son for such private matters, but eventually the shared challenge of bathing, grooming, and toilet brought them closer, deepened their feelings for each other.

By the time Joe was sixteen, Frank was suffering with fibrous ankylosis. Huge rheumatoid nodules had formed at several joints, including one the size of a golf ball on his right wrist. His left elbow was deformed by a nodule almost as large as the softball that he had thrown so many hundreds of times in backyard practices when Joe had been six years old and getting into Little League.

His dad lived now for Joe’s achievements, so Joe was an honour student in spite of a part-time job at McDonald’s. He was a star quarterback on the high-school football team. Frank never put any pressure on him to excel. Love motivated Joe.

In the summer of that year, he joined the YMCA Youth Athletics Program: the boxing league. He was quick to learn, and the coach liked him, said he had talent. But in his first two practice matches, he continued hammering punches into opponents after they were

sagging on the ropes, beaten and defenceless. He’d had to be pulled off. To them, boxing was recreation and self-defence, but to Joe it was savage therapy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not any specific individual, but he did hurt them; consequently, he was not permitted to compete in the league.

Frank’s chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure. Frank died two days before Joe’s eighteenth birthday.

The week following the funeral Mass, Joe visited the same church after midnight, when it was deserted. He’d had too many beers. He sprayed black paint on all the stations of the cross. He overturned a cast-stone statue of Our Lady and smashed a score of the ruby-red glasses from the votive-candle rack.

He might have done considerably more damage if he had not quickly been overcome by a sense of futility. He could not teach remorse to God. He could not express his pain with sufficient power to penetrate the steel veil between this world and the next — if there was a next.

Slumping in the front pew, he wept.

He sat there less than a minute, however, because suddenly he felt that weeping in the church might seem to be an admission of his powerlessness. Ludicrously, he thought it important that his tears not be misconstrued as an acceptance of the cruelty with which the universe was ruled.

He left the church and was never apprehended for the vandalism. He felt no guilt about what he’d done — and again, no pride.

For a while he was crazy, and then he went to college, where he fit in because half of the student body was crazy too, with youth, and the faculty with tenure.

His mother died just three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Lung cancer, spreading to the lymphatic system. She had never been a smoker. Neither had his father. Maybe it was the fumes of the benzene and other solvents in the dry-cleaner’s shop. Maybe it was weariness, loneliness, and a way out.

The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation. There was a big hand with eighteen fine musicians,

playing genuine dance music, not just shake-in-place rock-’n’-roll. She and Frank were self-taught in the fox trot, swing, and the cha-cha, but they weren’t bad. They knew each other’s moves. How they laughed. There were balloons, oh, hundreds of balloons, suspended in a net from the ceiling. The centrepiece on each table was a white plastic swan holding a fat candle surrounded by red chrysanthemums. Dessert was ice cream in a sugar swan. It was a night of swans. The balloons were red and white, hundreds of them. Holding her close in a slow dance, he whispered in her ear that she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and oh how he loved her. A revolving ballroom chandelier cast off splinters of coloured light, the balloons came down red and white, and the sugar swan tasted of almonds when it crunched between the teeth. She was twenty-nine years old the night of the dance, and she relished this memory and no other through the final hour of her life, as though it had been the last good time she could recall.

Joe buried her from the same church that he had vandalized two years earlier. The stations of the cross had been restored. A new statue of the Holy Mother watched over a full complement of votive glasses on the tiered rack.

Later, he expressed his grief in a bar fight. His nose was broken, but he did worse damage to the other guy.

He stayed crazy until he met Michelle.

On their first date, as he had returned her to her apartment, she had told him that he had a wild streak a foot wide. When he’d taken that as a compliment, she had told him that only a moron, a hormone-crazed pubescent boy, or an ape in the zoo would be witless enough to take pride in it.

Thereafter, by her example, she taught him everything that was to shape his future. That love was worth the risk of loss. That anger harms no one more than he who harbours it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.

Six days before their wedding, in the evening, Joe went alone to the church from which he’d buried his parents. Having calculated the cost of the damage he’d done years before, he stuffed a wad of hundred-dollar bills into the poor box.

He made the contribution neither because of guilt nor because

his faith was regained. He did it for Michelle, though she would never know of the vandalism or of this act of restitution.

Thereafter, his life had begun.

And then ended one year ago.

Now, Nina was in the world again, waiting to be found, waiting to be brought home.

With the hope of finding Nina as balm, Joe was able to take the heat out of his anger. To recover Nina, he must be totally in control of himself.