The Weight of History

Shortly after Gerry told Sonny that the headache she woke up with wasn’t getting any better, the aneurysm that had been covertly ballooning at the junction of her anterior cerebral artery and middle cerebral artery blew out like a bald tire on an eighteen wheeler and hemorrhaged blood into the subarachnoid space between her brain and her skull cap. Gerry reached for and missed the handle on the refrigerator door, folded deeply at the knees, muttered something about an unpaid parking ticket and crumpled to the floor.

Within ten minutes of Sonny’s 911 call, the EMTs from Bronx Lebanon Hospital filled the front doorway of their house, a stone’s throw from the Hutchinson River. Sonny steadied himself against the wall of their living room as the EMTs intubated Gerry and then ripped open her pajama top to try defibrillation. At sixty-seven Gerry’s breasts were fulsome and youthful even though they were no longer part of a living person. At the sight of Gerry’s body unveiled to strangers, Sonny experienced a surge of desire unlike anything that had come his way in months. He was shocked by the arousal and his face burned with shame, but he also smiled softly at this, Gerry’s final gift to him.

The EMTs wrapped Gerry in a sheet and strapped her onto a rolling stretcher. On the way out, one EMT told Sonny to follow the ambulance back to the hospital. There was an urgency to the EMT’s voice as if an ember of life buried somewhere in Gerry could be stoked into a flame at the hospital. Sonny knew better. He was at Khe Sanh, a seventy-seven-day war within a war when on most of those days he had ample opportunity to observe the difference between a chance for survival and the end of the line.

“Something happens, not the injuries, not the eyes rolling around or fouling your trousers. The face just goes blank. Life disappears. You can’t mistake it for anything else, in a second you go from looking at living tissue to seeing a statue or a puppet, something made out of plaster and paint. When the spirit goes, everything goes with it.”

That or some variation of it was what Sonny told people when he got back from Nam until deciding around the same time that he was an atheist. Sure, it was ghoulish to talk about the appearance of dead people, but more than that, he found he could not do it without saying something about the spirit or soul being irrevocably snatched away, and since he no longer believed in such things, he thought it better to say nothing at all. But as he wrestled Gerry off the floor and with every nerve ending in his body flashing in protest bore her to the couch, it all came surging back to him.

Sonny did as the EMT told him. Damp with sweat in the frigid afternoon air, he got behind the wheel of their Prius and started the engine. The emergency lights on the ambulance went into full swing as the vehicle rolled into the street. The Prius was Gerry’s choice, which she told him was more sensible than the 2010 Dodge Ram that Sonny coveted and was gleaming with a massive, hand-painted $8,000 price tag behind the windshield at the used car lot on Pelham Parkway, ready to go home with him. Gerry informed him that following his spinal fusion surgery, she would hide his keys if he made any attempt to head to Home Depot for the railroad ties and sacks of gravel he wanted for his backyard landscaping projects and so a pickup would be extraneous. Sonny argued a bit, alleging that his back was only half the reason, and maybe less than that. The larger reason, both Gerry and he knew very well, was that she had evolved from garden composter into a full-blown climate change activist. The transition had been gradual and went full throttle after Superstorm Sandy covered their street with a body of water that rose to the top of their front steps. The Prius with its diminutive carbon footprint followed shortly thereafter.

Sonny’s surgery was one in a pack of not insignificant medical procedures that ganged up on him in recent years. These included installation of both an artificial knee and a coronary stent as well as a hemorrhoidectomy that required that Sonny saddle up with adult diapers for six weeks and turned every morning’s meek attempt at a bowel movement into a violent ejection of blood into the toilet bowl. Gerry cared for him without a murmur of complaint, never once exhibiting the faintest sign of disease until she suddenly expired on the kitchen floor.

Through the space vacated by the ambulance Sonny discovered elderly Mrs. Fazio standing across the road in front of her bungalow in a pink quilted robe. She was clutching Jack, her cottony Bichon Frise, against her chest and watching him with limp-jawed horror as if the Prius and Sonny were levitating several feet above his driveway. Mrs. Fazio was probably no older than Sonny, but he and Gerry referred to her as elderly because she was a widow, lived alone and, if appearances were any indication, held Eleanor Roosevelt as her fashion exemplar. When she started to cross, Sonny killed the hybrid engine and retreated into the house. At once he felt he was in an alien place. The front hall and stairs to the second floor were bleached by a wretched winter sunlight. In the kitchen the mug of coffee Gerry had left near the sink, The New York Times she had opened on the table, her furry blue slippers underneath it, the sight of each intimately familiar object now unbearable.

Sonny flicked on the basement light and escaped down the narrow stairway too quickly for his artificial knee as well as his deteriorating real one. He nodded at the pain, welcomed it, thinking that the period of life he had just entered could possibly be endured by constant movement, something that would anchor him to the world of the living, to the primitive compulsion to survive that is stirred up when you are cornered by your own physical deterioration.

Not much about Gerry existed below the first floor except of course the washer and dryer and her folding table and a clothes line strung between two ceiling beams where she air-dried delicate items and where three flamboyantly bright blouses were now suspended from wooden hangers. Ever since their trip to Hawaii to celebrate Sonny’s retirement from control room manager with ConEd, Gerry decided she could no longer abide wearing anything monochromatic above the waist, including eyeglasses, necklaces and bras. Sonny was secretly terrified about the effect Gerry’s fashion transformation would have on their savings, but he needn’t have worried as Gerry restocked her closet with thrift-store clothing, on each excursion across the eastern boroughs and down into Manhattan’s Lower East Side and north into Westchester bargaining down the prices of fresh items in exchange for parts of her old collection.

He peeled Gerry’s blouses off the hangers and rolled them into a single ball that he stuffed into a cardboard computer box half filled with Christmas ornaments. The box butted his Army foot locker, a basic pine container with a lid and a hasp and coated with faded green paint. He dragged over and sat on an old piano seat, swept away dust and chips of basement wall paint from the lid and raised it. At the top were his fatigues and his combat boots, which the Army gave him for free, and under that his helmet, which he had to buy and, for some forgotten reason, did. There were gloves and socks, his gear belt, a collapsible trenching tool and a pistol holster; save for firearms and a pack, everything he needed to again go marching off to war. Below the clothing and accoutrements were a stack of vintage Lifes, the ones with big in-your-face covers of young soldiers trudging along muddy paths in napalmed jungles, and a bunch of Gerry’s letters bound with a blue ribbon. Seeing the letters, his impulse was to burn them immediately. Burn the letters, throw away her cheerful blouses and her shoulder bag that was upstairs hanging from the doorknob of the closet holding their winter coats and the photo of her above the fireplace on the beach at Maui in her one-piece cracking open a can of Southern Cross. Eliminate every piece of evidence that Gerry ever existed and thereby seal whatever bottomless canyon her departure left him with. Why not? It could be a strategy, it could work, he thought, even while simultaneously understanding at a deeper level that he was a drowning man grasping at lunatic ideas.

He lifted the letters, surprised by how little they weighed. At the bottom of it all was a tattered piece of canvas tied with two brown strings around an object long and narrow. It was the one thing that Sonny remembered was in the locker. It was what he was looking for, and when his hand closed around it, everything about it, every word, rushed back to him with perfect clarity.

After peeking through the blinds to determine that Mrs. Fazio was back in her bungalow, Sonny hustled into the Prius and headed west. As he did most of the time when he left the house, he forgot his phone, which occurred to him now when he was already halfway across the Bronx. So he navigated the traditional way, actually the way he preferred, by pulling over and asking pedestrians for directions, and once he crossed the Hudson into New Jersey, doing the same at gas stations. The quick conversations, the human contact, dissipated temporarily at least the bleak mist gathering around his thoughts and seeping across his vision, a creeping indifference to everything, a summons to nothingness he saw no reason not to follow. But none of that would happen until he saw Uncle Ned.

Sonny had no current information about Ned beyond knowing he was still among the living, that he resided in a community called Evening Star and that the community was in Paramus. Ever since Ned took up residence there, Gerry visited him every couple of months. He’d always been her favorite uncle, she said, and she could never understand why Sonny preferred not to join her. Eventually she stopped asking. After taking the Paramus exit off Route 4, two stops for directions got him nowhere. At the third, a lovely young woman who seemed to understood English but not speak it, the only female pump jockey Sonny had ever encountered, pointed wordlessly to the other side of the road where a driveway bending through a treeless parcel of yellowed grass led to a low building that looked like a large and marginally maintained roadside motel.

“Evening Star?” said Sonny.

The attendant nodded.

Behind an S-shaped receptionist desk of reflective metal, a man in blue hospital scrubs snacking on an apple asked with what Sonny guessed was an African accent what was Sonny’s connection was to Ned.

“Nephew,” said Sonny.

“Mr. MacDonald he does not socialize,” the man said. “Maybe don’t want to see you.”

He had Sonny sign a register, gave him a room number and pointed with his apple to a corridor.

“Go through the common area, then fourth door on the right.”

The corridor was long, vacant and quiet until Sonny picked up the unmistakable harangue of Judge Judy. On a sixty-inch screen attached to a wall in the common room the judge was busy insulting her litigants.

“No,” said Judy, “no, no, no. I asked when did you inform the defendant that the toilet, in your words, not mine, exploded. Not why, not how, when? Show me the email with the date.”

The plaintiff, a fortyish woman obviously perspiring in a black tank top flailed through a stack of papers. Sonny continued along the periphery of the room. Scattered about were a dozen or so residents, all on couches or in wheelchairs, almost all women, all about the size of pre-adolescents, all silent. As far as Sonny could tell, no one was paying the slightest attention to Judge Judy’s antics or to each other. It would be hard in fact to put a name to anything they were outwardly doing except breathing in and breathing out.

He found the door, knocked gently, waited, knocked harder and turned the knob. The figure inside, outlined against the window with the blinds fully raised and backlit by daylight was standing, aided by a cane and looking directly at him. Remarkably, Ned, now ninety-four, Sonny estimated, seemed to have lost only a few inches of his six-foot-four height, at least from Sonny’s five-seven perspective.

“Hi, Uncle Ned. It’s Sonny.”

“I’ve been informed,” said Ned.

The room was what Sonny would expect for a prison cell, a narrow bed, an undersized rattan chair frugally upholstered, a plastic dresser with three drawers, recessed ceiling lights, everything save an inmate commode and bars on the window. It was all showroom neat, which served to highlight the lineup of pill bottles on the dresser. The only sound was Ned’s rasping breaths; breathing appeared to be the major pastime at Evening Star.

Ned was on Gerry’s half of the family but Sonny had always referred to him as “Uncle.” They’d first met at Sonny and Gerry’s wedding reception forty years ago. Sonny had broken away from Gerry to talk with the stark, almost emaciated single man sitting alone at the end of a long table at Villa Barone when most everybody else was dancing to Gloria Gaynor. They knew nothing about each other but quickly learned that both had served. Sonny wasn’t fond of war stories, except for some of his work with the Engineer Brigade. His favorite, the one he related to Ned, was installing a groundwater pump surrounded by kids in a village near Tay Ninh after it had been swept for VC. Ned asked, somewhat suspiciously, if Sonny saw combat, and Sonny mentioned Khe Sahn, about which, oddly, Ned knew next to nothing. But it didn’t matter because Ned has his own story to tell.

Ned stabbed the floor with his cane and took a shaky step. He looked Sonny up and down as if he was a Christmas tree he might buy.

“You got skinny,” Ned said.

“Doctor’s orders.”

Ned made a phlegmy noise, an ironic laugh perhaps or just an old man cough.

“Did you bring my niece?”

“Not today. She sends her love.”

“Swell kid. So waddaya want?”

“I don’t want anything” said Sonny. “I have something of yours and I want to give it back.”

Sonny said they would have to go out to his car because he couldn’t bring it inside.

“Bring what inside?”

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t like surprises,” said Ned, who, even so, was apparently not going to pass up any chance to get outdoors. In no time, he tightened the Velcro straps on his shoes, buttoned up a long wool trench coat and was leading Sonny at shaky but brisk clip through the corridor.

“We’re talking a walk,” Ned barked as he swept by the receptionist without looking at him.

Sonny, following, silently mouthed It’s okay at the receptionist who barely raised his eyes from his phone. Outside, Ned stomped aimlessly through the parking lot before rediscovering Sonny.

“Where’s your car?” he said. “Let’s take a drive.”

The roads were thick and syrupy slow with afterschool traffic. Ned directed Sonny to a 7-Eleven, handed him a ten and told him to buy a pack of smokes.

“What kind?”

“I don’t care.”

Neither did he care about where they drove. “Anywhere away from that graveyard I live in,” he said, lowering the window so he could hold his lit cigarette outside. Wind gusted through the car, but Ned seemed oblivious to the cold, staring intently through the front window at the leafless trees, the middle-class homes, the crossing guard waving her stop sign, hungrily devouring the bland suburban landscape as if it was a vision of the future.

“There,” said Ned, aiming his cigarette. “The next left.”

They rolled through the entrance of a town park with a large pond, a ring of thin ice around the open water, both encircled by a blacktop walkway. Ned cranked himself out of the Prius, said the car was too fucking cramped and immediately took to the path with Sonny in pursuit. A duck couple waded on the water, submerging their upper bodies, webbed feet flapping in the air. Ahead of them on the path, a man was walking a shaggy wolfhound whose shoulder was as high as the man’s waist. Halfway around, Sonny grabbed Ned’s sleeve and told him to sit on a bench. Ned was inhaling and exhaling nosily but his eyes were bright and his cheeks rosy with excitement, his skin stretched smooth over pointy facial bones. A fringe of his full head of evenly white hair fell over the back collar of his coat.

“Those are called dabbling ducks,” said Ned, thrusting his chin at the pond. “The ones that go underwater like that.”

Sonny placed the package on the slats between them, untied the strings and turned back the canvas. Seeing it now for the first time after many years, Sonny was struck by the bayonet’s efficiency of design. It was long, about twenty-five inches from grip to tip, to enable fighting at a distance. The guard was curved on one side with the barrel ring on the other. The grip itself was two pieces of darkened hardwood rounded smooth to accommodate a soldier’s hand and locked with three pins to the tang. The narrow blade, as dark as the grip, was accompanied along its entire length by a blood grove.

“This is what I brought you,” he said.

Ned glanced down, considered the object for a few seconds and then looked back at the pond.

“Where did you get that?” he said.

“You gave it to me,” said Sonny.

Ned grunted and shook his head slowly, emphatically.

“You dropped by right after we moved into our house. Gerry asked what you were holding, and you said it was for me. We went down to the basement and you said you could no longer keep it, that it was too heavy for one man. But it needed to be kept, and it could only be kept by a soldier, someone who understood. You said it was history. History is important, you said, and you needed to pass that on too.

“You were with the 147th Infantry, island hopping, mopping up after the Marines. That’s what the command told you on the way Iwo Jima, just a quick stop to secure the airfields before Okinawa. But the enemy had dug in, literally, tunnels all over the island and pill boxes chiseled into the hills, twenty thousand Japanese who would rather cut their own throats than surrender, and a lot of them did, for the Emperor. But first they would fight.

“The island was ugly even before the bombing raids, nothing but black volcanic dust and rocks. But when you landed, it was worse, like a body that had been turned inside out, all raw guts and broken bones exposed to the sunlight. There were three thousand of you from Ohio, thinking the hard work was done and then running into a fire storm on the beach. Digging foxholes in the ash was impossible. It was so slippery you’d advance a yard and then slide backwards. So everybody piled up behind the dunes. And all the time, the enemy sharpshooters were popping out of their tunnels and picking you off.

“It went on like this for a week until a day before dawn when you and three others were ordered to work your way to the end of the line where there was an ocean cove. Just go and wait and watch and if you see anything come back and report. That’s what you were told—go, watch, wait, and return. When you reached the cove there was an abandoned Higgins boat split in two, and you huddled up next to it. The artillery hadn’t started up yet. It was just small arms fire on your flank and further down the island. It was almost peaceful compared to the first days. You were all wondering if the lieutenant was giving you a break even though you couldn’t figure what you’d done to deserve it.

“You decided that two would keep watch on either side of the wreckage while the other two took it easy. You were dozing off when one of the lookouts saw movement. It was strange, he said, some shift in the black sand. Maybe just wind, he said, but somebody else said there was no wind. It was a spot only about 20 yards from the boat. All four of you were staring at it when the sand exploded, rose up in a cloud. You thought it was a mine or a shell but in the dust something appeared. At first you thought it was a child, a small figure running straight toward you, screaming. The figure seemed to be wearing only a bathing suit and he was carrying this. You raised your rifles, but before anyone fired, the figure stumbled and fell face first into the sand. Two of you rushed forward, foolishly, you said, because it could have been a trap to draw you out. One of you stepped on the bayonet and another on the neck of the man who had charged you. He struggled a bit, but with no strength, and then lay motionless, half his face buried in the ash.

“The solider was finished. Separated from his bayonet, he was very still. One of you put his M1 to the back of the soldier’s head and looked at the others one by one. Each of you nodded. It was monstrous, you told me. It was the world gone mad. You could have taken him prisoner, but there was so much death, bodies turning blue in the sun everywhere you looked. Iwo Jima wasn’t about taking prisoners. It was about killing the enemy before the enemy killed you. But before the trigger got pulled one of you noticed something. Around the enemy’s neck was a thin beaded chain. Somebody lifted it and there were dog tags attached, three of them. Two were the round types the Marines had and one was the longer Army kind. No one could say how he got them, if he had killed the soldiers himself or just stole them from bodies. But as the tags got passed around, something hot and very angry got stirred up. You decided shooting was too good for your prisoner.”

Ned flicked his cigarette butt onto the path. With a bumpy hand, he massaged his face, starting with his chin and working upward to his cheek, nose and forehead as if he was trying to wake himself from a torpor created by Sonny’s narrative. Sonny paused. He would have stopped had Ned had asked him to. If Ned had said I know what happened next, Sonny would have left it at that. But Ned seemed to be waiting for the rest.

“You flipped him over face up. He was nothing but skin and bones. There was no more fight in him, but two of you held down his arms and a third pressed the tip of the bayonet between his ribs. And then he pushed it. Not all at once, but slowly, very slowly, into his chest. Your prisoner made not a sound and didn’t even move, his eyes closed. The soldier pushed it all the way in right up to the hilt. But the prisoner was still alive, still breathing. And one of you said, ‘twist it.’ And that’s what he did, again and again, until finally the prisoner’s chest stopped moving.”

The man with the wolfhound had been joined by several other dogwalkers circling the pond. As he spoke, Sonny watched the dogs, pulling on their leashes and sniffing seriously at places along the path before doing their business. He stood and turned to Ned.

“You ready?” said Sonny.

“Go on, get the fuck out of here,” said Ned

Sonny paused, thought about calling a cab for Ned, remembered that he didn’t have his phone, and took to the path alone.

Before he got out of earshot, Ned called him.

“You got it right. Except for one thing. Each of us pushed it in. We took turns. Even the twisting.”

He didn’t look back until he reached the parking lot. On the other side of the pond, Ned stood near the water, holding the bayonet at his side. When he saw Sonny watching, he reached back and with a full swing of his ancient arm cast it into the air. The two dabbling ducks took flight even before the bayonet splashed down nowhere near them.

It didn’t last long at all. Whatever oblivion Sonny had found by returning history to the man who rightfully owned it shriveled and blew away like a minor dream within minutes of him turning out of the parking lot. He found his way back to the highway and the bridge with an ease that would have surprised him under normal circumstances. Neither did he need to ask directions on the New York side. It was as if an interior navigational device had seized control of both the Prius and him and in defiance of his yearning to be forever lost was taking him home.

On his street the sun was low but still strong, creating razor edges between shadow and light. This was, it seemed, a day that would never end. In the driveway, he turned off the engine. The notion of entering his house filled him with dread. He would just sit until exhaustion that was numbing every part of his body put him to sleep or until he could think of something worthwhile to do, which seemed the less likely of the two. His eyes were shut for only a minute when there were three taps on the window. Mrs. Fazio, now buttoned into her full-length fur-collared coat, had her face almost against the glass. Sonny stared at her without comprehension and she tapped again with her house key.

“The police were here before,” she said when Sonny pushed open the door. “They were looking for you.”

“Why?”

“The hospital called them when you didn’t show up. They were afraid you’d done something. You know, to yourself. I let them inside. Was that alright?”

Sonny nodded. “Sure.”

“You should go to the hospital. They revived Gerry.”

“What?”

“There was emergency surgery, the police said. She’s in recovery.”

Sonny nodded again, that or he started shaking, he wasn’t sure which. Mrs. Fazio observed him severely.

“Get out of the car, Sonny,” she said.

She had him wait off to the side as she backed her green Subaru out of her garage. Sonny got into the passenger seat. The shaking had worsened and he squeezed his arms across his chest with every ounce of strength left in him.

“Oh, wait,” said Mrs. Fazio. She darted back up her steps and returned in a minute with Jack, whom she deposited on the back seat.

“Do you know how to get to the hospital?” said Sonny through his violently chattering teeth.

“The hospital? Yes, I do, Sonny. I know it very well.”