Don't Disappoint - Chapter 1
by Martin Van Cooper
We begin the the third week of our second quarterly PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the next week, we’ll serialize the excerpts of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novel, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don't Read the Dust Jacket
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1
The sky was iridescent beige and a light rain would continue for the rest of the day and into the night. It was 45 and the stillness of the air gave a finality to the mist and chill. He was on the way to the airport and had to meet his sister, for a coffee she said, before leaving and he knew it was going to be a close call. Security check at CLE was never more than 15 min and traffic nothing to speak of, but he was half an hour late after getting Jessica’s texts and then talking to her on the phone for a harried couple of minutes, leaving him wondering whether there was any real need to fly back to California at all.
Jason Driver pulled into the Starbucks in Seven Hills at the corner of Snow and Broadview and saw his sister Alice’s car already there and her seated at the window.
Sorry, he said, sitting down across from her.
Everything ok? Get something.
I don’t want anything.
It’s fine, get something.
Yeah, no, I don’t want anything.
And then after a moment he took off his jacket and blew into his hands to warm them, avoiding eye contact with her.
What did she say? How’s your wife getting along without you?
One thing he knew for certain: his wife Jessica had signaled unambiguously his marriage was over. The reason he was home was because he had to attend the wedding of his cousin and because things had gotten untenable with his mother. His sister said it was time to make a decision and she didn’t want to do this by herself.
Early onset ischemic, or so-called vascular dementia, moves fast. It can be less than a year from when someone starts repeating stories several times a day in a fugue until when they can’t sleep, wander off naked at 4 in the morning, or try to boil hot dogs in windshield washer fluid. It has been nearly two years since Jason had been home and about a year since his sister said that the near misses had gotten more frequent and that she needed to move in with their mother. Jessica was in the middle of fellowship and couldn’t move so Jason had been begging off his sister to handle this—although truthfully he knew there was no possible scenario he saw for himself that included moving back to take care of his mother. Now he was being asked to endorse a proposal to move her to assisted living. He didn’t feel he knew the woman when he was a child and certainly didn’t know her now and he had clearly shirked any familial responsibilities regarding caring for anyone, let alone his infirmed mother, so why now was his sister insisting on dragging him in to participate in the distasteful act of committing into a sterile place to die the woman who bore him into world? It was not to punish or shame him, this was not his sister’s trade. To make him own it? To help him atone? Maybe just assurance she was doing the right thing.
He had learned to apologize back to baseline. And no further. This had taken him the first 30 years of his life to figure out.
It was perfectly timed. It kept him from reacting rashly (her words) and gave him time to figure out how to keep her revelation from defining the rest of his life. Children bind you. Parents bind you. Spouses cannot bind you. It was the year someone discovered a 200-year-old salamander in Indonesia by stepping on it.
Jason had moved away from Ohio in the mid 2000’s. The period since saw his country spend enormous collective subconscious energy worried about being blown up by Islamic terrorists, who killed fewer people in the United States during that time than untreated spider bites. He’d been teaching high school English for the last decade. They lived in a suburb called Vanvleck, in a mid-century single level ranch on a postage stamp yard with a backyard pool in the never-ending checkerboard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, two blocks from the school where he taught. Jessica had the commute.
He could not imagine a situation in which he would be fully formed. The upshot of this was that until his early 30’s, he was an indefatigable optimist. The kind of person who is a real chore to be around. Sun as morning star and whatever. It wasn’t that with her act he suddenly became aware that he was living in real time or that he became instantly pessimistic. Rather, over the past day he had become increasingly, suffocatingly aware of the volume of things he had experienced. The urge to eliminate one’s own map in such a situation can be overwhelming, not talking about anxiety or necessarily even depression or social ostracizing here. Just talking about sitting down in front of an excel spreadsheet listing out all the things you have done in your life. Nausea does not even begin to describe it. I don’t think you’ve ever had your heart broken, she observed in an impish, analytical, pugnacious manner over dinner during one of their first dates in the year of the JCPOA and a gold or maybe blue dress.
After landing at Cleveland Hopkins a day earlier, he had collected his older sister, who lived with and took care of his mother, and his grandmother, who lived separately and alone. The wedding ceremony was in neighboring Rockside Hills, and then on to a 1950’s rectangular single story sandstone brick Kiwanis Hall for the reception.
I went out for lunch yesterday, his sister started in before the car door is closed behind her, with my friend Laura. Well you caught me right now in the middle of stripping mom’s bed that’s why I was slow to come out. But I was ready. I haven’t done her room all week and it’s Friday, you’d be proud of me. I went with Laura, we met up at this place she likes for, she told me I have to try their mac n’ cheese. And this, I have to tell you Jason, this was a very different mac n’ cheese. And she told me it was going to be, she told me Alice, you need to try this mac n’ cheese, it’s really different, and you know. Mac n’ cheese can be really heavy and I don’t like, I’m trying not to eat so heavy, but Jason, this, when she brought it out. It was noodles stacked in a bowl and she asked me, the waitress, you can get one topping. She had asked me before, you know. You can get one topping and so I said sure and so I got the pork. The pulled pork they call it. Like shredded. They call it pulled pork. They put this on top. Jason, let me tell you, you should have seen it when they brought this out, it looked like, like I don’t know, like a flower. With the noodles and the pork on top. And. Do you know what? There wasn’t even that much cheese. And it wasn’t too rich, you know, because you know how I am, I don’t like things too rich. It had just the right amount of flavor. It was different. And that’s ok. I tried it. I’m ok with different.
He had lived with his older sister and mother for a few months after finishing grad school and before moving to Los Angeles. It was a time of perfect uninterrupted creativity as they both completely left him alone to work on his dissertation in the basement. The only hiccup: even before she got really bad, his mother had a phobia against the dishwasher and his sister therefore hand washed all the dishes. She used too much soap and failed to assiduously rinse the dishes such that over time they built up a layer of soap that inevitably got into the food. The result was a reactive constipation when he moved out of his mother’s house. It had been the year Lebron took his talents to South Beach.
He tried to disentangle the anger about the act and the anger about the fact she waited until he wasn’t there. She was the one traveling all the time. A week still before his classes began again. Days before this wedding he was already scheduled to attend without her. Time for him to get back to baseline for work and domesticity. Precise. The mathematical concept of chaos is slippery and very hard to explain in non-mathematical terms, Jessica said to him when they were still dating. Every simile obfuscates rather than clarifies. Chaos characterizes a system whose outcomes are sensitive to so-called initial conditions: one could predict those paths with some fancy math, though this was not her area per se, but the idea was there was some sort of predetermination, or at least some initial limitation of possibilities, inherent in all living things. The world is not random, it is chaotic, and this absence of order was necessary for anything to exist. Of course you needed some order. But every scale of life, every stage of life was laden with chaos. Medicine was about learning how to harness this, control it. And when necessary, eliminate it. A defibrillator, which rescues a patient from life threatening arrhythmias, does this by returning the heart to asystole. That is, no activity. The physician then waits and hopes the internal pacemaker, which is something called an emergent property at the cellular level, she said, kicks back in to restore a normal sinus rhythm. Humans can create order—for chaos, we need nature, she told him. It was the year that shooting-an-unarmed-black-man would become an adjective.
They arrived at his grandmother’s house and she was already walking down the sidewalk as they pulled up to her driveway. She was barely 5 feet tall in middle age and, now in her nineties, had lost several inches and most of her hair, blessedly hidden by a wig they all had chipped in to buy her last Christmas. Her hands had adopted the wrapped in cellophane appearance signaling convalescence and they looked like multigrain bread, pock-marked with melanomas she was bound to outlast. He needed gas and so stopped at the nearby station.
I was so relieved when Lisa was a girl, his grandmother was saying as he got back into the car at the pump, because I knew that she was number six and that was it. And if after those five other girls, with five sisters, if she would have been a boy he would have turned out to be a sissy boy.
Huh. Uh-huh, Alice said.
Course my girlfriend, well that’s exactly what happened to her. Four girls and then a boy. Same age as Lisa.
After about ten seconds his sister asked, humorlessly: So, did he turn out to be a sissy boy?
Well no, I don’t know. He went to college, you know, but they always had money and that. He ended up marrying a girl in a wheelchair. M.S. My girlfriend never got any grandchildren from him. So.
Jason hurries to get buzzed as soon as they get to the reception. His aunt’s sister-in-law, who’s probably 45 and single and 95 lbs sopping wet and 4’8” in precarious looking heels is showcasing her new assets: double D tractor beams that have every married, pear-shaped hypertensive man in the place red faced. A cousin he doesn’t know may be the only self-aware one in the whole place. She has bleached blond hair with untended soot-black roots and a single pink thatch in the middle of the right side of her head, pierced nose, pierced ears, a small red tattoo of an infinity sign on her left wrist, badly chipped black nail polish, a thrift store dress, and too-big shoes that are too-big in a somehow intentional, slightly prurient way, evincing the sort of tacit agreement that some young girls have with lechers. Her fiancée, whom she met 6 months earlier, was 4 months into a tour, his 5th, with the USMC in Mosul. Helicopter pilot. She smelled like cigarettes and Royal Pine car air freshener and hair spray and when Jason offered her a beer she declined. I’m underage, she replied, flatly.
His uncle, his father’s older and only brother, is changed. There is menace, fury, and a fleeting confusion in his eyes that Jason had never witnessed in the last decade he was old enough to remember such things. His wife had died the previous summer, perhaps freeing him to live more ruthlessly. His body was slowing down—breaking down—and this had alarmingly accelerated since the last time Jason had seen him.
I told them, no one’s gonna buy them, his uncle said. You can put them in the machines, charge a buck. We got our machines downtown all over near Progressive, the Flats. Quicken. You gotta make it cheap. Nobody gonna pay two-fifty for something from a vending machine. It’s like I told him when bottled water was getting big in the late ‘90’s. I told him nobody gonna buy water from a vending machine. This guy come to my office. I told him get the fuck out of here. I tossed him out. Black guy. But then we tried it few months later. What do I know. Charge a buck for it. People can’t get enough of it. Now it’s credit cards. Same thing. I told them, nobody is going to use a goddamn credit card in no goddamn vending machine. Well. That was 37% of our sales growth last year. 37%. Worked with cash all my life. You gotta be creative when you go see the taxman with 37% from credit cards Jack.
That’s from Lizzie’s redneck side of the family, they live in Indiana or whatever, my aunt is telling me. That’s her cousin, her father, not her cousin, her father’s daughter from another relationship, they never married, her half-sister, they live near Indianapolis. The girl’s a mess, she’s always been a mess, she, that guy, that’s not the guy she had the kid with, the first kid, she’s married to that guy now and he’s some kind, I don’t think he’s slow per se but he’s not all there. But he’s a saint. He adopted her daughter. Her daughter from the previous relationship, the guy she didn’t marry. The kid was born with her organs on the outside of her body.
See now that’s not where you want them to be, Jason says.
Right, right, she continued. The child had surgeries, had to put them back in, like a dozen surgeries before she was a year old. To put all her organs back into her body. You’re not supposed to have that many surgeries in that amount of time, the doctors don’t even want to do it but they had to do it.
Jason is calling every guy in the place buddy—uncles, cousins, people he has never met, men and women—he has absolutely no idea why. He realizes he has gotten slightly drunk.
That’s her, his aunt says to him later in the evening when an adorable toddler goes running across the dancefloor in the interlude after the cake cutting and the father daughter dance. Who, Jason said. The girl who was born with the organs outside her body. And he is staring at this child in stunned amazement, a child with whom he can find no conceivable flaw, that is happy, proportionate, not discolored, disfigured or in any way low energy, who is smiling and has long blond hair and a pink cotton dress and mock ballet shoes, thinking, he can’t stop thinking, about some kind of a zipper.
The last wedding was the year before. His cousin, who’s married to a man—hands down the best organized, most fun wedding Jason had ever been to, held in Manhattan at a Lutheran church (they’re the only ones who’ll do the gays, his aunt, his mother’s sister, said to him at the time in a curious turn of phrase) in the West 30’s…for Christ’s sake they served Old Fashioneds at the reception cocktail hour and the bartender was burning an orange peel with a hand held cigar torch and pouring Jefferson—and their twins are now almost three and they are running around this reception chasing the girl in the pink dress and they clearly look like one Dad and not the other and the winner of that race, if you catch the drift, is now apparent. Someone at their table also notices this and Jason is asked to give some academic-ish type of explanation, and he is trying to avoid euphemism but basically there’s no mixing he tells them. He uses the word recombination and there’s blank stares and so he says it’s a coin flip. It’s one or the other. His cousin is a few ahead and wants to know if there is a turkey baster involved. Some sort of slurry? The same cousin’s husband is checking his email and scowls into his third Diet Dr Pepper and it’s not even salad time yet.
Some distant relation he can’t place is telling Jason about how his store called Pampered Pets or Spot Chanel or something like that, which he started with his wife a decade ago as something to do in retirement, and which has a Yelp review average of 4.2 he tells Jason, is doing fine, we’re growing, there’s always a new challenge, he tells Jason, with finding new chintzy shit to sell to rich bimbos for their spoiled dogs. A little fluoxetine kicker, you hear me? Keep them from blowing their and/or their husbands’ fucking brains out by glossing over the moments where a vacuous thought might not be forthcoming, between the house renovation show and the update on Kardashian yeast infection and the trip to the eyebrow threading and hair salon and nail salon and the next trip we think we are headed back to Naples, you know the wife just loved the Gulf and to be perfectly honest it’s not that the resorts aren’t great but she’s kind of, frankly, uncomfortable in Mexico and the people are perfectly hospitable but she, don’t look at me like that, she wants to stay in the US this time so we are going back to Naples, it’s a quick 50 min drive from Ft Lauderdale, we have a guy, last time he got us a house right on the water, Gulf side, there was a pool, I didn’t get in, and a hot tub for the wife. But let me tell you, the books are balanced, there’s hiring and firing and always something new. He keeps going on like this and Jason is trying to maintain eye contact but he has a hair coming out of one nostril, about two times the nostril hole diameter in length, he estimates, that bristles and bobs with his speech and that Jason can’t stop watching and that the urge to cut after listening to him for 5 minutes is pure torture. Little patches of grey butch fuzz on either side of his nose too. Why is it once they are over 50 men who shave lose all the ability to negotiate nostrils, mandibular joints and ear lobes?1 His aunt’s sister-in-law is doing the electric slide, the artillery off her bow is strafing the crowd.
Internists—Jessica told him she had learned this from her father’s college roommate when she was 13 and spending a summer with him and his wife in the Inland Empire while her parents took a break—study and debate with the problem. Interventionists go in and fix it. A gastroenterological surgeon, he died of a fulminant heart attack the summer of her third year in medical school. His influence until that point and the nature of his demise played no small part in her decision to pursue a PhD between residency and EP clinical fellowship in interventional cardiology. What could be more elegant than advancing a laser equipped catheter into a beating human heart and obliterating naughty, arrhythmogenic cells? And satisfying. Bringing order to chaos, quite literally.
What was the source of his indignation and rage—she had the indignation to ask him over the phone, after she told him. What is it you feel has been taken from you? Jason found himself thinking in the middle of their argument, insanely, that he was pretty sure the word dasein had never been uttered out loud outside of a college campus.
All of my problems in life, his uncle is saying, come from other people.
These projections were just goalposts, not facts, she told him. Which quartile were you in. There are no diseases. Medicine is the probability, based on things that have happened, that something else will happen over a prescribed period of time. Medicine never deals in absolutes. Doctors are more similar to mechanics than engineers, she told him. They definitely weren’t scientists. And most doctors are religious. Because when you see these things up close, you realize how little we know and how even the most talented surgeon is at the mercy of the innate life force. But not me, she added in phlegmatic clarification after a moment. I’m not religious.
She was a cunt hair away from being back on Pennsylvania Avenue, his uncle is saying, prompting uproarious laughter. Fucking swipe left, you know what I’m sayin’ man?
Was there something that had to be cleaned up, he found himself thinking as he glanced surreptitiously at his watch for the moment at which he could not gracelessly excuse himself from the reception and Uber back to the hotel. This didn’t seem like something that you could do on your own, I don’t care how good you were with your hands. Was there some chemical involved? And then he was consumed with the idea that she was cleaning things up, literally and figuratively, right now, with him out of town for the weekend. The garage? The bathroom? What physical implements still in their daily life were complicit?
I didn’t know how to talk to my wife, his uncle is saying, drunk now and increasingly unhinged, and she didn’t know how to listen to me. People go their whole lives.
That house was bought for investment purposes, his grandmother is telling his sister in the car on the way back from the reception. Well, that’s the way it was. Your grandfather made the money and I made the financial decisions. And when he couldn’t work anymore, that’s when we sold the house. And we did make a profit off of it. It was more house than we needed, you know, with all my kids moved out by then. It’s what you did.
Yeah. No. I know, his sister replies.
There are people who live their lives for other people, to please other people or in the tracks of others’ expectations. As reaction. Following commands, spoken or tacit. And there are those very few that make their own lives out of full cloth, make their own lives their project. Not their parents’ project. They don’t make their children their project. All effort is focused on the self. And these people cut large swaths, they throw off chaff in all directions, they create carnage and largesse, plow through time devouring days and years unobstructed, uninfluenced, seminal. They move.
I’m not going to go in when I drop you off, he told his sister that morning. She’s not going to know either way. Meaning their mother. It was the year Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas. I intervened, Jessica said to him. There’s no other way to explain it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t exist.
I’m not saying what I’m saying has never been said before or that I’m the first to think these things. I’m saying these things came to me more or less from the ether and that any plagiarism is unintentional.