The Nix(73)

They checked the toilet to see if he made it in the bowl.

They measured his swallowing. There was a whole flowchart for swallowing. On a scale of one to five, they rated his chewing, how he worked chewed food around in his mouth, how well his swallow reflex triggered, whether he drooled or spilled. They asked him questions to see if he was able to speak while eating. They checked for food pocketed in his cheek.

Stuck their fingers right in there and checked.

Made him feel hooked. Like he was the fish now. He was the one diving into darkness.

“It’s good to see you again,” said this young man in front of him. “Do you know who I am?”

He had a face that reminded Frank of something important.

It was like a screwed-up look, like what a poisonous secret does to your face, the pain that lives just below the skin and twists it.

Frank was getting worse at most things but better at some. And he was definitely better at this: reading people. He could never do this before. All his life, people were such a mystery. His wife, her family. Even Faye, his own daughter. But now? It was like something had been reshaped within him, like how a reindeer’s eyes change color: blue eyes in winter, gold in summer.

This is what it felt like to Frank.

Like he could see a different spectrum now.

What did he see in this young man? The same look he saw on Clyde Thompson’s face beginning in 1965.

He worked with Clyde at the ChemStar factory. Clyde’s daughter had thick golden-blond hair. She grew it down to the small of her back, straight and long like they used to back then. She complained that it was too heavy but Clyde wouldn’t allow her to cut it because he loved her hair so much.

Then one day in 1965 she got the hair caught in the band saw at school and she died. Took her whole scalp right off.

Clyde asked for a couple days off work and then came back like nothing happened.

Just kept soldiering on.

This Frank remembered very well.

People said how brave he was. Everyone agreed. Like the more Clyde could dodge the pain, the more heroic he was.

This was a formula for living a life full of secrets.

Frank knew this now. People constantly hid. It was a sickness maybe worse than the Parkinson’s.

Frank had so many secrets, so many things he never told anyone.

The look on Clyde’s face and the look on this young man’s face were the same. How that frown gets etched on there.

Same with Johnny Carlton, whose son fell off a tractor and was crushed under the tire. And Denny Wisor’s son was shot in Vietnam. And Elmer Mason’s daughter and granddaughter died at the same time during childbirth. And Pete Olsen’s son died when he tipped a motorcycle on a gravel road and it landed on him and broke a rib and punctured a lung, which filled with blood and made him drown right there on the road near a babbling brook in the middle of summer.

None of them said anything about it ever again.

They must have died shrunken, miserable men.

“I’d like to talk to you about my mother,” the man said. “Your daughter?”

And now Frank is Fridtjof again and he’s back at that farm in Hammerfest, a salmon-red house that overlooked the ocean, a great big spruce tree in the front yard, a pasture, sheep, a horse, a fire kept going all the way through the arctic’s long winter night: He’s home.

It’s 1940 and he’s eighteen years old. He’s twenty feet above the water. He’s the spotter. He has the sharpest eyes on the ship. He’s on the tallest mast looking for fish and telling the guys in the rowboats to take the nets this way, that way.

Whole schools churn into the bay and he intercepts them.

But this is not the memory where he’s looking for fish. This is the one where he’s looking at home. That salmon-red house with the pasture, the garden, the little path leading down to the dock.

It’s the last time he’ll see it.

His eyes are stinging from the wind as he watches from the crow’s nest as they sail away from Hammerfest and the salmon-red house gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot of color on the shore and then the shore is just a dot on all that water and then it’s nothing at all—it’s nothing but the lonely cold fact of the blue-black ocean everywhere around them forever, and the salmon-red house becomes a dot in his mind that grows larger and more terrible the farther away he sails.

“I need to know what happened to Faye,” said the young man in front of him, who seemed to appear out of the murk. “When she went to college? In Chicago?”

He was looking at Frank with that face people gave him when they didn’t understand what he was talking about. That face they thought looked like patience but actually looked like they were quietly shitting pinecones.

Frank must have been saying something.

Speaking these days was like speaking in dreams. Sometimes it felt like his tongue was too large for words. Or he’d forgotten English and the words came out a jumble of disconnected Norwegian sounds. Other times whole sentences shot out unstoppably. Sometimes he had whole conversations and didn’t even know it.

This probably had something to do with the meds.

One guy in here stopped taking his meds. Just stopped swallowing them. Refused. A real slow suicide, that one. They tried restraining him and forcing down the medicine, but he resisted.

Frank admired his dedication.

The nurses did not.