Here After

chapter two

Wednesday, May 30

 “GOOD MORNING, PETER, IT’S WENDELL.”

 Peter hit the pause button on the DVD remote; he knew he should have ignored the phone. He breathed and said, “Hi, Wen.”

 Wendell Smith was the head of the anesthesia department. He’d been calling twice a week for the past month, trying to get Peter to commit to a date for his return to work.

 “Sorry to bother you about this again,” Wendell said, “but we need a decision here, manpower being what it is.”

 Peter’s first impulse was to tell him to forget it, he was done with the whole damned rat race. Though he was only forty-two, he’d been smart with his money. He could retire today if he chose to, not lavishly, but comfortably. And comfortable would be a welcome sensation right now. But the department had been good to him, giving him plenty of time to get his act together—it had been almost four months since the funeral—and like most people in the medical community, for Peter the pull of duty was a powerful one.

 He glanced at the room around him: the bed unmade since the cleaning lady had last done it a week ago; the curtains drawn against the daylight; every available surface littered with fast food containers and empty pop cans. Since David’s death he’d spent the majority of his time in here, the bedroom he’d shared with his wife.

 And just down the hall, David’s room.

 “I’m not ready yet, Wen. I can’t even tell you when I will be.” Then he was saying it. “If ever. To be honest, if you need to fill the slot, I’d say go ahead and do it. You’ve got some promising recruits, I know that.” He felt an unexpected lightness in his chest. “Maybe you should just go ahead.”

 Silence. Then: “Do you know what you’re saying here, Peter?”

 “I believe I do.”

 “Tell you what. Take a couple more weeks. We’d hate to lose you. If it’s time you need, you should have it. We’ll get by. I’ll check back with you around the middle of June. Okay?”

 “Okay. Thanks. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

 “I appreciate that. Talk to you soon. And take care.”

 “Shall do. Bye for now.”

 He replaced the handset in its cradle and returned his gaze to the TV, a thirty-two inch flat screen built into the wall unit Dana had loved so much. He’d been half-watching an episode of I Love Lucy on DVD, one of many gifts people had given him in the months since David’s death, all of it thoughtfully designed to lift his spirits. Looking now at the screen—Lucy still frozen in the midst of stomping around in a tub full of grapes—Peter understood that since his son’s death what he’d been desperately trying to avoid was the pauses, the lulls in the stream of input he’d been exposing himself to through every waking moment, sleep coming only when his eyes could no longer endure the light, his mind the ceaseless chatter. He’d jacked into the tube and let it zombify him. He could lose himself in it, ride it downstream, forever if need be. The pauses were the hard part.

 He thumbed the play button and the chatter resumed, numbing him.

                                                                                * * *

  Hunger. That gnaw. There was the animal part of him—bladder, bowels, hunger, thirst, fatigue—and the rest was emptiness, the absence of drive or enthusiasm, the simple baseline energy required to power a life. His friends had been after him to seek counseling, all of them doing their level best to snap him out of it, set him back on the path. But the path to where? What was left after family? His family had been his engine, the center from which all things flowed and into which all of his energies were directed. What was he supposed to do now, pick up and start again? He just couldn’t see it. A family was not a car, an item you simply replaced if it got trashed. It was over and he could see no path.