The Life and Death of Arthur Lasker

2

Anna moved through the hallway with one arm in front of her like an insect's broken antenna, and the other around her stomach as if there was still a baby in her womb.

Joe stumbled forward in an uncoordinated attempt to keep pace with his wife. The walls, curtains, and doors were all slight variations of the same canary yellow, and the longer they walked, the more he felt like he was trapped in a mustard bottle. “We should have waited for the nurse,” he said. “Benton said he would call an escort—”

“I don't need an escort,” she said.

“I don't think he was asking.” Joe slipped his arm around her back and felt the sweat beneath her arms. “You're supposed to be in a wheelchair.”

“I'll sit when I see him.”

Joe took his cue to shut up and wondered again how Anna was keeping it together.

The news of Arthur's illness was equally surprising to Joe, but there was another, quieter conflict brewing beneath his husbandly veneer: since the moment Anna announced she was pregnant, Joe resented Arthur.

Yes, he wanted kids someday… but was he ready to trade the best years of his life to raise one? That was how his parents' generation did things: turn eighteen, get married, pop out a kid, work, die. But Joe was a modern man. Joe had ambitions. Since high school, he studied the ins and outs of business ownership at his father's department store. When he was old enough, he would use his expertise to open his very own movie theater. In the meantime, he wanted to hang with Chet and Don, sneak bottles of Seagram's Extra Dry into the Biograph Theater, and take advantage of the free-love movement before the hippies grew up.

Besides, it wasn’t Anna that hampered his plans, it was Vietnam.

Joe had been dating Anna for less than a month when the birthdays of the nation’s youth were sealed in plastic capsules, tossed in a bowl and removed—one at a time—on live television. She witnessed the fear in the eyes of the Lasker family as each capsule was opened and announced to the world, condemning friends, neighbors, and classmates to a one-year tour in hell.

For the first time in his adult life, Joe was terrified.

Anna knew that the next lottery would contain dates from 1952. She knew Joe's birthday would be inside one of those capsules. She knew that, without college enrollment, political connections, or a wife and kid, her first serious boyfriend would be sent to war.

One week later, they were engaged.

Everybody knew it but nobody said it: Arthur Lasker was conceived out of fear. The boy was a testament to the doggish mindset of the United States, and a sacrifice to the gods of Nixon's draft.

But what now? If the war continued, Joe would have one less reason to stay off the battlefield. But if the war ended... he would have his life back.

The sense of relief made him sick.