Salt Tooth

We were watching a cooking show on the television. All the chefs were given garbage and ordered to make a 5 star meal. Everyone looked real nice. They were lined up in a row in their professional chef uniforms, each one happy as pie.

A pretty woman wearing a tight, purple dress walked on stage with a dinged up tin trash can. Rampant cheering erupted. She stopped center stage, absolutely beaming, with the chefs applauding behind her. She raised the trashcan up, high over her head.

More cheering.

As her arms struggled to keep it there, she flicked her hair to the side and smiled, beautiful as pie. Compared to the trashcan, her arms were thin and fragile, like two small naked Chihuahuas. The cheering was so loud that each time she turned to face a section of the audience her arms shook uncontrollably.

After posing, the woman let the trashcan fall to the stage, which clanged magnificently and spewed its contents. The chefs dove into the pile of garbage, wasting no time sifting, organizing, and fighting over half eaten pieces of chicken.

The pretty woman glanced at her hands and walked off stage.

This was what my grandfather and I were watching. He was taking it all in as seriously and as intensely as he breathed oxygen from his oxygen tank. He sat there in his wheelchair with the tank in his lap, the translucent tube running up from and feeding into his nose, staring at the television with a mildly bemused interest.

That was how he died. With that expression left behind on his face.

***

Not too long ago we sat together in a similar situation. He was interested in infomercials at the time, so we were watching an infomercial about a robotic crab that scuttles around your house, picking up trash with its pincers and sucking dirt into its vacuum mouth. I was sure that the tape had to be fast forwarded because it was zipping around the room—its stainless steel legs moving so fast that it must of sounded like a fire cracker. My grandfather wanted ten of them.

Anyway, I went to make popcorn and when I came back, the T.V. was snowy and flickering.

From across the room I called his name, but the only response was the high pitch whine of the television. His body was like a concrete sack, propped up in a wheelchair and intent on the television. A concrete sack that was my grandpa. That was not my grandpa. A concrete sack that looked an awful lot like my grandpa.

His head was tilted slightly ajar.

I flicked the lights off and on, hoping for some sort of reaction—a twitch in his finger or the side of his mouth, even a snide comment would be like a balmy summer melody.

“Grandpa?” I whispered and crept over to him.

My hand went to touch his shoulder and, without a change in his expression, the gears in his neck slowly began to churn, wheeling his head around in my direction.

This secured my attention.

He then stood up in that awkward, teetering way that robots have. “Neener-neener, neener-neener, neener-neener,” he kept saying.

I was terrified.

For the next few months, my grandfather’s new hobby was this particular form of reincarnation. Other grandfathers garden or go out bowling. Mine killed himself and rose from the dead, which amused him to an infinite degree. I found him laying in the hallway with a bowl of popcorn scattered on the floor beside him; face down in a large bowl of tomato bisque; hanged, swinging from a ceiling fan; laying on the front lawn with the lawnmower still rolling across the grass; tied up to a chair in the attic after I had found a note on the refrigerator saying, “Dear To Whom This May Concern, I have taken your wise and ingenuous grandpa hostage. Fill me with 12 honey-baked hams, or else. Sincerely, Refrigerator.”

It was quite a thing to think about when you’re away during the day and knowing you might come home to a loved one that’s either dead or pretending to be dead in some horribly grotesque manner. I couldn’t just ignore him because there was always that chance that he may actually be dead. I couldn’t stop him either. For some strange reason I wanted him to be happy during his last days, even if that meant sharing the hysterical fondness he had for his own death.

So when I found his bare ass and legs sticking out of the top of the chimney, I had to go to the fireplace and call out into the dark sooty tunnel. “Hello?”

“Neener-neener, neener-neener.”

And I would laugh a little, but also, deep down, I felt as though there was a little vacuum crab scuttling around in the rubbery crevices of my small intestine.

***

He would get on these kicks, killing himself only being the most recent. Before killing himself, there was Audrey Hepburn. He watched her movies religiously. Every now and then, he hit the pause button and stared at the screen. Audrey was hardly recognizable. She was flickering, blurry, and fractured—the way VHS frames look when they’re paused. All the pieces of Audrey were sliding away from her.

“Isn’t she lovely?” he said as I passed through the room.

I ate a bite of macaroni and we stared at the screen together.

Another time he stole forks from all the different restaurants downtown and hung them around his room with pieces of string.

That was just how he was.

This is an example of how his kicks progressed:

One day when he was practicing his morning ritual of Tai Chi in the backyard, he noticed an inchworm crawling across the sleeve of his jacket. For the next few weeks he was obsessed with that inchworm and bought all types of inch worm books and posters. He named it Audrey. He took Audrey everywhere. One morning I awoke to my grandfather screaming like a raccoon had crawled into his bed and licked his foot. Audrey had formed a chrysalis. My grandfather named the chrysalis Fatty Fatty Bom Bom. When Audrey transmogrified into a moth, my grandfather watched her fly off and bat repeatedly against a light bulb. For the next two months he was obsessed with all things light bulb. And so on and etc.

During his infatuation with Audrey the Inchworm, the three of us were in my grandfather’s room, which was still populated by forks suspended by string. Audrey was inching her way across my grandfather’s forefinger when my grandfather stood up. “Life,” he said, “is some sort of great, vague expansion” and poked at one of the suspended forks. Then he sat back down, concentrating on Audrey, who was rearing up and pawing at the air with her little suction feet.

***

In the hospital waiting room, I sat staring off into space. A nurse told me so by flicking her hand in front of my face, as if she were shooing a raccoon from the garbage. She wondered aloud if anything was going on "up there." She was referring to my brain, but I thought about the ceiling, and all the people standing on our ceiling, and all the people on the ceiling above them, and the people above them, and so on until there was no more people any more—just pigeons, cooing and cock-eyeing each other with those beady little orange eyes, strutting up and down the blade of the hospital helicopter, just as happy and dumb as can be. And then, above the pigeons, all those undulating ceilings of air, stacking on top of each other with maybe an airplane stuck in the middle, and a flight attendant inspecting a crouton, and embedded in the crouton, a kernel of corn. Higher still, the ceilings of air get thinner and thinner until there is no air anymore, just space, where all the ceilings of other stars and planets collide. That was where I wished this nurse to be, right in the middle of all that and not hunched over flaring her nostrils at my face. She could be doing that up there, I suppose, but in quick time her nostrils would crackle and grind to a halt as her body crystallized. Ffffffffft. Her nostrils would say. Ffffffffft. Her body would say. Then she would float off into the indescribable ceiling of space.

That was how she died too. My grandfather had gone to bed early one night, leaving her, my grandmother, to listen to the late show, and found her the next morning. They both died watching the television, on the same couch, side by side in different moments of time.

He didn’t like to talk about that.

What he did like to talk about were two things. The first was how she loved the sunlight. How she licked her lips when she stepped out of the shade and felt the goose bumps popping up all over her body. How, whenever she sat out in the light, she referred to it as recharging her batteries. How she called herself a sun baby, even when she was wrinkly and blind.

The second thing he liked to talk about was how her interpretation of heaven was wrong. She believed in the pearly gates up in the clouds and how everyone would be happy, happy, happy for all time, forever, and eternity.

My grandfather believed his soul was going to shoot up into the air, catch fire, and come floating back to earth in little bits.

After she died, there was one day when I couldn’t find my grandfather anywhere in the house. I thought he might have taken a walk. A little while later, my neighbor called me and said that she had just seen some sort of metal tank fall from the sycamore tree in the front yard.

He was looking up to the spots of sunlight in the canopy. One hand rested on a branch while the other clenched the end of the clear plastic tube that plugged into the oxygen tank. The tube ran around my grandfather’s sweaty, half-naked body and engulfed the lower half of his face like a rubbery tributary. His breath came in great wheezing heaves.

I asked him what he thought he was doing. He paid me no attention, studying the lattice of leaves. After I asked him again, he took hold of the branch next to him. He shook it lightly at first, and then he kept on shaking. He looked like a man trying to lift an elephant. Sweat poured from his face and the vein on his forehead swelled into a bulge. So did his eyes. So did the water rising up to the brims of his eyelids. His whole face was swelling and turning a deeper shade of red as he shook more violently and more desperately than I’ve ever seen anyone shake anything before.

"I'm climbin' this goddamned tree," he said.

Then he looked confused, like he had sent his anger through the tree and into the earth like a lightening bolt. His eyes were empty. All that was left was a bunch of steam rising from them and dissipating into the atmosphere.

I helped him down. We plugged him back into his oxygen tank, he put his arm over my shoulder, and we toddled across the front yard.

“It’s a very pretty day,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Very pretty.”