The Illusion Of Separateness Part 9

"I'm just a close friend . . . no blood relation."

"You need Oncology, Building O-Fourteen. Just go out these doors and take a right and look for the letter O building-or you can take the elevator here and there's a floating bridge that will connect you. If you get lost, pick up any phone and dial zero."

"Thank you," Danny said.

"I hope your friend feels better."

Raquel's ward had its own private receptionist. There were vases of flowers on her desk, and balloons. One of the balloons had come untethered and touched the ceiling at a slight bend. The receptionist walked Danny along the hall. She offered to carry the magazines and cookies he had stuffed into a tote bag that read FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES.

Raquel was sleeping.

Her room was bright and luxurious. He stood by the window and looked out at Los Angeles in the distance. An endless stream of cars surged like colorful dots through the canyon. Traffic helicopters hovered over Sunset Boulevard. Danny quietly typed a message to Preston asking him to make sure insurance was covering Raquel's room.

Then he sat in a beige leather chair beside the sleeping woman who had brought an immeasurable amount of happiness to his life. She had been married to his agent and best friend for seven years. They were trying for a child when the doctor found a lump.

Danny took out the magazines and looked at the faces on the covers. Everyone was searching, he thought-trying to unravel the knot of their lives.

When Raquel woke up, she reached for his hand.

"Why aren't you on set doing something amazing?" she asked quietly.

"I prefer nursing."

"I think Jack does too," Raquel said, and sat up.

"I like your hair."

Raquel giggled and fingered the thick strands. "It's a wig."

"You can't tell."

She blushed. "It's bad enough not being allowed makeup."

Danny squeezed her hand. "I spoke to Jack this morning."

"I know," she said. "He called to say you were coming." She paused for a moment. "When he came yesterday, he couldn't stop crying. Did he mention anything?"

Danny shook his head.

"Don't tell him I told you."

Jack had always seemed confident about what was going to happen, even taking cla.s.ses on the process of treatment and joining an online support group.

"Keep an eye on him for me, Danny."

"I will," he promised, searching her face for some sign of what was to come. She pointed to the magazines on her bedside table.

"Are those for me?"

Danny read the t.i.tles. "French Vogue, Italian Vogue, British Vogue, Chinese Elle, World of Interiors, h.e.l.lo, OK, and Tatler."

Raquel laughed, but it seemed painful somehow. "Thank Preston for me, would you, Danny? You know how much I love magazines."

"I brought cookies," he said.

They talked about her treatments, and how soon she would be allowed home.

When she closed her eyes, Danny let her sleep.

He remembered her real hair, and how she tied it up when she came over on hot days to swim in his pool. Jack joined them after work.

One Sat.u.r.day, there was so much rain that the three of them stayed inside and had too much to drink. They played Monopoly and watched A Single Man. Jack smoked a joint and pointed to the television, "That's like you, Danny, but no one's died." Danny threw a cus.h.i.+on.

Raquel ordered food from Greenblatt's and they watched Sixteen Candles. Jack and Raquel stayed over in a guest bedroom. Danny lay awake, listening to them laugh and move around.

It rained all night.

The next day he called his mother and asked about his dad. She was silent for a while and then told him the whole story, not just the note he taped to the television saying he would never come back-but his childhood in the slums of Manchester, his own father's savage death on a battlefield in northern France. She told him how they met, how he took her out to nice pubs, and picked flowers for her on the viaduct behind their house where steam trains once swished hotly past. The smell of his aftershave. The gentle rough hands from a decade of factory work, and how quickly those hands became fists when anyone called her a name, or made racist remarks.

"I knew deep down he'd go," she said. "I was upset, but not surprised."

She told her son that his father was not the love of her life, just someone she loved along the way.

As Raquel lay sleeping, Danny remembered his life in Scotland, the television studio where it all started and his daily commute through the mouse-gray morning. Then he imagined himself as a child, and felt the small house of his boyhood in Manchester. Cold white bottles on the doorstep, a fish-and-chip shop on the corner run by Bert Echlin, who always gave him an extra sausage. The people he had loved along the way.

But there had also been name-calling, insults, people telling him to go back where he came from. Their words tore into him, because he felt hated, but had done nothing wrong.

People made fun of his neighbor too, an eccentric old man with a deformed head who grew tomatoes and gave them out in small brown bags.

Raquel opened her eyes and blinked a few times. "How long was I out?"

"Not long, maybe forty minutes."

"You should have woken me up."

"Never," Danny said.

"What did you do while I was asleep?"

"I was remembering this neighbor I had growing up."

"Your neighbor in Scotland?"

"No, when I was seven or eight. He was the neighbor in Manchester-the city where I was born. He seemed old to me then, but was probably only sixty. His head was deformed, and he spoke with a sort of muted voice. The people on our street called him the elephant man."

"Jesus, that's unkind."

Danny nodded. "I think my mother would remember him, but I hadn't thought of him in years until lately."

"Tell me more."

"He grew tomatoes and left them on our doorstep."

"But you hate tomatoes."

Danny smiled. "I also think he taught me to read."

"Really?" she asked.

"I saw some infomercial in the middle of the night last month and it reminded me of some of the things we did together."

"An infomercial for what, Danny?"

"Games for kids who are dyslexic."

"Are you dyslexic?"

Danny looked at her blankly for a few moments. He had always been a slow reader, and remembered the frustration in school when teachers thought he was lazy.

Raquel handed him a tissue.

"Jack and now you," she said with a smirk. "What a pair of crybabies."

Raquel asked if Danny was in contact with this old neighbor.

"He'll have pa.s.sed away by now, I'm sure," Danny said. "And these things always mean more to children, don't they?"

"Look him up," Raquel said. "Ask Preston to make some calls."

Danny shrugged. "It was all over thirty years ago, and he was pus.h.i.+ng sixty then."

"It won't hurt to try."

When it was almost time to go, Danny leaned down and kissed Raquel's head. "You're so very special, do you know that?"

Somebody pa.s.sed her room with a trolley.

"If he's alive, he will remember you," she whispered. "I guarantee it meant more to him than you think."

Then a nurse knocked and came in. "I hope I'm not interrupting."

"No, not at all," Danny said. "I was going to leave soon."

The nurse checked the machines, and chatted to Raquel about tomorrow's procedures. Danny stood and watched her arrange the sheets. Then she bent down and picked up the empty tote bag.

"Fox Searchlight Pictures," she said, reading the side of the bag. "That's my son's dream."

Raquel leaned forward and the nurse did something to her pillow.

"He's got it in his mind," she went on, "that he's going to be the next big thing-a Hollywood director. He's saving up to go to school for it and everything. My husband told him it's not practical. He should study business or computers or something."

"Danny is a famous film director," Raquel said brightly.

"Oh?" the nurse asked, adjusting the shades. "What's your name? I'll tell him I met you."

When Raquel's face caught a few rays of sunset, Danny saw just how ill she was.

On the way out he stopped in to see the nurse. She was drinking soda with a straw and watching something in Spanish.

"Here's my card," Danny said. "Have your son call to set up a meeting at my office."

"Are you kidding?"

"Just have him call my office."

She put her soda can down and stood up.

"Oh, mister, is there anything I can do for you? That's so nice of you, I can't believe it. You're going to help my son."

"Just get her better," Danny said. "Just get her better, because without her we're all finished."

After feeding the dogs, he stayed up and went through boxes of old photographs. A few of the pictures made him cry, because he remembered how it felt to be a child.

After eating a sandwich, he made a list of all the people who had ever loved him. He put it on the refrigerator and read it out loud.

In the morning, he swam in the pool with his dogs, then sat at the kitchen table drawing curved lines. Then he joined those lines and made shapes. The shapes together made words and formed the contents of a letter, which began: Dear Mr. Hugo, You may not remember, but you once saved a child . . .

He drank coffee and read the letter over and over until he knew it by heart.

Then he went outside and sat by the pool.

One of his dogs trotted out and settled at his feet.

He thought of the ca.n.a.l, the piles of litter, the old furniture softened by rain, the weeds in summer, the black water upon which barges once entered and left the city. He saw trucks reversing into the loading bays behind the supermarket. He heard the balcony door slide open and felt the aluminum handle, cold in winter. He remembered his old bedroom in Manchester, the racing-car pajamas, the squeaky slippers he wore until his toes poked through, his mother's low voice and the lullabies that sailed him off to sleep. Jumping on the bed. Playing cars on the rug. Deciding which teddy to get him through the night.

He stood over the small boy and touched his hair. But the boy did not move-could not feel that he was being remembered.

Danny sat on the bed and traced the outline of cartoon shapes on the duvet. He stared at the plain sleeping face and felt the churn of dreams within.

And then Danny felt a sensation he had never before known, an intense pity that relieved him of an incredible weight. And the boy he reached for in the half dark, the head he touched was not his-but the soft, wispy hair of his sleeping father, as a child, alone, suffering, desperate, and afraid.

AMELIA.

EAST SUSs.e.x, ENGLAND,.

2010.

I.