Do Not Resuscitate Read online

  The article mentioned nothing of my father, the antiques dealer from Minnesota.

  The article in People said that when Marilee found out she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, she flew down to Haiti to join the relief efforts with the American Red Cross. It’s a misprint because I know for a fact that Marilee didn’t find out she had Lou Gehrig’s disease until later. She flew down to Haiti because that was where things really mattered at the time, and Marilee always wanted to be where things mattered most.

  When her art took off, Marilee fell into a state of depression. She couldn’t stand the idea of people all over the country looking at those gruesome images on the kitchen walls of her American Girl dollhouse and applauding her for being socially conscious.

  She lamented in private that she knew she hadn’t actually done anything to help.

  So while her exhibit toured the country, starting in Los Angeles, where my father refused to see it, and then on to Austin, then Chicago, and finally ending up in New York, Marilee was in Port-au-Prince lifting cinder blocks off mangled bodies.

  At the end of June, just after my fourth anniversary working at Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., at which I was making about $75,000 a year, I got a letter from Marilee.

  The letter wasn’t in her handwriting, except for the address on the front of the envelope. It was the scrawl of a child, no more than ten or eleven years old. This is what it said:

  Dear Monsieur Frost,

  I am writing to tell you today is my birthday. I am going to my father to take me to buy the fish. Tell Kobe Bryant hello please for me.

  Emmanuel Blanc

  There was also a photograph of Emmanuel Blanc taken on my sister’s old Polaroid camera, which had belonged to our mother. The small boy was standing in a churchyard wearing a Lakers jersey with the number twenty-four.

  That was the beginning of a stream of letters I would receive from people all over the stricken country. Never once did my sister explain why they were writing to me. And never once did the letters mention anything about the earthquake or the death toll or the turmoil we were seeing all over CNN. I think that was Marilee’s point. People can get through just about anything.

  I saved the letters and the photographs, and they were later published in a book called Letters to Jim, which brought my sister posthumous fame. That was what the article in People was mostly about. That and my sister’s canonization by the Catholic Church.

  CHAPTER 7

  I CAME HOME from the hardware store this afternoon to find Eliza in my kitchen. I forgot to call her this morning, so she decided to stop by the house to see if I was dead.

  “Maybe I should call Dr. Haug to see if we can get your appointment moved up,” she said.

  She was, of course, referring to the microchip.

  “Then do I have your permission to die?” I asked.

  She did not like that one bit.

  She asked me where I had been all morning, why I didn’t have my cell phone with me at the hardware store.

  My cell phone was dead, I explained. Finished. Kaput.

  But at least I was alive! I reminded her.

  She frowned. I never knew a woman who could frown so well. I think she inherited it from my grandfather on my mother’s side. I never met the man. He was a big old Sicilian with a frown that made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  I explained that the water pressure in my shower was low and that I had gone out to pick up one of those showerheads that gives you a shiatsu massage while you shower.

  “I could have picked that up for you,” she said.

  “I am perfectly capable of doing it myself,” I replied.

  “Did you see the article about Auntie Marilee in People?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they let you proof it before they ran it?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t about me,” I replied.

  “They mentioned you.”

  “Yes, but I’m not the one with the halo.”

  “You deserve more recognition,” she said. “You’re not going to be around much longer.”

  I’m not sure how things sound to Eliza in her own head, but I certainly know how they sound to me in mine. So I changed the subject and asked her to help me with the new showerhead.

  Incidentally, while we were working side by side in the small upright shower unit, she asked me about my grandfather on my mother’s side, the one with the marvelous frown. Pasquale Lorenzo. She had stumbled across an old picture of him in a photo album my mother kept, which was passed on to me, and which recently found its way into Eliza’s garage with a dozen old boxes I wanted to throw away but that Eliza had insisted on keeping.

  Eliza is a hoarder. Not the kind that fills her bathtub with old milk cartons and dead cats, but the kind that cannot seem to let go of sentimental knickknacks, like teddy bears and jewelry and magazine clippings. It might be the only way in which Eliza is sentimental.

  My mother grew up in Pompeii, Italy, on the beach. Her father was a fashion wholesaler, and when my mother turned fifteen, old Pasquale-with-the-Frown took her to Milan to introduce her to a few modeling agencies, all of which were eager to sign her. She was very beautiful. And her father was very powerful.

  She modeled in Milan for several years, until she met my dad, who whisked her away to California like a modern-day Pocahontas.

  Eliza, my daughter, wanted to know how Anita, my mother, felt living her whole life an ocean apart from her family.

  I can’t say I know how my mother felt. My mother never talked about it. But she kept photo albums. Lots and lots of photo albums. After my mother gave up modeling to marry my father, she became something of an amateur photographer. Snap-snap!

  Eliza wanted to know if we had any family still living in Pompeii or Milan or thereabouts.

  Questions, questions!

  “Nobody in Italy that I have anything to do with,” I told her. “But you have an uncle in Belgium from your mother’s side, Duncan.”

  The last time I mentioned Greta’s brother in Antwerp was forty years ago, when I went out there to scatter Greta’s ashes on his little farm.

  “Is he still alive?” she asked.

  “He is indeed still alive, and he’s quite a bit older than I am. I think he must be about eighty-three.”

  Eighty-three is nothing nowadays. Europeans have the longest life-spans in the world. It has something to do with their diets and walking everywhere and the air quality and the general availability of health care over there, which pretty much nobody can get over here anymore.

  As a matter of fact, I just got a letter from Duncan Van Bruggen. He tells me he is fine. The weather is colder in Belgium than it was when he was a kid, and the frost has killed his herb garden.

  These are the types of things he typically shares with me.

  I wrote him back.

  Duncan,

  I am doing well here, but your niece Eliza thinks I am dying. The weather in San Francisco is mild, as always. We are having the warmest winter on record. You should try rosemary for your garden. It is very sturdy and usually survives the frost.

  J. Frost

  We are both lonely old men, so this kind of correspondence is good for us.

  Duncan never married. He has lived on the farm his whole life and takes care of the place all on his own. He is healthy and strong and runs a tight ship. Or at least that was how I found him when I visited in December of 2025.

  The urn containing my wife’s ashes, which had been misplaced by the airline, ended up in Aruba. The people at Queen Beatrix International Airport found it circulating the luggage carousel Christmas morning.

  Merry Christmas!

  I spent Christmas Day in the Brussels Airport awaiting the return flight from Aruba that was bringing my late wife back from her postmortem vacation. Then I took the train from Brussels to Antwerp, and a taxi from there to the little cottage where Duncan lives. It was past midnight when I arrived. Duncan walked down to meet me at the gate. He led me throu
gh a garden covered in freshly fallen snow to the house where he and Greta had grown up together.

  The inside of the cottage was orderly and quaint, and had the untouched feeling of a museum, except for the kitchen, which looked lived-in, and where I imagined Duncan spent most of his time.

  He served me soup and bread, which I later learned were made from the bounty of his own garden, and he hardly spoke a word except to say that he was sorry I had so much trouble at the airport.

  We sat in silence for some time, he on one end of a wooden bench, looking into the fire, and I on the other, staring into my soup. I did not know then if I should take the ashes out of my luggage to share with him—if he wanted to see them or to hold them—or if that would be unsettling. I wondered if he felt any ownership over Greta’s ashes, like I did. It was his DNA, not mine, in there, after all.

  But because he said nothing, and because I was not in the mood to broach the subject, I decided to put the topic off until morning, and I brought the ashes to my room, where they spent the night with my socks and underwear at the foot of my bed.

  The next day we scattered the ashes without much ceremony. I followed Duncan out to a small orchard, which was stripped of all its leaves. The farm was no more than a few acres of fruit trees and vegetable patches, a chicken coop, a hog, and a goat. Not to mention a host of crows, which sat perched on a single telephone wire that ran from the cottage to the road, perhaps the only link between Duncan and the outside world.

  I asked Duncan how he thought it should be done.

  He took off his gloves and stuck a hand in the urn and pulled out a handful of ashes, the remains of my late wife, his late sister. Then he just dropped it onto the ground.

  The ash was gristly and coarse, not like I had imagined it would be, and it turned quickly to mud in the snow. We walked around the yard, tossing it about as if we were feeding chickens.

  “That’s all of her,” he said finally.

  “That’s all of her,” I replied, because I could not think of how else to end our little ceremony.

  Back inside the house, Duncan rinsed the urn in an old wooden washbasin and placed it on the windowsill to dry. I didn’t want it anymore, the urn, and I told him so.

  “I’ll bury it in the yard when the ground thaws,” he said.

  I was satisfied with that solution.

  Eliza has always held it against me—my not bringing the urn home for safekeeping. She wishes I had kept it. With no grave site and no urn, she says she has nowhere to mourn.

  I prefer it that way.

  Eliza has already cleared a spot on her mantel for my remains. She showed it to me once and said, “See, this is the proper place to put an urn. Not in the ground with the worms.”

  She doesn’t know it yet, but I have made Spencer the executor of my will, and I’m going to be scattered across AT&T Park. My urn will be smashed to smithereens against the side of a newly christened sailboat. Spencer sails, and he owns lots of boats. He also owns the San Francisco Giants. How’s that for making it big?

  Eliza can mourn over the titanium canister with the microchip containing my backup brain at Humanity Co.

  CHAPTER 8

  I JUST RECEIVED an e-mail today from the man in the yellow coat, my new friend, George Ainsley. He has informed me that the Genova Delicatessen is out of business. Finished. Gone. Kaput. It is now a Chinese-run nail salon.

  We are still planning to have lunch. And play chess, he says.

  I haven’t played chess in years. I was an online champ once, in college, during midterms of my freshman year. My dorm had an online chess tournament every term during exams. It was our way of putting off studying until the very last minute.

  Charlie was the one who got me into it. He lived two doors down in 501, which was the largest suite on the floor. Charlie had a poker table in there, and a chessboard, and darts. Charlie was very popular on move-in day because he had so many great games that the fellas could sit around and play without having to say too much about themselves. He also had the best hash.

  Charlie also had the best girlfriend. Kate Drummond. She was a knockout. She was a year older than we were, and she was studying marine biology. Whenever she came over, she tried to fill our heads with hoopla about the impending apocalypse: the arctic poles melting into the sea, shifting sea currents, a European ice age, invasive species killing off all the indigenous life in the ocean. That sort of thing.

  She was pretty much right on the money, it turns out.

  I had the hots for Kate Drummond, and Charlie knew it. And he would endlessly taunt me by grabbing her ass and reaching into her crotch in public.

  “Wish you had some of this, Frosty?” he would say.

  Charlie had a bit of a complex. It was called treating women like shit.

  Kate shrugged it off, since she had a complex of her own. It was called not feeling worth anything.

  She told me once that she felt helpless, that she always got caught up thinking about all the different decisions a person can make in his or her lifetime, and where all those different decisions lead, and how unpredictable it all is—and a sort of paralysis would come over her. And so she’d just light a joint and fuck around with Charlie because she felt so completely and utterly helpless.

  She told me this one day after she’d spent the afternoon fucking around with me.

  Kate Drummond was right on the money again, I think. We are completely and utterly helpless.

  Kate never cheated on Charlie. They were broken up three years before she and I got together. And by that time, Charlie was married to a girl from South Korea.

  We had all graduated from Berkeley, and I had moved to the city with my Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. money. Charlie had quit the museum job and had gone off to South Korea to teach English to second graders, and I had nobody to smoke with anymore. So I called up the closest thing to Charlie I could think of, which was his ex-girlfriend and my longtime crush, Kate Drummond.

  Kate was working at Philz Coffee in the Mission District with the rest of the hipsters while she applied to grad school. I don’t think she ever ended up going to grad school, but I can’t be sure since we lost touch years ago. She loved living in that part of the city because everybody was supposedly very environmentally conscious. San Francisco had ordinances for all sorts of things, like mandatory composting and community gardens and bagless grocery stores.

  Lot of good that did anyone. San Francisco was just one city out of thousands. A molehill on Mount Everest. Whoever said one person can make all the difference didn’t live in a world with seven billion people.

  Today you simply can’t afford to live like we were doing back then. We call those years the Age of Innocence. Wikipedia refers to the Age of Innocence as “the period in American history between the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the California Water Crisis in 2034, when the people of America enjoyed unlimited access to affordable resources like gasoline, water, precious metals, lumber, and food.”

  They call it the Age of Innocence because they think we didn’t know what we were doing back then, so we couldn’t possibly be held accountable for our actions.

  That’s a nice way of putting it.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE WOMAN who cleans my house just came in, so I have to move out to the living room while she puts the kitchen in order. Then I’ll have to move into the bedroom while she puts the living room in order, and then I’ll move back into the kitchen once the floors have dried. It’s our Sunday routine.

  Her name is Pilar Rochac, and she is from El Salvador. Eliza hired Pilar to come into my house and shoo me from room to room. In between subsequent shooings, Pilar cleans the house.

  Eliza also hired a gardener to mow my lawn every Tuesday, and somebody to wash my windows, and somebody to launder my shirts. Eliza thinks I am too old to take care of myself, and so she has hired somebody for everything, effectively stripping an old man of his last and only reason for living: to clean up after himself.

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nbsp; And with all the cleaners and washers and gardeners coming and going nowadays, she says she can take comfort in knowing that when I die, somebody will be there to find my corpse.

  It’s my own doing, all these comings and goings. I gave Eliza free license to manage my estate, mainly because I have more money than I can spend in my lifetime, and there are a lot of people out there who could use some of it. I like to think I’m fueling the economy.

  The expression “fueling the economy” comes from the early part of the century, when the economy tanked. About the same time I moved into the city. And about the same time Marilee quit her job at Wells Fargo. Everybody thought my sister was crazy for giving up a six-figure salary and benefits during a recession. To go to art school.

  “Dead in the water,” my dad said of Marilee when he found out. “Your sister is Dead. In. The. Water.”

  Turns out she was going to be dead either way, but it wasn’t the economy nor the Novocain for fools that would kill her. It was Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  That was about 2008, I think, right about the time Kate Drummond and I broke off whatever it was we had going on. Kate couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore, and both of us knew we weren’t serious, so we split up, and she went to live with her parents in Daly City, and I crossed my fingers that the recession wouldn’t slow the traffic of mysterious red coolers that were paying for my ninety-inch flat-screen and my Blu-ray player and my Victorian-style townhouse in Hayes Valley.

  About that time I got a letter from Charlie. He had moved with his new wife to London, where they were both returning to school, he for a PhD in philosophy and she for a master’s in public policy. Old Charlie was finally getting his shit together.