Do Not Resuscitate Read online

  He wrote letters, Charlie, up until he died. He could have e-mailed or iMessaged or FaceTimed from London for no charge. But Charlie preferred to send handwritten letters with eighty-seven-pence Mark Rothko stamps.

  Mark Rothko was a Russian-American painter who was famous for painting blocks of color on canvas. Novocain for fools.

  At some point in his life, Charlie got his hands on an original Mark Rothko, which he later bequeathed to me in his will, and which now hangs in the living room where Pilar Rochac is dusting.

  Charlie’s letter wanted to know what I was up to and how I was doing and if I wanted to visit him and his wife, Soo Yeon, in London sometime.

  I wrote him back that I was doing fine and that the deliveries business was booming and that I would fly to London if I ever got some time off work.

  And as fortune would have it, in February of 2009, right around my twenty-sixth birthday, I got a notice from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. saying that all deliveries would be suspended until further notice.

  I took this to mean I was out of the job.

  I had some money put away, and I figured the best time to travel was between jobs. So I renewed my passport and took Charlie up on his offer.

  I flew to London for Christmas that year and crashed on the living room couch in Charlie’s flat for a few weeks. Old Charlie had changed. He didn’t smoke anymore, or drink for that matter. Soo Yeon didn’t allow it. He wore skinny ties and blazers and checkered pants, and I swear I could hear the slant of an English accent when he spoke.

  Old Charlie had become the thing he always dreaded becoming: a yuppie.

  Soo Yeon had him by the balls. Her English was perfect, and I could tell right away that she was smarter than both Charlie and I put together. She spent her days in the flat typity-typing away at her master’s thesis while Charlie was away in class.

  While I was staying with them, I usually woke up late. Charlie would have already left for class, and Soo Yeon would be plugging away on her laptop. So I spent the mornings in London sitting on the couch, browsing for jobs online.

  In the afternoons, Soo Yeon prepared glass noodles or kimchi or soup, and we’d sit at the kitchen table and eat together. Then she’d start back on her thesis, and I would go out to wander the streets and take in the sights. I’d swing by the London School of Economics around four, and together Charlie and I would tube home.

  I wasn’t having any luck in the job search, mainly because I’d spent the past few years working for a nonexistent company as a delivery boy. And so on the cusp of my twenty-seventh birthday, my résumé was about as empty as my bank account.

  Then on January 12, 2010, two things happened: an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 hit off the coast of Haiti, and I got an e-mail from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. requesting a pickup at the Oakland International Airport the following week.

  My funds were running low, and I couldn’t afford to miss out on an opportunity to make some cash, so I booked a flight home the next day.

  Marilee was looking after my apartment while I was away. When I came home, I found the whole living room cleared out, and standing where my coffee table should have been was a six-foot American Girl dollhouse.

  Marilee wasn’t home, so I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and turned on the news. Every station was covering the devastation in Haiti. Fallen buildings. Bloody children. Mass chaos and looting. But it couldn’t have seemed farther away to me. Like news from the moon or another star.

  The news was having a completely different effect on my sister, it turned out. She came home that evening with a copy of every publication in the city covering the quake.

  That was how it started for Marilee: a morbid obsession with suffering that would inflect every decision she would ever make from that point on.

  The media later called Marilee’s impulse to surround herself with suffering a virtue. I called it a hobby.

  Marilee was interested in suffering the way other people are interested in home decor or French cuisine or Frisbee golf. This hobby of hers, coupled with the fact that she happened to be a devout Catholic, are the reasons she is known as Saint Marilee Lorenzo today.

  That fated day in January of 2010, Marilee Lorenzo began work on the lifelong project that would put her on a collision course with canonization. And I, her good-for-nothing brother, started back at Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. delivering unscrupulous packages to strangers in delis for cold hard cash.

  CHAPTER 10

  PILAR ROCHAC has kicked me out of my own house. Today I write from a folding chair on my patio, watching some person I don’t even know wash my windows. It amazes me that we have come to this: a person who specializes in mopping floors, and another who specializes in washing windows, and another who mows lawns, and yet another who balances finances, and another who calculates risk, and so on. We are each a cog in some giant cuckoo clock, one man among many in a Fordist assembly line.

  And to think in pioneer times most people managed all of it on their own: the floor mopping, the window washing, the lawn mowing, the checkbook balancing, the risk calculating, et cetera.

  I sometimes wonder what would happen if all the gardeners or accountants or risk consultants disappeared from the world. People would have to start thinking for themselves again; that’s what would happen.

  Case in point: I almost got run over the other day crossing the street in front of the bank. I move about as fast as an ice floe, and the light changed color while I was still in the intersection. And this roly-poly of a man stepped on the gas, as if green means go no matter what. And then he saw me and slammed on the brakes and gave me a look as if to say, “You’re holding up the assembly line, Jack!” This man would rather a little green light tell him what to do next than think for himself.

  I have just had a party to celebrate my seventy-third birthday, and the yard is still littered with plastic cups and cigarette butts and God knows what else. But not to worry, Eliza assures me, Manuel the gardener will clean it up.

  All three of my children made it out for the party: Kendra Ann and her husband, Pradip, and their two boys all the way from London; Spencer and Eugene and their two girls out of New York; and of course Eliza and her three girls and a lot of other people I don’t have any interest in going on about now, as I had little interest in them last night.

  They are all gone now, except for Kendra Ann. She is staying another week to visit some friends in the area. She is out with a gal now who used to be our neighbor. Jackie Olsen From Next Door, we called her. She became a hotel real estate broker in the city. She recently sold the Sir Francis Drake to a company in China. The Chinese own all the hotels now.

  Yesterday Kendra Ann’s boys flew back to London with their father. Her eldest, Gokul, is fourteen and managed the flight well enough. The little one, Rajiv, is ten and has been diagnosed with ADHD. But they have all sorts of digital entertainment on flights now with which to anesthetize the young. Kendra Ann reports that Rajiv managed just fine, too.

  When she isn’t out with her girlfriends, Kendra Ann sits on the couch and reads while I write. She reads mystery novels, like her mother used to do, and she has managed to dig up an old collection of Janet Evanovich novels from the basement. They start One for the Money and Two for the Dough. The series goes on like that, Three to Get Deadly and Four to Score and so on.

  I, myself, prefer nonfiction. I have enough trouble wrapping my head around all the things that have actually happened on this planet. I don’t have time to worry about all the things that happen in other people’s imaginations.

  Tonight Kendra Ann wants to take me OOTT. Translation: out on the town. She noted, quite accurately, that I haven’t left the house in days. I usually get out a lot more, I told her. I like to go for walks in the park across the street. But lately there has been a woman there whom I am trying to avoid. Her name is Eleanor Summerland. She is a widow. And she thinks it would be a grand idea for she and I to get married.

 
Naturally, I asked, WTHF? In Eleanor’s native tongue, that means “what the hell for?”

  For creature comforts, she said.

  I couldn’t tell whether she meant money or sex. But from what I can tell, she has plenty of money. Her husband left her the deed to a private groundwater supply in Marin County. Might as well have struck oil! And as for sex—that’d be like asking me to do a cartwheel on a balance beam.

  So I am avoiding the park until she goes away or dies. She is pushing ninety. Won’t be long now.

  Unless she has a microchip. Eliza says it is going to be the elixir of life. “Just think of it!” she says. “When they figure out the technology, someday after you’re dead, you’ll suddenly wake up in a young person’s body, maybe even your own, and you’ll be able to go on living again!”

  Magnum Opus!

  I shudder to think of it. Maybe Eliza is too young to understand this, but I am just about done. Finished. Kaput.

  Kendra Ann knows better than to bring up this microchip business. Instead she tells me she is taking me to a basketball game at the high school tonight. Her old coach got in touch with her recently, and he wants Kendra Ann to see the team play while she’s in town. He says that they’ve still got her photograph on display in a trophy case in the gym lobby. Kendra Ann was the high school league MVP three years running. She was recruited by the San Francisco State Gators, and she was the star player there, too.

  Then she was recruited by the WNBA, and she wound up playing for the L.A. Sparks. But she sat on the bench most of the time. Not to mention she got knocked up midway through her first season. So she quit the Big League and moved home.

  Kendra Ann is about six-four. She gets it from her mother’s side of the family. There are some real whoppers in the Van Bruggen family tree. I’m told my father-in-law was seven feet tall. He died of heart complications before Greta was old enough to have any memory of him. They say his corpse wouldn’t fit into an ordinary casket, so they had to bury him in a horse crate, and the makeshift casket had to be interred perpendicular to the grave site, spanning two burial plots, since it wouldn’t have fit otherwise.

  When Duncan and I paid a visit to his grave during my stay in Antwerp, Duncan said when you sit facing the headstone, you’re facing his father’s hip. So it is better to look west toward his head. I don’t really see what difference it makes which part of his dead father I’m facing.

  Duncan isn’t particularly tall. Maybe six-two. And Greta wasn’t either. Their father, whom I’m told was a veritable yeti of a man, ran the family farm, which at the time spanned about a thousand acres of wetlands popular for grazing sheep. But after the old man died, Greta’s mother parceled out the land to the neighboring farmers for 4,000 Belgian francs an acre. She kept only the main house and the surrounding forty acres for herself and her two children.

  The whole region turned out to be the site of a major freshwater aquifer, and the land is now valued at about a quarter million US dollars an acre.

  Duncan inherited the farm when his mother died. He planted the apple orchard, since the climate of Belgium is better suited for apples now. He planted hedgerows around the property to keep out the neighbors’ sheep. And he installed an electric pump for easy access to his gold mine of water. He refuses to sell the land, however, even though the state has offered him twice its going value.

  People everywhere are willing to pay a lot of money for water.

  It is a thirsty, thirsty world.

  Greta left her father’s farm to attend university in Paris in 2001, when she was only fifteen. She was the youngest student in her class, and earned the highest marks, even though French was not her native language. She entered Pierre and Marie Curie University as a classics major, studying Greek and Latin and ancient philosophy. But she was steadily lured away by the sciences, which seemed to have more convincing answers to the questions that plagued her. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What’s the point of it all?

  She was satisfied with the explanation that we are all made up of the stuff of ancient suns and that we have the fiery furnaces of dying stars to thank for all the elements on the periodic table. She agreed that only the strongest and quickest and smartest survive. And she understood that humans were turning our planet into a shithole of greenhouse emissions and nuclear waste.

  There was a professor of biology at the university by the name of Gerard Boule who took an interest in young Greta Van Bruggen. He offered her an internship with his research group. After four months of working closely with Greta in the lab, he whisked her away to Indonesia to spend the summer studying endemic island plants.

  They carried all of their equipment on their backs. They slept in a single tent. They bartered with local merchants for food and supplies. Greta spoke Dutch, French, and English fluently, which came in handy since the islands were a patchwork of dissolved colonies from all parts of Europe.

  Each day they staked out a five-hundred-square-meter parcel of land and combed through every inch looking for rare varieties of trees or shrubs native to Indonesia. The location of every specimen was logged in a computer database, and from it, they were able to produce a digital map of the country showing the growth patterns of rare and exotic species.

  Some plants preferred sunny, temperate westward-facing shores, while others survived best in the windswept plains of dried-up river basins. Some occupied regions no larger than a backyard, while others traced long, winding webs across the archipelago. Each plant had its own unique growth pattern, which gave hints as to what exactly these rare plants needed to survive.

  Many of the plants were on the verge of extinction and were numbered among the last of their kind. With the map they were making, Gerard Boule and young Greta Van Bruggen were able to advise the Indonesian government on the best places to designate national parks and conservation sites.

  It was sometime in the midst of this adventure that sixteen-year-old Greta Van Bruggen became pregnant.

  Greta went to see a medicine woman in the village where they were staying. Her name was Rasima Rasima. Rasima Rasima prescribed an herbal blend of nutmeg and papaya, believed to have abortifacient properties. This was supplemented by a deep abdominal massage.

  Two months into the pregnancy, Greta miscarried.

  She never told Boule about the pregnancy. He had a wife and three kids of his own back in Paris. Surely Madame Boule had her suspicions about Greta, but the understanding seemed to be that as long as Boule came home to his family at the end of the summer, nobody needed to be the wiser.

  Rasima Rasima was sympathetic.

  “I see your future,” she said to Greta. “You will have many children. And your children will have many children. But this child was never yours to keep. God has other plans for you.”

  I don’t know about God, but Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. certainly had other plans for Greta Van Bruggen.

  When they got back to Paris at the end of summer, Greta politely resigned from Boule’s research team and went to work at the Jardin des Plantes, a seventy-acre botanical garden in the fifth arrondissement, across the street from the university.

  She had a few other boyfriends back then, guys her own age, and they took her to the cinema and to wine bars and salsa dancing, feeble attempts at sophistication. And although none of these boys had any of the spark or charm of Gerard Boule, she found their amateur overtures refreshing. And she never went farther than second base with any of them. And word around school was that Greta Van Bruggen was a prude and a square.

  Duncan visited her once in 2004. He was still working on the farm in Antwerp, and it was the farthest he had ever been from home. Greta put him on the couch in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment she and three girlfriends were sharing on rue Mandar in the second arrondissement, a few blocks from the Louvre. The way Greta used to tell the story, Duncan never left the apartment except to visit her at the Jardin des Plantes, where he made friends with all the botanists. Then he went home and never visit
ed Paris or anywhere else ever again.

  Duncan knows all about Gerard Boule and Rasima Rasima and the abortion. Greta told her brother in the strictest confidence. As far as I can tell, he didn’t love her one ounce less for any of it. Who would? She was the most wonderful woman in the world.

  CHAPTER 11

  INCIDENTALLY, Rasima Rasima, the medicine woman whom Greta consulted in Indonesia, would later serve as a trusted consultant to my late sister Marilee Lorenzo. Rasima Rasima and Marilee met at a field hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the earthquake in 2010.

  The Red Cross volunteers stayed in tents, and ate around a portable stove, and relied heavily on relief shipments from all around the world for their food and clothing and supplies.

  Marilee wrote to me from their camp on May 7, 2010. I have kept the letter all these years, and I will transcribe it here.

  Dear Jim,

  There is so much I have to tell you. The people here are remarkable. So many of them have lost someone they love: a family member, a neighbor, a friend. But there is something in the air here, a sort of brotherhood. People are coming together from all over the world to help, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. So many of the people here are asking, “Why would God let this happen?” But I look around and see that God has given us an opportunity to do his work.

  I know what you’d say to that. You’d say phooey. Things just happen. There doesn’t have to be a reason. Nobody cares what we do on this planet. And when we die, we’re dead. Finished. Kaput. That’s what you’d say, right?

  I don’t think so.

  I am living in a Red Cross field camp, and every night there is a group of us who get together to pray. We pray for the people who are suffering here. Sometimes we pray for the people back home, too. I know you don’t care much for praying, but it’s my way of coping with the unfathomable world around me. And sometimes it is the only thing I can do when we’ve run out of clean bandages or water or food.