Do Not Resuscitate Page 6

  I wanted nothing more than to throw the envelope into my newly restored colonial-style fireplace. But there was one thing that stopped me, one thing that sent my moral compass spinning.

  Cold hard cash.

  It was a trap. If somebody had asked me to subvert the government and board a plane to another territory under a name that did not belong to me to retrieve a package that did not belong to me, which contained God knows what, I would have, in theory, refused on moral grounds.

  In theory.

  How many times have humans used those words to paint their own portraits in a better light? “In theory.”

  In practice, $2,000 is a lot of money, especially when paired with another $8,000 to make a grand total of $10,000.

  That was just enough money to make the needle of the compass, which so steadfastly points north, stand on its head.

  What can I say? I had a mortgage to pay.

  So I numbed myself with the help of Courtney Love, which was the name of some hash I got over in the Haight. And I packed my bags. And I slept like a log. And I boarded a plane for South Korea the next day.

  Why not?

  CHAPTER 13

  THE HOUSE I live in now has six bedrooms and four and a half baths. An upgrade. And if this were still the Victorian era, the era in which this house was built, a house of this size and stature would surely mark me as a respectable and decent man.

  But now a house of this size and stature only means I am using more of the world’s resources than I deserve.

  I still have the same bed from our old house on Ortega, which I ordered from Robinson Furniture Company all those years ago, a big four-post with a mattress fit for a king. My mother always said, “Never skimp on a bed.”

  Greta and I sold the house on Ortega and moved into this one when Kendra Ann was born. Kendra Ann spent her whole life in this house, that is, until she moved to Los Angeles to play for the Sparks and got knocked up.

  She just flew home to London yesterday. While she was visiting, she stayed in the same room that she lived in growing up. I still call it Kendra Ann’s room, even though she hasn’t lived here for at least fifteen years.

  We still call this California, even though it’s two entirely new states now.

  What’s in a name?

  The house I live in now is a pretty Victorian manor on Gough Street, built circa 1880 and painted a lime green that makes it distinguishable from its neighbors. It stands a few meters above street level on a small grassy mound, which the Chinese say is good chi. Furthermore, the front door opens on Lafayette Park, which a Google satellite image will show as a vibrant green quadrangle bespeckled with scantily clad sunbathers of every make, shape, and creed, basking in the glow of a warm October sun. You can tell it is October because some of the trees are yellow.

  Good chi.

  I get lost in this house sometimes, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I wander the corridors like Marley’s ghost, looking in on the silent rooms and thinking of Duncan’s small cottage, where he and Greta grew up and which, despite its considerably smaller size, is just as much a museum as my house.

  Someday, too, if the microchip really does work, people will wander through the chambers of my mind like Marley’s ghost, looking in on the hazy relics of thought and wondering how something that was once so full of life can gather so much dust.

  Too bad there isn’t a Pilar Rochac for that, too.

  I think I will give Pilar Rochac the Mark Rothko when I am gone. Or the Degas, which belonged to Greta.

  Much of the furniture in this house we inherited from my father, who left me his antique shop after he died. My mother certainly did not want any of it. Postmenopause, my mother developed a taste for le moderne, and she began to look on anything predating the twenty-first century as vile and gruesome, like a corpse.

  That might explain her feelings toward my father. After he died, my mother moved out of their quaint 1960s beach house in Malibu, into a chic condo on Point Dume made almost entirely of glass and chrome. She took up golf and tennis and horseback riding at the Point Dume Country Club. She had lunch dates every week with women who were about as well-to-do as she was and who also abhorred anything old or aging because it reminded them of themselves.

  She had several friends from Milan and Napoli and Rome, none of whom she knew when she was young, all of whom had been shipped out to Malibu, as she had, by wealthy husbands who had all died, like my father, of stress-induced heart failure, and with whom she spoke exclusively in Italian, elevating her status in the eyes of the other country club women because she was European.

  What a strange woman she turned out to be!

  I think being caged up your whole life with dead people’s old things can do that to a person. Like spending your life in a mausoleum. That’s what the antique shop felt like to me and my sisters growing up, anyway.

  Now those dead people’s old things are in my house.

  My mother met my father in Milan during Fashion Week, 1975. After the dissolution of Franklin Brothers Used Cars & Parts, my father took a trip to Europe to “see the sights.” I think all he really wanted to see were the cars. And the women.

  He had lots of money from Franklin Brothers Used Cars & Parts, and he never paid a cent of it to the government.

  Like father, like son.

  So my father lived it up in Paris and Barcelona and Greece and Rome. In Milan he went to the runway shows to see the pretty girls, and he ended up coming home with one.

  My mother would later tell me and my sister, in a rare vulnerable moment (when she was full to the brim with Cliff House rum runners), that my father was American and rich, and that was enough to satisfy her girlish fantasies and, at the same time, infuriate her own father-with-the-frown, with whom she had always harbored a secret grudge for keeping her out of school to do modeling.

  Marilee, of course, suggested my mother go back to school.

  “What for?” my mother said. “So I can become a hotshot computer scientist and run around the office on a skateboard, throwing computers down stairs?” She had just seen a documentary on PBS about the young people in the social networking industry.

  It turned out what she really wanted to do was take photographs. But nobody knew that until after she died. I found at least twenty photo albums dating back to her days in Pompeii stashed away in the attic of her condo in Malibu.

  I do remember her being an avid picture taker when I was a kid. But I thought that was how all mothers were.

  What my dad wanted her to be, I think, was a Russian nesting doll, a little wooden doll within a doll within a doll. What I mean is he wanted her to make lots and lots of babies. And she did. My oldest sister, Emily, was born within a year of their honeymoon. And then came Laura, and Jillian, and Annabel. Pop, pop, pop! They took a little breather before I came along, and then Marilee.

  I’m the only little wooden doll left.

  Heart disease runs in our family. My father died in 2020 from cardiac arrest. Emily and Annabel went out that way, too, in their late fifties. Jillian had a stroke when she was fifty-eight. Laura was luckier: she made it to sixty-three and died in her sleep. There was never an autopsy, but we suspected she died of a pulmonary embolism.

  With the exception of Marilee, who was as thin as a flute, all of my sisters were obese. They had my father’s genes, old Midwesterner stock, ranchers raised on dairy and beef.

  Marilee and I took after our mother, who came from a long line of Sicilian seafarers and fisherfolk, nimble-bodied men and women with severe features and sunken eyes, well-catalogued in the earliest of our mother’s photo albums.

  Age has only made me thinner (so that Eliza worries all the time that I'm not eating enough), and time has made my ears, nose, and brow more pronounced.

  None of my sisters were alive long enough to have their brains downloaded onto microchips.

  They are gone forever. Finished. Dead. Kaput.

  I don’t have any nieces or nephews, either. M
arilee died too young and too celibate to have children.

  The other four were fat old hens that preferred each other’s company to the company of men.

  The Four Spinsters Frost, my friend Charlie used to joke.

  My older sisters lived their entire lives in Malibu. They were all four of them dental hygienists. They spent the majority of their short, fat lives staring down other people’s throats. The one piece of good advice they ever gave me: floss daily.

  Incidentally, they say flossing daily cuts down on the risk of heart disease.

  Go figure.

  When my mother moved into the condo on Point Dume, she bought all new furniture imported from European designers, installed the latest amenities, and picked out a new wardrobe for herself.

  Where did she get the money?

  My father left behind a sizable fortune, not to mention a prize car collection, which he had kept a secret from the family for forty years, until his death, which occurred on June 18, 2020, behind the sales counter of the antique shop.

  He was ringing up a customer, a long-forgotten talk show host and her husband, when he went into cardiac arrest. They say it took all of two minutes, and then it was over. Finished. Dead. Kaput. The whole affair made the ten-o’clock news. “Death of a Salesman,” the headlines read. “Famous talk show host left speechless when salesman dies at her feet.”

  My father left his car collection to my mother in his will. The cars were holed up in warehouses in Victorville, Ventura, and someplace back in Minnesota. There were thirty-eight cars in all, in mint condition, most of them predating the Vietnam War.

  We contacted Rick Milliken, dad’s old partner from Franklin Brothers Used Cars & Parts, and let him have first pick of the lot for a discounted price, and then we auctioned off the rest, along with the furniture from the antique shop that neither I nor my sisters wanted.

  Greta had never seen the antique shop before my father died. We flew down to Los Angeles for the funeral, and stayed a few days to help my mother board up the store, which was her immediate impulse now that my father was gone. The moment Greta stepped inside the musty old mausoleum, she was smitten.

  “It’s beautiful,” Greta said, “like walking back in time.”

  It was true. My father had a taste for only the most sophisticated pieces: ornate chests from colonial trade ships, candelabras from post-colonial churches, Winchester rifles in working order, turn-of-the-century glassware from Tiffany’s, cutlery from Sheffield, and bejeweled cigarette cases by Fabergé worth up to $30,000 apiece.

  Quite a fortune indeed.

  And we had our pick of the litter, so to speak. My father left the store and everything in it to me. He stated in his will that if there was anybody in the family who knew how to make money out of manure, it was his son, Jim Frost. I was the only kid of his with any guts, he said. “So to Jim, I leave all my shit.”

  Thanks, Dad.

  Greta wanted to give the house on Gough Street, which we had bought only a few months earlier, an authentic feel, like a real Victorian manor. Thanks to my father, the house was furnished head to toe with rare antiques dating back to the Gilded Age, a time when a house such as this one commanded respect and represented the prosperity of a nation.

  Today a house such as this one is “a symbol of our nation’s excess and ongoing environmental abuse.” At least that is what one young solicitor told me when I opened my door the other day to find a small congregation of protestors on my stoop.

  They were from a local coalition called the MOVEment, and they go around to large property owners in San Francisco and try to convince them to move to smaller, more eco-friendly living spaces.

  I told them to get the hell off my stoop.

  Our house was featured in the March 2021 issue of BBC Homes and Antiques magazine, back when the American Dream meant something to hopefuls all over the world.

  Today the American Dream is seen for what it always was: a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  None of my children want this house when I’m gone, nor do they have any interest in inheriting any of the treasures it holds.

  “It’s too much upkeep,” Eliza says. “And what do I need with a place this size? My kids are practically all grown up.”

  I have put it in my will that this house and all its contents are to be sold at auction, and the proceeds are to be divided among my seven grandchildren. Pilar Rochac can have the Rothko and Degas. Eliza can have what remains of my father’s car collection in Ventura. Spencer will inherit my investments in InfraGen Tech, which are considerable, and Kendra Ann will inherit the savings account, which I opened in 1998, and which is valued at $760,217.67, thanks to prodigious frugality on the part of Greta and myself.

  You’re welcome.

  There are a few pieces in this house that I will donate to the San Francisco Art Institute: a watercolor by the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot entitled, Les Déchus; a chaise lounge from the apartment of Henrietta Levine, a New York socialite who was tried and hanged for poisoning a US congressman in 1902; a complete collection of the works of Mark Twain signed by the author; a quill pen that belonged to the British stage actor Sir Henry Irving; and a decoupaged bookshelf my sister created for her apartment before her meteoric rise to fame.

  I have given these final instructions to a lawyer friend of mine, not Sam Getz who is trying to publish my book, but an actual lawyer named Holly Carter, who defended me during the Lambert-Keaton trials in 2039. She has written my final prattle down in legal terms, airtight, as they say, so that when I’m dead, there won’t be any nasty battles over who gets what and so forth.

  I have made Spencer the executor of my will.

  As for the microchip, for which I still have an appointment in less than a month—well, that opens a whole new can of worms, Holly says.

  “Imagine,” she said during our last meeting, “if they develop the technology to upload your brain onto a clone. Well, what then? Who is to act on your behalf then? Your children? Your grandchildren? And who gets to decide when to wake you up, and where, and how, if at all? And then what? Where will you live? How will you make a living?”

  She looked grave, more grave than she had ever looked during the Lambert-Keaton trials.

  “Consider carefully what you are doing.”

  Holly is about my age, maybe a little older, and is just about as skeptical as I am about living forever.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m ready to go right now!”

  “Me too!” I said.

  Done. Finished. Kaput.

  In a recent interview with Time magazine, I was asked by the correspondent there, a young twentysomething with his mouth agape, if I think human civilization is getting closer to enlightenment.

  I said, “About as close as Icarus got to the sun.”

  Then he wanted to know what was my greatest criticism of the human race.

  “That we made wings out of wax,” I said.

  The article was never published.

  Here is the latest from Duncan, dated April 15, 2056:

  Hullo Jim,

  I planted the rosemary like you suggested, and it is coming along marvelously. If I am not careful, it will take over the whole garden. It is asparagus season here, and the air is perfumed with an earthy aroma, which is produced when the shoots ripen in the ground. My new neighbor has agreed to pay me two euros per kilo for my first harvest of white asparagus. He is a vegetable distributor to the local restaurants in Antwerp. To think of those fine city folk dining on my humble asparagus. I am honored!

  Last week I went into town to find a replacement part for the icebox, but since the model was discontinued thirty-five years ago, I was obliged to order a whole new refrigerator, a monstrous thing with lots of confounding gadgets and gizmos.

  When they took away the old icebox, I discovered a photograph that must have slipped down beneath it some years ago. It is the photograph Greta sent me of your wedding day. I have enclosed it here. If I rememb
er correctly, next week marks your forty-fourth anniversary. What a remarkable coincidence. Bon anniversaire to my brother and friend.

  Regards,

  Duncan

  I will give the photo to Eliza. She has begun her own photo album, in the fashion of my mother. Only she calls it a scrapbook.

  She says she has been inspired by my mother’s photography.

  “Inspired to become a photographer?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel inspired,” she said.

  CHAPTER 14

  ON DECEMBER 11, 2010, I landed in Incheon International Airport, Seoul, South Korea, with three million won in my pocket, a passport that wasn’t mine, and a backpack filled with nothing but spare underwear and socks.

  First thing off the plane, I ducked into an airport gift shop and bought an English-Korean dictionary.

  I might as well have bought a lawn gnome for all the help it turned out to be. Here is the Korean word for “Hello.”

  Annyeonghaseyo.

  Here is the Korean word for “Thank you.”

  Gamsahabnida.

  The language was not one I readily understood; the alphabet was not one I remotely recognized; even the way the people greeted one another, and the way they disembarked from the plane, and the way they steered through a crowd was foreign to me.

  I was like a salmon swimming upstream.

  I wanted to call Charlie, who had spent a few years teaching in Seoul, and whose wife was a native, to ask for advice, anything that would help me get around this foreign anthill without attracting too much attention.