Page 10 of Only Lovers in the Building

Ben’s Journal

April is the cruelest month. —T.S. Eliot

Outside the hospital, spring shows its colors. The parking lot is slick from a sun-shower. The air smells of grass. Birds

sing, and one craps on your windshield. A tree dumps pink flowers everywhere. All this life, and he is dead.

Dying alone is a joke, an empty threat, until you watch it play out. If you hadn’t dragged your feet, delayed this visit,

you might’ve saved him from this fate, but every story has the ending it deserves.

The first time you visited, you got lost in the hospice ward’s long, dim, ghostly halls.

By the time you found his room, he was either asleep or unconscious.

The bed was a boat tethered to land by tubes pumping fluids or oxygen.

You hated seeing him like that, but you couldn’t look away.

Head propped up to ease his breathing; thin and waxy skin, once golden, now a dull brown; sunken eyes, coal-black hair turned ash gray.

There was nothing left of the titan who loomed so large over your life, the myth who held so much space in your mind.

It was a shock seeing him like this, reduced to nothing, like any abuelito on his last days.

How different from that man who, one frigid January morning in Washington, DC, stepped up to the inaugural

podium and made history.

That poem is not his best work. The message is generic, expected. A new administration ushers in change, an opportunity for

a nation to make whole those shattered by the hammer of injustice. But who are these nameless victims, exactly? And what injustice

had they suffered? It was anyone’s guess.

Here, you could show some mercy. It was likely the best he could do. Riddled with disease, as he was at the time, his once-sharp

mind was dulled by radiation and chemotherapy and whatever else. No one would know it. With some makeup, a tailored suit,

a fake tan, and a hairpiece, he’d fooled them all, including you.

That first visit didn’t last long. You hadn’t made the pilgrimage to pray and weep at his bedside. You left disappointed,

itching for a fight.

This time, he isn’t asleep: he’s dead.

The nurse hands you a worn leather box. “For you,” she says.

“What’s in it?” you ask.

“You’ll have to open it to find out,” she says. “He set it aside for you last week.”

A current of judgment runs through her words. You could’ve laughed in her face. His father had waited a week for his visit? You’d waited a lifetime for visits, phone calls, birthday cards, a letter of explanation. You owed the dead man nothing.

Most fathers were a mystery to their sons; yours was a total stranger. What you knew of him were facts and opinions found

in books and articles. Everyone agreed—critics, scholars, former wives, jilted lovers, everyone the poet had ever encountered—that

he was great. A great man of letters!

Early on, at ten or twelve, you’d been fool enough to believe that life had spared you. No father to look up to meant no legacy

to uphold. You could be whatever, do whatever, and what did you do? You wrote a poem and won a prize.

Life father, like son! they cheered.

You hadn’t been spared a thing. His legacy was a weight that would drag you to the bottom of the sea if you let it.

The box is heavier than expected. It holds a collection of journals, letters, a few photos, and a watch. It slides from the

seat to the floor as you drive off the lot. Bougainvillea trees line the road.

Death in late spring.

Full blooms for a funeral.

Birds sing a eulogy.

Daisies push through the grave.