Straight Man

“Just one simple question. It’s one your wife and your kids and all your friends would like you to answer.” He’s close enough to whisper now, so he does. It’s a nice, short question, but he pauses between its elements for emphasis. “What … the fuck … do you … 
want
?”
    This
is the question with which he expects to stump William Henry Devereaux, Jr.? Even Marjory, telephone to her ear, looks like she could answer it on my behalf. But there’s nothing for me to do but gird, as they say, my loins, summon what strength remains, grab my dean by his lapels, lift him onto his tiptoes, and draw him to me. This I do.
    “I want,” I tell him as solemnly as I know how, because I don’t want this to be mistaken for irony or any other literary device, “to
pee
.”
    Something—the seriousness of my demeanor, or the simplicity of my text—gets through to Jacob. “Okay, I was wrong,” he shrugs so I’ll let him down. “You
do
know what you want.”
    And I’m out the door and into the corridor, hobbling at full throttle, unzipping as I go for the sake of efficiency, toward the door marked MEN . A minute or so later, Jacob follows, either sent by Marjory to check on me or summoned by the sound of my laughter. The look on his face as he watches me is a mixture of embarrassment and concern and perplexity. I cannot for the life of me stop laughing, and I certainly don’t expect him to understand the meaning of what he’s bearing witness to. But the fact is that no fifteen-year-old boy standing barefoot on an icy tile floor after awakening from a ten-hour sleep in a cold bedroom has ever hit porcelain with a more powerful, confident, thankful stream than mine. It is heaven. “Dear God,” somebody moans. Probably me. It’s the last thing I remember.

CHAPTER
36
    In my dream I am the star of the donkey basketball game. I have never been more light and graceful, never less encumbered by gravity or age. My shots, every one of them, leave my fingertips with perfect backspin and arc toward the hoop with a precision that is pure poetry, its refrain the sweet ripping of twine. And remember: I’m doing all this on a donkey. I have chosen an excellent beast—honest, bright, generous, and kind—to bear me up and down the court, and we have established between us a deep rapport. I have whispered into his ear that when the game is over I will not give him up, he will have his freedom, and this news—that he will no longer be indentured to the foolish master who keeps him in diapers—has made a young ass of him again. He is so ennobled by the prospect of his freedom that he sees in the occasion of his last game the opportunity for glory. Together we steal the ball and fast-break at every opportunity, thundering down the court to the wild cheers of the capacity crowd. I
love
this game.
    “I love you, too,” Lily assures me.
    Lily? How did she get here?
    She got here, I conclude solipsistically, in the usual way, by my opening my eyes.
    “I was having a dream,” I tell my wife, looking around at the hospital room she’s brought with her. I appear to be lying in its bed, though why is a mystery. This is one beautiful woman, my wife, and I’m very glad to see her except for her bad timing. I was about to achieve glory, and now I never will. Someone left a cake out in the rain, I think, my dream sliding away on greased skids, and I’ll never have that recipe again. I’ve always feared the day would come when that lyric made sense, and now that day is apparently here.
    “How do you feel?” Lily wants to know.
    “Great,” I say. “A little sleepy.”
    The door to the hospital room is open, and out in the hall there’s a large man sitting, looking in at us. There’s something wrong with his face. It’s sectioned off, like a chart of a cow, the kind of diagram butchers display in supermarkets, telling you where the various cuts of beef come from. Despite this, he looks familiar.
    “Phil said you’d feel pretty good. They’ve got you shot full of painkillers.”
    “My head hurts a little,” I admit, studying the large man out in the hall, who has not moved a muscle. I wonder if he might be an allegorical figure. Maybe if I look at Lily and then look back he’ll be replaced by another shape whose significance I’m supposed to decode.
    “You hit your head when you blacked out,” she explains, taking my hand. “You’ve had a busy few days.”
    “It wasn’t easy making all your predictions