The Book of Joe

in the fourth quarter from sixteen down. With less than ten seconds to go, he went up for the tying layup, got elbowed in the face, and still managed to finish the play. They won on his foul shot, which he sank with blood dripping down into his left eye from the gash on his forehead, all but obscuring his vision. The story, and a grainy picture of his bloody visage, appeared in The Minuteman, a framed yellowed copy of which hung conspicuously in the den of our house.
    There is no sound in the room save for the beeping of monitors and the steady, mechanical hiss of the respirator. I sit in the chair beside his bed, not sure what to do with myself. Small talk is clearly out of the question. If he were conscious, that would no doubt be my defensive weapon of choice, but the coma puts me at a distinct disadvantage. I consider talking to him anyway, the way they always do it on television, in a low, trembling voice fraught with emotion, exhorting the patient to just hold on. Because he will hear me. Somewhere in the haze of his coma, my voice will circulate through his benumbed mind, images of me will flash in rock video fashion behind his eyes, and some as-yet untried combination will open the lock on his brain and his fingers will twitch in mine as his eyes tentatively blink open, and his first word, uttered in a hoarse, dry whisper, will be my name.
    But I know I don’t have it in me. His hand lies by his side on the bed, and I reach out furtively and wrap my own around it. It’s much larger than mine, hard and callused on the edges, but surprisingly soft in the center, like a slice of toast pulled out of the toaster just as it begins to burn. I can’t remember ever having felt my father’s hand before. I squeeze it lightly. It doesn’t squeeze back. I hear the door behind me and quickly retract my hand, like a shoplifter.
    “Hey,” Brad says, coming up behind me.
    “Hey.”
    “How have you been?”
    “Pretty good. And you?”
    He sighs. “Been better.”
    “I guess so,” I say. We both turn and looked at our father’s unconscious form. Brad walks past me and gently straightens the blankets on the bed. He does it slowly, with a good deal of tenderness. As I watch him, it occurs to me that Brad is devastated. In my ambivalence over my own feelings toward my father, I’ve forgotten that he is someone else’s father, and grandfather, and that he is loved. I turn away as Brad finishes straightening the covers, feeling ashamed and more than ever like an interloper.
    Brad steps back from the bed and grins at me uneasily.
    “So ... ” he says.
    “What’s the prognosis?” I say.
    “Pretty lousy. They don’t know that he’ll regain consciousness, and even if he does, there’s no way to know what shape his brain will be in.”
    “How long do they think he can just hang on like this?”
    “They don’t know.”
    “They don’t know much, do they?” I say.
    I look at my father again. He seems drastically reduced, his frame smaller and his color duller than I remember. We’ve seen each other very infrequently over the years, and I haven’t thought to age my mental picture of him. There is no way, in his current state, to assess the natural toll the last seventeen years have taken on him, to see how he’s aged up until the stroke. It occurs to me that even though I am finally in the same room with him, I will probably never really see my father again.
    Brad sits down on the windowsill, and I take the chair beside the bed, the vinyl cushion emitting a whistling sigh as my weight descends into it. What happens now? I wonder.
    “How long do you plan on staying?” Brad asks after a bit.
    Staying? “I don’t know.”
    He nods, as if this is what he expected, and then clears his throat. “I’m glad you came. I wasn’t sure you would.”
    “I had to come,” I say vaguely.
    He looks at me. “I guess so.”
    We sit quietly as the conversation limps off to wherever it is that conversations go to die.
    “Where’s Jared?” I say.
    Brad frowns and looks away. “I told him to stop here on his way to school, but he’s not what you would call reliable these days.” Jared is Brad’s son, my nephew, who by my calculations should be sixteen or seventeen by now. I figure this because he was fourteen when he ran away from home, took the Metro-North into Manhattan, and showed up at my apartment at ten-thirty that night, hungry, out of cash, and simmering with righteous anger at the unspecified offenses