The day before I left for Boston, my father and I sat together on his bed. It was January 2010, late afternoon in California, rainy outside, a good stretch for him. We were talking about his poems.
We looked through drafts that my mother or brother had transcribed for him on notebook paper. He held a page in his shaking hands, although he couldn’t read, his vision doubling, perhaps tripling, if you counted the hallucinations.
I read another in the small stack on the plastic table. The Great Gambler. “God the Gambler,” my father called it before we found the right page.
His hands and feet wove through the air. The table joggled, spilling my coffee into its saucer.
He was oblivious, sightless, his Parkinson’s-afflicted mind turned to whatever he thought he saw—or was trying so very hard to see—on the page in his hands. He was cold; I helped him put a scarf around his neck. Then he was sweaty, hot and cold at the same time, another Parkinsonian symptom.
He’d lost the sense of touch in his fingertips, he told me. He could pick up a paper towel, but not a Kleenex. A notebook page fell somewhere in between, but I thought that what he really held was a memory of writing, of waking up late at night and putting down fevered words in his tiny, cramped script.
He had still been able to do that a year ago. Even two months before, we’d discussed line breaks and meter, words he might like to change.
He was a poet. It took the blow of severe illness for my father to do the writing he’d always longed to do, and for awhile his analytical sharpness meshed with the hallucinatory overflow brought on by drugs. Over the past two years, I had typed in many of his poems on my computer. I had produced a book for him, an improbable wonder amid his disintegration.
But now the hallucinations were taking over. As I went through his files that January afternoon, as I transcribed poems on fresh pages in one lemon-yellow notebook—his words, “my lemon-yellow notebook”—he told me in his professorial tone about the methane gas leaking from the heater vents.
“Just hear me out,” he said. “What if there’s a 5 percent chance I’m right?”
There was no chance, I thought, trying to school my expression. He told me again about the National Geographic special he saw about a volcano in Africa, which had vented methane, which had created a pool of dead air into which gazelles wandered by accident, then dropped dead in their tracks.
He grasped for words he couldn’t remember, saying he’d been forced to recall his high school chemistry, trying to explain carbon monoxide—”C…damn…I…it is a chemical.”
He knew this was an hallucination, he said. He could observe himself spinning paranoid fantasies. Yet he woke up gasping in the darkness, terrified. He wanted a rational explanation for why he couldn’t breathe, for why his mind wouldn’t work. If only he were surrounded by dead air.
“I get so anxious,” he said.
My mother and brother had told me he sometimes staggers out of bed late at night. He would open all the windows or the front door. He worried my brother, the caregiver Ana.
“Damn.” My father turned aside. “I can see the look in your eyes.”
I touched his arm. “Sometimes the simplest explanation is best.”
“Occam’s Razor. Your brother has picked up that language very well.”
“You’re very ill.”
“These…” He looked at me then. “Halloduc…hallodin…what was that word?”
“Hallucinations,” I said.
“Hallucinations. That’s right. I know that. But what if I’m right?”
He could have been. Not about methane leaks or his caregiver being a ringleader of a drug cartel or the pockets of dead air he kept stumbling through or the shadow people he saw against the wall. But what if all truth is self-constructed, self-fabricated, self-imposed? I saw it then, sitting beside his shaking body on the bed, my father’s huge and final effort.
He was letting go, too, allowing me to rub down his chest when he was clammy, to help him put on his slippers, to comb his hair, to tell his story.
He said he trusts me as an editor. He told me to take these poems and break the lines where I saw fit, to add the right words.
He was a poet.
I considered making changes to “God the Gambler,” taking out his exclamation points. I wanted to ask are you sure this is what you think, Dad, has it really come to this? But I didn’t.
It was his truth. It was real, far more real than any happy ending I could construct.
*****
The Great Gambler
By James L. Nichols
I think now is the time to make this call.
I’m going to cash in my chips, I only wish
My stack did not look so small!
Perhaps in that Greater Game we all
Must play I could make a bigger haul.
But wait a minute! Couldn’t it be that some
Of us are just meant to be losers after all?
Where is the Great Gambler who will make
That call?
Martha Nichols | Contributor
Martha Nichols is Editor in Chief of Talking Writing, a new online literary magazine that seeks new submissions and a lively community of writers and readers. A long-time journalist and freelance writer, Martha has published in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Youth Today; Salon; and other journals. A former editor at Harvard Business Review, she is currently a contributing editor and blog manager at the Women’s Review of Books. Martha teaches in the journalism program at the Harvard University Extension School. Come find her at Athena’s Head, her website and personal blog; she also cross-posts on Open Salon.
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