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  • Other People
  • Tom Lakin (bio)

Winner of the Gail B. Crump Prize in Experimental Fiction

Suppose you are about to die. Suppose you're lying on your back, say, in a makeshift hospital bed on loan from a nearby hospice center, and you've got one arm crooked behind your hairless head, maybe, and an equally hairless leg jutting out from beneath a blanket and hanging over the edge of the mechanical bed, and this bare leg is cold, bone cold, exposed as it is to the cold brown air of the shuttered room in which you lie, curled in on yourself in a bed whose aluminum parts are able to be folded if need be from their current upright position into the flat rigid form of a stretcher—a fact that has not escaped you, probably—and yet, torture you though it may, this arthroscopic chill, you possess neither the strength nor the will to do anything about it—even the thought of reaching for the blanket (though your thoughts are by this point mostly fuzzy and out of focus) brings a fresh ache to your deteriorating spine—and so instead you simply lie there quietly, perhaps watching the motes that twirl and wheel in the ribbon of wan light slanting in between the shutters, and you think about your cold leg, and you breathe cold shallow breaths, and at last you drift hazily off, listening with closed eyes to the faint patter of your heart, your fingers, your feet, and during these brief moments of relative peace very probably you wonder:

Why.

Why has this happened?

How has this happened?

Is it a punishment of some kind? The karmic consequence of some unconfessed sin? Some terrible thought you once had? Something you said?

Or something simpler, maybe. Something you ate? Or drank? Tumblers of gin at tailgates, scotch at the club? The eggnog each year at Christmas?

Why is your leg so unbearably cold?

Why can't you stop this thing from happening?

When, exactly—at which precise moment on which exact day—will you die?

And then what will happen?

BUT OF COURSE that's not you, there in the bed. That's Roger Manley, fifty-three years old, stage four pancreatic cancer, mere minutes from death. You are sitting on the old wingback chair across the room from him, arms crossed, one blue-jeaned leg folded beneath the other, a bright mindless magazine—US Weekly or something—falling open on your lap. You've been sitting there in that same spot for, like, a week now, it seems, reading or thinking or sleeping even, when you can, snoring softly into tangles of your blonde hair, eyes snapping open with each of the dying man's fitful, ragged breaths. There are some things you want to say to your father before he dies. You want to tell him, for instance, that you never liked golf. Never. Not even a little. And all those times he made you play when you were just a kid, hauled you off to lessons at the club or stuck you in the backyard with a [End Page 97] sawed-off nine-iron and a bag of plastic balls, when inevitably each time you'd wind up back home in tears, stamping your little golf-spiked foot and begging to be allowed to give it up: please, Dad, can't I please quit? My friends are playing at Rebecca's or just left for the mall or are over at Tina's getting ready for the dance, and I'd really like to be with them, you know, just, like, this one time? And he would peer down at you through his tortoiseshell glasses or over the gray horizon of the Wall Street Journal and say, "Why, Lisa, you don't want to be a quitter, do you? A quitter? No, no. Manleys do not quit, we are not quitters. However we are golfers, and I think you'll find you're going to be one too, one day, and in fact I'm pretty sure you're going to thank me for all this later on, when you're out there at...

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