
It came to pass that I was asked to assist the executor of a modest last will and testament. The problem was that I had become intimately entangled with the deceased as well as one of the beneficiaries invited to the document’s reading. And despite the fact that I had no legal training whatsoever, the former had insisted upon my inclusion in the process while the latter had no idea of the extent to which I was involved. The worst part was that the deceased wasn’t even deceased yet. He wasn’t dying—he was just fiddling around.
The family’s name was Will. The Wills were in mourning, nominally. They were said to be in mourning. I counted eleven of them and not one was weeping. They had been through a lot, or expected to be going through it soon. Now they were gathered to read another revision of the will ahead of the imminent demise of the soon-to-be deceased, and what more was there to do with his stuff but divvy it up and sort out his debts? What was owed, and who would get it? Palmer Bell, a Gray Flats lawyer who was serving as the executor, had gathered the Wills in a wallpapered room, altogether too floral for this day and age, on the first floor of his downtown office in a building that was once a chocolatier’s before 2008. It was now a room that seemed to belong to an undertaker rather than an attorney. It was decorated with plastic flowers and it smelled of potpourri. Palmer sat behind his desk and fought to keep his spectacles from sliding down his porous nose as he muttered just audibly through the first page of the document. Then he coughed and looked out at the Wills as if he had forgotten they were there.
He looked at me to invite me to speak. I had nothing to say. “Our condolences,” I offered, resisting the urge to shrug. The family watched me stupidly. What was it we were doing? their faces seemed to ask. Condolences for what? Bill was right there. He yawed rightward in his motorized chair, his chin grating against the rough tweed of his sport coat. He looked at me and did not blink at all.
Creighton had been a longtime adjunct in the writing program at St. Bernard’s, where many years ago Bill had settled in as a provost—“briefly” he then thought, before overplaying his hand in an attempt to secure a chancellorship at another university. Having failed to advance in his candidacy, and bearing the brunt of St. Bernard’s president’s resentment for having mistakenly hired a striving flight risk, Bill had been knocked down from his post and forced to pass his days as a lowly tenured professor of humanities in the little college’s interdisciplinary program. To Bill, the failure to advance as an administrator represented the great failure of his career, and the 2/2 load teaching Homer and Shakespeare and Toni Morrison to devout little Catholic freshmen was akin to being sent to the farm, so to speak. For Creighton, the same position represented a brass ring forever out of reach. Every semester he cobbled together five classes in first-year composition and mid-level rhetoric to earn enough money to scrape by for another academic year. Then he powered through prep and grading to save enough time to work on his little articles to bolster a CV that he futilely submitted each spring to the humanities chair in an attempt to be hired on a permanent basis. When Bill stopped chemotherapy and loudly decided to ride out his days without the pain and nausea brought about by what he saw as futility itself, Creighton saw an opportunity—or so he crudely confessed to various colleagues over the next several months. And “confess” is the right word: there was something uncharacteristically sinister about the conjoining of “chemotherapy” and “opportunity” in the mouth of this highly educated, under-employed, almost stereotypically nebbish waif of a man, a boy who had been raised on the victuals of upper-Midwestern politeness and whose turns toward crass guile appeared, therefore, all the more unpleasant. He was tall but did not seem it. He was slim in all the wrong places. We had been dating for five months.
I had taken a class with each of them. Creighton’s was unremarkable. He did not carry himself with any sort of weight. He hardly seemed capable of carrying himself at all. He relied far too much on students to move the discussion along. When he “lectured” it was with too much self-conscious commentary and unnecessary apology for the fact that he was the one doing the talking. He seemed to think it his entire job to let students say things. When they didn’t, he flushed and spoke curtly and behaved petulantly. On the other hand, Bill Will occupied the chair at the head of the rectangle of seminar tables like a wax Boddhisatva in an unvisited rural temple. It did not matter who was there and who was not. He spoke at length, and slowly, with no regard for the gliding second hand of the clock behind him, at which he never glanced. He wore no watch and seemed unaware that his cell phone could tell time. He spoke lowly. He said things that students felt compelled to note in their journals. Things about Kafka and Bram Stoker. Things about verisimilitude and the uncanny. When he spoke, he kept both hands flat on the table in front of him and his torso upright, with his elbows eternally at right angles. He did not turn his head upon his neck—so rarely in fact did he turn his head that his short, elegantly wrinkled neck seemed superfluous. Instead his eyes roamed of their own accord, like those behind the portraits in Scooby Doo cartoons. When he had to move to make eye contact with a student seated too far to his right or left, he shifted in his seat and turned his entire torso so that his head, aligned with his chest, might face them. His neck, again, never seemed to help.
At The Hatch, the terrible shot bar where we drank because they offered the cheapest specials in town, I told Creighton a secret. We were always passing things back and forth like this. Ever since I had started seeing him, it felt like secrecy was the only play. Maybe it wasn’t, but it felt like it. At grad student orientation, Creighton had told me, they were very clear that you are allowed to date students, so long as they are not currently in your class. I was surprised by the school’s laissez-faire attitude in this regard. They were usually attempting to cover their asses in all sorts of ways. Now he was graduated and still hanging on, and we were in a much grayer area. But I enjoyed the secrecy—the fun of sneaking around campus and acting like we weren’t fucking. Something about it. So at the Hatch I let him in on another one. “Don’t get mad,” I said. “Bill has been treating me like a bit of a sounding board. He asks me to walk him back to his office then confides in me the strangest details of his medical problems.”
Creighton clutched at the tiny shot glass in his palm.
“For example, he told me that he can no longer read without his eyesight becoming fuzzy, so he carries a ruler with him and measures out twelve inches at a time and draws a line with a pencil and that, he says, is his finish line. Just read twelve inches at a time. And he told me that there is confusion both in his household and at the department about whether he is permitted to use the same toilet as other people—whether, because of the drugs and what happens after they are expelled from his body, other people can use the same toilet as him.”
“This is the secret you wanted to tell me?”
“That’s not the secret,” I said. “The secret is that he needs a blood transfusion, and he wants you to do it.”
He looked around the bar as if to ask someone else for advice. “Don’t they have blood at the hospital?”
“He said he wants you to do it. ‘Creighton would be willing,’ he told me.” When I said ‘Creighton would be willing’ I started to imitate his raspy voice but gave up on the impression halfway through. I don’t think he even noticed that I did it, but I flushed in embarrassment.
“Why would he tell you that he wants me to do it? Does he know we’re together?” Creighton said that he did not understand.
“It can’t be bad to do this,” I assured him. “It can only be good.”
He looked around the room again and no one offered him any help. “Take, take, take,” he said. He downed his shot and left his glass spinning on the table.
There was something testing the limits of my reality in those days. It was not that the world had become suffused by the surreal, but that people, ordinary people, in their city-bus commutes and their Walmart blue jeans—ordinary people, who surrounded me in their anonymity all my life, had in a span of two years become palpably emotional characters. Things had an edge to them. People had an edge to them. They were angrier: on their freeway drives, or as they pushed their carts through the supermarket, any minor brush with another human being was amplified as a personal slight. They were quicker to despair: a faulty piece of technology could bring on great hysterics or acts of abject begging. They had grown morose: you could find a miserable person anywhere you looked. Their edges were sharper. The lines of these nonporous individuals were more darkly shaded. They were given to shouting and protracted address. When I say the limits of my reality were being tested, I mean this: that everyone seemed heightened in their personalities, yet not a one of them seemed any more the real for it.
It was in these days of unmasking that Bill asked me for the first transfusion of blood. His kidneys were in bad shape, he said, and his prospects, according to his nephrologist, depended as much on luck as on the response of his body to treatment. Imagine someone saying that to you, he said: “luck.” Creighton had refused him outright. He had told me to tell Bill—and here I was acting as a middleperson again—that he could not do it. But I had known even when the topic first came up that if Creighton refused, I would be asked next, and here I was, in Bill’s office, being whispered to by a man I could hardly hear, that my blood was just the ticket. I told him I would think about it, and after several days, during which I said not word one to Creighton, I agreed to donate. I said I would do it. What did I need all that blood for?
We did it in separate rooms at different times. They rubbed me up with alcohol and stuck a needle in me and it wasn’t so different from when I used to donate plasma. Somewhere down the hall on another day in another room, they pumped the blood into Bill.
Near the end of the fall term Creighton received an invitation to interview with a school in Maine called the Nautical College for a position as assistant professor of humanities and social sciences on a permanent, full-time basis. He asked me to help him prepare by being his “sounding board,” listening to his rote answers about pedagogical philosophy and diversity initiatives. I asked him what he knew about the ocean, having been born and raised here in Gray Flats, ND, where the nearest sea was an extinct glacial lake that had covered the plains ten thousand years ago. He brushed aside my quips and said I wasn’t being helpful.
I attended history and English classes in the mornings and helped Creighton at night and did my volunteer hours on the weekends, as usual, but through all of November and the first week of December I maintained a standing appointment at the Center for Nephrology and Dialysis to have my blood sucked out of me and deposited in a plastic bag. I never saw Bill in these medical settings. I only saw him in his office, once a week on Mondays, where he had grown increasingly quieter and almost impossible to hear. It was to the point that my ear practically touched his lips whenever he tried to tell me something.
My friends did not know about either of these “situations.” They were mostly girls I had stayed close with since the first-year dorms, or other students from classes in English or IPH, and they had their own concerns and anxieties. I felt that telling them about Creighton would expose me to harangues about dating ethics and interrogatives about my personal taste in men. But telling them about Bill seemed the far less possible thing. Over lunch, a friend disclosed that a lab assistant had made a pass at her, and it received such a startlingly outraged response from our small friend group that I began to panic, growing hotter in my chair as I attempted to banish the feeling of embarrassment, which only made me redder and warmer in a vicious cycle. After lunch I went to the Center to rid myself of some of that panic-making blood and ran into Bill, who was being wheeled down the hall by an orderly, straight out of the movies, clad in white. I cheerily said hello and thought I sounded like a naïf, and Bill tugged gently at the orderly’s sleeve with a slack hand so that he might whisper something into his ear.
The orderly rolled his eyes and spoke: “He wants me to ask you, ‘Isn’t it familiar?’”
Bill’s eyebrows flickered in consternation, and he pulled the orderly’s sleeve weakly, and the man stooped to him and listened and spoke again. “Correction. ‘If it isn’t my old familiar.’”
“I’m afraid it’s not,” I told him. “In our situation, you’re Lucy—trussed up on the bed with the cowboy and the doctors.”
I’m not sure this could have elicited a laugh from anyone, let alone someone in his state, but it drew another tug on the wrist of the orderly, who yanked his hand away from Bill and said, “Man, come on. I’m not your go-between.”
Later, in what I could only think of as my ‘pumping room,’ as I drowsily scrolled the endless social media posts that my phone mediated, I saw that I had an email from Bill from earlier in the day. It was a delicately phrased request for me to assist his lawyer with the execution of his will. He wrote—almost lost among the variety of flimsy reasons why I should assume the position—that it was a paying gig: the only reason I needed. I sent the automatic reply suggested by outlook (“Thanks, that sounds great!”) and made a fist at the end of the arm with the needle in it.
Yet more, on that same day, I had dinner with Creighton in his one-bedroom apartment, and he unfurled a series of events—with no flair for storytelling—that had left him scrambling in desperation for a sense of self, so I surmised. Word had come back from the Nautical College of Southern Maine that he would not be granted a campus visit, and on the verge of tears he told me that he couldn’t keep at this 4/4, 5/5 composition-classroom life. “It’s too much work for too little pay, no future, and absolutely no status,” he said.
I rubbed his back and told him I was sorry. I said that I myself was only just beginning to understand the various archaic hierarchies of university employment.
“Sometimes I’m jealous of you,” he said. “You could still do a lot of things.”
“Other interviews will come in,” I said.
He told me there was more to tell. “I was feeling low,” he said. “I was feeling low, and in a fit of desperation I went to Piper’s office.” He told me that he had found the chair of IPH at her desk and asked her, as he leaned against her door jamb, if he could ask her a question.
“Yeah?” I offered.
He wanted to ask her about being hired in a more stable position. She sighed and gave him a look of real sympathy and said what she always said, that hiring lines were dictated by the dean’s office and that they were highly unlikely to be able to make him an offer for long-term employment. Rubbing his neck, slouching uncomfortably in the overstuffed psychiatrist’s chair before her desk, he tried a new tack, “What about Bill?”
“What about him?” Piper said incredulously.
“It’s no secret,” Creighton said. “It really isn’t a secret. How much longer can he stay on the faculty before—.”
This had apparently been the entirely wrong approach. She was too professional to reprimand him in any recordable way, he told me, but her face said it all. “I’ll be okay, though,” he said. “I just need to figure it out.”
I rubbed his back again. Through the cutout that separated the kitchen from the living room I could see his balcony window, and beyond that, in the premature darkness of night, a light snow that had begun to fall. Against the black air it looked like abstraction: pale sparks on a tarred canvas. They stirred up and down, left and right. I watched them fall, rise, and shimmer over Creighton’s wiry shoulders, through the cutout and the balcony window, my own thoughts drifting to tomorrow, the next day, the next year: my plans, my possibilities. Creighton sat up and shuttered into sight, breaking my reverie, and asked me if I would move in with him.
I stammered. Was he—I could not tell if he was serious. “I think you’re letting your mood go to your head,” I said.
“Sure,” he whispered. I had to lean against him to hear what he was saying, so close I could almost feel his heart beating through his reedy sternum. “My mood.”
It was the end of term, in December. I had just finished writing my final paper for a history seminar on the fall of the Qing dynasty. The Wills had gathered around a still-living wax statue. His daughter was in attendance with her husband, and several extremely old cousins sat in folding chairs like warding gargoyles, and a child or two paced near the door. His sons had called in via zoom despite living less than a thirty minutes’ drive from the lawyer’s office. They were busy, they had remarked. They had too much to do. Creighton had been invited, I don’t know why. He showed up just as things were beginning. Palmer Bell, a man out of time, was speaking on the professor’s behalf.
Palmer explained that Bill had, “as you know,” made several important changes to his last will and testament. A total inventory of his possessions had been provided to the children. They had been sent via fax. The house on Belmont, in which Bill currently resided, would go to his cousin Margaret as part of a longstanding agreement they had reached decades ago. In the event of Margaret’s demise, the house would be put up for auction by the executor with the proceeds going to the Valley Arts Foundation. The cabin in Beltrami County was to be put up for auction, as well.
As the itemized will was being read, Bill sat completely still in his wheelchair. He seemed not to move at all, not even to blink. Creighton watched him in turn with a curiosity that I would describe as morbid. In fact, he looked something like a sallow undertaker come to oversee the draining of the body’s fluids. Bill, meanwhile, totally static, could only be marked as one of the living by the unpleasantly visible pulse that forced his right index finger to twitch up and down on the arm of his chair to a slow, steady rhythm.
Bill’s personal effects, Palmer explained, including the Tahoe, were to be distributed among the grandchildren in a complex snake-draft thing Bill had diagrammed on a napkin. His stock holdings would be transferred upon death to his cousin Tabitha’s son Brinton, while Bill’s life insurance policy had been adjusted to identify only one beneficiary, his grandson Tugg. Palmer looked over at me and said that Bill finally bequeathed one dollar each to his three children, and nothing to Creighton, whose presence had apparently been requested simply to throw this in his face. The remainder of his cash savings would be divided evenly between the endowed scholarship at his alma mater and, again, the Valley Arts Foundation.
It didn’t bother me, but I was not added to the will.
I think it’s worth mentioning that I was not included in the will.
Before Palmer could continue with his concluding statement, the children began to voice their dissatisfaction. Things had clearly been changed to such a degree as to leave all three heirs emptyhanded but technically satisfied by the law, and the results were what would naturally be expected: frustration, anger, displeasure, disbelief. The two sons were essentially voiceless as their digital protestations clashed unintelligibly, but his daughter could speak and be heard with ease as her elderly relatives watched in silence. “You’re selfish,” she said. “Don’t you have any regard for your children? You are taking away what we are owed.”
Bill Will did not move, but by his stillness a sign was somehow communicated to Palmer, who stood from his desk and smoothed his pleated pants and walked to Bill and bent at the waist until his head, from my vantage, eclipsed Bill’s face entirely. Palmer lingered in front of the figure for several moments before standing upright to face them. “No one here owes anyone anything,” he said.
His daughter begged his pardon, and Palmer replied that he was only acting as a mouthpiece for her father. “That’s all he said? That’s all you have to say?”
Deep in his low-shouldered hunch, Creighton seemed to be performing some complex moral calculus by which he might leverage his invitation to this reading of the will—even if it was a cruel, cheap gesture—into proof of his right to the soon-to-be vacated faculty position. Or so it seemed to me that that’s what he was doing. I could only make out from the low angle of his head that his face was a mask of concentration.
Again with no motion Bill somehow beckoned to Palmer who bent again, and listened again, but this time for only a brief second before standing upright once more. Palmer straightened his buttoned jacket by pulling on the bottom of it. He waited for the laptop to quiet down before speaking again, and he launched into what seemed—I don’t know—a performance: “How have you behaved as a son?” he said. He surveyed the small audience and spoke with soft, low power. “How have you been a daughter? Do you come to me with gifts? Do you seek my counsel and take my advice? Do you succor me in loss, or lift me up in times of need? Have you tarried by my bed as I wheeze through mucus? Have you worried in the car as you circle the hospital parking lot to meet me at the entrance, where an orderly in white opens the door with one hand and wheels me forward with the other? Have you wept over me, have you smiled? Have you yearned with your children’s hands in yours for the memory of your own father’s soft, steady grip? Do you care? Do you love? Do you pine? Do you ache? Do you stir with feelings that you keep and quell, that you imagine—because they cause you such discomfort—must be felt by all, must resound somewhere in the universe with the same resonant note they sound in your own chest? Is that it? You think of your father and see him dying through a video screen and assume that whatever pain is happening in that moment in your own mind must be felt too by your father, must be communicated because you feel it so deeply? No need to voice it, you think, to act. No need to pay a visit, to touch. You speak with friends and counselors. You seek a therapist or a partner in bed, and you tell them, It hurts, I am sad, I am bothered, I am unresolved. They comfort you, and you walk or go for long drives to your houses after work, and after reflection you make your peace, you say, you tell those friends on the phone, I am at peace, I am at peace with it, with my father’s death, it is inevitable, and I am making my peace with it. And you see me on the video screen or you hear my weakening voice on the phone and you make small talk, you dare make small talk. You tell me about the weather? You tell me about the changes? And you laugh, at times, you chuckle with unease, but do you carry your father from chair to couch and cover his shivering limbs with a bedsheet? Do you bake for him, or make his tea? No! No! And now you come to me with your arms open and your hands upturned saying, Father, father, my right, my children. You come to me and ask, ask, ask, but where has been the answer to my asking? Where has been my warmth, my comfort, my gratitude and my grace? Where is my love, my feeling, my resolution? I used to stand above you, when you were children, full feet above you,” Palmer said now, calmly, and as if they were his own words, “and just as easily, I now sink beneath you, into the earth, where I will inevitably seep and leach. You come to me but I am not here. You come to me with what gall, what burning hearts, and though you are here now in this room asking for the waste, the remainder,” he said, “the very blood in my veins is someone else’s, the very voice you hear is not my own.”
What now? I thought in the ensuing silence. This was beyond response. It was theater.
The dire faces of the people waiting in the superannuated room showed confusion. There were stories in the slight space between his daughter’s parted lips, a whole fiction in the stony resolution of the redheaded son on the laptop screen. But I could not keep myself from looking at Creighton, who in his too-large blazer had assumed good posture and sat up to watch Bill the way a birder might pause in observation of some movement in the canopies above. He was totally still, and though Bill was less in command of his own body than ever, I could swear that he too perked up to take in the maudlin effects of Palmer’s antediluvian rant. The lawyer had by now resumed his seat and resorted to smoothing his sport coat, a behavior that seemed habitual and ingrained, and the loose agglomeration of relatives stirred quietly with the sense that perhaps the proceedings were indeed unceremoniously come to an end. Palmer shot me a look that said, gently, Dismiss them from my office, and for some reason, despite the ad hoc nature of my position, I hopped to and began to usher the seated relatives out row by row like a Lutheran volunteer. All the while Creighton had not moved. His birding posture made it appear as if he had gone into a strange sort of shock, not stymied into lank stupor but spurred into sudden temerity, a backbone materializing in the slack jelly of his spinal cavity.
With the deathly space nearly cleared of bodies, Palmer began pointlessly shuffling random papers on top of his desk while Creighton, now alone among the funerary foldout chairs, stood and extended his rangy frame to its full height. I watched from the doorway to the hall, my hand still holding the lock stile, as he plodded mechanically from the second row to the outer aisle to the front of the room where Bill sat unmoving and Palmer, that fossil, continued sliding pieces of paper from point to point on his desktop with no apparent purpose. He slid a sheaf of typewritten documents to the rightmost side of the desk until they nearly tipped over the edge; he removed a single blank sheet from a jumbled pile and looked blankly at both sides before slipping it beneath his outbox.
His posture excellent, Creighton positioned himself inches from Bill’s immobile form. With grace, he dropped to one knee and placed a hand on the arm of the wheelchair. I listened with intent but heard only a murmur. I would later ask Creighton what he had said to Bill in that moment but I would never find out: an argument would follow, and eventually I would confess the whole thing: not only my participation in the blood transfusions that Creighton had refused, but the old man’s confidence in me, my happy status as his confidante, my preference for him as an instructor, which baffled Creighton to the extent that he had to pull his car over to the side of the road and smack the steering wheel with the flat of his palm, and more: my uncertainty about whether we should be together at all, the excitement of secrecy now waning, the half-illicit status of things as they stood in the first place, and hovering over it all—or perhaps seeping beneath it—the sense that I was young, pulsing with life, my future still then a potential ahead of me and not a charted march, and Creighton already stuck on the rails of a carnival ride that only mocked and spooked with no real juice to it. In Palmer Bell’s office, Creighton murmured into Bill’s downy ear something that I could not hear from my post by the door. Palmer continued to shuffle papers on his desk, first from one side, then—the same piece!—to the other, like a whirring mechanical man. For the first time since freshman year I felt like I might white out and faint. In a moment Creighton was standing again, some unreadably mixed expression on his face, and in another moment he was past me, in the hall, and moving for the exit—and I pursued him, leaving the antiquated men to their potpourri and their motions.
Time went by. Nothing seemed to change as a result of what had happened. Then one day after a particularly heavy snowfall, Creighton was driving his little hybrid car down Washington on the way to the grocery store when he came to a light and saw, through his windshield, the oversized white Tahoe that was usually parked in Bill’s unshoveled driveway. The Tahoe was right across from him. He could just see through the Tahoe’s windshield as they both waited for the light to change. It was Bill Will driving. It was Bill Will behind the wheel.
Creighton stared in disbelief as cars passed between them, going left and right. It was Bill Will, and he was driving. He was out and about. His head seemed bigger, and jagged veins had become visible in his forehead. His neck was large. It rose out from between his shoulders like a volcano. At its top he leered. He grimaced with a life-gripping grin and waited for the light to change. His eyes were virtually bulging. And his shoulders too appeared rounder, firmer, broader, and higher. He was altogether plump. He seemed about to burst with life. The cars passed between their vehicles going left and right. Bill was behind the wheel and he was larger than ever. You could almost see the red lines pulsating in the whites of his eyes.
The green left-turn arrow blinked on, and the Tahoe veered just in front of Creighton’s little car. This oversized Tahoe, which crushed the ice violently beneath it, veered with life past Creighton and his little car. Bill throbbed behind the wheel as he maneuvered the Tahoe leftward. He vibrated with liquids. He maneuvered the vehicle expertly. He throbbed and quivered, and the vehicle lurched forward with the deafening roar of machine-injected gasoline.
Joshua Brorby was born and raised in rural North Dakota. He holds a PhD in nineteenth-century English literature and has taught at institutions in St. Louis; Columbia, MO; Zhuhai, China; and Atlanta, where he currently resides. This story marks his fiction debut.
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