Free God's Gym by John Edgar Wideman Page B

accomplishment in life was maintaining a fierce independence winds up on display, naked, paddling around in his own shit. Cruel years of pointless hanging on. Years the son does not have now, thus different now, on his mind daily, monopolizing the little time, his only time remaining.
    The father so present dying, so absent alive. For years, decades, starting even before his daddy had passed him to his grandmothers and aunts to raise, they'd been losing touch, becoming two men who see each other infrequently, not exactly strangers, more like longstanding acquaintances who hook up now and then in restaurants or bars, talk ball games, politics, an easy, no-strings-attached fondness. They observe an almost courtly politeness and restraint, as if questions about the other's personal life would be not only prying but breaking the rules, a kind of betrayal even, an admission of desiring more than the other so far had given and thus a rebuke, whiny dissatisfaction, after all these years, with an arrangement formed by mutual consent that had seemed to serve them both well enough.
    Since he wasn't God and couldn't simply will his father's death and be done with it, killing his father necessitated tending to messy details. A weapon, for instance. And words, his unreliable weapon of choice, wouldn't suffice in this crisis, either. Wouldn't buy more time. Or finish his father's time. Yet a word,
hemlock,
popped into his mind, clarified options. A quick, lethal does of poison no doubt the most efficient, practical
means of accomplishing the dirty work. Hemlock shorthand for his plan, code word for whatever poison he might procure. Hemlock certainly sounded nicer than strychnine, anthrax, arsenic, cyanide, cyclone B—poisons he associated with murder mysteries, pest exterminators, concentration camps. After repeating the word to himself many times, it took on a life of its own: Hemlock, a cute, sleepy-eyed little turtle. Hemlock finally because it reminded him of the painting.
    During its first year, when the veterans' hospital was overstaffed and underused, only a small group of patients occupied the locked-down seventh-floor ward, and walking the brand-new halls with his father, he'd been reassured without realizing it by an illusion of spaciousness and tranquillity some clever architect had contrived with high ceilings, tall windows, gleaming floor tiles, unadorned planes of wall like a gallery stripped for the next exhibition. Almost as if he strolled with his father through that familiar classic painting, the one whose tide he couldn't recall then or now,
The Academy of So-and-so at Somewhere,
he thinks, remembering a slide from a college survey of art, philosophers in togas, their elegant postures, serious demeanors, a marble dome, sky-roofed arcades, a scene, said the voiceover, embodying intricate thought, calm speculation, the slow, careful accumulation of beads of truth on invisible threads connecting Socrates to Plato, Plato to Aristotle, Aristotle to Virgil or Dante or the pope, whoever these bearded, antique figures populating the painting were supposed to depict, wherever the idyllic version of Greece or Rome was supposed to exist, living and dead in earnest conversation—maybe it's heaven, the strollers immortals, maybe he had needed to flee that far away from the nearly empty, spic-and-span scrubbed corridors of the seventh-floor ward to feel what he felt then and wishes he could feel again: the peace, false or not, of those first walks now that everything has changed, very aware now, mainly because it's missing and irretrievable, of the comforting illusion
he'd once enjoyed, the sense of order and safety impossible today beside his father in a traffic jam of shambling, drugged, dull-eyed, muttering men in aqua pajamas, father and son slowly shuffling back and forth along corridors where windows begin above their shoulders and ascend to the top of high off-white walls, giant glass panels cloning light but allowing