Free A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims Page B

elsewhere as here his diet consisted of whatever was worst for him, his dinners spent at fried-chicken chains and his breakfasts, if he bothered to eat breakfast at all, at McDonald’s. Oh, and he smoked too, about a pack a day. So one night after handling a jackhammer all afternoon Mr. Mazoch suffered that seized-up pain in his sternum and vomited gray spume into the shower. Matt, in college and living on campus at that point, wasn’t there when it happened. It was only much later in the night that he received a call from the hospital, where Mr. Mazoch had managed (while undergoing myocardial infarction! while his great heart fibrillated!) to drive himself.
    His father had had a heart attack, Matt was told, and was being operated on as they spoke. A quadruple bypass. Could he come to the hospital? He could. I know now what he saw on arrival—the treetop angiogram of Mr. Mazoch’s X-rayed veins—but at the time all he mentioned of his visit to the hospital was what the cardiologist had told him: (1) that it had been ‘this close’—accompanied by a hair’s breadth of air between two demonstrating fingers—that if Mr. Mazoch had arrived ‘even ten minutes later’ he’d be dead; and (2) that when asked for his son’s cell number Mr. Mazoch had instructed them to tell the boy, not that he’d be okay or that there was no need
to worry, but that he loved him, last-words words, just that he loved him and nothing else. Matt’s tone spiked when he related these two things, in his voice a little anger flashed like mica. 31 And it was here that I backed off from what struck me as a sore subject. Today, when he remarks the birch’s resemblance to the angiogram, I can hear the slightest echo of that anger, and so I refrain—for the time being—from asking him what Rachel asked me to. I wonder how long he has been brooding over this association: whether the shadow could have reminded even earlier of the heart attack (of all the excesses that led up to it: the obesity and the greed and the sheer ignorant gourmandism), and whether it was out of anger that Matt attacked the double doors. At this thought I imagine him battering the façade itself (swinging that bat like an ax into the shadow, as if chopping into the trunk of the tree of the veins of his father’s heart), and at this thought I imagine him battering Mr. Mazoch, beating on his undead body, just as Rachel fears.

    Mazoch is finished with his apple. He has eaten the entirety of the core with grim efficiency, and I watch as he spits the dark seeds out of the driver-side window, where they patter onto the gravel of the parking lot. How far from the tree the fruit falls, it occurs to me! The father ashes a cigarette onto the gravel, the son spits out apple seeds. Is this what the heart attack meant to Matt, in the end? A memento mori, spurring him to eat an apple a day? Was Mr. Mazoch’s incised chest, bloated and vulnerable on the operating table, Matt’s own archaic torso of Apollo, exhorting him to change his life? Probably not. Matt, with his wrestler’s build and workout regimen, has likely been eating an apple a day for ages, and he definitely didn’t need his father’s brush with death to scare him off Snickers bars and greasy hamburgers. If anything, Mr. Mazoch’s heart attack would have only confirmed Matt in his habits. But I’d still be willing to bet that those habits—the bookishness no less than the bodybuilding—were formed in direct contradistinction to Mr. Mazoch. That is, I’d be willing to bet that Matt styled himself consciously as his father’s opposite.
    It can’t be an accident that the fruit has fallen as far off as it has. Indeed, it’s as if Matt’s entire life has been engaged in this one Sisyphean task: to roll the fruit as far uphill from the tree as possible. That Mr. Mazoch was a college dropout and plumber, Matt