There's Something I Want You to Do

“Another word for greed. Go ask Corinne,” I tell him. “She’s upstairs, watching TV. She doesn’t like it, either. She sounds like you.”

“I still hate her,” he says. “I can’t talk to her yet. It’s my policy. She just wasn’t—”

“I know, I know,” I say. “The policy is understandable. You’ll just have to give it up eventually, sweetie.”

“You can’t tell me that it’s no biggie because it was a biggie. If that wasn’t a biggie, leaving my dad and you to take care of me, then nothing is big, you know?”

“Yes,” I say. “I understand. For now.”

“Jeremy,” Astrid pipes up from the stove, “where’s your father?”

“Him? He’s out in the garage. He’s working on the truck or something. I heard him drop his wrench and swear a minute ago. There are too many of them in the house. That’s what he said before he went out there. He’s been saying it.”

“Too many what?” Astrid asks.

“Women,” I say, because I know Wesley and how he thinks. “We confuse him.”

—

I can see it all, and I know exactly what will happen. I have second-sight, which I got from my own father, who foresaw his death. He saw an albino deer cross the road in front of his car while he was on vacation, and he turned to my mother and said, “Something will happen to me,” and something did. A stroke took him a week later, and no one was surprised.

They’ll do surgery on me and give me the usual chemo and radiation. I’ll be okay for a while, but then it will come back in other locations in my body. I won’t have too much time then. The point is not to be morbid but to meet the end of life with celebration. This is what I want to say: the thought of dying is a liberation for me. It frees us from the accumulations.

This is where Corinne comes in. I have it all planned out. I will say to her, “There’s something I want you to do. I want you to accompany me on this journey as far as you can. You can’t go all the way, but you can keep me company part of the way.” She’ll agree to this. As long as I can walk, Corinne will take me around to the parks and the lakes. We’ll go to the Lake Harriet rose garden, and together we’ll identify those roses — floribunda! hybrid tea! — and then we’ll stroll into the Roberts Bird Sanctuary nearby. I know most of the birds over there: there’s a nest of great horned owls, with a couple of owlets growing up and eating whatever the mama owl brings to them, including, I once saw, a crow. I’ve seen warblers and egrets and herons, very dignified creatures, though comical. We’ll see the standard-issue birds, the robins, chickadees, blue jays, and cardinals, birds of that ilk.

She’ll take me over to the Lake Harriet Band Shell, where on warm summer nights the Lake Harriet Orchestra (there is one) will play show tunes, and I’ll sit there in my wheelchair tapping along with “On the Street Where You Live.”

We’ll go down to the Mississippi, and we’ll walk, or I’ll be wheeled, along the pathways near the falls where the mills once were. I’ll hear the guides saying that Minneapolis has a thriving industry in prosthetic medicine because so many industrial accidents occurred here years ago thanks to the machinery built for grinding, lost arms and so on, chewed up in the manufacturing process.

We’ll be out on the Stone Arch Bridge, and Corinne will be absented in her usual way, ideas batting around her head, all the bowling pins up there scattered and in a mess. “I just don’t have any filters,” she’ll say. “Any thought seems to be welcome in my brain at any time, day or night.”

“Yes,” I’ll agree. I’ll see the Pillsbury A Mill from here. What a comfort these old structures will be to us, still standing, their bright gray brick almost indestructible. Spray from the Falls of St. Anthony, named by Father Hennepin himself, will lightly touch my face, and I’ll feel a sudden stab of pain in my body, but it won’t matter anymore. Pain is the price of admission to the next world. Here will come a boy on a skateboard talking on his cell phone, and behind him, his girlfriend, also on a skateboard (pink, this time), texting as she goes. They’ll look just born, those two, out of the eggshell yesterday.

“Jeremy has one of those,” Corinne will say, meaning the skateboard.

“He’s quite the expert.”

A fat man in flip-flops will pass by us. He’ll be carrying several helium balloons, though I don’t think they’ll be for sale. On the other side of the bridge in Father Hennepin park, we’ll rest under a maple tree. A single leaf will fall into my lap.

Here. I place it before you.