To Draw Hours - William Gatewood (best novels to read for beginners .TXT) 📗

To Draw Hours


As a child, I believed hours looked like clouds, and I would draw them that way. My father would hand me large pads of paper and tell me to “go at it.” He was a tall, powerful man, but his huge hands held the sheets of paper delicately. Often he would lie on his stomach beside me and hold the box of crayons in his hands, elbows propping him up on the hardwood floor. Eventually he stopped there. I drew hours as clocks, as trains, as old people constantly waiting in hospitals: their delicate wrinkled hands in their laps and their feet still against the tiles. I was sixteen when two small men in white lab coats told my mother that my dad was dying of cancer. They shook hands when they did it. I drew hours as death, always hanging open-jawed and skeletal from the rafters of pale green rooms.
I drew my father’s nurse as Mother Mary, sympathetic eyes downcast and loving, small feet in white shoes. But she smelled like blood, and she was silent. On bad days, I spent entire afternoons trying to pull a word out of her. She wouldn’t even smile at me. I found myself grinning like a madman at everyone in the hospital, just hoping to force them to smile back.
I met Amy Kinders on one of the bad days. Her mom was dying in the hospital room next to my father’s, so she spent as much time as I did in the hospital. Amy was a big girl, but she was okay-looking in makeup. She’d walk slowly and deliberately along the green linoleum floors of the cancer wing: high heels making little taps with every step. I would spend long hours imagining her in nothing but those shoes. When I asked if they were comfortable, she looked at me as if I had made a mistake.
“It’s not about how comfortable it feels,” she replied, “It’s about how it looks.” I looked at her round face and imagined her mouth around my dick. A robed man in a wheel chair slowly coughed his way past us, a young girl pushing him. “What are you looking at, anyways?”
“Nothing,” I said.
We would spend a lot of time on the hard-backed chairs between the rooms and talk about anything but dying. Sometimes I’d bring a sketch book and she would tell me to draw all the people she’s ever known. She’d describe them to me in minute detail, carefully going over the beauty marks, the eyebrows, the hairlines. I would always get it wrong, but we did it anyway.
“You’re not getting my father’s looks down at all, Danny.”
“I’m sorry; I’ve never seen him before.”
“I thought that was the point of this game.” She put her hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers firm against the fabric of my t-shirt. “The mystery is half the fun.”
“Why doesn’t your dad ever come to the hospital?”
“Why aren’t you drawing?” She took her hand away and looked down at her lap.
“I don’t know.” I suddenly felt guilty, but I didn’t know why. Amy stood up, and she walked to her mother’s room. She looked at me before she closed the door.
“Do you ever think that maybe it’s this hospital that’s killing people?” she said, closing the door before I could reply. My dad had cancer, Amy’s mom had cancer, and all I could do was picture us together in a janitor’s closet somewhere quiet where we could just get it over with. I felt guilty drawing Amy’s breasts in my sketchbook, the way her shirt pinched them together. I felt guilty about everything.
I stood up, stretched, and went back into my dad’s room. He was laying their quiet and thin-faced. His body was covered in a small blanket, and a pillow from home propped his head up. Hospitals are strange gardens. Tubes ran from him like vines all heading into different trees of machinery which endlessly ticked away his pulse. Sometimes I drew hours as machines, stark and metallic against great fields of trees.
“Hey Dan, good to see you.” His voice was weak, and the words came out between thrusts of air from the funnel around his mouth, but he smiled.
“You just saw me an hour ago, dad,” I said. I felt like I was seeing him in a movie. His grey hair was pulled back, impeccable even as he was fading away. After he had passed, I would picture his hair pulled back tightly, lined across the expanse of his smooth forehead, slowly graying but still a youthful jet black.
“Was it just an hour ago? I’m sorry. Just groggy.”
“I’m always here,” I said. He fell back asleep and I waited for a very long time by myself in his room. I placed my sketch book beside his bed and watched him sleep.
My mother came in after work. I had fallen asleep in the chair across the room, but I woke when I heard her voice. She held my dad’s face in her hands for a long time, whispering, and when she turned to look at me, she was crying. She is the only woman in the world who looked beautiful even when crying. My dad’s nurse had trailed in after my mother, and I stood up. I needed the nurse’s silence. It had become the only thing I could rely on. I smiled at her.
“How are you doing?” I asked her: that old familiar game. She looked at me for a moment, studied my face.
“Fine,” she said. “How are you doing, today?” She smiled at me. I knew my father was going to die. I couldn’t say anything.
“Mom, I need some fresh air. I’m going to go for a walk outside.”
“Okay, honey. Come right back.” She didn’t even look at me. My father didn’t look at me. They were crying. I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t take her hands from my dad’s face.
I left them alone in the room and knocked on Amy’s mom’s door. Amy opened it and put her finger to her lips. The room was windowless. She pulled me in by the collar of my shirt and started kissing me. When she was done, she stepped away from me.
“That’s the first time you’ve been kissed isn’t it?” she asked me. It was. Her mother was covered with only a thin blue sheet; her short legs lay out to either side of her, and her chest wasn’t moving. She was so thin and ugly. Her eyes were closed. I could barely hear her breathing. “I like you, Danny. You’re the only thing that’s kept me sane here,” Amy said. She looked at her mother, “She’ll be asleep for hours and hours. She always is when they give her that stuff.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I said, “Are you sure this is okay?”
Amy fell to her knees in front of me and began unbuttoning my jeans. She made small sounds. I stared at her mother and thought how different she looked from my father. There was no garden of tubes here. The blinds over the window allowed thin lines of light to pass over the room. The scene was so different than that of my father’s room. The doctors were letting Amy’s mom die, and they were keeping my dad alive. I wondered if the nurse was there to take the machinery out today. Amy moved her face back and forth. She stood up.
“I can’t believe we just did that,” she whispered.
“Neither can I,” I said, blank and empty. I had imagined my hands on her thighs and our bodies moving in a private closet somewhere, not here in this morgue with her dying mother lying like a frail ghost over the whole scene, not these almost silent gulping noises and the cold feel of her lips. I stepped away from her. I ran a hand through my hair. My father’s hair. “How do I look? Can you tell a difference?”
“You look like a guy who just got his dick sucked,” Amy said.
“Yeah. I guess so.” I looked at Amy’s mother. That’s what death was supposed to look like. Natural and slow and peaceful. “I’m sorry,” I said. Amy laughed at me. She rolled her eyes and placed her lips against my ear.
“Do you think you could fuck me now?”
“Yes.” Please, anything to forget the long cold tubes and the pillows and all those homey touches that make the whole process more pleasant. I never wanted anything to be pleasant again. Amy’s mom breathed heavy and slow. I wondered what would happen if she woke up. What could she have done? Could she have explained this to me? Would it have made any difference at all? I pictured Amy’s mom waking up, throwing off the sheet and walking naked to us in slow steps through the air like some kind of savior figure. Would she look down with wide eyes and see her daughter like this? How would she feel? I felt responsible. Amy pulled me down to the floor. I focused on my breathing as the back of my head rubbed the floor. The ceiling was painted blue and white, and it circled in my vision for what seemed like hours.
Amy rolled off me and laid on her stomach. She propped herself up on her elbows. I was blanker than I had been in my entire life. I remained there for half an hour, and neither of us said anything. The hard floor pushed up against me, lifting me against gravity. I felt so heavy. I buttoned my jeans and sat up.
“What are we doing, Amy?”
“What’s it look like? I’ve never slept with a virgin before,” she said, “How did it feel? Do you feel more alive than you ever have before? I always do.”
“We should’ve used a condom,” I said. I stood up and walked out of the room. At the doorway, I turned and looked back into the room. I couldn’t look at Amy. Her mother was in exactly the same place that she had been, chest still. Those faint breathing sounds still emanated from her. She hadn’t changed at all. Neither had I. I would draw hours as sex: neither golden nor saintly, but rather two skeletal people naked and moving, vulnerable but removed from themselves: never changing.
My plan: I would go to my father’s room; I would tell him I was sorry, I would tell him I love him. I would hug him and hold him until he passed. He would die, but I would be there and his wife would be there, and we would hold his hands and say “We will miss