Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 11

Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Is it possible in his situation to say life is good?

Chapter 11

What Clifford didn’t expect today was a visit from his son. He and Jeremy had their stark differences, just as Clifford had contended with his father. There was no getting along between the generations of male Klovises. Clifford was basking in the sun not long after Myra’s exit when he heard an electric whine, followed by a voice behind him:

“Catching some rays, I think was the slang in your day,” Jeremy quipped.

Jeremy was in his own wheelchair, an electric one, and Clifford thought it grossly unfair that the boy had arrived unannounced. Jeremy was hardly a boy — twenty-eight by his father’s dim reckoning.

Myra should have prepared me.

“They say you can’t speak,” Jeremy said. “And it’s a damn shame because I’m sure you’ve got a lecture for me all pent up in there somewhere.” And he laughed.

As Myra suspected and Jeremy dared hope, he believed his father understood what was going on around him. Based on clinical tests, Christensen — and perhaps the rest of his colleagues — seemed to think Clifford was a dim bulb. But Myra sincerely wanted Clifford to comprehend her advice.

Jeremy wanted — he needed — his father to listen and understand. Over the years, their conversations had been rare, and even then mostly trivial. An introvert himself, the son didn’t have any confidants. At work, his colleagues tended to be even more withdrawn than he was. He hadn’t given up on finding a girlfriend who could overlook his disabilities, and he’d considered hooking up with someone who was similarly impaired, but his love life had been at a standstill for years. His mother would have been eager to give him advice and counsel on any topic he might bring to her, but, to Jeremy, mothering was smothering, and he’d had too much of Eleanor’s worrying and fretting, especially after his accident. Besides, these days she was off on another continent doing a professional job of worrying and fretting about other disadvantaged children.

Jeremy went on, “I was cleaning out your place. It’s not like you’ll be going back there. Oh, and don’t worry about your privacy. My helper was a guy from the street corner who spoke only Spanish, of which I can speak next to none. Ten bucks an hour, and we won’t tell the government. I pointed and he lifted. Your secrets, if you had any, are safe.

“I can’t believe the amount of junk people accumulate over their lifetimes. It’s ridiculous. You go into some antique store, and that stuff is priced like it’s museum artifacts. But you try to unload any of your shit yourself, and nobody wants it. Nobody wants your glitzy stuff! It’s a life lesson, my man.

“You had that executive desk. Was it granddad’s? Solid walnut, nineteen twenties, hand-carved. Big as a fucking subcompact car. Anyhow, I go looking on eBay, and I see other stuff, quite similar actually, and the replicas are going for, like, three grand. So, I think — hello! — maybe we can actually score on this one. I list it, and no takers. A few watchers but — no — fucking — takers. Then I relist it on auction — at a starting price of ninety-nine bucks! Just one bid, any bid, and it’s sold for a laughable price! I’m thinking, At least somebody’s going to pay the freight to take it out of our lives. But no takers! Not one! And here it is something you’ll see on some movie set tomorrow because there aren’t many of them — and who wants to make more? So somebody scored, and maybe they peddled it to the prop guys at the studio, but such was not our luck.

“And the rest of your old stuff? Mountains of it! Files and books and files and — LPs? Are you kidding me? — junk. I called the junk guys, and they charged me half a grand — half a truckload — to haul it all away. Best day of my life, frankly. No more old musty shit to worry about. You, I doubt you’re worried, but just so you know, I did you a favor. A big favor.”

Read more