The Disinherited by Matt Cohen

said only ten o’clock. Richard lay still in the bed, the sheet folded over him exactly and his right hand draped carelessly on the back of his left. Erik wondered how long it would take his father to die, whether it would happen easily and passively one night in his sleep or whether he would have to be prolonged by esoteric mutilations. Or possibly this was just a temporary setbackfor the body and it would endure finally, without reason or shape, like the woman in the hall or the cars scattered carelessly like wheelchairs in the empty courtyard.
    The girl in the school house had told him that death was nothing special.
    “When you’re young, life is too much for you and you try to push it away.”
    “And?”
    “When you’re old, there’s less to push away.” They were standing in the middle of the room, fitting the tubes of paint to the machine as it was necessary. They had covered the walls and the floor of the room with paper and were running the machine at full speed. “His idea was to perfect the machine and then to go around to institutions offering to do murals. You could do a gymnasium in a few hours and even something like an office building in a couple of weeks.” The arms of the machine wheeled about the room, spraying thin stripes of paint in long curved arcs. “You see here,” she said, grabbing one of the arms and switching off its connection to the motor. “You can set it any way you want.” She turned the nozzle and let it go again. It sputtered paints in small round dots. Now that they had made love and were covered with paint, he had lost his fear of her. They were wearing long, knee-length laboratory coats, and with the yellow and red paint splattered finely over her, she looked more like a field of wildflowers than a rose, harmless and transient. She was smoking a cigarette and demonstrating the details of the invention. “Of course there were still a few problems to be worked out,” she said. “He hated being young. He always said that he was just waiting for time to pass, to be sixty years old, or even older, like the man we used to visit here, so old there was only enough energy to cut wood and go for a walk every day.”
    “People don’t know what to do with themselves,” Erik said. He sprayed a white circle on her chest.
    “You’d think it would be hard to clean,” she said. “But it isn’t. All the tubes connect to one central place with plastic piping and you just hook them up to a bottle of turpentine.”
    “You can’t drink it.”
    “Some people do.”
    “Pat Frank drank some turpentine once. He was sick for a week.”
    His watch said only ten o’clock. Richard was going through his magazine, turning each page slowly. Like the people on the stretcher he seemed under control, pleased to slide easily and gratefully through his last time. In the car Miranda had summarized the available information, diabetes and a heart condition; they didn’t know exactly what had happened in the field. It was serious but not hopeless. They would drive to the hospital and sit, unobtrusive and cheerful, in a room and wait for him to live or die. Then they would go home. Richard Thomas would not be allowed to smoke cigarettes.
    “We’re going to do the shopping,” Brian announced. “We’ll be back by noon.”
    “You can have a box of chocolates,” Nancy said. Her short-cropped hair and slightly snubbed features made her seem turned-in and sullen, like a self-explanatory cartoon. Her fingers were short and stubby and her nails were bitten down to the quick so her hands looked like they must belong to a nervous child.
    “No chocolates for him,” Miranda said. “Nothing with sugar. You could get him some of those special candy bars though, they’re marked.”
    “We’ll be back by noon,” Brian said again. Miranda looked at him, raised her eyebrows in protest of the repetition, and then picked up a magazine. Richard had leaned back and closed his eyes. Erik went into the