White Manna

We’re in Jersey because my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer that keeps spreading from tumor to tumor, throat to spine to every bone, and though the diagnosis is three to eight months left to live, he is signing up for every treatment, getting targeted radiation in Montvale and bloodwork in Ridgewood and chemo in Hackensack. Three nights ago, he had a small stroke because the chemo makes your blood thick somehow, so now he can barely move. But he’s optimistic. He wants to be a cancer survivor and be back at work in a month or so. I don’t think he’ll be on the planet in a month or so, but I’m the son-in-law, so I keep my trap shut and stay out of the way except to kiss my wife when she cries at night and hold her hand as I listen to her complain about her father refusing this or demanding that. Occasionally I make myself useful helping him move around, supervising him as he takes his laps in a walker around the living room, or groans in agony trying to bend into the passenger side of their car on a chemo trip, or slowly, with visible trembling strain, back down the stairs to the basement for the rare shower. 

In the mornings we live that good Jersey life. Get banging bagels at 5:30 in the morning. Eat Taylor ham, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches oozing ketchup on the porch and listen to the landscapers in the burbs unload their mulch or mowers. Listen to the reassuring background thrum of life, LIFE, goddammit, as the highway heats up, filling with that good Garden State buzz of rolling tires and squeaking brake pads and engines humming like a cliched Springsteen song. 

My mother-in-law’s yells interrupt this peaceful interlude and my wife attends while I eat the remnants of her bagel and she returns and says, “mom threw her back out trying to help my dad out of bed. We need you to take him to radiation.” Then she turns to watch the landscaper across the street smoke a cigarette over a pile of dark mulch and she’s crying but stoically because she’s a tough cookie this one, one hard piece of biscotti, and I say, “whatever you need,” because I want to be useful though her father never liked me—understandably, mind you, we’re very different. He’s a go-getter, likes to be in charge, to be struggling against something or someone and to win that battle of wills, while I’m not much interested in battles or struggles and I don’t make much money. Which is a disappointment I think a father is entitled to because who wouldn’t want their daughter to be provided for in this dangerous world teeming with endless expenses? But I love her and that has to count for something.

“He wants to go now,” she says.

“When’s his appointment?”

Now the mulch guy is heaping the stuff into a wheelbarrow by the shovel load. “Later. But he wants to go now so just take him. We need a break.”

It takes about an hour to get him medicated with the various types of morphine he needs to start the day and to get him dressed and down the stairs and into the car. I adjust the rearview mirror for what feels like an hour as he hums in pain—he’s taken to humming as a way to hide the groans of pain but it just makes everyone around him feel like they’re trapped in his anguished musical. We wave to my wife, to his daughter, on the porch, back out past the mulch man doing his mulch work, and are off. 

“Hackensack, right?”

Hum, hum. “The bakery there,” he says, hum, hum, “not the hospital.”

“You’re hungry?” I’m surprised because he hasn’t had much of an appetite and turned down the breakfast sandwich I’d left cooling on the kitchen counter in all its salty, eggy goodness. 

“B&W Bakery. Plug it in.”

I put it into Google Maps and we drive the thirty minutes over to Hackensack listening to the algorithm’s robotic instructions mispronouncing streets and towns and to my father-in-law’s cancer speaking in those painful hums. 

Off the highway, the road is pitted and each bump elicits a whine from my passenger which I take as rebuke of my driving skills and my husband skills but the bakery is thankfully close. 

“Get me the crumb cake,” he says. 

Inside, the place is packed. The crumb cake seems to be the draw. They have sheets of it with the thickest crumb I’ve ever seen, three inches at least, more crumb than cake. I bring one sheet to him in the car and with a trembling hand he tears off one corner and bites it—chews isn’t the right word, chews sounds too vigorous—gums, maybe? The sugar and crumb dust coat his legs and arms and for a second, I don’t see him beside me but the urn he’ll soon fill. 

“Eat some,” he orders, his voice weak but still commanding.

I take a bite and it’s good, better than good. Fucking Jersey.

“The best crumb cake you’ve ever had, right?”

I nod because it probably is but also because yes seems to be the only answer he’ll accept. “To the hospital, then?” I ask.

“Sandwiches. Cosmo’s Salumeria. Plug it in.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t—”

“Plug it in.”

I look at the mostly uneaten crumb cake but recall my wife on the porch and that his appointment isn’t until noon so there’s time and this could be his last meal or his second to last and probably the last time he’ll have this crumb cake or whatever the salumeria is serving up so I plug it in. It’s down the block. We arrive and he tells me to order an Italian hero. I go in and the place is just starting up and has huge cans of olive oil stacked on one wall and a glass case full of all sorts of Italian goodies, mortadella, fresh mozzarella, soppressata, prosciutto, and on and on. I bring him the Italian hero and he says, “eat some,” so I take a bite and it’s incredible, balsamic vinegar soaking into a crusty semolina bread, spicy capicola, fatty genoa salami, roasted peppers—before I know it, I’ve eaten half.

“I told you.”

I nod but notice that he’s barely touched his. “You must be stuffed. Ready to head to the hospital?”

He hums, grimaces, rests his head against the window, and finally manages to say, “White Manna.”

“What?”

“Plug it in.”

I don’t know what he’s referring to, some sort of racist heaven or what, but I plug it in and it turns out to be a burger spot down the road. “You want burgers? Now?” It’s about ten in the morning and they’re open but he hasn’t eaten any of this other stuff and I’m anxious to get him settled at the hospital, to not fuck this up. 

“Drive,” he says. 

We drive and the road is pitted and the humming intensifies into shrill whimpers and we arrive at this little steel and glass shack right off the Hackensack River and he says, “order me two doubles with cheese and onions.” I go in and the place reeks of meat and grease like I’m standing right on the griddle. The Manna turns out to be these tiny little smash burgers on potato rolls like fancy White Castle sliders. The counter is full, raucous even, despite being too early for lunch. I look through the greasy window at the car with my father-in-law huddled in pain over a crumb cake and a third of an Italian hero. Minutes later I bring him a paper plate with his order and he says, “not here.”

“You want to take them to the hospital?”

“The river,” he says. 

“The river?”

He looks out the window, pointing with his head to some polluted brown trickle running behind the shrubs at the edge of the parking lot. “I want to eat the burgers by the river. Get off your ass and help me out of the car.”

I put the burgers on the hood and go around to his side and ease him out as best I can until he’s shaking with pain and leaning on his walker and scowling at the twenty-feet separating us from the river’s edge. 

“Get the burgers,” he says. 

I get the burgers, feel the grease soaking through the plate and they smell good, oniony, but I’m stuffed and surely he’s stuffed but nevertheless we’re walking towards the river, him shuffling in teeny-tiny pain-ridden steps, me walking beside him with the burgers like a waiter sucked into the wake of his indomitable will. The will of a man who’s run companies and bought and sold buildings and raised a child and whose bones are more cancer than marrow and who the hell am I to deny him? Just a lower-middle-class Midwest fella whose greatest accomplishment, I’ll freely admit, was marrying his daughter. 

We reach the end of the pavement as it crumbles into dirt and scraggly trees adorned with plastic bags and fishing line, and opening up below us is a steep muddy slope down to the river. 

“This is it,” he says, staring at the water intensely, like it’s the mythic Styx and not the Superfund Hackensack. 

“You want your burger now?”

“By the water,” he says, his walker standing unevenly, half in the dirt, half on the pavement.

“You can’t make it down there. I don’t even think I can make it down there.”

Then he takes a few shuffles forward, drops his walker at his side, and fall-slides down into the mud, rolling right up to the edge of the river and howling in pain the whole time. I stand there with the burgers like an idiot, wondering if he’s dead, if every cancerous bone in his body is broken, if my wife will leave me. I half come to my senses and scurry down to the river still holding the plate of burgers.

“Are you ok?”

“I’m dying,” he says, wheezing and humming. 

“Let me call an ambulance.”

“Give me a burger.”

“No, you need an ambulance.”

“No, I want to die,” he says. “That was the plan. I had the crumb cake and the hero and now I want the burger and then I want to die. I want you to drag me into the river and let me drown.”

“Drown?”

“In the river I grew up beside. Ashes to—” and then he starts coughing violently yet weakly, a rasping sort of cough, and spits up blood. “I think I broke a rib.”

“What about your family? Your daughter?”

Now he’s crying. I’ve never seen him cry. Never seen him express any emotions aside from anger, pain, and stiff disapproval. “What about her?”

I think about her tears, the porch, the mulch. “Don’t you want to live for her? For as long as you can? Or at least say goodbye to her? At least try? Or do you want to be a damn coward, dying in the mud?”

We listen to the river, the road, the parking lot filling with burger-seekers.

“I’m scared,” he says, gripping the mud with his long, pale, frail fingers. 

“Me too. So is your daughter. So is your wife. We’re all scared. Everyone’s scared. But that doesn’t mean you can quit, right?”

There is this knowing silence between us; the sound of the river bolstering the moment. I see something that passes as a nod from him, so I try to make him comfortable, as comfortable as a man dying next to the Hackensack River can be. I clamber up the muddy slope and grab my phone and call an ambulance and then I call my wife and tell her everything is under control, I’m taking care of it, and from the edge of the parking lot I spy my dying father-in-law leaning against an abandoned tire and a tree trunk. He’s shuddering with pain and humming but managing to nibble his burger and even as an atheist this far from the shore I can tell it tastes divine.