I hadn’t spoken to my father in a number of years before he died. I’m not sure he was the type of person who particularly valued goodbyes. I’m not quite sure I am either. I suppose we may have that in common.
I’m not entirely certain if showing up that day was for closure or out of spite. Some things in life you find over a long period of time. Sort of like how you can sometimes lose things over a long period of time. Persistence is a tool, and you can either use it or allow it to be used upon you. Trust doesn’t happen overnight, nor does resentment. I think it was my father who taught me that.
*****
I got drunk in the hotel room and considered leaving several times. I actually decided to leave but by that point I was too drunk to drive. So I spent a few days in the hotel. My mother didn’t know I was coming, I could leave at any moment, and she would be none the wiser. I drank coffee and wrote in the mornings and afternoons, and then drank bourbon and wrote in the evenings and nights. I wrote to find the answer but drank to avoid it, and they fed off one another like a snake eating its own tail. I just kept playing the conversation with my mother over and over again in my head.
“You knew he wasn’t doing so well,” she had said. That’s how she always phrased things. Regardless she had ever told you before, it was always as if you already knew and weren’t doing anything about it. She’d call me out of the blue and say, “You know I’ve been trying to call you,” even though she hadn’t. And so on.
“I knew he wasn’t great, but I didn’t know he was unwell,” I had said. Which is how I phrased things, precisely in the middle to imply that I was listening but not entirely engaged. She’d say things like, It’s been raining a lot this year, you know I hate the rain. And I’d say, I knew you didn’t like the rain, but I didn’t know you hated it. And, The neighbors are having another party. You know how they are. And, Oh, they’re not the most couth but are they that gauche? It was a simple formula to keep the conversation in motion without actually having one, a useful tool to convey that you were not only listening now but that you’ve listened before.
“I think you should come. He’s your father.” she said, which didn’t fit our typical pattern.
“He’s my father,” I said. As if I just discovered this information. It was all I could think of to say. My father and I existed in parallel realities and the only conduit was my mother, who in an attempt to be neutral ended up being completely indifferent. She referred to each of us as only He and Him, and only when completely necessary. I never called them on the off chance he answered, so she always called me and we never spoke about each other directly. We were both known, but illicit affairs. So it was the use of that phrase he is your father, that directness, that made me pack my car and drive to the hotel, but it was everything that had happened until then that had kept me from going any further.
*****
I called my mother from the driveway.
“You know you can come in,” she said.
She showed me to a small room in the back of the house where I set my stuff down on a perfectly made-up twin bed. The house was a small A-frame on a secluded, wooded plot of land with trees towering on either side of it on the edge of the Mendocino forest. I heard they had moved out here several years ago to minimize. They had never invited me to see it, and I had never asked.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Just down the hall.” She gestured with her chin. “Last door on the left.”
“Why here?” I asked.
She sighed. “It’s quiet I suppose.”
“How are you?” I asked.
“I think I’ve had a lot of time to accept it. You know your father.”
“Do I?”
“Well, are you surprised?”
“You know, I can’t say that I am.”
“Then maybe you know him better than you think.”
She sat down next to me on the bed and for a brief moment it felt like it was my bed. “I know this is sudden,” she said, “but it’s what he wants.”
“And you always do what he wants, don’t you?” I said dryly.
“Please, can we not?”
I shrugged. “We never have. You’ve always just changed the subject or made some excuse.”
“I’ve endured,” she said. “You two didn’t always put me in the best spot. You left, he stayed.”
I nodded. “Got it. I left.”
She lifted my chin. “I’m your mother. Mothers lose their sons. They move on and start lives of their own. That’s what you did. What’s between you and your father is between you and your father.”
“That’s not what I did, Mom. I think that’s what you tell yourself I did.”
She rubbed her forehead.
My mother wasn’t necessarily cold, she just allowed herself to believe the best-case scenario. She loved me and she loved him and if she could keep it that way it didn’t matter if we loved each other.
“He takes dinner at 6, he doesn’t eat much anymore but that’s what we call it. Feel free to stop in any time you want. I’ll give you two sometime.” She left the door cracked behind her.
I didn’t go for dinner, but I went into his room later that evening.
“You don’t even look sick,” I said.
“Shut the door, would you? You’re letting the air out.”
“Grown crotchety in your old age, huh?”
“No, just grown tired. Help me out, would you?” He leaned over on the brass bed and threw a thumb behind his back.
I walked over towards the bed and fluffed the limp pillow behind him. “Better?” I asked.
“As good as it’s gonna get,” he said, and then took a sip of the water on the nightstand.
“You should put that on your headstone if it’s not too late.”
He laughed, and I was surprised at how genuine it was.
“You were always a funny kid,” he said casually. “You know that? You got that from me.”
“Not sure about that Pops.”
“Sure you did. It’s that dry, self-righteous humor, that I-hate-myself-but-still-think-I’m-better-than-everyone-else attitude. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I said, a little taken aback he knew that.
He shrugged as if to say there was nothing more to say.
I walked around the other side of the room and sat down in the bay window sill.
“Anyway,” he said, wiping his hands as if there had been something on them, “You’re right, I don’t look sick, and that’s exactly how I want to leave it.”
“And what’s the alternative?”
“Whatever you like. Debilitating body, crippling debt.”
“Sounds like a folk song.”
“See. Funny.” He took another sip of water. “How many days did it take you to get here?” He asked.
“Almost a week,” I said.
He whistled. “Impressive. Surprised you didn’t just send a card.”
“I almost did. I almost turned around about three times.”
“Only three times in a week? That’s not too bad. I don’t think I would’ve come. Wanting to turn around you got from me, but coming you got from your mother.
I didn’t say anything. I glanced out of the window and at the sun setting over the tall evergreens, their needles glowing a wonderful gold. A long shadow stretched along the sill, ran the length of the carpet and then crawled up the bed to fall on him. He had always been a burly man, a real Mr. Fix-it type with calloused hands and a short temper, but something about the way he was wrapped up in all that cotton made him seem much smaller to me.
*****
“You hear that?” He asked.
I listened. “I can’t say that I do.”
“Exactly. Isn’t it wonderful?” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if he was breathing in the sweet scent of a magnolia. “I was so tired of the noise.”
“What noise?” I asked, uncrossing and crossing my legs.
“Oh, you know.”
“You sound like mom,” I said.
“She’s even rubbed off on me I guess.”
“Has your life been so loud?” I asked.
“It has. And I’ve enjoyed the bagatelles of life – that’s a good writer word for you, you should jot it down – for a long time now.”
“It’s a good word,” I said. “It’s actually a pretty ironic word.”
“And why is that?”
“Because the definition is “a short unpretentious instrumental composition” but no one who uses that word is unpretentious.”
He cracked up at that.
“You are funny. You’ve always proved me right and I like that about you.” He shook his head as the laughter faded. “As long as you admit you’re pretentious it’s not that bad.”
“I’m not pretentious, I just like pretentious things.”
“Right, right.” He winked.
“So, what about the bagatelles of life now?” I asked.
“I guess I’m just ready for the coda,” he said earnestly. “The final sweep of the baton.”
“Sheesh. Talk about pretentious. And what about the audience?”
“Isn’t this metaphor growing a little tiresome.”
“You’re right, let’s bring it to a coda.”
A flare of laughter in the setting sun.
He grabbed the remote control that was lying next to him on the bed but did not pick it up to use it, he just rolled it over in his hand. The television was off.
“How long have you lived here in the quiet?” I asked.
“Enough to listen and see.”
“Ah, a riddle now.”
“If you wanna call it that. Silence is a mirror. And I don’t think I let myself look into that mirror for the majority of my life.” – a pause- “Have you?”
“No,” I said flatly. My candidness surprised even me. “I don’t believe I have. You can fog up that mirror with a lot more than just noise.”
Now it was his turn to nod.
“Are you tired of the noise?” He asked plainly.
“Someone inside of me is. Some small part, at least.”
“And when will you be ready to see it?”
“I think I’m doing it right now.”
He was quiet. The sun sank further beneath the trees. The room caught fire.
*****
“So, a writer, huh?”
“A writer.”
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Forever. Never.”
“A riddle now?”
“I’ve never been published, I mean. It’s not my primary source of income.”
“Sounds like semantics.”
“I suppose.”
“What do you write?”
“Everything. Nothing.”
“Here he goes again…”
“I have nothing to say, I mean.”
“You have nothing you want to say.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“I told you, your mother rubbed off on me.”
“About time.”
*****
I couldn’t sleep that night, so I poured myself a drink from the sparse liquor cabinet and sat on a rickety swing on the front porch. Moths tapped drunkenly at the porch light. Crickets and cicadas clamored about in the night. I listened intently for the call of a loon but none came. I remember thinking that the world always found a way to go on, and that small thought made me remarkably bitter, as if the world owed it to me to stop with my grief. I recognize the absurdity of that thought, but that doesn’t mean I expected it any less. Now I understand that loss isn’t necessarily the worst part about grief, it’s that you do it alone.
Silence is a mirror.
That it is.
I had never been more aware of my own mortality, and that made me feel incredibly selfish. I was angry and that too made me feel selfish. Above all, I felt cheated. Cheated out of the years I would never get back and cheated out of the years that would never come. He was a thief of the past and of the future.
And what am I?
The silence did not answer.
*****
The next morning, we ate breakfast in silence. Afterwards, I helped my mother clear the dishes. We spent the remainder of the morning watching television. Just before noon we moved to the garden so my father could watch the birds. We saw quite a few sparrows, the occasional scrub jay, a warbler or wren, and some hummingbirds. A flock of geese honked past, and a few large cumulus clouds rolled listlessly across the sky.
“Clouds’ coming in,” I said matter-of-factly.
“You know,” my father said, “I’ve always loved Barbara Streisand.”
My mother spent the evening making a dinner my father did not eat. She cleared the dishes quietly. When the kitchen was cleaned, I saw her rummaging through the drawers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I – I’m not sure,” she said.
The three of us watched television through the evening.
The day subdued.
My father put on his favorite John Denver record.
“You know that’s not his real name?” I asked inquisicaly.
“Huh. I didn’t know that,” my father said. “Amazing.” He smiled widely.
“Is it?”
“I’ve been listening to him for over 50 years and today of all days I learn that.” He did not insinuate if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Silence. What do you say when you could say anything?
I said nothing. I have been saying nothing for so many years.
I didn’t know what to say about that.
I excused myself and used the restroom. I flushed the toilet and cried into the hand towel.
“So, you’re leaving on a jet plane?” I said, sitting on the bay window again.
“All my bags are packed,” he said.
“Sunshine on your shoulders,” I said.
“Do you know the rest of that song? He says, If I had a day to give to you, I’d give to you a day just like today. A little ironic I suppose.”
“His real last name is Deutschendorf.”
We laughed. The laughter quickly faded away and I held on to its tail like a kite string; distant but still real, fearful it could so easily just slip away. As long as that laughter lasted we didn’t have to fill what came next. I didn’t want to see it lying dead in the sand.
“I would though,” my father said.
“You would what?” I asked.
“Give to you a day just like today.”
“And why is that?”
“This is a watershed moment.”
*****
The next couple of days passed with all of the indolence of southern hospitality. We watched television in silence as it roared with laughter, we watched the birds, my mother cooked the meals my father would not eat. In the evenings my father played his music and we’d talk, later I’d drink on the porch. It was irritatingly melancholy. The days passed with extreme precision. I felt the weight of each moment. Time was a steady yet sluggish river too deep and dense to wade. It was like quicksand; any movement would only pull you under. You had no choice but to drift. I wanted to scream. I wanted to shout, Is this it? Is this all you want to do? Is this how you want to remember the earth, your life? This is what you’ve chosen to remember; the most forgettable? I remembered even feeling mocked.
*****
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him one night.
He said, “I didn’t tell anyone,” as if that helped.
I shook my head.
“Would you have preferred it another way?”
I couldn’t decide if this question was rhetorical or not.
“Would you have preferred to spend your time worrying and preoccupied?” He asked.
“I would’ve wanted to be there for you.”
“You are.”
“How?”
“I don’t need you to be close for you to be present. I raised you and you’re off living your life. I don’t want to do anything to distract you from that.”
I looked off and out of the window. I bit my fist.
A whisper: “So sorry.”
“Stop”
“So selfish.”
“Don’t.”
A long silence ensued.
“I’m angry.” The sun was in my eyes.
“You have a right to be.”
“I don’t want you to be okay with me being angry, I want you to have not made me angry.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time, long enough for someone to have excused themselves, walk down the driveway, check the mail and then return. At last I said, “Do you think you win this way? Do you think anyone wins this way?”
He said it wasn’t about winning.
I asked what it was about.
He said it was about dignity.
“It’s about control,” I said. “You’ve always needed control. Even when I was a little kid.”
He nodded. “I suppose that has something to do with it.”
“You don’t even look sick,” I repeated, this time meaning it.
“I know.”
“So then why?”
“Because I don’t want to look sick.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that.
*****
The evening waned and not too much later, he was asleep, and I was outside out on the lonely porch again, drink in hand, listening for the call of the loon and staring into the mirror of silence. I thought about leaving but either cowardice or resistance kept me from doing so. I wasn’t sure what I was there to prove, or who I was trying to prove it to. I only knew that my whole life there was some kind of emptiness, a lack, like leaning your ear against a glass on a wall and hearing nothing. Or leaning your ear against the wilderness and waiting for the call of a loon and hearing nothing. And all the roads led back to my father. There may not have been an emptiness I expected him to fill but there was certainly one I needed him to take accountability for. And how was I expected to do that with the dirt from his grave freshly turned? My guilt kept me from my anger which kept me from my grief which ultimately kept me from my growth. I had been stunted for so long. I had mistaken that for so many things.
I tried to write but all I ended up doing was brushing ash off the clean paper.
*****
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“To be forgotten,” he said.
“Forgotten?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I guess I wasted a tank of gas,” I said.
He grinned. There was no snarky comment and that made me sad.
“Why do you want to be forgotten?” I asked.
He looked out of the window for a while, staring so far away. Finally he said, “I guess I just don’t want to take up any more space.” He winked.
How much space had he taken up in my life? How much space had I allowed him? I suddenly felt exceptionally distanced from him, as if I was merely stuck at a friend’s family’s dinner table and they had gotten up to use the restroom. The smile on my face felt incredibly fake.
“I never liked the idea of the afterlife,” he said.
I didn’t reply.
“Heaven or Hell,” he continued, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter. I just couldn’t imagine getting to the end and being told, okay, now do that for eternity.”
“Too much noise?”
“Too much noise,” he said as if I had answered correctly. “At the end of it all, I just want to sit and watch the birds.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what Satanists think the afterlife is?” He asked.
“I never thought about it.”
“They think you spend eternity in the memories of the people you’ve met throughout your life. Each memory is an alternate universe. An alternate eternity. If someone has poor memories of you, your eternity is poor. And so on.” He paused. “I want to be forgotten.”
*****
The clock chimed six times. My father did not eat dinner.
*****
“Won’t you miss it? I asked, referring to life. “Won’t you miss us?” I asked, referring to the living.
“Oh, come on,” he said, “you know the saying; you can’t miss what you don’t have.”
I laughed insensibly at that, not because it was funny because he could still try to be funny.
*****
“I don’t know about love,” he said.
“Now you sound like a Joni Mitchel song,” I said. “Which is in fact her real name.”
“And no one is surprised.”
I smiled.
“But I really don’t know love,” he went on more earnestly, “I don’t know about parenting, or being a husband – or being a friend quite frankly. My whole life I’ve gotten by on necessity, by what I need.” He paused. “And for some fundamental reason, I needed you. I think I needed you more than I realized.”
“I didn’t want to be needed, I wanted to be wanted. You don’t need me, you need something from me.”
“Maybe so. And you need something from me. Isn’t that why you came? Isn’t doing something you hate for someone you love the definition of family?”
After a long pause I said, “I don’t know if I ever loved you.”
He blinked.
“I know I’m supposed to love you,” I said, “and I think an extraordinarily large part of me has convinced me that I do love you, but I can’t help but feel that it’s just-”
“Out of consideration for each other.”
I didn’t know what to say. He waited as if he didn’t expect this.
“You were difficult,” he said at last.
“Was I difficult or did you just have certain expectations?”
“I did have expectations,” he said, “and you didn’t meet any of them.”
I was thankful for his candidness.
“I know,” I said at last, and I was just simply relaying a fact “I had no expectations, I only had you.”
“For that I’m sorry.”
For that he was sorry. Just that one specific detail and nothing else.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said.
He rolled his hand over and it opened on the duvet like a lotus. I reached for it and held it. The two of us stared down at the limbs in front of us conjoined at the wrist for an indeterminate amount of time. When was the last time we embraced like that, or even touched? I noticed then that we had the same hands, and I wondered what else of him was inside of me. I resented him for not giving me the opportunity of knowing him well enough to know; I resented myself for not knowing myself well enough to know regardless.
“Why today of all days?” I asked at last. “Just a patriot?”
“I guess I wanted to go out with a bang.” He smiled. “Like Hemingway.”
“Sun is about to set,” I said arduously.
“That it is,” he said, still holding my hand. “That it is.”
And that was the end of that.
*****
“You don’t want to stay?” My mother said at the door.
I shook my head.
“I wish I could say I understood,” she said. “I’m glad you came. And so is your father.”
“Is he?” I asked genuinely.
“Of course. You know he told me to make sure you came.”
*****
I didn’t make the drive back down to San Francisco that night. I needed to keep away from the fog. Instead, I drove up to Berkeley Bayview Point and sat for a while on the hood of my car. When at last, small explosions broke the sky apart. Red, blue, green. I stared up at the fireworks blooming in the sky like lotus flowers, playing their bagatelles of freedom. “Like Hemingway,” I said.
******
Anthony Raymond is an emerging writer from San Francisco, California. His most recent publication is a story for Czykmate Productions. He was also semi-finalist in the Ember Chasm Review novel excerpt contest. He is currently a student at Stanford University in their novel writing certificate program.