Loitering: New and Collected Essays (11 page)

Documents

Poem by father (1972)

One Sunday morning when I was a boy, my father came out of his office and handed me a poem. It was about a honeybee counseling a flea to flee a doggy and see the sea. The barbiturates my father took to regulate his emotions made him insomniac, and I understood that he’d been awake most of the night, laboring over these lines, listing all the words he could think of ending in a long
e
. This meant using many adverbs and the elevated
thee
as a form of address. My father was a professor of finance who wrote fairly dry textbooks, where the prose marched in soldierly fashion across the page, broken by intricate formulas calculating risk and return, and
this poem was a somewhat frilly production for him. The poem was an allegory about his desire to leave our family. Like a lot of people my father felt a poem was a bunch of words with a tricky meaning deeply buried away, like treasure, below a surface of rhyming sounds. I was twelve years old, and I understood the sense of the poem instantly, but the strange mixture of childish diction and obvious content silenced me. I was ashamed. That Sunday morning I was sitting on the living room floor, on a tundra of white carpet my father considered elegant. The drapes were closed, because he worried that the sun would fade the fabric on the furniture, but a bright bar of light cut through a gap in the curtains, and that’s where I sat, since it was warm there, in a house where we were otherwise forbidden to adjust the thermostat above sixty-two degrees.

Letter from younger brother (1997)

Not long ago, I was in Seattle, sitting in a café downtown. It was raining. I’d been there for some time before I realized that someone was staring at me through the window. I turned around and saw worn tennis shoes and dirty gray sweats. The man outside the window was my brother Mike. My father had three sons.
I’m the eldest; Danny, the youngest, killed himself sixteen years ago.

In addition to the tennis shoes and sweats, Mike was wearing a white T-shirt that hung to his knees and a black leather jacket he’d bought with VA money at a thrift store. His thinning hair was soaked, and his face had the pallor of warm cheese. In a plastic sack he carried a carton of cigarettes he’d bought at the Navy PX. He’s schizophrenic, and on some level I’m always aware that he’s a stranger. I went outside and we talked and, in talking, we were brothers again. He did not look good; he was shivering. He was several miles from his halfway house, but when I offered to give him a ride he said, quite happily, that he preferred to walk. He started up the hill, limping a little from a pelvic injury he received, years ago, when he tried to kill himself by jumping off the Aurora Bridge in Seattle. Very soon he was gone.

Only a few years ago, Mike had been doing much better, and he wrote letters regularly, often two or three a month. Here is one:

Dear Char,

Mike here, who is there? I am fine as a blade of grass. How about you?

As I was leaving church the other day there was an opportunity to be part of a poor person’s Kriss Kringle. I decided to buy an
AIDS
patient some high-quality gloves. The situation reminded me of Danny—I don’t know why. The gift will be given to him although I believe I will never actually see the recipient. I will give him a card that says, “To a friend I don’t know.”

I don’t think of Danny a lot. I don’t feel pain about his death a lot either. Jesus has stepped into his boots and has replaced him. It caused me to heal and be born again. It is really quite beautiful. My heart is still with that kid like you cannot believe—or I suppose you could. Love can play a trick on you. It can cause you pain like you were suffering in hell but it is still love and still beautiful like heaven and the heaven and the hell of it are woven into one fabric, which is love. It’s a mindblower to think like that but that is what Danny has done to me.

Call or write please.

I don’t own a cat or dog—but I do the same by looking at squirrels and crows. I plan to buy some peanuts to feed the squirrels and bread for the birds. It is so much cheaper and I enjoy it the same as having my own animal.

When I pray I can see my life flash before my eyes. It is very beautiful. My life flashes before my eyes about twenty times a year. Other stuff like that happens to me also.

I’ve been through so much since becoming mentally ill—most of it, believe it or not, was good. Because of that I became sort of an indestructible man.

Love, Mike

Letter from youngest brother (November 26, 1986)

My brother Danny wrote his suicide note in my bedroom, and then, after a caesura that I know exists because he had to put down the pen in order to pick up the gun, he shot himself. For some reason, I’ve always been concerned about the length of the lapse, whether he reread what he’d written or stared dumbly at his signature, his name the final piece in a puzzling life he was about to end, before he pressed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Most suicides go about the last phase of their business in silence and don’t leave notes. Death itself is the summary statement, and they step into its embrace hours or days before the barrel is finally raised to the roof of the mouth or the fingertips
last feel the rough metal of the bridge rail. They are dead and then they die. But Danny wrote a note, or not so much a note as an essay, a long document full of self-hatred and sorrow, love and despair, and now I’m glad that I have it, because, this way, we’re still engaged in a dialogue. His words are there and so is his hand, a hand I’d held, but, more important, one that left words, like an artifact, that are as real and physical to me as the boy who, at twenty-one, in a November long ago, wrote them.

I read the pages he wrote two or three times a month, often enough so that the words ring like the lines of poems I know well. All the struggle is still there in the headlong sentences that tumble toward his signature, in the misspelled words and syntactical errors, in the self-conscious language of a boy starved for love and trying, instead, to live a moment more off pride. The note has the back-and-forth of a debate, of words equally weighed and in balance, of a slightly agonized civility. He says, “I stopped making dreams.” He says, “I don’t know why I am doing this. I don’t want to. I have dreams.” He says that there is no God and that God is looking over his shoulder as he writes, making editorial remarks. He says, “I am glorifying myself now. I am afraid to stop writing though. I want to keep talking.” He says, “I don’t know what to say except I
am sorry and I love. I love the whole family quite a bit and the terrible—” He clearly wants to find a way back, but he can’t. He asks that we keep “the way” he died a secret and, as though he were done, signs his name. But on the next page, the last, he again asks that we keep “the way” he died secret, and again he signs his name. Much of the note is printed and those letters stand upright, but in the end Danny slips permanently into a sloping cursive as despair and self-hatred accelerate beyond return, as if he were being pulled down by the dark undercurrent of his life, his last words looping quickly across the page, continuous as breath.

Letter from eldest brother (2001)

Two years ago, I moved to Philipsburg, Montana. In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones. The best bones weren’t on trails—deer and moose don’t die conveniently—and soon I was wandering so far into the woods that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the bones, I continued to spend my days and often my nights in the woods. I vaguely understood that I was doing this because I could no longer think; I found relief in walking up hills. When
the night temperatures dropped below zero, I felt visited by necessity, a baseline purpose, and I walked for miles, my only objective to remain upright, keep moving, preserve warmth. When I was lost, I told myself stories, recounting my survival, implying that I would live and be able to look back at it all. At some point, I realized that I was telling my father these stories.

I decided that I would try corresponding with him. I had built a lean-to at seven thousand feet, and I routinely slept there. In the morning, I warmed myself by a fire and then walked home and began writing. I worked for days, even weeks, on the letters. The last time I’d seen him he made a point of showing me the stains in his bed, on the sheets. He pulled away the blankets, revealing bright yellow splotches of mustard, red patches of spaghetti sauce, something urinous that had spilled from a carton of take-out Chinese. I’m not sure what he meant to show me, and I’m not sure what saddened me more, this man eating alone in bed, who could not clean up after himself, or this man who needed to share with his son a grotesque failure.

My father and I had survived the same wounds. His lost sons were my brothers. I believed we might have something to talk about. I was drawn to the antique idea of a correspondence because it seemed restrained and formal, even ritualized. In Philipsburg, there is no
home delivery, and people go to town to pick up mail. I always walked to the post office with my dog, and even that little effort, the mile of dirt road, blowing with dust or drifting with snow, made the mail that much more meaningful.

I delayed sending my first letter for several months. My father replied with a long, bulleted outline. I read it, bullet by bullet, feeling disoriented, despite the orderly indents and the nesting of what, in outlines, are called “children.” After four or five readings I was able to breathe normally. I reread his outline until I lost its meaning, then got out my colored pens and began highlighting. The bullets and dashes and indentations were like the sleeves and straps and buckles of a straitjacket. I’ve often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath, but there was no air in my father’s sentences; he seemed to be suffocating inside them.

I had made an effort to discuss the events of our past, but he regarded this as a trespass. “When did God empower you,” he asked me, “with such omniscient abilities?” His position was truth; mine was not. My letter, he wrote, “is incorrect throughout, is a fictional (‘Having no foundation in fact,’
OED
) version of reality (‘Reality: The quality of being real or having an actual existence,’
OED
).” He was defensive, which I should have anticipated: “After nine years of sixty-hour weeks of intensive
research, not reading and study, but research, I know I was a terrific dad and terrific husband.”

I wrote more letters. His replies were long—seven, eight, nine pages. There were words he couldn’t get past. He became obsessed with
boundaries
. Boundaries were bad. “Those who set them up,” he wrote, “protect the dysfunctionality they see in themselves and seek to foist that malady on others through their boundaries.” Boundaries, he wrote, “are the antithesis of meaningful honest relations.” Boundaries have no place between a father and his children. He insisted the proper word was
relation
. “Relation is a mathematical notion which means one-to-one correspondence.”

Another time it was the word
gag
. He had used the word, saying that I was prevented from speaking honestly; I objected; he objected to my objection. “Emphasis on the word,
gag
, denies the act!!! The gag is the aggressive act. The word
gag
fits, is proportional to, the act. The gag is the loaded act; the word
gag
fits the denigrative power of the act. The act, not the word, is aggressive and odious. Place the focus where it belongs, properly, on the aggressive and repugnant act, and not on the word.”

Some nights, I dug into the lee of a snowdrift and hollowed a shelter for myself. Snow contains air and insulates, holding the body’s warmth so that, at a certain point, the temperature remains constant, blood and ice
in equilibrium. In deep snow, I dragged supplies with a pulk I’d made from a child’s sled and plastic conduit. I was afraid of avalanches and checked a slope meter before traversing open, treeless hillsides. What I feared was suffocation, particularly the inability to make my chest expand. I really knew nothing about winter, nothing about surviving the season beyond the blunt lesson in fatality I’d learned from picking up bones. Sometimes I slept in the open mouths of mine shafts, their crumbled headframes like broken teeth, where twice I found clusters of bats, hanging by their feet, their wings folded in, like the strange fruits of darkness itself.

I wrote, asking him about our home movies. For years I’d kept alive the fantasy that he burned the movies, only because I was haunted by the image of them orphaned in a Salvation Army thrift shop, reels and reels of birthdays, Christmases, and Easters, all reduced to an ironic treasure for strangers. In the past, I had wanted to believe my father was a liar rather than a man who could destroy something so valuable to his children. The movies were old Super 8s, poorly lit and without sound, but the only place left where I could see my brother’s face.

I wrote, “You intentionally destroyed something inside your children, a place of warmth and fondness, a cherished dream, a continuity that connects us in time to our history and across space to one another.”

His response was icy: “Of what sense of warmth and fondness are you speaking? It is an interesting sentiment, laced with some romanticism, but devoid of reality.” And he wanted to know, “What did I destroy in you that was not already destroyed?”

In my father’s last letter, the grammar carries the summary tone of a narrative closing down. It is framed by the forms of family affection. He opens with “Dear Char” and parts with “Love,” followed by his signature. In between, the language suggests closure, termination. My previous letter, he says, continued an “unacceptable tenor and dead-end focus.” It smacked of “recidivism”; it followed a “desolate and vacuous path.” None of my letters “added a repairment.” “So be it,” he says.