Save the Enemy (11 page)
Authors: Arin Greenwood
His e-correspondence seems mainly to consist of discussions among a group of internet friends calling themselves “The Individualists.” These lovers of liberty have conversations about things like roads. Boring, you’d think, but the language is so odd and colorful and foul. One particularly explicit back-and-forth is on the topic of how the world would be better if all roads were privatized. Another vigorous debate concerns the government’s right to outlaw child labor (most agree that the government has that right but shouldn’t exercise it) or to mandate that kids go to school (no consensus on that one).
I try not to get consumed reading these emails, since I am trying to save my father’s life, but it is hard not to linger on the long-winded messages he wrote himself. Like this one, from over the summer:
TO: INDIVIDUALISTS
FROM: ALMOST-FREE MAN 401
RE: ENSURING LAZY DAUGHTER WILL NOT EAT CAT FOOD IN OLD AGE?
DATE: AUGUST 21
I have children—two of them, a boy and a girl. Do I want them to work? Verily, I think that paid labor might benefit them more than school itself. At least in certain, possibly different ways. Let me explain.
The boy is neurodiverse. He is a brilliant autodidact. When he was a child, my wife and I worried that he would be severely autistic. Smearing feces on the walls, that kind of thing. It became clear as he got older, both through testing and personal observation, that he is certainly on the spectrum. Yet while he does have the occasional bout of … not rage exactly, but almost like a flash storm of anger from time to time … he is not, overall, so different from many of us. As we Individualists like to say, he should be free to experience his own life as it unfolds. This smidge of an issue will certainly impact his life in difficult ways. He does not make eye contact or like to be touched, except by my late wife and our dog, whom he adores. He loathes disruptions to his schedule. I doubt he will ever meet a partner with whom he can connect with on this
human
level; he will most likely live alone, forever.
On the other hand, he has a phenomenal memory, and while he is wrong about the gold standard (who raised him to think that paper money is a solid foundation on which to build an economy???), he will thrive. Professionally. He could even become rich. In which case, even if he can’t make eye contact, some woman will, in all probability, make eye contact with him. I do not believe that my son needs school. He does not need his teachers to guide his studies. He is self-directed.
My daughter is a tougher case.
Oy vey
, as my parents would say. Seventeen now. Smart—very smart—but not ingenious like my son. Lazy about certain things. Like I was at her age. Indecisive. Nervous. I tried to teach her self-defense and survival techniques. I think all girls—all people—should know how to defend and care for themselves. She’s a natural, more gifted than I am, at Shotokan, for instance. But she has no interest in the art or history of this discipline. She refused to practice further once I’d instructed.
Higher education will be more important for my daughter. Not because of the knowledge she will gain. It will serve as a signaling device to others that she is the sort of person who can be accepted into impressive institutions. But then for what purpose? How will she support herself? Would she be just as well-off working instead of studying? I believe that real-life experience could teach her to treasure her own gifts and to apply them.
Other times I think that she should go to a prestigious university in order to meet the sorts of people who will help her attain material comfort. She may
meet a boy of high standing at a young age. Perhaps I should encourage her to settle down early, have children, and skip having a profession. Except I wouldn’t want her to flounder and do some “consulting” like my late wife. She would regret that life. I know she would. I know it.
Individualists: What think you?
Despite the shock of reading my father’s ungenerous, if true (true?) analysis of me and my personality disorders, I am curious what his online friends would suggest for me. (Though I am secretly relieved that he finds my brother’s disorders not so horribly disorderly after all.)
Indeed, the fellow Individualists have some ideas. So many ideas.
One thinks I should join the military—the Marines, to be exact. Another thinks military service is an awful idea because it is wrong for the country to maintain tax-financed armed forces. “Only private militias should exist in these United States.” Yet another thinks that I should go to college if and only if I get into a very “prestigious” school, in order to “enhance the signaling effect of the diploma.” My favorite Individualist tells my dad that perhaps he should consider setting up a trust for me, so that in case none of the other options come to fruition, at least I will have lifelong dining options beyond the pet food aisle. A final emailer, my second favorite, has a son she thinks I might like. Twenty-five years old, about to enter medical school. She’s attached a photo. Not bad …
The doorbell rings. I heave myself up from the desk and go downstairs, where Pete is standing in the doorway with P.F. Greenawalt.
Pete’s back is to me, so I can’t see his face. I can see P.F.’s,
and he has a pretty intense look on it. He’s huffing a little and seems a bit out of breath. I suppose he’s an intense guy, anyway, in what anyone would understand to be a pretty intense situation. He’s dressed sort of like Dad-going-to-work. (Which he used to do, once upon a time, looking both frumpy and disheveled, just like I often do.)
It’s not warm, but there’s a line of sweat at his hairline. He’s wearing a dirty wool coat that looks like it’s about three sizes too big. His khakis are worn on the edges. His metal glasses are smudged and quite a bit askew. Taking P.F.’s somewhat malodorous coat and draping it over a chair, I wonder how all this differs from his usual weekend afternoon.
Pete stares at him, an intense look on his own face (“pinched” is the best word) as P.F. and I head back into my Dad’s office. I ponder the pinched-ness for a moment. Pete usually looks friendly and sleepy, not anxiously constipated. Is something wrong? Is he upset with me? Is he actually constipated? (Hey, at least we’d have that in common!) But then I remember why P.F. is here: the cigarette in the toilet bowl and who may have left it there.
“I was going to call the police, but I didn’t,” I tell him.
“Good, good …” Looking up, P.F. must realize that this is anything but double-good. “I mean, good that you didn’t call the police. If the authorities become involved, it will compromise everything.”
“You mean put my father in greater danger?” I ask.
P.F. blinks by way of response. He sort of reminds me of Ben right now. I kind of want to punch him, too, which is how I sometimes feel about Ben.
“Is anything missing from the house?” he asks after a moment, perhaps noticing what one might interpret as an unusual amount of chaos.
“Not that I can see. I assume that they’ve come looking for the J-File. I assume that they dropped the cigarette in the toilet to scare the shit out of us. Since I don’t know what a J-File looks like or where it is, I can’t say if it’s missing. I assume it would be in here.” I gesture around the cramped, musty office that—when not ransacked by a panicking Zoey—is organized in a way that makes sense to exactly one person. “If it were ever here at all,” I add.
I consider telling P.F. about ghost Mom, about how she told Ben that the J-File was destroyed, but I’m worried that he’ll stop helping us. We need him. I think we need him.
“I understand,” says P.F. His lips turn downward as he surveys the room, wandering from spot to spot to spot. He rubs his finger along, but not—and I monitor this closely—
into
a nostril. Then he turns to his eyebrows, smoothing them, then fixing his glasses. He pokes an index finger into one ear, circling it, wiping the finger on his pants, then the same routine with the other ear. P.F. is gross. I did not know you could be this kind of gross and work in politics.
You must be really good at your job
, I think.
Tall stacks of paper teeter precariously on whatever flat space is available. Books are strewn across the room (thanks mostly to me); so are piles of dust and dog hair. Roscoe’s cushioned bed still sits next to Dad’s desk; there’s still a circle of chewed-on bones and rawhides, along with Roscoe’s favorite squeaky toy: a stuffed dreidel that Mom got him as a Hanukkah present last year. (Yes, those tops you use during Hanukkah to play the world’s most boring holiday gambling game; the winner receives the world’s least delicious chocolates.) It’s apparently a huge hit with the canine crowd. Roscoe carried that stuffed, spit-soaked top around with him from room to room, shoving it at us, trying to make us throw it for him, even way past the
holiday’s eight nights. He’d sometimes take it out on walks, holding it in his mouth as we wandered the cobbled streets of our not-so-new neighborhood. The more worldly neighbors would wish him a Happy Festival of Lights and ask what the Hanukkah fairies left for him under the menorah. He must miss all that, I think. If he’s still alive.
Shit. SHIT.
“Do you see anything … significant, or … promising in here?” I ask P.F. I bend down to pick up the dry stuffed dreidel and, hugging it to me, I sit on the dog bed. It’s very comfortable. It’s made of some special NASA-approved foam, according to the tag. I used to read here sometimes while snuggling with Roscoe, while Dad did what dads do at his computer. I guess my dad was doing dangerous, diabolical things. I had no idea that while Roscoe was snoring and I was digging into
Wuthering Heights
he was … what? I still don’t know. Doing things that led to this, I guess.
P.F. blinks again. He opens drawers. Pulls out pens, checkbooks, delivery menus. Birth certificates and passports from another drawer. He flips through the passports, one by one. Mine, with a really, really gawky photo, but otherwise nearly empty—I’ve been to Paris, once, with my parents when I was fourteen. Ben’s has a better photo but just the one stamp in it, too. My parents’ are filled with colorful pages. Jacob Trask, born in Philadelphia, dorky and pink-cheeked but not hideously un-photogenic. Stamps from Australia. Bali. Some other warm places with pretty beaches. Mom’s passport, which is much the same, except she was born in Rhode Island and possessed a flattering photo in which she wears a black linen V-neck and smiles warmly, her dark hair in long, loose waves.
“Sad,” P.F. says, examining the photo a little longer. He
looks up at me and wins me over with three words. “You look alike.”
“Can I see?”
P.F. hands me the passports. I glance through them, page by page, trying to remember our lives, their lives. My parents used to go on vacation a couple of times a year together—alone, just the two of them—when we lived in Rhode Island. That Hyannis vacation, come to think of it, was one of the few we ever took as a family. They would alternate between stupid, boring beach resorts and then more exotic beach resorts. I always wondered why they didn’t include us. Were we that much of a hassle? (“Sixty four percent of parents in the United States vacation without their children,” Ben once told me, ending another potential brother-sister heart-to-heart.)
Not that I
wanted
to go, either. Dad said he hated the more exotic places because he always ended up feeling like an “Orientalist” while he was there. He hated “exoticizing” the “local poverty and squalor.” Mom said you could get a good bargain in that sort of a place. Their ridiculous commentary was enough to make me grateful to be left out.
Besides, Ben and I would always stay with Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa. We’d go to our own decidedly unexotic Rhode Island beaches for clam cakes. Not to be underestimated: this is a Rhode Island specialty, with bits of clam fried into big balls of dough. We’d go to the movies. Movies
without subtitles
, even. We’d have fun.
That stopped when we moved to Alexandria. And Mom died.
I push myself from the dog bed and put the passports back in the drawer. P.F. stays at the desk and presses a button on
Dad’s computer. After a good long time, it chugs back to the blue screen again. I type the password, trying not to let P.F. see what it is, both to maintain the slightest bit of privacy and also because it just seems like an embarrassing window into our family quirks.
“You going to marry the med student?” he asks me.
I almost laugh. “I’ll let you know.”
“This is going to turn out okay,” he says. He reaches out. I worry that he is going to place his hand on my arm—
ew, snot and earwax!
—but he doesn’t. He just stretches and adds, as I’ve heard from someone else who doesn’t seem in a position to make these assurances: “I promise. Listen, Zoey, I really promise. If we work together, it will be okay.”
P.F. asks to look
over the rest of the house. I trail him from room to room to room to room. Pretty much just the four rooms. We only have three bedrooms upstairs, and we skip Ben’s because he’s still asleep. Downstairs, there’s the combo living room/den/kitchen and Dad’s already-pored-over office. As P.F. peers bloodlessly into each space once inhabited by our fractured family—now just with Pete on the couch, reading some dusty book, looking up from time to time with a somewhat lost, somewhat impatient expression on that lovely, clear-skinned face, the ukulele again sitting in his lap—I recollect slivers of memories of what our family did here:
In front of the stove, Dad, exasperated, said to me that I had to do my homework if I wanted a hope of going to Berkeley. Then he made me practice tying fishing knots for an hour as punishment for getting a C on a calculus test.
In the den, Mom, who herself was no snazzy dancer, tried to teach my graceless brother how to do the box step. He refused. Then she danced with Roscoe. Then she danced with
my dad. She tried to get me to dance with her, but I stormed off, angry about something; I don’t even remember what. It may have had to do with being picked well after our dog.
