The Great Perhaps (23 page)

A
FTER
A
MELIA GETS HOME,
after she kicks off her shoes and collapses onto her bed, she stares up at the photograph of Patty Hearst on the wall above her bed and something in her heart goes sick. No. She is no revolutionary. She is a coward. She is done trying. She is done pretending. Like the rest of America, like everyone else she knows, she is giving up. She is done trying to do something great. She is done trying to change things for the better. She pulls herself to her feet and seizes the photo from the wall with one quick swipe, splitting it down the middle as her blue eyes begin to swell with tears. She rips the image again and again until it is a dozen tiny pieces of colored paper, until, like her, it has become nothing. When she has finished, she snatches the torn pieces from the floor and quickly shoves them into her bottom dresser drawer. There the pieces lie—inconsolable, inconsequential—a sad hum rising from her collection of other tragically useless objects.

A
FTER SCHOOL ON
W
EDNESDAY, AFTER CHORUS PRACTICE
has ended, Thisbe pedals down the shady twilight streets, down the Midway to her block, and then walks her bicycle around the side of the house to the garage. Thisbe opens the garage door and is jubilant to find her mother’s Volvo parked there. She runs inside the house but her mother is nowhere around. She finds her father hunched over a stack of maps and documents in the den, and says hello. Her father nods, without looking up, and whispers, “I’m going to see Grandpa tonight. If you’d like to go, I’ll be leaving in an hour or so.”

“Is Mom home?” Thisbe asks.

Jonathan looks up from his work for a moment, and then nods, without a sound. His eyes meet his daughter’s and Thisbe feels an exquisite sadness for her dad. She smiles at him, then turns and runs up the stairs as quickly as she can. She knocks loudly on her parents’ bedroom door, calling her mother’s name, but no one answers. She gives the doorknob a turn and finds it is locked. Why would her mother lock it? What’s going on in there? What’s her mother so afraid of anyway? Thisbe knocks once more and then begins to back away, unsure of why her mother won’t answer. She sits silently beside her parents’ door for an hour or two, then gets tired and wanders off toward her room.

A
ROUND TEN OR
eleven that night, Thisbe gets hungry and traipses downstairs. All she finds in the refrigerator is spoiled milk and some wilted celery. She finally uncovers some old crackers and munches them dryly in her mouth. She heads down the hallway to watch television and finds her mother sitting there in the dark, looking messy in her robe, staring out the window into the shadowy backyard.

“Hi, Mom,” Thisbe whispers.

“What are you doing up, sweetheart?”

“I had a bad dream that I didn’t have any arms. And then I was hungry. And then I had to go to the bathroom. And then I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

“Me neither,” her mother sighs. Thisbe sits down beside her and offers her some crackers. Her mother nods and quietly nibbles along the cracker’s salty edge. “These are pretty stale,” her mother whispers.

“Yeah,” Thisbe says with a grin.

They both chew in near silence, mother and daughter, staring through the window at the dark shapes moving as shadows in the backyard. Thisbe glances over at her mother’s face and mutters, “Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Are you…are you planning on leaving us?”

“Oh, Thisbe,” her mother says with an unsure smile, shaking her head, her dark eyes looking sad and full of uncried tears, glowing in the faraway light from the kitchen. “I would never. Never. I just…it’s just hard for me to be here right now. Your father and I…well, we…” Her mother smiles again, sadly. “We just don’t know what to do with each other.”

“He loves you. I know he does.”

Her mother smiles again.

“Thank you, Thisbe. But it isn’t that.”

“What is it?”

Her mother fingers a thread that has come unloose from the corner of her robe. “It’s complicated. Your father loves me but he’s also in love with his work. I feel like I’m always in competition with it. And he wants me to give up a lot of things to take care of you guys but he doesn’t want to give up anything himself. And he can be so selfish…sometimes he can act like we’re not even here. I know he loves me but I’m afraid it’s because he needs me to take care of him. I don’t know, honey, like I said, it’s very complicated and I just don’t think it should be all that complicated.”

Thisbe nods, chewing another stale cracker.

“Oh.”

Her mother nods, too, staring back out the window. She then turns, her smile big and beaming. “What if you and I, what if we take the day off tomorrow?” her mother asks.

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. We could go shopping. Or get some lunch in a fancy restaurant or something.”

“I don’t know,” Thisbe says. “I have chorus after school. And a test in English. And then I’d have to get the homework from someone and I don’t really know who I could ask.”

Her mother nods, touching Thisbe’s knee.

“Well, you’re definitely your father’s daughter,” her mother says with a smirk.

Thisbe’s face goes red for a moment. She realizes, too late, that she’s hurt her mother’s feelings. She shakes her head and says, “I mean, I bet I could find somebody. Or I’ll just make up the test on Friday. It’s no big deal.”

“Are you sure?”

Thisbe nods.

“Okay, don’t tell your father.”

“What about Amelia?” Thisbe asks, hoping her mother will not invite her older sister as well.

“Amelia will probably want to go to school instead.”

“Probably.”

“Okay?” her mother asks.

“Okay.”

“Okay, now, why don’t you head back up to bed? We’ll have a nice girl’s day tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Thisbe says, quickly kissing her mother’s cheek. She grabs the empty box of crackers and stands, picking crumbs off of her pajamas. She starts off down the hallway and then turns, thinking, staring down at her feet, unsure of something. She thinks of Roxie, of missing the chance to see her, of once again lying with her in the field.

“What is it?” her mother asks.

“Nothing. I just…well…maybe…”

Her mother smiles. “It’s okay if you think you should go to school instead. We can go out together some other day.”

“Are you sure?” Thisbe asks.

“Sure.”

“Okay,” Thisbe says and hugs her mother again. “Thanks Mom,” she whispers, then rushes off, climbing awkwardly up the stairs. Her mother sits in the dark, staring out the window, looking for the answer to something, anything.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY NIGHT, THE NURSING HOME STAFF
informs Jonathan that his father may be nearing the end. He has refused to speak or eat anything for two days now. That evening, the nurses do not bother Jonathan when he arrives after the visiting hours have ended. Jonathan thanks them for this small, thoughtful concession. When he walks into the darkened room, he sees his father lying there in the white hospital bed, the old man now hopelessly small and delicate. His thin eyelids flutter as he sleeps, his mouth whispering dull, indistinguishable noises. Jonathan takes a seat in the uncomfortable blue chair beside his father’s bed and carefully takes hold of his father’s limp hand. “Hello, Dad,” Jonathan whispers, but his father does not seem to notice. Jonathan softly squeezes Henry’s palm but there is no response. The nurses have left the television on to keep the old man company: a history program about the Wright brothers flashes from the TV set in the corner. Jonathan leans over and stares at his father, murmuring the single word, with the soft appeal of a question. “Dad?” But there is still no answer.

Jonathan squeezes the tiny hand, the skin, the knuckles so weak, so brittle. “Dad, don’t go. I need you. Please.” The eyelids flicker but do not rise, do not open.

“Dad. Please. I need you. Dad?”

His father is silent, breathing heavily. One of his eyes opens, then another. He glances up at his son and then smiles.

“Please, Dad. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

His father’s lips move without sound.

“The girls, and Madeline. I think I’ve lost them, Dad. I think I’ve lost them and now I don’t know what to do. You’re the only person who I can talk to.”

His father’s eyes blink and his lips continue to move soundlessly. There are only two words left, two words that remain before he vanishes for good. He wants to speak. He wants to use these two remaining sounds to help his son, but he is unable. They are gone. All the words he has ever known have disappeared—along with the clothes he has given away, the photographs he has discarded, the fantasies of flight, the old and unsure memories. Henry turns on his side, facing his son, then motions toward the nightstand. There beside a disposable plastic cup is his notebook and pen. Jonathan grabs them and carefully places them in his father’s hands. Struggling to open the book to a blank page, Henry slowly scribbles a single straight line, then a dot, then a wavy line, then a dot, then one more straight line, ending with a third dot, three marks that aren’t words at all, only a feeling, not even a single sound:

Jonathan stares down at the scribbling and shakes his head.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, Dad. I mean, Dad, she’s leaving me. Madeline’s leaving me. What should I do? What should I do, Dad?”

Dad?

Henry hears the single word
Dad
again and again. The single word resonates a long way, somewhere through the distance of ten, then twenty, then nearly forty years, the sound reverberating in Henry’s weak ears, a solitary echo making its way down an empty, carpeted hallway toward the den in the back of the house in St. Louis, where Henry, sitting on a pale green sofa, does not answer. It is an afternoon late in 1966 that Henry would prefer not to remember. And yet he is now remembering it, hearing that particular word resonate with uncertainty again and again.

“Dad?” Jonathan is calling out faintly. The boy throws his book bag on the yellow linoleum kitchen counter and then calls out once more. He listens for his father’s voice but instead he hears a boom and the tremble of a jet screaming across the rounded rectangle of the television screen. “Dad?” he shouts a second time, but again, there is no answer. Jonathan pours himself a glass of milk, then one for his father, and, carrying them both as carefully as he can, he shuffles toward the racket coming from the television room.

“Dad?”

His father, Henry, thirty-eight years old, sits in his place at the end of the sofa, with his unbuttoned white shirt, a dark blue tie hanging undone around his neck. There is a glow of sadness about him, surrounded by the dark wood paneling, the pale sofa, and the yellow shag rug, making the flesh of his hands and face look lifeless and ill. From the ashtray resting near the sofa, Jonathan sees his father has been sitting there for quite a while, a pyramid of stubbed cigarettes crushed on top of each other. Jonathan hands his father the glass of milk. Henry accepts it gratefully without a word. Jonathan takes a seat beside him and asks, “What are you watching, Dad?” but Henry does not answer.

On the television screen is the four-thirty news, and there is a story about the war in Vietnam being broadcast. Jonathan knows better than to ask questions while his father is watching the news, especially when it has to do with the war. Henry Casper sits quietly, his security badge from R and D—Research and Development at McDonnell Douglas—still pinned to the pocket on his white shirt. The television groans as a burnished silver F-4 Phantom drops a payload of napalm over the small gray and brown and green village of Trang Bang. Something important breaks in Henry Casper’s heart. The F-4 is his plane, one of the planes, a plane he has helped to design and build.

“Dad?” Jonathan whispers, but his father is faraway and silent.

An orange and red fireball engulfs an outcropping of trees and grass in one combustive show of flames—knocking the glass of milk straight from Henry’s trembling hand. There are two small girls, twin sisters, both naked, running from the flames, the clothes burned right from their skin, and all Henry can do is sit there on his sofa, thousands and thousands of miles away and begin to weep, quietly, regretfully, without surprise. His empty hands reach out toward the absolute distance of the television screen. Though Henry, in his position as an aeronautical designer, had worked mostly with the nose and wing design, on paper it had only been a drawing, a picture, a problem to be solved. On the TV now, the young girls are on fire, their mouths agape, shaken with all the fear of the world—
why has he done this to them?
He reaches out, ignoring his ten-year-old son, falling to his knees, placing his hands against the television screen. He is asking them to forgive him now, asking them to please listen, to know how awful he feels now, how small, how sorry. But there is no reply. Jonathan, upset, keeps repeating the word over and over again, “Dad? Dad?” until Henry turns, not recognizing his son’s voice, hoping it is the girls calling out to him, hoping, in their final moments, that they will forgive him. When he turns and faces his son, he sees they will not.

O
R MAYBE THERE
were no twin girls on the television screen at all. Maybe it had been a photograph or an article in a magazine or a story someone had mentioned at the office. Maybe the afternoon did not happen exactly the way Henry now remembers it. Maybe it does not matter—the order of events, the actualities, the facts. Maybe the image, real or not, transmitted across television waves or simply imagined, was enough.

A
FTER THAT DAY,
after watching the F-4 burn an entire village in a few static fractions of a second, Henry Casper will surrender himself to the television for another three months, waiting for the young Vietnamese girls to reappear. After using up his vacation time and one long month of an unscheduled medical leave, he will be fired by McDonnell Douglas. During those lengthy afternoons, he will only leave the television room for an hour or two, staggering around the house, looking for something to fix, a loose doorknob, the front porch railing. One day he finds Jonathan hiding in the familiar safety of his tiny bedroom. He spends hours watching his son glue together the wings of a model dinosaur, the chassis of a model race car, the nose cone of a model airplane, which the boy will hang with fishing line over his bed. At night, tucking Jonathan in, Henry will glance at the shadows of the winged dinosaurs and airplanes hanging over his boy’s head. He will understand then that he will never be forgiven for what he has knowingly or unknowingly been part of. He will kiss his wife Violet goodnight and return to the television room to watch the final news broadcasts of the evening, the stations signing off sometime in the night, the familiar static echoing from the room, the electric red, white, and blue of a flag waving in the darkness.

W
ITH THE LIGHTS
off then, the television set now silent, Henry unwillingly begins to imagine that which he wishes he did not have to. He watches ghosts—those of the two twin girls—and others who are nameless, faceless, hundreds of them, all burned beyond recognition, as they crowd him in the tiny television room. They stand awkwardly amid the matching furniture, their stares vacant, like fallen stars or moons, all of them softly aglow. Somewhere among the phosphorous dead is Private Faulk, somewhere there are other familiar faces, all sad, resigned, his father and mother, his younger brother, Timothy, his older brother, Harold, killed in action, all of them are quiet, and yet they do not let him rest. They hover beside him in the darkness, the glow of their bodies shifting from blue to white. The only thing that quiets them is the noise of the television, its own light fierce, impossible to ignore, overpowering. Even after the last broadcast, Henry will sometimes turn the machine back on, the soft static clouding the glow of the dead with fields of impenetrable, electric snow.

T
HREE MONTHS AFTER
his breakdown, Henry does not care what is on television during the day, as long as, at any moment, he can stand, sigh, check the knot in his robe, and cross the room to change the channel, searching for breaking news of the war in Vietnam. Violet, his wife, who seems to love him a little more since he has fallen apart, brings in trays of iced tea and small sandwiches for him. Jonathan, who sits near his father’s feet, watches whatever his father watches, news programs, nature programs, shows about American history. Together, they are silent, Jonathan doing his fourth-grade homework, lying on the yellow shag carpet, watching his father with curious dismay, Henry waiting for a message, an answer from somewhere beyond the screen that will let him live with a clear conscience again. But it does not come. It never seems to come.

T
OGETHER, DURING THOSE
months, father, fired from his job, and son, who is often quarantined from school with his mysterious seizures, watch
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Brady Bunch, The Price Is Right
, cartoons like
Yogi Bear
whom Jonathan dearly loves, and early evening broadcasts of
Batman
, with Adam West as the caped crusader.
Batman
is their favorite show to watch together. Violet has sewn a fairly accurate Batman cowl for Jonathan, who wears the mask around all the time, even when he goes to bed. Sometimes, with the mask on, he will sit on the sofa beside his dad, dividing his attention between watching the show and watching his father’s smile, gauging his dad’s reactions out of the corners of his small blue eyes. Sometimes, after a particularly good episode, his father will stand, patting his boy on the head, leaving the television room for an hour or so. Spying on him, following his father throughout the house, Jonathan will see his father standing behind his mother in the bedroom hallway, his arms wrapped around her middle, both of them whispering. Sometimes his father will make a telephone call to some unknown party. Other times his father will walk to the front window and stare out, muttering small realizations to himself: “Looks like the Penneys got a new porch. Good for them. Good for them.”

A
T THE AGE
of ten, only a few months before the introduction of the antiseizure medication, Jonathan begins to fake seizures at school. Taking a cue from his father’s heartbreak and glad to be kept at home, Jonathan sits beside Henry all day, silent as he stares at the television for a glimpse of forgiveness that will not appear. Jonathan fakes seizures as often as once or twice a month. After each episode, he is kept home for several days, or up to a week at a time. His parents, both reasonable, or mostly reasonable, are terrified to send the boy back to class until a thorough assessment of his health can be made. A boy from Jonathan’s grade, Billy Anderson, brings his schoolwork by. Together, Jonathan and his father travel from specialist to specialist, returning home weary from the white institutionalized medical offices. Jonathan will sometimes wear his pajamas all day, quietly playing in his room, building his dinosaur models, reading an abridged version of H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, waiting until he hears the electric buzz of the television suddenly flicking on, the sound of his father waking up.

I
N SECRET
,
while Violet takes a better-paying job at the telephone company, father and son watch hour after hour of television in silence, Henry searching the commercials, the game shows, the cartoons, for the shadows of the wounded Vietnamese girls. Once he thinks he sees them in a detergent commercial. Another time, he is almost positive that the girls are on a children’s show. Finally, they both appear as contestants on
The Price Is Right
. The girls do not jump up and down. They do not seem happy. They are both wearing the same white dress and they are no longer burning. They are ghosts. They have been trapped in this perfect world of luxury cars and vacuum cleaners and sparkling stereo equipment. They do not seem angry, only very, very sad. They do not win anything. They stand beside a row of products, their heads down, their eyes entirely dark. They are barefoot. They do not want to be on the game show, but because they are now ghosts they have no choice. The world of television, of reruns and repeated images, is the world of lost spirits. Henry, nervous in his spot at the end of the sofa, cannot watch it anymore. He gets up, cinches his robe, and switches the channel. It does not seem to matter. Now the two ghost girls are standing in the background of
Kojak
, dressed as underage prostitutes. Henry switches the channel again, and this time they are on
Happy Days
, a pair of odd-looking bobby soxers. He gives the knob another turn and all of a sudden the landscape of the moon appears—it is footage from an observatory telescope. The two ghosts have vanished somewhere in that distance, in that vast blackness. Henry watches the screen suspiciously, each flicker of movement, each white pixel, but no, now they are gone.

Henry then flips through the channels, finding a rerun of
Batman
, the garish outfits, the bright exaggerated sets, no sign of the lost girls anywhere. They are still out there somewhere, though, Henry is sure of it, trapped with all the other ghosts he has ever known, waiting patiently up there on the moon now, where everything always goes when it is forgotten.

Taking a seat back on the couch, Henry turns and looks over at his son, who is busy with a stack of homework. He gently places his hand on the back of the boy’s neck and says, “Don’t ever be afraid to say you’re sorry.”

“Dad?” Jonathan asks, his eyes looking up from his spelling assignment.

“When you foul something up. Don’t ever be afraid to say it was your fault. You’ll live a much happier life that way.”

“Okay,” Jonathan says, shrugging his shoulders, staring down at his homework.

“Don’t you wanna watch Batman?” Henry asks his boy.

“We’ve seen that one before. It’s Catwoman. She steals a golden cat.”

Henry nods. “I have a hard time keeping them all straight, I guess.” He looks over at his son and smiles, seeing the boy’s hand, so small, busily writing out his assignment. Henry taps his finger against his knee, wanting to say something more, to let the boy know how proud he is of him, for not giving up, for hanging in there, for trying to face whatever keeps happening to his little head, but all he can figure to say is, “Well, you can always count on Batman.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your mask? How come you’re not wearing it?”

“I can’t wear it and do my homework. It’s too hard to see out of.”