On the day when Brandon came home, it was cold. His parents had been bundled in their winter coats, and had wrapped him in a blanket that his grandmother had made.

“….CARE…SON!”

“<expletive deleted>”

As far as he could tell, the sounds originated downstairs — in the living room, the nexus of family gatherings, Matchbox-car rallies, space travels, and pitched parental battles.  These always left him uneasy, the morning after hearing them.  He often had a dream in which ghosts — clouds of gray smoke that vaguely resembled him — had taken residence in his favorite places; under the familiar wooden sideboard that was his Adventure Control Center; sprawled on the couch with the worn blue checkered blanket that scratched his face whenever he lay on it, reaching for a recalcitrant cat who had taken shelter from his relentless pursuit of fury tails; sitting in front of the aging black-and-white TV on which he (and sometimes his father) would watch “Mannix”.  And all of the ghosts were curled up into balls, whimpering, wherever he looked; in each play-sanctuary, in each hiding place, in each imagined fort.  And when he walked up to them, demanding that they leave, infuriated at the intrusion into his favorite places, they turned and stared at him with black, gleaming, insectoid eyes that were like daubs of fresh paint, and spoke with a whisper that became a giggling, rhythmic hiss:

not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here 

And each time he would awake; at first, screaming, until his father’s irate, abruptly-awakened stomps toward his door and the spanking that inevitably followed taught him to lie still, clutching his blanket and a phalanx of stuffed animals, his heart racing.  In those moments, he would force himself to remember being in that room, as if changing a channel from a scary movie, and with a soft *click* it would become Christmas, with him and his cousin Justin running around in matching Star Trek foot pajamas, the floor barely visible under the scraps and ripped sheets of wrapping paper that they flung onto it in the frenzy of Getting Things.

…frayed though nearly new, as the shouting from Downstairs continued.  He discovered that holding a stuffed animal against each ear more or less rendered the actual words, even their tonality, indecipherable.

It was usually better when others were over; when the stale, charged air of the house abated when the door opened, admitting both outside smells and some unseen force that made Mommy and Daddy behave differently.  Like other grown-ups, they reminded him in those instances of being in a pageant at school, when everyone dressed as Bible characters, and when Lucas, whose daily pastime was yanking the rug of the Play Area from beneath him, was transformed if only for a few hours into a less loathsome version of himself.  He was learning that there were times when people put on costumes, and those were the times when he felt only tentatively safe.  Because when the pageant ended, and the stage became a worn wooden platform, and the Biblical robes reverted to musty-smelling sheets, the Lucases resumed their yanking of rugs, throwing of pencils, laughing in circles with like-minded little wolf-packs of friends.  And when Company finally left, and the sounds of laughter and clinks of silverware against plates was replaced with the tired clatter of those same dishes piled in the kitchen.  Sometimes, with the sound of shattering.  And the air would thicken, as Mommy and Daddy slowly removed their Having Company costumes, Daddy often retreating into the room that served as their den.

They didn’t think that he could get out, unassisted — a conclusion unsupported by the unfortunate events of one particular afternoon.

While his father had been rakingleaves outside, making rhythmic WHUSH-WHUSH noises as he created evenly-spaced, identically-sized piles, and while his mother had lain on he couch Resting (as he had learned to call her increasingly prolonged periods of inactivity), the autumnal tableau had been punctuated by a thud, loud weeping, the thunder of adult feet stomping up 50-year-old stairs, angry words fired between the faces of Mommy and Daddy, the withering of Mommy, and, finally, all but inevitably,the final slap of his father’s rough hand against his face.

“…EVER, EVER, EVER…”

His sobs, alternately driven by pain (that which he had caused himself, and that introduced by his protector), seemed only to provoke him. He swallowed them, the way he swallowed the bitter medicine he always received when sick. He had pushed Daddy before. He had learned when to put up shields, like they always did on _Star Trek_. It was inevitably when Daddy had dropped his own.

“…AGAIN. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Against the far wall had leaned — to be accurate, slumped — Mommy, whose barely audible protest further provoked Daddy, whose head had darted in her direction — jerkily, like a bird of prey spotting a rabbit. His eyes glinted with contempt, and, true to the metaphor, with the recognition of power.

“…YOU……JUST A SPOILED BRAT…YOUR FAULT…”

He had, up until that point, very little time to learn what he would come to call “survival skills,” or “coping mechanisms,” depending on which book you were reading, once far enough along the journey to adulthood and the first stirrings of self-awareness, to Come to Terms With Your Past. To him, it was what he called Hiding Away. It took any number of forms. Optimally, he could find a physical place — under his crib, inside his closet, somewhere in the basement, amidst the maze of still-unopened moving boxes. Other times, he imagined himself watching the events before him as he watched TV, and turning it off, and seeing the picture fade, gradually, becoming a harmless haze of gray dots until it disappeared altogether. In those moments he was able to imagine himself becoming less and less real, his body fading, like the TV image, until he too was a cloud, until his father’s hand simply swept ineffectually through the air where a tiny cheek had been. He had first taught himself this game when much younger — in the Old Place, with huge windows and amply more closets. When he had first learned to walk and speak almost-complete sentences, to his barely developed mind, it had seemed as if Daddy had changed toward him. As if, as he became a Person, a volitional being rather than an intriguing specimen in confinement, he became something around whom Daddy was no longer comfortable.

And now, in this moment, at three years of age (“he’s too old for that crib, what’s going on?” he had remembered Aunt Joanne asking his mother, the urgency in her voice more decipherable to him than the words, which he barely understood), arguably too young for the cognition necessary to process “pride,” his sense of self had felt an odd, warming feeling spread through his chest whenever he did succeed in Hiding Away. Because in those moments, he won. He fooled Daddy (who would have looked funny, all red like that, if the redness weren’t like the fire engines he saw, often, hurtling down the street, heralding something Really Bad Happening. He didn’t succeed in fooling Daddy that way often — not as often as he would have liked — but got to the point at which he was able to look at him and stifle a laugh at the spectacle of that scientific, precise, obsessively organized and no-less-obsessively self-possessed man, taught from his own three-year-old-hood to put his emotions into carefully labelled specimen jars — “RAGE,” “REGRET”, “UNRELENTING SORROW,” “SELF-HATRED” — lined up on their wooden racks like the racks in his basement room (where he was NEVER, EVER to go without permission), looming nonetheless terrifyingly over him, his face increasing in discoloration because decades of the practice of WASP self-restraint would not allow his features to actually contort in anger, firing shouts and well-timed blows (FOR YOUR OWN GOOD) at what he thought was his little nemesis, but what was actually merely his ghost.

Decades later, at a party, he would hear someone drunkenly ask him if he had ever had an out-of-body experience.

“Something like that,” he had replied, before taking hold of a proffered joint.

and wondering if they were real, and wondering if, were they real, they would do what the sounds downstairs were now doing to him — twisting knots within his stomach, sending odd waves of Bad Feeling throughout his body (the former, only many years later, he would learn was “severe anxiety”), driving his head further under the covers, which he was slowly beginning to realize, in thoughts he had yet to understand, was a futile gesture.
He had felt disappointed with that book. The colorful, two-dimensional, decidedly un-scary figures that cavorted figuratively across its pages, menacing the (admittedly, insufferable) protagonist with comically exaggerated fangs, failed to elicit any more than a flash of amusement. He was scared, now, genuinely filled with genuine fear, and what scared him most was not knowing when it would end.

swept away by large, cursing, sweaty men and stuffed into dilapidated cardboard boxes. Where once it had greeted him, each time he had padded downstairs, with familiar smells; the promise of a new Matchbox car adventure; hide-and- seek with his cousin Justin, it now said nothing, nothing but the echo of his mother’s voice against the newly-painted walls, an echo that made him want to clap his hands over his ears, that made him want to scream, and to find any object sharp enough to tear long gashes in the just-polished floors.

Mommy had said to him, after emerging from the kitchen and seeing him standing rooted in the center of the vast expanse of floor, tears welling in eyes that had been blankly staring at the wall that he had once covered in crayon.  “This is where the town is!” he had told Justin, who, giggling, drew a bulbous airplane approaching it at an alarming angle.

She fumbled in her purse.

“Shit…”

A jingle of keys, and a rattling of unseen objects, preceded her extracting a rumpled envelope.  She walked back to the kitchen and placed it on the counter.

She returned to the living room, where he remained, the tears now falling steadily.

“You think you’re sad?  You think Daddy only left you?   Are you the star of this particular tragedy?”

This only made him cry harder.  Sarcasm had not yet become a concept, much less the weapon he would discover first in his later quest to Fight Back, but her words were a shove, and he angrily flung his arm across his face, wiping away tears and snot.  “Fuck her,” he would later imagine himself thinking in words he’d had yet to acquire.

Wordlessly, she began walking toward the front door.  “Stay here if you want.”  He ran to join her as she opened the large wooden front door with its familiar creak, and they hurried down the walkway as he heard it shut with a SLAM-CLACK as the force of it sealing that empty tomb caused the door knocker to fly up, and then down.

 

 

 

and rattled, some once-important mechanical part now floating unassisted amidst its innards.  Mommy sat for a moment, hands on the top of the steering wheel, staring straight ahead.  He looked at her face, but couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

Are you mad at me?

What did I do?

He knew better, however, than to interrupt her when she was like this.

 

was as difficult to discern, predict, or prepare for as the weather, and if he’d be able to take his Tonka trucks down to the vacant area two houses down in the alley, where he could dig imaginary foundations for imaginary houses that would become his imaginary city.

Sometimes, Like This was an unseen cacaphony that would grow louder when, awakened by it, he would pad downstairs, one stair at a time, stopping to peer through the balusters like an inmate in a more literal prison, and from around the corner could hear the crash-bang of pots and pans; the THWACK! of cheaply-made laminated kitchen cabinet doors being slammed shut; on rarer occasions — rarer, not by much — the crash of a plate hitting some harder object, followed invariably by a curse whose spectrum on the scale between “muttered” and “shrieked”.  This was his least favorite permutation of Like This.  With it came words hurled downward at him — “LITTLE….JUST LIKE…FATHER…SHIT” — or sentences spoken in Adult Language; cloaked in irony that he could not understand, except by the tone that carried them, or, sometimes, words without actual words: a glance, a glare, a look that made  him shiver inside, a look that he sometimes saw her direct at Daddy (rarely to his face).

Other times, Like This meant her being nowhere to be found.  He generally knew where she actually was at these times; if it wasn’t her and Daddy’s bedroom

but it’s not her and daddy’s bedroom any more, there is no more her and daddy’s bedroom or ‘her and daddy’ for that matter, and surprise, there’s no more Your Bedroom either, you little shit

it was the living room couch, where the curtains would be found shut even when the sun was streaming comfortingly and invitingly through his own sole bedroom window.

Today’s Like This was different.  She had been sitting at the wheel of the car, holding it without motion, without starting the engine.  He saw that the large silver ring she always wore on her right hand, the one with the turquoise stone that looked like half an egg, was right above the crack in the vinyl of the steering wheel of the aging car.  She had been sitting that way, sitting Like This, for what he guessed was five minutes, an accurate guess, as it happened; they had just learned telling time in kindergarten, and Mrs. Kaufmann had pasted a gold star on the “Good Job Board” that hung in the classroom for all to see.  It had been his first gold star, and he had been waiting for the moment to tell Mommy or Daddy, and he was angry to have thought of it now, when the car sat inert in front of what he was coming to see was and never would again be their house, and when Mommy was deep into this new, scary chapter of Like This, where the closed door was absent except in her straight-ahead stare.

 

 

 

 

which chugged reluctantly to life, an uneven, ragged sound made by rusted parts for which money was too scarce to have Richie — the mechanic Mommy knew well from repeated trips to Have The Car Looked At — take care of. He had become a regular fixture in their family’s life, like a doctor of a patient who is slowly dying, proffering sympathetic looks and palliative care.  And the car itself, with its dull, faded, rancid-cream paint, covered with huge tumor-like blotches of Bondo (“You need that fixed?  $25, I have it done for youse in a week,” the guy in the equally battered van had said to his mother at a stoplight), and fraying vinyl top, bore an uncanny similarity to a lesion-bespotted patient.

It had been several minutes, and Mommy had still said nothing.  He fidgeted in his seat, and played with the duct-taped window crank in silence.  He wanted to leave, and wondered for a childlike instant what would happen if he pulled on the door handle and got out, and ran; ran away from that house, ran from the leprous car filled with fetid, tension-infused air, ran around the corner, Across the Street, where had had been strictly forbidden To Go Without a Parent; ran to whatever was beyond that.  It scared him, this desire to run; unlike Hiding Away, it would be impossible to disguise.

Mommy broke her reverie.  Her affect changed as if by a switch; she shook her head slightly, as if to wake herself up, and tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear.  She glanced, sidelong, in his direction, as if about to speak, but said nothing.  She shifted the car into “D” (which he proudly recognized as “Drive”), and looked over her left shoulder before pulling out into the quiet street.

He was glad that it was, in fact, quiet — that the neighbor whose daughter invited him to birthday parties wasn’t there, that the man down the street who sometimes let him watch while he worked on a rusted ’57 Chrysler in his garage wasn’t there, that the fat orange cat who wandered onto their lawn every day, meowing to be petted and, sometimes, to be given tunafish that he had stolen from the kitchen, wasn’t there.  Aside from the cat, he had seen neither of them, or anyone else who lived nearby, since months before The Move.  He didn’t understand why, or understand that, when the miasma of divorce hung over a home, Grown-Ups often retreated into their own homes and worlds, as if not wanting to catch a contagious disease.  Or that watching and hearing screaming arguments, occasionally on the front lawn, other times, clearly audible through open (or at times, closed) windows, tended to make .  He understood none of what Mommy probably did, none of the Adult Things that she thought or assumed were beyond his awareness; in this moment, he understood only that he was glad that his friend, and his neighbor, and a furry creature who asked little and gave the comfort of deep, loud, rumbling purrs when he pressed his ear to his side, weren’t around to say goodbye, because he would have cried.

They drove for several minutes in silence.

“I’m…sorry.”

He looked over at Mommy.

“Sorry for what I said.  I never should have talked that way to you.”  She looked briefly over at him.  “This has been bad for me, and bad for you.  Just…bad.”

“I love you, Mommy.”

She smiled and looked as if she would cry again.  “I love you too.  Very much.”  She rounded  a corner, honking briefly at a car that seemed to veer toward them.  IDIOT, she hissed under her breath.  “I don’t know what to give you, right now.  I don’t know what to give me right now.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

Chris felt himself jolt (not visibly, he hoped); he had not thought to look at the clock.  It was a stark, modern, black-on-silver design that announced the time pitilessly, as if to underscore the softer tones of his therapist.  “He’s not kidding.  NOW, asshole!“

He reached for where he last remembered having placed his phone, and promptly knocked the last half of his latte onto the carpet.

“Shit…I’m sorry…”

He grabbed his bag, pulled out a handful of napkins, and began daubing the beige puddle that, in actuality, fit the carpet’s pattern particularly.

“Chris…”

“No, really…fuck.  FUCK.  I’m always doing things like this.”  Daub, daub.  He tossed the damp lump of paper toward a stylish mesh trash basket, and missed.

“I’ll get that…”

“Chris…seriously.”

“I…”

“STOP.”

Chris looked up.  Brandon seldom spoke sharply to him.  Or, at least, sharply in comparison to his baseline demeanor, which, had Chris not known him as well, would seem a parody of Theraputic Voice — unfailingly even, consciously soft, as if there were meditative music playing behind it.

“Chris…” Brandon put down his iPad, which glinted in a last, defiant bolt of setting sun,  ready to accept his $200.  “Like I said, we have to stop.  And we’ll talk about this more next time, because I think it’s important.  For now — listen to me…it’s OK.  Do you understand?  It’s. O. K.”

Chris smiled slightly.  “Right…I know.  At least, I hear you.”

Brandon stood, prompting Chris to do likewise. He held out the iPad as Chris reached for his wallet.  “20 years of conditioning can be a bitch to take on, right?”

“Well, that’s why you’re here.  We’ll be taking on a lot of bitches.”  He grinned.  With a brief swipe, money left Chris’ credit card, which Brandon held out to him.  “20 years can be a long time, sure. But you know that it doesn’t necessarily mean another 20 years to make things right.”

Chris fought to control the sadness in his words.  “Make things right..yeah.  A worthy goal.  For now I’ll settle for making things less profoundly wrong.”

Brandon, putting his iPad aside, smiled encouragement.  “We can do both, and we will.  See you next week.”  He shook Chris’ hand and smiled.  “Bring a Sippy Cup next time.”

 

 

 

he checked his email.

Why am I doing this?

It had become a daily routine: check email for the latest salvo in a series of embittered, accusatory, passive-aggressive shots fired by his father and stepmother.  Read. Feel heart race.  Consider punching something.  Realize that the least injurious target is the wall, which would result in hours of patching and sanding, the better to avoid a pound of flesh carved from his security deposit, followed by somewhat fewer hours of regret, slight bleeding, and shame.  And with it, an additional layer of anger induced by knowing that, once again, he had allowed them to get to him, to poke red-hot forks into already tender metaphorical flesh, to exert their last gasp of control — Jesus, I’m 42 — from hundreds of miles away, through text on a screen that he could easily dismiss with a movement of his finger.

Fuck.

Had his therapist not “had to stop,” as went the official (and entirely reasonable, he had to admit; it being essential, after all, to honor that 21st-century-popularized concept of Boundaries) therapeutic coda to a session, he would have voiced this anger; sucked in the energy that threatened to send his arm rocketing into rented property; put into coherent words that were not shouted, not screamed, their primal energy momentarily subdued by the better angels of his analytical nature.

But he did have to stop, and between that moment and the next start, he had to deal with this.  A game that he had already lost by clicking a hyperlink; seeing their names and title — “Double or Nothing” — that made avoidance impossible.

Double or nothing.  You sad, old bastard.

He got up, closing the lid of his laptop enough to keep it from his immediate view, but not enough to send it into its temporary “sleep” mode.  He walked to the door that led to his balcony, the tiny 10 x 5 foot rectangle that he had made his outdoor sanctuary, equipped with Adirondack chair and string lights because, who the hell was going to tell him it wasn’t his deck?  The deck had been sold, along with the house, the lawn, and the peacefully generic neighborhood around them, and now, his means of sitting and being soothed by breezes was more expedient.  He was about to leave, and then spun on his right heel, and went to his bar.

“I shall not ponder this unmedicated.”  He said this aloud, in his empty apartment, and found himself giggling almost uncontrollably.  Keep it the fuck together, his more adult impulse admonished.  His one cat looked at him and began meowing with its unmistakable Siamese yawp, and in his last permitted insane moment wondered what wisdom he was missing because he could not speak the language.

 

 

the softness of the carpet beneath his sock-clad feet.  He chose to focus on this, this seemingly trivial detail: a sensation of solidity that was also soothing.  Later, far from the sight of his father’s words on his screen, he would think about that sensation.  He would think about it, looking at it from as many angles as his as-yet-indeterminate state of mind would allow, and think also of the absurdity of what was happening, right now.

It was what he expected from a parent, from a human being who had chosen to cause him to exist — to cause him to emerge into the world, helpless, needful of guidance, hungry for teaching, a sense of self rooted in the premise that at the very least, his parents gave a shit.

His father gave as a father much as he gave in each and every other dimension of his life — his work, his pursuit of whatever passed for dreams in his mind, his marriage (at least, the one of which he, Chris, was a product), and, when that marriage had died — specifically, when he gave the knife that he had one day thrust into it, thrust; and then pushed, steadily, farther and farther, year after year, unrelenting as its life blood escaped by droplets, then rivulets, and, finally, by a steady gush.  That gush was — according to familial folklore, which was as murky and non-objective as the thoughts and motives in his father’s brain — his affair with a German woman ten years his junior, whom Chris’ aunt insisted, to that day, had been with him in a most non-platonic fashion on the N train platform.  His father denied this affair, of course, when Chris had finally confronted him, and this was no shock.  It was the least pertinent of the fusillade of denials, accusations, insults, that his father — more accurately, his stepmother, for whom his father served suitably as scribe in this recent electronic war of words — had unleashed upon him in the last three years.

to the impulse to read, again, what his father had written.  He had just finished hyperventilating, feeling the muscles in his chest clench as forcefully as if he had been bench-pressing a small car (whose trunk is packed with family baggage, he thought), and had worried about what he was in fact doing to himself.  He was forty-three; young enough to have at least a decent vestige of youth coursing through his veins, yet not-young enough, and just overweight enough, to be compelled to steer clear of that which provoked him to the point of what was, as best as he had described it to his psychotherapist, a “self-induced panic-rage attack.”  He had never entirely lost consciousness, since it began to happen, although in moments he thought he saw stars — little pinpricks around a gray corona in his peripheral vision — and these moments scared him.  They were not involuntary, but had become so ingrained in his amygdala’s wiring as to have the same effect, and only gained power with each implosion.

I can’t keep doing this.

This particular day was particularly absurd.  The worst of the smoke-filled crater between them — the word estrangement seemed laughably polite and measured — had passed, in fact, years ago, as had his father’s first ultimatum: You will have no relationship with me unless you treat Greta decently, as she deserves.

“Treat decently,” he thought.  It was a trivial but meaningful choice of words — as with the pages and pages of lies, wounded rhetoric, character assassination, and vehement denials, on its surface it looked and sounded, not only reasonable, but intimated that he, Chris, was the aggressor; that the last three years of cold silence broken by combative exchanges, bursts of thought, that lasted at most through three exchanges of email, were his doing and his doing alone.  It also reflected the impenetrable reality-distortion field in which Chris was now convinced his father had slipped, more and more, until it enveloped him; an emotional Faraday cage that shielded him from the threat of uncomfortable truths that might, conceivably, call for the one thing he believed terrified his father most: self-awareness.  “Treat decently” could mean many things.  It could mean reaching out to the woman  his son had chosen as a partner, and ultimately wife, rather than refusing, adamantly, any interaction with her.  It could mean looking his son in the eye and simply acknowledging at least one mistake.

It could also mean repeating the pattern of self-abnegation that had been the leitmotif of Chris’ relationship to the ever-s0-euphemistically termed “blended family” that he had chosen; the suffocating chamber of unchallenged social mores and family propaganda to which he had pledged his own scared, at times desperate allegiance since graduating college.  Self-abnegation, that is, in the form of denying that which he believed to be true; denying his right to kindness, to courtesy, to basic respect.  “Treat decently” his stepmother, the deal went, and recant his supposedly “vicious, ungrateful lies” that were in fact unassailable truths that, ironically, he wanted not to believe.  Treat her decently, and acknowledge his transgressions

hail, Greta, full of grace…blessed art thou among reluctant parents who resent the very role that they stole, rumbled across like a Panzer division crushing the cobblestones of an unresisting town…blessed art thou among holders of unpayable debt, among the martyrs to narcissism…

and all would be forgiven; and he would — with appropriate dolings-out of shame — be welcomed back into the fortress, the church of unreason, the bunker whose shelves were stocked with provisions; cans of resentment and entitlement to sustain them until the world outside ceased to be relevant.

Fuck her.

It was a simple enough thought.  Fuck her, and her self-aggrandizement; fuck her, and her bullying; fuck her; let her fade into irrelevance as he let the shackles that he himself had forged, clank on the ground beneath his feet.  It was this that he wanted.  It was this that he fought to do.

 

 

“Fuck her.”  “Fuck him.”  As if years, decades, of a bewildering agglomeration of memories, feelings of love, feelings of rage, depression, could be coalesced into a simple, profane declaration; as if he could dismiss an entire connection, however flawed, even diseased, as if amputating a limb.

A funny and clicheed metaphor, that; it was one that he had heard repeatedly in the context of human relationships; often his own, specifically.  It was in paragraph three of Email the Latest: What kind of person are you, that you can cut off people who have done so much for you, like ambutating (sic) a limb?

Much was buried within the words — her words, as evidenced by occasional transitions from more or less logical English into discordant misspellings and grammatical errors; her words, interwoven with his father’s both inextricably and obviously, artlessly – a perverse analogue to what their relationship had revealed itself to be.  In sentence after sentence, he saw his father’s familiar and repeated phrasing interwoven with her own in a syntactical Frankenstein’s monster: dead and decaying thoughts, unexamined, unchallenged, long bereft of the benefit of wisdom, insight, or shame, repeated as if understanding were the result of attrition.

Of course, limbs were amputated all the time — some surgically, with precision, and forethought, and healing intent.  This flesh-eating bacteria will kill you if we don’t stop it in its tracks, and oh, sorry, that means that your tracks will have wheels from now on, que sera; sera.   Others, with sudden, horrifying violence; limbs that were ripped from the bodies that needed them, and whose absence took away part of what made one whole, and left mangled vestiges and scream-inducing nightmares behind.

 

It was mid-afternoon, and unseasonably cool, and the fresh air that surrounded the bay-windowed area where he sat gave him a welcome, invisible caress.  He closed his eyes and sat back, fully, until all he could see was the popcorn-afflicted whiteness of his ceiling.

This particular Sunday had begun as a day of what he had redefined as his personal Sabbath: doing absolutely nothing that he did not want to do.  And so it had begun; for his first few waking hours, nothing but the inane sounds of another season of _Deadliest Catch_ filled the space in his apartment, and nothing but happily un-analytical absorption of images bereft of any meaning whatsoever had occupied his fields of vision and of thought.

But his computer, left on from the previous night, remained on his table, partly open, a faint glow from its mostly-concealed screen serving as either a warning or an invitation.  An invitation, of course, from himself — from the masochistic cluster of neurons that persuaded him to not simply close the goddamn thing and put it into its case, and that maintained a steady hum despite his best efforts to not-think; not-engage, not-care.

He stared at the ceiling a little while longer, thinking of how much the “popcorn” finish resembled meringue, and wishing that he had not eaten the last half of the pie that his girlfriend had given him the day before, between the hours of two and three that morning.

“You eat your emotions anyway,” she had said, slyly, when handing it to him.  “Add lemon curd!  You’ll forget how much they can suck.”

He was thankful for her.  His last foray into online dating, begun in borderline cynical resignation, had just begun its descent into what he felt right now — what the fuck exactly do I hope to get out of this? — when he had come across her profile.   And despite his somewhat ironic realization that at that moment, every important dimension of his life was one that either relied on, or began its arc in, a computer, he had pressed the “Send” button that set the wheels of Change — most unexpected — spinning madly.

She had worried about him; worried about his health, and, unspokenly, about this current intrusion into it.  He had been careful about what he had shared with her — knowing when to be “open” was not among his most well-honed skills — but took comfort in her presence, even its remnant in the form of the scent of her shampoo on his pillow after she had gone home.

He would see her later.  And in the interim, he had time.

He pushed the laptop’s cover open, and the screen greeted him with the white glow of the email page that he had left open.

You seem to have developed a real need to demonize Greta, just as you did your mother 24 years ago. Is it because you have now reconnected with Frances, and need to justify yourself to her? Let me be perfectly clear: I agree with Greta 100% and always have regarding the guidance she tried to give you. In addition, I am appalled that you would refer to her the way you do after all she did and tried to do for you. You have no right to build a personal history where you take incidents out of context and conveniently string them together for your purposes. This is what Frances used to do, and I see you are now following the same pattern.

He sat, his hands folded underneath his chin.  The cat stirred and blinked at him, and walked off in search of food, or the disposal thereof.

He was uninterested in the time that had passed; the pale pink traces of sunset on his walls, the steadily increasing urgency of his cat’s pleas for his dinner.  He saw nothing, nothing in his peripheral vision, nothing but the letters on the screen, which after the first ten minutes (it had in fact been exactly eighteen) had ceased to be words and phrases, and become a pattern that was visible only through a growing red haze.

He put his fingers against his wrist, trying to measure his pulse as he had learned from his last girlfriend, an ER nurse with a gentleness and quiet intensity that at times scared him; scared him much as he was scared now — because in certain precipitous moments, it was the quiet intensity that felt like a loaded gun, loaded and slowly leveled, an unseen finger pulling, in nearly immeasurable increments, on its trigger. He enjoyed guns; enjoys them and feared them, both for the same reason: the potential, the threat, of immense power, a power that could destroy in an instant.

He felt that trigger, now, except that in the place of metal was a growing tightening of his stomach.  He felt his breath growing more and more shallow.  

NO.  No.  Not now.  Not again.

Hell, it might as well have been his mantra.  Which, in his own limited understanding of what his friend Steve called “Whuddism” (“White Buddhism,” the practice of extracting the simplest and most easily trivialized of a complex spiritual practice to sound enlightened with no actual discipline.  Tastes great!  Less metaphysically filing! ) was a level of peace, or at least an absence of turmoil, that he could not easily imagine.  “Not again” brought, not comfort, but the feeling of hearing a siren, piercing otherwise still air and growing louder as the urgency that summoned it grew; flames licking that which was nearby and worth preserving.  

He gripped his head in his hands, eyes closed.  He remembered something he had read that morning, while taking a “mental break” from that day’s particularly thorny programming fuck-up — something called “combat breathing.”  Breathe in, counting to four; count to four with filled lungs; do the reverse.  His last therapist had recommended something similar — a slightly different sequence and time span.  The mathematics of psychosis, he thought.  Immediately before the thought that the recommendation that he’d read for free trumped the one that had cost him $275 and a parking ticket.  

Combat breathing.  Military.  What the fuck?

It amused him — amused him, perturbed his mother, had irritated his girlfriend, whose benevolent intensity, proving no match for his own thundercloud-darkened moods, had ultimately led her away – this fascination with things military; with guns, with violence.  Or rather, with the intimation of; the imagined adrenaline flood accompanying, violence.  He was not a violent man.  So he often told himself.  And as a man; as an adult, one who knew better, he had never actually participated in a fight; never beaten an antagonist to the point of bloody submission, never unleashed any of his flashes of rage upon flesh and blood.  It was only the inanimate and the within-arms’ reach that had thus far any cause to fear him, anthropomorphically speaking — the walls of his college dormitory, artlessly hidden with The Clash posters; a mirror; the jagged hole in its center looking like a mouth that had just vomited shards of glass into the sink; a laptop that, after five replaced screens, finally refused to boot up.  But never a living thing; certainly, never an animal (better than most fuckin’ people, his friend Jeff had slurred through a raised mug of watery beer last week), and more certainly, never another person.  Never, at least, as a man.  Never, at least, since the boy within the man had terrified himself.

He sat unmoving for another few minutes.  Unseen by him, the cursor on his screen blinked, content to taunt only the top of his head as he felt the beginnings of the headache that he knew would follow.

Go ahead!  Do it! One shot; one moment of catharsis, one look at the spiderweb of cracks that will only betray your weakness…play all the fucking breathing games you want; asshole…in the end there’s no soft therapeutic cadence to talk you down; tell you you’re — what did that fucking pussy say?   “More than just the sum of your emotions.”  How sweet.  Because that’s exactly, entirely, what you are. It’s all you are.  It’s all you’ve ever been.

It was an old myth; schoolyard-preparatory wisdom from his uncle, who in his father’s absence had taken it upon himself to teach him To Be A Man.  “In all my years as a judge…I have seen more lives destroyed in a moment of anger than I can count.”

He had told Chris this, late one Friday evening after he had stormed onto his aunt and uncle’s porch, having been followed halfway home by Sean Creeden, a fat, greasy-curly-haired underachiever who had initiated Chris into 6th grade with a math book to the back of his head, and not relented since.  “Showing your hatred is their victory,” his uncle had told him.  And he believed it; yet, knew that the next day, when his book bag was ripped from his hands, when a glob of spit slowly ran down his sweater, when whispers of “faggot…faggot…faaaaaggott” intermingled with stifled giggles from those relieved not to be that day’s target, that the victory of which his uncle spoke was a slow, day-by-day erosion; a steady bleeding of his self-worth onto a floor that would be wiped clean ruff night, leaving no trace, only to be dropped on again, and again.  And so one Monday, when after Sean Creeden shoved him into the wall, he felt his fist collide with an unexpected CRACK! with the bridge of his nose, and saw the glint of shock and — was it? — fear in his glassy eyes, it had been impossible to stop; impossible not to follow that punch with another, and another, his ears roaring with his own blood, drowning out the shrieks — shrieks!  — of his tormentor and the commotion of the onlookers and the shouts of his teacher to stop it stop it right goddamn now, his fist finally swishing through the air where Sean Creeden’s bleeding face had been because he was now lying on the floor, clutching his face, blood streaming through his fingers.  And just before his teacher had grabbed the back of his shirt, ripping it nearly in half, it had been equally impossible not to kneel on Sean Creeden’s doughy stomach, grab two handfuls of his greasy curls,  and begin slamming his head into the floor, again and again

whos the faggot now you fat fuck whos the faggot now whos the faggot now

until the teacher and the principal he had called on a panic grabbed him, one on each arm, while he thrashed and managed to kick a by-then unconscious Sean Creeden in his large, motionless ass.

It had been his uncle who had picked him up that day, offering apologies and assurances to the cabal of School Officials who had surrounded Chris in the school counselor’s office, looking at him with varied glances of alarm, disgust, anger; looking at each other with concern — he would later, during his month’s suspension, look up the words liability and mandatory (the latter attached to counseling, a word common in his home’s lexicon).  His uncle had barely spoken during the ride home.  He had not been angry; nor his silence punitive.  And when he had looked over at Chris, whose face had been all but blank with shock and exhaustion, he had reached over and gripped his shoulder.  

“You’ll be OK.  This is bad…this could be very bad.  But you’ll be OK.  And when you’re ready — we can talk about this.”  Paused at a stoplight, he met Chris’ hundred-yard gaze.  “OK?  We can talk about this.  And I’ll do whatever I can to help.  Because the little shit had it coming.”

It had seemed funny, in that moment when he had needs to laugh.  And in the months that had followed, as he had prepared to transfer from Our Eternal Savior Lutheran School, to which its principal had decisively recommend he not return, and as his uncle had met with the parents of Sean Creeden, whose broken nose healed badly and whose concussion had left no apparent damage, steering, somehow, Chris’ family clear of a lawsuit, it became less funny, and, to Chris’ initial surprise and much more eventual regret, calming; calming as had the clean and pure logic with which his teacher, now former teacher, had spoken of both math and God.  Some things, like 2 times 4 equaling 8, just were.  They were; they were clear, and not up for discussion.  2 times 4 equaled 8, as it always had and always would.

And some people had it coming.

It was a precisely engineered, pitiless piece of machinery.  It was impervious to unrelenting anger; despair; the feeling of brief, electric exhilaration when his finger squeezed the trigger until the instant when the fun leapt upward, leaving a single hole precisely where he had intended it to be.  It was the product of thousands of hours, of days, of focused design and engineering, all for a single, terrible purpose.  Terrible, at least, writ large; terrible in the context of a race of beings that had always, and would always, kill.  But seen more precisely, as if through a camera that zoomed inward from a hazy philosophical panorama, down through clouds of abstraction, finally reaching a moment in inescapable, human time: a man, alone, his face wet with tears as he grasped at shreds of what had once been human connection and meaning.  A woman on a darkened street, hearing footsteps quickening behind her, and reaching into her jacket.  A soldier, surrounded by horror and chaos, seeing the human form of one intent on killing him.  

Or a son, pondering the irreplaceable that has been snatched from him.

jerking his hand upward as if he were dropping an actual weapon from his hand.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

It was not uncommon, these thoughts of vengeful and brutal “what-if.”  It was more common, in fact, than allowed him sound sleep.

that filled him with the inevitable onrush of guilt and shame that inevitably accompanied such thoughts.  Some vague, foggy notion of the Social Contract; the belief that Killing is Wrong?  Perhaps.  The fear that he was, perhaps — given the right combination of time, disposition, opportunity, armament, provocation — more than capable of launching into violence?  Fear that he could kill?

He was often darkly amused by the phrase “take a life.”  Would he in fact be taking it, grabbing it as if it were a mugger’s spoils and skulked off into some generic darkness?  Would he make it his own?  Collect it, as a trophy?  Or was he simply halting it — halting it, and all that it brought into — or took from — the world?

 

 

Unencumbered by the blue plastic case in which legality demanded he keep it, the pistol lay, where he had left it, after his more-or-less regular time at the range with Ian.

Ian, like him, but for different reasons, didn’t fit what he perceived to be the vague, generalized profile of Gun Owner.  Slender, bespectacled, and from every angle the intellectual, he was in fact not only an owner of a handgun, but an expert in its use.  And with that expertise came a quiet, unyielding focus; an ability to — unlike Chris — either shove aside whatever anger resided in him, or to somehow talk him out of it.  And like Chris, he had much surrounding him, dogging his every step, in fact, to poke at the ashes of that anger; to probe as if stoking a bonfire until the right log shifted and let in a gust of air that emboldened the bright red embers to burst into dancing, unpredictable flames.

Both had grown up in a constant state of flux, wandering from toddler-hood, to childhood, and into the heavier, awkward clumps of adolescence with a gaping hole where a coherent sense of self might have been.  Both had spent their entire young lives wondering why Mommy Was So Sad, what those noises were behind her bedroom door

Suicide what does that mean i heard that kid say it today at school when he was telling us how he and his dad had found his older sister in an overflowing bathtub staring up at the ceiling with pink water running across the floor and one arm with this long cut in it flopped over the side so suicide meant DEAD, and gone, and what was happening behind that closed door and would there be red flowing from under it

during the hours, sometimes days, when he spent his daylight hours building models, the TV blaring, occasionally wandering into the kitchen to grab whatever food was within reach.

And with the accumulation of years of hypervigilance, interspersed with the denial to which they had each clung while still young enough that adulthood was a distant goal, they had grown; grown larger; grown stronger — stronger, to the extent that learning which fears to stomp on; which to share, was a strength.  Ian had the advantage, and had had the advantage, in the form of a father who was a distinct presence — a giver of advice, ensurer that the inherently counter-intuitive fissure between him and his mother Had Nothing to Do With Him.  Ian, Chris felt, was the stronger of the two of them.  Ian felt the opposite — and out of this a friendship had grown.

Ian and I will damn sure share some catharsis this week, he mused.

 

He looked over at his nightstand again.

This is doing me no good.  No good at all.

He left his bedroom, making the hairpin turn in the average-sized-for-average-sized people hallway of his apartment.  On the kitchen counter was a bottle of Jameson.  He grabbed it, and last night’s shot glass, and walked toward his couch.  His cat followed him, meowing as if suddenly, angrily realizing that these objects were not, in fact, for him.

Chris poured, and downed, his first shot of whiskey.  It warmed his throat and chest with a start, as if calming him by first punching him in the face.

Jameson will punch you in the face.  Jack Daniels is a kick in the nuts.  And Jaegermeister…that leaves your face-the-fuck down with your pants around your ankles, weeping, wondering what the fuck happened last night.

As he opened his laptop, he smiled wryly at the realization that he had merely left one source of danger for another — farther from the handgun; closer to the weapon that wounded far more gradually, and that, unlike his handgun — fuck suicide, I won’t give them the satisfaction — was one that he seemed compelled to turn on himself.

He scrolled through his files.  There was one document that he wanted; one that he needed to see again; needed, to see where and how this had begun, how a battle had devolved into a melee complete with screams, hacked-off limbs, and severed heads, all of course safely metaphorical.

He found it.  “Letter to Chris 11/1/06”.

Another shot of Jameson sent flames down his throat.  His finger hovered above the mouse button.

Lock and load.

 

 

 

Chris,

 I very well remember the conversations we had regarding your “other” part of the family.  It thus, very much comes as a surprise to me that you say “you never felt fundamentally good, or right, about losing touch with them”.  Every time we asked you whether you ever thought or wondered about them, or whether you ever had any interest in contacting them, you always emphatically said that you did not.  Even as recently as Easter, when after you and dad took a drive through the old neighborhood, I asked  you whether you had any interest in seeing  your other family, you once again said “absolutely not”.  So either you were lying to us all along, or your lying to us now.  It seems rather coincidental that you  contacted them after all this time which also happens to  coincide with our disagreeing with your choice of a girlfriend.  It seems that when the going was rough with Frances you decided to live with us, and now that we are not supporting you with your choice of a girlfriend, you chose to make contact with Frances, so that you have a soft place to fall on, or to get even with us.  I  remember how we suggested to you when you moved in with us that you have the same arrangement with Frances as you did with your dad in terms of visitation, and you were adament (sic) about not seeing her.  You bashed her and the rest of the family and told us that you did not wish to ever go back or see her.  You had no kind words about your”other “ family whatsoever, and so I find it rather surprising to hear that you missed them all this time. We never ever stopped you from contacting her, and you had plenty of  opportunities to do so . After all, you have been living on your own for quite a few years. So your timing seems rather interesting.   All that being said, under normal circumstances it would be perfectly normal for you to want to re-establish a contact with them.  

However, remembering all the things you said about Frances, the fact that you saw her in front of the mirror slapping herself in the face, her dropping you off at your grandmother’s and often not picking you up until 10:00 o’clock at night, not getting dinner at regular hours, not getting up to fix you a breakfast, letting the toilet overflow and covering it up with newspapers for weeks, the dead mice lying around without cleaning it up, the cereal boxes stacked up in the kitchen to the ceiling, your being quieted by buying you more toys and keeping you cooped up in your room without providing you with friends of your own age to play with, seeing her walking around naked, seeing a black friend of her naked on the couch, telling you all sort of lies about your dad and me (whom she had never met) , lying in bed all day and you having to bring her her books so she would study for exams,she taught you how to lie, by telling you that any time we ask anything about you , you should just say, I don’t recollect, etc., etc. makes it incomprehensible to me why you feel so warm and fuzzy or even have the urge to reconnect.  You always told us how you just wanted the opportunity to lash out at her and just tell her all the problems she has caused you and now you tell us how much you missed her and how happy you were to hear that she loved and missed you so much.  So, Chris, tell me where has she been these last 24 years?  She knew where you lived at least until the age of 18, and I also remember telling her that you were attending Bates , the one and only time she called.  How is it that she made no real effort to stay in touch when she supposedly loved you so much?  You were a child then, and even though you may have told her that you wanted no part of her, as a mother, I would have send you at minimum a letter every week, care packages and saved up money for college.  I also would have apologized for not having been there for you, which according to you never occurred.

 

…that the way to show that she loved you was to contribute to your college education she told me that as far as we are concerned it was all about money.  How to you think the bursur (sic) at Bates would have responded if you told him that you had no money, but that your mother loved you.  I very much doubt that that would have kept you in school.  It’s easy to say now that she loved and missed you when all the bills are paid, and when we helped you get established by allowing you to live with us after you graduated for 5 years without contributing a dime towards anything so that you could save up for a down payment on a house, and then on top of it gave you a mortgage that you could not have obtained at the time from a lender because your salary level was not adequate .  Furthermore, she tells you that she loves you, yet when you asked to come to live with us, she had no objections, except that she wanted to continue to get child support.  Does that sound like love to you? There was no mention of contributing to your support on her part. As for Marie, you told us that she hit you when you had not done anything wrong, she sat you down and screamed at you.  You referred to her as a “mad woman”  and now you ar sooo happy to hear from her.  Irving, smoked pot and now you are awed with his position.  They too could have contacted you had they really missed you so much.  People do it all the time.  Justin being in the computer field, I’m sure is savy enough to have been able to find you, and if all else fails one can always hire a detective to find someone that “we loved and missed so much.”  I’m amazed how needy and gullible you are.  Under normal circumstances it would be totally understandable, but based on what you told us, your problems stem from the time you spent with them, especially Frances.  So why would you want to go back and fall into their arms?  I truly don’t get it.  Or is it, Chris, that you lied to us about how bad things were with them and just didn’t like their telling you what to do, and so you decided to live with us to escape, just like you didn’t like the fact that we didn’t see eye to eye with your girlfriend and so you decided to get even with us by contacting Frances.  If so, that is rather juvenile.  

Furthermore, if you truly felt you wanted to make things right and needed for whatever reason to reconnect, don’t you think that you should have first repaired the relationship with us, the two people who have REALLY been there and SACRIFICED so much for you in a loving way?  Did it ever occur to you that maybe you should have sat down with us first, especially with me and discussed your intentions.  Are you so insensitive towards other people that you just don’t care what impact your actions may have on them.  I want to remind you that you asked me if you could come to live with us and if you could call me Mom.  Even though you treated me VERY unkindly over a period of seven (7) years, I opened not only our home, but also my heart in a BIG way.  I ALWAYS treated and loved you as my very own, and went to great length to be there for you and to make up for what you should have had when you were younger.  Remember,  I got you into Stuyvesant at the 11^th hour.  You didn’t even know about the school nor did Frances care to get you into a school of your caliber.  Imagine how different your life would have been had you attended Snug Harbor High.  I suggested that your dad find you a summer camp, because you were so people shy and didn’t relate to other kids.  Your dad went through great length to find a camp for you where you would find other kids with intellectual interest, a camp that was rather expensive for us at the time.  We didn’t care about the money, we just wanted you to learn to be a kid.   We got you into Bates and paid all of your tuition, to which I contributed equally from my hard earned money.  When I sensed that you were having emotional difficulties, we drove to Maine after work to spent a few hours with you. It would have been much easier to go home and put up our feet and watch TV. We really cared and didn’t just tell you we love you.  I helped you find your first job when you didn’t make any effort upon graduation, we made it possible for you to buy your house.  I spent weeks driving around trying to find a nice house you could afford.  We not only gave you the mortgage, but also furnished your house, not with junk, but good and expensive furniture, right down to pots and pans and décor.  I washed and cooked for you, took care of you when you were sick, and even after you moved out invited you for dinner every week and in addition had something for you to take home with you.  Even during the process of moving, I went over to your house to help you with your yard because I knew you were spenting (sic) so many hours at work and did’t (sic) get caught up with your yard work.  One day when you were sitting in the kitchen depressed, I suggested to you that you should write a book  I was always looking for ways to help you find something you enjoy to get you out of your doldrums.   THIS WAS ALL OUT OF LOVE FOR YOU,  and you seem to take it all for granted. 

You know, Chris, that I had absolutey (sic) no obligation towards you.  It all came out of the goodness of my heart.  This is what love is all about, not just words.   In spite of 24 years of love and caring for you, you turned against us when we disagreed with you over Denise.  What does that say about you, Chris. Over a period of six months you have ignored us totally, you have not initiated calls, in fact you didn’t even return your dad’s calls.  You never visited, even though we invited you.  When we tried to get together with you by offering to meet with you up in Northern Virginia, you had a barrage of excuses why you couldn’t see us, yet you had all the time to look and chat with your “other” family who were where these last 24 years?  You didn’t even inquire about our health, yet you tell us in your e-mail how happy you were to hear that your other family was healthy (the family you right up until Easter) never wanted to see or hear from again.  I mentioned to you only a little about how your behavior has effected your dad’s health, and I didn’t even tell you the half of it, never mind what effects all this has had on me. Is this how you treat people who have been there for you, loved and cared for you and gave unselfishly, over one incident .  I didn’t sent you back to Frances when you broke our mirror after the second week you were with us, or when you put holes in the wall, or broke our door, or tore out your hair and lied about it.  I stuck with you and didn’t run from the problem.  Believe me it would have been far easier to send you back.  That’s what you do for people you truly love.  You say you love us, yet you treat us like aquaintances (sic).  We have to make phone appointments with you.  You are so nasty and disrespectful towards your dad who has loved you more than I ever have seen anyone love a child.  His patience is unparalled (sic).  I would give anything to have a dad like you have even for a month.  My dad was never there for me, never told me he loved me or even cared how I was doing. You write in your e-mail sarcastically regarding your dad telling you maybe we should have a cooling off period (“what is this a dating game}.  May I remind you that you were the one that shouted uncontrollably at your dad.  He tried to diffuse the situation  by telling you that maybe we should have a cooling off period (which by the way is a standard technique).  If anybody should have been angry, it’s your dad.  He did NOT deserve your kind of behaviour.

 

 

 

all you care about is your feelings and what makes you feel good for the moment.  You never consider what impact  your actions may have on people that care for you.   Needless, to say I am very disappointed in you.  It  really is difficult to trust  or believe you, as there have been so many lies and deceptions.  You say one thing and then do the opposite, just like when you told me that you don’t like heavy woman, and then two weeks later you are dating Denise.  It appears that you act very impulsively, without first considering the consequences .  I remember when you told us the first time you signed up for a hair transplant.  You came crying to us, telling us that you made such an irrational decision and felt so ashamed.  Then a few years later you decide to do it again. 

I think  you are looking for external fixes to your problem, be it your hair, a girlfried (sic), contacting the “other” family, a new job, etc., instead of really solving your problem.  I can assure you Chris, that external changes  is not what will make you happy and feel whole.  You need to find happiness within yourself. It is for these reasons why I disagreed so vehemently about your dating Denise, or anybody at this stage in your life.  You are correct in that I have no right to tell you what to do, and in fact, I don’t want to do that.  But I don’t understand, Chris, that you don’t know me better after 24 years together where I have demonstrated my love for you and how very much I tried to steer you in the right direction so that you can become a whole and happy human being, and where you become so hostile when I tried to tell you that you should rethink your choice of a girlfriend.  You have always done that and when it was over told me how I was right and that you saw what I told you all along, but just didn’t what to admit it.  Don’t you think, Chris, that it would have been far easier for me to say , Oh Chris, if you are happy I am happy and gone on my merry way.  I am simply not that kind of a person and you should know that by now.  Yes, I should respectfully disagree, but that also applies to you.  You can’t expect of me to accept anything you do and embrace it when I don’t feel right about it.

 The bottom line in my book is that you just don’t ditch people after 24 years of being toghether (sic), the way you have these past six months.  You say you feel people should talk to each other, yet you have procrastinated in that department in a big way.  So your mad at your dad for 6 months, even though he reached out to you time after time via phone calls and e-mails.  Furthermore, if you cared at all about us and our feelings, and out of appreciation for what we have done for you, and considering how sensitive the subject was, you should have sat down with us and explained to us your great need to reconnect with your “other” family, before you did it.  When you broke up with Birgid, I asked you if it would bother you if I continued to stay in touch with her.  I told you that if it bothered you I would not, even though I had every right to do so.  That’t (sic) how you deal with people you love and care for.  You don’t hurt them. Or is it, Chris, that your feelings for us are so superficial that you can just turn us off by flipping a switch?

 You gladly accepted all the help we gave you, but with that also comes responsibility on your part.  I see other grown up children all around us who are there for their parent.  Our neighbors daugher (sic) across the street told me that her mother had very strong opinions about everything, and had no hesitation telling her adult children in their 30^th and 40^th.  She told me that they didn’t mind, because they new that she loved them and meant well.  What a mature attitude. For our 30^th wedding anniversary you couldn’t even take out the time to buy us a card, instead send us a run of the mill e-mail card.  Contrast that to the hotel clerk where we stayed.  We happened to mention to him that we were celebrating our 30^th wedding  anniversary.  After we checked  in and returned from our walk on the beach, we found a nice bottle of wine from him in our room with a very nice personal card.  We needless to say were very moved. 

 Obviously, what we have done for you, which is far above and beyond what other parents have done for their kids, does not mean anything to you.  It’s  either we agree with you or you are going to stomp off and do your thing , regardless of what impact that has on us.  I am very sad that this is the way you deal with people who have loved and cared for you so much.   It’s amazing how you have taken one disagreement to alienate yourself from us and forget the 20 some odd years that we have supported  and loved you.  It should have been obvious to you that whatever was said was because we care so much for you in light of all we have done for you over the years. Also, I find it interesting that it was more important to you to  reestablish a relationship with your “other” family, of whom you always spoke so very unkindly, before you made things right between us, even though we were the ones there for you. I want you to know that I am NOT at all jealous of your talking to Frances or the rest of the gang, only very puzzled in light of everything you said and the effect it has had on you.

 Now that you are in therapy, I hope that you can appreciate my frankness.  Your dad and I have always been open and honest with you, and had hoped that you would be too.  I am very surprised that after all these sessions you had with your therapist, you tell me that they are going extremely well, yet you treat us abysmally and don’t even seem to feel guilty about it.  I even suggested family counselling (sic) if it helped, which you made very clear is not what you want.  I wonder what your therapist would say if she read through the stack of cards we saved and which you gave us over the years.  In every card without fail you extol the virtues of your parents, right up until last year.  All of a sudden we are the worst parents whom you can treat disrespectfully and extremely unkind. 

Truthfully, Chris, I don’t know really who you are any more.  You have changed so much, and all the lies, deception, haughty attitude, anger, and ill –treatment  bring all those wonderful words you said over the years into question.  One thing I can assure you of, and that is that we have NOT changed.  We are still the very loving and caring parents we always were. I certainly wish you well, but can not tell you how deeply disappointed I am in that you have become so callous and selfish, especially towards two people who have cared and loved you so much.  I think if you are really honest with yourself, and contemplate the last 20 odd years, you too will come to that conclusion . Remember Chris, we are not just toys that you toss away when you are done playing with them. 

 Love, Mom

It was not the first time he had read it, of course.  And he had considered simply deleting it; flushing it into whatever electronic oblivion deleted things went.

Maybe there’s a big electronic farm in a bunker in Nevada somewhere, like that farm people tell kids their dog went to after they pumped it full of drugs and then buried it in the backyard.

But he couldn’t.  Some part of him, of course, kept it for the same reason that that same part of him — some murky little nodule in the nether regions of his amygdala — wouldn’t let him delete memories, feelings; it shoved them into a box which it pretended to lock, with a smirk, only to fling open whenever it goddamn well chose.

Having a quiet evening with your wife?  Hey, here’s a mental video of that argument you had with that asshole roommate, enjoy!  Let your blood pressure rise!  You want to punch something now, don’t you?  Oh, don’t you worry, I have THOUSANDS of these.  And I never sleep.  Ponder that one, asshole!

He had a list of phrases that he wanted to eradicate.  “Let go of your anger” was near the top of the list.  His friend Sasha — a loud, zaftig, gorgeous, brilliant, unrelentingly strong, gleefully profane woman who was, coincidentally (and subconsciously speaking, maybe not so coincidentally) both his closest friend and a gifted psychotherapist, had engaged him in a spirited debate on this matter.

“So…what the fuck does that even mean?”

“Does what mean?”

“‘Let go of your anger.’  As in, what, I turn off the switch that controls whatever makes me want to punch my father in the face?”

“Come on–“

“You know what I mean.  I’m not talking ‘anger management’ or whatever…choosing not to act on feelings, yadda yadda.  Self-control, I get the concept.  It’s just…well, what makes it more than another vacuous-ass cliche?  ‘Hey, this fits on a picture with a background of a sunset over an ocean, let’s go with it!'”

“You finished?”

“For now.”

“Of course it doesn’t mean turning a switch–“

“FLIPPING a switch.”

“Bite me.  FLIPPING a switch, you Aryan shithead.  And no, of course it doesn’t.  It doesn’t mean going all Mr. Spock, and shutting off emotions, or pretending that they don’t exist — which actually makes them even more powerful, more destructive.  Like a prisoner in solitary confinement, left alone with all his…his rage, his meshugas, until he’s defined by it, and he finally gets out a thousand times more dangerous than when he went in.  It’s more like…”

‘What…fighting the anger with logic?  Feeling that…surge, that rush, and choosing to…I don’t know…talk myself down?  Like, a pit bull is going for my balls, and my response is to calmly say ‘good boy…you’re not a real dog about to rip my nuts off, you’re an externalization of my collective childhood fears…that’s a good boy…’?”

“Really?”

A sigh.  “I know I’m being flippant…but, seriously, is that what it is?  Step back from it before it takes hold, look at it, think about where it comes from, take away its power?”

“That’s a little too formulaic, but…basically, yes.  We all find the image or the ‘practice’ that works best for us.  And that might work for you — you are great with images–“

“I’m ‘imaging’ you gloriously naked right now, so…agreed.”

“Remember when I said ‘bite me?’  Blow me.”

“Anytime.  So..what works for you?  I mean…how do YOU ‘let go?”

“That’s a really short question with several hours worth of answer, sweetie.  Which we’ll get to at some point…but for now, here it is: there’s no simple answer.  It’s basically everything you said, more or less, actually.  I take a step from my anger.  Sometimes I literally start watching my breathing, keeping still.  I look at the anger — look at where it comes from, look at WHO it comes from.  And — here’s the hardest part — I remind myself that I don’t deserve the part of the anger that’s directed at myself.  Because that’s really what’s happening when we rehash old hurts, isn’t it?  That’s why it’s so fucked up — because even when we THINK we’re re-telling a story in a way that makes us the righteous victim, even if we decide to re-write it, so we maybe end that one fight a little better, tell that person off, kick that kid’s ass — the act of letting that memory send us into a rage, it’s masochistic.  It hurts.  And sometimes it’s self-punishment.”

 

 

 

 

Because, on some level, he allowed himself to believe it — to internalize it, swallowing it whole and letting it slosh around in his consciousness, a foul, undigested mass.  He read that letter, as he had, on repeated occasions since seeing it arrive in his inbox, and found that at least part of his rage emanated from some faint, strident, slightly-German-accented voice at a podium in his superego, a voice that echoed decades of un-subtle assaults on his sense of well-being and that wouldn’t…fucking…stop.

“Needless to say, we are VERY disappointed in you.”

It was her trump card; her teflon-coated bullet, her guaranteed means of knocking him off balance; sucking the metaphorical wind that blew only rarely in tentative, fearful gusts in his figurative sails.  Because she knew; had sensed, long before she came to know him at the depth of which she was capable, how desperate was his need for, if not praise, than at least the recognition that he was not offending the space he occupied, that he was not selfishly hoarding the air he breathed.  She sensed weakness — however unmistakable his own had always been — and pounced on it, a predator ripping its claws into the softest part of its prey; a cancerous cell latching onto a healther one, growing, encroaching on those around it, not enough to kill; enough to make its presence painfully known: I will never leave.  I will occupy space that I have not asked for, as long as I please, and how dare you resent my taking the time to grow steadily and make an effort to be in your life.”

“VERY disappointed in you.”

So had begun the first step toward his emancipation.

The event that had precipitated the rambling, grammatically flawed, vitriol-sodden missive at which he was now staring; a manifesto of a woman whose every waking hour was a grab for control, was not trivial.  Not inherently trivial, nor at all trivial to him.  It was an event that had sprung from the most difficult decision of his adult life.

into the haze of memories that comprised his childhood and youth — some barely discernable; others, brilliantly and fiercely clear.  One had to look at an act — more accurately, at a series of acts, each built upon its predecessor, each part of what had, many years ago, when Chris had been a terrified, insecure thirteen-year-old boy, begun as the last sputter of the fire that had consumed his family in divorce: a campaign of one warring faction against a faction that shunned the war altogether.

the kind that results from a bomb dropped by a shaking hand, attached to a fear-and-anger-infused consciousness that was only barely aware of the size of the inevitable explosion, and of the wreckage that it would leave behind.

It had begun, in fact, amidst the gentle sloshing of waves on against the rocks of the Maine house where he and his family had spent every summer since 1971, since Chris’ parents were young, considerably younger even than he was now.  Amidst the rhythmic sound of water on rocks, the creaking of the floating dock, the occasional screech of a hungry seagull, and the background-audible chatter of his cousins inside the house, Chris had chosen to unleash The Threat.  He had spoken, aloud, words that he had turned over and over in his mind, looking at them from various angles, reshaping them, as if they were one of his models or other craft projects, for months.  Words that he had known — or at least, had hoped, would be the detonation that would at first damage or destroy, but then — as in his private world of buildings and cars and planes that he perpetually built, took apart, re-made in an image of his choosing — allow for re-creation.  Words that he knew were his only means of autonomy.

“I want to go live with my father.”

 

He had been sitting in the living room, having grumpily turned off the even-then-ancient black-and-white TV that had dared deny him his Saturday ritual, his customary deluge of cartoon images.

Justin had stalked into the room.  “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

Close behind him, nearly stepping on his heels in what could not have been more deliberate, Chris’ other, younger cousin George (Georgie, as he would be known to the rest of the family for a time that would ultimately try his patience).

“JUSTIN JEANS!  JUSTIN JEANS!”

It had been Georgie’s latest insult of choice, derived from a well-known TV commercial at the time for “Jesse Jeans,” one of at least four indistinguishable brands of designer jeans that, in their early-1980’s heyday, promised the wearer innumerable sexual experiences in exchange for $50 and the willingness to walk around in public trapped in tight-fitting denim with a generically-shaped embroidered design prominently emblazoned on each ass-cheek.  Georgie, somewhat ironically, had seized upon this fodder for teasing, unaware of the inherent idiocy of the actual product, interested, as a ten-year-old boy would be, in the similarity of the name to his chosen victim — who in those years was primarily Justin, given his older sister’s willingness to slap the living shit out of him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgie had continued his verbal assault, following Justin in a circuit around the room.
“SHUT UP!”  It had been rare that Justin actually raised his voice.

“MAKE ME, JUSTIN JEA–“

In an instant, Justin had grabbed Georgie by his shirt and shoved him against the day bed.

“Are you going to shut up now?”

“MOOMMMMMM!”  His alliteration had given way to his second-favorite phrase.  “MOMMM!!   MOMMM!!”

“STOP!” Chris had said, trying to pry them apart.

Chris’ aunt having been away that day at a house-construction symposium, Georgie’s strident pleas had brought Chris’ stepfather into the fray instead.

“ENOUGH!”  Like Justin, he too rarely raised his voice in anger.  His bald pate had begun to grow pink.  “DISENGAGE!”

“Disengage?” Chris had briefly wondered, safely inside his head.  His stepfather was prone to what seemed unwitting anachronisms.  Which were often funny to him, but on this particular afternoon, there had been no impetus to laugh.

“STOP IT!  All of you.”

Georgie had bolted from Justin’s just-released grip, running around the coffee table, tears streaming down his cheeks.  “HE-“

“I don’t want to hear it.”  He had looked at Chris, accusingly and with a hint of disappointment.  “I expected better of you.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“You were GOADING HIM ON.”

“I was no–“

“Yes, you were!”

“You can’t blame m–“

“YOU WERE GOADING.  HIM.  ON.”  He had reached a level of sternness that, uncharacteristic as it had been, had both taken Chris aback and infuriated him.

“I’M GOING TO LIVE WITH MY FATHER!”

The door had slammed behind him, leaving that phrase in the already-charged air, looming over the childish squabble as if a large, hulking shadow had entered the room and towered over his stepfather, while invisible to his cousins.

Chris had stalked to the edge of the rock outcropping next to the dock, and made his way to the glistening, jagged landscape that, at low tide, was the mutually-agreed-upon playground where he and his cousins invented adventures involving Star Wars figures and whatever crabs were too slow to escape young and surprisingly deft hands.  Chris had always felt comfortable there; it was a place of imagination and laughter, and that day had been the first one that had brought other emotions — a sudden and new amalgam of rage and fear — into it.

Once on the alarmingly jagged landscape, slick with seaweed and residual tide, he shivered slightly as he zipped his hooded sweatshirt.  He looked up at the house.  His stepfather had not followed him down.  A part of him wanted that to happen; wanted to know that he had been — finally — HEARD.

Being HEARD, after all, presupposed, at least in his particular context, raising his voice enough, which was something that he had never — not after exiting the infant and toddler years, during which inarticulate screams had been the better part of his lexicon — done, consciously; angrily, decisively.  Until that day.  And on that day, balancing on one of the flatter rocks that, after hundreds of excursions to that part of the shoreline, he could have found solely from memory, he had found himself staring across the bay, the wind whipping his bowl-cut hair around his head, feeling an amalgam of emotions of which fear was the most dominant.

Had he meant it?

Had he meant it?  Had he the will to carry out his threat, the one threat he knew, beyond any trace of doubt, they would take seriously — the amorphous They that would inevitably become his mother, stepfather, uncle, aunt?

“Had he meant it?”  It was the most weighty decision that he could have considered making.  It had been, in fact, the one decision that would conceivably have had an effect on his world that was actual, measurable, far-reaching — how far, in fact, he would only begin to imagine.

…although it would only be decades later when he would learn that particilar phrase.

Suppose he left.  Suppose he did what logically came next.  Asked his father, and, by extension, his volatile and childishly vindictive stepmother, if he could live with them.  Not “him”, them.  An important distinction, given the preceding five years.

And for that matter, had he ever authentically, sincerely, from the metaphorical (and quite likely, mythical) heart, said “Yes” to fatherhood, even before it was reduced to three-point-five-hours on a Friday evening, time spent, yes, pleasantly, but with no particular intensity or earnestness, when the two of them sat, playing a game, tinkering with a model, all the while with Charles having the nagging and incongruously adult feeling that his father was periodically sneaking glances at his watch?  Was there a “yes” to which to run?  A “yes” worth sending his mother into a spiral of depressed withdrawals and tearful conversations in which he wasn’t, in fact, emotionally mature enough to participate?  Was he letting go of a dock that to his eyes was rotted and creaking its last, shedding scraps of wood, only to find himself frantically paddling toward the outline of a ship that was steadily powering away from him?

Had he been the older and more ironically adept version of himself, the tortured nautical metaphor, born as he was staring into the middle distance between his irate 13-year-old self and the actual dock that stretched, non-rotting and very much real, into Lake Damarascotta, would have made him laugh.  

It was wet, still slick with algae and other indeterminate residue, and in a brief terrifying second he found himself losing his balance as it slipped in his hands and he shifted to regain his grip.  Always be careful you don’t take on something you can’t follow through with, came the words of his grandmother, as if whispered gently into his ear.  He steadied himself, and gripped the rock tighter.  

He stared at it.  It was like many of the rocks he and his cousin stepped on, or over, in their daily explorations of the shoreline that was a mere thirty feet from the screened-in porch of the house: stained with marine life that was determined to stand fast as it was battered by waves and slammed against other rocks by indifferent tidal flows, worn partly smooth from the more gradual, gentler natural forces that brought slow, barely measurable change.  He did not consider, in that moment, when his body shook with anger, when he had yet to acquire what adults called “wisdom”, that the entirety of his frame of reference was represented in that rock: violent change, painfully slow change, the impulse to cling doggedly to that which was familiar out of primal, non-thinking instinct.  He did not consider, seething with a rage born of a mere thirteen years of solopaistic existence, the terror that comes with the realization that the forces that operated on his own ecosystem, that buffeted him at times violently, were fundamentally no less indifferent to those that sent waves onto shorelines, that could in an instant change from soothing and reassuring to brutal and destructive.  

The impact wasn’t what he had expected — a loud CLACK, followed by a cluster of lesser CLICKs as fragments arced through the air and landed around him, and partly muffled by the screech of a seagull.  But it felt good.  His arms and stomach lost some of their tension.  And he was surprised — surprised that he enjoyed even a trivial act of destruction.  It was alien to him, as was the acknowledgement, and, moreover, the expression, of anger.  

More accurately, or so he had imagined, assumed, divined; not from an explicit prohibition (because that would require directness and unambiguity, both proven to be anathema in his family), but from his self-perception of irrelevance, ironically juxtaposed with what at times appeared to be an almost preternatural ability to affect his mother’s mood.  A slight change of affect, however imperceptible to him, cast ripples in her psyche, much like

*SPLASH*

the ripples of his latest, largest hurled rock, which to his momentary surprise had cleared the shoals and plunged into deeper water.  And he, seeing this effect, fearing it, felt his own psyche — a grownup word, one he had heard the adults say on different occasions, often tearful ones — quiver in fear at what the change, induced by his change, resulting in another, onward down into a spiral of tension.  His supposed “power,” his seeming ability to Get Through To Her in the most elemental of ways, felt like anything other than power.  He could not permit himself to speak, to shout, to declare himself worthy of attention, fot to do so would put him at the mercy of a far greater power; that of distance.  And so he kept quiet; swallowed, on most days and weeks and months and years, the sort of rage that had brought him, on this particular day, down a treacherous, hastily executed descent onto slippery rocks pockmarked with knife-sharp barnacles.

Today would be different.  It already was, in fact. In shouting his greatest threat, he had lit a fuse, and as it crackled and popped, the sparks edging closer and closer to the bomb that it served, it was becoming clear to him that tomorrow would be even more different.  And the days to follow; and the days to follow that.

He was holding a rock, the fifth or sixth that he had picked up.  The tension in his muscles felt dissipated, and his arms now quivered with exertion and, of course, running through his arms and entire body, fear.

He heard noise from the top of the hill.  Llewelyn was making his way down the incline.

He’d seen that face before — practiced, clearly inquiring, perfectly formed so as to welcome an answer rather than demand it.  He generally never noticed it — it was integral to the Theraputic Affect, designed to be subtle.  Particularly to those whose cognitive faculties were leashed by anti-psychotic drugs.

“And then…what?”

“And then, what happened?”

“Why are you asking that again?  This is old territory.”  He shifted in his seat.  “I’m really not…”

“Comfortable?”  An empathetic smile.

“With all due respect…what the fuck do you think?”

The empathetic smile held.  “I think that you’re incredibly uncomfortable right now.  And on all the occasions when this particular matter comes up.  And I think that as with all discomfort, the reasons go deep.  And as you know, I’m paid to ‘go deep.'”

He smirked.  “That’s what she said.”

His therapist leaned back in his chair, eyebrow raised.  “This is also familiar, you know.”

“What?”

“Deflection.  Avoidance through humor.”

He sighed.  “Look…yes…I know.  I’m sorry, I don’t mean any-“

“Stop.  Don’t apologize.  We talked about no more shaming.”

He felt a flash of anger.  “No more shaming…OK, fine, great idea.  Totally on board.  Shame has fucked with me for, oh, the last 45 years.  Not an easy habit to break.”

Smile holding fast. “I know.  Not easy at all.”

“…and with this particular topic, with this, you know, little chapter among fucked-up chapters in my fucked-up narrative, well, the shame feels pretty goddamn deserved.”

He sat back, his eyes closed, and ran both hands through his hair.

“It feels more than deserved, in fact, when you almost kill someone.”

 

 

He had almost missed seeing his stepfather’s left foot slide outward; see his arms flail wildly as he reflexively tried to keep his balance; see him disappear from his stunned gaze as he fell, backwards.  He had almost not heard the *THUD* of his head against what had been (thankfully) a seaweed-cushioned rock.

“MOMMMM!!!!”

He yelled, un-heard over the crash of waves.  One of the particularly strong ones splashed droplets on his un-responsive face.  The tide was coming in — not the optimal time to be unconscious

or dead oh shit oh shit maybe hes dead maybe hes dead

on the rocky shore of the New England coast.

“MOMMMMMMM!!”

He ran toward the place where he’d descended, and then stopped.  Could he leave him there?  Could he help him if he stayed with him?

He remembered the First Aid class to which his mother had brought him.  He had not particularly paid attention; that had been an Adult Activity at which his presence was for want of babysitting funds, not his personal enrichment.  He had spent most of those classes reading, playing his handheld video game, muffled under his jacket.  None of which had prepared him for an actual emergency.  Such as his stepfather lying unconscious on the wet rocks, inches from the steady lapping of encroaching water.

yes unconscious thats all hes not actually dead and its not actually my fault

“MOMM–“

“OH MY GOD!”

It was, not his mother, but his aunt.  Her initial look of fear and shock quickly morphed into what he had expected: rage.

 

Her voice, a shriek, reverberated against the stone, overwhelming the rushing sound that had begun in his ears, and the otherwise peaceful sloshing of slowly encroaching tide.  This place was usually his sanctuary — his, and Justin’s (and oft-begrudgingly, his other cousins’).  It was usually where he went for Thinking Time, when he wasn’t devising adventures for the battalion of Star Ware figures, Matchbox cars, and model kits that he hauled on every trip.  He tried, now, with his heart pounding, his stepfather groaning as he — thankfully — struggled to his feet, his aunt teetering on the edge of one of her explosions — to put himself back there.  To shut out what was real and immediate; to fend off figurative (or, it seemed, actual) blows with his disappearance.

It wasn’t working.

not quite contorted in rage, but barely restrained; tensed with the effort of keeping a tantrum in check while negotiating an incline made of steep and jagged rocks.

“WHAT DID YOU—“

He ran, as quickly as the wet rocks would allow, over to his now-struggling-to-get-up stepfather.  He didn’t look hurt.  Their eyes met, and the initial flash of outrage in his eyes was gone.  In the span of time required to nearly greviously injure himself, parental outrage had become what usually characterized Llewelyn – gentleness, behind which was mostly genuine compassion and a non-trivial degree of disconnection.  Which was what had, most likely, made him raise his voice; less offensive than the latest in a long chain of childhood misbehavings had been the intrusion into a reverie that could as easily have been rooted in a day in 1965.

“Are you OK?”  Brandon reached out to him.  “I hope you-“

“I’m fine.  I’m OK.”  He winced slightly, having pulled an underused muscle.  “Listen, back there, I—“

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING??  IS HE OK??  I’M TALKING TO YOU!!”

His aunt’s voice issued forth from midway down the rocky incline.  “HE’S FINE,” Brandon replied.

She paused.  Her face relaxed.  “Jesus Christ…Llewelyn, what were you thinking?

Llewelyn looked up at her and smiled.  “Not enough, I guess.”

She shook her head and made her way back up the incline.

“Look…I wanted to say…”

Brandon interrupted.  “I know…I’m sorry.  I was mad.  I was trying to break them up, and  I got blamed—“

“You’re right.  I should have listened to you.”

Brandon hugged him.  “You scared me!  I thought you were—“

“Dashed on the rocks?  Not this Norweigian mountain goat.”

They stood, watching half-interestedly as a distant lobster fisherman hauled his pots in.

“You know…your mother and I love you.  Very much.  I know that things have been challenging for you.  For us, really.”

Brandon kept his eyes fixed on the fisherman.  He thought he heard a muffled curse as a pot slipped as he was lifting it over the gunwale of the  boat.

“I know.”

It was the best answer, at least in that moment.

On this particular trip, he had been given The Day Bed – an old, wrought-iron framed trundle bed in the west corner of the living room, nestled against a large window overlooking the bay.  It was, in the mythos of Mrs. Wilton’s House, the sleeping spot most looked forward to, and more often than not, fought over.  This was partly because, in a tiny cottage, it was one of the few private beds.  This was in larger part because, on a foggy morning, the lucky cousin could wake, long before the rest of the house had begun to hum, chirp, yell, bicker with activity, almost before the sun itself had risen, and crank open the old window, letting the moist, salty air rush over his or her face, listening to the continual clang of buouys far and near.

And on this trip, it was Brandon who had the coveted nest – awarded to him because of the recent spurt in his growth, which had caused his feet to jam up against the footboards of the beds he had slept in on previous years, which had in turn caused his vociferous (to him; “whiny,” to his mother) protest.

He was glad to be alone, specifically, for those first moments.  He could imagine that beyond the fog was anything – a boat, waiting to take him anywhere he wanted to go; a shoreline that had magically appeared during the night, beckoning him to explore; a seaplane that, of course, he was fully capable of piloting.  The fog felt familiar, as much as it was connected to what was decreasingly an annual event at best – -something he longed for the rest of the year, when the  smell of pine, and the ocean, and freshly-cooked lobster, and the sun shining down on what seemed hundreds of hours of escape, of adventures that took his and his cousin’s Star Wars figures and Matchbox cars into a hundred unlikely scenarios, was both a fond memory and the source of at times tearful longing.

He looked out into the fog.  It always amazed him, how he could come back to the same place, over and over again, finding each time that it looked slightly, almost imperceptibly, different.  How things that had engaged him happily now seemed a little less exciting; how other things he had never noticed were more vivid.  His adult mind would later see this as obvious; as the reality of a person growing and shifting perspective, as months built into years, and as experiences shaped him, some more roughly than others.  His yet-to-be-adult self simply lay in The Day Bed, looking into a gray haze that he hadn’t realized mirrored that of his own mind, his portable escape — feeling unexplained feelings and fears.

This trip had been different.  As was each trip, of course, but this particular one had been different in ways that had – as he realized only on that morning – saddened him.  And he didn’t know why.

The fog had already mostly dissipated, and he heard thumps and voices overhead.  The floorboards,  not fully flush, admitted light from the upstairs rooms, and as his cousins began rumbling into their collective mechanism of childlike activity, he saw shadows through the small cracks as small feet covered them.

His sanctuary over, he swung his legs from the bed.

The previous day’s events were fresh in his mind, and the cacaphony that went with them was ringing in his ears.  The thumps from upstairs increased in intensity and frequency.  Soon, his cousins would rush downstairs, some arguing, all on their respective trajectories.  Adventures had yet to be plotted and executed.  Grudges had yet to be avenged.  Toys, yet to be squabbled over, despite parental injunctions To Share (Dammit).

He walked over to the Dutch Door that separated the living room from the sun room.  The lower half swung open with a creak, and he padded out to the porch.  It was slightly overcast, and a chill rode the periodic gusts of wind that the slightly-open windows admitted.  He liked the chill, and the gray that went with it.  His mother had always thought it depressing, but for him, it was a source — and often, one of his only sources — of calm.  The gray meant time to think, time to stay indoors.  It subdued the often manic energy that accompanied the sunnier days.  He sometimes wondered if that energy wasn’t a strange kind of panic — we have to have all of our fun now!  It’s only nine more days until school starts again!  Perhaps it was just he who felt that way.

Panic.  Back then, it was not a word he he had used often, if at all.  He had of course felt it; on days when he was late for school, waiting for his mother to appear, keys in hand, to give him a ride, it was there, a lump in his stomach that evolved into what felt like a fist punching him from the inside.

PleasemomineedtogettoschoolifimlateagainillgetintroubleandeverybodywilllookatmewheniwalkinandtheylllaughtheyalwayslaughwhydoyoumakemewearthisstupidoutfitnoonedresseslikethisHURRYUPHURRYUPHURRYUP!

He shoved that thought, that frequent memory, from his mind — from the front of his mind, into one of the hundreds (thousands, if one with the requisite ability were actually counting) of cubbyholes into which Things That Troubled him co-mingled with the Things He Didn’t  Understand.

 

 

before one of the Adults, those whose personal pronoun would always be capitalized, those who loomed, even when gently disposed; those whose moods, size, and auditory volume made them as comforting as they were terrifying, would sit him down.  Sit him down To Talk.  They would be concerned, brows furrowed, tones gentle (depending, of course, on where the familial Chastisement roulette wheel’s silver ball clacked to a stop), looking at him with some combination of concern, fear, probably anger.  Because in a moment of anger, propelling honesty in a manner that only flashes of rage can, he blurted out the one threat that carried any weight “The Nuclear Option,” as his therapist would call it decades later.

It was as if he had invoked the one actual ghost that haunted every room of every house they lived in, a ghost that bore enough of a resemblance to that of his father that it instilled the same fear as had his presence.  It was a threat that was worse than the more common ones that children made: “I’m running away from home!” or even “I’m going to kill myself!”  (the latter, of course, lower on the spectum of “worse” than when issued forth from the mouth of a parent who had actually tried it). It was worse, not merely because it was entirely possible, not because it was entirely easybut because it portended a deep fissure in what he knew as his family; an old wound, jagged and badly healed, of which no  one seemed to speak.

had been progressing at a welcome pace, as he spooned Cheerios into his mouth — you had to time that just right; once they stopped floating determinedly and became small, rubbery, flavorless masses, all was lost — while focused on the instructions of the model Packard he had planned to build that day. A steady rattling on the roof heralded a day of gray skies and, perhaps, solitude. The two seemed to belong together.

He was just reaching his ideal state of focus — mechanically spooning cereal while envisioning small plastic parts coming together, his surroundings irrelevant — when his aunt entered the room.

“Can I sit down?”

I don’t know if you CAN, but you MAY, briefly and idiotically flashed through his brain. His concentration knocked abruptly askew, looked up. She was standing by the chair nearest him. He knew his aunt’s many expressions, the subtle variations of set of eye and of jaw that could mean a hug, or an explosion, forthcoming, and today he wasn’t sure if the next hour held something in between, or both.

“Sure.”

The chair creaked. She put down the bright yellow coffee cup she had been holding. “Another model? You and Justin…it’s like you’re addicted to those things.”

He smiled. “Yeah, I think we are.”

“You know, your grandpa — Frank — loved building.  Hobbies. Not models, not like that one; this was way back when wood and metal were the thing, but he’d be constantly hammering, sawing, gluing…I remember this one shelf in his office, growing up, with these beautiful ships on it…”

He waited. Sometimes A Story was just a story; other times, especially when those other times followed an event high in volume or intensity, it was the overture to A Talking-To. Which often made him nervous — most interactions, with adults or others, did — but his aunt had a way of approaching her kids, and him, without the inevitable whiff of condescension that most adults seemed incapable of avoiding with kids. She had always spoken to them — even when they had been much younger; single-digit younger — as equals; as beings capable of rationality.  It was much of what he loved about her, and much of what sent a lump into his stomach in that moment. Was she about to admonish him? Express sadness at his behavior? His mind generally leapt to either of these potentialities; guilt, unnamed and all-enveloping, followed him like a cloud of some overwhelming scent. It was ironic, this; he who took such exacting pains not to offend, not to anger, not to color outside any lines, existed in a perpetual cower.

But this is different, isn’t it? What happened yesterday. You’ve started something now. You’ve crossed a line, and there’s no backtracking…

She was looking at him, and he could tell that he was choosing words carefully.

“So. I think you know I’m not only interested in your latest glue-fumed activity…”

He laughed, nervously. “Yes. I mean…no.  No, you’re not. I–“

“We love you, Brandon.”

He felt a small tear form, and felt the lump in his stomach slowly migrate upward. “I know. I love you too. A lot.”

“You want to talk about yesterday, don’t you?”

A pause. “I do…about yesterday, about tomorrow, about the weeks after that — about you.  About what you’re feeling.”

He didn’t know what to say.  He didn’t know what he in fact was feeling, in that moment. Or yesterday, for that matter. Anger, yes, but — what kind? How deep?

“Well…I guess…I know what I said was a big deal. And I’m really sorry that Llewelyn fell…I didn’t think he would…”

“I know. I’m sorry I was so…loud that day. I heard yelling, walked to the rocks and saw him right then land on his ass…”

He laughed again. “I’m sorry…I know it’s not funny…”

“Oh, come on…it is.  Now, anyway.” She sipped her coffee. “But listen — it wasn’t your fault. Okay? Not at all.” She took his hand. “You know that, right?”

He felt more tears form. “Mostly.”

Her gaze shifted to the “I know you better than you are willing to admit you know yourself, but will let you have space” expression that so often comforted him, talking to her. “Sometimes I think that you don’t know what is or isn’t your fault…do you know what I mean? Sometimes, I think that…I don’t know…you think you deserve to be scolded, or punished, all the time.”

More tears, lining up for a march downward his cheeks. Shit.

“I know. I think that, too.”

“Well…stop it!” She smiled at him. “See, being a person is easy…”

His tension abated. They laughed.

“Seriously — you are a wonderful person. So kind, so gentle — you and Justin both share that. It’s why I love seeing you playing together, you’re so much like brothers…”

“…and that’s why I want to talk about yesterday. About what you’re feeling now — I mean, about what you said, of course, but it’s more important to know what’s behind it.”

She stood up, and hugged him, in an awkward half-hug suited to a tall woman hugging her seated nephew. She left. Somewhere outside, he heard one of his cousins shouting, and then, in cadence, hers in response.

He sat, looking at the chipped green paint of the window frames; looking at the gouges and stains and occasional, faint residual drops of paint on the long table. He felt, for a moment, at peace. Outside, opposite the scene of familial duress that was unfolding in front of the house, there was only the soothing, rhythmic SHUUUSHHHH of waves moving closer and closer up the incline of The Cove, which would soon be waist-deep, the seaweed that now lay in clumps on the gravel dancing ghost-like as the water tossed it. He smelled the smells that he would soon miss, that he cherished, even, in the year that would elapse before he and his family would — might — once again return to that place. He closed his eyes, and repeated all this — sucking the salty, brine-touched air deep into his lungs.

For that moment, he did indeed feel at peace.

It would be the last such moment for a long time.

in that moment. Sitting in a worn chair in the shiny-mustard-colored-walled living room of his family’s house in Broad Channel, Queens, Brandon felt at once rooted to the faded fabric and painfully restless. as if his body wanted to leap up, vault over the three stacks of newspapers and magazines in front of him, throw open the door, and run; run through streets he had no idea how to navigate, run until the vaguely sulfuric odor of the nearby mud flats faded, run until no one could find him. It was an irrational thought; an insane thought. (This, at least, is how he would characterize it years later, when time and a more articulate voice allowed him the dubious pleasure of emptying the contents of his mind into an othetwise peaceful therapist’s office).

In a few hours, his father would arrive. His father, and Helga, who was technically and in fact his stepmother, a fact that he loathed. They would ring the doorbell; his mother would stiffen herself and open it; they would, thin-lipped, enter, taking silent and covert inventory of the clutter, the shabbily painted walls (which, as hitherto stated, were indeed mustard-oolored), the worn and in places stained remnant of carpet.

His mother’s face tightened (or so it appeared to him). Rosemary fussed, on the verge of a full-throated cry, as his mother lowered her into her folding Pack-and-Play. I know how you feel, Brandon thought.

She walked to the door, stepping over two stacks of magazines. Through the lace curtain on the door, Brandon could see two silhouettes — which from his vantage point could also have been the shape of a single, grotesquely misshapen visitor. His stomach felt the way it felt, when he was nervous or apprehensive (which was in fact often), as if a knot was rebounding inside his gut while it was forming.

He knew, deep within the recesses of his brain where he generally feared to wander, that he had good reason to be nervous. He knew, despite his most ardent and well-rehearsed attempts at self-delusion, that when the front door opened, when his father and Helga crossed the threshold into their home, a point of no return would be under their feet. He knew, with growing sadness and fear, that he had set into motion something Huge, something that had already vastly exceeded his capacity for control.

He had done it. He had made the ultimate threat; the one threat that was credible, by virtue of its being entirely feasible. And as his mother walked, seemingly in slow-motion, to their front door, thoughts raced through his mind — did he do the right thing? What would actually happen?

He suddenly remembered an afternoon, that pivotal summer, at the Maine house. His aunt had joined him at the picnic table outside, where Brandon had set up what would be a fatal attempt to capture and carry home an assortment of live starfish and crabs in a makeshift seawater-filled container. His father, he had explained to his aunt, had offered to set up a salt-water aquarium for him. About which his aunt — remembering a tearful sister and years of broken promises — had been skeptical.

“So…what about your ‘tank’?”

The door opened. His father’s face was in his own version of Tough Guy mode; Helga’s, a largely expressionless mask in which her eyes nonetheless made brief, critical passes over the place Brandon had come to call home — over the worn linoleum tile in the hallway; over the shiny, scuffed walls, over the worn carpet and secondhand furniture.  There were cursory words of welcome; his father and Helga’s voices had the flat affect of politeness squeezed within an inch of its life. Brandon heard no actual words — in his ears, a rushing noise had begun, and whether imagined or real, rendered him isolated.

 

filled his ears, again.

“What about your tank?”

It has been a question that he had not, could not, ask for himself. And yet it was a question that festered, like an old cut, and that at this moment had begun to throb and bleed.

What, exactly, was he doing?

On the rocks of a beloved, familiar vacation retreat, his choice; his need, had seemed painlessly clear. Surrounded by scenery, and sounds, and smells that had always brought him joy and peace, even a moment of anger — of, actually, rage — had seemed safe, contained, un-tethered from any actual consequence. What happens in South Bristol, stays in South Bristol, he would wryly recount twenty-five years later. But today was different. Today, he was where all was real — his frustrations; his fears, the sadness — actual or anticipated — of others. Here, there was no cushion of fantasy.

He saw his father and Helga enter the living room. His father slightly met his gaze, and Brandon desperately looked for an unspoken assurance — a glance, a momentary flicker across his well-trained stone-facedness — it’s all going to be OK, pal. He saw nothing. Nothing, except for a resolve that he had never seen before — one whose roots he would only begin to uncover.

His mother’s nervously-executed nicety hit the united front that had rumbled into their home like a dove smashing into a brick wall. Their expressions, seemingly in unison, showed a momentary flicker of agonizingly forced courtesy. “No. Thank you.” Helga looked as if she were about to add “…I can’t imagine what’s on the glasses in this house.”

A flight of fancy not far from the truth. His mother sat on a frayed ottoman, glancing nervously toward the averted eyes of her Germanic….was it, “guest?” Brandon thought back to gatherings at his or (more often) his aunt’s house; thought of the din of his cousins and him at play, of adults engaged in a spectrum of conversations spanning the hyper-intellectual and the (as they thought Brandon and the other kids didn’t notice) profane; of laughter and a feeling that everyone was actually happy to be there.

This evening didn’t feel like that. His father had his wife (he struggled with “stepmother”) didn’t feel or act like guests. It felt, if he was honest — which he could be only in silence, with himself as sole audience and judge — like a hostage negotiation.

In the proceedings. His mother looked as if she were about to offer up a prelude of small talk, then clamping down on the words. By himself, his father had that effect. Yoked to Greta, whose somewhat round features had the ability to somehow appear menacing and angular, it was like a drawn and leveled gun.

“We have to be somewhere, so I think…”

“Yes. Of course. Well…” His mother searched for words. “…I think…I like to think…that we share a desire to do what’s best for Brandon…”

“Brandon was clear about what he wanted, to us.” His father’s eyes, after he spoke, briefly, nearly undetectably, flicked in Greta’s direction. Was that acceptable, Schatzie?” Brandon, having been at their house many times, found himself trying not to laugh. He didn’t know why. It was like the joking between him and Justin at a recent funeral for the latest elderly uncle (halted with a single glare from his aunt) — the reflex of a young brain unable to grasp the enormity of what was unfolding around him. This isn’t funny, he thought. This isn’t funny at all.

His mother replied. Brandon thought (hoped) that he had detected an edge, a sign of defiance in her voice. And this only confused him more.

I asked for this. How much do I want this?

It was possible, he sensed then, and would declare true much later, that what he had wanted most, what had stirred within him in Maine, what continued to twist within his gut in the midst of the pageant unfolding in front of him

because I’m just watching here it’s like I’m not in the same room

Was the realization that the answer to the question that his mother had asked, a week before this encounter, tearfully — “Do you want me to fight for you?” — was “Yes!” More accurately, “What I want is for you not to have to ask!”

His Master’s Voice, Brandon thought. It was an adult thought in its wryness; he enjoyed them when they occurred. Brandon had, in fact, since many years ago, wanted to be an adult. He had wanted to be larger; to drive a car, to talk about Important Things; to be — so it seemed — free. To be in control.

And now, he sat on a torn ottoman in a cluttered living room in a run-down house in a tiny, odoriferous, lower-income seaside community that — as he had overheard — his mother and stepfather could barely afford, watching his mother silently battle a woman she barely knew, and a man she had discovered that she knew even less, seeking said woman’s approval as if he were Brandon’s age. And he began to wonder what, exactly, he had been yearning for.

And with mounting fear, he began to affirm what he had suspected: that the world of adults was no fundamentally better than his own; no more predictable; no more moral, or honorable, or believable.

And it terrified him. It terrified him as a matter of course, and it terrified him most acutely in this moment.

that Brandon’s well-being is what’s important here.” His father finished this thought while seeming to both make eye contact with his mother, and avoid it, all at once.

“That was never in question,” his mother replied. Greta seemed poised to speak, and then stopped, barely concealing a trace of smirk. “It’s utterly reasonable that he would want to spend more time with–” a pause, and a glance directed at Greta — “his father.” She looked to Llewelyn, whose face registered no trace of emotion. “I would hope, however…that we can agree on…timing.”

Negotiating the terms of my release, Brandon would, much later, imagine himself having said.

She cleared her throat. “What I would suggest, is — a trial period. He would stay with you for six months, we would keep the lines of communication open…and then we would revisit this.” She looked over at him. He fought an impulse to avoid eye contact.

“That sounds reasonable.” His father looked again to Greta, who nodded. “I think that itshould begin tonight.”

 

while remaining seated, and even forcibly still.

Tonight.

That had been the plan. It has also been, at first, his hope. I want to get this over with. He had felt vaguely nauseous all the way home from school that day, barely able to make customarily mundane conversation with Llewelyn.

And now, he was getting what he wanted. And, as it was becoming clear, clearer than at any other point along this trajectory, what his father and Greta wanted. But mostly Greta.

“What about YOUR tank?”

As his father’s words had left his mouth, Brandon had seen that same smirk cross her features.

“Do you want me to fight for you?”

His mother had looked over at him, in — had it been sadness? Defeat?

His ears were filled with a rushing sound, as if he had just been underwater — and he found himself remembering the afternoon when his grandfather had chosen to teach him to swim, and had pushed him into the pool at his retirement community, where Brandon dutifully visited each year. He had been scared; he had looked into the blue of the water, not seeing the bottom, and he had hesitated — and his grandfather had pushed him in. “You have to just DO something when you’re scared of it,” he had told him afterwards. A simplified lesson among many, supposedly meant to Prepare Him For Life, but all Brandon had remembered was the moment of terror when his head went underwater, and he had seen the hazy shape of his grandfather above him while fighting to breathe.

I guess that was my tank, Brandon thought.

In the living room, he heard the sounds of the conversation drawing to a close.

His father spoke.

“…We won’t expect to continue the child support payments during this ‘trial period.’ I don’t have to explain why.”

Brandon saw his mother restrain a burst of rage, her face reddening slightly. “No, you do not. And I had not remotely considered otherwise. My concern has been Brandon, and his happiness.” She straightened the Afghan that had been draped over the back of her chair to cover a large rip.

and had Brandon been able to see his mother’s thoughts, he would have seen a pudgy German woman thrown out of the front door, beaten unrecognizably.

“Excuse me, Greta, was there something you wanted to share?”

She shook her head. Their eyes met and locked, and Greta found herself off guard. She was not accustomed to resistance.

“No, thank you. I think we’re done for now.”

His mother’s face retained its flush. She looked at Brandon.

“Brandon…how are you feeling? Would you like to…to go tonight?” She fought any show of emotion; any hint of defeat that might be filed away, recorded, held up as a victory. “I can help you get…your things together.” She got up, and walked over to him, and embraced him tightly.

If this isn’t what you want…if you ever find that this isn’t what you want…”

Brandon felt the tears begin, and was glad that his mother’s turtleneck soaked them up.

Brandon felt himself jump. He had paused, in recounting the events of that moment — what he would learn, progressively, was a singularly important one — and become disoriented; for the last twenty minutes, old smells and sights were real again: the smells of the house (which he and, moreover, his mother had feared would be recorded in the balance sheet of judgements carried inside Greta’s skull); the Teutonic set of Greta’s jaw during much of the discussion; the glistening of tears on his mother’s cheeks when she hugged him, as the proceedings had ended, and as they were making their way upstairs to retrieve what he held up as his most prized belongings. All of these had become far more real than was the carefully-hued, thoughtfully-scented sanctuary that was his therapist’s office.

Bradley smiled. “Did I startle you? I hate to interrupt really good flow.”

“I startled myself,” Brandon replied. “Don’t worry, I do that even when I’m alone.

Bradley laughed.

“What I wanted to ask you — and I want you to know that I ask this without judgement…are you telling me everything?”

Brandon smiled, slightly. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

“That’s why they — well, you, for sure — pay me the big bucks.”

Brandon had liked Bradley immediately upon meeting him: soft-spoken, radiating compassion, yet decisive and fiercely protective of his patients — gifted with the ability to elicit painful truths (some half-), while extending an open metaphorical hand to the teller, as if leading her, or him, through a treacherous hike into dark and echoing mountains.

“Am I telling you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Brandon sat back in the overstuffed couch, and ran his hands through (more accurately, over) his recently-buzzed hair. “No.” He reached for his coffee, and drained he cup.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant.”

“I didn’t take it that way.”

“The whole truth? To be honest, it has been hard to face. Especially in the last few years.”

“Since you re-connected with your family.”

“Yes.  Yes…hell, yes. Because seeing them, talking to them…even getting frustrated with them…and they with me…makes it all real. The whole, huge, gaping hole in my life; all those lost years…the more ordinary my time with them becomes, the more, well…profoundly fucked-up all that distance looks to me. It’s like…if it can be this easy…why did I throw it away?”

Bradley frowned. “Well…I think you can answer that. Now, it looks easy. Right? Now, your family isn’t just an abstraction; isn’t just a massive weight of guilt and regret and what-if. But…I want to encourage you to be fair to yourself.” He glanced at his clock with a barely-noticeable flick of his eyes. “You can see it as a whole, as this Thing You Threw Away, only now. Only now that you have this unique perspective. And — and I want you to remember this — only now that you have changed.”

 

after hearing the old wood door of Bradley’s office thud closed behind him. It always amused him, the uniquely theraputic switch from soul-shredding truths to the oh-so-curt “we have to stop now.”

Of course, this was the point — to have someone else, someone Other, help you navigate the rocks and crags and steep cliffs that comprised all that you remembered and all that repeatedly flashed into your consciousness. A psychoanalytic sherpa, taking from you the weight of guilt and shame and self-loathing; giving you the freedom to climb, breathe rarified air, look down upon the small smudge of landscape that, forty-eight minutes previously, had delineated your entire world.

How fucking poetic, Brandon thought. Better not repeat that, he’ll jack up his fee.

“We have to stop now.” On its face, it seemed so jarring; superficially, even cruel — and yet that phrase encapsulated what was probably the most profound measure of compassion Brandon could receive, or had ever received. Because alone, alone with his thoughts; alone with one too many drinks; alone in a crowd, there was no one to say “we have to stop now.” No one to gently lead him away from the jagged rocks below onto which his relentless hyper-focus would gladly fling him; no one to give him permission to not think, to not let his stomach twist in regrets impossibly chained to the past.

He snapped himself out of his reverie. The elevator pinged as it emptied a skinny, morosely texting man in a ski cap — it was January — onto the floor, and Brandon watched disconnectedly as he shambled to his apartment. He felt an odd sense of peace, and wished that there had been a large, soft couch to immediately welcome several hours of inaction.

He opened the doors to the stairway, and began a rapid descent, letting the echoes of his shoes on the worn marble stairs remind him that he was not yet home.

The door had shut on Brandon’s father and Greta. His last image, absurd and yet prescient, had been her marching down the creaking staircase of Brandon’s then-home, the small, loathed rental house that had been all his mother and Llewelyn could afford. He had watched, his mind buzzing, refusing to settle on any one thought, watched as she steadily and heavily proceeded down the steps and through the dining room, carrying — in all its multilayered irony – a rifle.  Had she actually slung its strap over his shoulder, Brandon could not have stopped himself from bursting into a wet, teary, manic laughter.

It had not, of course, been an actual, functional, lethal rifle, or even a weapon; it was an M1 Garand training rifle, retrieved from his father’s old bedroom, that he had played with as a boy. His initials were still visible on the stock, where he had carved them. Its barrel protruded harmlessly from a solid, carved block of wood, and the trigger merely made a vaguely disappointing CLACK when squeezed.

Brandon had loved it; his mother, since seeing him gleefully carrying it from his father’s car when he had dropped him off after their last trip to Buffalo, had greeted it with dismay and no little disgust. She hated weapons; hated the very idea of them — she and Llewelyn considered themselves pacifists. And yet they had, at varying points in Brandon’s childhood, indulged his fascination with weapons; among the worn and battered toys in his room was a small collection of harmless pistols, and the Corgi tank that he had gotten (from his father) on his ninth birthday.

Llewelyn, it turned out, had felt more strongly, and had refused to buy Brandon any toy, or model kit, that was even peripherally military.  In his earliest years, Brandon had greeted this with the kind of resentment that only a child’s reptilian mind for acquisition could breed, occasionally seeking to deliberately irked Llewelyn by painting in clumsy military camouflage colors the trucks, airplanes, and camper van models he had bestowed on him. The final straw had been a plastic model of a bird — specifically, a dove — which Brandon had slathered in olive drab and Air Force decals, and to which he had attached missle launchers, harvested from his huge box of old model carcasses, to the graceful feathered wings.

Llwelyn had looked at it, and burst out laughing. “It’s a DoveHawk!” he had cried, turning it around in his hands while his mother was doubled over in a nearby chair, barely able to speak. So had gone Brandon’s occasional gestures toward rebellion — conceived in moments of indignation; infused with mischief, offered up with a wink; received with grace. He had not seen, then, on that and on many such occasions, all that this meant — that what Brandon had been told was that genuine conviction, and belief, could laugh; could admit to its limitations. And he had also not realized how rare that would prove to be.

Brandon was sitting in his room, half-watching an episode of _M*A*S*H_ on the small, scuffed black-and-white TV that he had spirited away from its usual home atop a stack of books in the living room.

A duffel bag, and several of the multicolored stackable plastic boxes in which layers of childhood toys resided in plastic and metal strata, each layer filled with battered artifacts of years of his life thus far, were positioned near him, emptied of their previous contents as he deliberated over what he should pack.

He thought about a “what if?” game he and his stepsister had played in the car on the family’s last summer road trip. “What if the house was burning down, and you could only take three things?” He hadn’t had an answer then, when his house had not, in fact, been burning down.

I guess I’d grab the matches first…

Petunia, his favorite stuffed giraffe from his childhood, its fur long gone; its neck riddled with small holes and bereft of its stuffing. From a small distance, a person seeing him carry it around would have wondered who and why someone gave a small child a dead chicken.

He stroked the patchy fur. If someone were to ask him, it was still his favorite stuffed animal. In decades to come, he would learn about the infinite variety of cliches that rattled around in the vast warehouse of human knowledge, and long after the time when technology morphed these cliches into “memes,” he would find himself with a lump in his throat and a slightly damp cheek each time he heard a reference to _The Velveteen Rabbit_, or the maxim that the worn-out child’s toys were simply bearing the hallmarks of being loved.

Even at that moment — him alone in his small room, still tense from the previous evening, filled with a Gordian knot of emotions that his fourteen-year-old mind labored to understand — he wondered about that idea. The idea that the act of loving someone, or something that became a “someone” by way of a young and perhaps desperately lonely imagination, exacted a price. He held Petunia, trying to remember how her cloth eyelashes, now mostly gone, had felt on his cheek. It bothered him, it didn’t sit right, to think that love took a toll — that you could love even a toy until it was broken, or torn, or leaking its stuffing and bearing no resemblance to the fluffy, cute thing that had delighted him when he had been presented it with a warm smile and a hug.

He held Petunia, her fur-less cloth scratching his cheek. He cried. He cried for a long time.

The TV was now emitting the sounds of Johnny Carson, and his neck ached from having lain atop his bed while half-propped up by his pillow. Petunia was in the crook of his arm. He gently put her into his duffel, on top of a small stack of folded, prized L.L. Bean shirts.

His mouth was dry. He exited his room, looking left toward his mother and Llewelyn’s bedroom. The door had been closed since earlier that afternoon. He considered knocking — he had not talked at length with his mother since the previous night, after his father and Greta had left — but rejected the idea. There would be talk; there would have to be talk, but for that moment he had energy enough only for solitude.

He made his way down the oddly steep staircase, holding on to the one railing that had been attached, when they’d moved into the house, lest his sock-clad feet send him on an accelerated trajectory to the kitchen by way of his ass. The house was quiet. Outside, there was a car horn, followed by loud, indecipherable shouting.

In the kitchen, he retrieved his favorite glass — a souvenir from their last trip to Maine, adorned with a red lobster cartoon that was fading rapidly from repeated incursions into the dishwasher. He wanted a Coke, and knew that there would be no soft drinks in the refrigerator. He contented himself with the last of a bottle of cranberry juice, and made his way to the small utility room that led to the back patio. His socks suddenly felt damp.

“SHIT!!!”

He had forgotten about the flood — a leak in the roof had been steadily worsening, to the indifference of the landlords, and the last three days of rain had left the 20 or so square feet of warn, stained linoleum covered with a quarter-inch of musty water.

He hoped that his mother hadn’t heard him. His feet squished uncomfortably. He opened the back door with a creak, padded onto the concrete patio, and dropped himself into the folding chair that Llewelyn left there for his evening Sit-and-Reads, as he called them. Tonight, it would be sit-and-feel-tormented.

 

Brandon once again found himself in the kitchen, this time with sunlight streaming in the windows, and the ubiquitously comforting smell of the sizzling bacon that he had dropped into a pan. He had watched his mother cook, far more creatively than this morning’s repast would be, and enjoyed it. On this morning, it seemed especially welcome. And necessary.

“Your farewell meal?”

His mother had appeared in the doorway. In the background, secured in her high chair, Alexis fussed quietly.

Brandon turned the heat off under the bacon and put down the bowl of eggs that he was about to beat. “Well…I wanted to do something..I don’t know, special.” He resumed working on the eggs. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

Her initial vocal edge softened. “That’s sweet.” She walked over to him and kissed the top of his head. “I’m sorry. This is hard for me. Last night…let’s just say…”

“…was shitty.”

She smiled at him. “No hyperbole there.” Brandon knew what that meant. His latest interest had been diligently studying the lists of vocabulary words that his English teacher gave his 7th-grade class daily. He liked hearing, and especially saying, those words; to him they were part of the secret code spoken by adults.

He finished whipping the eggs. They had acquired a froth, which was just as he liked them. He told a joke that Nonny told often, when cooking breakfasts of her own:

“Why is the cook mean? Because he beats the eggs and whips the cream.”

His mother laughed. “Yes, Nonny told us that one, too.” She sat down and shot him an added smile when she saw that her morning iced coffee had been poured for her.

“When she served us hard-booked eggs…she’d put them in these little egg cups, so we could whack them with a knife and cut the tops off. Karen and I would draw scared faces on all the eggs.”

Brandon laughed. “That’s sick! I’m doing that someday.”

His mother’s smile turned slightly sad. “I don’t know…do you think Greta would find that funny?”

Not a chance, Brandon thought. “Probably not.” He poured the eggs into the heated pan. He liked watching the butter melt; waiting until the moment it began to bubble, just before browning. “I don’t really know what she likes.”

I don’t know what she likes.

I don’t know anything about her.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

the small house was filled with the sounds that preceded holiday trips to Brandon’s aunt’s house. Llewelyn repeatedly urging his mother to get ready, warning of the ocean of traffic that was between them and the boisterous chaos of another family holiday. His mother, telling Llewelyn to PLEASE let her think, lest she forget the cake that his aunt had assured her was not necessary. His half-sister, squalling in the background as she bumped between the padded rails of her playpen.

Brandon had always loved this part of the day — the hours preceding the gathering; the anticipation of food, and mischief with his cousins, and intense discussions of recent model-kit acquisitions with Justin. Today was different. Today, his anticipation was overlaid with fear; fear that, greeting him at his aunt’s door would be anger; sadness, judgement.

He had no concrete reasons for these fears. His uncle, as was his custom, had taken him aside to tell him, as to an adult, that he had to make the decision best for him, that he loved him, that he would always love him. And his aunt’s conversation with him in Maine continued to ring in his ears. What about your “tank”?

He remembered, several days after his return home after that trip, his room pungent with the odor of brackish seawater and decaying ocean life, his father having told him that had had not, in fact, set up the salt water tank that he had suggested. “There was no way those creatures would survive,” he had said, to Brandon’s disappointment. He had watched as his beloved starfish, absurdly carried hundreds of miles from its home in a plastic-lined cardboard box, slowed and eventually stopped all movement. Taken from his home; his comfortable surroundings, it had suffered, slowly, only to reach a destination that offered it no sustenance. The metaphor, which had at the time escaped his thirteen-year-old sensibilities, would one day become painfully apt.

at his aunt’s house, seats filled with bags of food and the proffered cake, padded with plastic bags from a month’s worth of shopping trips. There was no visible parking, which Llewelyn notes with a barely audible sigh as he pulled up next to an uncle’s Cadillac.

He remembered in vivid detail his last visit to his aunt’s house. And the events, and moments of rage, that had preceded it.

It had been a cooler-than average fall day, weeks ago. He had just turned the corner into his grandmother’s street, windbreaker defiantly unzipped to allow the cold air — as it always did — to calm him.

It had been a good day. The customary slings and arrows of 8th grade had seemed to subside that week, and he had finished his Edgar Allan Poe paper early. And waiting for him on his grandmother’s low wooden table, where he had left it that morning, was his latest model kit. “Another model?” she had asked; her customary response to his regular acquisitions. He had learned to largely ignore it.

In the near distance, he had seen a familiar, gold-brown, dented fender. He had squinted — was that Llewelyn’s car? This being the early 80’s, large, bulbous, somewhat battered station wagons were all but rare. But still — he had quickened his pace. His heart had begun to race: why would they have been there at that time?

He considered turning around. Whatever their reasoning, it wouldn’t be in his favor.

Immediately upon forming that thought, Brandon saw Llewelyn look directly at him. He had attempted a wave, and the casual gesture was bizarrely out of place. Hi kid, just another day, and oh by the way buckle up, here we are to take you somewhere you fucking don’t want to go!

It was too late to divert — and where would he even have gone?

on Llewelyn’s face when he reached the car.

“What’s going on?”

He had looked down, and seen the plastic bags Llewelyn had been carrying. The bags that his grandmother saved by the boxful, with “Silver Barn Farms” emblazoned on them. The bags had been bulging with what Brandon had identified, in silhouette, as His Stuff: the books, and pads, and smattering if model boxes and hobby supplies that he had been keeping at his grand mother’s apartment, on what he had come to prize as his sanctuary — the corner of his grandmother’s guest room where he did his homework each afternoon. This had been an arrangement into which he had more or less wandered — and only partly by default — over the last six months.

“I HATE it here!” he had shouted one afternoon, arguing with his mother in their Broad Channel living room. He had been late to that morning for the third consecutive time, prompting his homeroom teacher to — gleefully, it has seemed, despite the man’s eyes being perpetually concealed with the sunglasses he inexplicably wore all day — sentence him to detention.

Brandon’s explanation — that he had been sitting for an hour waiting for a tow truck with his stepfather inside a cold dented Dodge station wagon whose driveshaft lay inert on the pavement beneath it — had prompted nothing more than a partly-concealed raised eyebrow, and a no dice, pal, third strike, you’re out! that had sounded exactly like an unfunny attempt at coolness by a sweaty, balding algebra teacher. A teacher wearing high tops, and a fake leather cowboy belt strained to its limits above the pair of Jordache jeans that he wore every day. The students called him “Jordass” behind his back.

Brandon had shoved the detention slip — crumpled from Brandon’s having balled it up and thrown it at the tiled wall of the school hallway — at his mother later that day. “Look at this! I NEVER get in trouble. I NEVER got detention before! Only since we had to move out here and I have to go to school in these piece of shit cars!”

Brandon felt, interwoven with the rage that had been steadily building with each step toward his mother and Llewelyn, a wave of shame. He had been honest –‘more honest than he had been, since the Maine Incident (as they had wryly called it); more honest, even, than ever before. He had seen the look on their faces as soon as the words had left his mouth — looks that revealed understanding that it had not been adolescent angst given voice; that something was on the process of changing, on unraveling; something that perhaps had already unraveled into an angry snark of threads thrown at their feet.

As it’s suspension, taxed from years of road trips and the perpetual assault of New York City streets, bounced and wavered. Brandon was feeling slightly ill. He knew it wasn’t carsickness; he had been feeling that way since turning the corner and seeing his forced decampment from his grandmother’s house. It was a feeling he knew well: a party jittery, on-the-edge of nauseous sensation that heralded a crisis. Specifically, a crisis of which he was a focal point. And today was precisely that.

Llewllelyn and his mother were silent in the front seat. His mother briefly met his stare in the rear-view mirror, but looked away quickly. Llewelyn stares ahead, clicking his teeth rhythmically as he often did when worried. He was convinced that no one noticed this, despite having been told weekly.

Llewelyn said as he pulled up in front of Brandon’s aunt’s house. The street had been clogged with cars, most likely in relation to the music emanating from the house on the corner. Brandon remembered hearing verses of a disco song, which would, decades later, replay in his head.

His mother got out of the car. A gust of wind entered, rustling the plastic of the bags that held Brandon’s base camp. He put his hand on the door handle, reflexively, and then paused. He felt a sudden swell of rage. He briefly considered sliding over the bench seat, grabbing the nearest bag, and exiting the car through the opposite side.

The door on his side opened. His mother was looking at him with what he thought was an amalgam of sadness, apprehension, perhaps even regret.

that were honest, but without the edge with which he had repeatedly found himself drawing blood.

“Nothing is going to change.”

His mother registered no sadness, if it was what she had been feeling. She closed the car door, and Llewelyn drove away.

His aunt was in the doorway. They walked toward her. Brandon began feeling sick to his stomach.

that he was afraid of her. That, if he was really honest with himself, he had always been afraid of her.

That day in Maine now seemed at an untouchable distance — he and she at the long table where the family had all its vacation meals, talking, if perhaps in his own imagination, as adults. She had acknowledged his decision as his own; she had echoed the burst of selfhood with which he had declared, after so many invisible years, loudly.

But that day had come and gone. Today, he was a child walking anxiously toward an imminent outpouring of adult emotion — the kind whose trajectory was always downward. His “home base” was sitting in used plastic bags on the torn vinyl seat of his parents’ car. And the boy who had learned to shout, who had dared to threaten, now looked like no more than a fuming adolescent petulantly breaking rocks on a shoreline.

To them, maybe.

His aunt opened the door.

which as far as he could discern were arranged by an unsettlingly uncertain combination of love, and fear, and anger.

She hugged his mother, who had begun crying slightly. Llewelyn remained outside, holding the screen door open.

They moved inside. Brandon looked for his uncle; he had apparently sequestered himself for the evening. Behind his aunt, their dining room table had been set.

Past the old dictionary, presenting yellowed pages at an angle on its wrought-iron stand; past the even older organ that he and Justin would pretend to play until told to stop; past the huge, panoramic art piece that always reminded him of the coast up in Maine. Through this gauntlet of memories, he walked, behind his mother, toward the dinner table. Toward the tribunal, convened to adjudicate his impending familial trajectory, and catered with take-out Chinese food.

His mother followed, unprompted, and sat next to her. There was a chair opposite them that had clearly been set aside for him.

For an instant, Brandon felt something other than the knot, with its constant threat of nausea. He thought about arriving at his grandmother’s house; the one place that had felt like anything resembling a sanctuary, packed up and thrown into the same plastic bags that his mother used for trash. He thought about the timing; of this dismantling of this one part of his life that was — or seemed — uniquely his, made by him — and un-done behind his back. He thought about his mother and Llewelyn making only furtive eye contact as they rumbled toward his aunt’s house. They know what they did.

He was in fact rooted to that part of the floor. He imagined leaving; shoving Llewelyn, running past the huge sculpture that he and his cousins were terrified of jostling whenever they played on his aunt’s living room, past the couch where he would sit with Justin, watching cartoons, out the front door and past the round slate table where he and Justin had built matching F-4 Phantom model kits two months ago. And it was there that his imagination ended, because beyond that threshold was the world he couldn’t understand, where his entire Home Base of textbooks, and tattered Composition notebooks, and colored pens and drawing pads and at least one half-finished model were sitting in a locked car inside plastic bags.

His aunt was looking at him. She appeared to have said something for which she was awaiting a response. In her dining room, a circle of wrought expressions was at the table, and one seat, unmistakably his, was empty. Any hint of ambiguity had left the house in lock-step with his phantom self.

“Would you sit down, please?” The “please” belied the set of his aunt’s jaw. He pulled the chair away from the table, and sat.

in the cluttered office. The shadows cast by numerous leaning stacks of books and decades-old newspapers looked, from some angles, ready to pounce.

Ralph shuffled past a copy of a 1995 Journal of Oceanography, sloshing his coffee into his already-stained t-shirt.

Goddammit.

His computer screen glowed as if enticing him. The screen saver scrawled random lines in changing colors, creating the illusion of a purposeful design.

He fell heavily into his chair, which squeaked in protest. He stared at the lines slowly filling the screen, watching them shift from green, to blue, to pink, to green again. The screen lent his face, mostly hidden by a non-groomed beard, what to an observer would have seemed an unnervingly corpse-like pallor. His eyes — what his wife had once called “dancing,” — were fixed on nothing.

He picked up his mouse and clicked the icon labeled “Symposium:” a chat and social-networking application with a visual brand — a stylized mortarboard and diploma — that was as comically incongruous as its name. A few people, it’s designer foremost among them, held fast to the idea that it was in fact a forum for intellectually focused debate; a “marketplace of the mind” as it had been aggressively advertised. Which in a few, isolated moments, it succeeded in being. In the rest of them, as a rule, it was the technologically engineered, algorithm-driven equivalent of a restroom wall, scrawled with an overwhelmingly forgettable, chaotic web of misogynist rants, pretentious invective, and desperately racist screeds.

This had been pointed out to Ralph on more than one occasion — his propensity for uninvited sophistry, which prior to his retirement had been patiently indulged, due to his title, and which since then had found a context on the blinking pages of Symposium.

She could not hear him sigh, which boded well for him. It was Father’s Day.

The cursor blinked at the end of a partial sentence. He sat for a moment, as if waiting for it to complete his thought.

“Fuck it.” He held his finger on the backspace key until his words were gone.

“Ralph?”

He generally disliked admitting to himself — much less to any other person — that his predominant feeling, with respect to his marriage, was an odd, undifferentiated sort of numbness. Earlier that morning, he had been looking at the photo she had dutifully posted on her WhoAreYou page. It had been a scanned, grainy relic from 2005, taken on this same day, in a much different year. Brandon had been inexpertly cropped from it, the only clue to his presence a disembodied hand on Ralph’s shoulder. Greta’s handiwork — less an attempt to spare Ralph’s deeply buried feelings than one of many expressions of spite.

He forced himself up out of his chair, which creaked in metallic relief. He smelled freshly cooked bacon. He was grateful, at least, for the ritual breakfast that she always cooked on this particular day.

Brandon found himself wincing as the small car nudged the curb as it took a sharp turn.

His stepfather was gripping the steering wheel with what seemed to be a mixture of righteousness and terror. He did not drive often. After the last accident — where an SUV had severed the bumper of their other car, narrowly missing doing the same to the passengers — his mother had hidden the keys.

“Bastard.” His stepfather muttered, as a horn blared. He had been clicking his teeth since the trip had begun. This was something he did when nervous, or bored, or when suppressing murderous rage. Brandon tried to ignore the sound, which, in concert with bleats of the car horn, occasional screeching tires, and epithets, was not doing his anxiety any favors.

He stuck his finger into a small tear in the brown vinyl upholstery of the seat. He had done this for years, sometimes to mark the tedium of long car trips. Other times, to transfer the tension in his body into the aging carcass of the family strain wagon. He found himself longing for the tension that he had felt when he was 12, when the duo had been much smaller.

“Go to hell, turkey!” The car swerved. His stepfather had a unique way of making psychosis seem quaint. Turkey.

“I wanted ask you something.”

Brandon looked over. His stepfather had a look of sudden earnestness, and Brandon felt a pang of hope. Would this unnerving jaunt through Queens become a moment of connection? Would the polite distance that they had felt since he and his mother married, with which Brandon had become reluctantly comfortable, abate?

“I was wondering…if you didn’t mind….”

The car darkened as they passed under an elevated train trestle. An N train rumbled above their heads.

“…if I came over once in a while…”

Brandon had regretted renting his apartment — a spare, overpriced space in a newly and hastily constructed building — since setting foot in it. It had been the most concrete of a series of symptoms of the emotional maelstrom of the past year, highlighted by a series of hastily-conceived decisions. And it was lonely.

“…to smoke marijuana.”

Brandon suppressed a laugh. Of course.

Brandon wasn’t particularly surprised when, waking in a tangle of sheets and yesterday’s clothes, he immediately felt slightly ill.

It was that smell. He’d never figured out exactly what it was — some mixture of the nearby Jamaica Bay mud flats, garbage not yet taken out, or the omnipresent, slightly sweet odor that had permeated the house since they had first toured it three months earlier. Smells almost like that roach spray from…before, he had thought.

He hated that smell. Mostly, he’d come to accept it, which from observation was What Adults Did: they accepted that life would contain things that, in his parlance, sucked. Such as cars that rattled alarmingly, and whose driveshafts occasionally broke free on Cross Bay Boulevard, making a scraping “WHUNKAWHUNKAWHUNKA” sound from beneath the seat from which Brandon sat, counting the minutes that he’d be late for French (again), watching his stepfather click his teeth as he sat behind the inert steering wheel.

When he was a child, the terror announced itself with shrieks. During the first year, the shrieks resulted in his bedroom door opening, and a gently hand on his cheek. But a year became two, then three. By the fourth, the door seldom opened, and when it did, it heralded shouts, and once in a while, slaps. One warm night, at 4 AM, his mother had screamed “SHUT UP” outside his door for five minutes. Or so it had seemed, given that he could not yet tell time. Not, at least, as the grownups did.

This morning, in the stillness of his cabin, there had been neither shrieks, nor the promise of comfort, nor the fear of an enraged person three times his size. His eyes had opened abruptly. As they adjusted to the minimal light on the room — moonlight, especially bright in the clear mountain air — there were no hulking shadows, no bearers of punishment that was in fact worse than what had knifed its way into his sleep. The monsters, dreamed and seen and felt, were to him distant memories. Or so they should have been.

He lay, still, breathing deeply, focusing on the sound of the wind blowing tree branches against the bedroom window. He reminded himself that, even secluded, amidst wildlife that would happily feast on him, amidst — in some of the more eerily quiet and dilapidated houses nearby — human would-be predators armed with assault weapons and stupidity rather than claws and razor-sharp teeth, amidst a harsh winter that at times seemed to have a bloodlust off its own, that he was in fact completely safe. Safer than he had been.

In that moment, it was of little comfort.

among the 50 or so that were stacked, some precariously, in the shed. There was a stain on the corner that might have been water. This goddamn place.

Hoisting it above a snarl of ancient Christmas lights, he was slightly disappointed at its lack of heft. It was not the one that contained his photo album — a relic of what was alarmingly considered a lost age, where he paid a bored teenager to create prints that he would physically sort, wincing at the smell of the chemicals that had birthed them. He had no idea where that album was. The move, like many before it, had been hurried and in no small part chaotic, with the effect of trips to the leaking, moldy shed being an exercise in occasionally wistful and generally infuriating archeology. Was this most recently extracted box a treasure trove of emotionally resonant tschotchkes? A stack of long-forgotten and never-read catalogs? A tangle of cords that would never again snake from the devices for which they were intended? Such was the element of mystery that went with his occasional forays into this inexplicably still-standing tiny building on the corner of their temporary property.

The box in front of him today had been worth the trip, and the shin he had barked on an old A/C unit. He opened the flaps, folded in the interlocked fashion that his wife hated. “For the love of God…please tape that. Please.” One of the boxes he had secured in this manner had succumbed to gravity and the indifference of the crew they had hired to move and stack it among its brethren, and the entire stack had fallen into the basement floor one night, sending all of their cats bounding onto her while she slept, and shattering an entire flatware set that they had forgotten receiving as a wedding gift. Learning lessons The Hard Way had been a habit to which he had clung with near-religious devotion since many years preceding Leigh meeting him. Thank Nobodaddy she’s patient.