A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  It was essential that my work life remain good and clean and separate from the life that happened after work. Never would it occur to me to make a friend at the office.

  I had a few suits, which I wore when it was important to wear a suit. But mostly, I wore jeans and T-shirts.

  I worked out six days a week and was proud of my body. It was, for me, another point of difference between me and my father. It was important that I have as many of these as possible.

  I dated. But nothing ever became serious because at a certain point, you have to invite the other person over to your apartment and I could never do this.

  I had a few male friends, all of whom I’d dated in the past, and I kept them separate from one another. None of my friends had ever met.

  I made very good money and spent all of it, every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck and after working in advertising since the age of nineteen, had saved around two hundred dollars.

  My goal each day was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.

  I used to go out to bars. I used to go to clubs. Now, I drank alone. Once drunk, I might wander the streets and look for drugs. Or go to a bar and talk to a stranger.

  I was two people. The sane, funny, advertising me. And the other me, that came out at night. It was a constant struggle to manage the two. And lately, I was becoming very worried about this other person. It appeared that he was growing larger. The daytime me was shrinking. I was leaving the office earlier and earlier each day. It was only a matter of time before I quit entirely and went freelance.

  Then, I would be accountable to no one.

  This other side of me, this whole other person, even ate foods I didn’t like. Sometimes, I woke up to find an opened tin of smoked oysters on the bed. Once, I woke up in a different town. I was on the floor, beside a sofa. On one end of the sofa, a man who was unfamiliar, on the other a woman I’d never seen. I had no idea where I was or how long it would take me to get back to Manhattan.

  But I did get back to Manhattan and went to work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As if I’d stayed home the night before and read a novel.

  Nobody who knew me, or saw me on the street, would ever guess that I lived the way I did. That I had to keep my apartment air-conditioned year-round to control the odor. That my apartment wasn’t merely filthy but diseased.

  I had concerns that something might be wrong with me. That the dreams might be a part of me trying to come out. I was afraid I might be a serial killer.

  And I was afraid that I was exactly like my father.

  He, too, showed the world one face but wore an entirely different one in private. And was I missing empathy? I thought this might be so.

  It wasn’t that I had fantasies of killing people. But I was having dreams about it. And I had to admit, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Perhaps the dreams were fantasies, expressing themselves when I was out of the way.

  I read books about serial killers to see if I recognized myself. I was riveted by the gruesome details, repelled and fascinated. After each book I told myself, “That’s the last one.”

  One night, I dreamed I was visiting a mass murderer on death row. There was no table between us, we sat in hard plastic chairs, side by side. As he spoke, I looked into his eyes and realized I understood him on a deeper level than I had ever understood anyone before. He reached for my hand and said, “We’re the same.” I had an explosive orgasm. And woke up. I’d had a wet dream, the first since I was thirteen.

  When I read the curious statistic that many serial killers owned VW bugs, I felt a slight relief. I had owned, after all, a VW Fastback. Surely, this had to humanize me.

  All my life, I’d been afraid of turning into my father. And now, it looked like that was exactly what had happened. I was an alcoholic, like him. I had a double life, like him. And now, these terrible dreams, revealing some darker, more sinister part of me. The him part. The father part.

  SHORTLY AFTER THE divorce my father married a secretary from the university. She was the exact opposite of my mother—quiet, shy, even meek when you first met her. They lived on a secluded mountaintop and kept to themselves.

  I remained in touch with my father over the years by phone. It was my way of keeping tabs, of monitoring his state of mind. It was like I was peeling back a Band-Aid and checking the wound to make sure it hadn’t become infected.

  I called him at least once a week. It reassured me to describe my own life to him and hear, for myself, how unalike we truly were.

  I named the places I had seen, listing them like an airline employee ticking off destinations: Maui, London, Anguilla, the Grand Canyon, asking him after every one, “You’ve never been there, right?”

  I described the interior of a limousine, making sure he understood that I had not ordered it for myself, somebody had thought to order it for me, believed I belonged there. I explained the process of filming a commercial, demonstrating my expertise in a complex technical field, speaking faster as I sensed his interest diminish. I told him what it felt like to have Lauren Bacall shake me by the collar and say, “Go back to school, kid.” When I hired a housekeeper I called him and told him. And when I bought my first cell phone, the size of a brick, he was my first call.

  When these details failed to impress him, I laid myself bare and told him my salary, asking, “That’s more than you made at my age, isn’t it?” knowing that it was. I was reduced to reciting numerals, my worth dependent upon where, exactly, the decimal was placed among the zeros.

  He listened while I recited my small accomplishments. And then he said, “Well, I best be going now, son. These phone calls are expensive.”

  To my own ear I sounded like a toddler proudly proclaiming, Today I made a pee. And I made poo. And then I walked outside. And then I found a rock. And then the rock was round and so I kept it. And then I found another rock. Only this one was flat and so I kept it, too. And then tomorrow I am going to paint a horse with real paint and paper and everything! And it sickened me, but I could not stop and had to come back for more. Each time, it was exactly like it had been when I was a little boy, trying to crawl into his lap. Those arms of his, pushing me away. Nothing had changed, though everything had. I was the waiter on the Titanic running after a guest, Excuse me, but you forgot your change. Hey! I said, you forgot your change.

  Whatever happened between us had happened a long time ago, I told myself. You made it. You’re fine. If there is a hole there, simply walk around it. When he told me, “Well, it was awfully cold here this morning,” I responded with an enthusiastic, “Really? How cold?” And all the while I was telling myself, “It’s okay, see? You aren’t a bit like him. You don’t care about the weather. You don’t even own an umbrella.”

  As an adult, my father would call me twice.

  As an experiment in my early twenties, I decided not to call him to see what would happen. What happened was, we didn’t speak for four years.

  I fought the nagging compulsion to hand him a document listing all my accomplishments: moving to San Francisco at eighteen and not knowing a single person there; landing a job in advertising at nineteen on the strength of some ads I wrote on the back of scrap paper; being lured away from San Francisco to New York by none other than Ogilvy & Mather advertising. I wanted to present him the names of all the cities I had seen, along with my starting salary and my much larger salary now, photographs of the famous people I had met, the apartments I had seen. I wanted to show him this data and force him to admit that he was wrong about me. I wanted him to be forced to admit that I had made it, despite him. And that I was not him. Award me a prize, a ribbon he crafts himself and pins to my chest—I felt entitled to these formal recognitions.

  MANY TIMES THROUGHOUT the years, I thought back to the street I grew up on. Market Hill Road. Sometimes, looking out the window at the city beneath me, a memory would arise and I ceased seeing the c
ity outside, and would for a moment be a child of seven again.

  At night in bed, Brutus beside me, for this was before his defection, I am on my back, awake, dreading school, perhaps. Fantasizing about my adulthood, that beautiful promise of my future. When suddenly, there appears on the ceiling of my bedroom a wash of light. Startled, I look up to the window and see there is a light shining in. It moves quickly, around and around, as if somebody is sending me a signal. The flashlight traces the square frame of my window, it makes a figure eight. Busy signals. If I stand on the bed and look out the window, my face will be illuminated but I will see nothing, so I remain where I am. There is no sound, only this light, so Brutus remains asleep. It is my father outside my window, of this I am sure. After a few minutes, the light is gone, just as suddenly as it had appeared. I lie awake for an hour, maybe two, but it does not return that night.

  A few times I searched online for “unsolved murders, western Massachusetts.” I found nothing. I searched, “missing students, Amherst.” I found nothing.

  Always, I am drunk when I perform these searches. It takes alcohol both to unlock the desire to search, and then generate the motivation. Alcohol provides the buffer I would require should I stumble on something curious.

  As a little boy, I’d had a dream that my father had taken me to the woods where there was a dead body. He buried it and told me I must never tell. It was the only thing we’d ever done together, father and son, and I promised not to tell. But unlike most dreams, the memory of this one never left me. And sometimes, when I drank, I wasn’t altogether sure about one thing: was it just a dream?

  Dreams tend to grow transparent with time, they thin out like worn fabric. Dreams fade away to white, but the memory of this “dream” has the quality of true memory, a memory of an event, something actually done. It’s been with me for most of my life, this feeling that my father and I share his terrible, buried secret. The only reason I know it’s a dream is because it has to be a dream.

  It bothered me greatly that I did these Internet searches, that I had this question. It bothered me and sometimes I felt angry with myself. A body in the woods, a student taken for personal use and then discarded.

  Sober, it was nonsense, a frightened child’s comic book fear. Drunk, it seemed something terrible that I witnessed and had made myself forget. A fact that united us, father and son, and kept us apart.

  Sober, I knew it couldn’t be true.

  Drunk, I had a sinking feeling that it was.

  Drunk, I looked in the mirror and was startled by how much I resembled him, especially the eyes.

  THERE HAD BEEN nothing particularly unusual about that week. I’d gone to work every day, written scripts, watched them be killed for one reason or another, written more scripts. There might have been a print ad or two. I may have looked at a few directors’ reels. At the end of every day, I went home and drank. I may have thought about my father once or twice though it would have been a vague, unformed thought, perhaps just an image or memory. But Friday evening, at the end of a wholly unremarkable week, I made a call, one I had made countless times before, that on this ordinary day changed my life.

  Before I picked up the phone, I sat at my desk and thought: I want to stop thinking of him in this way. I am tired of believing he is evil. I am too old for this crap. He was a lousy father. He is not a serial killer. And neither am I.

  While I drank, I wrote some e-mails, read the personal ads, looked at a dirty magazine. Beneath all of these actions, a bedrock of just wanting to be free of him.

  Missing students, Amherst.

  I picked up the phone, pressed the on button, and out of nowhere, fully surprising, an idea was there. I set the phone on the table and thought it through. Where had this idea come from? But it was brilliant, wasn’t it? It was demonically clever and couldn’t it actually be my literal key? He would never on his own say the words that would set me free of him. If I could just feel he was only a bad father, he was only flawed, he only didn’t care. If I could believe that, I felt, I could move on. But as long as there remained about him something nefarious, as long I harbored these suspicions, I was trapped.

  It was a bit of a trick.

  Though they had been divorced for nearly two decades, my father continued to pay alimony to my mother, who had never worked in her life. Having survived a stroke and now partially paralyzed, my mother was fully dependent upon her ex-husband for all financial support. The dollar amount had not been revised as the years passed. She was living on an income that a judge determined was acceptable for a single woman of the late 1970s.

  Though the amount was still small, my father complained bitterly about this obligation. I had learned over time, one way to keep him on the phone longer was to get him to speak about her.

  Normally, when I called my father he would say, “Well, I have to be going now,” after just a few minutes, five at the most. But I’d discovered that I could engage him by probing. “So, why do you suppose she never tried to become a college professor?”

  That was how I kept him on the phone.

  On this night, I wanted to hear these words: “Oh, son, that’s a terrible thought. What on earth has gotten into you? Jesus Christ, son, are you drunk? That’s a terrible, terrible thought. I’m hanging up now.” Or any variation herein.

  I realized, these were the words that would set me free.

  To other people, my father was a nice man. He was a mild man. He may have been an alcoholic when I was young, but he’d been sober now for many years.

  I knew the truth. I knew that my father was not a nice man. He was just very good at creating an external identity, a mask to show the world. A mask he never took off anymore. Probably, he understood that if he did take off his mask, he might never get it back on.

  I picked up the phone again. Right away he asked about the weather in New York, never all that much different from the weather in western Massachusetts. I told him about the weather in New York. And then I told him about a new AT&T commercial that I would soon have on the air. “Watch for glowing red ears,” I said, adding, “it’s really not very good, but that’s their fault and not mine.” He said he’d look for it.

  And then I said, “You do know my mother takes a walk on that bridge behind her apartment every night. She goes out there alone.”

  My mother lived beside the footbridge that spanned the river in her town. She walked the bridge to maintain her strength. She walked the bridge alone at night. She loved the river beneath it, the roiling waterfall just beyond. Many of her later poems were about this bridge, the river, the leaves of the trees along the bank changing colors through the seasons.

  I said, my voice lowered to a confidential whisper, “You know, you could be on that bridge one night when she’s out for her walk. Old people fall every day. What would be so unusual about an old, paralyzed lady falling off the bridge and into the water?”

  Unexpectedly, I had to repress a laugh at my outlandish suggestion: Why don’t you kill her? And I prepared myself for the exasperated tone of voice he would adopt, the same tone of voice he used with me when I was a boy. Oh, for crying out loud.

  I waited but there was only the sound of his breathing—fast, steady, like an animal or a masturbator.

  And then he spoke in a soft, uncommonly low voice, as though taking care not to be overheard. “Well, there are sixteen buildings on either side of that river clustered there just near the bridge. Now, all together, those sixteen buildings—and again, these are only the buildings directly on the water, there are more houses in the hills beyond as well as further upstream—so like I said, those sixteen buildings have a total of one hundred and four windows.

  “Now, any one of those hundred and four windows could conceivably have a direct view of that very bridge and the water below it. So at eight o’clock at night when your mother generally takes her walk, how many people might be glancing out the window? Just a glance, that’s all it would take. Impossible to say.”

  At first,
I was completely perplexed and said nothing at all. Numbers, figures were echoing in my head. What was he talking about? One hundred and four windows? I thought, He’s misunderstood me. He wasn’t even paying attention to what I was saying. He’s talking about buildings and windows.

  But by the time I took my next breath I understood what he had said.

  First, I felt like I have before in dreams, when falling. It was a plunging sensation, purely physical. The bottom of me dropping away. And an undulating nausea overtook me. Immediately, I wanted to deny what I had heard. I wanted to go back in time just ten minutes and change my mind about making this phone call. I wanted this to be untrue.

  And I had to say something, just to stall for time.

  “Well, yeah. It’s just not something you’d want to do anyway,” I said dismissively.

  “Okay, son, well, I have to go now. It’s getting late and these phone calls are expensive.” It was what he’d said after every phone conversation we’d ever had. His tone of voice was as if we’d discussed the weather, my new commercial, nothing more at all.

  I then became sober.

  I had been drunk when I called him but now I was not drunk. I was utterly sober. And I sat in my chair, my computer before me, and I stared at the bright screen. And I was overwhelmed with the desire to sleep.

  Delicately, I began to perform an autopsy on the conversation we’d just had. I needed to break it down, line by line, and discover where, precisely, I had misunderstood him. I needed to analyze his words, understand what he had truly been saying. My insane “trick” to get him to say what I wanted had obviously infected and warped my understanding of what he meant.

  I lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into my lungs. So the first question would be, why would my father know how many buildings overlooked the bridge and the river beneath it? How, or why, would he know the exact number of windows?