Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  I flinch at the mention of my mother. Doesn’t this kid know it’s impolite to ask about someone’s family? Doesn’t he know that such things just aren’t done? I mean, I know I asked about his mother but that was only after he brought her up. That’s how you do things. That’s how you interact with people. You let people keep their secrets. You let them be whoever it is they want to show you. You let their ambassadors live. The thing you don’t do is go prying into people’s lives and asking about parents, and loss, and pain, and all the things that keep them awake in the late hours of the night after they’ve had nightmares for a week.

  “Let’s not talk about my mother,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m going to show you the key to getting through this life, Kid. I’m going to show you the trick to really being happy and really being able to take in reality and make it something you can stand up to day after day after day for all the years of the rest of your long and happy life.”

  The Kid and I sit together on this bench watching the airport crowd and eating the last of a lunch that I managed to steal off of an interviewer who was nice enough to meet me here and ask me all those types of questions that interviewers ask.

  I look over the travelers shuffling to and fro as I finish off my sandwich and wipe my hands on my suit pants. “Now,” I begin, “What’s your favorite animal?”

  “A peacock!” The Kid says, eyes dancing.

  “Peacock?”

  “Yeah! My uncle used to raise them. They’re awesome. At night, they would fly up in the trees and sleep up there. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, you would hear them screaming.” The Kid throws his head back in laughter. “Sometimes, my cousin from New York would come down during the summer. Every time the peacocks made that sound in the middle of the night, he would jump out of his skin!” The Kid buckles over. He grips his stomach with his dark hands and laughs. His mouth is all teeth, and tongue, and unsung glory. “It was the only time he was ever afraid and I wasn’t,” The Kid says. “The only time ever.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Look over there.” I raise a finger, pointing to a large azalea bush growing at the edge of an artificial pond.

  The Kid looks. “The flowers?”

  “No,” I say. “The peacock. The black one.”

  I point again, aiming my finger directly at the beautiful bird that stands no more than twenty feet away from us.

  It’s an onyx peacock. Black as anything. A dark star with plumage. From the bottom of its thin, delicately clawed feet, to the top of its thinly crowned head, to the final reaches of its train that is spread as wide as the horizon, ebony like a wall of night that has been bottled, and molded, and shaped into a sculpture worthy of song and wonder.

  I can tell from the boy’s eyes that he can’t see it.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “What is?”

  “We’ve got time. I’ve got time to teach you to see those types of things.”

  The Kid thinks for a moment. He looks at me and then back at the place where he can’t see the peacock. “Do you really see a bird there?”

  “Just as sure as I see you,” I say.

  “But I’m real,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “I’m just invisible to people that I want to be invisible to. I told you. My mama taught me. It’s my gift.” For the first time, he doesn’t sound certain. Neither of me nor of himself. I know what he’s feeling. Been there. It’s that feeling of the sand slipping out from beneath your feet and not knowing that you’re about to be pulled along with it.

  “I know,” I say. “And it’s a glorious gift. Your mother sounds like a wonderful person.”

  “She is,” The Kid says.

  “But did she ever tell you why she taught you this gift?”

  “To stay safe.”

  “Yeah, but from what? From who?”

  A cloud settled over his face and he was sad all of a sudden.

  “Want to talk about it?” I ask.

  “No,” The Kid says.

  I don’t have the heart to tell him that I know perfectly well what his mama was trying to protect him from. My mother tried to protect me from the same thing. My dad too. They both failed. And my guess was, The Kid’s mama had failed too. He just doesn’t know it yet.

  We sit for a while and I watch as the onyx peacock walks back and forth beside the pond. Its inky plumage scintillates in the afternoon sun, refracting the light through the lens of darkness and shooting out something more beautiful than I’ve ever seen before. It looks the way jazz might if it had a form that you could see that wasn’t that Miles Davis.

  I stand and walk toward the bird. As expected, it spooks and takes flight. It sails off into the distance of the unknown city and disappears among the clamor and clap of humanity. I pick a feather that it’s left behind.

  “Here,” I say, handing it to The Kid.

  “What?”

  “One of the feathers.”

  The Kid stares down at my hand and, for a moment, I can’t tell if he can see the feather or not. My gut says he can, but The Kid’s hard to read. Especially with that dark skin of his. It hides so much of him that, even if he isn’t able to turn invisible, I’m not sure he has much trouble disappearing in this world. It’s when his hand reaches out for the feather that I’m able to see just how much alike he and the peacock are. They’re cut from the same cloth, the same impossible shade of darkness. The same blackness. The same splendor.

  Just before his fingers touch the feather, he pulls his hand back.

  “I don’t see anything,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” I toss the feather away. “Say, Kid, you think about love very much?”

  * * *

  —

  I loved my mother, and I loved my father and Daddy Henry. And as I got older, I loved people in different ways. You met the receptionist. But I’ve never been much of a dater. The main problem I’ve found with dating is that, at some point in the process, you have to include other people. You have to actually interact with another human being. And when it comes to people . . . well . . . I’ve never really been a fan.

  But, like anybody else spinning through the void of space on this watery rock of ours, I’ve had days where I thought it might be good to not be alone. To feel someone else’s hand on my flesh. To tell a joke and hear laughter other than my own.

  The only flaw I’ve ever found with writing is that you can call out to it, but the page never answers you back. Writing is an act of obsession, after all. And obsession is, by nature, a one-way street.

  Only love can ever answer back.

  And for that you have to have another person. And in order to have another person, you have to leap into the maelstrom that is dating. To dip your toes.

  Exhibit A: Kelli

  It’s the middle of summer and I meet this lovely woman with hair down to the center of her back and a peculiar sense of humor and it’s enough to gain my interest. She tells me that her name is Kelli and I tell her that’s a great name—which it is—and eventually we agree to have dinner together. She invites me over to her house and promises to cook me dinner even though I tell her that she doesn’t have to.

  “I’ve never actually made Buffalo wings before,” Kelli says. We’re standing in her small kitchen that smells of sandalwood and spices. “I’m not much into fried foods,” she continues. “My aunt swears by this recipe, though.” She lives in a loft on the hipster side of town. Her home is filled with books and family photographs. She has a slight midwestern accent.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say, politely as I can. “I can eat anything, really.” Truthfully, I’m allergic to bananas, but there’s no sense in telling her that just yet. First dates are matters of ambassadorship, not diplomacy.

  “No,” she say
s, equally polite, “I want to. I love learning new things.”

  Then we both smile our best first-date smiles. She reaches over and turns on the knob on the stove. The cap beneath the pot of oil leaps to life with a soft fwoosh sound.

  “Do you know what I like about you?” Kelli asks.

  “Charm? Dashing good looks? Modesty? Take your pick.”

  She laughs a little. Then: “No,” she says. “It’s that you don’t try to tell me what to do. I swear, I keep meeting these guys who just, I don’t know, they’re just always trying to tell me what to do. You’re not like that.”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  The cap beneath the pot of oil continues billowing out heat. I stare at it, unable to look away now that I’ve noticed she’s got it turned on high. “I know exactly what you meant about those types of guys,” I say. Then: “Hey, I think that cap might be turned up a lit—”

  “I just don’t think you understand just how good it feels to spend time with someone who isn’t trying to be my father. You know?”

  “I totally get you,” I say.

  Wisps of smoke rise from the pot. The oil inside shimmers. There’s a gentle crackle like miniaturized lightning as the oil continues to heat.

  “You . . . uh . . . you said you don’t do much frying, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kelli answers. “Cholesterol, and fats, and all that.”

  She grabs a fistful of breaded chicken and holds it over the pot of sizzling hot oil that is, already, on the edge of throwing a tantrum.

  “Listen, Kelli,” I say, “I’d never tell you what to do. But—”

  “But what?!”

  Her mouth is a tight line. There’s a fire in her eyes that says, “I dare you to finish that sentence.” Both of our very lives could be on the line, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to say anything. I don’t want to be another one of those men who is always trying to tell her what to do. I don’t want her to reject me. I don’t want to be sent home to an empty house where there’s only a computer and a half-done manuscript filled with memories of my dead parents waiting for me.

  So I say nothing.

  The chicken wings get dropped.

  Then we’re standing in front of a burning building with smut on our faces and smoke in our lungs. Firefighters jostle us, racing toward the inferno. Water erupts from fire hoses. The burning apartment is a small, luminous sun.

  “So you’ll call me?” she asks.

  “Probably not.”

  “I totally get that.”

  “I’m going to leave now.”

  “Drive safe.”

  “Yeah.”

  And that was one of the better dates I’ve had.

  Exhibit B: Kellie

  It’s springtime. Warm in the sun, chilly in the shade. Birds in the trees. I’m in a car with a very attractive woman named Kellie.

  This isn’t the same Kellie as before, by the way. It’s a totally different spelling.

  For whatever reason, the universe chooses to send me lots of Kellys. Kelly, after Kelli, after Kellie, after Keli. I have no idea why. My mother’s name wasn’t Kelly. My first love wasn’t named Kelly. Freud would be pretty disappointed, I imagine. I never wanted to kill my father and marry my mother. Fact of the matter is, my father was a good fella. I liked him.

  * * *

  —

  Speaking of my father, let me tell you a little bit about the old man:

  Picture me at age nine. I’m tall for my age. Thin, but not really skinny. I look smart enough, but not so smart-looking that you might think me the kind of kid who might grow up to be a pain in the ass or anything.

  I live in a small, old, gray house. The outside paint was chosen decades before I was born. It’s hard to say whether or not gray was the original color. Maybe it was a soft shade of blue once. But then the sun came around, and time passed, and nobody cared for it the way they’re supposed to because the money was never there and so the paint leached away and all that’s left is a home that seems sad and forlorn.

  But this isn’t a place of sadness.

  Inside the house, the flooring is wood. Old and slightly faded, just like the outside of the house, but with an air of warmth about it. It seems like the type of floor you could put kids on and forget about them and everything would be okay. It’s the type of floor children remember sleeping on and feeling the heat rise up through the floorboards in summer and feeling the chill of winter creep through at Christmas while they waited for jolly old Saint Nick.

  It’s the type of floor a life is built on.

  The house has two bedrooms. Small, narrow rooms that fit all the other small, narrow outlooks of the house. There’s seventies-era wood paneling on the walls. It’s that tacky, deep-hued flavor of brown that everybody who couldn’t afford any better were into at one time. Makes it look like you covered your walls in mahogany, only you’ve never actually seen real mahogany before so you got sold a bad approximation and you don’t even know it. It’s tacky as all get-out, but eventually they get taken down and the wall painted a soft blue color called Last Summer Sky Before You Die. So, depending on your imagination—whether you want to imagine the paneling or the paint—the walls are either forest or sky. Whichever you prefer. Whatever you choose probably says something about you.

  There’s a living room here. The biggest room in the house. When I’m nine years old, there’s a big, square, wood-burning heater in the corner of the room. The kind you don’t see anymore because of all the houses they burned down. Pig iron arsonists, that’s what they were. A soot-black plume of aluminum reaches out like a burnt arm from the top of the heater. It punches straight through a hole in the wall to the concrete block chimney wearing a mildew-green patina and running up the outside of the house. That old heater was a beast. Had more tricks than a carful of monkeys. I still got a scar on my leg from one of the embers that broke out of the belly of that thing one time when my father was shoving pine into it.

  Nostalgia’s a funny thing, though. Even back then, when it happened, I knew it wasn’t a particularly terrible experience. Even though I wound up scarred for life I wasn’t scarred for life, you know? That’s what I call “Now-stalgia.” When you know a time in your life is gonna last forever, even before the moment is over.

  In the opposite corner of the room is the most important piece of equipment: the television. My father works a lot of hours. Swing shift in a sawmill. Mornings one week, afternoons the next, overnights the following, and on, and on, and on. Later, after my father’s dead, there’ll be articles published on just how bad swing shift is on a person. The body clock being always unable to adapt. No consistency. The brain, and heart, and liver always chasing something that will never come: normality. It’s brutal. And the father in this story knew it long before the eggheads in lab coats did their study and figured it out. But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it.

  Swing shift isn’t the cause of the old man’s death—cancer won that particular gold watch—but it contributes to the state of his life. The same way a grain of sand contributes to the existence of a beach.

  My old man is as tall as they come. Six-foot-six. Skinny as a bank account after Christmas. He’s got a wiry mustache and a small goatee with sprigs of gray cropping up around the edges. He wears work clothes every day of his life. Day in and day out, the same uniform of scraping by: dark blue button-down Dickies or tan-colored button-down Dickies. More pockets than he ever had money to put in them. Always one size too big so that they hung loose on him, like the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion decided to swap rags one day. Not long before the cancer got him—on one of those last lucid days—he told me that it was because of how he got picked on back in the day. They made fun of his gangly silhouette so he thought he’d mitigate it by dressing big. Didn’t work, by the way. You can’t hide who you
are. Not really. But he still tried.

  My old man was just as broken as the rest of us and he knew it.

  I tell you, those baggy duds were like skin grafts on my old man. I swear. Only time I ever saw him in anything other than that was when somebody turned up dead or married, and when those days came around even he didn’t seem to recognize himself. He’d walk and sit as rigid as Christ on the cross. Like nobody gave him the instruction manual on how to operate the stranger he saw in the mirror.

  At age nine, I’m sitting on my father’s knee as that old black heater growls in the far corner of the room. The TV’s on, throwing that soft mist of blue light and sibilant voices over the both of us. The old man loved those old black-and-white tough guy pictures. You know the ones: fast-talking private dicks dressed in double-breasted danger, getting steered between bullets by some hardcase dame that can’t be trusted half as much as she can be loved. All the fistfights are one punch and the murders bloodless. Just a lot of stiff-spined pantomiming and falling down slow. I figure blood would have screwed up the wardrobes in those pictures. I think that’s what my old man liked most: the suits. The suits and the certainty about their world. The lack of fear.

  The characters in those noir pictures were never afraid of anybody. Not really. Even when the lead started flying, they’d just duck down behind some ’48 gangster tank, tighten gray mouths into sideways exclamations, and fire back a few shots of their own. Fear never came into it.

  Maybe that’s what the old man wanted. To live that kind of life. I’m older now. Seen a few things. And, looking back on it, I think my pops was afraid. Always afraid. Every second of every day. His whole life was one long, sustained terror that he tried with all of his might to keep to himself. Not just to keep it secret, but to keep ownership of it. He wanted to be selfish with it.

  I think it was always running, my old man’s fear. Perpetual and widespread.

  Fear of being a bad father. Fear of being a bad husband. Fear of being arrested. Fear of being called skinny like when he was a kid. Fear of being poorer tomorrow than he was today. Fear of giving too much of his life to swing shift and not enough to his son. Fear of cops. Fear of lawyers. Fear of getting injured. Fear of dying. Fear of living. Fear of a past that he couldn’t change. Fear of a present that was always out to get him. Fear of a future that might turn out to be nothing more than the present with more gray hair. Same failures. Same struggles. All of it with fewer chances to get it right.