Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

  He needed the silence more than anyone else could ever comprehend. He needed it. He considered himself lucky that she did not mind that he was at minimum just a “neurotic” and might have “episodes” from time to time. A whole new set of options opened up before him that he had never seriously considered—that he could lead a normal life and have children and not always be so alone were wonderful ideas to consider.

  Since college, Michael had had two other breakdowns. One had occurred two months after his wedding to Nancy. Obsessive, paranoid thoughts crowded his brain and he had dizzy spells. I’ve ruined my life. I’m a fool. Everyone at work knows there’s something wrong with me. He felt he had married too soon in life, but it was too late; it was a binding agreement. He felt he could not bear to look at Nancy. He had taken a week off of work, claiming to be sick, and slept all day in his study with his door locked. He drank heavily during that time and came out for meals and the bathroom only. If Nancy were nearby and tried to help, he had sharp words for her, words that he regretted at the end of that week, and the regret had facilitated their reconciliation. Eventually, he left his office, went up to the bedroom, and put his arms around his wife. He said he would go to the doctor for a stronger dose of medication. Shortly thereafter, Nancy became pregnant with Ryan, which excited them both—it was something new to focus on.

  The second breakdown had come after Michael’s father had died, and that one had been a bit more disastrous. Nancy was due with Max in three months, and Ryan was a little girl very much attached to her father. It began right after the funeral. Michael found he could not sleep a wink and nothing would knock him out. So he was awake for four days straight and then cracked. He didn’t want Ryan to see him storming around the house, so he went and stayed in a hotel, leaving Nancy alone for two weeks. Finally, he got heavier sleeping pills from the doctor and slept for almost sixteen hours in his last night at the hotel. Then he drove home to Nancy and Ryan, carrying red roses and lying in their marital bed submissively, telling Nancy about his troubles. To his relief, she was not mad at him, just happy to have him back and be able to take care of him. He took a lot of his medication, so he slept a lot, and one evening he woke up to see Ryan, almost six, standing tentatively at the door.

  “Want to watch a movie, darling?” And Ryan crawled into bed with Michael. Nancy joined them with popcorn, and they all watched an adventure movie together about a kid and his father who realized that the contents of an old treasure map were real. They defeated alligators and goblins in a cave. It reminded Michael that life was magical, that dreams could come true, and his little daughter snuggled into the crook of his arm was proof of this, as was his benevolent wife, who was carrying a second child. After the movie ended, he was able to fall asleep easily by taking a heavy dosage of sleeping pills while Nancy tucked Ryan in down the hall. When she came to bed, he held her and told her everything was going to be all right.

  Now, many years later, here Nancy was, day after day, moving through their house, keeping things in order. Completing wifely duties like driving the kids to doctor appointments and picking up dry cleaning were chores that filled up her days, as she didn’t want to or have to work. She did for others all day long and put out the meals with straightforward humility, rarely expecting thanks. In her pure, unobstructed clarity, he felt she was the void that hangs around the static. After they were married, he had made her promise that she wouldn’t tell their children about his condition. He felt he must have loved her. For what else could that tenderness have been but love? It had gone so quickly, but it had once existed.

  * * *

  His head was cloudy from too little sleep, yet he couldn’t drift off. Sleep was a kingdom to which Michael constantly desired access. Unlike other people, he was often awake in the stillness of the house. It was a time of strangeness, when the moon was out, and he would sit and read book after book, drawing more and more information into his already cluttered mind, more knowledge to separate himself further from the people around him, making himself superior and strange to others. He knew his insomnia exacerbated his condition; if he were only able to get to sleep at night, his mind would be less troubled.

  Lying awake, in his mind’s eye he imagined the room called sleep: through an open door he saw a bedroom with a night-light illuminating a sacred, magical realm. He saw a room with a big navy-blue bed, dark as the night sky, with soft pillows and a fluffy comforter, a red fire truck night-light, a soft breeze coming through the window. The moon shone in softly. Fish slept in a tank in the corner of the room, their bodies swaying slightly as the filter pushed the water out and took it in. This was the world anxiety did not let him access every night—one of tenderness and surrender.

  From down the hall, Michael heard his son cough in his sleep. For no particular reason, he looked up to make sure the bathroom door was still locked. It was. Secretly, Michael felt his son was responsible for his being this way. One winter when he was a year old, his son’s asthma had been especially bad at night and he had developed pneumonia. The night coughs were excruciating—for four months someone had had to stay up and keep watch to make sure he didn’t cough himself to death. He lay in his crib, his face pitifully twisted and red, and cried through fits of coughing. Michael could hear the air catch on the phlegm that lined his inflamed lungs. He was not able to read while he sat by his son—there was little to do. Picked up or lying down, Max still coughed. It was difficult for him to imagine this tiny tortured creature becoming a man—he seemed genderless, small in size, and incapable of peace.

  After four months, the night coughs became less frequent, and he and Nancy were permitted to sleep. But at the slightest sound, they would wake up and decide whether or not one of them needed to go to him. Nancy had recovered from those awful years and could now sleep through the night, but he had not.

  During that time, they had seen many asthma specialists for Max’s condition, and each specialist had recommended that they consider moving to a climate with less moisture and mold. There was even some suggestion that the asthma had been caused by the climate—that Nancy had breathed it in during her pregnancy. Michael had spent many nights contemplating those things and even thought about moving, but he ultimately couldn’t get up the stamina to put the house on the market. How could he give up the one thing in his life that still gave him pleasure? If he left, he would have nothing.

  He had done enough research on asthma to convince Nancy that moving would be futile, that Max would suffer wherever he went. They were both careful never to upset Max, as any upset could easily trigger an attack that would take hours to resolve and drain the day of its energy. So they would both tiptoe around anything he did wrong, and when he spilled something they offered him big smiles and animated happy faces. Michael often felt the absurdity of his own reactions to spilt bowls of cereal—he suddenly got happier and peppier when disaster struck. Meanwhile, his son, sheltered and cushioned at every step lest he explode into disarray, now slept deeply.

  Michael tried lying on his stomach on the bath mat, with his arms around the sides of his face to block out the light coming in overhead through the skylight. Maybe this position would lead to sleep. The house had the stillness that only Sunday mornings bring—no work to rush off to, people could sleep in, children came downstairs and parked themselves in front of the TV still in pajamas.

  Michael listened for any sounds in the house around him as he lay. He knew his wife would be getting up in the next hour or so and would get Max dressed and ready for the day, whatever that involved for the two of them for this particular Sunday. His wife and son were extremely close, and their intimacy often startled Michael when he would come upon it. Because of the effort that breathing required, Max would become tired after school and would need a pre-dinner nap. When Michael returned home from work, he often caught Max and Nancy locked in some moment together, and the two of them struck him as a portrait of old age, neglect, decay. Max’s head would be on h
er lap as they lay on the window seat. She’d be looking out the window, one hand in his hair or gently on his chest as he heaved air in and out. The two of them were so separate from him in these moments that they might as well have been aliens. He found their separateness special, and it somehow freed him from his constant disapproval of Nancy. Seeing her there as a complete person, sitting with her child, mysterious and solemn, he wanted to reach out to her but resisted, as doing so would shatter the moment.

  As Michael watched his wife with their son, he would be reminded of and amazed at her genius for knowing and addressing human needs. That quality had always defined her, as some quality always defines a person in the eyes of another.

  They had been so different from the start that it seemed best for them to come together as a team and complete each other. But with each passing year, he found himself more and more unable to relate to Nancy. It became clear that, apart from the children and him, she had no real interests and none would be developed. She was a reminder that he had given up his calling to be a professor at his university. Her grounded, loving nature had not been enough to hold them in a good place, it turned out, though it had worked for the first few years of marriage.

  Those first few years they had gone out on “wine” dates, which involved two or three glasses of wine during a meal. After those dates, they had gone home and had sex and laughed while watching a late-night movie. Nancy was an attentive, generous lover, so once Michael was relaxed enough from the wine, the sex felt lighthearted and effective. In bed, after they had sobered up a bit, they would talk about what their future would look like with children. It was a nice routine, one that worked for those early years. After the first baby came, they were sure to go out once every month or every other month, but the outings didn’t always lead to sex. Soon the carefree feeling attached to nights out had departed. One of their last real “wine” dates had resulted in Nancy becoming unexpectedly pregnant with Max. After that second pregnancy, their sex life had slowly devolved to about once a season, if that.

  Nancy had never met a man like him before, a man of class and refinement, and he had reveled in her rapt attention and respect. She considered everything he said for decisions large and small, for she knew he must know best. That worried him; as the years passed, he sensed, he might not know best. He just might not know.

  * * *

  After his bath and the unsuccessful attempt at a nap, Michael dressed and moved through the shadowy kitchen, following his morning routine. The water was about to boil in the little pot on the stove. It heaved and tensed every couple of seconds and then began to quiver in little eruptions as bubbles floated to the surface. Michael had read and reread Alex’s essay. It dealt with the permissiveness of content that unreliable narrators allowed and examined this through three famous novellas, one of which was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Alex’s piece was well researched and well written and had that clarity of expression he had mastered in college. But in places it had even been a little difficult for Michael to follow, which showed him how deadened his mind had become over the years. He had been up half the night, looking through his own old essays, papers, and photos. He was trying to rekindle within himself the intellectual fire he had had in college, but it had been dulled by working in management for so many years. When he read Alex’s piece, the thoughts didn’t come as rapid-fire as they had in college. He had to read a paragraph over several times to truly comprehend it. Perhaps being around Nancy for so many years had drained his mind of its brilliance as well—it was not as if he could have intellectual banter with her or discuss politics in any refined way.

  Suddenly the kitchen around him seemed a wicked place that slowly sucked the voltage out of a battery. Michael could not recall the last time he had been alone in the kitchen, standing idly by. He was normally up and out of the house before Ryan or Max came down for breakfast. But today Ryan walked in, dressed in spandex pants and a workout shirt.

  He wondered, doesn’t she realize that she should not wear tight clothing like that? She no longer has a child’s body, and she should know it by now.

  She muttered a subdued greeting and made herself some tea.

  “Why are you up so early?” he asked.

  “I’m going running on the track at school,” she said without turning around. “Don’t worry; there’s no school today, so you don’t have to worry about me being late for anything.” With that she grabbed an orange and headed out into the half-darkness to her car.

  The refrigerator buzzed loudly and inwardly crunched out blocks of ice. Michael stood there, irritated, no, angered, by the little sounds around him. Ryan’s car was growling to life in the driveway, and when she flicked on the lights, they shone in through the windows, hurting his eyes. He wondered if his daughter had adopted his insomniac ways. He often heard her up at night, pacing around her room like a cat. He knew that she would occasionally smoke cigarettes out her window at night, as the smell would drift in through his window.

  He wondered why she was also having trouble sleeping. Would she adopt other undesirable traits of his? They had started in his early twenties; if she was going to inherit them, it would be only a few years before the signs popped up in her.

  He looked around the empty kitchen, his head pounding from exhaustion. It was Nancy’s domain, yet there were only small traces of her taste there. She would have liked more of her preferred style, an unrestrained expression of country craft and cheery fuzz. As it was now, she had only an occasional plastic apple set on a random shelf, when what she really wanted was to have a whole row of bright red decorative apples on the wall. Michael knew she kept it to a minimum for his sake, and for that he felt deep gratitude toward her. When they had first moved in, she had dared to place a large brown teddy bear on a little ledge in the corner of the room, from which it had reigned over them with its dead glass eyes. Michael had taken it down one day, and Nancy had asked no questions, for she knew it should never have been there. She should never have tried such a thing. Ultimately, she was guilty and self-conscious about her bad taste, because it exposed her for what she really was, a simpleton, an unsophisticated mother-nurturer. She was aware of the danger there, aware that the tacky power of such an object could rattle his nerves if he was forced to sit under it, day in and day out.

  He wondered about the combination of Nancy’s and his genes; two such opposite people would surely make for a mixed bag. He saw himself in Ryan. He felt they shared the same kind of intelligence.

  It pained him to imagine his link to his son, as Max had never had an easy day in his life. He had allowed Nancy to name Max after her own father, Maxwell, who had been a factory worker in rural West Virginia. Michael had never met the elder Maxwell, for he had died young, before they were married.

  There was a video of the beginning of Max’s birth in the cabinet under the TV. They had stopped filming in the middle, as things had not gone smoothly. On the timeline of his life, the birth of his second child coincided closely with his own father’s death, and he could not help but connect them in some cosmic way. Just a few months before Max was born, his father’s body had hardened in the hospital, and his mouth had permanently formed an “oh” shape, as he gasped his last breath. The man who had judged so many others for a living now seemed stunned by what he saw coming next on the other side.

  Three months later, Michael had stood next to his wife while she struggled through labor, struggled to eject the tiny being. Her stomach had been cut open, and from underneath her intestines, the baby had been pulled out. Nancy had not wanted the C-section, and he had felt humiliated for her, that she had not been able to birth the baby “naturally” but had been so rudely slit apart in places that were not meant to be opened. All this for a notion of love and family, an idea she believed in wholeheartedly. Michael had always felt that she should have been able to birth Max her way and it was some proof of their skewed chemistry that she could not. She had given bir
th to Ryan without the aid of drugs, and though it had been a hard labor, she had borne it with more dignity than most and had looked at Michael with such pride when she finally held the baby in her arms.

  It was after Max’s birth, as she had lain exhausted, emptied, that he had realized just how much she had been cheated. Michael understood that he had not been prepared for this, for any of this, that life was indeed grotesque, that bodies with their spasms of life and death were ripped open and buried, a process of endless upheaval. Nancy had stayed in the hospital for four days after the birth, Max as well, and Michael remembered these days as an excruciating series of hours. Walking through the halls and looking through the glass at Max, he had thought of his father—both lay in the most fragile state, in the most sterilized of places, in lifeless rooms and halls. The gore that had showed itself so clearly, twice, in such an empty place had haunted him—the swirl of colors after the birth, wiped up, gone without a trace; the yellow and purplish skin of his father’s corpse in the hospital, and then nothing except the green of the earth and the blue of the sky over his coffin while he stood mourning with a very pregnant wife and a bewildered little daughter. Life was swift in the big events—quick to do its work and then move on, leaving silence and endless contemplation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was an uncommonly bright Thursday morning as Michael sat in his car on the edge of the road. After spending a sleepless night puttering around his study, rereading all of his old essays, he could not bring himself to drive to work. He had left the house as usual, to fool Nancy, and had driven in the half-light toward the freeway, giddy from the secret changes to his routine. He had already, secretly, called in sick to his office.