His children will one day be part of this erasure, just as there is no chance his own part can be avoided. But when the mind grows cold these things are easy to forget.
When the mind grows cold so many things are lost.
NOV. 26
Thanksgiving.
He had been gone three months. It was the first major holiday, the first Thanksgiving, his children would have to spend without him.
For that he felt like a criminal. He had the urge to suddenly return home, but thought that wouldn’t be doing his family any favors. He was still too unsettled, and would unsettle their Thanksgiving.
He was still, he knew, a bad father and did not deserve such a reunion.
He planned to eat nothing this day, and instead spent his time recalling a Thanksgiving story from around here that he had first heard years ago. The sort of story that was all that he deserved. He concentrated on consuming this story bit by bit, chewing over each portion well.
The man’s name had been distorted and eventually lost through all the retellings, but Cal had always thought of him as Jack. He didn’t know why, but Jack seemed like an appropriate name.
Jack had a wife and four children whom he tried his best to control. He felt he had to control them because the world was such a harsh place, a terrible place sometimes, and sometimes a simple mistake could ruin a life forever. Jack believed that this was the most important thing to know about the world and therefore he was determined not to let his family make any mistakes. He was going to tell them what to do, what to eat, what to try, and someday they would thank him for it they would even sing his praises to the world oh yes they would.
Unfortunately Jack believed this meant that he loved his family. In fact his obsession had taken up all the space in his heart a very long time ago and there had been no room left for love.
Nowhere did Jack’s obsession manifest itself more strongly than in the matter of what they consumed. His wife wasn’t allowed to bring any food into the house on her own. All the food they ate he personally either picked or killed or bought. But only rarely was anything bought taken into that house. Jack was not an ignorant man; he’d read about all the artificial things they put into store foods, even when they said they didn’t (you couldn’t believe anything they put on those packages) and he would have guessed it even if he hadn’t done that reading. He guessed at a lot of things, and most of the time his guesses were dead right.
Oh sometimes he’d get a vegetable from the store, but only after he’d looked at it, smelled it and squeezed it in every possible way, scraped at it with his fingernail and put it up to his ear. But he never bought meat there, always provided his own (even if it meant stealing it from some breeder with a good reputation, like that pig farmer Jamison down the road). And breads got baked at home, using flour milled locally by somebody he could still call a friend (the worst thing in the world being unfriendly grain– it spoiled the digestion).
All this worked pretty well when his children were small, but by the time his two oldest boys were in high school there arose the usual arguments. The boys bought Cokes and Hostess cupcakes and didn’t eat the good lunches Jack had ordered his wife to prepare. That’s when the physical abuse started. Jack told the boys that when they were big enough to whip him then they could have their way but not until. Jack was a big bear of a man so that day didn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon. In the meantime there were days Jack beat those two boys nearly half to death.
That last Thanksgiving everybody told the story about, Jack said they weren’t going to eat a thing but beans and bread that year because of all the chemicals even the good breeders were putting into their usual holiday meats. Besides Jack figured that the less you had, the purer the test of your thankfulness.
But when mealtime came one of the boys wouldn’t eat and Jack started beating on him and his wife stepped between them and Jack laid her out with a punch and the other boy picked up a chair and brought it down across Jack’s head. Jack didn’t get up from that one.
The story varied about who suggested they cut old Jack up and stick him in the oven but Cal always figured it was Jack’s quietly suffering wife.
They did, and they spread him out on the table with a tomato in the mouth of his blackened head. They left his plaid suspenders and green socks on just for the added touch. But no, they didn’t eat him then like in some of the tellings. Cal figured the wife just said the blessing, telling them all they should ask themselves what they had to be thankful for and that must have set them all to laughing pretty good.
After that they dumped Jack into the hog trough and drove into town to the finest restaurant they could find for Thanksgiving dinner.
NOV. 27
1970: Pope Paul VI is attacked by a knife-wielding Bolivian painter at the Manila airport.
Cal wondered if all sons wanted, at some time or other, to kill their fathers.
He was sure a lot of them would be better off without their fathers, but to commit the act oneself? Perhaps it would be a healthy act of self-definition, perhaps not.
Throw your father into the volcano and on that day you become a man. It had a certain romantic appeal. Or would you be forever consumed with guilt, even if the old fart deserved it?
Many times he tried to imagine how Parker must feel about him now, and how he might feel about him in the future. Would Parker feel about Cal as Cal had felt about his own father? He hoped not, but he suspected there was no avoiding it now, especially after he’d left him this way.
It would come down years from now. Parker would choose a cold day like today because, after all, he was his father’s son, and understood the importance of timing all too well. There was nothing false about a pathetic fallacy– his son would understand this.
Cal– a little older, a little weaker– would look out his window one day and although his eyes would have deteriorated some by then he would recognize his son Parker sitting out in the snow, waiting. It would be only fitting that Cal would be forced to come to his son after his son had waited for him all those years.
One of the first things he would notice about his son is how little Parker resembled him physically. This would be due to efforts on his son’s part, of course. Parker would be tall, blond now, with large, muscled arms. Cal would feel dwarfed by him, Cal’s arms being small and soft, an artist’s arms. A failed, or would-be artist’s arms.
Cal would begin talking to his son almost instantly, of course, because Cal believed in words. He would confess, profess, cajole. But his son would say nothing in reply. As would be fitting, Parker would want to deny his father the utility of words. Words could do nothing to explain abandonment.
Then Parker would stand up, and Cal would see the mix of love and hardness in his eyes, and then Cal would see the baseball bat Parker had hidden behind his back, and Cal would note how skillfully Parker handled that bat. His son had obviously become an athlete of professional quality.
And as Parker stepped toward him and raised the bat, Cal would know that at last the son had come to kill the father and claim his identity.
But then Parker would pause, because he was his son and smarter than that. Because Parker would know that it’s not enough to kill the father. One must also murder the spiritual father, the holy father, if one is ever to be free. And Cal would be so proud of his son for realizing that.
Parker would then move toward Cal and strike him perfectly with the bat professionally applied across the brow, at just the right angle and with just the right strength so that Cal would fall to his knees and then over onto his side, unable to move, bleeding profusely from his head wound. A wound that could be treated, but which would be fatal if left untreated.
Then Parker would turn and leave his father lying in the snow, without looking back, knowing his father would bleed to death if no one went for help.
Because it wasn’t enough just to kill his father. He had to kill his father by abandoning his father.
NOV. 28
1
922: the first public skywriting exhibition occurs over New York’s Times Square.
1929: navy commander Richard E. Byrd makes the first flight over the South Pole.
As he lay there bleeding to death Cal would gaze up at the white sky and think at first that he was staring at the snow banks he was lying on. Cold would creep through his skin and he would feel himself spinning crazily like a needle on a malfunctioning compass.
In the snow banks high above, birds would arrange and rearrange themselves in various complicated flight patterns. He would try for hours to read their secret messages for him as he bled to death, but no understanding would come.
No explanations were necessary. There was cold, and there was the blood seeping out of the body into the cold, and leaving cold behind.
And he would think about how cold his son had become, and yet how warm his little boy had once been, before Cal had left.
And the birds above would endlessly circle, spelling 0.
NOV. 29
1947: the Dead Sea Scrolls are identified.
After Parker left his father bleeding in the snow he would be unable to resist going into the cabin where his father had lived all the years of his abandonment. He would go through the cabin room by room, picking up books, trying to comprehend the things such a father might read in order to justify his behavior. He would check out the refrigerator and the food cabinets to get a feel for what such a father might eat in order to sustain those countless days of abandonment. He would lie on the bed where his father had dreamed of the children he had left behind. He would gaze out every window to find the views for which his father had abandoned his children’s faces.
But finally it would be his father’s writings he would be mostly interested in: the diaries so sketchy they were a code that had to be deciphered, the doodles and the drawings that depicted his father’s dreams, the narratives that told the stories Parker should have been told, the tales that had been stolen from him and, worse yet, given to no one at all.
On the last empty page, Parker would write this:
A stranger lies outside my cabin bleeding into the snow. I do not know who he is. Nor do I care. I care about the blood, the way it seeps through the pure white crystal like liquid light, changing the snow into a canvas onto which his life will finally be painted.
I care what that painting will be, but I do not care about its source. For that, ultimately, is what a stranger is, the other who is essential but whom we cannot know, however much we might try.
The stranger bleeds for hours into the snow outside my cabin. The painting is of a boy, done all in red. It is a little boy, come direct out of the stranger’s blood and then into the cold, distant snow. The boy is not smiling or frowning– it is too cold to do either.
And when the sun comes out the boy will disappear, leaving stains like rust streaking the muddy ground.
Then the boy’s tale will be told, as well as that of the stranger.
NOV. 30
1835: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is born in Florida, Missouri.
In Cal’s imagined version of his own death, his son Parker left the cabin to begin the long trek into his future life. He’d arrived on foot, in keeping with the spiritual quality of his mission, but now a more rapid means of transportation seemed appropriate. The ice and snow had begun to melt again, vanishing quickly as a dream, so that the river that ran by the town was swollen and moving rapidly. Parker applied himself to building a raft.
The raft was long and narrow, built of lashed-together timbers and covered almost completely by an old canvas tent he’d found in a storage shed. Rotted holes provided windows for viewing the sky. A long skinny pole, pushed against the stream bed and embankments, provided maneuverability. The raft shipped water badly, but still managed to stay afloat, and Parker didn’t mind getting wet or cold. He’d just murdered his father, and transitory inconveniences held little meaning for him.
Here, as the raft shot forward on the winter stream, he could see all the things dying that lined the shore. And yet he wasn’t dying; he was rocketing forward into new experiences. It wasn’t fair, he supposed, but it was. And it excited him.
A mile downstream he saw a beautiful young girl wrapped up in a fur coat waving to him from the bank. His arms were too stiff and cold to wave back.
Several more miles downstream he encountered a small group of deer crossing the stream. He couldn’t avoid hitting one broadside, breaking its legs, but his raft was gone so quickly he didn’t see the deer drown, although he knew it would. He felt worse about the death of that deer than about the death of his own father.
He passed a number of small towns. A few people came out of their homes to stare at him.
Until finally the river became so shallow his raft could travel no further, and it broke apart on the stones and deadfall in the middle of the stream.
There Parker settled down and made a family for himself. When his wife or children asked him about his father, he said the old man had drowned in the river, and he would always regret that he’d been unable to save him.
Sometimes in the night, Parker could hear his father’s body floating past in the river, moaning, whispering prayerfully for his son, begging his son to at last tow him into shore.
DEC. 1
1987: four U.S. companies are awarded contracts to help build a space station.
As a boy Cal had dreamed of giant wheels in the sky. Giant wagon wheels that turned and turned across the darkness. Two of them together were the spinning eyes of God watching him. A dozen, two dozen together: an endless choice of divinities.
He had yearned to live on such a wheel. A wheel was the perfect place to dream. A hundred, two hundred wheels turning together, and a multitude of realities could be dreamed.
He had been a selfish father. He had never given his children wheels to dream on. He had never talked of the spinning eyes of God.
To his children wheels got them to the same places from the same places. Again and again. Their wheels were circular– his had been shaped like a Mobius strip.
But a circular wheel was safer. You could fall off a Mobius band trying to find the other side.
DEC. 2
1859: neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat is born in Paris.
1942: a nuclear chain reaction is demonstrated for the first time.
1970: the Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.
1982: doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center implant the first artificial heart in retired dentist Barney Clark.
The day was sunny, too bright by half, scattered with tiny, unmelted pockets of snow which steamed brilliantly in the clear air. The world looked like a pointillist painting, a cloud of colors which held to definite shapes but which threatened to float apart and dissipate if he moved too quickly left or right. It was on mornings like these that he imagined he saw the individual atoms of things, vibrating into song and filled to bursting with light.
He was reminded that for all its beauty the physical world was a volatile and dangerous place, always on the verge of explosion and collapse. If the proper notes were played or if the vibrations of things were altered just so there would be this flying apart, this chain reaction which might not be stopped, and the cloud of the world would tear like the sudden disruption of a dream.
Yet people still brought children into this world, still brought them up to care about the physical things of it, even though these things were ultimately an illusion. And would die, and disappear, and eventually the children would forget that these things had ever been, no matter how hard the generations strived to protect and preserve them. New vibrations, colors, substances were being inserted into the cloud that was the world all the time, threatening its increasingly marginal harmonies. Nothing could stay the same, or else the cloud of the world might freeze into a series of rigid, Victorian-backed figures like those in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, the men in their high-hats and the women with their umbrellas staring out over the wat
er, trying to remember how they used to enjoy themselves.
He had brought his own children into this world, out of lust or out of a need to share its vague, unstable, and generally dangerous qualities with others who resembled him, however distantly.
If only he knew how to give them the artificial hearts they required in order to survive such a dream.
DEC. 3
1911: poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen, author of The Journal of Albion Moonlight, is born in Niles, Ohio.
1984: toxic gas from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, kills over 3,000 people.
When the disaster in Bhopal occurred, his kids had been small, babies really, and he remembered thinking at the time how awful this was, and beyond that, how we somehow expected children to die in the Third World, as if this were an everyday happening, and, of course, it was.
Children died everywhere every day, without even the opportunity to begin the journey.
Someone should keep a journal of the adventures of all the children who had died, but it would be much too sad a book to actually read. It was the sort of thing you might keep under your pillow in order to stiffen it, and to dream upon. Knights, ghosts, and shadows …
The dead begin their journeys in our dreams. Our dreams are the journals for their journeys.
On his dreaming journey with him were a few friends and the multitude of tiny gray corpses of the children of Bhopal following the shoreline to Heavenly Savior. There they would complete their trip, but they had to stick to their path. Along the way monstrous bombs dropped out of the anuses of angered adults. Long serpentine arms entangled the shore, snaring their tattered clothing. These arms had abandoned the men who owned them: men who wanted to hold children until there was nothing left to hold anymore, and the children broke apart and left their sweet and sour smells on the skin. The corpse children had to eat from great piles of rotting food in order to cross the borders kept free by uniformed guards with dogs. In caves, mothers’ cries circled and erupted with clock-like regularity. And everywhere underfoot there was the paper trash the adults had left behind on their own long journeys into night, printed with words the children could not read and pictures years outside their own narrow experiences.
The Book of Days Page 13