The fraying, dirty mummification of my arm enchanted my cousins as if I had carried a filthy stray cat into their house and then refused to give it up. This was seen as boldness on my part: the lawlessness they imagined for me was an outline I would have poured myself into if I could. They wanted to touch and poke and unwrap, and since that would earn me more reverent attention of the kind boys pay only to what slightly sickens them, I would have let them. But my aunt said Boys. Now you leave it alone. My cousins stuck close, honoring the leprous itness of my arm. Asked by my aunt about the pain, I don’t think I was constrained by loyalty to my parents’ version, which was that nothing was broken. The doubleness of my vantage point—aware that they were wrong but sure they were perfect—wrecked my awareness of them; where what they want belonged, there was a blank, so I was honest with my aunt, and relieved by the distress she let show. Reined in only by my aunt’s southern-lady-ness, that distress verged on an indictment of my parents, especially my mother; but my aunt held her tongue and didn’t accuse her of anything, not where I could hear, and I think not to anyone, because it wouldn’t have served any purpose, not really, or made it any easier to accomplish what she right away determined to do, which was get me to a doctor. My aunt had brown eyes so dark they were often described as black, enviable eyes, as hers was an enviable high-cheekboned black-haired drawling beauty that hadn’t gotten her into too much trouble, either because she was naturally sensible or had set out to cultivate happiness. She’d married my father’s droll, soft-spoken, easygoing little brother, and their household seemed miraculous to me, so much so that on previous annual visits I had insisted on watching my aunt do every little thing, spellbound by her gentleness and determined to attract as much of it as I could to myself. This greed of mine for my aunt’s company didn’t go unremarked, and it embarrassed my mother. If she’d liked my aunt less, she might have held it against her, or conjectured to my father late at night when they were finally alone that my aunt was egging me on in my ridiculous infatuation, with the secret aim of making Bill’s Yankee wife look bad. My aunt’s nature was equable and warm and self-effacing, qualities my restless hypercritical mother did not possess but religiously impersonated. As sometimes happens, two women who seem exactly positioned for mutual loathing ended up forging a spirited conspiracy, whose great staple was discussion of their men, those very different brothers.
At the hospital I was sugahed and sweethearted, endearments good as opium. The dream of benevolence was pierced by my fear when the doctor bent close. I hadn’t bathed since the accident and my skin radiated the stench of fever and chlorine, but the possibility that he would be repelled by me did not concern me—that wasn’t it, though what I was afraid of was like smelling bad: it was present, like a taint, when the doctor leaned in. It was the possibility of being deeply shamed. With his mannerly Tennessee-slow slightly formal inquisitiveness the doctor might assent to my parents’ view that nothing real was wrong, and attention-lover that I was, I would be seen as having impersonated brokenness and spun a fable of pain. Could that be, could I have done that? Across a wall, at adult eye level, ran the sequence of black X-ray sheets, and I gazed up at the frail light of my bones while grownup voices took polite turns, the longest, southernest turn belonging to the doctor. You know how if you take a little stick and give it a good twist, it will splinter out with the strain but not snap clear through? What’s called a greenstick fracture. Fractures here, here, and here too. The truth of X-rayed bone, the lifted-up feeling of rescue, the sensuousness of the expert winding of plaster-soaked gauze, spindly as layers of papier-mâché, around and around until the hurt arm vanished.
The opposite of hospital order and clarity and decisiveness is the velvet passivity of sinking into the high-backed seats of a darkening theater, but whose whim was this? Down at the thrilling level where children piece together rumors of what adults find dirty, this movie was a source of joking and awe and back-yard reenactment: This bad guy kills women by sneaking in while they’re sleeping and painting them gold, all over so their skin can’t breathe. They die? If a person’s skin can’t breathe they die. Wouldn’t it wake you up to be painted—you’d feel it? They’re just in real deep sleep. The painting happens fast. They used real gold. This one woman, while they were painting they forgot to leave her a patch of bare skin to breathe through and she died. In real life, died, and you get to see her. For my aunt and uncle as evangelicals, the corruption that could attend moviegoing wasn’t taken lightly; how did they ever agree to Bond? I can’t explain it, unless the movie was meant as reckless compensation for the ordeal of the hospital, which had left the grownups in a dangerous state of disenchantment with each other. Maybe some unprecedented enchantment was needed, which could embrace them in its scandalous arms—maybe it had to be scandalous or it wouldn’t constitute enough of a break, it wouldn’t do the trick. Neither can the adults’ decision to sit apart from us children be explained, unless their apartness seemed the route to undistracted calm and unity. So: to the gilding and velvet and shushing of southern audience voices, to five cousins in thrall to each other’s nearness, alert to every flicker of an eyelid in a cousin’s profile. The troubling parts are going to go right over their heads, the grownups had decided, a satisfying conclusion all round, for them because it guaranteed them a respite from the strained aura of mutual apology that had overtaken them at the hospital, for us because we fully intended to absorb every bit of sex and violence. In the downfalling twilight I rested my brand-new cast on the armrest and admired its luminous whiteness, the separate aluminum splint that shielded my thumb, the cute pawlike entrapment of my other fingertips showing at the cast’s end. Then it was dark. For music there was a moaningly erotic blare of trumpets whose notes were prolonged with a nyaaaah nyaaaaaah obnoxiousness well known to children. Bond too was gloriously obvious: he did whatever he wanted. We understood! How beguiled we were to find ourselves surfing the shockwaves of a movie for grownups. We grew bolder, also for some reason indifferent to each other, staring without whispering. Deep in the movie, in the silk sheets where Bond had left her the night before, a woman lay on her side, her hair swerving across a pillow, her back to us, what my dad called the cheeks of her ass exposed, just a little string running down between them. Bond came in. Bond sat on the edge of the bed. She was bare bright overpowering gold, the tilt of shoulder declining to the tuck of waist, the hip the high point of a luminous dune tapering to rigid feet. Had she slept through her own death? Or wakened to feel consciousness beat its wings against suffocating skin? How long did it take? What came next? In his white pajamas, his back straight, Bond extended his fingertips to the glazed throat. No thudding, no pulse, only calm metal thingness like a tin can’s, a car fender’s. We sat there hushed and oppressed and sorry. My cousins hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch, but they had gotten farther away. Maybe to my cousins, maybe to something else, I directed an inarticulate wish along the lines of Come back, come back. The wish could do nothing. It was a trammeled, locked-in wish beating against other people’s unknownness. It wasn’t going to work. Aloneness wasn’t going anywhere. While my soul hung waiting for the next part of my life, I looked down at my arm, emerging into visibility as the lights came up. Under plaster and gauze was the ghost of the X where I had once bled into somebody and she had bled into me, and it worked, that X, and if it worked once, it could work again, or something like it could, the X of one body held to the X of another, and this notion stirred me, though I didn’t know enough about bodies to make the desire any more authoritative or detailed than that, I didn’t know this was sex. But I knew it was a way out. Find Jenny and ask her if she loves you and when she says yes say good because I do too. And like magic, I did. Love her.
They were reality. Like everybody’s parents, they were the most real thing there was. It was not possible to blame them, it would not have occurred to me at ten. The truth is I was sickened by myself for being a child they wanted not to know about. I repudiated myself because I could
find no way to matter, it was my failure, and I understood that another, more beautiful child could have had a hold on them. Yet it seemed possible that by force of will I could become this other, more beautiful child. Was it a thing a nonbeloved child could figure out—could replicate? How long would it take? This was an emergency. I was wrong, in my wrongness I was alienating them, and either I was doing things wrong or I was imbued with wrongness, irretrievably wrong, a wrong self, and that could not be changed, and it could not be borne. Therefore it must be the case that I was doing things wrong, and if I was doing things wrong, then it was only a matter of beginning to do things right, and I could do that, I would, I had to, it was life or death to me to be loved by them, so I would do things beautifully, beginning now.
If they have both been lost to me by death, gone for years, that hasn’t changed things: death, it turns out, can’t touch the deep aura of waiting, the lifelong spell that is the need for them to see.
WELLS TOWER
The Old Man at Burning Man
FROM GQ
THE LAND, THE VERY atmosphere out there, is alien, malignant, the executioner of countless wagon trains. I am afraid to crack the window. Huge dervishes of alkaline dust reel and teeter past. The sun, a brittle parchment white, glowers as though we personally have done something to piss it off. An hour out here and already I could light an Ohio Blue Tip off the inside of my nostril. One would think we were pulling into this planet’s nearest simulation of hell, but if this were hell, we would not be driving this very comfortable recreational vehicle. Nor would there be a trio of young and merry nudists capering at our front bumper, demanding that we step out of the vehicle and join them. These people are checkpoint officials, and it is their duty to press their nakedness to us in the traditional gesture of welcome to the Burning Man festival, here in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
The checkpoint nudists are comely and embraceable, in the way that everyone ten years younger than me has lately begun to seem comely and embraceable—the women’s dolphin smoothness still undefeated by time and gravity; the men bearing genial grins and penises with which I suppose I can cope: neither those lamentable acorns one pities at the gym, nor fearsome yardage that would be challenging to negotiate at close quarters. But here is the question: Do I want some naked strangers to get on me? Or, more to the point, do I want them to get on me with my father watching? This quandary is no quandary for my father. He is already out of the vehicle, standing in the coursing dust, smiling broadly, a stranger’s bosom trembling at his chin.
My father and I are staid, abstracted East Coast types without much natural affinity for bohemian adventures. But we are here less for the festival itself than in service of an annual father-son ritual. Fourteen years ago my father was diagnosed with an exotic lymphoma and given an outside prognosis of two years. When we both supposed he was dying, we made an adorable pledge—if he survived—to take a trip together every year. Thanks to medical science, we’ve now followed the tradition for a solid decade, journeying each summer to some arbitrarily selected far-flung destination: Greenland, Ecuador, Cyprus, etc. This year we’ve retooled the concept and departed instead on a bit of domestic ethnography. We have joined the annual pilgrimage of many thousands who each year flee the square world for the Nevada desert to join what’s supposed to be humanity’s greatest countercultural folk festival/self-expression derby. Or it used to be, before people like my father and me started showing up.
Now I too am in the daylight, being hugged by a small, bearded Mr. Tumnus of a fellow, and also by a bespectacled lady-librarian type with a scrupulously mown vulva. “Welcome home,” they murmur in my ear. “Home” this is decidedly not. Whether it is good to be here, we shall discover in the coming week. Still, I reply, “Uh, it’s good to be home.”
At the adjacent welcome booth, dreadlockers, having been duly greeted, are trudging back to their hippie wagon. “I hope it doesn’t suck this year,” one of them says, eyeing our vast and foolish RV. “We’re surrounded by all these bougie people.”
“I’m so fucking stoned,” complains a bikini-clad girl wearing a fedora snugged over dreadlocks stout as table legs. “Man, I gotta focus. Gotta get ready for the Slut Olympics.”
We climb back aboard, tracking pounds of dust into the RV. My dad is enlivened. “What a nice greeting that was,” he says. “Did you know that woman didn’t have any trousers on? I was so focused on her breasts I didn’t notice she was naked until after the ceremony.”
When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Burning Man with my sixty-nine-year-old father, Good idea were the words out of no one’s mouth. Perhaps this was a poor idea. Mere moments here and my emotional machinery, specifically the feelings-about-my-family manifold, is beginning to smoke, creak, and blow springs with a jaw-harp bwaaaang!
The root causes of my embarrassment, unsurprisingly, naturally, track back to my childhood, a montage of my father perpetually falling short of the dull, decorous Ward Cleaver ideal I imagined everyone else had for a dad. Because my father is constitutionally incapable of being embarrassed, I spent much of my early life being embarrassed on his behalf. In elementary school I was embarrassed by his car, a mulch-colored Datsun coupe which, when the clearcoat gave out, my father repainted, with brushes, a pupil-puckering shade of kelly green. I was, and am, embarrassed by his house. After my parents divorced (I was six), the home became a tribute to unreconstructed bachelorhood, a place where the dominant cuisine was ramen noodles, where the dirty-clothes hamper was a delta of fragrant laundry on the kitchen floor, and where, when the furnace broke, it went unrepaired for the better part of a decade. For much of my adult life, my father’s house has existed in a state of entropy so ideal that were a band of vandals or a flood to hit the place, it could only enhance the house’s orderliness.
I was embarrassed by my father’s fearlessness about his body—how, for example, when we met for a tennis game, he never bothered to change ahead of time or repair to a restroom but instead shucked his trousers off in the parking lot without a care for who observed him in his sagging BVDs. I was embarrassed, and also sort of impressed, one day when I was seven when I saw him drink some of my pee. The setup was this: I’d spent the morning pissing in a Collins glass I’d hidden in the garage, which I intended to take down the street to show a neighbor friend, for reasons unclear to me now. In any case, I set it on the kitchen table while I went to find my shoes. When I returned, my father was hoisting the glass to his lips and uttering these words: “What’s this, apple juice?”
I recall yelling, “Noooooooooo,” in slo-mo basso. Too late. He took a generous slug. Then he set the glass down, turned to me, and said only this: “Don’t ever, ever do that again.”
But I think what I’m feeling now is the opposite of the old embarrassed feeling, more a kind of petulant recognition that my father’s heedlessness, his lack of inhibition, are in fact virtues that I failed to inherit. Did I mention that my father is no free-ranging hippie papa but a professor of economics who once voted for George W. Bush? Yet when I asked my father to come with me to Burning Man, though he’d never heard of Burning Man, “Absolutely” was his prompt response. Never mind that his immune system is faltering. He now requires monthly transfusions of immunoglobulin. His chronic chest cold seems to be getting worse. His doctor recently noticed sulfurous halos around my father’s pupils, inspiring worries that he may someday soon go blind. His mouth has lately broken out in ulcers, part of a painful accumulation of signals that this year’s trip could be our last one together.
The Best American Essays 2014 Page 22