Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  I remember that afternoon as one of the most surreal in my life. I had no idea what to do. When this would end, or how. I couldn’t wrestle the car away from her. I couldn’t get out and start walking back to Rotterdam in the rain. Where would I go? I had no money. I couldn’t reason with her, couldn’t win; she’d built the story of my guilt, my treachery, so high that it had become real to her—absolutely, heartbreakingly, infuriatingly real. A fact. I might as well have been trying to convince her that we weren’t in a car, or that it wasn’t raining and hadn’t rained in weeks.

  Looking back, I think it was this ability to believe so completely in something of her own making—something that never was—to construct a narrative out of air, support it with made-up memories, then commit to it as though it represented the last measure of justice, that still amazes and appalls me. You could see it growing, beginning with the first small brick—the expression on my face, let’s say, that particular thing I’d (never) said—then quickly cementing, gathering reality to itself, becoming indisputable, then fact. In some sense, my mother was like a method actor who is able to vanish into the scene—not feel grief or rage but actually grieve, rage—except that in her case the play never closed. My crime was real now, as real as anything in her life—it was the nail on which her sanity hung. For me to say that nothing had happened, or that she’d made it up for reasons of her own, was a metaphysical assault, as absurd as it was cruel.

  I caved. I gave in. I was sorry, I said, still trying to salvage something with the usual qualifications: I was sorry she saw it that way. I hadn’t meant, I hadn’t intended. If it was my fault, I was sorry, though I didn’t remember . . .

  Meant, intended, if, though—none of these would do. Truth was truth. And sitting in that steamed up little car in the median of that highway heading toward the German border, utterly exhausted, just wanting to go, to find a place, to sleep, I gave her the truth she wanted. After all my denials, her respect for me ticked up a notch; at least I’d been man enough to admit my fault.

  And she wiped herself a little window over the steering wheel with her handkerchief, checked her mirrors, and we bumped out onto the road to Germany.

  XVIII

  WHEN PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK me about writing, I tell them that our books write us. It’s not a particularly clever line, but I think it’s true. The act of writing will reveal you, word by word, line by line. You can remain ignorant yourself, you can hide in the shrubbery of your prose till the day you die; to a great reader, you’ll stand naked as the day.

  I’m not a great reader, particularly of my own work. It’s the reason I’ve been surprised by what my own books conspired to say behind my back. And not always pleasantly surprised. Sometimes I think it takes more guts to read what you’ve written than to write it in the first place.

  In my third novel, Brewster, which showed my own childhood in the dark carnival mirror of fiction—stretching some parts, shrinking others—I never realized that by having my narrator lose his younger brother in childhood, I’d worked out the essential dynamic of my life. In Brewster, the narrator’s immigrant mother, perpetually mourning the death of her idealized firstborn child, can’t see the younger brother—even hates him for surviving. In my own life, my mother mourned the perfect child I’d once been, then turned on the pimpled traitor who’d survived. I spent three decades arguing on my behalf, saying, “I’m right here. I’m your son. Nothing’s changed.”

  Obvious? Not to me. I was in the shower, four months after the book’s publication, when I had my little epiphany. I remember standing there like a fool, soap in my armpits and egg on my face, suddenly aware of what had been hidden in plain view.

  There were other times. I thought that “Dog,” a story I wrote in the fall of 2007, was a deeply strange—all right, fucked-up—story about a man and his dog. The man loves his dog as the dog loves him. They’re a church of two. They hang out together, play together, watch TV together. And sliding down to sleep on the trough and crest of her breathing, he’d know that this was love, love as profound and true as the slowing of blood when the season’s screw starts to tighten. Just so.

  Everything is daffodils and sunsets until the day the man finds a razor blade growing out of the dog’s hide. He doesn’t understand how this is possible, but there it is; the next day there are more. Soon the dog’s a clicking mass of blades. They don’t hurt her, but every time the man touches her—as she expects him to, because she loves him—he bleeds.

  My God, is there anything more embarrassing than self-analysis through literature? Let the defense go out for a smoke and the prosecution proceed; behold the evidence of my obtusness:

  Exhibit A: What hurt him most was her inability (or unwillingness) to understand, to insist on having her feelings hurt, to see his attempts to protect himself as a kind of betrayal. He understood why she felt this way, of course. She loved him unconditionally. . . .

  Exhibit B: She would attack death itself for him without a moment’s hesitation, and yet here she was, suffering . . . unable to comprehend why she’d been abandoned. Why he no longer loved her.

  Exhibit C: The pills were from Mexico, a bright canary yellow. He pressed three into a piece of hamburger meat he’d brought in a plastic bag and walked over to the mound of blankets. He was already weeping when she began to lick his bleeding hand, working her tongue between his fingers. . . . Letting her lick the grease off his hand with her cut tongue, he jumped down into the grave and then, lifting her in his arms, laid her gently on the ground. There was plenty of room. Lying down beside her, he drew one of the blankets partly over himself and looked up at the rectangle of branches and sky. He’d taken eight himself; there was nothing else to do. He could feel her next to him, the slowing bellows of the lungs, the shallowing crest and trough of her breathing. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog.”

  I missed it all. My mother? Don’t be ridiculous—what did this have to do with my mother? In early drafts of the story, I’d made the dog male—some last feeble attempt on the part of my brain to hide from itself. Even after my agent suggested the switch, and I sensed the rightness of it, I still didn’t make the link . . . until I did, and then it was like finding the hidden rake or badger or watering can in the picture in the dentist’s office: I kept looking at it, wondering “How could I not have seen that?”

  During the American Civil War, observers noted a curious fact: the sounds of a battle, clearly distinguishable at ten miles, could be utterly inaudible at two. These weird wrinkles in the landscape were called “acoustic shadows.”

  Maybe it’s the same thing with memory, except that our inability to hear something in our past is proportional to the misery of the event; the uglier the battlefield, the deeper the shadow.

  When I was eight or nine, I was in my room half-listening to my parents fight when a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before—a kind of horrible, bellowing wail—rose from my father’s study. I rushed into the hallway just in time to glimpse him lying on his stomach next to the metal filing cabinets, hitting his arms and legs against the floor like a giant infant, and then my mother’s body blocked my view. And the memory vanished into shadow.

  Perhaps ten years later, in college now, I had a profoundly erotic dream in which a vague but deeply desirable woman sat on a high stone wall looking down at me, wanting me. There were no edges to the dream, no borders—just the wall, the woman, and pale, yellow light. A rival appeared next to me, a man so huge he seemed more god than mortal—larger than life, impossibly powerful; he could reach the woman with ease. This made me angry and I pointed at him and he began to shrink, and I kept pointing, thrilled at my own power, until he was an infant at my feet, lying on his stomach, helpless kicking his arms and legs.

  If I ever get therapy, I’ll save that one for a special occasion—a treat for the holidays.

  My point is that the original event—my father’s breakdown—remained hidden. It would be another fifteen years, until after he’d suffered a massive heart
attack, until after I’d slept in the waiting room of the IC unit in Bethlehem for two nights wrapped in my coat, until I’d seen his morphine-bloated body hooked to a dozen machines that beeped and pulsed while he dreamed away in his coma, that the silence cracked, the hour returned, and there I was, nine years old again, glimpsing Daddy wailing on the floor. Go figure.

  Truth makes you hungry for more truth. It’s a bit like confessing—once you start, it’s hard to stop. The trick is recognizing when truth-telling shades into self-indulgence, or worse, step-right-up exhibitionism.

  I’m clearing my throat, stalling. If there’s something unpleasant you need to do, we always told our kids—best get to it.

  The thing is—I missed the cats. They were everywhere, a kind of go-to metaphor. I saw them, used them, but I didn’t understand where they came from. Now that I do, I can see why I might not have wanted to know.

  I can look almost anywhere now, and there they are. In my first novel, God’s Fool, my nineteenth-century heroes wake late in the night to a strange, barking sound, and find a cat drowning in a well. In an essay on the virtues of idleness I claim that “we’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well.” At the beginning of this memoir, for Christ’s sake—the irony here is priceless—I imagine my subconscious daring me to ignore my past: “You want to strike out like the American Adam with your freeze-dried beef stroganoff and your telescoping walking stick? You want to fucking baptize yourself? Well good luck and God bless—I’ll drown you like a cat in a well.”

  But I need to say something. Of all the animals I’ve loved in my life—and I’m the kind of person who rescues damsel flies from the lake, carries hatchling turtles off the roads in spring—I’ve probably loved cats the most. When Bob, who I loved ridiculously, disappeared two years ago—I missed him profoundly. I still do. Cruelty to animals makes me crazy—as does any cruelty, actually. I’d take a stick to Michael Vick in a heartbeat.

  Time to connect the dots—or try.

  My grandfather, the Nazi sympathizer, the man who most likely slept with his own daughter for years (because a man doesn’t begin having sex with his daughter when she’s nineteen, because it takes time to build that horror into habit)—this man, as I’ve said, also killed cats. An atrocity barely worth mentioning given his other sins, but revealing nonetheless. He did it regularly. He did it for years. He shrugged off the threats, the hate, accepted his ostracism philosophically.

  I don’t know when I learned this fact about Grandpa—not till my teens, probably.

  In 1994, a father now, I woke up in our bedroom in Leucadia, California, to a weird, barking sound. It wouldn’t stop. It was quite dark—perhaps an hour before dawn. Eventually, unable to sleep, I got dressed and went out back behind our apartment complex, then pushed aside the board in the fence that led to our garden. The strange, rhythmic barking was louder. Eventually, in a neighbor’s yard in a cistern half full of water like a deep bathtub, my flashlight found a cat, barely swimming, barking desperately. I pried the board off the fence, levered the poor thing—soaked and small as a rat—out of the hole, carried it back to our apartment, where my wife wrapped it in towels, then drove it to a twenty-four-hour pet clinic in Carlsbad. We heard later it had to be put down. Like a cat in a well.

  It troubled me deeply—if only I’d gotten up sooner—but I was still in the shadow of the larger thing.

  I’d stay there another twenty years, through my thirties and forties and late into my fifties, until I traveled to see my mother in a care home for Alzheimer’s patients in Brno. And I remembered. It was after we’d returned home to the States. I was driving somewhere with my wife, and suddenly I was telling her the story—as though I’d always known it, always remembered it. Just like that.

  In the summer of 1977, my parents left for Europe—my father had some kind of work there. I was left in charge of our house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was nineteen. I could handle whatever needed handling, my mother said.

  A week or two after they left, our cat, Chiquita, had a litter of kittens. It was her sixth, maybe her seventh. I don’t know why we’d never had her fixed—it was less common then, or maybe we were just idiots. In any case, we hadn’t. At regular intervals, a litter would arrive and I’d spend days giving kittens away to strangers, to pet stores, to anyone who would take them.

  But I was a man now, and I knew what a man would do because I’d been told. In the Old World, you see, in the old days, the country people were a tough, practical lot; if a cat had a litter, they’d put the kittens in a bag with a rock—do pitlu s kamenem—and throw them in the river. It was hard but necessary—otherwise the country would be overrun. And if you did it right away, while they were still blind and small, it went very quickly.

  My father hated doing it, but he had, once or twice, returning from the garage white and sick in the face, unable to talk. But he was my father, and though part of me felt sorry for him, well, he wasn’t Steve McQueen. And I was a man now. I did due diligence, tried to place them, made a few calls. No one wanted kittens, nor were they likely to. I got a bucket, filled it with water. I almost relished the responsibility, the chance to show I could do the hard thing. Hell, I couldn’t have my parents return to a house full of cats. And besides, if I did it right away, while they were still blind and small, it would go very quickly.

  It did not go very quickly. I can’t go into the details—I won’t. Perhaps there were some air pockets in the bag. Impossibly, I could hear their miniature mewling all through the house. I couldn’t get away from it. It went on and on. I was horrified by what I’d done, too scared to get them out, thinking I’d find them half-gone, dying. . . . I wasn’t a man—I wasn’t even my father. I was a child, wiping away tears, swallowing down the taste of my own vomit. . . .

  To this day, I think it may be the most despicable thing I’ve done—the thing I’m most ashamed of. Was it Mommy’s fault, or Steve McQueen’s? Sorry—that’s a coward’s out I won’t take. It was mine, and to say that it went against my nature, or that for those three or four minutes I existed in the most profound state of self-revulsion I’ve known, doesn’t alleviate my guilt; it compounds it.

  Why? I can tell you why: Because I didn’t stop. Because I made myself do the hard thing even though it made me sick; because, for all I know, most of the terrible things done in this world are difficult for the people who do them, are, in fact, a violence against the self.

  You tell me it went against your nature? I don’t care. That it was hard? I don’t care. That it gave you pain to do this thing—that it still gives you pain? You’ll get no mercy from me.

  It’s impossible for me to deny it. For just those few minutes, in my own small way—though I’m not for a moment comparing our deeds—I came within range of my grandfather’s gravitational pull, sensed in myself the seed of his cruelty, and I’ll spend my life trying to uproot it.

  XIX

  THE SPRING OF 1945 WAS, or should have been, a time of reckoning with what our species is capable of. Over the previous six years, 50 million souls had disappeared into a furnace so profound it would wither any attempts to reckon its magnitude, caking the brain, leaving only a still, annealing dust for which there could be no analogies, no accounting, out of which we could draw no saving truth. All that remained were apparent facts, recorded dates, accounts of events and motivations so jarring, so emotionally dissonant that they seemed to refer to some other world, a realm from which both humanity and sense had been surgically removed.

  I grew up in the shadow of this time; in our house, 1945 never really ended. Drawn like a moth to our contradictions, hypnotized by the damned human race, I couldn’t help but dwell—and wonder.

  During the last days of the Third Reich, for example, as the concussions of the Russian heavy artillery jingled the crystal in the cabinets of the Reichschancellery in Berlin, Propaganda Minister Goebbels would while away the long after-dinner hours reading to Hitler from Thomas Carlyle’s history of Frederick the Grea
t. I could see it: Hitler, perhaps, at one end of a plum-colored damask sofa, his head leaning on his right hand, absentmindedly running his middle finger along the center of his brow; Goebbels in a comfortable chair opposite, one leg draped over the other, a fire companionably puffing and spitting . . .

  And there, in one of the well-furnished rooms of the armor-plated, concrete-reinforced bunker beneath the Chancellery (only six years after passing through the line of sight of a fifteen-year-old boy standing behind a thick, blue curtain), Adolf Hitler wept, touched by Carlyle’s apostrophe to the long-dead king in the moment of his greatest trial: “Brave King! Wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds and soon will rise upon you.”

  Sixty feet over their heads, the nine-hundred-room Chancellery, with its polished marble halls and hundred-pound chandeliers, was methodically being pounded into dust and rubble: stacks and columns of books taken from the Chancellery libraries blocked the tall windows looking out onto the wrecked Wilhelmstrasse, the short, ugly barrels of machine guns poking between the spines; bulky crates of crosses and oak leaves barricaded the main entrance. A month earlier, Anglo-American armies had crossed the Rhine.

  None of this mattered. Sensing a promise, an omen of redemption in Carlyle’s description of Frederick’s deliverance, Hitler sent a guard to retrieve the Reich’s official horoscopes. And there it was: proof that, just as Prussia had been saved in the darkest hours of the Seven Years’ War by the miraculous death of the czarina, so the Third Reich would survive her harshest trials. History would save her. “Even in this very year, a change of fortune shall come,” Goebbels proclaimed in an eleventh-hour message to the retreating troops. “The Führer knows the exact hour of its arrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we . . . [can] testify to the miracle. . . .”