Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  Inside you, it’s worse. Betrayal, at least, still places the crime where it belongs—outside of you; guilt brings it home and lays it at your door. It’s your fault now. For having instigated it—because you must have, somehow. For having continued with it. For having been kicked out of your home when your guilt was discovered, exiled into marriage.

  You’ll tell no one, ever. Not your friends, not your lover, not your husband, not even your son—though there, strangely, you’ll come close, tapping on that closed door, signaling something he can’t imagine and you yourself barely believe anymore. When your mother dies, it will stagger you like no natural parting ever could: besides your father, she was the last one on earth who knew, and now she’s gone. It doesn’t matter. You’ll bury this thing, you say to yourself (even as it shovels the dirt up around your throat).

  And because it’s easier than hating him—he’s still your daddy, after all—you’ll hate yourself. You’re closer. Your face is always there in the mirror, your body ready to hurt. It’s so convenient. After a few years you’ll forget the source—hating yourself will feel like instinct.

  But hate is late-stage, and it won’t stop with you. It will spread, branch, interlace with the betraying world that grows all around you. Which is the cause and which the effect—whether the world betrays you first or your hate forces it to—is up for discussion. Extra credit.

  Which is where I come in, making my entrance with my usual flair in a gush of blood and amniotic fluid—ready to play my role. Our case—yours and mine, Mom—will be different: no primal sin, no originating horror. We’ll be echoes.

  I’ll love you, trust you—utterly. And you’ll manage to hold on to that for a while. And then the pattern will assert itself. You’ll be cruel, then hate me for it because, as you know so well, we hate the ones we’re cruel to. You’ll make me the responsible one. Though I’ll bleed every time I touch you, though you’ll be the one who leaves, I’ll be the one hurting you. I’ll become what I was always going to be—the betrayer.

  And neatly closing the circle, I’ll learn to hate you for it. For having betrayed my trust. For hating me. And then, because it’s easier than hating you—but this landscape looks familiar, no?—I’ll begin to hate myself. I must have done something. I’ll fly to guilt like an arrow to its wound.

  Until, gulping for air like a goldfish on the carpet, I’ll put you in a book, then under a bus.

  Until I make you a dog with razor blades for fur.

  Only then will the merry-go-round begin to stutter, then stall.

  XLII

  IN THE COURTYARD BELOW the window Jan Masaryk jumped from (remembering to close it behind him), the Czechs erected a plaque. It took them a while to get the funding—those who’d helped Masaryk out the window had to clear the stage first.

  The plaque gives the name and the relevant dates, then adds the motto of the Czech nation: Pravda vítzí! Truth prevails!

  Which would normally be that—another boring plaque for schoolchildren to yawn over—except that this is Prague and the Czechs, whatever their faults, tend to apply reason to pap. Even if the pap happens to be their national motto.

  An adjustment is necessary. The committee votes, the stone-carver is notified. And the plaque goes up in the courtyard: Pravda vítzí . . . ale dá to fušku. Truth prevails! . . . but it takes some sweat.

  XLIII

  AND SO, BACK IN good old Bethlehem, “Christmas City, U.S.A.,” it all went sideways—slowly at first, then not so slowly. My father, as he had in 1945, the year he and my mother were married, buried himself in work, then added booze and the new hobby of running vast distances around the cornfields and subdivisions before having a smoke. My mother descended, methodically, rung by rung (though she’d regularly reverse direction for a day or a week) into depression punctuated by rages that would turn her features into a kind of broken mask—the face of someone who’s just seen their family killed and is looking at the person responsible. More and more often, that person was me.

  It’s a feeling I’d only wish on my worst enemy.

  The endless silence of those sleety December afternoons, the darkness setting in by four. There’s no one to laugh with, no one to talk to—eventually your friends on TV have to go.

  I didn’t know she was going mad. Such an old-fashioned expression—“He’s mad, I tell you!” At the time, unbelievably, it all seemed normal. At the time—but this is how it always works—it was just Mom. Mom was sad. Mom was angry. When Mom flew into a screaming rage over nothing, over air, then locked herself in her bedroom for four days, emerging only at night to stagger down the hallway to the kitchen, her hands out to the walls as if walking the deck of a rolling ship (turning her face away if you happened to be coming out of the bathroom), I thought it was normal.

  It didn’t happen overnight. She struggled for a while. For a year she lived back in Tarrytown, New York, renting a room so she could finish up her years of service in her old job and earn her retirement, returning home for the weekends. I’d clean the house, buy flowers. I did what I could. I was a good-enough kid. If I’d been listening, I would have heard the whine of an incoming shell, and run.

  By the time I was seventeen, and for years after whenever I’d come home, I’d wake up in the mornings and just lie in my bed, taking the pulse of the house. I could tell from the way a door clicked in its latch how bad it was; I could tell by the weight of the silence. Often it was less subtle. I’d pick up that horrible telltale hissing—my mother raging at my father yet still, absurdly, trying to keep her voice down, then a scream of rage and something smashing, then a second, two, and a door slamming so hard the water in my aquarium would tremble—and just stay in my room to shorten the time I’d have to spend outside of it.

  I’m not making any claim to anything—this isn’t Queen for a Day. I have no interest in hustling our unhappiness for a bit of misery cred and a shot at Oprah. What I’m interested in is at once more selfish and less sellable. I want to know what the fuck happened to us, and why, and why I couldn’t see it. I want to know why I couldn’t save us, though what I really want, I think, is absolution, the beginning of this sentence with the word “why” removed like a long thorn: I want to know I couldn’t save us.

  I had enough to do saving myself. On the afternoon of January 15, 1975, when I was almost seventeen, with my mother off in Tarrytown for the week and my father at work, I found myself wandering around the house, room to room, then down the hallway, then again. Aimlessly, pointlessly. Unable to work, to read, to sleep. Unable to stop. It was sleeting outside, and as I passed by the rooms, the windows looked like empty slides in a projector. The world seemed drained. I’d never known such loneliness. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Life was a death sentence,” my mother said.

  I couldn’t stop walking—it was a small house—back and forth, back and forth. I’d promise myself that on the next go-round I’d stop, and then the next—and then I’d walk right through, berating myself for my weakness. I thought I was going crazy. I remember trying to laugh, then getting down on the floor and knocking out a bunch of push-ups, then scaring myself by starting to cry.

  I took a blank notebook off the shelf, scrawled the date—January 15, 1975—on the first page with a Bic pen and began describing the sea I was drowning in.

  I’ve never stopped.

  XLIV

  I DIDN’T SEE THE PILLS. I didn’t even imagine them. And now that I know about them, all they do is confuse things. I’d like to Google it: “What percentage of mom was the Lexaurin singing in her skull?” then press RETURN.

  We had a pact, Mom and I: We would always tell each other the truth. Always. No matter what. From the time I was old enough to understand, this was the rock of our church: Her word or mine, once asked for and given, was the one thing we could depend on in this life. If that trust was ever broken between us, she’d tell me, the tears welling up in her eyes, she might as well kill hersel
f.

  I believed her.

  As far back as I can remember, there’s my mother, warning me about the perils of addiction. Addiction terrified and disgusted her. Addictive personalities—like my father’s—were weak; they gave in, they bent under their personal unhappiness. They lacked that certain something, that inner core; they broke. You had to feel sorry for these people—it wasn’t their fault—but so it was. Some just had it—it being associated by now with having a limit, throwing the peach, being a man, breaking down the door—others didn’t.

  Mom, of course, had it. Not that she didn’t understand, you understand—the temptation could be great—but alcohol, or “drugs,” or even sleeping pills, given a chance, would make you their slave. You had to keep them in their place through sheer force of will. And to show me what she meant, to demonstrate the indomitable power of her will, she’d take me by the hand and lead me to her dresser and show me the pills she kept hidden in her drawer. There they were. She’d taken one once, she’d say, pointing—it had been prescribed to her by her doctor—and it had been wonderful; she’d slept like a child, woken happy, floated through her day. . . . She still remembered it, and for precisely that reason she’d never take one again; more, to dominate the temptation, the memory of that treacherous peace, she’d keep them close. Just to prove her own strength. Now and then she’d take them out and look at them—then put them back in their place.

  In the spring of 2003 my father and I were having a drink in our café in the same inner mall on Vinohradská Street we always went to, when the subject of Mom came up. He and I didn’t talk about her much, but she was always there. At that point I hadn’t spoken to her for seven years.

  What happened to us? I asked him that afternoon, pretty much out of the blue.

  He glanced at me with those slightly watery eyes—part drink, part age, part love.

  It was just that I’d never really understood what went wrong, I said—why she hated me. Why she seemed to need to think the worst of me—or him, for that matter; to treasure every word I’d ever said to her in anger—or, if necessary, make up my sins from scratch. Where did it all come from—the crazy rages, the business of locking herself away for days over nothing, of thinking me evil for packing a t-shirt?

  I remember him tilting his head in that way he had whenever the question was bigger than the answer, then looking at the fake plants by the bar. He had his shot of vodka by him, his seltzer water, his cigarettes. They’d been divorced for a decade by now; he’d remarried years ago—a decent, unvarying, sane woman.

  “You have to remember, your mother had a lot to carry,” he said vaguely. “It wasn’t about you.”

  He paused.

  “Well, obviously it was about you—involved you. And I’m sorry for that.” He shook his head. “This is hard for you to see, but she loved you.”

  “I know she did,” I said. “Once.”

  “In many ways she was a lot like her own father,” he said, thinking aloud. “So full of anger. And then of course there were the pills. . . .”

  “What pills?” I said.

  He looked at me. “Your mother was addicted to pills for almost thirty years,” he said. “Still is, probably. Surely you knew that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I tried to get her to get help, to come to AA with me.”

  “Pills?” I said.

  “She’d never admit she had a problem. Our good friend Slavka—remember her?—kept her supplied for years; your mother would call her whenever she was running low, then meet her in the city.” He lit a cigarette with those wide, worker’s hands, took a drag. “It’s important to have friends in this world, don’t you think?”

  I heard what he said, and I didn’t. It was as if my mind simply set it aside—“I’ll deal with this later.” I was forty-five years old, with a family of my own, yet part of me still accepted the story I’d been told as a priori truth: My father was the addictive personality, not my mother. My mother was the one standing before the dresser drawer, pointing out the things that would make her weak. She’d never give in. She’d never lie to me.

  On a cool and cloudless July morning in 2014, a day after visiting my mother in the care home in Brno, my wife and daughter and I made our way to Zadní Vydí, the tiny medieval village where my mother had lived the last twenty years of her life with a man named Mr. erný. Getting there wasn’t easy. Flummoxed by detours and road signs that seemed to lead us in circles (in 1968 the Czechs had delayed the Soviet tanks for two days by rearranging the road signs, a gesture at once grimly amusing, ultimately pointless and very Czech), we bumped through slate-roofed towns essentially unchanged for centuries, down miles of tree-lined country roads flashing with sun and shadow, and eventually found our way to my mother’s stuccoed little “villa” more or less by accident. We bumped to a stop, got out of the car. Two clouded carp ponds, the sudden silence of the fields. We hadn’t been there in years. It didn’t look as if anybody had.

  The twenty-foot dirt driveway was knee-high in grass, the gate in the wall rusted shut, the courtyard a waist-high jungle of nettles and weeds. Under the apple trees, wasps buzzed on the rotting fruit. Our daughter tried one key, then another, then a third.

  When we shoved open the door, a cold, mildewed rush of air pushed past as if escaping into the sun, and then we just stood there, feeling like we’d burst in on something shameful, humiliating.

  This was like entering a troubled mind: black mold grew in the corners by the ceiling, the ripped arms of the recliner were wet to the touch. Stuffed into corners or piled haphazardly on the damp carpet were bags of dead batteries, twenty-three broken watches (we counted), fifteen pairs of eyeglasses, used hypodermic needles and bloody cotton swabs in jars (erný had been a diabetic). Stacked high along the walls were moldering books and piles of Prevention magazine from the mid 1970s; in the peeling TV console, next to warped LPs by Karel Gott and Andy Williams, dozens of used adult diapers. The old beige sofa we used to sit on in Bethlehem was there, and the slice-of-a-tree coffee table, and a flat, faded mat that looked like our cat, Chiquita’s, old, embroidered cushion.

  In the bedroom the French doors to the courtyard had been boarded up and nailed shut. With a flashlight that we found in the kitchen, I picked my way through the dark piles of cracking suitcases and picture frames and broken exercise equipment hung with the dresses and pants suits I could remember my mother wearing to her job at Pocantico Hills where I used to run off into the woods.

  A path, narrow as a deer trail, ran from the door to the bed. On the night table was a photograph of her holding me as a baby on Jones Beach, another of F. as a young man, squinting into the sun, and a spoon.

  I’d written to her here, argued and pleaded with her on the phone while she sat on this bed, tried to talk her into leaving. Nothing would move her. She was barricaded in, screaming for help.

  Once she’d called me in the winter, when we were living on the Canadian border—it was almost two in the morning, her time. Crying, incoherent, raging at her companion—erný. I tried to say something, comfort her. He was hiding her documents from her, the bastard, controlling her every move. I could hear him yelling back, an old man pushed to the limit, playing for keeps.

  And then she forgot I was there. They both did. I could hear them screaming, now closer, now farther off. There’d be a lull—during which I’d yell into the phone, hoping she’d hear me—and then the fight would explode again. I stayed on the line for almost an hour, then hung up. When I called back, the phone was busy. It stayed busy.

  I called my father, who called the town’s mayor, who put on his boots and crossed the grassy walk between the carp ponds at dawn and banged on the gate. My mother was fine, he said.

  The pills were in an empty food carton in a broken wardrobe in the main room—hundreds of empty, cellophane-backed pill packets, maybe a dozen or two still unused. The carton ripped wetly when I pulled it out and small, black bugs scattered into a pile of 8-track tapes. The
names of the pills meant nothing to me.

  That night in our hotel in Brno our daughter looked them up on the Internet and the answer came back from the ether.

  This is what I learned: That my mother had been an addict for many years. That benzodiazepines, the class of drugs she’d been addicted to, were developed in the 1970s for the short term relief of severe anxiety and insomnia. That they were so highly addictive the FDA was attempting to have them reclassified as Class A drugs, like heroin. That trying to get off them could stop your heart. That our good friend Slavka, who’d supplied her, was essentially a criminal with an M.D.

  It wasn’t enough. Or too much—the one-word answer to every question. Scrolling down through the side effects was like watching an old home movie, now with added narration: “Look, look—see there? That’s your mother’s free-floating ‘anxiety,’ the ‘changes of perception and feelings of unreality,’ and here—see how she’s staggering down the hallway at night?—that’s the typical ‘loss of balance,’ and here—where she’s coming apart on the way out of Rotterdam?—that’s the ‘panic attacks’ and the ‘paranoia,’ the ‘persistent and unpleasant memories’ and the ‘short-term memory loss.’ Oh, and here, where she’s sitting by the shore of Skalák in her tight-around-the-ankle slacks counting out the number of pills needed to kill her, there you have the ‘suicidal thoughts’—always an ironic side effect of any ‘medication’—and finally—we’re almost done—here we are in the care home in Brno, the gift bag at the end of the party—the ‘heightened risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.’”