by Ime Atakpa
“If you don’t like it, why are you out here?” Father asks.
She doesn’t answer, and he declines to press the issue. Mother repeats the process for the remaining seeds, making sure to place each centrally in its chamber and fill the hole evenly with the dirt she removed from it. “I’d like something to grow,” she whispers. “I want to make something that doesn’t leave me.”
“Lyn…”
“Even if these plants die, they’ll still be here, right? I’ll see them wither and die. I’ll have proof that they existed, you know? That they were even ever alive. That’s a good feeling.”
Father sniffles and cradles her. “Yes, it is. It’s a good feeling.”
Father taps irregularly against the table. First he taps three fingers in quick succession, then two. Then four, then two. Two, four, four, three. His eyes follow his fingers. His fingernails have already dug holes into the table from his nervous habit. The tragedy of my invisibility gives him more than enough cause to lapse into mental debilitation, loathe as I may be to admit it. I accept this penalty wholeheartedly and bear its full weight, for it is my continued silence that ushered it in.
“What’s the point?” Father asks the air, looking up. “Is this a test?” He slouches in his chair and lets his arms hang limply at his side.
I regard him quietly.
He registers little of the world around him and less of me. His mouth opens and closes at seeming random, spurting out silent words.
“I need…what I need.” His voice comes out in raspy spurts. “I need it.” Father shakes his head violently. He clutches at his head and pulls it down against the table. He speaks muffled words through the jumble of his arms and the marble.
This is what happens to men who have lost more than they can bear to lose. I contemplate what Father’s predicament means for me. Something surely awaits one such as myself whose very existence is defined by suffering. And he, having nothing of that genetic disposition, must combat that terrible hardship with his own meager weapons. I have my mother and my ancestors, their accumulated knowledge. Father has his own experience to draw from. That alone provides little comfort.
“You don’t,” Father says loudly, lifting his head. “No, no, no. You don’t need it. Just…just breathe.” Inhale. Exhale. “There you go. Breathe.” Inhale. Exhale. His eyes close. The breathing continues, albeit frenetically. His eyelids tremble.
I move around to his side simply for the comfort of being there. It is a comfort I alone enjoy, yet I remain nonetheless, hopeful that by some miracle he might feel me: the warmth of another living human body.
Alas, the dream is but a dream. Reality turns its harsh clockwork.
“I can’t breathe.” He clutches his chest and pants heavily. “Make it stop.”
Quiet though he tries to be, Father’s heavy-handed movements upset the silence. He shouts another expletive when the needle travels through both layers of cloth and into the skin of his thumb. He rears back, dropping the unfinished glove as he does. It falls onto a bed of needles and tangled threads. He’s tried for endless hours to knit a hat in my size. I envy that he might spend his time so leisurely, though the significance of the event is not lost on me.
“Just like before,” Father sighs for what should rightfully be the last time. He lifts the fabric and adjusts the needle. Dozens of homemade clothes hang in my closet, most of which Mother knit or sewed for me during the infancy of my night walks. As time erased my fear of that destiny, so too was Mother’s desire to coddle me diminished. The gloves and caps and scarves collect dust in my closet, most untouched for years.
Father never embarked with Mother and me on our journeys into the wilderness. Owing to that shortcoming, he instead insisted that Mother teach him to sew. For a long time, she tried and failed to teach him to control his hands. But by then, something had already burrowed into him and stolen his steadiness. As far as I can remember, Father never had steady hands.
Nonetheless, he attempts again to maneuver the thread into place, biting his tongue progressively harder as the needle shakes. “If you just focus.” He weaves in once, sloppily. The disappointment shows in his eyes, just before a spark of dedication replaces it. He moves in to make the next stitch. Eagerness undoes him. The needle slips to graze his finger.
“It won’t help.” He tosses the tools across the table. “Only if you’re not focusing. You need to focus.”
Focus cannot fix the unsteadiness.
“I need to do something, right?” He raises his hands to eye level. “There’s nothing you can do.” He’s taken with himself, turning his hands over and stretching his fingers. Then he turns one palm toward his face. He traces the lines and wrinkles of his hand with a finger. “How will this help him anyway?”
Father’s voice alters from phrase to phrase such that it seems as if two entirely different people hold council in the room.
“It’ll help you. You need help as much as he does. She’s not helping.”
She? Mother? How could she? Grief took hold of them both. It offered no warning before its descent, and it refuses to return to its dark source. I shouldn’t expect so much of it. The wellspring of its birth flows evermore. Every moment since my disappearance, we collectively strove against self-destruction. Months later, all our efforts amount to naught. Though we have survived thus far, grief collects its frequent toll.
Father’s neurosis confirms his failure to rise above. He’s reasoning with himself, searching for answers where there are none. The search itself must bring him comfort, even if it brings him no peace.
Father slams his hands against the table. “No one is helping me!” I fight the urge to separate myself from this moment.
Or perhaps there is no peace to be had. We’re all drifting along in search of an end we’ll never meet. Only hope keeps us moving forward. Where it shall lead, who’s to say. But we cannot resist the instinct to travel there, to that place we cannot reach.
Father slams the table again.
The only certainty is that we cannot possibly hope to conquer this crucible alone. And so it becomes vitally important that I recover from trepidation. If my parents cannot muster the strength to carry themselves through this crucible, responsibility falls upon me to do so in their stead. Whatever it costs, I must bridge myself to them.
Father jumps at a sound from down the hall. The door opens and the sounds of the outdoors, leaves rustling in a strong wind, resonate inside. He catches the breeze but it’s not the chill of the wind that gives him pause. It’s the idea that Mother has returned and what that means for him.
“I’m a rock,” he whispers. “I’m a rock. I’m a rock.” He takes up the supplies and whisks them away into a small bag resting on the floor beside the table. With the evidence of his tinkering stuffed away, he then does away with the bag itself, tucking it into an obscure corner of the pantry until he finds a better opportunity to return it to its proper place.
Mother rounds the corner expecting to see him to her left, on the couch. When the initial expectation fails, instinct leads her to the right where she catches him leaving the pantry, an overripe banana in hand.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Fine. I’m fine.”
His hand twitches. A spot of blood appears from where the needle pierced.
“Where are you?” Father asks. Dirt squeezes between his rigid toes. Below him, half a dozen raised mounds of soil indicate the burial sites of the seeds Mother had sown there. Most sprouted, sporting several inches of bright green stalk. A select few remain beneath the surface, and one barely manages to poke its tip through the soil. It takes but a moment for Father to decide which sapling sprouted from the seed he seeks. A smile crosses his lips.
“Is it you?” His voice trembles. It’s harsh and subdued. He reaches slowly for the mound before drawing back and making a short consideration. Thereafter, he distances himself from the plants and sits back in admiration. For a short moment, he takes in the minor growth.
The back door swings open. Mother emerges from the house. She moves daintily across the field of grass to where Father crouches. She kneels down next to him. “You’re not at work.”
He sighs and pats at the soil. “No. I’m taking a break.”
“Mm.” Mother kneels closer to the soil. “They’re growing.”
“It’s this one.” Father points to the smallest of the sprouts. “That’s the one that reminds me of him. Just barely above the surface. Barely making it.”
They watch the plants for an hour or so, pretending to see more there than what’s present. They read between lines that don’t exist to construct narratives never to be told. The sapling that struggled through its youth will not survive into adulthood. It’s a shame that I, of all people, should augur this fate, but I feel the truth of my prediction hanging on a thread of time not far removed from today.
Like the advent of my blood curse, there is an inevitability to each of our lives, each event. We live as spectators in our own skin, awaiting divine intervention to save us from the mundanity and sorrow. (Or do only I see the world as such an immutable thing?) Salvation shall not reach us here.
I wish that it were true that I could attribute all the misfortune to predestination. But I cannot. I am afraid. I am two feet, barely submerged beneath the surface of the water.
“I used to love working at the store,” Father says. He finally stands. “It had all your favorite books.”
Mother closes her eyes and sighs. “They were never my favorites.”
Father reels at this. I hear the sound of his teeth grating. “Hubert loved it too. He loved those books. And so do I.” He grits his teeth. “But then one day…”
“Things change, Dylan.”
“Do they? You’re still clinging to the idea that he’s still here.”
“He is. He’s not gone.”
“He’s not ‘gone.’ You can’t even say the word. Things change, but this can’t change? Well guess what? It changed. And these damned plants!” He swipes at the soil. “These plants can’t bring him back! They can’t replace him. They can’t do anything for us.”
“They can ease us.”
“Can they?” Father whimpers. There’s a sharpness to his words and a heat, and they aim for Mother’s head, the one part of her he cannot seem to reach. She bows it down, considering Father’s declaration.
“They can,” she answers softly, and though those words carry none of the sharpness or heat of Father’s, they hit heavier by infinite degrees. Father puffs. Then he turns his back on her and skulks the short distance back to the house.
Now Mother bows in deference to the plants, a stray tear finding its way down her face. She digs her fingers into the soil, burrows deep enough to touch the roots. Then she stops and exhales in relief. “It’s okay, Hubert. He didn’t mean it.”
-X-
The Chamber of Spirits
Months have passed since I visited the pier, since I first breached the barrier between my prison and the world outside. In all that time, I’ve failed to replicate the results of that night. Despite hours spent in quiet meditation, channeling all my energy into something physical, straining myself against the confines of my purgatory, I’ve made no significant developments.
I promised myself to live in the present, and so I have, but no other tool has since then presented itself that might aid in my journey to return home. The connection between my perceptions of time and my ability to transmit my voice across the barrier between here and there is nebulous at best. At worst, it does not exist. Thus I see no further use in pursuing that connection.
Loathe as I am to consider the outburst of those black threads a fluke or a construction of my mind, it seems at this junction that I may be left no other choice.
No evidence, scientific or otherwise, suggests my capability of completing the task to which I’ve devoted so much of my time. Each stride leads to yet another barricade. Answers pave roads that end in questions.
Transcending the boundaries of physicality, if at all possible, requires a muscle I may not have. The ambiguity of my mission has confounded me at many turns and deterred me at many more, yet the reality of my circumstance is that my parents’ happiness depends on my return. Without me, they’re destined to continue their spiral into depravity.
It’s been a long two months, filled with tears and harsh words and cold silences, and Mother now roams the house as a husk—Father as well, though markedly less so. That much is to be expected. He came to terms with losing me much sooner than she could (and what a relief it must be for him to finally turn his back on the extraordinary). I’m pained to know his sympathies for me have dwindled so unrelentingly, but how can I blame him for choosing to move on from the tragedy? I could never ask that he continue mourning or become what Mother has become.
Nonetheless, sentiment still has a small hold on him. During his feverish moments, those underlying feelings rise to the foreground. It’s in those moments that I understand him best. Tears he sheds in solitude, prayers he offers to incorporeal forces, and his thudding fists which follow the silence of those forces—they hold him together. Lingering sentiments keep him sane. More than that, they keep him human.
My sanity, too, depends on unfounded belief. Peace cannot return to my family except by the completion of an impossible ordeal. I linger before the mirror that still refuses to grant me a shape. My non-present body finds a complement in my still-supple mind. Clearing it of thought propels me forward through time.
Not quite. Focusing my thoughts on a particular moment draws me to it. But what if I directed my focus elsewhere? It dawns on me that I may have been approaching the problem improperly. Instead of focusing my thoughts on a moment, perhaps I might focus my thoughts on a feeling. That night, months ago, I’d felt desperation. I wished to speak with Mother and inform her that the gale took me in its clutches.
She heard my voice.
That desire to be heard may very well have produced the link between there and here.
Mother. Father. Their sadness. The absolute misery I have wrought upon them. My sadness at having done so. Anger and depression, the two seeds born from that sadness. I cultivate them in a dish of feeling from which I feed, driving me further along into those simple, powerful sensations. I attach myself to them like a magnet to its polar opposite. I drive them into thoughts that I might project into the world apart from here. The feelings gather and coalesce with thought. I feel the pull.
Yet the ends never meet.
In its infancy, I believed Father’s habit of speaking with himself to be a healthy outpouring of his innermost thoughts (and if I’m honest, I much preferred it to his lonely tears), but his condition has developed into something else entirely. In the weeks I’ve spent rallying against the barrier between visibility and invisibility, he has developed a frightening regimen. During even the slightest moment of solitude, his expostulation begins in earnest.
From my bedroom window, I watch Mother pull away. It is much like watching the very sanity of the household up and disappear. In the absence of that sanity, an immediate alteration occurs. From upstairs, I hear it only as whispers, but as I make the transition down, the utterances gain clarity.
“Damn it all.” His words reach me at full clarity halfway down the spiraling staircase. If I stare down the center for long enough, I can catch the blur of a man passing by, raising his voice very suddenly amidst murmurs and half-speech. “Damn it all. Damn it all.”
The history of night walks in my family never seemed to startle him, and he seldom contributed to any conversation on the matter. He remained neutral and distant, cowering away from an admission that the blood of his spouse was cursed, that premature death and incurable sleepwalking plagued us. The brave face he wore to protect himself against the intrusion of the fantastic crumbled away on the night of my disappearance. Every night after, as fantasy intruded upon his reality, he could no longer separate himself from it. He collapsed under the weight of absolute tr
uth. This was to be the true cost of marrying my mother.
Now here we are, him venting rapidly and me absorbing the few comprehensible remarks. Seeing him like this dismantles all that I held him up to be. Whatever happened to his strength and silence, the man who carried me through the worst of my hardships with a levelness Mother could never offer? Where inside this new man might I rediscover even a fragment of the father I knew before? That man would never allow himself to fall so completely into disarray. But these days, the slightest altercation sets him into a fine frenzy, distillable only by Mother’s despondent placations. On occasion, not even her voice soothes the wrath boiling within him. Instead, they’ll only feed his fire, and the two will toss incompatible perspectives back and forth until one either surrenders their position or becomes too fatigued to continue.
“I should have seen this coming.” His voice softens to a screamed whisper. “God, Dylan, you’re losing her again. Not again.” And back to whispers from there. I could move closer, get a better grasp on these barely-audible phrases, but something stops me. As a child, whenever my parents argued, I’d sit right up here, looking down on the conflict. If they sensed me listening, they’d quiet themselves to whispers and I’d strain to isolate anything significant. I wish for those times again. Looking down on him now seems the closest I may ever get.
It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but all around me, evidence points to the contrary. When Mother leaves for work or errands and Father is left alone, his heart warps into a perversion of itself. Devoid of sense or reason without her, he devolves into a thing of madness, slouching about and groaning oddities at the air. My presence, being entirely blocked from their perceptions, has absconded with a fragment of his sanity long before Mother ever did, and now devoid of those critical components of himself, Father’s malady thrives. Absence makes the heart grow wicked.