The Best American Essays 2013

by Robert Atwan

  My father too was a Vietnam veteran. So were a lot of men in my family. One of them was my uncle, who died of Agent Orange– related complications. “Let that be a lesson to you,” my father said. “Don’t join the service, and don’t let your friends join the service. Because they tell you what to do. They tell you where to go, they tell you what to eat. They tell you when to die. And then you’re dead.”

  In that parking lot, my father was right to trust in my expertise. I was well acquainted with the problem at hand. I was a promising young drunk, bad with women and an easy vomiter, and occasionally I had to shit as well. I had shit the bed once and kept sleeping and got up in the morning, going happily about my day off, and had not noticed until my then-wife came home from her job and asked me what it might be in our bedroom that smelled so much like shit. And, of course, it was shit that smelled that way. That was the answer.

  And so I was prepared to aid my father. As in so many endeavors, the first step is to lie: I said everything was going to be just fine. I told him he had to be brave for a few minutes, could he do that, could he walk, if not we could find some other way but that would be the simplest, and he said he thought he could.

  We walked past the parked cars and trucks and the yellow paint on the asphalt toward the gray concrete of the arena and its public restroom. I got my father into a stall and stood outside and told him to take his shoes and socks and jeans and underwear off. My father hated public restrooms. Once, when I was a little boy, I had noticed he did not wash his hands after urinating and asked him about that habit and he had given his explanation, saying, “I’m confident that my penis is the cleanest thing in this environment.”

  His drawers were not so bad after all, but I threw them in the garbage just to seem like I was doing something to help. I passed him handfuls of paper towels. “Check your legs down to your ankles and feet,” I said. “Check your socks. How are your pants? We want to keep them.”

  “What if we can’t?”

  “Then you wear my shirt around your waist like a kilt until we get back to the truck,” I said. But he washed and dried himself and put his pants and socks and shoes back on. And that was that. It was nothing he could not have done on his own if he had given it a moment’s thought, instead of willing himself to helplessness, to asking for help. Orders make you stupid, the captain told me, figure it out for yourself.

  What do you know, I’m finally shitting my father. God knows I ate enough of him. I am thirty-seven years old, five feet, ten inches tall, 180 pounds, a hairy man like Esau with an increasing amount of gray in my chest, a miniature facsimile of my father is half extruded from my rectum, otherwise I am in good health.

  The past is behind me, burning, like a hemorrhoid. My parents will not die if I wish them dead. They will die because life is finite.

  When I was in college, one of my teachers said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you waiting for your parents to die before you write something honest?” and I said, “That is the dumbest question I have ever heard.”

  My mother calls collect from Hell. She rides her bike and goes swimming. There are a lot of ibises in Hell. She sends me a picture. It’s pretty. I’m shouting into the telephone, I’m trying to shout but it’s hard to make a noise, my jaw won’t work, my teeth are long and getting longer, they break against each other, everywhere I turn I’m biting something. I bite the telephone, biting.

  My parents are not dead. I mean hell on earth, plain old regular real hell. You know that hell? That’s the one I’m talking about. And even when they are dead they will live on in me, burning in my hell-head, it’s so crowded in here, still yammering about what I ought to do: Now I see how it is, you drop a coat hanger on the floor and if no one is watching you don’t pick it up, that’s the kind of man you’ve become. My dead father in particular is very interested in the proper configuration of everyday household items like coat hangers.

  Ibiza was on fire as we approached by night from the sea. A third of the island was burning. We anchored and watched airplanes swoop to fill their tanks with seawater. They flew high over the mountains and dropped water on the burning trees again and again. It was the biggest wildfire on the island in all of recorded history. It was still burning the next day when we left.

  Shlomo, swimming just before we pulled up anchor, was stung by a jellyfish. “Do you want me to pee on it?” I said.

  “No, I want you to shit on it,” he said. “Americans!” he said.

  On that boat, surrounded by blank water and blank Hebrew, with a somewhat less blank Spanish awaiting me on shore, I was free from the obligation to apprehend and interpret. If I don’t understand what you want from me, I don’t have to try to do it, I can’t. The sea is incomprehensible and uncomprehending, the sea doesn’t care, which is terrific, depending on what kind of care you are accustomed to receiving. The sea is wet.

  As a teenager I was once waved through a roadblock by a police officer who then pulled me over and ticketed me for running the roadblock. “I don’t understand what you want from me,” I said, something I had already, at that early age, said many times to many different people.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the officer snarled, something many different people have said to me, and when my father and I went to court we found I had been charged with attempting to elude a police officer and failure to comply. My father knew the judge, or should I say the judge knew my father: she had been his girlfriend in high school. My father and I were wearing the nicest clothes we owned.

  “Well, Mr. Prosecutor, what do we have here?” the judge said, smiling.

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Mr. Prosecutor, and he was also smiling, and they were speaking to and for my father, not to me, although I had been charged with attempting to elude a police officer, for Christ’s sake, I still don’t understand it. I got off with a fine for making an illegal turn. The judge knew my father, everyone knew my father, just as everyone had known my grandfather, and even people who had not been alive at the time knew that all the lights in Hodgenville, Kentucky, had gone out when my grandfather died. I was not a tree, I was an apple, I had not fallen far from those trees, but I had fallen. Somewhere there had been an apple and a fall. This much we knew.

  If anyone wanted something from me on that boat, he said my name; if no one said my name, I was not wanted. And I was not wanted, I floated for a month in a sea of unmeaning noise, I was free from the horror of being deformed by another person’s needs and desires.

  I became a twin, a sibling to myself, and I gnawed myself for nourishment in the red cavern of the womb, relaxing into my own death.

  I ate myself until there was nothing left but my mouth. Then I ate my own mouth. Then I died.

  But no one ever dies. I got off the boat and hailed a cab and took a train to Madrid.

  In Madrid I went to the Prado, where I looked at Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo. There he sat, sickened, with his horrid mouthful, and the whites of his eyes were huge.

  I had always thought of Saturn as vicious, as power-mad. I had never realized how frightened he was, how compelled to commit and experience horror against his will. I began to cry. I felt sorry for Saturn. He didn’t want to eat anyone. His stomach hurt. He wasn’t even hungry.

  And I flew home. Last night I dreamed the Devil bit my penis off. This morning it was still there, or here. Where I am is called here.

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

  Ghost Estates

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  IRELAND BEGINS FOR ME with the end of “The Dead,” which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in Indiana. I don’t remember what age I was—feels like anytime between the sixth and eleventh birthdays—but I picture the scene with a strange and time-slurred clarity of detail. His offices were always in the basement, because that’s where he could smoke his endless, extra-long menthols, exhaling nasally over the rust-red mustache. The air in the room would get so thick with smoke that sh
afts of sunlight beaming in through the high basement windows took on a slab-like solidity of definition, such that you couldn’t believe your hand passed through them so easily. I accept that tobacco is evil, in both health and historical terms, but will always love it on some animal level, because the smell of it was so great a part of the physical existence of my father. I smell it in his sweat when he bends down to kiss me, and I smell it in this room. I also note cat urine, because our vicious, lonely old calico likes to relieve herself on the dark green chair in the corner when stressed, and the scent has soaked into the stuffing, and my father won’t throw away the chair, because it belonged to his father. The mottled surface of the desk where he writes is a dark green—the green that is almost black—and bright, glowing green are the little letters on the screen of the primitive word processor the newspaper gave him, and forest green is the cover of The Portable James Joyce, my mother’s Penguin paperback from college. He’s holding it close to his face. He was blind in one eye and couldn’t see especially well out of the other, wore dark-framed, vaguely government-issue glasses, but they’re lowered. He’s turning his head and squinting over the top of them. He reads the famous last paragraph, “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward . . .” Nothing of the specific language remained with me, except, years later, reading the story at school, there was something like déjà vu at the part where Joyce first says the snow was “falling faintly,” and then four words later says it was, “faintly falling.” The slight over-conspicuousness of that had stuck, as I suppose Joyce intended.

  That memory found me last year, as I sat outside a hotel on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, talking to the night manager and having the first cigarette I allowed myself in a long time. For once I’d given in not out of anxiety but from sheer excellence of mood. After four days in the country, my jet lag hadn’t corrected by as much as an hour, so it was pleasant to find that the manager, Chris, made good company. Not just that, but he had keys to the bar. In fact, he was also a bartender. If any locals wandered in at 3:00 A.M., as happened more or less nightly, Chris would open the bar and serve them. And if they caught him in the middle of a short nap on the sofa in the lobby, they knew to shake him awake. “It’s great,” he said. “It makes my night go faster.”

  He was one of the most authentically Irish-seeming guys I’d ever met, apart from the lone fact of his being Ukrainian. His family left before the Orange Revolution, and now they were scattered all over. A lot of his (very good) English was perfected in Ireland: his Ukrainian accent had an Irish accent. I can’t describe it, but it suited him. He seemed to be going through life quietly, good-naturedly laughing at how charming he was. He set up two chairs in front of the hotel, with a view of the harbor and the moon, which was either full or almost full, the moon over the dark jutting silhouette of the Aran Islands, a thing I’d always hoped to see. He told highly convincing wee-hours bar stories that can’t be printed but that had a way of involving “beautiful, insane” tourist women who nearly caused him to be late for work.

  A couple of older gentlemen showed up at one point, in jackets and caps. We went inside, so he could take care of them. I sat at the other end of the bar and tried to spy on their conversation a bit, but they spoke in low, grumbly tones, and the English in the western part of Ireland can be so heavily inflected with Gaelic rhythms that it’s often hard to tell it apart from the Irish language—you see tourists, having passed some natives and overheard a chance remark, turn to each other and whisper, “That’s Irish,” when what the woman said, if your ear had been given time to adjust, was something like “Don’t open the gate yet, idiot!”

  Back outside, I asked Chris about the men, who they were. “Well,” he said, “they used to be fishermen.” But the fisheries had been declining for some time, partly due to overfishing, and “when the Tiger came”—by which he meant the Celtic Tiger, the mainly technology-fueled economic boom that began in the mid-1990s and transformed Ireland before the collapse three years ago of a catastrophic housing bubble—“a lot more tourists were coming here. So a lot of the fishermen sold their boats and bought minibuses.” It was the easiest fishing on earth: you just picked them up at the dock. But it didn’t come naturally to the men, dealing with outsiders. “These are island people,” Chris said. Often they would all but forcibly herd the dazed and newly arrived visitors onto the minibuses, drive them to a few main sites, mumble some unintelligible words, and drop them off again, demanding payment. Folks complained, but the ex-fishermen complained harder, at the bar. Many of them regret giving up their boats, Chris said, especially now that tourism, post-Tiger, has gone back to the old decent-but-sleepy levels.

  The day before, on the way from the dock to the hotel, I had passed rows of these minibuses, each with its own bored-looking owner standing by the open driver’s-side door, on the way from the dock to the hotel. One man gave me the look, asking if I needed a ride, but when I said, “I’m just going to the hotel,” he said, “Aye,” and looked relieved, folding his arms back and looking off, even though it turned out that the hotel was farther than a person would want to walk with an awkward, heavy suitcase and he could easily have talked me into it. Something in him hadn’t wanted to. That something is part of what draws travelers to the Aran Islands: it takes an independent and even perverse character to live the way they do, on three spits of barren limestone in the North Atlantic, in a place where you couldn’t even grow spuds unless you created your own soil-scrum with a kind of layered-kelp composting. If they were to suddenly offer to braid your hair or be smilingly hustling you onto group tours, it would spoil the effect. You go to the Aran Islands expecting to keep a certain distance from the population. You go to observe their indifference.

  There was an obvious affection in Chris’s voice as he spoke about the locals. He saw that they could be funny, but he never made fun. He didn’t sound like an outsider. “I feel Irish now,” he said. More than that, he felt like an Aran man. “Even Galway seems strange to me now when I go to the mainland,” he said. Everyone there looked to be in a hurry. “And I don’t know,” he said, “they’re just different.”

  He wanted a house, was the thing; he was feeling maybe too old for roommates. And it was frustrating, he said, because there were empty houses on the islands, more than ever in fact. During the Tiger years, many people built and acquired second homes here, and since the crash plenty of these places were empty, “just standing there for years,” Chris said. He and some of the other “blow-ins” had approached certain owners and asked to be caretakers, to live there purely in exchange for upkeep. “We said, ‘We’ll sign a paper that says: “I give up all right to the house once you come back. You show up, I’m out.” Plus, your property isn’t falling apart.’” But most owners weren’t interested. They wanted what was theirs and were clinging to it. Chris looked out at the water thoughtfully, but I gathered he wasn’t too worried. His patience was right for this place. He would stay until something happened.

  “Marry a girl from Galway?” I asked.

  “Or not,” he said, and twinkled.

  I’d landed in Dublin a few days before, not having been in Ireland, other than the airport, since living there as a twenty-year-old restaurant worker, during whatever you call the life phase in which you try to reconnect with your roots—though what ended up happening, as is common in those cases, was I had my whole idea of “roots” and “heritage” and “blood wisdom” and whatnot smacked out of me in a useful way and exposed for self-serving sentimentality. “Jesus, Johnny, you’re more Irish than I am,” said Liam, the little red-cheeked, red-haired chef for whom I chopped vegetables in a railroad kitchen in Cork, after I’d unspooled for him once more the glory of my Celtic lineage: Sullivan, Mahoney, O’Brien, Cavanaugh, Considine, my Fenian grandfather, my . . . until he began to berate me for having screwed up the tartar-sauce mixture again, for drinking seven “minerals” on the job one hungover day, or for having brazenly lied about knowing even the
most basic, life-sustaining things about food preparation when he hired me.

  Nobody cared about “Irish American”; nobody wanted to hear about it. Were you born here? Then you’re not Irish. I remember the first real Irish bar I ever entered, an old man gave me grief about it. I’d landed in Shannon with my friend and traveling partner Ben. We had big Barney-looking purple backpacks. We started hiking out of the airport parking lot. Ben’s backpack had a small orange foldable shovel hanging from it, of uncertain purpose. Our plan was to camp in farmers’ fields; we’d read that you could do this, and probably Ben meant to dig trenches and latrines with it. Unfortunately it looked sort of murderous—he described it as a “cacking tool”—and this made us appear, I realize now, rather unappealing to passing drivers, who might otherwise have happily picked us up. Finally a young hippie couple did. I don’t call them hippies derisively; they were real old-school flower children; the woman had beautiful gold-brown hair that should have had twigs in it. They told us that recently there had been a terrible murder in the area—a man had killed a priest, and a child? I don’t remember the details. Nobody wanted to mess with hitchhikers, much less with two carrying a poorly concealed little shovel.

  Apart from those helpful hippies, hardly anyone stopped for us. We walked ourselves into blisters and cramps, but through magnificent, shining valleys, vistas of greens upon greens. Our money, which had come from selling my car, ran out so quickly that it was as if someone had put a curse on it, maybe the old Kerry woman back at the airport in New York, an impishly tiny person who told us how she’d won a great deal of dough off some airline after she fell asleep in her seat on a flight and her upper torso tilted out into the aisle and a beverage cart came along and smashed into her face. Ben and I kept re-doing the math on where the money had gone but finally just stopped talking about it.