I looked down at my hands. My fingers were short and stubby, then they were incredibly long, then my fingertips were grossly oversized, like a clown’s. The skin on my palms rippled and fluttered, patches of red and white skin organizing into intricate patterns, then shuffling themselves. I had done too much. My teeth were definitely rotting. I had given myself brain damage. If I was still this high tomorrow, I’d shoot myself in the head and be done with it. That thought gave me some comfort, and I closed my eyes.
I had explicitly asked my mom to come pick me up by herself to ensure that there was no big scene at the airport. Of course, there was the full welcoming party: my mother, Tashina, my brother-in-law, Bill—a fucking marine, for God’s sake, the squarest of the square in his “high and tight”—and Tatyana, who hugged me and immediately deposited my ten-month-old namesake in my arms.
I held Tatyana’s baby away from me for a minute, just taking him in. He was the size and weight of a thawed turkey, his useless little flippers hanging limply by his sides, staring at me with the same blank wonder with which I stared at him.
I had nearly become a father twice, at eighteen and twenty-two. My children would have been three and seven. Four years apart, just like me and Tashina. Or like Chuong and me.
I drew Mika to me. He pressed his head against my chest. I put my head down next to his face and took a breath, smelling his fine hair, his soft skull, the nascent promise of his new flesh.
I closed my eyes and had a vision of a nursery full of sleeping babies, each more unique and more perfect than the last, the air over them swirling thickly with boundless potential, the infinite possibilities of their lives. A beautiful nurse in a starched white hat walked among the rows of cribs, bending over each infant to caress the fine eddies of silk on their heads, brush their cheeks with her eyelashes, and whisper a blessing into their tiny, sleeping ears: Nothing bad will ever happen to you.
Nothing bad will ever happen to you: it’s just the most heinous lie, the worst bullshit imaginable. Millions of bad things will happen to you, a thesaurus, a full set of encyclopedias of bad things, a vast, shimmering spectrum of bad things, from stubbing your toe to passing a jagged kidney stone to the day you finally die, The Biggest Bad Thing, which, by then, may not seem so awful after all, because death, in its completeness, at least ensures that no more bad things will happen to you.
But before you achieve that, man . . . you will piss your pants, and you will shit your pants, as a child and as an adult. And not a little bit, where you can almost get away with it; you will shit your pants with such vehemence that you will have to change your socks. In fact, your final act on this earth will probably be to piss and shit your pants at the same time. Death and taxes are not the only inevitabilities; there will always be feces.
You will fall in love. Your lover will cheat on you with your best friend or your worst enemy or both in one action-packed weekend, and you will only find out when you wake up with crabs or herpes or Hep C or HIV.
You will get beat up. A lot. You will get beat up by your brother/sister/mother/father/friends/lovers/strangers. You will get raped. You will get raped twice, once by a stranger and once by someone you know, someone you trust, someone in your fucking family, God damn the world to hell. Your hamster will die. Your cat will die. Your grandfather will die. Your mother will die. Your child will die in your arms. You will pay for an abortion, you will have an abortion—several abortions—and those dreamed lives, those pre-children, will follow you around like starving stray dogs for the rest of your life.
You will be abandoned. She will leave you. He will leave you. They will leave you. Everyone you love who doesn’t leave you or turn against you or die will leave you and then turn against you and then die.
Something will happen to you that is so bad that you will not be able to parse it; you will have no language with which to comprehend what has happened to you, so you will just carry it around in your abdomen like a dead fetus, which will calcify in your gut, a stone baby that grows so large and so heavy that you will lay awake at night and feel it, cold and unyielding inside you, and understand that you have been transformed into just a vessel to transport this profane weight.
You will do bad things to people you hate, and to people you love because you are angry, because you are confused, because you are hurt, because you have become cruel, and because you can’t help yourself. You will do truly rotten shit, small, mean-spirited shit, petty shit, shit so base, so abominable it will keep you awake years later, wondering if it could really have been you who had done it at all, because it seems so foreign in essence from the polite, responsible, even caring person you understand to be your true self. It will disturb you, it will hurt you, you will bleed, it will destroy you, it will murder you, it will kill you to fucking death, over and over, again and again. And you will go on living.
Still, glassy-eyed and sleep deprived and half-crazed in the San Diego airport, I held my sister’s baby boy to my chest. It’ll be different for you, Mika, my little man. Nothing bad will ever happen to you.
When I awoke late in the day, my sister’s house was empty. I showered and dressed, then followed the sound of voices out to the back patio.
“There he is,” my dad said, as if I’d been gone for hours, not years.
Seven years since I’d seen my father. Like something out of a fable or maybe The Princess Bride. I looked at his face. He had aged far more than seven years. He had aged immeasurably, irretrievably, incomprehensibly. His hair gray, his skin not just lined but crinkled, broken veins splashed across his nose. He had crossed the line; he had become old.
His girlfriend was way younger than Mom. Maybe closer to Tatyana’s age? Long legs, long blonde hair, generic toothy smile. Dad, you swine, did you order her from the factory that way?
I took my place: equidistant from Tashina and Mom, our outsider and our core. On a tiny blanket in the center of our mangled family circle lay Mika, face down, staring at the dirt. We all turned our gazes to him.
“Better than TV, huh?” I said to Tashina.
She smiled.
No one said anything. I stared at the baby.
Mika had pulled our parody of a family together for the first time in ten years—my father from his hideout in northern California, my mother from the Virgin Islands, Tashina from Colorado, where she was finishing high school, me from New York, the very ends of the earth. This battered circle—how could it hold so much power over us? Was it enchanted, a faerie ring?
Bullshit. It had no meaning, held no power. This whole bogus ritual of celebrating the bloodline . . . genealogy meant nothing. It had been a mistake to come here. I’d allowed myself to be duped. Not drinking was making me soft.
Mika picked up a tiny rock, turned it over in his infinitely detailed little fingers, inspecting each and every surface. Another rock caught his eye. He discarded the old rock for a new one, then a new one, one after another. It reminded me of a picture from my childhood of another baby performing a similar inspection. What was that from? Cheap white quilt speckled with checks of bright primary colors, but the baby looking at a clover, not a rock. That baby even looked like Mika. Ah, shit. That baby was me.
I glanced over at my dad. We had probably spent less than a month together since I was fifteen. He was watching Mika intently, his hands on his hips, fingers pointing backward, his thumbs pointing down the sides of his legs. I looked down at my body, my hands on my hips, fingers pointing backward, my thumbs pointing down the sides of my legs. So maybe there was something to it after all.
I had no intention of extending an olive branch to my father on this trip, something I think he understood. His girlfriend, Theresa, hadn’t gotten the memo. She brought me a glass of lemonade without asking if I wanted one, so I didn’t have a chance to decline. I waited patiently while she made herself a couple of sandwiches in the kitchen so I could make my own, but the two sandwiches went onto two plates, not one, and she handed one of those plates to me. It would have bee
n rude not to sit and eat with her.
Didn’t this stranger know that I hated her simply because she was inside the same sphere around my father that I had been excluded from? Was she not picking up on any of the signs I was throwing out that I wanted nothing to do with her? Or was she deliberately fucking with me?
She asked me about New York. She asked me about my music. She asked me about Allison. After a few minutes, I realized I had stopped trying to assess if she was an evil genius or a dolt. We were just talking. It was easy. She said something, then I said something, then she said something. Could I make her laugh?
“Are you Catholic?” she said.
“No, but I am religious. Evangelical Defeatist.”
She laughed.
By the time she excused herself to tidy up in the kitchen, she had confounded every shitty off-the-cuff judgment I had made about her. Theresa was nice. Not in a wishy-washy way, but in a thoughtful, open, engaged way. I hated being wrong, but I felt relief, gratitude even. Dad’s girlfriend wasn’t just okay, she was good. Worst-case scenario, she might turn out to be great. What was she doing hanging around my dad?
Over the next couple of days, my dad made a few small overtures to me, asking how I’d slept, if I was hungry. I gave back as few syllables as possible, even going so far as to address him by his first name, Murray, instead of calling him Dad. Still, he was trying, in his stilted way.
The last day, I suggested we talk. Not that I wanted to talk, but no way were we going to just slip back into some half peace. Maybe my family was content to let him skate, but not me. I’d learned one thing since I’d backed down from clocking him with a roll of quarters in the Denver airport: fighting sucked; it was scary and it was painful, but pain was temporary. Taking some lumps or even getting your teeth kicked in was far preferable to rotting slowly from the inside out from the knowledge that you were a coward. Fuck it, I would take the old man on.
If we had to yell, we would yell. If we had to scream, we would scream. If it came to blows, well, I hadn’t had a drink in six months and had even made it to the gym a couple of times. Even over the hill, my dad was still a physical specimen. He might win. But if I went down, I would bring him with me. If it went to the ground, I wouldn’t just hurt him. I would damage him.
I opened the door for my dad, and we walked outside. I could feel a bustle in the air in the house, the sound of my sisters and my mother and Theresa whispering to each other, or maybe just looking at one another. As I closed the door behind me, the tension in the house oddly calmed me. Was this the sensation of completeness a murderer felt the moment before the act?
We pulled up white plastic chairs and sat down opposite one another across the dusty white table. The sun was setting before us, flamboyant sorbet oranges and pinks. It just made the cheap Home Depot deck furniture and the plain concrete patio seem that much cheaper and plainer.
“I’m glad you want to talk,” my dad said. “I think it’s good for us to talk.”
He crossed his arms, not really something people do when they want to talk.
“I don’t want to talk, Dad. It’s necessary. I’m not willing to just let things go back to how they were, like everything’s hunky-dory, you know?”
“I understand that. Where would you like to start?”
That was a good question.
“Under the terms of the divorce, you were to be financially responsible for us kids, right?”
“Until you were eighteen, yes.”
“And you were supposed to pay for our college, right?”
“Your undergrad, yes. You knew that you were on your own for grad school.”
I could already hear him tightening up.
“That’s fine. So . . . you bailed on any and all emotional aspects of being a parent. When you dumped Mom, you tried to bury all of us kids with her. All that was left at that point was the financial thing. And you couldn’t even do that. I worked full-time the summer I was sixteen and started paying all my own expenses the day I left Simon’s Rock, a couple of months after I turned seventeen. From seventeen to eighteen, I got—what—five hundred dollars out of you? If that.
“The last time I wrote to you, it was about a $51 chiropractor bill for the thing with my back that happened when I was seventeen. I had already paid for my final semester at school out of my own pocket. You couldn’t pay that bill for $51?”
“It . . . At that time . . . Well, I don’t really know exactly what was going on at that time. It was so long ago. It just fell through the cracks.”
“I sent it to you four times.”
“Okay. Yes. I should have paid it. Is that what you want to hear?”
“It doesn’t matter now. I don’t need the money. I needed the money then, but I don’t need it now. I guess that’s the thing. When I was eighteen and needed help figuring out my taxes and my financial aid for college, you weren’t around. When I was seventeen, learning how to drive, and when I needed help buying a car so I wouldn’t get ripped off, you weren’t around. When I was fifteen, with the shooting . . . Hell, way before that! You were gone for a long time before you finally left. I had to figure it all out on my own. And I did. I don’t need you anymore.”
“You seem to have done well for yourself. You certainly look good. All you kids have done well for yourselves.”
“Thanks, I guess. Anything we accomplished, we did it without you.”
“It’s a good life skill to learn how to do things on your own.”
Like he had disappeared for our benefit, so we would grow up right. And not because he was a pussy. What was he thinking, sitting there with his arms crossed? I had known this man longer than I’d known any other man in my life, was supposed to have a deeper connection with him than any other man in the world. I had no fucking idea what was going on in his head. He was probably just thinking what a hassle this was. Anxious for it to be over. Just like me.
“Here’s the thing, Dad. If I had a friend who treated me the way you have, well, I would no longer have that friend. Hell, if I had a friend who treated his kids the way you’ve treated us, I would tell him he was a piece of shit, and then I would no longer have that friend.”
He didn’t say a word, just cinched up tighter and stared at me.
“But I’ve gotten a lot of second chances. And I’m grateful for that. If you’re going to be more responsive, then we can try again.”
“It doesn’t make me happy, not seeing you or hearing from you for years at a time.”
That was the closest I would get to him telling me he had missed me. Hearing those three words—I miss you—would have been better. But that was one lesson he’d taught me: Life is not about getting what you want. It’s about living with what you get.
“Okay, Mishka. If you’re willing to try again, I’m willing to try again.”
“Great. Then you’ve gotta stop bullshitting us.”
He sputtered a little, then drew himself up.
“And how have I bullshitted you?”
You really have no idea how easy I’m going on you, do you, Dad? You have bullshitted me in many ways, great and small; you have bullshitted me in every way. Our entire relationship, from the day I was born, was a lie. When you built me that little wooden box for the set of toy tools you’d bought for me, that was a lie. When you taught me how to tie a hook on my fishing line so it couldn’t be pulled loose, that was a lie. Every single thing you ever did to make me feel like I could count on you was a lie.
But those years and years of lies, a lifetime of lies, they were such a towering, inseparable clot that they threatened to overwhelm us both. Just cop to one lie, Dad. Give up one lie, and we can move forward.
I presented him with one lie I knew he would never cop to.
I’d never forgotten the unsigned letter, in his handwriting, that Mom had found in the back of one of his books while dividing up their stuff before the divorce. Though not addressed, it was clearly written to another woman before he and Mom had separated. Over the ye
ars, that letter had grown huge in my mind. It was not a letter but The Letter: concrete proof that Dad had betrayed us. After she had let me read The Letter, Mom had sworn me to secrecy. I wouldn’t violate that pact. Not exactly.
Dad was incapable of admitting he was wrong. He would swear he had never cheated on Mom, I would stand up and walk away, and we would be done with this. It would be a relief to go back to not talking. And this chat would keep Tatyana and Mom off my back because I had tried; they had seen me walk out here to try.
“Dad . . . you said you never cheated on Mom. Again and again, you come back to that, that your marriage was over before you started fooling around with your secretary or receptionist or whatever the hell she was. I know you did. I’m not going to tell you how I know. But I know.”
He took a quick breath, then puffed it out through his mustache. He looked away. He looked back at me.
“This conversation is between you and me.”
Only once, when I was maybe eleven years old, had my father brought me in on a secret. After a big fight with my mom, he had taken me for a drive and sworn me to silence in our Ford Aerostar minivan. Then he told me, “Mishka, sometimes the worst thing you can do is win an argument with a woman.” His intensity that night had chilled me. I had never forgotten it, would never forget it. He had not just never loved Mom; he had hated her.
“Fine. I won’t say a word to anyone about this.”
This was a strange turn. What was he going to say? I had prepared for cruelty, violence even. But I wasn’t prepared for this, for information, for secret knowledge.
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