“Are you drunk?” I asked, but you were already sawing logs, the two auxiliary heads busy mapping out a game plan for how to best lick your testicles. I went out on the balcony, flabbergasted. My heart was throbbing from the shock but as I sat there, all the clues I’d ignored trickled in. The myriad things I’d let slide. I remembered then how terribly wrong it was, when, beast. I am sorry to call you out, but. You did. You cheated at laser tag.
I thought about that, and grew cold on the balcony.
I flashed on Head #3 throwing his birthday presents at me after opening the first one and saying that it was not what he’d wanted and
Did you even buy it yourself or just send someone to get it?
The image of Head #1 refusing to speak to my parents because they didn’t order champagne to toast our engagement, they only hugged us and said congratulations and he said
How fucking hard is it to get a bottle and raise a glass and say something nice about me
And Head #2 calmly reminding me
If I raise my fist to you again just turn and go because if I start hitting you I may not stop
I’d said
But where will I go next time? I live here
One head had said
If I sit here on this couch any longer I’m worried I will kill you and kill myself
I didn’t know who that was, that last one. I could see the face and knew the name but everything else was too hard to understand, so maybe I hadn’t counted correctly and there were more. Maybe that was my problem—I couldn’t count? Why else would I go hollow and take it? Why would I never call the pound? I said sorry so many times that I believed I was, but was I supposed to be sorry?
A ringing then, you were calling me on the phone, saying, I need you. I said okay but you seem really mad. You cleared your throat and said,
“Yeah. I think you are picking up on my resentment toward you.”
Then began your J’accuse-athon, your attack on me for being rude to a man two years before. At the top of your lungs you shouted, but as me, shouting at the man. You were imitating me but doing the Korean soap opera version of it, as though I’d foamed at the mouth and clawed at his face; I was calling the man a motherf-er and throwing things at waiters. YOU HAVE TO BE KIND TO EVERYONE, you kept saying. Then all the heads were chiming in and attacking me, “Which one is this?” I said, and, “Wait, who’s attacking me now? I can’t even tell.”
“You were so horrible to your nanny!” you screamed. The poor nanny could barely enjoy the massage I got her because my children were so demanding, you snarled, and so what if she cleared out my minibar. “The nanny deserves a drink at the end of the day!”
“Didn’t you have sex with your kid’s nanny?” I asked, “Like for months and months?”
There was a silence.
“That’s different. I was at the bottom of my life.”
Then you started on my children. We were a bunch of fakes, you said, with our going to church and meditating. You said your children couldn’t believe how awful my kids were, which was when I started to hang up, but you began mimicking me again and I was fascinated as I realized, wow, that sounds exactly like your imitation of your ex-wife. I am hearing a preview, I thought. I’ve become an anecdote. He was trying it out on me first. I would be coming to a cocktail party near you, told between dinner and dessert. Convenient, too, since you were using the same voice for me and your ex-wife, you could just do a medley.
Then you, as me, yelled out a word that is not a word I have ever said, or a word my children even know. It rhymes with not smaller.
My stomach went tight and my eyes popped out of their sockets on springs.
I punched you in my mind so hard that you said ouch through the receiver. I stepped on the phone and ended you, walking out on your performance of me. I hung up on you, dog, for the last time. You cured me of overvaluing potential.
I have to admit also that having sex with you was like making snow angels under a rhino.
Bittersweet, my dove, though you must have known all things slow to a stop. The childhood scars of you are not for me to pinpoint and shave flat. Go to your local library and check out some after-school specials. Go to church. Line dancing, anything.
You didn’t expect me to tell the whole truth, did you? No one would believe how mean you were. It would have seemed like a fable, which is only as effective as its moral, and I happen to have one of those, finally:
She woke up in Brooklyn and stretched. She went to the bodega to buy tangerines and an atlas. She strolled home at her own pace and checked on her pet geode. Turning up the volume on Sinatra, she bounced on the trampoline.
Look at that. She’d come to her own rescue.
She wrote stories and when she was low on words her daughter brought her some, carefully written on scraps of paper. Her son threw poems over rooftops. They laughed so hard that the downstairs neighbors poked at their ceiling with a broom. Warriors, all three of them.
One night she stopped by the window because of a shadow. She put on her glasses and peered out. Knelt there.
It was you, dog, and you were failing. You walked in a circle and lay on your side breathing smoke. Those two extra heads were shrunken and lost in your fur, now overgrown and gray. Oh lord, she thought, we’re all just poor dogs in the end.
She called out and you lifted your head wearily, laid it back down between your paws. You were ashamed and she was too. She’d done enough bad things to be the beast in someone else’s story.
She started very soft, just air at first, and sang. Her wee ones in their beds could hear her somewhere in their dreams. She went on until you were breathing evenly. You sat up, moving in under the tree and her heart caught on something when she saw you limp. It was a shock how old and broken you were.
“Lie down, beast,” she said gently, and you did. When your eyes closed she inhaled deeply and told you this whole story. It went on until her eyes were little hyphens and her neck was stiff. It took a while but she knew that when you woke you’d crawl away forever, and then. She was I and I am older now and I am done. All over.
Oh, you are so tiny now. I can barely see you out there, beast. I don’t need you anymore. Believe me when I say I am grateful for all of it. My aim was off, but true. Sleep tight, little monster.
Dear Rafiki Yangu,
How’d you get so happy?
Maybe you could always get everyone to join you on the dance floor, even when there is no dance floor.
Last Thanksgiving, we were all around that coffee table in the living room. Some people were on the rug, others in a heap on the couch. The kids got to stay up late. You played your adungu, the homemade Ugandan harp. Starting with a song in Swahili, you tried to get Hunter to join in, remember? He was too humble and wanted you to sing, but you wouldn’t take no. You went on your knees, pleading, “Siiiing something, Hun-ter, siiiiing out, my brother . . .” Leaning across that table until you were up in his face, your singing dropped to a whisper and then rose to a howl. You sang that one line, entreating him to join you in Swahili, and then English, you lay down and sang it old and frail and jumped up and made it funky like James Brown. Hunter was holding his stomach, laughing so hard, and you’d both put back some Ugandan gin, I won’t say how much. That was the highlight of the party. Everyone sprang to life despite being spent from all the pie and Thanksgiving haiku.
It could be that you’ve always had that pied piper thing, but your life took a hairpin turn when you were so young. I can’t imagine there were any parties for a long time after that. There was too much to do.
When you threw down your weapon mid-battle you had to be quick, or the rebel army who kidnapped you might catch you. They would surely kill you in ways that would make you wish during your death that you’d never been born. What they did to escaped child soldiers is so far off the scale in terms of human atrocity that I can’t believe I was alive anywhere drawing a safe breath while that was happening somewhere else. I can’t hold those images i
n my consciousness and sustain the idea of a benevolent creator, but your faith does not waver. You believe in God.
You live as a free man now. “Free man” might be a relative term for some men, but not you. There is being kidnapped, brainwashed, and tortured, and there is escaping that. There is stowing away in a truck that you hope will bring you to safety, and when that truck is overtaken, the canisters of paraffin that you hide behind are pierced and the wax inside burns you so severely that your skin bleaches white. You are disfigured but it is temporary, more important that you run, and are free. You go looking for a distant relative who takes you in and gives you a mat to sleep on. There is a roof over your head and no gun acting as your pillow. You are free to work, and work is now freedom, even though you carry buckets through the slums for pittance and for more hours a day than most people are awake. Working your fingers raw is a privilege, because you have the sovereign right to be the boss and the slave, and you go back to school with your earnings and you graduate. Freedom is holding your diploma in your hands.
One morning you wake to hear that your hometown was taken over. People you knew, guys you went to school with were hacked up and set fire to, their bodies left to boil by the side of the road. You’ve already lost your beloved brother and now there are more children hiding, running. An idea comes to you that will bring massive work and responsibility but you don’t hesitate. You will build a safe place for those children, a school, and you won’t quit when reason tells you to.
It’s been a cycle of having your arms tied only to liberate yourself again. This grew you an enormous wingspan to rise above the bitterness anyone would expect you to have. When your hands are tied now, it’s not a surprise or an obstacle. Who needs more than a brain, and decency, you think. Wings.
• • •
Do you remember when we went to hear Adam sing? I couldn’t stay because I had to be up the next morning at dawn to work. Watching you hear live music was so sweet that I would have stayed but you said no, you must go back to the hotel to sleep.
For some reason parking was easy but leaving was a pickle. Three parking attendants came out, each giving us different directions and each time we ended up somewhere we had to back out of. Getting out of the garage took so long that when we finally exited, people were starting to leave the show. I was agitated but at some point I grew mesmerized by you. You did not panic. It didn’t even seem like you were suppressing frustration, you just didn’t let it in. Each time there was another dead end you only got calmer, including when the parking attendants were downright rude to you. The only change in mood came when we were out on the street and you high-fived me, laughing and turning up the radio, saying, “Okay, give me a cigarette, please.”
You are a reminder of how things could be if they were actually awful, and the unabashed face of joy when things are better than I realize. As I get older, things that were never interesting are alternately fascinating and thrilling. I’m sure that I never exclaimed over the grain of wood in a doorframe when I was in my twenties, or sat down to stare at a tree. I was afraid there would be a deficit of fun as I got older, but when I think of us being friends in twenty years, having pie on the porch while I beat you and Hunter at Rummikub, I don’t know. That sounds pretty damn exciting to me.
Someone asked you about our relationship. You put your hand on my back and said
She and I share the same soul
Pretty sure I am not worthy of that but it’s something I can strive for, having been already awarded it. I wish I could singlehandedly support your school, but I am humbled that you trust me to help. I know you feel like a family member in our home and that is both an honor and really freaking lucky, because, who else can build a fort out of sticks with my kids, and who else jumps in my pool with me at midnight and then sits on the porch while the crickets harass each other and we play records. Talk about family and theater. Drink red tea with honey.
One night in California we were on the deck having a beer. I know there are things you don’t like to remember but I wanted to know how you stayed positive. I asked if you ever got angry and you said, oh yes. You said, “When someone is bad to a child,” and I said is that all, and you said, “Well, also if someone interferes with my performance on a stage.” Then I asked you what you did when you felt so low about yourself that you couldn’t go forward. You were silent long enough for me to think you might not respond and then you said
I go far out, maybe in a field somewhere quiet. I think of things I have done in my life that people tell me are good. I remember that I have done good
You’ve seen me be irascible and flawed and I don’t fear you judging me, but I have worried you might do something so heinous that I’d be forced to erase you. It’s entirely a product of my looking so far up to see you, knowing you occupy a place on earth higher than I will reach. In the past my doing that has been a fatal error. I forget that we are all made from ether and instinct. We’re all missing parts and orbit the same moon.
I’m going to take you off that pedestal and I want to ask you to do something stupid right in front of me, so we can have that shock of human fallibility thing past us. I will look forward to that disappointment like I await next Thanksgiving, the day you now celebrate with us. You can help the kids to find branches for the thankfulness tree again and help Kenneth cut up paper for the haiku. I promise no more scavenger hunts, that was insanity, but if we need to have a break from all that, your gin will be waiting, and we can make dancing and singing mandatory.
Dear Firefighter,
As we crossed the street we saw you. You were covered in debris and white soot that flaked off of you with every weighted step. With all of those protective layers you loomed enormous, like a weary snowman trudging home from an apocalyptic winter. There was a buzz on the streets of downtown New York right after 9/11. Walking outside was like entering a comic book world with no gray area. There was only horror and heroes.
We’d taken duffel bags of steel-toed boots down to Ground Zero, walking home with nothing to say. You were trudging in the opposite direction, still wearing the remains of the World Trade Center on your body. Some people passing by held up a hand in acknowledgment or called out encouraging words. No cars were honking and there was no shouting to be heard for weeks after, it seemed.
That night it was still being called a rescue and everyone was holding on in a stasis, some people postponing what was too unbearable to process. I wonder how long you kept digging after you knew there was nothing left but buried screams to unearth. I try to imagine you alive today. Maybe you are? You are getting out of a taxi, or playing catch with your son. Writing a book.
About you: you weren’t the only firefighter who made a stain on my memory. Six years later, I gathered my three-year-old son in my arms and marched down Sixth Avenue, sure that at Ladder 5 there would be someone to convince him that the small fire he’d seen across the street wasn’t still going and perhaps on its way to swallow him. Ritchie was on duty, I said hello, and asked, “Has that little fire over by MacDougal been put out?” mouthing the word scared and pointing at my boy, who was still trembling. Ritchie kept his eyes on my son the whole time and calmed him down. He made him laugh and showed him how he’d brought the fire down. Did you have little boys like that come into your station, too? Come back the next day with their mom and bring you a batch of brownies when you were out on a call? Leave you a crayon picture, like my son did, and sit at attention for years whenever he heard a fire truck go by, searching each face aboard to see if he could recognize his friend?
You never had any next-day thank-you, or cookies waiting. I never knew your name, and your face I wouldn’t recognize if I had only three to pick from, it was so thick with ash when I saw you. You didn’t even look in my face as I saw you across the street and ran into your arms, but you saw me running and opened yours, lowering your head. Your eyes were closed, not weeping but not without weeping either and I rushed in, holding you tightly while your soot fell onto me li
ke dandelion seed. I went on tiptoe to whisper to you while you nodded and answered back like we’d been talking for hours. It must have been impossible to tell from the outside who in our dance was leading who, or to hear that bell that rang for our ears only, telling us when to stop.
Dear NASA,
Sorry. I’m sorry for repeatedly stating that you were a massive misuse of tax dollars and basically an oversized playground for those who like to wear antigravity suits. I realize you haven’t stopped the launching of shuttles on my behalf but I’m apologizing. Anyway, I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Shamefully late, I began to understand that your research, directly and derivations thereof, resulted in: the artificial heart pump, the surface that protects the Golden Gate Bridge, the handheld jaws of life that save victims from car wrecks, and those invisible braces that Tom Cruise wore when no one knew there was anything wrong with his teeth. The FDA has you to thank for the drop in salmonella cases, as does everyone who got to read those charred Roman manuscripts from forever ago, A.D. Also anyone who rides a school bus in Chicago.
NASA, you were for me a bunch of geeks who lived on Hot Pockets and looked for E.T. while people on earth starved to death or couldn’t afford health care or college. I get that this is asinine, that famine and an illiterate populace were not your fault. I am dim when it comes to a whole lot, but what I realized is that
Space is entirely poetic.
Listen. I read about stars that wander the galaxies. Some end up with their bright sides in the face of some dim unlocked planet who neglected to deal with its issues. With their volcanic air of refusal, those tidally locked stars never show their dark half and all the junk in their trunks where nothing grows. It is the baldest metaphor I can imagine. The white dwarf star, once so carefree, starts sucking the life force from its stingy blue companion, and a mutual thievery ensues until a supernova rolls up and obliterates everything they shared together. Somehow the white dwarf limps onward, meekly blinking, its space tag now reading, “Hi! My name is Zombie Star! Ask me about codependence!”
Dear Mr. You Page 9