“Sometimes I wish I could feel the way they do, the stupid, happy people of the world. Just once I’d like to know what it’s like to be free of this weight. I think about my father and how happy he was every day of his life. He was so simple he didn’t even realize how mediocre he was. He thought because he knew a lot about science that he was an intelligent man. He had his wife and his job and a family of his own, and that was all he ever needed. I always knew I never wanted to be like him. More than that, I knew I never could, be like him. I never felt any shame or guilt because of my abilities. But as I get older, it’s so exhausting, living like this day after day. I’ve tired myself out just talking about it.”
He set his glass down and backed away from the counter. At the rate he was deteriorating, I knew if I didn’t get him off his feet now, pretty soon he would collapse of his own accord, and that once he fell he would be immovable. I snuck up and held him by the shoulders.
I said, “You’re not well, Dad. We need to get you to bed. We’ll visit the doctor in the morning.” Throwing my arm behind his back, I led him step by step to the bedroom. It was almost like dancing in a way. The cheap box-spring mattress squealed sharply under his weight as he settled onto the bed. As soon as he was positioned halfway comfortably, he shut his eyes and fell into a deep, semi-comatose sleep. I pinched his cheek to make sure. “Dad. I’ve got something important I need to tell you.”
I waited for a response, standing over him and watching for any disruption in the rhythm of his breathing. When it was clear he wasn’t waking up anytime soon, I set about searching the shabby little room for any spare quilts and blankets that could be used to constrain him. Fortunately, the master bedroom was as slovenly kept as the front room was sparse, and all it took was a few quick tugs to bring the bed sheet out from under his leg; it had long ago receded to the bottom left corner, leaving the rest of the mattress exposed. From there, it was simply a matter of locating a pair of scissors and cutting the sheet into strips that could be tied securely around his wrists and ankles. I dove into the task with an energy and sense of purpose that, under different circumstances, I’m sure would have made the old man proud.
I once heard an atheist talk about space dust. It was during my final year of high school, when guest speakers would come in all the time to lecture us about college and opportunities for the future. One day, I believe it was in the early fall, an astrophysicist came to give a short spiel about whatever UC campus he was representing, and toward the end of his presentation he started veering off onto tangents (he was an older scientist, already retired from academic work, and far too soft-spoken and frail to hold the attention of three hundred exhausted seniors for very long). One of the things I remember him talking about, though, was space dust.
As he put it, “I’m not a spiritual person. That is, I don’t believe in a divine creator. But I do believe in a common link between all carbon-based life in the universe. The carbon that’s in your body right now, it’s existed in one form or another since the aftermath of the Big Bang over fourteen billion years ago. It hasn’t changed since then, at least on the atomic scale. Maybe, at one point in time, the particles that make up who you are existed as cosmic dust floating out in space. Perhaps one of you sitting in this room today shares the same carbon that once formed a hair follicle on the head of Julius Caesar or a skin cell on the face of Marilyn Monroe. In this sense, we are all connected to one another on the most basic level of existence. We’re all descended from the same dust from outer space.”
Between the Augustinian phase I was going through at the time and my general loathing for student assemblies, it’s not surprising that I hated listening to the old scientist rhapsodize about the meaning and origins of life. Too materialist. Too much muddling of science and philosophy. That’s the verdict my seventeen-year-old self arrived at, and years later, after my perspective had changed, I could look back with a hint of nostalgia on how misguided I was then, while simultaneously finding new reasons to tear down the learned astronomer’s premises from a more enlightened vantage point. For even in a universe without God, the astrophysicist was still searching for ancestors among the comets. In place of the blood, clay, or celestial spermatozoa the theologians looked to as evidence of our shared beginnings, the atheist substituted iridescent dust drifting aimlessly through the Milky Way. That simply wouldn’t do as far as I was concerned. To my young and newly godless mind, there could be no freedom and progress until we as a species divorced ourselves from any mystical notions of a common, elemental denominator. We can only move forward when we stop looking to dirt for answers.
For the man who called himself my father, there was no freedom or progress to be had, not until he broke down and gave me what I wanted. He slept fifteen hours straight and awoke screaming in pain and vomiting uncontrollably onto his chest and mattress. He railed against his bonds until his ankles were bruised and the loose headboard had left a ceiling-high crack in the drywall. It was all a matter of waiting on my part. I had suspected I might have to employ arcane stress positions to get him to talk, but the pain of his own body proved torturous enough to suit my purposes. By the time the sunlight broke between the closed blinds of the small bedroom window, he was slipping in and out of consciousness, gagging constantly on his own bile as his ghostly pallor gave the pearls of sweat on his forehead an almost brown or golden hue, like a thin broth. He writhed constantly, extending his abdomen out as far as it would go, as if to distance himself from his enraged entrails as much as possible.
I said, “You’re in bad shape, Temple. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s either your appendix or your liver, but in either case you should have seen a doctor some time ago. I can help you get the medical attention you need. But first, you need to tell me where you keep the money you’ve saved up over all these years. You need to point me to your checkbook or banking statement, something that will let me get my hands on what I’m entitled to. Which, I’ll tell you right now, is a pretty sizeable amount by my reckoning. And I’d say you’re not in any position to haggle given the state you’re in. So why don’t you spare yourself the prolonged agony and tell me where the money is? That’s your only way out of this.”
Dad’s eyes rolled back behind his brow. I picked the bucket up from the carpet and splashed some ice water in his face. Partially digested globs of food clung to his cheeks and to the matted furls of his beard. He mumbled “hospital” and his head slumped down against his collarbone. I doused him again.
“Don’t try to pretend like you don’t have anything saved up. You’ve been living alone, working nonstop for years. You couldn’t have spent it all on liquor and whores.”
“Hos . . . hospital.”
It occurred to me that the only thing keeping him from passing out entirely was the pain itself. In this way, pain became my greatest ally, the arbitrator coaxing him along in a language I could only half-speak at best. Dad, of course, was perfectly fluent in pain; he had caused me plenty of it (emotional, physical, and spiritual) and now his toxified system was using his own vernacular against him. And still there were moments during his suffering when he appeared almost peaceful, as the sick sometimes do, I’ve heard, when the fever dreams take over and the reality of their illness is briefly obscured. But then his gag reflex started up again and the force of his dry-heaving knocked him back into cognizance. He looked around the room and saw me standing beside the bed. He tried shutting his eyes to me again. Worried he might not reemerge this time, I decided to take more active steps toward attaining my goal. I plunged my hand into the water and struck him across the face with an open palm.