This is unexpected, and I feel the smile I’ve maintained since first seeing her falling away. For just a moment I get a glimpse of how I must seem to her, this aging man, her father, who has given up and chosen the institution to hide out the rest of his days.
The windows begin to cry, and the floors sigh with the weight of the invisible. “Don’t take my bag of sleep,” I say to her, thinking there may be nothing I can do to convince her of my aberration. I turn to watch the windows weep.
“Do you know what the weather is like outside, Dad?”
“It’s raining, my love. I’m not crazy.”
“Then come home, or whatever you want to call the place. Come with me.”
The roof is on fire above me. I can smell the children’s burning flesh. Soon there will be no more roof, and I will stare straight up to Neptune.
I look at her. She is crying. I can remember the little girl she had been and I feel terrible. “I can’t decide who to be,” I say, beginning to cry myself.
“Just be yourself, Dad.” Her anger is obviously genuine—it’s worn into her face. I am grateful to recognize that.
Somewhere, in another hall, Shirley is waiting for the Insect King. She is dressed in white, with three folds of newspaper over her head. I know this because this is what she does every day. She has married and divorced the Insect King many times. Theirs is a troubled relationship.
“Dad, why aren’t there more visitors?”
I don’t know how to explain this to her. “We get visitors,” I tell her. “Every Saturday afternoon…” But I can’t go on. Bob and Shirley, the General, the Ballerina, they’ve all wandered into the lunchroom. They sit down, they get up, they wander around the room. Cold like a hand rubs at my arm.
“She wouldn’t want you to be like this…” my daughter is saying, has been saying. I wasn’t listening.
“What did you say, honey?”
She looks at me oddly. “Mom. I was saying that Mom wouldn’t have wanted you to act like this after she died. She would have wanted you to keep it together.”
The cold in my arm settles deeper, and despite myself I look up, toward the window.
And there I am, pacing back and forth, gesturing angrily. I move my head in front of my daughter’s face, afraid that she might see. But she can’t see, of course.
And as I turn my head I see myself again, a gentler, more contented me, standing behind my daughter and getting ready to caress her with his hands. And somehow this one is even worse than the other one.
“Get away from her!” I scream, and before I know it the male nurse is behind me, dragging me away. My friends protest the aggressiveness of this solution, even the Siamese twins. My daughter cries like a little girl, inconsolable, and that is the worst of this.
In my room, the light bulb speaks disparagingly of the night. Dust beneath my bed dances to the sad songs the walls would sing if only they had mouths.
I gaze out of my one face and a hundred faces of me stare back, all angry for my failure of ambition and terrible lack of care. If I am not careful I know they will be the death of me.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” I whisper quietly. “I don’t know how to be.”
And the faces come, and come again, to make one vast and unforgiving stare.
A VISIT HOME
The house is not as I’ve remembered it all these years. The style is more modern, the living room more spacious. There is no real wood—it is all imitation grain. My mother and father seem older, grayer than any human beings I have ever met.
I have brought three college friends to see this town I grew up in, this place where my dreams came from. My friends appear startled by the lush greenness of the vegetation, the humidity, the bright sunlight through blue skies striated by wispy cloud. I know they won’t want to stay long.
I realize it is the same lot, the same location as the house I spent my childhood in, but there is a new house here. What have my parents done? Torn the original down and rebuilt according to some hopeful plan for rejuvenation? But I am afraid to ask them what has happened. I am afraid of what they might tell me.
I spend my nights roaming the halls of this new house, stepping quietly so as not to awaken my three friends, somehow knowing that my parents won’t be aroused no matter what I do. I examine several pieces of furniture each night: my father’s new, barrel-shaped liquor cabinet with the carved eagle on its front, the new refrigerator with the automatic ice-maker, the matching pieces of the never-used guest room, the ornate rugs, the new pictures on the walls—photographs of people I don’t recognize.
Occasionally I find something belonging to the old house; a piece of bathroom tile, a door stop, an old worn footstool, and once an entire yellow-papered wall that materialized in the hallway without warning. When I blink it is gone.
THE MULTIPLES OF SORROW
Malcolm had gone from London to Paris after the end of the First World War. His few remaining friends in England speculated it must have been a desperate move to escape some unhappiness. What they had not grasped was that desperation required a certain emotional investment Malcolm had not budgeted for during his remaining years on the planet. He had no intention of feeling desperation or any other strong emotion. He could see no point. If he was going to waste his time, there were activities far more interesting for his thoughtless consumption.
If anything, he’d left for aesthetic reasons. Not because Paris during that time promised so much in terms of freedom, beauty, art—he had no illusions of access to such things—but because London promised so little. Despite the post-war appearance of palatial department stores and great business houses, jobs were few and the divide between rich and poor intraversible. He’d grown tired of the slums of the east end and the architecture of ruin and rust, surfaces silky with a moist dust of unknown content, unidentifiable insects disassembling on the edges of vision. Worse than the bombs dropped by the German Zeppelins had been this devastating fusillade of failed commerce.
Of course the aesthetic background of Paris was no richer, only different: a stacked mess of darkened brick, spider-veined by wet, depthless streets where broken beggars stumbled and died. Upon reaching Paris he was possessed of few funds and he had no considered plan for their replenishment. Now and then he would work a menial restaurant job for the privilege of some laughable underpayment and the dubious benefit of glimpsing such luminaries as Picasso and Ford Madox Ford. He lived in the worst possible places, attic rooms where he could not walk upright, the ceilings decorated with the long, looping signatures of marching insects. If he grew tired of the wriggling creatures falling into his small store of food he’d burn a bit of sulphur to drive them into the next room, separated from his by the thinnest possible layer of paper and board.
“Monstre!” boomed the voice on the other side of his flimsy door, followed by a rain of fists on wood that shook the room. “Meurtrier!”
But instead of hiding like a child he rolled out of his bed and jerked open the door. “Oui!”
The large bearded man hunched in the doorway, his head lowered as he peered inside. Malcolm noticed several gray insects crawling in and out of his hair, thin black legs slipping on the oily strands.
“Degaré?” Malcolm asked, recognizing him as a man he sometimes washed dishes with in the restaurants.
“Mon Dieu! Malcolm!” He suddenly grinned. “I have bread, if you have the wine to wash it down!”
For a time they had an arrangement, but nights when Degaré had too much to drink Malcolm would always leave.