I started writing in 1970, just after the My Lai massacre. That was quite a massacre as massacres go, five hundred defenseless children, women, and men. We at home (as we called it) were told that it was just an accident of war, but do you kill so many people by accident, and how do you sexually abuse and mutilate people by accident? That guy, Calley, served a couple of years under house arrest and in therapy trying to undo his short man’s complex and now he probably runs an advertising firm in Nashua, New Hampshire, or an oil speculation company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, married to a second wife named Sadie, who is constantly nervous and pissed because his first wife, also named Sadie, keeps calling, complaining that he’s behind with his child support even though the kids are grown and out of the split-level tract home they once shared in Redlands, California, but all that is just in the mind of a bitter old man, namely, me. I’m sure he’s attending a luncheon with a Kiwanis club in Georgia and that he still gets calls from that Medina guy telling him when he should scratch his ass and stiff his fingers, because that’s what good little soldiers do, right? Take orders, follow orders, obey orders, carry orders out, see to it, comply, roger wilco. I can still recall the images, the descriptions, the reported snatches of language from the soldiers involved, the way my heart broke, sank, collapsed, and the way it sounded so familiar, so much like white men in white hoods driving dirt roads and whistling through gap-toothed grins. I did not write about war or killing or overtly about my disdain for my lying, bombastic, self-righteous, conceited, small-minded, imperialistic homeland. Instead, I wrote about getting high, while getting high every chance I got, at every turn, smoking this, swallowing that, all this as a way to escape blame for my country, at least that was my excuse, all of it as a sad, juvenile metaphor about the lost American spirit, the mislaid, impoverished, misspent, misplaced, wasted, suffering American soul. The novel was titled Pass the Joint, Motherfucker, and it was published on the first Earth Day, not that it matters, not that I knew that at the time. The book was a success and so I became a success and I never published another word. I wrote plenty, keeping the pages in my drawers and burning them periodically, a haughty and vainglorious display, if you ask me. I gave interviews freely, usually to moderately, though to not overly bright students fresh out of some graduate program or another trying to see their names in the pages of those literary magazines that no one really reads. I contradicted myself from one to the next. I did not grow complacent, I was complacent. I was smug and I was therefore ugly. I was never bitter about my career, but I found it a bit amusing, ironic, ridiculous. Not that my career should have been anything more than it was. To say that I published nothing else is of course a lie. I published eight science fiction novels and twelve detective novels under different names. The science fiction novels, the Plat series, were penned under the name Nix Chance. As a crime writer I was known as Bill Calley. You should know that I’ve never confessed this to anyone. Only my agent knows. It’s a story in the works.
Back up, if you can do the math; that means your mother left me with a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t particularly like me. Tell me that’s not cruel. To you, I mean. But I liked you well enough. I thought you were funny, sardonic, sometimes a little twisted. Me, I’ve always been just a punster, but you were funny. I suppose you still are, but how would I know?
I call this entification. I mean, as subjective as all this business is, at a point, it is, the story is, the world is, and there it all is, entified. It all starts at arm’s length, points here are there falling into focus, coming together or separating and becoming distinct. The process is not all that unusual, it’s all happening under rather obvious intersubjective circumstances. What am I trying to say? Nothing, if you ask me. I’m an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man. But none of this matters and it wouldn’t matter if it did matter.
You are Lang and you write: The woman who claimed to be my daughter was still standing in the garden. Bathed in the afternoon light as she was I was still not prepared to admit a resemblance, but I did think she was pretty. I hadn’t thought that before and I wondered about how the gaze of parents is always so clouded. It’s hard to imagine a mother saying, This is my son Bobby, he’s uglier than a plastic bag of shit, but he’s mine. But that’s not quite the voice, is it? Again. Outside, I found Meg Caro staring at the pile of rhizomes. You can imagine that my wife is a little upset. She nodded. I have to tell you that I really don’t remember your mother and I’m not the sort of person who forgets the women with whom he’s slept. I mean, there haven’t been that many. I only know what she told me. I bit my lip and nodded, realized that we were just going round and round. I suppose we need a paternity test. You wouldn’t happen to know how we go about that, would you? No. I can ask my friend. Do you have a number where I can reach you? She gave me a number and told me it was her cell. Sylvia came and stood by me as we watched her walk back down the drive to the car she’d left near the mailbox. I’m going to call her when I know how to get the test. Sylvia turned and walked away, back toward the house. You can’t be upset with me about this. This I knew was completely untrue. How could she be anything else? And the last thing I needed was to compound the problem by further denying my relationship to Meg Caro or especially making an appeal that we consider the poor young woman’s feelings. I wonder what she wants was the only thing Sylvia said at the table that evening. My response was, I can’t imagine. The evening was difficult. My routine was to go out to my studio after dinner and work until Sylvia was well asleep, but tonight that seemed a bad idea. Yet so did the breaking of routine seem like a bad idea. In fact no ideas presented themselves for consideration. I could not abandon Sylvia with the weight of the situation and yet sitting and stewing with her in the cauldron of anxiety that was our bedroom appeared no better. All I could imagine hearing, since there was no speaking, was the bubbling of the bubbling broth around us and an occasional pop from the fire. Then my mind turned from my concern for Sylvia and by extension my concern for myself vis-à-vis Sylvia, to simply me or perhaps simple me. Just what kind of massive quagmire had my, I imagined, rather average-sized sexual appendage gotten me into some twenty-eight years ago, leaving me to roam through life happily, though clumsily, for so long, only to find myself feeling for the bottom of the mess with my foot while trying not to drown, laying my arms angel-like flat, as I had read in survival books, so that I might just float out and to safety, my organ, my penis, my stupid dick, for all the pleasure that I had imagined that it gave me, what had it done to me now, if indeed it had done anything at all, because I really did not recall the face of the woman in the photograph, the mother of my alleged daughter, and I was no playboy, was always rather backward, awkward, if not plain ugly, had thought myself so lucky that Sylvia would even give me the time of day and thought when she did that it was because she believed she could feel secure with a homely man that other women did not find attractive, but there had been others, a few, and I thought I remembered every one of them and every name and who could forget a name like Carly Caro, alliteration having always worked throughout life as an irritant on me, and I had not been the kind of man who had oneor two-night stands, at least it was never my desire, as I was always just a little needy and clingy and was possessed by the desire to not be that kind of man and why wouldn’t this Katie Caro have told me that she was gravid, enceinte, fraught, in a family way, parturient, with child, replete, expectant, about to bear fruit, knocked up? Was I so unattractive a man that even when he got a woman pregnant she would flee for the hills? And if I was that off-putting, physically or intellectually, why should she have kept the child at all? I mean, there were ways, and why would she then tell the poor genetically disadvantaged child who her father was? Perhaps upon learning of my career, that there was one at all, she decided that there was possibly a bit more to me than had met her eye (and apparently other parts), or maybe she thought, mercenarily, that there was something to be had, and oh how mistaken this Chloe Caro and her daughter were. What if it was all just a big mistake? A faux pas. Or worse, a ruse. A scam. We’d get the test done wherever one goes to get such a test done and we would discover that I was no more related to Meg Caro than I was to Chuck Berry or Igor Stravinsky and yet somehow I knew that if my pecker came out of this mess clean, untarnished, Sylvia and I would never again be the same. I just didn’t know why that would be so, but I knew it all the same, talking to each other would be difficult, I would not know where to stand when she brushed her teeth, when to leave to work, when to come back or how to touch her in or out of bed, and I was filled right then with such sadness and perhaps terror that I was far less afraid of Meg Caro’s actually being proved my daughter. I thought all of this while Sylvia and I lay in our queen-sized bed (she’d never wanted a king because we’d be too far apart), on opposite edges, the six-hundred-thread-count sheets she’d insisted on, growing as cold as an overworn cliché between us and the colder that space became the more difficult it became to traverse. When her back was turned, though she was nowhere near sleep, I glanced under the covers at my dick and it looked so innocent, harmless, and at that particular moment, pathetic.