My parents disagreed about the semen stains. My mother wondered why the personal theme of the work should be shunned, why a man’s masturbation, his loneliness and sadness were somehow outside “art.” She was emphatic. She said you had to make a distinction between what you saw — stains — and its identification as human waste. My father found the stain business self-indulgent and repugnant. Oscar, who is usually pretty phlegmatic, said the work sounded stupid, really stupid. I said I wasn’t sure, I hadn’t seen the show. This meant that my mother was alone defending semen against two men, who had been producing it regularly over the years. I remember thinking it was fortunate that their emissions had hit the mark at least a couple of times. Mother worked herself up, becoming both more articulate and more irritated. My father’s age-old technique was simply to change the subject, which would further infuriate my mother, who would then cry out, “Why don’t you answer me?”
I was twenty-six years old, married and pregnant, and still I found the tension between my parents intolerable. My mother hung on to her passionate defense while my father, embarrassed, glanced around the room and wished she would stop. A thousand times I had witnessed the same scene, and each one of those times, I had felt my own anxiety mount until it felt as if I would break into pieces. Anselm Kiefer’s semen wasn’t really the issue, of course. After all the years of their marriage, my parents continued to misread each other. My father didn’t like conflict in any form, and so, when my mother came out swinging, he ducked. My mother, in turn, interpreted his avoidance as condescension, and it drove her to punch harder. I understood them both. My father could be maddeningly evasive and my mother annoyingly persistent.
Their verbal brawl ended when I yelled, “Stop it!” My mother apologized by kissing my cheek and neck, and we all recovered pretty quickly from the dried-semen debate, but I did notice that my father’s face was drawn and tired, and that the age difference between my parents had begun to show. Mother looked robust and still young, and Father a bit wizened and white. After dinner, he smoked a cigarette as always and then another and another. I had given up nagging him to quit. The smoking Dunhill was part of his body, his posture, two fingers aloft, smoke circling in the vicinity of his face. It was also the only sign that my father was nervous. Nothing else about him was nervous. He didn’t jiggle or tap or tic. He was calm and contained always, but he smoked, as they say, like a chimney.
After dinner, we went into the other room for a brandy, which my mother and I did not drink, but Oscar and my father did. My mother was silent then, as she often was, weary, I think, from her heated defense of sperm art and content to listen. There were candles and a vase with peach-colored roses on the low table and some chocolates. I remember these details because it was the last time I saw my father alive. Every moment during that evening has become magnified by his death. I didn’t expect to lose him. I thought he would be a grandfather to my child, and I believed my parents would fight on, would annoy each other for many more years and grow old and crotchety together. Isn’t it funny how we just think things will go on as they are?
I can’t remember how we strayed onto ghosts and magic, but it wasn’t very far from our earlier themes: my Lower East Side panpsychist’s collection and an artist’s peculiar habit of saving bodily fluids on paper, as if the marks that remained had some mysterious value or power. My mother said that when she was a girl, she used to look at her dolls in the morning to see if they had moved at night. She had half hoped and half feared they would come alive. Then my father brought up Uncle and his spirits. Uncle had worked for my great-grandparents in Chiang Mai, a skinny but muscular old man, covered from his neck to his feet with tattoos that had wrinkled along with his thin brown skin, and whose teeth had turned black from chewing betel nuts. I had heard about Uncle since I was a child. I had seen pictures of my great-grandparents’ beautiful old house, which rose up from stilts with its gabled roof and curving eaves, and the spacious grounds Uncle had tended.
My father’s eyes narrowed as he told the story. He was ten years old and living with his grandparents in Chiang Mai while his mother and father “traveled.” He had never known why they left him. Neither of his parents had ever given him a straight answer, but his childhood had always involved traveling and multiple nannies, all of whom had dropped hints about his mother’s “adventures” and given him pitying looks.
My father’s big room had a view of the garden and was visited regularly by small gray lizards, and a boy, Arthit, who worked for the family, had slept on a palette at the foot of my father’s bed, for company, because Thais never slept in a room alone. My father had followed Uncle around without being able to converse much with him, but as his Thai improved, he began to understand the old animist’s stories. Uncle told him about a beautiful girl whose fiancé had drowned in the Mekong River. Distraught with grief, she hanged herself, and after that her spirit haunted a tree. Uncle had seen her, a floating head only — dangling entrails from the neck. He also told my father about a ghost his mother had heard and seen, a fetal ghost that cried out in the forest from the place where his mother had miscarried him, a half-formed little monster that sought revenge for his early end by harassing the living.
One day, Uncle drove my father home to his village north of Chiang Mai. He remembered that when he arrived, children had come running and that they chattered and laughed about his light hair, which reminded them of phee, the spirits.
He said that the people he met had been kind to him, but he had felt like a curiosity, a thing on display, and that, most disturbingly, Uncle had turned into another man. All his obsequious mannerisms, his smiles and bows, vanished. He retired to a corner of his sister’s house, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and waved my father away from him. It was still daylight when Uncle’s sister took him to a thatched hut on poles near the river. Men drummed and played instruments, and then the women began to dance, slowly, rhythmically. He was told the ghosts were on their shoulders, riding them like horses. A very old woman with a cigar in her mouth was waving her arms over her head and puffing out smoke as her eyes rolled upward into her head, and then she moved in on my father, her mouth open, and blew smoke right into his face. He had the feeling he couldn’t breathe, gasped for air, and after that, his memory went to pieces.
All he was certain of, he said, was that, at some point, he came down with a high fever that lasted two days. He remembered screams, rolling around on a floor, choking terror, and what he thought was a whip hitting him or someone else, and then the sun through a windshield, tires jolting over a road, clouds of ochre dust. He must have hallucinated the body of a child burning next to his bed and dark birds streaming through the window. He thought he remembered a man beside him, and lying in a cold bath. On the third day, he came out of it. He was in his own room in Chiang Mai. An amulet of the Buddha was hanging around his neck, but he had no idea how it had gotten there.