“You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.
I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”
Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.
“You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.
Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.
It felt weird, none of us a complete sibling to another, steps and halves stitched together into a Frankenstein’s family — how could the usual rules apply? Every time I saw a commercial on TV about needy orphans in faraway lands, I’d pretend that Thumper belonged with them, face streaked with mud and belly swollen from hunger as he stumbled along squalling to the village’s gods at the injustice of it all, wondering how he’d gotten there.
I held onto that dream for years, until I outgrew it, finally able to take pleasure in subtler tortures, Thumper’s father now using me as a motivational weapon he could wield over a son whose brain was ill-motivated or ill-equipped to process math, science, the higher intricacies of his native tongue.
“Why can’t you be more like Angus, why can’t you even try?” he’d challenge. “Those report cards you bring home, they’d shame a village idiot.” Thumper would glare at me with all the resentment his maturing face could muster, while Rachel made sure he didn’t miss her Mona Lisa smile, and knew whom she was siding with and always would.
Came the day, then, fourteen months after he’d been driving, when a drunken Thumper rolled his car. A lumbar vertebra crunched like a hambone in a dog’s jaw, taking the spinal cord with it. After that, he confined his driving to a wheelchair, mostly around the house, but of course I was gone by then, having let Chicago swallow me, make me anonymous, reprogram me with its different rhythms, its harsher harmonies and jagged dissonances.
I can still recall the look on my stepfather’s face in the hospital waiting room, after they’d given us the news on Thumper’s lower extremities, and while I was not without pity, a part of me felt responsible, too, because for over a decade I’d been wishing harm on him, and finally that muscle had flexed.
I looked at my stepfather’s slack face, remembering what it had uttered about my real father, and wondering if I should remind him of that, since impotence had again become a fact of life close to home. But at least my dad could still walk — which, as I quickly realized, had been an option he’d exercised only too well, so I kept silent, my stepfather still holding the means with which to cut the legs from beneath me, too.
*
Days passed and Jamey never would go rank, not even when the city and the ‘burbs broke new sweat in the heat of Indian Summer, his decomposition arrested by a force beyond our reckoning, until it got to the point where I couldn’t think of him as Jamey any more.
I’d make a trip out to the slaughterhouse every several days to check on his progress, or lack of it, and it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one, other recent visits annotated by gifts left in front of the bedsprings, below his cruddy bare feet. Coins and locks of hair and interesting chunks of scrap metal and sticks of incense and shredded audio tape and the odd piece or two of drug paraphernalia — offerings of these and more. He who was no longer Jamey hung above them all, bent-limbed and woven into the rusty springs like a 3-D portrait of a Hindu deity, no more or no less skeletal than he’d been in life, just incredibly resistant to change.
I’d come home and tell Rachel and Mae about it, and it was always fun to try and figure out who’d left what.
The signs went up during the third week, scrap lumber shoved horizontally into the springs, slash letters burned into the wood and chipped paint with a soldering iron. The sign at the bottom read Musica mundana; the one over his head, Deus ex nihilo. Given this further Latin I rightly figured it had to be Nathan’s doing.
“Well, what do you think it means?” he asked me on the street the next day.
“Is this from another private confab you had with him?”
Nathan shook his head. “This one I made up for the occasion.”
I resigned myself to puzzling it out since there was little else to do, Nathan and I sixth in line from a theater box office, waiting for tickets to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show to go on sale. It’s what Nathan does for money, making a surprisingly adequate living by standing in lines for people whose time is more valuable than his own and will gladly hire surrogates. Business was in fact good enough that he was ready to subcontract some lines out to me, so I was tagging along to learn the finer points of queuing. With my degree in communications, I felt confident and ready to solo.
“Well, ‘Deus’ would be ‘God,’ obviously,” I said. “Past that I’m rusty when it comes to dead languages.”
“Deus ex nihilo means ‘God out of nothing,’” Nathan told me, then said, “Andre didn’t get it either.”
God out of nothing. So that’s what we’d been doing out there.
“Speaking of Andre, have you talked to him lately?”
I shook my head. “Got his answering machine twice.”
“He’s in a mood. You know how he gets: ‘What do I have to show for my life, it’s one-third gone already, I have so much more potential than this, I can’t sleep.’ Et cetera.”
“I think the slaughterhouse thing’s gotten to him.”
“Could be,” Nathan said. “But you kno-ow … Jamey being an incorruptible like he is, if the Catholic Church heard about it, they’d shit. All of the others, so far as they’re concerned, were these obedient types who traded a lifetime of orgasms for a corpse that wouldn’t rot. Now. My theory is, their perpetual freshness had nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with devotion in the people they left behind. The collective focus of a bunch of hysterics is an amazing thing.”
“Get out.”
“Quantum physics is on my side. Energy, that’s all anything is or will be. Waveforms on different frequencies, when you get to the subatomic level. The only difference between matter and energy is, matter’s congealed. So, with brain activity being electrical, thoughts and the physical world are made of the same stuff — we just don’t have all the cause and effect sorted out yet.”
Which made me view Thumper’s wreck and my malicious fantasies in a new light. “You’re saying we’re keeping him the way he is?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. When’s the last time you had that kind of faith in anything? Except maybe for entropy, but that’s beside the point, since Jamey’s doing a good job of defying it.”