by Jack Livings
I think you got bored and wanted to talk about sex.
That’s possible. Perhaps I got spooked and ran to sex because it counterbalances death? My point, if I even have one, is that an obsessive fear of death would be a natural reaction in a person experiencing an overwhelming desire to die. It’s a reasonable response.
Oh come on. Everyone’s afraid of death. It’s our collective obsession with not dying that keeps us all alive, my father said.
It is?
Yes! Of course it is. You think everyone wants to die? Everyone’s suicidal?
Yes.
You think everyone’s suicidal?
Yes, Schiff said.
We need to switch chairs.
Now we’re getting somewhere. You were insane. Yes or no? Schiff said.
No? said my father.
Wrong! But also right. Certainly no more insane than anyone else. In fact, I think you were expressing a completely sane reaction to your situation.
The roller coaster?
The war.
What war? I was at a resort! The hospital was the Casa del Rey! What was there to be afraid of at the Casa del Rey? Otters?
I don’t know. Were you?
Was I what?
Were you afraid of the otters?
No! I wasn’t afraid of the fucking otters!
Okay. Lemme write that down. Not afraid of otters.
And where were you stationed? my father said.
Would it be useful for you to know that?
Yes. Then I’d have an idea who I’m talking to here.
You know who you’re talking to.
Tell me again, my father said.
I was with the Red One.
Ardennes.
Yes. We’ve been over this.
What were you, eighteen?
That’s about right, Schiff said.
Then I must sound like a complete coward to you.
You sound like a man who suffered greatly during the war, and who’s still suffering.
I helped write manuals, my father said. It doesn’t hold a candle.
What was in the manuals?
Nothing. Instructions.
Survival manuals? Foxhole radio instructions?
No.
What, then?
Stupid instructional manuals. The point is, no one was trying to kill me. The 12th SS Panzers weren’t lobbing shells in my general direction.
Where were your schoolmates? The boys who lived on your block. The ones you’re always talking about.
European Theater. Pacific. Africa.
They were on the front lines.
Yes. Being killed on the front lines, my father said.
And you?
I’ve told you. Instructional manuals.
You persist in saying that as though it were some kind of despicable work.
It was.
Only to you, because you wished to die alongside your friends. And you felt that you betrayed them because you went right on living. Thus you created a world where at any moment a steam pipe might explode and crush your skull or a malfunctioning bicycle might spear your heart or a roller coaster might collapse and send you plummeting to your death. A dangerous world. And you still wish this dangerous world would harm you, to even things up.
Well, that’s all behind me now.
When’s the last time you rode an elevator?
They weren’t my schoolmates, you know.
Your friends?
Yes.
Where did they go to school?
Well, you know, I went to private school and they went to public school. I was a dry old man and they were boys. Real boys. Boisterous and industrious. Like kids out of a Life photo essay. They were fearless. My job was to dream up the next stunt and watch them execute.
You were separate from them, an outsider.
Jesus, enough.
Only an observation.
Don’t go shrink on me, okay?
So these boys were fearless?
Afraid of nothing, no one, and aware of the world. You know what the real difference is between private and public education in this country? It’s not the money. Public school teaches you how to work the system. Private school teaches you to be the system. It’s no different here than in England or Switzerland, or anywhere. You’ve been inducted into the family of power. Oh hullo, I’m Chas, pleased to meet you. I believe you prepped with my brother. Yes, Choat. Yes, yes, that’s right—Tom Buchanan, he’s my brother. And there you are, next thing you know you’re at a goddamn family picnic on the estate lawn with Daisy and Jordan. Take away all that money and all that power, though, and you’re a goner. You don’t know how to do anything but shake hands and drop names. But a public school kid can get things done when the chips are down. He’s got no family to depend on. His brother Tom probably owes half the guys on the block money. My friends from the neighborhood could walk into a bar seven thousand miles from home and when they walk out, they’ve got a place to stay, they’ve got tickets to the show, girlfriends, everyone wants to follow them to the next bar.
You think schooling was the difference between you and your friends from the neighborhood? Schiff said.
It’s the reason I went into my precious branch of the service and they went into the infantry.
I see, Schiff said.
You know, they were funny, my father said. They made me laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed in my life. At eleven, twelve years old, they understood more than I ever will. Tell me Woody Allen would be funny if he’d grown up wealthy. Tell me he’d be funny if he’d gone to private school.
What the hell private school would have let in a Jew? said Schiff.
All right—tell me anyone who’s funny who’s gone to private school. Nobody, that’s who. You have to know the truth to be funny.
And what’s the truth? said Schiff.
That we’re cannibals, said my father.
That kid—the one who falls down stairs on TV? Good-looking kid. Prep kid. Went to Riverdale.
I don’t know who you’re talking about, my father said.
You know, Woody Allen is only funny to goyim because he confirms your beliefs about us—we’re neurotic, weak, sexually perverse, generally loathsome. But we think he’s funny because he’s really making fun of you morons.
See? Something for everyone.
Dangerfield’s got better range, Schiff said.
You’re a philistine.
I find his act enchanting.
He’s a hack.
I never told you this, but I knew him a little bit, Schiff said. Smart cookie. Dark, thoughtful guy. You’d probably get along great with him.
Terrific. Let’s have lunch.
Chevy Chase, Schiff said. That’s his name.
Yeah. He’s not funny.
You’re more of an Andy Kaufman guy, I suppose.
Nah. Radner. Now, she’s funny, my father said.
That thing she does—those spoof commercials. Jewess Jeans!
You don’t have to be Jewish.
But it helps.
We should take this on the road. They’d love us in Peoria, my father said.
You they’d love. Me they’d nail to a cross.
Why do we always wind up here?
Because you’re paying me to facilitate your delusional views about Jewish comedians, Schiff said.
Sometimes I lose track of who’s delusional, said my father.
You know, that public school kid who walks into a bar walks out with new best friends only about half the time, Schiff said. The other half of the time he winds up getting the shit kicked out of him.
But he’s not afraid to fight. He knows how to take a punch.
Because his father taught him how.
Oh come on. What are we talking about here?
We’re just talking. I have a theory. Want to hear a theory?
Is it going to hurt? said my father.
Of course it’s going to hurt. Now, listen. Americans are obsessed with rene
wal. What’s our number one sales pitch to the downtrodden masses? A fresh start! A shot at reinvention. Adopt a new identity, become someone unrecognizable to the hicks back in the ancestral village. What was the Boston Tea Party? A costume ball. What is politics? A stage play. Actors playing politicians playing gods. That’s why there are so many steps on the Capitol building. A stage high enough for the whole country to see. Everyone’s playing dress-up. We know we’re being told fictions, yet we continue to watch, reacting with outrage when our gods behave like humans. It’s our role to yearn for them to do good deeds, and we’re thrilled when they don’t. You don’t see the French impeaching anyone for spying on the other party. Good god, they’d impeach d’Estaing if they found out he wasn’t spying on the Gaullists. The French have made an art form of complication, and what did our most famous homegrown philosopher say? Simply, simplify.
I hear he kept a radio under his cot.
It’s a fool’s philosophy. You cannot simplify yourself. You are complex, infinitely complex. Like everyone, you contain multitudes, you’re a warehouse of selves, innumerable versions of you. When you talk to me, you’re pretending to be my clever patient. When you’re talking to Sarah, you’re pretending to be a distracted husband who wants to get back to his manuscript. When you were in the Army, you were a file clerk? A copy editor? Come on. And now you’re pretending to be a comedy expert.
And who are you pretending to be?
Your therapist, I guess.
You need to work on your accent.
Lemme write that down.
Keep at it.
What was in the manuals? Schiff said.
Instructions.
That’s time. See you next week.
* * *
His knees quavered and he went down in the narrow channel between the console and the hull wall, his gloved hands vainly groping for purchase. Oh god. The boat flew over the top of another wave and the deck fell out from under him. Feeney hooted with glee from aft, the deck rose back up against my father’s body, and the dark thought materialized that if he could muster the strength to throw himself overboard, he could drown within minutes and it would all be over. He gave up trying to reach for the cutaways where the rods were stored. He was sliding around like a dead fish on the icy deck, getting the hell beat out of him every time the boat crested a wave, driven on by Bo, who was really feeling the weed, hadn’t noticed my father’s predicament until he careened across the deck and came to rest momentarily against his boot. But what could he do? Now they were out on the open water, and Bo wasn’t going to cut power, not in chop like this—you had to beat it back with velocity, that was the only way to conquer rough seas. Every time my father hit the deck, he groaned so loudly that Feeney could hear him over the drone of the engine; he had lost control of his body and had resigned himself to whatever expulsive force chose to visit itself upon him. Then he felt a weight on his back, pinning him to the deck; he managed to twist his head to the side and saw that it was Bo, who had stomped on him as he might have a potato chip bag tumbling around in a backyard twirler.
Hold still or you’re going to bounce overboard, Bo yelled into the wind.
My father moaned. He curled his arms beneath his face and remained secure beneath Bo’s boot until they reached the deep water of the sound, where all those blues were allegedly schooling in the depths. Bo throttled back. The sun was a hard ball of ice just over the horizon.
Bo set the engine to idle and released my father.
Sorry about that, he said. There’s no cure out here for what you’ve got except to grab your sack and pray.
My father barely heard him. He was still facedown, a puddle of water licking at his cheek. His ears were popping.
Let’s do it, Feeney said, planting his foot between my father’s spread legs so that he could reach the rods. You’ll acclimate, Salty. Get yourself up where you can see the horizon. That’ll do ya.
My father groaned and moved one of his fingers to signal his assent.
It was another white day, the sky washed clean of color, with a decent wind whipping across the water. The boat rocked gently as the rollers marched beneath it, a pendulum ticking out a dirge. It rose and fell, and my father rose and fell with it. He felt it with his every cell. Eventually he managed to drag himself into a sitting position—cheers from his boatmates—and lodge his chin on the gunwale while they rigged their lines on the other side.
Punishment comes slow but harsh, my father thought. So much to pay for. He opened his mouth and let forth an eruption of vomit that slid over the gunwale, down the fiberglass hull, and into the water.
9.
Back at the house, beneath a headboard as darkly ornate as a Gothic altar, I was asleep in the enormous bed, a bed so large that my presence barely disturbed the expanse of its surface, enveloped in the cocoon of heat sleeping children spin around themselves, curled beneath a gray wool blanket, heavy, a layer of warm lead; when I moved, it did not move. My small face a pebble on the pillow. I was dreaming that our black-and-white cat, Slade, was creeping along a high beam traversing the span of a barn, and I was below him, my arms extended to catch him should he fall. Dust hung in a wedge of sunlight, cinematic. Slade, who in waking life had never displayed the courage to venture farther than the threshold of the apartment door, was exhibiting unusual daring, and when I suddenly found myself on the beam with him, transported there by dream physics, I took his tail. I knew Slade would lead me to the other side. Instead—horror—he leapt, spreading his limbs like a flying squirrel, and we plummeted before planing out inches above the packed dirt floor, accelerating through the open barn doors, arcing upward in a graceful climb, the green hills flattening out beneath us. Good boy, Slade, good boy!
Over the countryside, over the square hats of high buildings, past dark factory stacks oozing smoke, and down over suburban neighborhoods, each yard a perfect green cube bounded by a high, white wooden fence. Slade set down on the sidewalk in front of a white clapboard house. Tail high, he trotted down the walkway and slipped inside. I chased after him. It was dim inside, a warren of narrow corridors, and off the corridors, small rooms. In one room a boy sat on a bed all alone. The room had been turned inside out—chairs faced the wall, a standing mirror showed off its plywood back. A man entered and began to spank the boy. I ran out. I woke up.
I was not disturbed by what I’d dreamed, but I had no desire to close my eyes and return to that house. I was fully conscious in seconds, that great trick made possible by the porous membrane between a child’s dreaming and waking life, and in that blink of time I became aware of the weight of the blanket pinning me to the bed, and I drew my feet up and propelled myself out through the top of the pocket my body had formed in the covers. I stood straight up on the pillow and surveyed the room, then clapped my legs together and dropped bottom-first onto the pillow like a pile driver, the bed’s ancient timbers shuddering and clacking, before flipping over on my belly for the blind drop to the floor. I was supposed to be quiet. A child up early can have a house to herself if only she is quiet. I lowered myself down a millimeter at a time until my socked feet touched rag rug and I released the mattress.
Though I slept there, I was an interloper on the second floor, where my parents slept in the other guest bedroom, where Jane and Bo slept at the end of a long hall, where the atmosphere was saturated with evaporated sounds, loosened belt buckles and bathroom faucets, the bumping of shoes, hinges, squeaks and thumps and muffled voices, commonplace noises made mysterious by a closed bedroom door. There was a bathroom off the hall, and other doors leading to more bedrooms. I went downstairs, careful to tread lightly on the steps. In the kitchen I felt the cold granite floor through my socks, a wide, living chill radiating upward into my feet, a pleasing contrast to the warmth of the bed. No one was around, but I saw the coffee cups on the counter and knew that adults had been there before me. Bo, my father, and Mr. Feeney had gone fishing. The fireplace was a cold, black square. There were wine bottles and beer bottl
es on the hearth. The room smelled good, like charred logs.
Behind the sofa was a chest of toys, but it contained nothing of interest. Old wooden trucks with strings attached, a few cloth dolls with yellow yarn hair, a set of jacks with a rubber ball that had turned to stone. I’d already been through the desk drawers and the cabinets beneath the bookshelves. The house was like the gymnasium at school, large and empty, concealing nothing. The drawers had nothing in them except pads of paper and pens. It was like a dollhouse, too, in that way, lacking the proper distribution of the detritus that accumulates in places where real people live, and I had rightly deduced that I was to proceed with care. This was not a place for children. My own suitcase of toys was upstairs but didn’t interest me, either.
There was one thing in the living room, a Nutcracker soldier with red gums and white teeth whose head popped off to reveal a hollow interior that emanated a thick purple scent, the dregs of candy, perhaps, though I did not connect the pleasure I took in inhaling the soldier’s empty body to what might have been but what was at that moment there to smell. I felt no need to sift through an imagined past, no need to unearth the source of my pleasure. The possibility of stealing the soldier had not yet formed in my mind but would later that day.
Through a pair of doors with large glass panes there was a sunporch, brilliant with light, and I entered and breathed on the glass and drew faces in the condensation. The world outside was white. The dream was with me still, the parts where I’d flown with Slade over forests and hills, houses with white plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys, and I exhaled again on the glass and drew curves and loops, linked proto-infinity symbols that flowered across the surface until my finger reached the edge of the condensation and, like a skater catching a blade at the edge of the pond, snagged and tripped on the dry glass. I mashed my finger against the cold surface. Parts turned yellow-white and parts turned red, and I flipped it over and looked at my fingerprint, which was flat and white, freeze-pickled. Against my philtrum the flesh was smooth, cold. I stayed at the glass for a while, pressing, touching my finger to my lips. Usually when my mother and I went away, my father stayed home and fed Slade, but because my father was with us this time, my mother said she’d left enough food in the bowl for Slade to eat until he exploded. In my mind I replayed the image of Slade bursting open. I’d been doing it all weekend. His legs would shoot out and his fur would undulate in sharp waves, as if he’d been electrocuted, and then there’d be a cracking sound like a balloon breaking and a ball of smoke and Slade would be gone. It worried me and made me giggle every time I thought about it.
