Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

by M L Rudolph

  “I never expected to see you over here,” Karl said.

  “Is that why you came here?”

  Karl stood up and shoved at the closed door. “I know this is hard for you to imagine, but my coming here had nothing to do with you. This is something I wanted to do. I’m doing something important with my life.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m proud of you.”

  Karl went quiet. He didn’t want his father’s approval. Somehow everything his father said made him feel like a little boy. He didn’t drill wells in the desert to get a pat on the head from his father.

  “I wish that guy would quit snoring,” he said, transferring his frustration.

  “What did you mean when you said you’re doing the right thing?” Matt said, nearly drowned out by a Teutonic snort.

  “I said that out loud?”

  “I talk to myself in the mirror sometimes, too.”

  Karl bristled at the comparison. “I am not you,” he blurted. “I don’t know why you have to think everything revolves around you.”

  “I don’t,” Matt said.

  “Then why do you have to always compare me to you?”

  “Always? We haven’t spoken in years, Karl. And anyway, you’re not me. Okay? I get that.”

  “Could fool me.”

  “You couldn’t be more different than me. I would never do what you’re doing. You’re your own person. Done. Over. I get it.”

  “You say you get it but you don’t.”

  “What’s not to get? You’re on your own. You work on a huge project in the African scrub. I’m only visiting. It’s your life. I get all of that.”

  “You never got it. I spent years trying to tell you but you never got it. I wrote all those stupid letters that you never answered. All that immature angst. It was always all about you. Trying to make me in your image, one of your players, an X on your charts. With your training schedules, your disciplines—your ‘my son has to be better than everyone else.’ You remember that? I had to be better than everyone, even better than you. I swear, when it’s my turn, I’ll never make the same mistakes with my kids.”

  “You know,” Matt said, after Karl settled down. “Grandpa annoyed the hell out of me when I was growing up.”

  Karl snorted in the dark. Dropped his head. Here he goes again. Relating everything back to himself.

  “Every night at the dinner table, Grandpa made me and Uncle Luke tell him one thing that we did that day we were proud of. Before we got to eat, we had to stand up and tell him and Grandma a story and give our reason. I always hated that.”

  “Spare me,” Karl said. “I know the story.”

  “It was an intrusion. He didn’t need to know everything.”

  “Really, Dad. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “And if I didn’t have something….”

  “You made stuff up. I’ve heard all this before. Please, don’t come here and act like everything’s the same, and worse, get drunk and repeat yourself like an old man with no memory.”

  Matt dropped the story. Silence settled. Each man isolated and alone.

  Karl was stuck in this room with his father starting to tell yet another of his long Aesopian stories meant to have a message. Treating Karl like a boy in need of paternal guidance. Another era, Karl thought. Nothing to do with me.

  “I’ll never forget when you were about six months old.” Matt reloaded. “I sat next to your crib and watched you sleep.”

  Matt paused, then not getting any response from Karl, continued.

  “I felt this overwhelming need to fast forward, see you sit up and talk to me. It seemed too cruel to have to wait for you to grow up. I wanted to know you so badly. You’ve seen those time lapse tapes. I wanted to watch you blossom before my eyes into a man. I breathed in your sweet baby smell, willing you to hurry up.” Unseen in the dark, Matt glowed with the magical mystery of new fatherhood. “But.” He coughed and reached for the water.

  “But what?” Karl said, perturbed, still hunched at the end of the bed.

  “But you know you can’t fast forward. You take it one glorious minute at a time. And now I’m afraid I don’t know you any better than I did when you were asleep in that crib. Somehow you got away from me, Karl. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  Karl muttered a response. Not sure how to answer.

  “I swore I’d never treat you the way my dad treated me. I wouldn’t make you tell me everything you did. I’d give you space to grow up, and that’s what I tried to do. Step back. Let you explore and learn for yourself. I’d listen, but not tell.”

  “That’s a good one.” Karl laughed through his nose. “You really think you’re a listener?”

  “But nothing ever turns out like you expect. I swore not to make the same mistakes my dad made with me. But all I ended up doing was making different mistakes. I should have been there more. I should have tuned into you better.”

  “I grew up fine.”

  “I know you did. That’s not what I mean. I just wish we had a better relationship.”

  A profound stillness pressed into the room. Even the gasping action beyond the door fell quiet. A minute or more passed this way.

  “There was a time when I needed you,” Karl said, breaking the silence. “Needed your approvals. That was all I thought about. But you weren’t there. I had to learn how to get along without you. It might have been nice to have you in my face once in a while. But that’s not the way it was.”

  Matt didn’t respond.

  “And here we are,” Karl said. “I worked things out for me. You worked things out for you.”

  The German sucked in a grotesque quantity of air and resumed snoring.

  “Did you eat?” Karl said, moving on.

  Matt grimaced in the dark. “Don’t talk about food. I can’t chase the taste of those damn peanuts.” He reached for the bottle.

  Karl listened to Matt finish the last of the water, then thought to dial room service but recalled the sound of the phone plug popping out of the wall.

  “We can call for more water from the other room. You want to tell them to let us out?”

  Matt moaned and scooted to the edge of the bed to sit beside his son. He paused, head in hands to let a wave of vertigo pass.

  “Let’s do it then. You probably need to get back.”

  “I should.”

  They sat so close Matt felt the warmth of his son’s body, detected the scent of the Sahel in the fabric of his clothes.

  Matt took out his passport pouch and removed Melanie’s letter. He handed Karl the envelope. “She wanted me to give you this. This is your mother’s last wish.”

  Matt slowly got up to call for Jean-Louis, but he changed his mind.

  “If you would, Karl, please turn on the light and read it. Believe it or not, I carried it all this way and didn’t succumb to the temptation to read it. It was meant for you, so please. I’ll wait. That’s how she would have liked it.”

  April 17, 1979

  My very dear Karl,

  I whispered my first words to you in a hospital room a lot like this one. I don’t suppose you remember. We hadn’t even named you yet so I didn’t know what to call you. I just said, You’re beautiful. You’ve heard me tell you this before. But it just came back to me when I finally got the pen to write you. I’m looking around at the inside of this hospital room and from what I remember not a lot has changed in the past twenty-three years. Still the same uncomfortable bed. The same shiny linoleum floor. The same table that slides over the top of your bed so you can eat sitting up. Seems like a blink of an eye when you look back in time. I bet you’re still beautiful. Handsome now. Rugged and manly. I can almost picture you standing next to me.

  I wanted to write you this letter, because it’s been so hard to find you. I wrote to the Peace Corps in Washington DC, to IU, and called your teacher Mrs. Adams even, thought you might have kept in touch with her. You always seemed to like her. But nobody knows where you are. Or if they kno
w they’re not telling. We’ll eventually track you down, but—I promise not to be maudlin—it might take longer than I have. So I write you this letter, because there’s a few things I want you to hear from me direct.

  You probably know about the lung cancer. (That’s a mouthful, I tell you.) Last thing I thought would ever happen to me. I was such a clean smoker. And I quit so long ago. My only symptom was a loss of appetite and a little more fatigue than usual. You’d think I would have been coughing up blood or something, but I never did anything like that. That’s probably why it took me so long to accept Dr. Lake’s diagnosis. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t even go on chemotherapy right away cause I thought she was wrong. I made her send me to another doctor, get more tests, before I could accept it.

  But now I’m here. I’m on the chemo, even did a little radiation, though I can’t say I understand what it’s all supposed to do to those little cells they tell me are growing inside my lung tissue. Even with the treatment it didn’t stop the cancer from spreading to my bones. They told me there’s nothing more they can do.

  Hospitals are only happy places when you’re in the maternity ward. If the cancer won’t kill you round here, the food surely will. That’s no joke. You’d think they’d serve healthy food in a hospital but it’s got enough salt and fat and sugar to give everyone in here heart disease. All you got to do is look at the nurses. Never seen so many big butts in one place since we visited that dairy farm on your third grade field trip. But I’m being catty.

  Now look at this. I’ve taken up half my space and only talked about me. But I had to tell you what happened. Wanted you to hear it from me so no one could ever tell you the cancer beat me down. I’m still the same old person. Your loving mama. And if you were here I’d give you a big hug and tell you so. Imagine that for me will you? Cause I’m imagining you standing right here with me. Or maybe it’d be more exciting to imagine me standing over there with you.

  What’s it like over there? It all seems so mysterious and exotic. You must have really taken to it. Did you meet any nice girls there? What do you do for fun? Where would you take me out to eat if I just showed up and said I was hungry? Do you have good restaurants?

  Best I can picture it you’re not in a big city. You’re somewhere out in the countryside. With the rural folk. From the pictures I see in magazines, it must be pretty poor where you are.

  I read an article in the Sunday paper about the Peace Corps. They said you lived out in the villages, in simple homes, kind of like dormitories, a bunch of you together. And you do things like teach math—you’d be good at that—and health and sanitation. They say you also organize small businesses for town folks and help them improve their farming, teach them how to get more food from the land. I’m so proud you have chosen that kind of job, Karl. Makes me think of Albert Schweitzer. Though I know you’re not a doctor, I’m sure what you’re doing is just as valuable. Helping so many people. And to think I held you in my hands in a room like this one. I must have done something right for you to turn out so magnificent.

  Okay, then. I’ve rambled quite enough. It’s not easy to write a letter to someone you haven’t spoken to in more than three years. Is that how long it’s been? I always knew you’d come back with lots of stories to tell. You’ll have to tell me in heaven. Or maybe I can peek down on you when you don’t know I’m looking and see what you’re up to. I’ve daydreamed about running into you on the street one day. Or about you ringing the doorbell and saying SURPRISE! and giving me one of those carved African masks. You’d tell me how you found it in some out of the way place in the desert or bought it in a dark corner in some market. You’d hang it on my wall. Tell me it would help you watch over me.

  I miss you so very much, Karl. I know you have your reasons. But I do miss you. And though I know we’ve all had our differences, your father misses you, too. I want you to know how good he’s been since my illness. As tough as he is on the outside, he can be pretty soft on the inside. He’s taken care of the house, took me to every doctor visit. Sat with me when it all seemed too much. I’ve had friends and neighbors stay in touch—the Perry’s, of course, and the Simon’s, the Baumgartner’s. They’ve been great. But if it wasn’t for Dad, I don’t think I could have made it. He slept over on the living room sofa when it got too much to bear. He’s been my rock. Since I got the news he’s been with me ever since.

  I’m going to ask him to hand deliver this letter and he’s going to say no. I know it. But after he thinks about it, and after I ask him again, I bet you’ll be reading this with him not too far from you. (Considering we can’t mail it without your address.) So give him that hug for me, will you. Imagine I’m squashed right between you two. And think of me. That’s what I’m thinking of right now. All three of us are together and we’re doing something simple like drinking a Coke. At that counter where you got the extra squirt of cherry syrup when you were little. Going for a walk and telling stories. You’re telling us all about your graduation ceremony from IU. About the Peace Corps—where were you? The Ivory Coast? Mali? (I had to look them up in the atlas.)

  I love you, Karl. You are my gift to the world. Because of you I made the world a richer place. You’re in my thoughts every single day.

  Always remember how much I love you,

  Mom

  Chapter 44

  Karl read the letter twice then sat back in the bedside chair and shut his eyes. His hard won independence from his mother and father just dissolved into a messy pool of memories. He didn’t shed a tear, but he very nearly lost his composure on the second reading when he imagined his mother scribbling out this note, knowing what she knew, surrounded as she was with the signs of her impending death.

  His earliest memories of her flashed before him. He literally looked up to everything she did, thought she was the prettiest of all the mothers in the neighborhood, admired the sound of her laugh when she took the phone and had such fun talking to someone on the other end, or when she tossed around the football with him in the back yard even though she could barely get a grip on the ball.

  But that was when he was too young to think for himself. Eventually he had to survive an accelerated maturity toward a hard won emotional independence from his father. It still hurt to remember the day he realized he wasn’t the center of his universe.

  “I was eleven.”

  “What?” Matt had waited quietly for Karl to finish reading.

  “The day my science teacher introduced the concept of infinity.”

  “I remember that. You couldn’t sleep. We sat up looking at the stars.”

  “She drew a cloud-like figure on the blackboard with arrows pointing out in all directions. Just for something to think about, she said.

  “Yeah, right. That night that’s all I could do. Think about it. Even after you took me back to bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about limitless space. I was bothered by it. I mean, the idea of infinity really made me worry about dying. Death was inevitable. I accepted that. But I couldn’t get my mind around the contradiction. That time stretched so far backward and so far forward that my own puny flash-in-the-pan lifetime didn’t really matter.

  “How could that be true? How could it be that I would die, that everyone would die? My room would disappear. My house. My school. The whole neighborhood. Just pffft. Gone. Like it never existed. But this universe thing, it would expand forever. I felt worthless. I mean what was the point of anything?”

  Matt listened. He was being invited into his son’s private thoughts. Karl was opening up to him. They were on their way toward a real relationship again: father and son.

  The snoring German pierced the intimacy of the moment with a snort from the other side of the door.

  “My thoughts carried me to an overwhelmingly disturbing place of powerlessness and insignificance. Mortality: I would die. Okay, I accepted that. But infinity: The universe would go on without end? A universe that grew forever and a life that was certain to end. The combination petrified me. Why couldn’t
things just stay as they were? I needed help to make sense of it all.”

  “I remember. We looked up at the stars. Tried to define words like forever and eternity.”

  Karl paused. He coughed like he had in the truck when he was preparing to say something unpleasant. “Do you remember what you did the next morning?”

  Matt didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say.

  “The next morning you woke me up. I hadn’t slept for more than an hour or two and I was exhausted. You sat on the edge of my bed, just like that.” He motioned to the way his dad was sitting now. “I was so tired. I still felt pretty gloomy. You were real serious when you told me.”

  Matt froze.

  “You gave my eleven year old brain a new concept to deal with: divorce. You said you were going to leave home and live with someone else. After that I didn’t hear another word. I watched your lips move and remember pulling the covers over my head. The sound of my world collapsing drowned out everything else you said.”

  “But we worked it out….”

  “So here’s how my thoughts went that night up until you said you were leaving: The universe is infinite in all directions. I’m a speck of dust in the middle of nowhere and anyway I’m gonna die. Nothing I do is really going to matter. My dad’s going away forever.”

  “It wasn’t forever.”

  “Don’t. I don’t want an explanation. Or a justification. Or an excuse. Or even an apology. Like we said, we each found our own way. Let’s just start from there.”

  June 3, 1979

  Ouagadougou, Upper Volta

  Dad,

  Hope you’re finding your way around Abidjan without any troubles this time. And I hope someday you’ll feel like giving Africa another chance.