Riding with the Ghost

by Justin Taylor

  As recently as last summer he was lecturing me on the threat of Trump, on Hillary’s weakness as a candidate, on the horror awaiting the nation. When Trump’s odds were in the single digits all he said was, “Get ready, because it’s coming.” As I sit here today at the campus Starbucks, under gray Indianapolis skies, I realize that he did not once mention politics when we spoke this morning. The inauguration was two days ago, the Women’s March was yesterday (they got six thousand people! in Indianapolis!), and today there are brazen lies spilling out of the White House: Sean Spicer is talking about the size of the crowd in the inauguration photo, Kellyanne Conway just coined the phrase “alternative facts” to the face of a stunned Chuck Todd. This stuff is the bread and butter of his outrage, and a major if bitter vindication: It’s all going like he said it would. It’s the kind of thing we’d normally fume and crow over together for hours. I am sure it all passed across his TV screen (was on his screen with the volume low but not off even as we were talking) but it only occurs to me now that he didn’t bring up any of it. Is it possible he did not understand what he was seeing, or that it registered but quickly passed out of his mind?

  * * *

  —

  I think of Patrimony, Philip Roth’s memoir of his father Herman’s life and grueling final illness. Roth writes of a man who became “utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.”

  And what it was like, as the son, to watch the walls of that pen close in around his father, to be powerless as he saw and heard and felt his father’s terror taking hold.

  * * *

  —

  After Michael bought Dad the apartment—because it was cheaper, in the long run, than renting one for him, to say nothing of what it was costing per week for the hotel room—there arose the issue of reuniting him with his belongings. This must have been late 2013 or early 2014. At least some of “the Stuff,” as he always called it, was really all of ours: family pictures, sets of dishes, my and my sister’s childhood things, book collections, school projects, stuffed animals, whatever else. But most of it was his: boxes and boxes of papers from jobs he held decades ago, ancient tax records, his vinyl collection. In the old days he always had the radio on or the turntable going, belting along as the mood struck, at home or in the car or even in public sometimes, singing half under his breath. After he sold the house and moved into the hotel he stopped listening to music, and was perfectly frank about the fact that he would probably never own another record player. (In fact, he did own a record player, along with stereo receiver and speakers. The same rig he’d had since the ’70s, kept in mint condition all these years, and it still sounded good as new. It was in the storage unit with the rest of the Stuff.) But he didn’t want to listen to the music, had no interest in hearing the grand anthems and love songs of his heyday, all those lyrics he still knew by heart but would no longer sing along with. He had, of course, not so long ago told my sister that the collection was probably worth some money, and suggested she try to sell it. And yet now the idea of parting with the records had become unthinkable to him.

  * * *

  —

  All of the Stuff was in a storage unit in Nashville, and he was in South Florida, and he wanted it all shipped to him. My mother, for her part, was ready to be rid of the storage unit, which she had been paying for, for years. Christ, the way these things have of dragging on, so it feels like time itself has gone gummy, every “issue” a quicksand. Poverty depression indecision. A black hole that neither spits you out nor sucks you in. (By the time this imbroglio resolved itself, the very word “stuff” was effectively soiled; to this day my wife cringes to hear it.)

  Dad hadn’t wanted to leave the Stuff behind in Nashville in the first place. He was quick to point out that we wouldn’t be having this problem now if we’d just listened to him then and brought it with us when we moved him. But this, I reminded him, had been impossible, because at the time the family did not trust him to make the drive alone, and my sister was in law school, so it fell to me to drive with him, and I had been living in New York for so long that I didn’t trust myself to drive a U-Haul with a car hitched to it. Plus (I didn’t mention this to him) it had taken so long to get him to agree to move back to Florida that we were racing to get it done before he could change his mind. Compared to that problem the idea of the Stuff seemed nebulous and abstract. It was just a bunch of old shit in boxes, right? He hadn’t needed it for this long; nobody had needed any of it. We said to each other that once we got him settled in South Florida his sense of imperative would soften, maybe disappear.

  This was a lie we told ourselves. We all knew Dad better than that.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was twenty-three. Growing up, I hated driving. I was scared of it. More than that, I hated taking lessons from Dad, who didn’t trust Mom to give them and yet was so uptight himself that every lesson devolved into a fight. When I quit he was happy to let me. Mom resented his coddling me on this point; she thought it was infantilizing and the fact was that they could have used the help getting my sister to and from school and extracurriculars, instead of having to ferry the both of us wherever we needed to go. My father defended my decision; he protected me, which I appreciated at the time and still appreciate, at least in principle, though in retrospect I’m not sure that he was right to do so, besides which it’s clear now that he was also protecting himself. The truth is that he was scared. As scared as I was and probably even more scared: that I’d hurt myself, that I’d wreck a car he couldn’t afford to replace, that I was growing up so fast.

  I learned to drive in college, through trial and error (no major errors, thank God) while driving a drunk friend home in her own car or doing my share on a road trip. Bit by bit until I could actually do it. The summer before I started grad school, the learner’s permit I had acquired at fifteen years old finally expired. I took the driving test in Tennessee, mostly so I’d have a valid ID in New York City, but over the next decade I never found myself behind the wheel of a car more than once or twice a year.

  * * *

  —

  October 2013: five months after Dad’s suicide attempt at the Nashville airport. I flew to Nashville and he picked me up. He’d parked the car in the garage, and there we were walking through it, like this was a regular day and this was a normal place without any deeply upsetting psychic weight attached to it—and who knows, maybe for him it was. He got me my own room at his hotel, using accrued loyalty points, which had been racking up again since May, as we had tried to convince him to come back to South Florida, while scrambling—and failing—to find a place to put him when he got there.

  Dad would have stayed at the hotel indefinitely, but in September his mother had fallen and broken her hip. Since George was senile and Barbara was his full-time caretaker, they couldn’t live alone while she recovered. They’d been installed at Ronni’s apartment in Plantation, Florida. Ronni used her spare bedroom as an office, and was now sleeping on its fold-out couch so that George and Barbara could have the big bed and their own bathroom.

  We seized on this development and used it like a battering ram to break down Dad’s resistance to relocation, which, insanely, he was still trying to cling to even after everything that had happened. I don’t know if he thought Michael would just keep paying for him to live at the Nashville hotel forever, or if he’d planned to ride it out as long as he could and then try to kill himself again. I don’t know what he thought. But once we had my grandparents at Ronni’s, we were able to insist that Dad take their empty apartment while his long-term arrangements were being worked out. We figured—correctly—that if we could just get him down to South Florida he’d stay put, and we got him to agree to come by telling him that Ronni and his parents would need his help. As ever, the only way to get him to do something self-preserving was
to convince him it was actually in the service of somebody else’s need. The only problem with this plan was that it hadn’t left us enough time to deal with the Stuff.

  Now I was spending the night at the extended-stay hotel that had been my father’s pseudo-home for most of the last three years. I wish I could say that the experience was profound or revelatory, but it wasn’t. The hotel was anonymous and without character, which is the whole point of hotels like that. It felt like falling asleep inside a piece of clip art. We left Nashville early the next morning, the Nissan packed tight with clothing and a few boxes of I-don’t-even-know-what. Whatever he’d deemed too precious to be left behind.

  * * *

  —

  I was supposed to be helping him with the driving but he hardly let me behind the wheel. In those days, the tremors in his arms still went away when there was a task at hand. The engagement of his mind and body overrode whatever was misfiring inside him, and so the network of processes required to operate a car focused and soothed him. Also (he didn’t say this, but I knew it) in his mind I was still sixteen years old and didn’t know how to drive. The trip was going to be hard enough already without us having to wage a war over that, so I let it pass. He didn’t seem to be a danger to himself or the other cars on the road. I did not feel unsafe riding shotgun, fussing with the A/C and the music while he cruised along, the hours chewing through the miles.

  * * *

  —

  Dad always had unfathomable stamina and discipline. When I was three years old, and he was thirty-three, he decided that he needed to get in shape. He got up one day at five-thirty in the morning and went for a run. To his dismay, he could hardly make it through two ten-minute miles. He got up the next day and went again. He kept a log of his daily distances and times. Within a year he was averaging five miles per day at six minutes per mile. To build core strength he did a hundred sit-ups every night, using the living-room couch as a prop for his legs. He did this routine at home and on vacation, seven days a week, no matter what the weather was or how he felt or what else was going on. When he was forced to miss a day, the morning after we were all in a car accident and I was in the ICU, he started his count over again, and after that didn’t miss another day for twenty-eight years—that is, until his suicide attempt. A few days later, he started running again, and continued to run, even as his body deteriorated, until he was staggering down the street in Sunrise Lakes, wearing hideous green runners’ short-shorts and his “Coach” T-shirt from the years he volunteered at the Special Olympics. By the time he finally gave it up, in the summer of 2016, I was older than he had been when he’d started.

  * * *

  —

  On our road trip we only ever stopped when I got hungry or asked for a bathroom. He hardly seemed to have needs of his own. It’s twelve or thirteen hours from Nashville to Plantation. Technically doable in a day but we decided to stop for the night in Gainesville, where he and I and my sister all went to college. This way, we reasoned, we’d arrive around lunchtime the next day instead of in the middle of the night.

  We stayed at some place by the highway that took his hotel points. (He would have points for years to come: his single major asset. When I got married—a courthouse wedding, Portland, Oregon, July 20, 2015, he was too sick to travel: Melanie skyped him in, his frail and deeply drawn face bright on the phone screen, sitting in his bedroom, at the desk that I helped him build when he first moved and that he’d later bruise his head on when he fell and got stuck between it and the bed, wearing a shirt and tie that surely dated to his stockbroker days, crying and smiling—he gave us a few nights at a hotel in Seattle for our honeymoon. When we checked in the concierge thanked “Mr. Taylor” for being such a loyal customer, and gave us an upgraded room. We called Dad from the executive suite and thanked him for our gift. We told him it was a hell of a view from up there.)

  Dad offered to let me take the car if I wanted to go see the old stomping grounds. Maybe it was me and not him who was hallucinating that I was sixteen again. Maybe, I thought, I don’t give him as much credit as he deserves. But I couldn’t bring myself to take him up on the offer. I wasn’t sure who lived in Gainesville anymore, or—if I did find someone to meet up with—what I’d say when they asked what I was doing in town.

  Thanks but no thanks, I told him. He shrugged.

  We ate an early-bird dinner at, I think, a Cracker Barrel. We went back to the room, a shared room this time, and watched Shark Tank, a reality show about wannabe entrepreneurs. He had very detailed thoughts about the show, about this particular episode (which it turned out he’d seen before), and about entrepreneurship in general. We were asleep by eight o’clock, up the next morning before six. Hotel breakfast and on the road again.

  * * *

  —

  What did Dad and I talk about on our drive? In the hotel room? At breakfast? At dinner? I know we filled the days but so much of the content of what we said has slipped away. He told me about his first days in the brokerage business, how the company that gave him his first job (Bache, I think, though I may be wrong) sent him to New York to train for a few weeks. How he’d never lived in the actual city before, and how there was another new recruit there, a guy from Kentucky, with the heavy accent and everything, who hated the noise and grit and chaos of the place, was terrified of being mugged. How Dad had taken him out on the town—I had to practically force him to leave the hotel at first, but he got the hang of things eventually—because he thought it would have been a shame for this guy to go all the way back to Kentucky without having ridden the subway or walked through Chinatown.

  He talked a lot about his childhood: his parents’ lack of interest in their children, and a sixth-grade teacher who had told him he could do anything, be anything. He remembered her as the first adult who ever gave him strong, unqualified encouragement. Who told him that he had promise, and had seemed to genuinely appreciate him as a person. There had only been a handful of adults in his life who said things like that to him, and she was the first. He still remembered her name and the names of all the other students in that class and what the classroom itself had looked and smelled like. He told me all these things. I wish I had written them down so that I could share them here, so that I could honor that woman’s name.

  He said he hoped that some of my students might talk about me like that someday.

  At one point he told me the story—blow by blow—of an entire season of Little League he coached, a team I must have been on, eight or nine years old, and how he took on the whole Optimist Club over an unfairly umped game, how he knew the whole rule book and lodged a formal protest, demanded and then got a hearing, during the course of which he exposed some kind of self-dealing that had been fucking up the whole league for years (or was the corruption thing related to the peewee basketball league? because I heard that story too) and he was eventually vindicated, though in the course of the crusade he made a lot of enemies. He didn’t quite register that last part, but I did, as well as the fact that the men he’d gone up against were mostly other neighborhood dads. People with whom he might have done business, people in whose homes his own children played.

  * * *

  —

  On the last stretch of the second day he finally let me get behind the wheel. It was just enough so that when I told people about my trip I could honestly say I helped my father make the drive to Florida, rather than that I kept him company while he drove me there, though this was in essence what happened. We were getting close to my aunt’s apartment. Twenty minutes, fifteen, ten, off the highway now, wending our way through the sunbaked streets of Plantation. The road we were on teed off at a canal. I stopped at the Stop sign, turned to him, and deadpanned: “It’s not too late. We could still drive into the canal instead.” He laughed harder than I’d heard him laugh in months, if not years. I laughed also, a shared rib-splitting crack-up, the both of us.

  In t
he parking lot at my aunt’s development we stood by the car and embraced like we were saying goodbye to each other. He thanked me and said the drive was the best thing that had happened to him in a long, long time. I told him I loved him and he told me he loved me too.

  We went inside to face the family.

  * * *

  —

  Depression is a failure of narrative. One effect of trauma is the collapse of the concept of time as distance. Trauma is not just what happened but the fact that you are no farther from it today than yesterday, or tomorrow. In the night terror of the present tense, foresight becomes a form of déjà vu.

  * * *

  —

  Ronni: “We talked about it when we were older, how bad it was in the house and how we wanted to do better with our own kids. But he never got over it. I used to say to him, ‘Whatever it was, it’s over now. It’s done with. You’ve got to move on.’ But he really couldn’t.”

  * * *

  —

  When Dad was suicidally depressed we all did whatever we could to convince him there were things to live for. We tried to tell him he was wrong. But that was 2013, and now, four years later, when he speaks about his pain, his exhaustion, the moment-to-moment horror and indignity of his existence—all of which have worsened and are worsening—I sometimes think suicide might be a sane response, a mercy. I never say this to him. But I know he thinks about it, probably constantly. “Every third thought shall be my grave,” Prospero says at the end of The Tempest. This must be how my father’s mind moves. It is how mine moves now, only the grave-thought isn’t mine but his, or rather, it is him. His life, his death. It’s all pretty much the same to me at this point: illness I cannot cure, pain I cannot know, poverty I can hardly help relieve. The wound—the wound of his suffering, as it has been inflicted on me—will be my scar one day or it is already; or it will never scar, will stay a wound. He is in his apartment right now thinking about doing it, the quickest and surest way, the tidiest way. I admit that I’m surprised when he says that he’s afraid of the pain. Physical pain never bothered him much, and anyway these days his whole life is pain. When he told me the story of falling by the desk and getting stuck, his fear of starving to death and how long it would take, I barely caught myself, barely cut myself off before offering that I’ve heard drowning is fairly painless, that there’s a canal running along the perimeter of his development, just like the one we joked about driving into. I wonder what it would take to get me to say this to him. I’d like to think that nothing could, but I’m sure that isn’t true. I am weak, selfish, angry, and, in my own way, exhausted. I have a hate for him that is hardly distinct from my love. But it would be pointless, this suggestion, because I’m sure he has already thought of it, is thinking of it now, and has held off for his own reasons, whatever they are, and I am trying, trying to be grateful, through all this darkness to be grateful for every hour, every strained conversation, every breakdown, the whole cycle, every awful day he is still here.