Soon, he required a deeper transformation. One hot July afternoon, he arrived home shirtless with a dozen, rusted fishing lures arrayed across his chest like military medals, dark traces of blood still dripping. On that day, though my mother and sister and I dared not speak of it, we knew he had crossed a great divide.
In the following weeks, my father became a true wanderer and disappeared for extended periods, sometimes overnight, more than once for several days in a row. Rumors would reach us that he'd been seen chasing golf balls into water traps down at the country club or that he'd fitted out a small rowboat and was quietly sculling about Silver Lake in the middle of the night, gazing in hopeful reverie across the still, dark water. My heart ached for him. I wanted him to come back whole and fulfilled, having accomplished his miracle and made his peace. I wanted him to know me, to take a heart, and possibly even helpful interest in my early teenage life, which had its own troubles. These hopes never completely died, but they sometimes flickered. I could turn gloomy and entertain the possibility that, as some had suggested, he had become a bum and was now wandering around aimlessly. This was, of course, unbearable to me.
Shortly after daybreak, one Saturday late in my enchanted, anarchic fourteenth summer, a bemused female police officer brought my father home on a gardener's complaint that he'd laid his weary head for the night among the pine needles in Horace Greeley Park. The officer explained that his crime included disturbing a mound of cedar chips.
My father stood, shirtless, on the front porch, the skin of his small, bony chest weathered to pink leather. He wore his white, muslin loin garment with the loose end tossed over his left shoulder, imitating the popular image of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He stifled a giggle in his clenched fist. His hair was still full but he'd been shrinking for some time and now stood just my height.
The patient police officer didn't bother with a trespassing citation but she flexed her big arms showily and told my mother she must control my father's movements in the future. My mother agreed listlessly, like a dog owner paying lip service to a leash law she knew she could not follow.
Once the cop had left, my mother took my father's head in her large, strong hands and kissed him with a great “smork” between the eyes. She then held him at arm's length and sighed mightily. “Oh, Bill. Bill. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill,” she said.
He gazed upward and beat his eyelids like an enraptured saint.
* * * *
Well after midnight, when our streets were quiet, I heard bumping downstairs that sounded like a giant cat batting around a giant catnip mouse. I pulled on my robe and slippers and padded down the front staircase.
My father had shoved all the living room furniture into one corner, even the rug. Wearing just his white loincloth, he sat in the middle of the bare wood floor, atop a small red cushion, eyes closed, face composed in a mask of serenity.
I approached him quietly on hands and knees. I could never get close enough to my father to satisfy myself but I could move closer and that's exactly what I did. Closer. And closer. I smelled him: wood smoke and perfumed soap. I almost tasted him—he would have been salty and sour. His beard area looked like yellow sandpaper.
I crazily pretended that I would be able to grasp him and embrace him and join with him in the other world. We had our special rules, our special places. Didn't he remember? Couldn't we go back to our time of miracles? I was drunk on the sensual possibility.
Then, my father modestly cleared his throat. His eyes flickered open. “We'd better not do that,” he said.
"But Dad..."
His hand approached as though he were about to tousle my hair. Instead, his fingers settled into the hollow of my collarbone. I believed that God regularly touched my father, and, through my father's hand, God was now touching me.
He withdrew his hand and gave me a head twitch which was an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. I waited for some sign of his approval or love. His eyes closed. His breath slowed. His attention was fixed firmly in the other world.
He had no use for me. I was rejected. My panic was total. I ran up the stairs and threw myself on my bed. My tears flowed.
* * * *
In the following weeks, my father adopted new, catlike patterns that enabled him to move about the house undetected and even leave the neighborhood with no sound or trace. No one knew for sure if he really could melt through walls, if he had trapdoors and secret passages, or if he had simply become much lighter and less material.
My heart would leap when I caught sight of him. Sorrow would sweep over me when I tried to bring him into focus and, instead, found myself straining to see what was no longer there. He had become a magical creature, a floating adornment, like a jeweled pendant twisting in the sun, occasionally flashing intense light in a great tease.
In August, this serene period ended tragically. The fault was mine. Unlike my mother, who now communicated with him mostly through small notes stuck by magnets to the refrigerator, I, at the threshold of adult strength, was growing daily more determined to confront my father face-to-face and even “man-to-man.” I hoped we could talk out our interpersonal issues the way I imagined other fathers and sons did, quarrel, no doubt, probably stomp and snarl at one another, renegotiate our way of being together and then affirm our everlasting respect and love for one another.
With these hopes in mind, I searched him out. He was meditating in the backyard, eyes closed and upturned, legs folded so the soles of his bare feet faced the sky, hands pressed together before his chest in the cosmic mudra.
As I approached, he reached inside his garment and withdrew a small card. On the card he had written, “We bear a sacred burden which we can allude to but must not speak of.” My anger surged. “Sacred burden!” Outrageous! Not helpful at all.
I brushed his forearm with the tips of my fingers. He waved me aside. The sharp gesture of his arm was exaggerated, deliberately overdone, I later concluded, to mean exactly the opposite of what it appeared to on the surface. Yes, he was pushing me away from himself in the physical world. He was widening the eternal, unbridgeable gap between us. But it was not rejection he meant for me. No, he wished fervently for my spiritual liberation, my freestanding independence as a conscious entity. He waved me aside with that superficially harsh gesture precisely because he wanted to clutch me to his bosom.
That's when I poked him in the ribs.
I hadn't meant to hit my father hard, much less knock him down. I had intended more a love-shove than a punch, my driving force more exasperation than anything hostile. Unfortunately, I sent him sprawling like a floppy-limbed puppy.
He got up slowly, his head hanging, his eyes sweeping up and down my body. His cramped, wounded frown achieved his aim, told me I had transgressed the ultimate boundary of decency.
I was shamed. I couldn't apologize, though. At the time, I could not swallow that much pride. I skulked away to my room to brood.
* * * *
On a ridge top above a dairy farm, my father pedaled off the paved road onto dirt. He lunged valiantly at his bike pedals and raised a rooster tail of yellow dust. I strained on my own bike to keep him in view. As his road became rougher, he pedaled faster. A mile or so in, he veered, dropped his bike into a thicket of yellow grass, and disappeared on foot down the steep hillside. I followed his sounds of rustling grass and cracking twigs.
I spied him perched lotus-style atop a grassy hummock with a great view of a tree-lined valley. His eyes were closed. His upraised hands were pressed together before his breastbone in a classic pose of veneration, his cheeks tensed into a faint smile.
Clouds parted and a magnificent curtain of sunlight draped him. He floated a few inches into the air, lifted gently by the mysterious magic of his personal force field. His eyes opened wide. He stood up. His arms spread to the sides and for an unbearable, anxious moment I feared he was about to step off the cliff, spread his “wings” and attempt to follow the red-tailed hawk spiraling in the valley beneath us.
Instead, the hawk came to him, alighting on a bare branch not twenty feet away. The hawk was missing several tail feathers. I couldn't be sure, but he might have been missing a toe. My father considered the hawk. The hawk looked back, cocked its head first to one side then the other, showed off his powerful beak. My father did pretty much the same thing.
They had a lot in common, these two old birds, neither one part of any flock, both bearing permanent wounds. Both still strong and capable of sustained flight.
When the old hawk finally labored into the air, my father's hands rose after it, making a nest shape with his upraised fingers, suggesting his boundless love.
If I had known then that my father was about to vanish from our lives, I might have found the courage to present myself forcefully. I could have walked right up to him and demanded that he acknowledge me as a struggling boy who needed an ordinary father's attention and love. I could have, probably should have, apologized for slugging him. But I had no heart for intruding. I snuck off to my bicycle and rode home. I never saw my father again.
* * * *
Had my father achieved his dream of teleportation and carried himself to another planet? Had he moved into one of the other dimensions he was so sure he would find if only he could sufficiently loosen his grip on this one? Was he battling dangerous demons from the far reaches of other galaxies, using thought-control to protect humankind and “The Future"? I preferred to believe he was doing all this and more. Sometimes, at the corner of my eye, I would see a flash of orange among the clouds and for me that would be him. My father had joined the sun, taken up his role in maintaining the forward movement of time, become a vital part of the firmament.
Despite our sadness, my mother and sister and I welcomed the tranquility his absence brought. We closed and returned to their shelves the books he had left open and half-read a year before. My mother locked the studio door and put our father's shaving brush and cup away in a cabinet. One late summer afternoon, I lay on the grass in the backyard and searched the clouds for messages from the gods but saw none. Later, I lined up my father's shoes and slippers on the floor of his closet. They remained in perfect rows from that day on.
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The Magician's Umbrella by Dicky Murphy
Because he was a magician, people thought he was always doing tricks. But he was much more than a magician (a Lionel train enthusiast, for instance) and so he was not, in fact, always doing tricks. Sometimes he had trouble communicating this. It was hardest on dates, especially when the lady had been selected from the previous night's audience, as was the case with tonight's date.
It bothered him when a date mistook quotidian acts for magic. For one, it made him look like less of a magician. If lighting a cigarette was one of his tricks, then he didn't deserve to call himself a purveyor of magic, no less a prestidigitator par excellence. And furthermore, if the girl saw a trick in everything he did, then soon she would tire of his magic. And then she might miss the finale.
The finale that night was “The Magician's Umbrella.” The trick was said to originate somewhere along the Dalmation coast in the early seventeenth century. Stories said it wasn't even a trick, rather a rain dance gone bad. Those stories were, of course, apocryphal, as Dalmations never danced, least of all for rain.
Debatable origins aside, one thing was clear: The Magician's Umbrella was the hardest trick in the entire world of magic. Only two living magicians had mastered it: one was serving time in Lima, Peru. The other was on a date with a lady from last night's audience.
If you'd been on that street that night, you might have noticed that the air suddenly stopped like a cheating husband, caught. You might have noticed that the clouds rushed in from the north, south, east, and west, as if drawn by a magnet. If you were on that street, at least one thing's for sure; you'd have gotten wet. Very wet, very quickly.
But not if you were on a date with the magician.
The rain was really ninety-nine percent of the trick, the umbrella just a flourish. But by that point in the evening she'd already applauded his catching of a cab and the pulling out of her chair and even the taking off of her jacket. She giggled when he made wine come out of a bottle and gasped when, from his wallet, he pulled a gold American Express. This late in the date, the young lady was just out of astonishment.
Which is why she didn't bat an eyelash. Not for the umbrella, not even for the rain.
And that's why she never saw the magician again.
She later told friends he simply disappeared, but of course that was just an illusion. At least he left cab fare and tip in her pocket.
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Leave the Dead to the Living by Alissa Nutting
My friend who works at the funeral home occasionally smokes the hair of the embalmed dead. The smell does not bother him; he is used to horrible smells. He claims that after a few minutes of inhaling, moments from the corpses’ lives flood his head like a movie. Except he won't smoke the locks of children. “I did that once,” he tells me, “and I watched a dog die over and over for two days."
"What happens if you smoke the hair of the living?” I'm a little intoxicated. I like this friend romantically, and I wonder if rather than having to tell him, he could just smoke my bangs and figure it out.
"I don't know,” he shrugs. “Maybe then I'm just breathing burnt hair. Or maybe then I'd steal their memories and they'd never get them back."
Memory theft currently seems like a pleasant concept to me, because I've just been through a horrible breakup. As the relationship dragged itself out, I often called my friend late at night while he was at work. Between tokes of hair he gave me really great advice.
The next day I decide to go to the salon and get the past fourteen months of hair chopped off. “I want the hair back,” I say, holding up a Ziploc baggie that I brought. Since I know I'll feel a little creepy requesting this, I go to Save-N-Snip where there is a large hand-drawn sign near the register that says IF WE FIND LICE WE CANNOT CUT YOU; the wording is sinister and when I leave with my hair bagged I don't feel like the oddest animal they've ever seen.
At home I worry that maybe strands of other peoples’ hair got swept up with mine. Who knows what memories of other people he could accidentally smoke and attribute to me? There are some wild people out there. To be safe, I go through the baggie and take out anything even remotely straight. I am miles of curls.
* * * *
The next night when I show up at the morgue with my bag of hair and a lighter, my friend is somewhat skeptical.
"What if I take the wrong memories?” he asks. “What if I smoke this and then you don't even remember your name?"
"I don't think so,” I say. “You'd need toddler hair for that. This hair is just memories I can stand to lose."
For a moment I ponder tricking him and pretending not to know anything right after he begins to smoke. I imagine asking Where am I? then grabbing his thigh with confused doe eyes.
Suddenly he gets a very suspicious look on his face and lowers the joint. “Have you ever owned a dog who died a slow and painful death,” he asks cautiously, “and if so, did you stand by its side the whole time in constant vigil?"
"No dogs,” I report, “goldfish.” I make the sound of a toilet flushing.
Assured, he nods and takes a deep inhale. My head begins to feel warm and maneuvered, like certain parts of it are getting massaged. He coughs a little. “Is it working?” I ask.
"Peanut butter,” he says, putting his hand out kind of like a psychic. “You really like peanut butter.” I nod; it is my favorite food.
The contents of my head begin to fill with motion, like water is bubbling up in my ears. Tiny popping noises start coming from a place in my skull and
grow crunchier. Suddenly, my friend's eyes change.
"Your ex is a jackass,” he says. This seems right too, but when I try to come up with a specific example of his jackassery, I'm left with a vague and unscratchable tickle deep in my brain. “You're too vulnerable,” he says. “That moron could never have given you what you really want."
All of a sudden, one of the dead bodies shakes and its hand raises up on the table. I scream and hold my bubbling head. “Don't worry,” my friend assures me, “it's just a death rattle."
"Just a death rattle?” I laugh. “Do you even know how disturbing that sounds?"
My friend puffs more of my hair. I suppose he is used to disturbing.
When we walk over to the rattling body, it seems vaguely familiar. “This isn't him, is it?” I ask. “Did my ex-boyfriend recently show up here dead?"
"Not him. I can see the resemblance, though.” My friend turns his head a little and stares at the corpse. “Same chin.” As I admire my friend's hands, they take a small clump of the body's hair between two fingers. He gives me an inquisitive look. “Want to see what this guy's life was like?"
I decline, for superstitious reasons. I figure I now have a memory hole in my head that might take a few days—weeks, even—to fill. I'm afraid I might decide some other person's memories are my own.
When I look over, my friend is done with my hair joint and is staring at me in a funny way.
"What,” I ask. “Spill it.” We move towards a corner where there is a bench, and suddenly the sour smell in the air grows stronger. “It's wrong how we try to postpone bodies from rotting,” I say. “I can smell how wrong it is."
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