Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  He had his memory that was beyond remarkable. He had his no-nonsense style of interrogation with adults. Whatever else ticked inside him, there was an unlimited hard drive that saved every answer. I saw these give-and-takes as tiny ships of hope on the darkened sea, beacons of promise that would one day spread over the water until you could see the shore. He would make it to the island of normalcy, even though there is no such thing. All it would take was a simple rearranging of those wires. He seemed so impenetrable, but then came moments when he redacted what was important in the world to its essence.

  —What are you thinking about, Zachary?

  —I’m just thinking about things.

  —What things?

  —Just things.

  —Are you okay?

  —I’m okay.

  —Are you happy?

  —I’m happy.

  —Do you love me?

  —I love you.

  —How do you know you love me?

  —Because I love you.

  —Do you know what love is?

  —It’s love.

  I began to wonder if there was more to my son than I ever knew or wanted to know. Debra and I had hovered over Zach all his life regardless of the freedom we granted him inch by inch. There was no other choice because of his limitations. Do you have your shirt for ShopRite? Did you forget anything? Do you have money? You can walk around the block twice but you have to be home in ten minutes. You can’t have dessert. You can have dessert.

  We had been appointed his legal guardians for life when he turned twenty-one. That too was a necessity. But we refused to make him a shut-in. He needed to work, whatever the work. Because he was so good at map reading, giving him the freedom to use the transit system became a potentially great opportunity: he craved freedom, we all crave freedom, and this was a way to give it to him.

  Debra and I gave him a cell phone and taught him how to use it. I raised hypotheticals with Zach.

  —What do you do when a stranger comes up to you?

  —You walk away from them?

  —That’s right. What if they ask for your wallet?

  —You give them your wallet.

  —What if they ask for your money?

  —You keep it because you need the money to get on the train to go downtown?

  —No, you give it to them.

  —What if I don’t have any money I don’t carry so much.

  —You should always have money. We will give it to you. What else do you do?

  —Call you or my stepdad or my mom?

  —That’s a good idea but the first thing you do is call nine-one-one. That’s the police.

  —I call nine-one-one.

  —Let’s practice. I’m a stranger. I come up to you. I ask you if you want to go somewhere or take a ride. What do you do?

  —Call nine-one-one.

  Perhaps he was ready.

  The first trip was nerve-racking, like a baby taking his first steps. Would he wobble and fall? Would he need rescue? But he called when he got to the appointed stop—the corner of 15th and Locust streets in downtown Philadelphia. On his own without telling anyone, he started getting on the train a little early. He went to the Reading Terminal Market downtown to get Chinese food where the proprietors knew him because he introduced himself and asked their names. He went to the Barnes & Noble and branched out to maps of foreign countries. He began to meet me for dinner around the city, sitting at the bar sipping a Shirley Temple before I arrived. The only thing missing was a cigarette and a blond with his own patented pickup line: “Hey, baby, when’s your birthday?”

  Zach had a way of looking at the world that wasn’t haphazard or accidental. The more independence he got, the more independence he desired. He loved taking the train to work. There were many people he knew. He always sat next to one of them, firing away with his questions and remembering the answers. They embraced him with understanding and tolerance and delight at his uncensored innocence, except for one man who told Zach after a single trip that he didn’t want to sit with him anymore. Perhaps the man was being callous. Or perhaps he was just startled that after more than twenty years of not seeing Zach, my son still recognized him and knew his address. Or wanted to know his birthday. Or the names of the people who swam in his pool, even though Zach had never been to his house. The man liked riding the train alone because it was his quiet time, and Zach’s inquisitions ruptured that quiet.

  Zach told me he wasn’t upset by the reaction. He never said he was upset, although I think he was in this instance. It confused him why somebody he knew, however tangentially, wouldn’t want to talk to him since he was just trying to be friendly. Not all people are the same, I told Zach. Some people just like to be left alone.

  —I shouldn’t sit with him anymore?

  —Zach, you know the answer to that. You shouldn’t sit with him anymore.

  —What if I see him at the station can I say hi?

  —You just need to leave him alone. It isn’t that he doesn’t like you. It’s just that he is busy with other things.

  I could feel the wheels of Zach’s brain slowly start to produce an answer that made sense to him.

  —I guess he’s private.

  He figured it out. Just like he figured out that love is love.

  It appeared that Zach observed tiny decorations of life, carefully storing them away on the hard drive of his mind and then incorporating them for future use. He had a valid sense of logic, even if most people failed to see it. Or maybe all he had on a sustained basis was a determination to find a good restaurant for the next meal to satiate his very expensive gourmand tendencies, no McDonald’s in his particular playbook. It was always hard to tell how much of Zach was the result of deliberate effort and how much was just the result of his wiring. Actually it was impossible. He had never expressed himself with deep introspection, and he never would.

  All my life I had yearned for conversation with my son. A conversation making him aware of his own reality. I had never told him what had happened when he was born. I never mentioned the term brain damage. I never mentioned the reason he went to special schools. Did he know he would never marry or have a family of his own? Did he know what sex was? Did he know who I really was like Gerry did, like my youngest son, Caleb, did?

  Why had we never discussed, even in the broadest terms, his long-term future, no matter how wrenching the subject might be? Maybe because I wasn’t sure how much he would understand. Or maybe because I couldn’t bear to think about it. Because when I did, the same image always appeared:

  I am gone and his mother is gone and Zach is old now, in his sixties, stooped and scraggly, his brown eyes more dark and furrowed than ever, his voice raspier than ever when he talks to himself, still doing with dutiful duty what he started forty years ago, bagging groceries. I see him walking the streets, on the way to some group home with his hands in his pockets, warding off the wind. I see his head cocked at that forty-five-degree angle as he talks in his self-chastising way, and passersby edge away because this guy is on the edge. Through windows filled with greasy fingerprints, I see my son sitting on a bed beneath a ceiling lamp spitting out freezing light. I see him quiet on that bed with his hands clasped in front of him. And then I see him talking aloud to himself some more, which no one tries to silence because no one else is there.

  II

  I had never told Zach about himself because I thought I was protecting him. I began to think I was not protecting him at all. Zach had to know the truth. Or maybe I felt the time had come for his father to tell him the truth. As long as I concealed Zach from himself the bond between us would never seem right. There would be love, but there would not be complete connection. The truth had also become his right. He deserved to know who he was. He deserved to know who I was.

  I couldn’t predict how much Zach would understand. While his vocabulary was rapidly expanding, his knowledge of what words meant was not keeping pace. When I tried to give a definition, or more important to explain
the ramifications of certain actions in life like the need for good health, he tried to understand. I could literally feel him sifting through that hard drive with all those millions of data points. But his thought process was like using any steppingstone he could find to get across the water. The hard drive did not help him with the concept of preventive health, or terrorism, or racism, or civil liberties. He did not know who Osama bin Laden was. He did not know about Islam or the Middle East or the Holocaust or World War II. He had some vague idea of what 9-11 was: he knew something terrible had happened, but when the anniversary came he called to wish me a “happy 9-11!”

  Our relationship for most of our lives had been largely predicated on games. He loved goofy hypotheticals of what would happen if he did something I told him he could not do. When I kissed him good night, he invariably asked me if there was a certain word or name he could not say after I turned out the lights.

  —What can’t I say?

  —You can’t say Rick Lyman.

  —What happens if I say Rick Lyman?

  —I will have to come back upstairs.

  Dressed in his usual garb of T-shirt and gym shorts, the bedspread and the top sheet kicked down like unwanted rags in preparation for the tickling war we referred to as “cuddies,” he began to giggle. Then giggle some more.

  —What happens Dad if you come back upstairs?

  —I will have to give you a cuddie.

  —No no no.

  —Then just don’t say Rick Lyman.

  —I can’t say Rick Lyman?

  —You can say anything else but not Rick Lyman.

  —Not Rick Lyman?

  —What did I just say?

  —Not Rick Lyman.

  —You can say Rick. You can say Lyman. But not Rick Lyman. Okay?

  —Okay.

  —Okay?

  —Okay.

  —Good night, Zach.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  In previous lives, we had obviously both appeared in Waiting for Godot. And perhaps written it.

  I walked down the stairs and waited at the second-floor landing. He was plotting strategy.

  —RICK!

  I said nothing.

  —RICK!!

  —I said nothing.

  —RICK L!!!!!

  I said nothing.

  —RICK LY!!!!!!!

  I said nothing.

  —RICK LYMAN!!!!!!!!!!!

  I ran back upstairs and banged open the door. Between giggles, he pleaded false innocence.

  —Dad come on Dad.

  I came closer to the bed.

  —What did I tell you NOT to say?

  He stood on the mattress in final preparation.

  —Dad seriously Dad I need to get to bed.

  It was on.

  He squirmed with surprising strength, accidentally kicking me in the head and scratching me with his long fingernails. He jumped out of bed and I began chasing him around the room. I threw pillows at him. He threw pillows at me. I got ahold of him and tickled again. He kicked me in the head again. I chased him around the room again. I became exhausted and finally had to stop. He seemed exhausted as well. I rolled the top sheet over him and kissed him good night. I shut the door to his room. I went back downstairs into my room. From above I could hear a pulsating drum getting louder and louder.

  —Rick Lyman. . . . RICK Lyman. . . . RICK LYMAN! RICK LYMAN!!!

  He could have gone on forever. At any time. At any age. But when he turned twenty-one, after nearly fifteen straight years of doing it, I decided it had to stop. I was ambivalent about giving up this tradition, though. What else could we do together that brought him so much pleasure? But I could not stand it anymore. It only reaffirmed our frozenness. Could we not move on to something else? Anything else? Now, when I put him to bed, there were no tickle wars.

  —Zach, you’re twenty-one now. Not six. This is what six-year-olds do. I can’t do it anymore.

  —Sorry Dad.

  —There is nothing to be sorry about. You’re just too old. You’re twenty-one. What happens when you are twenty-one?

  —You’re not supposed to do things like that anymore.

  —That’s right. Do you understand why?

  —I’m twenty-one I’m kinda too old for this now.

  I closed the door to his room. I stood right outside. I burst back through the door.

  —Just don’t say “good night.”

  It was on again.

  I knew it was the one thing he loved about being with me. I was scared of losing it.

  If I was going to talk to Zach with a directness and intimacy I had never approached before, the setting itself had to be a place of intimacy. For the past decade he had been living primarily with his mother and her family in New Jersey, half an hour away from my home in Philadelphia. I saw him every weekend and sometimes more. But the longest I had ever spent alone with him was a week. We needed time together. We needed to once again fall in love.

  We needed to drive across country. No matter how many times I had done it, the road was always fresh. Like a precious inheritance, I wanted to pass that experience on to Zach and have him seize it as much as I did in my own life. My expectations were high.

  A wise friend tells me I am dooming myself from the start by raising the bar far too high. She tells me to just let the trip flow. She tells me not to go searching for epiphanies and revelations. She tells me to take the natural bends as they come. It is sage advice, and a shield against the deflation of expectations. If you deliberately look for surprises and significance in life, all you find is an old box of cassettes by America and Heart and Peter Frampton you bought when you were alone and very drunk, and nobody else was watching. But I still want to seek out epiphanies and revelations with Zach beyond the only one I’ve ever had, the day he was born. I so hungered to crack through the surface into his soul and have him do the same with me.

  The trip must engage Zach. The passenger seat must be more than torture rack. Scenic attractions are clearly out. Yet I still think initially it should be a trip to expand Zach’s horizons and let the wonder of the country at last course through him. Then I recall the experience of Yellowstone. In addition to his fury over the ill-timed bats, he found Old Faithful woefully lacking as a water slide compared to Hershey Park. And there wasn’t a taco concession in sight.

  Zach is interested in people. It doesn’t matter whether he last saw them twenty minutes ago or twenty years ago. The route becomes self-evident. We will travel across country in ten days, stopping at all the places we’ve lived before or know well—Chicago; Milwaukee; Odessa, Texas; Los Angeles. Branson, Missouri, the evangelical antidote to Las Vegas, is an add-on because I have always wondered what happened to Yakov Smirnoff. The real Las Vegas is on the itinerary as well.

  Las Vegas will be the highlight. I am sure of that. By the time we get there a new understanding and bond will have developed between Zach and me. I will speak the truth to him; there will be catharsis. I know Zach gets overwhelmed with too much sensory stimulus. But I am convinced the kinky kinetic kaleidoscope of Las Vegas will dazzle him much like fireworks dazzle him. He won’t be able to take his eyes off the lights that ignite the universe. Zach himself has already taken to Las Vegas. He calls it “Vegas,” as if he just joined the Rat Pack.

  No scientific research is required to know that this is, by any ordinary standard, the worst cross-country route ever contemplated. There is literally nothing to see in terms of sights or natural beauty. The hills and mountains of western Pennsylvania have beauty, but the rest is an amalgam of tarmac, concrete, grass, dust, dirt, blown-out little towns with nothing open except the pawnshop, mesquite bushes, bugs smeared against the windshield like frosting. The stretch in particular from Milwaukee to Odessa, which we are probably the first human beings to ever undertake voluntarily, is without redemption.

  We sit at the kitchen counter together half a dozen times to plan. Zach needs to be involve
d in every decision, so that the trip becomes a truly shared experience. Mutual agreement on where to stay. Where we should eat. How many miles we need to drive in a day to keep to our schedule. Where to stop at night in between our primary destinations. I promise Zach that we will try to go to an amusement park every day since he loves speed-of-light rides.

  At this, he displays mild interest.

  I buy him a new Rand McNally atlas of the United States.

  No interest.

  I purchase an octagonal gadget from a truck stop that gives the distances between every city in the United States: 1,433 miles from Yakima to Yuma, 876 miles from Vicksburg to Van Horn, 963 miles from Altoona to Albert Lea, 1,315 miles from Milwaukee to Odessa.

  Definitely no interest.

  I purchase guidebooks of the United States that describe interesting places off the usual path.

  Less than no interest.

  —Hey, Zach, what about Metropolis?!

  —Where is it?

  —It’s in Illinois.

  —Remember when we went to that basketball game in Illinois in 1991?

  —Metropolis is the home of Superman.

  —That would be nice.

  —Have you ever been to any of the Superman movies?

  —My cousin Nick lives in Chicago in Illinois we’re going to see him.

  —What about the Superman movies? Have you seen any?

  —No not really.

  —Do you really want to visit Metropolis?

  —I remember the building where you worked in Chicago it was the Tribune building and remember Dad I used to go up there sometimes and see Barry Temkin.