Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  —Do you know who Superman is?

  —Not really.

  —I think maybe we should skip Metropolis.

  I ask him what kind of car we should rent.

  He suggests a Cadillac.

  His mother tells me he’s getting more excited the closer we approach the July departure. I hear him tell people that “I am driving cross-country with my dad.” His acknowledgment encourages me. But Zach’s lack of engagement is worrisome. Perhaps the whole thing is too overwhelming for him. Perhaps the divergence from routine is just too radical. He seems more distant than ever. But then I figure it out. There is a precise motivation behind Zach’s detachment.

  He really does hate being in the car.

  He really does want to fly.

  III

  On a Sunday afternoon in the third week of July, the twins and I are standing in the second-floor study of Gerry’s apartment. Zach and I are leaving the next day and have come to share an early farewell dinner. On the far wall, held together by yellowed Scotch tape, is a paper map of the United States. I never noticed it before, and I gravitate toward it. Gerry watches from a few steps behind me. He understands better than anyone the tangled stitching of the journey I am about to take with his brother. He knows I am apprehensive. He also knows the importance I have attached to it. He knows me better than anyone, since we lived together from his birth until his graduation from high school. He also knows his brother better than anyone. He understands how tightly Zach clings to the lifeline of his literal landscape, next meal, next train ride, next ice-cream cone, next quesadilla with extra sour cream, next Kit Kat bar if nobody is looking.

  I am glad Gerry is here with me. He plays off my overreaching one-liners, chuckling in the right spots like a dutiful laugh track. He is responding to me even though it is Zach’s attention I am bidding for. Zach’s affect is dulled; he looks far away into some pinpoint of space that only he can see. I believe he does see something, hear something, know something that cannot be touched by others.

  —Zach, show the route; where are we going? Where are we now?

  He points to New Mexico on the map. It is a strange and uncharacteristic error given his gifts.

  —Is that where we are?

  —No we’re in Pennsylvania.

  —Where?

  —We’re in Philadelphia.

  —So where are we going?

  Zach traces a tentative line with his forefinger. He speaks each word slowly. He is fearful of making a mistake. His eyes rise up to look at me. Then roll back down.

  —I guess we would go out to Pittsburgh . . .

  We have been over the route a dozen times, yet it has not sunk in. His look reminds me of the psychological and mental aptitude tests he took when he was young and turned to me in bewilderment, trying to make sense of the instructions when it was all a nightmarish blur of square pegs and round holes. He is overwhelmed because he is scared; any step away from the Routine is a frightening leap for him. We normally spend a week in Nantucket with my sister, Annie, every summer. She is kind and loving and hilarious. She talks more than anyone I have ever met, but a lot of it is to offset the fact that I don’t talk very much. When we’re there, we see the same people, we eat at the same restaurants. He always walks downtown to Kevin Dale’s office and drinks a bottle of water. He goes out on Michael O’Mara’s boat. He visits Billy Einstein. It is his zone of comfort. It is where he wants to be going now. He will not tell me that. He hates to disappoint me. The day is supposed to be celebratory. Waiter, shots of tequila for me and my boys here! Instead, it seems weighted by the heat that presses down. The liquid air reminds me of when the boys were born, the last thing I wanted to be reminded of right now, the last thing I ever want to be reminded of.

  We leave the apartment and walk to a restaurant called the New Wave. We sit outside to the dull clank of silverware and the transit buses headed to downtown Philadelphia in trailing burps of gray exhaust and the speedy gossip of women in unrequited love coping with men who act like broken traffic lights—on again, off again. I order the grilled hanger steak salad. Gerry has the flatbread pizza. Zach has the shredded lamb taco because there is no salmon on the menu. Gerry offers advice to Zach.

  —Have a good time. You’ll have fun. Don’t be against doing new stuff. Sometimes you’re hesitant about that. You know what I mean about that?

  —What do you mean?

  —You like to have your routine. You like to wake up in the morning. Eat breakfast. Read your e-mails. Get ready for work. It’ll be different now.

  —Yeah.

  Silence . . .

  Gerry fills the hole with talk about the courses he’s taking for his master’s degree—school and society, a social studies methods course, student teaching at an inner-city elementary school. Penn has one of the finest schools of education in the country. The work is arduous and sophisticated. I am enormously proud of Gerry. So is Gerry, who never ever thought there would come a day when he would attend an Ivy League school.

  I glance over at Zach. How can they be twins? Sometimes I wonder if they are even related. My pride in Gerry tamps down because of the guilt I feel for Zach. The goddamn guilt. The scrap-metal weight shackled to my ankle. It is always there.

  —You look lost in thought, Zach.

  —Yeah.

  —What are you thinking about?

  —Nothing.

  The food comes. More silence. Forget what Zach and I are going to talk about for two weeks in a car. What are we going to talk about for ten minutes? Gerry again fills the space.

  —Hey, Zach, is that lamb?

  —At the July Fourth block party on the Fourth of July they made lamb I sat with Jay he’s a member of a golf course.

  It is a typical string of non sequiturs connected by disparate strands of memory. The plates are taken away. We wait for the check. I look at the mottled sidewalk and see blotches of blood and vomit and tiny bits of glass. I glance again at Zach. His head is cocked at an angle. He is staring inside his space. We need to get out of here.

  We walk back around the corner to Gerry’s apartment and go inside to fetch Zach’s red suitcase. Then we come back outside. I have my black camera bag with me. I insist that they pose in front of the apartment door for a final picture before we leave. I like to be reminded they still are twins.

  In my study is a photograph of Gerry and Zach taken when they were six years old. I was living with my second wife, Sarah, at the time in a suburb of Milwaukee. She took the picture.

  They stand in front of the house we rented, wearing black jeans, white socks, and striped shirts, Gerry blue and Zachary green. They are holding each other’s hands. Gerry looks straight ahead, and Zachary gazes at Gerry with adoration. They look like what you always hope twins will look like, in the uniqueness of their love.

  I try to get them to imitate the posture of the picture taken almost twenty years ago. I am trying to replicate the possibilities that existed then, that moment between the two of them, my belief that it would all somehow work out even though I knew it would not. Zach was beautiful back then, with marble-smooth skin and eyelashes as long as a wedding train. I thought that this beauty would last into eternity and somehow shield him. It was an irrational thought. So what? Any parent who has a child that is different has a right to be irrational. It is how we cope. It is how we pray.

  Gerry tells Zach to stand up straight as I fire off photos. He drapes his arm around him. He coos into his ear. Zach bursts with laughter. Their fingers intertwine. Then untangle.

  —I’ll miss you, Zach.

  —I love you.

  —Make sure you call me, let me know what you’re doing.

  —I will.

  Zach and I walk back up the steps to the street. Gerry yells.

  —AND TRY NEW THINGS!

  IV

  Zach and I go home from Gerry’s apartment. We are leaving early tomorrow morning. Zach has packed by himself with economy, tight balls of clothing inserted into his red suitcas
e and a blue knapsack containing the Fort Knox of all his private possessions. I have packed the opposite, an enormous black soft cloth bag of clothing for different parts of the country. A hanging bag. A computer bag. A camera bag. There is also a green duffel bag that weighs fifty pounds and contains virtually every photo taken of Zach and Gerry from the worst moments to the best. Each night we will pull out a fistful of pictures and Zach will fill in the names and places that I have long forgotten. Another blending experience.

  All our bags are neatly in a row by the side door, a joyless line of attention. They are sick of waiting. So am I.

  —I think we should go tonight because I’m kind of excited.

  —Yeah.

  —Just the two of us. Are we going to learn a lot about each other?

  —Yeah.

  —What are we going to learn?

  —A lot.

  —What do you think it’s going to be like being with me for two weeks?

  —Different.

  —Different? That’s interesting. Why different?

  —Because I’ll be away from my other family.

  —You gonna miss them?

  —Yeah I’ll probably call them a lot of people want me to call them.

  I feel another uptick of self-doubt, but I move on. I grill him to make sure he has everything. He assures me he does. I am tempted to open the suitcase and see for myself. The razor he says he brought particularly concerns me, because the blade is usually two years old and rusted. The shaving cream he says he brought is a tiny can of Gillette Foamy, which I thought was discontinued after World War I. I have no idea where he got it. I let it go. I let all of it go. He does not like being treated like a child, and as much as I can I don’t want to treat him like a child; his suitcase is his suitcase.

  I go up to his room on the third floor to fetch a pillow and blanket so he can sleep in the minivan I’ve rented for the trip. To call this space Zach’s room is a misnomer. It is simply the place where he sleeps when he stays with me. I should have done more to fill it with his possessions. I’m not sure why I did not, maybe because he never seemed to be here for very long.

  I don’t turn a light on. I don’t want to be reminded of the sterility. A single bed with a drab brown bedspread is wedged into the corner. Sports Illustrated etchings of Ted Williams and Eddie Arcaro that came from my own childhood hang on the walls. He has no idea who these men were. The square eye of a television he never watches stares from the back wall. His only remnants lie on top of the chest of drawers. They are business cards from restaurants. Some are from restaurants where he has eaten. Others are from restaurants where he has never eaten but walks in and asks if he can take a card. He keeps all of them in a plastic box. There are hundreds. He has memorized the addresses.

  I hate this room. It has nothing of Zach in it. It reminds me of the point in his life and mine when he was a young teenager and I let him go. I grab the pillow and blanket and rush downstairs. I am suddenly hungry although I have just eaten. It indicates stress. I rip open a package of processed turkey from the refrigerator and shove several pieces into my mouth. It actually indicates both stress and gluttony.

  I go outside and pack up the minivan.

  —Off we go, Zach. What do you think, pretty crazy?

  —Yeah.

  —Exciting, different. Are you nervous?

  —No.

  —Are you feeling anything?

  No answer.

  The motor kicks up. The minivan shakes only moderately, reminding me of the Magic Fingers at the motel room in Saratoga Springs with my father.

  —What’s going through your head?

  —Nothing.

  —Nothing? Are you ready?

  —I’m ready.

  —Here we go, Zach!

  —Oh wait wait!

  He has obviously left something behind despite all my interrogation. All I’ve ever done with Zach is sweep up after him. He is an eight-year-old in a twenty-four-year-old body.

  —What did you forget? I asked you over and over if you had everything.

  —Hey Dad is there stuff on top of the Taurus?

  —What are you talking about?

  —There.

  —Where?

  —I don’t see anything.

  —Right there.

  I move closer to the windshield and squint at the Taurus station wagon parked next to the minivan. There is something on the hood of the Taurus.

  —Oops, I forgot to put the turkey away. I guess I took it outside when I was packing up the car and left it there.

  —That’s okay Dad.

  Zach gets out and retrieves the package from the hood of the Taurus. He gently places it between the two front seats of the minivan.

  —Pretty stupid of me, huh?

  —Yeah.

  3. Blue Box

  I

  WE POKE THROUGH the tunnels bisecting the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, the light inside watery and yellowed as if lit by flickering candles. The tunnels are out of another time, converted from railroad underpasses built by a Vanderbilt before he went broke in the 1880s. He was trying to be an industrial visionary in uniting Pittsburgh with Philadelphia, but a parochial unwillingness among the populace made the idea a frivolous pursuit.

  The more you move forward in Pennsylvania the more you move backward; the farther west from Philadelphia the deeper into the time lock of block-long family-owned appliance stores selling televisions and mattresses and La-Z-Boys, the descendants of Slovakia with fingers the size of shotgun shells and three-masted backs walking into some beer-and-a-shot joint at the top of a hill drinking in silence because there’s no point saying anything anymore after the coal mines and the steel mills severed your spirit and spit black into your lungs, smoking stubby nonfilters down to the last orange glow.

  You think about the past as you roll through the night. You wait for the unknown. With each mile you gain more space from the suffocating trappings of daily life—the strip underneath the gutters that must be repainted, the landscaping bills that cost more than the house itself did, the rooms you don’t need, the parties you haven’t been invited to, the white wine that brings you hangovers, the crap you accrue that you never use, the crap you would use had you not misplaced it, the bills as plentiful as shells on the shore, the car insurance payment you never remember, the private school bill you always remember, the floor that the dog has destroyed, the only truly peaceful moment of the day of sitting on the john and realizing that the last roll of toilet paper is down in the basement, the refrigerator containing six different bottles of chicken marinade, the awareness that the kind of chances you took twenty years ago when you lived light you would never take now because you have submerged yourself.

  As Zach and I move into the western fringe of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I already feel, just like I felt with my father, that we are the only ones on the road. Up ahead the only thing you see are the lights of the last wagon train in America, the tractor-trailers. You come up on them and wonder if anyone has ever called the number on the back to report an erratic driver. You peek into the cabs and wonder if the little perches where the drivers sleep have sufficient porno. You try to figure how many bottles of speed they have already taken. You steal a glance at them in your minivan and wonder if they are friendly or friendly fire. You press pedal to the metal and still you can’t get around the damn things. You feel glorious anyway.

  —Zach, think we’ll ever come back?

  —Yeah we will.

  —Why?

  —’Cause we’ll have to.

  —Why?

  —’Cause I’ll have to go to work when I come back.

  —Then let’s just keep going forever.

  He has a map in his hands in the seat next to me. He holds one wherever he goes. They have become a part of him, an obsession the origins of which no one quite knows. Some he keeps out in public; others he secretes in his blue knapsack. I respect his knapsack as much as any parent does, so I peek inside when he is
using the men’s room at a gas station and figure out why it weighs so much: there are dozens of maps inside. When we left the house earlier tonight, his map of choice was of New Hampshire, because he knew someone who had once run in a cross-country meet at Dartmouth. Now he is holding a map of Montgomery County although we aren’t in Montgomery County.

  The map-holding looks odd. It is odd. I ask him why he does it. He says with a giggle that he doesn’t know. But I can tell that holding the map reassures him and gives him peace. Zach first gravitated to maps when he was seven or eight. He found clarity in them; they leave nothing to chance. He can lose himself in a map and find himself; it also becomes a special source of social capital. When he meets someone for the first time in a place he has never been to, he can regale them with his knowledge of streets and how to get to where they live from anywhere. They look stunned and think of him as a mad genius, the human GPS. The map becomes an extension of him, a badge of who he is and what he can do.

  This is all guesswork on my part. It is always guesswork with a child like Zach. I have been through the circuit. All of us have been through the circuit with children with mental or physical or emotional disabilities, or autism or Asperger’s or a thousand other behavioral differences that distinguish them from the Normals, the labels irrelevant. We have placed our children before enough psychologists and psychiatrists to fill the Nile. Some spend hours to find a diagnosis. Some spend ten minutes and just pluck one out of thin air. Too many of them are childhood developmental speculators relying on instant-oatmeal observations and strangely crafted tests we all would flunk. But we listen. We listen because it provides the balm of explanation. We all have the same repository at home or some variation of it.

  Mine is in a blue box.

  II

  My blue box is a file drawer filled to capacity with neatly typed pages and impressively exhaustive summaries of Zach’s condition dating from his birth onward. At first, I believed the blue box would be a cure-all. It would contain an answer and a solution to the answer. I rode the special-needs circuit to the neurologist and the psychiatrist and the psychologist and the speech pathologist and the psychopharmacologist and the battalion of special-education experts. I read all of their reports, or as much as I could before I couldn’t take it anymore. The summary of Zach’s incapacitations at birth seemed too monumental for any single human being to bear: yellow jaundice, constant blood transfusions, the “blue baby” syndrome, stiff to the touch, difficulties in sucking and feeding and swallowing and crying.