Irreversible

by Chris Lynch

  “I’m really glad you like it,” I said, gathering up every possible granule of taste, scraping my plate clean with my knife and fork together.

  Without the food as the sort of third party at the table, the reality started rising, and obviously we both knew something was up.

  “So, you gonna tell me what god-awful thing you need to stoop this low for?” he said, and it was sweet that he was making the effort. He wanted to put me at ease, when clearly he wasn’t finding anything funny in what he had to guess at. His discomfort pulled him, down and toward me, his shoulders hunching, his spine giving out to a big sunflower wilt over the table.

  “Ray . . . Dad,” I said, reaching across to force him back into his best big-man posture. “Don’t do that. That’s so awful, I can’t stand to see that. No matter what, nothing’s ever so bad you have to fold up like that. It’s like you’re stabbed, destroyed, filleted, and gutted when you do that move, and it kills me. It’s hard enough without you killing me.”

  He got less animated then, less responsive. “What move?” he said without a trace of a joke. His mind was occupied now, guessing probably every kind of crazy wrong thing that I might be going to say to him. Though the crazy right thing wasn’t going to be any great improvement.

  “Okay,” I said, standing up and gathering plates and utensils and condiments, very much the elements my father and I had constructed a pretty nice life over, through it all. “I have to wash up now.”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?” I said in return, keeping my back to him as I deposited things noisily into the sink. “Since when is no to cleaning properly, immediately after meals, acceptable in Ray Sarafian’s house?”

  “Since Ray Sarafian is being kept on edge in a suspicious way by the only roommate and dinner companion currently residing in Ray Sarafian’s house. It’s pretty damn noticeable and distracting, so the freakin’ dishes could wait for once while you talk to me, Keir.”

  Why was this so hard? I hung over the sink, still refusing to address him directly because, why was this so hard? People did this all the time. It was normal, it was correct, in a lot of ways, a positive step in a person’s life. It was a natural move, an adjustment—okay, a big adjustment—but completely natural to millions of people just like us, just like me and just like Ray, who do what I was going to do. Millions, just like us, every year.

  Why was this so hard?

  “Are you all right, Son?” he said from back there, a voice just about bursting its seams with suppressed anguish.

  I was so weak. I couldn’t even force it up just a little bit quicker and save him from the dread of anticipation. I couldn’t even give him the word that I had made a big decision, because I was frozen stuck in knowing that telling him would be the moment of impact that would certify it as actually happening.

  I wasn’t yet man enough to live with that moment.

  “I tell you what, Ray,” I said, turning on the taps and squeezing a ridiculous stream of green liquid into the mix. “I’ll just put a few things away and leave the greasy stuff to soak. Then I’ll meet you in the living room. I went and dug out Risk from the games closet. I set it up for us, in the living room. What do you think about that, Dad? Up for a game of Risk?”

  I got no response. He had escaped while I was waffling on like a sad, sorry fool.

  But of course he was up for a game of Risk. We had played Risk, me and him, practically in an unbroken campaign of conquest that lasted all of my senior year. We played it, invested in it, dedicated ourselves to the great epic game as if it really was countries and continents and the whole of the world at stake.

  And when we faced each other across that board for all those months, I suppose it pretty much was.

  “You leave me enough time on my own and even I can work a thing out,” he said, posing like a bored teenager, arms folded, legs splayed out from his chair. He was seated beside the awaiting Risk. “You’re leaving. You’re getting itchy feet and you don’t want to spend any more of your exciting new lifetime oafing around with your old-fart father. I can’t blame you. Hell, it’s the right thing to do. It’s gonna be sad, but I’m gonna have to face it anyway, whether it’s now or a few weeks from now. Right?” he said with his droopy tired eyes watering up over his performance.

  And this was when he still thought it was relatively just up the road. Denial maybe wasn’t the worst thing, for a time. It could be a stage, on the way to something better, lots of things better, if we took it by degrees. Could we even pull this off? We were both drifting toward some sort of chicken-heart treaty, where we would agree to fool ourselves for just a little bit longer.

  Could work. It was already working for me. I would delay beyond reason if I had half a chance, because I knew why this was so hard. It was willfully ignorant of me to compare us to the millions who pull this off, because they were not us and we would never be anybody else, even if sometimes that would be a very good thing.

  When my ma died, the Ray Bear turned inward, in to us—me, Mary, and Fran. He wrapped us in Ray, and that was all the life he was ever looking for from then on. And then it was time and Mary left, and then it was time and Fran left, and Ray just kept bear-hugging tighter to what he was still holding, because what else would you expect a bear to do?

  And I hugged him right back. I was his cub no matter how much I grew, and I always felt special about it. It just got more muscular over time, the bears holding on, and I only hardly noticed when the girls didn’t come back the way they said they would. And I never even hardly allowed myself to think about what would be left in that house once I left the old bear on his own inside it.

  Now I couldn’t not think about it, even as I made my plan to do it big and bold and more emphatically than anything I had ever done in my life.

  But we could kid ourselves, kindly, thoughtfully, for a little bit longer, couldn’t we?

  I went to sit across from my longtime adversary, the esteemed old commander who had taught me everything I knew and was going to have to pay for it. I prepared myself for at least one more battle and possibly a couple of hunks of coffee cake and some trash-talking to rattle the old man’s thinking.

  And in one musket flash of a moment, all that burned away into the air when I saw Ray’s face that he didn’t seem to see I could see. He was staring at the board, bearing down like it could and would tell him something that he couldn’t work out on his own. He flashed a stranger’s frightened look, lost and suddenly, shockingly aged in his heavy, and heavily scored, face. Like a geographical map of his life. Like, Mongolia.

  “My turn?” he asked politely.

  I couldn’t do this. Finally, this was the breaker that forced me to step up to the line.

  “No, Ray,” I said, “it’s my turn. After all you’ve done . . . I have to be fair to you.”

  He raised his bulky head and showed me his softy eyes and tried one last stalling, diversionary maneuver.

  “Who says you have to? I never did. I never expected you to be fair, just to be there. To be here. That’s all I needed.”

  “Ah . . . Ray. Ray—”

  “I know, Keir. I couldn’t expect that indefinitely. It’s no more reasonable to expect you to stay home than it is to expect you to be fair.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, yeah, hey yourself,” he said, sitting up schoolboy straight and folding his hands. “We are going to have to have this conversation now.”

  I nodded a good number of times as a sort of flying start. “Yes,” I said. “Well, Ray, it’s probably a lot more drastic than you imagined. . . .”

  • • •

  “Well,” Ray said, very deep into that hard night, “you sure know how to spoil holy hell out of a game of Risk, I’ll give you that.”

  To be more accurate, I didn’t spoil it so much as obliterate it. We poised ourselves for combat, angled ourselves toward it, sat on opposite sides of the waiting board, and even occasionally glared at it just to break the tension of staring at each ot
her. But we played no Risk that night, not one skirmish.

  Instead we talked each other into submission. I told him, calmly, simply, and repeatedly, why I had to go away. I was a lot more patient about it than even I would have expected beyond, maybe, the second telling. That was because of the situation, sure, and because Ray needed and deserved the kid gloves on this. But I realized, listening to myself try to get him to understand a thing he would never truly understand, that I was making sense of events right along with him. I was explaining it to both of us.

  But I was already altering the details, editing myself on the hoof because, exactly because, I wanted to spare him the pain, the worry, the drama, the trauma that was going to come to a certain kind of guy, with a certain kind of profile, in a certain kind of situation, even if he didn’t do anything wrong. And that pain, that worry, that drama, that trauma would inevitably be inflicted on the guy’s innocent beloveds. The conversation was a sort of mini play preview of the bigger picture: I was cutting out the unbearable facts in order to leave something much finer behind after I was done.

  And I was done, with home, and with Norfolk, too. Ray didn’t need to know every thought in my head. He didn’t need to know that the boy he found waiting for him on the third step down thirteen years ago and the one he found there just recently had very, very different feelings about home. It was enough that he knew his son was in fact alive but maybe he got beat up and worn down enough by people and place that there was really only one thing for it. And Ray didn’t need to know how tough things were between me and the girls, especially Mary. It would slaughter him to learn that his oldest daughter told his only son to basically fuck off and don’t show your face on our campus, so he wouldn’t ever be learning that. If what he learned instead was that my concerned sister phoned because she was looking out for me, and she wanted to give me the best advice, which of course you won’t get anywhere like you would from your big sister, that would be a finer thing for him to hear. There were groups on the Norfolk campus who were planning to make trouble for me. Because they tended to make certain specific types of transgressions—which I didn’t even do, but that didn’t matter—into their own crusades and generate all kinds of noise and conflict and agitation wherever they went. And if I was going to be an angry mob’s cause, to launch my very first semester, well, my sisters were going to worry that I would never make my way after that. Mary never even mentioned the obvious point of how difficult things could get for them at the same time, any spillover from my troubles. And they were up there and already established, Ray, you know, and that would be all wrong, to let something like this poison all the great stuff they have going on for themselves up at that beautiful campus. So, you see? Ray? This just has to be, my moving now. To clear up the atmosphere, to give everybody, all of us, a chance to live whatever lives we’re meant to live and not have to be fighting people and getting into hate wars and having to defend yourself from a past that isn’t even there when you look behind you. It’s only there when other people make you see it and make you live with it forever. And who can live like that? Right, Ray? You see. We all need me to go, to let things get back to right again. Okay?

  “Bullshit,” he barked, again. Only a wearier bark now. “How come we never discussed this so I could talk you out of this nonsense?”

  Even I never knew, during almost the whole of my lock-in stay at Club Ray, that I would be changing course and tacking west and breaking out of my cell inside his huge, hairy heart. It came to me in a flash of clarity that beat the pants off any kind of certainty I had ever experienced all at once before. It was the nearest I would ever get to calling something a vision, and I wouldn’t be calling it that now. Ray was having enough trouble wrapping his big head around things without bringing mumbo jumbo into the game.

  “It all makes sense now, Ray. I know you know it, so just say that for me and we’ll call it a night.”

  For a few seconds I thought I might be losing him, as he let his chin drop to his chest and then didn’t move. We were worn out, the two of us. It had been three hours since my father consumed an entire coffee cake out of spite, and we had gone over a lot of rough terrain in the time since. We got through all the cake and crying, all the pleading and scolding, all the remembering and laughing, though that didn’t eat up a lot of clock. All the remembering, and all the crying again. We got through all that and had now eaten well into the available eight hours for Ray’s sleeping before work. He was a wreck when he didn’t get eight hours or close to it, and this day emotional wreckage was all but guaranteed. Fortunately, he would be gone before I woke up. And if he wasn’t, I was just going to have to fake it. I’d spread enough sunshine and sugar cubes around the joint to get him out the door before he could start bawling all over again.

  I began packing up the game, getting it all back tidily in the box while the old man snoozed alongside it.

  We used to not even bother with putting it away. We would leave it right there in place and come back to the same epic battle between us across the globe and across days and weeks and more weeks. Because we could. Because it was just us, and just the way we liked it.

  “You’re going . . . Keir? Keir, where is that? I never even heard of the place. What’s this all about? Is it happening, really? How is it happening? Surely it’s too late now to switch—”

  “Done,” I said, pulling him up from the chair with a mighty tug of his burly bear arm. “I had to move fast, Ray, as I have already told you, and as you can certainly appreciate. I was fortunate enough . . .”

  And blah, and blah, and balls to it all anyway. Blah. I sounded like a recorded message. Like a machine, a robotic nonperson selling a new kitchen to an old man who didn’t need a new kitchen but did need his well and truly adored son to stay.

  I knew all that. I knew exactly, how profoundly I was loved. And still.

  How did we get here? How far, how fast, how wrong, totally wrong every which way?

  We were not the type of people this was supposed to happen to. We were a great family, a really special, lucky family, and I said it many times to many people. I knew it then, when we were in it, and I knew it now, when we were apparently not.

  Fran could say as much as she wanted that I made things be the way I wanted them to be, but that didn’t mean anything. Because I was not wrong about this.

  unimaginable

  I didn’t have to worry about my father coming into my room and getting all soppy the morning after I told him I was leaving. I didn’t have to worry about it any other mornings either. Because he turned out to be as determined and hard-hearted as I was, and that was pretty good for a couple of sappy saps like us. It was a crash course now, the accelerated program for getting used to the new world order in our tight little world.

  Life without Ray.

  Ray without me.

  Those thoughts were always unimaginable, and I had decided that they would remain unimaginable forever. I started concentrating, thinking hard about not thinking about it at all. Ray was going to have to look out for himself, and himself only, from here on, and he would be fine once he got the hang of it. He would be in his old familiar home, and he would simply get familiar with it all over again, but with more elbow room, more freedom, less grief. He had earned it.

  I was going on to all things unfamiliar, and that was what I focused my entire consciousness on. We were pulling off a screecher of a turn here, and it was taking all of Ray’s efforts on this end—talking to the bank, redoing the loan paperwork while I filled out the Carnegie application to make it official. Coach Muswell was either a warlock or just a very can-do persona at that school, because somehow a lot of wheels got greased in setting up my football arrangements, housing, food plan, and he even looked into all the various travel options to get my body delivered onto that campus, the cherry on this very swirly cake.

  Ray and I were reading the printout when he intoned, “Well, it’s not a choice at all. You’ll fly. There, that flight is the one. You don’t wa
nt to be dealing with those connecting flight nightmares. I’ll take care of this.”

  He went to get up quickly, to avoid my eyes the way I had been likewise avoiding his. I grabbed his arm and guided him back to the seat across from me at the kitchen table.

  It was a perfect summary of how haywire all the old familiars had gotten for us, that this was the first time I could remember us ever sitting across this table together without having one scrap of food. It felt perverse. It felt like shame.

  He knew it too, I could tell. But he couldn’t do anything about it now, because that would be to recognize it. To acknowledge that small but damning oversight that he had never committed before.

  Anyway, this was the better way. If you don’t want to recognize a thing, then don’t. If you just don’t acknowledge a thing, who is to say that it is there at all? Or that it ever was?

  “You are not to buy me a plane ticket, Ray, and that is an order. And before you say anything, even if you do buy it, I won’t use it. This information from Coach Muswell is great, but I already pretty much knew how I wanted to go. And there is the trip.” I flattened the page out for him on the table and tapped it several times. “That is how I want to go. And that is how I’m going.”

  He read my choice, did a small dramatic recoil from it, and made a sound like yuck, but as if a bear made it.

  That didn’t bother me one bit. This life was mine now, and I had been snap-crackling with nervous energy to get it out and on the road since practically the moment I finally said it out loud.

  I slapped Ray’s arm and stood up over him because for once, there was no discussion necessary. I kissed his overheated head on my way to my room to change. I came back out a few minutes later, kissed that same spot as he sat in that same spot, and crashed out the front door for my final distance run from this house.

  It was just starting to rain lightly, and I never at all minded having the rain accompany me on my runs. So this was right, for my final lap of the old town. Victory lap? Farewell circuit?