“Alright. First one to roll down a window loses.”
The game was on. Every time the car got quiet, someone started cracking up again.
“Jesus, my back is wet. I am wet.”
“TEST-OF-WILLS! TEST-OF-WILLS!”
“Oh god, I lose. I lose. I need to roll down a window.”
“TEST-OF-WILLS! TEST-OF-WILLS!”
Every once in a while one of us would let out a moan of discomfort and the other two would laugh even harder. Still, each of us refused to end the game, to be the first to break. We drove like that for ten minutes, then fifteen. It went on so long that it ceased to be a joke and became a genuine competition. We were all dripping with sweat. In the heat delirium, we began to wonder why we'd started playing the game.
“Why are we doing this?”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“I'm going to open a window.”
But none of us did. None of us wanted to be the one to end the game.
“How long do you think we can go?”
“How hot do you think it is in here?”
“I'm going to open a window.”
I was wondering how long the game could possibly last, when the driver finally spoke up.
“Oh shit, we're almost out of gas! We need to find a gas station like...now.”
“Didn't we fill up before we left?”
“Yeah, but between the towing and the heater, we must've really burned through it.”
“I'm opening a window.”
We might've been running on fumes, but we managed to coast into a gas station right next door to a hamburger joint about twenty minutes from our final destination. We ate and tried to dry off a little bit. The test of wills had drained our strength, but the fast food was delicious. So far, the trip had been hugely successful. We piled back into the car in high spirits. Only getting a little lost, we made it to the address I had written down in about half an hour. I called to give the guy some warning.
For what I was paying, I knew this car was going to be a piece of shit, but boy was it ever a piece of shit. The brake calipers and carburetor were sitting in the back seat. The paint was bubbled around the lights and turn signals where rust had taken hold. The wheel wells were completely rusted out. The frame that held the convertible top was intact, but the fabric was torn and had clearly been that way for a while. Inside, there were several tears along the seams of the upholstery. The wiring harness was hanging out beneath the steering column, and the engine was its own nightmare, probably seized. The hood wasn't even attached, so the first thing we did was load it into the back of the tow vehicle.
The next problem we had to deal with was the fact that the car was also missing a wheel. Not just a tire, the whole wheel. Good thing I sprang for the full bed dolly! Of course, the car wouldn't exactly run. I had known it wouldn't, but I hadn't really thought the next step through. How were we supposed to get the damn thing up the ramps to tow it? Luckily, the seller had a come-along, which if you didn't know, is a real thing and not just a hilarious made up name for a tool. Really though, once we all stopped giggling about the name, the cable winch was a huge help. Even so, it took us a solid hour to push the heap up into position and ratchet it down. The sun had almost set when we were finally ready to leave.
You must be wondering why, after I've described this car in all its glory, I still agreed to buy it. There were a number of reasons. None was very good on its own, but taken together it didn't feel like there was much debate. For one, the car was really cheap. I can't overstate that. For another, I'd invested almost as much in the tow dolly rental, gas, and food, as I'd have to pay for the stupid car itself. Then there was the fact that I'd already dragged my friends across the state with me to get the damn thing. The biggest reason I went through with it, though? I really wanted that car. I'd spent so much time daydreaming about bombing around town in a sporty little convertible that I couldn't just give up on it. I'd sold myself harder than the previous owner ever could have. So, car in tow, we headed back toward home in the dark.
The ride back was totally uneventful, but it was late when we arrived. I mean late, late. I'd planned ahead, so we stopped halfway down the driveway to load the junker off the trailer out of sight of the house. It was a long driveway that went through thick woods, and that was the key to the whole thing.
My dad said he didn't want a broken down old car sitting in the driveway, but he never said anything about me hiding one back behind the treeline, out of sight, where I could work on it without bothering anyone. It wasn't the kind of idea he ever would've come up with. For him, it would've been too difficult and too impractical to haul a car through the woods – if such a thing was even possible. I, on the other hand, had gone to the trouble of measuring a narrow corridor through the trees weeks in advance. It went way back, and the ground dropped enough so that the car would be totally hidden. It took a couple inconvenient turns, but there was a natural path wide enough for a small vehicle. It could work.
We were already tired when we piled out of the car. Maybe we were still feeling residual effects from the test of wills. Maybe loading the trailer had done it. In either case, it had been a long day. We pulled out the ramps on the trailer and unchained the wheels...or at least the three wheels the heap had. The missing wheel was in the rear, and all the weight seemed to shift toward that corner when we rolled it back. We had laughed at the come-along before, but without it we could only trust gravity and pray. The bare steel hub in the empty wheel well left a trail of iron oxide as the old rust bucket screeched down from the tow dolly. It might've woken the dead, but I hoped it hadn't woken my parents.
My neat little wooded trail wasn't so easy to find in the dark, and pushing a car through thorny brush on three flat tires was even harder. The real trick was making the turns in reverse without power steering, but with enough sweat and swearing, we pulled it off. I don't know how we did it, but we did. In the dark. In the dirt. After that, the only thing left to do was chase the mouse that had been living in the hood of the junker out of the back of the tow vehicle.
And that's how I found my face buried in my pillow half an hour later, tired, dirty, happy, a little bit relieved, and very glad to be through the worst. My mother woke me up early in the morning.
“Your father said he wants to have a word with you.”
Oh shit.
I went to the living room where he was sitting, looking out the window toward the driveway.
“I thought I told you I didn't want you bringing that car home.”
My heart fell through my stomach as I saw the mess of dirt and rust that was visible from the house.
“I thought you just didn't want it sitting in the driveway.”
“You knew what I meant.”
“Dad, if you ever told me not to bring it home, I wouldn't have done it.”
“I don't see how I can trust you after this.”
And there I was driving us to dinner, and there he was in the passenger seat of his own truck. I immediately noticed that he wasn't doing as well. Where one moment it had been Christmas, and the next I was losing my father's trust, now I was driving his truck. I could remember that moment in the car, but for some reason I wasn't sure what was about to happen. Each shadow and road sign was familiar the moment I saw it, a living memory, but the future remained a mystery until I experienced it again. Déjà vu. My dad cleared his throat. Suddenly, hearing that sound felt like slipping into an old pair of shoes. His voice was like coming home.
“You know, sometimes life sucks.”
I got a lump in my throat as the months that had led up to this conversation caught up with me all at once. I swallowed and nodded without saying anything.
“First your grandparents, and now your dog... You know, sometimes it's just not fair.”
We let the words hang there between us in the cab of the truck. My eyes welled up a little. There was an edge to his voice I had only heard a couple times.
“Yeah,” I finally m
anaged.
He sighed.
I shook my head.
The truck went over a bump in the road. His wheelchair rattled against the tailgate behind us.
It hit me back in the present, as I sat in that very wheelchair next to his hospital bed. The words still rang in my ears. I could still feel the rubberized plastic of the steering wheel under my fingers. In another ten minutes I would park the car, unload the chair, and open it up next to the passenger door. I'd push it up the walk to the restaurant and the race against low blood sugar would begin. Meanwhile in the hospital, as I watched the IV drip, I finally understood. Back in the truck, on our way to that evening meal, he hadn't spoken up for my sake. I wasn't the one he was trying to comfort.
Somehow, I had forgotten that moment, or at least parts of it. I had missed the subtext of our conversation the first time around. But there in the hospital it had come back to life. Each of those memories and half a dozen others, as real and present as they had been all those days or months or years ago. I looked at my father's face again. This time I saw something different. I began to realize how much he had lost, and how much all those losses had cost him. The insulin, the nerve damage, his loss of balance, loss of muscle tone...near the end, when he couldn't walk. Not to mention his parents, my grandparents. What had it all meant to him?
I remember I had trouble dealing with some of it at the time. The bigger losses had a way of taking over our lives. Getting through the present was the top priority. We had to deal with “now” first. Start with today, then worry about tomorrow. We didn't waste much energy on yesterday. But there's a question worth asking – why not? Yesterday had seemed awfully important yesterday. Yesterday had been “now” once. Now we didn't care about it anymore. Why didn't yesterday count? Why should tomorrow count for more? I guess the obvious answer is that we had a chance to change tomorrow, and no one knew what was coming.
That explanation bothered me because it didn't address what felt like the source of the problem. Forget about yesterday and tomorrow. What about an hour ago and an hour from now? Whatever was happening an hour ago had a direct impact on where you found yourself in the present, and an hour into the future...well...you would have to be doing something that led from the present. Talking about hours gets you closer to the issue, to the problem at the heart of it all, but it doesn't get you to the answer. What is happening right now is most important, an hour from now still matters, but an hour ago is just history.
How about seconds? A second ago, a second from now, right this second! This second has come and gone several times over the course of this thought. In each case, this second was “now”, but now they're all gone. If that's true, and it definitely is, what is “now”? Now seems to stretch out depending on what we're doing. “Now” can be a starting gun, or the duration of a thought. What are you doing now? Reading a book. Baking cookies. Going to college. Dying of natural causes.
Can we even agree on when “now” is? Let's say we meet on a flat, straight road. Each of us has an identical starter pistol set to a timer. We synchronize the timers so that both pistols will fire at the exact same time. Now we walk in opposite directions until we're a mile apart. Even though we know both pistols sound at the same time, I don't hear yours for more than four and a half seconds. To you, mine reports four and a half seconds late. Even though light moves orders of magnitude faster than sound, the principle is the same. You just need a greater distance to notice the effect. If we detonated two massive explosions simultaneously on the earth and the moon, the flash of the explosion on the moon wouldn't be visible for more than a second after the one on earth. Sure, those are extreme examples, but they're just illustrations of a more important point. Everything you see or hear is something that has already happened. Your “now” is someone else's past. Their “now” is your past. Living in the past isn't a metaphor, it's reality. Maybe the only way for us to truly share our time with one another is to share space. To be close. In the same room. By a bedside. Holding hands.
Whether that's the case or not, what does it say about our conception of the past? If my present is your past and my past is your present, then the further apart we are, the further back your present is in my past. The further back I am in your past. If you pick a point far enough away, the moments that are only memories for me are just becoming the present for you. If I could teleport six trillion miles away with a telescope powerful enough, I could watch myself eat lunch a year ago. Of course, I would only be seeing an image, but what difference does that make? We only experience the world through our senses anyway. Life is the combination of the sights, smells, sounds – all the sensations you experience put together. If it's one year ago six trillion miles away, is last year really gone? The past still exists, just not here.
Somewhere else, my dad and I were sitting down to dinner. Somewhere else, I was still working to earn back his trust. Somewhere else, I was taking off a pair of oversized boxing gloves. There was something sad and comforting about that. I watched the IV drip and held my father's hand.
POLYPHEMUS
From the very beginning, we started off on the wrong foot. I came home to find a strange man's coat hanging on the back of my dad's chair at the kitchen table. The asshole had the nerve to sit in my dad's seat. That rubbed me the wrong way. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place where I'd seen him before.
“Oh! I didn't expect you to come over so early!”
My mother was smiling a little too broadly. It was a strained, artificial smile I don't think I'd ever seen on her before. Something unusual was going on. She had a nervous flutter as she introduced us.
“...and this is my son!”
“I've heard a lot about you.”
He stood up and extended a hand. I made an effort to be polite and shook it. He was putting on a show. I saw through it immediately. It was like I could read his mind. “See? See us shaking hands? Look at how well we get along.”
I didn't let on, but left as soon as I could without being rude. I hoped that was the last I would see of the slimy bastard, but the way life had been going I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. Over the next couple weeks, his name seemed to come up in every conversation I had with my mother. I'd never seen her smitten, so it was an alien experience. She was like a school girl with a crush. She would break off mid-sentence to answer the phone when he called. They were talking several times a day. Don't get me wrong, I was glad she wasn't lonely. I wanted her to be happy. But there was something unsettling about the guy.
There was something phony about him too, like he was faking his way through each social interaction. He seemed manipulative, and the timing of their new relationship made me trust him even less. I wasn't alone, either. My sister felt the same way. No one in the family liked the jerk, but her work friends had signed off on him immediately. I don't know if they were just trying to be supportive or if the superficial context of those interactions helped him get past their collective radar. Either way, it got to the point where I had to say something.
I dreaded the conversation. My mother had been at the hospital every day my dad was sick, and I couldn't even imagine how difficult those months had been. Her unexpected romantic obsession seemed unhealthy, like she was trading one extreme for another. Still, who was I to say anything? What did I know? I seriously debated what right I had, if any, to speak up. In the end, I came to the conclusion that I had to at least tell her how I felt about the guy. If nothing else, I had to be clear for my own sake.
I spent a lot of time trying to sort out exactly what my feelings were and where they came from. It took me even longer to put the whole thing into words and figure out how to explain why I felt the way I did so that it would make sense to anyone else. I honestly put a lot thought into what I was going to say, but I only got more anxious as the conversation drew nearer. We were eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and my stomach was in my chest by the time our meal began to wind down. I don't remember how I initiated the conversation or even if I was
the one to do it, but I do remember that her eyes filled with tears almost immediately. I had begun to expect that response. It had become an unavoidable part of any emotional discussion we had in those days, but that didn't make it any easier, seeing her that way. She was my mother. She had always taken care of everyone else in the family and had always come across as being so strong, so in control. I didn't know how to handle vulnerability from her. My father was a strong man, but my mother was more resilient and unflappable than anyone I'd ever met. Here she was, practically crying, and we hadn't even gotten to the hard part.
I opened with a gross understatement.
“I know you really like him, but he makes me kind of uncomfortable.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
I lost all the words, the calm, careful explanations I'd worked out ahead of time when she looked at me with tears in her eyes.
“I don't know. It feels strange having a strange man in the house.”
“Well...he's not a strange man in the house, he's just a friend.”
I had to stop for a moment to take that one in. Was it possible that he was just a friend, that I'd completely misinterpreted the situation? If they were just friends, I'd witnessed some highly unusual behavior. No, that explanation didn't make any sense. Even if men and women can be “just friends”, their relationship had a codependency to it that removed it from the realm of casual acquaintance.
“I don't think he just wants to be friends. I think he's interested in you.”
“Really? But it's not -... It's just been so long, I don't even know how to think like that. We've known each other for such a long time.”
“Mom, I'm telling you he's interested in you. I've had girlfriends I talked to less often than you two talk to one another.”
Telemachus Rising Page 3
