“He didn’t tell me it was you. Hey, I didn’t get it until you started to change.”
“Emerso changed.”
“Yeah, he got on this kick of ranting about how screwed up everything was. Then I read through everything — old stuff and new — and I put the pieces together. That is some education we gave you at school.”
“You introduced me to the German philosophers.”
“Stay away from Nietzsche, okay?”
“Now we just do math in math class.”
“Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“I always covered my tracks. Never said anything personal on the site. It was always Emerso.”
“It was always you, kid. And I know the answer to my question. I know who you’re angry at.”
“Then why ask it?”
“I know the answer but you don’t.”
“This is stupid.” I realized I had made a mistake coming here.
“Tell me then. Who are you angry at?”
I sucked in a breath. “I’m angry at me.”
“Maybe a little,” he shot back. “But that’s not where the deep-down anger is coming from.”
I said nothing.
Mr. Kensington Miller picked up a couple of empty beer cans and dribbled the leftover contents onto a dead fern plant. “Martin, I know. I’ve been there. My father died when I was fourteen. He worked construction — he built bridges for a living. My mother had been trying to get him to quit for a long while. He always said it wasn’t dangerous. And the money was good. When she complained, he said that she didn’t appreciate him. He said that none of us did. After his accident at work, I was angry for a long time.”
“Who were you angry at?”
“I was angry at him.”
My father was in the back yard when I took the keys from the kitchen table and started the van. It was the first time I’d ever driven around town in the daylight. I kept trying to tell myself that what I was feeling was wrong. Not logical. But what if Mr. Miller had been right? I felt a horrible kind of guilt for feeling the way I did. I focused on the driving. Slow and cautious. Keep the animal in the cage.
I hated the antiseptic smell of the hospital more than anything as I entered it. I took the elevator to the third floor and went to room 317, walked in. One bed was empty. In another was an old man with an oxygen tube up his nose. He was asleep.
I stood by the empty bed where my mother had died and looked up at the TV screen as I had before. I studied my muddy reflection in the dark screen, reconnecting that day with this one, reconnecting myself to that hollow image in the screen. I closed my eyes and slipped back to that time. I saw how easy it had been to make my great escape. But I knew where I had to go next.
I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to find the exact location of the grave. Everything was green. The place had just been mowed maybe a couple of days ago. As if on purpose, I was making detours in one direction and then another until I wove my way from the older headstones to the newer ones.
And as I stood there facing her grave, I felt nothing. I knew where I was and why I was here, but it was like I’d tricked myself into looking for a solution to my problem. And there was no solution. I felt hollowed out, like that dead image of me in the hospital TV. I did not cry.
I heard the sound of crows in the trees nearby. I leaned down and touched the headstone and it felt warm. Polished granite. Dark, in sunlight. Behind it someone had crammed in a paper coffee cup and on the ground were two cigarette butts.
Maybe it was the guy who had mowed the grass on his coffee break. Or someone who had been walking through the cemetery. They’d thought nothing of leaving their trash here.
A kind of tidal wave swept through me as I picked up the trash. I hated whoever had done this.
I tried to say something, something to her. I wanted to say that I loved her and that I wish I had said something more there in the hospital room that day and that I wish I had cried. I wanted to ask her to forgive me, but instead I whispered, “Why did you leave us?” And I placed the blame squarely on her.
But as soon as the words were out, I knew I got it all wrong. What I had known to be true, I now felt in my bones. It wasn’t her fault.
I lay down on the grass and pulled my knees to my chest. I began to speak to her and say the things that I needed to say. Bad timing, but it was all I could do. I closed my eyes and heard the sound of the wind in the treetops. I could hear the traffic, too, but it sounded like the river in the forest.
When I opened my eyes, it took a few minutes for the world to get back into focus. Sunlight spilled through the branches and filtered through the pale green leaves so that it seemed like every tree was illuminated from within.
I realized I had done a pretty fair job of pushing away the memories I had of my mother. If I wasn’t careful, it was all going to slip away and that was not what I wanted at all. Emerso and I had been very careful about the construction of a safe and cynical alternate world to inhabit. My self-appointed dictator status in that nation was about to come to an end.
When it came time to pull the plug on Emerso.com, I wanted to leave nothing there in its place except a vacuum. My fans would find other diversions, but my so-called wisdom and my many opinions would not be available.
My father was in the kitchen when I came home. He had the radio up quite loud — old music from the seventies. I think it was ABBA. He was making spaghetti sauce from scratch. Tomato and garlic and basil and something else. He hadn’t even noticed the van was gone. I hung the keys up on the hook where they were supposed to be.
“Lilly’s had another fight with Jake,” he said. “Be nice to her, okay?”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“Taste this.”
“Not enough garlic,” I said.
“More garlic coming up,” he said.
As he reached for another garlic clove, I asked him if I could read some of his poetry. He pulled down a Hilroy notebook from a kitchen shelf and handed it to me.
Darrell was exuberant about his plan to shut down Emerso.com. At twelve midnight, three days after my final posting, it would “go off the air.” The domain name would cease to exist. All trace would be gone as if it had never been there. Emerso.com would disappear as mysteriously as it had emerged. I would not reveal my identity but the final words would not be mine. I decided to end the kingdom of Emerso with the disappearance of the king, an abdication of that czar of wisdom, compassion, arrogance, and ultimately dark sarcasm that had been me. But there would be no hi-tech send-off with bells and whistles as Darrell had suggested. Only one last message — the first ever e-mail to Emerso.com’s visitors. And it would go to everyone who had ever visited Emerso. It was a poem written by my father, for my mother, but now a final gift to my lost tribe:
I give you the square root of sky,
the large province of hope and the view
from the top of the hill at the end of the beach.
I give you finches in the apple tree,
sunset, west over ice,
the wedge of sunlight in late afternoon
with its warm explosion of cloud
at the end of a dark day — the brooding clouds overhead
unable to repress the adventure.
I give you guardians in the form of cloud
and snow and summer rain on calendula.
I give you balance and assurance to allow
you to dance along the edge of disaster
without looking down.
Here is the compass from my past
and the map I’ve kept hidden in my heart —
the tools necessary to find the path
from despair to happiness.
And in the wind
you will find the solved mystery
of being and moving at once.
I give you the polished remains of glass
washed up on every shore
sculpted into gems
and all the lost toys of our childhood, the ri
ght to reinvent any world
to fit your dreams.
I give you back all
that knowledge and responsibility has taken away
and so I set you free.
Shoulder the Sky Page 14
