We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “I have to say I like Paul O’Neill,” Connell pronounced academically. His father continued to look at the television. “I’m not one of those Mets fans who hate a guy like that just to hate him. He’s the heart of that team, a blue-collar worker.” The silence on his father’s end of the exchange was growing desperate. “Yankees or not, it was exciting to have a New York team in the playoffs again.” This last remark seemed to have gotten his father’s attention, because his face brightened into a smile, as though it were news to him; and then Connell realized that it was news to him, even though he’d watched all the playoff games the previous October and Connell had called after every one.

  “Yeah!” he said. “Good!”

  Connell felt stupid for trying to tread carefully around the old man. It was time to face facts: his father’s short-term memory was shot. He probably didn’t remember anything longer than a few minutes. As soon as Connell left the room, his father wouldn’t even know he had come home in the first place. He wouldn’t have wanted his son to sit around with him on a Friday night; it would have embarrassed him, and Connell didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so he went upstairs to get ready, because there were people he hadn’t seen in a long time.

  • • •

  He still had his first bottle of cologne, which he had made last a few years by dabbing it sparingly, once behind each ear, once on either side of the neck. He had sweated it out on dance floors and left its trace in heated grapplings on couches. When he’d departed for college, he’d left it behind on the counter in his bathroom, a little offering at the altar of adolescence.

  He found the bottle in his parents’ bathroom, down to the dregs. A vague horror crept into him, turning to fury. His father must have scooped the bottle up in his wanderings through the house. He could see him struggling to open it, sloshing its contents around, watching it pour through his fingers into the sink. He imagined him clapping it to his neck and chest in big cupped palms and uncoordinated splashes, trying to steal some of the future that stretched out before his son. How much could he even smell anymore? And what use did he have for cologne anyway? That part of his life was over.

  Connell marched downstairs with the bottle. “Did you do this?” he asked, thrusting it under his nose. “Did you take this? There was more than half a bottle in here.”

  “I don’t know,” his father said, looking scared. “I don’t know.”

  This time he didn’t soften it for him.

  “I get it,” he said. “You don’t know. Well, you used it. I know it’s just a bottle of cologne. But it was special to me.”

  His father’s eyes widened; his forehead wrinkled; his mouth turned down. He sat back in the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  Part of Connell wanted to say it was no big deal, but he couldn’t somehow.

  “Look,” he said. “Just be careful with my stuff. Okay? Whatever I left in my room. Maybe you could leave that stuff alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He felt his resolve wavering. He had to resist comforting him. His father ran roughshod over everything, and everybody was supposed to go around picking up the pieces. You couldn’t get mad at him; you were supposed to feel sorry for him all the time. Well, forget that. Connell was the son, not the father. It wasn’t his job yet to pick up the pieces.

  He went to a friend’s place in the city. They hit a few bars, closed the last one down. He took the first train home in the morning, the five-thirty.

  • • •

  He awoke to his mother shaking him.

  “Your father has his routines now,” she said. “You’re disrupting him. He needs this couch for the TV. Go up to your bed.” The room was dark, but a sliver of light filtered through the sliding door. He smelled coffee and the eggy sweetness of batter on a grill. “Just go upstairs.” A frown flashed across her face. “You didn’t have to come home.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m getting up.”

  “I need to know what I can expect from you while you’re here.”

  “I’m here,” he said. “What do you need?”

  “Can you stay with your father? I don’t want to leave him alone today.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She stood there for a second looking him over.

  “Can I count on you?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Just stick around the house, make sure he eats, make sure he doesn’t get hurt. Sit with him awhile. Don’t sleep too late.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “He’s excited to have you home.” She made it sound hopeful, but a sad note crept into her voice. “You’re all he asks about. ‘Where’s Connell? Where’s Connell?’ ”

  His mother had dressed his father in a long-sleeved shirt and slacks. He looked as if he was about to go to work. One detail remained, though: his shirttail hung out. She undid his belt, then hiked his pants up high and rezipped them.

  Connell passed through the kitchen. The pancake batter bowl was empty. She hadn’t made enough for him. He threw his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s all yours,” he said, not as gently as he could have.

  His mother stopped him on the stairs.

  “Are you going to be here?” she asked. “Tell me now. I’ll try to figure something else out. I can’t afford to have you acting irresponsibly.”

  “Mom, relax,” he said. “I’ll take care of him. Go to work.”

  At the top of the stairs he heard his mother tell his father she was putting on the television, and his father gurgle in response, and then he heard the volume rising, step by step. “If you need anything,” his mother shouted over the television, “Connell is upstairs.” If his father responded, he couldn’t hear it. “I love you,” his mother said. There was a pause. “Can you say it back, honey?” He didn’t know if his father hadn’t responded or if he simply hadn’t heard him over the loud volume, but after a while he heard the garage door opening.

  • • •

  He thought it important to let his father drink his own soda. His father grabbed the glass by the brim and pulled it toward him too quickly. The glass dropped to the bricks and shattered. Connell picked up the biggest chunks of glass by hand and got the dustpan and broom to sweep the slick shards into the garbage. He toweled the pool from the floor. So it had come to this: you couldn’t give him anything to drink by himself. He had to be in a bib, practically. You had to hold it up to his mouth. You had to give it to him in a plastic cup, maybe even a sippy cup. And he just sat there defenseless as you reached into his lap with a sponge to soak up the spillage. He didn’t even try to brush you away and say he would do it himself. He just sighed and offered himself up. And the fragile, helpless look on his face, the way he didn’t even try to argue that everyone made mistakes, made him seem like a whipped dog, complete with sad, soulful eyes and a desire to please.

  “Don’t move an inch,” Connell said. “Not one inch.” But he didn’t know why he’d said it. He had cleaned up every bit of the glass.

  • • •

  His father was picking at his belt, trying to get it open. He was pumping the waistband up and down like he was trying to fan out a fire. Then Connell smelled it. He went to unbuckle the pants, but his father wouldn’t let him.

  “No,” he screamed. “No! No!”

  “Dad!” he said. “Calm down. We have to get you clean.”

  His father was whimpering as he kept his hand on his backside, trying to hold the stuff in place. In the struggle, some crap soaked through his pants. Connell maneuvered him upstairs somehow and into the shower, still in his clothes, but when he tried unbuckling the belt, his father started yelling and keening again. He undid the button of his father’s pants, then stopped. This wasn’t the time to rush stupidly in. He would get the shoes off first; everything else would follow from that.

  “Can you sit down? If you sit down this will go a lot easier.”

  “Go away!” his father shoute
d. “Go away!”

  Connell moved behind him and pulled his father down onto him, breaking his fall with his body. His father crashed an elbow into his chest and flailed around like a man on fire. He would have punched Connell in the face if he could have turned around.

  Connell held him in a tight grip. “It’s okay,” he said, over and over. He had to slow everything down.

  He climbed out from under him, cradling his head. He tugged off his father’s shoes, unzipped his pants, and started pulling them off. His father grabbed at them and kicked at him, but Connell got them past his butt and off his feet. Crap clung to his father’s legs and fell to the tub in clumps. Connell heard it splat and realized he could never be a nurse like his mother. His father was breathing hard and staring at him with an eerie intensity, as if to keep his gaze from drifting to his nakedness.

  Connell dropped the pants in a heap on the floor. He didn’t have the heart to tackle the underwear yet, so he went after the button-down shirt. His father was slicked with crap all over and hard to grip, but Connell got the shirt off; only the socks and soiled briefs remained.

  “Will you stop, Dad? Will you stop for a minute?”

  “Go away!” his father shouted. “No more!”

  “You are going to have to listen to me,” he said sharply.

  “Leave me alone! Leave!”

  As he took his father’s underwear off, Connell looked away, partly so as not to mortify his father and partly because he hadn’t seen his father’s penis since he was a little kid in the shower with him. The smell in the hot shower overpowered him, and he gagged. Some of the crap fell out of his father’s underwear, which Connell cupped like a diaper and dropped into the little trash bin with the grocery store bag in it. His father lay there naked. Connell would have to pick him up and wash him, but he would have to get the tub clean too, or they would both track it around the house. His own clothes were going to get sopping wet, so he quickly undressed. He left his underwear on. He needed all his strength to lift his father up. His father wasn’t resisting anymore, but he was dead weight. Once Connell got him standing, he closed the curtain and turned the water on. The crap stuck to the bathtub began to wash toward the drain. He grabbed a towel from the rack and started wiping the crap from his father’s legs and butt. It seemed that no amount of wiping could get him clean. His father’s head hung down and his shoulders slumped. His chest heaved in deep, mournful sighs. When the towel was too filthy to continue, Connell rolled it up and dumped it on the floor. He grabbed the bar of soap and another towel and made it into a giant washcloth with which he washed his father’s genitals and gave his legs and backside a good scrubbing. He had never touched his father so much in his life. He soaped up his hands and washed his father’s feet and his own. He washed his own arms and legs and scrubbed at his hands, then turned the water off. “We’re almost done,” he said, opening the curtain, taking his father’s hand, and helping him out into the steam-filled room. He ran to the closet and grabbed more towels. His first thought was to wrap one around his waist and remove his sopping underwear beneath it, but something told him it would be a great indignity for his father to be naked while his son was clothed, so he took his underwear off and stood exposed. He toweled his father down and they stood naked together. He wrapped a towel around each of them. He found his father’s cologne in the medicine cabinet, made a little well of it in his hand, and clapped it to his father’s neck. The smell rushed up at him, and he was reminded of when his father showed him how to shave. “Go with the grain,” his father had said into the mirror. “To avoid bumps. Take it easy. Take your time. Don’t go over the same spot twice if you can avoid it.” Afterward, he’d leaned down to let Connell pull at his cheeks and feel the cool, smooth skin of his face.

  Connell put some underwear on his father, and a T-shirt, and led him to the bed and tucked him in.

  When his father was asleep, Connell left the house to go buy a box of adult diapers. He didn’t know why his mother hadn’t thought of this sooner. It would save everyone a lot of trouble and be a simple fix. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to use them.

  • • •

  “He wants to leave you his desk when he’s gone,” his mother said at breakfast the next morning, before she left for work. His father was upstairs. “The rest you’ll have to wait for me to die to get.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You want to be a kid forever? You have to hear this stuff eventually.”

  Connell knew that getting that desk had been one of the few happy experiences his father had shared with his own father as an adult. It was of no use to his father anymore, though. Now it was where his mother did the bills. She could use the little desk in Connell’s room for that; he could switch them out.

  The desk was five feet wide and three deep and made of solid wood. It wasn’t an heirloom, exactly. The wood was scratched and nicked from the banging by the chair. A set of drawers on either side formed the base on which the desktop rested.

  Taped index cards ran along the front and side edges. One card listed the day, month, and year of all three of their birthdays. One had a little family tree branching out from his grandparents to his aunts, uncles, and cousins. Off EILEEN TUMULTY LEARY (WIFE) and ED LEARY (SELF) was CONNELL LEARY (SONN). One card read SOCIAL SECURRURITURY #, as though his father had picked out a syllable at random to keep the thread going. Inside the desk was a card with a pump pin affixed to it and the caption, PIN FOR BLOING UP OF BACKET BALLS.

  While his father watched television in the den, Connell lugged the heavy thing up the stairs piece by piece to his room. When he was done reassembling it, he felt energized by a sense of possibility. He would fill in the drawers and get down to whatever important work lay ahead, which would reveal itself to him if he sat there long enough.

  His own desk was so light that he could carry it downstairs without removing the drawers. He shoved it into place where his father’s desk had been. It looked miniature beneath his father’s diplomas. He taped the index cards to the desk’s surface.

  All that remained was to bring his father’s chair up and carry his own down in compensation. His father’s chair didn’t just swivel and wheel; it pivoted back, to allow for those periodic bouts of idleness deep thinkers required for their important ideas.

  The chair, which was heavier than it looked, was anchored in a metal base. Once upstairs, it lent his room an appealing seriousness. He sat in it and picked at the remaining tape on the desktop. He leaned back, to let his mind wander wherever his thoughts would go.

  He must have fallen asleep, because he awoke to his father shouting. He went downstairs and found him in the study.

  “My desk,” his father said plaintively.

  Connell pulled at his shirt’s hem. “Mom said you wanted to leave it to me.”

  “Yes,” he said. Tears were streaming down his face. “For you.” He pointed at Connell, jabbing him in the sternum. “You.”

  “I brought it upstairs.”

  “When I’m dead,” he said. “When I’m dead.”

  The weight of a lifetime of kindnesses done him fell on Connell at once.

  That night, when his mother told him to take it back downstairs, he felt almost relieved.

  For a moment, he hoped that his father might forget it ever happened, but then he realized that the condition didn’t work like that. He forgot things you wanted him to remember. He remembered things you wanted him to forget.

  • • •

  The next day, he sat at his little desk again and tried to write Jenna a letter, but nothing came. He covered both sides of a sheet of paper with his signature, trying out different styles.

  The weather was nice. He decided to try to take his father outside for a catch.

  He found the gloves in a tote bag on which his father had written the family name multiple times in permanent marker during the period when he’d gone around labeling everything. The longer Connell looked at those insistent capital letters, the more
they sounded like the cry of a drowning man.

  His father had bought them both new gloves the year they’d moved in. Connell felt ashamed at how pristine his father’s looked, scuff-free and auburn-lustrous. They’d spent almost no time playing catch since. Connell’s glove was more worn, its leather cracked in places. When he’d quit baseball to do debate, the shift from body to mind had felt final. He hadn’t even considered taking his glove when he’d left for college.

  He put a tennis ball in his glove’s pocket and led his father outside. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, he held his father’s glove out to him.

  “Let’s play catch.”

  His father could hardly hold the glove on his hand, so Connell decided to ditch the gloves. He stood him with his back to the wall and walked a few paces away, then bounced the ball to him, trying to get it as close to his hands as he could. When he didn’t catch it, Connell fetched it and placed it in his hands. His father couldn’t throw, but he could bounce it to him in a rudimentary way. He could tell his father was throwing because he would hold it for a while and then it would leave his hand.

  • • •

  He felt like he was losing his mind, or at least his intelligence, sitting there watching that much television with his father. He started spending most of his time in his room, reading novels, trying to drown out the noise of the television downstairs, and writing and rewriting a tortured letter to Jenna that got longer and longer the more he realized he’d never send it. He understood he was writing it for himself now, to try to figure out what had gone wrong with him, why he’d asked her to marry him in the first place. She was right: he was nineteen. He was embarrassed to think of how he’d behaved for most of the last semester—like a child and an old man all at once.