by Tim O'Brien
And so it begins. The music comes on and we make our way out into a make-believe world, into a dead-end desert casino, where some of us deal blackjack and never lose, and where some of us pull wads of cash from the air, and where a croupier shoots fire from his roulette wheel, and where love is won and lost, and where a cocktail waitress sings to a cowboy doing rope tricks, and where a bartender produces bottles of wine from his bare hands, and where silver balls float to the ceiling, and where Lady Luck sets off her fateful explosions on a long-ago New Year’s Eve out in the desert of West Texas. Briefly, at least, it all feels real. The magic is happening.
Sixty-eight tricks later, it’s over. We blink and awaken from the dream.
* * *
Timmy and Tad, if you read this years from now, I want you to understand that my subject here is not magic. Nor is it storytelling. My subject is our longing for miracles. The human journey—yours, Timmy, and yours, too, Tad—is an immersion in all that is unknown and all that is unknowable: the unknown moment from now, the unknown yawn of eternity. Will I live on after I die? Will my children live happy lives? Will mankind survive the final flaring of the sun? Will Alice make her way out of Wonderland? At least in part, it is the mystery of the future that compels us to turn the pages not only of novels but also of our own lives. Unlike the animals, we conceive of tomorrow—tomorrow matters to us—and we spend a good portion of our time adjusting the present to shape the future, saving up for that vacation in Europe, heading off to church each Sunday in the hope that Saint Peter might issue his precious admission ticket. We yearn for the miracle of a happy ending. We’re human. We can’t help it. Likewise, on a less grandiose scale, we sometimes ask such questions as: Did Lizzie Borden take an ax and give her mother forty whacks? What happened to Amelia Earhart on her vanishing voyage over the South Pacific? What were Custer’s last thoughts at the Little Bighorn? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone on that November day in 1963? And late at night such thoughts can get pretty personal: Where exactly did things go wrong in my life? How did I end up in this strange bed, so restless, so shockingly alone? Why am I crying?
In the end, Tad and Timmy, we are mysteries even to ourselves. We may speculate, of course, and we may try to disentangle the microscopic threads of history and conscience and motive, but who among us really knows why we do the things we do or why we think the things we think? Is it not guesswork? And beyond that, what about the mysteries of the people all around us—our fathers and mothers, our children, our lovers, our friends? Is not each of us encased inside a leaden skull? Are we not all in solitary confinement? In her novella The Touchstone, Edith Wharton writes: “We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.” I cannot read your mind, Timmy, and you cannot read mine, Tad. Often you surprise me. Often you confuse me. Often I yearn to crawl inside your heads in search of some elusive ground zero, even knowing there is no ground zero, even knowing that minute by minute we all undergo endless modification. What was true five years ago, or even five minutes ago, is probably no longer true, and almost certainly no longer true in the same way. Yet I keep longing for a miracle. I want to live inside you. I want to swim through your thoughts and sleep in your dreams. What a magic show that would be.
14
Abashment
After a dress rehearsal for one of our magic shows, during which Meredith slithered through the footlights in a sensational showgirl costume, seven- or-eight-year-old Timmy waited a few days before clearing his throat and saying, “Mom, do you think that getup is appropriate?”
Meredith smiled and said, “It’s only for a magic show.”
Timmy said, “But I just called you Mom.”
* * *
15
Sushi
My memory is failing, overburdened by the brain-jangling pace of fatherhood, and now, when I try to survey the past several years, I’m mostly left with tiny, disconnected fragments of my life with Timmy and Tad. Each memory-shot exists in its own dimension. There is no before and no after, just flashes in the dark, as if brilliant pinpricks of light suddenly ignite and then blink out in a vast void of prehistory. Nothing connects with anything else. It would be nice to find shape or some sort of modest unity in my threadbare recollections, but I’m resigned to the sad fact that memory—at least my memory—is less a movie than a scrapbook of moth-eaten images and garbled audio clips.
Here, at 2:37 a.m. on August 13, 2013, is a sampling:
* * *
Back in 2010, little Timmy and I were inspecting a suit of armor in an old Belgian castle. “Boy,” Timmy said as we moved out into the daylight, “that guy knows how to stand still.”
* * *
Tad’s first-grade teacher asked the class to write an essay. On a sheet of white paper, Tad carefully wrote: “S. A.”
* * *
The year was 2009 or 2010, and in a park near our house Tad was playing a game he called Stop Sign. He circled his arms above his head, approximating the shape of a stop sign, and trotted up to a five- or six-year-old girl playing hopscotch. The girl hopped right past him. Tad turned and watched. After a second, he yelled, “You better not drive till next week.”
* * *
And then, somewhere in outer space, a star ignites, and I watch Timmy at age three or four come limping up to me. What he says, exactly, I can’t remember—something like, “It hurts.” He isn’t crying. He’s puzzled. His leg is broken.
* * *
* * *
Time passes, and he turns five or six, and Meredith and I are asking how he broke his leg, and Timmy says, “Spinning,” and Meredith says, “Spinning where? How?” and Timmy shrugs as if broken legs are a dime a dozen and says, “On the floor, in the kitchen, Mommy was doing dishes and I was spinning,” and the guilt trip of two parents who never knew how their firstborn broke a leg is partly relieved, partly resolved, though only partly, because there is also the memory of a hospital interview with a kindly social worker whose quizzical expression never changes as we explain, numerous times, that it is all a complete and baffling mystery to us. “Uh-uh,” says the social worker, also numerous times.
* * *
And at some foggy point in history, years and years ago, Tad screamed in his sleep: “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” and two rooms away, as I lay reading a book, I was struck by the terrible certainty that my son was dreaming of his father.
* * *
Out in the backyard one afternoon, Tad was helping our lawn guy, Jef Pierce, do his weekly mowing. Tad gathered up chunks of firewood and dropped them in front of Jef’s oncoming mower. Jef stopped, tossed the logs aside, and kept going. This repeated itself several times. “Okay, look,” Jef finally said, “why don’t you go get me a glass of water?” Tad stared at him and said, “Why do you want to mow glass?”
* * *
And there in a flash of light stands Timmy at age eight or nine—probably eight—pursuing his bizarre new hobby of sushi preparation. Multicourse sushi. From-scratch sushi. Painstakingly presented sushi. More or less edible sushi. He wears a chef’s hat and a white apron. His expression is stern, his hands deep in sticky rice. The floor is littered with bits of crab and avocado and seaweed and cucumber and my son’s homemade spicy mayo. Bamboo mats have been carefully flattened and smoothed on the kitchen table. Expensive glass chopsticks have been encased in cloth napkins. This is my child? A prodigy sushi maker? (I do not care for sushi; I applaud people who do.) At one point, after Timmy offered to prepare still another raw-fish feast, I suggested we go outside and toss around a baseball, or kick a football, or try some other all-American little-boy activity. “Sure, maybe tomorrow,” Timmy said. “Did Mom buy seaweed?”
* * *
Of such simple and mundane fragments have the years of my fatherhood been constructed. How little I have influenced my sons’ interests. How bravely they dive into their own. How I would chew and
chew that sushi.
16
Pride (I)
One constituent of a father’s pride is simple astonishment. We expect to instruct our children. We are then surprised to find them instructing us.
An illustration:
Several years back, on his ride home from school, Timmy noticed a man crying on a sidewalk along 15th Street in downtown Austin, Texas. The man was probably homeless, though not certainly, for his appearance and carriage had none of the beaten-down destitution of life on the streets. His clothing seemed clean; he was close-shaven; he wore a new-looking cap with the words “Vietnam Veteran” imprinted on it.
Timmy yelled at Meredith to stop the car, but it was rush hour and stopping wasn’t possible. Timmy looked over his shoulder as the crying man receded, and then Timmy himself was crying. He cried all the way home. He cried again at the dinner table. It was more than crying—it was unstoppable, quivering, somebody-has-died wailing. He got out of his chair and lay on the floor and bawled.
Early the next morning, before the sun had risen, I found my son sitting on a kitchen countertop, where he had just finished packing a brown paper bag with little gifts for the crying man on 15th Street. Timmy had packed a yo-yo, a sandwich, a granola bar, a photograph of himself, some fishing line, an apple, and a copy of one of my books. For several weeks afterward, riding to and from school, the boy searched the streets and sidewalks of Austin, but in the end, as anyone might guess, he never again saw the crying man on 15th Street. The sandwich grew moldy. The apple rotted. The granola bar was consumed by Timmy’s brother.
No one in our family has forgotten this episode. Certainly, Timmy hasn’t.
A year or so after the incident, for his English class, he began writing a poem called “My 15th Street Friend,” which is reprinted later in these pages. Though the poem isn’t bad for a nine-year-old, its literary merits and defects are not what caused me to look at my son in a new way. Rather, I was surprised—even amazed—that he had been carrying the hurt inside him for more than a year, that he had cared enough to still care, and that I had so wildly underestimated my own child. I would’ve guessed he might write about Minecraft, or about basketball, or about numerous other interests that appeared to consume him day after day. Not only had he not mentioned his 15th Street friend in many months, but virtually everything else in his life had seemed utterly transitory, here then gone. One moment he’d be clicking a Rubik’s Cube, the next moment he’d be watching NBA highlights, the next moment he’d be wrestling with his brother. Until the day he began writing the poem, I’d taken it for granted that his compassion was as short-lived and perfunctory as my own.
As an adult, humbled by my own failures and deficiencies, I have come to expect the worst of myself, almost never the best, and Timmy’s compassion for a suffering stranger reminded me of my own pitiful mediocrity: how I donate a few bucks to the United Way but then avoid the eyes of the homeless. I may feel saddened, but I don’t cry. Nor do many others. Nor, I guess, do you.
Now, after the passage of several years, what strikes me is the realization that an eight-year-old kid had become a better person that I am, able to feel what I do not. What had years ago been painful to me, seizing me by the throat, has now become little more than nervous embarrassment. What had once been empathy has become what Kafka calls the “frozen sea” of mankind’s heart. If a person’s humanity is measured by quality of feeling, my inner sea had frozen miles deep. This may be part of growing up, or part of living in an imperfect world, but it is no less depressing and no less despicable.
Timmy’s poem, and the incident that generated it, made me want to take Kafka’s ax to the frozen sea inside me, and maybe that explains, at least in part, why this maybe book is being written in the first place. I want to hammer away at the ice. I want to yell I love you, I love you, with every stroke on this keyboard.
17
Balance
A few days ago, Meredith and I attended Tad’s weekly soccer game, which concluded in a rare victory for my son’s not-very-talented assemblage of six-year-olds. Tad did not score. He does not believe in scoring. In fact, during the course of the game, Meredith and I could not help noticing that the boy seemed to be intentionally kicking the ball to his opponents, or at least in the general direction of his opponents. At halftime I asked my son about this.
“Well, sure,” said Tad, plainly bewildered, “but I was kicking the ball pretty straight, wasn’t I?”
“Very straight,” I said. “Except straight to the other team.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not exactly, but the whole purpose—”
Tad looked up at me as if he were about to cry.
“I felt sorry for them,” he said. “I mean, we were really, really clobbering them.” His eyes swept back and forth. “I thought you told me sharing is a good thing.”
* * *
Timmy plays lacrosse. Not well. He stands motionless at midfield. He balances his lacrosse stick on the middle finger of his right hand, the stick artfully vertical against a blazing-blue Texas sky. He seems to be auditioning for the circus.
Again, I asked about this.
“It’s not easy,” Timmy said sharply. “I mean, you try it.”
* * *
There is nothing in either boy that resembles athletic aggression. Where the competitive instinct might reside, there is instead a very sensible pain-avoidance instinct, or, as Meredith optimistically calls it, a propensity for excessive kindness. Which is not, I suppose, such a terrible thing.
Still, I’ve suggested that Timmy give some thought to moving his legs during lacrosse games; I’ve advised Tad to try sharing the soccer ball with his teammates, just for the experience of it.
No luck, I’m afraid.
And so, after some soul-searching, I’ve become more or less resigned, as fathers must and should, to letting the boys pursue their own visions, athletic and otherwise. But the whole letting-go frame of mind comes very, very hard for me. It’s hard to stay silent on the sidelines, hard not to yell pointed instructions to my kids, and hard to be cheerfully encouraging after another midfield balancing act. True, my sons are young, but I want good things for them, happy things, and I’ve learned that athletic accomplishment can make a boy’s life considerably less stressful, especially in the teenage years, and even more especially in this sports-crazy state of Texas. Around here, Scrabble experts don’t get elected prom king.
Meredith, of course, jumps all over me when I ramble on like this. “Are you kidding me?” she says. “We’re raising a couple of prom kings?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Prom kings?”
Swiftly, I cover my tracks, admitting it was a terrible example. But even so, in my head, I can’t help flashing back to my high school years. I would’ve killed to be prom king. I would’ve eaten salamander guts.
“Okay,” I’ll say. “What about homecoming king?”
* * *
It is February 5, 2012, a Sunday, and Timmy and I have just returned from unicycle practice in the cul-de-sac across the street. The boy has found his sport. Today, after months of false starts, Timmy navigated a complete circle all on his own. What joy on his face, what joy on my face. A unicyclist!
And behold: Tad, too, has blossomed into a whiz-bang athlete. A hula hoop pro!
For many, many months both boys have been pursuing their off-the-beaten-track sporting specialties, and although their feats may never be celebrated in the pages of Sports Illustrated, I challenge any high school linebacker to execute a striptease, underwear and all, while simultaneously keeping two hula hoops in motion. I challenge Shaq O’Neal to mount a unicycle.
* * *
Decades ago, after the publication of my first book, I called my mom and dad to ask how they’d feel if I were to drop out of graduate school and devote myself to becoming a novelist.
“You’ll regret it,” my mother said. “For sure.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harvard is Harvard,
” said my father. His voice seemed to me uncommonly ardent, a little desperate, as if I were contemplating suicide or bank robbery or both at once. “Listen to me. The world is full of people who think they can be writers. I’m one of them. Look how it turned out. Don’t do it.”
“All right, thanks,” I said, and then I did drop out.
Not immediately: I waited a couple of years. And yet in the midst of that phone call—somewhere between “Listen to me” and “Don’t do it”—there was a finality that slammed down on me with the full weight of the future. I remember hanging up the phone. I remember staring down at my hands. I remember how free I felt, how light and happy, and yet a moment later I was struck by a dizzying and unmistakable surge of terror. I knew what was coming. I would be exchanging security for jeopardy, forfeiting a Harvard degree for a degree in advanced uncertainty. The consequences, whether good or bad, would be with me forever.
Almost certainly what my mother and father had wanted for me was what every parent wants for a child, which above all else is safety. Graduate school was safe; writing novels and stories was not. And now, as a parent myself, I understand the ferocity of that protective instinct. Back during my “Row, Row” days, and over the perilous years afterward, the safety of Timmy and Tad had consumed me, and although I’m far from qualified as a biologist, I’d be surprised if our human DNA were not threaded with a gene or two that chemically wires us to be hypervigilant when it comes to the well-being of our offspring. It is this guardian instinct, I’m almost sure, that makes me worry about lacrosse sticks and soccer balls—a deep-seated, almost reptilian fear that my sons will be at risk in what can be a ruthlessly competitive world. And not just physically at risk. Emotionally, too. Who wants an unhappy kid?
