Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  I am afraid to open it. I am afraid not to open it. There is nothing symbolic about this. I am truly afraid. Nor is there anything at all symbolic about the door itself, that monstrous and glittery bedroom door—it is a thick, heavy, high, imposing, physical door. It once belonged to a bank in England. Two strong men had trouble hanging it.

  Maybe dynamite isn’t the answer. Maybe artillery.

  * * *

  “How was school today?”

  “Good.”

  “Any fun?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, like what?”

  “Art.”

  “Okay, that’s great. Tell me what you learned.”

  “Huh?”

  * * *

  The hormones are kicking in, bubbling from scalp to soul, fizzling and stewing and eating away at youth, turning my son Timmy secretive and silent and evasive and cryptic and sullen and withdrawn, a zealous guardian of all that is happening in his handsome head.

  Growth hormones: Timmy is three inches taller than I am. Each week, he gets taller. My neck hurts.

  Hair hormones: shave his armpits, gather up the clippings, stuff a mattress.

  Acne hormones: nothing terrible, but worth watching.

  Door-closing hormones: terrible, but what’s the answer?

  Ear hormones: “Timmy,” I said to him yesterday, “I don’t want to lose you.” He was wearing headphones. He didn’t hear me.

  * * *

  “Any homework, Timmy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like what?”

  “Math.”

  “So what happened in school? Anything interesting?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, did you talk to anybody?”

  “Sean.”

  “How’s Sean doing?

  “Fine.”

  “Is there a God up in heaven? Does e still equal mc squared? Will you become a sculptor someday? Do you dream about girls? Do you dream about me? Is there something on your mind? Do you want to talk about it? Have you murdered your best friend?”

  “Huh?”

  37

  Lip Kissing

  It has become perfunctory, obligatory, and abashed. It once lingered, but no more. A clock whirs in Timmy’s head, one calibrated to milliseconds. A buzzer sounds. Basium interruptus with an almost fifteen-year-old. “Bye,” he says.

  Sometimes I will be as cool and dismissive as my son, as if I’m uncrushed, as if my heart isn’t broken, as if this is how it is meant to be and therefore should be, as if we must all grow up and accept a law out of John Wayne’s textbook on male-to-male, father-to-son propriety. No lips. No moisture.

  “Bye,” I’ll say, but I’ll be thinking, “Row, Row.”

  38

  The King of Slippery

  “Hey, kiddo,” I’ll say, “is your homework finished?”

  Timmy will say, “Yes.”

  I’ll say, “Completely?”

  He’ll say, “Almost.”

  I’ll say, “Then it’s not finished?”

  He’ll say, “I just told you it’s almost finished.”

  I’ll say, “I know, but at first you told me it was finished. Didn’t you say the word ‘yes’?”

  He’ll say, “Yes meant almost.”

  I’ll say, “Almost does not mean yes.”

  He’ll say, “Well, I worked on it for a whole hour. It felt finished.”

  I’ll say, “In other words, yes means no?”

  He’ll say, “Not exactly.”

  I’ll say, “Yes means yes. Finished means finished. Almost means almost.”

  He’ll roll his eyes. What he wants to say, but doesn’t dare, is that his dad is a hairsplitting pedant.

  “Go finish your damned homework,” I’ll say.

  He’ll say, “Okay, in just a minute.”

  * * *

  On weekends and over Christmas break, Timmy stays up late. He’s testing the boundaries of my indulgence. I issue precise orders—“Be in bed, lights out, at 11:15 and not a second later”—and then, at 11:15 sharp, I go check on him. He’ll be in bed, lights out, except he’s playing Angry Birds on his iPhone.

  I raise hell. He pushes back.

  “I’m in bed,” he says, as if he doesn’t know better, as if he’s not splitting his own regulatory hairs. “The lights are out. What more do you want?”

  “I want you asleep. At least trying to sleep.”

  “You didn’t actually say that.”

  And off we go.

  * * *

  All right, granted, Meredith and I should have banned electronic games of any sort from day one. We did not. We regret it. We had no idea.

  And so, at the moment, we are living under a set of emergency decrees put in place after a long, sometimes tearful, sometimes bitter discussion about my intention to permanently and absolutely and without exception outlaw video gaming within the brick walls of our house. Zero tolerance. Harsh penalties. Although I’m tempted to recount our three-hour discussion in all its convoluted and emotional detail, I will merely list a few of the topics we covered: sleep deprivation, addiction, obsession, immobility, anxiety, disobedience, pallid skin, optic dysfunction, crankiness, willful deception, and (according to Timmy and Tad) the stunning educative virtues of Minecraft. “You wrote a whole chapter about how terrible absolutism is,” Timmy said at one point, “and now you want to take away all our video games. Like a complete dictator. You should just erase that chapter.”

  He then used the word “hypocrisy.”

  He did not use the words “police state,” but he bracketed the concept.

  In the heat of argument, I was unable to summon a reasonable reply, and we soon came to an uncomfortable compromise: x number of hours on weekends, y number of hours on school days, z number of hours on holidays and in the summer months.

  But now, after nine days, our agreement is in ruins. Amid the hurricane of daily life, Meredith and I have been unable to track the actual hours Tad and Timmy spend staring cross-eyed into video screens. And how could we? Do we burst into their bedrooms like a SWAT team? Do we set alarm clocks? Do we take away their iPhones at certain hours of the day, and if so, which hours, and which days? And what about their schoolwork, much of which requires a good deal of computer time? How do we know—actually know—if Timmy is peering intently at Google Classroom or at Clash Royale? How do we know if he’s composing an essay or gunning down pixel villains? Do we spy? Do we deploy parental guile and stealth and subterfuge? Do we purchase computer surveillance software? Do we install cameras? Do we organize a do-it-yourself FBI? Do we want to live that way?

  For the past nine days, Meredith and I have been beating ourselves up, losing sleep, trying desperately to hold on to some trust in our kids. Timmy and Tad are under orders to keep written records of every minute devoted to electronic screens of any type—iPads, iPhones, TVs, and computers. But they forget. Or they fudge. Or we think they fudge. Or we aren’t sure if they’re fudging. Or we suspect they’re fudging. Or—and this is terrible—we suspect much worse. We suspect subterfuge. We suspect cunning.

  Last night, I knocked on Timmy’s bedroom door, waited a moment, walked in, and saw his computer screen instantly flash from one website to another.

  I said nothing. I didn’t dare.

  To mention it to him, even now, would be received by my son as the next closest thing to outright accusation. Timmy was supposed to be doing homework. And perhaps he was—perhaps I had stepped into his room just as he switched from Spanish to algebra—but regardless of that, something sour and sickening wobbled in my stomach.

  This was no longer about video games.

  Only a few months ago, suspicion did not exist. Doubt did not exist. Somehow, stupidly, I had conceived of my sons as unblemished innocents, immune to the corruptions of adolescence, beyond petty betrayals, beyond deception, and what had been so utterly unthinkable—so unthinkable I didn’t think about it—has now become all I can think about. Is the fault my own? Probably so. Maybe eve
n certainly so. The corrosion of trust, in any case, is more than the corrosion of trust, because I fear I’ve lost Timmy’s absolute and untainted love, the confidence of absolute love, the bond of oneness, the shared valences, the unbreakable and eternal unity between father and son. I had believed in all that. I had believed there would be no secrets. I had believed, ludicrously but faithfully, that there would be no differences at all between us, ever. I had believed he would not grow up.

  “Dad,” Timmy says, his voice deeper than my own, “I just want things you don’t want.”

  “I know,” I tell him.

  “I like video games. I like YouTube. I learn things.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not you,” he says. “I’m me.”

  And I say, “I know,” though the knowing hurts and won’t ever stop hurting.

  39

  Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III)

  Even at this moment, as I try again to speak to my kids about Ernest Hemingway, I’m doing what I can to give Timmy and Tad the father they deserve. I want their lives to be rich with stories—not just those by Hemingway—and I want them to feel the moral push and pull that is the heartbeat of good stories. Hemingway is a place to start. Also, I want my sons to begin thinking about what they read; I want them to quarrel with Nobel Prize winners, to challenge Homer, and to feud with Aristotle; I want them to receive the pleasures I have received. More than that, years from now, the boys may be curious about their dad’s interior life, the things I had once thought about, and through the work of Ernest Hemingway, I can approach my own childhood, my father, my time at war, and my struggle to tell stories about those things.

  I will begin not with Hemingway but with a relevant real-world incident.

  A couple of years back, Meredith and Tad watched a movie called The Impossible, which involves a vacationing family caught up in a real-world tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004. Much of the film’s story line is devoted to the anguish of separation: a father frantically searches for his missing wife and missing son; the missing son searches for his missing brothers and missing father; a missing mother lies badly injured in a Thai hospital. Near the film’s conclusion, two of the young boys are seated in an open-air shuttle bus parked in a crowded area outside the very hospital in which their mother now recuperates. One of the boys needs to urinate. He jumps out of the bus and elbows his way through a throng of survivors. Miraculously—in that precise instant in time—the boy finishes peeing and looks up to see his long-missing older brother. A moment later he sees his long-missing father. In this happy and poignant way, the family is finally reunited—impossibly reunited, as the movie’s title alerts us.

  Meredith turned off the TV set. She asked Tad what he thought.

  “Well,” the boy said, “I liked it, but I know what the moral is.”

  “What?” said Meredith.

  “Take your time peeing,” said Tad.

  He was deadly serious. He was also being clever. And he was being serious and clever in a certain way, in the way irony is serious and clever, poking serious fun at a film designed to elicit tears of poignancy and joy. My son was aware, if only in his nine-year-old way, that what works very happily in the real world may work not so happily in the mediated world of storytelling. Coincidence can be read as contrivance, and contrivance can be read as pothole. The reader is jolted awake.

  “I know it really happened,” Tad said, “but that doesn’t mean I believe it.”

  * * *

  With Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Killers,” I react in a similar though not quite identical way. The story’s potholes, at least for me, involve coincidence that seems to teeter on the edge of contrivance. Nick Adams, the story’s point-of-view character, appears in exactly the right place at exactly the right hour to encounter a pair of mathematically unlikely human beings. How often have you encountered even a single homicidal thug? How often have you, or has anyone, been tied up by a homicidal thug? It’s not that such coincidences can’t happen. It’s not that such coincidences don’t happen or haven’thappened. Rather, as a reader, I find myself straying off into thoughts about coincidence itself. I’m thinking about the author, and about convenience, and about what strikes me as a strained arrangement of improbabilities. I react to “The Killers” just as I would react to a stranger relating these events at a dinner party. I’d be thinking, Yeah, right—tied up? Belief would come hard. At least for me, this story falls off what Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer Andrea Pitzer calls “the narrow ledge between coherence and coincidence.”

  At one point, Hemingway himself seems unsure of his story:

  “I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”

  The next sentence is: “It sounded silly when he said it.”

  “Hills Like White Elephants” does not sound silly in summary. Nor does “Fifty Grand,” another story involving boxers. Nor does “The End of Something” or “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” or “Soldier’s Home” or “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” or “Out of Season” or “A Very Short Story” or the haunting and oddly neglected “A Simple Enquiry.” I see little coincidence and even less contrivance in these and most other Hemingway stories.

  Coincidence alone, however, is not what stops me as I read “The Killers.” Any number of well-known and convincing stories depend on improbable intersections in time and space, among them O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” For me—and maybe only for me—the story-dream of “The Killers” is dispelled by an unpleasant convergence of coincidence with melodrama, cliché, and stereotype. The potholes multiply. The two thugs in Hemingway’s story seem to me uniformly and relentlessly thuggish, often in familiar ways. There is little contradiction between fact and fact, and as a consequence—again, maybe only for me—the whole reads less than human and exact. The thugs dress identically, like a pair of B-movie hoodlums, in “overcoats too tight for them”; their dialogue rarely strays from the glibly villainous: “Another bright boy,” Al said. “Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?” To which Max replies: “The town’s full of bright boys.” The repetitive “bright boy” stuff, which continues off and on for some time, begins to sound cartoonish, inhuman, and at times almost humorous. I hear typicality, not individuality. While it may be true that Hemingway knew such characters in his early Chicago days, and while it may also be true that all such mobsters once spoke in identical tones and with identical tough-guy lingo, I am nonetheless snagged up in ungracious thoughts involving George Raft and Edward G. Robinson and gangland homogeneity. By contrast, O’Connor’s Misfit goes about his business with good Southern manners, more like a Milledgeville bank teller than a criminal, and this, for me, creates the impression not of a caricature but of a twisted and disfigured fellow creature—a murderer, to be sure, but still an ill-fitting member of our own species.

  * * *

  My unenthusiastic response to “The Killers” is of course personal, and I do not expect Timmy or Tad to share my opinions. What I do expect is that they will think about what I have to say. I hope they will reread the story, maybe on my birthday in the year 2037, partly to recall how much I loved them, partly to engage in a conversation with the dead.

  “The Killers” is a popular story. Many readers find it wonderful. Each of us, Timmy and Tad included, has his own Hemingway, and, beyond that, we should bear in mind that there is not and never was a single Ernest Hemingway, but rather many, many Hemingways, and that with each of his stories there was made, or born, a new and revised Hemingway—recognizable, yes, but still altered in the ways that each passing day alters all of us. Also, I hope Timmy and Tad realize that admiration for a writer does not require hero worship. As with any reader, I have often simultaneously adored and despised the same piece of writing. I adored and despised For Whom the Bell Tolls. I adored Pilar. I adored the moving earth. (I was sixteen then.) I despised the resigned, tough-guy stoicism of Robert Jordan at th
e novel’s conclusion, which seemed to me an ideological echo of the resigned, tough-guy stoicism of Ole Andreson at the conclusion of “The Killers.” Robert Jordan I was not, except when sharing a level patch of ground with Maria.

  Additionally, with both “The Killers” and For Whom the Bells Tolls, I had the uncomfortable sense that the author was imposing on me a pretty dubious moral code. Even as a kid—and now much more so—I found it difficult to swallow without complaint a questionable notion of the heroic. Ole Andreson and Robert Jordan choose to respond to similar dangers with what amounts to passive suicide; they reject the obvious and wholly honorable alternatives—flight in Andreson’s case, surrender in Jordan’s case. (Did the survivors of Bataan behave dishonorably for having surrendered in hopeless circumstances? Was Robert E. Lee—or Kurt Vonnegut, for that matter—morally culpable for calling it quits?) “Couldn’t you get out of town?” Nick asks Ole, to which the boxer replies, “No. I’m through with all that running around.”