The Porcupine of Truth

by Bill Konigsberg

  “Never mind,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget I said it. Please.”

  “Tell me,” I say, because now I’m worried. But she is already walking back toward the path. I’m thinking, If I told her about my dad and why I’m here, would she tell me her thing?

  “My dad,” I say, and she turns around and waits for me to say something else.

  My head spins. I am not so good at serious talks.

  “Is an alien,” I say.

  The joke floats up and around us like a bad smell. It’s strange. It’s not funny. And I can’t take it back.

  “Sorry, I’m weird. Tell me why you sleep here,” I say.

  She pauses, and for a moment I think perhaps my weirdness was enough to get her to talk. Then she says, “Another time. Long story.”

  “I like long stories,” I say.

  “Did I tell you about the mainland sika deer?” she asks.

  I want to press, but I am afraid if I do, I’ll freak her out. “Tell me,” I say as we start walking, and she proceeds to explain how these particular deer are known for never obeying the DEER CROSSING signs and just crossing roads wherever the hell they want to.

  “Tragic,” I say. “So can I have your number?”

  She stops walking and tilts her head to the side. She thinks about this for longer than I’m comfortable.

  “Give me yours,” she finally says. “I’ll call you.”

  Defeated, deflated, and aware that I will never hear from her again, I recite my number and she seemingly enters it into her phone. Probably just faking it. And it especially sucks because in an hour I’ve fallen a little in love with Aisha Stinson, mysterious zoo sleeper. I need to hear more of her weird thoughts. I have to make her laugh.

  We keep walking until we have completed the circle. When I see the gift shop, my heart sinks. What started so magically has ended so poorly, and I’m not sure why.

  We stand in front of a large, empty field. She turns to face me and sticks her arms out like a legitimate tour guide might. “And this, my friend, is the end of our tour. Behold, the” — and she turns around to glance at a sign behind her — “Optimist Club’s Children’s Play Area.”

  I laugh, though my heart is not in it anymore. “Yeah, the Optimist Club,” I say. “They probably see the zoo as half-full.”

  Her smile gives me just the faintest bit of hope that I might hear from her. Just maybe. But probably not.

  ON THE DRIVE back to my dad’s place, my mom tells me that he doesn’t look well, that the house is a bit of a mess, and that she could use my help cleaning all of it up. I nod and nod, mostly still thinking about Aisha.

  She pulls off a main road and up a steep gravel driveway, and she drops me off once again. This time it’s because she needs to get groceries.

  “The back door is open,” she says. “Your dad mostly sticks to his room, so don’t be surprised if he doesn’t come out to greet you. It’s not — personal.”

  I shrug and undo my seat belt. “Okay.”

  “He means well.”

  “Fine.”

  “Also, don’t be shocked if the place looks a bit underappreciated.”

  “Does that mean it’s more than a bit of a mess?”

  She shakes her head for a full five seconds and sucks in her cheeks. “It means your father …” she says. She runs her hand through her auburn hair. “My suggestion is to get yourself settled and locate yourself a bit. Pay him a visit in his room.”

  My mom is all about self-locating. It’s one of the infuriating things she always says. “Sure,” I say, totally unsure.

  I get out of the car, and she pulls away. I pause at the back door and take a look around. I know we are only three minutes or so from what passes as downtown, but it feels rural here. The house has a big backyard full of weeds and a separate garage, outside of which sits an old blue pickup truck. Looming huge behind the garage is a massive rock formation that my mom called the Rim. I walk around to the front yard. The house is dark green, a single story, dwarfed by the yellow two-story house next door and a huge pine tree that pretty much hides the house from the street. A rusty rocking chair sits alone on a dilapidated front porch covered in pine needles.

  I walk around back and go in the back door, which opens into a mudroom. There are stairs down to the basement, or, if you turn left, you enter a white-walled kitchen, which looks like something you’d see on Nick at Nite. Yellow window curtains with green stalks of corn on them. A squat white refrigerator with a metal latch that opens it and a yellow Frigidaire logo front and center. Faded blue Formica countertops.

  I know I’ve been here before, back when I was three and Grandma lived here. But I don’t remember it at all. My dad moved in to his family’s home when my grandma Phyllis got sick seven years ago. After she died, he stayed, and he’s been here ever since. The place does look a bit “underappreciated,” to use my mom’s word.

  I decide to check out the basement. When Mom told me I’d have the basement here to myself, I warmed up to the idea of having an entire floor of a house just for me. It was actually one of the only things I was looking forward to.

  That’s before I walk down the rickety stairs and sniff. The air is dank. Like bitter seaweed. Like how I imagine a dry lake would smell. The walls are concrete, and the room feels ten degrees colder than it was upstairs. My mother has set up an air mattress for me on the carpeted floor. In the far corner of the room, next to the door to a bathroom with a little shower, a mess of storage boxes are piled high. They look like they’ve been there since the dawn of time. I walk over to a dark corner and find a billiard table, the kind with mesh pockets to catch the balls. The felt on the table is peeling off in places. Under it is a plastic garbage bag. I peer in, and it’s filled with empty whiskey bottles. It is nice to have my own space, but it’s … I don’t know. Like a remote bunker where people store their afterthoughts.

  When I can’t stall anymore, I head upstairs and check out the rest of the house. The living room has a charcoal-colored, scratchy flannel couch and love seat, naked white walls, and, where a television might be, a big old radio. Way to update this place, Dad. I check out the green-carpeted guest room, where my mother’s unpacked suitcase sits empty on the made bed. And then I see the closed door across the hall, and I know it’s my dad’s room.

  I stare at the door until it looks and feels a million miles away. Then I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and take the short, long walk down the hall.

  I knock. After a few moments, I hear him lumbering slowly toward me.

  My dad opens the door, and my impression when I see his face for the first time in fourteen years is that he looks like me if I were put through a meat grinder. His face is raw yet colorless. His hair is ratty. He’s bloated yet skinny. I have to look away, because seeing my dad look so sick is way more intense than I even expected it to be, and I feel bile rise into my throat.

  “Carson,” he says, his voice not exactly as I remember it from our annual birthday phone conversations. Softer yet rustier. “Death warmed over. I know.”

  He opens his arms and I stand there, frozen. He looks so pathetic, a scrawny death triangle with his arms out to the side and slightly pointed down. A Christmas tree the following April. Finally, I stutter-step over to him and we do a side hug. My chin juts into his bony shoulder. He smells like a mixture of baby powder and pee.

  “Good to see you,” I say to his shoulder blade.

  “You look wonderful,” he says, though he can’t see me either. “Your mom did a good job with you.”

  How do you know? I want to ask. Can you somehow tell just by side-hugging me?

  He lets me go and motions me into his room. His bed is a beaten-up gray pullout couch, and it faces a small, old, chubby television with two silver antennae in the shape of a V on top of it. There are no bedside tables, nothing else in the room, except a few old photos on the far wall and, in one dark corner, a maroon chair with holes in the fabric. It feels like the room itself
needs antidepressants. He’s lived here alone for seven years, and this is where he sleeps? Not even in a real bed?

  I ease into the maroon chair as he sits on the corner of his bed, facing me. The chair farts. “Wow, nice place you have here,” I say.

  He laughs. “Bullshit. It’s awful, I know. Needs a woman’s touch.”

  “No,” I say, “seriously. You should rent it out as a bed and breakfast.”

  He laughs again, and I crack a smile. My face heats up. It’s funny how you can hate someone and wish them dead, and at the same time you just want to curl up in their lap like a baby. Is that deranged? I mean, I’m seventeen. That’s a little deranged, probably.

  “I may do that. You have my sense of humor,” Dad says.

  “Well, take it back,” I answer. “No one likes it.”

  We laugh together for the first time, and the room lightens up a little, which is necessary because it was about to commit suicide. But then there is no follow-up joke. We sit across from each other and stare.

  What do you say to your dad whom you haven’t seen in fourteen years? On the phone, our typical conversation went like this:

  “Happy birthday, Carson.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay then. We’ll talk again soon, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I’d get off the phone, and Mom would say to me, “You know, it’s okay to be angry with your father,” and I’d say, “Sure.” And she’d say, “What I want you to hear me say is that it’s okay to own those feelings.” And I’d say back, “Great idea.”

  I don’t know if I was angry at my dad so much as done with him. When someone disappears from your life when you’re three, you don’t really appreciate his yearly reappearances.

  And now he’d reappeared, only this time in the flesh. And maybe Mom would like me to own certain feelings, and locate them like we’re playing a game of feelings hide-and-seek. But frankly, I’m not that sure I want to play. Or maybe I do. I don’t even know anymore.

  “So,” he says.

  “So,” I say back. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, I’m dying. So that’s something,” he says, and even though we do probably share the same sense of humor, him just blurting this out makes me feel like I’m choking. I lean back on the raggedy recliner for support.

  “Sorry,” he says, seeing that his words have had an impact on me. “Why am I such an asshole?”

  I shake my head. Part of me wants to say, You’re not an asshole, but I can’t say those — or any — words. I count to twenty-five, and then to eighty-four by sevens. It brings me back. One of the good things about having a mom who doesn’t do a lot of mom-ing is that you learn to take care of yourself.

  “So Billings is a city,” I say to change the subject.

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s a city in Montana.”

  “You live here. I used to live here.”

  He coughs into his hands. “Yes, I do. You did.”

  Why did you stay here? I want to say. This place has such bad family memories for him. His dad disappeared when he was my age; his mom had cancer for seven years and then died. And even though we left because he wouldn’t stop drinking, I guess I still don’t understand why he couldn’t stop drinking and leave himself behind too. Come with us to New York and start a new life.

  “Mom said you stopped working.”

  “Yup.”

  “I don’t even know what you did for work.”

  “I was a bartender.”

  “Terrific,” I say. He shrugs, and I can tell there’s a part of him that is also looking at this situation and realizing how insane it all is. That he is just as horrified as I am that he allowed himself to become a drunk and then went to work as a bartender. When I was a baby, he was a carpenter. What happened to that? I wonder.

  “People do different things,” he says, his voice defensive. “Not everyone’s a school psychologist. Your mom did well for herself.”

  I cross my legs, and then I uncross them, as if there’s some weird inborn part of me that wants to make sure my dad knows I’m manly. His eyes keep wandering around the room. There’s not much to look at. A blue-green vase on the floor to the left of his bed, some sort of food basket next to his feet, the old photos on the wall. And yet he doesn’t spend much time looking at me. It’s like he can’t.

  “What’s with the food basket?” I ask, pointing.

  “The warden,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “Pastor John Logan,” he says. “Lives next door. My mom’s — your grandma’s — best friend. Your granddad’s too, I guess. Hasn’t left me alone for half a second since your grandma died. Doesn’t take hints too well. As long as I’ve lived here, he brings me my mail, like I can’t do it myself. And now that I’m sick, he keeps bringin’ me tuna fish. I fuckin’ hate tuna fish. Wish he’d mind his own business and let me die in peace.”

  I wince.

  He smiles a bit and picks at his scalp with his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry. Gotta work on my tact. Not used to visitors, I guess. I just … The guy’s a relic. My dad — your granddad — he was a piece of shit. I don’t need the pastor man coming around here feeling sorry for me. My father left over thirty years ago. I’m over it. Piece of shit. Gone. Good riddance.”

  We have more awkward silence.

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do here this summer,” I finally say. “I mean, I’m here to help — I mean, visit, obviously.”

  “Well, sure,” he says. “But you have to do other things. Maybe you could run a lemonade stand? Five cents a glass?”

  I know he’s joking, but I’m not in the mood to laugh. “Probably,” I say. “I’ll probably just do that.”

  I stand to look at the pictures on his wall. One is a shot of a large, curly-haired woman with a round-faced boy standing in front of her, squinting at the sun. That must be my dad and my grandmother. Another, amber-tinted in that way that old photographs sometimes are, is a portrait of my grandmother posing with a man who must be my grandfather. I look closer, and I realize it definitely is, since he looks like me — long-faced, with the same high cheekbones, dark eyes, and lanky build. In another one, my dad, maybe ten, stands in front of my grandmother, who is flanked by my grandfather and another chubby, freckle-cheeked guy my granddad’s age. The two men have hands on my dad’s shoulders, and he has a goofy smile on his face. I close my eyes, trying to figure out how you get from there to here, to this sad room, all alone.

  I turn back to Dad to ask him a question, and that’s when I see it, behind the blue-green vase on the floor. A glass with brown liquid in it. I look at my father, who sees me see it. He stares at his feet like a kindergarten kid caught chewing gum.

  I pick up the glass and sniff it. It smells like paint varnish. I stand in front of him, waiting for him to look up at me. He doesn’t.

  “Somebody must have left this here. Like your last visitor,” I say.

  He nods.

  What I should say is, Because obviously you were not just drinking this, since you have cirrhosis of the liver, right? And people with cirrhosis can’t drink alcohol. Instead, I say, “What’s the world coming to, all these inconsiderate people not cleaning up after themselves.”

  He chews on a fingernail. I want to continue, You know Mom and me, we came here to take care of you, right? We flew here? We rented a car? I forfeited my summer? But as I stand above him and watch him chew his cuticle, I can tell that even if I said it, he wouldn’t be able to, as my mother would say, hear it.

  His voice is barely above a hoarse whisper. “People are the worst.”

  I turn away and take the glass out of his room and into the kitchen, where I pour the contents down the drain. “They really are,” I yell back to him. “You better tell those friends to stop coming around here.”

  He coughs, and I see he’s followed me out. I feel my thro
at tense up. He’s short of breath from the ten-step walk from his bedroom.

  “I’m a drunk, Carson.”

  “Shocking,” I say, and I start opening his cabinets to see if he has more bottles. The first cabinet has Corn Pops and about twenty boxes of instant Jell-O. The next one has ramen noodle soups, a twelve-pack. I go through a few more and I don’t see any alcohol. I wonder if my mom did a sweep while I was at the zoo.

  I open the cabinets under the sink, and behind the dishwasher detergent and garbage bags, something catches my eye. Two bottles. I push the garbage bags out of the way and pull out a Johnnie Walker and a Jack Daniel’s. I stand up, turn around toward him, and hoist them forward like evidence. My jaw is so tight that it’s hard to breathe.

  He sways a bit on his feet like he’s not too stable. “I’m a drunk. So was my dad. Hey, maybe you’ll be one too someday.” He stares at the ceiling.

  I exhale deeply. I want to say so many things to him. I want to say, You know, I didn’t really expect it would be like in the movies and you’d be all sorry for not being in my life and barely ever calling. But I did kind of think that maybe, just maybe, you’d try a little harder. Because you’re right. You’re going to die. And this is it, Dad. This is your last chance. And it’s my last chance too. So maybe think about that — how you can be a little less of a total fucking asshole, okay?

  But that’s not something I can say. I am physically unable to say it. I close my eyes and count to 217 by sevens. My head is pounding like something is trying to get out of there, a brain mouse trying to find its way out of a maze. I lift the bottles over my head and swing them back and forth like I’m a six-year-old trying to be cute, but it’s fucking ugly.

  “Need these for my lemonade stand,” I say.

  His eyes glance my way and then over to the bare refrigerator door. It’s like he wants to object, but he knows not to. “Take ’em,” he says, as if he doesn’t care.

  I wait for him to look at me again, and when it becomes painfully obvious that he’d rather study a closed Frigidaire than his son, when it begins to feel a little like I’m going to vomit up my heart, I exhale loudly. He turns around and hobbles back to his sickroom.