“Nona,” he began, “have you ever had ants in your house?”
“No, Papa,” she said. “Not really.”
“You’re lucky,” he said. “When I was a boy, we had ants everywhere, all summer long. The kitchen. The bathroom sink. You’d wake up in bed and there would be ants in your hair. There was nothing you could do. Ants are almost impossible to exterminate. Do you know why that is, Nona?”
“No. Tell me.”
“Because you can’t kill them straightaway,” he said. “They’re not like cockroaches, where you just spray ’em with poison and they die in front of you. For every ant you see, there are a thousand more hidden inside the walls. The queen lives in the walls. The scout ants come into the house, find the food, and bring it back to the queen and the rest of the colony. If you kill the ants you see in the kitchen, the queen recognizes their absence and goes berserk. She starts producing twice as many ants as before. So if you kill all the ants you see, you end up with more ants than you had in the beginning.”
Nona listened and nodded. She tried to will herself into memorizing every sentence. It felt asinine to memorize something so banal, but she knew how this process worked. These moments were not normal moments. Someday, this might be all she remembered about the greatest man she’d ever known.
“You can scare the ants away with peppermint oil, which makes your house smell like a candy factory. But there’s only one way to stop them for real,” he continued. “You have to feed them poison that doesn’t kill them. Not right away, at least. You have to give them poison they love, poison they consider delicious. Slow-acting poison they’ll take back to the colony and share with the queen and all the ants you can’t see. The scouts need to spread the disease, so that they all die over time, slowly. But even when it works, it’s awful. Because like I said, the poison that kills them is a poison they love. Which means that when you first put the poison down, the ant population goes up. For three or four days, you have more ants than ever before. And you can’t kill any of them, because you need to let them haul the poison back inside the walls. You have to let them overtake the house. You have to watch them overtake the house. God, I despise ants. I really do.”
He coughed again, this time harder and dryer. She poured him a glass of room-temperature water. It was a struggle, but he managed to choke it down. It worked like a drug. For a moment, his entire body relaxed.
“I love your stories,” said Nona.
“I know you do,” he said. “You’re so kind. I love you so much. You were a wonderful daughter who became a wonderful woman, and then a wonderful writer. Watching that transformation was the joy of my life. It was for your mother, too. But you know, that story about the ants . . . that’s not really a story. And I think you know that.”
“I think you’re right,” she said. “But I don’t care. I just like hearing you talk.”
“You actually should care,” he said slowly. “You need to care. I’m trying to explain something.”
“Then don’t talk about ants,” said Nona. “Just speak from your heart.”
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I’m certain.”
“9/11 was an inside job.”
Nona smiled. She loved her wacky father. Even now, at the end of everything. He was so clever.
But why wasn’t he smiling?
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“What do you mean,” he replied. “Weren’t you listening to the ant allegory?”
“I was listening,” said Nona. “How was that possibly about 9/11?”
“Isn’t it self-explanatory?”
“Not at all,” said Nona. “Papa, do you even know what you’re saying?”
“About the ants, or about 9/11?”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I know it isn’t,” he said. “That was a tough morning. I have regrets.”
“You have regrets?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “There was that first attempt on the North Tower, in ’93. That was real. That just happened the way it happened. But then we started talking, and somehow the talking became a plan, and then at some point around 1998 the plan stopped being theoretical, and then we installed W and—”
“Papa, don’t say these things,” she said. “This is not the time.”
“It is the time,” he said. “I’m sorry, but this is the time. This is the time to have this talk. I was hoping the anecdote about the ants would make it easier to understand.”
“What would it possibly help me to understand,” said Nona. “I don’t even know who the ants are supposed to represent. Are the ants the terrorists or are the ants America?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” the old man asked. “I’ll be damned. I’ve been working on that metaphor for ten years. But now that I’ve finally said it out loud, I see the problem.”
The door opened. A nurse stormed into the room and vaguely apologized for interrupting. She adjusted the old man’s catheter and replaced the bag of sodium chloride hanging above his shoulder. The feeble father and his flustered daughter stared in opposite directions. The nurse asked if he needed anything for the pain. The old man said he was fine for the time being, but maybe when she came back in an hour.
“Do they have you on opioids?” Nona asked when the nurse finally disappeared. “Is that what this is about?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “I am on opioids, yes. Percocet, and I think some sort of drip. But no, that is not what this is about. I need to tell you these things. I need you to know who I am, who I was. I’ve never killed anyone, but I allowed people to die.”
“Yes, of course,” said Nona. “Except that I don’t believe what you’re saying, so you don’t need to tell me.”
“We killed that singer,” he said. “Didn’t make any sense, then or now. He wasn’t even that political. His politics were like a high school kid’s politics. The stakes were so low. But we had this whole Manchurian candidate system set up from those World Vision refugee camps, and when Carter lost to Reagan everybody thought we should go back and give it a try, since we were still dealing with Khomeini and Ron was more open to that sort of thing. We all assumed it would never work. The nutjob from Hawaii was just a trial balloon. I was watching Monday Night Football when it was announced. What a kick in the head. I remember thinking that Cosell handled it better than I would have expected.”
“Papa,” said Nona. “Why even say that?”
“Because I love you,” he said. “Because you love me.”
“I don’t need to know everything you’ve ever done in order to love you,” she said. “You’re my dad. That’s enough. I don’t need you to tell me we didn’t go to the moon.”
“We did go to the moon,” he said. “But only twice. And the second time, none of those jokers made it back.”
There was a gentle knock at the door, which meant it must be the doctor (the nurses never knocked). A tall black man in an oversized white coat entered the room. He spoke to his patient without emotion, asking pointed questions and expressing no reaction to the answers. The old man recognized the physician’s accent and asked how long it had been since he’d left Nigeria. The doctor seemed annoyed by the query but said it had been just over twenty years. After briefly examining the patient’s adenoids with his forefingers, the doctor turned to Nona and asked if they could speak privately in the hall. The old man said he understood completely and did not mind. He said he was not afraid of other people’s secrets.
“Your father is an amazing person,” the doctor said when they were both outside the door. “He is withstanding an astonishing level of pain.”
“Are you sure about that?” asked Nona. “How much morphine are you giving him?”
“Some,” said the doctor. “But less than I would normally prescribe, considering the circumstances. He declines wha
t most patients demand.”
“He’s saying a lot of crazy shit in there,” said Nona. “Something isn’t right.”
“Your parent is dying,” said the doctor. “There is no other way for me to explain. He is dying, and more quickly than his behavior suggests. So we must make some decisions. We must decide when to diminish the systems that are keeping him alive and when to amplify the systems that provide only comfort. There are no more avenues for recovery. I am sorry to tell you this, but I must tell you this.”
“Oh, I get it, I get it,” said Nona. “It’s awful. I’m devastated. Of course I’m devastated. Of course. But again, about these painkillers—what are the side effects? Is there a possibility that my father’s physical problems are impacting him mentally? It is possible he’s suffering from dementia?”
“Dementia? I do not think he has signs of dementia,” said the doctor. “I am generally impressed by his awareness. He has asked me about Nigeria on more than one occasion, so perhaps his memory is not as keen as it once was. But your father is an old man. He is sharp for an old man, in my estimation.”
“That’s what I always thought,” said Nona. “But something is different today. He is not himself.”
“It’s difficult to die,” said the doctor. “It’s a difficult thing to explain to oneself, or to other people.”
Through the thick composite of the door, they both heard the old man cough, then wheeze, and then cough again, for a very long time, almost like a record album that was skipping. Nona wondered if the doctor would rush back inside, but he did not.
“Take care of your father,” he said before turning away. “We will talk again tonight.”
Nona went back inside. Her father was grimacing, breathing through his nose. She poured him another glass of room-temperature water. Again, he struggled to force it down his throat. Again, it helped instantly, more than logic would dictate. He regained his composure and smiled at his little girl.
“I like that doctor,” he said. “He seems competent.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Nona, I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Nona,” he began, “have you ever had a raccoon trapped inside your garage?”
Tell Don’t Show
You are not staring out the window of the bus. You’re looking out the window of the bus, but you’re not staring. You’re blinking the normal amount. Your eyes fix on one object and then another. You’re doing this because the window is made of glass, and because glass is translucent. You’re not sighing or chewing the inside of your cheek. You’re not closing your eyes for long periods of time, as if the world were too beautiful (or too painful) to see. The world is the same as it was yesterday. You can look right at it.
But you don’t feel good.
You’re not depressed. That would be melodramatic. That would be medically incorrect. But you don’t feel good, and it seems like you’re constantly evaluating how good you don’t feel. There’s an emptiness to your life you can’t talk about, mostly because it would be insulting to people with problems more significant than your own. You’re well aware that your life appears comfortable to others. You don’t hate who you are or what you’ve become. It’s way more complicated than that. Once, there were many things in life you wanted, and you were able to get most of those things, operating from the supposition that fulfilling those desires would allow you to feel the way you wanted to feel. But that didn’t happen, to a degree that now seems laughably predictable. Nothing changed. Nothing changed, so you convinced yourself not to want things, except for one specific thing that you can’t stop yourself from wanting (and is now the only thing you want at all). This specific thing is just beyond your reach, and you can’t fully understand why that is, and you wonder if your inability to achieve this goal is inherently connected to the single-minded persistence of your obsession. You also can’t shake the recognition that this ongoing process of desire and acquisition has never worked before, and that there’s no reason to believe this final achievement would be any different from all those other unspecific achievements that had no impact whatsoever. Your awareness of that inevitability makes you feel stupid. You’ve committed yourself to a difficult dream that is almost certainly hopeless, and that hopeless dream has become the center of your existence, further convoluted by the perpetual realization that such an existence is actually not that terrible (and that you should probably just get over yourself).
You step off the bus. Your face is just your face.
The concrete is hard and flat and composed of cement, water, gravel, and sand. You walk north at a brisk stride, directly into the wind. This means something. It means you don’t want to be late and that the wind is from the north. You pass an old man dressed as a clown, talking to a young biracial woman who looks appalled. You pass a soldier in military fatigues looking at pornography on his cell phone. You pass an aging Gen Xer carrying a copy of the Good News Bible. You notice all of these individuals. They are metaphors for nothing. You feel a few random raindrops on your face, despite the sun in the sky. It’s raining while the sun is shining. That happens sometimes. It’s a meteorological phenomenon unrelated to your worldview, which is that humans are conditioned to forget the most important things they experience, in the same way that dreams dissolve from your memory within the same moment you try to explain them to other people. There’s a reason you believe this, although you can’t recall what it is. A car passes close to the curb, and through its airtight tinted windows you recognize the melody of a muffled song you haven’t heard in ten years. But the song itself is actually twenty years older than that, and the car’s driver is hearing it for the first time, just now.
You arrive at the building before the rain gets cinematic. The address is 667 Avenue of the Americas. It’s a conventional office building with above-average amenities. It’s a fine building. You take the glass elevator to the nineteenth floor and head toward suite 84. The suite has comfortable chairs, a logical floor plan, and excellent views of the city. Most (but not all) of your colleagues have already arrived. You’re particularly happy to see that John Person was invited to the meeting, as he is your best friend at the company. Person likes to play video games and drink Old Fashioneds. He knows a lot about Civil War history and sometimes wears a bow tie. When he was fifteen, his father had an ill-fated affair with a stripper, and one night the scorned mistress tried to burn down the Person family home, trapping John in his upstairs bedroom and forcing him to jump from a two-story window. But John survived with only a broken ankle, and he got over it, and his parents divorced amicably, and when he told you this anecdote at the office Christmas party it almost seemed funny.
You are attending a meeting about a television campaign you’ve been working on for weeks. It promotes a brand of dog food. You suspect there’s a problem with this campaign, and your suspicion is due to an email you received. The subject of the email was “RE: PROBLEM WITH DOG FOOD CAMPAIGN.” The problem had been described in the email message and was now being pedantically restated at the start of the meeting, because this is how meetings work. Your supervisor spoke first.
“The problem,” Sharon began, “is that we are not reflecting the actual value of the product. This is not traditional dog food. Dogs go apeshit for this slop. I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever they did to this dog food is literally having sex with the taste buds of the dog. But our commercial literally doesn’t reflect that.”
“The dog in the commercial eats the food very fast,” said Person. “It seems pretty transparent that he likes the food.”
“No it doesn’t,” replied Sharon. “Dogs eat everything fast. Dogs eat their own puke like that. We need to show that the dog has a different relationship with this specific dog food. He can’t just eat it like he’s a hungry dog who wants dog food. That would be insane.”
“What if we made the dogs talk?” said Grover Edi
son, a man famous for his predictable ideas. “What if one animated dog complains about how his food is only okay, and another animated dog unconvincingly argues that his food is marginally better, and a third dog bemoans how dog food just isn’t what it used to be. But then the fourth animated dog—our dog—shoots a smug look toward the camera, and then he goes home to his dog wife and all his puppies, and they eat this great new dog food and frolic around in the yard and have this wonderful, edifying life. Our dog knows something the other dogs don’t. But he’s also not a jerk about it. He’s relatable.”
“That’s terrible,” said Sharon. “That’s hack. That’s how we sell bad dog food. That’s like every other dog food commercial ever made. You’re not grasping the paradigm shift: This dog food is actually good. It’s not like the normal crap we push on the other dogs. This dog food has to scan as superior.”
“So maybe we should just directly say that,” says Person. “Maybe we should say that we’ve spent a lot of years making dog food commercials, and that most of them were different versions of the same lie. But this time, the dog food is different. This time, we’re not lying. This time, the dog food truly is delicious.”
“You know we can’t do that,” said Sharon. “It would look like a commercial.”
“But that’s the whole idea,” said Person. “Why don’t we just explain what the idea is?”
“Because people want to see the idea,” said Sharon. “They want to construct the idea through the interpretation of unrelated actions. You know how this works. It only works one way: Don’t show me the moon, show me a dog eating in the moonlight. That’s what storytelling is. That’s why we do what we do.”
“But in this case, the only new idea is that this dog food is actually good,” replied Person. “What kind of interpretive action represents the word actually? Won’t people be more impressed if we just admit we used to be pretending, but now we’re not pretending at all?”
Raised in Captivity Page 18
