The Father

Once there was a man who accidentally had a child after graduating college. It was with a one-time lover and they had been appropriately careful, and at first the young man was dismayed and couldn’t believe it had happened – for though he knew there was always an inescapable risk, he felt that something miraculous, terrible and unjust had occurred.
It was in fact the case that this single shocking incident was merely following the course, like the course of the multitudinous galaxies, of his own actions, which were only partially conceivable. He had been carried along to here, and here he was suddenly stuck and couldn’t understand – here, he found himself reversed. Where he was used to resisting he found nothing to resist and where he was used to anger he found only indeterminacy, and he saw that he, along with his friends and those he knew, had nothing to be right about. And while all the rest of life was going on in him he had missed what was really happening. And so he went down to find this lady to see what she intended to do. He thought she might get an abortion but she refused – he spent the week with her talking awkwardly... he didn’t want her parents to take the baby because he didn’t like them, and he didn’t like the idea of adoption. For the first time since he was a child he started to smell the breeze through the window, lingering after breakfast, sitting in chairs.
He went back upstate with the baby to be nearer to his parents. There was a job for him up there as well – not one he had wanted, but with a salary. And there was something in the end that he liked about it. There was less time for ghosts and he didn’t know what was going on, really. The sounds of elections, of speeches and thought, of new films and shows and technology, and of love, kept coming and revolving and passing eventually on without leaving much behind. It was a short time before he allowed himself to become a father. Those things he vaguely imagined for his future, that encrusted shell of possibilities, and also the deep woods of an unseasoned heart dispersed of necessity. The child was a boy and his parents were unhappy that he chose to keep him when he was so alone. From time to time a friend of his would come to help out, staying overnight and having dinner with him; but he didn’t mind how all things faded into the background when he was with the baby, for all things expected something of him that he was only now aware he had to give. Life, which did not belong to him, nevertheless demanded his attention – he had merely waited this long.
And there was more. As his son grew older he started inventing projects for himself; he grew a garden in the back of their house where the sun was dense, and taught himself about certain horticultural mysteries, such as plants’ powers of rejuvenation, which would one day become mere objects of study, but which participated in the ecology of his unspoken life. This involved tearing out a bed of poison ivy, a fight that seemed endless and irresolvable, until one day the roots were completely wrenched from the earth and never appeared again – and a few years later, the first spring signs of white and yellow lilies sprouted. An old painter happened to pass his garden one day and developed a weekly practice of sketching his lilies. He eventually taught the son to draw as well, though the boy couldn’t stand drawing his father’s flowers. After fighting furiously one day, his son even took a blow torch and burned the garden. And as he carefully cleaned up the remains of his work and resumed the garden as soil, he thought of how much like the boy he had been as a young man.
There were countless hurricanes. It seemed as though the hurricanes had followed the man to this house, and sought to barricade him and his son inside in aeternum. In the fall, for many years in a row, the two of them spent an entire week without electricity and school. And although many of their neighbors were crippled by drowned basements and broken roofs, and although many around them ended up having to move at some point or another, the two of them were somehow spared. So they kept to their kitchen table, their small wooden chairs, and enjoyed the pleasure of each other’s company as they ate – and he felt lucky to have such a family.
With diligence the father managed to raise the money to send his son to college. Though not a motivated student, he was sharp and eager to leave home and do something. He had been saving up money himself, doing jobs for his father and working on the docks doing shipping, and he planned to put the money towards a few inventions that he had been designing – for he was an inventor and wanted to study engineering. And the young man was constantly criticizing his father for not knowing enough about how things worked, and his father was constantly criticizing the young man for not studying. Both generations were ready for the change. And after watching for eighteen years how his son had learned to walk and build and think and wish and yearn and fight back, he felt a terrible excitement for him. Eighteen years of cultivation were bursting across his heart and leaping into utterly new and unforeseen realms – as all the things he had pursued had proven not to be mere accidents: the weeding and gardening, the two lovers that had come and gone and come and gone, the chance each morning to smell what the air had to offer that day, the gradual evolution of his job into work that he liked, the writing he had begun to do of daily musings and memories to pass on to his son one day, and finally, ultimately, his son himself – his son, who from the beginning had always upended his father, and now was preparing to walk down his own path, of which, for the first time in his life, his father would be a bystander.
In the first year of college his son grew sick. He was unusually healthy as a child, but something was very wrong and he came back for a few months to recuperate, visit doctors, and take medication – he was eager to go back to school. The father drove the son back 400 miles for the next term and found a cheap apartment that had better accommodations so that his son could feel more comfortable trying to start again. A month later, his son collapsed in his apartment and couldn’t get up. He carried the boy home late one night and sat with him back in the old house, watching as he slipped away. He died with his father’s hand on his cheek.
The garden was dug up to make space for a grave, and flowers were never grown there again. Rain scattered over the loam and sunk downwards, finding no more seeds. The pines he sat amongst would still bow to the heavy wind and he thought often about moving, leaving the old house unsold for his son, finding somewhere new to go.
When he had worked long enough at his job to earn it, he used his vacation days to take a year off, without certain plans that he would return. The thought had occurred to him, for reasons he never fully understood, to visit an old friend, though he wasn’t sure how to reach her. He spent some time searching before he finally reached her, asking if he might come down to visit one afternoon, to which she agreed. They had not seen each other in twenty-five years. The last time, he had just turned nineteen, it was three months after they had finally broken up, on his birthday, and she was crying. They hardly spoke and she left early. They had fallen in love the year before, and for just over a year they were racing back and forth in each other’s hearts, stupidly, ecstatically. When they first kissed it was outside his parent’s house on a long walk, one of many, and they had known instantly that this was what they wanted. So they spent day after day together, as late as their parents would allow… they shared equally a frustration with the system and feared what would happen to them if they buckled. And she was electrically unsatisfied, as though fraying at the chords plugging her into society. Yet it was he whose willpower proposed itself insurmountably in those days, so that months later he ran away from home and he carried her along with him. They traveled around for a week, ending up in a town fifty miles away where her cousin secretly let her apartment to them. He intended never to see his parents again, while she spent hours pacifying her parents on the phone. Neither knew what exactly they wanted. As it turned out it wasn’t each other, and eventually they went off to college and didn’t speak again.
He drove down to her place on a summer afternoon with the dazzling sun. And there – as he trudged through the swampy grass in front of her porch – sat his old lover, paused in an armchair by the overgrown ferns. She wasn’t looking at him, prescribing her vision to the sky, tracing the clouds with distant precision, though her glasses dangled down by her chest. She seemed quiet, mistakable, dissimilar – his memories served him poorly. Have some tea. He sat down next to her on the porch and looked northwards like she, scanning the distance. He felt something queer tingle in his arm as though parts of his body could still remember parts of hers. But when he looked over he found nothing of worth to communicate. What is it that you do now?
I write about Japanese literature.
Incredible – I would never have guessed.
Well in college I started studying Japanese, and I ended up spending ten years there.
Ten years? But then – perhaps that’s not such a long time. Laughter.
She brought out salad and some noodles and they ate on the porch as the stars filtered in. Are you married then? I married someone in Japan, but we divorced a few years later and I came back here. And I haven’t really made another attempt at marriage. Light breeze scattered their hair and carried on the first cries of the crickets, and both felt bitter smiles on their lips.
And you?
No – not at all.
Oh?
Well I had a son to take care – not from a marriage of course – I don’t think I ever… I didn’t try too hard to look for someone.
So then you have a son.
No he died in fact. He had cancer. Eighteen. They were leaning back in their seats, their food half-eaten on their plates, and only certain words were left. Before them each sat the person from whom they had first learned of love. They could still remember how, looking into the other’s eyes, a startling force would whirl in their stomach, drive them into incommensurable proximities, impress whole spectrums of urgency into their hearts… they could remember slipping fingers into the others’, touching up and down their bodies, asking for anything, everything, more, from their galloping mate, like they were in a stampede, spiraling hotly inwards, into the infinite vast dream of the soul, the singular beyond. But, looking back and forth on this side of time, they remembered so much less. And in fact what there was to remember, for each an in each of the two oldest of lovers, was towering. And those old memories, swallowed up by the years since, such sharp etchings in their monumental bodies, were suddenly peculiar. Everything, everything, was lost to the past. Perhaps we have both lived too long. What will we do with the years we have left? This absence, of what they could call a future, made drops of rain of their extensive records. They had no business recognizing the other. Surely they should never have met again. And they believed so after they parted. And it was only many years later when he was staring death in the face that he accepted that it is just so, every infinitesimal instance of his dead history – it has all indeed been exactly the case, so that there is nothing to be said, nothing in fact at all to be said, when it is so, nothing except to be continuing, to be making use of – though only now, never before, and never again.