The time had come to pray. The place was half empty, my father in between us.
Sins were recited.
I heard him shut the prayer book and stick it in the rack. “No such thing,” my father said. “There is no one in judgment.”
My mother said, “ What?”
Wonders and signs. Lake Forest, Waukegan, Gurnee, The City of Zion, Kenosha, Racine. North of Chicago are the towns we never enter, sights we skip. There is a lumberjack constructed out of something indestructible. Coffee and cheddar and cut-rate gas. A finger the size of a silo is pointing to gratification.
“Dad,” I say.
“I am hungry,” I say.
“Drive faster,” he says.
“Consider the speed, ” my father said, regarding an occurrence in stunning replication. The panel was plastic or something translucent.
“Sound,” my father said, “ is slow compared to light.”
I said, “Who could forget?” though I’d forgotten the gist.
People were leaving.
“Magnificent,” my father said. His clothes had grown loose as a result of the treatment for corrosion of the arteries. The jacket, I saw, was ruined in an elbow. “Didn’t we read about this?” he said.
“We could have,” I said.
“I think so,” I said.
The warning had been given.
“Refraction,” he said.
He wanted to linger. Me, I can’t bear to be anyplace, ever, so close to closing. I said that we must have, probably, learned this. I said we ought to go.
“Where do you think it went?” he said as I looked for an exit.
“Where do I think what went?” I said.
He said, “ That book, The Restless Universe.”
Deep into summer we ’d go to the lake. My father would look through a tube through a glass in the night at night. I would look at him look.
Our lake was black. Fish rose dead, silver and unseeable, and rotting by morning.
He offered the eyepiece to give me a chance. “ Magnetic ropes,” my father said, adjusting the view.
My mother gave a signal, a tap, a thump. It was a habit of hers. The operation had only recently succeeded; late in the night and in sleep he had been deaf, at least for practical intents.
“Inside,” she said.
Light smeared the world.
“Do you see it?” he said. “Aurora borealis.”
He put away the telescope and entered the tiny cottage we had rented.
Insides of rooms were the family business after the war. Recliners and sofas. Bedroom sets, dinettes, upholstered sectionals; the loveseat, the mattress, the headboard and side board, the tables for all purposes. Wood and glass, metal and varnish, quality foam. All manner of lamps with wall mounts included. Anything a body could conceivably require, with no money down, my father said.
“Lay off the horn,” my father says. The throughway is torn all to pieces en route to improvement.
“Nothing is moving at all,” I say.
We had seen the fish first, then walked out to view the firmament.
Exhaust fills the car.
I give it a tap, attempt a maneuver.
“No one is watching,” my father says. He is licking his fingers. The bag we are eating from leaks grease.
“Touch it,” he said. My father was showing me how to determine the value of a vanity. The show room was empty. “If you can poke your reflection,” he said, “if there isn’t any distance, you know that it ’s junk.”
“ You blinked, ” my father says. “ It was your own hesitation.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“No matter,” he says, surveying the damage. “At least it was nothing more than a taillight. Things sometimes break. ”
“Look for the streaks,” my father said. “Now do you see?” It was chilly outside, despite being summer.
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you?” he said.
Where we sat was up a hill, late at night. After a very long while, or maybe a short while, I would be older than my father was then.
“Where are you going?” my father said, and I could hear the water lapping.
CHEATERS
In the book of the night, the man and woman sleep and oversleep until the night turns to evening. They wake to the dusk. The covers are tattered, shabby. The spine is worse for wear. Whole chapters are ragged, sticky, yellowed, and fragile from touch. The woman sighs. “We are not on the same page,” she says. The man does not hear, or else does not answer, as if he is someplace far from her. Significant objects fill up the bedroom: photos, keepsakes, the earrings on the dresser, the slip on the floor. These are cherished possessions indicative of character, personal quirks. “Must you?” he says. The dusk, the woman thinks, grows thicker as she rises. Outside the window the world is gone. Nevertheless, she is yanking on garments: skirt and blouse of salient label, the bracelet he gave her, clasping clasps. The man is still groggy and speaks through a yawn. “What is the conflict now?” he says. The woman turns. Space breaks between them. The phone starts to ring, and rings through a chapter. Neither one answers. He kindles the lamp. Paragraphs spill out unvoiced: Languid suspicions; an episode from childhood; a false sense of self; a shadow, if ever so faint, of hope. He watches her leaving, dressed for day. “You’ll be back,” he says, as if skipping ahead, as he sinks beneath covers.
FLESH, BLOOD
The woman does not want to open the door. She has failed or has neglected or refused or such — whichever you will — flat out, it can be said, to respond. The voices implore her.
The house smells of wax and of sanitary poison.
Perhaps they will believe, she tells herself, she’s gone to sleep.
“Silence,” said the woman. They were up in the attic — the crawlspace — again.
The neighbor had a weapon: out in the a.m., bandanna on the neck, checked vest, and fine, tanned arms. The aim too high. “Damnation,” she said.
The woman — not the neighbor — was my mother, which should not surprise you. “We do not live in a place like this. Look at this. Wash,” she said.
It was hanging like flags, a nation of wrung-out bodily shapes: stained, not ours, not ours — a madwoman’s torso.
Ours was in the house.
What they left was evidence, a hole in the wall up under the eave — intruders of nature — the gutter where the leaves collected in the fall.
It was supposed to be nice.
Someone would be paid for this, to settle this, or so my mother said, and winter, when it came, would do the rest.
In the museum, I watched the chickens hatch. Too cold to go out — it is never as cold as it was anymore, back then: downed up and shivering. I was sent there to play, and watch the spectacle of birth.
Always there was scurrying, too many offspring, the neighbor asserted. “One is too many,” I heard my mother say, although apropos of what I do not know. Quiet she liked, and weaponlessness.
You could take out an eye.
The newborns stumbled into the springtime under the glass as if stunned by the light. Their feathers were wet.
Knock on wood. I have not been in years.
The exhibit was a designated permanent fixture — but sadly, the neighborhood, my mother said, went.
My mother left a message on the answering machine in which she spelled the world “nails.” She asked me to call her. She asked if I were possibly already home.