First Life, Rotting Life

The tumult without – from the storm, the game or news show on TV, the drum machine upstairs – didn’t reflect the tumult within. If anything there was a detumescence within. I opened my eyes, glanced at a brown spider wending along the line where wall meets ceiling. I reached for my drink, not as cool as it was when I poured it, spilled some of it on my hand, the rocker, the glass top of the table I’d put the tumbler on. The book lay open on my lap though not on the page I was on before I started dozing. In my dreams I’m a knight, neither sage nor foolish, just seeking

How I hate this twaddle about seeking. They call them journeys now. How I hate

In my dreams as in life I’m nobody.

I got up, joined Doris in the sitting room. What’s on? I asked.

How’s your book? she answered.

The storm abated, prelude to its recrudescence. Doris lowered the volume on the TV. We both heard Stephan moaning. Maybe you should go up and check on your stepson, Doris said.

In time. I thought he was trying to add a vocal track.

No, he’s scared.

I thought I could train him to deal with adversity much as I hear one can induce an infant to sleep through the night by not feeding it every time it cries. I never lived with an infant. Doris wanted me upstairs. I glanced around the room. She kept the lighting muted. These damn spiders, she said, her chin pointing at the wall.

That’s not a spider, it’s a daddy long-legs, I lied.

Lightning flashed, thunder sounded, Stephan wailed, I was walking to the staircase when the power was cut.

Tamal, said Doris.

Tamal is our cat, a foundling. I paused. What about him?

He didn’t come home.

He’ll be alright.

How can you be so cavalier?

Animals much smaller than cats – squirrels, birds, spiders, mice – survive storms much worse than this every day I thought but didn’t say. Besides not all of them do. I held my tongue and felt for the spiral staircase, the metaphoric if not geographic center of our house. The house, something of a cross between a Cape Cod and a Victorian, sits slantwise on our half acre. Each of the second floor’s two turrets surmounts a bedroom. When I reached the top step, I turned to the right. I could hear Stephan on his bed shaking. I sat near him at a respectful distance. We both saw the headlights of a car speeding along the main road. We live just off it, this town is little more than a few mostly main roads describing an irregular polygon. What is it? I asked.

He was shaking, barely in control. My tapes.

What about them?

They’ll be erased.

They may not be.

They will. Like his mother, Stephan is a pessimist.

I placed a paternal hand on his shoulder. Even if they are erased there may be ways to recover them. I can call in a few favors from a tech friend at work. I thought of my job, of the maps I was expected to produce, wondered if I’d make it there in the morning.

You’re wandering, Stephan said. He wasn’t sniffling.

I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. I was saying

You said one of your quack techie friends could recover my files.

I let his sarcasm go. They aren’t real friends, they’re associates. When I’m away from work I want to stay away, when I’m home I want to be away among my imaginary spiders and toads and yet my mind always returns to work. I couldn’t see Stephan’s face in the dark. There have been artists, I said, who’ve lost all they were working on in fires or storms at sea. Of course, when disaster struck they took side trips to valleys or sloughs of despond but the best of them came out of it. They used the time to rethink their work, to prune away their dead parts. In the end they created work phoenix-like from

You’re mixing metaphors again.

I wished Stephan wasn’t in advanced English. Still, let’s take advantage of the dark, I said. It’s an unexpected opportunity to regenerate.

He seemed to mull this over.

I hooked up with Doris when Stephan was a toddler. After some time away I was just beginning a business career. I’d never been a father, was only intermittently a proper partner. Doris worked weekends to make ends meet. I learned to bathe him, feed him, change him. After a few months I developed a hankering for family life. Stephan and I became a familiar sight at playgrounds, the library, free musical events. Someday I’ll marry Doris, I thought, and still do.

I love you, Dad, he said in the dark, and yet

I know, I parried, and I

I guess it started with the camping trip, he half-snorted, half-sniveled. I can’t blame you or Mom for that. I thought it was something I wanted. Maybe if I had a better sleeping bag, I’d have slept better in the tent, had a proper breakfast

I bought our sleeping bags in the local chain discount store. I could have gone to the respectable sporting goods outfit two towns away but it was our first camping trip, I wasn’t sure Stephan would like it, I couldn’t get him on my insurance, money was still tight. It’s just that, I said,

It’s OK. I’m starting to learn the value of a dollar now. I couldn’t see his expression. What a night

We didn’t properly clear the ground of rocks. We pitched our second-hand tent with minimal help from the scoutmaster. He went off to help inflate air mattresses. I never knew that real campers could use them. It showered intermittently that night. We changed places so that I received most of the water that leaked through the tent. I felt the rocks underneath, heard Stephan’s tossing and turning, felt the rain on my brow. The weather cleared an hour or two before dawn. I dreamed I was in Elver City where I worked. A tall stout young woman with a buzz-cut was telling me about her poems, her admiration for W

A recording played reveille and we were up.

The boys went to the stream to wash. Stephan turned his ankle on a stone, limped down there and back. The fathers kibitzed a while, I felt like a fool with my inadequate equipment, we made pancakes, eggs, sausages on a gas grill. Stephan stood on the outskirts, nibbled a ginger cracker. Is that all you’re going to eat? I asked him.

It’s time to go, he said.

I looked around. The proper fathers were cleaning up. Stephan never ate a big breakfast; I thought little of it. Later Doris quoted me his diary entry:

The effect of that ginger cracker was almost lysergic

That’s preposterous, I told her. What does an eight-year-old know about lysergics?

He wrote it recently, she said, for his Honors English project.

Still

This didn’t seem like the proper time to talk about drugs.

Of course I don’t blame you for the hike, Stephan said, that’s on the evil scoutmaster.

He couldn’t have known.

He had an inkling, more than an inkling.

Our mission for the day was to fold and stow our tents, hike, then return to town no earlier than four so the womenfolk could enjoy their break.

Stephan, despite his limp, was ahead of the others when he discovered the half-eviscerated fawn. I was in the back of the formation marveling at the changeable sky, tripping on the uneven terrain. Of course I ran up to him when I heard his gasp. Until then his only experience of death was the sight of upturned trees we encountered on our rambles through the local nature preserve. How he loved to climb the exposed roots! He was younger then. I held the back of his head as he buried his face in my stomach. The other boys, noting Stephan’s distress, stood behind us and composed themselves. One of them touched the deer’s entrails with a stick.

The scoutmaster surveyed the scene. That’s nature, boys, he declared. It’s not like the movies. The fathers nodded their assent. The boys were puzzled by his allusion.

We’d yet to travel half a mile. Stephan, dejected, limped in the back of the pack while the other boys affected a false bravado. When we returned to the cars, the scoutmaster, who also taught high school music, clapped Stephan on the back and exclaimed, Hope to see you at next month’s jamboree, Claude!

Stephan and I remained close after our only camping trip but something started to claw us apart.

I’ve often thought Stephan’s arrhythmic drumming was his rebuke to the insensitive scoutmaster.

Dad, he said, there’s something I need to tell you.

Shoot, I said, bracing for a drug use confession, wondering about Doris’ whereabouts.

It’s about Susie.

Susie?

The clerk at the general store.

We call it a general store but it’s really an over- or right-sized convenience store. Well lit, part of a national or regional chain, it has few notices tacked onto its bulletin board, sells few or no local products. I sometimes stop there on my way home from work. At the counter anyone can select candy bars or condoms. Susie sometimes eyed me as though she thought we could be an item. She’s a high school senior or already in community college or so I gathered from the books she stacked for when business is slow. She’s too young hence boring for me, I’m almost married, and yet

As Stephan matured, we spent less time together. Part of my earlier single life returned. I tried to remember what that was like. My interactions with Susie

You’re wandering again, Stephan said.

I wasn’t, I dissembled, you’re telling me about Susie.

She’s pregnant, Stephan said.

So that explains her faint glow, meant not for me or not just for me. How do you know? I asked.

I’m the father.

Doris and I can help

Don’t bother, Stephan said. She wants to keep it.

But

She knows about my genes.

A thread, more than a thread less than a thick black cord, of insanity ran through Stephan’s father’s line. Any one of them could flip at any time. Doris told me her husband was charming till Stephan was born. When she returned from the hospital, his crazy gene expressed itself, he took to drink, and was gone soon after.

I couldn’t picture Stephan charming anyone.

She read my diary, Stephan said. She said I was sensitive. The boys in this town are either jocks or ne’er-do-wells. I haven’t done well but I haven’t done poorly either. She sympathized with my struggle, one thing led to another and

Struggle – how I hate

Stephan’s diary unlike his drum patterns was kept in purely physical form in one of those trendy blank notebooks anyone can pay too much for. The brooding entries on death and drugs were in Susie’s house. I wondered what they said about me, what Susie thought of

Now that I’m a father, Stephan said, though this wouldn’t happen for another six months or so, I guess I’ll have to give up some of my dreams. I think that and yet if a drum track is lost

I reached for his shoulder, missed it. Stephan turned away, began gulping air. I’ve already said too much. Mom doesn’t know. Don’t tell her. Go.

I found the staircase in the dark, descended it. Doris was asleep or feigning sleep on the couch. I covered her, found the bathroom, somehow brushed and flossed my teeth in the dark.

That night I dreamed I was powering up our hand crank radio, an overpriced premium from a public radio station. Muscles in the back of my hand twitched. I stopped. The announcer was saying

We don’t have a crank radio. I awoke, muscles on the top of my feet jerked, I turned and saw that sometime during the night our power was restored. The alarm clock displayed a time just after midnight. I fumbled for my watch, noted the time, listened to the pouring rain, peed while calculating my next steps, fell back asleep.

That night I dreamed, I did no such thing, I was as clean inside as out. I rose to pee, I must have dreamed the dream of the hand crank radio. I checked my watch, the alarm, my internal clock was accurate this time, I could show up at work on time or nearly so.

As often happens after storms, the day was sunny.

I heard Stephan in the other room snoring, dreaming his insane dreams of fatherhood.

I padded downstairs, saw Tamal sleeping on the arm of the couch where Doris slept.

I made coffee, turned the radio on, showered. The disk jockey recited the local utility’s statistics, claimed the main roads were fine. Once dressed, I checked on the crawl space, found no damage. I went back in: the house was spider-free or nearly so.

Everyone was still asleep when I pulled out of the driveway. I passed the convenience store on my way to the highway. It was open. It wasn’t Susie’s shift. The roads were clear, traffic was light, a new day was dawning. I hummed discordantly to the tune in my head not knowing what I’d find on my return.