The story of your father’s thwarted plan at Gotleib & Krav was the story of his life in miniature. “On the verge of something,” he really had believed what he’d told his family all those years. “Maybe a breakthrough.” Even into his ruinous fifties, your father could hike out to the shut door of his “studio” and look at the building the way he once looked upon his marriage to Eve, imagining that within that chrysalis he really might break through his own leathering skin. Become a different man entirely.
And your father’s transformation and self-improvement schemes were not only art related. In those first weeks at the hospital, Jed told himself that once the worst was over, once a single test result to hope upon came back, he would at last quit his long whiskey sessions out in the pickup, become the father his wife and son had watched him fail to be. When your mother expelled him from the property, he told himself it was only a temporary separation, that he would return very soon. Once the horrors of that night stopped playing on repeat on his closed eyelids, he would put down the bottle for a couple of weeks, regain the steadiness in his step, and then he could go home. Or he would write a long apologetic letter, an explanation of all the things he had never said, and then he could go home. Or he would wait until the worst of the summer heat passed, and then in the brisk mercy of autumn, he could go home. Or he would wait until Charlie was gone for college, when he could talk to Eve alone, and then he could go home. Or he would wait until Charlie came home from New England, when enough time had passed that his own failings were practically historic, and then he could go home.
Considering the specifics of the latest scheme, as he worked himself into a different spirit, it wouldn’t seem so difficult. Home was just a forty-five-minute truck ride away. Yet each time he tried to take a few steps in that direction, the ground would go uncertain beneath him, and he’d allow himself the one quick drink. But the little finger of George Dickel rye Jed let himself imbibe did nothing to dim those memory flashes on his closed eyelids: the way the school cafeteria lights had suddenly blinked on over the Homecoming Dance that night, the crush of teenage bodies in sequins and oversize suits, the confusion of shouts, cresting in a wave of panic. The way Jed, baffled at the cause, had nevertheless done his duty as dance chaperone, throwing open the gymnasium doors, shouting at the emptying room for the children to stay calm and make a line. But in the mass of bodies and the chaos of vehicular emergency lights outside, his son was nowhere to be found. A mad sprint back into the old schoolhouse, toward the distant corridor where the shouting escalated. And then, splayed there in a spreading puddle, an unfurling red flag, the body unseeable, crowded out by uniforms. At last Jed did see, would always see. Oliver. Two, five, nine years later, Jed allowed himself a second drink. Another drink led to others, to another ruined scheme, to another swollen-eyed, tooth-aching rebirth, to a whole new plan.
And so, as you endured the desiccating sameness of days and years in Bed Four, so too, in the prison of his Marfa bungalow, did your father’s life pass like a montage of decay, a time-lapse of a man shriveling in his skin, passing images of his artwork morphing in its futile directions. Landscapes became portraits, became clay busts, became scrap metal fused by a secondhand blowtorch, became trash left out at the end of the drive for the garbagemen to collect. A hundred times, he staggered out into the purple kindness of a desert dawn, looked in the direction of your mother’s house. But he’d never make it all the way. Because your father had come to understand this: the walls of his prison were different than your own, but hardly less confining. He might have walked the floor of the world, but it was an illusion. Your prison was your own body, but your father’s? It was the unfillable, unforgiveable place that lay beneath. It was his whole history, an unspoken and unspeakable force that cracked the rock, swallowed the arid substratum, shook your father off his uncertain footing.
Jed marched out to the shed, began hammering apart his new sculpture, as if the thing he made were a kind of Frankenstein, a monster that might destroy him when it woke.
A lonesome, pitiable man, it’s true, but even then, the effects of Spooky Action at a Distance bound your father to you. Somewhere, in a galaxy far away, in your last months before, you were still there with him, in your own studio of failures, wondering over a silence of your own. Somewhere, it was still just that overheated October morning, years before, your body still squirming beneath you.
*
It was October fourteenth, the morning after your stalker routine outside the Sterling house, and you had retreated to your solitude at Zion’s Pastures, your secret lair. The weather inside your own head matched the day: a lazy, intolerable atmosphere, too hot for October even in West Texas. In your creekside cave, with its card table and folding chair, you were attempting to whittle down your worries, chipping away at their sharp edges. A bruise on Rebekkah’s leg—it was true, it was much worse than the little faint bruises that often mottled her pale skin, but it was absurd, the stories you had let yourself spin. What evidence did you have that Rebekkah did not just take a hard fall? And what reason to believe that that strange bald guy who had shown up at her place had anything to do with her? Likely, you told yourself, he just worked for Rebekkah’s father. And what could you really know about her father himself? Your sum total experience of the man was just a bumbling shape, arguing with his wife as he stumbled across the lawn. Yet the events of the last day, the last weeks, were stubborn materials, and your blade ran dull. You couldn’t whittle away her vaguely pleading expression as you had held forth about your family, your astronomy, your tall tales. It was a sensation familiar to you from your faltering attempts at poetry: like some perfect, revelatory line whose existence you could sense but not quite fix into words, you could perceive the existence of some other unnamable, clarifying fact about Rebekkah just beyond reach. But why was it up to you to try to understand her, anyway? Wasn’t she the one who had stopped talking to you? These were the excuses you gave yourself for not doing the obvious, scary thing, the one that would most likely subject you to further heartbreak, just to beg Rebekkah to speak with you again.
Outside, the upraised wire arms of a stand of ocotillo swayed, creaking like a ship at sea. Crickets made their ornery, orgasmic percussion, rising to a clicking fever and falling silent. You had not, as was customary, brought your Casio boom box to the cave; Bob Dylan had no mystical fate to sing to you that Saturday. Distantly, through the lifeless flat that lay beyond the ocotillo, you noticed the plodding, aggrieved movement of your family’s one remaining longhorn, the steer your father named Moses. “Just like the real Moses,” Pa had said. “A desert drifter, a survivor of a dying clan.” Once upon a time, according to Granny Nunu, your ranch had thundered with the hoof falls of Moses’s many ancestors. Moses turned to you now, and you shared a long stare. Tell me about it. The day smelled of skunk.
In the late afternoon, your father stopped by the cave. “Dinner in an hour,” he said.
“I know.”