The Best American Essays 2013 (38 page)

All the Israelis, a little drunk, laughed.

“Yes,” the German said, “this is a kind of humor, I think.”

Amatsia had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with the captain ten years earlier. He smoked, and I smoked too, pretending to be him, because I wanted to fit in and because he seemed to be an admirable man, quiet and hardworking, and from time to time the captain snarled at us in Hebrew.

“He says smoking is stupid,” Amatsia said.

I smoked a cigar on a bench along the dock and saw a waterfront bum coming from a hundred yards away. He was burned brown and wrinkled by the sun. He looked like a wallet someone had been sitting on for forty years.

“Have you got another
puro
?” he said. “You speak English? You understand me? Don’t worry about Spanish. English is the best. A very good language. With English, you go anywhere in the world. All places. If you know Spanish, what does that get you? Tell me, where can you go?” He made a face as he gestured around himself, disgusted by the beauty of his native Spain.

It had been a long time since Señorita Geile had taught me Spanish with her hand puppet named Teodoro, a little bear. I had written the Pledge of Allegiance,
juro fidelidad a la bandera de los Estados Unidos de América
, as a punishment when I was bad, which had been often, and I had memorized
poesía
, but now I couldn’t remember one word of it, which is not what
memorize
means. I memorized the Pledge of Allegiance, and I memorized this fact: I am bad.

A cabdriver said to me, “How many languages do you speak? Your Spanish is very bad, we’re not going to count that one.” He adjusted his eyeglasses and said, “The real money in this cab-driving business is the night shift, the
putas
. Tell me something. How do you say
fucky-fucky
in English?”

I floated in a sea of Hebrew, or in an estuary of Spanish and Hebrew. I made up ways to spell what I thought I was hearing. It’s astonishing what you won’t need to know in this life. I got by for weeks with nothing but
ani rotse le’echol mashehu bevakasha
, which means, I think,
I want something to eat, please
. I thought about language—speaking in tongues, rebuking the Devil—and I thought about twins: about my new sibling, the fellow analysand I loved and had shared my precious analyst with and now wanted to kill. I would kill him and eat him. Maybe I would eat him first.

There were twins at my high school, nice shy Vietnamese boys. They were king-hell math achievers, but they hardly spoke a lick of English. At first I figured they spoke French at home, or Vietnamese, but I came to understand that they didn’t speak those languages either. They’d had one another since birth, before language, and they had never seen the need to learn to speak anything.

The Israelis were competitive in all things, and they soon set out to establish who was the greatest shipboard cook. The contest lasted for weeks and was delicious, but I was often unwell, and there was the small problem of the head onboard. I made it filthy, sometimes twice, because I was unwell, and then I made it clean again, not without some effort. I have cleaned a lot of toilets, I worked as a janitor at one time, and I can tell you land-based toilets are preferable, they do not move.

Shlomo wouldn’t take his turn cleaning the head. “It stinks,” he said.

“The head smells fine,” said the captain. “What stinks is human shit.”

We could urinate over the side if the sea wasn’t too rough. “One hand for you, one hand on the ship,” the captain said, “and no matter what lies she may have told you, boys, one hand for yourself is plenty. Most of the dead men in the sea have their flies open.”

On the boat, we did laundry like this. You wore your underwear until you felt you were no longer a member of the human race. Then you turned it inside out and wore it some more.

I found myself thinking about my father, about a time we had gone to a baseball game together. We were in the parking lot. “When are you moving north?” he said. “The forty-third of Delfember,” I said, and he laughed, and then he said, “Help me,” and I turned around and my father had shit in his britches.

He’d been out the night before with his best friend, Jeff, a bartender who was blind in one eye and drunk in the other and tended to wear a black T-shirt that said
Vietnam Veteran
, in case any onlookers happened to wonder if Jeff might be a veteran and if so, of what conflict.

And when I say
tended
I mean he wore that shirt to funerals, a T-shirt at a funeral, that was Jeff all the way. When his own brother, when Jeff’s brother, Sarge, had died, my father had lent him my mother’s car and Jeff, already crocked at ten in the morning, had almost run it off the road on his way to the service, scraping it along the guardrail and snapping off its side mirror. My mother said nothing, which was not her habit.

My father too was a Vietnam veteran. So were a lot of men in my family. One of them was my uncle, who died of Agent Orange– related complications. “Let that be a lesson to you,” my father said. “Don’t join the service, and don’t let your friends join the service. Because they tell you what to do. They tell you where to go, they tell you what to eat. They tell you when to die. And then you’re dead.”

In that parking lot, my father was right to trust in my expertise. I was well acquainted with the problem at hand. I was a promising young drunk, bad with women and an easy vomiter, and occasionally I had to shit as well. I had shit the bed once and kept sleeping and got up in the morning, going happily about my day off, and had not noticed until my then-wife came home from her job and asked me what it might be in our bedroom that smelled so much like shit. And, of course, it was shit that smelled that way. That was the answer.

And so I was prepared to aid my father. As in so many endeavors, the first step is to lie: I said everything was going to be just fine. I told him he had to be brave for a few minutes, could he do that, could he walk, if not we could find some other way but that would be the simplest, and he said he thought he could.

We walked past the parked cars and trucks and the yellow paint on the asphalt toward the gray concrete of the arena and its public restroom. I got my father into a stall and stood outside and told him to take his shoes and socks and jeans and underwear off. My father hated public restrooms. Once, when I was a little boy, I had noticed he did not wash his hands after urinating and asked him about that habit and he had given his explanation, saying, “I’m confident that my penis is the cleanest thing in this environment.”

His drawers were not so bad after all, but I threw them in the garbage just to seem like I was doing something to help. I passed him handfuls of paper towels. “Check your legs down to your ankles and feet,” I said. “Check your socks. How are your pants? We want to keep them.”

“What if we can’t?”

“Then you wear my shirt around your waist like a kilt until we get back to the truck,” I said. But he washed and dried himself and put his pants and socks and shoes back on. And that was that. It was nothing he could not have done on his own if he had given it a moment’s thought, instead of willing himself to helplessness, to asking for help.
Orders make you stupid
, the captain told me,
figure it out for yourself
.

What do you know, I’m finally shitting my father. God knows I ate enough of him. I am thirty-seven years old, five feet, ten inches tall, 180 pounds, a hairy man like Esau with an increasing amount of gray in my chest, a miniature facsimile of my father is half extruded from my rectum, otherwise I am in good health.

The past is behind me, burning, like a hemorrhoid. My parents will not die if I wish them dead. They will die because life is finite.

When I was in college, one of my teachers said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you waiting for your parents to die before you write something honest?” and I said, “That is the dumbest question I have ever heard.”

My mother calls collect from Hell. She rides her bike and goes swimming. There are a lot of ibises in Hell. She sends me a picture. It’s pretty. I’m shouting into the telephone, I’m trying to shout but it’s hard to make a noise, my jaw won’t work, my teeth are long and getting longer, they break against each other, everywhere I turn I’m biting something. I bite the telephone, biting.

My parents are not dead. I mean hell on earth, plain old regular real hell. You know that hell? That’s the one I’m talking about. And even when they are dead they will live on in me, burning in my hell-head, it’s so crowded in here, still yammering about what I ought to do:
Now I see how it is, you drop a coat hanger on the floor and if no one is watching you don’t pick it up, that’s the kind of man you’ve become
. My dead father in particular is very interested in the proper configuration of everyday household items like coat hangers.

Ibiza was on fire as we approached by night from the sea. A third of the island was burning. We anchored and watched airplanes swoop to fill their tanks with seawater. They flew high over the mountains and dropped water on the burning trees again and again. It was the biggest wildfire on the island in all of recorded history. It was still burning the next day when we left.

Shlomo, swimming just before we pulled up anchor, was stung by a jellyfish. “Do you want me to pee on it?” I said.

“No, I want you to shit on it,” he said. “Americans!” he said.

On that boat, surrounded by blank water and blank Hebrew, with a somewhat less blank Spanish awaiting me on shore, I was free from the obligation to apprehend and interpret. If I don’t understand what you want from me, I don’t have to try to do it, I can’t. The sea is incomprehensible and uncomprehending, the sea doesn’t care, which is terrific, depending on what kind of
care
you are accustomed to receiving. The sea is wet.

As a teenager I was once waved through a roadblock by a police officer who then pulled me over and ticketed me for running the roadblock. “I don’t understand what you want from me,” I said, something I had already, at that early age, said many times to many different people.

“What’s the matter with you?” the officer snarled, something many different people have said to me, and when my father and I went to court we found I had been charged with attempting to elude a police officer and failure to comply. My father knew the judge, or should I say the judge knew my father: she had been his girlfriend in high school. My father and I were wearing the nicest clothes we owned.

“Well, Mr. Prosecutor, what do we have here?” the judge said, smiling.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Mr. Prosecutor, and he was also smiling, and they were speaking to and for my father, not to me, although I had been charged with
attempting to elude a police officer
, for Christ’s sake, I still don’t understand it. I got off with a fine for making an illegal turn. The judge knew my father, everyone knew my father, just as everyone had known my grandfather, and even people who had not been alive at the time knew that all the lights in Hodgenville, Kentucky, had gone out when my grandfather died. I was not a tree, I was an apple, I had not fallen far from those trees, but I had fallen. Somewhere there had been an apple and a fall. This much we knew.

If anyone wanted something from me on that boat, he said my name; if no one said my name, I was not wanted. And
I was not wanted
, I floated for a month in a sea of unmeaning noise, I was free from the horror of being deformed by another person’s needs and desires.

I became a twin, a sibling to myself, and I gnawed myself for nourishment in the red cavern of the womb, relaxing into my own death.

I ate myself until there was nothing left but my mouth. Then I ate my own mouth. Then I died.

But no one ever dies. I got off the boat and hailed a cab and took a train to Madrid.

In Madrid I went to the Prado, where I looked at Goya’s
Saturno devorando a su hijo
. There he sat, sickened, with his horrid mouthful, and the whites of his eyes were huge.

I had always thought of Saturn as vicious, as power-mad. I had never realized how frightened he was, how compelled to commit and experience horror against his will. I began to cry. I felt sorry for Saturn. He didn’t want to eat anyone. His stomach hurt. He wasn’t even hungry.

And I flew home. Last night I dreamed the Devil bit my penis off. This morning it was still there, or
here
. Where I am is called
here
.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

I
RELAND BEGINS FOR ME
with the end of “The Dead,” which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in Indiana. I don’t remember what age I was—feels like anytime between the sixth and eleventh birthdays—but I picture the scene with a strange and time-slurred clarity of detail. His offices were always in the basement, because that’s where he could smoke his endless, extra-long menthols, exhaling nasally over the rust-red mustache. The air in the room would get so thick with smoke that shafts of sunlight beaming in through the high basement windows took on a slab-like solidity of definition, such that you couldn’t believe your hand passed through them so easily. I accept that tobacco is evil, in both health and historical terms, but will always love it on some animal level, because the smell of it was so great a part of the physical existence of my father. I smell it in his sweat when he bends down to kiss me, and I smell it in this room. I also note cat urine, because our vicious, lonely old calico likes to relieve herself on the dark green chair in the corner when stressed, and the scent has soaked into the stuffing, and my father won’t throw away the chair, because it belonged to his father. The mottled surface of the desk where he writes is a dark green—the green that is almost black—and bright, glowing green are the little letters on the screen of the primitive word processor the newspaper gave him, and forest green is the cover of
The Portable James Joyce
, my mother’s Penguin paperback from college. He’s holding it close to his face. He was blind in one eye and couldn’t see especially well out of the other, wore dark-framed, vaguely government-issue glasses, but they’re lowered. He’s turning his head and squinting over the top of them. He reads the famous last paragraph, “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward . . .” Nothing of the specific language remained with me, except, years later, reading the story at school, there was something like déjà vu at the part where Joyce first says the snow was “falling faintly,” and then four words later says it was, “faintly falling.” The slight over-conspicuousness of that had stuck, as I suppose Joyce intended.