Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

I hope this letter finds you well though of course I know you’re not or that you soon won’t be which is fine because now I understand everything and I’m only sorry that it took me so long to figure things out but it’s not every day that a dream splits me the way a maul splits an oak round into wedges, each wedge showing the error of my life and the future and the past and the direction and purpose of your life, my son, my son lost to me through suicide though not yet of course, of course that’s why I’m writing to you now to let you know that your suicide will not be purposeless because I was blinded in the dream of you where I was walking holding the stick I have held for years its wood worn with my fingers and burnished with my palms and there you were standing before me on the path the snow melting around your feet in an every widening circle and your back  was to me and all around was the end of winter but it was still hanging on the air crisp but from you the heat radiated and you were wearing your white T-shirt and your jeans with holes in them and your sneakers like you wore the day I left you only of course then you were a boy and in the dream you’re a man the hair on your head long and curly and dark and you reach out your hand and a crack of thunder of pure electricity snaps the hairs along my neck and arms but you have only touched the tree in front of you but from where a moment ago its branches were bare now there are buds of new green and you crouch to the dark patch at your feet and dig your fingers into the earth and grass sprouts and a single daffodil rises up its yellow as if you’ve crafted it from saffron and then I realize that you’re bringing life you have taken your own life you suicides all of you, your cousins, your friends, and now you you’re the bringers you snap the death of winter and bring the life of spring and summer you have a purpose you’re not lost and I didn’t leave you for nothing I didn’t abandon you I set you on this path this purpose without which none of us could survive.

As he’s dying because he’s listening to his third wife describe their latest litter of St. Bernard puppies and pondering whether to name the runt Thor in an attempt to give him something to inspire the pup to scrap beyond his scrawniness and overcome the hip dysplasia that tends to run in that particular bitch’s offsprings and his mind isn’t full in no way is he not simply not thinking of me he has forgotten me though he did not forget my half brothers who he did not get to name after Greek gods though he wanted to and his second wife rattling gin and ice guessed with me that was the reason for the divorce how she hadn’t given him an endless supply of breedlings upon which to bestow names and instead only the two of which I’ve met one and my father’s breaths pause and then pause filling the hospital room with a cloister of condensed milk because he has asked for condensed milk and because he has this way the nurses allowed the milk and he had the can cupped in his crumpled brown hands while his third wife waits but no one else as the third wife doesn’t like the second wife and neither of them know of the first wife as only he knew when he was full of life and that’s where I fit in or rather don’t but my father’s hands tremble and he can’t get the can to his lips so that the third wife takes its red and whiteness in her own hands so white that the milk he sputters onto them vanishes and her carnation fingernails match the can and he notices this synchronicity and then he says his last word, Thor, and she looks into his eyes for some recognition while he coughs once.

Up until now, it has been letters in long cream envelopes, stolen from his office, his embossed return address crossed out, his name inked in its place, the letters I insisted on after He tried to email me, email, me, and though I have nothing against the Internet, He owed me letters, for the gaping years, even if written on the back of whatever scrap of paper He appears to have had at hand, coupons for gutter cleaning, unpaid electrical bills, my own letters sent back to me, words x’d over, blackened, smelling of His cigarettes, and handwritten letters, after He tried to type one, because if He owes me nothing, which He doesn’t, but WTF, He can put His hand on his fucking Mont-Blanc and use his muscles and then allow His sacred spittle to dampen the envelope, though most of the envelopes arrive taped shut and I rip them open thinking His Mouth beyond hoping for a paper cut to curse Him spinning along His red lips everyone says we share because while I have nothing against Him or against making things easy on the one hand on the other hand emptiness as deep as cistern as black as tendon so when He called His voice oiling the cordless air and asked if I would have lunch with Him that would have meant I would have had to breathe His air and I waited for Him to dissipate and on the other end He was asking Well, don’t you think it’s about time? and I looked at the floor where the battleship gray wood slats beckon because they’ve shrunk over the years but the darkness does not open to spill me under the house to rest in the dust so I said what I had to say and He said Look for my sports car, it’s a BMW which will be easy to spot dusted in the Traceway Restaurant parking lot the only not-pickup but it’s certainly not Ferrari though this is the first time He’s asked so I go and wait in the pink plastic booth behind the globe filled with gum globes of every color so many I can’t even name them and the tabletop clear as a spring the Webster County Daily Progress sealed under polyurethane with photographs of men hefting cat fish and the Progress surrounded by silvered wooden hooked bait fish and while looking at that bait and the waitress her hair brown enough to roll in the deep fryer and at the lack of BMW that I say Shit but it’s too late and sure enough enough by the time I get back to my house small and nothing as it is with its sagging porch with no pillars only the rough boards I stole from Debby Ponder’s wood pile holding my front up, my house with one shattered window covered in black garbage bags because of some kids with rocks who I’m going to shoot in the knees if I ever catch them, my house empty as His offer which was no offer but a feint so that He could get here and talk to the ghosts of my wife and the ghosts of my little girl and steal them them going with Him because He has always had that damn way with women and damn Him their absence damn crowding in on me even damn though the door’s not even open yet their hissing gone and damn I look at the phone not damn begging for Him asking for Him to at least call and explain damn Himself this time but He won’t He never damn does as if He even damn could.

Began arriving as attachments. I didn’t recognize them at first, for what they were, are. Were, now. Before these, what I had: a brittle memory of myself receiving a present and when I tell my mother that I remember my father, who left her, us, when I was four, she says, Your father never gave you shit. We were driving, her to the left of me, the car overflowing with the family that wasn’t and I didn’t question her instead wondered which boyfriend, then, I was remembering. And then thirty years of nothing until email and attachments, the subject lines letters that at times almost became words, squamous, quincer, skeinning, and inside no words only the attachment. The first I threw away as a matter of course, not wanting to catch whatever lurked in the waiting .jpg files, but then curiosity, boredom, combining, and what the fuck, it’s only a virus, what can it do, hit, and I began opening them. Images. The first a deep array of interlocking limbs, as of trees, or rivers, and blood, circulatory systems, maroon black and garnet red and behind the nest of rivers the outline, the shape, a person? A blob. The abominable man. Then he is young, younger than I am now, in black and white, his head tilted to one side his eyes in shadow leaning easy against a doorframe and in his left hand, held with no consequence, a heart, his right hand a fist, his white T-shirt unstained and his jeans clean but at the bottom of the frame a pool of blackness beneath the heart and hand and I cannot ask mother to confirm his identity while I don’t need her as looking into the image on the screen becomes a small mirror. There’s no mistaking our resemblance. And still they came. One, close on his head, his eyes a clear blue as if punched through to the sky and around his ears and hair, green clover, pounds of it, each with four leaves, and though there’s no reason to think so, the picture ends an inch below his Adam’s apple, I know there is no body down there, outside of the frame, the browser, the computer, and his eyes are lit but not by life. A variety? A smorgasbord? A cornucopia? Of death. Deaths. Each time, he was back. A cartoon father who showed himself in the throes of possibility, though there was a progression of distance, near and far, nearer and farther, the swing-set he didn’t build he swung on, hanging from the seat, so limp the implication was obvious, but who needed implications when the certainty was so certain I ignored them for weeks, months, training the computer to shuffle the missives to the trash until I missed one and this one, I had been lapsing, was no death of father a grin, his teeth even and his face crinkling around his eyes in his hands the camera pointed at me and the next email the image was darkness and the next image was darkness and the next, the rectangle filled the screen deep with empty, the sort of empty you fall into, when you are forgotten. When you forget.

He was often a considerate man, not using both of my eyes at once. But in the deep left field, if I’d lose the depth of the falling baseball, and find the baseball searing down my face or chest, leaving the stitching bruised in my skin, I’d know my father had been there, borrowing an eye. Once, he took my legs when I was running from third to home, and I only knew what had happened when I woke up behind home plate, having slid all the way, my teammates faces like shrunken heads on a string circling above me. I hadn’t been wearing a shirt and had landed on my back, where there’s still small flecks of gravel beneath my skin. Am I safe? I said. The game went on. That sumnabitch, mother said, dabbing at my back with alcohol, picking at me with tweezers, showing me one bloody pea of gravel, only cuz he loved baseball so damned much. He never knew when to leave well enough alone, she said, and poured the alcohol straight into the bloody patch. There, she said, I hope he enjoyed that. I tried to imagine a world where I couldn’t be in the field, sliding from foot to foot, the batter no more than an inch high so that when he hit the ball the sound was of no use, only the arc mattered, and how my legs twitched which way to go before I did, my cleats throwing the smell of the dirt up into my nose and my whole body striving without memory. But if he dawdled, there were disasters. Bloody noses from line drives. The mark on my back healed but scarred. And what he does with my hands, well, that’s something else again. Where did you learn to do that? one woman asked, and I couldn’t tell her, my father, and even then I don’t hate him. Stealing from me, mother calls it, but he most times returns what he takes, though when I stand up from reading, my head aching, and discover my leg doesn’t work and have to catch myself and realize he’s been tapping my foot, using my eye to take the words. Or how some of my fingers will never curl the same way again. Then I do curse him, and search for him in my blood. At those times I can take him, you better believe, I can find him where he hides, and send him straight to my heart, where he’s broken into a thousand beats and centered in each cell. Then he can’t fight, though I feel him try, squeezing my heart, the ache the same pain folding me as when I first knew the word father combined with loss absence empty. He flows to my skin and evaporates, goose-pimpling the skin, as my sweat did after each game, leaving the dawdling line of salt across my forehead arms legs and back. I hate to feel him go, to force him out, but a person has to be alone. Empty. Sometimes. And then I can thump my chest as I say his name, and in that echo and skip, I know he’s gone. Though he’ll gather and return. I know you’ve felt the same thing, finding your hand or leg or arm dead to you, tingling, no longer yours, but don’t ask for my help to sound your body. I don’t know you. What has been taken.

My mother says he divorced her when, instead of giving birth to the son he had so wanted, she expelled a pile of sticky steaming bones which were identified as belonging to a variety of dead artists. They knew, mother says, because of the placenta, which had a list of each bone and corresponding artist’s name woven by the placental blood vessels. Also written by capillaries were the words A Fine Product Of Connecticut. Which is odd, she says, because the baby, or pile of bones, if you prefer, hadn’t been conceived in Connecticut. Though the doctor did a smash up job of attaching the bones using the best super glue, sutures and staples the hospital had, my father was disappointed and packed his bags after a week. Feh, what did he know? my mother says, look how well you turned out. And for an assemblage of miscellaneous bones I reckon I have done OK. Mother says my father never knew himself or what he wanted, and that was his real trouble. When they were dating, he had mentioned to her that he had read the Missed Connections section of the local weekly paper, where people could write in descriptions of people they had seen at a bus stop, or on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or the coffee shop. People they had been attracted to but were too afraid to approach at the time, and now they regretted that lapse and wrote missives to the paper describing the lost person, the missed opportunity. My mother was already in love with my father and so wrote a description of him that she felt was so detailed and caring that when he read how well my mother knew him my father could not help but be moved to ask her to marry him. He did ask her, but never mentioned the Missed Connection and when she asked him about the paper my father said he felt sorry for the sort of idiots who hope for one chance in a thousand, or a hundred thousand, that their once in a lifetime moment might happen to pick up the paper. What are the odds? my father said, I only read it once, as a lark. Meanwhile, my mother was getting emails from men who were convinced it was them she had written about. Each man wrote of how awed he was that she, who didn’t even know him, could have such insight into his soul. Each man wanted her. The emails flooded her inbox and she had to cancel the account. But that’s when I knew your father was replaceable, she said, while she taught me to use the computer, my skinless fingers moving on the keys. If you doubt that I can exist, being only a pile of bones, listen to your computer. The clatter of the keyboard, the click of the mouse, these are my sounds, though I share them with you. Besides, like my father, you don’t even know. You wouldn’t recognize your own mother or father transfigured into words, or you would pick the wrong person or the wrong words, there are so many to choose from. I doubt you could pick yourself out in a crowd. You’re like my father, you don’t even recognize yourself.

At first, he had two keys. House. Car. Then he locked himself out of the car so he had a duplicate key made, and put the duplicate in his wallet. He kept his wallet in his back right pocket, and the key made a key shaped pattern, though it could have been a leaf, or a bit of a broken shell. Then he locked himself out of the house, so he made a duplicate and left that key under the mat. A week later the key was gone. My father was worried that thieves had stolen the key and were waiting for the right time to break in, so he changed the locks, and this time hid his spare under a rock in the yard. He was looking for a battery for the garage door opener when he found the key he had thought he had put under the mat in a drawer in the kitchen, still in the cardboard holder from the hardware store, wrapped in a receipt. He had been over charged for the copy by five cents, and had meant to take the key and receipt and get his refund. On his way to throw out the over charged key, for kicks, he tried it in the new lock, and it worked. He called his locksmith, who explained that it sometimes happened. That there were only a few locks, what did he think, that each lock on the whole Earth was different? So my father gathered all of the keys and put them on rings. At the same hardware store be bought bright red and green and yellow rubber key cozies and intended to put them around each key, but he could never develop a system and so the cozies went into the drawer and the keys stayed on the rings, anonymous, sharp edged. He gave one to each of us, and then locked himself out again, and had new ones made. Then we moved out. For love. For money. For education. We left our keys. My father added these to his rings. Then he moved out. For love. For love again. He found that his new house opened with his old keys. In the new house, he opened a drawer and inside found rubber key cozies in purple orange and blue, and walking outside he picked up the mat and found a complete set of keys on their ring. Each key had a different head. Different teeth. Different slots. But they all opened his door. He looked at his house. When he put his hands in his pockets, he found the rings and the keys, bound through their heads like a collection of pierced ears, and then he thought, no, that it isn’t right, as he ran his fingertips over the hard edged ridges, not soft at all, knowing that he could cut his fingers on these ringed boundaries he held, the very things that were supposed to keep him safe, could bleed him if he wanted, and in fact, were going to scar him for ever, for life.

He knew Loneliness on a winter’s hilltop in Virginia. Overhead was low and gray and the ground was white with snow and rose to cup the sky. The boy stood on the hilltop and wondered at how the snow met the sky and the sky met the snow and the two were the same and yet he knew he couldn’t climb into the sky. At that moment, he recognized that Loneliness was there, and that Loneliness had always been there. The boy was so relieved, because now he knew what it was that had been with him forever. To Loneliness, he said, This sky looks like the time when I hid under the quilting frame, and the fabric hung down around me. Loneliness didn’t say anything, so the boy said, You were there, weren’t you? And Loneliness didn’t say anything, so the boy knew Loneliness had been there. And then Loneliness, of course, went. Loneliness stepped behind the boy, and there it stayed. Later, when he was a man, the boy tried to explain to a woman how Loneliness existed with him. His first attempt, the woman had said, You’re not alone then, if Loneliness is there all the time. The boy who was a man said to her, Imagine you’re standing at the edge of the ocean, a storm wind, a fierce wind, snaps at you, tossing the sand and salt, gritty, into your face, the air pulling at your clothes. She had nodded, loving him, holding him, convinced that she was stopping the Loneliness. She rested her head so that her ear lay on one side of his collarbone, and she could hear his breathing and heartbeat and his voice, twice, first in his chest, and then from his lips. OK, he said, Loneliness is that ocean wind, only I never feel it on my face, my front, instead it goes right through, catching my back, pulling me away in grits, atom by atom. Always? she said. And while she was doing her best to distract him, he was thinking of how soon she would be gone. How he had managed to say to her what he had first felt as a boy. How the comparison wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he would ever do with words, and how those words would never be enough to describe Loneliness. The explanations vanished from him into the air, her ears, where everything would be broken down into chemicals, and lost to him. And even as he was thinking these thoughts, he was aware that he was thinking them, and that they were fleeing from their being thought, and Loneliness was drinking all. And some time later, the woman was gone. He had found his life was like that. That’s why he liked his analogy. Things and people sailed to him, he felt, born on Loneliness as he was. And these things, these people, he could never tell when they were going to arrive, or when they were going to leave. There was another woman, and as she held him in her arms, and he wrapped his arms around her, he could feel her own Loneliness plucking at his clothes, exploring his fingertips, and even as she held him, and him her, he felt their grips loosen, and he wondered who would be the first to turn to Loneliness, and say go ahead, take this, take this too, I know you, be my guest.

He can see shapes, as if he had pebbled glass for corneas, or frosted glass like in a doctor’s office, or if he had complete cataracts. But he doesn’t. I know these comparisons because he wasn’t born blind and that’s how he talked to my mother before they divorced. Hell, mother said, he might still think he’s with me, if her shape is close enough. I was too young and don’t even have his outline or blur. Where they lived, married, her describing everything, it was hilly, but not too hilly. A man with a tower made of bricks might see other cities, glowing half bubbles in the night. Mother said, Your father’s gone blind all the way to his fucking toes, what for he expects to do with his tower instead of building that extra room for you, I don’t know. She doesn’t expect me to say anything. As if her husband were blind and she expected her son to be dumb. What I know is that even if his vision cleared, he wouldn’t know which way to begin looking, to be able to see me, here, now.