Fear is the Name We Give to Our Not Knowing

I finally read the short fiction piece you published. The one about the architect who joins the cult. Anything I could tell you about it are things you already know.

In that last scene, I thought you left everything perfectly buried. The argument was deafeningly quiet with all of the things that the husband and the wife could not manage to say to each other. I felt the exhaustion in my chest for those paragraphs.

I’m not writing this to tell you it was good (it was). I will get to the specific reason for this letter eventually. For now I wanted to say that the way that last scene played out and the calmness with which Emily throws this question in her husband’s face has been replaying in my head.

I went to the drawer where we keep the scrap paper that we use for grocery lists and Saturday to-do lists and I wrote the line down, word for word:

Tell me why it is you think there’s some other life waiting for you, some better life.

I went to get a glass of water. I filled a cup at the sink, downed it, and when I turned my head I saw the paper resting alone on the countertop. I imagined my eleven-year old discovering and reading the piece of paper. Recognizing his father’s handwriting. I imagined what he might assume, and how he’d worry, and how he already worries too much about me.

I didn’t just throw the paper away. I crumpled it and pushed it deep into the trash, pressing my hand down until I felt strange, wet things. I wasn’t going to let it unfold for someone at the top of the can.

I buried it.

There are certain things we cannot say out loud.

There was a panel at a writing conference you and I attended ten years ago or so called “The Ineffable.” It was up in the woods near the coast at the end of a bunch of narrow, winding two-lanes. The school had cut our graduate funding during the winter, and I think sending us to the woods was supposed to make up for that somehow. I remember seeing you from maybe 20 yards away, wheeling a small suitcase over a gravel path. I wanted to shout “Hello!” but the quiet hush of those redwoods drinking the ocean fog was so pervasive that it felt somehow immoral to raise one’s voice there.

I think we were supposed to be inspired by the lack of technology or Internet access, but my writing workshops felt unnatural and labored. There were a few panels. I missed the “ineffable” one entirely. Lots of reasons and none of them good. I ended up wandering through the woods for a while. I found a spot on a hill near the dining hall where I could get a few bars of reception, and I Googled the word ineffable. Something about things that are hard to put down in words.

Everything is hard for me to put into words, kiddo.

Everything is ineffable.

I don’t remember saying goodbye. My last memory of you is of not saying “hello.”

I drove home from the conference alone. I was living in a small rental just a few blocks from a convenience store that sold pizza and tires and loose single cigarettes. H was pregnant. I was working at a hospital, buried in a windowless basement room near the radiology department. Rent was due on the first and we got paid on the 7th, so I was late with the check to my landlord almost every single month for five years straight. I walked up out of the basement at 5:01PM and my phone lit up with the messages I’d missed during the day.

“It’s the 8th of the month. Rent?”

If he knew how broke we were, that landlord never would have given us the keys. I think we told him we were expecting our first and it made him feel good to think that we were going to start a family in this house, so he’d text about it being the 8th or 9th of the month, and I’d cut him a check and put it in an envelope. On the outside of the envelope I wrote the following:

RENT
(the money, not the musical)

I quietly drove up the hill to his house and placed the envelope under the doormat. Maybe a text that confirmed the delivery but no mention or acknowledgement of the joke. Not once. I wrote it on the envelope every month for five years.

I ran into them at a restaurant awhile back, my landlord and his wife, I mean, and we acted like old friends, or maybe I should say we didn’t act like I paid rent late for five years. No one said a word about the envelopes.

I had to go back to the house a few years ago after ordering some music equipment and, like an idiot, shipping it to the wrong address. The seller had already put it in the mail, so I drove back to the old neighborhood and parked in my old spot and stood in front of what had been my front door.

I knocked and a young guy, maybe 30 or so, answered in his bare feet. “Hi, I’m so sorry to bother. I used to live in this house…”

He leaned into the door frame and relaxed. “No shit?“

“Yeah we bought a place…” I pointed in a southwestern direction. “Like four years ago or so.”

So he took my number down in a notebook and told me he’d call if my delivery showed up. I ended up just coming by a few days later and stealing my own package off of his front porch, standing there for a moment to look for a camera or someone watching to make this action feel at least slightly less criminal. I could hold the package up to the doorbell camera, I thought, and show that it was my name. But there was no camera.

Anyway kiddo, I promise there is a reason I’m telling you all of this.

So I stood on the red porch and looked around for a camera without finding one and noticed, though I had seen it a hundred times before, the deep red acrylic paint on the pavement of that front stoop area, marked with a long, black arcing scar that ran from the door out toward the front step.

I had, when we lived there, spent what felt like a small fortune on a table and some chairs. I’d carry one of them outside onto a small patio and sit in the morning shade with the iPad. We were trying to come up with a name for the kid, so I was searching through rhyming dictionaries, trying to imagine the sorts of slurs and slanders that middle schoolers come up with. Cooper rhymes with pooper. Celeste rhymes with molest. It’s not that we were considering names like these anyway. Melanie never made the list because “Melanie commits felony” became like a bad song you keep singing all day without wanting to. After all that I’d try and think What if this kid becomes a Supreme Court Justice? Or a something a bit more noble like a car mechanic?” And what name fits both of those?

One night I sat there reading Nabokov until the mosquitoes came out. Maybe it wasn’t Nabokov — that whole year is sort of a sleepless haze with work and the kid and school and teaching. It was time to go inside so I half-heartedly dragged the chair back toward the door and it made a strange sound. I looked down and there was a new, thin black line that led right to one of the legs of the chair.

I kicked at it with my shoe a bit, but it didn’t even smudge.

I remember the black line so clearly now. I feel like I could trace it across the page with a pen and match its arc exactly. But I don’t remember any of the things that felt so important at the time.

I wanted everyone to think I was good enough to be there. We were supposed to be writing brilliant new work and having smart conversations about books like Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.” I don’t know if I could name two books I read in grad school. What was the one we all hated? Small with a green cover? I sold the books to a used bookseller a few years ago and spent my store credit on Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. It’s a cardboard picture book. E liked it so much he tried to eat it.

Ten years after grad school now and I remember only the bright, direct afternoon sun finally coming around the corner of the house and the red painted concrete of the patio and the tightness in my throat and how finding a name that rhymes with something stupid and crossing it off a list or seeing the iPad screen go black because the battery died felt as close to relaxing as I’d get for months and that maybe the Nabokov piece wasn’t essay but some sort of a short story.

The room where we held the critical theory seminars was a claustrophobia-inducing concrete tomb on the second floor of Voorhies hall. I spent hours looking out the windows, watching the barren tree branches scratching at the winter sky, trying to hang onto some thread of the discussion while avoiding a spiral of thoughts about the building collapsing, or the walls shrinking in on us, or being blockaded inside the room for weeks on end until we all starved to death.

I won’t name names (I don’t know that I could), but a few of the others were pronouncing Nabokov just slightly differently than I thought they would have (with an emphasis on the second syllable — nuh-BOE-kof), so I tried hard to discuss him without saying his name. “Signs and Symbols” is all about names, but I didn’t want to bring up the naming of a child. It felt irrelevant.

This, I think, is what I have been wanting to tell you:

It is a small moment. Wedged in between driving up the hill to Elmhurst with a dumb joke written on an envelope and letting the forest air starve us of a simple hello, there was a moment in a classroom when you and I began to live separate lives.

All twelve of us were doing the same things at the same time. We were desparate to be making beautiful and devastating art. We were deeply in love with language and the written word. But I was just starting to understand myself as a father and negotiating with what that meant for me as a writer, and I was alone in that. I’m still trying to figure it out–whether or not I can be both.

The ineffable thing that someone should have said on that panel, is that some days being a father feels like giving up on the life that you thought you wanted the most. That’s the thing you can’t say. That’s what you bury so deep in the garbage that you have to stand at the sink and wash your hands afterward.

Reading your story felt the same as standing in the doorway of a house I used to know, but seeing a stranger answer the door.

I started this letter to tell you that you are living the better version of my life. That’s how it started, but then I was sitting in the quiet living room repeatedly writing and deleting the same two sentences of a fiction piece (failing miserably to try and be the writer you have become) when my youngest walked out and told me he was cold. I had put him to bed hours ago. I closed the laptop. I lifted my son up and carried him quietly back to his room. His body went limp in my arms. I pressed a hand against his cheek. He felt warm.

I had to turn just so in the hallway so that I didn’t bang his head or his feet against a doorframe. The doorway to his room was already narrow, but made even harder to navigate by a stuffed animal tossed carelessly into the path of the opening door. I held my son against my chest while gently nudging the fuzzy rabbit out of the way, stepping finally into the room. I laid him down softly.

He reached up toward me.

“One sec. Let me check your temperature, OK?”

He nodded.

I winced when the digital thermometer beeped. 100.2. I sat down on his bed, but didn’t do the thing where I pretend to sit on his legs and then shout about there being rocks in his bed. I rubbed his back in small motions. We didn’t speak. I touched his cheek with the back of my hand intermittently.

Still warm. But it could be worse.

I eventually moved to the floor next to his bed. I found my earbuds in my pocket and put on an audiobook of Nabokov’s Pale Fire novel. A branch from the palo verde tree outside his window scraped across the glass. I’ll have to trim it back tomorrow. Hopefully his fever is down by then. I thought of reading Nabokov and the room in Voorhies and you and then the piece I had read, and soon I was just thinking, Tell me why it is you think there’s some other life waiting for you, some better life, and I kept asking it until it felt like the question wasn’t Emily asking Wes, but you asking me, and it grew louder and louder, and it buried the voice of someone reading Nabokov and buried the faint sound of a branch against a window. And yes. The question got so loud that it eclipsed the deep breathing of a small boy who was asleep, again, finally.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eleven. I was watching the closing credits to MacGyver and realized someone got to write that. It was the best thing I could imagine becoming. It still is.

This life feels sometimes so separate from the one I thought I would have. This life, the one with two children, the one with a mountain of fucking diapers, the one with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the one that carries a sick boy back to his bed and waits and worries with him in the dark — it is full of the heartache of unfinished and unpublished writing. But the other life, some better life where it all just falls into place, is a trick of the light, isn’t it? Smoke and mirrors?

Both of us, in our wildly different lives, are still trying to make the same kind of art and to rattle the same cages and to say the same kinds of things. I’m just a little slower than you. For too long I let myself believe you were at some distance. Maybe I can push through the quiet hush of redwoods drinking the ocean fog this time to tell you.

Hello.