The River that is not a River

He dances his rebellion on the small stage of a stool. At five, my youngest is the melody of a song too big to be contained.

I hold the small toothbrush in front of him and say things like “OK” and “OK now” and hold the toothbrush and say, “That’s enough” and say, “OK. Enough now” and hold the toothbrush with the shiny pink paste, which is sliding slowly toward the bottom edge of the bristles, and I hold the toothbrush, and I say to either the toothpaste or the boy, “Please.”

He wants desperately to see himself in the mirror, so he turns away from me and jumps just high enough to catch a glimpse of himself in it. He bursts with laughter, catches his breath, then places his palms flat on the counter to lift himself, kicking against the cabinet to climb and catch sight of the smiling boy in the mirror who is grinning back at him with dirty teeth.

I put my hands on his small shoulders and try to hold him in place.

I turn him so that we can face each other.

He wears the disappointment in the exaggerated slouching of his shoulders. He pauses and then suddenly crumples down into a ball, lying on top of my feet.

It’s not that he hates the toothbrush. It’s the entire notion of bedtime. Especially one earlier than his brother’s. It’s the moment ten minutes from now (or twenty) when he feels the chaotic joy of being five years old start to slip away. He will slouch into the uncomfortable quiet of waiting for sleep. Is it a fear of losing the song?

Down the hall from this still-crumpled up boy, there is a noise machine that makes the sound of a river that isn’t there. There is an astronaut night light that makes his dark room feel like something other than the emptiness. Just on the other side of the toothbrush. Green stars and a rainbow aurora that swarms above the river and onto the ceiling fan.

Stand still. Be calm. Stay here and stand in one place. Be still.

I know that sleep can feel like touching the other side.

I remember when I outran my fear on I-80 and pulled myself across this paved scar from Omaha moving straight West. Just on the other side of the toothbrush, right? Sacramento? Where it feels like something other than emptiness?
I cracked the window of the ’88 Accord and chainsmoked all the way through Southern Wyoming and then, having overdone it, pulled over at a rest stop in Utah to brush my teeth. A family chewing on ziploc bag sandwiches frowned at me when I spat white foam onto the parking lot pavement. I rinsed out my mouth with an Arizona Iced Tea that was so bland it might as well have been water and then back into the car. Another 20 miles before I lit up again.
The sun started to fall toward the horizon. There was a sticker in the rear window of that car (I didn’t put it there) that said: This sticker authorizes law enforcement to pull this vehicle over if operated between the hours of 10PM and 6AM on the assumption that the vehicle is stolen.

I got tired. I had a friend in Utah, so I found him, did a few shots of some new whiskey that he really liked, and took a few hours to sleep on a couch in his basement. The next morning I ran out of songs on my iPod during a climb up into the Sierra Nevadas nearing Donner Pass. I kept listening to this Bright Eyes song that had something about “leaving the sorrowful midwest” and “I did my best to keep my head,” but playing it over and over didn’t help me understand my Westward motion any better.

I kept driving. I stayed behind the wheel after 10PM but didn’t get pulled over. Somewhere past midnight I finally slipped into the parking spot of my empty apartment and pulled myself up the stairs. Key under the doormat like the landlord said it would be. Folded a hoodie for a pillow in the empty living room. Hum of the road and that shitty Bright Eyes song still echoing in my ears. I slept on the carpet for a week and curled up next to the wall so the apartment felt less empty. I woke up before the sun could begin to prove the dark of night to be soft as dream.

I bought a mattress. Tried counting down to zero. Tried counting up, too. I emptied a bottle of Zolpidem one night at a time, one pill at a time. I took up running because I needed the exhaustion to sleep. I know it can be hard to lie there and wait sometimes. With or without a river that isn’t a river or an aurora that isn’t an aurora. Two pills if it gets really bad. I know the quiet feels like it will swallow you up, so you count (even though you know it won’t work). A small act of faith.

Stand still. Be calm. Stay here and stand in one place. Be still.

Try something new.

I tell him to find the gray in my hair.

“See if you can find one. I bet you can’t.”

He reaches up. Pushes a fingertip through my hair and toward the back of my head. When he reaches the crown of my skull, he lifts his finger, brings it back to the top of my forehead and repeats.

This is the same fingertip he tapped against the back of my hand this afternoon. The same small fingertip that pulled me down and out of my thoughts like an anchor. Microsoft had just fired its AI Ethics team, and I was on my third article about it, copy-pasting the URL into a work thread, and thinking as loud as a house collapsing, doesn’t this mean something? Doesn’t this mean something? This means something, right? And when his voice was too small, he gave me the interruption of his quiet fingerprint. The same print he is leaving on my forehead now.

“No. I don’t know why adults say gray when they mean white. Can you find the white ones?” and then “Yes, my beard counts.”

He finds one. Or ten.

Counts them out loud.

I raise the toothbrush to his mouth.

He opens. Finally.

The bristles rise and then fall into the valleys of his molars. The pink toothpaste starts to foam. His small fingers still in my hair. We pause so he can spit, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lifts what he tells me is the longest white hair.

“Get it out of there.”

Without the courtesy of hesitation, he yanks on it and it comes loose. I feign some sort of surprise or pain and then he holds it in front of me — a strand long and silver like a full moon.

“That’s not white is it? It’s just sort of a light black.”

Mouth open again. Canines. The gap where his front teeth were just a month ago. Can’t see the new ones yet. I have to remember not to brush the gums too harshly because it is tender still.

I ask him to spit. He lets the foam toothpaste fall softly from his mouth into the white sink.

“How many did you find?” and then “Oh no. I must be getting old, then.”

His small fingers through my hair. Soft as sleep.

“Open your mouth again please. We’re not done.”

Softly, still.

“Please. Open your mouth.”

Stand still. Be calm. Be still.

Sometimes opening your mouth is a sort of admission of guilt.

The first girl I kissed had jet black hair. Straight as nails and soft as a promise. A pair of fifteen-year olds in a Budapest bus stop. Waiting for the 7 bus to take us into the city. She lifted my chin with a fingertip to pull me through a blushing ineptitude. Turned my head and felt the skin of her forehead against mine. The bridge of her nose against mine. She opened her lips. I remember the smell of cigarettes on her breath.

I wasn’t even there. Didn’t notice the wet of her mouth or her tongue because I was too busy wondering if I had ever seen her smoke.

Lots of places to buy cigarettes in Kelenvölgy, even if you’re only 15.

I had seen her brother smoke. He held the cigarette between the thumb and index like a joint and pulled it up to his lips that way. I thought it looked cool.

All of these things instead of the kiss, which I only recognized after the fact. Like walking through my yard after a heavy storm, quietly picking up oranges off the ground, placing them in a bucket, and thinking, well that must have been something.

I never knew what to say to her. Wrote her a hundred unsent love notes with bad metaphors.

I love you like a house on fire.

I had seen a house on fire, flames licking through the black skeleton of what the house was. A cop pushed me back from the fence. “Gas line,” he said. A thousand small, silver objects floated up and out of the fire. A swarm of them, all fluttering like a broken butterfly wing. Still glowing orange on the edges. One touched the ground at my feet. I picked up a piece of darkened paper. There had been words, but they were all interruptions now. I looked up again and the sky was full of them. Pages from books.

“I love you like a house on fire,” seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t need to say it. Of course I love you like finding a way to fall apart and fly and be destroyed and beautiful at the same time. Of course that’s the big red machine banging around in my chest. So obvious I don’t even need to say it.

I didn’t say it.

I wanted to know if she had seen me behind the apartment building, blocking the wind with my hands. Short drags. It was a way for us to think of ourselves as older. To fabricate something for the mirror. That word, fabricate, means both “to build” and “to lie.” That was also true of us, filling our lungs with smoke. We couldn’t construct ourselves without becoming liars.

Stay here and sit down in one place. Be still.

We stopped in the aisle next to the cough drops.

I knelt down next to him and pulled him in. He cried softly into my ear over a small Lego set that did not make its way into our basket. I felt him shuddering and heaving against me. Felt the sharp of his nose against my collar bone.

His older brother paced in the aisle behind us, building a quiet soundtrack of cough drop flavors, read aloud to no one in particular. “Black Cherry… Sugar Free Honey Lemon… Mentho-lyptus…”

“OK. OK. Now look. I’m taking a picture of it with my phone, OK? I’m taking a picture of it with my phone, and then maybe we can buy it later. Then we’ll know which one it was. I have the picture here, but we can’t buy it right now. OK? OK?”

He kept crying, softly and quietly, just letting it fall out of his mouth. I lifted him up. He leaned against me, but wouldn’t put his arms around me. I carried him all the way through the checkout lane, where I paid awkwardly, holding him with one hand and finding my wallet with the other. We went with the Black Cherry. I carried him all the way to the car. I lifted him in and took off his shoes. I don’t know why but sometimes that helps.

His brother was annoyed. Pulled his hood down so tight that I wasn’t sure he could see where he was walking at all. I understand wanting to disappear.

He followed us at a distance out to the car. Caught me looking for him over my shoulder, so he made sure I saw him rolling his eyes.

I shrugged as if to say, I don’t know what to do when he’s like this either.

He opened his own door and buckled himself in while I was still fumbling with his brother’s car seat. “Why does this always happen?”

“I don’t know, buddy.”

“I told you, I don’t like it when you call me buddy.”

“Oh sorry.”

“Why does the store even have Legos?” he asked, which is likely something I said aloud at some point in the last five minutes even though I didn’t remember saying it.

“I don’t know.”

“But why does this always happen?” I could barely hear him because his brother was picking up steam again. Kicking against the back of my seat now.

“I don’t know.” I wanted to say that it doesn’t always happen, but maybe that wasn’t true. The oldest likes words like “always” and “never.” They make an impossible world seem understandable somehow. I think it’s fair to want that.

From my peripheral, I saw him turn toward his younger brother, who was still crying of course and pressing his socks against the back of the driver’s seat. “Hey!” the oldest shouted. “You have to stop crying!”

I held up a hand like a crossing guard trying to stop traffic. “He knows already. Don’t do that. He knows. He already knows.” I hate that I do this. Say the same thing over and over because I expect not to be heard.

“But he won’t stop. Ever. And I can’t stand it”

“He knows he needs to stop. It’s so obvious that we don’t need to say it. We might make it worse by saying it. Out loud. Right?” I didn’t know if he agreed with me or not. I don’t know how to do any of this.

I turned on the car and the radio came alive. It was that Butthole Surfers song from the 90s. The one with that line that goes “They were drinking from a fountain that was pourin’ like an avalanche comin’ down the mountain” and I didn’t think twice about it, because I couldn’t hear it. It was just the noise of crying and discussing who shouldn’t be crying and I was still trying to find my seat belt and getting kicked in the back when I heard another shout from the back seat.

“BUTTHOLE?!”

I turned to give the source of the comment a dirty look, but the seatbelt in my hand caught and pulled my elbow backward awkwardly. I felt an immediate and sharp pain shoot up from my elbow all the way up and through my shoulder and I crumpled backward toward the door. A noise came out of my mouth that was not language, but before I could collect myself to understand what had happened, I heard it again.

“Butthole, Dad? Should you be letting us listen to the Butthole Surfers?”

“It’s fine. Just don’t tell Mom.”

Maybe he was just reveling in being able to say the word “butthole” without getting into trouble. I heard once that before they made it big, the band went by a different name for every show. That included playing shows as “Fred Astaire’s Asshole” and “The Right to Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole” and “The Inalienable Right to Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole.” So in case there was any question about whose butthole was being surfed exactly, it stands to reason that it was Fred Astaire’s.

In a rare stroke of wisdom, I said none of this out loud, but mostly because he didn’t know who Fred Astaire was.

“I hate this music.”

I reached toward the radio and punched the power button, silencing the song completely. “Sorry buddy.”

“Dad, I told you…”

“Shit. Sorry.”

Be here. Be in one place. Be still.

In bed now, the youngest remembers the day as the Lego set that was not, and has no room left in his heart to accept the night that is now. The calm. My quiet breath. The dog, curled in the soft of a discarded blanket at the foot of the bed, letting out a long sigh. The astronaut night light shining an aurora onto the ceiling. The sound of a river that is not a river. The sound of intermittent, distant traffic that is actually distant traffic. If we listen close, we can hear footsteps in the living room, and we know it is someone we love.

I say all of this as though the moment is static, but of course it isn’t. The dog gets bored with us and leaves us to find someone else who will pay better attention to her. The sound of traffic changes and disappears completely and then returns. I smell the laundry detergent of the sheets and then his breath and then nothing. The weight of his body against mine grows suddenly uncomfortable and painful. And maybe that’s why it is so hard for either of us to be here.

To stay here.

I keep stumbling through the museum of my memory. He does too. Several days of pulling yourself across I-80 is the same as the Legos left next to the cough drops. A cigarette-scented kiss is the same as the number of white, not gray, hairs you pulled from your father’s scalp is the same as a sticker on the window of a car I sold more than a decade ago.

Sometimes people see me wearing the exhaustion, carrying one of them through the checkout lane while the other one stands just far enough away to keep from being helpful, and they smile at me and they say “it goes by so fast,” and I hope they are telling the truth.

In the morning, I rise and walk quietly down the dark hallway and past the astronaut night light and the aurora that is not an aurora and the river that is not a river. I sit cross-legged in the dimly lit front room, feeling a strange new pain in my left shoulder. A hundred things I need to do before they wake up, but I feel like the page of a novel, reduced to a series of interruptions. Some piece of my former self, I take wing on the slightest pocket of air, still lost, but not any more lost than I was. I have to remind myself that the routine does not make this cyclical. That I am here for the first time. That there is, in this moment, some persistent and great new-ness like a fresh white follicle, pushing its way out through the rest of my hair and into the light. The melody of overthinking tries pushing me again from the moment. The moment is as relentless as it is hopeless and I am here.

I am always here.

Still.