Canyons
“Jonah… Jonah… what are you doing in there?” Mom yells.
“Give me a minute Mom,” I say, “Jesus.”
“What are you doing, touching yourself?”
“No, Mom. Just give me a minute.”
“What, did you fall in? What’s going on in there? You’re almost thirty-years-old. I thought you were old enough to handle a trip to the bathroom but apparently not. Are you running the water? Don’t make it too hot or you’ll burn your hands off. Can you hear me in there? It sounds like you’ve been running the water for a while now, don’t let it get too hot in there. It seems you were never trained to use the bathroom. I’m so sorry. I should have taught you how to run the water properly. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorr-”
“It’s okay Mom.” I open the bathroom door. The bathroom’s yellow and the shower curtain hasn’t been changed for as long as I can remember. There are permanent water stains on the wall, way too many years of hot showers and condensation. There’s fresh facial hair in the sink. “I was only shaving. I’m okay. You need to take your pills. Here.” I cross the hall into her bedroom and leave her pills and a glass of water on the bedside table.
“Thank you, Jonah. Thank you.”
Mom hasn’t left her bed in weeks. She’s suffering from one of her moods. As for Dad, he hasn’t left his couch in the living room for four days. He was recently sent back from the Home for attempting to do a Dutch on several occasions. One of these occasions involved plastic breakfast knives. Another was an attempt to crush himself via closing elevator doors. And the last effort entailed window-curtains. (He did not and could not realize that the knives were not metal, elevator doors have sensors to ensure against such accidents/incidents, and window-curtains are too thick to do an effective job. A curtain, when wrapped around a neck with all one’s might, is far too bulky to serve as a noose—it’s more like a scarf.)
Upon finding Dad in the midst of such attempts, nurses ushered him off to a small room for debriefing. He never pitched a fuss.
“He accepted our directions like a bum accepts change,” one nurse said. “It was like he was grateful. When he saw me coming to stop him he raised his eyebrows and his eyes lit up, and his dimples, like, appeared.”
In their incident reports, all remarked that as he was being escorted to the aforementioned small room, he was humming in a soft tenor, his trademark: You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. I bet his face was placid. And I bet he hummed in a way that made everyone want to join in. I can imagine him humming down the hallway, a nurse clinging to one of his arms as he swings the other—the same as when he held my toddler-sized hand as we walked to Sunset Lake, his gear strapped to his back. I can imagine him humming in my ear. Despite my age, he was convinced he could teach me to fish.
I walk downstairs to make myself a sandwich.
“Son, here’s the capital-t Truth. I am certain Jesus was a pet owner. He had a dog named Brady and that mutt was the most devoted disciple. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John my ass,” Dad yells from the living room.
“Yeah that’s good Dad,” I say.
This is why I have to be here, in the house where I was raised. Since Mom is an internal POW, Dad needs someone to look after him as he sinks further and further into the sepia couch. I enter the living room and sit on the adjacent loveseat. As I chew my sandwich, I fix my eyes upon the family photos that are framed and hung side-by-side on the wall above Dad’s head. There we are.
Mom smiles and sits in full-lotus as I, an infant, rest on her lap.
Dad fixes me up on his shoulders, steadies me with one hand, and gives a thumbs-up with the other.
Our arms are draped around each others’ shoulders as I stand adorned in my high-school graduation gown. Mom wears my graduation hat and Dad makes a goofy face at the camera.
The portraits hang unevenly above the couch. There’s room for one more picture on the left side of the wall. There used to be one there, a picture of our full family: me, Mom, Dad, and the brother I used to have, Sam.
“Hey Dad,” I say.
“Hmph.”
“Remember that day?” I point to the graduation picture.
“Use my codename.”
“What?”
“I said use my alias dammit. I’m incognito. They can’t find me or else I’m done for. I’ll really be done for if they find me.”
“Come on Dad, cut it out,” I say.
Silence for a few moments. Then he speaks. Half whisper. Half whimper. “Come here, soldier.”
“What?”
“You report to me, soldier. Soldier, this has been a good hard fight. It really has been. We really gave them hell. We really did. But we’ve gone as far as we can. You can’t let them find me. They can’t find me. Please soldier,” he says slowly, emphatically, and low, “take care of me.”
“I am,” I say, “See?”
“No.”
I stare at his face.
“You have to take care of me. You have to kill me.”
Imagine this. My father asks me to kill him, to relieve him of his infinite ache, and he cannot remember my name. He refers to me simply as soldier. My mother is weeping in her bed and I can hear the distant whir of the road beyond the house. My father asks me to kill him as he lies below the most treasured of my kin’s family photos. His eyes are canyons. I am causing him more pain than he can inflict upon me.
“I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”
Eventually, Dad figured that a belt attached to a 72” heavy-duty shower curtain rod would work better than an institutional curtain. He was right. Mom was sad when I told her but she didn’t look too surprised. She lifted herself from bed, went across the hall to the bathroom and looked at it for the first time all day. She hugged me, and kissed my forehead. She approached Dad and I helped her take him down, and she hugged him too, for a long time. And she said I think it’s time we spruce this place up a bit, maybe a new paint job. I’m sick of yellow.
Years earlier, when I was eleven and Sam was nine, we cruised through Braintree in your Ford, rocking to Petty, and sometimes Springsteen. You called Sam “Spike” and you called me “Fag” and we called you by your name, Dad.
One November morning you took us to the park to play with our golden retriever, Sal, and to fly kites. You wore your tatty leather jacket and puffed on Marlboros. You told us about the time you severed your right thumb while snow-blowing, and the time when you were stopped by someone in an airport, and that person said you looked like Sean Penn with Down syndrome, and you told that person to fuck himself.
You were always generous in blessing me with outrageous birthday presents—a backscratcher, water glasses inscribed with the phrase, “Give it to me baby, uh huh, uh huh.” Whenever my mom’s brother told you that these objects might be useless (in jest), you called him a fag and told him that he had a small penis (in jest).
A few years later, after I graduated, mom’s family came over for Christmas, and you had been drinking. You told everyone that Sambuca makes your shit turn green. You said you wished you could have bought presents for Spike that year. You said you were sorry. You said you wanted him back. You remembered how much he liked the Spiderman action figure you gave him for being brave. You remembered how you went into the operation room with him. You remembered how you counted backwards from ten as the anesthesia pumped into his lungs, how his eyes shut at the pace, you thought, that one observes when raising or lowering a flag, how his hair was brown and curly, and how he clung to Peter Parker, cradling the action hero with both hands.
I thought about you recently, as I was walking downtown and a car rode by, rocking to Petty. One night, after a day of play, Sam and I walked up the path to our house. Mom answered the door. The kitchen was bright. It smelled like coffee and brownies. Old Sal hurried over. You instructed “up,” caught him by the paws, and hugged him. You turned your head, smiled, and asked how we were.
David Cotrone is currently a student at the College of the Holy Cross. He lives in the relentlessly historical town of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
