I get my back into it, thrust upward with my legs, muscles knotting . . . no workouts for too long . . . a frenzied snatch-and-lift . . . I stagger sideways and heave . . . picture window explodes . . . shards, of glass cascading . . . TV in flight. . . cabinet folds inward as it crashes on the flagstone . . . muted cracklings precede one large red spark . . . the long rumble down the hill, pieces flying . . . Stephanie screaming . . . for an instant . . . one pure rushing instant . . . I was King Fucking Kong. . . .
Milkiness encroaching. I reached for the pint of Scotch in my coat. Almost empty. The pale light was seeping in through my ears.
Rock bottom. If not here, couldn’t be far off. What I didn’t know was whether to feel scared or relieved.
The TV . . .
Maybe she picked him on purpose, knowing how I detested the breed: electronic jackals in symbiosis with their brain-dead viewers. Mincing on the scene, crews running interference. Checking makeup. Asking their two stupid questions. Broadcasting the shoddy results hours before our stories hit the streets.
It was when she told me she was moving in with him that I assaulted the tube.
It proved costly. With the divorce came a custody judgment barring drunken violent me from seeing our daughters more than once a week.
Booze gradually came to fill a lot of empty places. I was a wretched part-time father. I alienated my friends. Jeopardized my job. Screwed up everything.
Strangely, my father’s death had seemed to offer a certain opportunity, a rite of passage to manhood.
“I can’t imagine how they tracked you down” Stephanie’s cool measured words—her telephone voice—sounding in my brain. “They called here for you. I told them our situation. If you need to miss a visit, I’ll think of something to tell the girls.”
By burying him I would ascend some pinnacle of maturity. There, viewing my thirty-two years with new wisdom, I would find significance and a tenable position.
“Take a month if you need, Sam.” City Editor Joe Salvio giving me a fishy smile, significant look. “Pull yourself together . . . skimpy interviews . . . facts not checked . . . get back to your old form!”
Or your ass is dead.
So this morning I had picked up the suit I’d ordered, flown to Cleveland, and cabbed to the Cuyahoga County Morgue. Without ceremony they slid the cold-storage drawer out and raised the sheet. Shivering in the refrigerated chill, I peered into the sallow face for the first time, seeking traces of myself. There was no cosmetic work: skin sagged from his neck, hair sprouted from his nostrils, snowy stubble matted his jowls and collapsed cheeks.
Did you fill your days? Did you love anyone?
I stared at the swollen nose. It was bulbous—like mine before college boxing flattened it—and purplish, crosshatched with tiny broken vessels.
Did you ever think about me?
“. . . like a chunk of pumice. . . .” The voice of the man from the coroner’s office buzzed. “. . . enlarged twice normal and severely cirrhotic . . . yellow and fibrous as dry sponge . . . sure as putting a gun to his head, just slower. . . .”
I had a fleeting urge to reach down and lift one of the wrinkled lids. What color were his eyes? Shouldn’t a son know?
Burial was expensive. I opted for cremation, my hand shaking as I signed as “nearest surviving relative.” I asked where he’d been living. The answer was vague; no address. I went back in for a final look. Beneath the odor of preservatives I imagined his stench rising about me. I turned away and heard the drawer slide in.
So long, Pop.
Outside, the afternoon heat hung like a force field. I stood uncertainly, swallowing hard, then headed for a liquor store.
Lately the milky light came often. Enveloped in it, confused by it, I seemed to experience multiple dimensions. Without disappearing, things around me receded into the pale haze as distant images and voices swirled to the foreground. Most of them I recognized as my own memories. But not all. The experience was unnerving, sometimes almost terrifying. Drug overload. Or maybe I was going crazy.
The idea of taking Amtrak back had been to give myself time to savor the experience, see the country. But what was to savor? A long look at a corpse? I tilted the pint up. They say drinking runs in families.
The woman across the aisle was staring at me. I leered and winked. She pursed her mouth and looked away. Hell with her. The last of the whiskey slid down. My stomach churned. My vision blurred. I pressed my hands to my eyes. The milkiness was close.
The delay—something about a tie-up outside Toledo—was announced not long after we’d cleared the last dismal suburb and were barreling across open country. I’d been watching the fields rush by ablaze with wildflowers, their beauty a mockery.
The train’s rhythm flattened as we slowed. We curved onto a siding and glided to a halt beside a weather-beaten loading dock rising like a low island from a sea of weeds and nettles. Waves of heat radiated from the wooden platform though dusk was settling. Insects swarmed in spirals. The compartment’s doors opened with a hiss. A steward announced that we would be held up awhile; we could stretch our legs. I looked around. Nobody seemed eager to leave the air-conditioning. I stood unsteadily. Had to go outside. Had to do something.
My shoes clumped on the long platform. I retreated inside the sounds, tried to focus on the grain of the boards. Sweat filled my armpits. I felt a chill in the thick, heavy heat.
At the far end of the dock a small wooden ticket office stood darkly
