Faltering

His days, occupied with the unassuming lethargy of intermediate age—Muzak-filled sequences, cold dust spilling off the monotony, the weary tedium of unexpected things—left him inexplicably hollow. The silence scattered in every which way, and the stillness slowly begun to ache.

He would spend too long studying the sunrise as it glinted off a crystal ashtray. Flickering circuits of light, fractured gold suffused his naked chest. His thoughts hung in a state of jarring weightlessness, like seeds, brief and unburnished, flung onto fresh soil. Where had all the songbirds gone?

His daughter noticed it, too. The normal, robust sarcasm of their conversations had absented. She would no longer join him for the microwaved dinners he prepared, leaving her portion of macaroni and cheese to grow cold on those untouched ochre evenings. But when his initial diagnosis came back, she was suddenly flushed at the prospect of assuming his burden. Eager to step into his shoes but unwilling to stay long. Even as she moved between this fraternity party and that campus dinner, she would cross the house in short, transient bursts that were exhilarating to her.

“Dad, did you hear what I said? You really must listen more, I don’t know what’s been going on with you these days. Stop fidgeting, you need to finish today’s therapy exercise before I get home around eleven.”

He turned his head, raised his eyes to meet hers. She stared back, alabaster features like her mother’s glowing beneath half-applied makeup. Was she glaring at him, or was her expression just a mascara-scrawled portrait?

“Diazepam at night on Mondays and Thursdays, Aricept on Tuesdays, Razadyne twice a day on the weekends. Daddy, can you remember that, I have to go to Alice’s in five minutes. Aricept on Tuesdays, remember? Never mind, I’ll just write it down—”

“What’s the Razadyne for?”

“Jesus dad, your Alzheimer’s is worsening, isn’t it? The Doctor told you just yesterday during the appointment, when you asked him the exact same question. Stop sitting around and get started on your therapy already, I set the tapes next to the TV...”

He heard “like a goddamn child” float by in audible whisper as she scribbled down his medications, saw her eyes dart furtively in his direction, even though she knew that he would not react. The words used to sting at his pride, cajole him away from the faltering abyss. Now they simply melded into the slow crescendo of day, indistinguishable from the casual rush of a passing car or a sparrow’s rambling symphony. Sounds that would hang in the air for hours.

Indeed, the sparrow had now returned to its dilapidated birdhouse in his backyard. It watched him inquisitively, peering through the window with dark, beadless eyes. Occasionally, few meaningless notes would spill from its beak. He surveyed the small creature, wondering if it was capable of intimate thought—if so, would it also see the 22-year-old running upstairs in the house, trying futilely to untangle her mother’s auburn locks, squeezing into a tight dress and borrowed heels, hastily putting on lipstick she had taught herself how to apply—or would it choose to ignore her entirely?

The sparrow jerked its head and swung its weight into the air, carrying the unspeakable truth away on its feathered back.

[Play]

December 13. 1993: Backyard

A young woman waltzes in the snow. Her skin is smoothed to an ivory husk, and it glows in the present setting. The footage is grainy and silent with the exception of the camera-wielder’s crunching footsteps.

The camera follows the young woman. Something is special about her. He does not know her well yet, but it just seems obvious to him.

Perhaps it is that her hair is so impossibly thick, with a distractedly made ponytail sprouting up from the crown, fastened with a blue hair tie. Perhaps it is that her smile is so earnest, unreasonably eager to experience new things. Or, likely, it is that she is blissfully oblivious, if obliviousness worried the gloomy saints and comforted those who longed to live in color; yes, that is her striking gift.

She beckons to him, telling him to stow the camera away. He does not know her well yet, but he realizes it is inevitable he will take part in her singularly absorbed dance.

The video cassette abruptly spun itself out of film. He stared at the gray TV screen for several seconds. A familiar lightheadedness had dulled his senses, and when he closed his eyes, he could almost feel the lovely wind spinning in his head. He allowed the sensation to fade—for it was a chivalrous folly to grasp at the wisps of wintery air as they drifted off, curling, twisting, disappearing into nothingness.

He shuffled through the rest of the VHS stack, selecting another tape at random.

[Play]

April 22. 2001: Mushroom Rain

A man (himself) and his seven year-old daughter duck underneath the cafe awning. They are taking refuge from the unforeseen shower that has caught the two off guard. 

The daughter is undeterred as the remaining few raindrops roll off her chaotic hair and dampened sweater, bouncing up and down in such a comical manner that her father cannot help but film her fiery impatience.

“Daddy, stop taking pictures! We’re gonna be late for the recital!” she wails petulantly. She had rehearsed her role at home for weeks.

Grinning, the voice behind the camera replies, “I’m only taking a video, dear.”

She glares at him, but she is too anxious to come up with an adequate retort. The father soothes his daughter.

“You know, your mother was the happiest person alive. She could always separate the good from the bad, and ignore the bad. She never had any reason to complain.”

“There’s nothing good about the rain, daddy!”

“Oh really? Your mother visited Russia once, and when she came back, she told me about what the rain was like there. The smell of new mushrooms in a Slavic forest after spring’s first rainfall—she said that they call that type of rain ‘gribnoi dozhdik,’ which is translation for ‘Mushroom rain.’ When the sky slow and gray as it is today, the mushrooms will blossom like flowers.”

The daughter does not respond, and the father cannot tell if she is mulling over his words, or if she has just decided to ignore him altogether. Suddenly, the irate French cafe-owner bursts through the front entrance, demanding that they either buy something or stop loitering under his awning.

The daughter giggles triumphantly into the camera, her wet Sketchers slapping against the wet pavement as she runs back into the rain. The father shakes his head, amused, before stowing the camera away and chasing umbrella-less after his daughter.

The front door swung open. He took his finger off the rewind button, incognizant to the fact that he had replayed the same three-minute video several hundred times in the space of his daughter’s absence. And when he wandered into the kitchen later and found her drunkenly slumped against a stained steel chair, he did not see a young woman who was maturing into her mother’s mold, but rather the same, uncanny seven-year-old who had recently exchanged her Sketchers for too-high heels and her sweater for a too-tight dress.

She turned towards him, with a valiant stoicism that attempted to mask her insecurity. But her bravado was spent. In halting sentences, meaningless words began to spill from her beak.

“Alice had her 21st birthday today, dad. All her friends came. Her family was there. They were all around her, surrounding her, and she looked so happy. So warm. Remember my 21st birthday? Remember it, dad?”

Her thoughts roamed the small room, fluttered like a gray afghan with her breath.

“My friends were away. You weren’t there, you were at the hospital. Mom, mom was already dead. I spent the whole day researching Alzheimer’s treatment for you, dad. But it’s all so stupid, because you just gave up, you just gave up yourself... Don’t you remember? Or do you just choose to forget...”

Her voice was steady, but she had started to cry. She had not cried for years and it she knew that it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a throbbing in her chest and a stinging in her throat.

“I'm faltering dad... I don't know what to do anymore. Everything is becoming so confused...”

He looked at her in fascination, as the tears, shining like diamonds, intermingled with the mascara, reducing her mother’s beautiful face into a tragic mockery of itself. His daughter reached out a trembling arm in his direction—the arm of a girl who was flailing for an anchor against the noiseless sobs that wracked her body. He appraised it but did not take it, watched as it limply swung back like a broken appendage.

After all, wasn’t it easier this way? To leave the childhood bridges they had forged, obliterated? To abandon the many roads they had traipsed, empty plains with no desire to be relearned? To sequester the world they had created, father and daughter, in one sweeping blanket that muffled the unintended screaming of their design?

Ignore the bad, ignore the bad, he would chant to himself, and slowly, what was unconveyable before began to rationalize with lesser meaning, and the unbearable pain became bearable. If love was truly inseparable from casual cruelty, then the heavens had ordained that he know neither.

So although he was here for now, he had already been gone for years—having vanished like a wraith because memories of a dead wife and a floundering daughter were distasteful things. A lightheaded restlessness would soon silence his demons, stumble errantly across his consciousness. He stared at his daughter’s hollow, calcified frame.

What was she crying over? He could no longer recall.