XXV

It was about this time that I began to smell the smoke. I was reminded of the winter, when he had set a plastic garbage can ablaze while drinking with some of his friends. They had been outside at our condo in the city, using a candle to light firecrackers and throw them at a pile of empties they’d set up on the patio. They had rested the candle on the plastic garbage can when they went inside to get some refreshments from the refrigerator. On the way back they were sidetracked by an old episode of Cheers on TV. When they finally made it back outside, the plastic garbage can had become a bubbling, oozing blue mess on the sidewalk that they were never able to clean up no matter how much they chipped at it with a metal ice scraper.
My mother made it outside right before me, and by that time the picnic table was fully engaged in becoming ashes rather than a picnic table. It was covered with a patina of burns, the oak barely distinguishable. My mother quickly ran over to the grill, turned it off, and pushed it around the garage, struggling as the wheels got caught up as it moved through the grass. I stood on the first step of the back stoop, mystified. I couldn’t move, but a slight smile was wrinkling the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t because I was glad my father got his comeuppance—at that age I would have never thought that way—but at the ridiculousness of the situation. When I saw the chicken burning, I felt my legs get heavy. I put my thumb in front of my eye and blocked out just the chicken burning, everything else I left.
My father came back around the house from his trip to the hose and tossed another bucket of water on the table. The flames laughed, cackling at the futile attempt to stanch their conquering force. The water seemed just to enrage them further, and they rose higher into the sky. My father again ran back around the house to fill his bucket, but this time my mother followed him.
My face had by now lost its smile. I couldn’t keep the chicken out of my view, and I didn’t know what to do, as I had not yet been imbued with the weathered umbrella of common sense that comes only after making costly mistakes. I first walked towards the garage, then back towards th house, then towards the picnic table, then backed up, then put my hands out in front of me and clenched and unclenched my fists rapidly, as if I were able to quench the flames through sheer force of will.
My mother returned, dragging the hose along with her. The hose was tipped with a pistol-like nozzle that could control the flow of water, making it capable of a wide, rainbow-inducing mist or a strong, focused jet. She squeezed the trigger tightly and focused all its power at the base of the flames. The water quickly cut down the fire, as the oil had been consumed by now and what was left was an out-of-control wood fire. What had once been a cause for concern was now a minor annoyance, the little flames dancing like butterfly wings.
“What happened?” my mother asked. “Why the hell were you running back and forth with the bucket instead of grabbing the hose?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—“ he began.
“Your eyebrows are gone,” she said. She chuckled and then grew serious. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I closed the lid when I went to get the matches—the gas was running, obviously. Dumb, dumb, dumb,” he said.
My mom went over to my father and hugged him tightly, squeezing him as though she were afraid he would melt if she let him go. I still stood on the stoop clenching and unclenching my fists. My eyes were glazed and fixed upon the picnic table. It was chaotic, destroyed, beautiful. The fire had cut ribbons of black across the surface of the tannin-colored oak. The turpentine fire had left a cloudlike scorch where it had spilled out. The rivulets of oil and stray splatters of turpentine created angels in the charred wood, all of them worshipping at the feet of a cloudlike deity of destruction. I mouthed the word wow and turned around and walked to my room.

My father would have said that turpentine caused the fire. I am not so sure. Perhaps I am some minor prophet. Maybe a Hezekiah, an Amos, perhaps an Obadiah. I am no Jeremiah, but I am something. Because those words, I wrote them without writing them, they existed even before I did. I am Gabriel. My name is Gabriel. Those words were through me but not of me. The silence that swirled around me congealed into words with power, words with actions. I had written that the chicken would burn, and it burned. Written and fulfilled.

Sexessential (it follows quintessential...)

What was happening outside with my father, I am not sure, but I can guess. I have thought about this numerous times in my life, and I think the picture that I have come up with is as close a version as can be created. Days later, when someone asked him, which many people did, it all happened because of the can of turpentine he forgot to put away.
My father set a large steel cauldron on the propane grill in the backyard. He emptied three bottles of canola oil into the pot. The gas hissed, and then the electronic spark from the igniter angered all the floating propane chains into flames. The chicken was on a plate on the oak picnic table located next to the grill. It was dusty white from the flour my father had splashed over it, and there was a piece of twine laced between where its head had been and a hole my father had gouged through the side with a paring knife. Overhead, vultures were circling. I’m kidding: they were crows.
After ten minutes, my father dipped the chicken into the cauldron. Nothing happened. He looked into the oil and noticed that there was no change: there were no bubbles forming around the carcass, no sound of popping and boiling. he stuck his finger into the oil, and it felt lukewarm. Wrapping the chicken’s twine leash around his hand, he ejected it from the oil pot and set it on the grill’s face. He attempted to set the pot of oil on the table, but instead set it tipped at a 25 degree angle with an edge on the table and the base itself on the plate that had held the chicken.
I remember him yelling to my mom. “Ridiculous. Fucking ridiculous. Honey,” he called into the house, “we have to get a new grill. This one is shit. With a capital shit.”
He turned dials, adjusted the knob of the propane container, twisting it on and off, on and off. Again, he pushed the igniter, hoping his adjustments could somehow change the physical properties of propane and cause the oil to heat faster, cause the world to bend to his will. Nothing. Hit the igniter again. Nothing. Closed the lid of the grill, pushed the igniter. Nothing. Turned dials, twisted knobs, popped the igniter. Nothing. Finally, he jogged around to the open garage, snatched a box of matches from the top of an abused file cabinet.
At this point, I think, it should be noted that he did not lift the lid back up when he jogged around to the open garage. Eminently important. Imminently important, as shall be seen.
Gripping the wooden handle on the lid of his propane grill, he opened it up. The chicken dripped cooking oil onto the propane jets. He took a match from the sliding cardboard box. They were nice, wooden matches, the kind one would take on camping trips and use for lighting gas fireplaces. He snapped the drawer of matches back into its sheath, then attempted to nimbly pull the match head across the rough brown ignition strip. The gases, which had been shooting out of the propane jets while my father was in the garage, were crashing, making weak bonds, cutting weak bonds. But when the match lit, they took out the rage that they felt at their confinement on the flame. A fireball erupted from the propane jets like a golden dragon, flying rapidly and swallowing the match and matchbook in one bite. My father, reacting quickly, had jumped backwards just as he had drawn the match head across its catalyst. I suspect that just as he drew it across he realized that he had left the lid down while he was in the garage. It started in slow motion, and ended in a blur as the flames and gases first met. The stench of burnt hair hung limply, was caught in his nose, and he realized that he’d probably just lost his eyebrows, but, luckily, not his eyes.
He looked at the grill, which was now burning normally—as though the golden dragon’s wings had not cut a swath in the air—and saw the chicken’s flesh burning and sputtering. Noticing the twine had miraculously escaped the flames, he wound it once around his hand and flipped the chicken off the face of the grill with the intention of putting out the fire crackling on its skin. But as he deftly popped it off the grill, the twine snapped, having been burned inside the carcass, and the chicken flew through the air toward the picnic table. The effect was something Rube Goldberg would have loved. The chicken’s heft was great enough to knock over the cauldron that was resting so dangerously on the plate. The cauldron continued its dangerous domino effect, toppling the aforementioned can of turpentine. The flames from the burning chicken met the spilled turpentine, and the can erupted in flames, which spread quickly across the picnic table.
Astounded, my father stood a moment looking at his picnic table burning. I’m sure he wondered if he had brought this all upon himself. He must have felt guilty about destroying my garden, thinking that this was his punishment. For a time he was probably tempted to call to me for help, maybe to apologize for wrecking something, to alleviate the tension between us. The way solving problems brings people together.
He did not call out, however. He ran around the house, grabbed the green bucket I had dropped my weeds into when I weeded my garden, dumped it out, and filled it with water from the hose. Turning on the balls of his feet, he ran back to the picnic table and attempted to douse the fire with a single bucket of water. The water flashed in the air, hanging together by its surface tension for a blink before it separated and splashed across the table. The fire seemed ready to die out, but by now the canola oil was heated by the turpentine’s flames, and it began to submit to the fire’s siren call. The water succeeded only in spreading the oil to parts of the table it had not yet visited. Undeterred, he again ran halfway around the house to the hose and filled the bucket. By this time the wood of the picnic table was burning along with the oil and turpentine on top of it. Black spots started to grow amoebically on the flawless oak surface. Black smoke was starting to curl a rumor in the sky, noticeably fouling the air. Again, he ran back to the hose, filled the bucket, threw it on the fire. Again, the flames laughed.

Quintessential

As I was trying to create life, my father was out in the garage. I’m sure that he was working on his chicken-plucking method. Spots of blood, piles of innards scattered about the oil-stained cement. He tried to throw the feathers into the fifty-gallon burning barrel, but most ended up on the floor, strewn about like bloody snowflakes. He kept his strong jaw clenched, little flecks of blood were spattered in his brown hair. His grey eyes squinted like high-compression springs ready to burst. He was biting his tongue on the left side of his mouth, his lips were pulled in that direction as well. I can see his brow, pulled together like a horizon, the wrinkles on his forehead clouds over the mountains of his thin, brown eyebrows. The finished chickens he hung on the pegboard that held his hammer, saw, and crowbar. The carcasses hung upside down, their feet tied together and slung over a wooden peg. It was probably not the best way to store the finished chickens, he knew, but he couldn’t think of anything more convenient so left it that way. The porcine anger behind his eyes was the anger of defeat, of gluttony, of destruction. He wanted me to realize that he’d done what he did. He wanted me to punch and kick and scream. He must have. Someone looking at him for the first time would have thought him a mental patient at best, a degenerate murderer at worst. His tanned skin was stained with blood from the chickens’ innards; on his chest was the imprint of his own hand over his heart, slightly blurred, but distinguishable.

A few days after the disaster, my father’s surplus of eggs had dwindled down to nothing, and he was uninterested in buying any more. “If I’d wanted eggs, I’ll buy more chickens,” he had said to my mother one morning. I was busy thinking about what ants do in the winter underground, but my father’s statement caught me off guard because of the odd construction of the sentence. I wanted to tell him about my egg, but couldn’t bring myself to do so.
Nobody knew that I had the egg, as my bedroom was a testament to the universe’s penchant for entropy, and as such my mother usually closed the door when she walked by, in case guests or members of high society or the President of the United States happened to knock on our front door for a tour. Who could possibly countenance messiness in the room of a nine-year-old? I was the only one who’d been in the room the whole summer, and I knew that my own messiness was the reason my secret was safe.
“You know, I think I’ll just have some chicken for breakfast, how does that sound?” my father asked the air.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” my mother replied.
I stared down at my bowl of oatmeal. They hardly ever asked me anything, especially at breakfast. There were always conversations existing at the forefront of my consciousness of which I was not a member. I was the phantom, the vapor, the ghost that made my parents occasionally speak in hushed tones but was rarely directly addressed.
“Have we ever had chicken for breakfast?” my father asked.
“I don’t think so. It sounds strange, but good. Chicken’s a dinner food, but I think we could eat it for breakfast,” my mother replied.
“How can I cook it, though? I’ve never cooked a chicken,” he said. I can picture the framework inside his skull. He must have expected cooking a whole chicken to be like grilling breasts on the barbecue. When he’d finished plucking the chickens, he probably realized that he had no idea how to prepare such a complicated animal. Was it the same as a turkey? Baste, baste, baste? Turkeys took, what, five, six hours? How long should a chicken take? Are they part of the same family, so you can just adjust the time according to their size, or do chickens have their own time frame?
“Do you need some help,” my mother asked. She had probably noticed the puzzled look on his face. I ate another spoonful of oatmeal.
“I can do it. I just need to figure out how we want to eat this. I suppose I could make a fire in the backyard and put it on a spit and roast it,” he said. I can see the confused look in his eyes. “Or I could put it in a pan in the oven for a few hours.”
“Yeah, you could do that. Although I’d probably cut down the time a bit, since we don’t want chicken jerky.”
When I finally looked up from my oatmeal I saw that he was frowning. I felt something building inside my chest, words that needed to escape.
“You could deep fry the chicken,” I said. The air went out of the room like a vacuum. My father and mother looked at me, eyes dull like soap, a slippery look. My father shook his head, looked at the refrigerator.
“You could deep fry the chicken,” my mother said.
“I suppose I could. Yeah, that’s a damn good idea. Good thinking, hon,” he said. I wondered if they heard me; my insides felt like battery acid.
But their breakfast meal was set: deep fried chicken.
My father went outside, and as he did so I washed my bowl in the sink and set it out to dry. In my room, the egg was still unbroken, but I knew it had to crack soon. It moved intermittently, which I assumed was natural. As I stood looking over it, I could hear my father dragging the grill out from the garage. Something stirred inside me, and I pulled down a green notebook off the shelf above the egg’s box and wrote in it The chicken will burn. The words compelled me to write them. They tugged at my hand gently, pulling me toward the pen and paper, pulling the downstroke on the capital T and cutting a line across its top. They scared me, for I didn’t know why I wrote them, and I didn’t know what they meant

Roy G. Biv

“It might be,” my grandfather said. I was on the phone in the kitchen and had already told him about the details. He said he was sad to hear about my garden, but that next summer I could come up to his house and he’d let me help him out in the cornfields and let me have a spot near the barn to plant some strawberries.
“But how can I know? If the mom was alive, how does she know?” I asked. I was trying to keep my voice low so that my parents wouldn’t know I was on the phone, but I was so excited it was difficult.
“Oh for pity’s sake, Gabriel, I don’t know the answer to that. But, you can figure it out if you hold it up to a light in a dark room,” he said.
“How do I do that?”
“You have to figure that out. You’re getting to be a big kid now, and you need to think for yourself.” I knew that he was smiling on the other end, for he’d been telling me that since I spent the summer at my grandparents’ house before kindergarten.
“But what do I do if it’s alive? How do I take care of it?” I asked. I heard my mom open the back door and come back inside. She walked back to her bedroom and I heard the TV click on.
“Just help it incubate. Look the word up if you don’t know what it means. I-n-c-u-b-a-t-e. You need some sort of box and a desk lamp,” he replied.
“But what if I can’t do it?”
“Gabriel, you’re whining. Stop it. If you can’t do it, call me back. But hurry, for heaven’s sake. The egg needs to stay warm,” he said and hung up. He never said goodbye.

I opened the junk drawer in the kitchen. Even though we’d only lived here two months, our junk drawer was already cluttered with unnecessary odds and ends. I was able to find a book of matches and a birthday candle among the broken headphones, dead batteries and anonymous keys. Tramping along the shag carpeting toward the bathroom, I heard laughter coming from my mother’s TV. After I had pulled the egg out of my pocket I lit a candle and turned off the light. The egg temporarily blocked out the match’s light, but as I adjusted to the darkness I saw in the silhouette the outline of a baby chicken, pink in its black universe.
In the entryway closet I found an old lamp and a cardboard box. After I looked up the word ‘incubate,’ I tried to remember television shows where I’d seen people take care of eggs. Most of the images I could recall were of people attempting to throw eggs across the room without them breaking, however. I couldn’t figure out why I needed it, since heat was what I needed, not light. I thought of calling my grandfather, but although he had said I could, I was already well-trained in the Midwestern art of never asking for more than one favor per day. Instead of thinking about it, I set the box on the bureau in my room. I found a styrofoam cup in the kitchen and cut it in half. The top cylinder I threw away, but I put the pared-down base in the bottom of the box. The lamp had a flexible, snakelike neck that I could bend down into the box, but its bulb was burnt out. I scoured the house for a package of bulbs, but there were none to be found. Undeterred, I pillaged the kitchen for one of its bulbs and replaced it with the dead one. I grabbed the bulb, and it was hot. The reason for needing the light clicked, and I was proud that I had figured it out on my own. Having done all of that, I put the rose petals in the styrofoam cup, then the egg, then turned on the lamp.

ETC

They were muddy before we got out there, I know it now. They must have been. It’s the only way it makes sense. His impassivity, no rage, nothing. The I that I am now knows that the he that he was and still is was the he who destroyed my garden. A week before we moved back to the city the police picked up the teenagers who had killed the chickens. Rather, one of the teens’ parents overheard them talking about it and put two and two together, as my mother had put notices up in the grocery store. But the teens never mentioned the garden, not in the police report, I know it. My father must have gone outside and saw his chickens destroyed and decided to continue destroying. Perhaps it was like the dent, what else could he do? Those boots must have been muddy before we got out there. They had to be.

I walked into the garden and began digging a grave for the chickens while my father was behind the house washing his hands. I heard the door open and saw my mother standing silently, her mouth agape. When my father came back around the house she asked what happened.
“Some kids, maybe they were mad at the rooster. I don’t know,” my father answered.
“Yeah, that’s just terrible. Are you going to bury the chickens? Maybe in the boy’s garden?” she asked.
“What? Hell no, we’re going to eat them. That’s what I was going to do anyway. I mean, look at it this way: at least I don’t have to chop their heads off.”
I heard him say it and stopped digging. A sharp pain cut into my sides, the knowledge that everything I’d done during the summer was worthless. It all ended in destruction. I was left with the massacre, the waste of my ambition, the shame that followed me like a shadow. There shouldn’t have been shame, the shame should have been all his, but it was mine. There was nothing I could say or do. What I did made no difference to the vandals who killed the chickens or the vandal who destroyed my creation.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” my mother said.
“I’m damn sad about that cock, though. It was a good cock.”
Tired of standing there and thinking, I walked toward the henhouse. It was the one thing that had been spared in the previous night’s events. The teenagers were much too clever to destroy the relative calm of the previous night with the sounds of hammers and axes. My mother went back inside, my father to the garage to gut and pluck the chickens.
By now I’d been awake for approximately two hours and the whole time had been filled with sadness and loss. I had the thought that this was the future course of my life, that my sine wave would forget to curve back up to the positive and I’d be stuck below the x-axis. I wanted to get rid of the thoughts, but they grew like withered daisies in a field of sand.
The henhouse smelled of hay and chicken waste, the scents mingling like incense in my nostrils, allowing me to commune with the chickens. The light cast crooked shadows through the interior. The hay was dispersed in clumps and piles on the floor. As I searched through the wreckage of this once-proud home, I noticed the tidiness of the nests. And there, in the nest nearest to the door, I found an egg of unimpressive size and shape. It was not white, but rather the color of wet beach sand. I pulled it from the nest, gripping it softly, and it was warm to the touch, having been heated by the sun throughout the morning. I studied the egg with a scientist’s eye, trying to pull a hypothesis from the data at hand. I knew that the destruction of my father’s property was significant. I also knew that someone who wanted to do that much damage must surely have wanted to anger whomever it was that he was doing the damage to. Yet, here was an egg that had escaped my father’s collecting, and the vandals had not thrown it at the house. It was witness to both its mother’s and father’s murder, and now it was in my hand. I felt that I was responsible for whatever this egg meant, whether it be some sort of sign from God or Pan. The instant I had picked it up I knew that it was infused with life: there was something about the way it felt in my fingertips, like the cool electricity from the soil of the garden on my feet. And I knew that the life was given into my hand, was my responsibility. My father would not understand, so I could not give it to him. At the time I was sure that the vandals were trying to hurt my father and that my garden had just been a noncombatant casualty: the destruction of the garden did not have any of the sadistically artistic touches of the chickens’ demise.
I stared at the egg, noticing the miniscule freckles spotting its surface. Though at first glance it had looked like its shell was a uniform brown, upon closer inspection I realized its surface was mottled, full of character and uniqueness. One freckle looked as though it were a frog; another was in the shape of a sheep with only two legs; seven of them taken together looked like the big dipper; another seven revealed a rudimentary Orion. My grandfather had bought me a book on the constellations for my birthday that year, and I figured that by connecting all the far-flung freckles together I would be able to construct a map of the night sky on the egg. First, however, I needed to know if the life I believed to exist inside the egg was truly there. I put the egg inside the pockets with the rose petals and called my grandfather on the telephone.

It still continues. Perhaps there is someone who cares

When I entered the house it was infected with silence. I didn’t smell eggs, there was no sound of coffee percolating, and I assumed that my father was still asleep. Since he had purchased the rooster he had lived on the same schedule as it. Yet, on this particular day, with the sun shining down like a sardonic grin on a massacre spattered in relief on the straw-colored ground, he had not awoken. I was the only one outside to see each of the minor horrors create a bloody masterpiece. The destruction that existed in stasis outside the back door left me unsure what to do: ought I to creep into my parents’ bedroom? Could I, the phantom, tell my father what happened? No. The best thing for me to do would be to creep back into my room, pull the blankets over my body, and try to fall back asleep. Perhaps I was afraid of what would happen if I told, if I broke the silence.
My feet instinctively avoided the noisy spots on the floor as I wandered back to my room. I clung to the wall like a catburglar, but when I reached the living room I saw my father sitting in the easy chair that looked out at the road through the big picture window in the front of the house. He looked huge, his shirtless back swelling over the top of the chair. He was picking at the peeling skin on his shoulder with his dirty fingernails. Could be that they weren’t dirty. In this story they are dirty.
I tried to speak, but faltered. Instead, I cleared my throat and tapped the wall. He looked at me without turning around. Staring at the surface of the picture window, he saw me in my reflection. I think I may have caught his eyes for a second, but then he turned all the way around and broke the link.
“I think you should come outside,” I said, the words like rocks in my throat. I had trouble articulating things to my parents. I didn’t talk much until I was four years old. My stubby hands could do addition and subtraction on paper before my mouth could form six-word sentences. At first my parents thought that I was developmentally disabled, since I spoke only to answer questions. But, during the summer before kindergarten they sent me to my grandparents’ house near the Canadian border, and by the time I came back I was speaking almost normally. They were quite relieved that they wouldn’t get labeled as parents of a special-ed kid, and also that they wouldn’t have to consult a doctor to see what was wrong with me.
My father set the glass of water he was holding upon the oak endtable next to his easy chair and stood up, stretching his hands above his head and locking his fingers together at the apex. He scratched the back of his head with one hand and then grunted, “Yep.” I was quite surprised at the time that he didn’t continue staring out the window, instead taking what I said as gospel and defeating inertia by standing up and stretching.
I led him, my hands in the pockets of my jean shorts, one hand scratching a mosquito bite on the outside of my thigh with the ragged edge formed by the seam in the pocket. I had thrust the rose petals into the other pocket and they surrounded my fingers. My toes caused tiny eruptions of dust volcanoes in the carpet, and the sunlight became alive with miniature dust beasts swirling around in constant battle. The beasts curled around my body, catching updrafts off the heat from my skin or the swing of my arms, flying upwards towards my head, some continuing towards the ceiling while others began to float back down. Because of their tenacity, I didn’t know if these beasts were alive, as they seemed to stay in the air without any help. I wondered for a moment if my father could see them.
We walked through the family room, through the hallway, into the back entryway; the whole time I stared straight ahead. The house was still silent, and I remember being afraid of what would happen when we got outside. I didn’t know if I would be able to stop myself from crying, and I didn’t know what my father would do. It was obvious, even at this point in my life, that he didn’t care for me. It would be wrong to say it was hatred, because hatred implies some sort of bright spark of emotion. There were no emotions, no orange sparks lingering even under buckets and shovelfuls of dirt. It was life at absolute zero: all was still, there were no moving parts. If I began to cry, he would stay impassive, a statue. We were immune to Newton’s first law: I acted, but he never supplied the reaction to balance the equation. At the time I questioned such things, but I’ve given up by now.

Or perhaps I lie. Perhaps I still stare at the ceilings on weeknights trying to let the sounds of dogs barking congeal into some sort of answer.

I opened the back door while my father put on his muddy work boots. They must have been muddy. My hands shook at the sheer insanity of it all: the decapitated chickens, their feather rosy with the stain of blood; the rooster with its comb cut off and stuffed into its beak; my father’s necessary reaction to the events. For, although the he-I pair were outside of Newton’s grasp, the physical world and he were well acquainted with reactions. I had seen the anger that existed just below the meniscus of his psyche, and it was almost mystical. The explosions directed at God, the weather, the shopping cart that left a scratch on his car, were exciting to see, because I had never been on the receiving end of my father’s wrath. I had never experienced the anger and hatred that he cultivated, the curses and blasphemies that grew like weeds. On two separate occasions I had seen my father grab a steel golf club between his two meaty hands and snap it in half as though it were a popsicle stick. One time was when he had hooked a drive into the water on the eighteenth hole in a company golf tournament. The other was when he picked me up from golf lessons and someone had put a shoe-sized dent in the side of his new Mercedes. The club pro asked him why he did it, and my father answered, “What else could I do?”
We stepped outside. The white sunlight reflected globulous shapes off the shining silver wind chime my mother had hung just outside the back door. My father and I were speckled with flawed circles, squares and rectangles, all the shapes looking only vaguely like the Platonic forms they were supposed to represent. The tears were beginning to burn behind my eyes, but I held them in check. I wanted to see with unglazed eyes the reaction that my father would have to this massacre. Something inside me thought that the sadness I felt and the rage that he would feel could somehow exist together and create a moment of mutual recognition.
But I was waiting for nothing. My father’s breath rushed inward, whistling as it went, and he exhaled with a narcotic groan. There was no rage, no anger. Both emotions were left sitting listlessly in the anteroom. The whole experience was so anticlimactic that I had to force myself to look at the scene again in order to be sure that I had originally seen was actually there. The scene was the same as I had left it moments before. The chickens were still dead, the plants destroyed, the rooster posing with its comb in its mouth.
I was going to speak, but I couldn’t. Instead, I walked over to the garden and put on my work gloves. At first I had planned on cleaning up my land, but it felt cursed, a place of ghouls and demons, so I walked over and began picking up chicken parts. My father was still standing by the door, still picking at the peeling skin on his shoulder, wearing muddy boots. When he saw me begin working he walked into the garage, grabbed a pair of gloves, and started cleaning the garden.
The chickens were difficult to extract from their wire armor. I worked slowly, taking great care not to pull out feathers or further mangle the bodies. My father worked in the garden, taking all the plants that had been uprooted and smashed and throwing them into a pile on the lawn. He worked quickly and efficiently. After a half-hour he had stripped the garden, while I had merely separated the chickens from the fence.
I lined up all the chickens in a row. I planned on taking each of their bodies and placing them separately in a grave in my garden. I had already imagined what the whole scene would look like: little crosses stuck into the ground like acupuncture needles trying to heal the tattered earth, to give it life again next year. The little crosses would stand until the next time I planted, at which time I would take them down and put them in the chicken coop as a reminder of the first summer. I even thought that my father and I could perhaps work on the crosses together: instead of looking shoddy and pitiable, they could be carved out of beautiful wood and lashed together with leather straps. Although I had resented the chickens, the massacre erased my feelings of ill will and replaced them with a desire to make amends for my evil will. The little garden tribute would be a way to show my father that both enterprises were noble, both deserved to be remembered.
My father exited the garden and gathered together as many plants as he could in a handful. He mashed them together in his meaty hands and carried them to the garbage can like refuse. As he was carting them to their final resting place, I straightened out the wire fence, having released all the chickens from their barbed suits. I picked up each headless chicken and carried it to the edge of the garden. My father was in the garage wearing his muddy boots.

Still Continuing...For at least two weeks more, actually...

“I got the nicest-looking cock on the farm,” my father announced to the entryway of the house. His voice was deep, rumbling like a bass drum. I was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of ice cream while my mother sat facing the sink knitting a scarf. At the time I knew there was something slightly off in the way he talked, but I couldn’t place why it was strange.
“That’s great,” my mother replied.
“This cock is something spectacular. Perhaps I’ll show it to you later.” He had by now taken off his shoes and crossed the house from the entryway to the kitchen. He leaned with both hands braced against the molding on the doorway to the kitchen. His face was grinning, but his eyes were festooned with the confused look of a man holding his wife’s purse. The whole time he spoke to my mom alone; as far as he was concerned I was invisible. I bit my tongue just to prove to myself that I existed, then got up and walked to the stainless-steel kitchen sink to clean my bowl.
“Yeah, maybe so,” my mother said.
“It’s strong and healthy,” he said. “And it’s sure excited to see you. It’s almost ready to crow.”
I turned off the water and put the bowl on the clean dish rack. I walked out of the kitchen trying to physically become the vaporous figure that my father took me to bed. My skin was hot; my father wouldn’t look at me. Every word he spoke was like steel wool, giving birth to microscopic abrasions in places where nobody could see them. He couldn’t see me. I was invisible. His jokes were incomprehensible. By this point in my life he must have felt the same way about me as silence feels about noise: It occurred; it is done; back to silence. I walked past him and out the back door without him knowing I was there.
The sky was cornflower blue, and the sun shone brightly on the earth. I could feel a creeping shadow coming from inside my chest. Perhaps this is just a function of me being the I that I am now, but I know now that I knew then that something about the scene was off, like a triangle that didn’t close. The new rooster was accosting the hens, because that is apparently what roosters do. By that time the chickens annoyed me on principle. When I thought of all the hours in the garden and all the cuts and scrapes I had from weeding I was annoyed that my father had merely paid his money and collected his chickens. He didn’t raise them from eggs, allowing the tiny chicks to sleep in the warm breast pocket of his flannel shirts. He didn’t watch them grow, watch their first stirrings, the first movements with which they announced themselves to the air around them by displacing it with their stubby wings. I had seen him take such care building the coop for the chickens, but still I could not understand how he could be so devoted to them.

The rooster was quick to make its presence known, and the next morning it announced to me and my family that the sun had yet again succeeded in conquering the night. For two weeks it did that every morning, and during that whole time my father doted on it and the hens, hoping the rooster would spread its seed among them. But on the fifteenth day after it came to reside at the house in the country, the rooster did not crow in the morning. At first I did not notice this non-occurrence; the rooster had only been there for two weeks, and I wasn’t yet imprinted with its schedule. The negative event brought with it some extra rest, uninterrupted sleep, dreams and phantoms of dreams. When I woke at 8, I strode out the back door of the house and into the geometry of the backyard. The lines of demarcation were usually quite striking, for the lawn was immediately abutted to the chickens’ pen, which was hedged by my garden. The heavy green contrasted the raw sienna starkness of the fenced-in pen, which in turn contrasted the deep coal black soil of my garden, which was further contrasted by the reds of my strawberries, the greens of my lettuce and carrot leaves, and the cool yellow of the roses I’d planted for my mother.
But when I walked down the back stairs and looked at the yard, I realized the lines of demarcation had blurred during my long sleep. The lawn was still a striking, heavy green. The chicken pen and my garden, however, had become a mess of black dirt, dead chickens, and uprooted crops. Globs of dusty blood spattered the straw-colored ground around the chickens. As I walked towards them, I realized that the hens were wrapped in the fence, and that they were missing their heads. Only their bodies lay ensconced in the wire.
The scene was disturbing, especially for someone only nine years old: the carcasses of the chickens lifeless on the ground, the fenceposts impaled obscenely through their bodies. But, if it weren’t so tragic, if it hadn’t happened to me, I think I would have been able to see some sort of grotesque beauty in it all. The way the chickens were wrapped up, the wire making a circuit around their bodies, under the left wing, around the right foot, straight up to the post doing the impaling. The color of blood on the ground and posts contrasting the white of their feathers, though the blood had darkened now to a copper stain. The severed rooster’s comb, its statement of pride stuck in its mouth in a way that seemed vaguely sexual, even at my age.
It wasn’t until I studied the garden that I started crying. My vegetables were all pulled up, some hewn by the tools that I had forgotten to put away the previous night. Most of the crops were scattered about the ground like refuse. I walked over to the fence, took off my shoes and socks, and stepped onto the tainted soil. I felt a flicker of the green electricity that runs through the topsoil in a well-tended garden, but the sensation was just a whisper of what I had felt just a day before. The carrots were all gone, ripped up, destroyed. The strawberry plants were uprooted; the tough pink wedges of fruit had been trampled on by heavy boots and were crushed under the black soil. The lettuce was nowhere to be found. The roses I had planted were ripped up, thrown out of the garden and onto the lawn. The flowers were cut off and the petals strewn maniacally about: it was as though whoever had destroyed my garden had done it with the express purpose of trying to anger me. Whoever did it destroyed everything so thoroughly, so methodically, so decisively that I was left with no way to replant, no way to fix what had been broken. My mouth tasted of copper and soap.
I ran my hairless hands through the deep earth as though I were somehow capable of regenerating all that had been lost. I let the moist soil stick to my fingers, get under my fingernails, clump and gather in the creases of my hands. For a moment, I thought I could bring it back. But then it set in: I was only a speck, a mere breath in the summation of existence, and I didn’t have the power of creation in my fingertips. For a child, this is an astounding revelation.
Pushing myself from the ground, I stood up and rubbed my hands together, letting the black soil flake off my skin. I dug at the lines in my hands with my fingernails, trying to eradicate every trace of soil from my palms. Wiping my hands on my shorts, I stepped out of my garden, picked up a few of the yellow rose petals from their open grave on the lawn, and walked back toward the house. In one hand I carried my shoes and socks, in the other the petals. In front of the back door was a welcome mat with a rough tangle of plastic hairs, and I slid my feet back and forth on it until they were red and burning. I left my shoes and socks near the door and walked inside.

This was the first moment of death that I had ever experienced. Previous to this, my experience of life was all circles, all unbroken lines. I had had no pets, no houseplants, and all of my relatives were still alive, as far as I knew. Every child, I know, must meet death at some point; yet some children meet it too early. I had read of death in Sunday school class during Easter, and I had seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, but neither of them was real. Neither of them could make my lungs forget oxygen, my eyes forget light. My parents had never talked to me about it. I was left to stand out there alone in my garden with the air around me like sulfur, tears on my cheeks, unable to deal with the emotions I felt. The fact that I didn’t like the chickens caused me to grieve for them almost more than my own garden, since I felt at the time that I had somehow caused their demise by my own evil will.

Continued...

It bothers me now, of course, but then again everything bothers me now. It bothers me that I cannot drink the water directly from the tap without getting violently ill. It bothers me that I wasn’t told that choice bit of information on my first day here and spent the next three puking and shitting and drinking more water to calm my stomach. I am bothered that I have not had a sober moment for forty two hours and can still somehow spit out coherent sentences. That just shouldn’t happen. But it does.
It bothers me that I remember exactly what my father was wearing the day he brought home the chickens. It was a pair of green shorts with a thick, white, horizontal stripe right through the center. He was wearing an old softball jersey with the number 11 on it and HAMMER written across the back. His hair was brown then—it was before he went grey—and it had been recently cut. On his left arm he had three cuts that ran the length of his forearm. They were bleeding, but not badly. It bothers me that I know that he will always have three parallel scars that never tan, no matter how dark the rest of him gets.
And it bothers me that there are exactly zero pictures of me tending my garden. I’ve looked through the albums: there are a remarkable number of photographs from that year. There are pictures of me with a spoonful of oatmeal in my mouth in the morning, pictures of me obscuring my face with a handful of popcorn while pointing at a rhinoceros at the zoo. But none in the garden. There are many pictures from that same year of my mother in various states of elegance. Her black hair is usually drawn up into a stylish bun, her green eyes are looking directly into the camera, separated by the bridge of her thin nose and the petite mole in between her arched eyebrows. My father took fifteen pictures of her like that, with her looking directly into the lens: he was either trying to see into her or look through her.

Two and a half weeks. It took two and a half weeks for me to massage and caress the soil to the point when it finally made a peep. I could hear the shoots cut through that silent soil and breathe the air. They were no bigger around than a tongue, but just seeing them made me grow. I felt like a giant, all four-foot-nine of me. I was God in miniature. In the beginning was the soil and the seed, the water and the silence. And it was formless, so I put up a fence and tilled the land and planted in crooked rows. I heard unspectacular components create the teeming kaleidoscope of life, and it was good. I was awash with green.
I stood guard over those shoots for four days. I took my meals outside beside the garden. The sun burnt my skin and by the second night my ears were brown and scaly, the pus from popped blisters coating the valleys in between the ridges in my ear canal. I wanted to be outside when it rained on those shoots. Absurd as it sounds, that was why I subjected myself to the burning sun, the sun that cut me with daggers of light. I wanted to see it banished behind black thunderstorm clouds and I wanted its silence to be replaced by the drumbeat of raindrops.
After four days of waiting it finally rained. I took off my shoes and crawled through the dirt and threw pea-sized clots of mud at the chickens’ feet. Every time I threw one, without fail, they pecked at it, apparently unable to understand the difference between dirt and food. When I finally went inside my father was yelling at the television screen.

By the middle of July my father had bought a rooster. But he would never have said it like that. He would have said he had bought a cock. I was not there when he bought it, but I know how the transaction must have worked:
“So,” says the chicken farmer, “you need a rooster.”
“A cock, yes,” my father must have said. And, since he sometimes forgets to think before he speaks, he would have continued: “I need a cock.”
At which point the farmer would feign ignorance at my father’s clunky attempt at ribaldry, because he must have been a Midwestern Swede, and Midwestern Swedes don’t mind pretending to be ignorant in order to protect a man like my father from his own stupidity. Then the farmer would say, “I have some California Greys, a Leghorn, some Delawares. I got a couple other breeds, too, but those are the three most popular around here.”
And my father probably looks at him for a moment, not having researched breeds of roosters in the least, not knowing what breed of chicken he had, only stuck on the one word that he had to say again: “Well, I want a nice-looking cock. I have some really nice-looking hens at home, and I want them to have nice-looking chicks. I probably need a nice, big cock for that.”
Eventually, the farmer would figure out that the best way to deal with my father would be to show him the roosters and let him pick one out, because my father is the type of man who needs to see. And so it would go, until the rooster was purchased and brought home.

A bit of a story that hasn't been finished

2/14

I am the I that is the sum of every I that I have already been.
Let me start over.

I am Gabriel.
My name is Gabriel.
I am Gabriel.
I am not only the sum of every I that I have already been; I am also the difference when all of the Yous that have ever been are subtracted from all of the Hes and Shes that have ever been. I am the one He that is not a You to Me. It could easily be sketched in a Venn diagram, if need be.
My name is Gabriel. I have blonde hair, some say dishwater blonde. I have never seen blonde dishwater, so I say dirty blonde. Dirty like the dirt on the dry, unpaved road that led to my grandfather’s house when I still had a grandfather. Like when I’d be riding in the back seat of the car at sixty miles an hour watching the dust follow me like an unfulfilled promise in the hot, dry air. My hair is the color of that dust that follows me.
Let me start over.

I’m sitting in my prison cell in Seoul, Republic of Korea. R. O. K. Was it a drug bust? Burglary? Loitering? Murder? Probably: I can’t really tell. My breath smells of Soju. I believe that Soju is made by adding gasoline to Sake. The prison cell and I do not get along. There is an infestation of Soju bottles and frozen food wrappers. It reeks of time and I. The truth of the matter is that I’m not sure why I’m here. I often lie when I am drunk. Sometimes, however, I forget to tell the lies I tell myself.

I haven’t seen the sun in three days. If that is true, I must be forgiven if I write with too many ornate descriptive flourishes. It’s hard for me to imagine things in such a cramped space; my only recourse is to imagine things in such a cramped space. It’s not my fault: it’s my genes. Of course it’s my fault. Of course it’s my genes: I squeeze the middle of the toothpaste tube because of my genes.
I lie when I’ve been drinking. Have I said that already? I haven’t been drinking. Or do I lie?

Antonio Gramsci wrote about hegemony while he was in jail. I am in jail because I am hegemony. That is the last I’ll speak of hegemony. Didn’t I say I was in prison? Lies build upon each other like stones: soon I’ll have a castle.


Dirty blonde hair. Blue eyes. Brown eyes. I have brown eyes, and my chin and jaw are strong and perpetually covered in reddish stubble. I am six feet tall on a good day. Today is not a good day. I am lying on my chest, so I cannot tell you how tall I am, only how long. I exist in three dimensions, but right now I can only manage two. Length and width seem to be okay, but height is a bit of a problem. My grandmother called me today and told me to come home. I told her I was in prison and they won’t let me leave.

Extradition, embassy, escape: perhaps she said these words; perhaps I just like the letter e.
Egress windows are there to help you escape from a fire: I know that’s true. Basement bedrooms in the Lower 48 must have egress windows that measure “XX inches by XX inches”. I could fill in those Xs, but even if I did how would I know I wasn’t lying?

There must be a story somewhere. It could be that I am just a liar with a typewriter. Or a computer. Or a pen and paper. Truth is, I am the only I who can tell this story. I am the subjective I that roams and scans and lies.
There is a reason that I’m here. It’s not a coincidence. It is definitely not serendipity. Truth be told, there’s a reason for me being here just as there is a reason for everything. I know why I’m here.
But not yet. I’m not ready yet. Maybe when I’m sober.


Here is the beginning of the story:

The day after I graduated from college I set out on a crazy, naïve quest for truth. I had always imagined myself as some sort of intrepid hero, the kind in storybooks and legends, my armor polished to a sterilized sheen, my sword in hand. Still wearing my cap and gown, resplendent with garish golden cords—summa cum laude—I stepped into my parents’ house and announced to the tables and chairs that I was leaving the next morning for the eternal memory of historians and saints. Then I lay down on the couch with a pretentious sigh of self-satisfaction. I believed that I could find the truth, as though truth were something that could be poured over cereal in the morning.

Wait. I have gone too far, and become too ridiculous: I know I am not a hero. I cannot start there, because this there is not the there that initiates the here where I am now. I must go back, must reverse.

I was born at exactly six-thirty on a Sunday morning in October. It was cold outside; there had already been two inches of snow, and more was expected. Nature was an imprecise monster that year, so the leaves on all the maple trees were still clinging to their branches like withered old women attached to ventilators. Inside the hospital room there was a jungle of tubes and wires, flowers and balloons. At birth I weighed eight pounds, fourteen ounces. That’s exactly four kilograms. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck with my left arm pushing it away from me, my body covered in slimy amniotic fluid. That is why they called me Lefty. At birth I had a full head of black hair and two blue eyes that glowed like sapphires and could devour whole cities in their gaze. My mother thought, “Only three months until I work off this weight.” My father thought, “Is there anything good on TV tonight?”

I have gone back too far. Nobody has ever called me Lefty. All the heres that I could narrate start with this there, and therefore this there is not the particular there I need for my Soju-infused here. This is the there that is the derivative of any here that is a here. This there is too self-negating: my birth was not a curse. The curses came much later.
I realize now the there I need in order to find my here.
Here’s the true there:

During my second grade summer vacation I lived outside the city limits at a small country house my father had purchased during our family’s initial years of prosperity. It was two bedrooms on five acres of land about fifteen miles outside the last hiccups of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s suburban sprawl. We spent the first summer we owned it there instead of at our condo in the city. I can still remember how the time began: my fingers in the soil; my hands covered in the blackness of the humus, the amniotic fluid of the fecund earth. I felt like the earth was trying to call me back home. My arms were umbilical cords connecting me to the soil, and I dug using my fingers instead of a spade. I appropriated the area the former owner used as a flower garden and I planted crooked rows of strawberries and carrots.
I don’t know why I wanted a garden. At first I just wanted to touch the soil, and I might have been just as glad to hunt nightcrawlers instead of plant strawberries in rows as parallel as I could make them. The backyard was like that, was all geometry. I had a square, the lawn circled the house, and there was a henhouse that took up a rectangle of dusty ground.
That old henhouse was a wreck. It looked absurd when observed alongside the simple elegance of the house. Its roof was partially caved-in, the formerly red paint peeled like paper held too close to the fire, and the fence that tried to mark the rectangle was a tangled mess of cockeyed wires strewn about the weedy, khaki-colored ground. Inside, things were much worse: the interior was gutted; the only thing left was the floor, and that had two boards missing. Yet, I would have loved to have it as my own. Maybe a hideout, a clubhouse, something. But there were no neighbor kids and no cousins that visited. It was me me me every day. Me and the black black ground.
It didn’t come easy. While my parents were moving in I looked in the garage and found books full of diagrams and botany tips and tricks, old books that reeked of mildew and the slow decay of time. My nine-year-old brain didn’t understand much about gardening, but I tried my best to read the books and soak up their knowledge. They told me to put up a rabbit fence, so I did. The books made me love the rain, and I loved to grab handfuls of wet dirt and squeeze until it squirted through my stubby fingers. I loved to listen to the rain argue with the ground; the concrete patio at our condo couldn’t talk like the soil. Even though my vegetables wouldn’t sprout and my strawberries wouldn’t blossom, even though the ground was practically barren it at least had a voice to argue with the rain.
Seeds refused to sprout, silent like unloved children. My father, however, began to take root in the yard during our second week there. He had spent most of the first days there inside, and in the mornings he’d look out the picture window onto the backyard. Then one morning he was outside with tools, and he hammered and sawed and created and destroyed. He destroyed the henhouse as it was, and in three days it was resurrected.
Or maybe it was four. Its exterior walls were deep, red-licorice; the roof was re-shingled and the perimeter fence was strung taut along a rectangle of posts, on the side bordering my garden my father used my rabbit fence rather than putting up a fence of his own. It was a week before he got the four white chickens, but when they arrived they immediately began clucking their way from side to side. I had been steeped in solitude, the quiet, the silence that was echoed by my sterile soil, but after the chickens came it was all disrupted with their inane chatter. They had that smell, the heavy smell of life, while I had the stink of cow dung stolen from the farm a mile down the road.
When he wasn’t at work, my father was tending the chickens. He cared for them clumsily, the only way he knew how, giving them water and feed. He did not know the intricacies of raising chickens: he did what he thought was best without asking advice. And even though his care was clumsy, the chickens laid eggs for him. They always clucked and followed him when he was outside, and he was devoted to them.
My memories seem to be infected with smells: I remember the flaccid smell of cooked eggs that would hang in the air in the morning on weekdays. My father would have to go to the office in the morning, but before he left he’d go outside and feed the chickens and steal the eggs from their nests. I’d wake up to find him drinking a cup of coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal, pecking at the last few specks of cheese omelet that dotted his plate like a cryptic message. He never offered me one, but that didn’t bother me at the time.