EAST AND WEST

4

 

Desire can be so exhausting, and has way too long a memory. It was early fall, and the leaves were turning papery and thinning on the trees. The afternoons were suffused with that sad and lovely melon glow, when everybody knows the days are getting shorter and those last hours of work and school take on a fresh purpose, letting out in a day already going dark. Halloween candy was falling off the drugstore shelves. I didn’t want winter to come any sooner than it had to. It had been weeks since I last spoke to Sarah and told her that Dad was being taken to the hospital.

Part of me wanted to tell her about the nurses giving me nasty looks. I mean, What kind of son lets this happen to his father? How they had to feed him through tubes because a body can only take so much before it breaks down, before it starts eating itself. How my father could not, or would not speak. About how Dad and I shared milk shakes from the hospital cafeteria, and the nurses split them into two small cups, and we used thick plastic straws.

I sat there beside him watching the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest, and made plans for the move because I hoped to take him with me back to California.

I needed to clean the house and get it ready for sale, but so much of my time was spent at the hospital that I couldn’t really get much done. I slept in the chair next to his bed and spent my mornings scanning the Times and the Post, and I thought about giving him a haircut because his hair had gotten so long. I read the magazines and movie guides for celebrity worship: what’s she wearing; who is sleeping with who. They were everywhere you looked, on the windowsills, in waiting rooms, by the vending and coffee machines. And I fell in love daily with Latina soap stars on telenovelas. There was a TV affixed in the right upper corner of his room. I realized at some point that I’d not been with a woman for a very long time, and what a pity it was that I hardly ever thought about it anymore, but also that now I was thinking about it a lot, actually. Practically all the time.

I had been casually talking with one of the nurses—in the elevators, or smoking out front in the parking lot. Not my father’s nurse, but one of those passing nurses, always swishing through the hallways in her mint-green scrubs. Her name was Leeann and she had a bright blond and glorious Afro, magnetic blue eyes. Skin so fair I could see veins in her cheeks. I’d spoken with her a few times. Always something like Hello, ma’am, overly polite, and she’d say something like Hello, yourself, before I finally realized we were flirting.

We wrestled in a maintenance closet at two o’clock in the morning, where she pressed me up against the wall like this was our last, last chance, and the world was falling apart outside.

The next day, feeling guilty, I wrote to Sarah.

I considered calling. She deserved to know more about Dad’s health, but calling felt too easy, anyway. And when was the last time I actually wrote a letter? There was something deliberate and mature about it, or at least I thought so, maybe even romantic. I sent her a postcard of the New York skyline: “Dad’s not doing well. Things don’t look good. I need to sell the house, which is a mess. I thought you’d want to know.”

She called me a week later. It seems Nikos had a conference at CUNY, and while she hadn’t planned on joining him, maybe now she would. She could check in on Dad and say hello, if I was open to it.

By the time she arrived, I was no longer sure I wanted her around, which isn’t to say I didn’t. I did want her, very much. I wanted her there in the house and in the hospital sitting vigil with Dad. I wanted her back home in Otter. And I wanted her every morning after, beside me wrapped in a warm toss of bedsheets, from that day on forever forward. I opened the door and there she was, in her arms a bright white daisy explosion in a cheap glass vase.

She pushed them at me and said, “You’re supposed to take them.”

She walked past me into the hallway. “So how far away is the hospital?”

In that moment, it was finally over for me. Not just because we were finished, but because we were both revealed, each of us new to the other. I saw her in the light of her new love, and I was standing there in the slant space of my father’s sickness, all of which hurt crushingly only for as long as it took me to turn and follow her inside. I asked her where they were staying.

“Downtown, with a friend.”

“One of his.”

“Yup. My friend, too, I guess.”

“I’m happy to hear it.” I told her some more about Dad, as she placed the flowers on the dining room table.

She looked around. “This is why I love your father. He is so sad and totally fascinating. Like one of those mystics in the desert. But it’s Queens.”

I think it was actually those silly flowers that finally let the old house breathe. Like I’d been holding my breath for weeks, I let go a long low sigh.

She said, “I don’t see any cat shit. So there’s that.” She took a protein bar from her pocket, and pulled back the wrapping. Took a bite, and pulled a daisy from the vase, gave it to me. “How can I help?”

She said she wanted to help clean while I sat with Dad. Nikos was out and about working anyway. By the time I got back from the hospital, she’d scoured the kitchen floor, emptied out a closet, and started organizing some of Dad’s things. She said she wasn’t sure if she could come back the following day. But she did. And again said she could only stay for an hour or so. Nikos (I still find the name preposterous), he understood.

But she stayed all day long.

“He wants me to be happy,” she said. “Anyway, he’s busy with social functions. Meeting with colleagues. He’s never been to New York.”

The days got shorter as we filled the boxes with garbage and set them on the street. We rented a Dumpster and joyously threw bags from the upstairs bedroom windows. We kept an ongoing pile of possible saves—the more interesting-looking books, the cleaner clothing. A few tchotchkes, the figurines my mother favored, and a sun-bleached jawbone my father found upstate in 1987. He’d Sharpied the date at the gum line. The wooden cross. The plate. I packed the family albums, and we braved the attic and its noxious air, urine-colored fiberglass falling from the rafters in leprous chunks. We sopped up puddles in the basement, and tried to identify a blue spongy mold. We boxed up his spirals and his papers, because God forbid some garbage picker, some young and impressionable squatter find my father’s dreams and exegeses and start a cult. We nudged the cats into the backyard. I carefully packed his mail-order shield in bubble wrapping, removed the red bulb.

Sarah asked if she could stay at the house for a couple of nights, because it was a waste of time going back and forth on the trains. It would just be for a day or two, because Nikos’s conference was over; he had other business, but not much, left. I said of course. We’d pretend like it was normal and comfortable. I think it felt, for both of us, like a way to fully bury our past. She slept in my old room, on a bare mattress on the floor. I slept downstairs, on the living room sofa where I’d been from the start. Sarah went and sat with Dad at the hospital, and he never said a word to her. He just lay there in his semiwakeful state, eyes closed, alpha waves ebbing on the EEG. I was happy to have a break from the hospital, because I don’t like hospitals. There’s nothing so strange about that. Amad told me he’d fainted at the hospital before even arriving at their inaugural Lamaze class. The doctor talked to me about refeeding syndrome, and the possibility of cardiac arrest and coma. We had to sell the house.

That second day, we both stayed home and cleaned, staying out of each other’s way, mostly, and not owing each other a thing. It was like living together again but without the relentless loan and debt of love, or even good conversation. And I finally made a clear and deliberate decision, one I was sure she’d made a long time ago about me. I decided it would be healthier for me if I just didn’t want to want her anymore.

*   *   *

I was sitting beside Dad, one morning at the hospital, marveling at the mysterious thing an eye can become when it sees. I asked him if he could see me. He never answered or moved his head. He just looked. I was flipping through the channels, when I looked up and saw the ghostly face looking down at me. I jumped to my feet, approached the TV. It was Issy. I don’t know how else to say it, but I saw his angelic baby face up there on the TV screen, his name in white graphic letters, Ismael “Issy” Demundo. I looked around for Sarah because I wanted someone else to see. Does anybody see this? But she was back at the house.

The anchor said that recent information had come to light regarding Issy’s disappearance, maybe even a possible suspect, whose identity was still completely unknown. A bartender had come forward and described a conversation he’d overheard twenty-five years before. He said the man had a mustache and wore a dirty white T-shirt. The man talked about the missing little boy from Richmond Hill, said he was the one that took him. And all of this would probably not have gotten the attention of the news if not for the fact that the latest episode of a detective show called Cold Capers was based on Issy’s story, on the resurrection of Issy’s case, which had long gone cold but now had a fresh new lead. The photo was the same as the one from our family album. I noted the date and the time of the episode.

Later that afternoon, I read a piece in the Daily News on Issy’s case, and the perceived epidemic of disappearing children in the 1980s. The article claimed it was most likely media coverage that had changed, and the proliferation of access to the coverage, but that things were no better and no worse, back then, before, or since.

That night, I watched the Cold Capers episode while Sarah was on the phone, on the porch. I decided I didn’t want her to see Issy after all. I didn’t need her to see his face to make it any more real than it was, and I wanted to be alone. The show was disappointing, anyway. They were trying to re-create and make visible his disappearance through interviews with the neighbors and his grade school teachers, and through a not very convincing portrayal of his mother. They tried to condense Issy’s most essential earthly moments into fifty-nine minutes, including commercials. The show was followed by some local news coverage. The reporter showed Issy’s block, interviewed the neighbors, even spoke with some childhood friends. No sign of Havi, though. Or me, come to think of it. The neighbors wanted details, to look at the ghost if they could, and to play a small part in the drama. Even I did, because the death you never see is your own, so we pay close attention to the others. Earlier that morning, I’d read a short piece on Issy’s mother online, about how she’d spent the subsequent decade devoted to finding her boy, every last dollar, and in doing so tried to assimilate every last moment in scrapbooks. The cuts on her face had settled into scars. She had that conquered look of a junkie who’d finally stopped because she had a sadness even drugs couldn’t fill. How was it I had no idea of her search? She had seventeen scrapbooks filled with photos, news articles, report cards, and the ripped pages of coloring books. I definitely understood the impulse and temptation to think every living moment deserves its own eschatology. But that’s just no way to live.

That next evening, after a long day of cleaning, Sarah and I sat on the porch where it was cool in the shade of the roof, our legs and feet brilliant in the sun going down. Boys were playing handball across the street. We ordered Chinese and drank wine and I told her about growing up in the neighborhood. She asked if I was still running and I said yes, and that I dreaded the idea of ever stepping on a treadmill again.

She laughed.

And for one brief flash we glimpsed the old love for each other, but then we also felt a longing to be somewhere else, with someone else. I thought I saw in her face the suggestion of a playful smirk, but I knew it wasn’t for me.

Half joking, I said, “We should go upstairs and see if we still got it.”

She laughed, slapped my back, and went inside, leaving me alone.

That next morning the bell rang, and we both jumped, excited to allow another force into our brief afterlife together. It was two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a man and a woman, and Sarah and I watched them through the curtains like we were hiding from a couple of trick-or-treaters. I thought vaguely of Bart and Gerard, and how it was not entirely impossible that I would see them again. Then the hospital called. Dad had finally opened his eyes. I asked Sarah to come with me. I insisted. Dad would love to see her.

She said no, better not. It felt like the right time to go, plus Nikos was waiting.

She got her bag together, gave me a long hug, and closed the front yard gate behind her. She waved goodbye. I watched her walk down the street, hoping she would turn back and wave.

*   *   *

A few days later, the doctors said Dad was as ready as he’d ever be. They’d forgo any psychological testing as long as he was released into my exclusive care and custody. The man still wasn’t speaking. So we made plans for his eventual discharge from the hospital. I asked the nurses for advice on what kinds of serious problems I might encounter taking him home with me out west. And without them, I never would have given thought to all that sand. He’d need his own wheelchair but forget about taking him to the beach. I said goodbye to the lovely Leeann.

The real estate lady promised it was a one-stop-shop thing with her. She knew plumbers, electricians, whatever. She said definitely keep making repairs but focus on the front yard and porch because this is what sells a house, a porch, and the market was looking pretty strong.

The doctors said Dad showed plenty of promise, even though he hadn’t said a word. The eyes were open, but he hardly moved, and they wanted to keep him just another day or so. So I should’ve been retouching the walls and scraping rust from the back porch railing, peeling paint flakes from the front porch columns. I should have been increasing our “curb appeal,” and getting ready for his return so we could finally leave. But I was spending time at my father’s computer. It radiated the same bluish glow that colored his face when he was rapt in his own daily online sessions, his hunt for I don’t what exactly except that, hospital incapacitation aside, it might have never ended. I let the computer light paint my face, too. I listened to the hum it made when the moving parts got warm and the fan clicked on. I couldn’t bring myself to wipe his fingerprints from the screen.

The search history was what you’d expect: Christian sites, online biblical resources, a community blog for dream journaling, some vaguely conspiratorial religious message boards, even a few genealogy searches. Nothing especially fruitful. But then I stumbled onto a site he’d apparently visited a few times. There was an article there about a place called Beth Sarim (!). It felt like a small mystery was unfolding. I went and got the photo from the coffee table where it lay with the others: “C. Russell and O. Laudermilk.” The article said “Beth Sarim,” Hebrew for House of Princes, was the official name given a mansion in San Diego, built in 1930 by the Watch Tower Society (two separate words, back then). Beth Sarim was to be a welcoming-home place for “the return of the resurrected prophets and patriarchs of biblical antiquity, like Abraham, and Moses, David, and Isaiah.” I was speechless. They’d built a house? An actual house? I sat back in my chair and thought about this. Architects were hired and blueprints were made. A hole was dug and the foundation poured because they were sure the End was just around the corner—and, lo, there would be a resurrection. So confident! Bold, really. I looked back at the screen, kept reading: “The End was to have come crashing by 1914, which would be followed by a resurrection of the faithful, and the Old Testament Princes would lead Mankind while God himself ruled over a new and Perfected Earth from His New Heavenly Kingdom and thus come the final disappearance of Death.”

1914. My dear God. And when the Great War hit, they must have salivated. What did they do come 1915? ’16? They built a house, for God’s sake.

I kept reading: “It was then re-predicted that 1925 would ring out the first mortal blow of Armageddon. Beth Sarim would be Headquarters for the Earthly Princes in the End Times and Forever After.”

1914. 1925. 1975. 2000.

What next? When next?

I looked at the Laudermilk in the photo, and it had to be my grandfather, young and handsome, with his whole life unexpectedly and aversely ahead of him. And yet nothing chilled me more than to read the final legacy of Beth Sarim. There on the screen, like an epitaph for that barren place as much as for my family: “Beth Sarim is privately owned now, adorned with tall palm trees, terra-cotta tile roofing, and a lush green lawn. It’s registered with the city of San Diego as official Historical Landmark number 474.”

*   *   *

The agent sold the house just two days after it was listed, to the Sikh temple right around the corner. They were expanding and would gladly pay the full price in cash if I would just please hurry up and leave, and to compensate for any emotional trauma I might experience after hearing their plans to immediately tear the old place down. They would do this as soon as I left the premises. I didn’t really know how to respond except by nodding, sipping my cup of coffee. I called a company about a custom wheelchair. A social worker helped me arrange for Dad’s release. I called Amad and told him I was coming home, that Dad was coming with me. I stood on that porch and watched the neighbors rake the red, orange, and yellowing leaves into small tidy piles.

 

 

 

 

It was still dark, before dawn, about a half mile down the beach from home, by the basketball courts. We’d been back in Otter for a week already, and I’d been rolling Dad around town in his fancy new chair, special-ordered, an all-terrain chair rigged for beaches. Large, white, with rubber pneumatic tires. Sky-blue seat cushion. It cost over two thousand dollars, and we were ready for just about anything nature might send our way. I wanted to watch daylight come on with my father.

Beaches are such a strange place in the dark, and so full of sounds, the rush and hush of water. I pushed the chair along on the concrete until we reached the courts. And when I pushed the chair onto the sand, it was exciting to see the wheels at work. The sand slowed us down, but not much, and we rolled along on the beach. We rolled over the sand to the courts, and we rolled over the courts and the painted lines to the short wall surrounding the concrete. I sat down and pulled the brake on the chair. In the center of the court, between the two poles, was a basketball, set in a recessed drain. There was a steel-wire trash bin filled with empty cans and bottles and partially deflated basketballs. A scrunched-up volleyball net spilled over the side. I centered my father in his seat, because he’d been slouching, his hair long and loose. His elbow was off the armrest, almost touching the fat wheel. I dried his mouth.

I said, “The water is right there ahead of us. It’s hard to see, but you can hear it.”

The sky was dark and deep, and a whole new day was waiting for us. I wiped saliva from his mouth. He wasn’t speaking, not because his tongue or his brain had failed him, I think, but because he was exhausted.

I’d quit smoking for good when I got back. The tricky thing with smoking I figured is that you really want to smoke—as in, I really wanted to smoke. But then I just no longer wanted to. It happened when we got to California, on the shuttle bus to Otter. I’m not saying it’s always this easy. I’m not saying I discovered some secret, I’ve figured out the cure for lung cancer: Just stop wanting. I’m saying I gave it a lot of thought.

I asked him if he was hungry. “Are you thirsty? Is it okay us sitting like this?”

I thought of that parable of houses built on sand. When the rains come falling and the floods come rushing, the houses on rock do fine. But the houses on sand are in for a shitload of trouble. Maybe that’s why southern California seems forever destined for trouble, earthquake, fire, drought. I asked him if he remembered the parable.

I said, “Just look at all that water.”

I stood up from the wall and walked toward the surf, where the ocean crawled along the horizon like a shadow you could see in the dark. It spat up and sloshed on the shore, coming up at me, and then falling back, like a tease. Think of a river, a long and meandering thin map line of a river, and its delta mouth fanning out and into the ocean. I was staring from the mouth of some great river, at the mouth of some vast unknowable and shapeless thing.

And then Dad called out: “Josiah.”

I turned.

I wasn’t sure if I was only hearing things in the wind maybe: a seagull, or someone else on the beach. I looked around. But then I saw his mouth move. He said again: “Josiah.”

I jogged back over the sand, almost manic, tripping in the catch of the sand. I couldn’t get to him fast enough, afraid he might never speak again. I didn’t want to fail him.

He was slouching there like a skinny little boy on phone books, a blanket over his legs, getting smaller by the second. I said, “Look at you, you’re alive.”

He nodded once, affirmative.

“How you feeling? Are you cold?” I was shocked, and trying to work through my shock. I set him straight in his seat. The dune grasses rubbed and shushed in the breeze. There was singing in the distance. He looked over toward the singing.

“I hear it, too,” I said. “You been ignoring me? Something tells me you’ve been hearing me fine all along.”

He said, “You sleep well?”

I said, “I couldn’t really sleep. How about you?”

“This chair is ridiculous.”

I laughed. “I know, I know.”

The singing was more than one voice. We saw a fire down the beach, a small fire, a flaring match head from where we sat. He asked me if I had dreams.

“As in last night or what do I want to do with my life?”

“Last night.”

His voice was clear and firm, but low. He cleared his throat. He sounded like a man who’d been biding his time until he had something to say.

I said, “Last night, I don’t remember. But I have dreams. Look at you, all talkative.”

He breathed a great, big, wearisome sigh.

I said, “Sometimes I have nightmares, bad ones. But not as much as I used to.”

He faced me as much as he could. “I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“Not a big deal.”

We listened to the singing and watched the match head bob down beach.

He said, “What about?”

I heard the voices of children. I said, “The usual. Death. Hell. Murder.”

I laughed, and so did he.

I said, “I have this one, a recurring one like outer space. No light or stars. But there is this one light, a white pinprick of light. I think it’s supposed to be me. And it gets bigger and whiter until it takes everything over. And there’s a screaming happening the whole time. Not like a voice, more like a low-flying plane. And it’s louder and louder until I can’t hear or see anything else at all. And I’m gone. Then I wake up with a hard-on.”

“That’s terrifying.” He laughed while he said it.

A small group was coming up the beach.

He said, “I think my heart is slowing down.”

“What?”

“Every day gets a little slower.”

“It’s slowing down right now?”

He smiled, patted my hand.

They were out there now by the waterline, Boy Scouts in army-green shorts, red handkerchiefs around their necks. A dozen of them, ten or twelve years old. Their pack leader had a torch, and they moved slowly, probably looking for air bubbles and crabs hiding under the sand. They were singing and I knew the song, or at least I knew part of it. I knew the first verse, the chorus. They sang: “As I went walking that ribbon of highway, / And saw above me that endless skyway.…” It was lovely. I looked at my father. He wasn’t quite asleep but it seemed he’d already fallen back inside himself.

“Dad?”

The group stayed by the water; they’d probably found a jellyfish. Their singing was petering out, and attentions were elsewhere. But a few kept singing, and I wanted them to sing because I wanted to hear the rest of the verses. How did the rest of it go? I actually knew nothing about this song, and yet I must have heard it a hundred times.

One of the taller boys threw rocks at the water, and then ran up the beach away from the others. The pack leader called after him and lowered his torch to the sand. The boy ran even farther up the beach.

The sky was opening up some. I saw clouds. A subtle light sneaked up from behind us. There were different shades of blue in the morning.

Dad said, “Maybe it’s a dream of Heaven.”

“Of what? You okay?”

The light was back in his eyes. He said, “Your dream.”

“Doesn’t feel like Heaven.”

“Heaven is a beautiful place.”

“Well, the dream definitely is not beautiful. How do you feel?”

The sky grew lighter. The boys were crouched, poking at something in the sand. The pack leader held the fire up high, looking out for the boy who’d run off. By now, the torch seemed superfluous.

“What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“I’m really glad you’re talking.”

I turned and looked at the court, at the ball in the drain. The basketball hoops were bare, no nets or chains. My father’s eyes went blank again. I couldn’t look at his face when his eyes went blank. A rosy mist was dawning in the sky. But the question was a good one. I’d driven cross-country and seen things that won’t go away, like when Sarah and I stopped at Cadillac Ranch while driving through Texas. The cars half submerged out there in the desert ground like they’d been here a thousand American years. The headlights and front grilles buried in the sand, and I remember saying to her that the idea of an ostrich doing the same thing is ridiculous. If it were true at all, the ostrich would eventually die away and no longer exist as a species.

He said, “Where am I?”

“You’re here with me in California. On the beach.”

His eyes glazed dully and he looked at me like I was a stranger.

I said, “Once, we drove through the Redwood Empire coming back from Mendocino.”

He looked straight ahead at the water.

“I don’t know how many hundreds of feet, the sequoias. Green leaves up top like a beard. Three thousand years old. And all I could think was, Hey, I think this is actually their planet.”

The kids were at the water, and the pack leader was looking around.

“Sometimes Heaven’s like a house,” he said. “But always different.”

I tucked the blanket under his legs and said, “Tell me your favorite Heaven.”

He wouldn’t look my way. He said, “There’s a front porch. Upstairs, and downstairs. I saw the room where stars are made.”

The water was taking on the lighter colors of the sky.

I said, “I was driving I forget where and saw a mountain on the side of the road. A white mountain, I forget where. Out in the middle of nowhere, scrub brush, and there’s this shining mountain of bright white sand.”

“Heaven is all white with clouds,” he said.

“Like a miracle out there. The full bottom half of an hourglass. I had to cover my eyes, it was so bright. I climbed as high as I could and I swear the mountain was singing and humming right there under my feet.”

“Heaven sings.” He reached out a hand in the air. “Everywhere, and you can feel Him on your skin, and His throne is like a skyscraper.” He opened his hand in the air. “You can feel the light with your fingers.”

“And what else,” I said. “I’ve never seen a volcano. I want to go to Hawaii and see the lava pouring out and sizzling in the ocean, the world remaking itself. I saw something once in Death Valley, or just Death Valley, leave it at that. Rocks in the Racetrack desert. One was the size of a Volkswagen. This is way below sea level, no water at all. The rock has a long trail behind it, moves hundreds of feet, and nobody knows why. Like I’m staring at the tree in the riddle. A tree falls in the forest blah, blah and nobody’s there to hear it. I was staring right at the riddle.”

He said, “Heaven gets dark. It gets dark, and I keep getting smaller.”

I looked up, and that boy was coming right for us.

He waved, and his feet made slapping sounds on the concrete as he hurled himself at the ball waiting in the drain. He had trouble bouncing it with one hand, so he dribbled with both. He tossed it in the air, but he couldn’t reach the backboard. Dad looked at the water. I stood and said hello to the boy.

His uniform was looking a little shoddy, sand grit falling from every crease. His red tie was turned backward. I put up my hands and he tossed the ball my way. I dribbled and threw it right back to him.

I realized it was the first time I’d bounced a ball on the court. I didn’t think I could make a basket. This would be an embarrassing failure of adulthood and might ruin him, for all I knew.

The sun stepped over the foothills and over the houses, the pink terra-cotta tiles. There was a dreamy glow of light in the air; the morning mist was wavering and heading for the water. I wondered how many suns there were: a sun for seagulls, and for Amad’s Little Josie, even for the ticks on a stray dog’s ass. A dog isn’t so selfish as to think it shines for him alone. I watched the boy throw the ball and chase it, and throw it again. The boy didn’t know it, but he was me, and I was him, and maybe God didn’t know our names after all. If He did, He hardly said them aloud anymore because of the thousand ways we daily do our loved ones in. I figured that waiting for the End is the End. And I figured the End was already here, always had been, and was happening over and over and over again, every last one a blessing and revelation if we’d only take a good hard look.

The boys at the water started singing again: “This land is your land, / This land is my land, / From California to the New York island, / From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters, / This land was made for you and me.…” Then for some reason I started to wish they’d stop singing the goddamn song already. I muttered this, and felt immediately bad about cursing in front of the boy, because then the boy started cursing as he bounced the ball. He kept saying “bastard,” which sort of cracked me up.

He said things like, “Our pack leader is a bastard,” and, “Today has been a real bastard.” He threw the ball and got it nowhere near the hoop.

I dribbled, and set myself at the three-point line. It was light out now and I saw the hoop clearly. I couldn’t use the dark for an excuse. I dribbled, bent my knees like you’re supposed to. I bobbed there with the ball in my hands, and tossed it up in a high sailing arc, when my father called out with a noise.

He was pointing out to the water.

I went over and knelt there in front of him, in the sand. His eyes were lit from the inside. I said, “It’s okay, Dad. What? I’m here.”

The waves rolled out like carpets plashing on the shore, and the air was heavy with moisture. I could feel it with my fingers. The water was deep and long; something forever about the water. How it lay there how many millions of years already before I ever came along, and it even let the otters stay until the last one got too old, and filled up with water, and fell through the water like a dark thick leaf dancing in air. The dawning light was on the Pacific like a yellow dust and the horizon had gone soft and disappeared. Dad was pointing and making that awful noise, trying to communicate to me what it was he was seeing.

I looked out again, and saw nothing—until I did.

Out there on the horizon where the morning light was going soft, I definitely saw something. There was this white and floating void quivering just above the water, and above it there was a dark and rising mass floating there in the air. I saw turrets and I saw towers. It was like the silhouette of an almost invisible city, and it hovered like a vision of the Heavenly Kingdom. It was there, right there, and I could see it. I bit my lip, hyperaware of how spooky all this was.

Then the boy came up beside us. “What are you looking at?”

Dad was still pointing.

The boy looked, and said, “What? Catalina?”

He started walking back to the group, and said back over his shoulder, “We take the ferry over and camp. Sometimes we stay the night in Avalon.” He ran back to the others by the water.

Of course it was Catalina. But Dad looked on without blinking, his face practically radioactive with joy. I saw now the trick of light on the Catalina Island mountains, and the clouds, and the vapor mist along the horizon, and already the mass was changing shape, becoming something altogether different, but no less radiant.

I said, “Dad.”

His eyes were blank.

I kissed my father’s head, and we rolled back over the sand to the walkway, and I started pushing him home. We took our time. The oil derricks pumped behind chain-link fences beside the Pacific Coast Highway, and by the time we reached my street the morning sky was simply bright and blue and beautiful. I pushed him up the front path to the courtyard. I rolled him alongside the building and parked the chair. I touched his face. I unlocked the front lock and propped the screen door open with a flowerpot. I lifted him from his chair, and he was light, his long hair covering his face. I decided it was time I cut it. I carried him, and we crossed the threshold together.

Some of his things still needed unpacking. His books and papers were in boxes beside the fridge. Resting on top of his boxes was a blank red spiral I found myself unaccountably attracted to. I swore one day I would fill it. The jawbone and a picture of my young mother were on the coffee table where he could see. His mail-order shield was on the wall beside the mirror. This was the very first thing I attended to after unpacking his clothes. The white cat napped on the back of the sofa. I could not in good conscience leave her behind. The plank flooring had a curved scratch and groove from the door where it rubbed, and the radiator clicked, and the stairwell was dark because the bulb had gone too dim. I saw us in the mirror over the sofa, my father in my arms, and the mirror caught a shard of sun from outside and flashed, filling up the glass. I looked at us, a little bit afraid to look away. His head was on my chest, and he turned away slightly. His long hair moved, and a sleepy medicinal smell of bedclothes and of days long ago home sick from school, and of that terminal air you find in waiting rooms and clinics, and of my mother’s soft and hairless camphorous head filled up my senses. I steadied myself and set him down on the sofa. Even if I could get to know all the space in my own skull, I’d never get inside of his. I combed back his hair and looked at his face. This was not a gullible man, not at all. I saw a man who was hungry and cunning in his own curious way, and was stubbornly still here, his lost and lank body afloat there on the mystery of the world.

*   *   *

There are three kinds of time, as far as I can tell. There’s God Time, infinity, which really isn’t any time at all, but beyond time, and borderless, not in our purview. It’s a scary thought, and I’m not so sure we ever come to really know it, whether we go out like space dust in death, like some manna from Earth, risen food for hungry angels, and fall back inside God, or if we fall forever forward, deep inside the advancing cosmos, pure expansion. And there’s Earth Time, our time, great clock of the Holocene, and all of it somehow stuffed and stored inside a plastic pocket watch. It’s the time of ends and there isn’t a single speck of grace or evil outside of it; it’s imperfect and enough in its broken wholeness. Then there’s the Time of In-Between, outside of place, and inside of sex, of memory and dream, the time of saints, and of the dead we remember. It’s the time of two times at once, of invention, of Beth Sarim and supernatural knowledge. It’s the time of sticky nostalgic want, false memory, and cheap reminiscence, so be careful. It’s the time of the world, and the world that we want. It’s from where we pluck the saintly face of Issy. And it’s where my father lives, the time of visions.

*   *   *

Look up and see there: the Great Room, the sky, and the ceiling. The boy sees the crack across a butter-yellow moon, and he doesn’t know how he missed it. The ceiling is just a ceiling. I see the men and women dead a hundred years, dangling from strung-up leather pulleys, on ladders, and balanced on scaffolding, carefully painting suns and drawing the circles of planets. I see my Dad in that pacific place between disappointment and hope, filling with pride for his little guy standing up there in a nice clean suit. And Mom with long red hair curling over her shoulders, filling up with one day’s portion of worry, honor, and delight. And I see Sister Hilda Famosa, frozen cross-legged forever in her balcony seat with her family, like she never got killed one day because she forgot to look both ways and walked herself in front of a speeding city bus on Queens Boulevard. I see the little boy Issy running past me at lunchtime, crazy looking for the girl in the yellow dress because now he’s all in love, because there is only one thought in all the world: what’s her name, I forget her name, nothing matters like her name. Forget the killers, remember the dead. Remember love and everybody’s name. A man with a paintbrush stands on the bridge above the stage. He stretches for the ceiling, and signs his name on Heaven. The men and women stand beneath a blank white ceiling before they drag the heavens down to Earth, because they never once imagined in a million years we’d ever get to go up there alive. See the ghost of a small boy guiding his father’s hand. He describes the great and strange unreachable craters of the moon.

*   *   *

Last year, Amad told me the good news he’d heard about Sarah. I didn’t even know she’d gotten married, or that Nikos had been out of the picture for so long. We were hanging up the sign for store number two, two beaches south, in Huntington. Teri was pleased. I have to say that good news about Sarah sent me down a deep dark hole. In fact, Amad and I were supposed to celebrate that night with dinner, but I excused myself and went home, where I got very drunk with Dad. And when I say that, I mean I got drunk while my poor Dad lay twisted in bed, not saying a word and completely immobile. He’d been lying there for over a year. He was here, but he wasn’t here at all. Only his eyes were alive, lit with that same anxious fire that showed on his face for as long as I could remember. That final night he saw something, I don’t know what. If I were more romantic, I would say my mother’s ghost was there in the room, and that he saw her. Because his face softened, and his eyes cooled, his heart was eased. A peace descended upon him, a peace he’d been looking for his whole life. I don’t know what frightened me more, watching death slowly descend upon my father or how he seemed to welcome it body and soul. I kissed his still head. I sat with him for a very long time. And then I went outside. I walked, and then I ran over the sand, like a free beast, running alive into the night.