My mother’s dead. A train slammed into her car when she stalled on the railroad tracks. I was in the front seat with her seconds before it happened. I heard the horn blow and felt the rails vibrating beneath us. I opened the door and tried to pull her out with me, but she’d frozen up completely, locked her hands on the steering wheel. I slapped her hard across the face to try to break through her hysteria, but even that didn’t work. At the last possible second I bailed out, rolling onto the ground, hitting my feet and running for it. The car exploded into flames behind me on impact, throwing me a hundred feet into the air. I’ve never really recovered from the accident. I still walk with a slight limp, though it doesn’t show when I’m doing my thing on the court. And my mother, well, you can imagine. She’s long gone.
My father’s not a happy man. He tells me losing her hasn’t been easy for him. I guess we both get lonely. “Just what do you want me to do about it?” he says all the time. Then he reminds me that I’m not the center of the universe. “I know that,” I tell him, but I can see he’s not listening.
My mother’s dead, I tell the priest in the confessional. He wants to know about my home life after I tell him about my stealing from stores, and the houses I’ve been breaking into and messing up, my drug friends, all the sex stuff. One night a band of angels dressed completely in black like Ninjas dropped down from heaven on ropes, shot her in the head with an Uzi and took her away with them. God’s assassins. Who can hold a grudge? Her number was up.
Once my father told me a story he made up called “Robot Dad.” It was about a world where all the women got the idea to kill all the men and then convert their bodies into robots to help raise the kids and do chores around the house. He didn’t explain exactly how they managed to do all that, only that the robots were machines that the women had programmed to be sensitive and nurturing like them, and they’d made them look just like their husbands did before they killed them.
What the women hadn’t counted on, though, was an invasion by aliens from outer space, which happened only a little while after the robots replaced all the men. Now that there was really no one left around to defend the planet because the men were dead and the robots were supposed to be peaceful and nurturing, the aliens landed their flying saucers all over the place and stood around pointing their ray-guns until the situation was under control. Then they rounded up all the women and took them back to their planet to be love slaves, leaving the robots to watch over the children.
For a while everything went okay. The robot dads did exactly what the kids wanted. They talked like machines and said stuff like, “How about some more chocolate cake for breakfast, Johnny?” and “Would you like me to pour my coffee out so we can go lizard hunting?” No matter what happened, they never raised their voices or got mad. Pretty soon the kids started doing stuff they shouldn’t and getting really out of hand and the robots didn’t do anything to control them.
And that was it. The story ended just when it started getting interesting. When I asked my father what happened next, he looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“My mother’s dead,” I tell the judge. “A rattlesnake bit her in the face.”
No, really, why do I even bother? You’re not listening to me. And don’t think I can’t tell the difference. I see how you pick up your coffee cup, hold onto it, swirl what’s left around inside. You aren’t paying much attention so you don’t hear a word I say. Why pretend? Nobody listens anymore. It’s a lost art. Most conversations are so short nobody says anything. They can’t. They don’t remember or maybe never knew how in the first place. People bump into each other on the street, in the office, at home like us, but don’t make contact. Like walking into a wall for someone like me who even bothers to try anymore. Too many distractions all around. Maybe that’s the reason—radios pounding in cars, televisions flashing colors, billboards everywhere competing for attention. Even your book. I can see how much you want to get back to it, how you placed it face down on the table instead of ripping a piece of paper for a bookmark and closing it properly, how your hand, even now, right as I’m speaking about it, is trembling, almost twitching only inches away from it.
So it’s certainly not me who is, like I’m almost positive you just implied, nervous or anxious or whatever. Look at my hands. Steady. I’ll hold a pencil straight out if you want, something you could never do without it jumping all over the place in the air like a conductor’s baton. But for me it won’t waver. The point being, of course, that I’m completely focused on what I have to say, though admittedly I’m getting a little frustrated with your attitude, which I won’t bother to define but will instead ask a simple, though entirely rhetorical question: “Is it too much to ask you to listen when I have something to say?” Who knows, maybe it’s important. Maybe I’m just trying to find a gentle way to tell you that I’ve only recently found out I’m very ill—terminally ill—with galloping cancer, a brain tumor, Legionnaire’s Disease, AIDS, polio, tuberculosis, yellow fever, bubonic plague, I don’t know what else—or that I’m going to have a baby, something I realize we have discussed several times, but nevertheless, in spite of how we left it, never really resolved or even fully explored, no doubt because I always secretly felt that if I started to tell you exactly what I was feeling you’d stop listening.
But important as that is, it’s not what I’m trying to get across to you. But I do feel that now that I at least have some partial, limited or temporary hold on your attention I can begin again to try and pick up where I was before you so rudely interrupted me with your lack of interest or concentration. But be forewarned that the second I feel your gaze or even mind beginning to wander away, no matter how slightly, like it’s starting to right now, I’m going to say something else, something that’s not really connected to what I want to say at all, but still worth listening to, like everything I say is, if only out of politeness and common courtesy, which will, since you seem to be in such a big hurry, only make the whole thing take that much longer.
I might say, for example, that what I’m telling you is something that’s going to deeply affect your life—and the funny thing here is that even though it really is one of those super-important kinds of revelations you still have the gall to sit there with your eyes almost rolling, which they certainly wouldn’t be doing if I mentioned, just in passing like I’m doing now, that I lost my job—got an envelope with the same letter inside as several others in my department saying that management has been forced to reduce overhead by eliminating key positions such as mine, which have been keeping people like you comfortable beyond what you could ever hope or expect as a result of your own work and job. Or maybe I went storming out on my own. You know I’ve never liked that job, the people, the whole distasteful, money-grubbing attitude in that office. Or at least I thought you knew, though now I have to wonder if you’ve ever heard anything I’ve said to you over the past year or so, or even anything since we first met nearly ten years ago. I mean really heard. Which I suppose is just another way of saying that you never really cared, or never cared enough to hear and remember what I said months or even years later.
No doubt you fooled me back then by pretending to be a good listener, which is what I most want out of a relationship and what I wish you had been and were now, and that over the years you got lazy, bored with the role, and simply let your apathy take over. And it has, believe me. In other ways, too, until what you’ve got to offer instead of attention is a near-total lack of sympathy, not to mention passion.
Meanwhile, ironic as it may seem, the very reason I quit my job, if that’s what I’m really getting at, which, I’ll tell you now in advance is not, but rather only a further attempt to force you to listen to me, was the result of being harassed by my boss at work, which, now that I mention it probably really is happening in some form or way, though it’s not blatant or gross or anything. He’s never tried to feel me up or ask me to go out with him, for example. But the way he looks at me—leers, really—gives me the creeps, though I’m not sure why I’m telling you this except to make you jealous, which you’re not and never have been, which is why I feel it should be fairly easy to tell you about the affair I’ve been having or how I’ve been doing strip-o-grams in other offices in the building during my lunch break.
Or better still, why I’ve decided that sex just isn’t worth the bother—all those fantasies that never seem to have much relation to what actually happens or more likely doesn’t happen and then, when something finally does, the big event, it’s nothing much but sweaty exercise and heavy breathing. So seeing how sex just isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, not for me with you anymore at any rate, I think from now on I’ll just sleep on the couch in the other room, which I should think would suit you fine as it will give you less potential exposure to someone who might try to engage you in unwanted intercourse of another nature, meaning conversation.
But you’re not interested in any of this. I can see that you’ve got other, more important things to do, that your eyes are glazing over and look the way a child’s do when he or she has a high fever and starts to imagine seeing insects crawling on the ceiling. So if you’ll just excuse me, I’m not going to waste your precious time, and thank you very much for your patience and understanding. You’ve been awfully kind, too kind, really. Now please, just go back to what you were doing before I came into the kitchen here and sat down across from you. Pretend, if you want, that I don’t exist, or that I was just coming in to refill my coffee cup, which I’ll do now to help create the illusion.
Just don’t ask me to continue. That I won’t do. You’ve had your chance. And I’m resolved not to let you talk me into it at this point. Whatever I had to say will just have to wait. On second thought, I’m through waiting, waited long enough, can’t wait for you not even a minute longer. I’ll take what I had to say with me to the grave like some horrible secret. Bury it so deep you’ll never get it out of me. So that’s it, my final decision: there’s nothing you could ever say or do to try and persuade me to tell you what I was going to say. I won’t. My lips are sealed. Zipped. Sewn. For I honestly don’t remember and will never be able to recall again what exactly I had to tell you, only that it was truly and utterly important. A matter of life and death, in fact. Something, as I said earlier, that will deeply affect our lives. But it’s no use now.
Because maybe, just maybe, you were right after all about me being upset or nervous, though when you said or rather implied it, I wasn’t. My hands were steady then, remember? But now I’m so angry they’re shaking right along with the rest of me—so much so, in fact, that if I tried holding the pencil it would probably slip right out of my hand and hit you like a dart, with the pointed end, sharpened lead, poking right into your eye. Or my shaking hands might just grasp uncontrollably around your neck and choke tighter and tighter until you beg me to let go.
Furious, that’s a better word for what I am. Pissed-off. Miffed. Burned. Outraged. Just so terribly distraught and annoyed about your lack of attention that no matter what you do, no matter what—do you hear me—whether you plead, beg, get down on your knees, whether you lose control of yourself completely and resort to threats or even the kind of violence I just spoke of, nothing could make me change my mind. No matter what.
I won’t say another word.