The garage of my childhood home is drenched in sepia and held in my memory’s back pocket like a folded Polaroid. The garage is always cold, the air permanently a nighttime frost. It never sees action during the daytime. This is a nocturnal space. This is the battleground between man and machine—wrenches and rust against my father and me.
Tonight, you can see my adolescent legs poking out from underneath a car, lying directly next to my father’s longer lower half. I’m hanging through the late-night hours, well into the a.m. on another school night, staring up at the vehicle’s undercarriage. At metal squares and rubber tubes and rusted bolts and alien designs. I’m rubbing grainy dust particles out of my eyes and smearing black grease all over my pants.
“Never buy a Chrysler,” my dad says in a mumble—his lips holding tight to a cigarette kept on the left side of his mouth. His Pakistani accent simultaneously scares and humors me whenever he gets frustrated. His face strains as he tries to undo a bolt. His hands disappear into a darkened crevice, trying to find the right angle within a pocket-sized gap to fit a wrench. “Should never have bought this piece of shit.”
The only cars my parents could afford were pieces of shit. It was always junkyard bait like a Buick LeSabre or a Jeep Wagoneer or anything that would break down one or two months after buying it from some shady classified ad. Some would overheat, while others would blow gaskets.
Cigarette smoke extends from my father’s mouth, folds end over end. A smaller cloud of carbon dioxide escapes mine from the cold. My back, protected by a thick nylon vest, runs chilly from the concrete—little goosebumps running toward my butt crack.
My dad’s cheeks puff out as he gives the nut and bolt one more significant effort. I hear a hollow clunk. A burst of air shoots out of him and his wrench falls from his grasp. He turns his head, shutting his eyes as the tool nearly crashes back against his skull, instead clanging against the garage floor. His cigarette, a loose convict escaped from the prison of his lips, now rolls away. He pulls his hand in close, holding his bloody knuckle to his chest. His failure is my failure. But his failure hurts me more than him because I’m forced to watch as it happens.
“Shit,” he says through clenched teeth. He snatches the cigarette off the ground and blows on the butt before putting it back to his lips. I watch as his chest rises and falls—impossible to tell if he’s out of breath or burning an epic rage inferno that is about to burst out at any second. I brace myself. His nostrils flare as he resets. “Maybe you can reach?”
I’m helpful now. I nod and scooch over, my father crawling on his back to make room. I see the small opening and watch my hand disappear into the shadow. I feel for the part. My fingers come upon a metal nub. A ribbed nut. I ask my dad which way to turn. He tells me to go to the left. It doesn’t move, and my fingers are heating up, sending an intense signal to my brain and telling it that the appendage is at least a decade away from being able to manage this job. My father gives an inquiring look back, trying to figure out if I’m going to do this or not. All five fingers are on this goddamn nut and all five fingers are undoubtedly fire-engine red and all five fingers are soon to be pale white.
Revolution.
The nut twists. I feel it come loose and pull my hand back. I open it in full view of my father’s eyes. In full view of the judge and jury. On some other nights, the executioner too. But tonight, there in my palm, lays the verdict.
He smiles.
Uncontrollably, so do I.
“A good team,” he says.
He holds his smile and talks and I feel his warmth in a way that makes me grow up thirty years all at once because now I know what it means to be a man and now I know everything I want to embody.
“Do you remember what this one is called?” He taps his greasy fingers on the steel car part shaped like a contorted Tetris block. I shake my head. “How about this one?” His fingernail hammers against another part, something hollower. I shake my head again. “I taught you all of this already,” he says in a tone that’s half disappointed and half teasing. “Why don’t you remember? Were you listening?”
“I forgot.”
“One day you might have to fix your car. Your mom and I would still be poor if I didn’t learn how to do this myself.” He puffs on his cigarette while staring at me in a gentle, contemplative way like he sees my future and is about to tell me. “I’ll teach you something else. Something that will serve you well for the rest of your life as long as you truly understand it. Nobody will ever be able to take it away from you. It will become your superpower.”
“A superpower?”
“Yes.”
Eagerly, I ask, “What is it?”
He takes one more drag on his cancer stick.
“I will teach you how to never forget.”
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .