ON MY PENULTIMATE VISIT TO BAR DIVE, I STUMBLED IN AT nearly one in the morning unannounced, just as the bar was closing. It was pitch dark when I deboarded the bus, avoiding a dead rat and a homeless man (who smelled curiously like tulips) on my way. Before I could start walking the few short blocks to the bar, I noticed a shadow lurking on the corner, a diffident amalgamation of restraint and might all in the same amorphous splotch. When I looked over to him, instantly he glanced the other way.
He is not real, I thought, and continued walking the two blocks remaining toward Bar Dive. The more I walked, though, the more the elongated smudge of his feet followed. The more I shifted my gait, the more his dirty trim shifted, so much so that the head of his confused shadow connected to the shadow of my moving feet, and when they first touched, a tender shiver swept down my spine. I felt dirty from our shadows’ intercourse. I couldn’t tell where mine ended and his began, but I walked faster, our shaded unit traveling as one, until it split when I ambled in front of the bar, just below the dangling tennis shoes still suspended from the sky, still perched over the wire, still providing notice to drug addicts of where to get their fix; only now, they were drenched with darkened exhaust from car engines, cigarette ash floating out from open windows on third-floor apartments, and acid rain. I stood under them, prayerlike, my hands placed together as if I were in church. Grant me this one wish, I thought. Grant me just this one. When I turned around, he was no longer there. My hands were still touching in prayer and I was still standing directly beneath the dangling shoes.
I rushed to the door and jiggled the locked handle with my left hand, looking up into the camera, hoping my father would see me and the handsome set of lines squatting between my eyes.
It took less than a minute for him to open the door and pull me inside. I think he asked me what was wrong. I think he asked me why I was calling for help. But I can’t remember calling for help. All I can remember is telling my father that someone was following me. A man in all black with brown cowboy boots and glasses.
“Stay where you are,” he instructed.
There was a loud jingle of bells, a creak of a door opening, and then nothing. Blackness of a dreamless night. A vacuum of all of my fears in one. And without hesitation, without sensation of any sort, my father vanished. Everything happened quickly from that point. I ran my hands across my arms, tenderly, inspecting them for injury. No spheres of pain erupted anywhere on my body. No mounds of future bruises forecasting a night sky on my temple or my chin or my back or my thighs or anywhere else. Just a beat inside the bar and nobody else beside me.
“Dad?” I called out, quietly.
I looked out front, but nobody was there. I looked in the back room, but he wasn’t there, either. Finally, I ran to the back door leading to an alley, scattered with trash bags and metal cans, opened the door and saw my father, hunched over the shadowman, breathing laboriously, as he was on the evening we first met.
“Dad?” I called again, screaming toward him. (In retrospect, I know that my voice carried barely a decibel of volume, but in my head it was so much louder.)
He didn’t respond. He didn’t hear me. He was too busy fighting off the shadowman who had abandoned his trail on me, or who had used me to get to him, or had mistook me for someone else or—
“—look out!” I called, as he pounced onto my father. On cue, my father mulled his fist into a ball of friction and began pounding the shadowman’s right temple until he retreated.
I hobbled toward him, and as I got closer, I saw that although the shadowman didn’t seem to be fighting back anymore, my father was still punching him on his right temple with his fist, once, twice, three times, dislodging the man’s eyelid from its home. I counted as he thrust. Five. Six. Seven. The man’s face twisted toward me in the most grotesque, disfiguring motion I’d ever seen, before falling flat on the concrete. It was at this point that I noticed how young the shadow was—perhaps not much older than me.
I didn’t know what I should do, but I couldn’t stand where I was, inches from my father, and watch as he put this man in the hospital and himself back in prison. In an instant, a thick pulse traveled from my feet all the way up to my heart and lips. I had never seen such precise fighting. I never told my father that, although I was scared of the thump in my heart, it was one of the most intoxicating moments of my life.
The shadowman pleaded for my father to stop, but he didn’t care. My father’s left hand, clean and untouched from the previous beating, lifted magically from his body and pounced into the thin shadowman’s gut, eight, nine, ten more times, until he bent in half, perched on the ground like a folded shirt.
“Stop!” I cried. “That’s enough!”
My father looked up at me and speared me with anger, with love, with devotion. His hands were twisted and torn. Spores of skin peeled from his knuckles.
Now, someone might think that I should have stopped him earlier. That I should have prevented another aggravated assault charge for my father or an ER visit with forty stitches and a concussive monthlong headache for the shadowman. But I didn’t. Nobody knows what she’ll do when she feels her life threatened. Or how he’ll react if he feels his family in danger. And my father was attacking him to save me. A man twice his age, using both right and left hands in self-defense, saving my life. It was one of the few times I saw any part of myself in my father. In anyone, for that matter. Perhaps I really did have the same gift of instinct, of self-defense, of violent protection: a present wrapped ineloquently with the two violent hands of my father, but a gift no less.
“Is he okay?” I asked.
My father didn’t reply. As soon as he caught his breath, he pulled me back to the bar with one hand. I nearly tripped over the cracks in the sidewalks. Had he not dragged me inside so forcefully, I might have fled in the opposite direction. I think about that moment in here at least once a week. What would have been had I not gone back into the bar with my father?
“What was hell was that?” I cried, just as my father locked the door behind us.
Inside, he bent over to catch his breath, and for a brief moment, it was strangely smooth. Like molasses, even, it spilled in thick globules, each richer than the previous drop. No coarseness, no coughing. A trail of dark blood formed in the corner of his mouth.
“How did you—?”
“—come with me,” he insisted, pulling me into his office in the back of the bar. He wiped his mouth with his bloody shirt and pulled out a small box from his desk. In it was a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Had I not been in North Philadelphia, had I not been with my long-lost father, had I not just been nearly attacked, had I not been sleeping with Bobby McManahan, had a lot of things not happened in my life, I would have thought that it was a toy. A sort of silver and metallic utensil with thick grooves where your fingers rest. Pillows for your hands designed with comfort and purpose in mind. It was relatively small and compact and sat in his hands like a remote control.
“Where did you get that?”
He placed the gun in my hands and they fell instantly onto the desk from the shock of it.
“Take it, Noa,” he whispered. “Be very careful. It’s not loaded now, but—”
“—who was that?” I asked, pulling my hands out of the grip of the revolver.
He didn’t respond.
“Take it, Noa. Please.”
My chest ached from the top down.
“Who the hell was that? Why did you do that? Are you some sort of secret spy? Do you work for the FBI and this is your cover?” I gasped. “Oh my god, are you … are you an assassin?”
He tried not to smile, which fueled me even more.
“Take the gun, Noa,” he urged, dropping the grin in an instant. “You need it for protection.”
“From what? From whom?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m not taking your contraband,” I told him.
“It’s not about me,” he insisted. “It’s for your own good. It’s for your own protection.”
“Stop saying ‘protection.’ Protection from what?” I cried. “From whom? I don’t think that guy will be following you around anymore. Or was he following me?”
Silence.
“Tell me. Tell me exactly what you’re involved in.”
“I’m not involved with anything.”
“If you want me in your life at all, then you’ll tell me.”
He shook his head and dropped to the chair in disbelief.
“How can you sit there in the same body and tell me how much you want to be a part of my life with gentility and kindness, and change, and then beat a man to a pulp in the same breath?”
He refused to speak. He refused to change his expression out of concern. He refused to take the gun back. I turned away to open the door, but he had locked it when we came into his office. I looked back to him. Instead of explaining things to me, he walked around his desk, took my hand, and pulled me back to the chair.
“I don’t know who that man was, Noa, but I’ve spent enough time around men like that to know that you can never be too prepared.”
“You know that’s not true,” I said to him, pulling my hands away.
“Please just take this.”
He was sweating heavily through his shirt, almost all of which was drenched in his own moisture, with just a few quarter-sized spots left dry as doubloons.
“I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you.”
“I’m not taking a gun, Caleb. You know this. I’m not carrying a gun. I’m not shooting a gun. That’s final.”
His head drifted downward. He was disappointed. If this had been ten years earlier and I had broken curfew, he would have sent me to my room. I would have probably spent years in therapy trying to overcome that paternal disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
He held out his hand to me again, and this time, I didn’t meet it. Instead, I just turned around and jogged the doorknob of his office.
“Can you please unlock this?”
My hands were sweating over the metal knob. My right arm burned at the shoulder in a way it hadn’t in years, so I tried my left hand, but the doorknob would not budge. His breath closed in behind me, and I could feel its exhaust on my neck. With one violent hand pushing down on my shoulder and the other unzipping my bag, I knew exactly what he was doing, and I didn’t stop him. After a long enough pause, he reached behind me and placed his hand over mine, twisting the knob to the right until it clicked open. With my weighty backpack sealed to my body, I left without turning around.
When I got home that night, I locked my door and took a long shower. Waves of tears came forth in series and rounds. Perhaps, to this day, I never truly washed that night or my father off of me. When I got out, I walked over to my backpack and took out the little napkin from our first meeting at Bar Dive with my father’s name and number written on it, signed with a small heart below the signature, as if written by an adolescent girl. It waved between my fingers, the old paper starting to harden at the edges, before crumbling in my hand into even little pieces that I could scatter outside my window. A ceremonial disposition of my father’s ashes.
I opened my backpack to remove my wallet, cell phone, and key, and found the revolver sitting there awkwardly like an adult in a kindergarten class. A box of .38 caliber bullets was resting beside it, heavy with ammunition. Next, I scrambled around inside the canvas bag to find the postcard, but it was missing. I carried it around with me for the better part of the last decade and now it was gone.