Striving to be in Sorts

“Well, I’m out of sorts today, which is too bad, since my preferred, and in fact default, position is to be in sorts. But I’m not; the sorts clearly have chosen not to sort themselves out—and can I be responsible for that?”

I said it to Lady, who wasn’t there but was, since now the coffee shop is in the capable hands of Amir, scion of the patriarch Santana. He’s the guy who gave me free papaya smoothies for a couple of weeks: free because the smoothies were medicine, and not drink. Anyway, I can complain to Lady since she is not there, though she always was even when she wasn’t, but can I complain to the man who cured my back? Of course not….

For it seems that I may be cured. That at least is what the neurosurgeon told me: and why can’t he be sure? Well, I was supposed to have gotten follow-up in the same distant hospital I was treated in. I, of course, decided (on the basis of what the discharging doctor had told me) to see a neurosurgeon closer to home. I mean, how hard could it be?

Well, not having the imagings (and I so agree, computer, that that shouldn’t be a word!) that the other doctor had, the new doctor can’t be entirely sure. But he’s 95% sure, which is good enough for me.

“So that should be great news,” said Lady, whose sorts have clearly been sorted out. “So what’s the problem?”

Do I have to make everything difficult? Can’t the divinities throw me a bone without my sniffing suspiciously at it? Again, of course not….

“The problem first of all is that we do illness very well. Illness we all get. Go to bed, take your medicines, see the doctor, let time and diet and prayer work. But recuperation is another story….”

Which in fact it was, since I came home from the hospital and faced a series of challenges. The first was that my in-laws were in crisis, and it was entirely normal. My father-in-law was facing a disease for which there is no cure, and would need, at some point, more care than a very frail wife could give. And yet they had been together for over sixty years—how does one give that up? And so decisions were made, then unmade, then remade—and the times were not easy for anyone. Except, of course, for the required Yuletide merriment, which I blessedly skipped.

In addition, a week after I had been released from the hospital, we got the news that Montalvo, our young son, had himself fallen and dislocated the left hip and fractured it as well. All this while running…

…at the beach!

“How in the world can he do that damage by falling at the beach,” said Lady, who was in fact there in all senses, when Mr. Fernández snapped into the café. He was holding my cell phone, and demanding, “what is this for!!”

Forgivable, and understandable, since all the attention goes to the invalid, but what of the man who sits at the gurney-side, copes with the house and the meals and all the things that I could no longer do? So I had escaped bed rest after only a week—forgoing the 11 other weeks I had been prescribed—and was drinking coffee cellphone-less at the café.

So Montalvo’s birthday present—as well as Christmas present—was an 160$ ride by ambulance to…

….Centro Médico!

Yes, Raf was there again, in the same dreary hallway, and the patient? Well, a bit less stoic than I had been, since when I called Montalvo to tell him Raf on the way, all I could hear was yowling.

So Raf had a husband on bed rest with a broken back, and a son awaiting surgery in a place not known for rapid action. In fact, it would be over a week before Montalvo got operated, and who would be there for him? Someone had to call his mother, and guess who did that? Right—not me, but Raf. Oh, and then, and even more difficultly, Taí, our sister home for the holidays.

It doesn’t seem right to replay the scene as it unfolded, because in the end, Montalvo’s mother came through. But here is what didn’t get said:

I totally understand that you are the messenger, and I absolutely comprehend your concern that someone be there for him. And despite the fact that NOT ONE of my children has given me a fraction of the trouble this kid….

Taí handled the situation brilliantly, and, as I say, all worked out well. And so, I called Montalvo every day for a week, and both of us gave numerical rankings of our level of pain. And he, damn him, was getting Percocet, while I was struggling along with a placebo called Tramadol.

The weeks dragged on; the nerves frayed. And then, one day Raf snapped, and I snapped, and I—once again!—completely lost control. I was tired of being in pain, and tired to the bone of being in suspense; I was raging and sobbing and alone, so whom to call? Lady!

Here’s the thing about being sick: your world has completely changed, but other people? Their world has not, and so, when Lady told me, “Marc, I can’t talk right now—I’ve got somebody right in front of me,” that made perfect sense. And did I say, “crisis, Lady, I’m having a meltdown!”

No, because I was and I wasn’t. Also another thing about being sick: when your femur is sticking out and wagging off the sand…well, that’s an emergency. That’s “stop everything and talk to me.” But was it an emergency? The fact that I was terrified of children on bikes and fat ladies with cell phones and of cats? And that I was tired of being terrified?

Blessedly, the Gods sent Taí, but not before I had called my eldest brother, Eric. Why he, and not John, whom I tend to call more often? Because Eric is retired: it was a Monday, John would be working. And so Eric got the meltdown, and very well he took it. Yes, he turfed the call, but I would have too….

“I’d call your psychiatrist,” Eric said. “You may need to jump up your antidepressants….”

I agreed, knowing perfectly well that I wouldn’t. Because I wasn’t depressed, or at least, any more depressed than the situation legitimately led me to be. No—I was simply venting all of the frustration and the anxiety. And so Taí made me slow my breathing down, and we went off to the café, and the storm was over.

In fact, it was the last meltdown. All would, apparently, be well. The only question now is….

…why am I out of sorts? And when will I get back into them?     

    

Scampering Back to Advent

“There’s absolutely nothing to write about,” I tell Lady, “though that tended not to stop me in the past. Unless, of course, you have never heard Montserrat Figueras, in which case you should cancel your day and get down to YouTube at once….”

“And who will paint all these houses?” asked Lady. “Besides, there’ll be plenty of time to hear whoever-she-is later.”

I ponder that. I might have agreed with her a few months ago, but breaking your back teaches you: you have to seize the moment. And speaking of moments…well, I go on to ask her.

“Listen, do I seem normal to you?”

Lady is wise: why answer when no answer will pass?

“It’s just that I seem confused, lately. For months I was busy listening to Bach, and waiting eagerly for the liturgical year to begin. Though, come to think of it, I must be the only atheist in the world who knows about, much less can’t wait for, the liturgical year.”

“That may perhaps account for that smallest bit of abnormality I detect in you,” said Lady. “Anyway, we’re well into the liturgical year, so all should be well.”

“Yes,” I tell her, “but before I fell, I was fiddling around with things like ‘the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost,’ which you have to admit is nothing so glamorous Quasimodigeniti. Or even Misericordias Domini. So I’d been waiting and waiting for Advent, and then I completely missed it! That’s what spending three months pre-hospitalized, hospitalized, and then post-hospitalized will do to you. And now we’re in Lent, and Holy Week is a week or so away, and I’m confused, if not discombobulated. How did we get here?”

“Well, would it help if you went back to the beginning, back to Advent? You could sort of crash-course your way through to the present, and by the time Good Friday rolled around, you’d be ready for it.”

“I’m never ready for Good Friday,” I told her. “Who is, or who could be? The suspense always kills me: will Christ this year agree to be resurrected? Because from a mystic point of view, it’s by no means certain that he will. It’s a lot to ask, you know, for a guy a couple of millennia old to get up and do it all over again, Easter morning.”

“Of course he’s going to resurrect,” said Lady. “He’s got to. It’s all over the place in the Bible….”

“Of which Jesus knew nothing,” I told her, “since the damn thing was written decades after his death. No, it’s clear: each year it’s a gamble, a risk. Jesus may very well decide not to be resurrected this year, and who could blame him? I mean, imagine going through all the trouble of being resurrected, and then getting Donald Trump as president? No, I’d hang out in the afterlife as long as possible, given that scenario….”

Of course he’ll be resurrected,” said Lady. “He’s got to be. Can you imagine what would happen if everybody all across the world got to church, and were faced with little signs on the church door: ‘Services cancelled due to lack of savior of mankind?’”

“Off-putting, to say the least,” I told her. “But you may have something, there. It may be that we all have a part to play in it, and that if Jesus is gonna have to drag his sorry-ass back here, as he may have done for 2000 years, then we all have to make it happen. Right—so I’ll do my part. I’ll go back to the first Sunday of Advent, which is approximately when the world fell apart for me….”

“So when was that?” asked Lady.

“In fact, it was the day after my birthday, or November 29. I had fallen a couple weeks before, you remember, and I don’t even remember my birthday. But anyway, it’ll be a stretch packing in all of the Christmas music into one week. Bach alone would be bad enough, but what about all the rest? Messiah, all of the French Baroque music like Couperin’s Messe de Minuit, to say nothing of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio itself. No, I’d really have to plow through a lot—musically speaking—to get this savior born before killing him off and resurrecting him again. And who’s to say it’s worth it? Why not let him take a year off, now and again?”

“No wonder you’re an atheist,” said Lady, “since it seems you hardly have half the energy to sustain faith. Nonsense, get down to work! After all, if Bach could write over 200 cantatas—though it was probably substantially more than that—the least thing you can do is listen to them.”

So I resolve to take on BWV 61, which is one of the two cantatas for the first Sunday of Advent. But I determined to hear Nikolaus Harnoncourt, since he had recently died, and since he had been known as “the pope of early music,” by somebody or other. But what happened when I tried to open it on YouTube? Absolutely none of my favorite conductors was available. Or rather, they were, but I kept getting those annoying “error” messages when I tried to click on them. No, it seemed as if YouTube had thrown down the gauntlet: no HIP (historically informed performances) today. I was left with Karl Richter, from the early 1970’s, and the effect was somewhat startling.

I would have been in my teens when I started listening seriously to Bach, and who would I have heard? People very much like Richter, who came to the score with intelligence and sound musical ideas, and who conducted them with a breath-taking sincerity. Not only that, but he got the best singers around to work with him: the great Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier, Edith Mathis. Yes, it sounds dated to our ears, so used are we to modern HIP performances. And according to Wikipedia, Richter died an embittered man, since he had been derided as “old fashioned,” and thrown onto the rubbish heap of “inauthentic” performances.

The truth?

I no more know what Bach’s band of musicians sounded like than I know how Sappho proclaimed her odes. I suspect that Bach would be amazed at the quality of musicians today, but perhaps not. Because many of the cantatas contain solo parts of surprising virtuosity. Would Bach have written them if no one could have played them?

And so I enjoyed the Richter performance, taking me back as it did to a time when I was hearing so much great music for the first time. Yes, I was lying on the green sofa of my childhood living room, my mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen, my father was chatting with her and leaning against the refrigerator. The glorious music came to an end, and it occurred to me….

…Richter’s Christ will resurrect  again!        

          

Ilia Charms the Cafe

“Of course we’re making progress,” said Raf’s cousin Mayra, whom I had met just minutes before. “You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t….”

I knew instinctively that “here” meant more than the restaurant at which we were eating: “here” was more about seeing Ilia, my mother-in-law, before we got to the restaurant.

Ilia is big on little gifts, regalitos, and since Mayra is a mother and possibly a grandmother (else why would Ilia be giving Mayra dolls?) there was a shopping bag full of little gifts. So we passed a pleasant ten minutes looking at all the gifts, and wondering—in Mayra’s case—how in the world she would get all this stuff back home to Texas.

We left Ilia to go to the restaurant, where the family secrets started to spill. There was the grandfather who... OK, that should probably stay a secret. And there was Mayra’s sister, who spent years and years being depressed, being hospitalized, being kept at home, all because she was Lesbian.

So yes, I am “here,” meaning also that last Thursday, the day that Ilia’s husband was admitted to a nursing home, I was chatting with Ilia in the café. Why? Because I got to imagining Ilia alone in her little apartment: how must she feel, knowing that her husband of 60-plus years was for the first time not coming home? Was she sitting alone in the living room? Praying? Crying? It seemed somebody should find out.

So I called and she immediately agreed to join me for coffee: that’s when the anxiety started. Why? Well, I proposed meeting her at her apartment; we could walk from there to the café. She, of course, refused and said she’d simply meet me at the café.

It’s only three blocks, but having had a broken back for the last three months, I can now tell you: relativity applies very much to space as well as time. And since all it takes is one crack, one bump in the sidewalk….

So I got to the café and immediately began to worry. Yes, San Juan is safe, generally, but an 85-year old woman is an easy target for a mugging. And what of the wind, which gusts so strongly on that street that my friend Harry, as a child, used to hang out there with his friends: the wind would blow lady’s skirts up…. Since Ilia is inversely proportionate in size to her years, she could easily have been blown into La Perla, outside of the city walls.

So I slunk off to her apartment, and lingered outside on the street, eyeing which car could provide maximal cover if she emerged. OK—that seemed silly, but was it? Of course not: she needs her independence, I need my reassurance. So if lurking outside the apartment, cowering for a moment or two, and then tailing my mother-in-law for two and a half blocks seems silly, well…

…you’ve never had an aged parent.

Which it now seems I don’t, since a Federal Judge, Juan Pérez Jiménez, has just ruled that Obergefell versus Hodges doesn’t apply in Puerto Rico. Why? Because we are a territory, and since we have the “limited” (his word, not mine) self government that could legalize same sex marriage.

OK—so today I am, again, not married. So if I’m hit by a truck and in intensive care, will I be able to see my (now) ex-husband? Or, since no legal convention holds me back, am I free to chat up and perhaps bed the really good-looking bearded guy who seems to be coming to the café an awful—or rather, a wonderful lot? Whee, I can go back to my promiscuous 20’s!

And how promiscuous was I then, and how promiscuous do I intend to be now? “Not very” and “not” to the two questions, and here it’s time to say that yes, some of the time it was fun, in those years. I had just come out—to everyone except my family and employer (you know, the little people in your life)—and you could hook up just by walking down the street, making eye contact, starting a mundane conversation, and throwing in the name of a gay bar. So yes, it was fun, except for the venereal diseases that were rampant, and the even more annoying problem of lice and scabies.

Was it as fun as watching Ilia work the café? Not really, since Ilia has advanced degrees from the very top-shelf of charm schools. She doesn’t enter the café, she makes an entrance—quite a different thing—since she has started the whole process by being introduced to Santana, addressing him formally as “usted,” and then, an hour or two later, as m’ijo. She then parks her walker in the corner, and gives a smile and a greeting to everyone she sees.

Nor does it stop there, since Ilia speaks just loudly enough so that others might hear, but not loudly enough to annoy. So it’s only a matter of minutes before the woman sitting on the sofa next to our table is engaged in conversation. And that’s wonderful, because the woman turns out to be a teacher, and Ilia herself wanted to be a teacher, and Ilia’s daughter is indeed not just a teacher, but a teacher de corazón, and that’s an excellent thing to be.

Well, Ilia and the teacher agree: things aren’t what they were when they were what they were, which they aren’t now. Which means that nuestros valores are all shot to hell—and no wonder that the insurance company was giving her such problems getting a hospital bed for her poor husband, because hadn’t the Feds cracked down on Medicare fraud? Imagine, even doctors….

Well, we go on about that, and then it’s time to discover that the woman is in the café not as a teacher, but as a mother, since her daughter is one of the people who draw murals. Instantly, it’s time to place the daughter, since Ilia has another daughter, not a teacher, but an artista de pura cepa, and that’s every bit as good as a maestra de corazón. Well, it turns out that a couple decades lie between the two artists, but is Ilia stopped? Absolutely not, since surely the daughter must remember Katherine, from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas? And indeed she does, and they both get a bit weepy thinking of Katherine, who took such good care of Ilia when she told the Grim Reaper to go “eff” himself, spent three months in ICU, and then three more months in the rest of the hospital. So Katherine was a godsend, and now she’s gone, having died of cancer.

Well, the idea had been to divert Ilia, and I had come prepared to chat, and was prepared to launch into my longest, and shaggiest of dog stories. In fact, I was about to tell her that the man she met at the opera last month was my shrink, and I was about to tell her that he’s surprising good, since he has absolutely only one, count it, one diploma on his wall….

…silence before the punch line….

But in that silence, Ilia burst in with a question about my brother, and didn’t he live in Montana? And so I choke the punch line (the one diploma is from Harvard University), and I tell Ilia, yes, he did. But now he lives in West Virginia, and then it’s Preston, who comes from the table two tables away but also from West Virginia. So we veer the conversation quite sharply onto a different ramp (since we were both about to trash the place, as if the inhabitants hadn’t done so already), and guess what? Ilia had a friend who was from West Virginia, and she was lovely, just lovely.

Here it must be said, I have never been with Ilia amongst strangers when she could not adduce a friend—of the highest loveliness—from any country which presented itself. In fact, speculation in the family runs high: how would Ilia fare in a tour of the United Nations? Would her roster of lovely friends extend even to Zimbabwe or Sumatra?

Very likely so, since Ilia is a loveable old fraud, which means that while she may not, in fact, ever even have met anyone from West Virginia, she still has friends there. As indeed she does: they just haven’t met. And now, of course, she does have a friend from West Virginia, since Preston is perfectly charming, and half-owns the bar with thousands of craft beers and rare whiskies. So Ilia and I agree: we’ll forsake coffee the next time and guzzle beer at Preston’s place.

So now we’ve met the school teacher and the school teacher’s daughter, and then Preston, and so who could be next? Easy, Stefan, who used to tutor Naïa, Lady’s daughter, but who has a masters in psychology. So now Ilia and Stefan are arm in arm, since Ilia has a masters in social work. But they both agree: the degree doesn’t matter, as long as someone listens….

At this point, Amir’s little baby appears, except that he has, in the space of only two years, gone from infancy to toddlerhood, which is excellent because no child can escape Ilia’s all-encompassing hand, and the encomium, “ay, que lindo!” So now it’s time to think about getting home, since at any moment Ilia may get a call from her children with the news: her husband is at the nursing home at last.

“It’s done me so much good,” she tells me. “Thanks for calling me!”

So we kiss, and then I go in and get her the shopper from SuperMax, because of course she has to know the specials. Then I ask her to please, please call me when she gets home, and she takes umbrage and says she won’t, and I tell her, “look, I ask my 22-year old son…”

So she kisses me again and takes off in perfectly good humor, having met more people in the coffee shop in one afternoon than I have in two years, though I am now—following her lead—saying hello to that amazingly hunky bearded guy that I was telling you about. You know, the guy I am now, this week, perfectly free to pursue, since Judge Juan Pedro Jiménez has decided I am not, after all, married. And speaking of which, might I ask the judge a question? If I’m not married, then what the hell was I doing, last Thursday, when I called Ilia? Because—excuse me, here—screw you, judge! I was doing it for Ilia, those hours spent in the café, but I was also doing it for someone else.

And that would be my mother-in-law.          

      

Ode to a Fallout Shelter

Before I was even five years old, my father had started to dig.

It wasn’t safe, you see, it was never safe. Yes, the house was only ten or fifteen years old, and certainly every precaution, every safety feature or code specification was undertaken or met. The foundation was sturdy, the studs in the walls were straight, the roof leaked only later, and never too conspicuously. No, no, there was no visible problem; no rational reason to believe that the house was not safe.

But it wasn’t—when the little tow-headed kids donned their pajamas in the cool evening, they might be doing it for the last time. They might, in a matter of seconds, be vaporized, their flesh and bones and eyes and teeth all becoming an infinitesimal smudge of a huge blast; a blast which would blink out the sun itself. And then, we would be sizzling atoms thrust miles up in the mushroom cloud. Next? The winds would take us, to poison anyone anywhere who had the misfortune to breath, to allow their skin access to the light or air. Yes, we would sear, we would rot the flesh, and claw at the lungs and endure for centuries—long past the measure of our days—as the toxic, radioactive fallout that no amount of scouring or removal could erase.

Yes, in any moment everything could change, or rather, everything could be revealed, since how could we turn so suddenly from something so sweet, so innocent—whiter than the white bread we ate—to something so evil, so toxic, so lethal? No, it was always in us, it must have always been in us, only taking the bomb to rip it out of us. Yes, the bomb—the bomb that we had dropped on Japan, and that now the Russians could drop on us.

And they’d do it, too—without a thought, without remorse. You only had to look at Lenin’s face: the black eyes, piercing without seeing. Eyes meant to bore, not to understand; eyes meant to send armies to their death, meant to see leagues of widows and children wailing in torture, meant to register all, and absorb nothing. No, Lenin would send his mother to the gulags, and never so much as twitch a hair on his mustache.

They were sly, the bastards—that librarian who sang in the church choir with your wife? A communist, with a gold-framed picture or Stalin himself on the inside of her closet door. Yes, he gazes in the darkness at her clothes, and the blouses that will cover her breasts, the skirt that will cover her loins. Yes, all night and all day her clothes will be drenched in communism; she will slip it on as naturally and easily as a dog rolling in a carcass in the woods. And then she will go, spreading her poison even to the woman sitting next to her on the bus.

Safe? Ha ha, no one was safe! They were everywhere, the bastards, and they were hidden, and no amount of searching would find them. No, they slunk among us, masquerading as bank presidents and doctors, even, but when the red army came down the elm-shaded University Avenue? When the Russians drove their tanks onto Library Mall, prepared to gut the men and violate the women? Ah, then we would see them—the people who had lunched at our table and cared for our children.

Dig, he had to dig. Because the house wasn’t safe—the blast would come, and then we would hear the sound coming across the radio waves. Yes, the high-pitched, unvarying sound, the sound made by nerves stretched just before they broke. Yes, we knew that sound, we had heard it before: but always, it had been followed (after several nerve-wracking seconds) with the words, “THIS IS A TEST. The broadcasters of your area, in voluntary cooperation with local, state, and federal authorities, are conducting this test of the Emergency Broadcast System. THIS IS ONLY A TEST.”

No, we knew—this was never just a test. Rather, it was a reminder, a portent, a sign that dig, we must dig. Nothing was safe, and so we dug, dug, dug—though we could never dig enough. No, there was no pit deep enough, because with every shovelful, the darkness and the deepness grew within us as well. And so he dug and dug, and put his eldest son to dig and dig, and put his wife to take the rocks and the earth and make a garden by the pit.

A garden, yes, that the neighbors would see, so that the neighbors would see the pit that was next to the house, and that was within us. For the fallout, it seems, had fallen even before the blast itself, and the rot and filth was growing within us—despite our white bread and tow-headed heads. No, we were as rotten as a pirate’s teeth, and just as black, as black as the soil which poisoned even the worms, the skeletal white bugs that lived under the rocks. And so they dug deeper, and deeper, and drenched themselves even more deeply as they went. They could not stop, and the dirt piled up higher and higher, and the neighbors began to notice and snigger.

Ah, the neighbors! For the alarm would sound, and it would not be a test. No, finally, finally the moment would come which we had dreaded and yet welcomed, since really, doesn’t the neck beg for the guillotine, once it has been decreed? Yes, bring it on, send that bomb and that blast and that heat and that mushroom cloud of all of the children and the houses and the trees and flowers and everyone and everything. Give us, please, give us the bomb. Because we can no longer dig, we can no longer pretend that we can out-dig the poison rotting through us. We laugh and smile and go to school and then to the library, where we check out books to inform and entertain us. To keep us from looking at what no amount of digging can conceal.

Yes, he dug, my father, and he dug, my brother. Together they dug, until Mother, peering over the abyss, could barely see the tops of their heads. They dug, and then the poured the concrete, into the tomb that had the two right angles necessary to keep the fallout out. (For fallout falls straight down, and cannot turn corners….) Yes, even Tut himself never had such a tomb, never had the shelter that we would have.

The neighbors? Would they storm the house, beat down the door, surge down into the basement, and seek to enter our redoubt? Yes and let them try, since for all the birthdays we celebrated, and all the cakes we baked, and all the Christmas cookies and cranberry bread that we had wrapped and exchanged—they were not us. Not us, and especially not us when the bomb was halfway across the Atlantic, and the alarm was sounding, and the friendly and official voice had grown graver and less polished.

Yes, he was no longer reading a script, he was at last telling the truth, and it was not just about the bomb, and about the fallout, and about the emergency precautions. No, finally, at long last, he would be announcing the truth. The father, who looks at his wife and wants to tell her, and cannot. Who sees his sons and thinks they are soft, in need of toughening, not strong enough to take the commies. Hell, who may become commies themselves!

The mother, who hates to cook and so does it badly—each burnt offering a tribute to her sacrificed life, her house that will never be clean enough or pretty enough. She moves the furniture around constantly in the living room, always trying to find a room that will comfort, that will please. Soon, she is banging the chairs against the walls, all but puncturing them; she grows maddened and frenzied, and sends the sofa spinning to all corners of the room. But still the room will not be right.

The children, whose white teeth and towheads are camouflage, or perhaps a shroud covering the pus-seeping corpse of the starved dead. The white bread had never reached the cells, so polluted and bloated with rot that nothing could be absorbed. The eldest would know success, but never happiness. The middle might know both, but only after a wrenching struggle.

The youngest? As much as anything, the father had dug the pit for the babe of the family, for it was all too clear. Yes, he had to dig and dig, but there was no pit deep enough to bury that secret, which was worse, far worse, than becoming a communist. Yes, it was a thing so black that it could cloud out even the nuclear blast, even the fallout itself would shudder, turn back, and refuse to face the horror.

Yes, the youngest had the blackest of secrets, the darkest of futures. He would be found dead, most likely, with his pants down around his ankles and his throat slit and the blood pooling, and most horrific, the semen drying on his chest. The police would come and talk to the family, and could they keep out the disgust they felt? He would not look them in the eye, could not look them in the eye, could not see the shame and pity and horror and disgust.

He had dug and dug, dug further than any man had dug, and had it been enough? For the more he dug, the darker the darkness grew, until it had consumed them all. And now, his youngest son had died in a park where everyone knew that only those people went. A park never spoken of, but sniggered. A park where no mother would take her child on even the sunniest day, since who knew, who knew….

He knew, he had always known. And he had dug, dug, and dug deeper, until it was clear that there was no digging deep enough, and that all of the digging only made it worse.

And so he dug, and tried to put the darkness back into it, and planted a garden on its side, and a patio on its roof. All so that we could go on, watering the flowers, sipping the lemonade, greeting the neighbors we would kill, when the time came. Yes, we would go on about our lives, never mentioning and never forgetting the pit and the shelter for all our darkest, worst selves.

The towheads had been peroxided—our hair was as dark as Stalin’s, Lenin’s. And our souls?

Darker still!