by Matt Alberhasky
The air is so humid that breathing becomes a conscious activity. Breathing in and out. It’s strange how our bodies need oxygen to exist. To keep functioning. With all the destruction we’ve done to our environment–all the deforestation, all the pollution, all the corruption of nature–I wonder if after so many generations the oxygen will eventually run out, and we’ll either have to adapt to a new environment or die out. The chance of the human race dying out seems unlikely to me because we manage to struggle on and keep going and going. Sometimes that’s all life seems to be, overcoming obstacles in order to keep the vital systems functioning. In order to keep on going and going. I’m pushing my son, Silas, in a swing, and he’s soaring higher and higher into the humid air. I can feel the sweat dripping in my armpits, and I know that it’s going to stain my white shirt and that Sarah will complain about having to get rid of the pit stains, but I don’t mind. My son kicks his legs as he approaches the pinnacle of his arch, and then he swings back towards me, and I give him another push. He leans back and his eyes are as blue as the cloudless sky. His mother’s eyes. I hear the neighbor’s Doberman barking, and I can’t understand why they would have only a chain-link fence between that dog and the playground. Why of all the neighborhoods in this city they would have to back to our park with their barking Doberman and only a chain-link fence? That dog practically stands halfway up the fence. As it is, it would hardly seem a strained leap for that beast to jump the fence. The distance between that fence and the swing is about 600 feet I’d say, and it’s only about twenty feet to the slide. If that dog did jump the fence, I’d simply pull my Silas out of the swing and put him on top of that slide. Then I’d fight that dog. I’d stab it with the pocket knife on my keychain. I’d kick it in the face. I’d bite it right back on its ears and nose. I’d let it take my left forearm while I beat its head senseless. I’d stick my fingers in its eye sockets and twirl them around until the eyeballs gushed clean out. I’d tear open its stomach before I’d let it hurt my boy. There should be some restrictive covenants about keeping a dog like that behind a chain-link fence in a neighborhood like this backing to the park and all. As he swings, my Silas is singing: Father Abraham had many sons many sons had Father Abraham I am one of them and so are you so let’s all praise the Lord right arm left arm…”Where did you hear that song?” I ask. “At Sunday school, Daddy.” “Did you learn that last week?” “Yes, Daddy,” he says as he kicks his tiny legs. I give him another push. He doesn’t realize how useless his kicks are. He doesn’t seem bothered by the humidity like I am. My shirt is completely pitted out now. He’s generating his own wind. He closes his eyes and smiles. He looks peaceful in a way that I could never be. I feel something like a mixture of nostalgia and envy for his experience, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect his peaceful innocence. Nothing I wouldn’t do even if it meant ripping a Doberman apart with my hands and a pocket knife and reaming its eye sockets into a bloody pool of filth. I’d even let that dog ruin my left arm. And the air is still and humid and the grass is green and extends as far North as I can see into the trees.
****
I heard a story one time about a father who accidentally backed over his son’s head. His only son was a toddler and had run out of the house while his mommy was on the phone in the upstairs bedroom of their Cape Cod. They think the little boy was playing some sort of game, thinking he was hiding from his daddy. When the father put his truck in reverse and stepped on the gas there was a horrific sound like a tire rolling over a melon. In that instant the father knew exactly what had happened, and he slammed on the brake and threw the truck in park, and he screamed. He screamed ferociously and slammed his fists on the car horn in the cab of the truck so that his wife in the upstairs bedroom of their Cape Cod dropped the phone and ran downstairs. The phone lay on the floor of the bedroom with what happened to be the mother’s sister on the other line saying, “Are you there? What’s going on? Are you there? Hello? Can you hear me? What’s wrong?” When the mother ran outside the father was screaming, “Oh my son, my precious son. Oh my only son. What have I done?” When he saw his wife he screamed, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry. My precious son.” The mother tried to move towards the lifeless legs dangling out from the truck, but the father had already looked underneath, and he held his wife back. He wouldn’t let her look. It took more strength than he would have imagined to hold his wife back. Some neighbors came to look on while the mother and father sat on the concrete steps of their home and cried and sobbed and screamed all through the night with their son’s tiny legs sticking out from under the truck. And as the night deepened the father cried, “Oh, my son. What have I done?” And to his wife he cried, “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Please forgive me.” And later into the night he cried, “God, why?” And into the small hours of the morning he begged and pleaded into the dirt and the grass and the earth on which he vomited numerous times and he asked God how a sovereign being could allow this. And it wasn’t until dawn broke that he stood up from the ground from the dirt and the grass and the mud and the vomit and he said, “Fuck you, God.” And it was about that time that the neighbors who had come to look on the day before called the police so they could clean up the accident. When the police came with the paramedics they tried to tend to the father’s left hand which was a bloody disjointed mess. He had smashed it repeatedly, his wife told them, on the partial brick front of their house. The father refused treatment. He used threatening and obscene language which the police and the medics under the circumstances were compassionate enough to ignore. In their compassion they even honored his ridiculous insistence of the refusal of medical treatment.
****
I’m walking home from the park in the humid air with my son Silas on my shoulders. The walking path runs along the north side of our subdivision. There’s an entrance to the path from our street. The path runs down to the park. Silas’s legs are dangled around my neck, and I’m holding both his ankles in my hands. My white shirt is unbuttoned to my waist and tucked into my black pants. The sleeves of my shirt are rolled up past my elbow. The sweat stains in my armpits run the full length of my side. I can feel the sweat beads as they roll down. I wrapped my tie around Silas’s forehead like a bandana. His legs have lost all the pudginess they had when he was two-years old. But he’s not old enough to have gained much muscle definition. His skin is smooth, and he has bleached blond hair all over his legs. I could never see the hair unless I’m this close to him. Both his knees are scraped and bruised. The cuts are healing perfectly well all on their own. He’s talking to himself about how he’s not a big man yet but someday he’ll be a big man like his daddy and how girls aren’t allowed to go to the park because they might fall and get big owies and cry but he won’t cry because he’s a big man but he’s not a big man yet like his daddy but someday he’ll be a big man…I ask him if he could have anything in the world what would he want. And he stops talking and thinks about the question for a moment before answering. I ask him again if he could have anything in the whole wide world what would it be, and he says jellybeans. I look up, and I can see him smiling. His mother’s blue eyes like a flawless sky. So I tell him that when we get home he can have some jellybeans. I ask him how many jellybeans he wants. At first he says five and then he says no three because I’m three. But then he reconsiders and says no five because five is more than three. Five is a lot of jellybeans he says. Five is more than a million he says. I tell him that when we get home he can have five million jellybeans. And he laughs at me and says wow that’s a lot. And then he asks if he can pick out the colors, and I tell him yes you can pick out the colors.
****
“Are you going back to work today or what?” Sarah asks. She is sitting at the kitchen table. I can see the muscle in her jaw is clenched.
“No, I’m not,” I say. I’m slicing a watermelon on a cutting board on the kitchen counter with a butcher knife.
“Well, are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she says.
“You know the deal I’ve been working for the last six months.”
“Sure, I know the deal.”
“Well, the deal’s dead,” I say. The knife glides easily through the rind of the melon. It makes a crunching sound before the momentum of the blade is deadened by the cutting board.
“What do you mean dead?” Her blue eyes which so often remind me of Silas’s look nothing like them now.
“I mean our client walked out on the deal this morning.”
“He walked out on the deal. The deal. The twenty million dollar deal you’ve been working on this whole fucking year. That’s impossible.” I watch her hands clench into fists.
“It’s dead.” I sever the sweet pink fruit from the rind and hack the half moon shaped slice into bite-sized pieces.
“It can’t be dead. He can’t just walk away like that. How can you just let that happen?”
“It’s not that simple. There’s really nothing I can do about it, but it’s dead. That’s just it.” I stab the individual pieces of watermelon with the butcher knife and eat them straight from the blade.
“We need that deal. That deal is your work this entire year. There goes our trip to Rome. I mean, forget Rome, how do you expect to pay the bills next month. You told me it was supposed to close next week. Why does this always happen to you?” It’s strange how her eyes hardly even look blue.
“I suppose the suitcase means you’re going to your mother’s again.”
“Don’t try to change the topic on me. Why are you so fucking lax about all this? You loose the deal and then you think you can just pick Silas up early from daycare and go to the park like it’s no big deal?” Her hands relax for a moment, and then she clenches them again.
“Are you going to be staying all weekend again? Silas misses you, you know.”
“I don’t understand you. You can’t answer a simple question. You always want to make simple things complicated. You always want to be philosophical or spiritual about every goddamn thing, and it’s really not that complicated. Sometimes it really is just that simple. If you’d just…if you’d just join the rest of us here on earth maybe this shit wouldn’t happen to you.”
“Look, it’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I hack another slice off the melon.
“That’s a lousy excuse. You know, I’m your wife, and I’m going to tell you how it is because I care about this family. I want to see it survive, and if you don’t realize that you have to control your own destiny than I don’t see how we’re going to make it. You’ve got to stop all this philosophical, spiritual bullshit and take charge of your life. You’ve got a responsibility to provide for this family.”
“I don’t even know what spiritual or philosophical stuff you’re talking about.”
“That’s just what I mean. I try and have a rational conversation with you about something clear and simple like your job and money, and then you always want to change the topic or try to blame me for your failure.”
“I wasn’t blaming you for anything, and I didn’t fail. It’s just more complicated then…”
“Then what? Then I can understand, is that it? Am I too stupid to understand your fucking job?”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“Yes, it was what you were saying, don’t lie to me. You always tell me about faith and sacrifice, well I had faith in you once when you were full of ambition and dreams, when you were going to be the biggest and richest commercial developer in this whole damn city. That’s the man I married. What’s happened to you? What’s happened to your dream?” For a moment I can see Silas in her eyes again. But the resemblance is cloudy. I want to reach out and touch her hand, but I don’t.
“I’ll call you later,” she says. She picks up her suitcase and slams the front door behind her.
I finish butchering the watermelon with quick, hard whacks of the knife. My excessive use of force leaves gouges in the cutting board and pink juice all over the counter and on my white shirt. But it relieves some of the tension. I take off my white shirt with the pit stains and now the pink watermelon stains and toss it on the chair Sarah was sitting in. Something inside tells me that she will come back on Monday. Something tells me it hasn’t gone too far yet. I won’t even bother to clean up the kitchen mess till she gets back.
****
In his sermon last Sunday the pastor spoke about the story of Abraham and Isaac. The pastor focused his teaching on the fact that God provided a ram in the thicket so that Abraham didn’t have to sacrifice his son. From this detail of the story, the pastor claimed that God is our provider, and that He will always provide for our needs. What the pastor neglected in his teaching is the most fascinating part of the story for me. Three days before Abraham found the ram in the thicket, that is, three days before he held the knife above Isaac’s body as his only son lay bound on the alter, God had requested that Abraham sacrifice his son, and Abraham had said yes without hesitation. After Abraham agreed to sacrifice his son, he had a three-day journey to the alter, the site of the sacrifice. What I want to know is what Abraham was thinking on that trip. It says that Abraham brought along a couple men with him and his son, and he didn’t tell any of them of his intention to sacrifice his son. I mean, in his mind, Abraham must have prepared himself during that time to kill his son. I can’t imagine what the other men would have thought of Abraham had he done it. Would they have taken him back to his city to be arrested for murder? Would his wife have been angry with him? Would she have seen him returning home without their only son, with the blood of their only son on his hands and face, and would she have screamed obscenities at him and beat him with whatever tool or weapon she could get her hands on? Would she have understood what God had asked him to do? Could she have understood the great burden of sacrifice? What would his neighbors have thought? Maybe Abraham would have been put in prison, and never have been the father of many nations. I want to know what was in Abraham’s mind during that three-day journey to the alter. I want to know how he was able to release his son to God, even if it was only in his mind. Three days. God sacrificed his Son too. God released His Son to death and hell for exactly three days too. What is it about God’s obsession with sacrificing our sons? What was God thinking during that time? Were God and Abraham pictures of perfect composure like their represented in the Bible? I can’t help but wonder if their minds were a torrent of doubt and fear. My mind would be a storm. I know my mind would be a dark and horrible place.
****
I crawl into bed with Silas while he’s napping. His breathing is heavy and his legs are curled up to his stomach while he sleeps on his side. I lay behind him and kiss his head. It’s damp and salty on my lips. His body temperature rises several degrees while he sleeps. Since he was born, he’s always been a hot sleeper. I rub his legs marveling at how smooth his skin is. There’s something sacred about his sleep. I can feel his chest expand against my body as he breathes. I want to protect him. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep him safe. I close my eyes and surrender to the stillness. I know that I love God, but I don’t think I could give Him my son. I don’t know that I could release Silas to Him if He asked me to. I hope He never asks this of me because I fear I might hate him if He did. I could see myself doing it and then hating God for it. Or I could see myself refusing, and God taking him anyway. But I’m afraid that when the word comes down, it’s not a matter of choice.
****
I heard that the father who accidentally backed over the head of his only son which sounded like the crushing of a melon harbored a secret bitterness in his heart for his wife. He blamed her for not keeping a more careful eye on their son. But he never told her about it. Instead he let her go on thinking that it was his fault for not taking greater care to look behind him. So, outwardly and mostly he blamed himself, yet he insulated a secret and innermost and tiny part of himself with that bitterness and blame for his wife as a means of self-protection so that he did not surrender himself entirely to the guilt. But as with most secret and innermost and tiny parts of the self, it began to develop hairline cracks until it eventually fractured and the guilt stole even that part of him. That’s when he sat late one night at the large oak desk in his office and choked himself with his own tie. His wife had outwardly and mostly blamed her husband for the accident, but there was a secret and innermost and tiny part of herself that believed if she had only had a more watchful eye over her son that she would have noticed him sneaking off and could have saved him, and in this blamed herself. In an effort to deny the existence of those thoughts, she blamed her husband. Her chastisement provided her only momentary exoneration over these feelings and when they would reoccur she would heap more blame upon him. After he was found choked to death by his own hands with his own tie wrapped around his neck in his office, her secret and innermost and tiny part cracked, and she was left alone to confront her own feelings of culpability.
****
I don’t mean to, but I fall asleep next to Silas. I dream about the depths of a father’s love. It’s an intense and brutal dream. I go to a place I would never dare in my consciousness, only in my fevered dream logic. I’m at the playground with my son, and he’s singing his Sunday School song, Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham, I am one of them and so are you…I can hear the Doberman barking madly and I hear the screams of a wounded animal. I run over to the fence and see a sheep trapped in the chain link fence. I watch the Doberman ripping apart the sheep’s flesh, its fur sopping with blood, its throat torn gaping red open. The dog devours the helpless animal. I run back to my son and the clouds abruptly part and the sun shines brightly on him. I feel the handle of a butcher knife in my hand. In what I can only explain as fevered dream logic I realize looking at my son with the sun shining brightly on him that to sacrifice him is not to hate him but to love him more intensely than I have ever known. It is not to take life away from him but to spare him from the trauma and ugliness of it. Why leave it to chance? Why leave him to be eaten by wolves? Why not let the loving hand of his father who gave him life now take it in a sacrificial death? God sacrificed his only son. Why not become one with God? In my dream it makes perfect sense to me as I run the blade of the knife into his stomach and open up his belly dumping out his vital organs.
****
I wake in Silas’s bed, covered in sweat. I’m shaking. I run out of our house in my black work pants and a t-shirt soaked with sweat and watermelon juice and I’m halfway to the park running down the walking path before I even notice that I’m holding the butcher knife that I cut the watermelon with and that the handle is sticky and that there’s a salty sweet taste on my lips I can’t escape from the images of my dream and I know that it is much more than a night terror that it is a vision something more like a prophecy than a dream a burden given to those who are sensitive to the spiritual aspect of existence who believe that life is not something chaotic and random that it is not just something corporeal that it is not just about self-actualization and pleasure and happiness but that there are sacrifices to make that life doesn’t necessarily always fit into the neatly constructed models of simple cause and effect that sometimes we have no choice at all to exert over situations that sometimes all we can do is to realize that we are taking part in something that is greater than ourselves something we don’t understand something that has predestined us before we could even speak and I’m realizing this as I’m running towards the park and I can hear the Doberman barking behind the chain-link fence and this time I’m almost daring him to jump it as I have a knife now and I’m searching for my son I know he’s here and as I round the corner of the last house I have an unobstructed view of the park and I see against the flawless blue sky my son hanging from the swings his neck bent at a terrible angle and the swing’s chain is wrapped around his tiny neck and his body is blowing in the wind and I can see in the distance North beyond the trees that a dark and cruel storm is blowing in.
