In a hospital room with no character, no sign that any person worth imbuing with a name or face had ever been there or was currently in the bed in the corner, Laura watched a man to whom she had barely spoken, but who she knew she would love like a father if she could have more practice, show her the Torah, letter by letter, as his estranged wife glared at her from eyes that would shed bullet casings instead of tears. Laura knew that if she could keep her body together for sixty more years and let her mind wander without supervision, she would become Robert, who was hunched upright in bed with little left in him but blood and a minute-steak layer of muscle that you could read under his skin like tea leaves. A slow hurricane of fluids was flowing to his lungs, and he had admitted that he'd come to the hospital to have it drained out, away from the embarrassingly watchful eyes of his brothers, with whom he shared a house despite their advanced age.
"People say 'Yahweh' or 'Jehovah,' but that's cheating. The name is not to be pronounced! Man can't know how! The first symbol, this here," pointing with his witchy finger at his customized golden Torah, "is 'Yod.'"
His wife sputtered. "Robert, she has no idea what you're talking about. She doesn't care about any of this." The wife, grey through and through, hadn't spoken to Laura since hello, and it wasn't clear who Robert had told her was coming to visit him, or what their relationship was. He brushed her away without looking up. Laura knew that love had died for them a long time ago, and that they did not live together or speak when there wasn't an emergency. He treated her presence like it was the bubbles of distracting thought that rise in meditation, like she was an eternal part of him that didn't agree with his effort toward self.
"I'm trying to follow along. I find this very interesting," Laura said. The grey wife scrunched her mouth and looked out of the window at the hospital courtyard, at the edge of which was a statue of Ronald McDonald with his arms wide open. It was the last thing that a lot of people ever saw, and was not cleaned regularly.
The grey wife seemed so fed up with Robert that Laura assumed she'd fallen out of love with him when he became the man who Laura had learned to love (not as a partner to long for but as the bend in space that he was, allowing her to see her own back a thousand yards ahead while it turned a corner). Robert loved Laura because she was the only person around who had a solid row of teeth and a twitchless countenance who was able to return his volleys of conspiracy jargon. She was a cashier at the grocery store where he bought green juice and alfalfa sprout sandwiches daily, and Laura felt like she was melting away her sore professional facade and coming clean, being freed, when she finally admitted to him that she, too, was worried that microchips were being secretly placed in children during inoculations. He told her that she was going to be "one of the last hopes in a drifting generation of perpetually entertained shallow idiots," and she told him that his kind of mania was the thing she was most afraid of losing from herself. The grey wife had known him before he thought that way. He had been a motorcyclist, a criminal, a backwoods drunk, and for that she had surely loved him. She looked like she hated the yarmulke-wearing paranoiac who'd eaten her rebel man.
A few weeks earlier, just after the Sun turned everything pink while it settled into the lakes to the West, Robert held up the line at the grocery store longer than usual. "Some of the countries they get this coconut water from can't be trusted. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't drink regular water these days. All of the stuff in the bottle has no life in it, the city's water is filled with metal, and the rivers around here are all sewage. I still see people fish in them, though."
"The coconut water has electrolytes, too, that's pretty good."
"I don't need much of that. I barely sweat at all because I can't move more than two feet without having to sit down and cough. I'm going to Costa Rica to see a doctor who does some interesting things and may be able to help me, and I might retire there because it's so cheap. I at least want to be gone for the Winter. My brothers are living in Ohio, right now, so I need some things taken care of around the house before I go. Normally they would do it all because they're a little younger than me. Not by much, but enough that they can move around. Would you be interested in coming to help me move some things in my house?" The people in line behind him no longer knew if they had the right to feel inconvenienced, and Laura said yes to him.
The spirit of charity looms over us so heavily, a specter of expectation, handing every bit of our time that it gathers into the lipless black mouth of death, who is the only one able to validate our giving and turn it into peace. Laura didn't know how to volunteer, or for what cause. When she came home every day she felt like she'd been electrified and fed fluorescent chicken wire for the duration of her work shift, and couldn't get together enough fortitude to even lift her arm from the couch so as to grab her pipe and get stoned. She would try to find the string in her tangle of limp thoughts that could pull on the part of her that had enough power to move her arm, even a little, but it was like every bridge toward will had been cut, and she'd be left screaming and moping inside of a frictionless vacuum of brain. She'd known that if she helped no-one (not counting her probationary community service at the Volunteers of America, where she'd met a fast-talker named Lenny who tried to sell her a bunk lottery ticket for five bucks and then acted like it had paid off big for him when she said no, and Augustus, a quiet cook who had played jazz with the greats and dreamed of the drug pushers around him one day waking up to the words of Marcus Garvey) she would go sour and brown. She waited for Robert to call and save her from Hell while sirens rang perpetually for blocks around her, and the 24-hour auto dealership across the street hosted cocaine deals under its bitter orange sign, and the kids who lived next door to her dared each other to yell under her window that they were going to fuck her up if she came outside.
When he called her and gave his address, telling her to come over any time that evening, she found a jacket that didn't smell like smoke, in a box of things she'd never gotten out the stairwell to her black mold infested basement. She told her cat, Luke, that she was going to meet a new friend.
Luke, named for Cool Hand Luke, had jumped out of the some bushes at Laura with his two siblings when he was a scrappy kitten. Laura'd been walking home from a cheap Italian restaurant where she washed dishes and stirred enormous pots of ricotta while cocaine-addled chefs yelled at her that she was made of garbage, was only allowed to eat garbage, and had an ass that they'd only lick if they'd had too much cheap cognac, so to see three grey malnourished kittens walk up to her was enough to make her want to move to the country so she could give them fields to play in, and herself a chance to heal from the heat and indignity of her life. She named them on the spot: Luke, the leader of the bunch; JB, for James Brown, because she kept trying to "get on up" Laura's lap; Shycat, who stayed on the periphery of the circle they'd formed together. After staying with them on the sidewalk for nearly a half hour, unable to walk away from the only tender beings she'd encountered in a few dense and raw years, Laura stood up and said "I don't know if you guys have homes. You sure don't look like it, so if you want to come with me, I live a few blocks away." They all followed her until Shycat got scared at an intersection and stayed behind. Laura promised herself that she would come back for him, but that maintaining the flow of cat travel was more important in the short run. Luke and JB came home, where she locked them in the bathroom with a dish full of taco meat. Looking around the neighborhood while crying steadily in loss and the guilt of negligence, Laura realized that Shycat had vanished into another life and would always be the one that got away.
The cats had been covered in fleas, and the bugs bred so rapidly in the house that Laura couldn't have anyone over because their clothes would become egg hostels in minutes. She'd been in a confusing relationship with a veterinary assistant who seemed to be sleeping with his roommate but found Laura funny enough to hang out with every day but never touch, and he was so disgusted by the onslaught of fleas that he said he could never come back to her house because she was being cruel to the cats by not taking action. He'd made her feel like a fool, so she felt twice as incapable of reason or growth when she realized that she was desperate to have him back once he really disappeared, even though he had hardly been anything but a blindfolded bystander onto whom she'd tacked a sign saying "boyfriend." She piled her dirty laundry around the periphery of her bed, so high that most fleas couldn't jump over the wall, and would leap over with the cats in her hands. JB eventually got sick, so much so that it was worrisome. Laura still couldn't move. She thought she didn't have any money with which to get flea spray, even though she could see the pizza boxes and empty packs of cigarettes piling around her as she blew her blood money by supplementing her weed habit with cheese and self-loathing. When JB started to spend all day under the couch, moaning in agony, Laura called her Mom and got forty dollars so that she could go to the vet and get some cheap pesticide. There's a type of chrysanthemum-based spray that is toxic to fleas, but not cats or humans, and when the fleas were nowhere to be found a few hours after she sprayed the last can of it she felt the sudden zoom-lens perspective of somebody who missed getting hit by a semi truck by a few inches. Not long after that, she pulled JB out from under the couch to show her that the house was safe again, but JB's moaning had turned to gurgling, and she stiffened all at once like a dark yawn in Laura's arms and died. The fleas had been too much for too long, and little James Brown, who was always softer and less hearty than Cool Hand Luke, had died of infections and anemia. The vet helped Laura bury JB in a shoebox in the front yard, and she would never stop wondering when some neighbor's dog would dig that shallow grave up.
Every time Laura looked at Luke she saw herself killing his sister, slowly and knowingly, by watching cartoons, listening to sad music, and denying herself what little strength was required to make a fair bid at responsibility, so she treated him like a prince and let him do whatever he wanted. If Luke didn't want to use the litterbox, he didn't have to. If he wanted to knock everything off of the top of the fridge, it was fine because he'd watched his sister be bled to death in front of him by an army of alien creatures under the command of the woman who claimed to care for him, so of course he was a little imbalanced. All of her friends thought that he was a jerk cat, but couldn't deny that Laura treated him as such an equal that he seemed to have a command of the English language, a sense of humor, and opinions about everything going on around him. He would jump onto her shoulder and stay perched there if she clapped her hands twice and said "time to be a gay pirate," and his distaste in cruel people, even those whose pathologies went long undetected by their friends, was so obvious that Laura could use him like a smoke detector to beep at sulfurous souls who made it into her house. She told him she was going to visit Robert and he walked to his food bowl.
"You're going to make it through this evening, buddy, don't worry."
Laura defeated the purpose of finding a smokeless jacket by getting into her car, which was a Volvo ashtray running dangerously low on oil. She didn't know if Robert would ever need a ride anywhere, but hoped he wouldn't because she thought that her car made her look hopelessly indulgent and vile. His neighborhood was five minutes away, two blocks north of the nearest police station (behind which she regularly walked while eating french fries and smoking menthols, trying to taunt the cops by staying within the limits of the law but still being a bothersome ominous rebel), and when she arrived she saw him in the front seat of his own car which, like hers, was a station wagon. Through the driver's side window of his parked car she could see that he was reading a big book. After she got his attention, he waved her into the passenger side.
"Hi, Robert. Why are you out here in the cold?" He was nothing, with no discernible body fat, and the brutal Michigan Winter was only a few weeks away.
"It's good for me to be out like this," he said with a lisp that he got from his beard curling into his mouth, "You know those people who swim in ice water? The polar bear people? It's good for your blood. Have you ever read the Torah?"
Laura had. She'd seen the Dead Sea Scrolls with her parents and bought a copy of the Old Testament in the gift shop in order to try to connect the Judeo-Christian worldview, which previously she'd seen as a con perpetrated on a perennial stream of lovable buffoons across time, with a sense of living history, and of the need that people felt to protect documents which they saw as revolutionary. She couldn't discern between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Constitution any longer, which left her feeling less like Judaism was a noble nation and more like America was a cult centered around inanimate paper. None of this mattered in the face of Robert's question, though, because he was a Chosen person within her life, whose light she recognized plainly as a sign that she was not isolated in a hell realm populated by styrofoam people who had risen out of the infinite mirage to distract her as she went limp in tar.
"Yes, I have."
"It was written by people wiser than we can imagine, and there's no part of it that's an accident. I know smart men who have studied this book their whole lives, and it always unveils new things to them."
"Sometimes I think that the key to a good spiritual text is that it can act like a mirror for everything."
"Not just a mirror- a light. Everything else is the mirror. The book is the living shape of the creator, because until we can understand what it's trying to tell us we're looking at the world with eyes that we haven't been taught how to use. We speak with minds that have no wisdom, which is the only thing that gives a brain any purpose." The Sun was almost set and frost was webbing along the window's of Robert's car. Laura saw that he wasn't wearing any gloves and got him to come inside with her.
His house was mostly an artifact. Though his life had likely peaked in its creature comforts during the sixties or seventies, most of the furniture and wall dressings were well-preserved antiques from the thirties and forties. Pale pictures of aging German ancestors with blushed cheeks and tight frowns lined the walls, and as Robert named them each, grandfathers and aunts, Laura realized that they'd all shared this home, and it was kept as if any one of them could come home that night, though they'd died not long after those photos had been taken, decades ago. Some things had been added in recent years, and under tasseled lampshades lay remotes for video players and cable boxes. Above the rusting gas stove that had been built just after the depression was a sleek black microwave with special settings for chicken, popcorn, frozen veggies, thawing turkey, etc. Modernity was an infection sprung up in pustulant devices across the face of that domestic museum.
Their tour never made it upstairs because Robert needed to sit down in an easy chair and catch his breath, which made a sound like a sink draining that Laura tried to catch every detail of and store carefully in her memory because it was the realest emblem of death that she could imagine, and she needed to remind herself that her body was precious and would shatter from within as her veins turned to glass and the weight of her vice crushed and ground them for years. She would be unable to escape the interminable suffering of the end of her days, but pain was so unreal to her, now, that tapping into fear and humility was a pointless exercise that made her feel dumber and more thankless whenever she tried it. The severity of human helplessness was written in a foreign tongue of decay and trial that couldn't even touch her ears.
After his lungs cleared, Robert asked her questions all night. He never got around to telling her what she was expected to help him move, or how to feed his cats when he left for Costa Rica, because he was quizzing her on whether she was fully awake. She could feel in the breadth of his questions that he wanted to penetrate her full potential to transcend her age, touch upon eternal truths, and be armed for a centered and dutiful life. She could not tell if she was passing the test or not, since her answers were just dead words in aesthetically pleasing rhetorical arrangements, and had nothing to do with the way she lived her life or treated people. "God allows everything to see, but also allows darkness, so people with anger and ignorance still receive blessings and permission to be how they want, but their disbelief and poison don't affect the truth at all," she said to him, looking him in the eyes, remembering how a week ago a friend had told her that he was always afraid when he heard that she was coming by because her words were so wrathful that he felt he had to hide his thoughts so that she wouldn't beat him into shame.
Laura had seen polished new SUVs with custom paint jobs down the street from Robert's house when she pulled up, which meant that his neighborhood had drug dealers in it. Half of her friends sold drugs in petty quantities and types, rarely more than a bottle of pills getting meted out to a few collegiate buyers or ten sheets of acid that happened to roll through town, but it was constant and somebody was always on the fickle throne of possession. A custom SUV in Lansing meant that you were dealing heavier quantities than that, usually powdered or crystalline and enough to make you paranoid to the point where she didn't go near houses with those cars in the driveways because an iota of errant eye contact with a meth dealer in a small residential area was enough for them to assume that you had 911 pre-dialed on your phone and were ready to press Send. Near the end of high school she'd taken to getting most of her weed from a gangbanger who lived in the apartment complex that she always noticed getting shot up on the news, which happened to be four blocks North of where her parents lived and like a whole other world. The dealer was a Haitian kid named Pierre who had nothing behind his eyes at all and made her feel like he was always sizing her up to figure out whether he'd be better off selling her for two grand, raping her for the sake of his afternoon, or killing her because she couldn't be trusted after seeing his face. When she was on foot, coming from a friend's house in the area, he'd have her meet him in his SUV outside of the basketball courts and he'd take her for a drive around the neighborhood for what he thought was a reasonable amount of time to establish that they'd been running innocent errands. When she did have her car he'd make her wait for him, often for five times longer than he'd said it was supposed to take, while the people playing basketball (mostly kids who she hoped didn't know better, but sometimes fathers and uncles who she thought could see straight into her desperate pothead eyes and tell that she was feeding off of the drug-stained wound on the side of their community) stared through her windshield and she pretended to be busy texting someone.
Robert didn't seem to care that his neighborhood had people running guns in it and handing off grams of heroin stuffed into open packages of candy, even though he'd lived there for so long that he had watched all of that settle over the tire swings and clotheslines that had tried to make their peaceful claim. Like any elder who doesn't become embittered, his aim was to harbor knowledge that could help the people around him, and not to observe or judge them. Laura was still very bothered that she had realized, after moving into her house, that the landlord hadn't pointed out that the back door showed signs of having been forced open with a crowbar multiple times. She couldn't look up from the sidewalk when she came home every night without somebody yelling from a moving car that they were going to make her love their dick, so she didn't allow herself to spend much time trying to figure out the people around her. It wasn't so much a community in her eyes as an irradiated jungle with random shapeless threats everywhere. No matter what she thought about the infinite peace of a living universe, she had to put on thick dirty coats and contort her face into a violent look in order to make it to the gas station to buy smokes. When you can only survive by acting insane, and the act of survival takes everything out of you, the insanity becomes real very fast. Robert was insane by most people's standards, with his obsession with psychic surgery and the New World Order, but he seemed at peace with himself, and she needed to get closer to him to find out whether he was what happened when you broke, or when you metamorphosed.
"I don't worry about who they're going to assassinate, ever. There's no use. They can kill anyone in a second and it'll look like a heart attack or sunstroke."
"So if there's a leader around who it seems like these capitalist guys in power don't like, should we just assume that if he's not dead it's because they actually want him around, for some reason?"
"I don't know. It's so complicated, there are so many levels of lies for them to use that you can never know if they're doing something by not doing something, or doing it to make it look like they tried not to do it but they had no choice. It's all a game, though, to make it look like the money is in danger."
She wanted to tell him that he didn't have to go to Costa Rica because she would take care of him, but she didn't think that she could help but neglect any living thing that came into her arms. She didn't want to have to explain to a whole family of strangers that she hadn't been able to tell when Robert's constant cough had finally gotten out of hand. She wasn't even sure if you were supposed to get an icepack when somebody hit their head, or if that made concussions worse. She'd been thinking, a few weeks back, about how she'd react if somebody started choking in a restaurant where she was eating, and it occurred to her that she would use the commotion as an opportunity to grab her food and run so she could save twenty dollars.
"What do you do when you're not at work or reading about all of these things you seem to know so much about?"
She was usually scraping resin out of a pipe and hitting reload on the weak internet that she was siphoning from her neighbors, waiting an hour to load a ten minute video of grotesque car wrecks, after which she would stare at her ceiling while Luke clawed welts into her arm, and then try to scrape together enough change to go next door and buy a beer with nickels. What she told Robert instead was the truth of how she wanted to spend her days. "I have a keyboard, and I practice piano a lot. I want to have more time to explore that."
"Oh, really? There's a piano over here." He pointed to a pile of old linens that she could now see was obscuring a white piano with filthy keys.
"Does one of you play?"
"I've never seen anybody play it since my Aunt Merrill. Are you doing anything this Winter? Do you have anywhere you're going?"
Laura shook her head.
"Maybe you can stay here while I'm in Costa Rica, and take care of some of the things we talked about, and you can play piano as much as you want."
She couldn't get out of her lease, but paying rent on one house and getting to live in another didn't seem like a problem. "That's very generous, Robert, I'd love to. Do you think your family would be okay with it?"
"I don't see why not. They're almost never here. What do they care about some old house?"
Laura's head was bathed in floodlights from the future the rest of that night, and she couldn't remember another word that Robert said. The thought of being away from her lifeless home, with its empty second bedroom in which she let Luke piss freely, and its assortment of amateur paintings and prayer flags that didn't make that cheap white box feel any decent than if she'd left the walls bare, gave her hope for some time to breathe. Robert's neighborhood was no better than hers and his house smelled just as much like cat food and rotting wood, but his house was saturated with the energy of a family. Her house had the aura of an indictment, with each empty can and broken VHS tape on which she'd stepped during a mushroom trip standing on a tribunal against her. She was a stereotype living inside of a stereotype, and Robert's house had been filled by people who loved either themselves or each other, and even though she couldn't reach that point she could still fill it on her skin when she was in his living room. His stacks of old magazines told a story of life's progression, though her piles of books proved that she was a gutter intellectual with a self-destructive bent.
It wasn't long after that before Robert called her from the hospital, which she took badly until he pointed out that it happened every couple of weeks. Laura wasn't surprised that Robert's wife didn't take to her, since hospital rooms tend to separate people centrifugally by their status in somebody's life. He was staying in Sparrow Hospital, where she was born 22 years before and had screamed so bitterly on arriving that the doctor's first words to Laura's Mom were "Here's your daughter, and boy is she pissed," which Laura felt had been an amateurish mistake on the doctor's part because like many first impressions it seemed to have stuck, granting her an ongoing sense that she was brought forth in order to be a great curmudgeon. During Laura's middle school years her Mom sat her down at breakfast and said "There's no easy way to say this so I'll just say it, and let you know that it shouldn't be a big problem and I'm 99 percent sure that in a month it'll be like it never happened: I have cervical cancer." When Laura told the kids in band class, later that morning, they didn't believe her until she was red in the face. She'd told too many grim jokes and now "cancer" was worth less than a punchline. After a life of relative health, Laura's second time in Sparrow hospital was for her Mother's hysterectomy, after which her normally booming and witchy voice was reduced to a wet whisper that Laura heard again a few years later while taking bong rips alone in a strange house where she was dog-sitting and watching TV static because she'd never had satellite TV and didn't know how to turn it on. In the swelling and hallucinatory roiling of the grey fuzz she saw a solid three-dimensional form of a crab extend out, and heard in a barely audible rasp under the waves of distortion her mother's dying, post-cancerous voice say "oh, honey. Oh, oh honey," clearly in mortal tears. Laura turned the TV off and ran downstairs to hack the cork out of one of her host's treasured wine bottles with a kitchen knife, filling the wine with chunks of cork, and downed the bottle fast while chain smoking on the back porch and watching the stately women next door close their windows from the smell and cock back their empty heads to judge her, but she couldn't sleep after watching her Mom die in static. A couple of years later she made friends with a twitchy pill-head with good intentions and a giving spirit, named Jeff, whose family had given him a house down the street from Sparrow on Bingham, which he promptly let degenerate into a flophouse filled with disease and plagued by power outages from nonpayment, where Laura was always welcome. In the rare days when Jeff was sober and at odds with his train-hopping painkiller addicted friends he would clean the place up and reign quietly over it with his mousy girlfriend and Australian shepherd, and in those days his home was Laura's sanctuary. She loved playing third wheel, sitting in the corner and playing jet ski video games while the couple did the dishes in the next room. She felt that being the random addition to a strong connection between two people was the perfect social situation to nuzzle into, because they always needed respite from the tension resulting from their constant contact, and she could treat them like a pair of talking kittens that slept on top of each other and would give her an extra dollar if she got them something when she went to the liquor store. Not to mention that couples were more likely to cook a little more and throw it her way. When Jeff went off the wagon, moved his pool table back in from the yard, and started mumbling all night every night, eyes half-shut, to a room full of banjo-playing alcoholics who he called "my habibis," Laura came around a little less but would stop by every few nights to take her eyes off of herself. It was hard to commit to the parties when she stopped doing hard drugs and the bills at Bingham House had gone unpaid for so long that everybody was living five to a room, shitting in buckets, and the dog's eye had clouded over with airborne bacteria. The craftiest and least scrupulous underachieving narcissists in the bunch would go over to Sparrow every night to steal toilet paper and the contents of the cigarette butt depositories by the bench where patients waited for shuttles. Laura never walked onto Sparrow's property that whole time, in part because she assumed that hospitals had good security, but deeper within she knew that she thought her Mother would be able to see forwards in time, during either childbirth or the removal of her tumorous womb, and watch her daughter digging around in a pile of ashes and picking the locks on the bathroom soap dispensers. The third time she went to Sparrow was when Mr. Kongtrul, her favorite substitute teacher from high school, was laid up with the umpteen-thousandth surgery he'd undergone for his scrambled guts, which were missing pieces and enlarged at all of the critical junctions. It was a miracle that he had lived past ten, but the price for that miracle was persistent pain that gave him eyes like an orphaned rabbit in cold rain. Kongtrul also had an estranged wife who walked into the room five minutes after Laura had and looked at her like she thought Laura'd walked in off of the streets to sell patients magazine subscriptions. Laura gave Kongtrul a collage she'd made for the cover of his next poetry book, and then remembered that his wife was a celebrated landscape painter in the area, and probably thought that a magazine cut-and-paste was a chump move to try to get her husband's attention. There had never been any hotness for professor when Laura knew Kongtrul, and in fact they'd almost never been in the same room together. He taught one of her classes and then they communicated from that point on through email diary entries. They shared a love of trying to reduce the world to an amber haze of Godly sentimentality, which was exactly what concerned Laura's Dad when he read through her emails and reported Kongtrul to the school board for "inappropriate consorting with students, demonstrating the emotional development of a 13-year-old." Her Father said "Laura, when you leave your email logged in a computer, anyone can see it. If you care about a secret like this, you should work harder to protect it." Laura didn't how to explain to a man who had never had any friends that she didn't think it was a secret that she was making one.
When Laura came home from Robert's room in Sparrow she remembered that she'd been ignoring the e-mail from her Dad about when she was going to return his jumper cables. She decided to forget about it for another week, because he never showed her any respect and it didn't matter if jumper cables were the language in which he thought respect was expressed. For her whole life his concerns had been where his headphones went, where his tire iron was, who drank his root beer, why did his car smell like smoke, and a hundred other things that she knew had nothing to do with being a living human and everything to do with being a dull white repressed angry lone gunman type from Ohio who had spent the last fifty years gnawing on the right side of his brain to try to break free from feeling. She wasn't going to give him his jumper cables just so that he could put another check mark in a column that he kept in the justice-fetishizing scorebook in which he'd placed every living human after converting them into their constituent numerical values. It wasn't like he ever made an effort to understand her life, which was a long float in saltwater from one golden life-giving crisis to another. He couldn't respect the chaos of dramatics because it wasn't efficient living, and it involved sentiment and engagement with suffering, which were the signs of being moronically irrational. Laura gave and received respect on the basis of who maintained their spiritual dignity while their minds exploded manically over each other and life became a wind tunnel streaming with trashed gauze. When she'd seen his name on the email earlier in the day she'd remembered how a few weeks ago he'd told her Mom that he was the smartest man he'd ever met, and Laura wanted to tie him down to a chair, beat him in the face with a sturdy whiffle bat, and hold his head back by a fistful of his hair so that he'd have to look her in the eye while she told him "You have to be fucking kidding yourself. You've never felt anything in your life except for things that you only know how to express behind closed doors. You're missing half of your heart and half of your brain and if you think for even a second that anybody is intelligent who doesn't have the hardware for empathy then you are actually the dumbest person you know. Your head is a dried out misfiring encyclopedia with no light that anybody can see it by, so it's useless. And if you ever try to make Mom feel stupid again, just because the only thing that you think you have is the GPA that you held up in college and which you can't realize no longer applies to anything around you, I will cut you and starve you and pray over you until you can't stop crying, and then we will see if you know anything at all."
She did not hate him, and rarely had except for a few weeks at a time, whenever he was at his most robotic and heartless. Her Mother would tell her "he's doing so much better than he used to, you have no idea. The new antidepressants that came on the market not long after you were born changed his life." It was hard to imagine the man who had called her gay when she went to spend time with her friend Poppy in high school, and who had explained that he never watched TV because it was "stupid, and made for stupid people" had been less agreeable, until Laura's Mom pulled out the one videotape of Laura's childhood. Their family had never owned a camera, but had borrowed one in order to film their new daughter and then the tape had been lost in a box in the basement for years. It started off as shots of Laura playing with bricks, hitting a plastic drum with a slide whistle, and crawling to and from everyone seated around the living room during Christmas at their old house (into which her friend Emily from the eighth grade had moved after Laura's family had left when she was three, and which Emily said had been broken into repeatedly for years on end, each time inspiring Emily to hide in the closet of her upstairs room, from which she heard the breaking of glass, creaking of stairs, and the cocking of her father's shotgun as the invaders checked and took it), and halfway through it her Dad appeared for the first time, coming down the stairs with a basket of laundry.
"Look, Edgar, she's getting so good at coloring!" her Mom said from behind the camera.
"Mel, I am preparing to do a second load of laundry. Is there anything that you would like to have included in that before I take the basket downstairs to the machine and it is too late?"
The camera panned from him back down to baby Laura, who was scribbling warbled circles all over a page. "Oh, I don't know, I'll have to take a look in a second. Oh, God, Ed, look at how fast she's going! What a little trooper!"
"Mel," the camera returned to him, "I need you to focus on this right now. Put the camera down and figure out what you need to have added to this load so that everything stays on schedule."
"We only have this camera for another week, I want to get some more footage of her while we can."
"You will have plenty of time to play with your camera after you take care of laundry."
Laura couldn't believe that they hadn't erased the footage, which she felt very bad for having thought because the next day the whole tape was erased when the VCR went through its automated program to tape a daytime talk show. She knew that people had it worse, and that even some of those people had fine relationships with their parents. A lot of folks would have gladly traded the boozy screams of their racetrack Dads for Ed's tireless calculating indifference, and Laura felt petty for not having enough perspective to rise above the pinprick emotions of her almost flatline upbringing in the Midwest. He had never hit her or her Mother, but she knew that he would have beaten her senseless if he had ever spent even a moment in charge of the house. He had the power to bring everyone down, but there was nothing in his life except his work, his perception of his own strength, and Laura's Mother, Melissa, so when Mel told him not to lay a hand on their daughter all of that violence went behind his eyes and taut mouth and stayed there like a pillar of poison in the center of felled woods.