You: The Final Fiction (ongoing), which explores life as a criminal and then a writer. In both you work alone and must accept risk. Failure is devastating.
You: The Final Fiction
Always beginning again, searching reasons. My father and I hated each other. Until the nursing home. On my rare visits—an escort activating the elevator to the secure third floor, a conversation with a shadow through a partition grill, signing to check out my father like a library book, then wheeling him to the gated courtyard—I call him dad. I’d never done that as an adult. His dementia makes that intimacy one-sided, performance, a way of testing what he and I lost with our emotional estrangement after my first arrest at age 18 and, Never thought haveta see a son of mine in jail.
“Dad …” (To find mutual ground I take us decades back. I’m a kid.) “Dad, remember the Rock River? Grandma’s. The walk from the stone house through a field of butterflies. Remember that summer day I drowned?”
For a moment his quick focus convinces me that a gleam of recognition pierced the mental fog—I know this human, he belongs to my life. But then he fists fabric at his pajama crotch and tugs, separating from his thighs the uncomfortable soggy circle where he peed himself.
“Sir, can you take me home? I’m not supposed to be here.”
* * *
After novels and stories and plays and poems—decades of this—I’ve chosen to use my tools to create myself in a clothing of words. Another way to lie: Look how I’m dressed! But finally I’m visible. In my attic workroom the floor slopes to the low, west window. During daily stints at the desk, I catch myself leaning a few degrees left to counteract the skewed floor. No surprise that I’ve developed back problems to go along with the new terror of facing words on the screen that betray the secret my life has been for nearly 40 years.
I don’t have writer’s block, I have writer’s wilderness, a dizzy panic at having sown too many words of make believe to ever now find my way from the forest to some clearing where another person might recognize me. Hey, I know you!
My niece gave me a handful of marbles I use as worry beads. Drop one and it rolls to the window. West is the direction of pull at my age—days dying with me. Sunset. Dark. While fingers pause above the keyboard as I mull over how much to confess, my eyes turn to that window where the sun right now is painting the floorboards yellow.…
pause
As a writer I know that moment in the nursing home is heartbreaking. Good start for my audience. As a son I feel nothing.