Waterworld
We’d left the ski hill, where my son has snowboard lessons that his mom, my ex-wife, pays for, and were sitting in the car at a red light, thawing out, when a woman performing on the radio in an advertisement for some unknown service or product said, with a high degree of false conviction, It just seems like I can’t go on. A self-assured man announced something after her. Then there was music, jazz music, a medicated trumpet, long oxy notes.
My son said in this new voice of his, this desperate adult voice, full of playful mockery, It just seems like I can’t go on. I laughed and he laughed and we laughed together in a way I had forgotten laughter could sound and feel. It just seems like I can’t go on, I said, trying out something with my own delivery, a begging, a pleading, but aware and a little ironic, and he peeled off a laugh that sounded like something from a laugh-track, from a sitcom, and I laughed again, too, now more at his laugh.
My knee, my MCL, I’d torn long ago on a halfpipe after a half-assed attempt at a Christ Air. It hurt when I transitioned abruptly from cold to hot, and so it hurt then, in the car. I kneaded the inside of it with my thumb.
My son asked if there was a war happening. I said, Probably somewhere. He said, Isn’t there a war happening between Vermont and Paris? I don’t know, I said. I don’t think so. One’s a state and one’s a city in France. Bernie Sanders is from Vermont, I said. Burning Sanders, he said. Yeah, Burning Spear, I said. Yeah, Britney Spears, he said. Yeah, I said. We laughed. It was dark out, and the superhighways were blown over with snow fallen from a black sky. Enough of a pause for it again—again he said, It just seems like I can’t go on. We laughed some more in an even deeper way, and I looked in the rearview mirror at this boy with his hood up, his face in shadow, an unopened Twix in his lap, beside him all the bar towels I accidentally walk out of work with every night piled up into a mass that looks peaty and alive.
The inside of the car smelled like the bar, but even sadder, because it’s not supposed to smell like that. I’d had a few shots and a couple lines over my shift, but was flatlining now, becoming agitated, angry, and irrational, the way my father would get, and his father, and his father, and his father, and so on and so on, which is how I figured my child would eventually turn out to be—all of us sons of some terrible thing. My ex-wife was an advocate of meetings, therapy, retreats, ancient grains, raw liver, the arrangement of stars, special plants, vitamins, sunshine, affirmations, and starting each day anew. I’d humor her once in a while, but I knew it was all bullshit.
We slipped off the highway and lit through a series of strip malls and the grounds of the facility that manufactures ammunitions, past the smoke shop and the Subway and the elementary school with the concrete dragon featured on the playground that I no longer pointed out to my son because he was no longer afraid of it, until we arrived at my apartment, landing in the spot that someone in the complex had once decorated with a swastika done in pink spray paint.
In the back seat my son appeared to be sleeping. He looked dead in the rearview mirror. I thought maybe it was possible to overcome impossible things, a dead child, for instance, if all the conditions were absolutely perfect and you were a certain kind of person. Of course, they never were, and I wasn’t this certain kind of person. It just seems like I can’t go on, I whispered. This isn’t funny anymore, I thought. But then I saw him crack a smile without opening his eyes. The heater blasted my aching knee. I looked forward to the painkillers I kept beneath my pillow, watching Waterworld on my laptop for the third night in a row, and falling into something wavy and dark blue that was supposed to be like sleep. My son was old enough to be okay on the couch. There were quilts and blankets. I’d stocked the freezer with frozen waffles and bought butter and the most expensive maple syrup they had. There were bottles of vitaminwater in the fridge. For the night, at least, he’d be fine. He still hadn’t opened his eyes.
Hey, I said. Still he wouldn’t open his eyes. Hey, we’re home.
The lights on the dash died when I turned off the car, enclosing us in darkness. I reached out for a vent I thought might still be warm. It was. But then, so quickly, it wasn’t. The soreness in my knee had dissipated. We sat for a while in the cold, in silence, our silver breath composing the air.
I can’t get this open, he said. It was the Twix bar. Here, I said, let me. My fingers trembled in a minor way. The gold and chrome of the wrapper shimmered. There must have been light from somewhere to make it shine like that. Just a little light. From the moon, maybe. Possibly from one of the parking lot’s security lights. We shared the Twix bar. I’d forgotten what they tasted like. It was amazing.
