Aftermath of Dreaming(113)



At least Reggie is fanatical about his phone messages. Maybe before he gets home, he’ll check from a pay phone, then drive over here. Please, God. I wish Andrew’s arms were holding me in a way that never lets go even when the arms have to.

I curl up on my couch, retreating into it as far back as I can. Like I’m on a precipice from the world’s unendurable drop. The wet, now warm towel is pressed to my lips. It’s no longer doing any good, but it’s comforting, like holding on to a rail.

I can feel my mind trying to back up and move away from this knowledge that it doesn’t want to know. And the knowledge has started moving everywhere inside me, rerouting itself to reach my body’s cells, but they are in flight—shooting every which way before this information can catch them. They don’t want to know that the two who made them—made me—are dead and gone. Life is not an inextinguishable right. Both of my parents are no longer here, therefore one day, neither will I be and vaporized into where?

I stare across the living room and find minuscule safety in this position, so I hold the gaze, not ever dropping it, while waiting and hoping and praying for my phone to ring, for Reggie to be here, for anything to happen that could somehow obliterate this demise, to see someone who has one parent left, who can still sometimes lie to themselves that the end doesn’t come whenever it decides.



I still haven’t heard from Reggie. It’s been twenty-four hours since I left my swollen-lip jumbled message on his machine. Could something’ve happened to him, too? Jesus, not a one-two punch of tragedy, I think as I dial. As I leave Reggie another message, the speaking reopens my lip and blood comes pouring out. The Band-Aid I put on feels oppressive, a reminder of the risk from any communication I make.

I have just hung up the phone when it rings, so I answer it quickly, hoping it’s him immediately calling back.

“Our father’s been dead to me for a very long time,” Suzanne says. “This changes nothing as far as I’m concerned.”

Then why’d you sound so flipped out when you told me? I want to ask, but don’t because it is difficult to keep thoughts in my head long enough for a second sentence to follow a first.

“So, no, I don’t want to do some kind of service with you,” my sister continues. “I’ve moved on already.”

How very efficient of you, I think as we get off the phone, having nothing more to say to each other, though volumes are being transmitted by the sheer act of our hanging up.

My body is beaten up and stiff from the crumpled pose I stayed in on the couch all night long, and my lips are swollen and throbbing red. I can feel my entire body’s internal width and depth fully defined by the aching and soreness. I’m hungry without appetite; exhausted without sleepiness.



My mind is stuck. It recoils from what it knows, then moves awkwardly ahead when I have to speak or perform a task. Backward and forward in a herky-jerky mode. I am frightened that if I don’t somehow jar myself, I’ll stay in this disconnected to-and-fro groove. I need to talk, to walk, to move through a prescribed course of events, and see the specific sight I never have before, my father in a coffin, for my mind to believe and interpret this event. I need family.



On the fifth day since Daddy died, or since I found out that he died, and having still not heard from Reggie—has he suddenly decided to drop me and is using my father’s death as a particularly grisly event to coincide?—so lumping his absence into the barren tundra that is my mind, I decide to go to a funeral from afar. I have no choice. I don’t know anyone here who has recently died, and that’s a dreadful invitation to want, so it will have to be a stranger’s and I’ll just keep my distance, like some bad TV movie where the killer appears at the funeral but conspicuously far from the grave.

Which is a bit how this feels—a killer of parts of me that I didn’t know even existed before. A cellular longing for my father. An inability to comprehend that he is truly and completely gone. A terror has set in inside me that with him out of this world, I have been unleashed into a void that I won’t return from. But at least choosing the outfit for this function is easy: black skirt, black shirt, and black shoes I won’t topple over in. Balance has been an issue these past few days, though I guess the lack of sleep and food could have something to do with that. Gloria brought me a fruit salad yesterday. She saw me haggard and bleary at the mailbox, so I told her why before she could imagine the usual reason for that physical state in this town. Though I’d take hungover whore over grieving daughter any day.

I have no idea if there even is a funeral today, but in a city this large, I figure someone has to have died recently. But just the thought of checking the newspaper or making a call to find one exhausts me, so I find a cemetery nearby and hope for the best. Or worst, I should say.

The Normandy cemetery is one of the oldest in Los Angeles. A huge leaping sprawl of land near the 10 by downtown, its sepulture services aren’t as fashionable as Forest Lawn’s are in Burbank near Warner Brothers and Disney, but giant pine tree branches roam above the graves, a wind is blowing gently, and cobblestone walks twist and sort themselves throughout, taking me past families who have long since dissolved.

The first headstones I study are old and settled into the earth as if the person they represent was meant for nothing more than to claim this land and prevent modernity from growing here. The distance between me here and them there via the death dates is oddly comforting, a silent somber notice of time’s impersonal march.

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