Homeland Elegies(65)

Barely a month after our breakup, I awoke in my childhood bed, the same bed where I’d masturbated for the first time at the age of twelve, and watched in horror as milky fluid pumped forth from my penis, unexpected, and I, convinced that I’d irrevocably spilled something essential from inside me, pulled off the pillowcase and tried to gather up as much of the sticky mess as possible, in case I might need it for the doctor. I awoke and rose, and as I made my way to the bathroom, I recalled a dim piece of a dream in which my hands had been on fire. At the sink, I turned the faucet knobs and felt an uneven, chalky thickness along my fingers. I turned my hands over to find a stippling of copper lumps across my palms. I was certain I knew what I was looking at. In college, I’d written a paper about Shakespeare’s late obsession with syphilis—“limekilns i’ the palm”—and had spent a long afternoon at the campus medical library, transfixed by the color plates showing pages of variations of the dusky-red palmar rash common to the disease.

Downstairs, my father was bent over a small saucepan in the kitchen, stirring the medley of breakfast tea leaves, cardamom pods, and skim milk that, once strained, had forever been his daily morning brew.

“Hey, Dad.”

“You want some tea?” he asked. He sounded exhausted. He’d been sleeping on the couch beside her for weeks now, up every few hours to feed her pills or porridge. The circles under his eyes were dark and deep.

“No, thanks. How’s she doing?”

“Same old. About time for the new dose.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

“No, I mean—can I talk to you in the garage…”

“You want to talk in the garage?”

“Yes.”

I bypassed the pantry for the mudroom and looked back. “Please?” He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head and switched off the stove fire. As he came up behind me, I reached for the door handle, but then stopped myself. I wasn’t sure if I should touch it.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Could you, uh, open it?”

“You’re standing right there…”

“Could you please just open it? I’ll explain in a second.” I moved to make room for him. With another irritated look, he reached across me and pulled the door open.

The garage had no cars in it—Father’d gotten rid of Mother’s car some time ago and left his own in the driveway out front. Piles of domestic debris lined the oil-stained bay, a cargo of never-quite-discarded things: the first television (small, black-and-white) my parents had bought in this country; an old microwave without a door whose inside walls were thick with years of curry splatter; dismantled table and box fans; suitcases filled with the saris and shawls and shalwars my mother would buy on her trips to Pakistan and never wear when she came home; the Apple IIe on which I wrote my first short story and the printer into which I’d fed the ream of perforated paper it was printed on; my dead brother’s tricycle; his shattered fish tank; a quartet of torn bike wheels taken from as many ten-speed and twelve-speed family bikes; an enormous ’50s-era Texaco sign saved from the gas station in Baraboo my father once owned; yard tools, toolboxes, a rusting rotary saw no one had used in years; an Atari video-game console and two plastic bags filled with game cartridges; crates upon crates of expired coolant and motor oil and Snapple iced tea and Listerine my parents bought in bulk during a brief membership at Sam’s Club in the late ’90s before canceling their membership after an altercation with a store manager; the mounds of fishing gear—rods and nets and reels—from my father’s middle-age obsession with freshly caught panfish, deep-fried Lahori style, which delight my mother had enjoyed perhaps even more than my father did; and everywhere below and between this ad hoc history of our family’s life, the rolled-up Persian rugs, wrapped in moth crystals and plastic, the relic of my father’s bizarre passion for purchasing and smuggling into this country the contraband carpets for which he never found any use. I nudged the light switch on with my elbow and led him into the lurid pool of light beneath the single yellow bulb, showing him my hands.

“Huh,” was all he said as he held my wrists, turning them back and forth gently as he studied my palms.

“Looks like syphilis, doesn’t it?”

“Syphilis?” he said, astonished. “Are you sleeping with prostitutes?”

“I mean, no…”

“So why do you think it’s syphilis?”

“That’s what it looks like. I mean, doesn’t it?”

“What do you know what it looks like?”

“I don’t know, Dad—I wrote a paper about it in college. I’m just saying…”

“Paper? About syphilis?”

“And Shakespeare.”

“He had syphilis?”

“Some people think he did. Yeah.”

“Is that right?” I’d never seen him so fascinated by anything I’d ever said about Shakespeare before.

“Anyway, I’m just saying—doesn’t it look like a syphilis rash?”

“Could be. Haven’t seen a case since medical school. And the only time I ever see this kind of thing now is with bacterial endocarditis.”

“What’s that?”