We Are Not Ourselves(152)

“I get the mail.”

“Just like that.”

“I get it every day.”

“But a minute ago you were saying you didn’t trust him. You were totally spooked.”

“He comes every day,” his father said. “I don’t know who he is.”

“He’s the mailman,” Connell said desperately.

“I don’t trust him.”

“Dad,” he said, “he’s the mailman.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“But you know he’s delivering the mail?”

“Yes,” he said reasonably. “He comes every day.”

“So why are you suspicious of him?”

“I don’t know who he is,” he said. “I get the mail every day. That’s my job. I have other jobs.”

He shuffled into the den and sat down. Connell followed him and unmuted the television. The volume shot out like a cannon report. Connell retreated to the kitchen and picked up the fallen letters, wondering when the last time was that his father had opened a piece of mail and whether he’d ever open one again. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The den was drenched in noisy static, and he went in and found his father watching the electronic snow of a lost signal as though it were a program. His father didn’t stir in that crashing noise. He clutched the remote like an amulet. Connell tried to take it from him, but his father had an iron grip on it. Connell went to the television, lowered the volume, and changed the channel until the picture came up.

“This thing,” his father said disgustedly. “It doesn’t work.” His mouth hung open, and a little drool leaked out. Connell used his father’s own shirtsleeve to wipe it up. His father gave him a knowing look. Connell wondered how much awareness still lurked in him. A faint whining hum emanated from him.

“It’s good to see you,” Connell said, throwing an arm around him.

His father kept looking at the television but patted his own knee. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

? ? ?

They watched Columbo. Peter Falk’s Beckettian detective wore his trademark trench coat and screwed up his face in his world-weary, gently bemused way—experience and innocence mingling in him. Connell thought, Thank God for Columbo. Thank God for Law & Order reruns. He didn’t know how he would ever fill the time with his father without television.

When the commercials came on, he had no idea what to say. His mother would ride in on a barge of stories about family friends or simply accounts of her day. Connell felt disrespectful delivering reports from the front lines of experience. He felt a little better talking about things his father knew already or that they had experienced together, but it felt awkward to introduce them into conversation. Still, he could feel it coming, the need to revert to the familiar.

“I have to say I like Paul O’Neill,” Connell pronounced academically. His father continued to look at the television. “I’m not one of those Mets fans who hate a guy like that just to hate him. He’s the heart of that team, a blue-collar worker.” The silence on his father’s end of the exchange was growing desperate. “Yankees or not, it was exciting to have a New York team in the playoffs again.” This last remark seemed to have gotten his father’s attention, because his face brightened into a smile, as though it were news to him; and then Connell realized that it was news to him, even though he’d watched all the playoff games the previous October and Connell had called after every one.

“Yeah!” he said. “Good!”

Connell felt stupid for trying to tread carefully around the old man. It was time to face facts: his father’s short-term memory was shot. He probably didn’t remember anything longer than a few minutes. As soon as Connell left the room, his father wouldn’t even know he had come home in the first place. He wouldn’t have wanted his son to sit around with him on a Friday night; it would have embarrassed him, and Connell didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so he went upstairs to get ready, because there were people he hadn’t seen in a long time.

? ? ?

He still had his first bottle of cologne, which he had made last a few years by dabbing it sparingly, once behind each ear, once on either side of the neck. He had sweated it out on dance floors and left its trace in heated grapplings on couches. When he’d departed for college, he’d left it behind on the counter in his bathroom, a little offering at the altar of adolescence.

He found the bottle in his parents’ bathroom, down to the dregs. A vague horror crept into him, turning to fury. His father must have scooped the bottle up in his wanderings through the house. He could see him struggling to open it, sloshing its contents around, watching it pour through his fingers into the sink. He imagined him clapping it to his neck and chest in big cupped palms and uncoordinated splashes, trying to steal some of the future that stretched out before his son. How much could he even smell anymore? And what use did he have for cologne anyway? That part of his life was over.

Connell marched downstairs with the bottle. “Did you do this?” he asked, thrusting it under his nose. “Did you take this? There was more than half a bottle in here.”

“I don’t know,” his father said, looking scared. “I don’t know.”

This time he didn’t soften it for him.