The first rays of sun pry their way
in between the blinds and through the crust on my eyes. I roll over on my side
and stare at my phone, ticking down minutes, seconds - back to sleep or not,
same question every morning. And then the screen lights up bright, and I know
what’s coming.
The screeching beep cutting deep
through skin and flesh and into the tendon, just like every morning. I raise
myself out of bed slowly. I look at the picture on my nightstand of her holding
my boy’s hand, and I smile a little when I look at it. It was taken back when
he was just a few years old. We went to the zoo. That was a happy day, all of
us just... together... watching his wonderment at the animals. He liked the
hippos the best and when I asked him why, he just smiled at me.
I pull myself out of bed, take a
shower. When I open my closet and let my eyes wander across all the
near-identical shirts, I remember my closet in high school, concert t-shirts
for shitty rock bands long forgotten, all their contributions to the world, all
the love and passion that they lived into their art, lost but for my fleeting
dreams of a time gone by.
After breakfast, I take my lunch,
made the night before, out of the fridge, toss it in my laptop bag, grab my
thermos full of coffee, almost forget the car keys.
The bag gets set in the passenger
seat in a moment so repeated as to be instantly forgotten. Key in the ignition.
I imagine a muscle car roar as I pull my little Toyota Camry out of the garage into the street. It’s barely
6:30 in the morning and the sun is casting the shadows of the mountains miles
out across the plains, the suburbs to the city, a million people all getting
ready for work and school, pulling shitty cars bought on safety ratings out
towards the interstate, just in time to hit the commuter traffic.
I get to the office, sit down at my
computer, hit the power button. Same thing a million times before and after,
early morning power-ons until I hit retirement and they let me die quiet. This
sort of thinking is poison for the mind, considering the endless, day in, day
out repetition marking the long, slow walk unto the void. It’s pointless to
question, so I just focus on the screen in front of me.
I try to
stay focused, actually get something done, but as the early afternoon sets in,
I feel the world around me start to slip. It’s the American Dream, over and
over and over and over. Day after day. Shower, dress, breakfast, commute, work,
lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, shower, dress, breakfast, commute, work,
lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, shower dress, breakfast, commute, work,
lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, counting the seconds until the weekend,
right up until Monday morning when you start your count again.. Childhood
wonder, teenage angst, young adult passion, then work, so much work, and then,
when your body and mind finally start to rot out from the endless, hopeless
repetition, then they tell you quietly to leave and never come back. And you
think, finally, that’s going to be the good part, the retirement, the finally
having the time to do whatever you want, no work or school left to worry about.
But after so many years of conditioning to only want to make more, it’s
impossible to be happy just stopping. And, after all, how long till your mind
and body are such that you can’t enjoy so much as your breakfast? And when you
reach that stage, all you have left is to lay out under that South Florida sun,
waiting for death to finally take you.
I walk in
the front door and let out a sigh.
“Peter! I’m
home.” He doesn’t respond. I figure he’s in his room. He usually is. He works a
few hours a day, and he always get’s home before me, then goes straight to his
room and locks the door, puts his headphones in. It didn’t used to be this way.
Just a few years ago when I got home he’d always be here to give me a hug.
Still, I know what he’s going through. Christ knows I was an ass myself when I
was his age. I knock on his door, and he still doesn’t answer. Every time he
does this, my heart skips a few beats. I know he’ll always be inside, but it’s
always so easy to convince me that today he won’t be.
I push his
door open and my heart stops. He’s not here. Not his shoes, not his backpack.
Nothing. I lean back against the door frame and take a few deep breaths. I
can’t face this, not even the possibility. I take my phone out of my pocket and
notice the text he sent me an hour ago letting me know he’d be home a little
late.
I wander
slow back into the kitchen, try to calm myself down. I feel silly, but it’s a
justifiable silliness. I just stand, head leaned up against the fridge, for a
good ten minutes. It’s July in Denver, and that means 90s. The cool metal feels
good against my skin, keeps me sane. I hear the door open. I want to run over
there and hug him but I know he’s fifteen and, well...
“Hey Peter,
how was work?”
“Oh, you
know, it was whatever.”
“Eloquent
as ever.”
“Yeah...”
“Listen,
later, after dinner, we’re going somewhere. We both have the day off tomorrow,
so...” He goes back to his room to do whatever it is he does in there all day.
If he’s anything like I was at that age, that means play video games and
masturbate. I slump down on the couch, turn on the TV. I stare listlessly at
whatever salesman’s pitch of the American Dream set to a laugh track is on
today.
We eat
dinner later in silence, eyes glued to our respective phones.
After we
eat, I sit on the couch a while and watch television, subject already
forgotten, in one ear and out the other, as they say. It’s just something to
pass the time, no different than work or family or art or love. Finally, sun is
down properly.
“Peter,
come on, we’re going!”
“Just a
minute dad.” I grab my car keys, and I wait. I desperately want for Peter to
enjoy tonight. I want things to be like they were in the picture by my bed, but
I know that’s not going to happen.
I let him
drive. Windows open, the same shitty classic rock station blasting over the
radio. Even as I caution him to drive carefully, slowly, all the wisdom it’s my
duty to pass on, I revel at the freedom in his eyes, the infinite opportunity
offered up to him by the road as it once was to me. Back in highschool, as soon
as I got my license, anytime I felt too trapped by my shitty hometown, I would
drive off into the desert, wind in my hair, that freedom I saw just over the
precipice of college beating in my heart and head. If I’d known then that I’d
end up just an hour away from that town, making my kid live the life I did... I
don’t know.
Still, in
this moment, in his youth, in the inexhaustible promise of college’s inevitable
supposed-infinite liberation, in this moment he has true freedom, that great
wonderment of life known simply as possibility.
I direct
him south, away from the city, nearer to where I grew up. Soon, we’re off main
roads, speed limits pushing up past 50 around blind curves with no
streetlights, simply because people around here don’t care if a stranger wraps
their car around a tree.
We turn
onto a dirt road, head up the side of a hill, park.
“Okay dad,
where the hell are we.” I smile at him.
“For years
in high school, me and my friends would come up here the night before the
Fourth...”
“The third
you mean?”
“Don’t be a
smartass. We’d come up here on the night of the third of July and set off
fireworks. We always spent the fourth with family, but the third was ours. Our
time to celebrate real freedom- driving wherever we wanted with no where to
go.” I open the trunk and delicately lift out a box of fireworks.
“Why here?”
“We’re not
quite there yet.” We start up a path that leads away from the parking lot, walk
for maybe fifteen minutes.
At the apex
of the climb, I see my son catch his breath. We stand at the edge of a cliff,
the desert below us, stretching away up to the lights of Denver, blurs of
colour cutting out through the night, all the straight lines of the city’s grid
streets. The American dream willed into existence by force of collective
belief. Suburbs built on working hard for your kids so they can do the same,
nine to five rat race office job soldiering away so you never have to do a day
of real soldiering. Then the older, blue collar neighborhoods, the bleeding
edge of the urban sprawl, people getting up early to run the basic
infrastructure that keeps the city humming along, riding the parabola of the
American zeitgeist. Then all the rich young hipsters, at that perfect age where
you have the career that lands you money, without the impositions of time borne
out of children and marriage, life all music and movies and sex and
recreational drug use. Finally the immigrant neighborhoods, Mexican, mostly,
the new age, the next story of the American dream made real after years of
struggling and striving and fighting. Pretty soon the people of those
communities will be part of the suburban collectivist non-life, but, for now,
they represent all the passion and drive of this country, the dream that their
kids can have lives better than theirs, if only they just work a little harder.
I put my arm around my son’s shoulder.
Together we
set up the fireworks.
They ripple
and crackle up through the sky, spitting out tails of hellfire as they hurtle
up towards the stars, their twinkling guide points unencumbered by city lights.
At the apex of the rockets’ arcs, they flash bang outwards in a shower of
sparks, red, blue, yellow, green, white, burning out bright and brief,
trickling and melting out towards the ground. Our faces are lit up in glowing
color, their tones surprisingly natural in our age of harsh neon technicolour.
Peter’s face surprises me with its youth, under these lights. It’s a childlike
wonderment that men seem to reserve for explosions, and I’m glad to see it on
him. I think briefly of peoples’ faces lit up by computer screens, but the
thought exists simply and without concern, a mere atmospheric twang in amongst
the rolling thunder of the moment.
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