2HousePlague

But that last one was not my best. It's christmas, and I want to believe in only all the best things, if only for today, k?

I wrote this a really long time ago:

If you read through it fast, it's just like running. I've always imagined I'd make a good daddy to a little girl, even back when I wasn't much older than Anna is here.


Vegas

"Where does light come from, Daddy?" In the stark shadow of a towering McDonald's road-side sign, I held the child in my arms longer than was usual. It seemed to me, as I was holding her, that logic and science and the reassurances of my academic formation were serving her less and less as she grew older. I was serving her less. The lapses had grown longer, when I could do little more than stare into her eyes. She was only seven. And It had begun to feel as if security and knowledge were gifts flowing from her to me, rather than the reverse. Anna was my child, forever and always. But somehow I had missed the moment of switchover when all the someday-things I wished to see in her had become the today-things she was. Physics is a strange place to seek sanctuary when the person you love falls flaming from the sky into the ocean. Anna was only two weeks old, and already her mother had felt too long the calling of remoteness. She'd been "recruited into the business of motherhood", as she'd always say while Anna was growing inside her. And there were important things to do in Macchu Picchu, things that could wait no longer. Anna's birth, after the interminable pregnancy, released her from us finally. So she went, and farther than husband or infant daughter could have dreamed possible. When Tara became pregnant, for me it was as if all the spinning and illuminated beauty of the universe had been drawn out of the mathematical ether, where I'd always sought it, and into the impossibly small space of her tenanted womb. I should have realized it then, how powerless my understanding would be when really tested. But for Tara, I could only guess, it must have been a rather unnatural state, like breath-holding. Something which had drawn her in, like a game, and around which it was possible to create a sort of artificial excitement. There were moments of terrifying intimacy between us, with my hand placed tentatively on her belly, when I realized just how much despair there was for her in that state. When her talents of convincing were in good order, she could make me believe that marriage and motherhood were surprisingly agreeable dishes that had emerged from the mysterious kitchen of her life, and been placed before her though she'd ordered something very different. The worst I permitted myself to believe was that Anna and I had only briefly interrupted her, while on her undeterrable way to wherever she was going. I'm afraid now, it may have been much worse than that. "Las Vegas 208 miles" Now Anna was becoming fidgety in the passenger seat. It meant I had been too long in my reverie while driving. It had been her idea to rent a convertible for our drive to Vegas, rather than something "less optimistic", as she said winkily to the Hertz guy. We were upon one of those great and strange stretches of American motoring ambition. Interstate 5, if the long-ago marker was still true. The miles, all strung together end-to-end in such homogeneous lengths of distance, forced the mind into a sort of linearity. I felt as if all my concerns had ceased clamoring to come through the door of my attention at once, and had formed instead a cordial single-file, that I might have them in one at a time. It was nice. I'm sure I would not have felt so capable before these demons if we'd been driving in a car with a roof on it. The blue of the sky, passing in a slow cloudless crawl over our heads, was scrubbing my mind free of something. "Well, what kind of light do you mean, angel?" Of course I knew what she meant. She had that way of lifting her eyebrows into two perfect little brown arches when she wanted to lead me somewhere I might not go comfortably. She just stared at me, her pink little knees held like two cherished things to her chin. "I don't mean like sunlight. I mean, isn't there a kind of light that isn't waves or particles, that just is?" Much as I'd like to pretend I don't know where she gets this brand of persistence, she is Daddy's little girl, in so many inescapable ways. We'd gone down this road before. When Tara died, I tried to balloon myself into some sort of protective bubble for Anna to come and live safely within, while she mourned her mother's death in her own secret-little-girl ways. But the larger I tried to become for her, the more it seemed it was she who was embracing me. I had spent the four years of my life graced by Tara's presence trying to collapse her beliefs into something I could express in terms a physicist might sleep on. Never worked. It came to be an early sign of true love for me that I lost the ability to sleep restfully when I met her. We each had our point of breaking. For me, it was the tears, and the big wide eyes of the ineffable all welled up inside her head, all of it just screaming at me, or wanting to be screaming, in a language I just couldn't hear. Tara was on her way somewhere, no question about it, streaking like a derelict satellite in the sky where I first saw her. At night, she was most visibly herself. She gave up the harder drugs while Anna was growing inside her. But the marijuana was a "natural path", and so whether I had consented or not, at sunset, she was often to be found smoking a joint, cross-legged in the forest just beyond our property, with her big Anna-swollen belly hanging over her waist. "Just is...? How do you mean, honey?" The mustang's legs were long, and she loved it when Daddy drove fast. I think she knew it meant I was feeling alive, in some way that made the risk an exhilaration for me. The press of a bare foot to the accelerator of a rented car in the Nevada desert at dusk. It was in such moments that Tara might have shrieked with joy all of a sudden and for no clear reason. She knew when I had transcended, even for a moment, the burdens of my deconstructed universe. "Come into chaos with me..." she would cry when we made love. I never exactly knew what thing in me might have won her for my wife. But I was grateful for it. And though I never confessed it to her while she was alive, whatever in me was worthy of her had to be the best thing I was. "Well, I mean a sort of light that isn't coming from something that's burning, or resisting electricity or some kind of chemical reaction. A sort of light that just sits there, in the middle of space, just being there, you know..." Most of the time, I feel compelled to honor the balance Tara and I achieved in this child. Whatever sanity or certainty before the madness I might have offered Tara, must now persist, and serve our child too. But there are moments when I swear I feel as if I am the child, and that the strange coils of illogic and pregnant circumstance that governed Tara's life want to take me inside for a period of wombing and re-education. It's what makes being Anna's dad so hard. Most of the time, I just pray she can't see how little I really know. I have no words now for my daughter. None at all. No answer, and only the frailty of my love to offer. So all I can do for her, really, is make the effort to un-tense the muscles of my shoulders and ease myself a bit more into the white leather bucket seat. Our timing is perfect. The mustang seems to have reached the summit of a long, slow-growing scend in the road. Anna has fixed her eyes on the horizon, where the black and permanent silhouettes of the desert are meeting the emptiness of the cobalt sky. She's let me off the hook for a little while, and she knows I know it. She's got that same way of radiating contentment from every part of her body that her mom did. My God, so little is beyond her reaching. "Faster, Daddy!" she bids into the infinity of my compliance. She stands up and lifts her head over the edge of the windshield, where the wind can caress her head as violently as the thoughts raging within. "I love you, Daddy!" she screams over the 100mph roar, just as the glowing spires and fantasies of Las Vegas dawn at the horizon before us.



2hp

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tada!