Auto Fiction
by Jason Zencka
I.
At the courthouse you see Aaron for the first time since Thanksgiving. And for the last time ever. But from a distance. He talks with his lawyers and you stand with your mother and the detective. You see him for no more than a moment. He seems small, frightened, nodding gravely at someone taller than him.
This memory might not be real. Which is to say, it might not be an accurate reflection of what actually happened in a historical sense.
For instance, only later do you realize that Aaron was nineteen in this moment, a child himself, younger than you are at the time when you realize this. And so it seems unlikely that he would seem small to you at the courthouse. You were eleven then, you think. You’re not sure about this. It was so long ago.
“Aaron is going to plead to a misdemeanor,” your mother tells you. “It’s a lesser punishment, but then he can get the help he needs. Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah,” you say. You look from your mother to the mustached detective. “I just want him to get the help he needs.”
At the courthouse you see Aaron for the first time since Thanksgiving. And for the last time ever. But from a distance. He talks with his lawyers and you stand with your mother and the detective. You see him for no more than a moment. He seems small, frightened, nodding gravely at someone taller than him.
This memory might not be real. Which is to say, it might not be an accurate reflection of what actually happened in a historical sense.
For instance, only later do you realize that Aaron was nineteen in this moment, a child himself, younger than you are at the time when you realize this. And so it seems unlikely that he would seem small to you at the courthouse. You were eleven then, you think. You’re not sure about this. It was so long ago.
“Aaron is going to plead to a misdemeanor,” your mother tells you. “It’s a lesser punishment, but then he can get the help he needs. Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah,” you say. You look from your mother to the mustached detective. “I just want him to get the help he needs.”
*
You are stopped at the red light. The crash will play out in the intersection before you like a performance. Your mother in the passenger seat. The detective at the wheel. Where were you going? To the courthouse? To the station? The courthouse, probably. The station was earlier. Your mother drove you to the station. Why was this detective driving? Why not your father? Probably your father was working. Your father, the university police officer. (So not really a police officer, but almost.)
Then…two strangers bash into one another. Metal meets metal, a cataclysmic ballet wherein contact reshapes two massive, fast-moving things in the exact places where the damages they inflict upon one another touch.
Glass confetties the asphalt.
The cars are totaled. Expensive machinery will be brought in to cut them from each other’s sclerotic metal embrace. It will all take time. Your father is always griping about the cost of leaving a light on or a radio playing when you leave a room. Don’t you get that it costs money? he yells. You hear his words. You flinch. The cars will be detached, eventually, and the people inside them repaired and sent on their way, but what will it cost?
When the detective returns, he closes the car door before he speaks.
“Ambulance is on its way,” he says to your mother. Then he looks back at you. “Everyone’s fine,” he says. “Just a little shook up.”
Then…two strangers bash into one another. Metal meets metal, a cataclysmic ballet wherein contact reshapes two massive, fast-moving things in the exact places where the damages they inflict upon one another touch.
Glass confetties the asphalt.
The cars are totaled. Expensive machinery will be brought in to cut them from each other’s sclerotic metal embrace. It will all take time. Your father is always griping about the cost of leaving a light on or a radio playing when you leave a room. Don’t you get that it costs money? he yells. You hear his words. You flinch. The cars will be detached, eventually, and the people inside them repaired and sent on their way, but what will it cost?
When the detective returns, he closes the car door before he speaks.
“Ambulance is on its way,” he says to your mother. Then he looks back at you. “Everyone’s fine,” he says. “Just a little shook up.”
*
The most obvious interpretation derives from its suddenness. Oceanic, formless void. Above it, the onyx glimmer of the spirit hovering over the waters.
And then a boxy, rust-chewed sedan slams into the side of a passing car.
All this seen through the frame of a windshield. As you picture it, we’re in the 21st century—film is the operative metaphor for our mind's eye, and so you might describe it like this: Embryonic, pre-credit dark, then…CRASH! You’re in the movie. The fabric tears. Everything belongs to one part or the other, before or after. From nothing, something. Fiat lux.
So…suddenness then. That’s the thing. The thing to take from this stiff, stubborn moment that protrudes from the knot of time, a loose string you can’t help but pull.
And then a boxy, rust-chewed sedan slams into the side of a passing car.
All this seen through the frame of a windshield. As you picture it, we’re in the 21st century—film is the operative metaphor for our mind's eye, and so you might describe it like this: Embryonic, pre-credit dark, then…CRASH! You’re in the movie. The fabric tears. Everything belongs to one part or the other, before or after. From nothing, something. Fiat lux.
So…suddenness then. That’s the thing. The thing to take from this stiff, stubborn moment that protrudes from the knot of time, a loose string you can’t help but pull.
II.
In the interview room, the mustached detective wasn’t the one who did most of the talking. That’s not who you remember. You remember a shorter man. A fat man. Jowly. Ugly, but nonplussed about it. Glasses. Bald. Serial victim of male-pattern inevitabilities. You remember him asking you to walk him through Aaron’s letters. He laid them on the table after taking them from a folder he carried under his armpit.
You showed him the stick figure Aaron had drawn, standing atop the big “s” of your name at the top of the page, how the little broken lines of graphite indicated this figure was turned from the reader’s line of sight as he peed off a public wall. You remember thinking how smart that dotted line was, from a craft perspective. The ingenuity of it—the broken line indicating that it was liquid, a thing in motion, a thing both there and not. And you remember the shock of it. Realizing that with this edgy drawing Aaron had changed the rules. He was your counselor at church camp and you liked the clarity of that relationship. The corny, wholesome clarity. Even as you liked that the extravagant attention he paid to you blurred that clarity. The dotted line indicated that blur, too. A line that was both there and not.
Pointing to this line in the interview room you felt the fat man’s…what? Disappointment? Disgust? Disdain?
I came all the way out here for this, kid? A stick figure pissing into the distance?
*
When you were in the fourth grade you told Mrs. Keilar that your friend Vinnie had told you to go to hell during recess and she was like, Seriously? Go back to your desk. You relayed this to your mother, whom Mrs. Keilar brushed off when she called the school to complain, saying, “Children say these things all the time.” Meaning: Man up, kid, your friends are gonna swear at you. What do you want me to do about it? Follow you around recess with a bag of lollipops? Which, I mean, fair enough. You were a prude and a tattler.
(You would later return from a weekend camping trip with the Boy Scouts and tell your mother the names of all the boys who smoked cigarettes or used curse words. Then your mother would tell the scout leader. Then you would quit the Boy Scouts. The bummer of it being that the camping trip had actually been pretty fun.)
Of course, when your mother kicked up enough of a fuss, Mrs. Keilar eventually pulled you out of class to apologize. She did this in the teacher’s supply room, which you needed a key to get into, and after apologizing she made you give her a hug. Which was easily the worst part of the whole affair: having to hug her even though you knew she didn’t like you, even though you knew it was something your mother had arranged.
(You would later return from a weekend camping trip with the Boy Scouts and tell your mother the names of all the boys who smoked cigarettes or used curse words. Then your mother would tell the scout leader. Then you would quit the Boy Scouts. The bummer of it being that the camping trip had actually been pretty fun.)
Of course, when your mother kicked up enough of a fuss, Mrs. Keilar eventually pulled you out of class to apologize. She did this in the teacher’s supply room, which you needed a key to get into, and after apologizing she made you give her a hug. Which was easily the worst part of the whole affair: having to hug her even though you knew she didn’t like you, even though you knew it was something your mother had arranged.
*
“At any time did Aaron put his mouth on your penis?”
This from the fat man again in the windowless interview room.
To which you shook your head and said, “no.” To which you thought something like, That’s a thing?
Did Aaron show you his penis? Did Aaron touch your penis? Did Aaron ask you to touch his penis?
Because that was what you came to learn over time: The whole weekend with Aaron was bad, but considering how these things go, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as if Aaron raped you, or masturbated you, or masturbated in front of you, or even touched you, really. Or if he did, it was just the once. And then, you know: barely. It was more that the whole thing felt off in some key way. Which was why you told your mom about it later. Although that, too, felt strange, because so much of it your mom was more or less in the room for, like when Aaron pulled you so close on the living room couch you were basically on his lap while you watched a movie you’d rented together. You spent a lot of the weekend that way, basically in Aaron’s arms, in plain sight, and didn’t that feel off somehow? That closeness?
“I feel so guilty,” she would tell you later.
This from the fat man again in the windowless interview room.
To which you shook your head and said, “no.” To which you thought something like, That’s a thing?
Did Aaron show you his penis? Did Aaron touch your penis? Did Aaron ask you to touch his penis?
Because that was what you came to learn over time: The whole weekend with Aaron was bad, but considering how these things go, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as if Aaron raped you, or masturbated you, or masturbated in front of you, or even touched you, really. Or if he did, it was just the once. And then, you know: barely. It was more that the whole thing felt off in some key way. Which was why you told your mom about it later. Although that, too, felt strange, because so much of it your mom was more or less in the room for, like when Aaron pulled you so close on the living room couch you were basically on his lap while you watched a movie you’d rented together. You spent a lot of the weekend that way, basically in Aaron’s arms, in plain sight, and didn’t that feel off somehow? That closeness?
“I feel so guilty,” she would tell you later.
*
Aaron closing the door to your room to show you the glossy hardcore pornography magazines he’d brought in his backpack and then pressuring you to look at the magazines while he just kinda watched you turn the pages was definitely not cool.
*
Much later—decades—a therapist would tell you, “I’m sure in some ways the interview with the detectives was more traumatizing than what happened with Aaron.”
To which you would laugh and say, “Yeah. I mean, I think there’s some truth to that.”
To which you would laugh and say, “Yeah. I mean, I think there’s some truth to that.”
III.
This is a way in which the car crash is Aaron: everything too quick and shocking to process in real time, then the stunned silence afterward a vacuum your memories rush to fill, and you replay them again and again, piecing together for yourself what the hell just happened, what it all meant. The sudden impact sends you reeling out of your original trajectory, spinning to a halt, glass confettiing the asphalt.
*
Then again maybe the important thing about the sudden impact of the car crash is not its suddenness but the impact.
Metal meets metal, a violent joining wherein contact reshapes two massive, fast-moving things in the exact places where the damages they are inflicting upon one another touch.
The violence of touch?
Interesting that for years your OCD manifested itself as fear of contamination, and that what you feared most was a kind of spiritual contamination that resulted from your being touched by people you did not like, in particular people who seemed pathetic or needy or oblivious in some tragic and hopeless way. And by “interesting” you mean that, written here, the interpretation for this seems so breathtakingly obvious it makes you even more hopeless and tragic for never having thought of it until this very moment.
Metal meets metal, a violent joining wherein contact reshapes two massive, fast-moving things in the exact places where the damages they are inflicting upon one another touch.
The violence of touch?
Interesting that for years your OCD manifested itself as fear of contamination, and that what you feared most was a kind of spiritual contamination that resulted from your being touched by people you did not like, in particular people who seemed pathetic or needy or oblivious in some tragic and hopeless way. And by “interesting” you mean that, written here, the interpretation for this seems so breathtakingly obvious it makes you even more hopeless and tragic for never having thought of it until this very moment.
*
You have no memory of your dad in this. You doubt you ever spoke to him about Aaron, before or after. Obviously, your mother filled him in. And you know your mother told your brother. Some version of it. Probably you asked your mother whether your dad knew and she explained that he felt angry and guilty. (You think you might dimly remember this.) Or perhaps he said something to you about it (something about how he felt guilty and angry?). You can imagine how awkward it would be to hear him say such things. How clear it would be to you that he simultaneously wanted to speak to you and very much did not want to speak to you and also that your mother undoubtedly arranged this.
*
Your dad was not like the mustached detective at all. The detective, with his dry, carroty hair and Ned Flanders mustache was like a well-coiffed, blandly handsome man playing a biker in a sitcom. He was a man, yes, but he seemed plastic-wrapped and prefab somehow, with his too-big blazer and polo shirt.
Your dad slicked his black hair back with pomade like a gangster. Your friends, even the ones that bullied you, were afraid of him. There was something feral about him, something musky and ethnic. Ferric, almost. Like your friends’ dads were all Formica and polyurethane molds on display at the hardware store and your dad was a rusty old metal bar left ominously in a public park. He had gone to the army instead of college. He didn’t talk to you if he could avoid it. He grew up in a tenement in south Chicago speaking Polish to his parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, few of whom you would ever meet. He pronounced garage “gararge.” There was a tortured, Hephaestean gravity to the way your dad carved out a lair for himself in the unfinished basement among mountains of yellowed paperbacks, the metal clink of his cast-iron dumbbells hitting the cement floor audible to you from where you watched sitcoms upstairs.
Your dad slicked his black hair back with pomade like a gangster. Your friends, even the ones that bullied you, were afraid of him. There was something feral about him, something musky and ethnic. Ferric, almost. Like your friends’ dads were all Formica and polyurethane molds on display at the hardware store and your dad was a rusty old metal bar left ominously in a public park. He had gone to the army instead of college. He didn’t talk to you if he could avoid it. He grew up in a tenement in south Chicago speaking Polish to his parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, few of whom you would ever meet. He pronounced garage “gararge.” There was a tortured, Hephaestean gravity to the way your dad carved out a lair for himself in the unfinished basement among mountains of yellowed paperbacks, the metal clink of his cast-iron dumbbells hitting the cement floor audible to you from where you watched sitcoms upstairs.
*
Your grandfather was a drunk who beat your father. And your grandmother didn’t like him. Didn’t like your dad, that is, her son, her first-born child, who lived in his parents’ basement until he was forty-two and worked at the same steel mill where his alcoholic, abusive father had been a crane operator. When your grandmother got Alzheimer’s, your dad would visit her in the old folks’ home and ask her if she remembered him, Carl, her son. Remember me, mom? Carl? Your son? It’s me, mom. Carl. You know this because your mother told you. According to her, your grandmother preferred your father’s brother, your uncle, a short, chubby bald man you saw once every few years, who, as a child, played “Lady of Spain” on the accordion, and who later sold insurance for a company in Wisconsin.
Your mother also told you she was going to divorce your father because he had stopped being intimate with her after they’d gotten married. It was as if the person he appeared to be when they were courting had vanished, or had been some kind of put-on, and now the same man was neglectful and emotionally inert. She needed to decide whether it was the right thing for her to take you boys and leave.
“I’ve wondered at times if he’s asexual,” she said.
And later, when you were a teenager, “It’s occurred to me he might be gay and unable to accept it.”
And, “I’ve often wondered if this is why I’ve had so much trouble with weight gain. Because I turned to the sensuality of food when your father stopped touching me.”
How you dreamed of confronting your father! Of fighting him with your fists, of thrusting your skin at his skin, of holding to his cheek, like a hot iron, all the ways he hurt your mother!
When you were twelve, you stayed home sick from school and your dad came into the room while you were doing homework and told you: “I know your mom thinks I don’t love her but I do love her. I love her and you boys very much.”
It was the only time you saw him cry.
“I know you do, dad,” you said. Crying, too.
Your mother also told you she was going to divorce your father because he had stopped being intimate with her after they’d gotten married. It was as if the person he appeared to be when they were courting had vanished, or had been some kind of put-on, and now the same man was neglectful and emotionally inert. She needed to decide whether it was the right thing for her to take you boys and leave.
“I’ve wondered at times if he’s asexual,” she said.
And later, when you were a teenager, “It’s occurred to me he might be gay and unable to accept it.”
And, “I’ve often wondered if this is why I’ve had so much trouble with weight gain. Because I turned to the sensuality of food when your father stopped touching me.”
How you dreamed of confronting your father! Of fighting him with your fists, of thrusting your skin at his skin, of holding to his cheek, like a hot iron, all the ways he hurt your mother!
When you were twelve, you stayed home sick from school and your dad came into the room while you were doing homework and told you: “I know your mom thinks I don’t love her but I do love her. I love her and you boys very much.”
It was the only time you saw him cry.
“I know you do, dad,” you said. Crying, too.
*
Aaron was compact and wiry. He had thick hair on his arms and a perpetual five-o-clock shadow. He wore jeans and faded t-shirts as he led you down the root-gnarled trails of summer camp. He took his coffee in the morning with a scoop of Rocky Road ice cream. He studied Elementary Education at Ball State University. He would read you unsettling parables from a black hardcover book called Friedman’s Fables. Your mother told you that Aaron had a difficult family situation. His parents were dysfunctional in some way. Or cruel to him. The details were unclear. She had learned this somehow at church. That was why you suggested inviting him to your house for Thanksgiving that year.
Astonishingly, and to your great delight, your mother agreed.
Astonishingly, and to your great delight, your mother agreed.
*
The sound of your dad’s cowboy boots on the hardwood floor as he walked from the kitchen, where he’d been washing dishes, to the living room where you were fighting with your brother about something. The suddenness of his movement. You remember that.
Your fear of your father was imaginative and theoretical. The fear was real but concerned less with what he might do than of who he was: strong; loud; quick-tempered. He was less old than ancient, like some wizened wandering samurai or a gnarly, centuries-old tree.
But this time he grabbed you by the collar of your shirt and pinned you hard against the living room wall. His face in yours, his knuckle pinching the skin on your neck, his words were a growl spat through gritted teeth: “Knock it off.”
Of course, not a minute passed before you told your mother, and then you waited in your room upstairs for almost an hour, listening to them whisper feverishly. Finally she called you down and your father crouched next to her while he apologized, one knee to the floor, head angled low with shame. The worst part of the whole affair was when he held his arms out and drew you into a hug, and you knew that the embrace was something your mother had arranged.
Your fear of your father was imaginative and theoretical. The fear was real but concerned less with what he might do than of who he was: strong; loud; quick-tempered. He was less old than ancient, like some wizened wandering samurai or a gnarly, centuries-old tree.
But this time he grabbed you by the collar of your shirt and pinned you hard against the living room wall. His face in yours, his knuckle pinching the skin on your neck, his words were a growl spat through gritted teeth: “Knock it off.”
Of course, not a minute passed before you told your mother, and then you waited in your room upstairs for almost an hour, listening to them whisper feverishly. Finally she called you down and your father crouched next to her while he apologized, one knee to the floor, head angled low with shame. The worst part of the whole affair was when he held his arms out and drew you into a hug, and you knew that the embrace was something your mother had arranged.
*
Each brother must have the same-sized portion, the same number of cookies, the same number of kisses goodnight.
“I love my children differently yet equally,” your mother would say, proud of this phrase.
She was proud of this phrase, and you believed her. Even as you knew she loved you more. Of course she did. The fact that she loved you more made you special. And yet, didn’t it also compromise your specialness? Pollute it somehow? It made the two of you, mother and child, unworthy of that love, didn’t it? Because what kind of mother loved one child more than the others? And what kind of child inspired such reckless, unseemly love? What kind of child accepted it?
“I love my children differently yet equally,” your mother would say, proud of this phrase.
She was proud of this phrase, and you believed her. Even as you knew she loved you more. Of course she did. The fact that she loved you more made you special. And yet, didn’t it also compromise your specialness? Pollute it somehow? It made the two of you, mother and child, unworthy of that love, didn’t it? Because what kind of mother loved one child more than the others? And what kind of child inspired such reckless, unseemly love? What kind of child accepted it?
IV.
Suddenness couldn’t be the key to this memory, the reason it endures. Because the thing with Aaron wasn’t sudden. He’d groomed you for more than a year really, the two summers he’d been your camp counselor, and then month after month of letters.
The thing with Aaron was many things, but sudden wasn’t one of them.
*
Also, cars have bodies and so do people.
*
The big thing with Aaron happened the morning after he slept in your room, him in your bed, you in the pull-out next to your bed. Your mother had already peeked her head in the room and announced she would make breakfast. When she left, Aaron squeezed into the pull-out with you, his body snug against yours. He told you a joke. He had pulled the sheet back to lie with you. Then, when he had told the punch line, he stretched his hand out and laid it on your crotch, which was covered by the thin fabric of your boxers. He let the weight and warmth of his hand rest on your penis.
“My mom’s probably made the pancakes,” you said as you stood up and walked to the kitchen, grabbing a pair of jeans along the way.
Much of the details are made up here, of course. All you really remember is the perilous softness of the mattress, the cloying warmth in the closeness of his body, like wetting the bed, and the weight of his hand on you. The joke, for example, you’re not sure about.
“My mom’s probably made the pancakes,” you said as you stood up and walked to the kitchen, grabbing a pair of jeans along the way.
Much of the details are made up here, of course. All you really remember is the perilous softness of the mattress, the cloying warmth in the closeness of his body, like wetting the bed, and the weight of his hand on you. The joke, for example, you’re not sure about.
*
Then again, Aaron liked jokes. You can remember that from his letters. Dirty jokes would make sense, since that was how he inched his way forward: incrementally, innocently, stealthily. A stick man pissing gleefully into the distance; a hug that lasted too long; a story he told you at camp about having to check the scrotum of another boy who’d injured his groin in a game of capture the flag; the introduction of swear words; then porn; then talk about masturbation (“You should really try masturbation” was one of the last things he ever said to you); then the hugging; then the touching. All the little things he did to make you feel chosen. Because he had chosen you. Out of all the boys at camp. Each step further evidence of how special you were. Although at a certain point each step was also evidence of how loaded, how polluted, how dangerous that specialness was, a specialness that was also a shame that encircled you like a dotted line, a thing both there and not.
So jokes would fit in well there.
But you don’t remember him telling any, if they existed. You just remember the corniness. Puns, for example. Aaron liked puns. (The worst type of joke!) There being something almost coercive about a pun: two words that so closely resemble one another they’re almost touching, but not. The laugh tries to tie it all together, bullies you into presuming a bond, but the bond isn’t there. Most puns are almost jokes, but not quite, and therefore not worth remembering.
Though we often remember them.
So jokes would fit in well there.
But you don’t remember him telling any, if they existed. You just remember the corniness. Puns, for example. Aaron liked puns. (The worst type of joke!) There being something almost coercive about a pun: two words that so closely resemble one another they’re almost touching, but not. The laugh tries to tie it all together, bullies you into presuming a bond, but the bond isn’t there. Most puns are almost jokes, but not quite, and therefore not worth remembering.
Though we often remember them.
*
Your parents didn’t divorce. They almost did, but didn’t. Divorce being a big scary thing you don’t know much about except that it almost happened to your family. (But ultimately didn’t. Thank god.)
*
Maybe it’s the almostness of the car memory that gives it its staying power. A noisy, battering thing that happened on the margins of your experience, but which didn’t actually happen to you. It was a car crash, but not your car crash. Aaron came close to abusing you, but he did not. Not really. Your boxers being a thin, permeable membrane, but there. You did not touch. He made you feel special, in word and in deed, and he let you know that he had chosen you, but that specialness was false, or toxic, or bad, but as bad as it was, you never really touched, the badness was not ultimately consummated.
Whew.
That’s why you remember. The near-miss. The close call. Almost.
Whew.
That’s why you remember. The near-miss. The close call. Almost.
*
When you were twenty-eight, your thirty-six-year-old boss threatened to leave her husband and children to run away with you. She was an attorney and you were her investigator, and she chose you out of all the other investigators at the agency and confessed to you in exhilaratingly hamfisted emails she penned before dawn that she was in a loveless marriage but had fallen for your mind even though you were so young, basically a child, and she talked you into driving all over town to meet her at every hour of the day, and sometimes she screamed at you and called you an asshole, and other times she grabbed your hand as you walked together down busy streets in broad daylight or kissed you recklessly at bars, and once she got shitfaced and demanded you explain why you wouldn’t fuck her if you loved her so much, and finally you did fuck, in an expensive hotel she paid for, but it was really the letters and not the fucking you remembered (the fucking was probably the worst part of the whole affair), the months and months of letters leading up to the fucking that messed you up royally, and in the final weeks of this debacle that’s mostly what you talked to your mother about—how wild and alive and unhappy and in love this woman was in these letters—and it took you a while to be grateful for the fact that the whole thing fizzled out and she decided to stay with her husband, but in the end you really, really, really were.
*
Funny how the only puns that are almost-funny (and therefore memorable) are dirty ones.
What’s the difference between deer nuts and beer nuts?
One’s a dollar ninety-nine, the other’s just under a buck.
Or: Poker? I hardly know her!
(You heard that one for years before you understood the joke. The joke being that there is a certain category of person in the world that is ripe for victimizing, and that category is women.)
Here’s an example of Aaron’s cornball humor. You were sitting on the couch, watching a video, snuggled up next to him so you were almost on his lap, and he began slapping your legs as if you were a drum set. He was doing a whole pantomime drum solo thing, making beatbox sounds with his mouth, and then whenever he’d do a cymbal crash he’d slap at your crotch. That was him blurring the line between proper and improper AND blurring the line between joke and not joke, both things simultaneously. Because what’s the joke, really? The symbolism of your penis as a cymbal? (The cymbalism of it?) It was especially dumb because more than being a joke, it was an excuse to creep closer to you, to make it seem normal to bring his hand close to your penis. Ba-doom-doom-doom-daga-doom-daga-doom-daga-CRASH! A symbol crash.
See? Not very funny.
What’s the difference between deer nuts and beer nuts?
One’s a dollar ninety-nine, the other’s just under a buck.
Or: Poker? I hardly know her!
(You heard that one for years before you understood the joke. The joke being that there is a certain category of person in the world that is ripe for victimizing, and that category is women.)
Here’s an example of Aaron’s cornball humor. You were sitting on the couch, watching a video, snuggled up next to him so you were almost on his lap, and he began slapping your legs as if you were a drum set. He was doing a whole pantomime drum solo thing, making beatbox sounds with his mouth, and then whenever he’d do a cymbal crash he’d slap at your crotch. That was him blurring the line between proper and improper AND blurring the line between joke and not joke, both things simultaneously. Because what’s the joke, really? The symbolism of your penis as a cymbal? (The cymbalism of it?) It was especially dumb because more than being a joke, it was an excuse to creep closer to you, to make it seem normal to bring his hand close to your penis. Ba-doom-doom-doom-daga-doom-daga-doom-daga-CRASH! A symbol crash.
See? Not very funny.
V.
A Friedman’s Fable: A man approaches another man on the bridge. The first man has a long rope tied around his waist. After handing the second man the end of the rope, he leaps off the bridge, then proceeds to beg and plead with the second man not to let go of the rope, because if he does so, the first man will fall to his death. After much agonizing, the second man decides to let go of the rope. The moral being: You can’t count on anybody.
Another: A man finds that his nerves grow on the outside of his body. His nerves are lush and beautiful as Rapunzel’s hair, but they make the man so alert to pain that he cannot so much as brush against another person. He becomes famous for the gorgeous, spindly nerves that encircle him like great wings, but he retreats into solitude to avoid the excruciating pain of human contact. The moral being: Never let anyone touch you.
*
Possible interpretations of the fact that, in your teenage years, your OCD manifests itself as an aversion to being touched by people who seemed pathetic or needy or oblivious in some hopeless and tragic way:
1) Your mother is the needy person you fear becoming, so desperate for affection and affirmation she seduced her son into loving her and then corrupted that love by making him her confidant and projecting upon him her hunger for companionship such that, sensing her son’s admiration and idolization of his camp counselor, she allowed the young man to come for a sleepover one Thanksgiving and sleep in her son’s room, because people should have friends, and their friends should be close.
2) Aaron is the needy person you fear becoming, so desperate for affection he seduced a boy eight years younger than him into thinking they were bound by a special bond, who groomed that boy over months and years, inching closer and closer, like Zeno’s Paradox, halving the distance again and again until they were almost—almost—touching, but ultimately not. (Whew!)
3) Your father is the needy person you fear becoming, who contrived to make a woman eighteen years younger than him fall in love with him, then disappeared, because he wanted nearness but not touching, or he wanted closeness, but not togetherness, he wanted to almost commune with another human being, because he knew that once you touch, there is nothing to stop the other person from devouring you.
4) You are the needy person you fear becoming.
1) Your mother is the needy person you fear becoming, so desperate for affection and affirmation she seduced her son into loving her and then corrupted that love by making him her confidant and projecting upon him her hunger for companionship such that, sensing her son’s admiration and idolization of his camp counselor, she allowed the young man to come for a sleepover one Thanksgiving and sleep in her son’s room, because people should have friends, and their friends should be close.
2) Aaron is the needy person you fear becoming, so desperate for affection he seduced a boy eight years younger than him into thinking they were bound by a special bond, who groomed that boy over months and years, inching closer and closer, like Zeno’s Paradox, halving the distance again and again until they were almost—almost—touching, but ultimately not. (Whew!)
3) Your father is the needy person you fear becoming, who contrived to make a woman eighteen years younger than him fall in love with him, then disappeared, because he wanted nearness but not touching, or he wanted closeness, but not togetherness, he wanted to almost commune with another human being, because he knew that once you touch, there is nothing to stop the other person from devouring you.
4) You are the needy person you fear becoming.
*
Possible interpretations of your affair with your boss:
1) Your boss is your mother, whom you intended to rescue by finally freeing her from a loveless marriage to a taciturn, needy, but ultimately withholding man.
2) Your boss, an authority figure who made a drunken pass at a subordinate eight years her junior, who simultaneously affirmed and violated your specialness by transgressing the clear moral and social boundaries that made your relationship possible, who extolled, excoriated, and then exiled you from your special bond through a series of letters, is Aaron, the camp counselor who almost abused you.
3) Your affair with your boss is an attempt to touch your father by supplanting him, or perhaps by wounding him, evidenced by the fact that even after the hundreds of obscene and impassioned emails, texts, and voicemails your received from your boss throughout your months-long affair, it’s the two plaintive and briefly raging missives that her husband sent you—including one in which he threatened to beat you up—that you remember best.
4) Your affair with your boss was the ultimate evasion of yourself, in that you chose a paramour with whom you could perform the vertiginous freefall of intimacy without ever having to risk setting foot on the level plane of actual intimacy, because you knew she would never leave her family (however much she insisted otherwise) and so your relationship would always remain the most thrilling thing that almost happened to you, an imaginative and theoretical passion, a terrible, life-wrecking love that occurred outside and against the logic of her and your lives and so could not by definition be consummated.
1) Your boss is your mother, whom you intended to rescue by finally freeing her from a loveless marriage to a taciturn, needy, but ultimately withholding man.
2) Your boss, an authority figure who made a drunken pass at a subordinate eight years her junior, who simultaneously affirmed and violated your specialness by transgressing the clear moral and social boundaries that made your relationship possible, who extolled, excoriated, and then exiled you from your special bond through a series of letters, is Aaron, the camp counselor who almost abused you.
3) Your affair with your boss is an attempt to touch your father by supplanting him, or perhaps by wounding him, evidenced by the fact that even after the hundreds of obscene and impassioned emails, texts, and voicemails your received from your boss throughout your months-long affair, it’s the two plaintive and briefly raging missives that her husband sent you—including one in which he threatened to beat you up—that you remember best.
4) Your affair with your boss was the ultimate evasion of yourself, in that you chose a paramour with whom you could perform the vertiginous freefall of intimacy without ever having to risk setting foot on the level plane of actual intimacy, because you knew she would never leave her family (however much she insisted otherwise) and so your relationship would always remain the most thrilling thing that almost happened to you, an imaginative and theoretical passion, a terrible, life-wrecking love that occurred outside and against the logic of her and your lives and so could not by definition be consummated.
*
Your mom taking you into her office, opening a filing cabinet and showing you a report card she received when she was very young, a thin yellow typewritten page, folded to fit in an envelope. The closeness, the tenderness of this moment. Your mother reading the report card to you, gauging your reaction as she described an uncommonly intelligent, affectionate child who remained isolated at school, who wanted friends but could not make them, who was smart but easily distracted and difficult and seemed destined to alienate the people who might have loved her, and you remember understanding the message she wanted you to receive as you heard this, which was a message of reassurance--We’re the same person!—and you remember receiving it and feeling such pride.
And you remember remembering this moment, your pride turning, year by year, to terror.
And you remember remembering this moment, your pride turning, year by year, to terror.
VI.
Many times in your adult life have you wondered whether it would have been better for everyone had your parents gone through with the divorce. As adults, you and your brothers have spent much time discussing this.
*
Later, you become obsessed with the idea that you have a moral obligation to leave your girlfriend (who will become your second wife). You fixate on the idea that your bond, which is merely rich and supportive and asterisked by good sex and laughter and shared passions and friends, is not sufficiently special. You even see a therapist about it. You recount how you tearfully confessed your fears to your girlfriend, and how confused and hurt she’d been, and your therapist listens to you over the course of several weeks, during which time she mentions that she has a pre-teen daughter who has become obsessed with the idea that she has murdered the president using telekinesis. (To be fair, you tell this woman, at any given moment it is impossible for her daughter to prove she hasn’t.) Then your therapist laughs at you and says you’ve blown it with your girlfriend and are probably addicted to confessing, even if you have nothing to confess. The bummer of it being that she is actually a pretty great therapist.
*
In your MFA program, your mentor, a warm but reflexively private man, mentions at a party that you have one of the most distinctive voices among the writers in your program. This surprises you, because you think of your writing as more plot-driven than voice-driven, but then again you are thirty, and one of the key takeaways of your twenties was how little you really understand yourself. So you ask him, “What’s my voice?”
“Guilt,” he says. “Everything you write is”—and here he uses his hands—“weighed down by this enormous sense of guilt.” Then he shrugs. “What you’re guilty of, I don’t know. But it’s there in everything you write.”
“Guilt,” he says. “Everything you write is”—and here he uses his hands—“weighed down by this enormous sense of guilt.” Then he shrugs. “What you’re guilty of, I don’t know. But it’s there in everything you write.”
*
Recently, your mother texts you the words call me, which of course make you think your father has died, but no, it turns out that the storm that sent a tree through your parents’ roof has inspired her to start sorting through her old stuff, and while doing this she has come across a letter Aaron sent to you months after you’d seen him in court, but which you never received, because your mother intercepted it and hid it away.
“Send it to me,” you say.
And she does, using Sesame Street stamps on the envelope, because there are things, you know now, that just do not occur to your mother.
You are glad to see Aaron’s handwriting. Glad to see that it was real. He wrote a letter to your parents and a letter to you. In the letters, he apologizes. His knowingness, his surety, his irony have all been stripped away and what is left of him is so meek and direct it’s hard to look at. Your mother says that these letters are probably something he had to write as a condition of his treatment.
He writes: I said the naughty things, I brought in the dirty magazine, I touched you. And: It is shameful that out of all the boys in the world I could have molested, I touched one so pure.
“Send it to me,” you say.
And she does, using Sesame Street stamps on the envelope, because there are things, you know now, that just do not occur to your mother.
You are glad to see Aaron’s handwriting. Glad to see that it was real. He wrote a letter to your parents and a letter to you. In the letters, he apologizes. His knowingness, his surety, his irony have all been stripped away and what is left of him is so meek and direct it’s hard to look at. Your mother says that these letters are probably something he had to write as a condition of his treatment.
He writes: I said the naughty things, I brought in the dirty magazine, I touched you. And: It is shameful that out of all the boys in the world I could have molested, I touched one so pure.
*
In your thirties, you teach. High schoolers, college students. You’re surprised to find yourself in this role, surprised to find that you like it. Surprised to see that even your best students, your savviest, are so, so, so young. You have favorite texts, texts you practically memorize, that you don’t mind teaching again and again. For example, you like to read the accounts of people who believe aliens have visited them in the night and performed experiments on them. You build a whole unit around this literature.
In one of your best classes, you find yourself telling a roomful of high schoolers: “No one will ever understand your mother as well as you do. And no one will ever misunderstand your mother as completely as you will.”
You are teaching Hamlet.
In one of your best classes, you find yourself telling a roomful of high schoolers: “No one will ever understand your mother as well as you do. And no one will ever misunderstand your mother as completely as you will.”
You are teaching Hamlet.
*
You regret that you’ll never really understand your dad.
*
The most obvious interpretation for your writing this derives from the fact that your wife will give birth to your first child, a son, in a few months.
*
Perhaps inscrutability is the message. The message of the memory of the car crash. The memory is vivid and enduring, but it’s really just fragments of random sense details. Its meaning will always elude you. There is order and quiet, and then touch, and the order is shattered, and the quiet is shattered, and you are left with a different kind of quiet, a broken quiet, a stunned silence with everything in pieces, glass confettied across the asphalt like the shards in a kaleidoscope that transfix you by appearing to form patterns as you hold them to your eye.
*
When your son is born your obsessiveness will collect like barnacles on your desire to touch him, will become an ironclad certainty that your touch, no matter how gentle, will shatter him. You have heard that skin-to-skin contact with a parent is the most important thing for newborns, but your head will swarm with images of his fragile neck snapping in your hands. While your wife sleeps next to you on the hospital bed, you let these images settle over you like flies, or rain, or the soft pressure of hands.
*
When you are an adult, your mother tells you that in the middle of the night on that long-ago Thanksgiving, Aaron touched you while you slept. She doesn’t know how he touched you, exactly, or for how long, or to what end. This is apparently something Aaron told the detectives, and which the detectives relayed back to your mother, and your mother, after years of waiting, after your memories of this time have settled into a more or less familiar configuration, finally tells you.
You’re not sure what to make of this.
Was he lying? Could it be that, suspended in an interview room for hours, beat like a pinata with question after question, Aaron understood that the only way to end an interrogation was to confess, to spill some new piece of the story, no matter how false or fabulous or unsatisfying? Maybe Aaron didn’t actually touch you in the night. Maybe he merely intuited that to make a story end, something new had to happen.
Or was this new story of secret touching a means of hiding something much worse? Did he say this maddeningly vague, penny-ante thing--I touched him, once, in the night, when he was sleeping—so that he wouldn’t have to reveal the truth? Who confesses everything, after all? Is the story you guiltily tell merely what you say in order to conceal the story of your guilt? Is this why Aaron confessed to the detectives? Why my mother confessed to me? Why I confess, here, today, in this story? Is this why?
You’re not sure what to make of this.
Was he lying? Could it be that, suspended in an interview room for hours, beat like a pinata with question after question, Aaron understood that the only way to end an interrogation was to confess, to spill some new piece of the story, no matter how false or fabulous or unsatisfying? Maybe Aaron didn’t actually touch you in the night. Maybe he merely intuited that to make a story end, something new had to happen.
Or was this new story of secret touching a means of hiding something much worse? Did he say this maddeningly vague, penny-ante thing--I touched him, once, in the night, when he was sleeping—so that he wouldn’t have to reveal the truth? Who confesses everything, after all? Is the story you guiltily tell merely what you say in order to conceal the story of your guilt? Is this why Aaron confessed to the detectives? Why my mother confessed to me? Why I confess, here, today, in this story? Is this why?
*
Or maybe the memory of the car crash means nothing. It is simply there, a mole, or a birthmark. Another silent feature of your shape. You cannot cajole significance out of it any more than you could persuade it to unhappen. You might come closer to its meaning, ever closer, halving the distance each time, but you will never be close enough to understand it, or to understand why you must remember it. It is simply a thing that occurred. Occurs. Then and still. It is the unstoppable force. It is the immovable object.
*
In the quiet after the crash, you feel the awareness of a change, a new feature in the landscape. What is this new thing? You are. Your ears ring as you kick and push your way out of your mangled metal cage. You crunch through the confettied glass, the fragments of your chrysalis at your feet. Are you okay? you ask, too loud. You nod, surprised to hear your own voice: I’m okay. You didn’t have time to be afraid. You’ll be afraid later. You exchange information. You’re in a new place, but there’s relief there. In knowing the worst has happened. In knowing what it is. In standing there, looking for clues in the face of the person who endured the exact mirror of the injury you still reel from, your double, who—you realize with the force of a blow—is a stranger.