Saturday, April 7, 2012

Coasting Towards Sedna


He is sitting near the window, looking out onto the empty spot into which the hovertram will float when it arrives in a few minutes.  From my position, I can only see him from the rear, only make out the contour of his left cheek and the furrow of hair over his ear.  He could easily be any one of a number of older men with hair yellowing, skin crinkling, brown spots on the neck.  The gray thermion pants that he is wearing could belong to any geezer of his generation.  Yet the short-sleeved white shirt with the undershirt showing through make him look not so much like anyone as an ad for the latest senior cruise to the Moon. 
            But despite all this, something tells me that this is not just a stranger staring out the window of the waiting area.  Not just any older man. 
            It is him.  I know it is.  In fact, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
            But how can it be?  It defies the laws of levity.  And why is he here now, taking the solarsail, of all things, to the outer planets?  Where could he be going?
            To Sedna like me?
            Impossible.
            I am going there to study soil, or dirt depending on one’s sensibility.  To Sedna, one of the hundreds of new planets now known to swirl around the sun.  Unknowable Sedna, with its wild ten thousand year orbit.  Sedna where heat is a rumor and light a rare but succulent dream.  There is nothing there, of course, how can there be so far from any center?  But I am drawn there nonetheless.  Perhaps the secret to life on earth is buried beneath the dust.  Or something even grander.  That is what I am looking for…secrets, grandeur.  And also, in the dim beam at the edge of the solar system, I hope to write some poetry that is not about loss. 
            Yes, I know very well where I am going and why.  Or thought I knew.  But now, his sudden appearance has thrown everything into question, all filed under Y.   Why him, why here, why now?  I cannot answer them since none of this makes any sense.
            Something is very wrong, I know that much.  But it is empty there in the hovertram station and silent as a conclusion.  Am I the only one who wonders?   He certainly does not look upset or even in doubt.  He is simply sitting and waiting.  There is no one else in the room besides the two of us.  This is lucky because it gives me time to prepare, to approach at my own speed, to gather my wits and my whats.  Without this pause, I would not be able to swallow the scream perched at the edge of my throat.
            The undershirt he is wearing reminds me that when I was little, I used to go into his bedroom every morning to watch him dress.  He did everything in the exact same order, day in and day out.  Glasses, shorts, socks, shoes, undershirt, shirt, neurolinks, tie, pants, smartwallet, a gold key chain, then the folded handkerchief.  This was fascinating to me and also comforting in some strange way.   The repetition itself seemed to me like a kind of philosophy of life.  Maybe an antidote to the daily threat of biowar back then, or to the cruel uncertainties of fourth grade.
            Without knowing it I suppose, in his way, he proved to me that life goes on in the tiny details.  And I have used that in my own life – the microbial grids for example – but also by becoming an accountant to indignities when I had to.  I always meant to thank him for that little lesson but of course I never did.  It was one of those many things you never get around to doing.  But I wonder if I should?  Thank him, that is, now that he is here.  I consider this for a moment but in retrospect it seems so minor all these years later.  Not worth dredging up in light of this bizarre opportunity.  Then a brief flicker in the photonics knocks the whole memory into oblivion. 
            I step forward and the floor squeaks under my foot.  Barely hearing this, he turns slightly, bringing more of his profile into view.   It is a familiar profile, so rememorable, so touchable, even though I have not seen it in forty years.
            Somewhere in my family album there is a holo of him when he was a model.  At least that is what everyone says.  You never know, given the way family stories bloom from the merest tattle.  The image I have in mind must have been taken in the 2020s; a studio shot showing a pleasant looking young man in a straw hat.  Not what I would call handsome but it was taken at another time when a different style of face was in.  More cheeky, more boyish.  Still, I like the thought that he was considered handsome.  It means something about me genewise, I imagine.  Standing there behind him and recalling all this, I realize that I never told him that either.  Never thanked him for the genes, the good ones I mean.  Face gene, order gene, and the one that shielded me from pneumonia.  All those unsayings that hang like pauses.
            It occurs to me that I should apologize now that I have this weird second chance.  And not just about the photo but plenty of other goofs too.  All those times I refused to let him kiss me goodnight because I was too big for that.  And the time I got fed up with him trying to teach me to throw a baseball and yelled at him.  So many things.  All the ways sons insult their fathers by being their own men and not necessarily better ones. 
            Could I make up for that now?  Perhaps.  And so I take one more step closer to him.  From this position, I can suddenly see my own reflection in the window but he does not seem to notice it.  He is looking through the surface not at it.  I stop in my tracks.  What am I doing?  An apology makes no sense at all.  I mean…I was just a kid when these things happened.  What did I know?   And would he even remember these awkward moments?  Did they even matter to him as they apparently did and do to me?
                 window.  And that clinches it, that hand.  He is my father all right.  I would know that hand anywhere.  The firm wrist with the wide wrist knob, the square mitt, the rounded fingertips, the thick coarse skin.  Patches of hair on the knuckles.  Just before I went to sleep most nights he used to close my eyelids by gently slipping his hand down over my eyes.  I liked that.  My first dreams of the night were always solid, of things with weight and force.  Planets, cars.  Good dreams, boy dreams, where you know what’s what and who you are.
            Maybe I became a planetarian because of those hands, because of him.  He was the one, after all, who put the stick-on solar system in my room.  As it glowed at night, I would drift off into sleep and he would proudly name the nine planets all set out in their neat orbits.  Mercury, Venus, Earth…  Did he know just how much that would influence me later on?  I doubt it.  Fathers, I suppose, know little about what will last.  Sons either, come to think of it.
            When I finally pull up alongside of him, as bluntly as a gob, he seems to perk up and notice me.  A transport passes by on its way out of the terminal and the helios glint off his glasses.  He turns towards me and I can see his complete face.  Incredibly, he has not changed a bit.  Same old pair of morphing glasses with the titanium frame; same firm ridge of the nose; same rounded cheeks and thin tan lips.  His white hair still has a straw-colored tint and still smells of Celestium.  It occurs to me that I could breach the silence simply by asking him if they still make the stuff somewhere.  Luckily I catch myself.  Idiot!  Your father is here, right now.  Your own father whom you have not seen since you were a small boy.  The continuum has opened up along a fault line and he is — impossibly, incredibly — here right now.  You can ask him anything you want, anything you have ever wanted to ask.  Secrets of the shadow world.  And all you can come up with is the odor of regened hair goo?  Pathetic!
            He smiles but says nothing and standing there looking at him again so close, I cannot even recall the sound of his voice.  I begin to hope that he does not say anything, although it seems like he might.  What if he squeals?  Or sounds like a crook?  Or has a lisp?  I only knew him as the man I needed him to be, the father.  Who he was exactly is another matter.
            I too am speechless but only because there are too many words welling.  A lifetime of questions that all went unasked.  After all, we hardly talked much; that must have been a rule about fathers and sons.  We played catch behind the museum as the wind whipped the ochre dust of the lot into my eyes.  We went i-fishing that time upstate that I cried about killing the worms and made a nuisance of myself.  We went to West Point and he took holos of me sitting on the cannon.  Our entire relationship was a handful of stereocards.  As a matter of fact, I cannot recall having a single conversation with him.  We were together once, a father and his son, and that was how we knew each other. 
            I suppose it was enough because it had to be because that was the way it was.
            Yet now, a whole lifetime later, I feel burdened with questions.  What was his life like?  Did he like himself?  Was he afraid?  Did he have a secret?  Did he betray his dreams?  But the bottleneck in my throat prevents even one of these from emerging.  All that comes out is one word, flat as a pancake, with no urgency at all.
            Dad?
            No reaction. 
            He is staring right at me but does not seem to recognize me at all.  An awkward moment but then it hits me…of course not!   How could he recognize me?  He has never seen me as a man so how could he know who I am?   I am as old now as he was when I was his little boy.  No, it’s odder than I thought.  I shall have to introduce myself, I conclude with perfect turvy-topsy illogic.  But should I also shake his hand…or hug him?   What would that feel like?  I can call up the impression of his body but only vaguely, like a tune half forgotten.  I remember some sensations but not others.  He did not lean in but let me do the caressing.  He had firm muscles but a delicate touch.  You could not feel his bones but he was warm.
            What to do next?  Should I touch him, scold him, question him, thank him?  I’m sorry, I feel like saying, but about what I am not at all sure.  Perhaps that there are only memories left and too few to bear any weight.  Like an atmosphere dissipating.  Or are there actually too many memories?  The time he got his finger stuck in the car door and cried like a baby; watching the ballgame with him on Sundays as he drank milk with crumbled crackers; the toy maglev trains he used to buy for me; lighting a neutra-cigarette with his gold lighter. 
            Or maybe I am just sorry that he did not live long enough to be proud of me.  But no that is not it.  What I am sorry about is that he did not live long enough to know that I cared if he was proud of me. 
            Of course, maybe he would not have been.  Maybe he wished I had studied the market rather than the planets or become a ballplayer or a salesman.  No matter.  By this point, the whole thing is getting quite ridiculous.  The two of us there together, beyond time and space, and not saying anything.  Like two talkers struggling not to talk.  Downright loony.  Some sort of cosmic joke I am sure but does he get it too?  I do remember that he could be silly, tell jokes about Chinamen using funny voices.  Or explain that aperitifs were two robbers working together.  A joke would break the ice for certain but I do not know any.  I am a somber fellow, student of the dust.  And right on cue that moment passes too as a voice announces the arrival of the solarsail into the dock.  The hovertram will be here in a few minutes and time – this extra little slice of timeless time – will soon slip into the continuum like a hum.
            I sit down in the seat across from him.  He follows me with his hazel eyes, my eyes.   The truth is, I really did not know him very well.  Most of my memories of him come from stories at holidays or my mother talking about him long after he was gone.  Or family pictures.  Like the one in which he is holding me just after I was born.  He is bare-chested, his thick waist fitting firmly into the fluted rim of his trousers.  He is facing sideways to the camera and there is a look of pride in his profile.  He is holding me up and out, the way one would examine the label of a fine champagne.  I cannot be more than a few weeks old there, his hand is under my head, all held and looked at.  All held.  Everyone said he was so proud to be a father but who knows what they meant by it.  People say things.  Yet…maybe you can see something like it in that picture.  I look at it every so often; it was the last time I was looked at for no better reason than that I was me.
            I realize that I love him for that picture alone and I want desperately to tell him so.  But words are weak, ghosts of the feelings.  And I know that blurting them out now, here in this way station to the galaxy, will sound stupid and trite.  I want him to know that in hollow moments I think of being loved by him like that in that one snapshot instant and find a fulfillment there.  But I cannot say this.  This is all internal, personal.  It is a fiction I have made to suit my sense of myself.  Who knows which parts of it are true?  Or if any of it would matter to him? 
            And what is there to say really?  After all, he lived his life and I live mine.  Even his planets are different from mine.  He had only nine, all laid out in their neat orbits, the stately solar waltz, the singsong names.  But the world was simpler then.  The world is always simpler then.  Now things are more confounding.  There are the five inner hardrocks…Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Remnants, and Mars.  Then there are the four medial gasbags…Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.  And then there are the outer eccentrics…Pluto and Sedna and Quaoar and the rest.  And after that, the hundreds of known contenders of the Kuiper belt with names like Ziusudra and Nemed and Pitteri Pennu.  So many planets now that they had to dip into nether mythologies, far-flung gods and goddesses, to name them all.  And at the far reaches of the solar dent, unknown thousands of whirls and worlds in the great Oort cloud. 
            Comets, asteroids, resonant objects, scattered planetoids…it is a churning solar system now, full of destinations, debris, and doubt.  He would know none of this.  Our worlds barely touched, like dimensions slipping by.
            The seats are close and our knees are almost touching.
            The day he died, I watched him put on his glasses, shorts, socks, and all the rest.  Then I went to school and then I came home.  And nothing was the same thereafter.  The house was dark, the screen silent, and my mother all drained and the air was chill and I was ten years old and my father was dead and I dreamed of coasting towards Sedna and finding secrets in its thick, dark, ancient soil.
            Now, in the hovertram station, as the solarsail gently floats above us, he leans towards me and lowers his bottom lip as if to speak.  His teeth are yellow, just like before.  I hold my breath.  What a fool I have been!  Such a moment and all I can think about is what I should say.  How selfish!  Perhaps he has returned because he has something momentous to say to me…like a whisper or a warning.  I used to think that everything I did not know about life, the things other men must know, resulted from him dying too soon.  Finer points about the art of baseball, how to seduce women, or how to sell yourself or buy a hyperbond.  Man stuff.  I was angry with him about that for years.  There were many times when I could have used some help.
            I wait but words never leave his lips. 
            The silence is as deep as the chasm in time that separated us. 
            My turn again and I suddenly know what to do.
            Here is what I decide to say:
            Forget all the questions unanswered, the things unsaid, the memories lost.  It all comes down to this.  I have missed you for my whole life, never gotten over your death, never come to terms with you never coming back.  I have lived with a hole in my hope since then.  But I also know this…I know about the mangle of orbits, and the teeming universe, and the membrane that holds it all together.  I have seen that each life is its own knit of questions and answers and that you lived in your weft and I lived in mine. 
            What could he tell me – then or now -- that I could not think of myself?  He was a man who had a life and died from it.  What else is there to know?  And finally, in the empty station, I realize just what to do.  It is now clear as a bell.
            Nothing.  That’s it.  I have nothing to say, nothing to ask, nothing to apologize for.  Nothing at all.
            The hovertram arrives and bright helios pour into the small waiting room, creating new ridges and shadows on his face.  I see now that without noticing, without paying specific attention to it, the moment is slipping away.  It is passing like a trace.  I try to keep it with me, to hold it, but it is no use.  It is out of my control.  He is vanishing, the seat behind him beginning to show through, his skin thin, then translucent, then vaporous.  The light shifts, shadows warp, and the world goes on…but with changes.  In a few seconds something that was not clear a moment ago can now be seen.  And what once was, is now only a reflection.
            Fully lit I can see him crisply for the first time.  And I realize something that changes things considerably.  This man getting up to board the tram is not my father at all.  In fact, from up close and with full illumination, it does not even resemble him very much.  This man’s face is wider, his eyes too weak, his nose pulpy.  This is the face of a plumber or someone who tells long stories with no upshot.  And the glasses he is wearing are not titanium anyway but only silver poly. 
            How can I have made such a mistake?  Thank God I did not say anything!  What would this dull fellow have made of me, all weepy and sincere, prattling on about baseballs and Celestium.
            Other people arrive quickly and crowd around us as we approach the gate.  Vacuum doors open and sounds skitter into the room from outside.  New voices interrupt the stillness as travelers from the returning hovertram arrive and pour out through the doors.  One of them greets him with a hug and he helps lift a bag.  I close my eyes to block out the confusion and when I open them again, the sounds are gone, blown dust, and so is he.
            I board the tram and it begins to ascend to the solarsail all billowy under the violet night sky.  Sedna is up there, somewhere, and perhaps has secrets in its soil.  I look back through the window to the station without regret, wondering what it was I was wondering a few moments before.

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