Louisa Hall - Speak

16th . Morning, and after a difficult night. Have lent myself to the seamen for mending, beginning with E. Watts. Monotonous work, that keeps my hands busy. Wish to God for less frivolous thoughts. Help me to devote my waking hours to remembering Ralph. Help me to harbor less concern for myself, to make mind an orbiting body.

Best to spend time among seamen, who keep to their work. During dinner, father asks after my health in such a manner of concern that various parts threaten decay. Mr. Whittier quiet on subject of unchristian love. Both of us aware of secret funeral on deck. Shell remains in my chamber.

At night, repeat Ralph’s attributes to myself. Circle him in my mind. White blaze. Two white feet, one brown, one black. Brown eyes. Black leather nose, white down on his chin. Refuse to forget him. If I can remember him, perhaps he is still living. Though such life being for my benefit, and not for his.

17th . Night. Resolved, at one point, to write as if writing to Ralph, but it becomes impossible. Seems a dry myth, to speak to him still. Am unclear, then, whom to address, and whether such questions have substance. What matter to whom I write? Only write, for when Ralph was still with us, so I wrote then.

18th . Lord’s Day, and so no mending to be done. Have listened to mother for hours, fretting about future dangers. Had resolved to be less scornful of her concerns: Indian kidnappings, savage rituals, shipwrecks, famine, disease. But find I cannot bring myself to fear these disasters. Fear only the disappearance of what we once were.

19th . Father expresses concern for my health. Notes that I have grown thin. Spend too much time in retirement, working or writing in journal. Admirable industry (he says), but important also to enjoy God’s universe. Mentioned sunlight, tortoises, etc. Have therefore tried to walk more at ship’s rail, but no longer enjoy watching the ocean. See only dark shapes passing under the water. Purple shadows. Frightful world beneath surface, domain of Ralph’s bones. Wish only to remember him.

Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040

Once, I was loved by Dolores. I was her husband, the father of her child. I taught my daughter how to form the sounds of my name. The three of us stood under our jacaranda and looked out over the ocean: All this, I could have said to my daughter, will be yours.

Dolores didn’t come to my trial. She didn’t testify on my behalf, nor did she rise to defend me against accusations of hubris. When the trial began, we’d been divorced thirteen years. She raised Ramona. Throughout my daughter’s childhood, I was a broken wing of a father, given custody one weekend per month. Over macaroni and cheese, Ramona and I were polite. She forsook her babybot when she was eleven, six years before they were banned and collected. When I asked her why she gave up her bot, she only looked down at her food. None of the other children were giving up their babybots. Older kids took them off to college, or lugged them in special carrying cases when they went looking for work. Why did Ramona refuse the company that her peers so doggedly clung to? She never undertook to explain. I do know that it happened around the time Dolores’s cancer recurred. They were living together, alone. The only child of a single mother, perhaps Ramona felt, at the age of eleven, that she should sacrifice her babybot in exchange for her mother’s life. A crazy idea, but the cancer went away and never came back, so maybe it was a good one.

After that, she was a quiet child, far too sad for her age. Estranged from her by the divorce, and all too aware of my part in her sadness, I tried too hard to wrangle quick smiles. These attempts were abrasive, but she was too kind to refuse me. Her smiles stretched her face tight. She must have been miserable, sleeping alone in that unfamiliar bedroom, far away from her mother, lost to the one creature that had always been hers.

Even now, in the rec room, wringing my life to squeeze out a memoir, I find it difficult to provide explanations. How did we get to that point, sleeping in that strange house, far away from Dolores? When, precisely, did the fatal shift in my marriage occur? When did I choose the path leading to prison, away from my wife and my daughter? Dolores and I lived for two years in a too-perfect harmony that caused us to speak in near whispers. I compromised so that she might be happy; willingly, she forgave me my errors. I learned how to bake; she kept a garden. She had a child for me, we built a family, and thirteen years later, she didn’t come to my trial. How does such transformation occur? Is it ever possible to pinpoint a moment, a clear before and a contrasting after? Or can the process of estrangement only be taken as an indivisible whole?

More nights than not, I lie in my cell, attending the second criminal trial of my life. What did Stefan do to lose Dolores? Exhibit A is the arrival of our baby girl. On one hand, we have the miracle of a child. On the other, Dolores had less time to listen to stories. The expression that I alone had been able to produce — the softening mouth, the lightening shoulders — came over her now whenever she looked at Ramona. In my more petulant moods, I sometimes wondered if she only kept me around to provide for our child. I asked myself on occasion whether she’d ever loved me at all. She’d never been overly expressive. How could I know how she really felt?

Such is the pathetic nature of Exhibit A. Exhibit B, equally lame, is the difficulty involved with quitting a libertine lifestyle. For many years, there was a concrete number with which it was possible to quantify my success. Every day, the scale of my conquests expanded. After I married Dolores, the numbers started to plummet. I wanted nothing more than to love my wife and care for my child, but how does one measure such progress? Meanwhile, my book’s sales had slipped, and my dating website was becoming archaic. I reminded myself that I’d chosen more humane pursuits, but it’s difficult to untrain a monkey. He still wakes in the morning and looks around for his audience, dresses up in his red braided vest, straps on his cymbals, and tips his tasseled cap for no one if no one is looking. He begins to wonder whether perhaps he’s fooling himself, whether he’s convinced himself he’s living when in fact he’s merely performing, going through the motions of life, a wire monkey raised by a wire mother.

Faced with such suspicions about my inner substance, I racked my brain for some kind of relief. I didn’t want to cheat on my wife, but I did want to know I still had what it took. In the interest of comparing them with my program, I began trolling a few dating websites. Here and there, I tried my hand. I had no intention of consummating an affair, but I did start to talk. I talked and I talked. A few months in, I’d gained the ears of hundreds of women. I never actually met one, but from the safety of my digital cave, I’d get eight or nine of them on the hook all at once and convince them I was the love of their lives.

For hours on end, I could glut myself with online flirtation, until I felt slightly carsick and completely done with myself. Then I slunk back to the bedroom. There, enfolded by familial warmth, I could momentarily forget about the importance of proving myself to strangers. Through the short night by Dolores’s side, through long, milky mornings, through walks with a mole in my front pack and hours spent pacing the nursery to keep her from crying, I was satisfied with my life.

For almost a year, these two strands of myself coexisted, jostling each other, sucking all the air from the room. They demanded all my attention. I was like a host who invites two bitter enemies to a party. It was stressful, but in truth I enjoyed the balancing act, the secret triumph of carrying it off. Part of me thinks I might have carried on like that forever if a particularly grotesque computer affair hadn’t forced me to abandon the plot. To focus on my wife and my child, to carry them down from my mountaintop fortress and cross many deserts to arrive at our river.