Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

He tried not to let her see the anger that was coursing through his system like a poison. “What does it say?” he said, calmly as he could.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t exactly steam it open. I remember he wanted to get some thoughts down for you. He wanted me to wait until he wasn’t compos mentis to give it to you. But obviously he didn’t want me to wait this long.”

Connell held the letter warily. “Thanks,” he said.

“Maybe you want to be alone for this,” his mother said, and left the room.

Instead of opening the letter, which sat like an unread verdict, he went to the filing cabinet and looked through the drawers. One was full of mementoes from his youth — report cards, honors certificates, birthday and Father’s Day cards he’d written his father, art he’d made in the early school years, a once-essential stuffed rabbit he’d forgotten about. As the years passed, his father had saved increasingly more things, no doubt as mnemonic devices, until he had stopped saving anything.

In another drawer he found shoeboxes full of those four-by-six photo albums that used to come free with a developed roll. The albums didn’t have dates, but one contained shots from a cross-country meet of his, so it must have been taken during his freshman year. They were mostly shots of Connell, though there wasn’t a single photo that depicted him looking at the camera. It was as though his father had been waiting for him to turn and look at him. A terrific loneliness came over Connell as he imagined his father looking through the camera and calling for his gaze silently with his own. He was relieved to see a few landscape portraits of the meadow at Van Cortlandt Park, but when he came to a photo of his father standing with his arm around his old teammate, a sensitive kid who left the school after an unhappy freshman year — he had to jog his brain to remember the kid’s name was Rod — he felt jealous. Rod dwarfed his father; he appeared to be leaning down to be in the shot with him. Their faces were close together, and they had such smiles on. It looked as if Rod was his father’s own child.

He was terrified to read the letter; he saw that clearly. He went to the bookshelves. All that remained of his father’s library were two shelves of reference books and some hardcover volumes of philosophy and literature that his mother hadn’t parted with. Another shelf held his father’s intellectual output — a shrine of published papers, notes, and notebooks. Connell remembered how much time his father spent in the lab just before he retired. He saw now that his father must have known he’d have to give up his lab soon. Was it possible to imagine him chasing an understanding of, even a cure for, the disease he was afflicted by? Whatever he’d been working on had come to naught, but maybe it would have had an impact on the larger world. If so, then these notebooks could hold the key to reclaiming him from the forgotten dead men on that hill. He wanted people to visit his father someday, paying posthumous respects.

Connell found a notebook from this later period, but there was no cache of revelatory notes, no raw materials from which he might fashion a second act for his father in death. There were only scribblings in a wavering hand and endless, unlabeled columns of numbers.

He sat back down and held the envelope before him. His fear of the verdict had waned as he read his father’s notebooks. He flashed with a juvenile hope that it contained something he urgently needed to hear, and now he hesitated to open it out of fear of disappointment. He wanted to preserve the seal of possibility on it; to reserve the option to project whatever he wanted onto it; to use his imagination to drag himself out of the hole he found himself in.

May 16, 1992

My dear son,

I wanted to take some time to tell you a few things that I think you should hear and that you can only hear from me, because a while ago I got some bad news, and to the extent that your knowing the things I will tell you here can answer questions you may have someday, I want you to know them. I don’t mean to insist on their importance by telling you them; I want my presence in your life when I’m gone to be a hand on the shoulder, not one around the throat; but if these things are important to you, then they are important to me to precisely that extent. I hope you can read my handwriting, let alone follow the train of my thoughts, which I fear may be hazier than I understand it to be at any given moment. I want to write this before the opportunity slips away.

I want you to remember me, but only if you want to remember me. I tried to be the kind of father that a son could recall with a full and open heart and not out of a sense of duty. The way you know me as your father is the way I most purely am. The understanding between us goes beyond words, and it is there that I live most fully, there and in the mental space I inhabit with your mother. It may be important to future generations to know the biographical facts of my life, to place some leaves on a bough of the family tree, but that is an abstract notion; you are the reason I am writing, you whom I feel in my blood and bones. I don’t want to leave you with questions. I want you to carry me around to the extent that it makes you happy to do so and gives you strength. I want you to forget me if you need to. I want you to suck the marrow out of life.

I am going to slow down. I am going to take a deep breath.

If you want to remember me, remember all the things we did together. The times we ran through words for your spelling bees, hours and hours of words. You used to sound like a monk chanting. We started before dinner, picked it up afterward, went until your bedtime. Remember the driving range, emptying buckets of balls. Remember the fishing trips, the canoe trips. The catches we had, the games we went to. Remember the radios we built together, the remote-controlled car. Remember the trips to the comic book store, the trip to Italy, the trip to Disney World. Remember us going through your homework together. All the times we went to the batting cages. When I taught you the names of birds and plants and animals. When we went bird-watching. The symphonies we went to. The plays. The Mobil games at the Garden. The time we watched the pole vault record get broken. The long-jump record. The mile-time record. The Knicks games. The wrestling matches. George “The Animal” Steele. King Kong Bundy. Andre the Giant. Hulk Hogan. The way I rubbed your back until you fell asleep. The Mets games we listened to on the radio together. The times we read together at night. The ground balls I hit you. The fly balls. The times I drove you all over the five boroughs and beyond to your friends’ houses, or picked you up from the train when you called. The trips to the museums. The trips to the barbershop. Getting our hair cut side by side. The way we went to get you your new baseball gear every year. The jogs we went on. The push-ups we did together. All the times we went out in the cold to throw the football around. The way we got you over your fear of the rope swing at the Coakleys’ summer house. The way we got you to jump off the train trestle. Making Easter eggs. The way you loved to watch the tablets dissolve and the cloud of dye suffuse the water. All the times we shoveled snow.

What matters most right now is that you hear how much I want you to live your life and enjoy it. I don’t want you to be held back by what’s happened to me.

I want you to know that I loved my work and did some good with it, and I believe that is worth more than any amount of money. I have not given you a lifetime of riches, but I have faith I have given you a father you can be proud of.