Susan Steinberg - Spectacle - Stories

There are some who say I did not kill my father.

Not technically they mean.

But the ones who say I did not kill my father are the ones who want to have sex with me.

They say I did not kill my father because they cannot have sex with a woman who killed.

What I mean is they cannot have sex with a woman who carries, though all women carry, an unbearable weight.

So they mix me another drink, they laugh, they say, You did not kill your father.

What they think they believe and what they truly believe: two different things.

I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to do much more than that.

Meaning I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to stick around in the mornings.

Meaning I am unable to lie there pretending I want what it is I’m supposed to want.

Because of this and because of that. And I cannot pretend to be anything other than the result of this and that.

When the doctor called at four a.m., waked me from a dream I can almost remember, something about chasing dogs in a field, something about a fence, he introduced himself as the doctor.

He said, I am doctor such-and-such, in this uptight voice, this deadpan voice. And I laughed and said, You’re who. I said, Who is this.

My brother was also on the line. My brother was in Boston. The doctor was in Baltimore. And I was in a place called Warrens-burg, Missouri. I was in Warrensburg, Missouri, for a job I was trying to quit. When I mention Warrensburg, Missouri, people say, Where the fuck is that.

I tell them there are cowboys there. I tell them there are tornadoes that can blow your house across the state. There are brown recluse spiders, I tell them, in every corner of every room. It’s a shit hole, I tell them.

And there I was in it, trying my best to sleep right through it, a doctor telling me, at four a.m., please, to please be serious.

I was not always serious, and somehow the doctor already knew this, knew perhaps because I laughed when he said he was the doctor. Or perhaps he knew because my brother told him I would not be serious. Or perhaps he knew because when he told me to kill my father, I laughed again.

He did not, of course, use the word kill. He had another word, a series of words, a more technical way of wording.

The doctor sounded exhausted, and my brother sounded exhausted. My brother and his wife had a one-year-old boy. The boy was always crying in the background. My brother was always saying, Shh.

My brother always had circles under his eyes. They were bluish, the circles, and they made him look beaten down.

You look like Dad, I said to him once.

Fuck you, he said to me more than once.

We were no longer kids and this was a serious matter. The doctor had been up all night.

Trying to save your father, he said.

To no avail, he said, and I wondered at the word avail, wondered if the doctor got to be a doctor because of whatever it was he had that made him use that word.

I wanted something to eat. I wanted to run downstairs in the massive house I was renting in Warrensburg, Missouri, and root through the refrigerator for the leftovers. The leftovers were in take-out containers, and I wanted to bring them up to my bed, switch on the TV, settle into that blue-lit space.

The doctor said my father had flatlined several times. I knew the word flatlined from my ex, who had flatlined three times when we were together. He had flatlined, my ex, because he was an addict, and being an addict, as it turns out, will make you flatline. After the first time, my mother, a nurse, said, He’ll never be the same. But he was the same, as it turned out, because he flatlined again. After the third time, we broke up. I’d like to say we broke up because I’d had enough, but really he broke up with me for another woman, a thinner woman, a paler woman, the veins too vivid through her face, and she eventually flatlined too, and she eventually died from this, but he did not.

He became a firefighter.

I moved to Warrensburg, Missouri.

The whole world just went on.

The doctor said my father would be a vegetable, and upon hearing this word, I imagined a plate. I imagined vegetables on this plate.

One does not want to imagine this. One wants to imagine one’s father running through a field, arms spread, something dynamic like that.

Something totally made up like that.

My father would never have run through a field.

He was mad, yes, but he was not that kind of mad. He was the other kind. He was ferocious.

And besides, what field. In Baltimore, where we all were before we all weren’t, there were no fields, just streets of nothing and more nothing, just my ex knocking on some boarded-up door, just me waiting in the car.

But here, where I was now, where I am no longer, in Warrens-burg, Missouri, there were fields.

The doctor said my name.

He said, Please.

My brother said my name.

I had a decision to make. I had a serious decision to make, because I was the older kid. Though, as stated, I was not the more serious of the two. And my serious brother, with his serious boy screaming his head off in some dark room in their serious city, was waiting for me to do the right thing.

This was years ago, and I’m telling you this because the story came to me today for no real reason, just because I happened to see a guy digging through the trash, and I was like, You again. I was like, Get out of there.

And I’m telling you this, because some have been wondering why I am the way I am.

Which is to say a mess.

Which is to say a lot of things.

I could not at first kill my father. I at first said no. I said, Not as long as he’s still breathing.

But he isn’t breathing, said the doctor. Not technically, he said.

The doctor sounded fed up. But not fed up with the limitations of science. And not with the limitations of the human body.

Meaning not fed up how I was.

A man I knew in Warrensburg, Missouri, a man I knew from the job I needed to quit, had been bitten by a brown recluse. He’d rolled over it one night in bed and got bitten in the ass. When he told me the story I laughed. I was like, Why were you naked. He was like, Wrong question. Because he was trying to tell me the bite dissolved the skin on his ass. Because he was trying to tell me that this just wasn’t right.

The technical term is necrotized.

The point is I was not always serious.

No, the point is we’re limited.

The doctor said, A machine is making him breathe.

He did not use the word machine.

I said I would have to call my mother to get her advice, and my brother said, Don’t be a dumbass, and the doctor sighed in that way that the assholes I have dated since this night sigh when they don’t get what they want.

Like the restaurant is out of chicken wings. Like the beer is flat. Like I’m trying to convince them I’m a terrible person. Like I’m already stepping into my skirt.

I’m already reaching for the doorknob, a bigger whore than they want me to be.

The sigh applies pressure to the woman. Then the woman is supposed to give them what they want.

Which is to say the woman is then supposed to perform.

Which is to say the woman is then supposed to know the subtle difference between being a woman and performing one.

I said, I’m calling our mother.

My brother said, Don’t.

I thought I could get her on the line. I didn’t know if it would work. It involved disconnecting the call. It involved dialing her number. It involved reconnecting the call, hoping everyone was still on the line.

The metaphor is unintentional.

I mean of disconnection.

There is no intentional metaphor in this story.