Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

My father said, “I’ve been thinking about that lawn mower.”

“What about it?”

“It’s such a good deal. Maybe tomorrow we’ll go back and get it, and I can keep it here until you need it.”

“Would you use it in the meantime?”

“Me?” he said. “What have I got to mow, my rock garden? We’ve got that big two-car garage, there’s plenty of room.”

“You mean on the off chance I ever have a lawn, I’m going to come out here and pick up this ten- or twenty-year-old mower?”

“They only make things worse and worse,” he said. “Do you know how much your mother would give to have her old Hoover upright back again? You can’t buy those anymore for any price, now vacuums are all made out of plastic.”

“You’re not serious about this,” I said.

“Sure I’m serious. You’ll inherit everything in that house anyway, why not inherit a good lawn mower at some future time when the only ones you can buy are made of rubber?”

“I don’t want a lawn mower,” I said. “Really. Thanks for offering.”

“Maybe I’ll buy it anyway,” he said. “Then it’ll be there, and if you don’t want it, you can give it to the Salvation Army or whatever.”

“Dad, I don’t want the mower,” I said.

“Well, wait and see.”

“I don’t want a power drill, or a microwave, or a Mercury sedan. I don’t want season tickets to the Indians. I don’t want a Rototiller, or a rod and reel, or a thermos that keeps coffee hot all day.”

“Now, now,” he said. “No need to get excited.”

“What I’d really like,” I said, “is to know what happened to me. Why can’t I seem to make a life for myself?”

His face clenched up. It was a familiar expression of his, this gathering of the facial muscles under the skin—it happened when he was confronted by the contrary or the inexplicable. His face actually appeared to pucker and shrink as his features worked their way toward center. He might have been straining to see through a keyhole from a distance of several feet.

“You’ll find something,” he said. “You’re still young, it takes time.”

“What happened ? You were there, you must have seen it. I keep thinking there must be something I don’t remember. I’ve got a decent job, I have lovers and friends. So why do I feel so numb and separate? Why do I feel like a failure? Did you do something to me? I won’t hold it against you. I just need to know.”

He paused to take in a gulp of air. His face continued to shrink.

“I loved you,” he said. “I worked hard, I don’t know. I must have made mistakes. Your mother and I took the best care of you we could.”

“Well, I know you did,” I said. “I know. So how have I turned out to be such a mess?”

“You’re not a mess,” he said. “I mean, if you’re having some problems—”

“Just answer the question.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. His eyes went glassy, and his mouth hung slightly open. What was he remembering? There would of course have been some thing—a spasm of hatred when I would not stop crying, some meanness born from jealousy. Some little act or omission, a brief ordinary failure of love that would not, in the end, explain anything.

We stood for a while in silence, which was rare for us. Ordinarily, my father and I avoided silence. We were both good talkers, and we knew how to keep the air around us thoroughly occupied with talk or games or snatches of song. The sickle shape of a hawk skated over the stars. An empty 7-Up can gleamed in the moonlight like something precious.

“Dad, listen,” I said.

He did not reply. It was only then that I realized how he was straining for breath.

“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”

His face was dim, his eyes unnaturally large as he concentrated on pulling in air. He had the shocked look of a fish pulled out of the water into a world of piercing, unbreathable light.

“Dad? Can you talk?”

He shook his head. My first thought was of flight. I could still get away; I could deny everything. No one need ever suspect me.

“Dad,” I said helplessly. “Oh, Dad, what should I do?”

He gestured me closer. I took hold of his shoulders, inhaling his whiskery, cologned smell, which had not changed since I was a baby. His lungs squeaked like a balloon being vigorously rubbed.

Carefully, as if he were made of porcelain, I helped lower him to a sitting position. I sat beside him, holding him, on the talcumy earth.

So this is it, I thought. This is my father’s death. I did not know how to help, what to do; where to bury him. I stroked his wispy hair, which had once been thick and prosperous enough to base a marriage on.

I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed clichés, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”

He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.

I said, “Don’t worry about Mom or me. We’ll be fine. Everything’s all right, really. Everything’s fine.”

I couldn’t tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.

And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the passage of oxygen.

Finally he was able to say, “Guess I overextended. I got a little carried away there.”

“You’d better stay here,” I said. “I’ll go get help.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “We just have to walk back very slowly. Okay?”

“Sure. Of course. Dad, I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

I helped him to his feet and we began the long walk home. It would take us over an hour to cover a distance we’d managed in twenty minutes on the way out. Stars fell overhead.

When I was fifteen, my father and I drove to Chicago together on a shopping trip and got caught in a storm on our way back. Rain fell in sheets; the sky deepened to the opaque green-gray that breeds tornadoes. It got so bad we pulled off at a rest area overlooking a muddy lake backed by the vast green of a barley field. Rain hammered on the roof and hood of our car. We sat in silence, occasionally clearing our throats, until a flick of lightning turned the lake’s surface a brief livid yellow. Then we both started to laugh. The lightning might have been the punch line of a long, complicated joke. When we were through laughing we talked about my future, about the possibility of getting a new dog, and about our ten favorite movies. After the storm passed we drove home with the radio playing and the windows open. Later we would learn that a tornado had in fact touched down in the vicinity and had flattened a water tower and an Amish cemetery not twenty miles from where we’d been parked.

Now we walked together, very slowly, through the blue-white desert night. “Dad?” I said.

“Yes, son.”

“Maybe we can go to another movie tomorrow. I hear Moonstruck isn’t too bad.”

“Fine. You know me, I’m always good for a movie.”

Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost—to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home.