Yannick Murphy - The Call

WHAT THE SPACECRAFT WAS DOING WHEN I GOT BACK HOME:Moving quickly up and down, then back and forth, the way a child would wave a sparkler on the Fourth of July, trying to spell his name out in the air with the burning tip. Was the message the name of the man who had shot my son?

WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID WHEN I GOT HOME:“Father” in German sounds like “Farter.”

WHAT THE WIFE SAID:They got that right.

WHAT WAS NOT IN THE PHONE BOOK:Anyone named “Pete Darlan George.”

WHAT THE FIRE SAID IN THE WOODSTOVE:You have loaded me with wet wood. You did not cover my log piles over the summer, and now I will smoke instead of burn.

WHAT THE WIFE SAID I DID IN MY SLEEP:Cried.

WHAT THE WIFE DID IN HER SLEEP:Snored.

WHAT THE TRUCK IS TELLING ME:Check engine.

WHAT I TOOK THE TRUCK INTO THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED FOR:The CHECK ENGINE light.

WHAT THE TRUCK COST ME AT THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED:$300.

WHAT THE TRUCK IS STILL TELLING ME AFTER $300:Check engine.

WHAT I HAVE DECIDED:That having a light on all the time telling me to check something is a good thing and it will make me check my levels more often. It will make me more aware and alert and maybe I need this constant state of alertness to feel alive. Maybe, just maybe, my high levels are keeping me young in ways I never knew. I have my levels to thank. To show my appreciation, I make the appointment with the doctor when I’m at the hospital visiting Sam. I stand by Sam’s bedside and talk to him and tell him I will be right back, I am going down to floor 5 to make an appointment with my own doctor. I feel stupid talking to Sam. I am too much like my wife for a moment, and I do not want to be like her. Talking to him, having him smell food she has brought for him that he cannot eat, brushing his hair for him when it did not have the chance to get messy-he was not running through the pastel yellow walls of the halls, the window was not open letting through winter’s blustering wind, he was not wrestling with his sisters the way he did before.

WHAT GISELA SAYS:Meine Telefonnummer ist zwei, sieben, neun, null, neun.

WHAT JÜRGEN SAYS:Do you play chess? (You see Jurgen is always trying to get Gisela to go out with him and do something. He suggested playing table tennis earlier, but Gisela, can you blame her, hasn’t got a thing for table tennis.)

WHAT MY WIFE CALLS GISELA:A slut, and then my wife wants to know how you say slut in German, and my wife guesses it’s something like a Schatz , but she’s not sure, considering how anything she ever learned about German was from the movie Das Boot , which we have seen several times over and over, because we love Das Boot and we and our children are known, every once in a while, to walk around the house and belt out the piercing cry of “Alarm! Alarm!” in German accents, as if we were not living in a house with creaking timbers, but living in a U-boat about to be attacked by the Allied forces and we have to quickly descend to crush depth in order to save our tails in our beloved tin can.

CALL:No call. Just the caller who hangs up. Jen wants to know who it was. I don’t know, I say. Was it the hospital? she says. I don’t know, I say. Well, who was it? How do you know it wasn’t the hospital? she says. Why would the hospital hang up? I say. The hospital hung up? Jen says, then call them back. And then she calls the hospital and talks to the day nurse asking if we had been called, if there had been any change in our son.

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS AFTER SHE GETS OFF THE PHONE WITH THE DAY NURSE:Well, he’s fine. There’s been no change. Thank God, Jen says. But I’ve been hoping for a change, any kind of change.

WHAT THE CHILDREN DO IN THE MORNING:Climb into bed with us. Sarah curling around me, pulling hairs from moles off my back. I tell her not to. She reads, her eyes close to the page, words from The Secret Garden somehow hard for her to see. Propped up on her elbows, the small muscles in her back pop up, and off her skin comes the faint smell of chlorine from when she had her practice swim the night before. A heavy header on the team, her face looking down at the tiles and the drain, rather than where the coach would have her look-up and out and toward the wall. Who can blame her, not wanting always to swim into a wall, when looking down is where one might want to go. At least down there in the holes between the hairs tangled in the drain there is a possible way out.

OTHER THINGS GISELA DOES NOT WANT TO DO BESIDES PLAY TABLE TENNIS:She doesn’t want to play chess, she doesn’t want to go to a movie, she doesn’t want to lift weights. Gisela is too tired for all of this. Perhaps, another day, she tells Jürgen, she will go in-line skating when she is feeling better.

THINGS I DO NOT WANT TO DO:Cut the limb off the big maple that leans on the asphalt shingle roof covering my wife’s office and threatens to rot a hole all the way through to the timbers. Oil the windows so the sun and rain and snow don’t ruin the wood. Fix the drawers in my wife’s desk. She tries to pull them out and they don’t work, the bottoms fall through, and the drawers’ runners are broken or out of line, so that in order to open them she has to pull hard, making her stapler, and three-hole punch, and black Sharpies all jump from the drawer and onto the floor. I don’t want to bring in more wood for the fire. I really don’t mind the hearth turning cold under my butt, at least not for a while. It is still only fall and the clutch of winter not yet here and besides the last time I went to the log pile to get more wood, I stepped in dog shit and I don’t feel like having to shovel up the dog shit now so that I can get more armfuls of wood. Maybe I will feel like going in-line skating in a few days, but not right now. Not right now, Jürgen. I am so tired right now, and I can say that in German. I have learned that much.

WHAT I DO:I lie down and close my eyes. What I see is an outline on my eyelids of the spacecraft and I wonder if that’s where it’s been all this time anyway, and it’s never even been in the sky.

WHAT WE HEAR ON THE RADIO:That the animal shelter has an overabundance of cats. Cats are being brought in by the sackfuls, quite possibly, and now there is no more room. The shelter is full. Owners can’t afford their cats anymore. What will happen to the cats? I wonder. They will be turned out into the woods. The coyotes will make meals of them. They will try to survive. They will band together, they will roam in cat packs. Cars will have to stop and let them cross in packs across the road, yellow-eyed in the headlights and silent except for the flicking speech of the ends of their tails.

WHAT ELSE I HEAR ON THE RADIO:Transmissions from Mars. It’s a break in the reception, the show that’s on is interrupted by a series of broken beeps. Beep-di-dah-beep-di-dah-beep-beep-beep. When it happens, my wife puts her fingers up on her head like antennae of an alien and says in a monotone to the children: I am getting a transmission… the next flight to Mars is scheduled to lift off soon. This is a very important mission. We need to fill a number of vital posts on board. We are searching for a loyal and dedicated Head Potty Cleaner. We are pleased to announce that you, Sarah, have been especially selected for this high honor. Welcome aboard, Sarah, Head Potty Cleaner.

WHAT WE DON’T HAVE:Cats.