Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I pause in the anteroom with the little piano and put my back against the wall by the door, out of sight of the main dining room, and slump, a slump that translates itself to Honey, who puts her head on my shoulder and her injured paw on my other shoulder and inspects her new appendage. I smell her hair which has its puppy smell and then put her down to pack away my wallet her diaper shit and prepare us for maximum efficient travel on foot.

I carry her out the door down the concrete steps and into a vast lavender sky and hot dry air that saps the remaining vitality I had counted on to carry us home. We walk through the parking lot and stop at the road while a truck barrels past. My heart suddenly starts pounding. I picture myself and Honey under the wheels of the truck, all her bright red blood outside of her body, her limbs mangled, and start crying. She puts her hand on my face with her toilet paper mitten and I walk fast, nearing a run as we pass the railroad tracks. My arms are beginning to falter as we round the circle toward the house and I’m gasping for the last twenty-five yards and then finally we are inside and I’ve illuminated every lamp before I realize neither of us has eaten anything. After debating with myself for three minutes about how best to approach the wound I find Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet and steel my entire body and wet the toilet paper and ease it off, during which Honey screams, and more blood oozes. I wipe the flap with a Betadine wipe and she screams more and starts wiping the finger on my chest again, and the blood streams. “I can’t fucking do this again,” I say to the empty room, to no one. We go to the sink and wash the finger again, and she cries. But then, miracle, as though she’s already grasped the basics of what needs to happen, she actually holds out her finger for me to look at and wipe with some gauze and dab on some cream and more or less wrap a Band-Aid around it. What a smart baby. I put Saran Wrap around the mitt and affix it with a tiny strip of Scotch tape. I fix scrambled eggs. I cut an apple. Honey, smart baby, knows to eat with her other hand.

I give her a warm washcloth bath and take the Saran Wrap off. I hold her tight and we read The Little Blue Truck , which is about a truck that stops to help a mean dump truck when a bunch of farm animals leave the truck stranded in some mud. “This is not a good message,” I tell Honey. “Really we should help people even if they don’t deserve it.” That’s what Little Blue Truck was doing; whether the farm animals absorbed this lesson or not is unclear. But maybe Little Blue was just helping a fellow truck . I put her in the Pack ’n Play. I go on the porch to smoke a cigarette and remember for probably the third time today that I am married.

Honey looks so much like Engin, came out looking so much like him in the way that children are said to resemble their fathers for troubling evolutionary reasons. And even though I carried Honey and gave birth to her and nursed her and pour my life into her sometimes I look at her beautiful small face and wonder if I’m her mother. Then I try and feel for one moment what it would feel to be almost seven thousand miles away from her and I wonder that Engin has not boarded a plane and fought his way through a battalion of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers to be with her and a fury settles like a cloud of horseflies on the image of his face before I think this is a horribly unfair thought to have.

Here are the ways I have imagined Honey dying: she stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and the glass shatters and pierces her throat. She stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and she falls two stories and shatters on the pavement. She darts out into the street like a panicked cat and gets crushed by a bus. She strangles in the blind cords. We fly to Turkey and someone blows a hole in the fuselage or the pilot reaches the nadir of a years-long spiritual torment and drives the plane into a mountainside or the pitot tubes freeze up and the inexperienced pilot who knows something is wrong is overruled by his imperious boss who was in the bathroom and has no idea what the fuck is going on but always has to have the last word and the plane speeds into the ocean. I give her a tortilla and she folds it up and crams it into her mouth all at once and stops breathing. The ceiling fan comes loose from its 1920s moorings and crushes her skull while she eats breakfast. We visit my father-in-law and he doesn’t pay attention and she is swept away by the sea. We go anywhere and I don’t pay attention and someone spirits her away. I go to work and forget to bring her to daycare and she roams the house screaming until she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck. I go to work and the Big One hits and I can’t get home to her and she dies in the wreckage of her daycare with all the other babies. We go to Istanbul and some demented widow from Dagestan blows herself up and Honey is scattered across the pavement. We stay here and she goes to school and some demented teen takes his dipshit mother’s unsecured assault rifle and fires rounds and rounds of bullets into her body and her classmates’ bodies. She rides a bus across Bulgaria and the bus veers off the road and flies into a concrete barrier. Her cells suddenly decide to murder her with mad replication. She gets in a taxi outside of Diyarbakır and a van crosses the median. Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.

For some reason I wake up on my own at 5:00 a.m. exhausted but alert. I go in the closet and look at Honey who is sleeping peacefully with her hand over her head, the Band-Aid brown with dried blood, and I go onto the porch with a cigarette. It is a breathtaking Paiute morning, the air is so cool, so thin that the call of a bird or a human voice would carry the hundred miles to the place where the mountains rise out of the plains. The sky is streaked with pink and the smell of juniper is tempered with some other freshness, some hint of a cooler season to come. There are three deer in Cindy’s yard, picking their legs through the damp grass with grace that belies their witless expressions. I sit for a minute and feel the whole-body feeling of place-love, and the smoke from my cigarette lingers discreetly in the morning air.

But then I come back to earth and it is Monday and obvious that I am going to have to do something regarding my place of work and explaining why I am not at it, in addition to my potentially lost income of $69,500 which is my family’s primary income. What is interesting is that under normal circumstances examining our finances and being hyperaware of every sum available to us is one of my primary interests and hobbies in life but in the past six days I have assiduously avoided thinking about it at all, namely the fact that $1,700 is due for our apartment and $1,100 for daycare, both of which are far below the market rate and contingent on the health and/or goodwill of the price-setters, which could change at any moment, and if we go to Turkey after all or Engin makes his way back here that will be $900 for the plane ticket if we are lucky which will have to go on the credit card. I lug out the laptop and log on to the banking portal and take stock which is $268 in checking with $176 available after two nights at the Golden Spike.

It is nearing the end of the month and I can assume that the University has not gotten wise to my job abandonment and thus that my full monthly salary is forthcoming on the first which after my mandatory retirement contribution taxes healthcare will be $3,316 which after daycare and rent leaves $516 which is never quite enough for phones and utilities and the food we are all three eating on two different continents and hopefully Engin will get one of his periodic but not totally reliable payments from Tolga et al. And there is the mobile home obviously with its current list price of $80,000 down from $99,900 but it’s not something to bank on although Christ that would be a windfall. I read in the news that some huge percentage of Americans can’t find $400 in an emergency so in the grand scheme of things we are really doing astonishingly well, a thought that both bolsters me at the intimate nuclear family level but demoralizes me at the citizenship human family level. I’d wager some huger percentage of Altavista residents can’t cobble together $400 but then again Cindy Cooper owns her own mobile home and goes to the Golden Spike every Sunday for $4 Picon punch with her lover so maybe she’s sitting pretty, who knows.