Ghosts at Midnight
A once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.
It is the third night in a row that Tinker has freaked out following the rash decision on my part to give one of her four kittens away at perhaps too young an age. In fear that I would not be able to find homes for them before departing for the US in twenty four days, I think I erred by letting the smallest of them go to a new home with an Arabic family living in the south of the KFUPM campus. The advice I got was to wait until they reached six weeks before separating them from their mother, and as of two days ago the small cats had only about four and a weeks under their belt. My rush was the desire to find a home for as many of them as possible before splitting for two and a half months and having to put them outside to sink or swim on their own with perhaps no one staying around the Old Shabab Complex this summer to in any manner whatsoever feed them or look after them.
Now there is an eerie and surreal scene taking place here in my studio apartment. Tinker is anxiously and dramatically pining for her kitten. While that may not quite paint the picture properly, imagine the sound of a ghost howling in the night for its lost love, unwilling to pass on to the next place without locating its charge. A mournful, plaintive wail, a brass horn sound rasped along the rough surface of her tongue. Imagine a yellow grey feline, her golden eyes turning questioningly at me, instilling within me a sense of shame and disloyalty. In her eyes I see the one word question formed, accusingly, at me, "why?" Could see her disappointment in me, the God who manifests chicken pieces, soft cat food, Swiss Ementhal cheese on small porcelain saucers, who opens and closes her passage to the freedom of the outside world. Could see that her God has, for reasons she does not and will not understand, decided to remove one of children, still suckling at her breast. Gone. The random act of a fickle God. And she is left to make meaning of it in ways that her genes will not allow her to comprehend.
Received some hard hitting news myself a couple of days ago. Had just gotten back from shooting hoops, changed out of my sweaty clothes, poured a drink, sat down to check my email. There is a funny difference in time between here and where most all of the people that I am in regular contact with live, about eight to ten hours difference. In the morning when I awaken, for example, there is email from afternoon and evening back home. During my daily grind here everyone is asleep back home. When evening comes here, however, I get morning emails from the folks back on the home front. So I tapped the keys appropriately and what popped up was one of those sets of symbols, collocations we call them in the language field, chunks of language, whose totality carries a meaning instantly recognizable, especially when they have embedded in them the pattern of lines that say, "passed away."
My oldest brother, Marco, sent me the email which notified me that our step-father, Garry Allen Fleming, had died. "Garry passed away." That was the subject line that showed on my screen just after my brother's name. It is the sort of moment that one will remember and that one will always remember precisely what they were doing when it transpired. Like the second plane flying into the World Trade Center. Like the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding. Like one's very first love. Inside of me the impact of the call was a halting of all things, as though the operators of the synaptic transit system had just implemented a general strike. Everything just stopped.
Looking under the couch, walking slowly along my bed, stopping to peer down between the bed and the wall, smelling, crying, mournful lamentations sent out, palpable like a sonar ping, meant to bounce back to her when it seeks out and strikes her little girl. This keening, this heralding of a passing between the worlds, catches me in my mourning the loss of my step-father and it is like a physical representation of the emptiness of his leaving. She is a crier moored here, tethered to this geospatial point, wandering around and around my flat, leaving regularly to search the complex, coming back announcing the news. My loved one is here no longer. To what other place has she gone?
"Garry passed away." Is there another Garry in my life that Marco knows well enough to refer to? "Passed away" means die, right? Not in the hospital, but dead, as in not any more. Found on the floor of his kitchen. Concerned neighbors checking. How long? From what? What now? Really? Dead?
Garry liked to tell the story of his first meeting with my brother Leone and me. We were about four, maybe five and six years old, Leone being my older brother by sixteen months. He had come to our house on Central Avenue in Beloit, Wisconsin, to visit our mother, and was sitting on our covered, robust, Midwestern style porch. He likes to tell the story with lots of drama, making big eyes and smiling his contagious, soulful grin, chortling, "And you little fuckers came up and I don't think you'd ever seen a black man before. And you, Peb, with your lil gibberish, cuz you had that hearing problem, standing there, and ya all grabbed my hand and turned it over and rubbed it like ya all thought it might rub off." His laugh made you want to laugh along with him and this is one of the stories I always wanted him to tell, even well into adulthood, even when I visited him last summer, bringing my youngest son, nineteen at the time, to meet him for the very first time.
Tinker will be competing with these kittens for food by the time I return to Saudi Arabia in the fall. The genetic switch that causes her to search and search for her little one now will switch off before too long. It remains as of yet a mystery when that will happen. In the meantime her grieving process too familiarly mirrors my own. And when will mine turn off? For me at least there is both the last few decades that I have traveled through that have given me the distance from the stronger relationship that I used to have with Garry and there is the presence of my ability to reason past and through the knowledge of precisely what has happened and how it has come to be. For her there is only the atavistic impulses of the rawness in the stomach and the sorrow expressed in her eyes and in her voice. For her there is a large black pool that represents a total lack of an ability to find where her child has gone. And so she continues to look under the same furniture, behind the same bed, turning her head to look at me and cry before trotting over to check on the patio and then back again.
He was, as we all are, a complicated man. His time in our lives was spread out over many years but it was in bursts, in brief spells of huge warmth and fatherly presence, punctuated with absence and with conflict in that our mother always reported that he could not in any way be faithful to her. In my mind and in my heart Garry was around a lot, was steady, a great man. It has always produced in me an almost desperate sense of anxiety on a lower level to attempt to merge inside of myself the various different versions of him that I have accumulated over the many years. Certainly later in life, from the time I was about twenty two years old, maybe the better part of thirty years now, he was not in contact. I learned that birthday cards, holiday greetings and any kind of visit from him would not any longer happen.
Hope, in the end, is the emotion that takes the longest to depart. And it was for years, into my late twenties, that I still thought the chances would be good that he was having a hard time but that he would come to see me, that he would want to be a father in my life, that for me that door would remain, along with the hope, open. But it didn't happen. It stopped happening. I got used to it, turned away from it, didn't want to face it, didn't want him to not want to see me enough to keep him from doing so. So the visits to him, the planning to see him, the calling him from time to time, just turned off like the loss of a love, as one learns to stop waiting and to get on with the life that one has available. The understanding that a life that included this giant of a man who loved me was no longer a future that I would have, took a very long time to die, but like all loss it did die.
I learned so many things from Garry. He taught me that if some boy was staring at me, trying to intimidate me, that if I looked at the boy, looked him in he eye and didn't look away, that the boy would stop staring at me. I learned that if you reheat pasta in a cast iron pan with oil that It would become crispy and even better than it was the first time around. I learned how to make beans and cornbread. The key to the cornbread was to put some canned corn in it to keep it moist, that it could also be baked in a cast iron pan. I learned about he blues from Garry. A lot about the blues. I learned about the distortion of an electric guitar, and that Jimi Hendrix revolutionized, in fact originated this sound. I first saw my mother be physically intertwined with a man, be in love with a man, be the woman of a man, with Garry.
I had to kick her out last night at about one in the morning. Tinker, that is. Her anxiety, her jumping on and off of my bed, her incessant crying and moaning, her expressions of grief, would not allow me to sleep. Trying to be sensitive, hurting for her, I tried soothing her, rubbing her as she twice carried one of her kittens up onto my bed, perhaps the safest spot she felt she could find. Of course, being the reason for her child's removal, this didn't make me feel in any manner anything but the heel. But after an hour and a half of it I finally kicked her out. And in this way my poor friend, heartbroken and worried to the point of collapse, was forced to find some place to harbor for the night, behind a boiler or under a bush in the dirt to curl up with her hurt, to try for a sleep to come devoid of the images of her lost girl.
Imagining him no longer around compels me to think of how as a child my brothers or I never needed to feel afraid. He was a powerhouse of a man. A physically imposing force of nature. When Garry Fleming's ire was raised no one alive wanted to be the focus of that gaze. Yet he was an ultimately fair and just man. I have no memory of his ever being mean. He never was physically abusive or verbally abusive. He was a gentle man, a kind man, but a man who raised himself and who did not stand in awe of any other man.
My oldest brother, Marco, wrote this to me in the past days, and I feel that it speaks properly to how I see things, but it was a very connective thing to hear and it made me feel somehow less guilty for some of the emotions kicking around inside my breast. He began by restating an oft spoken line of my step-fathers,
"Marco/Leone/Pedro, I am not of this world. I feel like an alien. I think that's why I like science fiction so much."
Marco then went on to say to me,
"I guess I see Garry's extrication from our lives-never spiteful and always available for a phone call, and his general extrication from everyday life, was a very gradual dying, rotting process. I'm glad he literally fell down dead and we didn't have to feel even more conflicted about him rotting away in a home. He was good to us, as good as he could be, and I definitely don't feel he neglected us. He was really only a brief presence, though. I loved him and appreciated him."
I'm laying in bed watching The Game of Thrones Season Four now, the scene where a baby is put out onto the snow outside as an offering for the white walkers and there are sounds of the baby crying, screaming out. Instantly Tinker jumps up onto the shelf that forms the headboard of my bed, the shelf that is holding my small Bluetooth speaker that is projecting the baby's wails. She kind of freaks me out. Her eyes have this intensity that makes me shiver, her head cocking left and right as she attempts to discover the origin of the sound. It takes only a fraction of a second for me to connect the dots. A shiver passes through me as our eyes lock, her face but a foot away from mine, her gold eyes so wide open and fixed on me as the baby shrieks that they appear to vibrate, the muscles in her neck standing out. It is as though her every fiber is trained to search. Like me, I think as our eyes stay locked, she too is not yet able to accept that a part of her has been removed and that it will not be coming back.
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