Fiction by Anne K. Yoder

Walls

I wake to the dimness of what was once my once childhood bedroom, now taken over by the forces of entropy. Or that’s one explanation for the cluttered shelves and containers and garbage bags full of god-knows-what scattered across the carpet. Am I dreaming again? I wonder. I often end up here in my dreams; there are so many better dreams to be having than these, and yet this is the version on repeat. Like I never left. Like I never can leave. I remain still: all seems quiet now except for the low undertone of voices trailing from somewhere far away. 

In my bedroom, I find its walls are impervious to time. The more I fight the past somehow the more enmeshed in it I become.

I panic. I need to leave. When have I been here and not had this thought?

I remind myself that my time here watching after Daddy will be brief. I say it softly to myself again and again to make it feel real, “Daddy is in hospice.” 

He’ll die within days or weeks. Probably. Despite Daddy’s wrongs, and there were many, he deserves a good death, whatever that means. I mean, I have considered what it means, but can’t decide exactly. A good death is humane, yes, and he like any person deserves to be cared for. Not at a hospital in some cold sterile room, or at a care facility surrounded by strangers.

Or maybe he does deserve it. But I don’t want the fucker to haunt me after he’s dead. He’s already haunted me in life: his voice at least, his condescension. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head despite my years of psychotherapy that he didn’t pay for. I don’t want my inaction in the face of his death to haunt me either.

No one else will bother. Lou has reminded me again and again that we have reason not to. Lou says he can’t leave the monastery even if he liked — and he’d rather not. Mother hasn’t been on speaking terms with Daddy for a long while. There was talk about Daddy having family money, on his father’s side, but when Lou asked Mother point blank she said she has no idea anymore. Daddy’s refused to involve us in any of his financial dealings. So, maybe he could pay for caretakers. It’s hard to say. But he’d likely turn them away just like he’s turned away anyone who’s attempted to help. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was deep in debt. Though looking at this room, the dust on the vents, my old Hole poster by the foot of the bed, I don’t know what he’d have spent the dollars on besides booze and pills. It’s like he just wants to spend his last days drinking himself into a stupor and rave along with the madmen on TV, all of the propaganda about the president’s actions correcting the terrible fate of this country. Makes me sick. 

But also, what if that’s how he wants to go out? Maybe we should honor that too. He’s miserable though. I bet Daddy wishes he’d already died when he’d fallen in the stairwell, where Mrs. Naguri found him after three days of newspapers had piled by the front door.

I finally muster myself out of bed. Up the stairs. Daddy was already in his chair. His sausage fingers on the remote. Television on, volume up. His eyes vacant, staring at the talking heads. Morning darling, he grumbles. Didn’t bother to look my direction. He’s wearing the same brown shirt as the day before. He insisted I wasn’t to interfere with his dressing or bathing. His bald egg of a head still has a shine. The thin band of hair circling from ear to ear has grown out and gives him mad professor vibes. If he hadn’t muttered his greeting I’d swear he was just asleep there with his eyes open. I ask what he’s watching and he turns up the volume. His gnarled old fingers can barely keep a grip on the remote. It’s hard for him to hold a pill or a pen or a gun for that matter. I mean, he’d never been a gun man, but recently his fear of being alone had got the better of him and he kept a revolver tucked away in his bedside drawer.

***

I can’t look at any one thing in this house without it evoking a memory: the books and papers strewn, the crucifixes in each room, the small statues of St Mary, St Francis, St Dymphna, the crèches, the dated vials of holy water, some from over a decade ago, the upright piano in the living room, the birdfeeder hung from the old rusty frame of the swing set. The kitchen table where Daddy and me had countless standoffs about this or that, mostly about what I refused to ingest. The kitchen sink. 

The past washes over me in waves as if the memories reside here. Daddy’s need to weigh and measure my food, his timers on television and my phone, my practice logs and bathing schedule. He never missed an opportunity to voice his anger, to scold me for what was left undone.  

But now, what of it? He’s living among clutter, among containers of papers piled high. (all the words he’s intended to read but remain as a reminder of what he hasn’t, the glut of possibilities forever preserved, the joy awaiting him, waiting to kill him with its weight.)

The clutter pushes everything else out in the end. It’s as if he was clinging to the word, the word that he fancied was with god, the word that to him was god. He was living some sordid inversion of the gospel, and there was little room for anything else. He could remain both lonely and abandoned while surrounded by this moat made of words. Maybe it staved off the reality of what lay before him in death. If only he were devoted enough. Daddy fetishized devotion. His desire for it was outsized. 

How clearly I could see his faults, and how they were rooted within me too. Me with my fucking obsessive desire to turn all experience into language. Though I didn’t think it mattered so much to hold on to words. Or books. Like relics. As if they convey some religious grace with their presence. And yet, wasn’t I just arguing that physical objects hold memories? Both are true. But maybe not. I mean, I laugh at the silly and short-sighted idealism of writers who obsess about their work surviving them. Male writers, mostly. Of a certain generation. Expending so much energy on creating the archive. Anyone with a mettle of awareness knows it will all wash or burn; anyone who’s read the climate science is disabused of the idea, or ideal, that books will endure. 

Though surely if books, periodicals, and letters are kept and collected, they should be organized in some way. I don’t care what method. Daddy can’t find anything. I mean it’s been this way for years. Daddy’s early methods of upkeep were interrupted by his bad moods and his intermittent—and now lasting—periods of drunkenness. Papers were shoved into boxes, into bags, for future sorting. So many years I wanted to forget were held onto here.

I really need to sage this house. Or better, take a lighter to these papers for a cleansing, for release. But they continue to remain in this persistence of holding onto. His attachment.

If only Daddy had embraced Buddhist principles; if only I could.

Speaking of which, I can never take a shit in this house. That’s how bad it is. I feel like Daddy is standing over me monitoring the regularity of my output. The ears of my youth still here. ‘Sabi, have you moved your bowels today?’ Always such proper ways to inquire about shitmaking. It didn’t matter if I had or hadn’t for days. ‘I have not,’ I’d always say. They’d just get wide-eyed and slip me a laxative in the evening after dinner, and call it ‘dessert.’ I knew better. It never worked. At some point they stopped asking. I was a shit incubator. I felt terrible too, so many pains in my gut, such bloating. It was disgusting. It felt disgusting. But that’s what happens when you hold everything in. It was never safe to sit and shit.

My therapist and I have discussed this more than once. To make a mark, my therapist has suggested: the first act of human expression is shitting. That it’s obvious, in my case why I hold it all in. Freud spelled it out so clearly, she’d know it without her training.

But then again, I was scolded for shitting too much in some toilets, too.

This is where my mind goes when I’m here.

What’s most confounding to me is the way memory retains a physical form, the blockage carried within my body. I mean, where are memories stored? Certainly not in my anus. But also. Maybe they’re everywhere. 

I wonder if Daddy had sold this house when Mother left him—if he’d had to downsize—would that have been freeing? These walls and what they hold would be mere memory. I’m not sure how to deal with my own blockages, which persist not just in my gut but in my head. Perhaps this is what I’m trying to do here. When I think of it in that way, of clearing this blockage in my life, it seems essentially true.

The boxes and papers, so much of what I’d rather forget is retained here. A commemoration of an unhappy past. In our very irreplicable way. The years of Daddy drinking himself into a stupor each night. I feel that too, in my chest. A sense of doom. When I’m inside, it’s like the time beyond these walls has never existed.

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Anne K. Yoder lives in Chicago, where she occasionally dispenses pharmaceuticals. Her novel, The Enhancers, was called “a new contemporary standout” among “great books in pharma culture,” and was featured in Wired, Vulture, and elsewhere.