Father

The afternoon burst like a tangerine, spilling orange into purple, its golden orb sinking into oblivion to reveal an infinite blanket of diamonds. The indigo tendrils that swallowed up the dying sunshine mesmerized me. It felt like an attack, but a very sensuous one.
We sat next to the shimmering swimming pool that mimicked the slowly appearing moon in its clear ripples. I looked at the dead leaves floating on top of it like palms upturned, ready to cup my cheeks in their wrinkled folds. What would a tree's embrace feel like, I wondered. Would it be warm and sappy or cold and mossy? Would it feel like the same as my father's hand that held my arm tenderly at that moment? On cue, as soon as that thought entered my mind, my father let go of my arm. From where his hand used to be, a spot of loneliness settled in.
My father started to pluck the strings of his guitar, its sound ringing clearly through the silent early evening. I could hear the quiet hum of insects through Jobim's "Meditacåo". The music felt like a warm hug from a loved one. Somehow it held the spot of loneliness at bay. It was still there, but at least it did not spread.
I stretched out my legs onto the blanket we sat on, its colors lost to the charcoal grey of the night. The browns and blacks that made up my father went the way of the blanket's hues. My father started humming through his strumming, and the insects were gathering more courage in their buzzing as well, their chatter, probably well meaning enough, becoming more incessant.
I closed my eyes, trying to sift through the din of arthropod talk to revel in the tinny strums. I wanted to commit it to memory. I wanted to remember my father's humming, which, remembering it now, sounded like a low ocean wave at midnight in Bali. I was not searching for slumber but for a clearer reception of the sounds surrounding me.
"Did you fall asleep?" my father asked though the sound of the guitar.
"No. I'm just thinking?" I half-whispered.
"What about?" my father queried.
I paused a bit on this. There was no particular thought in my head. There was just a string of random thoughts hanging there, much like my mother's pearls, each catching the light then fading as another one took its place.
"Nothing important. Just stuff." I answered at last.
"Just stuff, eh?" I could feel my father grinning through the darkness.
Without my noticing it, the song my father was playing had already morphed into the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". This song was sadder. It was not a crippling sadness like the death of a genuinely loved one. It felt more like the end of summer. It felt more like a goodbye to something you could never recapture.
My father still refrained from singing the words to the song. He was just content in humming along to his guitar. Sometimes I could catch little snippets of words and phrases through his humming, though. This entire tableau felt strangely soothing to me. It was not something that happened often. In fact, I kept thinking it would never happen again. Maybe that was why I kept my eyes closed. I was intent on committing all of these things into the annals of my memory. I could feel the spot of loneliness on my arm dwindling.
"Do you want me to ask your mother to bring us some Coke? Its pretty balmy tonight." my father suddenly broke his humming.
"Not really." I replied, a little testily. I was still absorbing all the little nuances of this experience and did not want him to stop. His question felt like a period in mid sentence.
"Okay." he said as relief washed over me. This night was not over. My father resumed his humming, having transformed his song yet again, this time into Jim Croce's "Time In A Bottle". This song was sweeter than the previous song choices. It felt like he was kissing me on the forehead with it. A strawberry red glow started to blossom in the middle of my chest. It felt like there was a rose blooming there. I started to hum as well. My father smiled.
A gentle breeze wafted through the night's balmy air. It ran its fingers through my hair. I think it ran through my father's as well. It felt playful. I rested my head on my father's arm. It was strange but I felt a static charge as I did that.
My father became listless. The song became Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and it pushed my head off of my father's arm, ever so gently. "This is a one-time deal. Things will fall apart eventually." it seemed to say to me. I could feel the rose in my chest wilting and a sharp pain on my arm replace it. The spot of loneliness was back.
I started to feel a sober thoughtfulness creeping into my heart with the balmy air. It was coming from that spot. Maybe it was the song. Maybe it was the air itself. Maybe it was because I knew this night would never reoccur and I did not want that to happen. Maybe it was all of these things together that pulled at my heartstrings with such vigor. Whatever it was, I started feeling all choked up.
I opened my eyes. From a distance I could hear a television coming to life followed by the whirring to life of half a dozen kitchen appliances. The sound felt artificial and foreboding.
"The power's back on." my father said with a sense of relief in his voice.
"I heard." I was resigned by now to the fact that whatever this night meant or was, it had bid me adieu a moment ago. It didn't drive off to its home a few miles away. It packed its bags, boarded a plane and left the country to live in some exotic part of the world where little boys and their fathers could be close and intimate without male machismo and lasciviousness thinking anything of it. I fought back the black bile building up behind my throat.
From the distance my mother's voice saying "You boys better come in. I'll have dinner ready in a moment." rang like a slap on the face waking me up from a dream. My father got up.
"Let's go." my dad reached out to me with his free hand, the other strangling the neck of his guitar. It felt as if he was choking the instrument into silence. Before I could even notice what was happening to stop myself, the tears came.
"What's wrong, son? Why are you crying?" I couldn't stop my crying to answer my father's question. It just flooded out like a dam breaking. My sobbing got that point where my face felt pins and needles. The embarrassment compounded my sadness and I just ran into the house.
I was crying because I felt a part of me die. I was crying because that part that died would have given me the courage to live a more honest life earlier on. I was crying for all the other little boys who cried when that part of them died. I cried for all the fathers, including my own, who killed a part of their sons without knowing it. If I had know, I would have cried for a generation of gay men and their emotional baggage and fear of intimacy.
A few minutes later we were all having dinner and that was the end of that. All through dinner though, my seven-year-old heart couldn't keep the sense of loss inside of me down. Unbeknownst to my juvenile psyche, that was my first taste of what heartbreak was. It would be my mistress many a night in my future. Still, at that moment, all I could think of was the fear that that night would never repeat itself.
I was right. That evening, or anything like it, never happened again.

Birth

Fronting him was a wall. It was a black and white picture of a road in Vietnam with a large pine tree in the middle. The road was strewn with motorcycles. One of his closest friends had taken that picture on a trip to Vietnam. He liked that picture. In his mind he felt like it made his little breakfast nook feel like an outdoor café.

To his right he had a metal ashtray another friend had given him from a trip to Singapore. You couldn’t see it anymore, but embossed on the bottom of it was the Singapore Merlion. Around its rim were carved different Singaporean sites. One side of the rim had the word “Singapore” carved on it. Three cigarette butts were crumpled in it. By night’s end, he assumed, the ashtray would be filled.

To his left, two packs of Marlboro Reds lay, one wasting away with just a single stick in it, waiting for the inevitable crumple and throw that would be the end of its brief time with him. The other was fat and proud, unopened. He looked at the blue seal that crowned the top of both packs, heralding them as “Class A” cigarettes and that they were “Fine Tobacco”.

“Get back to me after ten years when I’m withering away with lung cancer.” He wanted to tell these seals.

His electric fan hummed at his side as he typed away on his Mac. He had no bright ideas right now. There were no clever one-liners or searing stories that fueled his creative juices. He was just typing away for lack of anything better to do. He looked around him, thinking of clever descriptives to apply to the everyday objects that surrounded him.

He glanced at a nearby bottle of Absolut Rasberri, on its last leg with just a few good gulps in it. In front of it was a framed picture of his family; his mother and father, brother and three sisters aside from himself. The picture was taken on his parents’ golden wedding anniversary, so all of them looked particularly cleaned-up.

He had a strange relationship with his parents and his siblings. Partly it was because he was the youngest and his parents were both forty by the time they had him. His eldest sister was already fifteen at the time. His youngest sister was nine years his senior. As a child, he felt more like his eldest sister’s child than his mother’s. His parents spoiled him the way grandparents would spoil their first grandchild. It was only in recent years that his parents and siblings actually treated him in a more normal sense. Still, they honestly knew next to nothing about him. They didn’t even know he smoked like a chimney in winter.

Oddly enough, as his thoughts drifted into winter and the holidays, firecrackers sounded on top of the melee of car horns and motors from the streets below his condominium unit. He glanced outside his window at the cacophony outside. Ah, his window. This was the reason he decided to live in this particular building, in this particular unit. From his window tonight the city lights sprawled out like a night sky scattered with stars. During those mornings when insomnia still had its grip on him, the stars would flicker one by one into oblivion as a yellow-purple sky slowly faded in, revealing buildings nestled between trees. Acting as a backdrop to this cityscape, two separate mountain ranges cradled his city.

He said as much as he typed away. He had a lot of negative characteristics, most of which he proudly wore like a badge of honor. He was pessimistic most times, and aggressively short-tempered. Still, if there was one thing he was good at, it was seeing the beauty and interest in the mundane. This made him love this city, the city he was born and raised in. He found beauty in its hustle as well as its bustle. Its odd nooks and crannies were a treasure trove of exoticism for him.

He loved to pretend he was a tourist sometimes, seeing his city for the very first time. He would walk around his neighborhood looking at huge trees that lay scattered at odd intervals around 1970s and 1980s houses slowly being upended by newer condominiums. His own building stood where a bus line had once made its home during the 80s. The old as well as the new fascinated him. This sense of wonder was a treasure he kept that only reared its head when he was either writing or painting.

By point of fact, he was always somehow involved with this area of the city in one way or another all throughout his life. He was actually born in a hospital a few streets away from the building where he lived now. He grew up in a house a few houses away from that selfsame building. When they moved from that house into another farther away, his parents still owned several businesses in the area, and he would visit often. Suffice it to say; he never imagined living anywhere else but this city in this neighborhood. Even if he did, he never followed through.

Upon graduating college, he found work in a television station as a graphic and digital effects artist. It was not a coincidence that this particular television station’s offices can be found a hop, skip and a jump away from the house he grew up in. During particularly mild days he would walk the one block from his building to his workplace.

During the past decade, his city had been undergoing a sort of renaissance. In his neighborhood alone, where once there were houses, multicolored restaurants and bars sprouted like mushrooms after a warm summer rain. Condominiums sprouted with them. He wasn’t particularly alarmed by all of this. His city still knew how to keep its character in the face of all of this, and he loved that.

He surveyed what he had typed so far. Not much. It read more like a love letter to his city than anything else. He felt he got too rambling at times. Still, he felt that was part of the charm of his particular writer’s voice. It was like listening to an impassioned story being told by a very talkative friend. There were lots of detours and flourishes that didn’t actually belong, but they at least added flavor to it.

He yawned. He looked at the clock on his wall that heralded the 11^th hour. He wasn’t supposed to be writing tonight, but his internet connection had gone haywire so there would be no playing his RPGs on his iPad. There would also be no surfing for porn. The latter didn’t bother him as much as the former though. Starting young had made him an old man at 38. His libido had followed suit.

He arched his back to relieve the stress on his spine from being in one position for the longest time. He wondered to himself where this particular story would end up. He stood up, scratching his buttocks. From the nearby fridge, silver like most of the things in his tiny kitchen, he poured himself some Coke into a blood-red cup. He looked at the cup. It clashed with everything in his house. Still, in his mind he admired its impertinence at being the only red object in the sea of black, white, dark brown and aqua that was his condominium unit. He smiled a little at his cup. His cup had moxie.

After a sip of Coke, he lit another cigarette. At this point, the distended pack of Marlboro Reds had given up its last stick to his lips and he had already gone through three sticks from its proud brother. He pushed on the button to open his internet modem, hoping against hope that a connection would ensue. He was met with the flickering, unsteady second light of disappointment.

He turned off the modem in abject defeat and wondered about this day and age’s particular need for internet connectivity. He had never been an avid chatter, especially since he typed with just one hand, so he never understood other people’s obsessions with living their lives online. He did have a Facebook account and a Blog page as well as Twitter and Pinterest, but he saw them as tools for sharing his thought and his art, not for actually talking to people. If you went to his blog or his Facebook page you’d find half of the content are painting he had done or poetry he’d written. If he wanted to talk to people, he’d go visit his friends or call them on the phone.

The importance of the internet for him was different. As a boy, he had two sets of encyclopedias he poured over on his spare time. He would research about Greek gods and ancient Egypt and planets. The internet was an updated version of an encyclopedia to him. Sometimes, while watching television, he would Google a certain actor that struck his fancy, or a particular place that sparked his interest. It was wonderful. Well, that and his little Smurf and Hello Kitty villages were, he felt, what the internet was for.

He did love his RPG games. He took great pains placing every last house within his little villages and cities and boutiques and restaurants and zoos. He let his artistic eye guide him through planning and execution of these. A friend once asked him what the fascination was with these games. At the time he was maintaining a total of twenty separate games. His answer was clear. It was the closest thing to being God as he was ever going to get.

He looked up from what he was typing and looked around. The path his prose took was meandering yet poetic. At least now he was clear what this exercise was about. Mostly it was an exposition on how he viewed the world. He had covered a multitude of disparate topics ranging from his condominium unit and its contents to his love for the city he lived in to the internet and what it was to him. He looked closely at what he wrote, his one-handed style of typing allowing him to puff on his cigarette and sip Coke from his cheeky red cup while managing to click a few more words away. What had seemed an exercise in futility on the onset had taken a surprising turn that delighted him.

Yes, it was a prose of seemingly unrelated subjects rendered more interesting than it actually was by his florid words and sense of melodrama. Yes, it was a 45-minute excerpt from the life of a bored artist hoping against hope that his internet connectivity would magically fix itself. Yes, half the time he was typing he was wondering whether or not his Smurf Village honeydews weren’t already withered up. Still, more than that it did end up being a story unto itself…

It was the story of a man writing a story.

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