By Jared Pappas-Kelley.
This is the last time I see my dad, six years ago when I am eleven. He still lives in the area then, so my mom puts me on a bus, and I am supposed to stay here for a month. He’s a large rectangle man, arms always gripping or at his side, somehow backlit, wearing shirts he gets as freebies. Some event he attended. This is a casual look; his other involves putting on a sweater.
My father lugs out the green cot picked up at an army surplus store and sets it at the foot of his bed, hairy arms. The apartment is cramped, and he has us both sharing the only bedroom. He doesn’t talk much, and I don’t know what to say. His hand drops, pauses, then outlines with his index finger.
You will sleep here.
He stops then nods indicating the cot.
You can crawl through mine to get to it, but take off your shoes. I do not want dirt in my blankets.
From his mattress he tugs a brown comforter and drops it on my cot before retrieving sheets from the closet. The ride from the bus station was filled with questions, but now here, he is quieter, the space too cramped to fit more words.
We will both be here.
His mattress takes the bulk of the small room, so mine is wedged into the gap between footboard and window, pushed into the tight path next to his dresser.
Comfortable?
I shrug.
Unfolding orange floral sheets, geometric daisies; he spreads it onto my cot, while I pull corners and stretch it out. There’s nothing to tuck into, no mattress, so it dangles at edges. I don’t know what I’m doing here.
That night I can’t sleep, so I spend it listening to the overly warm sounds of a man snoring an arm’s length away, while trying to remain as silent and motionless as possible. I hold my breath and try to be quiet—morning has to be soon. If I lay small and motionless forever, it will all go away like bears in movies. I imagine the streetlight outside the window is the sun getting ready to come up. It’s unnatural for strangers to be enclosed in such small spaces together. If I turn or shift, the tent fabric of the cot groans a hollow click. Everything makes noise, and my rustling rouses my father.
Are you okay?
I am sleeping.
Oh, you are sleeping. I’m sorry.
I spend mornings sitting over a heating register on the living room floor, wrapped in a blanket that catches the heat and gathers it inflated around me. It’s chilly here, even though it is already summer, but I suspect he turns the furnace on to humor me. He does weird things, like taking sponge baths.
I take showers. From here I can float in the warmth of the forced air, while watching TV, but I can also see the shadows he casts around the corner while he’s brushing his teeth or shaving. He doesn’t have cable, so it’s a toss-up which is more interesting, ghosted images of the local morning news or the shadow his elbow casts as he dries off behind his neck. He is routines.
Lapso mori:
Hellen Kehler is going to blow up the tunnel in all realities. “I don’t see normalization.” Working some blind/deaf girl magic. The antagonist.
I’ve been here three days and already know that in five minutes he’ll call me in for breakfast. We sit at the plastic-topped kitchen table, eat off-brand cereal with characters I don’t recognize, and then he locks himself away for the bulk of the day in the only other room and writes. I am expected to entertain myself. I watch TV or go outside if I don’t wander too far from the front porch with the decaying La-Z-Boy, but mostly I snoop through his things.
On the second day I discover the closet in his bedroom connects to the back of the closet he uses for his office like an L-shaped secret passage. The duplex was redone at some point and the rooms added-on like palindromes. If I sit quietly with the door ajar, I hear him tapping away at the keyboard, pausing, or grunting quietly while he thinks something through. I stare out the window as traffic floods past, trying to decipher what he might be typing by the rhythmic chatter of the keyboard. Occasionally the phone rings.
Hello.
He puts force into the second half of the word, so it comes out hell-oh, like hell is a given, followed by a surprise, oh.
An echo.
Oh.
Then waiting while the person on the other end says something.
Yeah, he’s here. We’re fine.
I listen intent through the half-closed door.
Thanks for calling back. I was not sure if you are, so thanks.
An exhaled breath that is meant as a laugh.
We get along very well. No really. He acts the same way as I do, but he has everything in order, and that’s it.
A tapping noise, maybe his finger against the armrest of his chair.
I really don’t know what to do with it. I thought you probably know something.
Breath.
Oh, that would be great. Are you sure this is not an inconvenience? Of course, if you are confident, it sounds good. We will be back there later in the evening.
Under his bed he keeps a bin filled with old magazines and junk gathered over the years. Next to that I discover an enamel box that to my surprise contains a collection of seven grapefruit-sized ceramic heads. Heads. My first thought is these are real heads, shrunken, and kept under his bed, puppet-like. The box is threatening, and I invent the sucking sound of air escaping as I open it. I’ve interrupted something. My father is only one room away. The eyes catch light and reflect back at me and I close the lid, re-securing the latch. But I go back to them over the next two days. I don’t get a good look at first because every time I unpack them, I get the ominous feeling he’ll walk in on me looting through his things, or that they have a life of their own when I’m not there.
Lapso mori:
Judyth Buttler is in a Nirvana cover band or previously a Behead the Prophet band (name is behead the profit). Getting sued by Dave Grolle, and any other details, and Judyth is trying to get permission to use Nirvana’s back catalog but gets a cease order, so tries to orchestrate ways to meet Frances Been outside of a coffee shop. Perhaps we will be best friends. “I was in back of that famous photo with the Nirvana and child from Lolapalooza right after the RuPaul had pushed me out of the way.” Buttler’s finish is the last battle from Kill Bill. Frances Been is a character too.
I wait for his walks before undertaking these more in-depth explorations into his things. Every day after an hour of writing, we eat lunch together, and then he goes on a walk for forty-five minutes or so. He invites me, but I always say no.
That’s how I find the box of heads. Unlatching the lid, the case is long and rectangular, about a foot and a half by six inches. It is built especially for the heads, with each sequestered away in its own perfectly sized compartment, and the interior lined with gray velvet. Opening, they all gaze up in unison from their cubicles. It’s creepy. Their stare follows me where I move. Four little man heads, and the other three are women. Each alternate, so first it’s a boy, then a girl, and then another boy. It’s orderly, sort of voodoo or demented duck-duck-goose. Half matted, their hair feels real, like too real, cut away from a wig or from scalped dolls. The second from the left smiles vacantly, her teeth showing, and eyes too shiny. Dark eyes and skin pale luminous off-white. Mostly they look the same, like cast from the same mold with slight variations but the guy on the right is a little off. Eyes are a pale pinkish, his hair white at odd angles, stare gazing-off soft focus. He is part rabbit or it’s an albino’s head.
But they all seem familiar. Ceramic and oddly substantial for their size. The one in the middle looks vaguely like my mom. My hand reaches in to smooth her hair. Soft. I rest my chin on the edge of the case staring into their eyes, but watchful one might blink or flinch at my touch. I close the box.
Lapso mori:
This is a documentary made entirely from channeling parallel timelines and realities. In that, it is not a work of fabrication but a work of theory, it catches these pockets like a memento mori.
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The following day I investigate a beat-up trunk in my father’s closet, and here nestled between a picture of my grandfather looking serious, leftover Easter grass, and an old watch wrapped in a dark bandana, is a yellowish box of Trojan condoms. Ribbed and lubricated. My father has sex. I’m a kid but I know this means sex. I open the box and count eight. The box reads twelve, so at least four times. Next to that is a half-smoked pack of Camel Light cigarettes and inside a pink lighter, but my dad doesn’t smoke. The golden tones of the camel on the pack match the color on the box of condoms. They go together. I grab the lighter and flick the wheel. A strand of lavender Easter grass clings to the trunk and as I lift the flame to it, the plastic curl shrivels into a black knob and is gone. Burnt plastic smells bad as I locate another wisp and set it on the trunk and repeat the process. This piece also shrinks into nothing. I wave the air, then take a condom out and slide it into my stash of things I keep under my cot. So far, one.
Dream:
Sometimes I feel lost, and in this drifting state I find myself questioning the necessity of trusting my body as a means for anchoring me in my daily life. Yet we always return to the body. This return can feel like a betrayal, yet, when lost we become most aware of it. However, the corporeal has perhaps become beyond cliché in how we think. Pondering the body, I am left with this sense of wanting to be somewhere else; impulses to flee a crime scene or sift-through the remains. Or is there perhaps an other of the body that we are mistaking as stand-ins when we look or construct these things, this impulse, which doesn’t fall into the easy rhetoric of… The spirit. The mind. Or wishy-washy ghosts of the metaverse in decay. But something else or both and neglected. What you call clouds – I call smoke.
Body: sags, bone, seeps, bloats, is needy, virile, penile, and becomes tethered to any passing impulse, sigh, or groan.
This is an excerpt from Stalking America by Jared Pappas-Kelley, published by Delere Press.
