I open my mouth to say something more but she’s evaporated.
People, alive and dead, come and go, whenever they please. It’s a phenomenon that taken over as I’ve gotten older. My past blends into my present. There is no separation between then and now. It’s crowded in here.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice. It’s been turning over in my mind ever since. He told me, “time rushes towards you like your wife when she’s told you she’s pregnant. Terrified, expectant and saddled with growing responsibility.” I thought life was like watching the baby grow, monitoring her stomach expanding every second. Tick, tick, tock. One moment after another, after another, after another, like pearls on a strand.
We really are sold a lot of lies in this part of the physical universe.
Once it happened, my wife, the third one, Laura, would visit me pregnant whenever she wanted to break my heart.
“Dad, who are you talking to?”
My daughter is here. No, actually here. She’s let herself in. She likes checking on me.
“No one.”
“I heard you talking to someone. Who do you see?”
“Stop treating me like I’m losing my mind.”
She looks at me. She has spent her young life concerned, which is probably my fault. Or maybe her mother’s, I know they are close. I can smell the fear around her. Men watch her as she walks and have since she was very young. She is frightened of the attention, shrinking under their gaze.
Last year, I told her that people come to visit me. I shouldn’t have. It was a moment of weakness, born of living in the past more often than before. I guess I thought that maybe people came to visit her, too.
They don’t.
She touches my arm. A blue surrounds her and has since the moment she was born. I love blue. When her blue is near me I feel safe. I don’t know why. It has always been difficult for me to trace the genealogy of feeling. Where is anything born, if everything that’s happened exists before you at once?
Five minutes later, Marla leaves quickly.I am very tall, and I have to lean down to embrace her. For a moment, I see her mother in her eyes. She left quickly, too.
When I head back to the kitchen, I see Marla as a four year old, hiding in the corner, laughing. I love children. They are much easier than adults.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“What a wonderful surprise!”
“Sorry for hiding. I miss you.”
Don’t envy me. Just because my memories are just three-dimensional doesn’t mean I get to choose the pace at which life happens. Death comes fast or it comes slow. Time will, one day, end it.
Frank, by the way. My name is Frank.
...
The Oakley family was accustomed to Frank performing during mealtimes. Some nights, he literally sang for his supper.
“You need to sit down, Frank. Listen to your father.” Catherine, his mother, forty, was old for a mother. She was overweight and came from money. No matter how she tried to hide it, she was charmed by Frank, even if looking after him meant she had to vacuum with one hand on the machine, one hand gripping the collar of his shirt.
At night, as she would tuck Frank into bed, she whispered in his ear, “You’re a terror, you know that?”
He’d nod.
“But that’s why you’re my favourite. That’s the reason I fell in love with your father. Women are always attracted to terror. Never forget that.”
...
"I can see time!" yelled Frank.
There was a loud moan from the other side of the table.
The oldest Oakley son, John, after his father, had cerebral palsy. He was difficult. It was Paul and Frank’s job to take him for his daily walk after dinner. He was getting restless and wanted to go on his walk now.
Frank took that to mean that John believed what he was saying. His oldest brother saw, like him, as plain as the nose on his face, that he could read time like a book. As Frank grew, he learned to keep it between himself and his oldest brother. Just because he heard the future, first as a voice that was not his own and then saw it, painted like murals in the sky, didn’t mean he could tell people. He was sentenced to a life of lonely secrets, guarded by one sick brother.
“How did John get sick?” Frank asked Paul once, when he was about four. Paul was eight.
“Dad was painting his room and left him alone. He was about two and he crawled to the paint and drank it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Poor Pops.”
“Yeah.”
It was the one moment in Frank’s memory that Paul had not made him feel stupid.
There was some upsides to having a sick brother. They were the first family on the block to get a TV. John spent his days inside, not moving, watching three channels in black and white.
“You can’t predict the future, you just got lucky,” said Paul.
“Our big brother believes me,” Frank whispered.
“My son, the storyteller. You can’t make any money doing that,” said John.
That night, Frank stayed up in bed, under his covers, writing a story about an Indian who killed people and let the world know by releasing smoke signals above the town he lived in. They acted as a warning of what was to come, making the murderer sympathetic.
Frank believed you could do anything, so long as people could sympathize.
He read it to his mother the next morning.
“That’s beautiful,” she told him.
At that time, the strongest influence on his life and work was whomever he loved.
