FATHER
by Lilan Patri
Excerpt from the novel in progress, The Hunger Days
The light in the room is pale and gauzy as mother’s milk. Paul wakes with his bladder full and shuffles half-asleep down the hall to the bathroom. When he returns to bed, he sees the emptiness where his wife, Ingrid, should be, and for a second he can’t remember why that would be. Is she away at Glenview Hospital? No, she’s back from there. He glances at the open sliding doors that lead into Mia’s room…of course. He crawls back under the blanket. He has an hour before he has to get up and go to the university. It is fine with him if Ingrid wants to climb into bed with Mia because it seems to make Ingrid feel better, and at least it allows her to get some sleep. Otherwise she has that glassy-eyed look all day, and the bags under her eyes are such a deep shadowy indigo, just the sight of them fills him with guilt and rage.
But whom is he supposed to be angry at, who is there to blame? Anger is an entirely irrational response to the situation, he knows. When he feels it coming, churning in his stomach, he runs. Miles and miles. Down to the waterfront and along the Embarcadero, past the gray, silvery piers and in loops around the Marina, along the wind-battered shore to the Golden Gate. Or up and down the North Beach hills, through tucked-away alleys, down concrete staircases cloaked in bougainvillea, up the steep winding streets to the Coit Tower. He runs in old, unraveling Nikes and flimsy blue shorts. He runs until he is sick, until the soles of his feet ache, until he can feel the bones in his knees grinding against each other, wearing away the cartilage step by step. He runs in the earliest hours before Mia is awake, before Ingrid has untethered herself from the bed, whether she lies there in an uneasy sleep, or awake, doing battle with her mind, with her memories, with fate or whatever it is she believes in. He does not really want to know what her battle is, does not want to join her there. Experience has taught him that it is better not to dwell, better to rehearse the calculus lecture he must give to four hundred empty-faced undergrads that day, better to grapple with the math theorem he must solve and publish in order to rise from lecturer to associate professor and thereby earn the income necessary to pay off the outstanding Glenview bills, to fly Ingrid home to Stuttgart this summer, to send their temperamental VW to the mechanic, to keep Mia at her private kindergarten instead of switching her to the local public school. And he would, quite frankly, like to buy himself a new pair of running shoes.
He lies in bed, his eyes tracing a crack that runs from the ceiling almost to the floor where the walls meet, a crack that grows longer and wider with every small tremor—he should really caulk that—and he tries to enter the logic of his theorem. It was going so smoothly last fall, the x’s and y’s fitting so perfectly in place, but ever since that one morning in November, his mind keeps stumbling over pluses and minuses, his toe suddenly catching in the oval of an unfathomable zero, his gaze straying toward eights and infinity signs, their loops calling to him like a woman’s curves. And then he gets lost and must start all over again, and before he knows it his mind is wrestling with another problem entirely, a problem for which there is no solution, no explanation. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the doctor at Mount Zion said. Paul looked into the doctor’s pallid, lifeless face. He wanted to tear the Adam’s apple from his throat. He thought: No kidding it was sudden, no kidding she was an infant, no kidding she is dead. Tell me something I don’t know. The one word—syndrome—that might provide a clue, is just as useless as the rest: “A group of symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality.” Which means nothing, thinks Paul. The causes of SIDS are as yet unknown, said the doctor. I can assure you, however, that there is nothing you did, nothing you could have done. You mustn’t blame yourselves. The doctor looked at Ingrid as he said these last words, squeezing her arm, an unexpected gesture from so wooden a man. Paul wanted to knock that hand off Ingrid’s arm, wanted to snap every long finger like kindling. This is what the doctor had to offer in exchange for his ignorance? An upper-arm squeeze?
For the first few months after it happened, Paul read everything he could about SIDS. He stayed late hours in the San Francisco State library, scouring the medical journals, convinced he would find the formula: Circumstance A plus circumstance B divided by circumstance C equals circumstance D. If such and such mistakes are made, it follows that such and such disasters will occur. Take object x (small blond child with breathtaking eyes), place face down on object z (goose-down pillow in fire-proof pillowcase), inside of object y (tall wooden crib), leave unguarded for certain amount of time q (five hours), check at specified time w (six in the morning), and the result will be… waking nightmare v. Once, in the beginning, he tried to explain this line of thinking to Ingrid. She looked at him as if he were insane, as if he needed to be at Glenview, not she, so after that he kept it to himself. But, when three months of research still hadn’t yielded any satisfactory results, he recognized the futility of his project, the illogic of further pursuing the data, and he abandoned it. He is nothing if not sensible.
Now, as the room gradually grows lighter, Paul wants another hour of sleep, but he finds himself wondering, if they had checked on her an hour earlier, if they had made sure Sophie slept on her back and not in the belly-down frog-legged position she seemed to prefer, if they had purchased a different brand of pillow, if if if…then would the equation have worked itself out differently? Dammit, don’t dwell. He sits up in one swift, severe motion and throws the blanket aside, baring his naked body to the room’s chill. His running shoes are waiting for him in the closet, their tongues cocked, their laces loosened. He wasn’t going to do this today, not the way his knees have been popping this week, the way his anklebones have been crunching as he walks. But he rises now and goes to the shoes. And when he yanks them on, pulls their laces tight, settles the soles of his feet into their beaten-down arches, and stands ready to go in his shiny running shorts, he is like a man saved. A man who has finally found his breath.
