"Speck" by Justin Chandler
This is a story from our Summer 2022 edition, guest edited by Jose Diego Medina. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version.
At sentencing, the judge found it difficult to accept my claim that my father and I were truly alone that entire trip, that all the rest of the world had disappeared. But given the nonviolent nature of my offense, and with the diagnosis of an acute psychotic episode, I got off with just a week in the county jail and a summer’s worth of community service.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Way before that, my father had a child. Some things happened. Then, I got a call, telling me that he was dead and that my name and number had been written on the line for Emergency Contact.
The sheet covering him stopped just before the ridges of his collarbones. His head was shaved and shrunken. He lay on his back on a dull metal table, and I stared, waiting for him to move again. We had seen one another off and on throughout my adulthood and he had always been shorter than me, but he seemed so much smaller now.
We are sometimes called upon to compromise our sense of propriety in the name of love. A decision was not made so much as realized. I found myself already shuffling down the hallway, cradling my father the way one might an overgrown child, carried up to bed some late night with the dark house thickly silent. Only I was carrying him now through long halls of flooding light and gasping automatic doors.
And there was no one. The hospital was empty, as was the parking lot outside. I maneuvered him into a seated position in the back seat of my car, the sheet wrapped around him, and we were off, through deserted daylight streets.
I took a crisscross path through the city, passed by the cemetery; through some of the various apartment complexes where my mother had raised me; the neighborhood of tightly packed, dilapidated houses where she said he’d grown up; and the mobile home where he lived when I was in high school. I looked to him in the backseat for guidance and found him sitting with his head cocked backward at a painful angle, and then slumped onto his side as the seatbelt slowly unspooled. I stopped in the parking lot of a defunct motel, repositioned him, and stood there with his door open and the car running.
“We could go anywhere,” I said.
His eyes, deep-set in their sockets, were open, fixed on a position over my shoulder, on the sky far beyond me.
“Just say a place. Any place.”
Maybe Washington, where he’d done one of his rehab stints. Or California, where his brother had lived and died. The coast, for sure. He had always loved the water. I knew that much at least. In a letter from prison, he talked about the Oregon coast, the shore, standing waist-deep in the water and knowing he was changed. I still know it, he’d written. I know I had a setback but I feel that I am different and I am going to prove it. It will be easy to do because when you are changed there is no trying. I was eleven at the time. I had no real sense of what he meant, no expectations. Later, I came to realize that this had been a promise, an assurance to his son, himself, that he was going to be better. But it’s good I didn’t understand this then, since it was a lie.
It was a long drive. We had a lot of time. There was so much to say. I could finally lay out all my complaints without interruption. He had done nothing all his life except screw things up for himself and the people he should have loved. His family. Friends. Girlfriends, wives, other children. No one who came close to him got away unscathed. Before I was born, he took my grandfather’s car and drove to New Orleans. No one knew why, and they never got the car back. When I was three, he came for Halloween. In the one photo I have of him, we are both dressed as Superman. He stayed the night and in the morning he and my mother’s jewelry box were gone. When I was eight he stopped by the apartment where my mother and I were living. Maybe it was Memorial Day. He brought a portable grill and cooked for us. My mother sat in a camping chair, legs crossed at the knees, watching him in silence as she smoked one cigarette after another. After we ate he went to his truck for something and never came back. The grill he’d brought stayed in the backyard, rusting away, until my mom and I moved across town to another apartment.
For most of my adult life I had taken solace in the fact that my mother never forced him into a relationship with me, never even talked about him. He had been in and out of jail from fifteen on: burglary, possession, disorderly conduct, larceny, public intoxication, resisting arrest. And he was incapable of penitence, of recognizing that there was something deeply wrong with the way he had viciously carved out his life. Even his death seemed a sort of testament to this, his alcoholism a concession made to safeguard him from the darker vices that haunted him, but a concession that killed him anyway.
There it was. A constellation of complaints that, when I connected the dots, I could almost see through to the man. And it would have made perfect sense in that long drive to speak, to make those complaints real, to finally tell him what he should’ve known all along.
But I couldn’t. Through that first day and long into the night, toward dawn, I sat in pensive silence, stealing glances in the rearview mirror. He was slumped against the rear passenger door, head against the window, easily taken for asleep were it not for the fact that his eyes were wide open. His mouth too. And I detected the slightest blush in the bloom of wrinkles below his eyes. It was an expression adjacent to shock. Maybe that he was thousands of miles into a drive with his estranged son. Maybe that he didn’t know–I still hadn’t said–where we were going. Or maybe he was seeing it all too, hearing everything I had to say before I said it, finally coming to terms with the monumental travesty of his life. I don’t know. I only know that I wanted to speak. I wanted to tell him everything. But I couldn’t.
That tension stayed inside me for hours, shrill as an alarm bell I couldn’t quiet, couldn’t even locate. Later, when I tried to explain all this, my list of grievances, my rage, the long stretch of silence, and the sense of impending closure I felt myself both reaching for and recoiling from, the judge waved me off. He said, “None of this pertains to your case.”
It was dark when we finally reached the coast. I drove along trying to find a good path to the shore. Still no one. I looked back to find that he was sitting up again, his head bowed, his face veiled in shadow. I unbuckled him, readjusted his sheet, and carried him down the concrete steps to the beach.
“We’re here,” I said, gently propping him against a boulder. “What now?”
He stared at the night sky, his eyes still fixated on something very far away. I thought of closing them, but knew that he would just stare into the darkness behind his eyelids with that same intensity. The ocean was its own sort of alarm bell, reaching out to us. The waves too, in their way: crawling closer, drawing back. There was not enough light to see beyond the shore, but I stood staring too, waiting to discern the horizon in that endless stretch of water and sky.
I picked him up again and carried him to the shoreline, past the remains of a campfire and the driftwood and seaweed from the last high tide, into the water. It swooped into my shoes and spread up my pant legs, achingly cold. Up to my waist I went, but I felt too unsteady to go further. The sheet around him twisted, retracted, expanded. His head was turned away from me but as I lowered him into the water he turned to face me, unflinching, staring up at me now as his body submerged. There was that look again, like shock or surprise. I raised him from the water and his head lolled in toward me, his entire body drawing close, holding on.
“There,” I said. “It’s OK.”
I sat with him for a long time on the shore in silence. The sun rose behind us, turning us into shadows that stretched out across the sand and then slowly crawled back to us. Still I sat, holding his hand while he stared at the sky over the water, the empty expanse that turned stratosphere, lithosphere, then limitless space.
The police, when they found us, were not friendly. But they were back. Everyone was back. The officers. The bystanders who’d called them in, standing now in a wide circle around me and my father. The paramedics, who carried him into the ambulance. The judge, the prosecutor and my lawyer and representatives from the hospital, and my old boss and ex-girlfriend as character witnesses and my fellow inmates in the county jail and the people in the thrift store where I worked Mondays and Thursdays, the old ladies who volunteered for the Salvation Army selling second-hand clothes and books and antiques, and the customers, and a guy with an eye patch who I helped to unload shipments off a big semi, who daily shared a Bible verse he’d spent the morning memorizing. They were all here, back, alive, and real, and I knew it would be like this forever, that whatever my father and I had set out to do was finished.
But it didn’t feel finished. It didn’t feel like the end. They buried him at the cemetery in town, not far from his parents. I didn’t go out there. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t there. I knew what I’d find. A gravesite. A plot, beneath which he lay. A headstone with the day he was born and the day he died and the name his parents had given him and that he had carried throughout his life and that now served as the only thing to differentiate him from all the other dead.
But he wasn’t really there. Of course, figuratively or spiritually, whatever you want to say, he wasn’t there. But I mean too that his body wasn’t there. I knew it wasn’t. I knew they hadn’t really brought him back, knew if I dug up his coffin, I would find it empty.
Of course, I couldn’t say any of this to anyone. But I knew. He was still out there, out on the edge of the world, waiting for me.
I didn’t see him at first, walking down those concrete steps I had carried him down a few months back. Something was different but I couldn’t tell what until I got closer. Then I saw. I ran to him, cupped him in my palms. He was a stone now, a small, smooth stone, no arms or legs, no mouth by which to speak or eyes by which to see. I held him, this smallest, most distilled manifestation of him. I pressed him against my cheek and felt warmth. Life. I asked him, softly, what he still needed from me. “Anything,” I said. “Just tell me.”
And I heard him. I hadn’t heard his voice in years but I heard it as clearly as if he stood in the hollow of my ear. It was right there. It had been there all the time, what he wanted, but he had never been able to say it with words and no one had ever been able to decipher his gestures, his flailing. This world had been his only option but it had never fit. He’d never had a say, had been pulled away from nothingness and into existence, given a name and forced to be for years, day after day, until another blind force made him stop. He had wanted something else. Something better. He’d spent his whole messed up life trying to find it.
When I threw him I aimed high, out and over the ocean. It was a straight throw and he soared like an arrow into pure blue sky, away from here and out to wherever he was meant for, that truer place he never found in life. And he just kept going. I stood there watching, until he blended into and became that sky, and even then I could still feel him going. I haven’t stopped feeling it. I feel it now. I saw the whole thing and I promise you, he never came down.
Justin Chandler is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate in American Literature. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
