The Mounting Evidence Of Our Decline

The deliveries came by standard post. Boxes wrapped in brown paper, waiting for me in the hallway of my apartment building. Sometimes they were wrapped in brown paper with no box, as for example when the delivery was something soft, like a wig. That’s what one of those first packages was, a great powdered periwig, of the kind once proudly worn by men such as Leibniz and Newton back when not to have worn such a wig would have been as ridiculous as if I were to put one on my head now and walk to the grocer’s. But normally, yes, boxes, and in the boxes: the skeleton of a sparrow, a Grecian urn imperfectly repaired, desiccated flowers, old appliances fitted for outlets that no longer existed, secret formulas for soft drinks, a human jawbone, an autographed photo of Elvis on which someone had written the Lord’s Prayer, a child’s crayoned vision of pet heaven, etc. Each box contained exactly one object. No text was ever included to explain the implied significance, if any, or what I was supposed to do with these things, or even who was sending them.

My father was sending them. Each delivery bore an address and return address in his handwriting. His handwriting is all I know of him. I have never seen a photo of him nor spoken to him nor played catch with him nor held his hand nor in his arms been held. To the best of my knowledge. But his handwriting I know because he left as my birthright in the back pocket of my mother’s jeans before he vanished forever from her life a single scrap of folded paper on which was written the following:

                                ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

I should point out that the character of his handwriting, even in such a brief and straightforward missive, was remarkably inconsistent. Some letters were written with incredible confidence, almost arrogance, while others bore graceful curves and serifs, and others still were jagged and tentative, as though he could not make up his mind what to write, though what else he could have written who knows. A few of the letters were spidery wisps that barely impressed the page. But I have read over this note enough times, I have so often scrutinized it for some insight into my heritage, that I knew as soon as I read my name on the first of these packages – it was a map of the New World dated 1521 on which someone born more recently had jotted the phone number of a bowling alley – that it was my father who had written it.

I am aware, now, that this is an odd thing to leave one’s son. Possibly he was afraid my mother would not procure for me a decent education. She was a good woman, gentle though not kind, prone to fits of trembling cacophony that often resulted in the toppling of lamps and chairs and other hapless furnishings, but what I remember most now is her hand on my forehead. This was how she soothed me through the agitated moments of my youth, simply by placing her hand on my forehead. It was enough. In those days. But of the written word she was all but ignorant. Her life was ruled by clocks, not all of them synchronized, which made getting from her day job to her night job problematic. So she was of little help in explaining the string of letters, which I initially mistook for a name or an instruction until of course I learned what letters actually were and how they worked, which took a long time as I had no other teacher. And I wondered why he had left me an alphabet and not something like 0123456789, which would have given me a much more precise way to talk about things. With letters, I merely elaborated imprecisely, which I often did for hours, perhaps due to a lack of alternatives. Sometimes I even sat down and wrote out a list of alternatives, which amounted to the same thing.



Eliza disapproved of all this, of my father, I mean, and his deliveries.

“For a grown man to carry on like that,” she said. Eliza was my ex-girlfriend, though she still came around as often as ever. We were sitting on the roof of my apartment building. It was night, late summer, and we were sitting in what we called lawn chairs, though there was no lawn. We watched the fireworks explode high over the river. Neither of us had any idea what the fireworks were celebrating, they just started going off. We had a bottle of wine mixed with cola that we passed back and forth. It tasted terrible but it was her concoction and I was determined not to voice my displeasure until I could do it in the most passive aggressive way possible.

“My father sends a card on every birthday,” she said. “He calls me on holidays, even small holidays, even to wish me a Happy President’s Day, just to show he’s got a sense of humor as well as an endless font of affection for his daughter, who unfortunately he never gets to visit.”

“It’s different in every family,” I said.

“Except some fathers communicate in a normal healthy way and some don’t,” she said. “Some fathers do everything they’re supposed to do.”

All this was just her way of saying she was disappointed in her father too. Fathers were disappointing. This was all we were both trying to say but now it was an argument.

“He used to come home from work and lift me over his head and spin me around and never once was I afraid, so effortlessly did he hold me, so confidently,” Eliza said. “Not once did he drop me.”

“He sounds like some swell guy,” I said.

Colors crashed out of the dark, sizzling earthward in entrails of red and green and white, reflected in glass skyscrapers all around us. Eliza took a swig and passed me the bottle. We had this way of passing the bottle back and forth without ever once touching.



Immediately after opening one of my father’s deliveries and examining the contents, I would sit down and write him a letter. Partially this was just proper etiquette but I admit I saw it as a perfect opportunity to say certain things to him, to ask certain questions I had often posed to him in the sterile conversations of my imagination. I sat down at my desk and wrote: “Dear Father.” And I wrote as my first line always: “Thank you for your delivery,” just to get that out of the way. My first letters were at once overly formal and overly demanding. I wanted to know who he was, why he had left, the tedious usual. I wanted him to know how it felt to be a son abandoned by his father. It is like living in a house where half the roof is missing, I wrote. A week after I sent that first letter I received a toy soldier that counted to ten in German at the pull of a string. No text, no acknowledgment of all I had written. I went on writing anyway. As more time passed I came to see the tone of my early letters as puerile, selfish, petty. My anger faded and was replaced with worry. For what kind of man was my father? What miserable sequence of events had damaged him so completely that he could only send me inscrutable deliveries by standard post? I began to ask after him. How was he, how did he fill his days, did he know any funny stories, did he have any favorite movies. I wrote about happenings in my own life. My job, my lovers, my brunches and dinners, my fears, my daily moments of private and amusing embarrassment, my dreams of greatness harbored since youth that I had not measured up to, that I perhaps had never been equal to, that were now impossible. I imagined my father worrying about me much as I worried about him and I wanted to show him that if my life was not all laughs and lollipops, it was at least not so bad.

Whenever I finished writing a letter there was a sense of accomplishment not unlike catharsis, a sense that I had said what I had to say as well as I could say it, though this never lasted long because really there was no basis for my satisfaction, for not only did my father never send any written reply or acknowledgment but I had no proof that my letters were getting to him at all. The return address on each delivery he sent was never the same as the last. Often it was in a different part of the country entirely. In all likelihood my letters were being delivered to the wrong readers, the wrong fathers, who had no idea what I was talking about and likely only laughed at my ramblings. Or perhaps the letters ended up being delivered to no one at all, perhaps they were just sitting in a post office somewhere unread. Perhaps this was the best I could hope for.

But I continued to write these letters, in part because if nothing else they offered a break from the tedium of my employment. I worked from a desk at home, a desk I found on a curb one day waiting to be hauled off and junked, a perfectly good desk no one wanted. I charted the mounting evidence of our decline. Every week I sent my findings to my employers by standard post and every other week a paycheck arrived with my name on it, along with every now and then a note that said something brief and laudatory, like, First-rate! or Boffo! It wasn’t a perfect system but what is? The paychecks varied in value, which was a problem for a man like me with debts beyond tallying. Whether this variance resulted from the quality of my report or was some regulation that had been in place for years, I don’t know, and to ask such questions may lead to an entirely new set of problems. But wait, I was getting to something–

I was sitting at my desk charting the mounting evidence. There are many facets to this kind of work. Moral, mental, physical, phonetic, forensic, vertical, lateral, partial, total, dental, eventual, personal, political, polemical, ethnological, mechanical, psychological, musical, clerical, etc. In other words, a kind of diary. I couldn’t possibly get into the details. And even if I could, the data would almost certainly be misinterpreted, as most people don’t have an iota of the expertise necessary to understand the nearly endless implications of even the most minor evidence of decline. I myself have only the faintest inklings, which is why I stick to the facts of the matter as much as possible. I’ll write something like: fireworks last night, fireworks celebrating nothing. Soda, red wine, Eliza. Let my employers spend their nights obsessing over that. I don’t want it. Just thinking about it for too long makes me feel anxious, fidgety, feverish. Sometimes I am sure the world is trying to tell me something.

I was charting the evidence, at my desk, when in came Eliza, without even knocking. She was in her red summer dress. Her hair, light brown, was something of a mess, as though she’d been pulling at it all day.

A moment needs to be taken to explain why Eliza was beautiful, or at least how she was beautiful. She had wide cheekbones and an unblemished forehead and between these the saddest pair of eyes I’d ever seen. They were long and narrow, almond-shaped is the term I think for this, and startlingly blue. The rest of her was nothing special.

I cleared my throat. “I won’t even say how busy I am. I won’t even draw attention to it.”

“It’s just as well because I’ve got enough problems,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

I pulled up her dress to examine her belly and yes, she was pregnant, the convexity was minor but unmistakable. I don’t know how it had escaped my notice. I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression earlier when I described her as my ex-girlfriend. Coitus still occurred with great frequency, greater than ever really. On that level we were highly compatible. We could have licked and poked each other’s bodies for hours each day, never tiring, had we the time.

“My life’s pretty much over now,” she said, “impregnated with the baby of a man who no longer loves me.”

It was true, I had told her many times, more than would have sufficed really, that I no longer loved her. It seemed the easiest way to say what I really meant, which was that maybe I loved her and maybe I didn’t. For a while, I was sure I had. In those early days. Then one day I didn’t anymore. The things about her that used to excite me – her ideas, her nipples, her tendency to purse her lips and stick a finger in her ear when something perplexed her – revealed themselves as only tiresome, obnoxious even, as though she were flouting her tiresomeness. I was sure that I was not in love with her anymore, perhaps never had been, and I told her in no uncertain terms, cruel and honest. What a row. She stormed out, cursing my name. I sighed with no small relief and buttered some toast. But once she’d been gone a few minutes I wasn’t sure anymore that I really was tired of her. Or at least I wasn’t sure that I didn’t still love her despite being tired of her. I missed even the worst aspects of her – for example, the way her sarcasm often turned to plain nagging, often about things that interested me not at all, like whether I was ever going to do the dishes. But the problem went even deeper. The problem was I couldn’t be sure I had ever loved anyone. Maybe all of my fickle infatuations were only a pale shadow of true love, transcendent love, the kind of love for which apes climb skyscrapers. How could I tell? It would have been easy if my feelings came with labels and I could lay my feelings out on a coffee table and compare them and know instantly what they signified. I could confidently aver that I really did love Eliza, or had loved her, or if not her then some other poor woman in my past or my future, instead of all this subjective waffling, these feeble guesses at the workings of my heart that sent me lurching from one blind passion to another.

Now she was crying, my pregnant Eliza. She did not cover her face. I said, “Oh but I do love you, very much so, yes, very much more than ever before.”

By the time I got to the end of that sentence it seemed entirely true. I held her very tightly and whenever I was about to let go she would not let go so I held her some more and whenever she was about to let go I would not let go and we stayed like that for a long time until finally we were crying, or really laughing is what I mean. We would name the baby Cygnus, after our favorite constellation, though neither of us had ever seen it, having never left the northern hemisphere. It seemed equally suitable for a son or a daughter, some elegant prince or princess with pale blond hair. (Is it wrong to confess I wanted a son?) We even discussed the possibility of resuming the conventional boyfriend-girlfriend symbiosis, despite the spectacular failings that defined our previous attempt.



Naturally I wrote my father and tried to put into words my terrified joy, my optimism that however bad a father I turned out to be (clearly I would be horrible) little Cygnus would succeed regardless. That I felt I was finally contributing something worthy to the impasto of existence, though why merely creating another person constituted a worthy contribution in and of itself was difficult to explain. I myself was only someone’s son, and not all that fabulous, and if imperfect replication was to be my lasting triumph, it was hard to say where that left me. Perhaps sons are even greater disappointments than fathers, I wrote. Perhaps disappointment is the history and destiny of the human race. But what exactly were we expecting?

Eliza had spent much of her time redecorating my apartment, buying new rugs, hanging houseplants from the ceiling, making the place feel more and more like what I imagine a real home must feel like. Her cheeks were flushed with maternal radiance. She was learning to cook and every evening surprised me with some new culinary disaster. At night we lay in bed, her body curled against my curled body, her shoulder blades against my chest and my lips touching the crown of her head so that I could kiss her as she slept and my hands over her hands and our hands together over our child, floating around in that big belly, kicking every so often out of some primal reflex, some need to strike at the boundary of his existence, or perhaps it was only to reassure him that the boundary was still there, to confirm again that he was not simply floating around in eternity.



Her water broke at breakfast. I was reading the paper. She was making eggs. At the hospital they gave me a stretchy blue hat. Eliza was in tremendous pain but visibly thrilled. She refused all drugs. I myself took something for my nerves. I wondered did my father go through this. Was it in this moment he left me. The birth was like an epic battle where neither mother nor child was the enemy. My Eliza’s face was blotchy red and streaming tears. She strained to deliver our Cygnus into this larger world. It took a long time. Then suddenly the baby came out all at once. It was red and wrinkled and slick with blood and mucus. The doctor snipped the umbilical cord. He held the baby upside down and slapped its back but there was no cry. The baby our Cygnus was alive and moving its little arms and knees but there was no cry. Even before I saw the doctor’s face I saw what was wrong. He had no mouth. The baby our Cygnus – a son, it was a son – had no mouth. He had a pinched little nose and fat cheeks, he had eyes that could not yet open, but where his lips and mouth should have been there was only flat skin. His jaw twitched. He was trying to breathe and cry out. Oh how terrified he must have been, where must he have thought himself. He knew he should have a mouth to cry with but it was such a small jaw and where was his mouth? The doctor had a scalpel. He slit an opening where the mouth should have been. He held my son upside down and slapped his back again. Blood dribbled and smacked on the floor and still no cry. What pain he must have been in, all this slapping and slashing, all these strange noises and cold air, air that he could not breathe though he tried, my silent bleeding son how I wanted to take your place. I tried to restrain Eliza. She was screaming. She twisted and clawed and reached for our son. All the little muscles along her arms tensed against mine. I tried to hold her. She would not stop screaming.



Later our son was dead. A tube was inserted directly into his trachea but too late. It happens sometimes, the doctor explained. The baby is born lacking some essential part. In this case a mouth. The baby is born with certain mutations and irregularities, in this case a large growth of fatty tissue where his tongue should have been, obstructing the nasopharynx and oropharynx and thereby preventing respiration. This was a particularly unfortunate case, worthy of some study. Nothing could have been done about it.

And what happens to a baby after death? Even if there is an afterlife, what happens to a soul who arrives there with no memories at all? Who is he for all eternity?

Eliza and I went home to the apartment, my apartment. The eggs were cold on the stove. The paper was still on the table, open to a revolutionary breakthrough in weather forecasting. Eliza lay in a tight ball on the bed. I did some cleaning. All I could really do was move papers around my desk, take the cap off a pen, put the cap back on. I wanted to walk out the door and leave Eliza forever. I wanted to curl up next to her and say all the right things and one day we would be close to okay again.

In the mail that afternoon was a letter from my father. Not a package but a letter. In an envelope, thick with pages. I stood in the hallway of my building for a while, holding it. Then I went up to the roof and sat in my lawn chair.

The letter said:

The deliveries came by standard post. Boxes wrapped in brown paper, waiting for me in the hallway of my apartment building. Sometimes they were wrapped in brown paper with no box, as for example when the delivery was something soft, like a wig

I stopped reading. The sun was setting across the river. The windows of all the skyscrapers burned with red light, reflecting, replicating, rejecting. It occurred to me that there were people on the other side of those windows who I could not see and who could not see what I saw, that the fraction of sunlight that reached them was not the same fraction of sunlight that hid them from me, that all of this light around us was not the same light and our days not the same days.

I let go of the letter. The wind carried the pages west over the river. I watched them twist and flutter apart like wounded birds until they vanished into the horizon. The red sky darkened to night. I wondered if I loved Eliza.