POP!

Mark Polanzak’s father exploded. A puf of smoke.

Mark was eating pizza with his girlfriend in the converted attic over the garage of his parents’ house, when his mother collapsed into the rolling desk chair and slid a ways on the carpet, phone pressed to her right ear.

Dad’s dead.

But there was no need to rush to a hospital. No need to hurry somewhere to say goodbye to a body. The body had vanished. He had exploded, just blown up during his weekly tennis match with his friends. Dr. Hutch, his doubles partner, told Mark and his mother: it was deuce point, his father’s service game. Mark’s dad tossed the ball up, and when he made contact, there was a dull bang as if a bottle rocket had gone off, not loud, more like a pop. A little white smoke lingered where his dad had been in the act of serving. Then, his racquet was clanging to a rest on the baseline and the ball was rolling down the net. A fault.

“Yeah,” he told them. “He was young. He exercised. You never know.”

“But he exploded, you see,” they told the clerk.

“Store credit only.”

The brothers browsed. David picked out a racquet and waved it in the air like a fly swatter; he played. JV. Approaching the register, though, he hesitated. “Do you think it’s safe?” he asked.

“Your game is completely different,” Mark assured him.

“Yeah. I’ll never have Dad’s killer serve.”

I’m joking, of course. No one combusts or explodes, as far as I know. This is the beginning of a fictional story I wrote. My dad did not blow up. Did not pop. He did die, though, and it wasn’t funny. But I wrote this funny story about my dad’s death. It goes on for many more pages, being funny and super distanced from the grief. Analogies can be drawn, though, from story to truth: the explosion and disappearance of the body reflects the unexpectedness of my father’s sudden death and my never seeing the body. The line about my father being so fit intends to be humorous in the story, but that’s what everyone actually did say. I didn’t understand why, as if it would have been appropriate to say the opposite, if it were true: “Well, he was out of shape…” The joke about my brother’s hesitation to play tennis again—as if playing tennis were the real killer—is an analogy to the fears my brother and I share that we’ve inherited our father’s genes and will die for the reason he died: heart disease. The absurdity of returning the gift and being forced to explain that he exploded? Well, those sorts of things happen. It seems ridiculous, in real life, to explain a death in certain situations. For instance, my family had to produce a death certificate in order to change the billing information on a phone line. Who knows what crimes criminals have thought up to create such red tape? So, the ridiculousness of the story’s situations isn’t radically far off from the truth. It seems psycho to lose your father at seventeen. It is. The story was aiming for that. That feeling, I guess.

Plus, certain details are true: it was on a tennis court and during a weekly tennis date with friends that the dying occurred. However, I have no idea who had serve, whether it was Ad In or Ad Out, Deuce, or during a side change when my father’s heart was attacked. What I’ve been told is that my dad mentioned to Dr. Hutch that he felt dizzy, then he sat on a bench to the side of the court, fainted, and his heart fluttered and fluttered. His heart began to spasm, trying to pump blood to where it needed to be. His heart tried for maybe a minute. And that was that.

An important ‘however.’ There was an urgent need to rush to a hospital. Dr. Hutch picked me and my mother up at the house. My girlfriend waited, too, for her mom to come and get her before Hutch arrived. How unceremonious to see her face while waiting for a trip to the hospital. She was not a bad person—a really good person actually—but just a face of ephemera, understood to soon be gone. A high school girlfriend. She was representative of a fun but passing thing in my life right in the middle of a moment that would remain. Her face is in an ever-lasting mind photo. Of destruction. My mother and I should have learned about our loss in an empty, new, and high cathedral.

My mother did say goodbye to the body. I did not. My brother did not. Dave, three thousand miles away in San Francisco, didn’t even know our dad was dead yet. I was offered the chance to say goodbye. Mom promised: “He’s still warm. His arms are folded on his chest like he used to sleep. I don’t know how they knew he slept like that.” She informed me of the state of Dad’s dead body in a special room, with a couch, adjacent to the emergency room. I could hear the bigger waiting room TV through the wall. An episode of Seinfeld was playing.

I didn’t go see the body at the wake either. A request went in to have the casket closed. At the time, I was too scared to look at my dad’s dead body. Didn’t know what it would do to me. I was capable of anything, I thought, and I just wanted to avoid a potential scene. However, I now think that I refused to say goodbye to my father’s body because it left open the chance to find him among the living. And I want to assure you that I’m not in denial. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen my dad, and this is because my dad is dead. But I didn’t see his body, so I’ve allowed some part of my brain to play with the idea that my father’s still out there. Maybe he escaped. Maybe he hated me and my mom and my brother and his own life. My father faked it. Disappeared. Like in the explosion story. I think about this possibility. I think that if I do clap eyes on Dad—on the subway, in some foreign city, on a someday—I’m going to clobber him.

But that is impossible.

I’ve never stopped inspecting strange men of my father’s build, aged appropriately. I haven’t stopped searching, looking, reimagining. Because my dad blew up one day, and that cannot be real.

I want to tell you that I have been writing, taking workshops, been in writers’ groups, appeared and participated in conferences, edited literary journals, written book reviews, taught creative writing courses, conducted interviews with authors, and been publishing stories of my own for the past decade now. Writing stories is all I’ve studied. Studied with any real dedication. This fact bothers me. One: one doesn’t need formal education in writing to write a good story. Two: I’ve heard, said, and read so many various ideas and techniques on the subject of creative writing—many contradictory—that I have no idea what my own beliefs are anymore. Tree: ‘studying’ writing offends people. People like my best friend’s mother, who claims that one should go and live and have adventures before writing. I’ve always figured I’ve already been through an involuntary adventure. But I have chalked up more life experience in the study of writing. I learned all the tricks (which don’t work), all the rules (which don’t apply but here and there), all the clichés (which are alternately shit and Shinola), and I egotistically wish to banish them, to break boundaries, to prove all the teachers wrong. But I’m not going to do that. I have no idea why I’m writing instead of doing something, anything else. With this pain. Or whatever it is now. And. I want to know why. Here. In this.

I made my father’s death a disappearing act: the explosion, the spontaneous combustion, and examined the absurdity of life thereafter. I drowned my dad, and told the story of becoming a lifeguard. Gave my dad cancer. Shot my dad. Drove my father’s car of a cliff. Put my father in a burning building. Linked the death to a flower by the same name of the disease I killed him of with. Linked the death to idiosyncratic objects, comparing the death to little things, finding meaning in clever ways in order for the protagonist, always “Mark”—always me despite the renamings and recharacterizations— to learn just a little something about death. In the most absurd of them all, I kept my father alive and well while the protagonist grieved for not having anything to grieve about.

None of the stories do it right, though. None tell what really happened. None express how I feel.

I feel.

Call me Martin, Max, Mason, Marty, Mitch, Marvin, Major, Matthew, Michael, Milo, Miles, Malcolm, Micah, Murphy, Mo, Morris, Manny, Marshall, Mitchell, and Mark. I do.

I am not working that much, underemployed, having recently quit the bar bouncing, the midmorning to afternoon bartending, and English tutoring gigs. I should be searching for new gigs. I have nowhere to be. Almost ever. I held onto the creative writing workshops at the Adult Education Center in Boston. But essentially an unstructured life, so I make plans with myself to write, to edit, or to read. A fellowship without having to have won it—just underemployed and under-motivated to find work. Not having a job, not having any obligations but to oneself has its drawbacks. I can’t tell anyone that I am ‘busy’ and can’t say ‘no’ to anyone’s demands on my time. What are you doing that is so important? So, I say yeah to my mom. Say yes to something I don’t understand, something I don’t really hear. I flip the eggs out of the pan, underline the sentence to rewrite, snuf out the cigarette. Hang up. Almost totally forget the thing.

But the word bereavement is part of what I agreed to. And group and meeting. Somewhere in Massachusetts. This is what I remember for a minute here.

Wait a second! Is Mom attending a bereavement group now? Now? After ten years? Have I been checking in on her enough? She must not be attending. Someone told her about it. Some bereft so-and-so told her to just come by or stop in. Mom’s going along to this meeting in order to morally support someone who actually needs this type of group. That’s it. She’s doing a favor for this someone. And she wants me to accompany her accompanying, I guess. I feel. I satisfy myself.

It’s scattershot. This stuff. We go over here. We go over there. We move forward. We get knocked back. In the middle of a normal Tuesday, something pops up, and we are thrown for a loop. We pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves of. Then we get turned upside down. We roll with the punches, then throw one of our own. We find ourselves in a job, in a relationship, and we ponder it maybe for a moment. How did we get here? Then something gets remembered. Something gets imagined. We say we want to live in the moment. We say that actually we have to plan for the future. We say that the past is the past. We say that the past is prelude. We say that the past must not be forgotten. We say the past is history. Spirits rise tonight. Trick or treat, we say. A firecracker goes POP. Fall into Winter. We say the future looks bright. We say tomorrow will be better. We say our future is doomed. We say the present is a constantly evolving past. We forget something, then we remember it wrong. We say that’s not the way it happened, no. We say, I can’t remember. We say, oh yeah, that’s it! We say that was before I, that was after we, that was right at the time that you, that was when we. We tell lies. We admit to telling lies. We lie to get to tomorrow. We are honest about the past when it’s past. We say, all that matters is now. We hope for the best and prepare for the worst. We say, next time we’ll know what to do. We say, if that ever happens again. We say, lesson learned. We say never again. We revise. We edit. We get it right. Then something pops up. We want the children to be the future. Our parents, the past. We say, we are in the prime of our lives. Everything is going to turn around today. Things are looking up. Peaks and valleys, we say. We say thank god for rollercoasters or we’d not know how to describe this life. We say, sleep on it. See how we feel in the morning. Put it to bed. Don’t borrow trouble. No use crying. Give up the ghost. We say enjoy it while we can. Have a cigar. Have a glass of champagne. We say Happy New Year. A confetti gun goes POP. We say it’s a clean slate. We say this year we will. We resolve to. We say no regrets. We say we’re sorry. We quit this. We take up that. We quit that. We say that was a phase. This is a fad. We say another go round. We say there’s only one ride. We say legacy. Monument. Memorial. We say dust to dust. We say Winter into Spring. Anniversary, we say. A champagne cork goes POP. We say Tuesday into Wednesday. We say hump day. We say halfway done. We say halfway started. We want the best for you. Best for us, too. We want to help out. We say we’re getting better at asking for help. Teamwork, we say. We say individual. We say this is your life! We say that when we were little we wanted to be. We say pipe dreams. Delusions of grandeur. We say sidetracked. Backtracked. Derailed. We say we’re en route. Be there shortly. We say we have a headache. Stomachache. We say we need to soul search. We say pursuit. Passion. Duty. Obsession. Hobby. Chore. We say we do it all for you. We say we won’t really do it if it isn’t for ourselves first and foremost. We say tomorrow. Next week. Next year. Next time. We say accomplished. We say on to a new goal. We see a psychic. Psychologist. Psychiatrist. Life coach. Friend. Parent. Brother. Sister. We need divine intervention. We say malarkey. We say top of the Eifel tower. Back to nature. We can’t go home again. We say congratulations. Hooray! We give our condolences. Our prayers are with you. You are in our thoughts. We say anything you need. We say don’t trouble yourself. We say we’re here for you. We say back in fifteen minutes. We say reunion. We say divorce. We say for the children. We say for the best. We say happy Fourth of July! A bottle rocket goes POP. We say for our founding fathers. We say give us your poor and sickly. We say every man. We see fire in the sky. We see colors where they shouldn’t be. We gather in fields, on harbors, along beaches, on folding chairs, on blankets, lying on grass, on sand, on your chest. We look up. We say ooo. We say ahhh. We are illuminated. The sky is bright at night. We listen to the booms. We hear bang. We are just fine right here, right now, for once. We say come closer to us. We say hold our hand. We say we love you. Don’t you know that? Something goes POP.

And it’s October again. Significance: little, save for an unexplained and recurring dive bomb into depression. I can explain June’s, or the first two weeks of June. I can explain the torpor brought on by Boston’s late February snow prison, like anyone else. But I’m not sure about October’s brand of funk. Still, I expect it to come and hope to sneak out of the month quickly, quietly. Get into November. Come up for air. And turkey. Who knows? Presidential debates rage on fat screens—Obama and the other guy. It’s still warm enough to smoke morning cigarettes and drink morning coffees (Marlboro Mediums, French Press) on the roof out my window. View: little.

I’ve just moved into a studio apartment in Cambridge. Cambridgeport is the specific area. I’m still making frequent trips to Target and furniture shops around town. Buying plants because I’ve seen them in other people’s apartments. Buying melon ballers that I hope to someday have use for. Replacing dead plants.

Citizens of Cambridge are called Cantabridgians. Does that make any sense?

How to make one’s day valuable when not working 40 hours a week? Brand yourself a writer, I guess. That’s what I did. Go to the laptop. The Moleskin. Feel good with the coffee or wine or Miller. Light up a smoke. Open up Word. Look at what you’ve got going on. You are contributing to the world with this stuff! Eh.

I’ve set up the ‘speech’ tool in Word. I highlight one of my stories in progress. Tell the computer to read my story to me. Kick back. Bask in my own words. Sip coffee. Blow smoke rings out the skylight. See what needs revising, reworking in the fiction.

No plans in the foreseeable future. No meetings. Nothing to prepare for. Nothing but the rest of my life on the horizon.

The dudes who remodeled my mom’s master bathroom forgot to take away the old pink toilet. So there it stood, in the middle of our front yard—a constant amidst the turning, falling leaves of autumn.

We figured they’d be back for it, the toilet. After a week or so of rousing suspicion among the other residents of Green Street, the unspoken realization hit us: that pink throne was our problem now.

One crisp November afternoon, my mom and brother and I all found ourselves standing around the thing with steaming cups of coffee in our hands. My mug had a chip and read: “Nobody’s Perfect.”

“How heavy is it?” My brother tried his best to surmise the toilet’s heft with his mind then tilted it with his free hand.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” cautioned my mother.

“Well?” I wanted to hear that it was no problem; that Devon would throw it on his back and carry it to wherever hoppers go to rest in peace.

“Like a boulder,” he said, sliding a timid step back from it, sipping his coffee.

We just stared at the thing for a while, in silence. A leaf landed on it. We eyed each other.

Later on, we were back in separate rooms of the house, all of us pretty sure that that toilet situation would just take care of itself.

If my dad hadn’t gone and had a heart attack and died during a tennis date last winter, we would have let him deal with the throne’s removal. It was his after all. Well, we all conducted business with it, over the years, the taco nights. But my dad, he used it exclusively, never settling for a leak in the downstairs half bath, or maybe just a gassy false alarm in the upstairs hall john. The rest of us were equal opportunity with our ones and twos.

The only time I saw my father naked, he was draining the lizard into that pink toilet. He was upset, I remember. I was little; I flung open the door and froze. My old man looked up; he sighed; he breathed my name. He was never angry before or after that. Something cosmic transpired between my dad and the pink toilet that my encroaching upon disrupted. Also, outside that moment, I never saw him vulnerable. Except, of course, he was vulnerable and probably pretty pissed when his heart went and dropped the ball at deuce point.

Besides the toilet on the lawn, there were other new features at the Paterson household. For one, my brother was there all the time. He bailed on his life across the country, in San Francisco, after Dad bailed on his for good. When December rolled around, Devon began to pick up the pieces, got a marketing gig in Beantown, started saving for an apartment. I was in my senior year at a ridiculous private school, applying to ridiculous colleges. California schools looked good junior year, but I narrowed the list to campuses within driving distance to our house, to our pink toilet. Mom, despite talking vaguely of renewing her RN credits, stayed locked away in her room more and more. When I returned from school, she would be wrapped in her red and black fannel robe, in bed watching bad Lifetime movies, or at the computer googling involved French recipes that I certainly never had the pleasure of eating.

We were curious when the first snowfall began covering the pink toilet—would the thing go out of sight, out of mind? Early one morning, the first fakes made a white and pink polka-dotted sculpture of the toilet in our yard.

“Shit,” shouted my brother, and I hadn’t sensed that he was standing behind me, watching through the window, too. “We need to take a picture.” He ran off, then appeared in the yard with his camera, motioning for me to come out, and mouthing bring the paper. I grabbed the Sunday Globe and trotted down the steps.

We met up at the toilet.

“Sit on it,” he said.

“On the toilet?”

“Like you’re taking a shit.”

I lifted the seat.

“Don’t actually crap in the thing. Just sit on the lid.”

I did so.

“Now read the paper.” Devon danced around and snapped photos from all angles. At first, he was framing the shots for whole minutes, preserving the moment, the image, me on the toilet. He looked so focused, like he was staring at a developing cure in his Petri dish, Petri crapper. All of a sudden, I wanted to try and deal with it like my brother; I got into the whole charade. I mimed unzipping and fire hosing it. I pretended to barf, praying to the porcelain God. I laughed. My bro laughed. I faked all embarrassed like getting barged in on. Posing for a swirly proved too difficult. When we were through, Devon out of film, I depressed the handle, folded the paper under my arm, and whistled my way back inside with Devon chuckling and winding his camera behind me.

At the new toilet, relieving myself of what all the pretend bathroom business had conjured, I thought, so that’s how it happens, that’s how people wind up with junk on display around their property. Something is kind of too heavy or annoying to remove, then you get attached to it. It was sad and scary that though my dad was a doctor and I was in private school, none of that matters when you’ve got a toilet in your front yard. Presto—White Trash.

It was a white Christmas that year, first in a decade we were told. Mom said we were too grown-up to get presents, to get a tree, to put up the little white lights, and we agreed; I still didn’t know or care exactly what a Yule log was. I didn’t want any gifts anyhow, at least nothing that she could have given me. We gave Mom a nosegay of daisies and yellow roses though, and, of course, she cried, and Christmas was saved only when Devon rolled up an eternally constipated snowman to sit on the snowtoilet. He called Mom out to see, and she laughed. When she laughed, it was good. I watched through the window, her breath a misty cloud, then gone. The snowman strained. It was good for her and for Devon.

After New Year’s, a new orange bottle fluttered into existence on the white laminate countertop of our kitchen. Mom called them her happy pills. She didn’t seem to be taking the proper amount at first. It is slightly more upsetting, I noticed, to have someone around who is too happy rather than too sad, especially when you know they’re manufactured smiles. Either way, throughout that winter, Mom was out of bed before me, with breakfast made and everything.

“Am I doing an OK job with you, sweetie?” she asked, over scrambled eggs and coffee.

“Of course, mom. You’re the best.” I didn’t look up.

“Good. I’m so proud of you, you know.”

“I know.”

“Dad is proud of you, too.”

Pregnant pause.

“You can talk to him, you know.” She brushed my hair back with the tips of her fingers. My head, a block of ice.

Along with my mother’s newfound energy came a confusing and weird spirituality. This involved, as far as I could tell, a mixture of referring to Dad as still with us and watching the X Files. After an episode in which the ghost of a little girl keeps appearing to her mother, and the ghost-girl helps solve her own murder, my mother declared: “I believe that.” I told her to hang a shingle, do some readings.