Blackouts

by Justin Torres

Juan knew just how to get me to talk, despite myself; the words pulled forth as if through hypnotic force.

The past is a foreign country, Juan would say, quoting, and indeed back there, in that other place, they do things differently.

From the moment I arrived, I was met with rules, a litany of regulatory proclamations. I shivered on a chair before the intake nurse, trying to grasp my change in circumstance. I kept quiet, meek, tracing the pattern of pinprick ventilation in the dingy suede of my sneakers, unable to make eye contact, to utter even a word of protest. The entire scene felt like a copy of a copy of a bad script, one I recognized from television and books. Everything, from the nurse’s icy demeanor to my own timidity and dread—all of it a cliché little drama that must have played out in that very room countless times.

Yet the habits of poverty run deep—and I felt, underneath the surface, the same old dread. A constant sense that I’d forgotten to attend to a vague but terrible urgency. I’d startle out from under some half dream, some reverie of the old life, and think: Oh God, what’s coming?

Here’s what I remember of the dog: she spent all day in a crate, even though Mad Man worked from home. She was untrained, destructive. At the sound of my entrance, she freaked, and then at the sight of me she freaked harder, paddling her front paws furiously against the mesh metal door, which made the unlocking only more difficult and extended her agony. She never barked, because she couldn’t; she had been bred not to bark, but barks lived inside her, I read them in her face, in the way she opened her mouth and pulsed her vocal cords. A light reddish brown, achingly handsome—she looked healthy, expensive. A basenji. I remember her black eyes, deceptively kind and questioning, and how the skin of her forehead wrinkled to a peak in the middle as she pulled her brows down at the sides. At home, this was her most constant look, one of silent imploring, but when we were alone together a shadow would pass, and her features would harden into rage. She often tried to bite me.

Anyway, she’s old now, or else she’s dead. But I have this fantasy that she’s still chewing up the living room, still slamming against the limits of that cage, only now she’s vocalized, yapping and howling, and it’s a kind of music, and the whole neighborhood can hear her frustration and understand. And the song is a lament, something camp and bluesy, about how there ain’t no shame in being a bitch, but, Lord, be a bitch that barks.

He doesn’t remember if he called for his folks, or how they arrived, or how it came to be that both were home at the same time, but he does remember their reaction: a calm recognition in his father’s eyes, the sudden seriousness in his mother, this absolute reversal of their natural states. The lasting shock from that day was not the seizure—no surprise his sister might succumb to a contorting madness, what with all the erotic chaos, the trembling energy, the too-muchness of that home, of childhood itself—but he was surprised to find his father even capable of that kind of terrible calming care, or his mother capable of such seriousness, such focus. This was the quality of attention he had always sought from each, and now, with certainty, he knew the cost.

My father was a proud man, and moody. He could be sentimental, loving, hilarious, but he could also explode into violence. My mother explained this had to do with the prejudice and indignities of poverty he’d dealt with in childhood. Explaining away the “bad father” and redirecting us toward the “good enough father” is so often one of a mother’s covert responsibilities.

Those nights we shared a bottle of something pilfered and did not look at each other; we looked at the river, and the truths and lies were not kind, but terrible. At times, after one of us had finished speaking, there would be a silence so deep and hurt that the only sound was the suck of our lips pulling smoke in through our filters and pushing it back out into the night. We had to say what we had to say, stories about how lost and hopeless and mean we felt, and you could trace every story back to our families, and if you poked around a little in those families you’d find our fathers, men gone half-crazy with the spirit, or the spirits, or made mean from shit work and a broken body, and sex.

Who doesn’t want to be lovely, to be someone worth protecting?

Well, the last thing the father says is that in Brooklyn, in Gowanus, around the projects where the father grew up, there were these signs, all over, reminding people not to be sloppy, to cover their garbage. The signs read: STARVE A RAT TODAY. And the point was this: you could judge a man by the company he kept, and if you talk a lot of trash, you attract a lot of rats, and what kind of boy was he? And what kind of man did he want to become? And the kid best learn how to keep a secret.”

“So I’m a drinker?” “Are you not?” “I’ve always been bright. That’s the problem…” Jan points to the notebook open on the young man’s lap, indicating he ought to be taking this down. “… Always felt every shade of meaning in the room, and so yes, I drink. But methodically—in the evenings, and all day on Sundays—to quiet my mind. My father, you see, whom I did not meet until I was grown, diagnosed my personality almost immediately after making my acquaintance. You’re the type who never misses a trick, he said. And then he added, You’ll suffer for it.”

“Well, I don’t know how the comment was intended, but I can tell you it puffed me with pride. For years after, I considered never missing a trick to be the highest form of intelligence. Later, I came to realize the cost of believing so fully in one’s powers of perception. In my daily life, at work on the committee, I swing between states of anxious hypervigilance and fantastical egoism. But at night, you see, I find myself incapable of self-delusion, incapable, even, of simple escape, so I drink and drink and still miss nothing. Only I find moments of mercy in the drink, usually around dusk, when at least I feel less.”