Love, Your Dear Old Dead : a letter (multigenre project)

"Portrait of Dad." J. Utphall. 2009.

  I receive another email from you today, Dad, and I see by the time stamp that you’re up early and you’ve once again failed to answer any of my questions. This latest email includes a code to copy and a link to one of those online greeting card websites, where I paste the intricate string of alternating letters and numbers, and an image of a dancing leopard impersonating Elvis hijacks my screen. The cat twitches, thrusting its spotted tail and pelvis, mouthing, “Hunka Hunka Burning Love.” A confetti of bloated letters spell out “Thinking of You.”  I shift in my chair, pulling up my knees to sit cross-legged. People must send these greetings to their lovers and friends, and for a moment I imagine you do too, and what she must look like and how she might tolerate you. It’s a game I’ve always played, imagining the people other than me, your only child, who might have the capacity to show you patience. Your message, as always, is brief: “It’s hot here. Can’t eat raw vegetables anymore, but hope you enjoyed the cat. Love, Your Dear Old Dead.”

            What is it this time? the boyfriend asks.

When you left for Slovenia a few years back, I thought I’d never hear from you again. But you soon appeared, somewhere invisible on the other side of my screen, behind a million twisting copper tubes, telephone wires, and a string of radio waves bouncing between the moon and back. In messages you call me My Darling Daughter, and write that a stray cat near the lake where you walk in the evenings, probably with that lady friend, is very friendly and rubs its nose and whiskers along the cup of your hand. You sign messages, as you always have, Your Dear Old Dead. Mom thinks, of course, that you have finally succumbed to your drug addiction, and she must thank herself for divorcing you twenty years ago. But she has always told me, Your dad has always loved you. And I believe her, even if you were never where you were supposed to be, or like now, had already passed through into the wanderings and incoherencies only you can understand.

            At least you know he’s doing all right, the boyfriend says, breaking the late afternoon silence.
            Sure.

            Instead, I think about this most recent message with the Elvis cat, measure it against others and more distant memories. Oddly, I remember the afternoon before I started preschool when you covered our dining room table with a large sheet of butcher paper, torn unevenly at one end, and pulled out a purple crayon from its box and said, I will not let any daughter of mine go to the first day of school without knowing how to write her first and last name. You then printed our first name where your dinner plate should have been. You drew a large, loopy “J” followed by the vowels and consonant. The letters were only a little more distinct than from how I noticed you signed a check at the grocery story, in one giant and hasty flourish.  Is this how you now press the space bar? How you might quickly press send, and turn back to your life somewhere else? Strangely, as we send our lines of text, transmitted then as lines of code, across the scrolling wires and invisible singles separating us, I remember that it is you who not only gave me your name, but also the power of naming things myself, of language.  It is a language of some kind that connects us now.

I’m plucked from my reverie as the boyfriend descends upon the kitchen. Banging cupboards and clinking pots and pans.  I re-cross my legs in the chair and close my eyes, and remember back to when you first sent a quick message to say you were planning to leave for Slovenia, to meet an online lover. You were leaving empty handed, from the cottage where granddad told you he had buried his life savings. Even though I long ago vowed I would never do it again, I always have tried to understand what you are telling me. Your Dear Old Dead. I’ve mulled that signature over and over, wondering what you might mean. After jumping ship my freshmen year of high school you’d occasionally send—to me at least, I’m not sure about Grandma or your brothers whom supposedly you owe increasingly large sums of money—a rogue email, answering none of my questions, but sometimes dropping hints about a mysterious medical diagnosis. Are you half dead already? What are you sick with? You might as well be dead to me, after all these years.  Once you told me and Mom at some theme park when I was eight years old, so two years after the divorce, I will never stop loving both of you. My mother sat stern and stiff between us and we plummeted—silently—down Paul Bunyan’s log chute. 
I love you too, I say now at my computer desk.  I can still hear the boyfriend’s intermittent clanking in the kitchen.  

            Or maybe you mean you gave up long ago: out of all the fathers I might have had, I have you. You exist for me alone. Distances, you imply, mean nothing. You had already given up. You’re only as dead as you can be, for trying. And it’s true: somehow, you’ve always let me know. When I was a teenager, the emails, and sometimes boxes of my old toys on the porch, came to my mom’s house, but later, when I went to college, and then to the first of several apartments, and finally to this slightly less crappy apartment I live in now, I can only expect the irregular email, sent to the same email account. For a brief period of time, before Slovenia, we video-chatted. You pursued me, and no matter how far away you intended to seem, you made your presence in my life an instable stability. In your way, I guess, you’ve been dependable.

            I leave this latest email with Elvis cat in my congested inbox, scattered amongst the others, spaced at different intervals, closer together near the holiday months, and farther apart beginning with Father’s Day when I always feel compelled to email you. Or not. Then I pull out the pictures I have kept since I was a child and see us standing on either side of Mickey Mouse, and yes, there you are, hunched beneath my overstuffed Cinderella backpack.

            He’s probably up in Minneapolis now, I tell the boyfriend, as if that were explanation enough for your absence. You’re a professional occupier, a homeless man with a political agenda. I describe a life of shameless squatting and drug abuse, and the boyfriends nods with a dishtowel slung over his shoulder.

            Dinner will be ready in fifteen, he says.

            But in all these emails, Dad, I imagine you: you are the first one waiting in line at the downtown public library overdressed for the heat and carrying most of your possessions on your back, or you are buying a coffee at the internet café and sneaking back to use the in-house computers across from bathrooms. You overstaying your welcome in the basement of a friend’s friend with her laptop perched on her skinny knee. And sometimes I am there with you, and ask, Do you mean it? What about your veteran’s benefits? Can’t whatever is wrong can be fixed?

            Several times I have decided you are dead; I’ve even wished you were dead, but then another email would appear, with another cryptic message to ponder. And I’ve always read them, even when Mom or Grandma has said not to put too much stock into them, even if the messages have driven me to tears or rage. I’ve been dependable, too, you see. I’ve always kept track of where you might be, and saved the emails. Sixty-three in the last seven years, more if you count the e-Cards and YouTube links: our new family photos.

For the past twenty years I know I haven’t always given you credit for teaching me what you did. Instead I have let my scorn and blame for your absences fester, and for all the ways you have fallen short.  Do you deserve to walk me down the aisle some day?    

On autumn evenings, when the windows are open to the dark, I sometimes feel the miles dancing between us…the cartoon cats…the hyperlinks jetting back and forth from space—strange movements not meant to be felt all at once—all the ways of giving up without the dignity of death. I feel them as if they aren’t ringlets of copper and satellite frequency tangled in the far away sky, but real, and close enough to snag my heart with hope. And sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ll sit bolt upright, and know that I’ve been screaming in my sleep, but my cheeks are dry and the boyfriend sighs without waking, and I ask myself, What is it? What is it? And I’ll imagine the relief of learning about your death—but what would that change? You are, and always will be, my strange and only father: like a satellite’s flickering, your presence, Dear Old Dead, fades into oblivion, just out of my reach.