autobiographical fragment #3

“Footrub,” I told my dad, who sat dead center on a vast crimson couch that sprawled like a sleeping animal across the floor of his pine-green TV room. I put my feet on his leg before he had a chance to say no. He rubbed them for a few minutes before his hands grew motionless and heavy. When he started to snore, I shook my feet to wake him. Once in awhile I’d ask him a question about something on the news that gushed continually out of the big screen TV he’d had built into the wall. On nights when he wasn’t too drunk, I’d get a few words out of him.

I must have been in third or fourth grade. A couple of years prior, my dad had started making a lot of money and we’d moved into a contemporary fortress of a house, had it built for us -- all intersecting rectangles, asymmetrical, and overlapping, set like bare rock at the edge of a cliff into a man-made hill. Inside, everything was stone and white, impersonal as a temple or museum. Security cameras along the perimeter relayed fuzzy black and white pictures of the parking area, the front and side doors, the vulnerable windows, to a set of monitors atop an antique rosewood armoire in my parents’ bedroom. After receiving a kidnapping threat, my dad hired an armed guard to patrol the grounds at night.

The three of us -- my dad, my mom, and I -- each haunted a separate room or series of rooms. Mom’s primary room was the kitchen, with its gleaming overhead rack of pots and pans and its stainless steel refrigerator doors that could have doubled for the entrance to a bank’s vault. In the summer she spent all day by the pool, alternately roasting herself in the Oklahoma sun and swimming laps to keep off the weight she imagined she saw whenever she looked in the mirror. My own territories were just off the kitchen: a dirt-colored cow’s skin rug in front of the television and VCR in the living room, and a nest of printouts, magazines, computer game manuals, wires, and computer equipment that I called my computer room. My dad, like a sleepy, sweet, and harmless minotaur who’d long since ceased to venture outside of his hidden lair, had his combination wet bar, library, and TV room. Each night I invaded that lair, where he sat surrounded by shelves of antique books whose titles he’d never read, and insisted on my footrub.

As the house was being built, I had two recurring nightmares. In the first, I awoke to the sound of someone hammering nails into wood. It came from the kitchen. Before waking up for real, I made it a little bit further down the hall than I had on the previous night, the walls running beneath my fingers like the earth beneath the moon. The second-to-last night, I stood in front of the closed kitchen door. On the last night, when I opened it, I recognized a man with whom my father had quarreled. My mother had described him as a bad character. He’d built a coffin. “It’s for you,” he said.

It was evening in the second dream and I sat in the backyard, in a red metal wagon. Silver lines reflected streetlights on the wagon’s surface. Through the dining room window, I watched my parents eat dinner. “I’m out here!” I yelled. But they were as silent as storefront mannequins. The wagon’s black plastic handle came loose in my hands – or seemed to; actually, it just moved, like a key in a lock. The wagon rolled backward, then, magic carpet-like, drifted upward toward the fence. Each night the wagon got closer to the top. In the last dream I closed my eyes as it went over and when I finally opened them, the city look just like it would from an airplane: a grid of stars etched on an expanse of sheer nothingness, receding.