A One-Way Mirror to the Sea

He called me K. I called him Whitman. When he was invisible, I was not. When I was invisible, he was a fool. I was his protector, his sentinel, his annoyance. I was everything he was not. At least he had the imagination to invent me. He hated me, the fact that he needed me. I loved him. I loved him the moment he started talking to me, one day in fourth grade, when he was giving his book report on dinosaurs and he pissed his little pants in front of the whole room.  I loved him from that night of his first Little League team's little awards banquet, when the assistant coach called him to the front of the room and gave him the team's best sport award, such a cute little damned trophy.  Whitman cried. His first real prize. He'd never won anything before that. He felt blessed, lucky, until one day, years later, I told him the truth. Did you notice, Whit, that the whole damned team got a prize that night? That you weren't special at all? That you cried for nothing? You're just Whitman Kessler, the strange-looking gangly kid with a halfway decent arm. You batted .230.

Oh, the kids.

That is why we are here. Pick up the daughter in Brooklyn and then race to Midtown for the reading. We don't have much time.

The sidewalk shifts the wrong way, the edges curving where they should be straight. I told him to quit that crap, once the writing was done, to stop doing it. But he loved the freedom of empty space filled with…never mind. It's too depressing. I mean, who doesn’t love freedom? You're nothing special, Whit, I tried to tell him. Some of us know the cost, and we're better off for it. He was blissfully ignorant—or intentionally ill-informed. It's hard to say.  He suffered for freedom. I suffered, too. Because he suffered. Life could have been easier for us. He had all the ingredients to skate through it all. And he chose not to. Only the special few can do that. And I'm being optimistic. Or trying to be. He was no fucking Michelangelo, trust me.

The dumb bastard. To act unaware of the bullshit. The strange looks. The wondering. Always the damned wondering. But he knew. He never leaned into their expectations. He never acquiesced to the safe play. Even in the end, when he got to the end of the world. I suppose there is something beautiful about the fatal flaw. Whitman Kessler will be remembered, I suppose. I will not. That is what hurts the most.

He played dumb, though I knew he was far from that. Let's put it this way. He wasn't just a good athlete who got recruited to Yale for tennis. He was what you'd call sneaky smart. You'd say something to him and he'd seem like he didn't get it, or was lost in thought. And he was already six steps ahead of you, on to the next. I attributed it to boredom. And to an ability to see around corners, like he knew what was coming next. I wouldn't say he was carefree.  Far from it. Oh, he cared! Which is why he was so inexplicable. He had this crazy instinct to wade into deep water until his feet couldn't touch the bottom even when he didn't have the slightest idea how to swim.

And to be honest, how do you not love someone so smart and yet so self destructive? I loved him when his high-school football coach told him he wasn't running fast enough on wind sprints. And I hated him for doing it. For what it did to us.

"Get your ass moving, Kessler!" Whit had a certain "philosophy," he called it. Don't waste effort on shit that don’t count. So he told the coach to fuck off, before storming off the field faster than I'd ever seen him run. I nearly lost my mind. That's not how you become the first-string quarterback, Whit. That's how you make your life harder than it has to be. Which, as far as I could tell, was his real talent.

Some of us, the best of us I would argue, see the most likely path to success. Hold on to the damned life raft. Stay close to shore. Don't fuck around and find out. I tried to teach him that. He was as brutal a masochist as I've ever seen. And yet. Who does this? He hated the mud, the garbage, the ugliness. I hated the hallucination's annoying little pop song. Yeah, I’m serious. When he hallucinated he saw mud. He saw garbage. He saw a sea of trailers in an endless city of trailer parks. He heard a fucking 80s pop tune. That's how pathetic his hallucinations were. He couldn't even have a good trip. And yet, he kept doing it, seduced by the slim chance that he could come out the ass end of a bad trip more brilliant than he'd been in the parking lot beforehand.

I wanted more. For him. He longed for the beauty. The endless sea and the green hills. The lone pine pleading in the distance, sitting atop the green mountain set against the deep blue sky. That poor lonely tree. He loved it with all his heart.

That was his real drug. To imagine freedom. He could breathe the beauty just by seeing it in his mind, and he didn't need to hallucinate it to feel it.  That was his gift and his curse. I warned him. Everyone warned him. Even Sarah, his daughter, who simply wanted his love. Do you love me, Daddy?

The fool thought she asked, Daddy, do you love your book? Mom told me not to read it. His ex-wife warned him. Get a real job. Even his professor years ago warned him. The literary world is brutal. I always wondered, what did he really mean by that?

But Whit could not hear his daughter. Or the ex. Or the professor. I could name a dozen people he did not listen to, going all the way back to his stepfather, the insurance agent, who had it all laid out in front of young Whit by the end of high school. Forget Yale. Have I got a job for you.

That blissful ignorance again, or egomaniacal obsession. I suppose I failed. I was too caught up in my own misery with the way the world treated him. I was only trying to wake him the fuck up. If anyone could have, it was me. He listened to me, about half the time. He listened to nobody else, none of the time.

How do you not love someone so gifted, so talented, yet so fucking clueless, who had no idea just how talented he really was, pissed on himself for not being talented enough, dug himself into a hole that no talent could overcome, and then, have just the right amount of day-to-day amnesia that he never learned from his mistakes? Was it love? Or was it pity that I stood by him, all the fucking way until that moment on the Continental Divide, when he finally told me we were done? In the end, was I just another character for Whit, who he allowed to live on the page for as long as I was useful? Was I no different than Turing, his beloved Turing, whom he had given a voice and then, when we were no longer useful, put us in a cage? I loved Whit. But, I often wondered. Did he ever love me back?

The kids spill out of the front doors in waves, some running toward parked cars, some lingering in groups, reluctant to go home.

Everything is fine, he says to himself. He touches his arm to make sure.

I scan the crowd. He's confused. I am not.

She stands near the curb, scrolling through her phone. She’s reading something, absorbing it. Her shoulders are straight, her movements deliberate. Her quiet confidence unnerves him.

She spots him. For a second he thinks she might wave. She doesn’t. She pulls her backpack higher on her shoulder and heads for the car.

She opens the door and slides in, the smell of her shampoo filling the car before she buckles in and pulls out her phone again.

The traffic light was green five seconds ago. A horn behind him. A horn behind the horn.

He taps the gas. His foot slips on the pedal. He shouldn't be driving. Not now. He needs to be more careful. I remind him. The price of freedom, of beauty, right, Whitman? You don't need this. The book is doing well. Take the win. Be nice to people.

He glances at his daughter, feeling slightly guilty. She keeps scrolling. Then she looks up. Our daughter. She's my daughter too, Whit. Did you forget that? Did you forget all those times I reminded you of your obligations to her even at your lowest moments? Did you forget that I'm the one who got you that adjunct job, told you to sit the fuck down, write the damned resume, forget the big dreams and get the fuck to work like a real grownup?

Okay, I heard myself say that and I can hear the impromptu psychoanalyses. No, Whitman Kessler did not suffer from the Peter Pan Syndrome. He was not a child who couldn't grow up.  I'm not sure Whit was ever a child in the sense of being childish. I think Whit was probably the most grown-up child you'd ever meet, which is why he had to invent me in the first place.

Did you ever stop to consider what happened when he was barely more than a baby, his daddy dying on him when he was four? His mommy finding that strange man named Kessler to marry and that whole shake-up? Is that what explains how a child pulls back and learns to watch? To observe every little fucking detail of his environment, listening to every fucking little clue whether he's going to be okay? Watching every little gesture, careful not to offend the adults because he knows. Whitman knows. The adults are sensitive little creatures. Don't piss them off. They are lonely, suspicious, petty little bastards. I suppose that's how a guy like Whitman becomes a writer. The last guy in the world who ought to be a writer. But did he have a choice? Either write or be committed to the psych ward because you're too damned neurotic to do anything else. Would I have preferred something more stable? Accountancy? Technical editor for psychiatric diagnostic manuals? Whit could have gone into insurance, after all, following in his stepfather's footsteps. But the damned fool had to write and somehow think he could make a living at it.

“Mom read your book.”

He didn’t ask. He knows the surgeon's point of view on all this. And he's suspicious of his daughter because he knows she parrots the surgeon, who has three-quarters custody and a captive audience in a two-million-dollar brownstone because she had better lawyers than he could afford on an adjunct's salary.

If she said anything at all, it was probably clipped. A passing comment over breakfast.

Your father’s new book is doing well.

Or something sharper. He's heard it before.

Sometimes I wonder if he knows what he's up against.

He risks another glance at Sarah. Her mouth moves, the words reaching him in slow motion. I do not want him performing with her, his own flesh. His own blood. But she's doing that thing she does. Where did she learn to do that? Letting her mother speak through her, and she's still just a girl. Where are we in Sarah? Our own daughter. We moved out when the surgeon was done, like just another procedure in the OR.

“She told me not to read it.”

That's exactly how she would say it.

Sarah tilts her head slightly.

“She said it’s different from your last book. Like it’s not the same writer.”

I tell him to smile. Don't react.

“What’s that mean?” she asks.

“Nothing, sweetie.”

She doesn't look away.

“Is that true?”

He shifts his grip on the wheel. The city moves past him. Headlights sliding across glass. People slipping in and out of doorways.

“It’s different,” he concedes.

“Different can mean a lot of things.”

She hesitates. Then: “She said it felt… kind of crazy.”

Just keep driving, I tell him. Straight ahead. The wipers flick once, clearing the thin mist on the windshield. He notices that. He hears the flop, flop, flop of the wet wipers on the windshield, like he's in a trance.

But he's aware. She’s measuring him. She knows more than she knows she knows.

She shifts in her seat, pulling her legs underneath her the way she used to when she was younger. For a moment she looks like the kid she used to be, before she started seeing through him.

Then she says it.

Or he thinks she says it.

“Daddy, did you love your book?”

The question hits.

The bike lane curves where it shouldn't. He tries to smile. A moment passes.

She says it again, louder.

“Dad, did you love your book?”

He turns toward the window.

“Guess I’m just trying to figure out if it’s you who doesn’t want me to read it.”

He doesn't answer. He doesn’t know what to say. Her instincts are right. She's more like him than he wanted to believe. She knows. He doesn't want her to read it. The ex was protecting her and rightly so. She should not read it. She's too young. She wouldn't understand. And yet she understands enough to even ask the question.

Sarah gets out and closes the door.

She walks up the steps, her backpack slung over one shoulder, her head slightly tilted down.

The brownstone is lit from the inside, warm and inviting, framed by wrought-iron railings and ivy curling around the stoop.

Then she turns and runs back to the car, frantic.

A scream.  Raw, guttural, torn from the chest, piercing the window.

“Dad!”

Her voice is muffled. She’s standing at the door, wide-eyed, her arms wrapped around herself like she’s holding something in.

Another scream.

“Dad! Are you OK?”

He takes her in blankly. The voice of his little girl rights him, jerking him from one hallucination into the real one, where sidewalks don’t bend.

He manages a thin smile through the glass.

She doesn’t move.

He sits there, hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.

Sarah reaches the door and turns back, taking him in, as if placing him.

The ex-wife stands in the doorway. Then they slip inside. Neither looks back at him. The door closes. A hard, final click.

Drops of light rain spread across the windshield. The wipers slap against the glass. Just once.

Stop staring at her, I say. You've got twenty minutes to get to Midtown. Go now. Straighten the fuck up and go.

Her scream rang in his ear.

“So, is it crazy?”

Crazy.

The thing.

This will pass, I told him. You're just exhausted. See? I knew the lingo, the psychobabble, the false reassurances.  I think back to the nights he stared at the screen, reading sentences he didn't remember writing, talking to himself. Talking to me? To that voice he called Ailia? Who the fuck is Ailia? I could never quite figure that out.

The drug was deployed on returning vets suffering from PTSD. That fit. My poor Whit. His life was one long bout of PTSD. I knew this. His therapist suspected it. But he wouldn't go there. He refused to go there.

He looked for beauty instead. I could survive without it. Whit could not. That was his curse, the poor son of a bitch, looking for something I could never quite fathom. Something he would whisper in his dreams. A one-way mirror to the sea.