So Many Dying Stars

This place used to be an aquarium. Remember my dad telling me his parents brought him here when he was five, their first road trip up the coast. Said his dad sat across the street while Grandma took him to see eels and sharks. Wonder if I’m sitting where Grandpa was seated. Wonder how he’d feel if Dad went in five and returned a grown man.

Wonder how I’m gonna feel.

Harry’s five now too, same age as Dad was, same place as Dad was, only it isn’t an aquarium anymore.

Folks like me mill about as I try to create memories that won’t ever be, milestones compressed into minutes. So Harry will just know how to shave somehow? Or the ability to drive a car will be burned in? His drum kit’s gonna be too small, and he was really starting to get that hi-hat snare combo down. How about talking to girls, or boys, if that’s what he’s into?

These landmarks he’ll bypass.

Ah, what does any of that matter, anyway? Forget about the thirteen years he’s losing. When those fuckers ship him off, they’ll take the whole rest of it. Lucky if Harry ever comes home to me and Joannie, this Harry made mature.

We thought about running, yeah, but run where? Can’t afford tickets off-planet. I don’t know anyone personally who can. So this is it.

For us, for him. For most people.

Jesus, you look up and they’re all there, warships suspended like a string of Christmas lights or some long and sparkling guillotine.

A woman hunkering to my left isn’t studying the astral army. She’s fixed on the pavement, counting the cracks, maybe. Bet she has someone in there too. Of course she does. An innocent child grotesqued into some kind of grown up. It’s morning still; more parents will come.

No choice.

The building is arrogant, glass from roof to road, not a single thing to hide. Even from across the street, I see myself in its lidless stare as if the structure is showing without shame what it’s doing to my kid.

I don’t want to cry here in the sun, but it’s too late because I can remember when he was a baby and I was trying to get him to sleep one night but he just wouldn’t no matter what I tried and he slapped my glasses off with that tiny hand of his and I said out loud actually said out loud man can’t we just skip this and I guess somebody must have been listening.

I dam both eyes with my knuckles, and the black within shines, as will so many dying stars.

Fuck this.

I march to the place that used to be an aquarium, and I look up once more to that locked and loaded sky, and it’s cold in California.

They wave me through without a fuss and say Harry’s in room 5690. I hustle upstairs hard and recall a nightmare, one I had right around my 30th birthday. In it, we’re celebrating my 40th and I’m looking at this cake and thinking what happened? Where did an entire decade go? My mom’s next to me shaking her head, and when I look back, the cake has a 50 candle sticking out of it. Mom’s older, too, still shaking her head. I look again and see 60, then 70, then 80, and all this time Harry isn’t anywhere. It goes like this until my mom is white bone and flies are circling the moldy cake.

I slam the crash bar of the fifth-floor door and stumble into a hallway flooded with hopeless mothers and hapless fathers. Joannie’s a few yards away, palming her mouth, and before she can stop me, before her words try to make impossible sense, I barge into room 5690.

The space is small, just four blank walls, but they seem to pulse, undulate, inhaling life, and the young man sitting before me is Harry, but not my Harry from the morning who ate his croissant flake by flake. I mean, he is, but…

The unbelievable peach fuzz on his upper lip sends me to my knees but my hands catch me before I faceplant. The hair on my arms is already whitening, the flesh looser. I imagine there should be a big goofy OFF button I can punch but there’s nothing except me and my boy. Commotion from outside lights a fire under my ass, and even though he’s already bigger and even though terror sucks my nerve, I rush to Harry and pick him up.

My God, he’s heavier, getting heavier still.

I seize the doorknob.

But it’s locked.

It’s locked.

I turn to Harry and his peach fuzz has vanished, replaced by the telltale wintergreen of a razor’s travel, and despite the fact that I’d been hugging him high, his large feet are no longer airborne, they’re firmly on the ground. I watch his jaw square, his muscles uncoil like rope, his shoulders erupt from pebbles to boulders. I can actually hear the wrack of Harry’s skeleton and I’m for some reason proud when suddenly my back quits, my front crumples, and I spill again.

But this time my son catches me, taller than ever I was. That’s Joannie. I’m gonna go ahead and believe he got the rest from his father.

My shriveling heart hammers offbeat like Harry on his drums and it’s like that birthday nightmare but at least Harry’s here this time so it’s more akin to a dream. I realize we’re skipping. Skipping the bad stuff, the best stuff, but not the worst stuff. Never get to skip that.

Harry lowers us upon the cold tile, me a bundle of twigs against his chest, him a beautiful man. We don’t say anything.

Gently, so gently, Harry removes my glasses and lets me sleep.