The World is Full of Men
Thomas Kearnes
Winter 2010
Winter 2010
How on earth did he encounter the word only to learn it so wrong? Most people have never even heard of abysmal, so can’t possibly misuse it. But there’s the boyfriend of seven–no, eight–months with his breathless, juvenile message on Henry’s MySpace page. “I love you, abysmally, and eternally.” I’ve read it dozens of times today, tonight, eyes sticky and stomach churning from the tweak that won’t let me fucking sleep, please God, not another sunrise.
“Boy, all you do is sit in front of that computer,” says my father. I do not turn around, but I sense him at my shoulder. He wears the insulated motorcycle jacket and tinted helmet they buried him in two months ago.
“I can’t sleep,” I tell him as I click to the boyfriend’s own page. There’s a blog entry dating back to the month they started dating. After recounting their first night together complete with praise for how Henry’s back trembled under his hand, he goes on to write, “Thank you, Henry, for sharing your most abysmal thoughts with me.”
Henry is a smart man, sweet, forthright. He loves this other man too much to point out his bizarre linguistic snafu. I’ll let you make mistakes, it means. Henry allowed my first few mistakes, but then I made more. All my words were used correctly. I strung them together for him in page after page. It was abysmal.
“Weren’t you supposed to meet up with him sometime?” my father asks.
“How did you get in?” I ask, eyes unblinking.
“I walked through your front door. You should remember to lock it.”
It’s then the impossibility hits me. I turn back to my father, eyebrows raised.
“You’ve never seen a picture of Henry. Wait a second, this isn’t even his page!”
His hand extends toward me. The short, pudgy fingers fan from his scaly hand, all those fine, fine crisscrossing lines across its surface. My father grew old before I grew to despise him.
I remember the last time he held my hand, in the private suite at the cardiac ICU.
I’d let my fingertips glance over the bedrail and jerked to feel his own fingertips graze mine. He wanted me to hold his hand, so I did. I watched him smile weakly, forgot to smile back. He kept holding my hand but said nothing. Finally, I told him and my mother, who held his other hand across from me, I needed a cigarette. I squeezed his hand because that‘s what I do to let men know I don’t truly want to let go.
Returning from my smoke, rounding the corridor to the cardiac unit, my mother rushed to meet me and said my father had to rest and I could see him tomorrow. I never told him goodbye. But I nodded and drove home.
In my apartment, my father gazes at the monitor. He never answered my question about Henry. His hand still waits for mine to accept it. I limply take it in my own, my body twisted halfway toward him. “So,” he finally asks, “did you ever meet this Henry?”
“No,” I tell him. This is a lie. I know my father would never want to know we met by accident once last summer at the bathhouse, him in only a towel and me rushing from the rented room of a boy I’d met two hours earlier. Disappointed I couldn’t stay, Henry leaned over to kiss me. Briefly, softly. I still remember the brush of his lips against mine.
I cannot recall my father’s kiss.
“How long have you been sitting here?” my father asks. Finally, it occurs to me why his voice sounds so flat and rough: the life, of course, has left it. Two months ago.
I’m so, so tired and achingly awake, I forget to lie. “Two whole days.”
“What the hell were you gawking at for so long?”
“I couldn’t remember what Henry looked like,” I tell him. I want to cry, feel the hitch in my throat, but no tears come. I never cry for men, not even myself.
“You need to sleep, son.”
“I’m too–I’m just too fucking high, Dad.”
He squeezes my hand. He doesn’t truly want to let go.
“Someday, a man will love you,” he says, his voice dead, dead, dead.