De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis
Some days were good days for Kurt, he could keep track. Today was a good day. Not only could he keep track, he had a new puppy—another reason to live. Einar imagined Kurt phoning him six months down the line to ask for a rain check. “Weather too perfect.” The puppy eventually would have to get used to rough seas. “Too cooped up.” A whole island where mink ran wild was too good to be true for the puppy, born to herd.
Also, Kurt had just gotten off the phone with his doctor, who’d informed him that he did not have syphilis.
High noon. Kurt exuberantly swings away, his ball veering so far to the right that it lands on the third green. No matter. Two full hours of daylight lie ahead. On the bad days, by now, but not today, Kurt’s enigmatic infirmity takes control of Kurt and raises ethically complex questions regarding how to define personhood. Like, does personhood apply if you say, “Swing away,” and the response is, “Okay,” and that is the entirety of the response, both verbal and physical, and you then say, “Hips aggressive and left heel up,” and an identical response follows, one word out of the mouth, that is the totality of the response, and eventually, as each subsequent response prolongs the misery, no choice is left but to pry the club out of Kurt’s grip and take the swing yourself?
When Einar asks Kurt what the penalty is for hitting off the putting surface of the wrong hole, Kurt answers without hesitation. Personhood. But, like, what about volition? No, Kurt, the ball won’t all by itself make up its mind to roll up the hill into the hole, is a kind of thing a person with intact volition wills themselves not to say out loud, and succeeds in not saying loud, on one of Kurt’s not-so-good days.
Kurt leads the way across the heath to the correct putting surface. He is brimming with high spirits and volition.
“I didn’t even know they’d tested me for syphilis. Yes, well, it’s a routine test when the cause of the infirmity is. The cause of the infirmity is. The cause of the infirmity is.” “Enigmatic?” “Yes, not the word I was searching for, but in the neighborhood.” A good day all around. In a single phone call, the former radio broadcaster learns that he does not have syphilis, and that he has been tested for syphilis.
Later Kurt will tell the story with humorous embellishments, over ice cream, outside the clubhouse on the patio. The great herring fisheries of Stavanger were decimated by the arrival of syphilis aboard Russian military vessels in the eighteenth century, Kurt will tell the puppy as the puppy reads Kurt’s face, or mind, for a sign of faltering, the puppy salivating at the possibility as it fixates on the waffle cone in Kurt’s hand.
Dødens Hull
I find it helpful, said my father, to think of a father. Someone else’s father. A father addresses the ball, start with that. At the age of five, the father could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. Huh. What do you make of that, said my father looking up from the tee toward the wind turbines, where the doctor killer had just emerged from a low dark cloud that had not moved since the first Christians buried their dead on what was now a rough.
Inside the doctor killer was my doctor, scouting the course. The doctor killer buzzed the treetops. Banked toward the clubhouse. We turned and watched it circle back after it buzzed a cruise ship docked in the harbor.
I find it helpful to think of a harpoon gun. Fathers drinking in the clubhouse after a long day of restoration projects, one project a rusty ax, another similar project, the harpoon gun. “Saved my father’s father’s life more than once,” says one father. Not a father with an opioid prescription or, okay, maybe a father with an opioid prescription, but not a problem doctor. Not a doctor hard to reach when there’s a glitch in a prescription written by the doctor, not much of a glitch, still, no opioid.
Mistaking a surname for a Christian name, or vice versa, for example.
The doctor killer headed out to sea, possibly to scout for moving targets. If I restored a harpoon gun, I would first test it on a tree trunk. Then I would test it on a sea eagle, but obviously, as I adhere to a moral code that forbids offending the gods by doing harm to their holy servants, the sea eagle would not be a sentient creature capable of experiencing outrage, but a drone equipped with talons, a machine adorned with feathers. Go forth, I would command the drone, buzz the tourists gawking at the turbines and their lethal blades. Not lethal to the drone, because the drone did not have the flawed vision of a genuine sea eagle.
My father would crack a joke about the sport of golf being an entire world in itself, numbered.
Warmed by mead, the jolly fathers upstairs at the clubhouse would exchange stories handed down about fathers and axes, about the low dark clouds that came rolling over the horizon and were known as emancipators. Fathers who did not have the knack of sharpening, or lacked a weather eye. Ballads would be sung, honoring the pagan gods who had battled over contested waterways with blades the size of pylons, fathers nostalgic for adventure and risk, but also comfort. “I want a doctor who will take my call day or night if there is a prescription snafu,” one father might say. “I want a doctor who will take my call even while reeling from her life partner’s confession of infidelity.” “I want a doctor who will take my call even while reeling from a confession of infidelity sprung upon them amid the sincere joy and fellow feeling of a holiday party.”
Scouting for frost, the doctor killer, back from the sea, wagged its wings at us, its engine sputtering as it probed the boundary along the woods where pockets of frost tended to linger. Scouting for a tree, one of the fathers in the clubhouse had wandered those same woods equipped to fell a tree.
Now the tree stood in the clubhouse, or, if not a real tree, a tree made from father axes. Three fathers each had contributed an ax none of which would come to any harm, though for weeks they would remain bound together at their necks with a length of plain string.
When the drone grew weary, it would partake of the bounty of the turbines, doze at their feet, comforted in repose by the lullaby of their bounty. Soon it would rise into the sky again, alert and agile. My father would help me lug the harpoon gun up onto the platform beneath which frosty air circulated. Another father would lend a hand with the vertical offset corrections. I would line up a shot as if I were shooting from a bow offset from the sea as opposed to heath. The basic principle would be similar: not to miss. After the foreordained miss, my father, watching from the deck with the other fathers, would not curse under his breath.
Weywot
When he visited, I let my brother have my foam pad. I took my sleeping bag to the corner where the giant megaphone stood. At four in the morning, my eyes opened and I saw my brother at the mirror, working on his eyes. The sun wouldn’t be up for another eight hours. It would hover in the sky reprovingly for twenty minutes of grim twilight. Another day, another dolor. One of the first major childhood tragedies, a game changer, was when the child learned, courtesy of Dad, that this phrase had predated the child, had existed in the world long before the child came into the world.
Brother would be disappointed when he learned that the entirety of life on the island until sunup consisted of early risers bailing out their rowboats just for the gratification of working with a bailing implement.
Listen, I said, here you are, you show up unannounced, surprise surprise, the last time you showed up unannounced you left without warning after cleaning out my safe. So, the question I put to you is, are you Dad? Can you give convincing proof of an empirical distinction in identity? Empirically, that you are you and Dad is Dad and, let’s make this easy, the two identities don’t wholly and exhaustively overlap? Or if you want to take it in another direction, feel free to assume a distinction but then prove that one doesn’t blot out the other?
Now I feel that I am putting the giant megaphone to my mouth to declare to you, the reader, that amid the raucous free-for-all that was our childhood, an era that at the time I wrote about in daily homeschool assignments all of which construed the era as… botched bank robbery, white-collar blackmail, the firefight where the sergeant seeing his first combat panics and drops his weapon and runs not away, but toward… but wait, I see that I’m getting ahead of myself. As I am speaking directly to you, I would like to sound exactly like myself. My CPU has a very fast clock speed, but unless I go slow, I don’t sound like myself.
As a child, brother showed no individuality at all. Nothing distinctive except his on-again off-again stamp collecting. He didn’t choose stamp collecting, it chose him, he likes to say, omitting the part about Dad choosing it for him. But in his stamp collecting, he was such an All-American that at County Camp, in only his second year, the powers that be assigned him the uppermost posting: Weywot, the Sky Father, Tongva god of the sky. As Weywot, in all matters beneath the level of the powers that be, he held ultimate authority. Next year he was appointed Weywot again. And again, for I can’t bring myself to say how many years, but an unprecedented number, by far. It made him insufferable.
It would ruin the island for me.
I would give him the obligatory tour and we would end up on the spit of land where workers gather to be ferried to the offshore platforms where they drill for the raw materials for foam. One of the workers would eye us suspiciously. He would wander over and size up brother. Then he would break into a smile. Weywot? Hey, Weywot! Is that really you? What are you doing way out here? It’s me, remember the bonfire that got out of hand? Alfonso Gustafson? You look exactly the same, Jesus, I can’t believe it! Weywot!
In its essence an encounter of the kind that Dad is known for. Dad’s fame, or infamy, his in-family fame, consisted in part of being recognized everywhere. Middle of nowhere, out of the blue. Sometimes it wouldn’t be Dad but a kid. Wait. No. You’re his kid? Him? Really? Parallel narratives, Dad here, brother there, can we push the argument and defy anyone to prove that the narratives aren’t in fact identical?
After the last visit, I’d wised up. The safe was still present, a ship’s safe from a yard sale, fitted with a new lock. An antique wood stove similarly was in perfect working order but the kindling and firewood were locked in a shed, an outbuilding. Brother would have fun fumbling with tumblers. Once he gave up on the safe, there were all kinds of yard sale finds dangling from the ceiling to keep him busy, glass floats, antique purse-seine nets, plus much else scattered around the attic, wood boxes of all shapes and sizes retrieved from wrecks, ammunition cases, powder canisters, all potential hiding places. Foils. My valuables were secure in a stainless-steel lockbox a hundred yards away, buried in lonely unmarked heath.
You, I’m speaking to you, the reader, you surely have guessed by now that the giant megaphone isn’t a giant megaphone at all. I picked it up at a yard sale, that is true, along with a butter plumb. First a fisherman would peer into the depths through the megaphone. If the depths looked promising, they would butter up the plumb for a better look.
Weywot! Enjoy your Easter egg hunt! I lock the door from the outside, a community tradition from long ago when the attic was a dormitory for itinerant seasonal workers and it was in the best interests of the community to keep the occupants locked inside at night.
A light rain has been falling all night, and practically the whole community is at the harbor, in the dark, hard at work. It would be easy enough to cover the boats with tarps, but no one does, no one ever has. Many of the bailing implements are polished wood and have been passed down from generation to generation. I circle the harbor until I find an empty boat, anyone’s empty boat. It doesn’t matter who owns the title to this boat that will sink, at the rate the rain is falling, in another decade. I step in, I bail.