Jeff Hanson

Damage Control

If you are alone, washing a few dishes, and it’s winter, it’s night, it’s raining, and you see your son’s faint picture floating at the window in a cold light, moonlit, then that is no visitation or sign of his spirit flying back to check on you.

He’s gone, but not dead. He lives with his mother in Greece, too young maybe to be any more than a ghost to you—your far-away son, his face like a little moon, like a photograph.

And now his mother has her son and her voice has pressed a sort of tonnage on you.
You don’t answer the phone, but the messages get through: “irresponsible,” “self-absorption,” “fake,” “asshole.”

How can I advise you for a healing? Anna is your third wife, Aris, your second child.
I say the child is gone. Be alone.

I’ve told you what to do:

I’ve said: walk through your new town—a long, long ways—until part of it runs out to a few flat fields. Believe me, I see you, the old Jim standing like a hero again, a few clouds shredding out high overhead. It’s cold and windy so everywhere there is a burning but the vision is warm.

The new man says: “I can lose this child to survive; I can find my love and leave it here and get to my worst; I can walk home strong and new and finally ruthless.”

I’ve said, “If you can’t get moving, lock up tight and eat a mountain of food: half a dozen eggs, brauts, a few beers, and fat white potatoes fried hot.”

In the quiet, the skull eats, the eyes see nothing, the hand forks up what you’ve made.
And all this will put you down into a suffocating sleep where life is a line of light breath,
and that’s all.

You’ll heal if you wait until he can suffer, until he’s old enough to feel what damage is also waiting. See what this distance does now. Nothing.

Out there, boys, like Aris, will learn to walk and talk before they wonder what they are, before they know how to measure fathers with their own ideas of absence.

Return to Volume 3.4

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