Half-Past Three or Four O'clock

A small journal with sinuous covers carved from an ancient ebony tree remains my father’s final gift to me. The book is marvelous, the purest black I have ever seen. A gorgeous spiral snakes through both covers, like a suture, binding it together. Beneath them are layers of gold-leafed paper which, like brittle Winter leaves, crinkle when touched. They feel like old skin, and calluses. He gave me this nearly two decades ago when, after being missing for weeks, he appeared in a strange manner at my bedside. Nobody knew where he went and, truthfully, I did not miss him. Yet, there he was, middle of the night, unbidden and lingering in my bedroom doorway. He smelled awful. I remember his bag, a raggedy old thing, and how he reached into its mouth to remove a book whose appearance was antithetical to his own. He asked me to write in it.

I asked him, “What?” but he said nothing. A strange mood came over the room as he turned away from me. I watched him leave, ever expecting his late reply. But he left unflinchingly. Stepping from the doorway he walked through the narrow halls of my youth, toward the stairs. Then, without gripping the banister, he descended. The darkness of our unlit home swallowed him, and I heard the front door strike shut. Perhaps that was his answer, for I‘ve not heard from him since. Until two weeks ago, when an email served me news of his passing.

Now I sit here, in the office of a suit, grieving. As I wait for my portion of the family estate, I recall Father’s long journey of mental decline. Although his was not the slow death of failing memory, nor the ghosting paranoia of Dementia, I am informed he died of wandering. Found resting in a dark wood, far removed from his home, in the raw wilds of Alaska, was my Father’s corpse. The police took his picture. One needs only look upon his sunken cheeks, his frost-blacked fingertips, and his hunting rifle to know. That picture rules out murder.

My hands clutch the book as a tightness squeezes my insides. In my throat, there is a lump developing. Under my fingers, the ebony covers are dark and soft, cold and smooth, like a windy, wintry night. A grooved motif textures each surface. Adjoining every engraved depression are jagged borders not unlike the twisted imaginings of Escher. They seem endless. I drag my fingers across the spine’s wooden ribs, playing them like a rasping instrument. They growl at me. The throat is another rasping instrument, a ladder from the soul whose many rungs enable my speaking. What’s rasping bears me peace, like the cats I gave away, willingly, to save them the heartache of moving.

My grief is not the outward display that any should expect from another whose father has just died. It is the long scream travelling. Through this sparsely lit, many-doored hallway, at the end of which we expect death, I am paused to consider.

The man whose desk this is, is staring, but I cannot meet his eyes. He called me here, today, to discuss the business of my father who has, just now- ago, passed away. This journal was the business of my father. That is to say, I am or was my father’s business. Though, not professionally.

“You have seen our messages, then? You are not an easy person to get a hold of.” He shuffles, perhaps uncomfortably, in his seat. “It has been weeks since we first attempted contact. You understand this. We have been attempting by phone and email, of yourself and your employer, to bring you—You do understand,” he says, interrupting himself. “Your nonattendance may be taken as refusal to accept your father’s late wishes.”

“His wishes?”

The man goes on, as if I’ve said nothing. Perhaps, though, I have said nothing. I’m told that we humans carry water within our ears, and his words are like water, dripping into the dark, watery canals of my head, filling my space with sound. But I understand none of it, except that my father is dead, the details of which we are disagreeing upon. Though I have not voiced my argument, I am sure he understands. He must. It’s right there! Somewhere, in the papers that he’s now leafing through. I wonder what it is he’s searching for.

His eyes are flickering between legal documents and my journal, as if they are connected, somehow, by strands I cannot see. It was between Christmas and my twelfth birthday, in February, that Father gave the book to me. We, like the wadi, await the river to flow, turbidly, whether with blood or ink, or foaming water, through the narrow channels of the Black Ebony tree. I remember being dragged by a sudden maelstrom through both covers and every leaf. The memory pulls my shoulders down, into the seat. Through the black notebook’s coiled wooden spine there runs an ebony pen—presumably carved of the same splinter of trunk that, like a macabre column of fractured bone, must remain erect, lest it transmute the brokenness of the dissevered branch. “I have never used this pen.”—but the journal has inspired me.

“Yet the journal is full,” he states with a raised eyebrow, interrupting my thoughts. “It does not matter that the pen was not used. Such was never specified. Only that its pages are full. Hand it here, however, that I may confirm by notary that it is so.” He nods to the woman who, at some point, must have joined us in his office. I check the door to see that it is open, but it’s closed. Perhaps, except for me, it has never been open. Thinking back, I do not remember ever stepping through it. Now the walls are closing in. This book was never meant to be opened, its pages never to be thusly turned, and here I am overwhelmed because my shoes are too tight. The lights are too loud. Her hair is too bright, and three is a crowd. “Where is that sound coming from?”—the snapping of leaves before the wind. They wave, but do they wave for him? Afore their final snap to wave salutes, goodbye, the limbs release their tethers: they fly. Drawing her hair back from her eyes to her temples to see, she holds it there—reminds me of my mother. Her black, unruly hair, now un-bunned, and white.

I remember, she sent me to see him, unaware of the pieces he had become. I remember the bareness of him, like a tree shed late in Autumn. I wish she had not. I never wanted to see. To gather the leaves at my feet and stuff them deep inside durable, opaque bags, never to know them. Whose pendulous undulation of time’s scornful whip cracks against me? The unsurmounted-ness of Mount Sisyphus nor the blind grope of plants does compare. Yet, a scream echoes down the hall unmitigated, undamped, and uncalled. The sense of which does haunt me. It’s like my eyes are leaking wells that flood my ears with water. Truly, I can’t hear a word they’re saying.

The memory plays back for me, but I don’t want it to. If I could, I would drown it like a photograph in the chemicals of my mind until it choked and sucked and soaked the inking stain of time. I would hold it there, beneath the surface, for it to dye.

Black, and meaningless, like the starless night sky. I remember you standing there, straight-backed over an upturned chair, wondering “Where am I?” “Who are you?” I’m your son, you stupid old man! I wish you’d kick the chair and die, hanging! Better that than this- all of this, meaningless, torture. You would not know what mom goes through because you divorced her. You’d never seen the way she cries. You left! You left and- me with this book and some stupid instructions like money means squat when you die. I hate you.

The woman is still there. She says to me with her hand on my shoulder, “Sign here if you understand.”—like I ever would.

I sign anyway, and she certifies each sheet as we go. The man actively nods, and she is summarizing what I am agreeing to. The slight furrow in his brow looks practiced and doesn’t change until, finally, comes the check.

A sparkling mesh of blacks, blues and golds, intricate markings decorate the check, to ensure its authenticity. Set like a gem atop the dark remnants of a stained oak tree, the check seems almost mystical. A silly thought, really. The dense ringed-ness of the desk speaks a long history, full of meaning. The leaves impart status. A fractal pattern reminds of lightning, whose passage could not fell the mighty oak. Even in death, the oak seems to grasp the left hand of Zeus, having assumed after death a blackness that our ancestors do yet revere, in Heaven, or wherever. Now, its leaves are gone. Fell of final rustlings and lost, somewhere downwind, with the mutterings of Odysseus, or Jason, the Argonaut.

He slides the check across the dead oak desk with a sincerity that is surely also practiced.

He pushes it, and I take it from him, a check for twenty grands, which I am decided to take because it is my father’s will. “Did he know I’m struggling?”—emotion plays across my face. “What am I thinking.” I sigh.

It looks so small against the vastness of his desk. I open the book to any page and a bookmark falls out. The red satin string, once held in place by the weight of its surroundings, now hangs loose from the spine. The words once held there leap out at me. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night, by Tee Ess Eliot…” I sniffle and pinch my nose as the words pass through me. The poem is scrawled across two adjacent pages and ends abruptly with several lines of cramped writing.

I tuck the check into the crease between the pages, the final addition to an overdue chapter. I close the book. The suit gathers his papers. Is it pity in his expression when he says to me, “Your father was a veteran whose benefits package did include sums of money to be distributed upon his death. A strange stipulation, this, that whosoever of his two children does continue to possess such a notebook as yours should at the time of his passing be the sole beneficiary to such a,” he falters, perhaps omitting a word, “sum. In any case I had never heard of it.” His eyes seem to study me, darting quickly between my stolid features. “Well,” he says, correcting his posture. “Do you have any questions?”

I look at the door. It is open. My jacket hangs on the wall.

“Carry my things to the welcome mat, I, prepare to sob.”

The last twist of the knob.