Caleb Orion

I had that dream again, like every time, the one where I’m sitting on the edge of my bed and my dad comes in and he’s holding the beer bottle in his hand and I can tell he’s high because he’s sort of looking through me and at me at the same time. And my dad sits down next to me and puts his arm around me and I feel weird about it all and I don’t know why, probably because he’s drunk, and maybe because he’s high, and maybe because I know what he’s here about and even though it’s a dream and I can’t read the clock and I could take control and leave I stay, because it’s not really a dream but a memory and I let myself relive it every night.
And my dad tells me he’s been in the kitchen a hundred times, pacing around looking through the cupboards and then he asks me how school’s going, and I shift my position and he stops talking for a while. Just sits there and looks down at the floor, forming the words already in his head.
And I remember that during all of this I was thinking about my best friend Kate, and then about boys, and those two thoughts always used to go hand-in-hand, but when I have the dream now I don’t think about boys, I think about you. You’re boys to me, and I sit next to my dad and I want to tell him how I met this wonderful boy and I want to tell him about you but that’s always around the point when my dad starts saying how he’s moving out and I’ll be living with him on the weekends but it’ll be in another city. He starts to cry so I sit there uncomfortable. I’ll cry later on the phone when I’m talking to Kate, perhaps when I realize what another city is, probably when I realize what that means to be with you, but for now I don’t know how to respond. Does that mean they’re getting a divorce?

Then the next day, or maybe in the dream I walk out of my room, there’s boxes all over the place and I remember that big mouth bass with the songs and it’s packed away, and suddenly I miss that bass even though I hated it back then.
My dad is loading his car in silence, putting each box in and his back hurts because he cringes every time he picks up a box and he cringes again when he puts it down. I can also tell because only a few boxes into loading his car he lights up a joint and starts to puff away at it, inhaling and pretending I’m not at the window peering out at him.

When he rolls from the curb and disappears down the street, I open the door to my room and walk downstairs. There’s an old cribbage board sitting on the table, the hands laying face up, and I can count the cards. Fifteen-two, Fifteen-four, and a pair for six.
This part never happened. I don’t know why it’s there. And it’s always there.
Then my mother walks in and the pegs begin to wind quickly along the board, leapfrogging around the bends like rubber-banded race cars. Moving by themselves — and the green overtakes the blue overtakes the brown, but falls back again as blue comes in with a good crib — cards flipping around the table.
When the cards stop, my mother looks up from the table and looks me in the eyes.

And just like God. And just like my father. She reaches over for me and I put myself in her arms and hold her close as she cries.

The first time I tried to kill myself, I met with God.
He sat on a throne on top of a few layers of clouds and dust and I imagine it was the same stuff he made me and you out of, because he’d sometimes twirl his hand through it and it’d glow colors like it was made of something besides water vapor.
And I stood in front of God and he looked down at me and started to ask me questions.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?” He asked. Isn’t God supposed to be omniscient? He should know already.
“It’s a stipulation of your free will,” was his response. Apparently, when we’re free, he loses the ability to see us. That explains why it’s so easy for the devil.

He asked me why again, and I didn’t quite have a real answer. I mean, he gave me a lot. Family, lovers, friends, pets, money. But hey, not everything buys happiness.
So I stood there staring at God. I stood there looking around the place where God lived. His bed looked pretty comfortable. Did he eat well?
“Have you been having complications with the lovers I gave you?”
I thought about you, because that’s where I go when I hear the L-word. No, I suppose not. There has been nothing between us that I would say makes me sad. Perhaps dissatisfied, but not unhappy.
“What about your family, are they problematic?”
I thought it all through, each member, extended and close, that I knew. Nothing came to mind. The odd thing about being around God is there’s something about him that makes your memory better.
“And your friends, aren’t they helpful?”
Yeah, they’ve pulled me out of tight spots before. I try to return the favor, but I’m not very good at it.
No, I don’t know why, God. I don’t know why I took a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut all my hair into disgusting shreds. I don’t know why I gripped a bottle of prescription pills like it was the only thing keeping me from being swept off a waterfall. I don’t know why I counted out each pill, organized into groups of threes, and took each one. Three by three by three, swallowing the contents and hoping the chemicals leeched into my body before my stomach turned.

And God sighed and he stood up from his throne. He walked over to where I was standing in the middle of the room and took me in his arms. I could feel something wet against my cheek and I realized he was crying, and I tried to cry with him, but I couldn’t. I just sat there, a little bit uncomfortable, while he held me.
Eventually he pulled away and an adviser came over.
“Don’t come back,” God said to me, “I don’t want to have to explain this to Jesus.”
Right, because God’s a comedian.

When I woke up, my mother was stroking my hair and I was laying in a hospital bed. I could hear the beeps and whir of machines keeping me alive. You never visited me in the hospital, but you were at home when I got out.