Kerzenschein

    California has a penchant for cloudlessness, especially during the summer, and the sky was an endless ocean of the purest blue like the biggest sapphire in the universe. I was wearing little boy khaki shorts and a nice dress shirt, and I was driving to church with my mother. This is how we spent time together until she died: in the little spaces between other moments.

   My father sang in the choir, so we were going to hear him sing. I did not understand him at all. I confessed to my mother, “When I think of Daddy, I don’t feel the same way like when I think of you. I don’t think I love him.”

   She’d pulled into a parking space at the church by then, and sucked in air. “Don’t you ever say that,” she snarled. She fumbled over her words and glared at me. “You were a miracle, but we didn’t know you were coming. Even before you were born, your father loved you so much that we kept you.”

   This is my first memory of my mother. It wasn't until I was thirteen that I realized what she meant.

*

    The joke is that when I was born, my mother was teaching A Tale of Two Cities to her high school English class, so she read it to me aloud. This is supposed to explain why I am who I am. I have never read A Tale of Two Cities. I don’t even know what it’s about.

   I used to novelize movies when I was a little kid. My mother bought me an illustrated anthology full of dragon stories, because dragons were my most favorite thing in the world. So when Dragonheart came out, I became possessed. I sat down at the computer in front of the big windows facing the backyard full of cactuses and tomato plants and wrote the whole thing into a book. In my head, I was writing a novel. It didn’t occur to me, somehow, that I was lifting someone else’s work.

   My mother was beautiful because you could see the shadows of how beautiful she was when she was young. Her face was like a story, where every line said something important. It was like a first edition copy of Moby Dick.

   When I showed her my stolen novel, her lips clamped tight in a concealed smile, but the grooves of a million smiles before betrayed her secret. She said, "This is incredible.”

   I tried to write every day after that.

*

    My father didn’t know how to play chess. He said it had too many rules. He could cure diseases in a laboratory, but didn’t understand chess. Before I was born, my family lived in Thailand, and my mother bought a chess set there. It wasn’t very old, but had a mysterious film over it, like perpetual dust, and the pieces had been carved out of stone to look like demons. My mother taught me how to play. She bought me Chessmaster for the computer, so that I could learn how to play it better. When I went to elementary school in New Mexico, I joined the chess club. I never won a game.

    She worked just a few blocks away from where I went to school, so one day my father and mother decided that I should just walk there instead of taking the bus home. My mother drew a map for me on a piece of free business stationery advertising a pool company.  I was in Cub Scouts, but they never taught me how to read a map. They never taught me anything.

   I got lost and started crying until I recognized a friend’s house. I asked him for directions. He told me where to go, and when I got to my mother’s school, my eyes were red and my face was streaked with tears. My mother showed me that I was reading the map wrong. I calmed down when she showed me the pictures of dragons she’d bought from the janitor who was a budding artist. Her scoliosis and rotting hip were so bad that she was in a wheelchair, then. The janitor had given her a drawing where she was wearing sunglasses and her red hair flowed behind her and the wheels were going so fast that they melted the floor wax. She had it hung next to her classroom door. All the middle schoolers thought I was cool because I was Mrs. Heisey’s son.

*

   When we moved to Detroit, Bush had passed the No Child Left Behind Act. My mother was saving schools by bringing student reading levels up by three or more in a year. In order to do that, she made a library.

   My father was a research veterinarian, so a large portion of my mother’s salary could be spent on books. After my trumpet lessons, she would take me to the bookstore and buy twenty copies of Maniac McGee, fifteen copies of The Giver, twelve copies of Hatchet, and seven copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She let students borrow those books. Once, I visited her school. There were kids who were so disappointed that all the copies of a book were checked out. The principal said that was the first time he’d ever seen kids want to read.

   After reading Where the Red Fern Grows, I told my mother that I didn’t like that the dog died in every book. She bought me a copy of Clive Barker’s Abarat. It didn’t have any dogs in it. Instead, it had Christopher Carrion. He’s the main villain of the series, and eats his own nightmares instead of food. But he’s so bored by his own nightmares that he tortures his miners who harvest magic mud (used to give life to an army of minions made with stitched patchworks of human skin), and has his nightmares eat their fear, so that he can in turn eat them. The epigraph of one of the books was a poem titled "Nothing," said to be Carrion’s favorite.

After a battle lasting many ages,

The Devil won,

And he said to God

(who had been his Maker)

"Lord,

We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation

By my hand.

I would not wish you

To think me cruel,

So I beg you, take three things

From this world before I destroy it.

Three Things, and then the rest will be

Wiped Away."

God thought for a little time.

And at last He said:

"No, there is nothing."

The Devil was surprised.

"Not even you, Lord?" he said.

And God said:

"No.

Not even me."

  This became my favorite poem. In all the silly stories I never finished, my villains were the best part. I drew pictures of them and showed them to my mother. She told me they were frightening.

   I fell in love with the Final Fantasy video game franchise because the stories were so good. My mother described them as interactive books. I secretly wrote fanfiction based on the characters and published the stories online. People seemed to like them. I joined roleplaying forums and spent hours every night writing my own stories with other people’s characters.

*

   Isaac Asimov became my favorite author, and when I discovered I, Robot on my mother’s bookshelf, I also found that he said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

   I’d been an acolyte of the church since I was six, and when I got my wooden cross necklace signifying the position, my mother was so proud. In middle school, I didn’t understand the purpose of science class, because God could just change everything on a whim. I talked to my mother about my concerns for many months during the drive from school to home, and though she tried to answer my questions, her final suggestion was to read the Bible. So I did. I read the Bible four times.

   It only served to complicate things. When I discovered the word “infidel” in the dictionary, it resonated with me so deeply that I had to tell my mother that I was an atheist. She sent me to Confirmation classes. I knew the Bible better than the volunteer teacher. Other kids’ mothers were impressed by my decision not to join the church, and used me as an excuse to question their children’s reasons for going along with it. It made my mother sad. I started bringing books to church so that I had something to do. I argued bitterly with my mother about the pastor’s sermons on the way home. I got her to agree with me that Job was a nightmarish parable, but we could never agree on Joseph’s father. I told her that it was a story that justified favoritism. She was convinced it was much more than that, and anyway, favoritism wasn’t that bad.

*

   The Dodge Durango my mother drove had a CD player full of Broadway musical soundtracks and bands that I liked. We listened to a lot of CAKE and tried to figure out the lyrics. My favorite song was “End of the Movie.” She didn’t like it because it was so sad.

   “But it’s true,” I said. “The whole thing is about life. It’s awful and sad, but no one wants to die before it’s their time. It’s like a movie. No matter how bad it is, you don’t want to leave until it’s done.”

   “That’s not true,” she said, making a Michigan Left on Telegraph Road. “Life is beautiful. The more you learn about people, the more dynamic and complicated they become. Every shadow is always cast because of the light behind it.”

   Her favorite CAKE song was “Shadow Stabbing.” She thought the language was so good that she turned it into a poster that she put up in her classroom as an example of what to do right.

I’m so nervous, I'm so tense,

My heart can’t forget about this self-defense.

When the air is so hot

And my breath comes fast,

I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last.

I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last…

   We agreed to disagree on the song “Short Skirt/Long Jacket.” We talked about the Oxford comma, and agreed it was necessary. My report cards were never exceptional, but whenever my dad complained about my unsatisfactory grades, my mother was always there to coo over the good ones. I always got As in English. My mother read all the stories I wrote. Whenever my dad had a bad day and got into a fight with my mother, he’d lock himself in their bedroom, and she would beg him to come eat dinner. In the end, she’d leave a plate of food outside the bedroom door.

*

   I’d been living with exchange students since I was five, in constant competition with them for my father’s favor. I’d been learning German, and practiced by translating OOMPH! and Rammstein songs for my mother in the car. When I turned sixteen, it was decided that I should go to Germany for an exchange year. The streets of Kahrlsruhe were narrow and made of cobblestone, and I felt like I’d stepped into a fairytale. None of the trains ran on time, though.

    My host mother was a squat lady who reminded me of a ranch house. She had terrible teeth and smoked while we talked in her kitchen. There were no ashtrays in the apartment; instead, she made little bowls out of tin foil and quenched her cigarettes under the faucet. Then she’d put the cigarette butt in the tin foil, crumple it all up into a ball, and throw it away. We talked about The Sopranos and The Reverend Horton Heat a lot. She loved the song “Bales of Cocaine.”

   “Bales of cocaine?” she asked, grinning her pointed, birdlike smile. Her accent was thick, and her vowels were rounded sharply like sickle blades. “You mean, like for the hay?”

   “Yes,” I replied. “And they are falling from low-flying planes.”

   Her laughs were short and came in rapid-fire succession. They were high-pitched, raspy, and delightful.

   Even though my room was connected to his, my host brother Lukas instant messaged me on ICQ after the first day of school to tell me that I smelled bad, and that I should buy deodorant. He was snotty and fat and whenever he talked it was like he had all the time in the world because people would just listen to him. I hated Lukas.

   I learned that it’s nearly impossible to buy Dr. Pepper in Germany. I compensated by eating a lot of spätzle, dönners, and pretzels.

   My father called me on a Saturday a few weeks before Thanksgiving. He told me that my mother was in the hospital. The pain pump that had previously been installed to combat the scoliosis and the rotting hip had needed to be refilled on Friday, and the resident had missed it. The pump was small and dispensed liquid painkiller into her body, but the guy just let the medication flow and flow and flow and didn’t stop to wonder why the pump wasn’t full yet. My mother overdosed on medication and was in a coma.

   “She’s not dead,” my father reassured me. “They say she should be fine.”

   The Monday after, I was waiting for the city train to pick me up from my second stop on the way to school when a bird shat on my shoulder. I bought a pretzel from the bakery just for the napkin, and wiped off the goopy black-and-white birdshit from my shirt while I boarded the train. It took me around the far end of the city, past the scrapyard. The spires of rusted metal twisted towards the sky like a desolate kingdom.

   When I got to class, we discussed Antigone, and the pretty girl next to me asked to take me to the German dub of Disturbia. She had beautiful blue eyes, always wide and clear like crystal. During break, a skaterpunk named Alex wobbled a pen between his fingers. It looked like it was flaccid. “Gück mal!” he cried. “Zauberstaub!”

   I was alone when I got back to the apartment. Lukas was hanging out with friends at a biergarten, smoking cigarettes and being awful. I went upstairs to my room to work on a roleplaying post with a site for original characters. It was urban fantasy themed, and the central conflict revolved around gang wars between angels and demons.

   The phone rang. A woman was on the other end, and she said, “Hallo, kann ich mit Derrick Heisey sprechen?”

   “Das bin ich,” I replied.

   She immediately switched to English. Her accent was thick and she spoke slowly, like the words didn’t fit in her mouth. “Derrick, I am from your exchange organization. I have some very bad news for you, your mother is dead.”

   I laughed. “Nein, nein,” I corrected her, speaking only in German. “She's just in a coma. You’ve been misinformed.”

   The woman paused for a while. I could almost hear her run her tongue over her gums. “Well,” she said, in English, “you should perhaps call your father, to make sure.”

   In German I said, “That’s a very expensive call.”

   “I am sure your host parents will not mind. Please, call me back when you have spoken with your father.”

   Whatever, I thought. I hung up on her and dialed Michigan. When my father answered, his voice had the same color and texture as volcanic rock. “Hello?” he said.

   “Dad?”

   My father has always been the physical manifestation of an unrealistic ideal, like Clint Eastwood or Ernest Hemingway. He would get to work at seven in the morning, leave after five, and then do home repair or heavy yardwork until thirty minutes after dinner had been served. My high school teachers were afraid of him. When I was in their classes, Parent Teacher Conferences were a nightmare. He is very tall and his head is shaved and he can kick your ass. But it only took one word from his son to break him. After sixteen years of alternating stoicism or fury, I listened to my father weep.

   No words were exchanged. We simply wept together. We wept together for a long time.

*

   After I hung up with my father, I called the woman back. She insisted on speaking English, and her words lilted faintly with I told you so as she informed me of my already arranged trip back home. I insisted on speaking German, and snarled back at her like a rusted bear trap.  

   “Your German is very good,” she said at the end.

   “Danke.”

   I was still alone when we ended the call. I screamed into a throw pillow on the living room couch because Germans don’t like noise. I screamed until my throat was raw.

*

   Lukas was the first one home. I sat on the couch, hunched over with my forearms resting across my thighs. My fingers were laced together. I felt like stone. “Lukas,” I oozed.

   He stopped on the stairs and turned to look at me. His eyebrows were raised like I was already wasting his time.

   “My mother is dead. Can you call your mom and tell her I have flight plans tomorrow?”

   I took venomous pleasure in watching his jaw drop. I wanted to eat him just so that I could shit him out. I wanted to pour gasoline over the entire continent and bend the moon over my knee to crack it like an egg.

   The bedrock of my heart has always been fury.

*

   My host mother entered my room once it was dark and mourning wind howled through the pouring rain. She was carrying a case of Dr. Pepper and a bag of gummi bears. She held them out and said, “Es tut’s mir so weh, mein Schatz.”

   There isn’t really an English equivalent to this expression. Literally, it means “It wounds me deeply, darling.” But when you tie it with Sabine Kaiser’s tiny wrinkled face filled with ready tears like a punished dog and an offering of impossible-to-acquire soda, the effect is far more moving.

   She held my head and I wept and she stroked my mother’s long red hair and I hugged her and she told me that if I ever needed her, she was my Mama Zweiter—Second Mother. I asked her to get me a candle, and I lit it on the windowsill. When she left the room, I wrote my mother a couplet.

Doch bin ich nicht so ganz allein;

Ich hab’ das liebevoll Kerzenschein.

   I couldn’t sleep that night. When I left in the morning, my Mama Zweiter asked if I wanted to keep the candle lit. It hadn’t gone out all night. I’d been watching it. I told her yes. She hugged me and kissed me and through her beautifully ugly cigarette stinking teeth she promised she’d keep it lit. She knew it was important, because she’d read the poem. It means, “Though, I am not completely alone; / I have the lovely candlelight.”

   I listened to “Shadow Stabbing” all the way home.

____________________________________

Credit where it’s due:

Candle Photo by Anjo Antony on Unsplash, edited by me

The poem “Nothing” by Clive Barker appears in Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

The song “Shadow Stabbing” by CAKE appears on the album Comfort Eagle