Abandoned

CHAPTER NINE

His father sat him down on the living room couch one year. He patted the seat next to him.

“Move closer, Son. I have something I want to show you.”

The Boy complied, sitting on the old couch, with its faded plaid print. Everything in the home was the same: serviceable, not tattered but faded by use and by age. They were neither poor nor rich, but his father had known the harshest kind of poverty, so they kept things until they died.

His father picked up a large book from the coffee table and placed it on his knees. There was a photograph on the front. A bunch of melting clock faces.

“Read what it says on the front aloud,” his father instructed him.

“The life and works of Salvador Dali,” the Boy said, mispronouncing it as Dahl-eye. His father corrected him, and made him say it again.

“Dali was a painter. Some think he was nuts; many think he was brilliant. I think he was brilliant.”

The Boy knitted his brows, looking for the lesson in this.

“You mean he was smart?”

“Smart is knowing your multiplication tables. Brilliant is casting a different light on the world.”

The Boy frowned, struggling with the concept. “I don’t get it,” he admitted.

“Some people look out at the world and they see it differently from other people, Son. They try to share that sight with us, through paintings, or poetry, or the classical music we listen to sometimes.”

“Like Beethoven? Like the Ninth?”

He loved the Ninth. In his plodding and single-minded life, it was light through a prison window. It made his blood move faster. “Yes, exactly like that.”

The Boy looked at the Dali book with new interest.

“And you’re saying this man does the same thing with his paintings?”

“I’m saying he does the same thing for me with his paintings. You might not feel that way.”

Confusion set in hard. In his world, Father was always right.

“That doesn’t make any sense, sir. How can I see something differently from you?”

“I’m raising you to be strong, Son. There’s a world out there full of ways to be weak. It’s true, the road of strength is simple, single, and narrow, so in most things I teach you, there’s just one way. You follow?”

“Of course.”

“But when it comes to this,” he gestured at the book, “or to the music or poetry, it’s not as clear-cut. And that’s okay.” His father rubbed a hand across the book, a loving gesture that the Boy had never seen and rarely felt. “Dali’s paintings talk to me. They may not talk to you. The point, though, what I’m trying to tell you, is that you need to find the ones that do.”

The Boy pondered this, struggled with it, could come up with only one question.

“Why?”

His father turned to him, his gaze serious. “The basic key to survival isn’t toughness, Son, it’s speed. Thinking and doing and killing faster than others. You’ll never be as fast as you can be unless you’ve found the ones that talk to you. I don’t know why it’s so, but it’s so.”

Why didn’t you say that in the first place? is what the Boy thought but didn’t say. “Find the one that talks to you, Son, because it’ll make you quicker. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it proves anything. It’s an x-factor, like a vitamin that works but we don’t know why. We read the poems, and we listen to the music, and they make us faster, but neither one is evidence of the soul.” He leaned forward, like a dark tower, overwhelming the boy with his presence and his blackness. “There is no soul, Son. There’s only meat. Never forget it.”

“Yes, sir.”

And he never did.