Mouthful of Birds

A GREAT EFFORT

He and his father were a yellow animal, a single animal looking at itself in the mirror. It was a recurring dream. He woke up anxious, and every time he had it, it was harder to fall back asleep. During the day he felt stiffer than usual, more hunched over. His wife even asked him once if he was all right, though when he tried to explain, she seemed not to want to know too much. Then someone gave him Mrs. Linn’s name. He could go to her or some other woman; there was one in every neighborhood. The important thing, his friend told him while writing the phone number on a piece of paper, was not to let it go on.

He went to see her, and after that he returned once a week. The relief after each session helped him define his distress: his nervousness disappeared, and so did the anxiety that pulled his throat toward his stomach. The effect lasted all that day—a fullness that, according to him, was comparable to walking on air—and there was a residual peace that lasted for a few days after that. But in the end, the stiffness always came back.

In the fifth session he described the dream, and Mrs. Linn applied lavender essential oils and opened the window all the way. He sunk his head into the massage table’s generous opening and let Mrs. Linn work. Her hands, elbows, and knees were that woman’s true strength, and he let himself be influenced by them.

In the sixth session he talked about his father, about that first time his father had left home, and about the police officer, a woman, who called to let them know. He’d been found walking alone on the highway median; a driver had called 911 right away. He remembers his mother on the phone and the officer’s voice scolding her: “Do you realize he was putting everyone in danger, wandering alone along the highway like that?” Someone had to go pick him up from the station.

His mother put on her jacket over her pajamas, and he and his sister sat on the living room sofa and waited. “If you move your butts from that sofa,” their mother told them, “no more Dad for anyone.”

When the session ended, Mrs. Linn would say, “Open your eyes slowly.” It was pleasant to find the light a little more tenuous, and he wasn’t disturbed at not knowing when exactly she’d closed the curtains. In the eighth session he told about the next time his father had tried to leave them: his mother was making the shopping list, and his father was looking attentively at the tiles in the kitchen, the yellow ones.

“I know it’s strange,” he clarified for Mrs. Linn, “but I’m sure he was only looking at the yellow ones. Yellow like in my dream.”

He was afraid that among so many patients Mrs. Linn would forget the smallest details, and maybe it was there, in the yellow, where the important point lay. But Mrs. Linn’s fingers moved quickly up his back, and he understood how familiar she was with this kind of story, and he trusted that he had to go ahead with his own, without so many explanations.

“My father got up and left the kitchen,” he went on, “and it was the way he did it, a little stiffer than usual, that put me on alert. ‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked him. ‘You’re leaving without the shopping list.’ It was fairly violent, the way she stuffed the paper into his fist, like cramming an oversize letter into the mouth of a too-soft mailbox. But my mother knew what she was doing: with an order in his hands, my father would have to return.”

“Inhale and exhale deeply,” Mrs. Linn reminded him. “If you like, you can close your eyes.”

Sometimes he raised his head from the opening in the massage table to add a detail or size up Mrs. Linn’s eyes. But she dug her elbow into some strategic point of his body and put him right back in his place. Her elbows, her fists and knees approached, always shining and moist, avid. She shook the tubes of lotion before opening and squeezing them. She said it was good for the lotion to feel cold on first contact with the body, because it stimulated the epidermis and activated the muscles.

“I’m afraid,” he said in the ninth session, “afraid of a lot of things.”

He was immediately ashamed. He’d spoken without thinking; maybe the contact with the massage table put him too much at ease.

“Relax your arms,” said Mrs. Linn.

Maybe something had softened more than it should, and now there were things he could no longer control.

“Open your fists.”

Mrs. Linn poured more oil on her hands and extended her fingers several times, as if doing some sort of stretching exercise.

He felt more docile than usual; he was on the verge of tears, and it was a very embarrassing thing. But he took a deep breath and steeled himself to go on.

His father came back at midnight, almost twelve hours later and in the pouring rain, carrying the purchases in two large, drenched bags. In his last years of grade school, the father’s looming disappearances tormented him more and more, and not only because of the pain of feeling abandoned. It was resentment. Resentment that inflated in his chest and was caused by his father, so clumsy and weak and unable to leave for good. It was a painful ball of air that he carried with him, always with his mouth closed. Because if the father ever did manage to leave, that ball of air would be all that remained of him, and he wasn’t willing to let go of it so easily.

In the tenth session, Mrs. Linn asked about the dream again. He still had it, although the treatment was relieving the symptoms. He and his father were still a yellow animal, a single animal looking at itself in the mirror.

In the twelfth session he again felt the need to make some clarifications. His parents didn’t get along badly, that didn’t seem to be the problem, and neither were there financial problems. Sometimes these explanations were for himself, but he still made them out loud in order to include Mrs. Linn. Whatever it was that happened there on the massage table, it was a joint task. He said what he had to say, and, in exchange, Mrs. Linn’s elbows sank in on either side of his shoulder blades, they stabbed inward and outward, they acknowledged and permeated. There were only one or two occasions when, out of pure exhaustion, he didn’t say anything about his father in the whole session. And Mrs. Linn kneaded him more gently, pinching him in the lumbar zones a few times, emotionless.

A few months after high school started, the father left again. And one afternoon, finally, the father managed not to come back. For a time he was on the lookout, expecting the police to find him again. Would his father have some document with his address on him? His mother quickly got used to living without her husband. Almost three years later, the phone rang and it was his father. “I feel very alone,” his voice said.

“Where are you, Dad? I’ll come get you,” he said, and when there was only silence, he tried: “Are you to the west? Or should I take the highway? Are you near or far?” He waited, but the father had already hung up.

“Does it hurt there?” Mrs. Linn asked sometimes, and her hands moved around the painful zones.

But, and maybe it was better this way, she almost never asked the question when it really did hurt.

Later on, his sister left home, and he did the same a few years after. He left on a Saturday; he remembers because his father came home on a Wednesday. He had waited for his father nearly seven years, but all it took was for him to pack his own suitcases and leave home, and his father, just four days later, rang the doorbell of the house. His mother says that she looked out and saw him waving at her from the gate, and that for some days after, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. They agreed to sleep in separate rooms, and soon they grew used to each other again.

When his son was born, the past became distant for all of them. They had Sunday dinners with the family and his father tousled the grandson’s hair with such affection that he wondered if he hadn’t exaggerated the pain his father had caused him. When it came down to it, he thought, maybe that’s what adolescence was all about: the invention of a couple of unforgivable events that help you leave home. And that’s the way things still were with them.

A few weeks ago, he went to see Mrs. Linn without an appointment. He had his father in the passenger seat, in hermetic silence. He needed to see her, and she understood that as soon as she heard that both of them were in the waiting room. She wasted no time ushering him in, while his father waited outside.

Mrs. Linn asked him to sit on the massage table and tell her what had happened. He said that that afternoon he’d been reading in the kitchen when his son came to get him and dragged him to his room. He’d prepared a little puppet show, and asked his father to sit and watch it. His son went behind an improvised curtain, and he could catch glimpses of the boy as he made a great effort to put the puppet show on well. He had never seen his son so serious. And now Mrs. Linn had to be patient, because what happened was something strange, difficult to explain.

Mrs. Linn nodded, but she reached toward her tubes of lotion and picked one up before sitting down beside the massage table.

The boy brought a puppet out onto the stage and the puppet opened its mouth, white and huge, and it trembled without closing it, as if it were screaming. He was only a few feet away, as alarmed as the puppet. But what happened next, what happened next was impossible to explain to Mrs. Linn. The boy hid the puppet behind the curtain and brought it out again, made it scream again, and hid it again. His son did that over and over, until he recognized the pain between the nape of his neck and his throat. The pain that stiffened him and terrified him in his dreams, the pain that tied him to his father and to his own image in the mirror, the yellow pain.

Mrs. Linn held her largest tube of lotion, and she accidentally squeezed it too hard. The almond perfume flooded the room.

“I felt,” he said, trying to understand himself, “my son’s boundless need for attention. An insatiable need, that’s what I felt. A need impossible to satisfy.”

Mrs. Linn put down the tube of lotion and nervously extended her fingers, as though stretching them.

“And then I couldn’t look at him, at my son. I looked away.” He tried to concentrate, but he felt a little dizzy.

Then the boy put down the puppet and he looked out from the stage himself. He hid behind the curtain for a few seconds and then appeared again. The pain he felt every time his son disappeared was something brutal. Every time the boy hid behind the curtain again, an invisible thread pulled at him violently.

Mrs. Linn brought the tube of lotion to her chest, and for a moment her elbows poked out behind her, more ready than ever to sink and compress.

“I understood that I could no longer live with him, or without him. It was a huge mistake, whatever it was that joined us. A tragedy in which we would both fail miserably.”

Mrs. Linn handed him the tube of lotion and he held it, and somehow the tube gave him the strength to go on.

He tried to explain himself: he couldn’t meet the boy’s gaze. He looked for a point among the toys in the room, a fixed point that would save him from the panic, and he latched on to a yellow puppet hanging near the window.

Mrs. Linn’s arms now hung straight down from her shoulders and her fingers were just barely moving, as if they were practicing in the air a new way to knead.

“So I went to get my father, and I made him get into the car. I got on the highway and drove in silence for about thirty miles.”

For a few seconds Mrs. Linn’s fingers stopped, as if they’d lost the thread or didn’t entirely understand what he had just said, but as soon as he went on, Mrs. Linn’s fingers followed him.

His father didn’t say anything as they drove, and when the city’s lights started to disappear, he stopped the car on the side of the road and asked his father to get out.

“I couldn’t leave home. I’m as weak as my father was. But there is something I could do, something that could change things in the long term.”

He could give his father the push that he’d needed his whole life in order to leave them. He could forgive him and give him permission. He could sacrifice himself and disrupt this tragic cycle: loosen a link in the chain to break the circle. Maybe that way he would free his own son from the pain of sons, and his son’s children from the same pain.

Mrs. Linn leaned over toward her shelf and quickly exchanged the tube of lotion.

He got out of the car and turned around to open his father’s door. What he felt at that moment was the complete opposite of fear—it was something close to madness, but with the absolute certainty he was taking the right step. The exciting anguish of recognizing that what one is doing will ultimately change something important. To free his father was to free them all. His father had always known he had to leave. Now his son was there to help him. But the father didn’t move.

“He didn’t move,” he said. “I told him to get out. I waited. I said it again, harshly. But he couldn’t even look me in the eyes.”

He’d only sunk into his seat, terrified.

“Where is your father?” asked Mrs. Linn. “Bring him in.” He looked at her, he looked at his Mrs. Linn. He hesitated a moment, trying to emerge from his story’s aura, and a gentle push on his shoulder set him in motion.

“Go on, get him.”

When he came back with his father, Mrs. Linn had turned on her two lavender vaporizers. She circled the father and the son a few times, as if she needed to be sure they were similar enough. Then she had the father sit on the massage table. Perhaps the father thought he was dealing with something else, because before he gave himself over completely and let the specialist work, he made his son promise not to say a word to his mother. His son assured him he would not, and he had to explain that his face went into the opening, and that it wasn’t anything painful.

Mrs. Linn indicated that he, on the other hand, should wait seated in the armchair beside the table. But he was restless and didn’t sit down, and before he knew it, Mrs. Linn’s elbows, fists, and knees climbed up his father like a big spider in a trance. They sank and spun over his shoulders, his shoulder blades, his spine and coccyx. Her fists compressed the waist, then lifted it and dropped it. His father’s entire body let itself be kneaded and resettled. On the table, Mrs. Linn held him by the shoulders, arching him back more than he would have thought a father could arch. There were tugs, pushes, rotations. The oiled elbows sank into the hips and he, never taking his eyes from the father, let his body fall, completely relaxed, into the armchair. As if Mrs. Linn had been waiting for exactly that moment, she dug one of her knees into his father’s spine. It was a quick and surgical movement. Something cracked in his body, so loudly he felt it in his own, so loudly that he was frightened by the tug, the precise and expert correction. The three of them were still for a few seconds. Then, with relief, he understood it was all a good sign.

Mrs. Linn said goodbye to them in the waiting room. The receptionist made a file for his father and handed him a card.

They walked to the car and made the trip back in silence. They passed the plaza, and at the stoplight to cross the avenue, they both sat looking at the pedestrian crosswalk. There were green, red, and yellow lights. There was a turnoff for each street, and at each corner everyone knew what to do. He waited for his signal, and his father accepted the wait. When the light changed to green, they were already feeling much better.