Customs and Alterations

Finally, fifteen months after he died, I get my son’s death certificate in the mail. There it is: the manner of his death, the time, date, place, and also his name. It’s misspelled, both first and last. His middle name they got right.

“I like the name, you like the name. But you just know people are going to take the e off the end of his last name and put it on his first. So don’t act all surprised and pissed off when it happens.”

This was said by Emelie, my ex-wife. Whose name is also often misspelled.

“What did I tell you?” texts Emelie, in response to my text that they spelled our son’s name wrong on his death certificate.

“I’m at work,” texts Emelie, in response to my text asking what we should do about it.

Emelie is Director of The Center for Teaching and Learning.

A Center for Teaching and Learning is what we used to call a School, and a Director is what we used to call a Principal.

Me, I used to be a journalist. Now I write lists. Last month I wrote “Nine Signs That You Might Need a Life Coach.” Last week I wrote “Top Three Cities for Frozen Custard Fans.” Next week I will write “Seven Reasons Not to Have Your Wisdom Teeth Extracted.”

There’s a letter with the death certificate, and on it a number to call if I have complaints or suggestions. But when I call, the automated voice tells me they are no longer taking complaints or suggestions over the phone. “Please come visit us at our main office,” the voice tells me, without telling me where their main office is.

This—the certificate opening, phone calling, texting—is happening in my apartment. The apartment is new to me. It’s on the second floor of a three-story brick building. On the second and third floors are apartments like mine, I guess, though I haven’t seen inside any others. On the first floor are businesses—a coffee shop, a wig store, and, right below me, a place that, according to the lettering on their awning, does “Customs and Alterations.” Sometimes when it’s quiet, like now, I can hear the sewing machines jittering down there like thoughts in the too-early morning.

I find the address of the main office. A twenty-minute walk. It’s a beautiful day out there! But halfway to the main office I come across a downed electrical wire, writhing and sparking and looking like a dangerous living thing. One of the poles the wire was attached to is lying on the hood of a car. Accordioned into the back of that car is the front of another car.

I’m on one side of the wire. On the other side are two men. One gestures at the wire and then at the man next to him. That man raises his hands, palms out, the universal sign for “Hey, not my fault, pal.” The men start yelling: they have gone from gesturing and pointing to yelling just like that. After a minute of this, one man decides yelling isn’t good enough anymore: he pushes the other man, hard, and that man staggers and almost falls. If he’d fallen, he’d have fallen on the wire, which seems to hiss and leap toward him in anticipation.

I decide to turn and take an alternate route to the main office, but before I do I hear the one man say, “You’re going to regret that,” and the other, in so many words, that he highly doubts it.

“If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

Is number six on my “Top Ten Lines from Classic Movies You’ll Never Forget.”

Although that one line is in fact three lines. Dumbass.

Wrote one helpful reader.

“You’re not going to believe what I saw on the way over here,” says the woman behind me in line.

“Two men fighting next to a downed electrical wire,” I say to the woman.

“Boom!” the woman says to me. Which apparently is what one man said to the other after he managed to throw the other man directly onto the wire.

And which man threw which man?

The woman tells me, and I say, “Huh, I would have guessed the other way around.”

Half an hour later I make it to the front of the line.

“Please don’t get in line unless you have these documents,” says the sign at the front of the line.

“Wire down across Elm and Oak. Emergency vehicles on scene. Injuries reported. Please find alternate route,” says an alert on my phone.

My alternate route back to my apartment takes me past a hospital. It’s the hospital where my son died.

Was he brave? No, none of us were brave.

Back in my apartment I can’t find all the documents. In a panic I go through the documents I brought with me to the main office and discover that I’d already had all the documents.

I’ve been seeing a therapist. The last time, she said that when I feel the rage coming on, I should make an animal noise. What kind, I asked, and the therapist said it didn’t matter, so long as it was an animal I could imagine being very angry and making a very angry noise. But why, I wanted to know. My therapist said that either making the noise would drive away the feeling, or making the noise would cause me to feel so stupid that I wouldn’t want to feel the rage so that I wouldn’t have to make the noise again.

I make the noise. I yell as loud as I can, for as long as I can, until someone in Customs and Alterations bangs on their ceiling to tell me to stop. I stop. But I don’t feel any different than before I started yelling. My therapist said that if the yelling didn’t work, I should call her. I call and tell her about the yelling, and also what led to it. Then I wait to hear her response. It’s a long time coming. Downstairs I hear the sewing machines talking to each other.

“Okay, folks,” she finally says. I’ve noticed she has this habit of saying “folks” as though she’s talking to multiple people and not just me. “What’s the opposite of rage?”

“Death,” I say.

“No,” the therapist says. “Death is the opposite of life.”

“I thought death is a part of life,” I say. Because that was what people said after my son died, and in fact my therapist was one of those people. It was supposed to be comforting. But how?

“Let’s try again, folks,” my therapist says. “What do you think would make the rage go away?”

“If my son’s name were spelled correctly on his death certificate.”

“And what if it doesn’t?”

Now it’s my turn to make her wait for a response. I make her wait and wait and wait until finally she says, “You think that getting your son’s name spelled correctly on his death certificate will somehow make up for the fact that your son died, and you couldn’t or didn’t do anything about it.”

“Well, yeah,” I say, and then I hang up.

My apartment has four rooms: living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. In the living room there’s a fist-size hole in the wall, and over that hole is a calendar: Scenes of America. Snow-capped mountains. Rushing rivers. Sun-dappled beaches. Mist-shrouded lighthouses. No people.

“No one counts the bathroom,” said Emelie after I told her I had moved into a four-room apartment. “The bathroom is a whole separate category of room.”

Emelie lives in her own apartment on the other side of the neighborhood, in a new building called The Citizen.

“Why is it called The Citizen?” I asked, and she said there was no particular reason. “It’s just a name, Silas.”

Silas being just my name.

“Poor, poor Silas,” my father used to say when he thought I was feeling sorry for myself.

He would say that not in his own voice but in a baby voice. “Poo-wah, poo-wah Siwas,” is what he actually would say.

This went on throughout my childhood until at age sixteen I finally told him, “It really pisses me off when you say that.”

“God, what took you so long?” my father wanted to know.

“My throat hurts,” my son said. He’d just come home from school and was gulping and wincing.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I reassured him. “My throat really hurts,” he told me.

“You poor guy,” I said, and though I did not say this in a baby voice, my son looked at me, startled, as if he could hear, as I was hearing, my father’s voice in my own.

“Four Completely Safe Sleeping Pills to Help Get You Through the Night.” Was the title of another one of my lists.

“Sleeping pill” is not a proper scientific or pharmaceutical term. “Hypnotic” is more accurate. As is “sedative.” And no “hypnotic” or “sedative” is completely safe, not even if you call it a “sleeping pill.”

Wrote another helpful reader.

I take another alternate route back to the main office, past the dog park, which is on fire.

This time there’s no line. But there is a typed note on the door that says, “Due to the High Volume of Walk-In Traffic We’re As of Immediately Only Taking Complaints and Suggestions Over the Phone.”

“Go fuck yourself,” is a suggestion handwritten on the typed note.

“Do you ever think about him?” Emelie asked me, after our son died but before we got divorced and moved into our separate apartments.

“Do you ever think about him?” I asked back.

“Of course I think about him,” she said. “All the time. Every minute of the freaking day.”

Then she waited.

I did not want to admit the truth. Which was that I did not think about him. Because when I thought about him, all I could think, all I could remember, was he was sick, and then he went into the hospital, and then he died.

“Same,” is what I finally said.

Although I do suddenly now recall that he liked to pick his nose until it was bloody. Not caring who saw it or what they said. Always while watching television.

I don’t go back to my apartment. Instead, I stand right outside the main office and dial the number for the main office.

I don’t expect a human to answer, not right away; I expect to have to go down the habitrail of voice commands and I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-hear-thats and then the piano music that calms you, supposedly, while you’re made to wait for a very long time before you’re connected to the person who can help. But no, I get a human straightaway. Her name is Susan. She asks how she can help me.

“You misspelled my son’s name on his death certificate,” I tell her.

“It does happen,” she says. “And for that we apologize.” Then she hangs up.

I belong to the neighborhood internet chatroom Nextdoor. In it, you can read about goings-on in the neighborhood. Most of the goings-on are cars that have been broken into. The break-ins are isolated incidents, according to some neighbors. But according to others they are clear evidence of the neighborhood’s and probably the whole world’s swift decline.

I call Emelie at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

“Her instructions are that she’s not to be disturbed,” says Emelie’s administrative assistant.

“Yes,” says Emelie’s administrative assistant, when I ask whether Emelie doesn’t want to be disturbed by anyone, or just me.

Only once did Emelie go with me to the therapist.

“What do you think of when you look at Silas?” asked the therapist.

“I think of him getting raped in prison,” said Emelie. “Which would be terrible,” she quickly added.

But she’d said the first thing like she really meant it, and the second like it was something she was supposed to say, and not long after that we moved out of our house and into our new apartments.

When he was excited, my son would clench his fists and shake—no, vibrate—with happiness. That’s another thing I suddenly remember about him.

For instance, when he was eight, he was relentless in his campaign to convince us that it was in our family’s collective interest to get him a dog, and if not a dog then a turtle, budgie, meerkat, hedgehog, hairless guinea pig, some fish, a ferret. Finally, we got a kitten. When I brought it home, my son clenched his fists and vibrated with happiness. The shaking was so violent I had to wait for it to stop before handing him the kitten.

“Five Dog Parks You and Your Pooch Will Love” was on my list of possible future lists.

Did Emelie and I ever love each other? Well, yeah. Are you saying we don’t still?

I call the main office again. This time I am made to follow the voice commands, then forced to repeat myself, then told to please wait and enjoy the music. Rage, rage. Right after my son’s death, I was told the rage was healthy and normal. After a while, I was told it was still normal but not productive. A while after that, I was told it was counterproductive, self-destructive, and destructive to other people. After that, people stopped telling me what it was.

According to someone on Nextdoor, the dog-park fire might be connected to the wire down between Oak and Elm. Then again, according to someone else on Nextdoor, it might not be connected at all.

The next morning our son’s sore throat was worse, and now he had a fever.

“I think we should take him to the pediatrician,” Emelie said.

“Are we both going to take him?”

“Why would we both take him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you said that we should take him.”

This conversation, now an argument, was being conducted over the phone. Because while Emelie had to work from work, I could—though I was still at this point a journalist and not a list-maker—occasionally work from home if I needed. Although it wasn’t ideal.

By arguing about that “we,” I was reminding her of that fact.

“I can take him to the pediatrician,” she finally said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it. You’re at work.”

What would I do differently?

Almost everything.

“Doesn’t it just feel like everything has gone to shit?” someone writes on Next-door. This promptly gets him banned. “You can’t talk like that in here,” writes whoever is in charge of deciding who can talk like what in here.

This is all happening in a city, a medium-size one. But I grew up in the country, in a white house with black shutters and a gravel driveway with a green strip of grass down the middle, halfway up the long hill from the town to the mountains. The farms around us had wells, but we were hooked into the town’s water source. My father used to always say, “We have town water,” though I don’t remember why he would say this, or to whom, or why they would have cared. It occurs to me now that we might have been getting town water illegally.

Occasionally, after a midwinter thaw and then a freeze, something would go wrong, and rather than call the town my father would trudge up the hill, holding a large wrench, to a grate on the side of the road. He would remove the grate and descend into the hole, which was filled with icy water. At the bottom of the hole was a pipe that connected to other pipes, including ours. I don’t know what my father would do down there—loosen or tighten something, I guess—but eventually he’d emerge, wet and shaking, with bright red cheeks and deep blue lips. I’d take the wrench and mallet and we’d walk home. The water would be working again, and while my father took a hot bath I would walk around in a catatonic way, as though preparing myself for tragedy. I just knew my father was going to die from going down into that hole, that town water would kill him, but no, it was prostate cancer that ended up getting him.

When my son was unhappy, angry, even just a little bit frustrated, he would yell, “I’m going to choke myself to death!” And then he would put his hands around his throat and choke himself.

Emelie has seen my apartment only once. She came over to bring me a lamp she didn’t need, a lamp from our old house. The walls were bare—no hole yet, and so no calendar needed to cover it. No desk. No end table. No coffee table. No kitchen table. No television. Just a couch placed in the middle of the living room and a mattress on the bedroom floor.

Emelie walked from room to room, appraising. She is a small woman but a heavy walker who wears clunky big-heeled boots. Downstairs, the sewing machines paused just long enough for someone to pound on the ceiling to tell us to keep it down. The sound of the machines once they get going is like that of a tiny train that just keeps accelerating and never fades into the distance.

Emelie gave the floor both middle fingers, then turned to leave. I was between her and the door. On her way out, walking lightly, on her toes, she stopped and patted my cheek. “Congratulations, Silas,” she said. “You picked the perfect place to lose your mind.”

Someone finally answers. It’s not Susan. It’s a man. Horace. He asks how I can help him.

“Do you mean how you can help me?”

There’s a pause. “What’d I say?” Horace wants to know. I tell him. “Shit,” Horace says, then sighs and says, “I’ve been doing that.” Horace wants to know if he can try again, and I say sure, and he gets it right this time.

“Someone,” I tell him, “a woman named Susan, hung up on me when I called earlier.”

“You were probably just disconnected,” Horace says.

“I was hung up on,” I repeat. “That’s a kind of disconnection.”

“You were probably accidentally disconnected,” Horace says.

“Do you know Susan?” I ask.

“Which one’s Susan?” Horace asks—not me, I don’t think. I picture a large room with movable dividers and lots of people sitting at desks and wearing headsets. A faint voice in the background says something, and then I hear Horace saying, clearly, to me, “Oh yeah, I know Susan.”

“Is she the kind of person who would hang up on . . .” I struggle to know what to call myself. A client? A customer? A citizen? Someone seeking justice? Someone seeking satisfaction? Someone seeking a minor change? Someone seeking a major change? Someone seeking . . .

“I’d like to take this opportunity,” Horace interrupts, “to ask you to please pardon my French.”

“What?”

“Earlier I said ‘shit,’” Horace says, and again I hear a faint voice in the background. Horace laughs ruefully. “And there, I said it again.”

“I didn’t even notice,” I say, although I did notice.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Horace asks.

“You haven’t helped me with anything yet,” I point out. Immediately I can feel a change in the weather, right there through the telephone, and sure enough when Horace speaks again, his voice is cold. “I’ll connect you with the complaints department,” he says, and I say, “Wait, don’t,” but it’s too late, and he does, and I’m on hold again.

1. Unresponsive
2. Unwilling to engage the community
3. Dismissive of parents’ legitimate concerns and grievances

Are Emelie’s top three failures as Director, according to a complaint someone files anonymously on the Center for Teaching and Learning’s website.

If I were still a journalist, I would have written a description of the dog-park fire.

And the men fighting next to the electrical wire.

And the woman who reported that one of them said, “Boom!”

The pediatrician said that, yup, there was a nasty virus going around. “But he’s a healthy eleven-year-old,” the pediatrician assured me. “Healthy eleven-year-olds do just fine with this bad ol’ mammajamma.”

The pediatrician didn’t call my son by name. Instead he called him “Superstar.” “Hang in there, Superstar,” he told my son as we left the examining room.

“Dad” was what he called me. As in, “And you hang in there too, Dad.”

Do I wonder what my father would have done, to what lengths he would have gone, if I had died and my name had been misspelled on my death certificate? Well, yeah.

“It was just plain wrong that they booted you off Nextdoor,” someone writes on Front Porch, which is another neighborhood online forum, mostly for people who have for one reason or another been booted off Nextdoor.

Once again, I get Emelie’s assistant instead of Emelie. Once again, I am told that Emelie is too busy to come to the phone.

“Busy doing what?”

Emelie’s assistant tells me that Emelie is leading a workshop. I ask if a workshop is the same thing as a class.

“No,” she says. “A workshop is for teachers.”

I ask which teachers.

“All of them,” she says.

I wonder aloud, if the teachers are in the workshop, then where are the students, and Emelie’s assistant says, “Oh, they’re in class.”

My son could be cranky, contrary. And when I say “could be,” I really mean “usually was.”

But he was always very sweet when he was sick.

“Thank you so much,” he said that night, when Emelie and I brought him a cold washcloth, aspirin, several comic books, a whole sleeve of saltines.

“Sir,” a voice says. I look up, and there are two cops in front of me. One is holding a cell phone, which he places in front of my face. “Sorry to bother you, but we’re asking everyone in the neighborhood: do you recognize this man?”

On the phone is a photo, taken probably by another camera phone and from a great distance. In the photo is a man who is looking at his own phone.

“I can’t be totally sure,” I tell the cops, “but I think it’s the man who earlier today was fighting with another man next to a downed electrical wire.”

“Thank you,” one cop says. Then he sees the “go fuck yourself ” handwritten on the main office’s typed note. “Vandals,” he says to the other cop as they walk away. “I better call the main office and let them know.”

“I’m not choking myself,” my son said after I told him for Christ’s sake to stop choking himself. “I’m pretending to choke myself.”

“Lawyerly,” is what my son’s sixth-grade teacher called him, when he was still alive.

My father had a strong sense of property—odd for someone who stole water. Snowmobilers sometimes cut across our two acres on the way to someone else’s two acres, and this must have offended my father’s sense of boundaries, because late one fall he put up fence posts and strung barbed wire, neck high to a man riding a snowmobile. Three weeks later the season’s first snowmobiler almost had his head cut off by my father’s barbed wire—though my father argued to the police that because of the trespassing it would be more accurate to say the snowmobiler had almost cut his own head off.

Requires Teachers to Take Workshops When They Should Be Teaching Leaves Students Unattended in Classrooms

Too Often Relies on Clerical Staff to be the Center’s Public-Facing Representative

“Good night,” I would say to my son every night right before he went to sleep.

“Good night,” he would say back.

“Have a good sleep.”

“Have a good sleep.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Suddenly I’m no longer on hold. It’s like being woken from a dream in a dream.

“Hello, this is Susan,” a voice says. I assume it’s the same Susan, though I can’t tell for sure: after all, I heard her say only a few words earlier before she hung up. “So,” she says, “you’d like to lodge a complaint against Horace.”

“Fuck that guy!” I hear Horace yell in the background, followed by crashing sounds and then more yelling.

“Actually,” I said, “I have no problem with Horace.”

“Well, I wish you’d have said that earlier.”

“I’m saying it now,” I say. “Earlier was only a few minutes ago.”

“Earlier would have been in time. Now is too late.”

“Someone misspelled my son’s name on his death certificate,” I say. “That’s what I’m complaining about.”

“It does happen, and for that we apologize,” Susan says, and that’s when I know it’s the same Susan from before.

“Please don’t hang up on me again,” I say.

“Oh,” Susan says. Her voice is cold now, too. “Would you like me to connect you to the complaints department?”

I don’t point out that she is the complaints department Horace already connected me to. If I do, I’m afraid Susan will put me on hold or hang up, and if that happens, I’ll throw my phone against the wall of the main office—I’m still standing outside—and then I’ll keep throwing my phone until I destroy it, and then how will I call the number to get them to spell my son’s name correctly on his death certificate?

“No, that’s not necessary,” I say.

“In that case,” Susan says, “let’s see how I can help you.”

“I would very much appreciate that,” I say. That sounds sarcastic, but I mean it sincerely. So sincerely that I think I might cry.

Poo-wah, poo-wah Siwas.

“Now, what’s your name?” Susan asks. I tell her, spelling it out just in case.

“Thank you. Now . . .” Susan stops talking for a beat, and another, then asks, “Wait, is that you standing out there?” I look up and see, in a second-story window, blinds being separated by fingers before closing again. “You can’t be standing out there.”

“Why not?”

“It’s considered harassment.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say.

“I bet you were the one who handwrote an obscenity on our note.”

I tell her it wasn’t me, though that doesn’t sound convincing, not even to me. Or, I should say, especially to me. Because I was the one, in fact, who wrote “go fuck yourself ” on the note.

“You need to leave,” Susan says.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere until I get what I want.”

“See,” Susan says. “That’s something a harasser would say.”

Susan’s right, of course, and that makes me want to scream at her until my throat bleeds. Which is also of course something a harasser would want to do.

“Go home,” Susan says, “and call us back.” She hangs up.

“I’m starting to worry,” Emelie said that night. We were standing in the doorway of our son’s room. He was in bed, wheezing loudly, watching something on his tablet.

“He’s going to be fine,” I insisted. “I told you what the pediatrician said.”

But it’s true that our son looked awful. His face was the color of wet cardboard, even in the flickering light of the screen.

“One Sign That You’re Delaying the Inevitable,” is the real title of every list ever written.

“You could have really hurt that man,” my mother said after the police left, after they said they wouldn’t press charges as long as my father took down the barbed wire.

“He didn’t literally get his head almost cut off,” he said. “He just got a little scratched up.”

“You could have really hurt that man,” my mother insisted. “What were you thinking?”

My father didn’t say anything. He hung his head, ashamed. Because I bet that what he’d been thinking was that he really wanted to hurt that man.

I get another alert on my phone: “This man is a murder suspect, and also a suspect in the Colonial Ponds Dog Park fire. He’s considered dangerous. Please, if you see him, keep your distance and call the police.”

And then the same photo the cops showed me. The one of the man I said might be the one fighting with the other man next to the downed electrical wire.

At a crosswalk the sign says Don’t Walk, and so I don’t walk. I don’t walk for some time. Until I realize that no one is walking, and no one driving. There are only red lights. Then all the lights change at once. They don’t go to green. There are, suddenly, no lights at all.

Nothing works, nothing works, nothing works. Although surely this is just dumb pessimism, and something must work.

I say that I’m no longer a journalist. But the company I’m employed by also owns the newspaper where I used to be a journalist. In fact, my boss now was my editor then, and he is still the editor, though he no longer calls the newspaper the newspaper.

The Traditional Media Outlet is what he now calls what we used to call the newspaper.

We were woken the next morning by our son’s coughing, which sounded like coins rattling in a pan. His face now was bright red and shining, his skin hot to the touch. It was five a.m. The pediatrician’s office opened at seven thirty.

“There’ll be a doctor on call,” Emelie pointed out.

I looked at my son, who seemed to have fallen back to sleep. Or maybe he’d never really woken up, though it was hard to imagine a person could have coughed like he’d coughed and stayed asleep.

“He’s asleep,” I whispered. “We can’t even take his temperature without waking him.”

“I guess,” Emelie said. When she’s nervous, Emelie rubs her fingers together like a mantis. At least she used to do that. At least she was doing it then.

“Let’s just wait until the office is open,” I whispered. “We’ll call then.”

What was I waiting for? I don’t know what I was waiting for.

I continue walking back to my apartment. At the next intersection are two men and two women wearing bright-colored clothing, dancing wildly, badly, and waving to passersby and to each other. At their feet is a boom box playing frenetic, upbeat music. Top 40 music, stuff my son would listen to in his room, make us listen to in the car. One of the men is holding a sign. On it, the message EXPERIENCE JOY!!! On the man’s face, on all their faces, is the same avid, intense expression I saw on the faces of the two men wrestling over the downed electrical wire, and also the look on my father’s face when he’d strung his barbed wire.

“Your heart just doesn’t seem in it anymore,” my editor said, explaining why he’d decided I was no longer going to be a journalist for the Traditional Media Outlet but would instead write lists for the website owned by the holding company that also owned the Traditional Media Outlet.

He left unsaid what was nevertheless perfectly clear: that the people who write lists for a living are people whose hearts just aren’t in it anymore.

“I didn’t do it,” says a post on Front Porch, but that poster doesn’t say what it was he didn’t do.

“Such a sweetheart,” is what my son’s sixth-grade teacher called him, after he died.

The last time I saw my father was in hospice. It was winter, flu season. Visitors were required to wear surgical masks. My father wasn’t wearing one because he was in hospice and certain to die, and there was no protecting him. But if there was no protecting him, why was I wearing a surgical mask?

“Take off that stupid thing,” my father said, and I did.

I wasn’t yet married. My son wasn’t born yet. I mention this because if my father had died after I’d been married, after my son was born, those would have been two things we could talk about.

As it was, we talked about the weather. My father asked what it was like outside, and I told him we were in the middle of a thaw. My father nodded. I wondered if he was thinking what I was: about all those times he’d dunked himself into that icy hole. How did he bring himself to do it? Did he think that he’d done it once, so he could do it again? Or did he somehow forget how bad it was, so that every time he went into the hole it was like the first time he was going into the hole?

“I can’t believe how many times you went into the hole,” I told him.

My father seemed confused.

“What hole?” he wanted to know.

“The Traditional Media Outlet is short-staffed,” my editor tells me on the phone. “How’d you like to dust off your spiral-bound notebook and cover a fire at the dog park?”

Since my son died, have I thought about killing myself? Of course. All the time. But I’m glad I haven’t. Because if I killed myself, how would I get them to spell my son’s name correctly on his death certificate?

“Thanks, but I can’t,” I tell my editor. “I’m busy getting them to spell my son’s name correctly on his death certificate.”

I call the main office again, and Susan picks up. I suppose she must recognize my number because she says, without even a hello, “Sir, are you home now?”

I tell her I am, but I’m not. I’m only halfway there, and in fact am near the dog-park fire. I can smell the smoke, hear the sirens. If I were writing for the Traditional Media Outlet, I would say that even from blocks away you can hear the high, desperate barking of frightened dogs, but truthfully I can’t hear any sort of barking at all.

“Good,” Susan says. “So, you say your son’s name was misspelled.”

This makes it sound like Susan, or someone else in the main office, wasn’t responsible for the misspelling. That it was someone else’s fault. But I’m smart enough by now not to say that. “On his death certificate,” I say. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me how his name was misspelled and how it should be spelled?”

I do that. Susan asks me to spell it again, just to be sure, and I do.

“So apparently what we did,” Susan says, and it sounds as though she’s talking more to herself than to me, or to Horace if Horace is still in the room and hasn’t been fired, “was take the e off the end of his last name and put it on the end of his first name.”

“It does happen, and for that you apologized,” I say. Then, quickly, “Which I appreciated.”

Susan doesn’t say anything. Not for one beat, not for several. While I’m waiting for her to talk, a woman walks past. The woman is another person I’m not going to describe, except to say that she has white earbuds sticking out and that she looks at me with such intense hatred that I think, for a second, she’s going to strike me, and that I deserve it, even though I’m certain I’ve never seen her before.

I watch the woman until she turns a corner, out of sight, and then I say to Susan, “Hello?” and she says, “You lied to me.”

“I did?”

“You said you were calling from home,” Susan says. “I am calling you from home,” I say.

“Do you live on the street?”

“No,” I say, “I live in an apartment.”

“Then you’re lying,” Susan says. “Because I just walked past you on the street.” She hangs up.

I felt so good, putting my fist through the wall. That sensation of breaking through into a whole other space. But when I tried to extract my fist, it got stuck, and I had to wiggle it around to get it out, and the drywall crumbled and dropped to the floor and made a mess I would have to clean up and then I felt so stupid.

“It was this guy,” says the follow-up post on Front Porch.

The photo, again from a great distance, shows a man standing next to two cops, looking at a phone. The man is me.

A week after our son died, I asked Emelie when she wanted to have dinner and she said, “2019.”

Although back in 2019 my son and I were having an argument. It was about a friend of his who had taken up fencing. I was always haranguing my son to do something interesting. Meaning, more interesting than what he was already doing. Which wasn’t much. As far as I was concerned.

“Fencing!” I said, lamely. “Cool!”

“It’s not cool,” my son said. “It’s lame.”

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s pretty cool.”

“Well, it’s not,” my son said.

And so on.

Emelie was in the room, watching, and I finally stopped in mid-argument and asked if she had anything to say, and she said, “I wish I were somewhere else.”

At seven thirty our son seemed a little better, or at least no worse. His temperature was the same. His cough might have sounded a little less painful. He was sitting up, awake, wondering if he could please have some ginger ale.

“Maybe,” I said to Emelie, “we should give it another hour or so.”

Emelie looked at me, nodding, nodding. It was like she was doing some calculation. The past plus the present equals what future?

“Fuck that,” she finally said. “I’m calling the pediatrician.”

Emelie called. Our son’s pediatrician was on vacation, so she talked to one of the others.

“He called it what?” that pediatrician wanted to know.

“‘A bad ol’ mammajamma,’” Emelie said, repeating what I had said, looking at me while she said it.

“I don’t know what that means,” said the pediatrician, “but it’s a very serious virus.”

“How serious?”

“You probably should have called us earlier,” the pediatrician said.

“Well, I’m calling you now,” Emelie said.

“Now,” the pediatrician said, “is when you should take your son to the hospital.”

I notice, walking back to my apartment, that every fifth car has a door open and on one of the front seats are the contents of the emptied ashtray, the door’s side pocket, the glove compartment. It looks like nothing has been stolen. It looks more like the would-be thief was frustrated to discover nothing in the cars worth stealing.

I know what I was waiting for. I was waiting for my son to get better without us having to call the doctor. And then I would be able to think, and maybe even say, “I told you he was going to get better without us having to call the doctor.”

Emelie calls me. There she is, suddenly, a voice in my ear. “Did you leave an anonymous complaint about me on the center’s website?”

Anger: it starts out righteous, but then where does it go? What happens to it? It turns into shame, then regret, and then I’m ready to deny everything.

“No, why would I do that?”

“It’s in the form of a list.”

“Huh,” I say. Then, “Hey, I feel like I’m making some headway with the death-certificate people.”

“And there was another anonymous complaint,” Emelie says. “Also in the form of a list.”

Emelie doesn’t sound mad. She sounds tired. Bored. Like there’s not one thing I could do to surprise her ever again. No especially ingenious expression of cruelty or kindness. Nothing that could give pleasure or pain or hope. Nothing except, maybe, time travel, some magic trick in which I return us to the past or turn past into present.

“I’m not making lists anymore,” I say. “In fact, I’m just about to write something for the newspaper about the big dog-park fire.”

My son said he had a project for music class. This was a year before he died, when he was ten. He wouldn’t tell me what the project was, just that he had one.

He went into the basement, from which emerged, for the next hour, various sounds of struggle and frustration.

Finally he walked up from the basement, reeking of bleach. In his hand was a white plastic Clorox bottle. My son had emptied it, cut out one side of its belly. On either side of the opening he’d punched holes, and through these holes he’d loosely laced what looked like butcher’s string.

He was smiling, hugely. I’d never seen him so happy, so proud. But of course I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “Hey, whaddya got there?” and he said, “I made this lute!”

“It wasn’t me,” I post on Front Porch. “I had nothing to do with anything.”

“Why should we trust you, Silas?” someone immediately responds, pointing out that, after all, before joining Front Porch I had already proved myself unreliable by getting kicked off Nextdoor for writing the word shit.

How did this person know my name, I wonder, until I remember that to get on Front Porch, I had to register using my name and my reasons for wanting to join.

“You know,” I say on my former editor’s voice mail, “as it happens, I’m near the dog park anyway. Let me take a crack at it.”

A cell-phone number or email address. That was another thing I had to submit to get on Front Porch.

“And now I know who you are, SILAS,” reads a text from a number I don’t recognize.

I try to see who might have registered using that cell-phone number, but it turns out I’ve been kicked off Front Porch too.

Poo-wah, poo-wah Siwas.

“I was just joking!” my son would say, after saying the cruelest, truest thing.

“You look really old,” was the last of those cruel, true things he said to me.

“I loved you as a kid, and I love you now, and I guess I’ll love you forever,” my mother said. This was after my father’s funeral. I want to say right after, but it might have been a day, a week, a month. “But no, all you ever think and talk about is your son-of-a-bitching father.”

My mother died of a heart attack not long after my son was born, so I can’t tell her now that, no, thinking and talking about my father is not all I ever do. For instance, I’ve been thinking about my son, finally, after all these months. That’s been the one good thing to come out of them misspelling his name on his death certificate.

“I forgot to ask,” I text Emelie on my way to the dog park. “Do you want to have dinner?”

“With you?” she texts back immediately.

And then, three minutes later, she texts, “Let me think about it.”

“Bob Steve Wagner” is the name of a labradoodle owned by Iris Rexney, 29, who is pulled away from me, and the fire, by Bob Steve Wagner before I can ask her any more questions.

I no longer have a car, there being nowhere I especially need or want to go. The last time I remember driving was when Emelie and I rushed our son to the hospital. He was in the back seat, lying with a blanket over him. It was the first time we hadn’t insisted he put on his seat belt. Emelie was in the passenger seat. I was looking at the road, so I don’t know what she was doing. It was a road I’d driven a million times. I was driving it faster than usual, faster than was legal. It was the middle of the day, but foggy, and I couldn’t see much, even with my headlights on.

“Be careful!” Emelie shouted.

“I am being careful!” I shouted back, although I wasn’t, and in any case Emelie wasn’t talking about my driving. Ahead, cars were slowing abruptly, their brake lights looking angry in the gloom. I slammed on my brakes too. Finally, I saw what was causing this: in the middle of the city, in the middle of a busy street, for no evident reason, there was a sharp dip, and then the pavement turned into rubble. Not gravel, but big sharp rocks, the kind you can hear threatening the integrity of your tires.

“Oh my God,” Emelie cried out, “what happened?”

I walked past that section of road earlier. One lane is fixed and normal. The other lane is still rubble.

By the way, my father took down only some of his barbed wire.

“She usually comes right when I call,” says Marcus Tinsdale, 52, of Honeybear, a chow mix who is still in the dog park. Tinsdale calls from the sidewalk once, twice, three times, and still Honeybear does not come.

“Is what I hear on Front Porch and Nextdoor true? That you were the one who set the dog park on fire?” Emelie texts.

“No,” I text back. “The guy who did it is blaming me. Because I narced on him to the police.”

I wait for a response. I wait and wait, and then I text, “You don’t really think it was me, do you?”

“No. But did you tell the truth when you said it wasn’t you who complained about me in list form on the website?”

“No,” I text back.

I wait for a response. I wait and wait, and then I text, “But I really am writing a piece for the paper about the dog-park fire.”

Emelie texts back right away. “Why would you lie about THAT?” she wants to know.

“What about dinner?” is a follow-up text I manage not to send.

There’s so much smoke it’s hard to see that there even is a dog park. So much smoke that it’s hard to see flames. But I can feel the heat, can hear trees crackling and bursting. Someone inside the smoke yells, someone else yells back, and I hear dogs barking and yelping, and then I hear nothing but the chunk chunk chunk of something overhead. I look up and there’s a helicopter, hovering. Suspended from its bottom by cables is an enormous sagging tarp. It flaps to one side, dumping. I didn’t know water could sound like that, like a heavy thing hitting another heavy thing. It’s as violent and dangerous-seeming as the fire. The water makes a hiss that drowns out all other sounds. Steam races up, and the helicopter disappears in it for several seconds before it rises and flies away, the tarp dangling like a broken limb.

“Don’t you want to know why I did it?” the anonymous texter says. Of course I know who he is, even if I don’t know his name.

“Because he tried to push you onto the wire first,” I suggest.

“Obviously. But no, I meant the dog-park fire.”

“You hate dogs?” I suggest.

“What?” he texts back. “No. God. Who hates dogs?”

After my mother said that my father was a son of a bitch, I felt some response was required.

“I loved him,” I told her, even though I wasn’t sure it was true.

“Of course you did,” she said, like there was something wrong with my loving him, or my saying I loved him.

“Come on,” I said, “he was my father.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “But you know one important thing to remember about your father? He was his own worst enemy, while at the same time managing to be other people’s worst enemy too.”

“Sorry,” says the first of three texts from my former editor and current vetter/ fact-checker. “When you turned it down, we assigned the dog-park fire to someone else.”

“I’ll expect your next list on my desk first thing in the morning,” says the second.

“Just kidding,” says the third. “Get the list to me whenever. No hurry at all.”

“Because,” Anonymous texts, “after I killed that guy I wanted to do something like that again. Immediately. And I still do. So where are you, you big pussy?”

This time Susan calls me. I’m not in my apartment. I’m not by the dog park. I have no idea where I am. Probably I’ve crossed the border into another neighborhood, one that has a totally different online forum.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” Susan says.

“I’m not at home,” I say.

“I appreciate your honesty,” Susan says.

“I’m just sort of wandering around.”

“Clearing your head,” Susan suggests.

“It’s not working.”

“It rarely does,” she says. “So why don’t we focus on your son?”

“You misspelled his name on his death certificate.”

“That has been established,” Susan says. “Right now, for me, that’s all he is. Just a name, misspelled or otherwise. But here at the main office, we like to get to know the whole person.”

I think about that a moment. It always sounds good, getting to know the whole person. But does it happen? Is it possible? And if so, does it ever end up making anyone happy?

“Would you like me to tell you what he was like?” I ask anyway.

“I think that might be helpful, yes,” Susan says.

So I do. I tell her some of the things I’ve told you. Afterward, Susan doesn’t say anything. I tense up and realize I’m half expecting her to walk past me again with that look on her face.

Finally Susan clicks her tongue, disapprovingly. And of course this is what I’ve been worried about all along. Not that I wouldn’t be able to remember my son, but that my remembering wouldn’t be good enough.

“Everyone only talks about the good stuff,” Susan says. “It’s implausible.”

“You want to hear the bad stuff?”

“Yes. And don’t tell me there isn’t any.”

“I won’t,” I say, and then I tell her all the bad stuff I’ve told you. Plus something I just remembered, about the cat, whom my son named Butter. We assumed he loved Butter. But our son accidentally let her out one day, and the cat was run over right in front of our son’s eyes. We tried consoling, but our son resisted our attempts and in fact didn’t seem to need consolation, didn’t even seem to feel guilty. Our son had essentially led Butter to her death, yet he didn’t seem to feel anything at all.

“Butter was kind of a pain,” is how he explained it.

*

When I’m done, I feel sick to my stomach. Like I’ve eaten too big a meal and want to take it back. Except that’s one of the many things you can’t take back.

“That was too much,” Susan says.

“You asked,” I remind her.

“Just because I asked for something,” Susan says, “doesn’t mean you have to give it to me.” Then she hangs up.

We were in the hospital. Our son was being taken into the ICU. We waved to him, like he was about to go on a cruise. Why did we wave? I suppose we didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t wave back. I could hear him crying and coughing as the orderly wheeled him away. The next time we saw him he had an oxygen mask over his face. The next time we saw him after that he was on a ventilator. The next time we saw him after that he was dead.

But that wouldn’t be until three days later. For now, Emelie and I just stood in the emergency room, trying not to look at each other but not knowing where else to look.

“Why didn’t I call the pediatrician earlier?” Emelie wanted to know. I sensed she was talking to herself, but I answered anyway.

“Because I said we didn’t need to.”

“But why the hell would I listen to you?” Emelie said, raising her voice, and I raised mine to match it.

“Because you wanted me to be right!”

“It was you who wanted you to be right!” she screamed, and I watched a security guard stand up out of his rolling chair.

“If that’s true,” I screamed back, “then why didn’t you call earlier?”

I wonder if it was the sight of the security guard that made me say something—scream something—that would enrage Emelie enough to punch me in the face, which would then require the intervention of the security guard?

Emelie calls. A good sign. No one ever calls with bad news when they could text with bad news.

“I’ve thought about it,” she says. “And I’m not going to have dinner with you.”

“Not tonight or not ever?” I ask, fishing. But she doesn’t say anything to that. She doesn’t say anything and doesn’t say anything.

“Why did you call to tell me this instead of texting?” I finally ask, and she says that she didn’t want the last thing she ever said to me to be a text.

“Oh,” she adds. “And I read the dog-park fire story.”

“I didn’t write it,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“But I didn’t exactly lie about writing it either,” I say.

“Goodbye, Silas,” she says, and then she hangs up.

I call the main office and it says its mailbox is full.

Will he strangle me? Will he tie a plastic bag around my head and throw me into the river? Will he shoot me, garrote me, hang me, run me over with his car, stab me, dismember me with a chain saw, find another downed electrical wire and throw me onto it?

“Come and get me,” I text the guy, along with my address.

“Hey,” the guy texts back, “isn’t that near Customs and Alterations?”

There’s a man leaning against a car parked outside my apartment building, but it isn’t the man who’s been texting me, the man who threw the other man onto the live wire. This man looks nothing like that man. Much bigger, for instance.

“Silas Bartone?” this man says.

“What,” I say. Which was another thing my son used to say, when you called his name. Not “yes” but “what.” Always in the rudest tone possible.

“I knew it was you because you look pissed off,” the man says, also looking pissed off. Sounding it too. And that’s how I know who he is: I recognize his voice.

“You’re Horace.”

“That’s right,” he says. “The motherfucker you tried to get fired at the main office.”

He moves away from the car and toward me. Then he grabs me. I mean, he takes a fistful of my shirt, right below the collar. It’s the first time anyone has touched me in . . .

Maybe that’s why I ask if he wants to come in.

He’s the first person to be in the apartment, other than me, since Emelie.

Some things have changed.

There is, of course, the calendar. And the hole Horace doesn’t see underneath the calendar.

I have five pieces of furniture. Six, if you count the toilet.

But still there’s the murmuring of the sewing machines coming from downstairs.

“This is the loneliest place I’ve ever seen,” Horace says. Then Horace leaves, without saying anything, without closing the door behind him. I sit down on my couch and close my eyes.

What am I going to do now?

This is the question my therapist has told me to never ask myself.

What’s next!

This is the sentence my therapist has told me to say instead. Making sure to use the exclamation point, not the question mark, never the question mark.

What’s next is that the guy will show up to murder me, and that will be it. But what if he doesn’t? What then?

“Get up!” It’s not my therapist who says this. It’s Horace, back inside my apartment. In one hand he holds two slabs of wood with holes in them. In the other is a large mesh bag full of smaller solid bags. Some are red, some blue.

The slabs of wood have little retractable back legs that when extended raise the hole higher than most of the rest of the board. Horace sets one up at the far end of the living room, the other in the kitchen.

“Where did you get all this?” I ask.

“Trunk of my car,” Horace says.

“Why was all this in the trunk of your car?” I ask, and Horace looks at me as though I’ve asked the dumbest question he’s ever heard.

“It’s cornhole,” Horace says.

Each player gets four bags. The players stand next to each other and try to throw their bags into the hole. And/or land their bags on the board. And/or knock their opponent’s bags off the board.

It’s called cornhole because there are those holes in the boards. And presumably the bags are full of corn. They make a peaceful, soft, rattling sound, almost a shush, as you toss them from one hand to the other.

We play. One point for each bag on the board, three for those that go into the hole. Neither of us says anything, except for Horace calling out the score. He is much better than me. I throw my bags too low, not enough arc, and they go skidding off. His arc high and land with a good solid thump on the board, or on the floor when they go through the hole.

Once, because of the thumping, someone from Customs and Alterations bangs on the ceiling. Horace ignores it, so I ignore it, and we keep ignoring it until it stops happening.

When Horace wins a game, he says, “Game.” Then, “Again?”

Horace wins the first game twenty-one to five. The second, twenty-one to five. The third, twenty-one to three.

Still, there is something satisfying about the sound of the bags thumping.

It’s like a tired body falling onto a good mattress.

“Again?” Horace says, and I nod.

Loser goes first. I throw my bag, blue, and it lands and skids, but just a little, a corner hanging over the hole.

“Nice,” Horace says. He tosses his bag, which hits and skids off the board. But before it does, it nudges my bag into the hole. Three points for me, instead of just one.

Horace curses, softly, and says, “Susan said you went too far.”

“I went too far,” I admit. “In both directions.”

“People always go too far with Susan,” Horace says. “She drives them to it. It’s part of her character. There’s no middle ground with Susan.”

I take a breath, step, toss. The bag lands again on the board and sticks, not skidding at all, a hair to the left of the hole.

“Nice,” Horace says again.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Try again,” Horace says.

I look at him. What does he mean, try again? This is the first time I’ve been ahead. Is this some rule of cornhole I don’t yet know, that when you go ahead for the first time, you get to try again?

But Horace isn’t talking about cornhole.

My son needed a haircut. I’d been telling him so for months.

“You just wish you needed a haircut,” my son told me.

If I were still describing things, by the way, I would have already described how bald I am. Very. “You really need a haircut,” I insisted, and he just glared at me through the curtain of hair over his face. He looked like he would have been happy to cut me with his switchblade, if only I’d gotten a switchblade for his birthday like he asked, Dad.

Finally I prevailed. I don’t remember how. By threat, bargaining, or both. All I remember is that however I prevailed, I felt lousy, diminished, in a kind of permanent way.

“Don’t come in,” my son said outside the barbershop, not looking at me, staring straight ahead through his hair. “Just give me the money.” He stuck out his hand.

I did what I was told. I sat in the car. What were my thoughts? I did not have any thoughts. I was trying not to have any thoughts. I was afraid of them, and of him, and myself.

A half hour later he came out, unwrapping his sucker. I could see his face. I could even see some of his forehead. He waved at me and smiled. And there he was. My beautiful baby boy.

“Game,” Horace says. I’d like to say I won. But no, him again. Twenty-one to nine.

“Again?” I ask.

“Can’t,” he says. “Gotta get back to work.”

“Of course,” I say. We shake hands. Horace packs up his cornhole set and leaves. Even though he’s gone, the apartment seems a brighter, more lived-in place. I sit on the couch, and suddenly I can see the future. In it, Horace will be back, and we’ll play some more cornhole, and maybe I’ll get better at it, maybe over time I’ll even be able to give him a run for his money, and when Horace is not at the apartment playing cornhole, I’ll be calling him and Susan at the main office from right here on my couch in my quest to get my son’s name spelled correctly on his death certificate. And this will be a thing that will go on and on.

“Six Backyard Games That Will Change Your Life” will be my next list, if I can figure out what the other five games might be.

I get a notification on my phone. Suspect is in custody. The dog-park fire is under control. Expect no further alerts.

A minute later Horace is back. There’s a sheepish look on his face, an envelope in his hand. “Don’t tell the main office I almost forgot to give you this.” He hands me the envelope and leaves again.

Inside is a new death certificate. On it, my son’s name, first and middle and last, all spelled correctly. Nothing left to complain about. No one to call and no reason to call them. It’s all over. He’s really dead. And only then do I realize what I’ve done.

Read more from Issue 20.2.