The Futilitarians Read online

  All evening my younger son, Otto, kept padding down the hall in his LEGO Darth Vader blanket sleeper, stealing cookies from the table and sitting in my lap while we talked our weighty adult talk. I held my son’s lean, taut, and oblivious little body, kissed his blond hair as he munched the pilfered cookies, felt that protective ache of wanting to shield him from the worst of the world but also prepare him for the worst, knowing that neither was likely possible.

  Maybe coincidence, maybe part of the osmotic nature of families, one afternoon, around the same time I was reading “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Otto asked from the backseat of the car:

  “Mom, can I get a LEGO Nazi mini-figure?”

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t make those.”

  “Yeah, they do. There’s a site that makes custom military LEGOs and stuff.”

  “Still no. They were the really, really, really bad guys.”

  “But they have the cool uniforms.”

  “That was part of the problem.”

  This was the first time I’d heard his little-boy voice say the word “Nazi,” courtesy of the vast parallel universe of the online LEGO community. The dissonances were many: his absolute unknowing of the word’s meaning and the absolute evil it evoked, the context of toys and play with agents of genocide, and the sometimes-disturbing crux of grown-up and kid in the virtual world. Plus, driving the car, eyeing him in the slot of the rearview mirror as he talked to the back of my head, I wasn’t ready to have the conversation about Nazis and the problem of evil, nor make the cognitive and associative leaps necessary to contemporary parenting, especially as the Internet underscores how enmeshed childhood and adulthood are.

  During this time, LEGOs trailed like crumbs from the car to the front door and scattered through every room in our old house, which is pretty much the opposite of tight LEGO construction and Danish design. A couple of blocks from the Mississippi River, it was built in the 1850s by carpenters who paced out measurements, pounded hand-hewn nails into planks hauled from disassembled barges, sometimes using corncobs as filler in the holes the barges’ rods left in the thick wood. I do not believe there is one right angle in this home. And there are gaps—between heart-pine floorboards, in doorsills, baseboards—where the hard little plastic squares, rectangles, heads, weapons, get wedged. The detritus of the endless cycle of creating and destroying that’s encoded in childhood.

  This compulsion to create and destroy deluged my boys when they searched “LEGO” online, millions of offerings materializing, some official advertisements but mostly homemade videos, school projects, little dramas, lots of battles, posted in places from the Czech Republic to Thailand. Content and production values ranged. Some were burnished by special effects, others played out on bedsheets with the family dog sniffing around. The boys would find LEGO renderings of everything from the Book of Genesis to the March 3, 2011, tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown. Whole detailed worlds, like Coney Island; London; a geographically accurate conference-room-sized archipelago of the Philippines; canted bombed-out ruins of nineteenth-century town houses crumbling into perfect LEGO squares; the Twin Towers, about three feet tall, right after the planes hit but before they fell, billowing blackly but still erect. All technically masterful but begging for texture. Someone once told me he’d seen a LEGO reenactment of the Nuremberg trials, but I couldn’t find it online when I looked. And since there are scores of World War II LEGO battle re-creations, I’m hopeful the Nazi mini-figure modification Otto referred to and so wanted is a nod to verisimilitude and not something else.

  But the Internet is iridescent in that it can go shiny or dark with a single gesture and we can’t always be within reach of the mouse, cover our kids’ hands, and guide them away from danger. They have so many more worlds to navigate and synthesize than we did growing up, each one endlessly complex and atomized and volatile. One afternoon, as Otto was gliding across the surface of YouTube like a water bug, click to click, clip to clip, it didn’t take long before he was hearing grating techno and someone singing “We like them girls with functioning vaginas.” I grabbed for the mouse, but not before we saw a blond LEGO girl in a LEGO strip club with a missing leg pole-dancing, illustrating a line about how girls don’t even need both legs, as long as they have, you know… I like to think exactly none of that soaked into his spongy brain. The video was stupid and unerotic, but also painful. I’m sensitive about the subject of stripping, as my sons’ aunt Rebecca was a dancer at the time of her death. How did we arrive at this point in our culture where my five-year-old, his favorite toy, misogyny, stripping, and the sad context of my sister’s suicide would all merge into the same moment?

  A few days after Dad died, Otto presented me with a green LEGO cross, “in honor of Big Daddy.” It was a solemn, spontaneous gesture, a kid trying to comfort his sad mom, maybe comfort himself by making something. But by the end of the day the cross had been absorbed into some other project or lost in the shag rug in the living room, a reminder of the easily dismantled illusion of order, something we are no strangers to in this city.

  It was also a reminder that the kids were grieving, thinking about death as well. Our older son, Silas, tried hard to sound reassuring, talking adultly about how, yes, we would all miss Big Daddy. He gave me awkward hugs and a wide berth. The day after Dad died, Otto said, “Hey, today is Big Daddy’s first day in heaven. Do you think he’ll see Shadow and that kitten from Dauphine Street?” Shadow was their cousins’ dog, found mysteriously dead in the backyard, covered in leaves with no visible sign of trauma. A few months earlier, on an otherwise-lovely walk to school, we’d seen a run-over kitten in the middle of the street before I could avert his eyes. It was a gruesome little scene. I couldn’t eat for most of the day. He’d brought up the mutilated kitten out of the blue a couple of times since, so I knew it was still lingering near the surface of his mind, accruing portent, probably becoming one of those foundational memories that will keep bobbing up, shiny black fur and entrails, unbidden, over the years.

  Similarly, I was thinking about the twins, wondering if in Dad’s last moments, he was reunited with them. As galaxies of neural systems disintegrated and collapsed, maybe the most potent memories of people remained, floating as fragments in the burgeoning darkness. Or was there an actual uniting of their spirits? Or were they now just united in nothingness? Easier to conjure what Otto was probably envisioning: Big Daddy in a celestial recliner, peacefully stroking a cute, reconstituted kitten, with Shadow dozing by the raised footrest. Then I remembered that Dad really hated cats, was, in fact, allergic to them.

  That night at the ECRG, all of those questions about the blonde, the “liaison,” and the deaths by hanging still swirling and darkening in my head, I withdrew further from the discussion and held my little son tight, probably too tight, understanding guiltily that I wanted some of his soft, pure unknowingness to comfort me. And it didn’t feel fair. It made me think about what adults need from children and the trappings of childhood, some adults being needier than others. But just for that moment I wanted to lose myself in the absolute of maternal physical connection and reemerge into the conversation softened by that melancholy buzz.

  I guess Brad thought Otto was distracting me from the discussion, being too clingy, and he offered to do bedtime with him to give me some space. While I appreciated his intent, I excused myself instead to go read the bedtime story and do the tucking in, first checking on his older brother, who was dutifully finishing his homework at the kitchen table and completely uninterested in what the adults were talking about in the living room. Lying there in the boys’ darkened room, with light from the hallway illuminating the transom high up, we could hear the voices down the hall in all their grown-up gradations, low to high, masculine and feminine, accents ranging from eastern Massachusetts to southern Alabama. The talking and laughing were muffled by the house’s old barge-board walls and heavy cypress doors. Indistinct conversation circulated out of range. I had wondered what of t
his monthly living room talk Otto was going to retain (Silas willfully tuned us out), and now I thought I had my answer. From his bed, sound and light and meaning were diffuse, as though that evening’s meeting had already become future memory. All these blurred voices, often urgent, often laughing. What were they going on about all those nights?

  At some bedtimes, dread and affection weigh equally. Kids always look so cute in their PJs, so cozy-warm next to you, that connection so total and bodily fulfilling, and as their consciousness slips toward sleep they say amazing things, philosophical non sequiturs, snatches of playground drama, and then they are out, gone. And you lie there heavily, cloaked in the whole weight of the day, in the dark nagging of futility. Or worse, the promise of another day in about ten more hours. Often you can’t find comfort in your sweetly nestled child, in fact sometimes the opposite. After the twins’ deaths, my older brother, John, would inspect his sleeping daughters’ young features for traces of Rebecca and Rachel, as if an inherited slope of the nose or cheekbone could portend self-destruction.

  But sometimes you can find comfort elsewhere around you. Many nights, post-story and pre-sleep, my eyes have been attracted to the light-suffused transom over the door. There have been many times when I’ve received solace, or rather reassurance, from the heavy hand-hewn trim around the door, the architectural details of an old house that someone felt compelled to build more than a century and a half ago, with bargeboard floated down the Mississippi, made from trees chopped down and milled by someone maybe in Indiana or Ohio. Generations of parents have put their children to bed in this house and even if I haven’t quite figured out the why and the how of living, others have found reasons to keep moving things forward. In quiet moments I can feel the collective push of these ghost-hands on my back, nudging me on.

  This comfort of humanity’s anonymous nudging is something that Borowski seemed to feel, I guess just not strongly enough. In rereading his collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen to get ready for the night’s discussion, I had been especially struck by the final story, “The World of Stone.” The story’s opening describes one of those familiar moments of cosmic anxiety, the kind that arrive at 3 a.m. when you’re untethered from the activity of the day:

  For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser’s piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe might be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that ultimately—perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years—it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound.

  He tries to bring himself out of this state of free-floating fear by focusing on the activity of the people around him. After the suffering and atrocity of the war, people are moving on with the work of civilization, building, repairing, cooking, cleaning. He summons Rousselot’s trinity: willing, possessing, feeling. All three inspire him toward his own work of trying to record, and understand, his moment here on the planet. Knowing Borowski’s fate makes the narrator’s efforts particularly heartbreaking. “The World of Stone” ends like this:

  And since today the world has not yet blown away, I take out a fresh piece of paper, arrange it neatly on the desk, and closing my eyes try to find within me a tender feeling for the workmen hammering the rails, for the peasant women with their ersatz sour cream, the trains full of merchandise, the fading sky above the ruins, for the passers-by on the street below and the newly installed windows, and even for my wife who is washing dishes in the kitchen alcove; and with a tremendous intellectual effort I attempt to grasp the true significance of the events, things and people I have seen. For I intend to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging, difficult world chiselled out of stone.

  Though I was moved by the narrator’s search for affection and connection with these other lives, I was also a little confounded that, in the end, he deemed the world static and rigid, when he’d been describing so much of life’s flux and movement. What was so “unchanging” about this “world chiselled out of stone”? Our brutality toward each other? That we’ll build everything up just to see it all torn down again? What happened to the expanding soap bubble?

  That sense of confusion with the ending reminded me of my dad, but then again, during that time, anything I found particularly affecting, especially ECRG readings, did. He often seemed to have similar conflicting impulses about life. Just a few months before he died, he came home one afternoon with some sacks of blue crabs and shrimp, having happened upon a small seafood joint he’d never noticed before and stopped at on a whim. Dumping the crabs into trays on his kitchen counter, ashen but animated, he described the terrifically nice family who worked behind the counter, the freshly cleaned linoleum floors, even the lighting, with such vivid enthusiasm. Life could still surprise you, he was demonstrating, if you paid attention and took advantage.

  This seemed in opposition to how dark and fatalistic he could be, feeling his own world was made of stone. I think after the twins died, something in him began to calcify. He became even more attached to the recliner and his remote control, self-medicating with enormous gin and tonics, televised sports, and a weird Wheel of Fortune addiction, which always seemed so beneath him. Though now as a working parent I totally understand the need to put your brain in neutral and lose yourself to glittering low-stakes, small-screen spectacles. Six feet three and supine in a recliner is the dominant image I have of him from childhood until his death. It was a sacred zone, exempt from the demands of decor, though at least, thankfully, the recliners became less ugly over the years: terrible, scratchy polyester-blend plaid to maroon Naugahyde to puffy velour and, finally, his last one, a tasteful Mission-style brown leather.

  In the big houses he was always so proud of, there was nothing much else that we associated with his personal tastes or proclivities. The rest was Mom, antiques she inherited from some other big house, furniture she found and restored from a thrift store or garage sale. Besides the recliner, his other sacrosanct spot in the house was the head of the sprawling dining room table, where mandatory Sunday dinners were more debates and cross-examinations than meals. Choice discussion topics during the ’80s were women’s rights, the death penalty, nuclear energy, and whatever political circus was entertaining the state of Louisiana. Table 5 at the Rib Room was the third panel of the patriarchal triptych, outside the domestic sphere, where he operated on his terms only, no managing a hungry, unruly tribe, no compromising with my mother, who never went to the Rib Room or knew the extent of the time he spent there. The Rib Room was the cornerstone of his double life.

  We all colluded in keeping our lunches with him a secret from Mom, believed we were simultaneously protecting his privacy and her innocence. (Another reason my sister Amy boycotted the Rib Room.) At the time it seemed normal, harmless, even. Back then, it was a father’s privilege, after all, to have his own space out in the world, while my mom’s time and attention seemed wide open and always up for grabs. She was home in the morning and the afternoon, for homework help and parent conferences and doctor’s visits. I never thought of her as needing privacy or having a private self. The secret lunches were a way of aligning ourselves with our far more mysterious father, who wasn’t around much, gaining his favor and confidence, a glamorous introduction to the adult world of martinis and courtroom drama and politics. It all seems so unnecessary now, as Mom was more tolerant and understanding of Dad’s need for freedom than he gave her credit for. We didn’t really realize that we were helping maintain the existing wall between our parents’ parallel lives. Even into our adulthood, when we did realize that’s what we were doing, out of habit and deference to Dad we still never told Mom.

  But the turning point for me in how I viewed the place’s role in my rela
tionship with him was that long table 5 lunch when he’d asked me how my writing was going and I mentioned working on a piece about Rebecca and Rachel but, I don’t know, maybe it was too soon, not the right time. Dad had a special way of shutting us down with a sudden, efficient ferocity. He leaned across the white tablecloth and the elegant clutter of our meal, formidable in his suit and tie, attitude taut with litigator focus, and said that there would never be the right time for me to write about it because nothing good could ever come from their deaths. Their deaths could not be transformed by art into something positive or affirming (“Suicide; Transcendence”), and he announced that if I ever did attempt to do so, he would never forgive me, that he would take it to his grave if I ever did, which I did not doubt.

  For whatever reason, my dad needed their deaths to stay chiseled and unchangeable tragedies. Maybe it was just easier for him to possess their memories, their deaths, that way. Not to mention contain the shame and the pain. I once visited his office and was puzzled by what seemed to be dried-flower arrangements lining a set of shelves against the wall. It seemed an odd decorating choice for a man who cared nothing about decorating. On my way out I noticed a note of condolences on one of the arrangements. These were flowers people sent after Rachel died, over a year before, that he could not bring himself to throw out. That, oddly, his secretary didn’t touch either. Brown lines from water long evaporated ringed the bottoms of the glass vases. A sad tableau that he probably didn’t even notice anymore, had just become absorbed into the clutter of his office, his life.