FICTION

44 Clifford Avenue

Fiction By Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Illustrations by Ashley Cannon

BACK IN THE SPRING of 1980, a boy was walking home from school on Highbrook Avenue. He was small for his age, but he was an optimist about some things, especially his own potential, and his dad was 6’3”. So, when he walked under the stone bridge that held up the Metro North train tracks, he thought it wouldn’t be long until he was taller than that row of rocks, the ones he could barely touch if he extended his arm as high as he could. Much taller than the bullies who teased him because he wasn’t very good at sports and because he didn’t care about whatever clothes were popular (not that it would have done him much good if he did, since his mother couldn’t afford to buy them). He lifted his head and whistled a note to hear how it would sound against the tunnel’s walls and low ceiling.

He was out of the tunnel now, about to make a right and head up Washington Avenue to Clifford Avenue, where his house waited at the top of the hill. The next train to the city was arriving at that moment, slowing down as it prepared to stop at the station. He didn’t look back. The train made him think of his dad, too. That was one of the things he missed most about his dad being gone: their big adventures together in the city, just the two of them. He missed sitting on the train as they passed through Mount Vernon and the Bronx, heading to The City, New York, the only city that was “The City”, talking about anything and everything. His dad always listened to him, really heard him, really talked with him. Then, lunch at a New York diner—burgers and egg creams (memories of a Brooklyn childhood for his dad, a special shared treat for both of them) and, of course, a stop at the Super-8 store to pick up a new movie or two (monster movies and Chaplin were their favorites), before heading to the Museum of Natural History.

He hadn’t done any of those things in a while, not since his parents had separated and his dad had left. He thought about their adventures often and missed them very much, and wondered if they would ever do anything like that again. For eleven months now he hadn’t seen his dad—except for the couple of times that first month when his dad had pulled up to the house when his mom wasn’t home, and had banged on the door and called out to him—yelled his name and other things—while he stood in the dark in what used to be his parents’ bedroom (but now was just his mother’s), and peered out through the crack between the wicker shades and the window frame.

He was passing the church parking lot now. His backpack was heavy and he was thinking about what he would do when he got home—not homework, that was for sure. Maybe he would draw or read or sneak some television (reruns of the Rockford Files would be on at four o’clock). He glanced into the lot to make sure no cars were coming. On the far side was the wooded embankment leading up to the train tracks. He thought about how when he was little, he and his dad used to climb the side of it, looking for old railroad spikes for their ever-growing collection of finds. But that was when he was little. He didn’t imagine the hill would feel as big now if he climbed it. He wasn’t tempted to find out; he was too old for such things, and besides, it wouldn’t be much fun alone.

He looked both ways, then crossed Washington Avenue in the middle of the block. He did this every day, almost always at the same point. He could have waited to get to the next intersection, but he never did. He kept climbing the hill. A car turned onto Young Avenue just when he reached the curb. He waited impatiently for it to pass. Young Avenue was his least favorite street in town. A little beyond the point where the street curved out of view was the house where one sunny day about a month before his dad left, he had parked the car and turned to him and told him cryptically that if his mother didn’t stop what she was doing, that was where the two of them were going to live, without her. His dad didn’t explain what he meant or when this might happen, and the boy didn’t ask—but he knew from the urgency in his dad’s voice that he meant very soon. He didn’t ask because his dad was scaring him a little. When his dad spoke about things like that, his voice changed and the skin on his face tightened and his jaw clenched. It had been happening for about a year-and-a-half, his dad saying strange things like that sometimes and getting that expression on his face. He knew his dad was angry and upset—he didn’t know about what exactly, but it seemed to be changing him, changing the person who he had always felt closest to and loved more than anyone else in the world—and there was nothing he could do about it and no one he could talk to. His dad never mentioned the other house again. But that one time was enough to mark it forever in the boy’s mind as more than just a house on a block that wasn’t the block where he lived.

No one had told him what was happening to his dad. His mother said once before the separation that his dad drank too much, that he was an alcoholic. But he knew it was more than that. He knew, had known for a while, that something had gone wrong with his dad’s mind. It had started a couple of years before, and had gotten much worse since the separation. Everything in the boy’s life, everything in his world, was divided into Before and After—before and after his dad had changed. The fact was, he knew that his dad, who had always been his favorite parent and his favorite person in the whole world, was crazy—although he didn’t like that word and got angry every time he heard it used in conversation or to make a joke on TV or wherever. No one had told him, but he knew.

He was only a block away from his street now. He always got home from school before his mother returned from work. In his mind, he saw the answering machine on its little table in the woodpaneled room that used to be his dad’s home office. The mere thought of it blinking made his heart beat faster. Then he thought of the black mailbox screwed into the brown shingles next to the front stoop. He turned left onto Clifford Avenue, and started up the steep hill toward home. The sidewalks were cracked and uneven, marred by tree roots and cold winters. The cracks and the trees that lined the street were as familiar to him as his own face. He loved how about a quarter of the way up the hill his house seemed to rise up out of the middle of the street—he could see the brown shingles and yellow trim, the enclosed front porch, the giant oak tree bending over the house, protecting it, and the line of bushes out front, which had red berries certain times of year that you couldn’t eat, but were fun to collect and throw. The hill was very steep; his calves always burned by the time he got to the top because he walked very fast to overcome the climb.

As soon as he stepped between the broken row of bushes onto the short sidewalk path that split his front yard in two, his body relaxed a little, and he breathed more easily. Maybe it was his mind telling him he was home, he was safe; whatever it was, he felt it and it felt good. But he never felt it completely until he was all the way inside. He stopped to check, as he always did, for mail. He found a long white envelope in the mailbox—a letter from his dad, the first he’d received in two months. The discovery made him excited and nervous. He took out his key, stuck it in the door and turned it as hard as he could. The door unlocked, but he had to nudge it with his shoulder to get it to open, which made the brass lion knocker rattle. He stepped inside, turned quickly and locked the door behind him. He was standing in the enclosed front porch, where he and his dad used to relax every Sunday after walking into town to pick up the New York Times and a twenty-five-cent comic. He unlocked the inside door and entered, slipped his backpack off, and pushed the door closed.

Home. Finally. Ordinarily, he would have taken comfort from its familiarity. He liked being alone, away from the eyes of other people, in the old cool house with its hardwood floors and the things he knew so well. But today he liked it less, the feeling of being alone in a big house. Today, he wasn’t really alone. There was the letter in his hand. It was bigger than the house, bigger than everything in it. He knew the handwriting on the envelope as well as he knew his own and he could smell the cigar smoke on it, a smell he didn’t like but that reminded him of his dad. The last letter his dad had written had stayed with him. He had written that he was living alone in a house in the woods in New Hampshire. It was still winter then. He wrote about how he put out food on the deck for squirrels, and one squirrel had chased another squirrel away and not let that squirrel get any food at all. What did he think of that? he had asked. He knew his dad was writing about squirrels, but he could tell that he was also writing about something else— he just didn’t know what. He didn’t like that about the letter, but he liked that his dad had written about animals because they both liked animals. In fact, his dad knew that he liked animals more than he liked people because he had told him that secret once. It had seemed like an important thing he had revealed about himself, and his dad was the only one he had told. But that was or felt like a long time ago now. The rest of the letter was two different things: it was his dad telling him about what it was like to live in a cabin in the woods in winter, and asking him about his drawing (he liked to draw) and his friends and school; and it was also him explaining that there were people in this world who will enslave you with a smile, and unfortunately his own mother was one of those people. He wrote something about the government, too, and other things that were like the squirrel story, where there was something else going on under the surface that he didn’t quite understand but knew was there. But that wasn’t this letter. This was new, and it felt different—thicker.

He tore one edge of the envelope with his nail-bitten thumb, and then ran his forefinger under the seal, ripping the top of the envelope in a jagged line. He reached in and pulled out a one-page letter written on the thin college-ruled paper his dad always used. The letter was surprisingly short: “Thought you might be interested in the enclosed. Love, Dad.” With the letter was a thin stapled rectangular booklet the same size as the envelope. The cover was tan and the title was “Thought Control and Technological Slavery in America, Part One”, and under that was his dad’s name, with “Ph.D.” after it. His dad was a sociologist and he had written two books before everything changed, so he was used to thinking of his father as writing things. His heart was racing; he knew from the title and things his dad had hinted at that this was his dad’s explanation, finally, in black-and-white of what he thought was being done to him. He was glad this was one of the days his mother worked late; if she had seen the envelope, she might have taken it, and then he wouldn’t have had the chance to read it and understand, finally, what it was exactly that his dad was thinking.

Of course, he knew most of it would probably not be true. The month before, he had pulled a psychology book down off the bookcase in his dad’s old office, and read it, working earnestly and diligently to understand every sentence, until he found the right page—the page that described what had happened to his dad. His father had delusions, he was paranoid, and a little before he left he had started talking to himself sometimes in a strange way. The boy thought he had figured out his dad’s diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. He hadn’t told anyone. He kept it to himself. It didn’t change much to have a name for what had happened to his dad—except the part where they said that ten percent of children with schizophrenic parents develop schizophrenia, too.

He couldn’t wait to race up the stairs to his bedroom and read the booklet, study it the way he had studied his dad’s letters, the way he had studied the psychology book. There was nothing he could do other than understand—he couldn’t fix anything, he couldn’t change anything, he couldn’t go back to the way things had been before—so, that’s what he tried to do. He thought about all of it a lot; sometimes, it felt like he thought about it all the time. But he also thought a lot about who his dad had been before, how much he had loved him and loved being with him before he changed, and even after, sometimes. He never forgot that, even though it made everything hurt more and made him feel more alone.

But first he needed to check the answering machine. Any time he got home first, he always checked the mailbox and the answering machine. He almost skipped the machine this time because of the booklet. But if he didn’t do it then, if he waited, his mother might get to it first, and delete any messages from his father, if there were any. So, he walked down the hall past the stairs to the second floor, and entered the room he would always think of as his dad’s office. The answering machine sat on a wobbly antique table, and it was blinking red. He dropped to his knees in front of it, took a deep breath and pressed play. He heard his mother’s familiar refrain, “You have reached the ____ residence. Please leave a message after the beep.” The machine beeped. And instantly, his dad’s voice, clipped, urgent, filled the room: “I swear to God Almighty that I’m not joking, that it’s gone way too far, that I’ve been humiliated and disgraced too much by you, your family, and your friends, that you’ve kidnapped my son—and it is kidnapping—and I’m trying to behave in the most appropriate fashion in protecting my rights, but I swear to good God Almighty, that I will not stop, as long as I live, until there is judicial determination and procedural retribution for what you have done, the big companies, the government and everyone else, to one man in a systematic attempt to coerce and control, and to co-opt his work. For the next twelve months I will be publishing and distributing a newsletter documenting this unprecedented experiment in thought control and technological slavery. . . . ”

The voice sounded exactly like his dad’s, but different, too—more formal and impersonal, and at the same time angry and frustrated, and, underneath everything else (you could hear it only if you knew him well), was the sound of fear. His dad was afraid. The first time he had heard that in his dad’s voice, it frightened him, because there is nothing scarier to a young boy than to know that his dad is afraid. It still frightened him. But he was a little older now; and what had happened to his dad had loosened the bonds between them, had made it so that he no longer saw the world through his dad’s eyes or measured it according to his beliefs and thoughts and actions. At some point over the past year, he had had to choose between two mutually-exclusive and terrible worldviews: his dad was a maligned and persecuted genius being unfairly targeted by the government and corporations, with the help of his mother—that much, he knew about his dad’s beliefs—or his mother was just his mother, and his dad was crazy and getting crazier.

His dad had stopped talking. The machine beeped again. There was another message. He heard the voice of his best friend, Frankie, asking him if he wanted to come over and play Monopoly. He smiled, and said out loud, “Cool!” Where a minute before his father’s booklet had been the most important thing in the world to him, now, for a moment at least, it was forgotten or very nearly forgotten. He grabbed the booklet, ran upstairs, and propelled himself into his room. He quickly hid the booklet behind a row of books on his bookshelf (where he hid all the letters and other things his father had sent him). Then, he grabbed a pen and paper from his desk and wrote a quick note to his mother, telling her where he would be. He was so excited about Frankie and an afternoon of Monopoly that when he returned to the top of the stairs, he almost didn’t think of the scene that always came into his mind at that spot: overhearing his mother telling his dad that she wanted a divorce, and his dad sitting down at the bottom of the stairs, crying, his head in his hands. A couple of seconds later, he was past the stairs, and at the front door. He left the note on the floor where his mother would see it when she came home, locked the doors, and hurried outside.

As he walked down the other side of Clifford back to Highbrook, where Frankie lived, he noticed for the first time what a truly beautiful spring day it was. The green leaves of the tall oak trees lining the street were lit brightly by the afternoon sun, the air was cool, and you could hear the birds and squirrels in the trees enjoying it, too. He was happy and excited, thinking about all the fun he was going to have the rest of the afternoon. He was going to play Monopoly with Frankie and a couple of other friends (more Frankie’s friends than his), and they would eat the kinds of snacks he wasn’t allowed to have at home. They would play for hours, and then maybe he would be able to stay after the other boys left; maybe he would even be invited for a sleepover, which happened sometimes, and they would stay up late and sneak downstairs in the dark and sit on the plush carpet in front of the TV (much bigger than his TV) and play blackjack, betting candies from Frankie’s family’s candy jar (he didn’t have one of those at this house), and watching Saturday Night Live, which he had seen for the first time at Frankie’s house and only got to see there. They would laugh and play cards until they were so tired they would finally climb the stairs as quietly as they could and go to bed in a house where there weren’t his dad’s letters or any booklets about Thought Control and Technological Slavery in America hidden behind books on a bookcase, and where there weren’t any messages to be played from a scared, angry, hurt voice that was almost but not quite the voice of his dad, talking about things that were desperately important and not at all real.

But as much as he hoped that he would be invited for a sleepover, he never once wished, that day or any other, that he could stay there, that he could live with Frankie and his family, where you could stay up late and play blackjack and watch Saturday Night Live, and never think about your dad being crazy or whether you would ever get to see him again. Sleepovers were fun, but he still wanted his home—even if it didn’t exist anymore, not really—and his family, which didn’t either. If he couldn’t have that ever again, then he wanted whatever was left, whatever it had become. Even if it seemed like the most important part of it had become this: strange phone messages and letters and now booklets—there would be a new one every month for the next year—hidden in his bookcase behind a row of books in his room. Because it was his home and his family. And because, no matter what, no matter what the future held, his dad was his dad, and he always would be.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father's struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. His most recent book, The Singing Rock & Other Brand-New Fairy Tales, was published by First Second. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. NathanielLachenmeyer.com.