supplicium post mortem

He sat in the wing-chair, window open, admitting the sounds of assassin croquet. A timid rap on the door announced his second-eldest.

“Justin said you had a question?” Her tone conveyed mistrust of her younger brother, in this and everything.

He gestured to the footstool. She approached but did not sit.

“What?” she demanded, injured innocence.

“I’m wondering,” he said idly, “whom you are texting in the middle of the night.”

She crossed her arms. “No one. And if Justin says different, then you should talk to him about lying.”

“Differently,” he correctly. “Do you mean to say you aren’t texting after bedtime?”

“I’m not stupid, Dad.” Her voice exasperated, and so very plausible, as usual.

She’d talked him into the unlimited plan, promising to pay for it herself with earnings from her job at The Sno-Kone, and having agreed she would not violate her bedtime. He’d agreed, unwisely he saw now. He’d never been through this with his eldest daughter, who was too busy with her violin in Aspen this summer to be tempted by technology. His soon-to-be tenth grader, however…

“This plan is excellent,” he said. “You can’t exceed the limit, so we can avoid the run-ins that plagued us last year.”

She blushed and scowled. “That was the point, Dad.”

He reached for a paper on his desk. “Also, they provide the most helpful itemized bills, date, time and source of each text.” She blanched, and then burst into tears. “I think you’d better go cut a switch,” he said, setting the gas bill back on his desk.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Frenchies
• Rafi
• Nettagyrl
• Papatomla

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.

Last month I printed out and re-read “In Wine” and “In Wrath”, both by Ripping Yarns. The former was Mark-centered (Mark Aken, not my Mark): Hold-in Mark, age 18, feels guilty for getting drunk and asks for the whack, which Dad gives until the Hold-in lets the guilt go and starts to cry, cf. Jack Radcliffe in “First Half at Keene’s”, cf. Gray Riding, cf. all the hold-ins we know. In the second story, “In Wrath”, Dan mouths off to a neighbor and over the course of the story is moved from temper to repentance. Both stories are classic in that the climax is the same: the switch from Dad in the bedroom; and both are narrated by Dad, which seems to be how that series gets started. Both I read slowly and closely, more so than usually happens when I read on the screen. In both stories I was 100% with the author at every word. It felt as if I had written them, or M had written them, certainly someone who knew us that well. In some ways this dad had an edge over RP (I can’t believe I’m being disloyal enough to write that) because he was less coercive and calmer, although just as firm. Still, he doesn’t have RP’s playfulness or his lucky-dippy demeanor. But look, it’s no good comparing them because they’re so different; plus one is fictional and the other’s dead.

But I’m attracted to this character of Rip’s, to his unswerving moral compass; to his compassion and firmness which co-exist without conflict, in fact in service of each other; to his persistence; to his even-tempered nature; to his honesty; to his huge dependability. Even as a p.o.v. character, he is focused on his sons and their needs (which makes him perhaps a bit unrealistic?).

I don’t remember if I ever discussed Rip’s “In…” stories with M. I remember discussing “Keene’s” briefly and him saying it wasn’t his thing exactly but that he could see it was mine. He liked a more severe, non-con quality in his stories and fantasies, veering into the sexual. Less of the emotional stuff that I like. I can’t see him being too interested in these two stories whose implement is a very unaesthetic nylon cane/switch. Marky would also find them very wet because there are all these tears, but no marks from the whacking – s-nore, he’d say. Yet, M. would have liked this family, I think, and approved of a lot of it. Would we have been that kind of parents if we’d had kids? I wonder if he ever did read those stories and what he thought. I can’t quite grasp the reality that I’m not ever going to know.

except he’d have to follow through on the whacking front instead of leaving it to Uncle Jack…

perfect dad, perfect lap

A dream I had before Christmas about the father in Ripping Yarns’s series of stories about the Aken family. The “In…” series…

It was like college, and I was living with roommates. Mr. Aken, the dad from Rip’s stories, turned up. He found some glass shards on the carpet, evidence of a broken light, and this was an expensive and important light in some way. He looked to me and I had to admit I’d known about it. It wasn’t clear if I’d actually been involved with breaking it, but I had known of it and done nothing, which was wrong. I was flooded with guilt when he looked at me.

He walked by me and touched my face with his finger (long, slender, feminine), under my right eye and then just below my eyebrow, as if tracing the contours of the black circles there. Then he was holding me on his lap and I was 7 or 8, like Dan in one of the stories. He was wearing a plaid flannel work shirt and so was I. Mine was over-sized and both were soft, and he was holding me in that hugely protective way, and I was weeping because it just felt so safe and so good on his lap, even though I was in trouble – especially because I was in trouble. He told me he’d be able to deal with this matter even though he couldn’t be everything to me that I needed and wanted. Still, I cried in his lap because at that moment it was perfect. Even though I wasn’t his son, and couldn’t be his son, he could treat me the same as his son for this brief time while I was on his lap and while he dealt with me for the broken light.

When I had this dream I had been tutoring Othello heavily, in particular Act V, Scene 2: “put out the light, and then put out the light,” (1) the first light being Othello’s candle, of course, and the second being Desdemona’s life. I may not have put out M’s light myself, but am I guilty, in my heart, in some way, for not catching it, for all the uncountable failures that preceded and maybe led to his death, for all the times I didn’t love him enough, for fighting about taxes, for all the forever left undone? How can I ever be truly forgiven all of that unless I can be allowed to have him back and redeem it, put it right with him, love him fully like I always really have? How can I truly and really redeem anything without him?

(1)

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.