Library of Shadows

Vaults and apologies, memoir style.

This work of memoir is an interweaving of three different writing assignments from a class facilitated by Leigh Hopkins through Lidia Yuknavich’s Corporeal Writing. The class lasted through the winter of 2019.

The tire fire of 2020 and beyond left the works to languish until recently. The intent was to submit the finished result to some literary publications, but as I began the process I changed my mind. Submitting to slush piles in hopes of being seen is a tortuous process of formality, chance, and ambiguity. Much must align that is completely outside of a writer’s influence.

Being “good” is not a guaranteed entrance through the gates of acceptance. Being “bad” is equally nebulous, as it is very rare to get any feedback beyond “no thanks.” It leaves a writer with a sense of powerlessness.

Writing is fucking hard. Writing well requires a fool’s desire and bit of mad magic. Writing something that strums the strings of our humanity, feeding the phantom hunger of both writer and reader, is the hunted miracle. The reward is often only the process itself, and at a great sacrifice of time.

Don’t feel sorry. Writers choose this. They know the odds.

So I’ve decided to publish here, where the stupid-slim chances of finding a readership are at least equal.

My only plea is that if you are moved by what you read, please, please, share. Comments are always welcome as well. Tell me what you felt. Where you felt it. Why you felt it.

Thank you.

---

She showed me her painting and said, “It’s you, Cabby.”

All I have left are memories.

The love, the bonds, the conflicts and regrets, the wounds given and received, what was left unsaid, unresolved, unexplored, all resides within me now. Whether in denial or acceptance or resentment or in the flux between, I am the sole curator.

I am a library of shadows.

Mom is 19. She’s just had her firstborn, been told that her child won’t live more than a week. Her child is only one of three known cases in the world with these particular physical and mental defects. Renee is a less than one in a million baby.

Renee lives a week. Then a month. After three months the doctors let my mother take her child home. They say not to expect Renee to survive the year. Renee keeps living. Mom keeps caring for her, like a mother does, like a mother is expected. But this is motherhood magnitudes more than most will ever know. Regardless of the daily complications and conditions that assail her, Renee is a miracle of stasis—stasis that gains years.

The years weigh hard.

Renee is 8 when mom decides to give her up to the State. In all her retellings of this choice, things are left unsaid but the pain is always palpable. The guilt, visible. I don’t think it’s possible for her to share the entirety of this wound out of self-preservation. It’s too deep. Too wide.

It is a living grief that only ends with my mother’s last breath. Because Renee still breathes.

Mom is 29. She’s found out she’s pregnant after a fling with a fellow musician she knows isn’t much on character. Two previous abortions haunt her. Renee is still heavy in her thoughts. She makes a vow to keep the child.

This is my origin story.

Child Me: “Mom, what does my dad look like?” We have no pictures. “Go look in the mirror,” mom says.

His dark Italian genes give him way too much credit in exchange for his absence.

I am the miracle, she says. I am perfect, she says. I am perfect to everyone she can tell. Perfect body, perfect teeth, perfect face. I am redemption. I am pride.

But I am a different kind of handful, she says. My questions and milestones never end. I’m hard to corral, constantly surprising her how clever I can be. She’s alone and doesn’t know how to manage a child so full of life, so eager to explore beyond the walls of our home.

So she sets me free. I roam streets and fields and places I’m not supposed to go. I roam into trouble. I roam into danger. I roam into my mother’s unsaid fears.

I am seven and something isn’t right. I feel I am being tricked in some ungraspable way. I want answers and mom will tell me the truth, but there’s also a secret I need to hide. Mom says I ask, “Can boys get pregnant?” and sirens blare in her head.

I remember the subdued panic in her eyes, the scent of accusation in her unrelenting questions. I can feel her fear fill the room. I remember feeling small and alone as I sit on the vast, barren desert of couch in our living room. Her tall frame stands above—a merciless sun gazing straight through me as I try to evade her prying rays. The secret is broken. Judgement hangs in the silence of the drags on her cigarette. Suspicion lingers in her stare.

Into the vaults of our minds goes the moment.

I no longer feel safe anymore after this. I am now afraid of the dark. The night terrors come. Sometimes I don’t sleep at night.

Parents barely speak. No one sees a counselor. Everyone, everything, just moves along.

Mom is 36. She marries and my three sisters are born in as many years.

I am ill fitting and half to everything now. Addendum. A wildcard, unintended, struggling for definition and place. Illegitimate. Too smart. Too sensitive. Now a stranger for a dad. Not having one was easier. We make it work, but it’s more work for me than my child-mind understands.

I fall through the familial cobble.

I steal and lie. A lot. No one sees it coming from this well behaved boy. Except mom. Her awareness is just a matter of eventuality. But she’s also busy raising a toddler and twin babies and managing her rollercoaster marriage. It’s hot war or Nirvana. Up. Down. We all ride.

Things fall apart, come together. There are banishments and reunions.

Years pass and my sisters bring new friends to the house. It’s only matter of time before they stare at a family photo on the wall and then point. “Who’s that?” In the photo my three sisters shine. Milk and platinum and porcelain. Piercing blue.

And then me. Mead and bronze and clay. Warm hazel. Too old. Skin too brown. We joke that I am the black sheep of the family. “Brown Bear.” “Black Irish.” “Il Duce.” The comedy writes itself.

Mom has a breakdown and I am the good son.

She sits on the couch in her robe, her face blank, most days. I help change diapers and feed mouths. I clean. But I’m getting older. Wiser. Angrier. The family ship lurches and heaves. Calm seas are sprinkled with flotillas of fireworks and police. Screams. Broken things.

The marriage fails. Survival mode begins.

Reminiscing is all she has now to find parts of herself not consumed with balancing unending needs. This pastime often cascades—one memory bleeds into another, into another, into another…sometimes peering into vaults.

Regrets and resentments are paraded. Wounds are poked.

“You remember Michael?” she asks sometimes, waving around the memories at the dinner table. While watching TV. Driving in the car. The stampede of her retellings crash through my gates and fences and I go into lockdown. I keep my answers short and look for opportunities to divert her invasive nostalgia into other rabbit holes.

I’m 17 and still don’t understand what I’ve stuffed away inside. But one day mom is careless and am old enough to see the reveal.

I’m feeling guilt and shame over embezzling some money from where I work. The need to confide gurgles up while we are driving to the store.

“Mom, I have to tell you something.” I pause, consider the pain I will cause. “I—”

“Are, are you gay?” she interrupts, as her worry-struck face snaps over to look at me in the passenger seat.

“What the hell? No mom, I—“

“Did you kill someone?”

“JESUS, NO!”

And as I confess my crime and she cries, I’m having a separate revelation, one that has me tumbling. I think, gay over murderer? That pivotal day I’ve run from for a decade reorganizes, takes on sharp edges. The clarity stuns. Loose threads find their ends. A great shadow slips from my vault, coalesces in vengeance.

“Oh Cabby, how could you?”

“I’m sorry, mom.”

But I’m not. Not anymore. I want her to hurt.

I’m mostly autonomous, more a burden now. My brownness goes astray. Strayer, I guess. I’ve always been astray.

Baa, Black Sheep, baa.

The scalpel’s path runs true, sternum to pubic bone, and curves around the left side of my navel along the way. Left of birth, sinister of life. A sagittal river of communion down my vulnerable gut—in a smooth width that wanders, always wide, sometimes wider, with lines of current that flow within itself, all hinting that this flesh has been sundered more than once. Tiny dots uniformly line its banks, evidence of efforts to secure the repeated rift.

A portal for loss. Loss as a portal.

I am awakening pain and rage and doubt and distrust and fear and longing and grief. A haunting sense of fundamental untruth hangs hazy in my mind. But this rising unknowing has no scaffold, no outline. It has no language and therefore no voice. There is only an ache to escape.

I hunger for something from nothing and the living have nothing to offer in aid. But Shadow hears my call. Literal and metaphor converge. Conscious and subconscious and unconscious blur. External and internal wed. All unite to steer me to seek counsel with the dead.

Flesh as vehicle, flesh as counsel, flesh as witness.

September, 1986: Sacramento. A rural road and sprawling rice fields ripe for harvest. Above—settling dust and a blue broken by an uncanny uniform pattern of popcorn clouds. Below—cool dirt, dry grass crackle, and a stale scent of death. My body awake but limp, draped over a roadkill welcome mat of sun bleached fur and bone. A mangled motorcycle steaming in the distance. A woman’s worried face. The calm, crystal-surety of my mortality.

Surgeon’s meddling hands and machines. A sacrifice of blood and organs. Then, rebirth.

August, 1989. I’m roommates with my best friend and his first cousin wife. Their paternal grandfather, a Hell’s Angel, is in charge of dealing methamphetamine for Northern California. It’s Merry Methmas whenever we want. One night I get the brilliant idea to put meth into my soda. I bleed inside until my body purges black at both ends.

The docs opt to cauterize the bleeding with an endoscope. They get you pretty high before the deep throat. While recovering, a doctor making rounds notices I’m peeing cabernet. Doctors and nurses flock in panic. The blood transfusion is being rejected by my body and in come the parade of IV’s. Soon I’m peeing the sea.

This is how my pattern of loss works.

June, 1990: Phoenix. I’m visiting a friend. The airport is shut down because air at 122 degrees does not provide enough lift. Captain Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. The world dims when I stand and I fight for warmth in the record heat. I tell myself that the meth I’ve been snorting hasn’t drained down my throat and ate another hole in my weakened motorcycle-vs-Earth-blasted stomach. At least until I start vomiting blackness. Again.

More surgeon’s meddling hands and machines. More sinew offerings. Another rebirth.

When I return home, a letter from the sheriff’s department is waiting for me. A detective wants to talk to me about an investigation. The stolen car I abandoned in the parking lot of my apartment complex is gone. It’s obvious the two are not coincidental.

Good news: I’m done with meth. Bad news: I go to jail

Summer, 1991: I do an asshole thing at the perfectly wrong time and a beast-man extracts two whole teeth with a singular blow. In-my-face vanity gifts a pivotal gravity that all my prior, and far more grievous, bodily loss couldn’t deliver.

The accrued loss of permanent parts argue that enough is enough.

1988: My first legit girlfriend is trying to not look nervous.

“So, how’s life,” the councilor asks as we sit down. He’s somewhere in his forties, short but stocky, with a full head of wavy brown hair. His presence is warm and particularly disarming so I decide I like him. There’s introductions and then small talk that leads she and I to describe how we meet and fall in love.

We do not know what love is.

As she scrapes polish from her nails, the councilor asks her if she is ready to tell me “something.” I’m confused, but figure they must have discussed this moment on a previous appointment. She spends a long quiet moment staring at the floor. Tears come. She shakes her head “no” while collecting her flaked polish into a pile. The councilor hands her a box of tissue.

He doesn’t pry and neither do I. But her secrets and lies hide for only a time.

1992: I’m tired. Tired of losing. Tired of hurting. I choose to be sober.

Even though I’d only met him a couple of times through my then-lover, the counselor named Warren immediately comes to mind as I begin my quest for redemption. I visit his office and ask if I can start to see him. He readily agrees and coaches me how to fill out the county paperwork so I can afford to see him. I look forward to the sessions and rarely cancel.

In our sessions he often shares stories:

—He was a scuba-diving pothead.

—His first job after college is at a psychiatric hospital where one of his patients is a man who believes he is a dog.

—Issac Asimov is a family member.

—His best friend has a lavish wedding with overflowing attendance and the ceremony begins but the friend is missing—the rabbi, the bride, the parents, the everyone, the hoards of everyone, wait and wait and wait, the tension mounts, mounts to near-catastrophe…then an arm-flailing gorilla bursts in, hooting and grunting its way to the bride, throwing her over a shoulder and bolting from the room. Chaos erupts, parents explode and vow vengeance, questions and accusations fly, but not a soul is in on the costumed primate kidnap plot. The wedding slowly reorganizes, continues without return of bride or groom or gorilla—for there is food that begs to be eaten and a congregation of love too great to choose not to celebrate.

—The Vietnam draft is upon them and they all agree none are willing to kill or die for that bullshit. They stand together in a line, awaiting their military physicals. Warren limps—after purposely breaking his ankle the night before. One friend wears a bloody bandage over an ear—after jabbing a pencil deep into it. The third, a man who would later in life plot his bride’s kidnapping on their wedding day, shows no sign of injury, just wears a wide smile and purposely gets in line in front of the other two. They grill him but he gives no explanation.

Warren and the other watch him approach a doctor and hold their breath.
“Drop your pants,” the doc commands.
Pants fall.
“AH, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” the doc barks.
Everyone watches as future-gorilla bride snatcher sticks a finger between his butt cheeks…
…and then brings it to his mouth.
He tastes. “That’s shit,” he declares.
“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE,” the doc screams.
All their strategies succeed, though one is instant legend.

Warren waxes Socratic, poses questions instead of instructions, and this is exactly what my rebellious heart needs. But in a session that stands above the rest, he does not. I tell him some friends and I are headed to a concert later in the week and they are bringing shrooms. Shrooms! I confess my desire.

He says only this: “Well, I hope that you won’t.”

I respond with shrugged shoulders. The conversation moves along. Underground, the moment continues to mine the depths. I choose to stay sober.

Years pass. I see Warren less, and then not at all.

But I still call Warren on his birthday every year. I deliberately send him faux pas Christmas cards for Hanukah. We meet for lunch and he shares that his wife is divorcing him while I watch the grief well in his eyes. I get a steady blue collar job and a live-in lover. He gives me a copy of Ishmael, a profound book (about a gorilla, no less) that validates and clarifies murky feelings that have haunted me for a decade

Warren officiates my wedding. He comes to my 30th birthday party.

More years pass. Warren and I meet once or twice a year to catch up. He tells me that he is breaking up with his girlfriend and I help him move. I tell him about finally meeting my Father and the birth of my son after a harrowing infertility war. Warren talks about his dating struggles but eventually declares “the Pubic Wars are over” and that he has a fiancé. A wedding looms.

Then it’s Friday night, November 25th, 2005. 
My cellular service has been wonky for a couple of weeks. 
A voicemail notification appears on my phone. 
The automated voice timestamps the message from the 21st.
Goddammit. Monday? Fucking AT&T.
It’s Warren’s fiancée. 
What? We haven’t even met yet. 
She sounds out of it, just asks me to call her back.
Her voice.
Fear creeps up the back of my neck.
I call. She says Warren is dead. 
Wh-what? No. No. How? When? 
“Monday. He had a heart attack.” 
But he was only 58! 
“Complained of shoulder pain after going to the gym. 
I left the room for a moment and when I came back he was face down on the carpet.”
…Wh-when’s the funeral? 
“I’m so sorry, Cabot. The funeral was today.”
…Oh no. No no no. I didn’t get your message until today! Where was the funeral?
“Home of Peace Cemetery. So many people came.
Just know he always spoke fondly of you.”

My awareness blurs. I hang up the phone and howl. My wife runs into the room and now we both cry, her in the doorway, I sitting on a office chair. But we don’t embrace. No comfort, just tears.

We refuse to see that our cleaving has gone too far, only yawns wider by the day.

Late that night I sneak out of bed and drive to find the cemetery. It’s raining, blurring streetlights and road lines. Unstoppable tears do not help me read address numbers. I’m too upset. I return home empty-handed.

Empty-hearted.

I work hard to succeed. At anything. Everything. Yet it all feels so empty.

A therapist I am seeing for gnawing depression explains that I had been molested after I recount my childhood. By now I suspect, but to hear it from a third party, from someone with no shared memory, my waters clear a little more. My wife still doesn’t know. None of my close friends or family, either. They won’t know for years.

Except mom. She knows, of course. I explain to her what the therapist said. Maybe I confront? Both?

“He was your age,” she says. “My friend told me it was normal.” But she did finally have to threaten his life to get him away from me, this much she confirms.

“No, he wasn’t. He was at least five years older. And he was fucking any kid he could in the trailer park, including his younger sister, Karen. She was my age. Her and I had the same kindergarten class.”

“I’m sorry, Cabby.”

I don’t bring up her ridiculous paranoia of homosexuality or her unspoken projection of it onto me. It feels pointless. I don’t have to own her confusion, conflation, or fear anymore.

It’s her’s alone to wrestle with now.

It’s hard to be when you don’t know who you are.

Self-betrayal makes it seem like your intent is a pole star. The world says to just keep at it and you’ll go far. Meanwhile, truth’s silent sadness paints still life in the mind. Its phantom pain haunts the heart. For the lost end up as sails on someone else’s ship.

Illusion shames not to quit. At least until black swans hiss and nip.

Vampire neoliberalism and union busting tissue paper for corporate crocodile tears. My hard-won victory toddler son diagnosed with dangerous allergies and type 1 diabetes. A struggle to maintain gains until the Too Big to Fail year leaves no air.

My fickle father’s surprise RIP exit.

Bankruptcy. Foreclosure.

Things have only begun to fall apart.

April, 2010. In a year mom will be gone.

The bulky oxygen concentrator machine purrs in a corner. She stands, though hunched over her walker, staring at the flat screen TV hung above the fireplace. The TV can’t shut up, won’t shut up about our newest unprecedented environmental nightmare, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, because the TV is always on, always blaring. This is the company she keeps now, even when she sleeps.

I’ve just finished some chores around the house for her.

“It’s so terrible, Cab. So awful. Everything is dead,” she says. She’s been watching nothing else for days.

“I know mom. It’s much worse than they are reporting. This is just disaster porn. Maybe change the station?”

She does not change the station. Part of me is glad, wants her to bear witness. When I have conversations with her about the trajectory of civilization and the escalating consequences, her end argument always is, “well, what are we supposed to do, go back to living in caves?”

“No, mom. We can’t go back. We lost that knowledge. We have to imagine something new or we are fucked.”

The TV shows black dead things on a seashore.

“Cabby, will you rub my back?”

I step over the coils of her oxygen hose and place my hands on her shoulder blades. She moans and I am not sure if in pleasure or pain. Both, probably.

“Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve been touched,” she sighs.

I don’t comment. Time and distance gifts clarity and I am aware now of the unhealthy enmeshment she’d unconsciously created between us when I was young. An uncomfortable welling of conflicting feelings swirl: adoration, anger, pity, fear, suspicion, resentment…but mostly deep empathic sadness.

She lives alone, still prisoner to her faults, as all O’Callaghans end their lives. Not so ironically, in the same house her aunt lived out her days in solitude.

I’m in the process of a divorce, so I’m also doing the math.

She struggles in relationships, but she’s always been generous with touch. My childhood overflowed with hugs and cuddles and kisses. So much that I would push her away. She’d pout, and I’d run off and play. Now I miss it. I long for the reminiscent comfort and security. My life has become doubt and upheaval and loss and insecurity. So I gladly give back a speck of what was given as my hands glide over her back.

I rub, but gently. She’s so frail now.

I can feel her lungs struggle through her ribs. All those cigarettes came home to roost years ago. Everything since has been a long slide punctuated by emergencies. My sisters and I wonder how much longer. Regardless, her will remains unbending, indomitable. Fierce.

It’s hard to see her as weak. Her strength carried us all for so long. And shaped our hearts with hard blows.

She asks how I’m doing.

“I failed, mom. I miss my son. I’m lonely. Everything is a fucking mess.”

“I’m sorry, Cabby.”

She rubs my head. “Oh, my brown bear. You’ve done nothing wrong. Life is hard. You’re a good man. I’m proud of you.”

The TV babbles. The oxygen machine putts. I start to tear up.

“You know, all I hope is that I’ve done more good than bad by you and your sisters,” she says.

“You did, mom. You did,” I reply.

What else should I be? All apologies
What else could I say? Everyone is gay
What else could I write? I don't have the right
What else should I be? All apologies

—Nirvana, All Apologies