Chapter 4: Pee-Brained

Jesus may have given my father hope, promise, the faith to go on, and the blind assurance of an afterlife. Unfortunately, he was unable to get my father a job. Perhaps Jesus Fernando, our former gardener, would have been able to, but he was long gone.

It had been a week since my dad’s conversion, and his transformation seemed for the best. Every morning he would wake up earlier than anyone to pray for a successful interview. He would gather his briefcase filled with resumes and cover letters, grab his lunch, kiss us, and leave before any of us had even finished our Freaky Fruits[1] (the generic brand of Fruity Pebbles sold by our local supermarket). He would step out the door, swinging his briefcase, humming the latest Gospel tune he had come across (the realpolitik of lower-middle-classhood meant that there was no cognitive dissonance regarding illegal music downloads).

At the start of the next week, he still seemed indefatigable, but cracks were developing in his façade. Monday night I got up to go to the bathroom and heard weeping seeping from beneath the door. It was open a crack, so I glanced in. My father was in his boxers – his usual nightwear. The toilet cover was down and he was leaning on it, hands clasped and his head looking towards the floor. His eyes were closed.

Between sobs I heard him, “Dear Lord, Jesus…please let one of my interviews result in a job…” he broke down and his forehead hit the toilet cover. He let it rest there, “I know I’d been slacking before you saved me…but I’m really trying. I’m going to places I called, to random stores, and I’ll do it forever if I must…” He lifted his head and let his eyes roll Heavenward, “I’m a sinner and don’t deserve forgiveness, but I ask humbly on behalf of my family, as You saved us from Satan, please save us from poverty…”

I couldn’t handle any more, so I backed off. I wasn’t horrified, just scared – I had seen something I shouldn’t have, and was dealing with terror topped with guilt as I retreated. My bladder was full, but my mind was fuller with emotions I didn’t understand. I crawled into the sheets, then the covers, as if they could protect me, but each was as infiltrated with demons as the last. Peeking out, I saw the shadows that haunt the bedrooms of children: red eyes peering that are sequins echoing the moon, the shadow head with ruffled hair that is a doll’s doppelganger. It reminded me of the pastor, so I shut my eyes and turned to the wall, curling like a pill bug. When I lifted my eyelids, I was face-to-face with a black cross, dripping shadow onto the floor.

I caught my scream with my hand as I pushed back with my feet, tumbling to the floor. My eyes were welling again, but I couldn’t decide if it was from the pain, the fear of the cross, or the fear that someone had heard. Once I was confident no one had been disturbed, I scrambled to the light, flipping it to kill the shadow as I pushed my body against the door like a heretical secret agent. I looked around the room for anything that resembled a lower-case “t.” peering under and around everything. There was nothing. No coat-rack, no scooter. I took a deep breath and killed the lights.

It was still there, bleeding black down the whitewashed wall.

I wept as I slid to the floor. I lay on the cold wood with my eyes closed. After waiting forever, with my eyes sealed tighter than Jesus in his tomb, I blindly pulled myself to the bed like a paraplegic and curled into a ball again. My memories stop when I ran out of tears, so I must have fallen asleep.

I awoke to the stench of ammonia and dampness between and beneath my legs. I had peed myself – from holding it, the terror of the bloody cross, or my frayed and confused love for my dad. I screamed into my pillow, infantilized by circumstance. Once the dampness had stopped spreading under my face, I crawled out of bed. It was still dark, so I avoided the wall beside me. Sidling to the door, I flipped on the light to slay the bleeding cross; I then glanced over to make sure it was dead.

I put my ear to the door and held it there until I was confident no one else was awake. I then turned the knob and pulled it back, hiding behind it as if anyone in the hall would think this was your average self-opening door flapping like the jaw of a giant mute on his side. I peered into the hallway. Tears of shame and pain came back like a storm, but I kept my thunder quiet. I took a deep breath, opened the closet and, by the light of my room, took out sheets that approximated the color of the soiled ones. I dragged them back to the room like a longhaired Linus with less piano virtuosity. I stood behind the door, back to it, and retreated until it closed. I exchanged my carbon dioxide for oxygen like a climber scaling Everest and cried. Once I regained my composure, I looked to the bed.

I walked to it like a detective approaching a crime scene. I pulled off the covers and stripped the victim, throwing the soiled sheets to the floor in revulsion. I put the new ones on then stepped back, as if the mattress were a friend who wanted to know how she looked in a new dress. I nodded approval. She looked good enough to sleep on.

Now how would I dispose of the evidence?

There was the window…but I couldn’t do that to the flowers.

In disgust I kicked the dirty sheets, they slinked toward the bed as if they wished to hide beneath it. This was as a good a place for them as any, I figured, pushing them the rest of the way with my toes.

I walked back to the light switch and turned it off again, closing my lids to hide my eyes from the hideous shadow in what I knew would become a nightmarish ritual of fear. I slid across the room in the direction of the bed, falling into it as if it could save me from all (or any) of my problems. It didn’t.

In later years, I would wonder if my shame and silence on this matter had led or contributed to the debacle that would plague us in years hence, thinking that perhaps, had my family known how the disruptions disturbed me, they might have decided to return to a more rational and familiar state of affairs.

In later years, I would learn not to think such thoughts.