Nightmare No. 1
He is back home, in the States. He is visiting his parents. He sits, sunken into the leather couch in the darkening living room watching the evening news. Ukraine is strangely featured on the major networks and centers on him, in wide-angle shots taken from above, walking through the shopping mall under Independence Square in Kyiv looking for a present for his wife.
He understands that he is well known and becoming famous, but while he trusts the vast world machine’s ability to follow anyone around and capture them, as hard as he tries, he cannot remember living the moments being shown on the news, or understand the newscasters’ commentaries regarding what’s going on. He did not expect this, but surely this should be enough to convince his parents that he has gone on to become quite successful.
He is eating a hot bowl of macaroni and cheese that his mother has brought out for him. This is just a short visit. He will have to get going soon.
Zippy’s mother brings him roast beef sandwiches – she had gone to the butcher’s especially for him – on toasted bread with Hellman’s Mayonnaise. She is not happy with what he looks like, but what can she do. He is her son. With his thick black hair, she thinks, at least he beats his father in that department – the father, having gone largely bald down the middle of his head; but there is something powerful about the way he combs back what’s left on the sides and on top, dyeing the gray to raven black, including his thick eyebrows. The face, while pudgy, is manly and set in strength with fierce determination, while Zippy’s face is weak. And they are around the same heft and shortness, but there is great vigor and brawn in the father’s fat, expressing itself quite convincingly in a bull-like expansiveness of the chest that can know no barriers to his lusty will. The mother is still frightened of him and in awe. The only thing she can do to counter him sometimes is to say he looks like a Jew, which, for some reason, has the effect of stopping him in his rages and forcing him to reflect inwardly, take up the reading material closest at hand, and seclude himself in a small den off of the garage for hours.
“There are Cheez Doodles and Doritos in the cupboard, Zippy –”
“All right, Mom, I heard you the first time…”
“And you can make some onion dip if you’re –”
“Mo-o-om – thanks, thanks, I know, I know, I know…”
“And there’s ice cream, too – Rocky Road, and Chocolate Chip, and Cookies and Cream, oh, and, and Party Cake! You’ve never tried that one, I don’t think, and there’s chocolate syrup if you –”
“MO-O-O-OM!!!”
“All right. I was only trying to –”
He wills his mother to disappear.
The father comes out of the dark and stands over Zippy.
“You must re-qualify yourself. You do not make yourself famous in Ukraine. You must go to the school at night and re-qualify yourself as a teacher. And then you will teach in the high school.”
“But I’m not going to be a teacher! I was in the news. I work for an investment bank, I do political analysis and reporting for them, I –”
“So what?! That is garbage. I do not see your writing anywhere. Nobody here reads about you. When I talk to our friends in the church I am embarrassed every time they ask me what you do. I do not know what to say. Where you work, I do not really know. What is this, investment bank, what kind of a work is this, why do they need writer, why are you no published, in newspaper, or magazine, or book, so I can go to the church and show everyone and say – ‘See, see! My son!’ This is no real job. Nobody gets published in an investment bank. Do you think I am the stupid? I am businessman – I make much money. I know about that world, and you know nothing. You are no writer and you never will be. Or maybe you have no job!”
“I AM a writer, and I DO SO have a job!”
Zippy sees his father’s anger rise. He is becoming aggressive and moving toward his son. Zippy can’t believe he is being told what to do and that he seems to be bracing for a fight – against his own father.
“No, no, no!!!” The face grows furious. With each ‘no’ the father’s finger strikes out toward his son’s disbelieving expression in a violent jolt of incontestable proscription. What’s going on? This is insanity! Has he completely lost his reason?
What does he mean, Zippy thinks – go to school?; re-qualify himself? At his age? After all the time he’d put into building his career – as a writer; as a specialist on Ukraine? What does he mean? The nerve! How dare he try to control him and tell him what to do? Or bar his way back to Ukraine? He was here on a short friendly visit, out of a sense of duty to his parents; they should be glad to see him; he has to get going soon; but then he’s told that he’s not going back to Ukraine? What utter and complete nonsense! The insufferable gall!
But the father now stands over Zippy with a finger in his face. His upper lip quivers in a seething, building rage. Relentless, unstoppable, his voice churning with menacing lunatic authority, the father carries on:
“So I am telling you, and you will now listen to me and you stay here and you will go to the school. No more Ukraine for you!”
The mother, knowing it is better to stay out, peers into the room from the hall, nodding resignedly in sad assent with the father.
“No, no! I’m going back to Ukraine!”
“I said you will now live here and re-qualify yourself as a teacher and go teach in the high school!”
Zippy tries to stand but is overpowered into immobility by the sheer power of his father’s will.
Zippy swipes the hand with the pointing finger away from his face and feels he needs to follow up with some kind of physical resistance – a blow of some sort – against his father. But his other arm comes around slowly, and there is no strength in it, but weakness – weakness that has its source in paralyzing fear.
The father easily takes his son’s arm and wrenches it around his back, causing him unbearable pain. Out of terrified desperation, Zippy tries to strike his father with the free arm, but, laughing, shaking with glee, the father easily blocks him and counters with his own fist, ramming it over and over into Zippy’s face and head, his laugh reverberating like a demon’s deep in Zippy’s skull.
A terrifying white horse appears in the room and Zippy claws at it in profound desperation. For a minute, it feels as though the horse, neighing and rearing wildly on its hind legs, will rescue Zippy out of his parents’ home, but as Zippy clambers up, the father becomes the horse. The mother now stands by and sinks her wrinkled cheek into the horse’s flesh. With tears in her eyes, she caresses its flanks.
The horse throws Zippy and begins to trample him under hoof. As from Hell’s measureless chambers, the father’s deafening voice rises against his son out of the horse’s mouth in mocking whinnies.
Filed by Jack Step, for Blank-Frank, a Guest-of-this-Earth publication, December 21, 2013