It was a horror, albeit a slow, conversational one.

Dear Trevor,

O Carl, I miss you, too. Yours is a face that’s smoked 10,000 cigarettes. You told the same stories of closing deals on suburban split-levels until I wanted to punch you in the mouth. You were unable to make even the simplest decision. And you were the best friend I had since I died.

Carl is still in there, Trevor. Right where I left him. I stayed by him for what must have been many days, trying to get him to come back with me. He simply couldn’t decide what to do. So he did nothing. And now, like Martin, he’s turning back into nothing. Or into compost. His elements are coming unlimbed and unchained.

I know what happened to Martin now, because Carl showed me. It was a horror, albeit a slow, conversational one. The kind of horror that might happen over an afternoon of television and sandwiches. It was just as final and just as eternal.

I’ll tell you more tomorrow, Trevor. I’ll tell you everything.

Dad

I’ve seen some horrors, Trevor. And I need to go see them again.

Dear Trevor,

I’m back. I haven’t even ready your letters yet. I just collected them from the post office and thought I had better write you to let you know I’m still alive, or whatever the proper term is. I’m here, at least.

I’ve seen some horrors, Trevor. And I need to go see them again. I’ve seen the fate of my kind. I found Martin. He is there in the deep shade of the woods and he will likely stay there, beneath the moss. I can’t speak of it anymore today.

I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Right now, I need to put my hand on the arm of a chair and feel something solid, or as solid as I can find in this half land.

I need to rest, Trevor, because I need to go back into the woods.

Dad

We got a dog yesterday. I drew a picture of it.

Dear Dad,

I hope you’re gone. And I hope you come back. And I hope you’re still there. And I hope I never hear from you again. And I hope I hear from you again every day.

I hope you get this letter and I hope you never get this letter.

If you get it, you’ll know that we got a dog yesterday. I drew a picture of it.

Mom picked me up after basketball practice and had Rhonda in the car with her. We went straight to the animal shelter. The shelter is split up into two sections—cats and dogs. We were let in by a woman named Cassandra—she had like three piercings in her lip, but still talked mostly normal. She took us behind a counter and then opened a big metal door. As soon as the door opened, the room behind her exploded in barking. The room was long and narrow, lined in three levels of wire cages on both sides. Cassandra told us to take our time, look around, and ask questions.

Rhonda had her book of dog breeds with her. She would walk up to a cage, look at the dog inside, then flip through the book as if she were some kind of botanist or something. No, wait. A botanist is a plant scientist. What do you call a dog scientist? A doganist?

I’m pretty sure there weren’t any purebred dogs in there. They all looked like different kinds of mutts to me. Some were little and hairy. Some were big and hairy. They were all loud, as if each one thought, “If I’m the loudest one, maybe they’ll pick me.”

One thing that’s weird about mutts is that they all have tails that curl upwards. There must be some kind of dog breed with upward-curling tails that gets around a lot, if you know what I mean.

We looked around for about half an hour and finally got the choice narrowed down to two—one was a black dog with pointy ears that was kind of medium-sized. The other was a little, dirty white dog with hairy legs. Mom didn’t like that one, because he had one goopy eye. Cassandra kept saying, “Don’t worry about his eye. That’s just a temporary condition.” Mom would nod and smile, and then whisper under her breath, “How does she know it will go away?”

So we picked the black dog. The lady referred to her—it’s a girl dog—as a shepherd-lab. A schlep, for short. That’s what I call it. I wanted to name it, “Schlep.” Rhonda said we should name it Cassandra, because I’m pretty sure Rhonda thinks of herself as someone who will get piercings when she gets old enough. We argued about names the whole way home. The dog sat in the back seat, between Rhonda and me. First time I can remember that we didn’t fight over who got shotgun.

I’ll write more tomorrow. Right now, I want to go play with Schlep or Cassandra or Dog X or whatever its name is.

Your son,

Trevor

He told us we were all winners just for coming out.

Dear Dad,

I like your drawing of Julia. I’ve got a picture for you, too. Here’s another drawing of Mr. Schick, blowing The Whistle of Satan, as I like to call it. You’ve never heard a sound so shrill as that shrieking whistle.

I started basketball tryouts yesterday. They go this week. Then, at the end of the day on Friday, Schick will tell us who made the team and who didn’t. Yesterday he told us we were all winners just for coming out. Then he had us run a set of lines and told us we were the most pathetic bunch of slackers he’d ever seen. He seemed more sincere on the last statement than the first.

I’ve already resigned myself to not making the team. When I’m cut on Friday, it will be a relief and I won’t have to come to these stupid practices anymore. Then I can go home after school and play X Box. Or maybe I can finally start taekwondo lessons.

I know all about your Dad dying at the gravel quarry. Mom’s dad died when she was a kid, too. Burst appendix. According to Mom, her dad was a real jerk. All this dying doesn’t feel so much like a joke to me as a curse. Sometimes, I wonder if it means I’ll die when I have kids. I also wonder if it means Mom is gonna die soon. Then I’d be an orphan. What would happen to me then? Rhett is a senior, so he’d probably just live on his own. Me and Rhonda would have to live with someone, though. Maybe Aunt Fredi, but I think she’s an atheist, so Mom would probably never let us go there. She probably has in her will that we go to live with some church friend. Hopefully it would be with someone whose house doesn’t smell weird.

Some of the houses of church people have weird-smelling houses. Like Mrs. St. Claire. She’s got a really fancy house, as jammed full of knickknacks and doilies as a house can be. If there’s a flat surface, you can bet Mrs. St. Claire has put a doily on it. And there’s not a doily in the place that doesn’t have some porcelain ballerina or glass elephant on top. You can’t walk into the place without breaking something. Last time we went there, Rhonda pushed me and I knocked a glass clown off its doily. It’s little umbrella broke off. The grown-ups were all in another room, but I still I freaked out and started looking through drawers for some glue. Rhonda told me to relax. She opened a window and just chucked the broken clown into the bushes. Then she took a little glass panda from a group of other glass pandas and put it on the bare doily.

“Mrs. St. Claire will never notice,” said Rhonda. “Let’s go get some chips.”

Rhonda is the smartest person I know. Or at least that’s what she tells me.

Your son,

Trevor

It makes me wonder if God ever kills people simply as a joke.

Dear Trevor,

Maybe your mom just wants to get you a dog. I’d like you to have a dog. Maybe your mom senses that you are kind of lonely and that a dog would help. Maybe it’s not about her at all.

By the way, Chairman Mao was the leader of Communist China back in the 60s and 70s. You’ve seen pictures of him wearing a little cap with a red star on the front. And no, I never worked for him.

I drew a picture of Julia. She always looks like she is about to realize something, but never quite does. As if she’s thinking, “I just realized—oh wait. No, never mind. I guess I didn’t.”

I think that Julia waited all her years down on earth for her life to get started. And then, just when it did—just when she got married and became part of a family—she died. It makes me wonder if God ever kills people simply as a joke. I don’t think He does, but there does seem to be evidence that He has a dark sense of humor.

Here’s an example: My father died when I was young—just like you, I guess. He immigrated to the States as a young man, because work in the coal mines back at home had dried up. He worked in mines in Montana, but the work was so dangerous he wanted to stop before it killed him. So he moved to Tacoma and got a job in a gravel quarry, where he was crushed to death in a small landslide. Funny, eh? A real knee slapper.

I had a full life up until I died, but it was only half done. And there were many parts of it that were only half lived. I had a mess of wonderful, noisy children. I loved and was loved by a happy, bossy, beautiful woman. I started a business and had it going in a direction I was beginning to like. And all along this thing was waiting right outside of my peripheral vision. One day, I turned my head a bit to the left and there it was. And six months later, here I was.

I’ve got to get out of here. I need to get on with things again somehow. What should I do, Trevor?

Dad

This is my terrible Christmas gift to you.

Dear Trevor,

The boat came and went today. I’m still here. I can’t get on it.

Gordon was sitting with me on my porch, running his fingers through his longish, gray hair, when we heard the sound of the train. He jerked rigid, then grabbed my leg. “You hear it, too, don’t you? That means she’s coming. That means I have a choice to make. It is time to act. Time for the experimentum crucis.”

“Eh?”

“The crucial experiment. Literally, the experiment of the cross.”

I followed Gordon to the train depot, where we could already see the old train screeching to a halt. A minute later, the door opened and the newcomers started stepping off, about a dozen in total. Like always there were three basic types. Some climbed off the train and wandered directly into the woods, as if the trip was an orchestrated camping trip. These ones never said much. A young blonde woman—probably 25—walked by me on her way toward the trees. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a college lecture, with her brow still furrowed from a debate.

“Where are you going?” I asked her. She turned toward me, startled a bit by the sound, but when she saw me, she shook her head. I mean she shook it as if she were clearing out cobwebs. She frowned even more and walked past me toward the trees. When she reached the nearest one—a rough-barked Douglas fir, she put her hand on it and stopped there, as if catching her breath. She stroked the bark, looked back my way for the briefest of seconds, then stepped past the Doug fir into the shadows.

The second type were the wanderers. The people like me. They look completely baffled by the experience. A woman with unkempt hair and bright red lipstick almost asked me a question, but all she could manage was, “Do you?” She turned a bit frantically away and  followed the rest of the wandering crowd. As she walked, she kept trying to smooth down her hair.

As always, there were a few Crazies who led the way. The wanderers always follow them right down to the dock. I always follow them, too.

There were three Crazies this time—a fat Hispanic man in a freshly pressed white shirt, a thin-faced old woman with straight, steel-grey hair that fell to her shoulders, and a young man with rectangular glasses and a huge smile. This young man—I’d put him at about 25, too—led the way today. He shouted a laugh when he stepped off the train and practically ran for the dock. Gordon huffed along behind him with the others. I followed, farther back. It’s funny how people follow someone who is sure of himself, even if they have no idea where he is going. That young man would have made an incredible salesman. He sold his destination.

When we reached the dock, the boat had not yet arrived.

Gordon had a small, ratty suitcase with him. “Going somewhere?” I asked him. He smiled grimly without looking my direction. He was staring with everyone else, out into the fog. “What’s in the bag?” I asked.

“Very little,” he said to the fog. “Mostly just scribbles. A few pencil stubs.” He paused. “Am I the only one with luggage?”

I didn’t answer, because the boat arrived.

I know I complain about how little my five senses work in this half land, but when that boat came in, I wished I could have cut them off completely. The sight of all that blood, the smell of all that blood—I wanted to run back to my little cabin and climb under the covers.

The woman captain looked through her beaten, puffy eyes as she eased that wreck of a boat alongside the dock. The young man with rectangular glasses grabbed a line from the dock and tossed it expertly around a cleat on the boat’s deck. With a few quick spins of his wrist, the boat was tied off. He jumped from the dock to the deck without hesitation.

“Here I go,” whispered Gordon. He moved with the crazies toward the boat. When it was his turn, the young man smiled at Gordon’s little suitcase and said, “Can’t bring that, Uncle. Toss it away and climb aboard.”

“Ahh, it’s just a few tiny things.”

“A few tiny things that can’t come with you. Hurry and toss it. I want to get going!”

I rushed up to Gordon’s side. “Going where?” I asked. I think I sounded a bit desperate.

“You know!” the young man shouted. “Everyone knows! Every tongue declares our destination! Now climb aboard or cast off.”

Gordon moved to step on. The young man blocked his way, nodding at Gordon’s bag. When Gordon hesitated, the young man yanked the line from the cleat and threw it back onto the dock. The woman captain looked at me. I could not hold her gaze. It was so terrible. She was so beaten, so bruised, so swollen everywhere.

I turned and ran—yes, I ran—into the Laughing Gull. Sung-Hee had coffee waiting. She was ready for the confused crowd. I grabbed a napkin and, using the coffee, painted this portrait of the captain’s battered, feminine face.

This is my terrible Christmas gift to you.

Dad