He was a face you’d know. The mere contours, no colors included, and you’d have the name at the ready. Hell, even the colors, no contours, of a particularly lustrous and illustrious costume, and you might know him. And he was a voice that was heard somewhere, in some part of the world, in every second. Even while sleeping, he’d be serenading thousands. He was loved so much that he became reviled by many for no reason other than being loved.
His fame was not a novelty, but very much part of what he was. He’d come to develop consciousness on the stage. A strange thing, to be a boy to whom questions are asked more than one gets to ask. How is one to grow–such a boy? How is one to feel–such a boy?
Did he live, the boy-king, with unimaginable power, able to lord his will over those too eager to please him? Or was this boy a toy, a Pinocchio, posed and prepped by those far too busy, too anxious, to ever have the requisite patience to answer a boy’s useless questions? How does it feel to speak most in the spotlight, to feel most oneself in the dark corridors, alone–a brief repose before the performance? (If we are to take Shakespeare at his word and view all the world a stage, where all fret their hour on the stage, then we all might relate too well to this dilemma, of speaking one’s most in the light, being one’s most in the dark.)
Perhaps the question I am really asking is if any king lives more happily than a man with a loving father–better to have some corner of the world that can cover and caress us, as if it were a blanket, than to live in a world that caves beneath one’s touch, caters, limply, to one’s desire.
Whether cursed by fortune, or having squandered his blessings, he was a successful and unhappy man. He was perhaps the world’s best singer, and–with no knowledge of psychology, anatomy, or the structures of education, without much experience of parenting from either angle–he was an average, perhaps even mediocre, father. But no sooner did this boy’s boy arrive than the singer’s fate, the down-turned contours of his face, began to turn. He loved unreservedly, which said a great deal, given the reserves at the singer’s command. How is one to explain this–the joy of having a child?
I was myself well-cared for, well-educated. I received praises from teachers that I could not yet have deserved. Yet even the most supreme of these tendernesses could not but be hardened by the knowledge that I held the weight of their hopes. To survive, to thrive even, by the other’s grace–even an unconditional gift, with no demands, only the smiles of encouragement–is ultimately to be tasked with the burden of loving oneself, caring for this wretched, unrelenting body. Perhaps even succeeding where predecessors have failed. Managing somehow to create.
No such guilt exists for loving as for being loved. The moment I held my own boy I felt such unrelenting drive to love for no purpose. Felt driven to work wonder in the world solely to be the boy’s magician, to cast charms enough to elicit his still toothless smile.
So, hopefully this digression may suffice to show that I have words and experience enough to capture the singer’s sorrow.
Ass-cancer. Ass-cancer, he repeated. An indelicate remark, but it would be far more indelicate to tell him that it was so. His son was dying from ass-cancer. That’s not what the doctors called it, of course. They used words that are polite because the average person can’t understand their directness. (The clinical term is pediatric colorectal cancer; it’s a highly uncommon disease, and its prognosis is unfortunately even worse for children than for adults–according to my own, non-medically-licensed, non-specialist research.)
It was hard to feel, he said, like anything other than loose bags of flesh–when imagining it. Ass-cancer. The repetition did not help him to believe it. No living being willed it, but he was dying just the same. But death, thing, is no living being. His body was refusing himself, denying his want to stay together.
Ass-cancer. The boy-king’s boy could sit on no throne. He was feeling–and these are my literary terms, because the words would would not come to the singer–the burden of disobedient flesh.
The doctors were trying to cure him, too, even as they were failing to cure his son. And how to cure this inalienable alienation, this foreboding sense that life is just wheels, strings and pulleys–by making a medicinal machine of this man’s mind?
The nature of his son’s death forebade him both the accustomed shape of the human form and also the familiar shape of grief. The boy knelt, sort-of, on his father’s lap.
As for the mother, she was no consolation to the singer. She had committed the hideous and irredeemable crime of laughter. Laughter not even in the boy’s presence. Mirth not even for the sake of easing the boy’s strife, not even to squeeze the remnants of a life soon-to-be left dry. A laugh at a friend’s pun, an utter inanity. Perhaps the mother did not even will it, this laugh. But how, then, to console this father’s relentless grief, as the chasm widened between he and wife? In the religion of their son, evidence accumulated that he was the more devout. No proof could be made, of course, in such matters of the heart. But nonetheless evidence grew, and the father felt that he could not ignore it.
That his wife could fail to support her son (according to the strictest, most draconian standards), could succumb to laughter despite her own intentions, proved only further to him the relentless, inadequate fleshliness of life. The disobedience.
As I heard him speak of his wife’s laughter, I remembered a dimly lit evening from my academy days. In the library I was reading a great scholar, whose name I cannot remember, commenting on a Medieval tale, whose name I can even less remember. In the tale, the king loses his son to war and loses himself to melancholy, until the day that the queen comes to his isolated tower. Atop this tower, as they sit beside each other, nearly the whole kingdom in their eyes, the roaring sky in their ears, she places an arm around him, coaxes him sweetly, finally revives him to his senses, succors him with the hope of fresh life, encourages him with the promise of new children. The scholar called the Medieval mentality, the wife’s speech, crass, crude, and devoid of a fundamental humanism. How is a child to be replaced?
I was myself a boy that night in the library, and accepted totally the scholar’s judgment. I do not know now if the singer’s wife had ever permitted herself to utter such a heinous thought in the singer’s presence, or even to have one. For that matter, I do not know if the singer had even, silently, accused her of having such a thought. For reasons of sanity, I did not ask.
The verb switched, suddenly, from dying to died, which I had not yet known. The reasons for accepting the interview were still largely mysterious to me. The singer had accepted only one request: mine. My preliminary hypothesis had been that he was willing to pry himself from his son, but for only one interview, in the hopes that the news-coverage might somehow find the doctor able to cure his son. Now I wonder if perhaps the request came to him in the days after his son’s death, if he felt the need to share his story for other lonely fathers, other sickly sons.
Although, over the course of the interview, he was too forlorn for angry speeches; there were no demands for solidarity. His thoughts took no planned course, and his words wandered through the bewilderment of grief. I doubt that the singer himself knew why he wished to speak to me, could not give the answer anymore than he could tell you the words that were next going to leave his lips.
As the verb switched from dying to died, a new idea began to form in the singer’s mind: how strange that such a specific arrangement of calcium could mean so much. Perhaps you could find the brightest pearls, arrange them in the constellation of his former smile. Perhaps you could find the diamonds of greatest rarity, of utmost clarity, could arrange into angular arrays the most wonderful assortment of gemstones and precious sheen, in the perfect colors of his skin. Perhaps, one might risk saying, that such a divine artificer could embed an even more beautiful image, a statue more eye-catching in every way than his son once was. Though the boy was himself a face unknown, such a model would impress even a stranger with its beauty, would warrant the travel of pilgrims.
But unless blood could flow in rivulets between each jewel, could make again the moving face–twitching, stumbling, surprising as boys always do their fathers–then even this most astounding display of light would be nothing to cast away the shadows of his heart, the lingering presence of this boy.
The idea of bringing his boy, in some form, back from the dead brought his mind to another story, prepared him to cast forth another memory. Though he himself had not read much as a boy, the singer took to reading nightly to his son. Often, he read from an assortment of Greek tales, bound into a children’s comic; and, as he told them, the tales were as new to him as they were to his son. He could remember one night, before the son’s sickness, when he read the tale of Orpheus.
The boy was not, at all, taken aback by the story. It was no surprise to him that a man could cast the world under his spell with song alone, could bring even the great guardian beast of the dead to sleep. Indeed, lying in his bed that night, his father’s voice was meant to be a lullaby; he felt the lids of his own eyes flutter then grow heavy. Into warm puddles of sleep he slipped; the syrup of his spine sunk, as Orpheus snuck past the watch-dog Cerberus.
Though his son was nonplussed, the singer was deeply struck. The father’s hands could hardly hold each page, struggling to grip the corners and flip to the next. (Before my eyes, he was shaking, again, as he retold the story.) He no longer showed the pictures as he read; the boy was asleep. He was reading this children’s story solely for himself, perhaps for the boy he once was. The singer felt such an affinity with this Orpheus who cast charms over the world, could return even his long-cold wife to spring.
Now, he thinks often of the story and feels miserable; there are no songs to return one’s son.
In sum, the son was too fleshly to be immortal, the singer not flesh enough to forget.