The Moon

When my dad died Jacob and I were still living in our first apartment together in the upstairs of an old house. Because it was upstairs the apartment’s rooms were laid out on either side of a long hallway so that even the living room was behind a door and therefore seemed to contain something that should be hidden. In the smaller bedroom we had flopped down an old futon mattress and pushed it up against the window, and we had a cheap little stand with a big tube TV on it, and at night we would often eat dinner sitting up in the bed watching TV before retiring to the bigger bedroom to sleep. The absurdity of this arrangement felt deluxe to me. After my dad died I started getting a weird feeling when I was alone in the house. I felt something there with me. Not his ghost—not any thinking thing, or desiring thing, but something else, something leaden and uninflected: the fact of his having died. I could feel the fact of his death in the house with me, and it often seemed to be coming from the window in the small bedroom. Walking through the hall I would glance reflexively into the bedroom, and the view I had then, of the window there with the bed pushed against it, would make me feel that the fact of his death was in the house. A few weeks before he died there had been a terrible thunderstorm at night—it came through suddenly while we were watching television, and the rain started clapping against the window hard and flatly like paint and rattling the walls, and the light went rum-colored, like a sunrise, and I felt like the house might be brought into the sky. And in the middle of it all my phone lit up on the floor beneath the window. My dad was calling me. I don’t remember whether I answered then or called back later, or what it was he was calling about, and it wasn’t the last or even near to the last time I talked to him. But when I started feeling the presence of his death in the window I remembered that phone call, and when I think of it now I remember that too, as if it’s the reason it happened, as if seeing, at that frightening moment, that he was trying to reach me had sealed him there in the window—first just some piece of his spirit and then when he died some piece of his death. 

A few years ago an old man came to my mother’s door and told her he had lived in her house many years before, when he was a young professor at the university and his children were small. He said he remembered bringing his kids down from their bedrooms so they could watch the moon landing. It had never occurred to me before then to think of people watching the moon landing in that house, but of course they had. I realized people must have watched it in my own house, built over a hundred years ago, too. It felt wrong that I hadn’t thought of it before, that I hadn’t felt it, the part of them that had been sealed there by seeing that.