My Life in Quartet

A career spook recounts his life in a posthumous record for his daughter.

My Life in Quartet

 

 

 

Part 1: Strings

 

As an opening salvo, mine was pretty lousy. 

Mom dead. Dad gone. Me somewhere in between. If I stop to think about it, I become trapped in a foreign prism of swirling heartache, which is why I have only now retconned it. When you know you won’t sleep another night, cook another meal, or even make your stop, you can rationalize a bit of disturbing introspection. 

Whether my mom was simply too weak, or I was her curse, I will never know. What I will know is that no matter my own strength, my father is still my curse. Even as I sit here with the truth, I am not set free. Only death can set me free. 

In hastily constructing this narrative�"as I sit between the repetitive rollicking of wheel on rail�"I have come to the realization that the near end will not be contrived.

The strings began when I turned 18. The now fleeting image of my grandmother handing me a letter from the government. What it contained neither shook my world nor amended by perception of my father because my world never involved him, and I never knew him. Nonetheless, I was intrigued in vain. 

Its verbiage told me that my father was a spy. 

Decommissioned with honors. 

Silent honors.

They gave him a private ceremony, a plaque he can never have, and a pat on the back. They gave me a letter. They didn’t give me my dad back. 

He’s out there, in recluse no doubt. He swore to never find me. Never lead them to me. 

Here I am. 

My grandmother and I ate dinner (contently bland pasta), and I retired to my room while she watched a show from her golden years. 

Even though I hate music, and melody, and pattern, I began, though my intuition’s ear, hearing the dull sawing and occasional piercing chords of a distant violin. I went to school the next day, and never looked back. 

Until now.

__

 

Part 2: Flute

The dichotomy of the flute began when I graduated college. 

In three years, I did what most struggle to do in four: graduate magna cum laude from Princeton with a degree in Political Science and a minor in Russian Language and Culture. 

The only slightly nostalgic flute’s hum was swiftly quelled by the incursion of the government. 

Again. 

In its place was the passionately unmelodic harmony of a plug-in fan blowing a flute as an equivalent. As usual, the government wanted me to do for them what they could never do for me: help.

 I said, thanks, but no. 

Follow in your father’s legacy they said. 

And level an already ruinous life? 

No. 

They tried to buy me. They tried to tell me how the world worked. They tried to parent me. 

Too late is what I said, in less ambiguous rhetoric.

__

Part 3: Brass

 

The brass reared itself in a moment of pure chance and levity on the eve of my loveless marriage’s anniversary. 

As usual, I was aimlessly wandering the city streets, tempting my fate by eyeing the propellant of booze. I knew one sip would ignite a recursion, probably terminating in a ditch. 

Again. 

But as luck would have it (and this is the only part I take conviviality in), the synchronous blaring of a taxicab’s horn ushered in a whole new fugue of noise, vaguely resonating as music into the quickening thump of my heart. 

Before I could run through my tarnished playbook of social interactions, the face in the back popped out the cab’s quivering window and beamed at me. Phineas, the head yelled, cut short by its realization of error. 

One of my father’s many aliases no doubt. The only good the government did was tell me he was based out of the very city we both lived in. 

How considerate. 

No matter though, my father is an alias to me.

 Even though I previously said I found humor in this cataclysm, by now, I do not. But time waits for no man, and I have not the will nor the time to edit this account, for that horn-turned-recursive trumpet is what killed me. 

Well, my father killed me, but that taxicab loaded the gun and aimed it. 

__

Part 4: Percussion

 

The percussion started on a delayed symphonic track to the brass. 

Slowly, as the night grew darker and my mind more frantic, the oddly calming drumbeats in my chest grew ever louder and more resonant.

Resonant. 

I knew what it meant. 

I didn’t like it, but I knew it. 

I didn’t try to go home, I didn’t try to hide, I didn’t even try to do it myself. All I did was try to see her.

That’s how I wound up on the 2 a.m. train amongst misguided but altogether harmless youth, overworked moms, and degenerate hustlers. 

My father fit none of those categories, yet he was more oblique than any of them; more present than ever before. 

How ironic.

 Simply from a lapse of concentration or perhaps judgement, I neglected to mention the unsigned letter I received 6 months ago, simply reading: 

“Love is what I could never show, but always give. Death is what I could never give, but I can show you. Although I’ll never see to it, you won’t be like me. You won’t get trapped. If I could do it all over again, I would. But I’d lose you. For me, death will be a long-awaited remedy to life on the run. For you, death will be the distant cleanser of my misgivings. We’ll meet when we meet. On the other side.” 

Coward, I thought.

 That’s why when I saw the long black coat and the low-brimmed hat, I knew he had lied to me.

 Again.

All at once, the quartet of futile belonging beckoned me to oblivion. I would not get to see her. Time to face the music. 

As I try to compile the last remnants of my psyche onto this page �" through my life’s quartet �" I cannot help but feel a relentless sense of determinism. I never knew my mother, yet I killed her, and my father never knew me, yet he will kill me. 

The man in the coat and the hat is approaching me. He won’t shoot me, not on a train, so he’ll probably use a knife. 

This will hurt. 

That’s the truth though, isn’t it? 

The truth of the matter is this: through a cataclysm of events, my father’s friend �" fellow Frogman �" saw the old man in me, on the sidewalk, and made contact. 

The kiss of death. 

Now I’m connected, inexorably, to my father. 

S**t. 

My father told me that death will be a distant freedom, but in this moment, I must protest. Never believe dad, lesson learned.

No use now though.

Right now, death is the man in the coat and the hat marching towards me with a knife in his hand. 

__

 

Alice. Alice, if you are reading this, I love you more than I could show. More than you will know. Make sure when they ask, that you give them the above.

This is just for you:  I must tell you that I have deceived you. I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s imperative that you know one thing: