(Short Story I): In the Shadow of Young Men in Doubt

The Valley, 1977

What he disdained most about today’s youth was their inability to deal with the oppressiveness of the heat. To be a true citizen of ____ meant to be one who toils the land from sun up until sun down, and then tends to personal affairs until the siren-song of sleep beckoned. He also knew such self-indulgent indictments were a sure sign of his waning days. He could no longer maintain a furrow in his eyebrows, a habit formed early in his life to establish an aesthetic of virility that was betrayed by his short stature and slouched posture. He wrote less letters to the few souls he was connected to and spent more time ruminating in the dark. A clean exit required disassociation from the world.

Yet every man backed into a corner seeks one last performance and J. was no different. If his death was approaching, then he would concentrate his entire will into one moment of intense pleasure -- a moment he could recall with ease on his deathbed that his life, in fact, had a premise. Today was that day. After six years and only a few sporadic letters, he would reunite with his son.

Despite his immeasurable pride in his son, the distance between the two -- physically, culturally, emotionally -- had contributed to the pain in his heart that was dragging him nearer and nearer towards immortality. What would they talk about? Would he get into politics? Any women -- no, what a ridiculous question. The nerves of it all were nearly unbearable.

---

‘He takes after his father,’ J. thought. Both men favored silence over small talk; the former forced all parties into an introspection that was either constructive or destructive. This was far more preferable than chit-chat, which itself reflected the great sin of idleness. J. used the silence of the past ten minutes to investigate the features of his son. The area under his eyes was permanently dark, a manifestation of the effort it requires to forget one’s adolescence. His distinctive crooked nose was his mother’s. How they both longed for her to fill the ever-present recognition of loneliness. J. smiled. ‘He must have gotten the good looks from me.’

That smile quickly turned into bitterness. His son was 37 years of age, and not once had they felt compassion for each other. J. had never held him in his arms, had never admonished his friends, had never encouraged him to make something of himself. These were the defining moments of fatherhood that were lost to his incarceration. Why would his son not resent him? The lack of a father did not mean the lack of a role-model in the house -- it meant the lack of a conversationalist. His son had gotten used to keeping things to himself and things that take 18 years to build up must take 36 years to break down.

And he realized they never had a substantive conversation. J.’s release was nineteen years ago, and both men spent those subsequent years trying to mature into a rapidly shifting world. Naturally, conversations between the two never extended beyond that of the corporeal. To talk of the universal, of the spiritual, would run the risk of receiving philosophical advice, which J. would invariably loathe. No father could listen to the preaching of his posterity.

‘Son, I wanted to --.’ J.’s voice wavered upon the gaze of his son. There was a melancholy in it. They both recognized the energy this conversation required would mean it was the last. It had to be. J. sought advice from the bottle of whiskey in front of him, took a swig and then a breath. ‘I never told you about the nights spent in Naima.’

When one broaches an impossible topic of conversation, as J. was to do regarding his time in prison, one inevitably ponders that first line for an infinite amount of time. Every word is meticulously chosen, only to barely string together an unsophisticated sentence in the heat of passions. Prepared or otherwise, such words are superfluous to the receiver, for the shock of the topic requires a few minutes to digest anyways. The opening sentence, one’s magnum opus, is immediately forgotten upon arrival.

‘You know, I spent five years with the Leader there. Of course, he was then only a revolutionary. You were a baby when they locked him in prison. You only understood the shining regalia of a great man when he walked out and took up the mantle of our new nation. But I will always believe that he was most powerful those years I shared with him, isolated from the world.’ Consternation illuminated the face of his son.

J. clasped his hands and put his head down, noticing each mark imprinted on the leather of his boots. An impatience loomed over. ‘Sedition, that’s what they got him for. Most of us knew it was fraudulent but if you study the great heroes of history, it's a common trope to be attacked with these charges.’ He laughed. ‘An organizer of the violent riots -- if you were unaware.’

‘We got the newspapers in prison. His fight on the outside gave us hope here. It gave me hope for you, that you would come of age on free soil.’ J.'s eyes depicted an eerie nostalgia, a look that emerges when the head and the heart conflict on the veracity of something. ‘He was a shining reflection of our best selves, always pristine and diplomatic. When the riots broke out, there he was in the middle, telling the crowds to stand down, to go home. That’s not simply courage. That’s deep love for humanity.’

‘And how did his pupils repay him? They threw stones. They mocked him as a false prophet and disregarded his words. Worse was to come. He returned to the center of it all, where the deceased had been piled up. Can you understand it? Butchered men and women? He saw a child, perhaps twelve years old, meandering with tears in his eyes. They approached one another. He crouched over to be eye level with the young man. And that young man, with a two-ton heart, slapped him, screaming, pleaing, “bring my mother back to me! Bring my brother back!” They both stood there, recognizing each other’s affliction.’

His son’s eyebrows lowered themselves in defiance of his signature of apathy and conceit. Parables are the bridge of sorrows. ‘Go on.’

It was an unnecessary directive. J. was at his pulpit. ‘It is one thing to be deemed a failure, or to view yourself as a failure, and continue to work towards a cause in spite of it all. There is, rather, honor in that. To persist in action under those circumstances I cannot do, but I can praise it. But what I will never comprehend is having to sit in isolation for years with the thoughts he had after that encounter, haunting him every night.’

‘We were all scared in Naima. So we masked it with a scowl and a rowdiness. When he was brought in though, there was no alter-ego. He was dejected. His hair was disheveled, his clothes tattered. He remained that way for nine long years. He did not talk to us, nor us to him because we knew he could not articulate his commitments, his passions, or his despairs. Doing so would dishonor a purpose that is deeper than worldly words. If he had let out a primal scream, we would have applauded. If he cried, we would have cried with him. If he gave up the entire cause, we would have supported him. And yet he did none of those things. Perhaps our primitiveness was not the violence that brought us to jail but that unlike him, we could not bear to be alone with our own thoughts.’ J. began to unfurl his pent-up emotionality.

‘You know, as far as binaries go, that of good-evil is far too simplistic. I think they are actually quite close on the spectrum. A person can sleep having committed evil -- the world continually proves this. Rather, it is doubt that represents hell. That agony of doubt is what keeps me up at night. And our legends fell victim to its aura. Was it not doubt that drove Othello to kill Desdemona? Was it not doubt that forced Peter to renounce Jesus? It must have been doubt that drove Pericles to greed! Oh, it’s all true!’

‘On one level, our Leader must have doubted if he would have been better off living a life of normalcy, raising children, perhaps running a farm. But those only make him human. Those concerns are currency for life. Maybe he doubted if his fidelity to his life’s passion was worth the rigors of prison. But that too must have been fairly digestible. All adults must suffer the consequences of commitment. No, what I imagine was excruciatingly difficult was to know he was abandoned. That those he fought for rejected him. Those who accompanied him chastised him. And in those moments, he must have realized no one understood him. No, he...at his weakest moment, at his most vulnerable, was left alone.’

A resentment --which had thus far been tranquilized-- arose in his son. He wanted to shout, ‘you fool! You left me in the same position!’ His thoughts were irrelevant now as J. charged.

‘And he must have spent his years in isolation looking for an answer. What was his purpose? Why was God putting him through this trial? Who could he trust? And as he stared at his cell wall, only silence was pronounced. It must have been deafening, don’t you think? Imagine. Where no response was to be given from the world, from God, and yet you must still have faith in something? Give me the hangman's rope, that I can bear.’

‘I am convinced. Business is easy. Politics is easy. Death...is easy. But how omnipotent one must be to just walk forward, step by step, in this case. And the richness of it all? He was only human! He was one of us!’

His voice lowered as if the walls were closing in. ‘And you saw him address our great nation with smiles. You were proud. But he must have carried doubt every time he addressed an audience, or saw a child in the streets, or was alone. It could never go away. Yet, he still took steps. What courage! To hear that voice in your head that says, “what you are doing is wrong” and to accept it, inscribing faith deeper at every injunction -- God! It is doubt that makes humans ethereal and it is doubt we seek to eradicate at all turns.’

‘They say the Garden of Eden was bliss on Earth. And we ruined it. We fed our insecurities and deprived ourselves of solace. I reckon in Naima, he got back there. Nine years of despair was the price but any person who furnishes life off of that insatiable hunger for doubt is a transcendent being beyond you or I.’

His son grimaced and softly spoke. ‘I have work I need to get back to.’ J. was clever enough to understand falsities of impatience and condescension. His son put his cap on, and thought to himself: ‘How stylistic it is to use jail to teach me something. Funny man has no stories of his own to tell, so he resorts to those he reads about.’ They shook hands, and stared into each other’s eyes one last time. ‘Goodbye,’ J. said, with a nod.

The son walked across the house, out the door, and far into the fields. The only thing visible now was the white cap on his head that stood out against the dark backdrop of the night. J.’s throat swelled, his lips trembled. ‘I have more to say.’ He began to breathe in enough air that would let him shout. No. Better not.

The Leader may have understood doubt but there was something worse that he never fought against. That was the feeling of being a burden.