The Man at the Window
The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.
My father scoots his chair closer to the window, following the sun on cold days, a heated trail. Clouds bloom and bother but the sun is forever. An airplane moves from left to right, east to west, right on time, dragging its ragged breath behind it. Then a bird whispering at the window. A siren winding up and down, faucets dripping in unison. My father tells me that my mother is across the street, waving to him in an unfriendly way. “Can’t you see her?” he asks. When she lies in bed and won’t get up, he phones me and I tell him that she has been dead for four years, and he says in frustration, “Somebody better tell her that.” My father’s business is to connect things, to make things add up, to live by habit. He repeats his name every day: Walter, Walter, Walter. Most of his life he was called Chub. He was known to be good with a hammer.
Some days are nights for him, shutters banging, the scrape of sharp against dull, rough talk in the kitchen, the constant murmur of conspirators plotting ways to get in and what to take out. He argues with the noises, demanding recognition, claiming to be a man armed and dangerous. I have put five kinds of locks on his front door but the shadowy bastards have keys.
Once he could eat the world with his eyes, but now he blinks and blinks, his hands flutter and seek. He’s a hologram of flight. Now it is 2014 and my mother is baking bread, now it is 1943 and he’s on a ship in the South Pacific, now it’s 1951 and the Pontiac’s transmission is broken again, then it’s 1962 and numbers are stuck in his head: 22, 6, 32, 18. The blonde who calls herself Betty sits on the steps of the library and hikes up her skirt on a Sunday afternoon in 1949. Today is yesterday.
“Bub Lamb left his dog tags on the kitchen table the other night,” he reports, testing me.
“I don’t think Bub got home from overseas,” I say.
He says, “The son-of-a-bitch still owes me a hundred dollars. That’s the way it is with those Irish Catholics.”
Words are a comfort to my father. He speaks them without context: ricochet, chiffon, hoochie-coochie, angel food, Early Girl, toboggan, rhubarb, kestrel, Nishnabotna, sugar moon, bivouac. If only he could find his miter box.
My father sings “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and a tune by Patti Page, something about a dog, a window, and wagging. On the best days, he can see his voice.
The chair is maroon, his favorite color. He sits wrestling with the idea of distance. How far from his house to the grocery store? How far from now to before? He needs to believe that if you can’t smell a thing, or touch or hear a thing, there is no thing. His eyes have turned to cotton, his ears have become his eyes. “Listen, the geese are flying. Listen, someone is playing a piano. Hell, sometimes I can hear the sun going down.” I always pause to make sure. The window goes up and the window goes down.
He tells me that the naked woman has come back again. She never knocks, just struts right in. She’s always eating a juicy orange. She sits on his lap, her nipples tickle his cheeks and chin. “Sometimes she slaps me. What a tease! She says she knows what I want.” He blushes when he says this. He says she is soft as moonlight. I say let her keep coming then. He says her name is Twyla and that once she left her baby but he misplaced the baby and never found it. He hears the baby in the cupboard so I look: ten cans of baked beans, a dusty Pepsi, enough butterscotch pudding to last a lifetime, but no baby. I’m always looking, playing along, making room for my mother, checking to see what the county sheriff left on the steps. The footprints in the snow are my father’s.
My father walks the house, measured steps through the humble chicane of lamps, coffee tables, and shoes, never stumbling. The television is on but the sound is off. He’s hired a woman to come by every day, but she is bossy and can’t make good coffee. She brings him sweets, she gives him hell for not taking a bath or not eating the goulash that she left. I know that one day he will walk to the window, push the pane harder and harder until it cracks. He will prove a point to the window. And one day, a passerby will remark that the man at the window has vanished, and they will assume the window has won. The window will know better.
Gordon W. Mennenga grew up in a small Iowa town and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published in The North American Review, Epoch, Hamilton Stone Review, and other journals. His monologues have been featured on NPR and produced by the Riverside Theatre Company. He often teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. If he ever finishes his novel, it will be titled Warm the Knife.