Fiction, Daniel Dias Callahan
For me, the essence of life is how we handle our loneliness.
—László Kardos
Yes, I swear—
We are only ever perfect at birth. The moment we leave the womb for a split second. Then the trials begin.
1. As a child—before this condition of my eyes stripped the walls bare—my parents swaddled me in affection. We did everything together. At eight, we painted the gray walls of my childhood bedroom orange. Orange is a powerful color—one of protection and warmth—drawn from the sun. The trim we painted green—my parents choosing, to inspire creativity and calmness—drawn from the tree. When they tucked me in and turned down the lights, it was like falling asleep in Predigtstuhl. By age nine, an angel, to whom I prayed to every night, hung from a nail and guarded each cardinal direction of the room full of toy tractors, diecast cars, and Milkbrötchen. By eleven, makeshift posters of ripped-out pages from Kicker lived beneath the angels and crowded the walls. Those nights I fell asleep surrounded by the white, red, and blue of Die Bayern: Beckenbauer, Uli, and Schwarzenbeck. When I was twelve—I might’ve still been eleven—my life began to blur. I looked out my window—I remember there was a commercial on the radio, how un-Hollywood this moment was—and saw: Clouds had given way to a complete and total blue and the trees were indistinguishable from one another, their canopy melted into a soft line separating heaven from earth. Terrified, I prayed until I fell asleep. When I woke up, the orange walls mixed with the green trim and the metallic angels and the colorful kits of my favorite footballers into a beige, a brown. Outside was a blinding white-blue or an empty black grey depending on the sun, and I was forced to remember a forgotten path from repetition to walk to school.
2. In the classroom, crucifixes, rosaries, and clocks disappeared from walls. The entire school: a shade of white or beige. Sight became a prison.
3. At first, I didn’t cry. For God doesn’t give you that which you cannot handle, so I was taught to believe. I went through the motions of living in this world without detail, fumbling my way to and from school. I prayed and I prayed for this condition to go away and the world to return to normal. As days became weeks and months, normal became what my life had become.
4. Eventually, the school board caught on. They called me into the head office where the old nun used recent homework assignments as proof I was dumb. They asked me why my work had amounted to nothing but nonsensical words and directionless scribbles. Was something going on at home? Was I upset? Did I think about hurting anyone or anything? I told the old nun what I’ve told you. She believed my tale, my ongoing trial. She said, God works in mysterious ways.
She cited 2 Corinthians 5:7:
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
The old nun and the school director called my parents—who didn’t believe them, who didn’t believe me. They brought me home, where they took turns holding up fingers in front of the living room wall, quizzing me on how many they held up, as if subject to their mockery.
I said, 2. They said, It was 3.
I said, I don’t know. They said, It was 5.
I saw their arms become part of the wall. It was then
I began to suspect my life was over. It was then
I cried.
5. I continued to cry as a thirteen and fourteen-year-old, as my parents fought. My swaddled life unraveled. They cried their fatigue, traded blame and guilt, decided whose genes failed me. Failed us, my mom screamed a lot back then.
A year passed and my parents divorced. My life was devoid of what mattered as I was left alone between monotone walls. I began to lose track of if my eyes were open or closed.
Neither Werner Maria Kitzler or Amelia Heidi Kitzler could handle the blame and responsibility of raising their disabled child. They were young. Only eighteen and twenty years older than I was then. I cannot blame them.
6. Although, for many years I floated. Including all the years I lived with my grandmother, Maria Adelaide Charlotte Bauer, who spent her life savings caring for me. She took me to western doctors and opticians, and eastern acupuncturists and herbalists. Because of her, I learned I had what a doctor called visual amnesia. His definition never fit perfectly, but it was the only diagnosis close enough, so that’s what my condition became: an incomplete processing of the optic nerve; likely the result of head trauma. Did I see the poster of Beckenbauer’s goal against the Soviets in the 1966 World Cup but then my mind lost that information between my eye and my brain? I existed in sort of an in-between.
Sundays, my grandmother took me to confession. And just as every doctor failed when presented to diagnose an unseen condition, every priest did not fail to ask, When I thought God wasn’t watching, when He couldn’t see under the covers, did I sin?
The first confession, I was confused. The last confession, I was sure they hoped I’d confess: Yes. It was the only sin, the only bit of my life they were concerned with absolving. They said, Blindness is your punishment.
7. The years with my grandmother passed, and so did she, when I was 23. She spent whatever inheritance would’ve been left for my mother on me. I was unemployable and she died like the field of a starving farmer.
8. Over the next thirty, forty years, I fumbled my way through my grandmother’s home. I found work and lost work and found work again. I cycled through answering calls, sitting on the couch listening to tv, and withering away at graveyard shifts and unwanted jobs. The human body is remarkable. I learned to live this monotonous white-washed life devoid of detail for so long it became normal. I forgot there was another way, the way I longed for as a child, and that to whomever walked past me, I was the oddity. Forgetfulness was kind in that regard. Until my dreams returned. As a child, I swear I dreamt of the future, and there I was alone in my grandmother’s home, waking up to the same dream every night.
9. I’m in a house I don’t recognize—you only dream of houses you know, how you only dream of faces you’ve seen—but I know, somehow, to be my home. There is Sonje, I know to be my dog, who begins the dream with a paw on her nose. She leads me through this figment universe, past walls full of pictures: me as a child holding hands with my grandmother, sitting on my grandfather’s lap; Sonje laying in a gold field; a woman—I feel like she’s Miriam, that we married—setting fishing line, looking right at me; and there’s a photograph of me, I’m covered in a shawl, laughing. In this hallway, I reach for Sonje, for the pictures, want to feel their materiality and memorize the course, wooden, spackled textures. But they’re just ahead of my outstretched arm. I chase Sonje outside, the door opens, and I glimpse uneven treetops piercing a cloud-riddled sky. I step out back. I wake up.
10. And then, at fifty-three and at 10:53, I was in a car accident. I held construction signs by the roadway, directed cars away from the other workers. A car, whose driver didn’t see me, continued straight into me, and I couldn’t differentiate the car from the sea of grey concrete. In the hospital, the dream continued. I had ventured so far into its world, I’d become numb to the familiar details on the walls, the spruce and ash and hyacinths surrounding the property, the dark metal fence partitioning off the pool, and even the ripples across the pool when it struck me. The warmth of the sun. I saw the yellow disk summit a far-off mountain. I saw through the scope formed by my hand—like I did as a boy—the sun as a vacuum. It left a hole in my vision that I saw each time I blinked in this dream.
I repetitiously blinked, the black hole faded into a series of tubes, machines, and a nurse by my side. I couldn’t register where I was. I looked out the window, and the nurse said, He’s awake, but there it was:
11. My vision, for the first time since I was a boy, was filled with dense detail in every direction. Through the hospital window, as if looking down from the pulpit at God’s good creation, I saw every tree top, mountain peak, undulating valley, and all the fog still left to burn off.
12. As though life had returned to me, I spent the next year recovering from my other injuries. Everywhere I looked, I saw. And I saw the mess my grandmother’s home had become. My condition blinded me to the dilapidation and filth I lived in: trash littered throughout the house, empty wrappers and instant-dinner boxes, half-drunk water bottles, beer, and soda cans crunched beneath each step. The counters were covered in sludge, likely tomato sauce, coffee, and gravy, cheese congealed to plates and the dining table, clothes I once swore off as lost, I found as I waded through the rubbish. This was the man I had become. Plastic bags were caught on light fixtures, paper bags still had relish and mayonnaise I never saw to put away. I was squalor amongst dirt-caked window sills and walls. I’ve spent the time since my reawakening cleaning up messes, I thought I already cleaned up. My life has become a loop. In the two minutes it takes to wait for the water to boil for coffee, and the twelve minutes it takes to wash today’s—and chip away at the past years’—dishes, I’ve dreamt about returning to what was. I watch TV and am lured by the adverts. Behind each ad, I imagine the work. Each individual product is backed by a team abiding by core principles they learnt in present positions, school, and from management. Each ad is packed with these ideas to make the most of my attention for thirty seconds. They are so densely packed with detail; I find myself exhausted after thirty minutes. Three, four minutes of ads, followed by seven minutes of my show, which aren’t much of a break with their disguised ads for toothpaste, sodas, furniture, and clothing, the background detail, and plot foreshadowing. Everything is so dense. For forty-something years, my brain didn’t have to process so much simultaneous information. There is space for us. No space for me to actually rest, how I used to. I create more mess to keep myself busy: punch holes in the drywall, throw vases into the sink, rip clothes off hangers, and piss wherever I want like an animal. And then go on walks to escape my own mess, but outside is no better. Bottles and wrappers pool in every treewell along the sidewalk, parks are a collage of blue and grey tarps, streams have become concrete, and lakes: green. Boys and girls tuck away beneath shop awnings, women curl into entryways, and men collect cigarette butts. I want to end this so I can return to how my life was.
I bang my head against the wall.
Nothing.
13. I take out a gun, press it beneath my chin, tongue the muzzle, but I can’t.
14 The lonesome repetition of the amnesia years passively took my ability to have a family of my own, my chance of meeting Miriam, of having a child to name and love, how my parents once loved me before the condition drove us apart. I held out hope for a remedy because I was stubborn and had faith. But what was my reward? Living is imperfection. I can’t remember a moment when nothing was wrong. Before my visual amnesia, it was the eczema. It was a broken arm before that. And now, without my visual impairment, it is the longing to return. The only chance life is perfect, and to experience love, is the moment of conception. Then the trials begin and love abandons us.
And so, that is why I am before you today: I ask to be granted an exception, to be aided in my death. I ask to be granted an end to these trials. For fifty years, I dreamt of seeing all this. But this—this is all too much. There is no space to live, no space to exist. I am suffocated by detail’s desire to consume. And through my death, I hope that heaven is the silence of a world masked in monotonous white, a reprieve from the tedious and overwhelming, with space so I can sleep, stir with dreams of following Sonje, chasing her through an imaginary house, and living in the memory of a life that was taken from me while I floated through this one. What separates the world of blurred and blended absence from that of detail, of density aside from living? Death, perhaps just a chance. For God is my judge, and let him judge if I gave this life all I had.
—Johann Daniel Maria Kitzler
Daniel Dias Callahan is a writer from Sacramento, California. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of San Diego. His work has appeared in California Quarterly, Sonora Review, and Thin Air Magazine, among other publications. He is a former Poetry Editor for the online journal, Invisible City.
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