Bill Ayers

( Apologies to m.l.)

One of the most mind-altering and significant events of the last century took place on a makeshift creaking bed in a small cabin in an isolated stretch of a sun-scorched California valley as dawn was breaking many, many years ago. To this day no one has ever revealed to those not present what actually took place.

“You’re hardly trying,” Millie said to me last week on the phone.

Come on, I think – but don’t say out loud. I send her a food package every week — good stuff, Whole Foods, all the things she likes — and I visit whenever I can get away, which is at least once a month, and sometimes more. I leave money, I leave books. It’s not enough. Never enough.

I am, I said. Trying I meant.

“You’re my brother,” she went on, “and if I can’t count on you…”

I’m trying, I said again, but she wasn’t convinced.

I’ve got a job for Christ’s sake, and my last year-end evaluation wasn’t exactly a happy moment for me: “You seem distracted,” Sims had said flatly. “Exhibit more energy with clients. Focus.”

Exhibit more energy? That job has been sucking the life out of me for seven years — 8 years in July — and I’ve burned energy I never knew I had. Physical. Mental. Psychic. Spiritual. Maybe the key word here is “exhibit.” Okay, I’ll be the Energizer Bunny, I’ll be Krazy Kat, I’ll be Clarence the Clown. I’ll exhibit energy.

I’ve learned to address Sims with accurate and demonstrable information — he always wants the facts. How can you quantify that? Or, how could we measure that? That’s his mantra. I’ve learned to speak to him in units; he speaks to me in froth and abstraction. I should have told Sims to go fuck himself, but he’d have automatically ordered me to quantify it — beyond my job description I’m afraid, worse than unpleasant. Unpleasant is my default on the job, so I agree with his evaluation and vow to improve.

The divorce hasn’t helped, and I never wanted it. Okay, yes, the marriage was shitty, a catastrophe almost from the start, and I’m pretty much the problem. It was what they call a loveless marriage, pretty much sexless although Margo is almost 6, so there is that. She’s not taking it well — wetting the bed, sucking her thumb again, things like that. “She’s regressed to a safer place in order to gather strength for what’s to come,” her therapist had said solemnly in an attempt to reassure. At that moment I felt like asking the therapist if I could sit on her lap and hold her bosom, but I simply muttered that I understood.

Kate wants me to man-up and move on. “Stop whining,” she said to me on the phone this morning when I told her I couldn’t pick up Margo from school. I didn’t think I was whining, but I said I would. Stop whining that is.

“And that check for after-school had better be on time this month,” she continued without a breath, without a pretense of hearing me.

It is, I said. It will be, I mean.

Here’s how I see it: Sims needs me to generate more business and more money, get the big cash register singing; Kate needs me to be a cheerful adjunct daddy figure with a steady flow of happy cash; Margo needs Kate and me to be a couple again, to fly back in time and magically annul the divorce and everything that followed; and Millie needs to get out of prison with her sanity intact and a bit of future worth having in hand, and in the meantime — in the 25 years to life meantime I mean — she needs me to be a connection, a fragile thread of hope.

I can see each of them clearly, I can agree with them all. I can even quantify it:

• Margo wants my love.

• Kate wants my balls.

• Sims wants my body and what little is left of my brain.

• Millie wants my life.

And what do I want? I want everything, and I want nothing at all.

Tom thinks that every Viking ever born, by design or desire, by chance or by choice, is a complete fuck-up. Complete, he says. No exceptions.

So a picture appears in the papers this morning—a strapping chunk of a man with a broad fierce face, his horned helmet covering a solid block of head, his clothes fashioned from some beast who’s still vaguely recognizable and who appears to be only recently dispatched or perhaps not even entirely dead yet, his muscled body in motion, shimmering and rippling as he swings over the side of his ship with a sword the size of a tree in his left hand, blue eyes flashing, red mouth open in some sort of exuberant cry I imagine—and a positive accompanying story about the fellow’s accomplishments: the extensive plundering along the coast including a meticulous accounting of cities ransacked, homes pillaged, cattle fleeced, graineries emptied, youth kidnapped, woman swagged, virgins despoiled, villages looted and left smoldering. It’s really quite a story: lavish and awed and congratulatory, filled with complex characterization and vivid description, compelling and convincing. And wonderful.

I delicately place the paper, the picture, the story next to Tom’s coffee so he’ll see it as soon as he comes downstairs. A complete fake, he says the moment he picks it up. A piece of contemptible puffery placed in the unsuspecting paper by the puny but aggressive pro-Viking lobby.

There are other incidents and anecdotes I could relate, a steady stream really of instances and examples I could trot out as illustrative, but what’s the point? That dismissive response is typical of Tom—utter antipathy toward all things Viking. Now here’s the really weird and slightly scary part: Tom is pure Viking, all the way through.

I’m not Viking myself—not a drop—but I am open-minded, and, I suppose, sympathetic in my own way—the sea, the ships, the robust vitality. There’s some good there.

You’re romanticizing, Tom says. Barbarians, he adds.

I want Tom to accept certain things, but he won’t. He’s just so damned insistent.

Still, he seems happy enough in his life: he likes his work, he loves me, he functions well in the given world. He doesn’t seem to want more.

I worry. The little termites of self-hatred may be working their insidious paths through his deep structure, undermining his very foundation. One day he could break down—total collapse, catastrophic implosion. I hate thinking that.

So I turn my mind instead to those picaresque ships—like the fragile hand-carved wooden trinkets sold now by the wharf-rat boys by the bay—riding the North Atlantic swells and accepting the crash and crush of cruel or indifferent waves, and I think, too, of the yearning, the impulse to explore, the drunken, dream-soaked journey undertaken with arms outstretched and hopeful. And I feel glad.