Liminal spaces

As long as I’m doing the re-run thing, here’s another story I read at “Spark Off Rose,” last October for the “Supernatural” spoken word show. Thank you to the producers of the show, particularly Mark Betancourt for working long-distance from New York on my story, and to Jessica Tuck and Karin Gutman for their encouragement and developing the piece. (www.sparkoffrose.com)

In the wee hours of the night, I prowl. It’s something my father used to do. When I was a little girl, he prowled around our Chicago apartment, watching reruns of “Bonanza” and classic movies on our black and white TV. He was unemployed again, due to fighting with his coworkers and acting crazy in the workplace. So he put his skills as an engineer to work – pasting newspaper to our windows, wrapping aluminum foil over our light fixtures, and building a huge wood frame around my bed, complete with mirrors. He did all this to block the laser beams and tiny microphones and surveillance cameras that he thought were infiltrating our home, courtesy of the FBI, the CIA, and possibly forces from Red China.

My father had been dead for two years, and I still lived in the past tense of a childhood spent in the shadow of his schizophrenia. It was early 2003, and my daughter was a newborn. I’ve always been a night owl, but unlike my father, I never thought there was anyone spying on me – except once. I was in graduate school, and the student lifestyle, new parenthood, and my nocturnal habits were colliding. While my husband leaped into bed at 11 pm and the baby books advised me to “sleep when the baby sleeps,” I prowled. My nighttime vigil consisted of housework – like cleaning the breast pump – as well as things that made me feel like myself again, like emailing friends I had no time to talk to, knitting obsessively, and reading old New Yorkers. All the while, the baby monitor buzzed white noise into the stillness of the night, broken by my newborn daughter’s cry.

We’d had troublesome baby monitors. Some had broadcast our neighbors’ cordless phone conversations or erupted feedback noise if we turned on the stereo or used the phone. So I would stay awake, edgy, and knowing that at any moment my nighttime rituals could be interrupted by my baby’s caterwaul or the monitor’s screech.

My life had taken an abrupt turn when I learned I was pregnant. Before that, I’d been traveling to work on my doctoral research, certain that soon I would be on the academic job market as a freshly minted Ph.D. in epidemiology. Did I have an aptitude for quantitative analysis or an interest in teaching? Not particularly. Was I willing to relocate outside of Los Angeles for a job? Not at all. None of this played any part in my plans. I wanted a Ph.D. That was something I’d told myself two years earlier, around the time of my father’s death. He had been the one who was supposed to earn a doctorate, according to the plans his Chinese family had made for him when he was young. But paranoid schizophrenia had stopped him, and so far no other member of my family had achieved that brass ring. I remembered how he lit up when he recounted besting his childhood friends in the fields of science and math, wielding knowledge like a weapon, and how his face darkened when the subject of his years in grad school came up. I figured my Ph.D. would be a lasting tribute to my father’s memory. But now that my baby girl had arrived, the doctoral exam material seemed as arcane to me as questions of how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I didn’t like my odds, and I began to dream of ways to disappear from academia.

It was around this time that the baby monitor began acting up. When I was downstairs in the living room, I would not hear the familiar feedback screech, but instead what sounded like murmurs woven into the white noise. In my exhausted state, I imagined that the murmurs were a small crowd of dead relatives. I pictured my mother’s parents next to the crib, bickering with their ex-son-in-law, my father. My grandparents seemed to have the good grace to take a look at the baby, and then be gone. But my father, feeling entitled, seemed to stay. Looking back, I wonder if he had been with me all along, in some sense, ever since his funeral. When I was a child, no matter how much I argued and pushed him away, out of embarrassment and shame at his dirty, disheveled state, he always came back. He was stubborn that way. It was as though he still lived in the moments that were only photographs to me – the times when he held me up, a baby in a Polly Flinders dress, and smiled as though I was his proudest achievement.

I knew I must be losing it, succumbing to lack of sleep, but I could not shake the notion that my father’s ghost was skulking around the house, the way he had prowled around our home when I was a child. Were the dead really at peace, I wondered? Would a schizophrenic in life be a madman in death too? Or was he simply there to see the baby, like an ordinary, proud Chinese grandpa?

I tried not to believe that my father was in the house. He had adored me, but chaos followed in his wake. In all of the places I’d lived since my parents divorced, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and Boston, he had made it his business to visit me as often as he could afford a Greyhound bus ticket. Most of the time I’d been furious about it. I could rely on him to be unreliable. He never called before a visit, believing that if he surprised me, then the CIA and his long list of imaginary enemies could not stand in the way of his fatherly duties – visiting me, feeding me dinner, and giving me a little money. The first time he dropped in, I was in first grade. It was recess, and I had just finished pulling a worm out of my hair from where a boy had dropped it. I looked up to see my teacher coming to fetch me. My father, looking shoddier than I’d last seen him, stood at the corner of the playground and waved. I was young, still happy to see him. Then there was the time when I was a freshman at Vassar College, having afternoon tea with new friends. I looked up over my cup of Earl Grey to see my father in the doorway of the Rose Parlor. In the midst of my embarrassment and shock, I realized that I could never hide from my beloved stalker. And the last time I’d seen him alive he had dropped in on me in Los Angeles, surprising my live-in fiancé as well. He crashed on our couch for what felt like the longest week of my life. As he said goodbye, he told me that now he could die in peace, knowing that I was grown up and settled. He sounded both histrionic and sincere. And I shook my head, thinking that I’d been grown up for much longer than he imagined.

Now that I was a mother, I understood why my father had spent his paychecks on cross-country bus trips to see a surly teenager. He must have remembered what it was like to hold a baby. And now that I had a baby, I knew he would want to see her. He would gloat that she looked like me, and he might boast that, with a Chinese mother and a Jewish father, she would be smarter than all the other kids at school.

I began to divide my time between talking myself out of the notion that my father was in the house and worrying that I would actually see him. On the day of my father’s funeral in Taiwan, as I carried a marble jar of his remains, my Chinese relatives had given me strict instructions: I was to tell his spirit to stay in its crypt. Otherwise, they warned, his spirit would wander. I had done as I was told, and now I wondered if I had been firm enough with him. Or perhaps he was allowed one journey out of the spirit world for a special occasion like the birth of a first grandchild. My father seemed to lurk upstairs, close to the baby’s room. Every time I walked into the office, next door to the nursery, I willed myself not to see him sitting in my swivel chair – because that is where I was certain he sat. When I left the house with my daughter, my father never seemed to tag along. But in the midnight stillness of my home, I felt him just at the edge of my consciousness, right before my peripheral vision.

And then, after about two weeks, the fog of feeling perpetually awake began to lift. And my sense of him evaporated. I thought of him less and less as I slipped into the present tense. The United States had just invaded Iraq, and my baby was sleeping through the night at last. Sometimes I imagined him flying back across the Pacific, taking his place next to his mother in our family crypt in Taipei. I can’t account for his spirit permeating my home or its departure. But somehow, I felt as though my baby and I made him happy. And he has never returned.