Free Love and Fury by Richard Hoffman

away I was and if they could move the body or if I’d be there soon. I said I was far away.
    Alone in a car is a good place to get such news. I cried a good while, without restraint, before calling my wife and then my friend Will in Michigan, who loved my father like another son. He’d played baseball on one of my father’s teams and had stayed close to him and our family for more than forty years. “The world is different now,” I said to him. And then I spoke to my father, the one I’d made of him, the one in my head. Aloud. I thanked him and said good-bye.
    As if he were ever going to go away.
    I was trying to feel some of that grief now with all that was left of him in this stark room, but it was futile. A single fly, large, loud, came buzzing in a series of loops toward me, close enough that I shooed it away; it seemed to labor in the closeness and heat as it rose to a top shelf and alighted somewhere out of sight.
    I was trying to orient myself. I looked away, scanning the shelves of plastic jugs and bottles, cartons, paper towels, not seeing anything. I wasn’t feeling anything, either—no tears, no lump in the throat, no heartache.
    But I recognized my state of mind. Had I been younger, had writing not been a part of my life for more than forty years, I would have panicked at my lack of emotion. I would have levied a terrible judgment on myself. But by now I knew that I was recording all of it, not only to write about it but to keep it, as I could not if I were distracted by sentiment. I knew I would weep again for my father, for his suffering, for the injustice of his life, for his loss. In that moment I was receiving a kind of imprint, as if I were recording a period of time, and a place, that would forever exist inside of me, a
camera oscura,
my time with my father’s body in this room forever mine. I can return to that room now at will. I swear if I actually went back there I could tell you which cartons and containers had been moved. At any time now I can reinhabit this storeroom pieta and I can grieve all I want, all I need.
    The fly came humming toward me again and I ignored it. It alighted on my shoulder for a moment then zigzagged off toward the windows, where it bizzed along the frame and bumped along the frosted glass, looking for a way out.
    Then I did something impulsive: I pulled the blanket from my father and stared. I began with his feet and noted where he’d torn off the nail of his big toe with a pliers a couple of weeks before; he’d bloodied it on the doorjamb in his bare feet, and trying to free the nail from where it had cut into his flesh, he tore the whole thing off. I looked at his bowed, arthritic legs and bony knees, his penis and—he had a dozen names for them—“the family jewels.” He called them his privates. (Inflected with his army experience, the term became a quip, an adage: “Privates take orders; they don’t give them.” Good advice.) A hirsute man, my father’s abundant chest hair came right up to his neck, and I could see that the mortician had shaved a little there, probably when told that we wanted to bury him without a necktie. And that smirk which made me want to say “What?”
    It was not so much that I was looking at him; it was more my body, my whole body, recognizing itself in his.
    It occurred to me then that someone might come in. What would they think? What would they think I was doing?
I
didn’t even know what I was doing. I placed the blanket over him, kissed his forehead, patted him twice on the shoulder.
    At the door I looked back at the body on the gurney, my father’s body, the body we share. It seemed to mean, as surely as any broken bony Christ’s down from his cross, “Don’t be fooled. This is how it ends.”
    Except—suddenly I know it, wordlessly—it doesn’t end.
    Don’t be fooled.



I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their