Free American Masculine by Shann Ray Page A

almost tangible, almost real. Weightless though, she thinks, lighter than air, and she knows now what she wants. Her eyelids descend. She sleeps.
    Two nurses, a male, thick-faced and heavy set, a female, tiny with birdlike bones, stand in the doorway and speak in hushed tones.
    “Shame,” the man whispers. He shakes his head. He’s seen it often but still he finds it strange and overdone, the violence, he thinks, the wilderness of the human mind.
    “Understandable,” the woman says and sees herself walking in her own desires, lonely when she leaves the hospital after dark, life so painfully minute, and death so large, like an ocean, limitless and singular, so precise, but without end, unbound by earth or atmosphere, no more pain, she sees it that way, and the vision comes, as it often does, of gray birds flying the border between this world and the next, the tonal whisper of wings, musical and foreign, welcoming her.
PANEL II
    WHEN HE WAKES he sees his daughter’s sleeping face, the short breaths she takes. How lovely she is, he admits, and he is shocked at his desperateness, how much he hopes. Seven years ago she married a man he didn’t like, an old banker named Bishop who’d made her sign a prenuptial and left her multiple times before she finally decided to get away from him. He’d seen it long before, and told her so, but being himself he’d been cold, not paying a dime for the wedding, barely aware when she spoke in his ear, viciously, in the receiving line, You are a terrible man. Selfish. Uncaring.
    He wants and doesn’t want to say how right she was, how poor a man he is, has always been, more like Bishop than he wants to admit, like most men, same poverty of mind, same darkness. Hidden, unknowable. I tried, he says aloud as she sleeps. But he knows he didn’t.
    Her mother always did. But she’s dead too, he reasons, fifteen years back, ovarian cancer. A deeply interior disease, probably symbolic of his disloyalty. He’d been incapable of loyalty. Staring at Mary, he sees her chest rise and fall and he is amazed how fiercely loyal she has always been, despite his inadequacies. Even after the wedding,
she
had apologized, not him. And he rebuffed everything, the same way he blocked her mother, compartmentalizing all, refusing to see, as clearly as others did, the shell of his life. How under the skin—he touches his arm—he is ugly. And terrified. Teary again. Her choices a mystery to him. Her earnestness. He never knew her, or even her daughters. He never knew his own wife.
    Take
me,
he prays. The words that enter his mind appall even him, so hollow and made of shadow, and he is reminded of how incapable he is. I’m a coward, he thinks, God has never been anything to me. Though, for her part, she seemingly never doubted. But now all had changed.
    He knows she wants to die and knows she is truer to her desires than he has ever been to his. True to true desires. She described herself so at one of his firm’s corporate functions, and she’d told him he was true too, but only to false desires. They were standing in a hallway and he was trying to leave. Money, cars, women, she’d said. Even work, all self-consumption, all lies. But so what? You’re my father, she said. I love you. She was drunk.
    But he’d seen it in her, that love, he has always seen it.
    FROM THE HOSPITAL, back home, ten months on.
    Days in which she exists in seasons of wood or stone, seamless, nearly unconscious, no foresight or even alarm, only numbness and the cold feeling that all is one, all things arranged to capture and keep her, in sleep and wakefulness, dark, day, her thoughts disintegrating and re-collecting, and she is left again only with what has gone before. She is alone in her bedroom. She feels no emotion, no anger, or even apathy at him or anyone, no hatred, no sense of panic or barren expression, no self-annihilation. She stares at the wall beside her head; the wall is grainy, small bumps on the surface like