Koan
by Will Leggat
I’d tried to visit his apartment before. Phone calls were easy—to the doctors, to Mom—but visits meant time, which meant new memories replacing old ones.
Dad’s voice crept slowly from the shadows, nearly drowned in the noise of the movie, Biutiful, that had already begun to play. “Come in,” he said. As I entered, the light from the hallway crept across the walls into his studio. Everything was open, all the drawers and doors. Clothes strewn across the floor, too big for him now. The medicine cabinet an empty metal reflection. Bloody tissues in the bath. There were scratches that ran along the tan hardwood floor to a spot by the window warped by years of a chair’s weight, empty in the filtered moonlight. I entered, closed the door, and let the darkness fold around my body.
As the door fell shut behind me, I crept through the narrow strip of hallway that led to the living room—a small square with enough room for a mattress, a monitor, and a stack of books that served as a bedside table. Dad was a silhouette, unevenly illuminated by the backlight of the TV screen. He kept his eyes straight as he pulled himself a few inches over on the bed, which I took to mean I could join him. The bed was hard beneath me, and my eyes never adjusted to the dark. I was taller than him now, but still I imagined myself under his arms, remembering the once-steady rhythm of his chest’s rise and fall. I wanted to ask if he remembered. But in the blackness, we didn’t speak. We just listened to the movie play, our eyes tracking the subtitles as they rolled:
When I was little—one radio station played the sounds of the sea. Giant waves. The sounds scared me.
I could hear the bay through the open window, the drifting tide that dragged to the right. I wondered if Dad could hear it too, with his ears surrounded by the pillows used to prop him up.
Why were you scared? The bottom of the sea scared me. All the creatures that lived there. Dad? Dad…
There was a flash of light from the TV, an all-white shot as the scene panned over a snowy forest, and in the moment before the shot changed, I saw what was left of him. His eyes were hollow and sunken—his brows cliffs above the steep drop to the cheeks which clung tight to his jaws. Where before the robe had simply hung loose, it now seemed to clasp desperately at whatever skin it could still hold without slipping fully off. Through the slit in the middle, I could see a thin plastic sac that spread across his flat stomach. Tucked tightly under his ribs, a clear membrane showed through, brown and rotten. When I looked back up, his eyes met mine with a melancholy terror. He grappled with the sheets as he tried to get up, and before I could reach for him he dropped from the bed, landing on spindly legs. The robe shuffled loose against his skin and his feet fell with a muted slap against the wooden grain as he limped to the window.
Once there was nothing here. Just water. Saltwater. Do you know what it sounded like?
I breathed deep and felt the brine drifting through the window cling to the back of my throat and sting in my nostrils. It seemed to whistle in the curtains, carefree, as it entered. Choking for breath, I turned to the figure I could barely see among the shadows.
Your eyelids are still, your heart as well. Why don’t you just leave? What’s keeping you here?
He took a step forward, his one extended foot grey and stiff like a pale plaster mold. Standing next to me, he braced an arm against mine and grabbed the remote. After he clicked the TV off, I wanted to go on watching in the dark. In the close silence, I could hear his breath, his lungs rasping, raking for air that wouldn’t come.
“You’re not taking your meds, are you?” The air felt heavier, each syllable dragged down on my throat.
“It’s not as easy as that, Alex. You don’t know what they do to you.” He was standing where the bed used to be, before he had to make space for new equipment.
“So what, after all that I’ve done for you, all Dr. Andrews has done for you? You’re giving up because of what, some nausea? A headache?”
“It’s not giving up if it’s a fight I’ve already lost.”
“Go ahead, then, give up. A few more months, and then you’re free, do whatever you want wherever you’re going. But let us have that, at least. Because that’s it for us, Dad.”
“When your body is eating itself—”
“You stop it. You cut it up in surgery, you take one pill or a thousand, or however many you have to. You do what you can to stay with us. Please.”
“I’m sorry.” He took a half-step forward, bracing his weight against the TV.
I lowered my head, “No, Dad—you’re not.” I walked to the door, pretending not to hear him call for me as I passed the photos he’d hung, each one what we used to be. While I waited outside in the hallway, I hoped he’d give me some excuse to come back in. All I heard was rain against the rooftop, and I knew that it was over.
The memorial was on a Saturday.
On Sunday, I walked to the bay.
In the parking lot at the beach, the headlights and grilles of the cars looked like they were smirking at me, taunting me, asking me
Why would it be you? You think you loved him?
The black jar, cupped between my waist and arm, wobbled as I stepped past the gate and onto the beach.
I never thought it would be this heavy.
The waves crashed, roaring against the shore, and people by the bayside ran back and forth to dodge the rising tide. With the wind pushing, the waves were always going—in, out—never a moment’s rest. I saw where he and I had swum by the low docks and waited, holding each other, for the tide to recede, for the seats to be safe again.
It was here.
A long tree trunk lay in the sand, split through the middle by a storm. I stood by the one side and remembered when we’d sat together on the other, watching the boats sail under the bridge. I raised the urn to my chest, lifted its cap, and watched the wind carry the ash along the shore and across the bay.
He’d left me a letter, and inside I thought I’d find the same curlicues of script that had run wild through his old notebooks. But instead I found short, choppy strokes in smeared, warped ink that I wasn’t able to decipher.
It started to rain. I sat with what was left of him—the urn wrapped tight in my arms and the letter bending to the folds of my fist. And as the winds grew faster, as the families packed up, as the last of the ash vanished from beneath my feet and into the breath of the briny air around me, I dropped the note into the wind, too, hoping it would carry his message back to me.
Will Leggat is a 17-year-old high school senior from Brooklyn, New York who attends Phillips Academy Andover, where he is the editor in chief of The Courant. He also works as a prose reader for The Adroit Journal and as a second reader for Polyphony Lit. His writing is forthcoming or has been featured in The Eunoia Review, Bending Genres, Crashtest, and others. Will is also perpetually over-caffeinated.