There’s a box in the closet. It must have held boots or waders – it’s large and full of family photographs; Polaroids, photo-booth strips, sleeved negatives, scalloped edge snapshots from the 50’s, graduation photos, wedding shots, two passport pictures, a cube of slides, even some faxes that have faded to faint purple smears.
It’s a jumble with no evident chronology: our history expressed as clutter.
I set it on the bed and plunge my hands into the past and pull out a photograph. It’s a black and white of me at ten, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a sailor cap. I’m sitting on the front steps of the three-family house we lived in then, and in my right hand is a water pistol. I am grinning at the camera and holding the gun to my head, a mock suicide. The gun is a Luger, black, and I recall how much I liked that gun, the forceful stream it produced when I squeezed the trigger, its textured grip.
My father must have taken the picture. He had a Pentax with a leather case and was the recorder of our life, the selector of our memories. I see him looking at me in the little rectangle and I wonder if it gave him pause to view his son holding a Luger to his head, the iconic weapon of the enemy, the favored pistol of men he had killed.
The enemies are dead, long buried, and my father’s ashes have dissolved in the sea, all the Lugers turned to dust in landfills, but I still point a finger at my temple, make a shooting sound when you call.
Someplace in Belgium, you say, and while you ask again for money, and list your difficulties and plans, I search for the town on screen and zoom in to street view and imagine finding you sitting in a bar near a window. You look up and see me hovering, staring at you; you hear your own voice, tinny, coming from the phone in my hand. You point your finger at your temple and laugh.
