Appearance
The Journal of Paul Whitfield
This notebook belongs to Paul Andrew Whitfield. If you are reading it and I am not with it, the names start on the second page. Please get it to 1418 N. Corona St., Colorado Springs 80903. My mother will know what to do with them.
If you knew me, and you are reading this anyway: I'm sorry. I meant everything I ever said to you. I just didn't mean it the way you thought. — P.W.
August 14, 2018 — Colorado Springs
Bought this at the Walgreens on Tejon. $4.79. Composition book, the marbled kind, because the spiral ones come apart in a bag. The kid at the register asked if it was for school and I said no and he said cool and that was the whole conversation.
I have $340 in a credit union account and $60 in my shoe. I leave Saturday.
My mother made enchiladas. My father said grace and asked God to give me wisdom, which is his way of saying he thinks I'm being an idiot without having to say it at the table. He isn't wrong that it's a phase. He's wrong about which phase.
I'm not writing this because I have something to say. I'm writing it because I'm about to start meeting people and I have to keep them somewhere.
August 15, 2018 — Colorado Springs
The names, so far. These are from before. I'll add as I go.
- Dale Rennick. Beat his wife and his two boys. Everyone at church knew and nobody said it out loud. Christmas Eve service, 2009, he went down front and stayed down there a long time. It did not fix him that night. Over about fourteen months it lost. The thing to write down is the boys. Ethan and Micah Rennick used to duck when he reached past them for anything. By spring of 2011 they didn't. I watched for it every Sunday because I wanted to know how long it took. Fourteen months.
- Sylvia Mendel. Buried her son Toby, age four, in 2012. I am told this grief takes the color out of the world, though I only have that secondhand. In 2013 she sat with Kara Whitlow in the fellowship hall the week Kara's daughter died, and something went across that table. I watched it go. I have no name for it except the name they gave me.
- Mr. Ainsworth, my Greek tutor, who did not have to be kind to a strange child and was.
- Ruth Whitfield. My mother.
- Andrew Whitfield. My father.
Five entries. Nine names. It isn't much of a record for twenty years but it's what I actually saw, as opposed to what I was told.
August 16, 2018 — Colorado Springs
Pastor Lindquist said no.
I asked him to send me. I had a whole thing prepared. He let me get about two minutes into it and then he put his coffee down, which is what he does instead of interrupting.
He said no board on earth would commission an unmarried twenty-year-old with no training, no field supervision, no language of the place he's going to, no medical plan, no money and no exit. He said the reason those structures exist is that people like me have been getting themselves killed and getting other people hurt for a hundred and fifty years, and that the structures are not bureaucracy, they're grief that hardened into policy.
He said: Paul, the fact that you're smarter than everyone in this building is exactly why nobody should let you do this alone.
Then he asked me why I was going. Not what I wanted to accomplish. Why.
I gave him an answer. It was a good answer. It was assembled in about four seconds out of parts I keep on a shelf for this exact kind of question, and he took it, and he prayed for me, and I walked out to the parking lot.
I'm going anyway. I want to write down that he told me not to, so that later I can't pretend nobody did.
August 18, 2018 — Pueblo
Bustang south, $11. Forty-five minutes. You can watch the Front Range slide down the window and the towns get smaller and the signage get older.
Pueblo is not a mission field. I want to be clear-eyed about that. It's a steel town that mostly stopped being a steel town, with a hundred and ten thousand people in it and about ninety churches, and it does not need a kid from Colorado Springs. I picked it because it's close enough that I could get home if I had to and far enough that I won't.
First night in a motel on Santa Fe Ave, $52, which was stupid. I know it was stupid. I did it anyway because I did not yet know how to do anything else.
$312.
August 21, 2018 — Pueblo
There was a man at the bus depot this afternoon crying into his hands. Fifties, work boots, a phone on the bench beside him face-up and still lit. Nobody went near him. I watched him for about eleven minutes.
Here is what I want to put down, since this is the one place I ever will.
I have never felt love. Not the absence of it in the way a lonely person means, where the thing is real and you're outside it. I mean the mechanism isn't there. When my mother holds me I feel the pressure of her arms, the temperature of her, the fabric. That's the whole event. When my father cried at the Good Friday service I understood every part of what was happening and it was like watching weather.
So I watch instead. It's not a noble compensation. It's just what's left over.
I watched that man for eleven minutes and I could tell you the order things happened in — the shoulders first, then the hands, then the sound — and I could not tell you one thing about what it was like to be him. I know the word for what he was doing. I have four languages' worth of words for it. I have never once been inside it.
I did not go over to him. I want that written down too. I stood eleven feet away with a notebook in my bag and I ran the calculation and the calculation said he wanted to be left alone, and I don't know if that was true or if the calculation is just what I use instead of nerve.
August 24, 2018 — Pueblo
Ate. Slept in the Days Inn stairwell until 4 a.m. Nothing else to report.
$287.
August 29, 2018 — Pueblo
I should get the medical part down while I still remember the exact words, though I remember everything, so that's a lie about why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I've never written it anywhere and things I don't write start to feel like they happened to somebody else.
I was six when my mother took me in. Not for anything that showed. I was reading chapter books; I had already started Latin because I asked for it. What she noticed was that I looked at her and nothing came back. She has never been able to explain to anyone else how she knew. She just knew.
Children's Hospital in Aurora, on and off from six to fourteen. The doctor I remember is Dr. Ilana Barash, developmental psych, who was the only one who talked to me instead of over me.
The words they tried:
Alexithymia. Doesn't fit. Alexithymic people feel and can't identify or describe it. I can describe it better than almost anyone. There's nothing underneath to describe.
Anhedonia. Closer, but anhedonia is the loss of pleasure, and loss means you had it. Nothing was lost. Nothing arrived.
Schizoid personality. Ruled out at nine and again at thirteen. Schizoid people don't want closeness. I want it so badly it's the only thing in me with any weight.
Reactive attachment disorder. This one is the joke of my life. RAD describes a lot of what I am. It requires a history of insufficient care — neglect, deprivation, caregivers who changed too often. The diagnosis is definitionally unavailable to a child who was cared for well. Dr. Barash said it out loud, in front of my parents, in January of 2010: the only category that matches his presentation is one we cannot apply to him, because you did everything right. My mother laughed, once, a bad laugh.
The word nobody said in the room but everybody had looked up in the parking lot: psychopathy. Dr. Barash handled it directly, and I'm grateful, because otherwise I would have spent my adolescence quietly wondering. She said the callous-unemotional profile has three legs — flat affect, yes, but also a taste for dominance, and above all a total indifference to the fact of the gap. She said I had the first and not the second, and that the third was the one that decided it, because I do not have it either. Boys with that profile don't grieve the missing part. You have been grieving it since you were six. That grief is the evidence.
I have leaned on that sentence more than any verse.
Medications, in order: sertraline at eleven, for nine months, which flattened what was already flat. Something else at twelve that gave me headaches. A third at thirteen I only remember by the color of the capsule. None of them were aimed at this, because there is nothing to aim at. They were aimed at the parts that could be aimed at, in case the problem was hiding behind one of them. It wasn't.
At fourteen my father stopped the appointments. He didn't announce it. He just stopped scheduling, and one Thursday we drove to get hamburgers instead, and that was the end of eight years.
September 3, 2018 — Pueblo
Dr. Barash told me once to make a list of what I do register and what I don't, because "nothing" was too imprecise to be useful. I made it when I was thirteen. I've revised it four times. This is the current version.
Arrives on its own, uninvited:
- All the plain physical ones. Pressure, heat, cold, pain, the texture of things. These arrive flat. A hot shower and a cold room are different facts, not different experiences.
- Hunger. Added this week, provisionally. There is urgency in it, which nothing physical has ever had, and I don't have the measure of it yet.
- The body's alarm. Heart rate, hands, the jolt when something moves fast at the edge of my vision. Under the alarm there's nothing. The body panics and the room stays empty. I get the symptom without the emotion, the way you'd get a fever with no illness behind it.
- Shame. This one I can't explain and neither could she. It's small and gray and it works. When I've done something badly there's a real weight. Dr. Barash thought it might not be shame at all, just an error signal — the same mechanism that makes me flinch at a wrong note in a hymn, pointed at myself. That may be right. It's the only argument I have against my own diagnosis, and it's a weak one, because an error signal isn't a moral feeling. A machine can have one.
- The ache. The wanting. I'll get to that too.
Does not arrive, ever:
- Love. Warmth. Affection. Attachment, felt.
- Joy. Pleasure, in the sense of something being nice rather than being efficient.
- Fear, as an experience. See above about the alarm. I've had people threaten me twice now and both times my hands did the correct thing and I stood there in a quiet room, deciding.
- Anger. Not once. Not as a child, not when I was hit at school, not since.
- Grief. My grandmother died in 2014 and I organized the reception.
- Hope. I'll come back to this one, because I say the word to people almost every day.
Unsettled:
- Beauty. I say things are beautiful and I'm no longer sure that's honest. When I look at the Sangre de Cristos from the highway something in me goes correct — the same click as a proof resolving, or a sentence coming out right. If that's what beauty is for everyone else, then I have it. If beauty is supposed to be warm, I don't. I genuinely can't tell from the outside, and there's nobody I can ask without telling them everything.
- Gratitude. Same problem. When Mr. Ainsworth spent four years teaching me Greek for free, something in me registered an imbalance that wanted correcting. Is that gratitude, or is it accounting?
The list is the most honest document I've ever produced and I will never show it to anyone.
September 9, 2018 — Pueblo
Wendell. Sixties, Union Ave, sleeps behind the pawn shop.
I started talking. I had good material. I have memorized more scripture than Pastor Lindquist and I can hold a line of argument against anyone I've ever met.
He let me go about forty seconds. Then he said, "You got food?"
I said no.
He said, "Okay," and looked away, and that was it. Not hostile. He just filed me correctly and went back to what he was doing.
I have thought about it all day and he was right. Every single thing I brought out here was manufactured for a room that doesn't exist south of Colorado Springs — a room with chairs, where people have eaten, and the question on the table is whether the resurrection is historically defensible. Nobody out here has that question. I brought a key to a door that isn't here.
September 12, 2018 — Pueblo
I put hunger on the list nine days ago without knowing what I was writing down.
Third day now. Everything physical has always arrived flat. This doesn't. This grips. It demands, it won't be set down, it interrupts thinking. Somewhere in the second night it stopped being a sensation and started being an argument.
I lay down under the overhang by the laundromat on Northern and I was shaking and I thought: at least this is mine. At least I didn't have to build it by hand.
That's a disgusting thing to be grateful for and I'm leaving it in.
There's one other thing in me with weight and it isn't like this one. The ache never lets up and never gets louder. This is loud and it ends when you eat.
$41.
September 15, 2018 — Pueblo
I don't know what I'm
Today was
Nothing today. I sat in the library from ten to six because it's warm and they don't ask.
September 16, 2018 — Pueblo
Day labor out of the lot on Santa Fe. Demo work, tearing lath and plaster out of a house off Abriendo. $110 cash, no questions.
Pastor Lindquist's whole list is coming true in order and I'm not going to pretend I didn't see it coming. I did see it coming. I just couldn't feel the part that would have made me pack water.
That's worth writing down plainly. I used to call my lack of caution faith. I don't need a plan, God will provide. It wasn't faith. It was a man with no fear mistaking his own flatness for trust. A person who felt things would have been scared enough to be sensible. I have to learn caution from the outside, by argument, the way I learn everything, and I'm learning it four weeks late and about $300 poor.
September 20, 2018 — Pueblo
Working a car wash on Northern three days a week, $12/hr. Room in a house in Bessemer, $300/month, four other guys, one bathroom, a landlord named Hector who doesn't ask for anything in writing.
Names since I got here: Wendell. Hector Duran. Marisol at the laundromat who gave me quarters. Rick and Dane and Jefferson and Big Rick in the house. Some of these people will not matter and I'm writing them all down anyway because I can't tell in advance which ones will.
September 28, 2018 — Pueblo
Danielle Ochoa. Bessemer, two streets over. Husband Trey. Kids Aracely, 9, and Manny, 5.
He drinks and then he uses his hands. On her. On Aracely, at least once, this summer, by the ear so it wouldn't show.
I sat with her for two hours on the porch. I did what I do. I was gentle. I was patient. I built the words carefully and laid them down one at a time, with the pauses in the right places, and she cried and said nobody had ever listened to her like that.
She did not leave. Nothing changed. Trey came home at seven and I said good evening to him and he said good evening to me and I walked back to Hector's.
October 1, 2018 — Pueblo
Berta Ruiz, 61, three doors down from the Ochoas, came to the car wash to find me. She waited by the vacuums until I was on break and then she took me apart.
She said gentleness was the last thing that house needed from a man. She said my soft voice on that porch let everybody go to bed feeling better, including Trey, including Danielle, definitely including me. She said what was needed was someone willing to make an ugly scene in the street, to put a body between him and them, to be feared a little, and that I had mistaken being nice for being good and they are not the same thing. She said: your kind of love is going to get that girl hurt and you're going to feel holy about it.
She doesn't know the joke. I didn't feel holy. I didn't feel anything. I chose gentleness off a list, the way I choose everything, because it has the best success rate in the data I've collected.
Here's what got through. I have spent my whole life quietly assuming that because I run on calculation instead of feeling, my judgment is cleaner than other people's. Less biased. Unclouded. I have thought that since I was about fifteen and I have never once tested it.
Berta Ruiz, who is full of exactly the feelings I don't have, read that house in a week. I sat on the porch for two hours with all four of my languages and my perfect memory and I read it wrong. Her feelings were not noise in the signal. They were the instrument. Mine is not a cleaner version of hers. Mine is a worse one with better vocabulary.
And the second thing, which is worse: I chose gentleness because gentleness is easy for me to perform. It costs nothing. It asks for patience and patience is the one thing emptiness is actually good at. What that house needed was rage, and I don't have any, and I never will, and I picked the approach I could execute instead of the one that was required.
October 3, 2018 — Pueblo
I went back and did it badly.
I stood in the street and said it in front of the neighbors, which is what Berta said to do. I named it. I said the word out loud, hitting, and I said Aracely's name, and I did not lower my voice when Trey came out.
It was the worst-executed thing I have ever done. My hands did the alarm and my face did nothing and I could hear myself picking the words a half-second before I said them. Trey called me something and went back inside. Danielle screamed at me — at me, not at him — that I had no idea what I'd just done.
She's at her sister's in Alamosa now, with both kids. Berta got her on the bus Tuesday. Nobody was charged with anything. Trey still lives four hundred feet from where I'm writing this and we nod at each other.
Aracely wouldn't look at me when they left. I want to write down that I don't know whether I helped. Berta thinks I did. Danielle might come back in a month — Berta says they usually do, two or three times, before it takes. I did the right thing badly and the outcome is partial and ugly and I don't get to know how it ends.
That's the first time I've done something that mattered where the gentle version wasn't available. I didn't like it. I want to be precise: I didn't dislike it either. I have no access to that. I just noted that it cost more, and that the cost was the point.
October 8, 2018 — Pueblo
Letter from my mother. She writes letters because she knows I'll keep them and won't keep texts.
She wants to know if I'm eating. She tells me Mrs. Ainsworth had a stroke and is home now. She says the tomatoes came in badly. Then the last paragraph, which she clearly wrote separately, because the handwriting is different:
Your father is not angry with you. He is afraid of something he can't say out loud and won't say to you, so I'm saying it. He's afraid that you went out there because you've decided you can earn the thing you don't have. I've told him that isn't what you're doing. Tell me I'm right, Paul.
I haven't answered.
October 15, 2018 — Pueblo
Something from Mr. Ainsworth's Greek, which I've known since I was eleven and only understood tonight.
The Gospels, when they say Jesus was moved with compassion for someone, use σπλαγχνίζομαι. The root is σπλάγχνα — the inward parts. Guts. Viscera. The word is not a word about a decision. It's a word about something happening in your abdomen. Every time a crowd of people is hungry or a widow is burying her son, the text does not say he concluded that he should help them. It says his insides turned over.
I can parse that verb in nine forms. I can tell you what it does in Mark that it doesn't do in Luke.
I have never once had it.
Everything I have done since August — the porch, the street, Wendell, all of it — has come out of the top of my head. There is no place in my body where any of it starts. The word for the thing at the center of the faith I have organized my entire life around is an anatomical word, and the anatomy is missing.
Four languages. I used to think that was the impressive part. It turns out I learned four languages so I could be more precisely aware of exactly which organ I don't have.
October 27, 2018 — Pueblo
Aramaic has been useless. I want that on the record because I used to bring it up. In two and a half months out here I have used Latin never, Greek once, in my own head, alone, and Aramaic never. I have used Spanish every day and I'm bad at it. Marisol corrects me. She thinks it's funny.
I was not gifted. I was aimed.
November 9, 2018 — Denver
Came north because Berta told me to leave Pueblo for a while. She's right that Trey has friends.
Denver is a different order of thing. East Colfax at night is not Bessemer. Twenty-six miles of it, Golden to the far side of Aurora, and about sixty percent of what I learned in Pueblo is no good to me here.
Nights in the shelter on Lawrence when there's a bed. Nights out when there isn't. It was 11°F on Tuesday.
November 14, 2018 — Denver
Ray Sandoval. Forty-one. He has been in prison and he tells you that in the first five minutes, which I have learned is how you know somebody is going to be straight with you.
Three days with Ray and I have learned more about staying alive than in twenty years of everything else. Which side of the street to walk on after dark and why it changes at Downing. How to tell the difference between someone who wants money and someone who wants an audience. How to eat when there's food even if you're not hungry. When to shut my mouth, which he says is roughly always.
He watched me work a small crowd outside the liquor store on Josephine — being gentle, being patient, doing the thing that makes people say I'm the kindest person they've met. Afterward he looked at me for a long time, long enough that I started assembling a deflection, and he said:
"You're not in there, are you."
Not cruel. Just a man reporting what he could see. He doesn't know what he saw. He has no idea. But in one look he got what eight years of specialists needed a building for.
I should have been frightened. Instead the ache came up, hard, because for one second somebody had looked straight through the performance and hadn't flinched at what was behind it.
November 20, 2018 — Denver
I said to Ray, more or less, that the people I came out here for might be the only ones who could stand to know what I am. The respectable ones need me to be the saint.
He said: "Don't do that."
I asked what.
He said, "Don't make us your safe place because we're too far down to judge you. That's still using us. You want to be known, go get known by somebody who could actually walk away from you and doesn't."
I have been chewing on that for four days. He's right, and it's a worse problem than he knows, because the only two people who fit his description are in Colorado Springs and I haven't answered my mother's letter.
November 28, 2018 — Denver
Somebody came at me Tuesday outside the store at Colfax and Gaylord. Wanted the coat. My hands did what they do and my heart went and I stood there in the quiet room deciding, and what I decided was to give him the coat, which Ray says was correct and stupid in about equal parts.
Afterward I sat on the curb and checked, the way I always check, to see if anything had arrived.
Nothing had. It never does.
So I'll put this down while I'm cold enough to be honest about it. I have never been afraid of dying. Not once, not as a child, not Tuesday. That isn't courage — courage is something you do with fear and I have no fear to do it with. It's that nothing has ever been put in this life that I would mind setting down. No warmth to leave behind, no joy waiting in next year that death would be stealing from me. My own end reads as a date.
The only death that does anything to me is somebody else's, and only one kind of somebody else: a person I started and didn't get back to. A name in this book I don't return for.
Except that fear shouldn't be available to me. I was raised on the doctrine that salvation is God's work and I am an instrument at most, and if I actually believed that, no man's eternity could be hanging on whether I made it back to Colfax on a Thursday.
So maybe a man who feels nothing has to believe it depends on him. Maybe that's the only engine I have. A normal believer gets carried along by the joy of the thing; I have no joy to be carried by; so I tell myself it all rests on me, and the lie gets me up off the ground in the morning. I don't know whether God forgives an engine like that or whether He handed it to me on purpose.
Ray says the coat was a bad idea. He's getting me another one.
December 2, 2018 — Denver
Ray, second degree assault, 2004, pled down from first. Seven years at Sterling, out in five and a half, three more on parole. He put a man in a coma over a debt of $1,900 and the man came out of it with a permanent left-side weakness and lives in Brighton now.
He told me this at a Village Inn at two in the morning, unprompted, no self-defense in it, no "he was going to," none of the architecture people usually build. He said: "I want you to have it before you decide what I am. Everybody out here's got a version they lead with. That's mine, straight."
Then he said, "Now you."
I said something. It was true and it was not the thing. He let it go. He knew.
December 24, 2018 — Denver
Called home. Nine minutes.
My mother cried, which I could hear as a change in the consonants. My father took the phone. We talked about the Broncos. Then, at the end, right before hanging up, in the exact tone he uses when he's decided to say a thing and has given himself four seconds to do it:
"You don't have to earn it, son."
I said I know.
I don't know. That's the honest answer and I didn't give it.
Christmas Eve service, 2009, Dale Rennick went down front. Fourteen months later his boys stopped ducking. I have never once believed that Dale Rennick got that for free, and if I can't believe it about Dale Rennick I can't believe it about myself, and there's the whole thing, sitting there where it's been since I was about ten.
January 11, 2019 — Denver
Cody Reese. Nineteen. From Sterling, Colorado, which is not the prison, which he makes the joke about every time. Fentanyl. Six weeks clean in October, using again by Thanksgiving, off again three weeks ago.
He talks to me. He asks actual questions, the kind with follow-ups. He wanted to know, last week, whether God can love somebody who has already decided to do the thing again, before they do it. Not after. Before, while they're still planning it.
I gave him the real answer, not the comfortable one, and he sat with it a long time and then said "huh," and I have been turning that "huh" over ever since, because it was the most alive thing I've heard in a month and I can't feel any of it.
He is the first person out here I have wanted to come back to. I use "wanted" loosely. What I mean is that when I make my list for the next day, his name arrives before I've decided to put it there, and I don't know what to call that.
January 30, 2019 — Denver
Cody, four days, no word. Went to the underpass. Went to the library. Went to the two places he sleeps. Nothing.
February 6, 2019 — Denver
Went to Pueblo Sunday because Berta called about Danielle — she's back, Trey's in a program, Berta wanted a second set of eyes on whether it's real.
I was gone four days.
Cody died Tuesday night. Aurora, behind the strip on Havana. They found him Wednesday morning.
I was in Pueblo doing the right thing and he was in a doorway on Havana.
February 7, 2019 — Denver
I can't write.
February 9, 2019 — Denver
Three days and here's what I actually have.
My body did a thing on Wednesday when Yvonne told me — Yvonne Baca, who runs the drop-in on Colfax and has run it for nineteen years. Dropped temperature in the hands, a sound in the ears, and I sat down on the floor for about two minutes.
And underneath it — nothing. The alarm without the emotion. Again. A nineteen-year-old that I would have said I loved, if I ever used that word about myself, is dead in a doorway, and the room inside me is exactly as empty tonight as it was in August.
I want to be honest about what is actually happening in me, because if I lie here I've got nothing left that's true.
It is not grief. It's a fault. It's the feeling of a system reporting an error. Cody Reese was in the ledger and now the ledger is wrong and something in me keeps trying to correct it and can't. I keep going to the places he sleeps. I went twice yesterday. He isn't there. I know he isn't there. I went anyway, both times, and I could not tell you why, and that is the closest thing to mourning I have ever produced and it is a broken loop in a machine.
In November I wrote that I have never been afraid of dying, and I stand by it. Nothing has ever been put in this life that I would mind setting down. My own end still reads as a date.
I also wrote that the only death that does anything to me is a person I didn't get back to. I was right and I had no idea what I was writing. I know now. It is not fear. It's the fault. It's the ledger that won't come out even, forever.
February 14, 2019 — Denver
The thing I've been avoiding since Wednesday.
I was taught my whole life that salvation is God's work and I'm an instrument at most. Every church I've ever sat in would tell me Cody Reese's eternity was never in my hands and that thinking otherwise is a category error.
Then why has my whole body been on fire for eight days over four days in Pueblo?
If I believed what I was taught, that reaction would be impossible. The reaction only makes sense if I have quietly been operating as though it depends on me — not the instrument, the rescuer. That isn't humility. That's pride in humility's clothes, and it has been wearing them since I was about sixteen.
Here's where I have to be more honest than I was in November, because in November I left it at this: maybe a man who feels nothing has to believe it depends on him, maybe that's the only engine I have, and the lie gets me up off the ground in the morning.
That was a beautiful sentence and it was a way of keeping the lie.
Because look what the lie actually did. It didn't keep me walking. It sent me to Pueblo carrying a weight that was never assigned to me, and then when Cody died it handed me a verdict I have no standing to issue. The engine I was so pleased with is the same machine that is currently trying to tell me I killed him.
If it's my work, then every person I don't reach is on me, and there is no version of that where I survive the arithmetic. The last count they published put it at five hundred and fifty-two thousand people in this country on one night in January. I can count. The count is the thing that's unbearable, and it has been the count since the beginning, and I have been calling the count a calling.
I don't know how to run on anything else. I'm writing this down so that when I inevitably start doing it again, it's on the page that I knew.
March 3, 2019 — Denver
Ray, tonight, apropos of nothing, in the parking lot behind the church on 16th:
"You never ask anybody for anything."
I said that's not true, I ask people for things constantly.
He said, "You ask for stuff. Directions, a ride, whatever. You never asked me for anything you couldn't get somewhere else." Then: "You know what you are? You're a guy who gives so nobody ever gets to put anything in. That's not generous, kid. That's a lock on a door."
I said that's not it. I said, and this was true, that I don't have anything to receive with.
He said: "So? Neither did I for about fifteen years. You still stick your hand out. Somebody puts something in it. Then you're standing there holding something. That's the whole trick. Nobody ever said you gotta enjoy it."
I have been building a very sophisticated theology out of the fact that I cannot receive love. Ray Sandoval, who has a GED and five and a half years at Sterling, just pointed out that receiving might be a thing you do with your hands rather than a thing you do with your chest.
I don't know if he's right. I know nobody with a seminary degree has ever said anything to me that landed like that.
March 22, 2019 — Denver
Tessa Vance, 23, works the intake desk at the drop-in Tuesdays and Thursdays, second-year social work at Metro State.
I should write down that she has started arranging her Thursdays around whether I'm there. I noticed it in February. I noticed it the way I notice everything, from the outside, by the data: the seventeen minutes she stays after her shift when I'm in the building and doesn't when I'm not. The questions that are not intake questions.
I have known for five weeks and I have not changed one thing about how I behave toward her, because how I behave toward her is how I behave toward everyone — patient, attentive, warm on the surface, expensive to produce.
Which means I have been letting it happen. A man who felt things would have felt the temperature change in that room and either stepped toward it or away. I didn't feel it. I measured it. And then I did nothing with the measurement, for five weeks, because doing nothing was easier and because — I'm going to write the true part — because being wanted is the nearest thing to being loved that I have access to, and I was taking it.
That's the first genuinely dishonest thing I've done since I left. Not a failure of skill like the Ochoa porch. A choice.
April 4, 2019 — Denver
I told her.
Not all of it. Enough. I said that there is something missing in me, that it is permanent, that it was looked at by good doctors for eight years, and that if she is waiting for me to feel something back she will wait her whole life, and that I had known what she was hoping for since February and had said nothing.
She was quiet for a while. Then she asked if everything I'd ever said to her was a performance.
I said no. I said it's built by hand instead of felt, and that means it costs more, not less — that every kind thing I have ever said to her was a decision I made on purpose, at expense, and that I would argue that's worth more than a feeling somebody enjoyed having.
She said — and this is the part I need to get exactly right —
"That's a really good answer. You've had that one ready a long time, haven't you."
I had. I built it when I was seventeen. I have used it on myself probably a thousand times and never once out loud.
She said the sentence was doing two jobs. It was explaining, and it was also making sure she couldn't be angry. She said, "You gave me the version where you come out noble. Where's the version where you just used me for five weeks because it felt good to be looked at?"
I said I don't feel good.
She said, "Then why'd you take it?"
She doesn't work Thursdays anymore. She switched to Mondays. Yvonne says it's a class thing and Yvonne is being kind.
Berta read that house in a week. Ray read me in three days. Tessa read me in one sentence. I have been out here eight months and every single person who has gotten to the bottom of me has done it with the equipment I don't have.
April 21, 2019 — Denver
Easter. Sat in the back at a church on Sherman where nobody knows me.
The room did what those rooms do. Four hundred people and something went through it, lifting, the way it has gone through every room I've ever stood in, and they went home filled.
Twenty-one years of standing in that room. I've stopped expecting it. What I noticed this morning was different: I have started to resent the ones who get it. That's new. That's not in the list from September.
I don't know what to do with that, so it goes here.
May 12, 2019 — Denver
My father wrote. He has never written me a letter in his life. Four pages, both sides, in the handwriting he uses for tax documents.
The part that matters:
You have always believed your mother and I loved you in spite of getting nothing back, and that this was the proof of something. I need to correct the record before you build any more on it.
Your mother did feel it. All of it, the whole time, and it nearly destroyed her. She sat on your bed every night for eleven years with the full weight of it and no relief and I want you to know what that actually cost, because you've been walking around thinking of it as a beautiful demonstration, and it was a woman being taken apart very slowly in her own house.
I didn't. Not for about four years, Paul. After Dr. Barash's office in 2010 something in me shut, and I went in there and put my hand on the back of your neck every night the way I always had, and I felt nothing whatsoever. Not resentment. Nothing. I did it because I had decided to and because stopping was not available to me.
I have never told your mother. I'm telling you because I think you've made us into an argument, and the argument you built has a hole in it that's going to open up under you at the worst possible time, and I'd rather it opened now while you can still write to me about it.
So here is what I actually know, which is less than you think I know. I don't know if what I did in those four years was love. I know it was the same thing from the outside. I know the boy in the bed couldn't tell the difference. I know I'd do it again.
Don't you dare take this as permission to stop feeling bad about it. Come home for a weekend. Your mother is not well.
May 13, 2019 — Denver
Twenty-four hours with my father's letter and I don't have this sorted out. Writing it down in pieces, badly.
One. The demonstration I have been living on since I was ten was not what I thought it was. I thought: two people who felt love poured it into a vessel that couldn't hold it, for nothing, and that is the gospel in a house on Corona Street.
Two. Reality is worse and stranger. My mother felt it and it cost her everything. My father, for four years, felt nothing and did it anyway.
Three. Which of those two is the thing I've been calling proof?
Four. If it's my mother, then the proof requires the feeling, and I am disqualified permanently and everything I have done since August is a forgery.
Five. If it's my father — if love is the thing you do in the dark when the felt part has shut off — then I am not disqualified. I might be the most qualified person in the house.
Six. And that's exactly why I don't trust myself with option five. It's the one I want. It's the one that turns my defect into a credential. I have watched myself do this my whole life: find the reading that makes the hole into a doorway. Every time I do it I do it beautifully and I've never once caught myself in the act until afterward.
Seven. Here's the thing I keep coming back to, which is the only part that doesn't dissolve when I push on it. My father didn't know either. He said so. He wrote I don't know if what I did in those four years was love and he wrote it to his son, at sixty-one, after four decades of church, and he did not make it come out even. That's the most honest sentence anybody in my family has ever said to me and it does not resolve anything, and he sent it anyway.
Eight. My mother is not well and he waited until page four.
May 25, 2019 — Colorado Springs
Home eight days. She has lupus. Diagnosed in February. They didn't tell me. Nobody in this house tells anybody anything until page four.
I've been useful. I'm good at useful. I do the pharmacy and the insurance calls and I know what every one of her medications does, and I have organized her appointments into a system that is genuinely better than the one they had, and my father keeps standing in doorways watching me do it with an expression I can read and don't want to write down.
Last night she said, from the couch: "You're doing the thing."
I said what thing.
She said, "The thing where you're so helpful nobody can get near you."
Ray said it in a parking lot in March. She said it on a couch on Corona Street. I have had two people say the same sentence to me in ten weeks and they have never met and never will.
I sat down. I didn't do anything for about forty minutes. She watched a cooking show and I sat there and it was the single hardest thing I have done since I left, harder than the street with Trey Ochoa, harder than telling Tessa, because there was no task in it and nothing to execute and I had to just be in the room and let her look at me.
She reached over at some point and put her hand on my arm and left it there.
Pressure. Temperature. Fabric.
I stayed.
June 3, 2019 — Colorado Springs
Two weeks ago I found a Merton and a John of the Cross at Hooked on Books on Tejon, $3 each. Nobody at my church has ever handed me either of these, and I understand why — we're not a tradition that has much use for a mysticism that specializes in the absence of God.
The dark night of the soul: God withdraws all felt consolation. The sweetness goes. You're left with bare will and nothing under it, and for John of the Cross this is not punishment, it's advancement. He says the withdrawal is how you get weaned off loving God for the good feelings and onto loving God.
I read that in the store and had to sit down on the floor because it describes my entire life and for about ten minutes I thought I had finally found the book that explains me.
It doesn't. I've had two weeks to test it and it doesn't, and I need to write down why before the flattering version sets.
The dark night is a withdrawal. Every mystic who wrote about it was writing about the loss of something they had once had. John of the Cross knew the consolation intimately, which is the entire reason its absence was a crucifixion. The mechanism is the thing being taken away.
Nothing was taken from me. There was never anything there to take. You cannot be weaned off a thing you never had; you're just an animal that was born without a mouth.
So the dark night doesn't describe me. It describes my mother, actually — a woman who had all of it and watched it go into a child and not come back, for eleven years. She's the mystic in this family. I've been reading her book and putting my name on it.
That's the second time in a month I've caught myself building the reading that makes me the interesting one. I'm keeping a count now.
June 30, 2019 — Denver
Back. Ray got picked up June 18th — possession, plus a failure-to-appear from 2016 he never cleared. He's at Denver County. I've been twice. Fifteen minutes each, through glass.
He said, "Don't come every week. You got other people."
I said I'll come every week.
He said, "Why."
And I gave him the honest one, for once, without building it first: because you're on the list, and I don't take people off.
He laughed at me. He said, "Man, that is the coldest way anybody ever told me they cared about me." Then he said, "Come on the 12th, I got court on the 9th."
July 19, 2019 — Denver
I've been running the numbers, which is the only devotional practice I've ever been any good at.
Eleven months. Names in this book: 63. Of those, still in contact: 19. Dead: 1. Actively worse than when I met them: at least 4, probably 6. Actively better: I can defend 3, and one of those is Danielle Ochoa and Berta did most of it.
Money earned: about $6,800, all cash, car wash and day labor and four weeks of dishwashing. Money spent: about the same.
People who have told me I am the kindest person they have ever met: 8. People out here who have seen what I actually am: 3. Two of them worked it out on their own inside a week. The third I had to tell, and she got further in one sentence than I have in a year.
Total number of times I have felt anything in eleven months: zero, by the September definition. Number of times the alarm has gone off without anything behind it: I stopped counting in March.
I put those numbers down because I wanted the ledger to say something. It doesn't say anything. It's a page of arithmetic and it will not convert into a verdict no matter how long I look at it.
August 14, 2019 — Denver
One year today since the Walgreens on Tejon.
I'm not going to write the summary. I know exactly how to write it. I could produce four paragraphs right now that would make this year mean something clean, and every sentence would land, and I've been doing that in this notebook since page one and I've decided I'm going to stop.
Here's what I actually know, which is less than I knew in August.
I still cannot feel it. Nothing has changed about that and nothing is going to. The ache is exactly where it was. If anything it's worse, because a year ago I only wanted it in the abstract and now I can name four specific people I would like to be able to feel something about and cannot.
I know the difference now between gentle and good. It cost a nine-year-old something to teach me that and I don't get to know how much.
I know that my calculation is not cleaner than other people's feelings. It's a worse instrument with a better vocabulary, and the three people who saw through me did it with equipment I don't have.
I know that my engine is a lie about how much of this depends on me, and that the lie is not harmless, and that I don't have a replacement.
I know that giving without ever receiving is not the pure form of love. Ray says it's a lock on a door. My mother says it's how I keep everyone at arm's length. I think they're right, and I don't know what receiving is supposed to consist of for someone like me, and "stick your hand out and hold what somebody puts in it" is the only instruction I've been given that I can actually follow.
I know my father did it for four years with nothing in him, and told me so, and doesn't know what it was either.
That's the whole year. It doesn't make a shape.
September 2, 2019 — Denver
Ray out on the 28th. Time served plus conditions. He's in a sober-living house in Globeville and he has to be in by nine and he hates it and he's staying.
He asked what I'm doing next. I said I don't know.
He said, "Good. First smart thing you've said all year."
October 1, 2019 — Denver
I keep saying a sentence to people and I want to be accurate here about what I mean by it, because I've said it maybe two hundred times this year and it isn't true in the way they hear it.
You can reject me today. You can reject me tomorrow. You can reject me for ten years. But as long as you're alive, I won't lose hope.
I cannot feel hope. Not a flicker, not once. When I say that to someone what I am actually saying is: I have made a decision, and I will keep the decision after every feeling that should support it has failed to show up, because it never shows up, because there is nothing in me for it to show up in.
For a long time I thought that made it a lesser version. A counterfeit that behaves correctly.
I'm less sure now. Not more sure. Less sure, in the other direction. My father did four years on the bare decision and he's the reason I know what to do with my hands. Maybe the decision is the load-bearing part for everybody and the feeling is what makes it bearable, and I'm just doing it without the anesthetic.
Or maybe that's number three in my count of readings that make me the interesting one, and my mother is right that the feeling is the thing, and she paid for it, and I'm an imitation that works.
I don't know. I've gone back and forth for eleven years and I've never landed and I'm starting to think the going back and forth is not a stage I'm in.
Here is what I have instead of an answer.
There is a man named Ray Sandoval in a sober-living house in Globeville who is going to be out of a bed on the 30th of November and I have to figure out where he goes. There is a woman named Danielle Ochoa in Pueblo who is back with her husband and might be all right and might not, and Berta says call on Sundays, so I call on Sundays. There is a boy named Cody Reese whose name I will keep in this book until I'm dead because taking it out would be a lie about what happened. There is a woman on Corona Street with lupus who wants me to sit down and not be useful, which I can do for about forty minutes at a stretch and am trying to extend.
That's not a purpose. It's a list. It's the only thing I've ever been able to keep.
I'm twenty-one. I'm not finished and I'm not starting over. I don't have a conclusion and I'd like to stop pretending that every entry needs one.
Tomorrow's Wednesday. The drop-in opens at seven.
— P.W.