[for Mark Leidner]
Each morning the past week I’ve had vivid dreams. Yesterday my dream took the form of a beer commercial.
My perspective was that of someone watching this ad in a dark room. The only evidence I had that this was an ad was a small serif font in the upper left corner of the screen that said the brand’s name: Broglio Beers. After a few seconds, the brand name faded away.
The commercial’s opening shot showed a two-story wooden building in a one-street mountain town. The sky was heavy with leaden clouds.
The commercial cut abruptly to the interior of this building, the town’s only bar and restaurant. Its interior was rustic and simple, its lighting orange and warm. Laughter filled its upstairs room as a big party of twenty drank and ate, standing at small wooden tables. The camera focused on one person in the crowd: a handsome man in his fifties, his gray hair casually stylish.
The man’s eyes seem tired and satisfied. He seems to be the center of attention, though he’s not showing off or holding court.
We learn somehow—maybe through chatter or a line or two of dialogue—that this is a family reunion. And that the handsome man is the oldest son of the family that settled in this tiny town long ago. This sleepy town in the mountains of Colorado.
The gathering continues. Eventually, after many rounds, their waiter lets someone in the family know that his shift is ending and that a new waitress is on her way up to take over. The handsome man doesn’t hear this exchange; maybe he’s lost in some reminiscence of growing up in this absurdly small community, or in the middle of telling some tale from his life beyond this town, of doing business in big cities, of getting married then divorced, of learning to respect himself as a single man.
A thin woman in her 40’s reaches the top of the staircase and enters the reunion—a stranger. She walks with her head down, avoiding people’s eyes. She begins to clear empty drinks and plastic baskets off the table in front of her.
The handsome man who was once his family’s eldest son—and sometimes wonders if he still is, even though his parents died decades ago, wondering now what status he has in this town that seems nearly dead, or if not dead then certainly asleep, or perhaps in a coma out of which no one here could ever imagine or describe how it would wake—turns around just as the new woman, the waitress, looks up.
Their eyes meet.
The man sees her face: horribly scarred, the skin strangely tight over her right cheek and chin. One eyelid droops, eyebrow broken with a dash of boldly white skin.
She looks at him, at his fresh, groomed skin, at his tired eyes inviting confidences.
The man and the woman recognize each other.
The man slowly shakes his head. He opens his mouth but doesn’t know what to say.
The woman drops her tray on the floor, moans once—a low moan of a threatened animal—and turns away from the family, running away—her gait slowed by a stiff limp—fleeing everyone and disappearing down the stairs.
The man stands inert, taken somewhere placeless by his memories, so distracted by his past that he doesn’t even register the two mugs that fall and break at his feet, doesn’t even notice the woman’s curved back and pained hobble. The man sees simply the last time he saw this woman, a woman who was then just a girl. A six-year old girl.
The eldest son closes his eyes in the bar, taken by the pain of that memory.
The girl, Susy, was the only daughter of the town’s most controversial and gossiped-over couple. On the one hand, Susy’s mom worked hard and kept quiet, doing odd jobs around town and working for season-long stretches at the local feed store. On the other hand, Susy’s father was a drunk and everyone knew it. Not that he could hide his alcoholism: he frequently crashed his car into light posts and mailboxes, urinated on people’s front porches and lawns, picked quick and pathetic fights at the very same bar and restaurant, and was often locked up for the night by the local police chief, a fat man who had only one officer under his authority and who tried desperately each and every winter to make his rose garden last through the cold.
One day Susy’s mother’s car got stuck in the train tracks. No one knew exactly how that happened, but speculation was popular. Maybe the car stopped of its own accord, its leaking battery finally giving out right as the Oldsmobile’s front tires sidled over the metal rail and onto the perpendicular planks of decaying wood. Or maybe the husband and father, the drunk, somehow managed to sabotage the car’s engine such that it would stop at just the right time in some elaborate and impressive scheme to do away with his family, a wife and daughter the whole town suspected was the subject of his constant abuse, and who also were obviously the sole and mostly helpless caretakers of his disease. But however the car wound up on the tracks, wind up on those tracks it did. And then the train came.
Some locals claimed to have seen the crash, but in reality no one saw it—though plenty heard it. The train exploded into Susy’s mother’s car, despite the conductor’s attempts to stop it in time. Brakes squealed for at least fifteen seconds but the mass of the locomotive piled right into the car, sending a blossom of sparks into the cool night sky. Metal shrieked. Susy and her mother screamed—though no one heard them over the sound of bending metal and screeching breaks.
When the train had stopped a handful of tonwsfolk rushed to Susy’s mother’s car, which was almost folded in half. They saw and knew immediately that Susy’s mother was dead: her neck was horrifically broken and blood covered her face and chest in a sheet, soaking through the touch of lace at her dress’s topmost hem.
Susy, too, was in awful shape. The townspeople debated what to do, suspecting that she might still be alive, but also pointing out how bits of the car’s metal and glass had punctured parts of her skin, and how her right arm was so obviously broken—the bone shearing clean through her forearm’s skin—and how her face was hard to see but for all of the blood and bits of glass.
And then Susy sighed once. And then she coughed out some blood in a little cough. And the townspeople nearly shouted. One man fainted. And then the rest of them got to work.
The people carefully pulled away at the car’s broken door and windshield frame, bending metal where they could and wiping away shards of glass with their handkerchiefs and even their shirts, which they took off and wrapped around their hands so they wouldn’t get cut while they tried to save Susy.
It took twenty minutes, but they got her free of the wreckage.
They knew she’d broken many bones, so they tried to cradle her with as much comfort as possible. But they also knew they needed to get her down flat on a big table, both to better assess what they could do for her while they waited for the ambulance—an ambulance that at that moment was about thirty minutes away, its driver quickly finishing a cigarette before responding to such a stressful call (“Jesus Christ! A train wreck?”). And the townsfolk knew they shouldn’t risk carrying her for long, because who knows what would happen if one or two of them tripped while walking over the gravel embankment over which the railway track ran.
The train’s conductor by now was out of his compartment and staring directly up at the night sky, pleading with God to save the little girl, and feeling strangely hollow, as if what he’d just seen and in some way caused had left him totally empty of all his abilities, but also, inexplicably, of all his fears and worries.
By this time, the rest of the town had either woken up or set down their dinner or turned off their TVs. Everyone was out on the street.
The eldest son, who was at this point 16 years old and aching to leave town for good, got on his bike and rode directly to the tracks. He found the conductor, who sat on the gravel embankment with his hat in his hands and his head down.
“Where is she?” the 16-year old asked the train conductor. “Where’d they take Susy?” (He already knew whose car it was, even though it was mangled and looked more like a crinkled-up ball of aluminum foil than a motor vehicle; plus the other folks in town hadn’t stopped shouting some variation of “Little Susy! Oh my God!” for the last ten minutes, which the 16-year old thought was horribly annoying and even stupid, because what good would all that shouting do? Obviously what was needed was action.)
The train conductor, without looking up, pointed directly at the restaurant and bar, a piece of which you could just make out from that vantage point on the tracks.
The boy turned, saw the lights of the restaurant, and hauled off on his bike.
There was a crowd gathered of course. But what the boy saw and what he fixated on was the trail of blood leading to the establishment’s front door. There was so much blood. It was already drying. He sat there on his bike, propping himself up with one rigid leg, feeling the cold on his skin and staring at the blood. How in the hell could one little girl—who was no older than six, she hadn’t even started school yet, rumor had it because her father hadn’t enrolled her in time—how could a child bleed so much?
The young man stared at the blood and at the crowd, who mostly stood shoulder to shoulder in a strange anxious silence—as if they wanted simultaneously to hear some final bit of news about the world and also to collectively weep but also to implode—and then the young man realized he could walk into the restaurant and maybe see what had happened to her, to Susy. So he pushed through the crowd and opened the front door which wasn’t locked.
And he saw Susy on the table.
He saw her for one second and then looked away, because he knew that if he kept looking he’d puke.
And then the eldest son who stood in the middle of his family reunion in that same town, in the top floor of that same restaurant, now in his fifties, divorced, without kids, strangely alone even amidst people who generally comforted him and tried sincerely to understand his joys and sorrows, this man who was at this moment surrounded by his only family, many of which who had somehow and with great effort escaped their small fates—the eldest son opened his eyes.
And saw that the top of the staircase was empty.
The eldest son realizes that Susy works in this restaurant. Likely because this is the only job left in town that can pay.
The eldest son realizes that his home town is just a relic of an abandoned country.
The man opens his eyes and in the room before him, he sees Susy’s broken little body on a table.
*
The eldest son sits bathed in the sad blue light of a computer screen. One year has passed. He’s alone in his nicely-furnished modern apartment—a loft space that’s also part and parcel of an aggressive campaign of gentrification. He’s paying out the ass for rent but he can afford it. His firm doubled their profits in the last year. He’s a mostly absent partner. He rarely has to do much work.
And he’s up at 2am staring at the computer, trying to track down Susy’s father.
Since that family reunion, the eldest son has lost his ability to sleep soundly. Once he was a champion sleeper: head on the pillow and he was out in a few seconds. But since the night of that family reunion out near that dark stretch of Colorado mountains, that night right by the train tracks, he hasn’t been able to get more than a few hours of rest each night.
Finally, six months on, a therapist told him he needs to resolve whatever mystery is plaguing him. She told him to seriously think about what feels to him unresolved about that traumatic moment from his childhood. “What do you feel needs to be done? What do you need to learn? To see?” She asked him those questions, or variations of those questions, again and again, over multiple sessions. He never knew how to respond, so he didn’t.
But this night, at 1:45am, he gets out of bed and knows the answer: he has to find Susy’s father. He has to find out what happened to him.
Because, as the townspeople discovered shortly after the broken little girl was carried away in her ambulance, the father was gone. His car was gone. He’d taken none of his things—no missing suitcase, no rifled-through closet. He’d even left his small bit of drinking money, a few dollars and cents which he blithely stored in a dirty manilla envelope, change and all.
Where had he gone?
What had he become?
The eldest son, nearing the years in which a person must reconcile themselves with their own decrepitude and death, if they’ve been so lucky to avoid serious illness themselves—a luck the eldest son has somehow inherited, despite his mother and father’s early bouts of arthritis and eventual renal failure—sits and Googles the name of Susy’s father.
He finds nothing.
He goes back to bed.
*
The eldest son repeats this ritual every night for six months.
Finally, during a beautifully temperate spring night—the loft’s large windows thrown open to let in a soft and softening breeze—the eldest son finds it: Susy’s father’s name, right there. The name is right there in an obituary.
He reads the little clipping with disbelief. The obituary lists the father’s name, his history. Says he’s “survived by his daughter Susy ________” in Colorado.
He rereads the location of the paper in which the obituary is published, its website horribly outdated and barely navigable.
Oregon. He lived and died, apparently, in Oregon.
The eldest son reads the listing for the funeral home. He reads the date and time.
If he gets in his car and drives there and doesn’t stop, he can make the funeral.
He sits naked in front of the computer, feeling his fatigue, his listless body. He feels his fatigue, essentially now a fugue built up from more than a year of insomnia, of dissatisfaction with his labor, of shallow relationships and a deep and unmet desire to say all there is to say about himself, to lay out his life for another and have that life received and accepted with some kind of grace, or if not grace, with equanimity. He has no one, really. And he knows it.
He looks at the screen.
*
The eldest son is in his car, passing the Oregon state line. He knows what he’ll soon see: a sad small funeral home in a sad small town. Much like the sad small town in which he was raised. And he knows too what he’ll see inside that funeral home, that second-to-last home of the dead: no one. No one will be at the funeral of this sad lost father except him.
He drives forward knowing that he needs to maintain this peculiar vigilance. He drives forward not knowing what he’ll do once we has nowhere else to go. He knows only that he needs to be a witness.
Cut to black.
And then, slowly fading in, in big white letters:
Broglio
Beers
