Shoulder Blades by Daniel Elder
“Father wrote back that he has no son”
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The trace of my father's hand on my back.
He only ever struck me once, when I fiddled with the radio knob in the car while he talked business on his cell phone. I told him never to hit me again. If only I'd understood the other ways that he was flaying me, and had put a stop to those.
The ghost of my father’s hand.
Now my posture betrays my body, my alignment slipping out of whack. I have never felt comfortable in this being, have never felt that I was in my body. More I've felt like a homunculus, sitting in the control room behind my forehead and moving these limbs in stutters and starts along streets, through asanas, around and against other creatures and their bodies.
When I think of Father we are walking. I am six, I am eight, I am fourteen, I am twenty, it's always the same. His proud nose a mountain slope from which he surveys the world, the people in the gutter, the servers in the restaurants, all those below his station. We walk, and here it comes. Father’s hand on my back. Thumb against one shoulder blade, four fingers against the other. And then the squeeze. The pinch.
"Walk straighter, young man."
And now a man of thirty-two and hunched. I threw my torso in the garbage just to spite him.
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He asked me to read a new book he had written and tell him what I thought. His first time writing about something other than stocks and commodities. A foray into his favorite genre: travel writing.
I read the book. It felt disgusting to lie so I told him everything true. About the petty cruelties littered throughout his words, about the judgments he cast. About how often he would dwell on people's bodies, as if this told us anything about New Zealand. As if this was anything other than meanness in its purest form. Meanness, misogyny.
I don't remember how it got so bad. I was medicating our relationship with copious amounts of marijuana. I just know one night I carried a typewritten letter to his Avenue A loft. I drove my tangled body of bones and muscles up the two flights of stairs and with smoky tears I told him I was tired of having to sit in his apartment when we spoke, on his territory, where he made the rules of the game from the comfort of his throne. I had written my thoughts -- about us -- and would he just read them?
He took the envelope, announced that he did not read letters, and tore it into pieces that he threw into the waste bin beside the coat rack.
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I called him one day, after six years of silence.
I confess: I knew he was out of the country. My sisters were still in touch. I felt safer on his answering machine. We had said terrible things to one another, the last time. I called without rehearsing. I wished him well, and asked if he would like to get lunch. Let’s see what we can be to one another.
My phone never rang. I told myself that that was fine.
I drank ayahuasca a few months later. My fifth time sitting with the plants. As the brew of vine and leaf bloomed within my prostrate body the thought came: I can't believe he didn't call me back.
And then another voice: Yes, you can.
I hugged my bucket close and vomited him free of me. My whole body convulsing to expunge this penetrating shadow that had woven itself not just into memory but into my sinews and all my cells.
Out, out, out.
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I love to clean my bucket in the peaceful morning after ceremony. We bury our purge in the dirt all together. All of our pains, our griefs, mixing into one, feeding the earth. Then we clean our buckets. I use my bare hands, my fingertips, gathering every last bit and slipping it into the cold clean river out behind the house in the Hudson Valley where we hold our sacred circles. Watching my catharsis float away downstream. Watching the light kiss the river. Reciting cummings to the water. I thank You God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky.
And then walking away, across the grass, feeling each light step from the arch of my foot through the bridge of my spine to the twist of my hair. Embodied being, walking back into life, breathing deep across my shoulders, free of the hand on my back.
But its echo keeps returning. There is always more to clean out of my bucket.
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I decided to leave home. A calling to go west. Wondering if we would meet again one day in a hospital room. So I gave it one last try: Let’s meet before I’m far away, Father. His answer: short and vicious.
Before I left I spent a weekend sitting with the plants.
The first night, I lived in the prison of my father's mind, inhabiting the awful loneliness of his architecture. Walking the stone walls. Feeling the barbed wire. Ballistic missiles and snipers on the parapets. The gates where I would need to kneel if I hoped to be admitted. The whole world kept at bay.
The second night the shaman brushed a feather across my face, then reached into my back and pulled something free. I felt two wings spread wide and lift me into nebulae I never dreamed that I would see with all this weight in my bones pinning my bent body to the earth. The pulse of my heart barely contained in my chest.
She reached between my shoulder blades, and placed her hands inside my wounds.
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Traveling to Peru was an old dream.
In the airport, they told me that I could take my huge backpack in the cabin of the plane. I had two connecting flights, and I was worried about arriving in Cusco without any clothes, so this was good news. But I knew there were some things I needed to toss that wouldn't pass security. The huge can of sunblock. Liquids.
And the knife.
He gave me the knife when I was fifteen and I had carried it for seventeen years. The knife was the only object left that linked my body to his body, that had passed from his hand to mine. I had already cut him out of my life. Removed his cancer from my thriving organism.
I threw the knife in the garbage can beside the TSA agent. Then I flew.
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In my tent at night, in the Andes, I find myself thinking of him.
How we would sit on my bed beneath the world map while he quizzed me on the geography of the earth. Filling me with wonder for its vastness. How he took me all over that world, as he traveled on business. Hiking, hotels, farm stays. Long drives with jazz and books on tape. Flickers of warmth.
It took me nine years apart to build a life that brought me to Peru. I climbed out of a swamp, then found my footing on the ground, and then I built myself a bridge to the West out of scrap. I followed the bridge into the mountains.
And I am here. But he is here, too. In the melting glaciers, in the sound of the tent zipper, in the oxygen-thin air.
Out, out, out.
The hike strains my back. My shoulder. The imprint of his fingers.
I find a healer in Cusco named Dhruva. He lays me on a table surrounded by jagged crystals and Shipibo tapestries. The moment he touches his hand to that spot on my back, he gasps.
Tell me what happened here.
So I tell him. I tell him everything. About money as the currency of love. About judgment, disappearance, expectations, pain. About not being enough. How I swallowed my pride and offered up an olive branch, apologizing for the hurts I’d caused. How Father read that letter.
How Father wrote back that he has no son.
Dhruva pours himself into my shoulder. His fingers lava hot, making me a believer in energy, for this soft hour at least. Stillness in the room with us. He pauses, and leans down. A voice so gentle.
Tell me about your relationship to the spiritual father.
I wish, I say to him.
I wish I could believe that we are all held.
There is no bucket here for me. No container for my story. Nothing I can purge into and make clean again. Yet all the same I feel some great release, some drainage, not through my mouth but through Dhruva’s fingers. My shadows condense in the space between his skin and mine. They evaporate, out into the Peruvian sky, under which I lie with my shoulders raw, revealed, exposed to the touch of two strong and caring hands.
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Header image courtesy of Pierre Schmidt. To view a gallery of his artwork on NAILED, go here.
Daniel Elder is a New York City native who now calls Portland home. He is the author of a self-published collection of essays and is currently revising a novella. He lives in an attic with his cat, Terence.