Goodbye
There’s nothing about saying goodbye to a place that feels right. You want to say goodbye but it never quite works out, does it? Maybe the place is changed by the time you get around to it – empty of all the things and the people that made it a place you might want to say goodbye to – changed enough that the gesture is just that. A gesture. A little empty and meaningless and embarrassing and dumb. Or maybe the place wasn’t even yours. Maybe it was somebody else’s and you go there trying to find some scrap of them after they’re gone. Some echo of them. Some imprint they left in the air.
I feel like I’m clearing my throat here, you know? Saying what doesn’t need to be said in order to keep from getting to what I really want to say. I’m clearing my throat but it’s not because I don’t really want to say it. It’s just that I don’t know how to get there.
We were at the mall one day when I was about six years old, my father and I sitting in the food court at the center of the mall by the escalators, waiting for my mother as she shopped. There was a kid there about my age, playing at the foot of the down escalator. I don’t know where his mother was. He crouched neatly to the side, out of the way of the descending shoppers, and walked his hands along the moving belt. Hand over hand over hand.
“Get away from there, kid, you’ll hurt yourself,” my father said, but the kid didn’t hear him or maybe he just didn’t obey, and a second later there went his arm. This was a long time ago, you see. Twenty years or so. They didn’t have those sensors or whatever that they have now. Those things that make the escalator stop if the droopy edge of your sleeve gets tangled up in the guts of the thing and your arm gets pulled inside.
The kid’s arm gets pulled into the machinery under the escalator and as he tips back his head and opens his mouth impossibly wide and screams, the piped in music and the splashing sounds from the decorative fountains are gone, buried under this other, larger sound as the whole world explodes into action and noise. A security guard halfway across the food court pivots on the ball of his foot and runs toward us in the big screen, Hollywood-style slow motion of my memory, but my father is there first. I don’t know what he thought, or if he thought at all. Maybe if he’d stopped to think he would have realized he didn’t know what to do. And maybe if he realized he didn’t know what to do, he wouldn’t have done anything at all. But what he did was this: he grabbed the handrail of a moving escalator and, through sheer force of will and impossible strength, he stopped it.
It’s his foot that I remember, bent hard from the exertion. That desperate, grasping need for traction and strength.
Then the security guard got there – it must have been just a second later – and opened the panel that revealed the button that canceled the electricity that powered the escalator. And he punched the button and it all stopped.
My father’s gone, you see. He’s gone and no one knows where he is. All we know is that he did this himself. He disappeared himself. He’s not missing, because he’s gone on purpose. And I’m here in this building where he spent nine hours of every day, five days of every week, fifty weeks of every year, and and even though he’s gone I’m looking for him here. But I never even knew him here. I never came here before. How does that happen? I don’t know. I don’t know. It just does. There aren’t even floorboards in the classroom where he taught, just plywood screwed down and painted. Maybe there was once carpet on top of it. I don’t know. I never knew. It feels like he’s dead and I have to remind myself that he’s not. Except he is, isn’t he? Or he might as well be.
I can’t see him in this room. I can’t feel him here. I want to blame the room but I can only blame myself.
It’s all so silly, isn’t it? The things you think about at times like this. The things you think matter.
Everything happened quickly after the escalator stopped. People swarmed. A panel was opened and the kid was freed, his arm purple and torn and abruptly sleeveless. His mother appeared, shrieking. The ambulance came and then left. A strip of colored plastic tape blocked access to the escalator. They didn’t turn it back on.
He turned to me, to where I stood next to our table, and we just looked at each other. My mother approached, purse over her shoulder, a pair of bright paper shopping bags in the other hand. He told her what happened in words I could not hear, and she dropped her things and threw her arms around him. He reached for me and pulled me into their hug and I felt his arms still trembling as he clung to us like he’d never let go.
Rivka Jacobs
This is a beautiful, moving, and technically excellent piece of writing. One of my favorites of all your stories.
In terms of writing technique, expertly done. The way the narrator moves from the memory of her father (heroic) to the current reality of abandonment and loss — you fold a memory into a narrative introduced by a revelation of emotional pain and avoidance. The entire story demonstrates exactly the way the human mind works, from the search for meaning and memory to the way memories flash into our minds and illuminate hidden truths.
By ending the story with the memory of love and a tight family bond and the image of a father’s heroism; the whole is made all the more painful and poignant to read, and stays with us so much longer, and is so much more powerful.
Writers make choices, as to what to reveal, and when, and in what manner. And your choices are perfect in this story. It’s one of those rare times that I’ve read a story or any fiction, where the structure and content are so well integrated and mutually illuminating.
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