The next day my dad took me fishing. It was Martin Luther King Day so there wasn’t any school and my dad was in town. For a long time he was away all the time because he and my mom divorced, but now he was just away all the time because he drove a truck. We were rocking in our little boat drinking tall cans of Arizona Iced Tea. It was cold but I had a fleece on and there was something good and metallic about drinking the cold tea out of those cans.
We didn’t talk for a long time. I rolled my bait into a ball and then mashed it on the tiny golden hook. I handed it to my dad so he could cast it for me. I can cast okay, but he does it way better, and I thought it would make him feel good if he thought I needed him. He cast it far out and handed it back to me and then we sat there. The water of the lake was rippling and the lips of the ripples were white with the sun. If I only looked at the water it seemed like we were moving, like the water was pushing past us and we were moving further out onto the lake. But the moment I looked at the shore, which was so far away that the bushes and reeds looked like cheap lace, I could tell we were just sitting there, anchored.
Then he started in, saying, “I’ve been reading these books I think you might be interested in.”
“What kind of books?” I asked.
“Just books. Metaphysical books. Spiritual stuff.”
“What do they say?” I asked. My dad started to get kooky a couple of years after the divorce. For a long time I think he was drinking a lot and then he sort of bottomed out and now he doesn’t drink at all but he’s always saying crazy shit, like about how it’s my mom’s dharma to fail at relationships with men, and that she can’t help herself from chasing after lame-o types like Lenny, and that we should all just pity her and try to be nice. I pointed out that no one could really be nice and understanding when Lenny starts singing in the car, beating the steering wheel with that round hairbrush of his, and that made my dad laugh. That’s the nice thing about my dad—he always laughs when you say something genuinely true and funny.
“Well, the one I was thinking about was actually about illusion. And how the world as we experience it is all just Maya, which is Sanskrit for illusion. Just shadows.”
I made a sort of grunting sound. I didn’t want to be talking about this with him, but I knew what he was talking about. Like with the boat, how it seemed to be moving when you looked at the water, and how it seemed to be anchored when you looked at the shore. But everything was like that. Just like my face in that mirror when Eddie was fucking me.
“And the book didn’t say this, but I just got to thinking: what if that is the real message of Jesus Christ?”
“What do you mean?” I said. I had to say something—I hate talking about Jesus Christ way more than I hate talking about dharma and crap, but he is my dad. And even beyond that, we were stuck on a boat together in the middle of a lake so it wasn’t like I was going to tell him to shut up or anything.
“Well, I mean, everybody always says that Jesus taught about love as this guiding principle, but then they try and make that fit into the framework of heaven and hell—and that’s just dead structure there, you know what I mean? I mean, that’s old-world illusion pure and simple.”
“Uh huh.”
“And when you think about love, you know, not love for a specific person, not loving them cause you get something out of it, just love that extends toward people and out to the trees and the Earth and the cosmos—you know, that means loving nothingness too. And to love all that you have to understand that something and nothing are really the same. They’re interchangeable.”
I thought my dad was talking a load of bunk, and I still do, but for some reason it put this crazy image in my head of Jesus riding through empty fields on a skeleton horse, and everything around him dying as he passed it.
“You’re a good kid, you know that?” my dad said.
“Thanks, dad.”
We didn’t talk anymore about it that day. We didn’t catch much either.
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