2006-09-12 || 4:09 p.m.

|| telephone telepathy ||

i have telephone telepathy. my dad answers the phone, and all of what is being held in his throat, pushed down by his voice box, eases out across copper wires and fiber optics and into my ear canal and down to my heart. i'm okay, he says, but i have evidence to the contrary. and all the heavy clouds caught in his silence are enough for me to picture him hiding in his office with the door shut, his hands holding his head. i'm fine.

the house my parents built in mexico before my mother got sick, finished a few months too late for my mum to most likely ever be able to see it, was hit by a hurricane last week and filled with water. the water reached high enough for you to be able to properly speculate whether ceramic plates and cups in cabinets tend to float with the ebb and flow of flood water or stay put on their shelves, waiting it out. there's a layer of mud on the counter. all the furniture has been upended. trees are missing outside.

when my dad first told me about it, he was cautious and restrained; he didn't know what to expect. he didn't have pictures of the kitchen yet, and it was hard to detect what feeling was getting pushed to the back of his throat. my mother cut in on the phone and repeated what you tend to repeat in situations like this: it's just stuff. we can replace stuff.

he's looking for a way to get down there. when he discusses flying vs. driving, i can tell he is burdened by the task at hand (toxic mud. cleaning. there was a picture of a horse dead on its side washed up on a driveway down the street.), walking through the devastated town and playing the game of what used to be where. finding someone to stay with my mum. he pauses on the line for a while and i wait. it wasn't supposed to be like this. it wasn't supposed to be like this. i tell him i'll come down and stay while he goes down there, but he knows i can't and says no. there wasn't supposed to be a hurricane and there wasn't supposed to be pulmonary hypertension and there wasn't supposed to be 4 liters of oxygen a minute flowing through a plastic tube long enough to wind its way like an artery through the house down the hall to where my mother is sitting.

he is supposed to be fishing off a beach in baja. he is supposed to be saying he is fine on the phone and meaning it.

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