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I have wasted the entire day waiting around for Imaginary Keith to get home from work.  With the ghost sitting in that jar in the back closet, it’s been impossible to even think.  I keep sneaking into the closet to sit next to the jar, but the agreement before Imaginary Keith went off to work was that I would do nothing until he got home.  The ghost in the pickle jar is too exciting, and neither one of us wants to miss out on anything.  And so I wait.

You’d think that after all the waiting I’ve done in my lifetime I would have become good at it.  Health, strength, success, and wealth, I bet if you can name it, I’ve waited on it.  Love, respect, trust and kind words, I think the list could go on forever.  I sat on the bench for years, waiting to be played, and am forever sitting around, waiting for the right words.  I once stood in a sports store for five hours, waiting for my son to make up his mind about a pair of roller blades.  Five hours in the same aisle, wondering what kind of indecisive man my son would grow up to become, as the store clerks looped round and round until they finally grew tired of us and we became invisible.

Maybe invisibility is all that ever comes of waiting.  Maybe you simply disappear if you’ve sat around waiting long enough, or that it just feels that way, as everything and everyone else around you just passes by without a glance.

So like I’ve said, I’ve been sneaking back to look at the jar and just sitting there, staring at it without saying a word, trying my best to keep my promise.  Promises are important, I think.  A person should do everything they can to keep their promises because if you make one, you can bet that there’s someone somewhere sitting around just like me, waiting on it to come true.  I think people spend a lot of time sitting around waiting on promises.  Probably too much time, but then that’s the thing with waiting, it’s hard to know when to stop.

But you know, this time maybe the waiting will do some good.  I don’t think it’s going to end up anything like the time I waited on some girl to glance up, or for the phone to ring, or that one night I waited for hours for that bus to show up in the rain.  This time it felt like something was changing.  Sitting there in the dark, staring at the jar as I tried to catch some movement from the ghost trapped inside, I found myself thinking of what it’d be like to be trapped in a jar myself.  What would that be like?  Like having your world unravel all around you?  Is that what it felt like?  Like the universe had somehow lured you in and threw the lid over your head when you weren’t looking?  I hadn’t thought of it until now, but the last couple of years of my own life had felt a little like I was in a jar.  Like my body was trapped on the inside while the rest of me floated around lost and loose on the other side, beyond my reach, drifting further and further away.

It was hard sitting in the closet with the ghost after that, and I was glad that I’d made the agreement with Imaginary Keith to wait.  When he got home, I’d tell him what I’d been thinking, and he’d know what to do.  He’d know what to do about the ghost in the jar, just like he’d know what to say.  I don’t admit it often, but he’s better at that sort of thing then I am.  He really is.  It’s like he lets things just go in one ear and then right out the other, but somehow never ends up looking like he’s not listening.  It’s the kind of thing that makes you think you could never trap him in a jar, no matter what you tried.

So I spent the entire day waiting, wondering what I would say to the ghost when Imaginary Keith got home.  I walked around the house, trying to imagine what the ghost was doing here in the first place, thinking that maybe that would help with the waiting.  I’ll tell you, it was a long day.  I didn’t think it would ever end.  I think the highlight was when I discovered that my head was only slightly smaller then a jar of animal crackers we had sitting around the house.  I held the jar next to my own head, and tried to imagine being in there somehow, trapped, looking out.

So yes, I think the waiting today did some good.  I’m suddenly thinking more about what I’ll ask the ghost.  I’ll be more careful with my questions.  I’ll imagine my own head inside that jar of animal crackers, and try my best to keep some perspective.

I’ve been doing a lot of tossing and turning the last couple of nights, thinking of everything that has gone on over the last week.  I just sort of flip around under the covers, trying to imagine what it all means as I listen to the hum of the generator out in the field.  The investigators are still hard at work as they continue to dig up my field in their search for more of Mr. Cooper’s bones.  I’m beginning to wonder just who this Mr. Cooper really was.  I’ve closed the curtains, but the light from the floodlights streams in between the cracks.  I swear they have one aimed right at the house, watching.

I keep thinking about the conversation dad and I had as we drove the hour up to the airport.  All the same small talk that we always skate around on.  Ice so thick that you’d think nothing will ever crack it.  Divorces, marriages, new families, life in another country, life, death, and finances.  Love.  Loneliness.  Dreams and responsibilities.  Our skates barely scratch the surface, yet the slightest mention of any of it and you can almost see the two of us, pretending it’s gotten colder, looking around for another jacket.

One mile from the airport he brings up the fact of my broken marriage.  It is a safe distance to begin such a conversation, being only minutes from the baggage check-in window.  He knows he will be getting away and has a safe escape.

“I had no clue you and K were even separated,” he says.

“We didn’t really tell anyone,” I answer.  “We weren’t sure what would happen, so we just kept it to ourselves.” It’s a statement painted in both truth and lies.  A diplomatic answer.  What it means is that I told no one that I knew, other then my few close friends and everyone with access to the internet.  But other then that, I hadn’t said much.  Secrecy, after all, is the glue that binds us all together.  Once we learn the secrets, what would be left?

The conversation lives out its short life by turning into a series of brief, almost unrelated statements about life and relationships.  Everything that my dad says is about his own life, and what it meant for his own marriage to end with my mom, but of course, spoken in a completely guarded way.  Nothing is said directly.  There are no names or specifics given.  Everything is in some sort of code, and sitting there, I must elicit every meaning or emotion if I am to understand anything.  It is as if Dan Brown has written the entire dialogue for every conversation my dad and I will ever have.  We are the original Da Vinci family, hailing from parts midwest.  But you wouldn’t know that, not just by listening to us that is.  Not without knowing the code.

I stop the car and we unload his bags onto the sidewalk.  There isn’t much time, and I will only drop him off at the door.  We hug.

“I wish I could stay for a month,” he says.  “But I think some little guys need me more back there then here.” He gestures with his hand the height of his new little boys.  My half-brothers.  Three of them now, one of them whose name I can’t ever seem to remember.  It’s a strange thing to say, I think, as you leave one son and fly off to see three others, but then, there is always the code to fall back on.  Never get caught up on the words.  Read between the lines.  Find the meaning not in what is said, but in what is not said.  In the Da Vinci family, true meaning lies somewhere in the unspoken, but it is a code that I wish had been cracked and discarded a long time ago.  It seems as useless in today’s age as an heirloom teacup.  It all seems so fragile and requires so much protection.  One day, I think, someone’s going to smash that fucking cup.  Just throw into onto the ground and grind it under their heel until there is nothing left but dust.  Then what will the Da Vincis all stand around and talk about, when there is no more teacup left to protect and gather dust?  What then?

“I love you, dad,” I tell him, and we hug a second time.

I couldn’t tell you what he said back to me.  It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s just that I can’t.  I don’t remember.  But I do know that it wasn’t what you’d think you might hear.  He stumbled on his response, I think, unsure of what to say.  Caught off guard, maybe.  I don’t know.  And that’s the point here, I think.  I might never know, not at least in the way that I imagine other people might know about their own fathers. 

Dad grabs up a suitcase in each hand and heads toward the doors, on his way back to Costa Rica.  I pull out the camera and try my best to capture an image of what it looks like to watch this man disappear.  I think of a lot of things in this way, if you really must know.  I look at things and see them as if they are about to disappear forever.  I can gaze at antiques for hours because I know that most of the things just like them have disappeared.  I stare at people like I am insane, because I know that only minutes from now, even seconds, they will not be the same person that I was just looking at.  Something will have changed.  Something will have disappeared.

But my camera is too slow, and I don’t get the picture that I thought I had in my mind.  Or maybe the camera also goes by the code of my family.  Maybe it knows that some things must remain a secret.  It senses this thing in me that would grind the family heirloom under my heel, and knows that I must be protected from myself.  Who am I to disrupt what has always worked?  The camera takes the picture, but slowly and deliberately, capturing only the faint outline of my dad as he disappears into the revolving doors.  It is an image that only I would recognize, having been there to witness it.  An image that would make sense to no one other then me.  I stare at the picture, thinking that maybe my camera knows more about what it means to disappear then I do.

“Goodbye, Dad,” I say, watching the place where he once was, noticing that the doors continue to spin, long after he is gone.

So lying there in the dark, with the floodlights streaming into my room, I think it is easy to see why I cannot sleep.  There is just too much to think about.  My weekend with Other Keith.  Dad’s brief appearance and disappearance.  And now this thing with the bones. 

Through the window, I hear the distinctive sound of a diesel governor kicking in.  It’s easy to imagine the government funded backhoe out in my field, pushing it’s bucket deep into the soft earth.  I have no need to sit up and look out the window.

Someone, it seems, is always looking for something.  Somewhere out there, there is always a man or a woman who seems lost, and for some strange reason, it doesn’t seem to matter to us whether or not they are dead or alive.  We don’t care.  When it comes to searching for the truth of someone, we seem incapable of making a distinction between the two.  And without a shred of evidence that the two are connected whatsoever, we begin to dig.

I’m busy.  You’re busy.  We’re all busy.

Other Keith introduced me to one great site while he was here.  It’s the internet, as it should be: zombo.com.  Everything you could possibly need, all wrapped up in one neat package.

The boy arrives by surprise, just as I am getting home from work.  “I’m staying here tonight!” he tells me.

The phone rings.  It’s Dad.  “What are the chances of a ride to the airport in the morning?” he wants to know.

Six white vans pull up.  It’s the investigation team, looking into the appearance of Mr. Cooper’s bones.

“Which way to the bones?” someone in a white jumpsuit asks.  I point off in the direction of the skid marks left behind by the crashed space shuttle.  I see him sizing me up, then jotting down something on a clipboard.  As if I don’t already have enough to worry about.  Fuckers.

“I’ll need to reschedule a meeting, Dad,” I say into the phone.  “I’ll call you right back.”

“Okay.”

“Who’s that?” It’s jumpsuit guy again.  Cripes.

“None of your business.” I suppose I should cooperate, but I’m just not in the mood.  Let him scribble away.  As far as I’m concerned, it was my dog who dug up Mr. Cooper’s bones in the first place.  If you ask me, finders keepers and all that business.

I go into the house.  The Little Billy Clinton presentation has been rescheduled for tomorrow.  Tonight we will tweak the coloring.  Add sky and some grass around his feet.  Search for realism.

I stick my hands in the toilet out of love and devotion and start scrubbing.  If anything, I will be Pine Sol fresh.  Friends deserve nothing less then a clean toilet to pee in, don’t you think?  The world, obviously, has gone mad.  I live on a farm.  He should be required to walk out to the field and pee with the rest of the animals.  We humans are such a pampered bunch.

The telephone rings just as I finish.  It is Theodore Dreiser.

“I hear Stowe called.  Claimed she could answer any question with a line of her own dialogue.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said.

“What a show-off.  I can do the same thing.  Easy I’ll use my story The Second Choice.”

“Are you sure?  She was pretty much right on about the whole mopping business.”

“Are you questioning me?”

I’d always imagined Dreiser’s voice being deeper.  Maybe it was the connection.

“Okay.  Here goes.  When my friend Other Keith comes to visit, can I make him pee out in the field with the cows?”

“What?!.”

“Well, that’s what I want to know.”

“Alright.  The answer is -

How are you, Shirley?” he asked sweetly . . “

“You’re kidding, right.”

“No, wait, that’s not the one.  Here we go.  This is it -

What’s wrong, honey?  Aren’t you feeling well tonight?”

“Theodore . . “

“Hold on.  I’ve got it.

Make it Sunday, she pleaded.”

“It’s okay, really, Mr. Dreiser.  It wasn’t that important.”

“Wait!  I’ve got it -

Not this trip, anyhow, he answered bravely.”

“Yes, that’s the one.” He sounded proud.

“Excuse me, but I do believe that line is from The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

“Whatever,” and then the line went dead.