Empty Tracks

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My father drove himself to his office on the day his brain exploded. That’s actually what she said to me once, my mother, after the fact, a sentence made of metaphor—because of course there was no explosion, no boom, but in her language there was violence where I’d wanted to hear violins, and then I just wanted to fall over, though that verb phrase lacks accuracy, too, because who fell over but my father, curled on the floor when his assistant found him in a darkness he’d made for himself inside a room, holding a headache later known as an aneurysm later compared to the size of a baseball. 

Heather McCalden wants me to write about my dead father because she wants every reader of The Observable Universe, her scattered, shrewd, and heartbreaking debut, to write about their dead parents. Even if it is easier not to write, or easier to write about anything else other than the absent dead, to avoid demands of tense and authority, to describe instead a Lego collection or the weather. McCalden makes her case plain: “It is hard to write about your dead parents in any way that is appropriate and yet: you must write about them.” 

The Observable Universe is a memoir so many-armed and internet-animated that I am tempted to capture it with a cluster of keywords: AIDS, internet, computer, Los Angeles, virus, memory, metaphor, photography, technology, movement, movies, art, grief, vision, friendship, inheritance, detective shows, degeneration, death. Despite McCalden’s exhortation to do so, it feels a little anemic, indelicate, and/or pathetic to begin by offering my one, somewhat conventionally dead father for consideration alongside McCalden’s improbably, almost theatrically doomed pair of parents. But McCalden didn’t want to write about her dead parents, either. She was working on a project about the internet and viruses and metaphors of “virality” in online culture, yet because it was AIDS that killed both of her parents in the early 1990s, because it was the internet that allowed her to search their names and then, also later, because her grandmother died, it soon became obvious that the big track was and had always been grief, fated to be stuck to the book like a song in her head. 

Following two epigraphs—one by Raymond Chandler and one by Aristotle, maybe, “at least according to the internet”—the book begins with a section entitled “DIRECTIONS FOR HOW TO READ,” the first nod of many to paradigms of technology and an introduction to the notion of the book as technology. It’s also a solid joke, as if a book needs a user’s manual. This section reads, in its entirety:           

This book is an album about grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build up on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.          

One experience of this book is formed by engaging with its use of white space, a landscape of absence in which the reader might be compelled, finally, to write. The Observable Universe won the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, which awarded it publication by Hogarth in North America and by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the United Kingdom. In both editions, sections are not numbered, and each receives a title, by turns tender and tongue-in-cheek, in capital letters (my favorites: “I WAS WRITING A BOOK,” “TINDER MONKEY,” “SOME THINGS ABOUT METAPHOR,” “WRITING ABOUT DEAD PARENTS,” “NOIR IS A PLACE,” “QUOTE FROM A TELEVISION SHOW”—which contains, as it promises, a single quote from True Detective—“DAD ASHES,” “THE BOOK I WAS WRITING WHEN NIVIA DIED,” “DAD FRAGMENTS,” and “IF YOU’RE WONDERING WHY THOSE SCENES ARE HERE”). But there is a major difference between the two books, besides the obvious aesthetic divergence—Fitzcarraldo’s plain white cover with cobalt blue lettering, the press’s visual shorthand for nonfiction, vs. Hogarth’s cover in color—which is that the Fitzcarraldo edition is significantly longer than its North American counterpart because each section is afforded its own page. The UK version comes in at 424 pages compared to Hogarth’s 283. It is almost too obvious to write, but was ultimately too important to my experience of reading the book to elide: there is a lot more white space in the UK edition, and I think this makes for a better book—or at least a book closer to what the book itself wants to be, which is a thing to be handled and flipped through, paused and pressed forward, like channels on a TV, pages of a photo album, or songs on a playlist. The white space provides a frame, or breathing room, reading room. 

And now I’ll turn the page and continue to write. 

•

The office to which my father drove himself on the day his brain exploded would more accurately be called a two-room, one-story commercial building in Blakeslee, Ohio, population 104 at the 2020 census, Wikipedia tells me. The business: FOSTER & FOSTER TAX SERVICE. The image on Google Maps Street view: bleak beyond description. At the time of his death, one of the Fosters (my father’s father) had been long gone; now both Foster men are dead and I think the assistant has fled, but I don’t know for sure. All I know is that the phone number I’d first memorized at six and called intermittently for twenty years thereafter is now out of service. 

It is the same number that I was compelled to write onto the last page of McCalden’s book during my reading of an early section about a Japanese phone booth. McCalden recounts a story she heard on National Public Radio about a telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Japan: 

A man in his seventies built it, painted it white, and placed it on a hill in his garden where it overlooked the sea. The interior of the booth held a black rotary phone, a pad of paper, and a pen. […] The booth was completed shortly after the 2011 tsunami, and then people just started showing up to use it. […] They called their missing parts. They called landlines and mobile phones.      

As I pictured myself inside this phone booth—“the wind telephone, they called it”—I scrawled into McCalden’s book a dead number. 

McCalden was born in Los Angeles in 1982, one year after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention observed the first official account of what would become known as AIDS. She was seven and ten, respectively, when her father and mother died of AIDS-related complications, after which she was raised by her mother’s mother, a prickly, minutely sized woman with whom McCalden shared little other than that huge, heavy thing that is everyday life in the aftermath of death and, on special afternoons, the movies, which McCalden sometimes calls pictures: 

For some reason, when I think back to this time, it is always summer and school is out. I see us ride up the glass elevator to the top floor of the South Bay Galleria and stroll underneath fake palm fronds and skylights to the entrance of the GC Multiplex. Around us, people are excited about “the big screen” and “blockbusters.” People still believe in the stories they tell, and eagerly anticipate them. What I mean is, life is not yet so confusing as to render moviegoing an antiquated experience.

Yes: life gets confusing, and it’s the fault, at least in part, of the internet, the rise of which McCalden traces—technologically, chronologically, culturally, philosophically—and locates alongside the rise of HIV/AIDS. The correlations are straightforward yet continually astonishing—that the early nineties heard these twin shrieks intensify in unison; that network, connection, and link are all words that may be understood as relating to family, disease, and online culture in equal measure; that in 1982 the word “Internet” is used with a capital I, and later that same year, the CDC gives the set of symptoms “first identified int the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report a name: AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”—an eerie thrill for the reader to uncover in step with McCalden in pursuit of research, or at least various layers of Google search. 

More than sharing a timeline, McCalden stresses, the AIDS crisis and the internet came to be understood in similar vocabularies within the public consciousness—in terms of defense, waves, spread, reach, infection, interconnectivity, transmission—and they also shared metaphors (virus-hacker is a big one). Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) is never cited—which might seem strange for a book that loves to rub against other sources—but McCalden makes no claims to be writing a comprehensive account and is, moreover, distrustful of the notion that such a thing could ever be possible for someone like her. She describes a first date with “ol’ freelance producer Kevin,” who, she laments, is asking run-of-the-mill questions about parents too frequently assumed to be plural and alive:  “I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. The truth is: I have no idea how to tell another person I feel closer to the thing that killed them than to either of their identities because that thing still exists. […] It is my closest living relative.” 

McCalden is careful to make the distinction between her father the person and her father the death-shaped hole: “The most intriguing thing about my father was his absence. […] his death—not the man, but his passing—chiseled into me, molded me, punctured me, shaped me into something like a person.” I could feel selfish, reading my dead father into these lines, especially the capitalized Nothing that comes later, but am consoled because even McCalden questions her legitimacy in writing them: 

I don’t know much about my father. […] There are already so many stories of missing fathers, and awful, poisonous, lunatic fathers, fathers who murdered and fathers who lied, fathers who left, ran, hit, touched, fathers who swindled,  and fathers who drank, that I don’t feel quite right adding my own story, which is only the story of a dead father. 

Mine was a father who drank, yes, but he was also a father who danced, who sea-dreamed, who wrote letters then went silent, who didn’t leave so much as drove north in order to return and ultimately to recede, yes—this dead father who was my father would never recover from his chosen retreat, and McCalden’s sentences are roomy enough for me to fold him into them, keep him warm. 

Despite McCalden’s qualms, the story of her dead father does become something quite remarkable. The subtitle of The Observable Universe is “An Investigation,” which the reader might first understand as being connected to McCalden’s predilection for the narrative arcs of detective texts, foregrounded throughout—the novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy; the TV show True Detective. But about two-thirds of the way into the book a new keyword is introduced: private-eye—albeit, as instantiated here, a batty, chatty, clueless one—whom McCalden hires once she’s well into adulthood. This private detective, a friend of a sister of a well-meaning bartender, is hired by McCalden to investigate her father, to search for clues related to something that she discovered during a high school class on “internet language and communication” by typing her father’s name into a search engine. This results in a plot twist so seemingly colossal that you assume that the rest of the book could do nothing else but work to unravel it. But no—this completely bewildering piece of information (her father, far-right political activist and Holocaust denier) does not twist the plot at all. In fact, little else is illuminated that relates to it—neither for McCalden, we understand most importantly, nor for the reader. This mostly fruitless search might be most generously understood as a metaphor—if we can bear another one—for grief: “I knew all of this was doomed to fail. Knew it before I got on a plane, made a call, typed things into a search engine, because none of it was real. What I mean is, if you want The Truth, or at least the version of it you can live with, you have to find it yourself.” 

Or write it yourself, which became clear to me after my father died, not without frustration, because who wants to do the labor of writing? At the beginning of his ending my instinct was, like McCalden’s urge towards the PI, to impose the task of writing and remembering on others—asking questions and delivering prompts to those who were in his orbit when he died, or when he was young. Facts were delivered to me via physical materials McCalden would admire for their proximity to the symbolic universe of crime—manila envelopes stuffed with pictures, a USB key, a John Grisham paperback, a bag of bullets. A greasy pizza box used, inexplicably, as a storage container, crammed with newspaper cuttings and documents. The object that comes closest to destroying me with metaphor is the stack of empty CD cases given to me by a woman we nicknamed Connie the Con who explained how the CDs themselves had been stolen from my dad’s car but here, wouldn’t I like these sticky cases. Where I may lack or lose the words, McCalden finds them: “I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.” 

As that last zinger makes plain, McCalden’s tone careens coolly between poetic and pithy, lyrical and crude. The words “lame-ass” and “batshit” and “dude” next to readings of Mary Ruefle on metaphor and Cicero on sorrow and the belief that “you can bring someone back from the dead and fold them inside a sentence.” Or a song: McCalden created a public Spotify playlist to accompany the text. Each fragment is assigned its own track. That’s 255 songs, or fifteen hours and seven minutes, which is also the duration of approximately thirty-three episodes of White Collar, a USA network television show that revises the detective show trope of the “unlikely duo.” White Collar centers the sometimes-paternal, always-fraught relationship between an FBI agent and his criminal consultant, a young, handsome conman and thief who steals and forges masterpieces. Reading The Observable Universe, I learn that I was not alone in watching this show when it aired throughout the 2010s, a period in which I was penciling an outline of the drunk and absent father, pocketing purple eyeliner, and forging, for myself in a notebook, an aspirational relationship with the word “estranged.” 

•

The fifty-second song in McCalden’s playlist is “Hammond Song” by the Roches, the band responsible for my first separation from both of my parents after I was born—they’d long had tickets to the Cincinnati show because I wasn’t supposed to have been a baby yet, was instead supposed to have heard the concert with them, inside the belly of my mother. That it’s the fifty-second song wouldn’t matter, except the number fifty-two had already dinged my heart once during my reading of the book, when I understood that in the fifty-second year of the twentieth century both my and Heather’s father were born. 

The story goes that my father ended with failure on his tongue. “I guess my body finally failed me,” recited his assistant to my mother and me, his last words before losing consciousness, she said. Nice, isn’t it, what a way to go, almost makes you want to believe it, or at least read it—that’s good writing, I thought to myself upon hearing the line. Later we learned that this same assistant, hours after my father named his failure and two days before he died, had forged his signature on a check for three thousand dollars.

More than three years after his death, my father’s failure sometimes slips into the present tense because he owes the Internal Revenue Service $153,000 in back taxes. You read that correctly: my father, tax man, did taxes for a living, often in exchange for maple syrup or fish, but not his own.  My father the mystery! My father is getting—I note here the thrill of the present continuous—a lot of mail. My mother returns these threats to their sender with the date of my father’s death written on the front of the envelope like a postcard from the grave. I see palm trees, blue waves, a cartoon flamingo, a middle finger, and a speech bubble that reads: the joke’s on you. 

Next to a nine-page bibliography that divides sources into books, articles/journals, TV/film, and podcasts/radio, McCalden includes a NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT: “The book was written […] beginning in 2016 and ending in 2021. During this time many of the referenced URLs, web articles, and Wikipedia pages have either transformed entirely or no longer exist. Of course, some of the physical locations and businesses mentioned have also disappeared, all of which is to say: the text you are reading is already a souvenir.” Like a tourist, then, or a dedicated viewer of detective television, the reader of The Observable Universe is granted the space to sprawl, roam the margins, fill in the blanks with their autobiographical bile. I croak: My father’s ashes—whereabouts unknown—never made it to sea, I don’t know what became of his wallet, the standing ashtray of my childhood is AWOL. But there is comfort in carrying them all inside a sentence. A paragraph is a pocket, is possession—this is what McCalden’s book has taught me.  

We might conclude this experience by imagining The Observable Universe as a postcard in transit from here to there, from south to north, from one end of an imaginary phone line to the clouds, from shore to sea and back again. Stretched across its frontside is a photograph of my or yours or anyone’s dead parent: “The past is only past until you look at it again.” Now flip it over and read the words: WISH YOU WERE HERE. Then, right after Courtney Barnett’s “Different Now” and just before Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” listen to the Roches implore: “Do your eyes have an answer / To this song of mine / they say we meet again / on down the line. // Where is on down the line / How far away? / Tell me I’m okay.” Maybe, once the song is over, you want to press REPEAT, and that’s okay (you’re okay). It’s a big track.