Memories of My Father

1.

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Genesis

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??????????? When he was thirteen years old, my dad went to juvenile hall for trying to kill his dad. For the rest of his childhood he was in and out of state institutions. In 1962, instead of graduating from high school, he was sent to Folsom State Prison, the infamous birthplace of the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia. During his stint there, he saw one inmate drive a four-foot-long spear through another inmate’s torso, had “Johnny Reb” tattooed on his shoulder, held his ground against a charging Samoan nearly twice his size, and barely survived a riot. My dad never forgot the people he met: a man who used kitchen cleanser for toothpaste, another who stopped talking for an entire year, and another who boasted of his involvement in several car bombings in Belfast.

??????????? After serving his sentence, Dad moved into an orange teepee he had built high up in a tree, grew his hair down to his hips, and sported a big gold earring. It was the late Sixties, and the world was insane. For several years Dad did what he had to do to feed his heroin addiction, but one night he overdosed and died in the backseat of his friend’s car. At that moment he witnessed an ineffable “light show”—an infinite, twisting kaleidoscope of colors that he could actually hear. It was his first glimpse of what he called “God.” When I asked what happened to him after he died, he said, “My friend probably buried me in an empty lot somewhere.”

??????????? Several years later, Dad was staying at a mandatory rehab center outside of San Francisco. An “honorary Chicano,” he earned the nickname Juan Tortuga because he kept several box turtles in his bathtub. One day his friend César complained of a headache that had been bothering him for several days. Dad told him, “If someone cut off your head, it wouldn’t feel any more pain.” A few hours later César came to him and said, “You healed me, ese.” Convinced that César was messing with him, Dad got angry: He didn’t believe it was possible for anyone to be healed, let alone healed by a convict like him. It wasn’t until several months later, when he discovered Mary Baker Eddy’s Unity of Good in the library of the rehab center, that he began to believe in spiritual healing. In fewer than 15,000 words, that little book seemed to explain not only what he experienced in the back seat of his friend’s car several years earlier, but also how he healed César of his headache. By the time Dad finished reading, he knew he was a Christian Scientist.

??????????? In 1972, Dad was released from the center. For reasons I may never know, he decided to leave Northern California for good and take a twelve-hour bus ride down to Riverside, a rapidly growing metropolis in the semi-arid hills that stretch between Palm Springs and San Bernardino. As soon as he got off the bus downtown, he walked over to the First Church of Christ, Scientist. It was a bright Sunday morning, and dozens of people in suits and dresses were going up the stairs and into the church. Dad was wearing torn jeans and a muscle shirt; his hands, arms, and chest were covered in prison tattoos; several of his teeth were missing, and everything he owned in the world was inside the garbage bag that he carried over his shoulder. When he came to the entrance of the church, he saw a beautiful young woman standing at the top of the stairs. Her name was Gloria, and she was 25 years old. When her eyes met his, they fell in love. Six months later they would be married, and eight years later I would be born.

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2.

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January 7, 1984. Lake Evans, Riverside.

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Wearing my brand-new, sherpa-lined jacket, I am walking above the shore of the lake. It’s late afternoon, and the golden sun is about to disappear behind Santiago Peak. The cold Santa Ana winds are blowing hard, making my long, blonde bangs smack against my forehead until the skin itches and tingles. The reflection of the sun on the lake water is so bright that I have to squint just to look at it. Unable to see me behind the tall barley and buckwheat, Dad is calling out to me: “Joel, where are you?” “Dad?!” Now I hear his big footsteps in the crunchy, phyllitic dirt. I look up, and I see his face smiling down at me from a superhuman height. Dad is forty years old (as old as I am as I write this): His thin, brown hair is parted down the middle of his scalp; his big glasses are tinted in the weakening light of the almost-setting sun; and his weightlifter’s biceps are stretching the fabric of his Le Tigre polo shirt. “Come on: Let’s get some good food.” Dad holds out his hand, and I eagerly take it. And that is the last thing I remember—my oldest memory of Dad.

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3.

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My father’s father, James Kilpatrick, was the mayor of Millbrae, CA, and the owner of Kilpatrick’s Groceries. Work was his life. He once told my dad: “I will die when I retire.” And he wasn’t joking. In 1985, just a few years after he stopped working, he was in a hospital in Chico, lying unconscious on a hospital bed. I saw him for the first time when I stood on my five-year-old toes and peered over the bed’s plastic railing, which reminded me of the wooden poles on a crib—my crib from only three-and-a-half years ago. James couldn’t see me: He looked like a mannequin with closed eyes. The last thing I remember is my father saying—with a gentle but vaguely rueful voice—“I love you, Dad.”

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4.

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June 25, 1985. 8:13 AM.

Evergreen Cemetary, Riverside, California.

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Dad and I are sitting in the old Shadow-of-the-Cross section of the disused graveyard. Beside us: a tiny leaning tombstone, into which only the words “Til He Come” are carved. All around us in the unwatered field: deep holes and tall mounds—the work of a legion of unchecked gophers. Close by to the west: Mount Rubidoux, shrouded in the morning mist, looming like a specter, its steep, smooth slopes aglow with the soft golden brown of dry barley grass. I am running my fingers through the warm, phyllite-rich dirt when Dad gently taps my shoulder. He then points at a nearby anthill covered in a churning swarm of fiery Solenopsis xyloni: “Witches live inside these anthills,” he says. “They come out as tiny whirlwinds and steal your soul, dragging it down to Telmakish, the Land of the Dead….”

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5.

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December 21, 1985. Split Rock.

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While the peakéd Winter sun was still shimmering feebly over the Vallecito Mountains, I squeezed my way through the narrow crack in the fractured, twelve-foot-high boulder. After popping out of the other side, I gazed in wonder at the faint, red pictographs on the boulder’s eastern face: A tiny stick-man running toward the south, three circles bisected by a straight line. A little while later, Dad found a black arrowhead, on both sides of whose long, thin point were intricate serrations. “This arrowhead,” Dad said, “was designed to take down large prey, like bighorn sheep….” Now it is night, and the temperature is below freezing. Dad and I are sitting around the fire when he takes a picture of me with our Polaroid. At the moment of the snapshot, my lips (chapped down to the dermis by the cold, dry wind) are contorted into a painful smile, and my long, thin hair (blowing about uncontrollably) is busy flogging my half-shut eyes. As soon as the fire starts to die down, Dad and I climb into the bed of his red Toyota pickup and cover ourselves in blankets. Orion is poised at the meridian, with his blue belt and bloody shoulder. Dad points him out to me—“and the big, red star: That’s Betelgeuse.” As sleep tugs at my eyelids, and as the coyotes howl by the Indian graveyard on nearby Hapaha Flat, I feel like I can say and do anything in this far-off, unpeopled place so far away from home. “Fuck!” I exclaim. Dad chuckles. “Shit!” Dad lets out a loud guffaw. “Bitch!” Now Dad is rolling with laughter, his howls mingling with the coyotes’. “Don’t tell Mom that I let you say those words.” “I won’t.” And right as I say that, a cobalt-blue Geminid meteor streaks over Orion’s hazy head and lands somewhere deep in the Carrizo Badlands to the south. “Goodnight, Dad.” “Goodnight, son.”

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6.

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August 16, 1986. Deep Creek.

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A well-maintained trail winds along the west slope of the ravine, at whose bottom—over 100 feet below us—is the creek with its gentle currents, shadowy water, and swarms of rainbow trout. Pine and oak almost completely cover the slope in darkness, and at every point at which the trail takes a sharp right, a steep defile cuts upward toward the mountaintop. Inset with boulders draped in myriad colors of shaggy moss, and spotlighted by dozens of thin, dusty shafts of sunlight, each defile cradles a silent rivulet that gently erodes the trail as it flows down toward the creek. Atop the east slope of the ravine—with the lavender-blue sky as a backdrop—are dozens of granite monoliths that mingle with gnarled pines and shine enchantedly in the sun. I am walking with Dad up the trail when I spot something unusual on the ground in front of me. Although it resembles a granite pebble, it is too symmetrical to be natural. I pick it up and show it to Dad. “Nice, Joel. You just found your first piece of Indian pottery. Make sure to hold on to it. I’ll put it in our treasure box when we get home….” Seventeen years later, our house on Edgemont Drive burned down, and the treasure box was forever lost in tall, deep drifts of ash. Today, only my memory of the potsherd remains—yet I hardly feel the wound. For if I had to choose between my memory and the potsherd itself, I would pick the former without hesitation. After all, what good would it do to possess the sherd if it held no significance—if it were not the symbol of a reminiscence that is priceless to me? Severed from my recollection of the creek on that August day, the sherd would be just a piece of fired clay; but severed from the shard, my recollection shines as bright as it ever did—indeed, as bright as the original experience itself. And now, by being transferred to paper, it shines even brighter.

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7.

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When I was seven years old—standing with my dad in a dry river bed covered with ripe chia whose spiky bulbs were adorned in bright, purple florets—I asked him, “Why is it that when we are in the wilderness, we want to be silent, while in the city we want to be loud?” My dad said he didn’t know, and then he shook his head with a half-disguised smile—a sign that my words were for him an insight … a sign that made me proud.

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8.

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I started going camping with my dad when I was very young—about as soon as I was old enough to walk. And one of the first places we used to go was Dos Cabezas Spring in the Anza-Borrego Desert. The name “Dos Cabezas,” as far as anyone can tell, was inspired by the two massive, granitic outcrops that sit—like a pair of severed heads set face-to-face—on the crest of the sumac-covered hills that wrap tightly around the spring. So head-like are these outcrops that to many observers—myself included—they appear to have noses, mouths, and even eyes. The western outcrop is especially lifelike, having two projections that look just like big, bushy eyebrows—and to me he has always resembled Abraham Lincoln, one of the wisest and most eloquent American Presidents. Every time I look up at the “two heads,” I imagine them being engaged in deep conversation—a silent and centuries-long tete-a-tete that only huge boulders can have. I confess that it has always been my wish to become a third “head” and join them on that crest, since for some strange reason I have always felt that their mysterious, wordless conversation either is about me personally, or is on some topic on which I am (or one day will be) uniquely qualified to speak.

??????????? During one of our earliest camping trips to Dos Cabezas, my dad told me a story that I will never forget. He said that two-hundred years ago (about 1786) a trio of Spanish horsemen, who had been lost for days in the desert, came to this spring in search of food and water; and although they certainly did find water—as Dos Cabezas is a year-round spring, lush and flowing even in the driest part of the year—these three Spaniards died at the spring a week later of starvation. After telling me this, Dad grabbed a branch of one of the several dozen mesquite trees that grew around the spring, pulled it down to my level, and with his right hand, which was missing its ring and middle finger, he pointed to a gnarled, yellow seed pod. “The pods that grow from these trees,” he said, “are filled with seeds you can eat. The seeds even taste good—the Indians knew all this. But the dumb Spaniards, thinking the desert was just a dead and worthless stretch of sand, didn’t pay the least attention to these tiny, wrinkled pods. And so those guys just wasted away, right here beside the spring, right where we’re camping—even though they were surrounded the whole time by all this incredible food.”

??????????? After my dad’s death in 2009, I began digging into the lore of Dos Cabezas, and after several years of research—to my complete surprise—not one of the historical sources I found made even the smallest mention of the three lost Spaniards and their poetically ironic demise. My father, therefore, must have made the whole story up…. It was a parable that he had improvised right there on the spot.

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9.

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Camping with My Father

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There were moments in our conversations when I felt as if I had taken possession of the entire universe, as if I had within my grasp the past, present, and future, the Alpha and the Omega, the swirling hub of the galaxy, the constellations and the black clouds of dust that blanket the stars; as if all of it sat in the palm of my hand, and I held it so tightly that not even a single grain fell through my fingers, not even a single muon shook loose and slipped through the empty spaces between the atoms of my hand onto the shore of space and time—moments when our shadows, cast by the firelight, broke off from us and began to speak, when ideas came to life. Some might call this “truth.” Even we would call it that. But now I know better: It was love.

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10.

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My father was a “mystic”—although he hated that word. But of all the thousand-and-one nights during which he and I sat around a campfire under the desert stars, not a single one passed without my receiving some new portion of his strange and secret teaching. To give just a brief example—so that you may have a taste of what these fireside chats were all about—one night he asked me, while the reflection of the blue-green flames danced in his drunken eyes, “Can a mind exist without its thoughts?” Having no idea how to respond, being only seven years old at the time, I went with my best guess: “No?” And to that he nodded and said, “Then neither can God exist without Man.”

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11.

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Tres Dedos

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I remember we were camping at Corn Spring—Dad, my best friend Wade, and I. It was around three in the morning, the Witching Hour. Ophiuchus and his Serpent were rising in the east, and I was in the tent, supposed to be asleep. Wade—who was six years my senior, and so was about 18 at the time—was sitting with Dad by the fire, and the two of them were hard at work on a bottle of the cheapest brand of Tequila that has probably ever been produced in North America: Tres Dedos. I was “supposed to be asleep” because the fact of the matter is that I was as wide-eyed as a crusader standing before the walls of Jerusalem, caught in a spiritual state somewhere between rapture and horror, hanging on for dear life to every syllable of Dad and Wade’s conversation. That night the subject was God’s Omnipotence and its Implications for the Quality and Quantity of His Manifestation. As the two men imbibed more and more of that wicked Aztecan elixir, and as the fire grew bigger and bluer with every antique railroad tie they threw onto the coals, their theological dispute grew hotter and hotter, and my heart beat faster and faster. Wade, the young adept, maintained the position that God, by virtue of His being omnipotent, has the power to make Himself as small as a rat. Dad, the old master, repeatedly insisted that an all-powerful being like God simply cannot reduce Himself to such a puny and feeble thing. At this point they were shouting—not so much because they were angry as because they were drunk and having the time of their lives. “But, Jon, if God doesn’t have the power to turn himself into a rat, then He is—by definition—not All Powerful!” “Wade, the one thing—the only thing—that All cannot do is to be less than All!”

??????????? Twenty-five years have now passed since that debate took place, and during every single one of those years (nay, during every hour of every day of every single one of those years) I have dedicated the being of my very existence to the goal of determining—once and for all—the answer to the question, “Can God turn Himself into a rat?” Indeed, for more than 219,000 hours I have been walking barefoot on the broken, tequila-soaked glass of Truth, immersing myself in the syllogisms of all the great theosophers (Aristotle, Aquinas, Pascal, Augustine, Anselm, et alias); pushing my mind as far as God, schooling, pharmaceuticals, and genetics would allow; and even prematurely prying open the still-closed petals of my yet unblossomed heart to see what hidden reasons it contained—all for the sake of this one goal. And so today—at the well-qualified age of thirty-four—I would like to announce that I, Joel Wesley Kilpatrick, am finally ready to take my place by the fire, toss back a swig of Tres Dedos, and give Dad and Wade my hard-won insight into this issue, which is: You’re both right?

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12.

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Memory: 1991

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My dad once led us to the edge of death. We were camping at Clark Lake, the name of which is a misnomer that taken at face value can kill the unwary; for rather than being an actual lake of water, it is a desiccated basin of never-ending wind and mist-like silt, its empty floor carpeted by upwardly curled strips of dried mud, caked chunks of fine sand that once—only once—in the last three years had been pressed down, sweetened, perfumed, and darkened by droplets of rain. Dad had drunk himself to sleep the night before and threw up several times in the morning. By noon, the temperature was over 130 degrees in the sun. He and I, along with my best friend Wade, had decided days before to go in search of the so-called “Corps” petroglyphs.? Hundreds of years ago, this gallery of rock art had been carved by the Cahuilla Indians into the rust-colored patina of several boulders at the foot of a butte on the northeast side of the lake. Upon arriving at our drop point, Rockhouse Canyon Road (just a little over a mile from the glyphs), Dad—still drunk—decided that a small, blue spray bottle, containing no more than 125 mL of water, would be enough hydration for the three of us during the two mile hike. He also suggested that we split up, so as to find the petroglyphs faster: the first person to spot them would yell out to the others, and the three of us would reassemble to behold the spectacle. My job (or privilege) was to carry the spray bottle, but by the time we were halfway to the butte, I had polished it off entirely. Now none of us had any water. Dad—finally realizing the severity of the situation—began calling out to us, and we found him by his voice. We were now about 1500 feet from the base of the hill, having walked about three quarters of a mile. Dad suggested that we turn back, as the water was gone and our likelihood of finding the petroglyphs was less than 50 percent. So back we went, waterless and painfully aware of all the precious time—all the precious life—we had wasted in our aborted expedition. By the time we were about a quarter of a mile from the truck, Dad collapsed. The abscess in his last remaining tooth (all of this other teeth were gone as a result of many years of methamphetamine use), had in the past few months begun to spread its poison throughout his body, so he was already sick and weak before the hike began. But now he was near death, panting and drooling like a rabid dog, his hands and knees pressing into the cholla-studded ground. I, being so young (only 12 at the time), also collapsed, my head throbbing, my bones shaking, my stomach churning, and my skin goose-bumpy with chills as if I were succumbing to the Plague. But Wade (17, and in his prime), threw me over his huge shoulders and carried me the rest of the way. Dad somehow managed to pick himself up, but not without the addled recommendation that we undress completely, seek shade under a creosote bush, and wait until the sun set, so that the hike would then be cooler and therefore less deadly for the three of us. But Wade urged us on, until the red glow of Dad’s Toyota, like the light at the end of a tunnel, appeared in the distance and guided us to the earthly delights of ice water and air conditioning. Once we reached the truck, we were nearly ghosts. I went straight to the ice chest, pulled out a soaked, ice-splattered, plastic gallon-container of water and nearly emptied it in a single breath. As we were driving back to the little town of Borrego Springs, I had to roll down the window several times and vomit. I threw up nearly all the water I had drunk.

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13.

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Memory: 1994

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I was camping with my father and my best friend Brad at an abandoned gold mine in the high desert west of the Sierras. Not far from our camp—amid the arrastres, partially full dynamite crates, semi-dry cyanide vats, and 200-foot-deep, half-visible shafts—an old cabin stood. Made entirely of wood planks, and having bided the mummifying winds of the desert for at least a century, it was so dry that it was already the first part of a fire, just as an intention is always the first part of an action. Dad, being the drunken mystic that he was, served as the shadow that stood between the cabin and the fire, between the intention and the act: he was what turned the former into the latter. When it was time to go to sleep, he took his bayonet, kerosene lamp, Winchester Model 94, and a bottle of tequila into the cabin, where he drank himself into semi-unconsciousness on an old, black-widow-strewn bedspring covered by his wool serape. Brad and I slept on the bed of his pickup truck, leaving the tailgate open to invite in more of that night’s steady breeze. The next thing I remember is the gate flapping up and down, a towering blaze, and machine-gun fire echoing throughout the valley. Dad was driving the truck so fast that Brad almost bounced over the side wall of the cab and I almost slid out the back over the gate. Dozens of jackrabbits were running across the dirt road trying to flee the blistering flames and the hundreds of thunderclaps reverberating in the night. Maybe fifteen or twenty of the long-eared hares got caught under the wheels of the truck and popped like balloons. Dad had several “bricks” of .44 magnum rounds stowed away in the cabin, and all of them were exploding in the conflagration—over 1000 bullets firing in every direction, unguided by the spiral rifling of a barrel. Apparently Dad had placed the kerosene lamp too close to the wall of the cabin, and after he had passed out from the tequila (about an hour later), he jumped up to the sound and heat of six-feet-tall flames. A tunnel of fire stood between his room and the exit of the cabin, and he ran through it as if it were a gauntlet in the Eighth Circle. As soon as he had escaped, the cabin collapsed, irradiating—just like Trinity—the entire valley with a sinister, deep-red glow, a glow that made even the black dots of distant creosote visible in the moonless night. Still drunk, and fearing that the heat was so great it would melt everything within a hundred yards (including Brad and I), he made a run for it, jumping in the truck and hauling full speed all the way back to town—a one-hour, dirt-road drive. By then it was around 4 AM, and as the three of us sat silently around a table at the all-night diner—covered in ash, half in shock, and reeking with the tar-like stench of molten-square-nail smoke—Dad asked the waitress, “Is it too late for a beer?”

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14.

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Memory: 1996

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On the Halloween of my sixteenth year I had my first experience with the Ouija board. Because my relationship with my father was troubled at the time (I was addicted to meth, and he had more faith in the curative power of discipline than in the wishy-wash of materia medica) I tried to contact Edgar Allan Poe, not only because he too had had trouble with his father (in this case over gambling), but also because he was my literary idol at the time. Sitting with me in a lightless, cobwebbed garage was my best friend Mickey. Also sixteen, he was a chain smoker and the virtuoso drummer of our punk band, Throat. After he and I had invoked Poe’s spirit, we placed our hands on the planchette, and it began to move. On the spirit board three words were slowly spelled out: L E T D A D G O.

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San Bernardino: 2004

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If Dad were not a convicted violent felon, he probably would have carried Mom’s .22 revolver on his walk with our sheltie Joshua into the barley-coated foothills above our house. Instead, on that sweltering August day in 2006, Dad played it safe—he did not want to go back to prison—and brought with him only a tiny yellow can of pepper spray, a can that had been hiding in his pocket for so many years that the capsaicin solution inside of it had probably evaporated, and its trigger, full of dust and lint, had probably jammed. But Dad was not concerned, even though the foothills were home to a secret cadre of devil worshippers, who burned upside-down crosses into the soft, wide trunks of eucalyptus trees, and who nailed cow tongues, wrapped in red ribbons, to the rotting, leaning telephone poles that no longer carried current. In a small valley whose steep sides were coated in moldering orchards of blue-gray olive trees—and whose narrow, dry, and concrete-lined irrigation reservoir was the site of the recent murder of a fifteen-year-old girl—Dad ran into four young boys carrying long kitchen knives. “The boys wanted my wallet,” Dad told me after he got back home. “So what did you do?” I asked. “Well, I pulled out my pepper spray, roared at the top of my lungs, and charged at them.” “What happened then?” “They ran away.”

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Ghost Story

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??????????? On a snowy February morning, two months after Mom died, Dad began to make changes to the master bedroom. Although he was terminally ill with chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis, his stubborn pride would not allow him to abstain from strenuous activity; and so, with his back hunched over and his belly distended, he slowly and painfully dragged Mom’s bookcase—every shelf of which was tightly packed with Christian Science literature—into the yellow hallway that led into the living room.

??????????? When I awoke and discovered what Dad was doing, I scolded him for going about it on his own, and then I began to help out. Together we pulled Mom’s solid cherry writing desk into the living room, where it would sit until we found a suitable place for it somewhere else in the house. Then we brought in his corner desk, a massive oak affair with towering hutches, multiple segments, and countless drawers. We also took his favorite reading chair from upstairs and placed it next to the bed. With every change we made, the master bedroom reminded me less of Mom and more of Dad. The room eventually became a widower’s pad.

??????????? Later that month, Dad and I were watching television in the living room. It was late, probably around midnight, and the howling wind was throwing clumps of snow at our windowpanes. While Dad lay on the couch facing the television, I sat on a chair not far from Mom’s writing desk. A few days before, Dad had placed two gold-framed pictures on the desk: the first was of him, and the second was of Mom. The pictures sat on opposite ends, but because Dad had angled them both toward the center, they seemed to be looking at one another—mom’s eyes locked onto Dad’s.

??????????? As I sat in my chair staring at the TV, I saw out of the corner of my eye a fuzzy, gray orb of light, about the size of a tennis ball, pop out from the dark space between the desk and the wall. The orb floated across the surface of the desk, passing between the pictures of Mom and Dad. Then, as slowly and gently as a snowflake, the ball went over the edge and drifted down toward the hardwood floor. When it landed, it made an ear-piercing crack, startling Dad and scaring me right out of my seat.

??????????? “What the hell was that?” Dad exclaimed, glancing over the arm of the sofa. Immediately I dropped to my hands and knees and began scouring the floor around the desk. Obviously something heavy and solid had fallen, but what could it have been? Dad pulled himself off of the couch, and together we searched every inch of the living room floor—but there was nothing except dust and lint. By now tired of crawling around on our hands and knees, and disappointed with ourselves for failing to solve the mystery, Dad and I lay down in defeat on the cold floor; and as the wind wailed in its passage through the crack in the kitchen window, and the muted TV threw flickering rainbows on our faces, he and I just stared at each other—his eyes locked onto mine.

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17.

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No more than a year before my dad died, and not long after I had read Zarathustra for the second time, I approached him in the living room and asked him, “What if God is actually evil?” As soon as my question had registered in his Mind, he got angry, but he tried his best not to show it. Then, after a long silence, he responded—looking me straight in the eye—“What do you mean by God?” And that was the end of that conversation.

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18.

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When you lose your taste for food, you have only weeks left to live. My father, for example, always enjoyed ketchup. But during dinner one autumn evening, he refused to put any on his French fries. When I asked him why, he said that the ketchup tasted strange, although to me it tasted fine. A month later, he died.

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19.

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Opium Dream: 2011

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I’m sitting around the dinner table with Mom and Dad in our old house on Edgemont Street. It’s an hour after dawn, and the early morning light trickles through the sliding glass doors that lead into the backyard. A warm breeze stirs the wind chimes in the patio, while the scent of honeysuckle and rosemary steals from the garden through the open kitchen window and fills the house with the fragrance of Spring. Mom is telling Dad and me about the headline article in today’s issue of the San Bernardino Sun: It seems the F.B.I. is searching for a middle-aged woman who was last seen driving west across the country in a ‘79 Chrysler sedan filled with dirty-bomb material. Dad, who views our mortal existence as nothing more than a “ghastly farce,” is completely nonplussed by this news, commenting in his usual Christian-Science fashion about how the world is blinded by error, and how it is impossible for anything but evil to come from a mortal mind. And that’s when I snap. Cutting Dad off in mid-sentence, I growl, “You guys know you’re dead, right?” And then, as if by some magic, the silence of Reality pours into the room like freezing, briny water into the hull of a sinking ship. Dad begins to cry, and I automatically embrace him. I can smell his cologne and feel his muscular arms as if he were still alive. He says to me, “I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want you to think that I didn’t care about you anymore.” I tell him it’s okay, knowing in my heart that he can’t care anymore, since for at least a year he has been nothing but ashes. “It’s okay, Dad. Everything is okay.” As for Mom, however, both Dad and I know that she has been gone the longest, but we don’t say anything. We know the truth would only hurt her: The truth that none of us is here right now, that this old house burned to the ground eight years ago, and that for the last two years Mom has been very dead, and each one of us has always known it—she most of all.

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20.

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My father said that when he was happiest and healthiest—sometime in his early thirties, when Unity of Good was his favorite book—he did not dream at night, but awoke each day refreshed, with nothing but the memory of the day before. This is quite unlike me, who cherishes his dreams almost as much as his memories; for they are images much like the perceptions of our waking experience, and hence are a kind of experience, an apocryphal chapter in our lives. To have no dreams is to live less; a dreamless life is a life cut short. And O how my father’s life had been cut short—in so many ways.

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21.

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My dad once told me, “You never actually see anything: you only see the light that bounces off of things.”

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22.

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I asked Dad, “What happens when we die?” He said, “You decide whether you want to stay here in this world, or go.”

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23.

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When, as a boy, I asked my dad, “When do you think the Rapture will come?” he looked down at me and said—almost in a whisper—“It already has come.”

24.

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Something my dad said that I will never forget: “The Ten Commandments are not law but prophesy.”

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25.

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Once while hiking in the desert I ran into a man who was camping alone. He was the same age as my father would have been were he still alive, and he dressed just like my father, too, wearing a jean jacket and cowboy boots. As he sat in his tent and smoked his marijuana cigarette, I leaned on my father’s walking stick and listened as he told me that mathematics is the language of God. At the end of a long conversation about metaphysics—one just like my father and I would use to have—I bade him farewell and strode off. After I had hiked about a quarter of a mile from the camp, the man caught up to me, panting with exhaustion. He was holding my father’s staff, which I accidentally had left sticking in the ground by his tent. “You forgot this,” he said between heavy breaths.

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26.

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Dream: 2012

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Dad says, “We Kilpatricks have always been very frightened people. And that’s why we are so desperate for knowledge.”

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27.

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Dream: 2014

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Dad apologized to me last night. I am slowly gathering the courage to be myself around him, to relate to him as one man to another—smoking, drinking, cursing, and agreeing to disagree as only true friends and equals can do: gladly and playfully. The more we disagree (and we disagree so often!), the more we learn about each other and ourselves—the most precious kind of learning—so that now we demand honesty from each other and would be offended by even the most courteous and compassionate mendacities. The whitest lies are now to us the most revolting and depressing sepulchers.

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28.

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Memory: 2018

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It was midnight in the middle of the Fall. I was dozing off in my tent less than a hundred feet from Dos Cabezas Spring, the tiny, moss-encircled trickle—hidden deep in the desert just north of the Border—that my father and I would visit when we were young. As the wind stood still, a huge, invisible hand passed through the wall of the tent, and its thumb—as big and round and soft as a ripe fig—gently touched my chest, as if to leave its fingerprint on my heart. Right away an umbra and penumbra and a thousand humbler shades of warmth spread through my torso, loosening the binds of my muscles, tranquilizing me and quickening me like a dose of Dilaudid. And with the warmth came a feeling of love, of the kind of love that a father has for his son—a love like the dribbling water of the Spring, the threadlike, trembling stream that makes the tule reeds tall and thick and straight, and that gives the moss a throbbing, emerald glow. Now fully awake, I closed my eyes—not to sleep, but to revel in the love, just as the petals of the primrose bask in the swollen drops that stray from the seep. Now I was more than fully awake. So when I heard the sound, coming from a clearing by the water, of boots pacing slowly in the sand, I pulled out my knife and waited. Tessellated with the chirps of frogs, the footsteps went in circles, betraying a man deep in thought, inching closer—with every circle—to the Truth. Circles within circles, until the footsteps faded. The man must have stood still. A void now where his pacing was—a dangling abyss into which the frog cries fell. For several minutes I waited for the walking to resume, but it didn’t—the abyss refused to evaporate. So after several more minutes, I crawled out of the tent, grabbed my flashlight, drew a tight grip on my blade, and went looking for the man. At the clearing I found no one. I then searched the entire area of the Spring—squeezing between decrepit boulders, pulling aside veils of catclaw—until there was nowhere left to look. Back at the clearing, I began to think: If those footsteps did not come from a living, breathing man, then were they a fiction of my mind? A ghost? Now I was pacing in circles—pacing until my thoughts yearned for a rest inside the tent of my unconscious. I let them go—they disappeared into the dangling abyss. Now only the sound of the wind filtering through desert willows, and the warmth of the love that stole into my heart from the hand of a ghost, or from the suggestion of a half dream.

29.

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July 30, 2020. 6:55 PM. Pinyon Flat.

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At my feet: phyllite-rich sand and several dead segments of jumping cholla. Around me: gray-green scrub oak and yellowing creosote, clusters of needly agave and clumps of glossy sumac. In the distance: pine-shrouded mountains inset with mile-wide monoliths. And at thirty-yard intervals: tall, sparsely branched pi?on pines with cloudy tufts of pale-blue needles. I am standing here in this haunted place when a memory of my father creeps into my Signified…. It is 1985, and for the last three days Dad has been hiking the Palm Canyon Trail. Today he comes to the end, and Mom and I are there to pick him up. “He should be here any second,” Mom says, pointing in the direction of a low hill ornamented with lush chuparosas and draped in a mirage whose squirming currents reflect the light of the alabaster sky. I am staring into the twisting columns of air—entranced by their kaleidoscopic interplay—when I notice a dark form precipitating behind them. In seconds a head takes shape, then shoulders, then a torso—then the wiry glasses with outsized, shaded lenses—then the brown tank top and the green, plastic canteen. It is my father, tearing through the paper-thin illusion. Wielding his notched walking stick—his weightlifter’s thighs straining the fabric of his cut-off jeans—he waves to me and Mom. I run to him, and wrap my arms around his narrow waist, nearly in tears from joy. And there the memory ends…. Now I am back in Pinyon Flat—thirty-five years later. Under a nearby scrub oak, two spiny pocket mice rummage through dry, fallen leaves in search of seeds. Off to my left, a raven lands on the barkless, half-naked branch of the tallest pi?on pine in sight. O if only my father could emerge from this wilderness and stand before me once more! Perhaps for the last eleven years he’s been alone on a trail, and perhaps this is the moment he will come to the end. I call out to him: “Dad? Dad? Are you there?” But all I can hear is the moaning of the wind as it pushes its way through the trees. Maybe I’ve come too early. Maybe Dad still has a few more years to go. “I’ll come back,” I whisper, as I put out my cigarette. “I promise,” I say aloud, as the raven flies away and the falling sun touches down on the San Jacinto Mountains.

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30.

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August 8, 2020, 7 P.M. Dos Cabezas.

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I’ve come here alone, and everything seems different. The Two Heads and the sky above them, the sumac and the willow, the spring and the ravine—not only do they appear slightly smaller than I remember them; they also look vaguely yellow, as if they were suspended in olive oil or amber. A voice inside my Heart tells me, “You were never supposed to see this,” and the feeling of being unwelcome percolates upward through my torso—from my stomach to my Adam’s apple. And then the thought, I will never see my parents again—such an obvious thought for an old “atheist” like me! And yet this is the first time I have ever had it.

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*

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3:00 A.M. I am lying down under an aging desert willow, watching its thin leaves and tiny blossoms, struck by the hot breeze, dance in and out of the flickering light of my campfire. I am half-dreaming, half-thinking: What would I say to my parents if I did see them again? Knowing me, I would probably say, “I’m sorry,” since that is what I always say—and say repeatedly—when I have even the slightest hunch that I may have done something wrong. And what did I do wrong as a son? What didn’t I do wrong? Right then a chorus, comprised of the voice of every friend I have ever had, bellows in my Mind: “Stop apologizing!”

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*

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5:00 AM. White Venus sputtering like a lit fuse against a pallid pre-dawn sky. The nearby spring gurgling in the shadow of the ravine. It’s already ninety degrees, and I’ve just started to break down my tent, when the question, again, rises into my Mind: What would you say to them? A toad, camouflaged to pass for a granite rock, leaps onto my backpack and begins to chirp. What would I say? A wasp, en route to the spring’s muddy shores, whirrs past my face. I guess it all depends on how much time I would have with them: If I had months or years, I would “unpack my heart with words” and tell them everything. But what if you only had a minute? The cactus mice are rustling in the dry brush, and the ants are leaving their holes to search for food. If I only had a minute? I would hug them. But what would you say? If I couldn’t say “I’m sorry?” That’s right. Just now a cool draft of air passes through me like a ghost, applying its balm to my sweltering arms and face. Grateful to Nature for the momentary reprieve from the August heat, I look up and whisper, “Thank you.” And then, as the first rays of daybreak illuminate the Two Heads, I toss my gear in the car, start the engine, and whisper—to the spring and everything around it—“Goodbye.”

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31.

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Bow Willow: 2021

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I’m standing next to my telescope in the breezeless darkness. Behind me—a dry marsh dotted with patches of tall, dead grass. In front—a steep, creosote-covered hill that looks like a stairway leading all the way up to the looming constellations of Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus. I remember camping in this very spot over twenty years ago: Dad was sauntering around in his cowboy boots, camouflage pants, red tank top, and brown fedora, playing ancient Irish love songs—songs so sad and so suggestive of everything that words cannot touch—on his hundred-year-old, handmade penny whistle. Standing here now with fully dilated eyes, I hear in my soul those sweet and somber melodies echoing off the sheer hill. And then I realize: my recollection of those melodies is just another kind of echo—a spiritual echo that will last as long as I live.

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32.

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The Rule of Three

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It’s 2:31 PM., December 21, 11,273 BCE. Naked underneath the long rabbit-skin blanket that she holds around her shoulders, a young girl stands on the lush, northern shore of Lake Cahuilla and gazes at the snow-covered San Jacinto and San Gorgonio peaks in the blue-gray distance. A cold wind blowing eastward down the Banning Pass stirs her long, black hair, while thick strips of low-lying rainclouds move almost imperceptibly under the higher, white overcast. “Life is so small,” she thinks—and then she turns around and walks down toward the water.

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*

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It’s 3:16 PM., March 12, 1978. Dad is standing on the sidewalk outside of a windowless mariscos restaurant in Coachella, gazing at the snow-covered San Jacinto and San Gorgonio peaks in the blue-gray distance. He’s wearing a pair of scuffed-up Nike sneakers, torn jeans, and a wrinkled, blue tank top. A cold wind blowing eastward down the Banning Pass stirs his curly, black hair, while thick strips of low-lying rainclouds—looking like the shredded hems of ancient death shrouds—move almost imperceptibly under the higher, white overcast. “Our lives are no longer than an ant’s life when compared to the age of the universe,” he thinks—and then he lights a cigarette and walks down the empty street.

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*

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It’s 11:46 AM., January 29, 2022. I’m standing in a crowded Costco parking lot in Indio, gazing at the snow-covered San Jacinto and San Gorgonio peaks rising in the blue-gray distance. I’m wearing suede tactical boots, oversized straight-legged jeans, and a wrinkled white t-shirt. A cold wind blowing eastward down the Banning Pass makes my eyes squint and my jaw tighten, while thick clumps of low-lying rainclouds—looking like drops of black blood in a clear glass of water—move almost imperceptibly under the higher, white overcast. “My soul cannot be privy to what lies Beyond this veil and hidden from my eyes,” I think—and then I put out my cigarette and walk down toward the store’s crowded entrance.

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33.

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Memory: 2023

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I am hiking with my fellow rangers on the Cedar Spring Trail, roughly twelve miles west of Pinyon Flat, deep within the dark-green mountains that loom over the desert to the north. Although I’ve been to the Flat dozens of times with my father (and nearly a dozen times without him), I have never been to this remote swath of wilderness. Our job today as rangers is to maintain the last mile of the three-mile-long trail by smoothing it out with Mcleods, shovels, and rakes. As I hike along at the rear of the pack, I notice the way the morning light illuminates the tall, dry grass that grows in the meadows which line the trail. Then I think, I am the first Kilpatrick ever to see this place—and the last. Every hundred feet or so the trail passes under an arching canopy of oak—a sylvan door that whispers, “Go further.” And so I go, though with every step I take, a new feeling—a feeling I have never had before—grows more powerful inside of me. Pressed down by its weight, I begin to walk slowly—as slowly as a deacon walks down the nave with his smoking censor, as slowly as a father walks down the aisle his with his only daughter. Then I think, This place is the Future, while Pinyon Flats is the Past. And then I begin to reflect on the beauty of this wilderness—how, with its wide swaths of ribbonwood, manzanita, and juniper, it may seem plain at first, perhaps even monotonous, but once it has bled fully into one’s Soul, once it has shared its essence with one’s Heart, it proves to be as beautiful as any place on Earth. Still transfixed by this bright new world—still gripped by this natural symbol for What Will Be—I stand there and watch the way the shafts of morning light pierce through the gaps between the thick, drooping branches of oak. That’s when Ranger Cesar calls out to me from ahead on the trail: “Hey, Joel! Why are you going so slow?!” “I’m just admiring the scenery!” I shout—and then I run to catch up.

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Finis