As Halloween approached again, I learned the hard way that the old cliché you hear about the one-year anniversary of a loved one’s death being hard is dead-fucking-on. I’d be out grocery shopping or running errands and for brief instants I could swear I could see him. Someone would catch my eye and something about them – the set of their mouth as they perused a menu; or their gait; or a turn of phrase, like “a couple three” – would remind me of my father so strongly that for a dizzying moment I felt the uncanny sense that he was somehow there. When I got a letter from the Cremation Society a few weeks before Halloween telling me that “the anniversary of a death can stir up many emotions all over again and may come when you least expect them,” I thought to myself “no fucking shit,” and threw the thing in the trash.
So when I started smelling him, I thought it was more of the same. First it was the familiar sour bite of alcohol; the smell that always seemed to ooze out of his nose, even when he was passed out in the living room. But then I began smelling his odor, the peppery, oily musk of his dirty clothes and his lived-in recliner. And then the smell of old piss, the ammonia funk that emanated from his bucket.
At first I suspected Eli. “Are you peeing on the floor?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if I’d asked him something bizarre, then he said, “No, Daddy. It’s Grandpa.”
“What do you mean?”
“Grandpa was here. That’s who you’re smelling.”
At the time, I wrote it off as the one-year anniversary getting to him, too. But as the month went on, he began to have night terrors. The first time, I heard him in the middle of the night, yelling in a fearful timbre. I came to his room and saw him thrashing around and crying in his bed, Star Wars sheets tangled and knotted about his body, his eyes open but sightless, terrified. I took him out of his bed and held him tight, stroking his hair and repeating “shhh, Eli, shhhh, your daddy is here, you’re safe.” But I couldn’t awaken him—he just kept writhing and crying in my arms until dawn’s first sickly light filled the room and it was time to get him ready for school.
Soon, this was happening every night—Eli waking me up in the middle of the night with frightened screams, followed by my futile attempts to comfort him as he flailed and shuddered in my arms. Feeling helpless to alleviate his terror, I took him to a pediatrician, who told me to start giving him children’s melatonin—or “nighttime vitamins,” as I referred to them with Eli.
But the night terrors continued, even when I upped the dosage—from the two pills recommended on the side of the bottle, to three, then four. If anything, the higher dosages just seemed to send him deeper into his nocturnal deliriums, which he could never remember in the morning. So I stopped giving him the melatonin, and started having him sleep in my room. He’d keep me awake, tossing and turning as he struggled to sleep; then thrashing in fear once he finally lost consciousness.
Soon the nightmares came for me, as well. During my brief snatches of sleep between Eli’s fits, I’d have visions: my father’s shattered face, broken teeth in that bloody abyss of his mouth; his feeble pawing at my face as the life sputtered out of him; his final look of unfathomable paternal love even as I choked the life out of him.
The sleepless nights began to take their toll, and I began to have the thoughts that had derailed my previous stints of sobriety—
I needed a drink.
I deserved a drink.
I could handle it this time.
I got a prescription for Ambien after checking with my AA sponsor. He told me it was OK, but warned me about taking more than one pill in a night. “I shit you not,” he said, “one night I doubled up on it and went to bed. I woke up in my car; it was running, and I was sitting outside the liquor store.” We both laughed at that, but then he looked into my eyes and told me, “For real, though, be careful with that shit.”
The Ambien helped me sleep for a while. But my dreams were even worse than they were before. They would usually feature the dark alcove in the basement, seething with a febrile, violet pulse, like some malignant organ. I supplicated myself before it, kneeling and accepting from it a bottle full of Eli’s blood, feeling a pleasant burn as it poured down my throat and into my belly. I’d awaken from these dreams with a start—parched, my blood feeling poisoned and my skull pounding, as if I’d actually been drinking.
I began doubling the prescribed dosage. Then tripling it. My dreams were less vivid then, just phantasmagoric blurs: the alcove downstairs, still thrumming with evil; the burning sensation of booze as I gulped from the bottle; the smell of festering urine and unwashed, diseased flesh.
And the sounds of him. My father. Laughing a wet, snuffling chortle.
But I kept it together. I continued to get Eli to school each day, both of us pale with dark rings around our eyes. I kept going to AA and was on the verge of getting my one-year token, a goal that had always evaded me even in my prior stints of sobriety.
I thought if we could get past the one-year anniversary we would make it. We’d be fine.
But then Halloween night—the anniversary of my father’s death—rolled around.
#
On Halloween night, I took Eli trick or treating. He’d outgrown his Darth Vader costume and now went as Luke Skywalker. Another year older, he’d shot up three inches. But he was gaunt and haggard now, after a month of sleepless nights and anxious picking at his food. He held his trick-or-treating bag with ragged, bitten-down fingernails and the white tunic of his costume hung limply from shoulders slumped from exhaustion and the toll of constant fear.
After around an hour, he was too tired to continue, so I got him home and put him to bed. I sat down in my father’s old recliner, good as new after its professional cleaning. I watched some television, occasionally distracted by the full moon limning the skeletal limbs of leafless trees above the Rock River. I turned off the television and watched the river for a while; it glistened and rippled, reflecting the moon’s cold white light. I must have been exhausted, because I drifted off to sleep then, without the help of Ambien.
But then I was awakened with a start by that sound – the gurgling snuffle of aspirated blood.
The last sound my father ever made.
But this time, it was directly next to my ear. And I could smell him again—booze and body odor and urine. Stronger than ever.
I tried to tamp down the sudden sense of panic I felt and looked around the River Room. It was bathed in the full moon’s terrible light. But there was nothing there. Just another dream, I thought to myself.
Just to be safe, I crept upstairs and opened the door to Eli’s bed. I braced myself for what might be in there.
Nothing. Just Eli sleeping under his Star Wars comforter. He seemed at peace for once, sleeping soundly.
I left his room, and then heard the sound again. The same wet, strangled gasps.
It was coming from the basement.
I went to investigate. As I descended the stairs to the basement, the sound intensified, as did the smell of sour flesh and its emanations. I held my phone in front of me, flashlight on, to add to the feeble light cast by the bare lightbulbs above. The phone did little to illuminate the shadowy and cavernous basement, but I held it up anyways, as if it were some sort of talisman. I shined it into the darkened corners of the basement, but saw nothing that could account for the now-deafening curdled choking sound that filled my ears.
Finally, I made my way to the place I’d been avoiding. The darkened alcove near the laundry room; the one that pulsed with malign intent in my dreams. My old hidey hole, where I would keep my bottles, trying to keep my secret at bay.
As I approached the darkened alcove, the sound grew louder, deafening—the sucking wheeze filled my skull, and the smell of evil decay filled my sinuses, gagging me.
My sense of dread mounted as I shined the light of my phone into the alcove. I stepped forward. And the light caught….
Nothing. There was nothing.
The snuffling stopped. The smell disappeared. Was this the Ambien again?
But then I saw something near the back of the alcove. A faint glint caught by the light of my phone.
I stooped down and walked into the alcove, slowly, fearfully. I reached down to what had caught my eye.
It was a bottle. Empty. Of bourbon. My brand.
I picked it up and examined it. It looked new, unweathered by time or the damp of the basement.
I looked down again and saw half a dozen other bottles piled up at the back of the alcove. The same thing—Maker’s Mark, empty but otherwise untouched by time.
How did they get down here?
I put the bottle down, my head and chest suddenly filled with a dull sensation of dread. I resisted my urge to sprint out of the basement and rush Eli out of this house.
And then I heard it again. That wet, snuffling gurgle coming from upstairs.
Along with the shaky, stifled sobs of a young boy.
I sprinted up the stairs to the main floor. The pungent, organic odor was back now, thicker than ever, almost physical in its unholy funk.
I made it upstairs and ran toward the kitchen. As I approached, I could see Eli sitting at the kitchen table. From my vantage, he appeared to be alone, but his eyes were wide in terror, and shaky sobs came from his heaving chest.
Then I entered the kitchen and saw him, at the other end of the table, making his awful wet snuffles.
My father.
Snakelike with his noseless visage, he held a bottle of Maker’s and was drinking from it greedily, the flap of his almost-severed top lip lolling over the side of the bottle. When he finished his pull, he brought the bottle back to the table, a long string of blood-streaked saliva trailing behind it. Then he gave a grotesque, wheezing laugh, exposing the blackened nubs of his splintered teeth and his festering, truncated tongue.
He beckoned to me with a bony finger. Trancelike, I complied and sat down at the table. I could feel Eli’s eyes on me, urgent and imploring. But I couldn’t look at him. Not now.
I stared into my father’s eyes. They were dull and vacant, but showed a sort of grim amusement. He slid the befouled bottle over to where I sat. He opened his bloody, jagged mouth in a hideous smile, some thin yellowish liquid trickling from his smashed-in nose.
Then he said, in a thick, clotted voice, “Think you’re better than me.” He threw his head back in uproarious, mocking laughter.
Then he said, in his choked, gurgling voice, “Drink up!”
A great sob of despair built up in my chest. But instead of letting it out, I picked up the bottle and stifled the feeling with a long pull.
I felt a burning bliss as the spirits traveled down my throat, past my sternum, and into my belly, where it erupted in a sort of glorious flame.
I looked over to my father, where he was letting out an awful, phlegmy chuckle. Hands shaking, I took another drink from the bottle.
I took the bottle from my mouth, then joined his mocking cackling. As my father and I roared in mirthless laughter together, I finally met my son’s eyes. They were wide with terror. Tears streaked down his face. And I laughed and I laughed and I laughed, until tears rolled down my own face as well.
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