I Am So Proud of You (2008)

[GabrielAlejo2341]

(sounds of the ocean)

Last week, Bill's class took a field trip to the beach.

His half brother Randall came along, a little boy in the special class with aluminum hook arms whose mind was as misshapen as his legs.

(metallic clattering)

No one at school really knew him because he always rode a separate bus and was taught to stand within the confines of a tetherball circle every recess.

In the late afternoon, Randall was over with the adults when he spotted a gull overhead.

His eyes burst with emotion and he suddenly took off stumbling after it.

Tears streaming down his little face, he stretched his aluminum hooks as wide as he could towards the sun, howling, "Boon, boon," and disappeared into the deep blue sea.

The other kids were surprised he could even run that fast.

Bill's mother put a heavy coat over him whenever he left the house for fear that he might fall victim to something called "walking pneumonia."

She started doing this the winter after losing Randall, but then made him wear it every day for the next five years.

In the summers, he also had to wear a helmet and asbestos safety gloves.

These were the days she rarely left the house and shaved the cat on weekends.

On his sixth birthday, his mother gave him a postage stamp and a piece of yarn and hugged him for five minutes.

His parents argued again that night and she threw meat.

His stepfather stormed to the door where he turned his face up towards a hole in the ceiling and yelled, "I just can't handle this god damned woman," and left.

(door slams)

She stared at the front door and rocked there in place saying, "Aaa, aaa, aaa, aaa, aaa, aaa, aaa."

Every now and then at school, he'd find a note from her in his lunch box.

(water running)

His hair was finally growing back.

After completing the clinic's daily memory quiz, Bill went to the city and saw ants take apart a dead bird.

(footsteps)

Yesterday, he spent 30 seconds trying to open his front door with his mailbox key.

It's been over a year now since his diagnosis, when they'd stayed up late drinking and Bill slept on the couch.

In the morning, he sat on the toilet seat and quietly watched her put on her makeup.

That afternoon, she told him it was over.

In the hardware store, a nice kid with a skin condition helps Bill find the right battery for his wall clock.

He had taken a walk to the park but didn't really know what to do with his day there.

At home, he makes toast but changes his mind.

He's been having trouble sleeping again, and realizes he's lying in the dark with his eyes open.

(tool powering up)

(leaf blower power increases)

(power increasing and decreasing)

When Grandma would visit and he'd show her his drawings, she'd often imagine how easily she could toss little Bill into the fireplace, or even through a thin window, for he was still young and quite small and floppy, and she reckoned light enough for a woman of her size and strength to hurl across the room several yards or more.

In the middle of the night, she opens the drawer to find the preserved cat head from last week.

She can feel the fish smothering her brain, and the magic scrubbing of their furry little heads across her skin is doing less and less good.

(voice layering)

And she decides this is because the little heads are of low quality, and she needs more of them.

She needs more of them from higher pedigree cats, little heads with better hairdos and cleaner little ears and clearer eyes.

(static)

They said she had a tumor and was suffering from seizures and dementia.

Bill didn't know what those words meant, but he had ideas.

Grandma was born in Bootblack, Wyoming, two years after the great mud storms drowned all the hogs.

Her father serviced electric machines and once strangled a rock in a fit of religious excitement.

He enjoyed wood and telling the children late night stories of how his own papa used to tame the wilderness.

He was a quiet, unassuming man who was eating an onion one day when he was cut in half by a train.

(train horn blaring)

Grandma's older brother became a preacher who grew his mole hairs long to purify his soul.

In his early years, he secretly fathered an illegitimate child and smothered it one night in the abandoned stable.

As he aged, he became plagued with fire bugs, and once claimed to have seen an aquatic creature make off with the sheriff's prized cow.

He was eventually crippled with lead poisoning and polio and was k*lled by a train.

Grandma's little sister Polly had beautiful golden hair and pounded at imaginary animals with a hammer.

She died at the age of eight after contracting yellow fever and catching on fire.

After Polly's death, Grandma's mother cut out her tongue and vigorously enjoyed taking health tonics and prescription medications.

(wind blowing)

(slowed down screaming)

A wild man wandered into town that summer and beat the church organist with a shovel.

He defecated what looked like a pile of blueberries on the family porch and disappeared, howling into the marsh.

Nobody knew that this wild man was in fact Grandma's great uncle, a forgotten, unwanted child who'd been fed carbolic acid and abandoned in the northern woods 52 years prior.

He ate mud and sticks and knew only how to say the word "Bible."

"Bah ball!"

He died alone in the field one summer morning while dreaming of the moon.

Six weeks later, a sunflower grew out of his head.

In their later years, Grandma's family moved to the big city where her mother lived out the rest of her days making jam and persecuting Jews.

(clinking)

There was a bush in front of their building in the shape of a heart that made her cry every time she saw it.

She died alone while Grandma was away at boarding school, surrounded by visions of phantoms.

(eerie sounds)

Grandpa died 11 years before Grandma did.

He used to sit next to her every Sunday, but now she plays his bingo card for him.

Last night, Bill dreamt he was young again in a field with friends at the seaside.

A big, happy seal barked at them and bounded from the water to play soccer.

He was pretty good.

It was like an animal movie.

Then the seal hit the ball a little too excited and it flew over everyone's heads and struck a little boy in an adjacent field really hard in the chest.

It seemed like maybe he had a heart condition or something because he wasn't moving.

Everyone sort of froze.

The seal retreated to the sea.

Nobody knew what to do.

(birds chirping)

He'd slept on his arm funny and it felt sort of numb.

(whispering voices)

Sometimes it sounds like there's voices in the water.

He's been putting some weight back on and his doctor had said that was good news.

At the bus stop, his left testicle ached for no apparent reason, and it almost made him feel dizzy.

Not much happened at work.

Bill made a pyramid out of three staplers, and the new guy swallowed a paperclip and was rushed out in a wheelchair.

The guy in the next cubicle over told Bill about a thing he saw on TV about identical twins who were separated at birth but had individually grown up to be serial K*llers.

It was as though they didn't have any choice in what they turned into.

"Genetics is pretty messed up," he said as his chewing gum flung itself from his mouth.

At lunch he told Bill about a physics book he was reading about time, how the passing of time is just an illusion because all of eternity is actually taking place at once.

The past never vanishes away, and the future has already happened.

All of history is fixed and laid out like an infinite landscape of simultaneous events that we simply happen to travel through in one direction.

Bill made a joke that he could have sworn he'd been told that somewhere before, but the guy just stared at him like he didn't get it.

At home, Bill watched the microwave spin his food and daydreamed about the Galápagos Islands.

He'd purchased the new brand of paper towels that had hundreds of little raised bumps across every sheet.

(microwave running)

(microwave beeps)

He found a message on the answering machine that was sorry to inform him his mother had just died that morning.

They said she'd launched into a fit of senile hysterics after skipping her medication and was hit by a train.

She'd reserved her own funeral plot years in advance in order to be buried alongside her parents, but due to a clerical error had to be placed 50 yards away between a coffin full of rocks and a rich woman's golden retriever.

After the funeral, Bill went through her old storage boxes and was surprised to find a hundred-year-old photo album.

Among the many pictures of relatives and people he never knew were several photographs of bacon and lumber.

He also found an old series of strange portraits that had been neatly labeled for unknown future reference.

Scattered throughout the box were forgotten photos of himself as a young boy.

He'd read once how each cell in the body replaces itself and dies as the years pass; how everyone is slowly reconstructed out of continuously changing pieces.

It depressed him how foreign the pictures seemed to him now, how his ridiculous ingrown cells had long ago stolen this happy dead kid's identity and with his own life made a complete mess of it.

Beneath the album was a folder of his mother's medical records.

Attached to her initial diagnosis was a physician's note that strongly recommended she never have a child.

(passing traffic)

He pictures himself having trouble breathing and waking to a room full of concerned faces.

He'd been terrified of dying his entire life, and as much as he tried not to think about it, death was always in the back of his head, around every corner, and hovering on each horizon.

He'd brushed shoulders with death on a few occasions, but in his carefree youth, it had almost seemed like an abstract, impossible thing to ever happen to him.

But with each passing decade, he began to gauge the time he probably had left, and by his 40s, what he considered his halfway point, at best, he had come to know just one thing: you will only get older.

The next thing you know, you're looking back instead of forward, and now, at the cl*max of all those years of worry, sleepless nights, and denials, Bill finally finds himself staring his death in the face surrounded by people he no longer recognizes and feels no closer attachment to than the thousands of relatives who'd come before.

And as the sun continues to set, he finally comes to realize the dumb irony in how he'd been waiting for this moment his entire life, this stupid, awkward moment of death that had invaded and distracted so many days with stress and wasted time.

If only he could travel back and impart some wisdom to his younger self; if only he could at least tell the young people in this room.

He lifts an arm to speak but inexplicably says, "It smells like dust and moonlight."

He'd forgotten years ago to replace the battery in the cheap wall clock in his kitchen, and it was forever stuck on 11:57.

He couldn't remember why he'd put a clock there in the first place, since it was sort of in an awkward nook around a corner where he'd never wonder what time it was.

Near the bottom of the storage box, Bill found an old notebook he'd never seen before.

Filling the pages inside, his mother had repeatedly practiced her handwriting so she could send him off to school with the best-looking notes.

He calls his ex-girlfriend and arranges to meet for lunch after his checkup.

(opens and closes drawer)

This morning, he couldn't remember where he'd put the clinic's daily memory quizzes.

(zapping)

(hum of vacuum)

He decides to make toast, but for a long moment can't think of how it's done.

There's only a brown stain now where that bird had been.

His doctor has nothing but good news.

Bill has continued to make terrific progress, and he can no longer find anything out of the ordinary.

He tells Bill that if he'd not known his medical history, he would probably give him a clean bill of health today.

(otherworldly ambient noise)

(birds chirping)

(wings flapping)

On his way to lunch, Bill smiles and thinks for the first time that maybe everything will be o--

(zap)

(zapping)

Bill was born late Tuesday morning into a world of orange and red.

He likes the way the aquamarine rug feels across his hands.

(wings flapping)

He likes sunbeams and rockets and the smell of the backyard in the early morning.

(dog barking)

He likes tigers and trees and melted chocolate ice cream and watching the lights while falling asleep in the backseat.

(cars rushing by)

(wind howling)

(zapping)

Someone sits on the shore and tells him how the waves have been there long before Bill existed, and that they'd still be there long after he's gone.

Bill looks out at the water and thinks of all the wonderful things he will do with his life.