It bothers me more that I cannot remember when I forgot my son’s name than that I have forgotten it at all. I guess sometimes, screaming out into the house: Isaac. Benjamin. William. Edward. Aloysius. Aloysius. Who names their child Aloysius?

Perhaps I did. I could have. I could have named him anything. Any word that I do not remember could be his name and I think of the many words that I cannot remember, but as each one springs to mind I know it cannot be right, because there remains a nameless, son-shaped shadow in my mind. No matter how often I call out for him he does not come to me or answer. And what child would? What son would come to a father who can only bellow out “boy” or “son” or “you there?” What sensible child would answer a man screaming out into an empty house, “Is anybody there?”

Of course somebody is there. My son is there. And the house is not empty. It can’t be empty. *

We arrived in my beat-up, wheezing two-door on a cold, clear night in early Spring and even my breath had sharp edges. I lifted him from the back seat where he’d fallen asleep and carried him up the hill toward the three-story farm house of red brick and old windows laid in by hand. The house had stood on this hill for more than two hundred years, had seen all its land parceled away to farmers with means. Halfway up the hill my son woke and I set him down so that we climbed hand in hand, my steps matching his sleepy ones. All of the windows in the house were dark, and I was not sure if the lights would work or if there would be heat. On the drive I told him stories about building a real fire and as we walked up the hill I said that perhaps we will sleep in front of one tonight, like settlers I said, like pioneers. “Are we home, Daddy?”

“We’re home, son.” “That’s good.”

“Hey, can you tell me your name?” He laughed. “You’re silly, Daddy.”

I look down at him, but his face is hidden by his hat and I am about to tilt his chin up so that I might see him when… …I am dragged from the dream as if I sleep in tar, the tangled sheets clutching around me like fingers and vines and tentacles. Something woke me up other than the dream, some sound and it may have been footsteps in the hallway beyond the door. Small ones wearing, I think, sneakers. Maybe that pair of Vans I got him, a link between his childhood and mine. Before we got to the house he liked to ask me what shoes I was wearing, hoping that he could put his on and we could match.

“I’m a skater, daddy.” “As soon as you’re old enough we’re getting you a board.”

And you’re right, kiddo, daddy is silly. Very silly. Daddy is so silly he can remember what sneakers you wear but he can’t remember your name, not even when he’s dreaming. I get out of bed and dress, my leather jacket as cold as the window I lay my hand against to the check the temperature. It is early and the lawn and fields behind the house, the pasture of the cattle farm next door are blue with early spring frost and dawn-filtered light. “Are you there?” I call out as I walk down the spiraling back stairs toward the kitchen and the back door. “Hello? Son?”

Was that laughter or were those cars driving past? Were those steps or was it birdsong? Did he answer me or was that a cow lowing from the far pasture? The fields behind the house and to either side are fallow now. Corn one year, soybeans another but I have contributed to growing neither. I sit in the house now, looking out the window, a man whose family bought a castle on land that belongs to other men. I walk toward the sunrise on a dirt and gravel road with empty fields to both sides and a bit of red flashes against a stand of trees, a fox after a mouse perhaps.

I saw a fox once when I was a boy. Dead though. Walking here with my father and a farmer with a black Chevy pickup had just killed one nearby, said it was after his chickens. I saw the fox, its tongue extended and very dead, its shit soiling the bed of the truck. “Where’s your farm?” My father had asked.

“Nearby.” “That so? Don’t remember any chicken farms nearby.”

The farm puffed up his chest and leaned toward my father. “Ya’ll live in that house down yonder?”

“That’s right.” “City folk, huh?” He said and swaggered back to his truck, the slender rifle he’d used to kill the fox slung over a shoulder. The exchange had the feeling of a contest that my father had lost somehow. Hunter, my father, the fox had lost, dead in the back of a pickup truck without even a little prey’s blood around his muzzle to show for it.

Standing on this gravel road now, I decide to walk to the tree line but when I step onto the field a sheet of black rushes up from the grass, a thunder of sound and shrieking blots out the sky and the dawn and the forest behind. It blots out the fox and the memory and it blots out me, it blots out my son with his forgotten name. The shadow swallow the moon and any moment, wave-like, it will fall upon me where I stand, gap-mouthed in the early dawn. But as it shrieks and rises, it separates and I can see that the is sun still rising between its wings. Wings. Birds.

Starlings. Hundreds nesting in the tallish grass of the field. Starlings. Only starlings. I watch and listen as they fly around and shout at me. You’re city folk, ain’t ya? Yes. I am. No. We are. We are city folk. My son and I, we live in the house.

Am I speaking to the starlings? What sort of man talks to birds? The sort who can’t remember his son’s name, I guess.

*

At home I find a bowl of oatmeal gone cold and crusted hard on the kitchen table, a clean spoon beside it. I push my fingers against the oatmeal now rough like sandstone. It must have been sitting here for some time, months or a year. I am sure it was not on the table when I’d gone for my walk just now. In the sink under the running faucet I stab at it with the spoon and spark up chips of dried oatmeal. I leave it to soak in the cold water. Cold water. I try the hot water tap. Nothing.

I had put on the boiler. I remember going into the basement when my son and I arrived and turning it on, and the thundering chug and whoosh of flame as it stuttered to life after months of inactivity. The last time I’d been here was September and now it was March. We.

We’d not been here since September. Us.

There had been an early fall snap to the air, but I was reluctant to turn on the heat for just one night. “Let’s sleep in front of the fire.” I told him. “Go get all the sheets off your bed.

"Mom says that dangerous.” “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. But maybe don’t tell her about this.”

He’d laughed. “Daddy’s gonna get in trouble.” “Not if you don’t tell her. Want to hear a story?”

I read him stories all night until he fell asleep and just before I dropped off myself, I made sure the safety cage was tight and in place. The flames made his face look peaceful, burnished like something adorning a plaza in the wake of a victory or a liberation.

* It’s a beautiful morning with a slight chill when the car pulls up the driveway and stops beside mine. A woman gets out and walks toward the back door where I sip my coffee looking out through the screen. She says my name as she approaches, and she looks relieved. I wave because it’s the polite thing to do, but I don’t know who she is.

“You have to come home.” She tells me, standing on the other side of the screen. “Would you like to come in?”

“No, I would not like to come in. You have to come home.” “But I am home. I mean, we are home. My son and I.”

“You can’t be… Look, just please come home. I’ll drive you.” I shook my head. “We have to stay here.”

“But I love you, you can’t stay here. Can't…” “Who are you?”

“Who am I? Please don’t do this to us.” “What’s his name?”

“What did you just say?” “What is my son’s name? Do you know us? If you know us you must know my son’s name.”

She stares a me for several seconds and then her jaw drops wide and there is black in the back of her throat, black like hundreds of rising starlings, black like the shape in my head where my son’s name should be. She screams it at me, but her impossibly wide mouth is just a shape of silence while the chords stand out in her neck. There is force in this shout and I can even feel the wind from her lungs, the wind of that name screamed around my head, but I can hear nothing. Still she screams…

…and again I am ripped from sleep, battling sheets damp with sweat. I can hear the sound of plastic wheels on a hallway floor. I can hear a little boy’s voice. Vroom. Vroom.

He is playing truck. She said that I have to come home, but I am home. We are home. My son and I are home.

Vroom. Vroom. It is very dark.

“Son? Why aren’t you in bed?” I walk out of the bedroom to sharp pain in my right foot and I stumble up against the wall. My toe is bleeding, cut on the grill of a large yellow toy truck sitting in the middle of the hallway. I pick it up and put it on a shelf downstairs. It was his favorite truck, this is something that I know, that I remember. I know that his favorite truck is called a Tonka. I know its name, but I do not know his.

*

If he insists on walking around the house at night, I wish he’d learn to pick up his toys. Three mornings in a row now I have tripped over that yellow truck, but no matter how many times I put it away it is in the hallway for my toes to find in the morning. “Son? Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you want some breakfast?”

I tap the bowl of oatmeal on the table with the spoon next to it like he is a cat, but he doesn’t answer. I don’t even hear the rumble of his footsteps. “Son? Breakfast?”

The oatmeal will stay on the table then, it is already cold. I even sprinkled cinnamon onto it, his favorite. I turn toward the stove to clean out the pot I prepared his breakfast in, but it’s not there and the stove is cold. I must have turned it off right after the oatmeal had finished cooking. Throwing on my jacket I go for a walk in the field behind the house. The foxes and starlings are not there. He just needs his space, then he’ll come down to breakfast. He wants to be alone and that’s okay, a boy needs time for his own thoughts. If you knew his name, I thought, he might come to breakfast. What sort of father cannot even remember his own son’s name to call him to breakfast?

It’s no wonder his oatmeal has grown cold.

* I take his yellow truck to bed with me, throwing my arm around it while I sleep so that there’s no way it can be in the hallway for me to trip over tomorrow. He’ll just have to find something else to play with. A small hope flutters within me that he will come into my room to ask for it back and then we can play together, rolling it up and down the hallways.

Vroom. Vroom. Maybe he can help me remember some of the words that I have forgotten and maybe one of those words will be his name.

Vroom Vroom. In the morning I still have the truck and “Tonka” is embossed into the soft skin of my inner arm like I have been branded. I carry the truck downstairs and set it on the table next to the bowl of oatmeal.

“Son. Breakfast.” I call into the empty house. No. Not empty. The house is not empty. We are here. We are here and his breakfast is getting cold on the table. Vroom. Vroom.

It comes from the basement, this sound. He must have another truck because I can hear its little plastic wheels on the stone floor. I open the door and am met with black, black like a sheet of starling rising from a field, black like the inside of that screaming woman’s mouth, black like shapes of all the words that I cannot remember. “Son? Are you there? Come on up and eat your breakfast.”

Vroom Vroom. I can hear the wheels of the truck, I can hear him playing. “Do you want me to turn on the light?”

Vroom Vroom. My fingers hover by the switch, brush the white plastic that I can barely make out by the daylight coming in the kitchen windows.

“Son?” Maybe he likes it down there, maybe he’s left the lights off on purpose. I drop my hand from the switch and raise it again, drop and raise, drop and raise.

“Son, I’m coming down. It’s not safe for you to play in the dark like this.” I flip the switch and light floods the basement and I can see the stone floor around the boiler and the stairs leading down into the second level of the basement where the root cellar is. I walk down the stairs listening for the sound of the trucks wheels. “Son?”

I try the storm doors in case he slipped out there but they are too heavy for a small boy to open, and anyway they are chained from the outside. I look into the root cellar, scanning its stacked shale walls and packed dirt floor. Now I hear footsteps on the stairs, small and fast and heading up toward the kitchen and the trickle of his laughter as he reaches the top. I race around the corner and up the stairs, calling out. “Son!”

I burst into the kitchen and see the door to the living room slam and I barge through to hear his feet upon the stairs to the second floor. I chase him around the house, these sounds of him audible just over the pounding of my heart and my gasping lungs. Through the house I chase footsteps, laughter, slamming doors. “Slow down, dammit. Where are you?” Why is he always running? This isn’t a game. He hasn’t eaten in days, I know because I’ve prepared his oatmeal every morning and every morning it’s grown cold on the table. A growing boy needs breakfast. I hear the wheels of his truck again, this time from the kitchen. The wheels don’t slide as well across the linoleum. A long wood hallway is better to push a toy truck. If he would stop I would show him this. Heaving for air I lean against the wall and gasp, a little snot drips from my nose and I wipe it on my sleeve.

“Dad?” It’s so soft I almost don’t believe it, just a whisper from the kitchen and the sound of the truck wheels has stopped. I can see him there, sitting and bored with it and the game of chase we just had, and maybe… maybe a little scared so that he wants his father.

“Son?” “Dad!”

I race down the hall to the back kitchen stairs that spiral down. I’ll open the door in full view of the stove and the table where his oatmeal is getting cold. I am sure that I’ll see him there with his truck looking up at me and I’ll remember his name and I’ll make his breakfast again because… I am falling.

My foot must have hit that first step wrong and I tumble down, the wooden stairs biting into my knees and spine as I careen off the walls. There is a blinding pain in my leg as I burst through the door and fall past the last two stairs. My leg is twisted, something with the knee and I am sick on the kitchen floor. Each heave of my gut twists my leg further and there is so much pain. I look at my hands and wonder why there is so much dirt beneath my nails. What a thing to wonder at now. I push myself toward the wall so that I can lean against it, each inch brings a fresh dry heave as the wrongness of my leg becomes clearer. Broken. Something is broken. Something is wrong. My leg is twisted. I dry heave and a little bile splashes out onto my chest.

I look around the kitchen for my son, to reassure him that his dad’s alright, but he is not there and neither is his truck. His truck is back on the shelf upstairs, of course, just like his oatmeal is getting cold on the table. I can see the dust on the bowl. These old houses are dusty, nothing left out escapes it. No. That is not the reason.

“Son?” The croak of my own voice scares me, but I call out again and hear nothing. He does not answer but I do hear something from the basement, faint but audible.

Vroom Vroom. Vroom Vroom.

Helluva title right? Got you listening. Gets everybody listening. I expect that’s why Decky Edwards, we all call him the Vicar, says shit like that out loud to perfect strangers in the bar.

“I was kidnapped by sirens and they replaced my left nut with a mechanical ball that plays a song.”

It’s not like you just turn away from some shit like that, no matter how jaded and New York you think you are, somebody starts talking shit like the Vicar does and you can probably hear the cows back home mooing, right? Smell mom’s apple pie?

First time he said it, Mark and Sej, this Albanian fuckin’ madman, wanted to know why police and firemen’d been messing with the Vicar’s nuts. In Sej’s case it mighta just been a translation thing, or if we’re talking about Sej and Mark put together, a vocational thing, or a public school thing.

“Sej, the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

“He says his fuckin’ bole has a siren.”

“No, he means sirens fucked with his testicle.” I said.

“Right. And I want to know, police or fireman?”

Mike nudges Sej. “Why not ambulance? Ambulances got sirens.”

“That is a good point. They’d have all the shit you need too.” Sej says. “Hey, Vicar, why’d an ambulance fuck up your bole, bro?”

It sounds like a joke some shitty kid would tell you. “Why did the ambulance fuck up your nuts?” I let it go. I correct that shit and I’m gonna end up with some permanent fuckin’ nickname like Bookworm or Librarian. What? You think not? We been calling this one dude Fuckface for so long I don’t even know what his real name is. For all I know when he gets pulled over, 5-0 is like: “Do you know why I pulled you over, Mr. Face?” But it wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t the fuckin’ firemen, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an ambulance, but to be honest those things scare the shit outta me so I’m not ruling it out that the Vicar got drunk or something and they picked him up to put a kazoo in his nutsack or whatever.

Then one night, the Vicar turns on his barstool and says to me.

“You seem like a smart kid. Not a fool like these alcoholics.”

“That fuckin’ tomato juice in your glass, Vicar?”

“I want to tell you a true story.”

This is kinda why we call him the Vicar. Least, I think that’s where it comes from. He gets fuckin’ hammered and wants to have fuckin’ storytime with you like I imagine some priest is when he wants you to come to his office after mass to show you these great comic books he’s got about Special Jesus. “It’s just like Spiderman.”

Trust me, kids, it ain’t just like fuckin’ Spiderman.

“I used to be a sailor.” The Vicar tells me.

“What like sailboats and shit?”

“Don’t play with me, kid. You’re not that fuckin’ dumb.”

I sipped from my drink and ordered another one from Fausto behind the bar. His hands shook so much he could fuckin’ probably carbonate whiskey. “Have one for yourself too, Fausto, before you fuckin’ drop something,” I told him.

“I had a beautiful boat. The sun would turn the wood to gold.”

“You used to be rich, or what, Vicar?”

“No. Maybe. That’s a relative question, kid.”

“So what? You had this boat.”

“I was sailing off the coast of Greece. Near the islands there.”

“Only thing I know about Greece, Vicar is those fuckin’ sandwiches nobody knows how to say their name right.”

“Smartass. You wanna hear this story or not?”

“Yeah, sure.”

And the Vicar said:

The wind died and the moon turned the islands silver. I didn’t mind just drifting, my ears empty of waves and wind. The boat talked, like they do. Creaking. Groaning. Settling its beautiful bones. Then I heard this melody. Figured it was coming from the shore. It got louder and louder. My ears were filled with it, shrieking and screaming beautiful. My teeth rattled in their sockets, two fillings popped loose and I nearly drowned in the musty smell of feathers. Then the sound stole the sky, it stole everything. I fell into darkness.

When I woke up, the moon was nearly gone and the sun was starting to burn the horizon. I spat my two filling out onto the deck. It wasn’t until later that I heard the same sound, a smaller version, coming from, well, my pants.

There’s my story.

“You trying to tell me you got roofied by sirens. Real sirens.”

The Vicar nodded.

“Bullshit.”

“Where’s your sense of magic, kid?”

“Special Jesus stole it.”

“What?”

“You’re fulla shit, Vicar.”

Then this motherfucker does the damndest thing. He asks Fausto for a glass of fucking water. And starts humming this little tune. Really catchy, I think I heard on KTU once. But then he starts slowly drinking the water and the tune keeps going, and I realized it’s not even coming from his mouth. It’s coming from, well, down there.

He winks at me over the rim of his glass and keeps drinking.

The little tune keeps going. I swear to Christ, I’m halfway leaned it toward the Vicar’s junk when I finally snap out of it. I gulp my drink.

“Cute trick, Vicar.”

“It’s a gift and a curse.”

Fausto snorts and says in his quavery voice. “It’s bullshit too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, fuck you, Fausto.” The Vicar said like a little fuckin’ kid you take his toy away.

“He’s a fuckin’ failed ventrilo-something. Dudes with the fuckin’ puppets. He got drunk in here one night and told me.”

I start laughing. “Man, fuck you, Vicar. You keep fuckin’ around with those puppets they’re gonna put you on a registry.”

“They weren’t puppets.”

“What?”

“I said they weren’t really puppets. They were something quite different.”

Fausto shook his head and started dumping glasses into the sink, making more noise than he normally did.

“I’ll tell you about it.” The Vicar said.

“Tell you what, Vicar, you can tell me about how you’re gonna pick up my tab before I tell all the guys you play with dolls.”

“Hey, Fausto. Can I settle up?”

“Smart man.”