Bleak by Jiayi Ji
A Sudden Passion
It was the memorial for his father, a tedious, even boringly arranged affair which, in its paint-by-
numbers planning and total lack of the unforeseen—so anticipated and prepared for had been the
death itself—was not without its brief moments of pleasure or even a kind of accidental grace, as
when in the floral-scented vestibule of the immaculate funeral home he ran into a younger cousin
of his on his mother’s side, once a reddish blonde and in all ways rather average adolescent West
End Long Island type of girl, name of Katherine or maybe Clara—though Rebecca, perhaps a bit
strangely, also seemed right—who was now living as a man apparently, and only a short distance
away from his own apartment on Burnett Street, dark-haired and bearded, with a not insignificant
potbelly, and going by the name, if you could believe it, his late father’s name actually, Robert. It
was around three o’clock on a cold March afternoon that smelled of rain, already long, it had felt,
into the first day’s viewing, so that when the introduction itself took place, mediated by a spooky
uncle yet then unmediated, he had to carry their conversation before it could carry itself and only
then could afford a selfish glance, another, at the full figure of this man before him. Round in the
shoulders, a rounded chin, but more surprising than this, the face he found beneath a scrub-patch
of beard, rid somehow of its innate Catholicism to match the still high, definably Hebrew quality
of his cousin’s voice, a voice in timbre, if not altogether in cadence, they held now after so many
years almost in common, as he knew from the handful of times the receiver on a landline had in a
sudden passion kicked his own voice back toward him and revealed a petty embarrassment. Why
be elaborate about it? People change. Their family itself had changed, had it not? he remembered
with the condescension inherent to small talk he’d tried to explain. Yet, for all the obviousness of
the transformation—the almost violent extremity of it even—it became clear that this Robert had
avoided, no doubt beginning with that period of time soon after his first surgeries, had avoided to
a tee the often difficult traps of their shared family’s functions, a call from an aunt or grandparent
for new marriage and grandchildren at weddings, a religious and similarly natal variety of social
pressure had in the white-papered, loosely ribbon-tied bags of baptismal party favors, and talking
to him only incidentally for the first time in decades that day, not uneasily conversing there amid
plates and plates of suspicious white cheese and incredibly cold, red seedless grape clusters at the
back of the dim and heavily carpeted funeral parlor’s best viewing room, it could suddenly seem,
a sudden passion, that all their relatives, the very people surrounding them, were but distant poles
of reference for this unknown cousin out of the blue, dim and muffled as the placid rooms of this
small funeral home on Quentin Road, as though they were the muffled strangers to a life that had
been, quite simply, differently peopled. What few members left alive from his father’s generation
could be seen sitting or standing in the taupe-walled rectangle of the space around them, dressed,
even the women, save for their pearls, like veteran railway workers in the baggy and heaved high
navy trousers somehow typical of the elderly, for whom dress clothes have become, with accrued
tragedies, casual; while others worse off with rollaway oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, seemed barely
able to make it to the wake at all without a necessary assistance from disapproved-of in-laws, the
capable sons and daughters of yet older in-laws with reliable enough, gray company cars to drive
across bridges, and between boroughs, to knit a family together, just barely, for however much it
wound up costing in gas, tolls, the hours spent. Another hour passed in just this way. Six months,
a year, could pass in a room like this, and declining the man’s offer to accompany a group of the
youngest, saddest among them to a nearby saloon, Robert instead took his leave, handed the man
his business card, said he shouldn’t be afraid—for he used this word, exactly—to give a call here
and there, to chat hello. They made a plan to get together soon, oh, let’s say, Christmas. The card
was clean-edged, cut from fine paper, and as he stood there on the sidewalk, receiving it, shaking
hands, what he wanted above all was to make a kind of space for it, the slightest smell of a sweet
cologne hanging there to card’s woven fibers, as what had passed with a kindness between them,
even then, he could feel growing coldly familiar, the card in his hands only a knowable curiosity,
off-putting, if not a little bit desperate. And, later that night, after he’d finished telling the woman
he was seeing how surprised he’d been to find his cousin at the memorial, he caught himself with
a guarded tone in his voice at her suggestion that she saw Robert’s status in the family as, in fact,
something quite enviable, that she’d winced, even, actually winced, at the thought of the business
cards being exchanged, as though it were the situation of an inmate escaped only to return, struck
dumb with solitude, to the dark woods surrounding his prison. “How could you think a thing like
that?” he asked, by which he meant, of course—“What does that mean for us?” The conversation
was not yet a fight, but there was a silence in the air that might have been damaging. He held still
on a nipple of hers. He rolled it between his fingers, but already he was outside himself, down on
the open pavement looking up at his apartment’s windows which through a pair of green-colored
curtains seemed filled with a powerful light.
About the author:
Joseph Michaels is a graduate of Hamilton College and Columbia University. His work has been published in Passages North and Hindsight Magazine, and will appear shortly in an anthology from Dostoevsky Wannabe Press. He teaches English.
In the artist’s words: