David Darling

I’m standing on ice. I used to do this all the time, but ice in LA is pretty scarce, so it’s been a couple of years. It is night. A cold wind blows ghosts of snow across the dark road. Cars crunch by through the darkness. I walk with unsteady steps across the road and down towards the water. My hands are buried in the pockets of my black overcoat, rescued from storage for the occasion. A musty scarf is wrapped around my neck and I try to bury my face in its comforting folds. I’m wearing a Walkman, and my shaky fingers find the buttons and press play. Soon the moan of a cello fills my head, like a howling dog, like a train in the night, like every lovely, lonely sound ever made in the eternal darkness. And for the hundredth time that day, tears squeeze themselves out of my eyes and roll stiffly down my cheeks.

My father is dead.

Two days earlier, he had walked across the snowy island of Kodiak to the mental health center. He used to joke that he had moved to Kodiak to die, but those of us that really knew him weren’t laughing. It was still dark when he reached the door of the office where he counseled the island’s residents and helped them to find a spark worth preserving, a light to follow out of the tunnel. It was not quite six in the morning, and nobody else would be there for at least another hour. He unlocked the door and walked upstairs to his office, which overlooked the empty parking lot. He put a piece of paper in his typewriter and wrote out a few last instructions, then turned the machine off. He looked around to make sure everything was in order. Satisfied, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his gun. He looked out again over the parking lot, to the trees beyond, just starting to show themselves in the pale pre-dawn light. He stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

It’s a story I could tell for the rest of my life and, in some senses, probably will. And it will never make any sense. I will never find all the loose ends and tie them together in a tidy package and put it away for safe keeping. My father was too complex, too hidden, too scattered to ever make a whole picture. He ended his life the way he lived it – on his own, the rest of the world be god damned. And since I’m part of the rest of the world, god damn me too.