Diffuse

By Caleb Kostechka

I throw out all of my daughter’s art. Compost every macaroni necklace. Recycle every markered sailboat drawn on printer paper. Every coat button stuck on cardboard with slathered paste using popsicle sticks. Distorted thick handprints made with tempera paint, the colors peeling off like a layer of oil or plastic. All of it—in the bin. I have taken stacks of construction paper delivered in bundles from her smiling preschool teacher and thrown them in the recycling without removing the twine. 

My mom, last year, gave me a cardboard box filled with spelling tests from second grade and phonics worksheets with stickered stars in the corners. She has kept matching boxes in her basement for years—memory boxes she calls them. They have survived malfunctioning sump pumps and mold. They smell like wet laundry and insulation. I cracked the first one open when it arrived. The corners of an old book report on Catholic saints were yellowed and stained with what looked like coffee and, now, had a white layer of something that appeared to my eyes like an organic form of Styrofoam. A new species of preserved penicillin. All this has been sent to me via U.S. mail. Each box costs roughly fourteen dollars to send. One for every year.  A small fortune spent curating the museum of me.

  And I throw away my daughter’s art. 

***

 My daughter rushes into my classroom where I teach and wraps her arms around my neck. Her blistered fingers are raw, and I feel their scars on my neck where her bent fingers touch above my collar. Her hot breath blows damp on my shoulder. Today she brought me three ghosts made out of tissue paper. Kleenex balled up in the center and tied off with string. I hang them above my desk. When I show up in the morning, I stare at them swinging from the air that pulls from the opening of my classroom door. I think about dying and hanging. And I watch them. I will throw them away after Halloween. For now, I will decide if today is a day I will pretend to care about anything. 

I read that an artist in Manhattan plunged a forty-foot metal stick into a boulder in J. Hood Wright park. He is a “natural process post-minimalist”. It’s made of aluminum on the outside and magnesium on the inside. The metals are evaporating into each other in a process called diffusion. It will take fifteen hundred years for this to happen. It might be the world’s longest art project. It will culminate after my daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s children decide not to have children in a calculated decision not to carry on with all of this.  The spike and rock in J. Hood Wright park will sit and meld and then be one. 

 It will happen after their parents decide to either keep or throw away their own children’s art, their own children’s childhoods. The parents will curate the museum for posterity. Or not.

In a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, among the wrapped bodies and sarcophaguses, archeologists found gold and lead bars that in time had become a solid piece.  We know this happens—that metals blend, a transfiguration happening at glacial speed. The New York artist intended this and titled the piece “3000 A.D.” after the year it will be complete.  We don’t know how this reverse alchemy works but it takes at least fifteen hundred years.  The memory of an artist spanning across generations. Practical immortality. Remembered and remembered and remembered. 

And at the whir of a trash compactor, my daughter’s art will be transformed, crushed together with egg cartons and flashlight batteries into a landfill cube. Forgotten and forgotten and forgotten. The change blistering in comparison. I think of this juxtaposition and about speeds of transmuting. I think of myself. I think of my parents and of my children and my marriage. I think that if enough is erased that the forgetting will come more easily. That moments can be torn up into thin strips of paper.

I drink coffee and listen to her play in the bathtub. She is with her brother and they are playing firefighter. He is screaming “You are burning up!” and they laugh as I hear them douse each other with plastic cups filled with water.  The door to the bathroom is open just enough so I can’t see them but can hear water splash outside of the tub.

 My camera sits, resting in its velcro bag, wrapped in cords, at the very bottom of a drawer filled with other electronics. Opportunities missed and forgotten. The constant reiteration on every family outing. Something along the lines of “we should have brought the camera” or “I wish we had caught that on video” and then quickly forgotten. The utterance drifting away like the missed photograph. A flashbulb of thought. 

And here I stand now, still with four by six snippets of memory, no matter how many photos have been discarded. A tiny bundle of ephemeral polaroids emerges when I close my eyes.  It takes only a moment to flip through. No real image to recollect how she looked in that one dress—but it’s still there. The dress with the turtles jumping rope on it. At this point, the turtles are fuzzy, but I can see them in blurs.  I can see what her face looked like at eight-months-old covered in sand and snot and red with sun. I have rid my life of the visual clues to spring forth the recollection of purple kiddie pools surrounded by plastic toys and popsicle wrappers strewn about in mayhem but the images still creep in. 

I get up with my coffee and peek at them playing in the tub. I hold on to the glance I take of them in the bathtub dripping with plastic cups. 

Sometimes when I go to friends’ houses I want to steal their snapshots of my child. It’s never the perfect posed pictures. It’s the throwaways. The ones that remind me of what their yards look like unmowed. A child’s face frozen in a blink forever. 

I stopped taking pictures after her accident. Maybe before it really. A premonition. It’s like I started deciding to forget before things needed forgetting. Like my body was prepping itself for self-induced amnesia.

When she burned her hands off on our wood stove after her bath, I started this process. Forgetting and forgetting and forgetting. But my mind hangs on. A brief series of images cellophaned over—flipped through daily.  

***

It always first starts with me turning the corner of the hall into the living room. I hear her first. Or maybe I don’t, and I see her first and hear her second. This is how memory works. Sometimes it’s a scream from the hallway. Sometimes I see her hands peel off the glass of the fireplace before she can even react with her voice. Sometimes both happen simultaneously. Each time I see her actual fingerprints left on the soot-covered window. Skin stuck to the glass like frost or pieces of cellophane tape.

Now, she is wrapped in a towel in my lap. We are in a car. I am in the backseat and my wife is driving. I have a passing wonder as to why I am not sitting in the front seat and sometimes, within the memory, I feel like I am in a taxi. I can’t hear her in this one. People talk about the smell of a burn. I only smell her hair—still wet and shampooed from her bath. I feel the wet strands on my lip. There are no sounds at all in this one. Just the image of her hands and arms. Plump, like overcooked chicken. Skin paper white and swollen like it will burst. 

***

She is lying in the ER. I am kneeling next to her. My kneecaps ache, so I must have been here for a while. I’m glad they hurt. I dig them into the scuffed vinyl flooring. Her eyes have rolled back like she is dead. They have given her something for the pain and she is no longer there. I see the whites and her eyelids flutter with what looks like the last of her energy. I know this can’t be true but, in this one, there are ambulance lights on the wall. Red. Blue. Red. Blue.

***

There are so many people in the small room. My wife has gone back to get an overnight bag. We know already we won’t be leaving, and we will need to take out our contact lenses. Or, we feel like this is one thing we can control. Or, someone told us we will be here for a while. So, she left. I feel helpless and alone.

 I smell rubbing alcohol and can still smell the baby shampoo in her hair, and I am holding my daughter’s thigh. My hand is so big, or her leg is so small, that my palm easily wraps around it. It is the only place on her body not connected to something. The only skin exposed. Tubes and IVs already are protruding from her nose and ear, her arms, and a heavy cuff, that I imagine is for her blood pressure, wraps around her leg and stops below her knee. I brush her hair and my wrist tangles on a wire. It is attached to her toe which is attached to a monitor that beeps steadily. My movement pulls it off, so it emits just one long beep like she has flatlined. My eyes dart in panic and I’m sure that I’ve hurt her. A doctor reattaches it, this time with elastic stretching tape. I hold her thigh. I move again and pull off the wire. A nurse replaces it. 

This will go on all night. 

I’ll become less panicked and more worried about her sleep. I ask them to unplug this machine which they will not do. As I kneel next to her, I go back and forth between being there and imagining black-and-white pictures of children’s funerals. Children dressed in baptismal gowns, the photographs always looking like they are from the 1880s or the 1930s as they flash in my head.

***

A nurse walks in sometime in the morning and apologizes for her reaction in the ER. She has a thirteen-month-old too, you see. She couldn’t be in there. She is sorry she cried. She is sorry she left. She is so sorry. I don’t remember her. This is the first time I’ve seen her. Her face is contorted in pain staring at me and my daughter in the dark of the room. I don’t want to know what we look like. I hate her. I hate me.

***

I’ve read about Gregorian monks pre-Renaissance. Dozens of accounts of spontaneous apertures blooming in Christlike beauty in the midst of a midnight mass before the birth of a savior. Taking on the pain of Christ through holy stigmata.

I lay next to her, again disconnecting the wire, and drape my arm over her as she sleeps in her hospital bed. Her arms are stiff and large with the bulk of bandages. The other side of the bed is gated, and my body barely fits on the mattress. I wonder if I stare hard enough at my arms if they will blister and blacken. I wonder if I can self-immolate with the sheer force of guilt and sadness.***

I’m learning how to slather her arms with silver sulfadiazine…a metallic-smelling paste to prevent skin infection. I’m learning how to use a popsicle stick to spread a white paste over her palms even as they bleed. The line between her forefinger and her thumbs, burnt beyond repair, pumps out blood like a small fountain bubbling over. I always start there and try to plug the hole in her hand with the paste. The silver mixing pink with the iron of her blood. 

***

I’m taking notes in a small black theme book like a diligent student. We learn about split-level thickness in skin grafts. We nod as we are told that they can replace her arms with the skin from her buttocks, but hands are a different story. Hands need padding. They need thickness. The grafts won’t have nerves. She will have to be forever careful around hot objects. 

I look at my hands, as if for the first time and find myself over the next weeks in grocery store lines pinching the thickness of my palms. I hold my hand over our oven range and wonder about the sensitivity of the cells.  I take showers with scalding water. We find out she will never sweat through her hands, and that she will have no fingerprints. We make some joke about how we are going to keep her from awkward first dates with clammy boy hands and how she will outsmart Scotland Yard with her lack of fingerprints. We somehow cheer as a team when the doctor says she might have just enough skin on her groin to be able to cover both palms. Beaming smiles. Proud parents. My mouth is drier than it has ever been, and I can’t swallow my own spit.***

Her new hands are sewn on. The skin has been taken from her groin and shaved from her buttocks. Slabs have been cut off of her biceps and her biceps have been sealed back together—glue and string with jagged scars. Halloween is the next week and again I joke about Frankenstein costumes and mummy wrapping with the hospital staff. I will laugh with them and then cry outside of my car in the parking lot when I can’t figure out how to set her down without hurting her groin or her buttocks or her biceps or her hands. I hold her in my arms with my hands around her thighs so as to not touch where she is cut. I see that the blood has seeped through her bandages and her pants have small dotted red squares where this has happened. I stare at her car seat by myself and hold her and cry. A woman who looks as though she works in the administration offices of the hospital asks if she can help and I say I’m fine and just need to adjust this car seat and I will be fine. I feel embarrassed.  

***

I am surprised at how much the skin looks as though it has been sewn on. I know it was sewn on, I mean, I knew that it would be sewn on, but it looks like leatherwork at a summer camp. The skin is raised at least a centimeter above where the surface of the palm should be. Like someone has sewn skin over already existing skin. 

It will smooth they say. 

They tell us we can try to push down the scar lines and make the skin match. We will have to do therapy. I will massage her hands each night for what seems like hours. The silver sulfadiazine is gone and is replaced with udder balm that smells like eucalyptus. She will cry the entire time and look at me with fear wondering why I continue to hurt her over and over again. 

***

She walks up from the basement where we have set up an easel for her and my son. They are finger painting. She emerges from the steps singing and holds out her gift to me. It is streaked with blue and black, and the paint fills about a quarter of the page. She smiles up through her hair and brushes it aside with blackened hands. I go to the sink and hold them under the water, feeling their tight smoothness. I wash the paint off and feel the ridges where her old skin meets the new.  I think about 3000 A.D. and wonder if anyone is running their palm over the surface of the statue and am jealous of their ability to reflect on such a grand scale of transformation.  

I don’t throw the paper away. I stare at the streaks. I note the emptiness and the beginning of color in the corner.  I tuck the painting into a drawer to keep it safe.

I have visions of saving popsicle sticks to construct a rectangle frame. I will decorate the wooden slats with glitter glue and regret and love. I will stencil acrylic turtles in the shape of hope.

She is melting into me. She is waking me in dreams.  I wake before I even hear her call for me at night. I lay next to her sometimes after the house has quieted and smell her shampoo. She curls into me like a question mark. And I melt. And sometimes it melts into a hole. And sometimes we diffuse and fill all the space. And I don’t know what to do but bury the camera further, keep smelling her hair, and pray for forgiveness.

About the Author

Caleb Kostechka teaches Literature and Philosophy. He currently works as an Instructional Coach for Springfield High School. He is the winner of two writing awards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was recently published in The Madison Review and The Sandy River Review.  He currently resides in Oregon.