Abolish the Father

The day all fathers were officially abolished, Lanny woke up without pain. Since birth, the only thing she’d ever prayed for was the absence of pain. When she danced, pain was inseparable from her body, as if she’d sprouted from its seed, a skinned tree. The pain was her refrain: again, again, it sang as she sprang across the floor. The pain was a chewy light, organizing her entire life, filling the meat of her mind so that everything else scattered, abstract as the sky. Everything else died. She did not think about the steps, about grace or musicality. About squaring her hipbones or rocking an imaginary baby in her arms to nurse her servitude to movement. What she loved most were the metaphors shouted at her by the teacher — bones like sloshed milk, wrists like wind, belly coin-flattened — because they were instructions for transformation, for vacating herself completely, shedding into a series of things. For Lanny, dancing had always been a way of separating her life from its flesh, allowing her limbs to move the way the moon did, seduced by the bloodless and irresistible force of an orbit, the love of another planet.

The morning Lanny woke in a fatherless world, two absences overlapped inside her, and she did not know which she felt more strongly. First was the absence of pain, the erasure of pearled blisters between her toes, her toenails unbruised and clear as lakes, her spine no longer a thrashing, achy snake. The second was the absence of her father, and of all fathers, for they had all been banned from land. For years, Lanny’s mother acted as the head of the campaign to abolish fathers: If they’re not going to provide, if they’re not going to keep house, if they’re going to beat and berate their wives, we might as well not have them at all. If they’re going to be useless, they might as well become beautiful. Like all other useless things. So why don’t they go and join the birds in the trees and the whales in the sea, something that brings delight at a distance?

And so the fathers were herded into the sea, some protesting and others celebrating their newfound freedom, far from the petty demands of their daughters and wives. At last, they cried out, we will be able to achieve our dreams and fulfill our schemes, without their nagging voices, without the restraint of their tiny realities, and we will be limitless. The world is more water than land, they said, so doesn’t that mean we’re winning? Doesn’t that mean the majority of the world is ours, still ours? We have been liberated at last!

Some fathers walked into the sea alone, and others linked arms, dragging each other down. Some became marine mammals, literally heartless, their blood replaced with heat-insulating blubber. Some joined whale pods, migrating with new families, secretly missing their aboveground lives, and others fought with dolphins and lost their territory, retreating into trenches where the only living creatures carried their own light, declaring independence from the sun. Those trench-dwelling fathers were fools, believing they could survive on their own after relying on generations of mothers and wives, on the labor of light, and many of them starved or died of vitamin D deficiencies. Back on land, Lanny’s mother continued to espouse the benefits of the ban on TV and over the radio: On land, we will have peace, Lanny’s mother said, We will be thrillingly empty. Gone are the origins of our agony.

At school, many of the children were missing, and Lanny enjoyed the empty desks beside her own, the feeling that she could stretch out her limbs and span the planet. She wondered if those missing children were in mourning, sailing the sea in search of their lost fathers, the ones who had taught them how to tie their shoes, the ones who walked them to school. Lanny always looked at those fathers with vague alarm, the ones who lingered in the parking lot, waiting for their children to get out of class, the ones who dropped off forgotten lunchboxes. They were rare, but they were definitely living. She watched them carefully, observing the way they held their daughters’ hands with easy intimacy as they crossed the street together. This sight did not stir up any kind of longing or envy in her. It was too foreign a concept for her, a father who held hands with his daughter. A father bound by gravity. She did not dream of such beings. In fact, she often found herself wanting to warn the girls who ran to their fathers: Read this list of all the atrocities he could do to you. I hope he does all of them, because the sooner you learn, the earlier you learn, the better it will be for you. Lanny always suspected that her imagination was born blunted, rotted soft. Rather than the presence of true happiness, all she could envision was the absence of violence, nothing standing in its place, nothing to replace an abyss. She shut her eyes and saw an emptiness that plastered the planet, vaster and deeper than water. To imagine anything else seemed impossibly extravagant. She knew that her classmates wrote letters to Santa, saw them scribbling at their desks, curating lists of presents: a pony. Pleasure. A hairbrush that lit up when you brushed with it. But Lanny observed this ritual with indifference. Her letter was blank. An obliteration. She wanted the gift of making something gone, but she knew it couldn’t be granted by anyone, least of all Santa. On her list of things to annihilate:

-The time her father found a greasy handprint on a white wall in their house and forced Lanny to confess to it by pressing her hand to the silhouette. When it fit, he punched her hand into the stain, crushing the plaster like eggshell.

- The time she found her mother sobbing in the backyard at night, trying to feed the sound to owls. Trying not to disturb Lanny’s sleep. Your father said to me: since Lanny was born, you’ve lost all interest in giving me sex. You have been lazy. I said, you’re not the baby. Go cook for yourself. Go fuck yourself. The moment I said these things, I knew it was over for me. I knew that motherhood was death.

- The time her teacher read Animal Farm aloud to the class, and Lanny wept uncontrollably when Boxer the Horse was carted away to a glue factory, ground to death. Boxer’s last words were, “I will work harder,” and this wrenched at Lanny’s chest, the futility of his work, that no matter how hard he labored, he was disposable to those he loved, and that he died without knowing this, died trying to prove his worthiness. I will work harder, Lanny repeated to herself, when her father ignored her.

The teacher rocked Lanny back and forth in her arms, reassuring Lanny that Boxer’s death had been swift, and when Lanny stopped crying at last, the teacher smiled and said, You’re such a strong girl. But this only made Lanny want to cry more: She hated to be praised for her strength. What she wanted more than anything was a world in which she could be weak. A world that could contain her collapse.

On the second day of fatherlessness, a few students returned to Lanny’s class. One girl named Jenny had gone on an early morning whale-watching tour in an attempt to recapture her father. Because she didn’t have a fishing net, she’d brought with her a hairnet, the same kind that Lanny used for ballet class. But Jenny had been sorely disappointed: though she did spot a pod of humpback whales, her father only made one brief appearance. 

“He had a gray, greasy belly. He didn’t spray water or anything,” Jenny had said, doming her hand in the air, tracing the shape of her father’s emergence from the water, the arc of his slick body. “He came up just once,” Jenny said, explaining that she hadn’t even had time to aim her binoculars at him, to get a good glimpse of his face, or at least his barnacles. And the spray had blurred his silhouette, so that even his shape was vague, curving above the water’s surface to bracket his own absence.

It was to be expected, Jenny said, repeating what the tour guide told her: Whales are responsible for their lungs and must breathe, coming to the surface eventually, but fathers are beholden to nothing, not even their own bodies. They have no problem abandoning the need to intake oxygen, to bathe in sunlight, or to engage with landbound civilizations. In fact, they prefer to be accountable to nothing, seeking freedom from all consequence in the depths of the sea, the parts of the world no one has ever reached. There were creatures down there, Jenny said, that lived so apart from us, so unaffected by our sadness and our joy and our anger, that they believed themselves to be gods. To them, the sea presided over the sky. We were the ones submerged, a country beneath.

Fathers have always lived in a different world from us, Lanny’s mother often said. That they live in the sea has hardly made a difference.

Though she didn’t find her father, Jenny said that at least she returned with a severe sunburn, and now she could pry the skin off her back in sticky strips of lace, revealing the fish-raw flesh beneath. She claimed this process was far more insightful and entertaining than a father-watching tour, which involved seasickness and waking up early in the morning. Jenny said she would never go again, or if she did, she wouldn’t bother with the binoculars. There was no need to spot a father clearly if he was only going to disappear soon after.

At ballet class that afternoon, Lanny stood in the dressing room, staring at herself in the slender mirror. The absence of pain continued to accompany her, and she began to wonder if she, too, was disappearing. She was so used to pain, or the anticipation of it, that its absence unanchored her. She felt as if she’d been draped in something other than skin, something akin to wind. Now she rode the air, lifted above all surfaces. While the other girls changed around her, switching skins, she imagined what it would be like to dive into the carpet and dissolve, to find absolute freedom from her body. To be untethered from the pain of relating to that image, the one that stood before her in the mirror. In water, her limbs would be weightless, and her blood would banish itself. In water, she would no longer wake up to the sound of her mother in the backyard, trying to mask her cries with the moon. Eternally unbothered, Lanny would surface only to breathe every few weeks, and she would at last achieve the kind of lightness that taunted her like a swarm of flies.

But when she stepped up the barre at the back of the studio and rested her hand on it — hold it lightly, her teachers always said, so lightly that it’s the same as letting go, its presence becoming invisible, its presence like another bone in your chest — she turned her head and was confronted with the wall-spanning mirror. It clothed her in light, housing her better than a body. The glass rippled like water, filling with all the girls’ bodies. As they lined up together, the mirror became an endless fabric, a silver net that expanded with their breath. They moved across it as if swimming, parting it with the blades of their hands and legs, and suddenly Lanny saw the space between their bodies as its own living organism, the air forming limbs between them, writhing along to a separate rhythm. They manipulated the air, shaping it like clay. Lanny lifted her arms into fifth position as another girl lowered hers, and together they carved a hollow for a heart. Lanny swung her leg backward. In front of her, a girl’s leg swung backward in the same shape, filling the space she vacated. Their heat held like a weave. Lanny shimmied forward to meet the other girl’s foot, the heel smashing into her nose. Blood lapped her chin and cheeks, an affectionate heat.

The teacher gasped and scurried toward Lanny, asking her if she was alright. Lanny waited a second and realized: pain did not arrive. The blood kept coming, but the pain was detained. She waited and waited. She feared it was too late for any of them to be saved: though her father was now in a different world, she suspected deep down that her mother had long ago joined him, her soul submerged at the bottom of the sea, refusing to surface without him.

At breaktime, the girls gathered in front of the water cooler, which glugged like a perpetually thirsty throat. Lanny licked the blood off her chin. The girls were talking as if underwater, their words blurring. No longer did they mention their fathers. Such information had become irrelevant, and in fact had never been relevant. As Lanny sipped from her mushy paper cup, she was filled with a deep relief. Her skin felt expanded, wrapped around an absence. She could stand inside her skin without touching its walls. She could twirl and dance inside the turret of herself. She would no longer have to make up stories and excuses and lies and omissions. It was simpler to live in a fatherless world, a universe in which fathers never existed, than it was to explain their absence. Easier to lead them one by one into the sea than to receive a lifetime of pity. 

Don’t worry about him, Lanny’s mother said, The sea is where all life originates. He’ll be able to start over, to go back to the beginning and erase his behavior. To answer the question of her father was like trying to explain the failures of a world. It would take a millennium to talk through. For a long time, it had been Lanny’s responsibility to explain the failure of her family, the particular anatomy of her pain. And what about your dad? But now it was no longer personal. Fatherloss was universal. It was ecological. Now the world was taking responsibility for her story. She was no longer lonely. The sea, having swallowed all fathers, would now be the one to speak, to make light of loss, to repeat again and again, yes, no worries, it’s okay to ask, I’m okay now, that’s the important thing, it was painful, but it made me strong, it did, it did.

The night her father followed all fathers into the sea, Lanny tried to fall asleep. She petted the familiar presence of her pain, the sharp twinge that lodged in her ankle after she landed a jump crookedly. She began to fear that she had accidentally rubbed up against the white wall in her sweat-soaked leotard and yellowed the pigment. Would it be traced back to her? Sometimes she wished for her own absence. The pain can remain, she thought to herself, let the pain stay. I will disappear, and my pain will sprawl bodiless on this bed like clean silk sheets, incapable of staining anything. Her own presence was incompatible with her father’s, and she knew that one of them would have to waver, one would have to destroy the other.

The time had arrived: in the doorway of her bedroom, Lanny heard her father breathing inside its frame. Perhaps he’d found the stain on the wall and wouldn’t leave until she accepted her punishment. Perhaps he wanted to gather her air in a bag and add it to his own supply, which would soon be limited in the sea. Perhaps he wanted to harvest her hurt, to rake it off her ankle and sow it into his own body. His ecosystem seemed to thrive on it. Whenever he was done with her, he seemed lighter, absent of anger, while Lanny always felt heavier, each of her limbs doubling.

Lanny shut her eyes tight. The air thickened into water. The planet turned heavy as a pent-up breath, denting its orbit. But Lanny did not move. Soon it would be over. Soon the world would absorb what she remembered, and only the sea would recall what fathers were, how many eyes and teeth and fingers they had, what they could do with such things. 

I’m going to be free, her father whispered in the doorway. Lanny opened her eyes and lifted herself up on her elbows. Clutched in her father’s hands was a plastic yellow scuba mask, the dollar store kind that was meant for children to use as a toy in the bath. It would not survive submergence into the ocean.

Be strong, father, Lanny wanted to say, Use the deprivation of light and air as an opportunity to show your strength. But she knew that if she said it aloud, he would start a fight and never leave, so instead she only nodded. Fighting was his way of anchoring himself in her body, yanking her down into the depths until she could not breathe.

Be free, then, Lanny said instead. In truth, she did not know what freedom was. Whether it was different from abandonment. In water was the only time she was weightless: when she was splayed on her back in the bathtub, her limbs rising to the surface like leaves. Her bruises sinking to the bottom like coins.

You can come with me, he said, and Lanny was startled by the softness of his voice. She had never heard it before. It must have been the kind of voice he used on her mother. When I met him, he was funny and sweet, her mother often said. Lanny hadn’t believed it. I didn’t want to have children, but he insisted it was his dream. And I wanted to make his dream come true. It was simple to do. So I had you.

When Lanny first heard this story, she felt at first betrayed: her mother hadn’t chosen her. It was her father who made the choice. It was her father who had given her life, and Lanny could not forgive that. Could not accept that she owed anything to his wants. But what did it matter, Lanny thought, what he chose? In the end, it was her mother who taught her how to bathe, how to scrape out her belly button, how to save the leftover water to feed the chilis in the garden, how to disappear a bruise by pressing on it often, forcing new blood to rush through the wound, repairing broken bridges beneath the skin. The choice had not begun as her own, but she carried its consequence. What did choices matter, Lanny thought, if all you did was make them? Making them was the easy part. Living with them was different. And that was what Lanny and her mother did: live in their little ways. Live the agonizing length of their days. 

Yours is not the freedom I want, Lanny said. I don’t need the sea. It was true, what her mother said, that her father always lived in another world, but it was not the world Lanny wanted to join, one in which she fled her failures, feeding them to everyone else. One in which the mirror came down like a blade, cutting her from the other girls, stripping them of the blood they had bestowed upon each other. It was not pain that soothed her but the way they shared it, passing it back and forth as information, preventing it from settling. From becoming permanent. It moved until it was a message, an encoded memory in their bodies: Do not forget this. She thought of the blank letter she sent to Santa every year, a single sheet of white paper, the way her mother laughed as she addressed it to the North Pole. What is the point? her mother asked. You’re supposed to ask for what you want. Is there nothing you want? But Lanny shook her head. The point was this: what she wanted did not yet exist. What she wanted was another world. Even if it was too late. Especially if it was too late.

Her father stepped back, vacating the doorway. Slowly, Lanny leaned back on her bed and listened to the sound of his footsteps receding down the hallway. She wondered if it mattered at all that he was leaving, that he had been abolished. What remained was her body, which remembered anyway. She wondered if the absence she prayed for was anything but a fantasy, an erasure of her entire being. Lanny wriggled her toes, then her fingers. She lifted her neck like a fish gasping for air, gills starved and flapping open like envelopes. She counted the pain, tried to quantify it, tried to imagine her life without it, the only freedom she ever dreamed of. In the morning, the sea would be made of fathers. When she was little, she wondered how it was possible that a puddle of water could evaporate, but not the sea. How did the water make more of itself, endless replenishing? How did it resist emptying? It must be solid as meat. It must have memory. Lanny rolled in her bed, holding her breath, listening. 

For the first time, she did not hear her mother in the backyard, throwing bathwater on the camellias to disguise the slosh of her tears. All she heard was silence. Not the absence of sound but the end of it. A deliberate death, like a fist choking off a flood. When Lanny yanked the cold bedsheet to her chin, the sea swallowed her father’s head.