[ WP ] Growing up , your father always kept a loaded .44 hidden in every room of your house . Now you understand why .

On the best days we would forget about them altogether. 
 
 Forget about the black and the silver that shone like trapped fishes. The smooth grips that always felt warm to the touch, like the soft humming of oak trees. The open mouths that gaped with a darkness we could not fathom despite our childhood fears. The old roulette wheel clack clack clacking slowly. 
 
 And most of all we would forget about the way our father walked through the house every morning and every night, touching them with a fever that was indescribable. He walked with his eyes shiny and his hands raised in prayer, like the many kings who had gone mad before him, and after passing each one his hand would trail in spasms of regret. A god and his apostles, forgotten but waiting. 
 
 We lived in the lee of that large and dusty house, my brother and I. We taught ourselves to sleep in its shadows and barter with its creaking bones and speak its endless, unsettled language. Every time the house shifted and wept we would murmur to it in comfort. Every time it plunged in to darkness we would climb downwards with our fingers until they found the switchboard. 
 
 And most of all we knew where the guns were kept. In shoeboxes and shelves, taped under desks and nestled under pillows, beneath the third floorboard or above the medicine cabinet. We knew this because it was the only thing that our father ever insisted on, the only thing he ever tested us on. Instead of bedtime stories we would recite their locations, their make and model, their weight and recoil. Only then could we sleep. 
 
 On my twelfth birthday I fired one for the first time. On his twelfth birthday my brother did the same. The violence, the shock, the noise. Standing there blinking like a fool because nothing could have prepared you for what was to come. And far, far away, a paper target fluttering in the wind, tacked to a makeshift scarecrow which we were sure walked around the house as we slept. 
 
 But we never practiced with the guns. That first shot was the last and nothing ever followed. Not until you understand, my father would say. Not until you can see what I see. Beyond these words he did not speak to us much, and for a time we grew up believing him to be a robot in disguise, coded with select responses and incapable of learning. 
 
 Soon after my brother's gunday, he began to leave the house on what he called his missions. As the grandfather clock choked the hours in to minutes in to seconds in to whatever lay beyond, we waited. We would sit at the top of the stairs and talk about what grew in the empty kitchen, what lived in the empty attic, what smiled at us in the mirror. 
 
 We talked about this without getting afraid, because at some point both of us had realized that we had treated fear as though a poison, consuming a small amount every day until nothing could scare us anymore. Whatever wanted us would have to try really hard to have us. 
 
 The missions grew longer as the time between them shrank. We would not ask where he came from, with his boots tracking mud and his hands trembling. He carried a duffel bag that clanked as he set it down and weighed as though it contained bricks. My brother once peeked inside and said that it contained more weapons. Maps. Books in strange languages. Pictures of creatures that should not have existed. 
 
 The guns in the house - the house guns - would stand sentinel whenever he left, and we would know this because he would make us recite their hiding places before he left and after he returned. Sometimes he would change their position and if we forgot we would go without supper or stand on one leg for hours on end. You are their keepers when I am gone, he would say. You should know this by now. 
 
 But he never raised a hand on us. Or his voice. Even when he was upset it was with the gentleness of waves after the storm. 
 
 The police finally caught him in an abandoned shoe factory, tipped off by a passing car that saw a man where there should have been none. Of all places to find the man, they found him in an abandoned shoe factory. 
 
 Once they discovered his cache of weapons, his carvings of unknown words, and his intricate maps of sewers and ley lines and cloud landings, they had no choice but to think him an extremely dangerous individual. This was the line they told me: extremely dangerous individual. As if they did not know what true danger was. 
 
 He disappeared under the weight of judicial charges and police beatings, shrinking in his prison cell until there was nothing of him left. He did not understand what he had done wrong and nobody could explain in a language that would work. The robot had ventured too far out of its territory and there was no coming back. 
 
 We visited him until the end. But undoing the knot of time takes time itself. As the numerous psychiatrists and childcare professionals and charities and orphanages taught us what the outside world was supposed to look like, our vision of the truth slowly dissolved, and was steadily replaced by another. 
 
 Over time we forgot about our lack of schooling, our filthy clothes, our wasted bodies and the perpetual darkness of our house. Little by little we surrendered to the reality that existed beyond those four walls and little by little the house and its language were left behind. In undoing the lessons of our father we found ourselves at last. 
 
 He watched it all happen silently. The only thing he promised us was that we would keep the guns in the house with us. My brother, who had found his voice after long years of silence, screamed and beat the glass and swore that he would never allow a gun in his house as long as he lived. That was not the last time he and my father spoke, but it might as well have been. 
 
 So the guns landed up with me. The house came with them, despite my best efforts to sell the damn thing. I buried them in the backyard but I could still sense them. The gospel of steel and thunder had gone, but the prophets remained. Ready and waiting. 
 
 To his grave my father did not speak of what he had waged his war against. The last time we saw him he bent his head against the glass as though a monk before saying goodbye. That was the most serene I had ever seen him. 
 
 He died the next day, in his sleep. We were the only people at his funeral. We threw handfuls of dirt and promised things that we did not mean, both to him and each other. And that was that. 
 
 My brother and I drifted after the death of our father, unmoored from the bonds that had kept us wrapped so tightly in the past. He moved to another city, married a woman, raised children of his own. He had a job that paid him well and a family that loved him dearly. He would often lean back and close his eyes in sudden contentment, not realizing how much he looked like our father just then. 
 
 I drifted through life. Broken marriages and children that did not wish to see me. A life that could never expand its radius far enough from the large and dusty house with its guns. I looked in the mirror and all I saw smiling back was myself, and that alone filled me with a horror no childhood fable could. 
 
 But my father could n't save us in the end. He tried, but he could n't. 
 
 One of the most curious things about life is how quick we are to explain things. When we talk about broken men doing broken things we can only assume that the demons that live are those inside them, creatures of medulla and Freud. It is with beautiful ignorance that we turn our back on the screaming dark, and perhaps that is why we have survived as long as we have. 
 
 At the trial they called my father a man who was unstable, who had diseases that forced him to imagine things. My father stood mute and looked at the ground, and I remembered the shame that I felt on his behalf. All my life I waited for those symptoms to flower and when they did not I felt a fool and a failure, like a patient who is sad at finding no cancer. 
 
 But shame is the wrong word, you see? Shame is not what my father felt. He guarded his tongue because he knew better. He guarded his tongue because opening it would make matters worse, and he needed to be around his children for as much as he could. 
 
 My father was suppressing laughter. 
 
 Shortly before writing this letter I received a call from the police informing me that my brother and his entire family had been murdered. The detective who spoke to me sounded on the verge of nausea, and in the background I could hear the muted curses of technicians and journalists. 
 
 I tried to leave immediately, thinking about flights and money and clothes in a vain effort to bury the grief that had cleaved me in two. But in this paralysis I realized that I had not yet hung up the phone. And the detective had more to say. 
 
 We are coming for you, my beloved, he sang. His voice had changed and altered as though from the bottom of a well, and as he spoke the house began to shudder as if expecting a blow. We are coming to take you home. 
 
 I must have responded but I do not know what I said. All I could remember is his response, goading and taunting me in a thousand different voices, telling me how the darkness was coming to get its due. And in these voices I recognized all the fears my brother and I had put away, all the times that we had stared so bravely in to the night. All the imagination that we had conquered. 
 
 We had not. It had been our father and his silent disciples. A constant, silent war against the minds of his own children. 
 
 I am going to dig up the guns now, and place them in shoeboxes and shelves and all the other hidden places. I will do this but leave this letter behind, so that those who may find it may know the sacrifice of my father and the foolishness of his sons. It is my hope that you never have to read it. 
 
 May God be with us all.
