Say a Prayer for the Pretender by Alli Cruz

I knew it was going to be a bad day when Eliana called. I was playing hooky, walking through a white-walled art gallery, beneath a helix of tiny red, blue, and green sports cars suspended by hundreds of thin wires. Beside me, my friend was craning her neck upward. I didn’t pick up the call. Didn’t decline it either. I just read her name on my screen over and over, for the first time in three years, after three Christmases, three birthdays, three times forty days of Lent. 

I had given up on my father years ago. In that time, I had coached myself to expect a call notifying me of his death – something he had expressed, on-and-off, that he wanted. At the exhibit, each tiny car was positioned mid-nosedive, poised to race down an invisible track. I walked beside the display until it stopped abruptly in the middle of the room, at a height only slightly taller than my waist. It was the second to last day of the exhibit. There weren’t any descriptions of the artists’ work, which annoyed me. In places like this, I want someone to tell me what to think, where to focus.

My father had given away all his furniture. That’s what Eliana had said, over the phone. I’d decided to call her back that night, after hugging my friend goodbye. Worrying was a waste of time. As I watched a yellow BMW speed through a red light, I thought, the only thing worse than death is anticipating it. Apparently, my father had checked himself into a facility in Pasadena, only a few minutes up the 110. 

The day before, I had read on the news that a man, who worked at my company, got shot on the 10 freeway. He drove, and kept driving, until he pulled up to our office building. The security guard was the first to notice the blood. The man hadn’t even registered the bullet that ate through him. He just wanted to get to his 9 AM.

At work, I excelled. I was in the business of assisting other people. On my dual monitors, I played Tetris with my boss’s schedule, dangling meeting above meeting with five-minute increments of space in-between. I knew exactly what my boss had to do at any given moment: get a root canal in Brentwood; pick up her daughter from softball practice; schmooze the art dealer at a new rooftop bar downtown. That night, when I asked for more time off, I didn’t explain why, and she didn’t ask any questions. 

My father didn’t know that I was living in Los Angeles, or that I had taken a job well-beneath the expected salary range of someone who had attended such an overpriced private university. Unsurprisingly, studying abstract expressionism and quoting Barbara Kruger hadn’t equipped me with many marketable skills. I wasn’t quite prepared for adult life, but then, who is? I was happy, or at least close to my definition of it. In school, I could spend 20+ pages convincing myself that I knew what I was talking about.

For a long time, my father had been under pressure. Too much, he said. He’d had a kid at 16, parents who didn’t speak the language, and – he’d never say – an inability to express what he needed. Before my visit, I called to let him know ahead of time. It’s important not to surprise someone in his condition. To reach my father, I gave an access code to the receptionist. I couldn’t identify my father as my father – only as a patient, number 0159. When my father picked up the line, the first thing he said was my name, as a question. Then, he told me, for the first time: you were right. “About what?” I asked.

When I was 16, my father taught me how to drive. We would head out early on Sunday mornings, while most of the town was still kneeling beneath stained-glass windows. I had started with a few slow turns in the Target parking lot before graduating to long stretches up the Pacific Coast Highway. My father explained exactly what to do in a panic: breathe, and don’t fight against the wheel. While I rounded the bends by Crystal Cove, we would play Frankie Valli or Jackson Browne. We sang along to his favorite song – about a man who pretends his way through the years, as a slow kind of surrender.

My father wasn’t a drinker. Wasn’t a smoker. Hadn’t taken a single drug in his life, save for a few puffs of marijuana that I jacked from his kitchen cabinet. Over Telehealth, my new therapist explained his illness as a gun: the barrel of the gun as his environment; the bullet, his genetics. Any number of stressors could pull the trigger. We don’t know – until we know – what those might be.

Driving in circles around my apartment, I passed by the old warehouse that was now The Immersive Van Gogh Experience. Weeks earlier, at The Experience’s soft opening, I fell silent inside the warehouse’s blank walls—livened only by a series of prismatic projections. They casted yellows and blues onto my hands, and I allowed myself, briefly, to blend into negative space. The exhibit would only last about twelve weeks.

The first time I heard of van Gogh, I was in second grade. Our school district had just implemented an art program to teach kids about the most influential painters in modern Western history. After a presentation on the artists’ most famous works, students were asked to emulate them. So, with black construction paper, glitter, chalk crayons and colored pencils, I forged a spiraling night sky. It shimmered and shivered in my hands. During class, Ms. Garcia had called Vincent ill, but she never said with what.

It didn’t matter what the doctors called it because I already knew. I had seen my father look & look over his shoulders; forget his passwords; swear his ex, or the IRS, was out to kill him; worry that dogs were listening in on our conversations. “He certainly has a creative mind,” I told the doctor. We make words for things we don’t understand, and from there, find new ways to live. 

From the facility, my father called back. He told me that if I got lost on my way there, I should turn around and not bother coming back. I told him I’d be fine. I’m 24. I can find my way around. “Well,” he said, “I’m 61, and I don’t know where I am.”

Alli Cruz (she/her/ella) is an American writer. A Lambda Literary Fellow, her work has appeared in The Margins, The San Franciscan, Hobart, and elsewhere. Alli holds a BA from Stanford and resides in Los Angeles.

27 February 2024