On Your Daughter's Eighth Birthday

On your daughter’s eighth birthday she will fall down a well.

She will swim to the bottom, open a hatch she’ll find there and be given one bloody plastic bag by a mermaid, who’ll reach through with a glittering hand and pull her to safety. Your daughter will crawl out of a sewer grate, dripping, in the rain, clutching the bag. On her return home she will profess to hate you. This will continue through her teenage years, during which time she will read a lot and raise chickens.

Upon her departure for college you will weep fragments of chicken claw that will cut your cheeks so badly you’ll need a constellation of stitches and staples which you will be unable to pay for, resulting in a garage sale where you will sell your first edition of a your favorite novel to a book dealer from Istanbul, who will in turn trade it for an old clay tablet containing a text in Sanskrit, Egyptian, and Linear A. In his excitement, the book dealer will drive too fast and collide with a bicycle. On that bicycle, standing up on the pedals to get a better look at a billboard bearing the words ‘David Foster Wallace Found Alive and Well in the Caribbean,’ in Turkish, which she learned from the Turkish boyfriend you will never know about, will be your daughter. Lying on the pavement, soaking in water spray from a dislocated fire hydrant, her bloody grocery bag fluttering in the wind, your daughter will think about a small circle of water, and dim unplaceable guilt.

Your daughter will be wearing a locket. Her mother will give her the locket, which is shaped like a heart. Your ex-wife, the anthropologist who will give your daughter half her genetic material and later live in Trinidad, will explain to her the origin of the heart symbol over a cup of chamomile tea mixed with another kind of tea you wouldn’t recognize if I told you.

“The shape of the heart symbol comes from the peeple leaf. Indus River Valley civilizations used the peepal leaf and other plants as contraceptives.”

Your daughter will take a sip of tea. She won’t be thinking of you. She will not think about you a single time that whole week. Not where you are, what you might be doing, not even a stray image, like your nose, which she will inherit, or your whiskers, which you will rub on her face to make her laugh when she’s a child. It would hurt you to know how little your daughter will think about you.

“Wild carrots, too. These heart-shaped plants are abortifacients,” the Anthropologist will explain while blowing into her own tea, which will be only chamomile.

“Take this,” the Anthropologist will say, pulling out a grocery bag from her coat pocket. They’ll be meeting in Moscow. Your daughter has not yet gone to Turkey, she has not yet met the man who will give her the bicycle and the job at the bookstore. She has not yet had her first orgasm, which the man will give her because his circumcision will make it difficult for him to climax, giving him much more stamina than most men. She has not yet had many of the experiences she will get to enjoy in her short life. They will be concentrated toward the end, as with all great lives.

Your daughter and her mother will meet in Moscow, where she will be studying on the Fulbright Scholarship which you will help her apply for over the phone. Tedious, but it’ll be the only way you can hear her voice. Only something practical like an application will get her to call you. Also, this will be the last time you speak to her. You won’t know that at the time. All you’ll be thinking about is the new, quick way of talking that she has developed, and the fact that she says “huh” now instead of “you don’t say,” which, you will remember, used to charm you when she was little.

It’ll be winter. Moscow in winter will drive your daughter into a depression. It does that to a lot of people. This depressive episode won’t be as bad as the one you will have in in 1998 but it will be pretty bad, and it will be one of the reasons why she’ll call her mother in tears asking how to get an abortion in Russia without getting herself killed. Her mother will get the next flight out.

From the plastic bag the Anthropologist will take a heart-shaped locket. Your daughter, whose abdominal pain is just about setting in, will take the locket and put it around her neck.

The anthropologist will say, “People in the Indus River Valley had to get abortions too. That is why the shape of this locket, which I am giving to you because I love you, is shaped like a peeple leaf and not like my heart.”

After the abortion, which will take all night, your daughter will wake up late the next evening to find her mother already gone. The bathroom will be clean. Four steaks will be in the fridge. She’ll eat all of them quickly and then crouch over the toilet, bringing them back up. Then and only then will she spare a thought for you, staring into the toilet bowl. She’ll think about the way your cheeks turn red in the cold, close to the same shade of red as what used to be steak in the toilet. This thought will be accompanied by no emotion and will leave as soon as it comes.

From Moscow, she’ll go to Turkey. She’ll meet her Turkish boyfriend. She’ll start working at the bookstore. She’ll hear mermaids gurgling in the storm drains, and her guilt, which has been following her ever since that day in the well, will bubble up. She’ll start spiking cedar trees by Turkey’s southern border and even go across the border into Lebanon to spike trees there. Some bad people will be trying to cut down these trees, and your daughter can’t let that happen. Her Turkish boyfriend with the unsensitive penis will help her.

Your daughter will take one book and her laptop in a backpack to the cedar forests and nothing else. Briefly she will connect to the internet when a passing airplane, which is just testing out its new inflight Wifi system, passes low overhead, but all she will be able to download is a single news story: David Foster Wallace dead at forty-eight. Suicide. Hanged himself from the rafters knowing that his wife would come home to find him. Which, according to the news, she did.

Your daughter will lie awake all night, wondering. Did he leave a note for her? Did he paste it to the front door? “Dear ___, Don’t go inside. Call emergency services. You’ll find a longer letter in the dresser drawer. I love you. -David.” Or did he just leave a few words on the kitchen table for her to find, close to where his legs were swaying back and forth? Or did he not say anything at all? Could this man, whose compassion for his fictional characters was so unbounded and complete, be so callous as to have killed himself without taking measures to prevent his wife from finding his body? Maybe she was traveling for work and he was certain that the authorities would find him well before she did, but maybe she came back early, a fluke. Or maybe not. Maybe he was that callous.

Maybe, about to die, he thought only of himself.

Your daughter will go back to Istanbul in a daze of grief, pouring over a certain book, searching anywhere, in any line, on any page, for some piece of irrefutable evidence that David Foster Wallace would have been too compassionate to allow his wife to see his body hanging from the ceiling.

One bright afternoon the bookseller for whom she works will be driving too fast. The tablet sitting on the front seat is a new Rosetta Stone. It will, he’ll hope, catapult him to fame and finally decode one of the last uncrackable languages: Linear A.

Your daughter will be bicycling distractedly. Running late to work at the bookstore, she’ll peddle vigorously. In her right hand, she’ll hold a plastic grocery bag containing a heavy book filled with notes in her thin, illegible hand. Each tree she passes will be spiked, each face she passes will be her mother’s, each storm drain she passes will be a portal to another world.

Then, it will happen: she’ll look up, spot some text on a billboard, stand up on the bike pedals to get a better look. Around the corner will come the bookseller in his sedan. Your daughter will lean just a bit into the road. The bookseller will sideswipe your daughter at forty miles an hour, turning her hip bones to powder, her upper leg muscles to putty, her ribcage to pulp. She will be wearing a helmet, which will protect her head when it strikes the pavement.

She will lie in the road. People will rush up to her. She will try to get a look at the billboard between them. Water from the fire hydrant will pour over everyone. One of your daughter’s rib bones will puncture her heart, which is not shaped like a peeple leaf. The bloody grocery bag will flicker in the wind. In a sunny villa in Port of Spain, across the ocean, an anthropologist will suddenly feel anxious. In Massachusetts, you will be asleep.

Your daughter will slip out of consciousness holding the hand of a stranger.

You won’t find out until almost a week later, when the bookseller, who has finally gotten hold of your number, will tell you a half truth.

There are so many things you won’t know. So much you will have to do. But right now, you have no worries. Right now, you’re eight years old. You’re standing outside, in the cold, with your grandfather, chipping off ice that has formed on the lid of a well.