HERR DIRECTOR!

Jim lost track of how many times he had to circle the labyrinthine airport before seeing them. He pulled the car alongside the curb, ignoring the blaring horn behind him, and flipped on the emergency lights. His son David slouched tragically between two rolling suitcases with a forest green scarf snug around his neck and wiry glasses that sat precariously on his face. Jim felt a hearty swell of joy upon seeing his son after all this time.

“Davie, over here!” Jim said as he hurried toward him, smiling generously.

“David, Dad. My name’s David.”

Jim shook David’s hand and turned to embrace David’s wife, Alison. She hugged him weakly and presented their son Martin.

“Hey, kiddo, how are you holding up?” Jim asked.

Martin shrugged and retreated back into the cool shadow of his mother. Jim hoped he would have more luck with the older grandson Lucas who, beyond the tight berth of his parents, kicked at a dirty clump of snow.

“How about you, young man?” Jim said to Lucas, this time with a bit less enthusiasm.

Lucas trotted over in a puffy red and green jacket that made him look like a walking Christmas tree ornament. Jim wasn’t sure to hug him or shake his hand, so he patted him gently on the back.

“You’re gonna see a lot more than that while you’re here,” Jim said, nodding at the patch of ash-colored snow.

Jim had invited David and his family to visit him for an early Christmas. One small step toward restoring the tatters of a father-son relationship, at least that’s how Jim’s sponsor Gil phrased it. Just two days ago, in fact, Jim had received his one-year token for sobriety at an AA meeting, where he had shared the story of his final night out as a drunk, when he had jaunted up the unsalted steps to his townhouse, slipped backward and cracked his head clean open. On the cold ice, he had felt his neck grow warm as the inky purple spread behind him like wings. Jim had recited the tale of his near-death fall so many times in meetings that he knew exactly when to slow the leaky cadence of his voice. When to let a stray pause usher the wonderful silence of attention. When to shift the moderate, reflexive laughter into white-faced gravitas. And, finally, when to knot the whole thing together: And splitting my skull on ice was my proverbial wake up call, he would say, smiling. Bloodied, face skyward, it was at that moment I realized that if I didn’t stop then the drink would eventually knock down the door of my life and consume me, bone and all.

For twenty-seven years drinking and working had been Jim’s primary loves. As a salesman for Caterpillar he spent more time sleeping between starchy sheets in aggressively air-conditioned hotel rooms than in his own bed. As his wife Linda prepared meat sauce for their son David, Jim might be regaling a table of bullish suits in a steakhouse. As Linda wiped vomit from David’s chin after a sleepless night of food poisoning, he might be waking up, his head a screaming siren, alongside the puttied nakedness of a stranger. His drinking meant he only watched David grow up in the corner of his eye with iced aluminum clutched in his hand. Despite this domestic truancy, he came fully alive on the road. It was after a day locked in a fluorescent tomb or touring a factory, slapping the cold ass of a compactor like prized game, when he really went to work. The dinners, happy hours, lounge outings. Filled with drink, he could provide an endless torrent of jokes and popcorn-worthy anecdotes. Those around him liked the way they felt in his bleary gaze and in return, they—his audience—agreed to long-term contracts worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Eventually, though, he ran out of lies to tell his wife to distract her from the betrayals, the truth no longer a plaything for him to mold. She grew tired of hearing that work-induced absence equated to fatherly sacrifice. That his drinking wasn’t anything other than drinking. Now, here he was: sixteen years divorced and retired, left with nothing but the commitment to not doing something—the commitment to not drinking. Recovery was now his only family, his only work.

Jim drove from the airport beneath a cottoned sky flushing against the earth’s four corners. He flipped on the radio to drown out the awkward rustling of winter coats, tags freshly removed. Sleigh Ride filled the car with squealing brass.

“How was the flight?” Jim asked, his voice rivaling the festive buoyancy of the music.

“The airport was a zoo,” Alison said in a low voice to the backseat window.

“Now it’s time for the fun part,” Jim said, and then suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing everyone in the car to lurch forward.

“Jesus, Dad!” David yelled.

“I saw him,” Jim said.

“Should you be driving with your eye?”

“My eye?” Jim said, looking at David with confusion. “Oh, yeah. It’s just the flying. I can’t go that high up in the air apparently.”

Hosting David was supposed to show his son he was a new man ready to make up for history. Jim was working the Steps, accepting responsibility for his countless errors and lies, attending church, performing in a band as a way to give back to the community—all manner of things to show David that he was new non-alcoholic wine in new wineskins. And while Jim wasn’t shy about telling David these things when they talked over the phone every few months, he felt David needed to see it for himself. And what better way to show him than to host his son and his family: cook for them, play with his grandsons, let them see the spotless linoleum floor of his kitchen, the well-stocked fridge and cabinets, a home and life managed by a man in control? But Jim’s plan nearly crumbled when David called to tell him they couldn’t make the trip after all. Alison had an important client meeting a few days after they were scheduled to get back. It would be cutting it too close, David told him. Instead, David offered to fly Jim out for the holiday but that would mean having to deal with Jim’s ex-wife, something for which he didn’t have the stomach. Though, the real problem with the new itinerary was that it wouldn’t allow him to show his son just how much things had changed. Puttering around David’s house as the feeble guest, sleeping on a screechy air mattress and sharing a messy bathroom with his grandsons was out of the question. After Jim told David no problem, and that Jim would be more than happy to come out just to get off the phone, he sat in silence for an hour, eyeing the floating flakes of skin, hairs made visible by a fold of sun through a crooked blind. As the dying light of the afternoon collected in the room’s corners, carrying with it a familiar loneliness, Jim had an idea. He called David back and told him he wouldn’t be able to make it, unfortunately. “

I really wish I could, Davie, but I forgot that I can’t fly because of the surgery for my torn retina,” Jim said, moving his free hand to each syllable as if directing a fleet of woodwinds. “The doctor said it had something to do with cabin pressure.”

It technically wasn’t a lie, Jim thought after he hung up. He had had surgery on his retina, even if nearly a year ago. And while he couldn’t say for sure—a fact to which he tethered himself—who was to say his doctor wouldn't agree? It was not not the truth. Even his sponsor Gil couldn’t tell him it wasn’t. No one could.

When they got home from the airport, David insisted they pay for takeout since it would be easier. Jim tried to counter, explaining that he had planned to cook a meal for them but his son was adamant. They ordered Greek and when Alison mentioned, for the third time, that the restaurant didn’t give them enough tzatziki sauce Jim understood the vastness of her resentment. Jim and Alison spoke directly to each other rarely, having had only a few opportunities over the years. This hadn’t stopped Alison from providing regular advice to Jim for living a healthier lifestyle, though. David served as her proxy. Alison thinks you should start swimming rather than lifting weights. Alison thinks you should consume more fiber to help with your digestion. This was the bulk of his relationship with his daughter-in-law: a series of should statements funneled through David when they spoke over the phone.

The next day they went to the mall, where they ate cheap Chinese at the congested food court and roamed clothing shops that smelled of synthetic Douglas Firs. Jim received a text from Gil as they waited in line for sugar-blasted pretzels for Lucas and Martin.

Gil: Free to check in?

“Gonna make a quick call,” Jim said to David as he stepped away. David nodded, mesmerized by a bright, colorful menu featuring a variety of sweet and savory breads.

Jim made his way through a parade of families and took a seat on a tinsel-laced bench. He pulled out his phone.

At Jim’s first AA meeting, two weeks after the terrible spill that landed him in the hospital, Gil invited him to breakfast. It was there that Gil offered to be Jim’s sponsor. Jim felt he had no choice but to accept, even though Gil’s general comportment left a bitter taste in his mouth, like the dregs of a coffee urn. Gil was the type of recovering addict who purchased a new Big Book every couple of months to highlight it blue and orange and write in clichéd aphorisms and esoteric Bible verses. Jim begrudgingly endured Gil’s weekly breakfast meetings and daily calls. It was under his knowing gaze that Jim was supposed to uproot his egotistical desires like summer weeds.

“How’s the kin?” Gil said through the phone.

“Could be worse.” Jim said, transfixed by the handsome white lights of a Christmas tree at the mall’s center.

“How’s that?”

“Alison’s not the happiest of campers. She’s preoccupied with some stupid work thing,” Jim said, laughing to himself. “And Davie, I mean, I don’t know what I expected.” Jim grew serious. “He seemed a little annoyed last night. A little distant. The boy could at least pretend he’s grateful for the effort.”

“Herr Director! There he is! It’s your son’s problem, isn’t it? He’s the one who doesn’t get it,” Gil’s harsh voice caused Jim to pull the phone away from his ear. “What do we always talk about, Jim? Always an opportunity if you’re looking for it. Take what you get and don’t fight against gravity.”

Jim knew Gil was right, goddamn him. Jim felt that when Gil used the term opportunity he really meant it as a warning. An opportunity to not become the dry drunk. An opportunity to fashion his not drinking into something like faux enlightenment, the ascent of some mythical mountain of surrender. The type of AA bullshit and throaty chatter about self-honesty and acceptance that Jim had learned to endure because he had nowhere else to go.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I’ll talk to you later,” Jim said, and hung up before Gil could respond.
The sun, weak in the winter sky, had nearly finished its retreat back to earth when they left the mall. Jim drove them around the city, pointing to various landmarks through the smudged, icy windshield. David nodded politely here and there while Martin slept and Lucas sporadically kicked the back of Jim’s seat. Alison kept her eyes monastically glued to her work phone.

That evening Jim cooked a meal for them and insisted they exchange gifts. Jim got the boys a traditional ruby sled and an aqua foam saucer sled. Lucas inspected them both with surgical attention before losing interest and joining his younger brother who had wandered off in front of the TV.

“Dad, we appreciate the gifts but we’re not going to get a lot of use out of these back in Austin,” David said.

“For tomorrow morning,” Jim piped up, doing his best to sound cheerful. “I figured we could take the boys sledding tomorrow, down that hill I used to take you when you were little.”

“What hill?” David asked.

“I’ll give you money so you can get them something else, too. You know best what they want,” Jim said, looking at Alison with faint hope. Her gaze was fixed to the sad, drooping Christmas tree in the corner of the room.

“That’s thoughtful,” David said as he scooped up the wrapping paper and crushed it into a small rainbow-colored ball.

Jim got Alison and David a $250 gift card to a restaurant in Austin. They gave him a sweater, a pair of chocolate dress shoes, and a futuristic-looking blender.

“We thought you should start having smoothies for breakfast, now that you’re getting older,” Alison said.

Jim nodded and said thank you, grateful she was at least addressing him.

Later that evening, Lucas and Martin remained crossed-legged in front of the small TV watching a Christmas cartoon about an elf coming to terms with receiving a blue—instead of an orange—scarf for Christmas. On the couch behind them, Jim sat with David, each nestled firmly against the couch’s arms. Alison was perched rigidly on a chair across from them. Jim had put on a Perry Como vinyl and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas was playing dreamily from the far side of the room.

“How are you keeping busy these days?” David asked.

“Well, I got my meetings, those intolerable breakfasts with Gil,” Jim said and laughed. He cleared his throat when he saw no one else in the room was smiling. “I also see my buddies Daniel and Cliff from AA. We perform together in that jazz band I told you about a couple times a month. A percentage of the proceeds we get are donated to organizations through Cliff’s church. People seem to like the stuff we play,” Jim said. A sense of great importance bubbled up within him, causing him to take a sip of Martinelli’s as if it were a real drink.

David said that was great and Alison gave a vague, somewhat approving nod.

Jim noticed Gil was calling him but ignored it.

The reason Jim hadn’t had a drink in a year had little to do with the so-called work of recovery. It was because if he lost the two friends he had made in AA, Cliff and Daniel, along with the performances, he would have nothing. At least he had them, and the few dozen distracted bar and café patrons who offered their trickle of applause once every other week. Sure, his friends would welcome him back if he slipped but then they would then see him the way David did. As a failure. But lately none if had felt like enough. Jim had grown tired of hearing about how Daniel was planning a vacation with his son and grandkids to Martha’s Vineyard or how Cliff and his wealthy brother were taking their Winnebago to Flagstaff. Hell, even Gil had a daughter in Montauk whom he saw a couple times a year. Their sobriety had managed to give them their families back, and the more Jim considered this, on those long and lonely evenings in front of the TV, the more it bothered him. When they asked Jim about David he shrugged and changed the subject. But later he would feel a dull pang of regret as he thought about his son, even if he couldn’t always recall his face. Sometimes he could only remember a far-off image of his son swinging a bat awkwardly at a Little League game. Or his son’s eyes, a mingle of terror and joy, as he teetered over a snowy hill on a sled.

“How many people do you get at your shows?” Alison asked Jim.

“Oh, it depends. Sometimes fifty on a good night,” Jim said, watching his son’s face closely.

David looked at Jim and nodded.

“Actually, take a look at this.” On his phone Jim pulled up a photo of him playing the piano in a crowded restaurant. He presented it to Alison and David as if showing a flip book to a group of children in a library. Their swelling interest made him feel more like himself. “This is from two weeks ago, at Holland’s on Fifth. We’re actually going to be playing in Tampa in early January. Cliff’s got a friend who set something up for us. The proceeds will go to some non-profit for teens, which is pretty cool.”

“Tampa Bay?” Alison said. “That’s far.”

“No so bad. Three hour flight or so,” Jim said, returning the phone to his pocket.

“You guys are flying?” The wine glass floated in Alison’s loose grip. Her eyes looked like two small pools of oil in the room’s dewy orange.

Jim nodded.

Alison offered a weak mm-hmm and looked at David with a smirk. David, his eyes half-lidded, was leaning back on the couch. He was tapping his feet rhythmically to Little Drummer Boy.

Idiot, Jim suddenly thought to himself. He quickly took the offensive.

“My doctor said I should be alright by then. It’s still up in the air, to be honest.”

Alison pursed her lips and nodded.

“When did you have your surgery again?” Alison asked.

“Alison,” David said, widening his eyes.

“Sometime in the summer.” Jim offered.

“That’s convenient. Just long enough ago that you can still make this trip out to Tampa,” Alison said. She gave Jim a strange smile.

Jim, unsure how to respond, turned to his son. David looked at his wife for a moment, shaking his head, and then dropped his eyes to the empty wine glass in his own hand. Jim felt he had no choice but to double down, will himself through this brief little hiccup, this mere confusion of timelines.

“I know, it’s awful timing,” Jim said in a low voice. “I wish I could have seen your new house.”

“Yeah,” David said. He picked up a walnut from a bowl on the coffee table, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, and apathetically tossed it back with the others.

“I really do, Davie.”

“David, my name’s David! How many times do I have to tell you?” David snapped.

“You could have just told us you didn’t want to come out instead of putting on this whole charade,” Alison said, aggressively bouncing a leg over her knee.

“Alison, please,” David said, struggling to keep his voice down to not distract the boys.

“Did you make it up?” Alison continued, staring hard at Jim.

“No, I told you I had surgery. I don’t make up the doctor’s rules!” Jim didn’t understand how these words, strung together by a bitter and coarse thread, had gotten away from him. He attempted to regain the room, stabilize the tail spinning and steer things back on course.

“I’m sorry, I didn't mean to raise my voice.”

Alison sprang from the couch and glided by Jim, her chemical perfume stinging his eyes. She stopped at the entrance to the hallway and looked over her shoulder at David.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Alison said as if he were the only one in the room.

David flashed his eyes at his father, stood up and went after his wife.

Jim stared at the cartoon-lit faces of Lucas and Martin across the room. If it wasn’t for Alison then he wouldn’t have had to lie in the first place. What was wrong with her, with both of them? They just expected him to change his plans at the last minute and jump on a flight without any planning? They were the ones in the wrong for expecting him to readjust his life as if he didn’t have one, Jim thought. He crossed his arms to ease the slight trembling of his hands. No, he would stick to this. They didn’t know that he was lying. What if he had actually had surgery during the summer? Did they expect him to dig up a goddam Explanation of Benefits?

He stood up and walked toward their room, ready to do all he could to convince them. As he approached he heard sharp whispering through the door.

“...it’s not fine. We came all the way out here and I’ve been stressed the entire time. If we lose Russell Cordona we might have to lay off a third of the agency. Do you realize that?” Allison said. “He doesn’t want to fly out and so he makes us, with two kids, fly half-way across the country? He has nothing else to do but play in some band like a teenager.”

“This is how he is. What do you want me to say? He makes things up. He only thinks of himself,” David said in a dejected voice. “If it wasn’t for the boys we wouldn’t have come. I wanted them to spend time with him. We’ll tell him we have to leave early because you have a lot of work to do.”

“Don’t you dare make me the bad guy here.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell him something else but please don’t get into it with him. We won’t have to see him for a long time once we leave.”

Jim backed away, grabbed his coat and walked out the door. He clenched his fists as he felt the outside cold against his neck and face. How could he have been so stupid? He had undermined the whole enterprise of this trip. Jim became aware of the sweet aftertaste of the Martinelli’s and suddenly hated it. In the past, he would have dealt with this by drinking, just like everyone else in the world did. He always had appreciated the drink’s faithfulness, its resolute blurring of reality, flipping the production of his life from tragic to comic. That with enough of it funneling down his pink throat any misfortune could be transfigured into a tale of levity. That he could laugh about it until his chest and stomach ached in a room full of red-faced strangers, like an overly scripted and bawdy film after which the audience pours from the theater dumbly content. What good was recovery without redemption? Some semblance of right-making?

It was cold and so he stepped into a large, glass-walled restaurant. He sat down in an elevated booth in the room’s corner. He noticed dozens of crystal bottles stacked along the wall in front of him, winking gold in the rusted light. He could smell the alcohol but it didn’t matter. He didn’t crave it like he used to. It wasn’t a drink that he wanted, but for this whole dog-and-pony show of sobriety to have given him what it had given his friends, even Gil for chrissake. Then Jim thought of something: where was Gil to carry forth encouragement, his simple-minded enthusiasm? The husky bromides about riding any setback into some opportunity?

“Can I get you anything?” The waitress pulled a placard from an invisible sleeve along her belly with Poppins-like flare and handed it to him.

“A Ginger Ale is fine.”

He took out his phone and placed it on the table like a talisman. He was ready to see for himself, to test Gil and everything he stood for. Would Gil, his sacerdotal advocate, sense the danger, encourage him not to lose heart on a journey that now felt pointless? Exhort him to grovel before some Higher Power with empty hands? Not to keep him from drinking—that wasn’t at stake—but to keep him from giving up hope, no matter how faint, that something good could still come from it all?

His phone remained, silent and still, as he watched the ice melt in his virgin drink, the honey soften and ghost.

The TV offered the room’s only light when Jim walked into his living room. The volume was lowered to a faint bubbling and David and Lucas were asleep on the couch. Jim eased himself onto the recliner across from them and stared blankly at the TV. A black and white woman with long, dark hair flirted with a black and white man, a coat neatly resting over his forearm. Jim was tired. Right as he was about to drift to sleep he felt a gentle throbbing along his leg. A text message from Gil.

Gil: You and the boy doing good?

Had Gil ever been on time? Jim thought, shaking his head. He let the phone fall into his lap and looked at his boy sitting upright, head tilted back. The room’s blue light made his son look strange, spectral. Under David’s eyes, at the corners of his mouth, crawling up along his temples, there were ancient lines, a network of dried rivulets. Gray had begun sprouting above his ears. With his eyes, he traced his son’s face and neck, down his shoulder and along his arm draped gently over his grandson’s small body. Lucas was curled up on the couch, the top of his head tucked against David’s thigh. Their bodies swelled and shrank in the electric light, soundless as drifting snow.

David stirred and opened his eyes. They floated toward Jim.

“Where were you?” David asked.

“Needed some air.”

David remained silent and gazed at the small Christmas tree as if considering a profound truth.

“Dad, Allison and I have decided that it’s best if we head back tomorrow afternoon.”

“I understand,” Jim said in a tired voice.

David looked as if he was about to say something but didn’t. They both stared at the TV for a while.

“We should get to bed, it’s late,” David eventually said. He lifted his arm from Lucas to remove his brittle glasses and rub his eyes.

“Let the boy sleep.” Jim nodded toward Lucas. “I’m gonna be up for a bit.”

David returned the glasses to his face and looked at Jim. He nodded without saying anything and started for his bedroom.

“You mind if I take the boy out to that hill tomorrow morning?” Jim said, keeping his eyes on the TV.

“Huh? What for?” David said.

“Sledding, you remember that hill, don’t you?”

“Maybe another time.”

“David,” Jim protested but didn’t continue when he could no longer see him, his son already having passed through the hallway’s long shadow and into the room.

Lucas shivered as he stepped out of Jim’s car. It was early morning, and orange curled the edge of the white sky like a burnt manuscript. At this early hour there was no one on the snow-covered hill but the two of them.

“What if I go too fast? Could I die?” Lucas asked, his eyes large as melons.

“No, no,” Jim said, adding a smile to try and brighten the boy. “You’ll be fine. Let’s try the normal sled first.”

Jim slipped his hands under Lucas’s arms, lifted him and carefully lowered him onto the sled. Once he was secure, the bristly red rope gripped tightly in his hands, Jim pushed. His grandson didn’t make a sound the entire ride down. It was only at the bottom of the hill, once the sled began to slow, that Lucas let out an ecstatic screech.

“I was going so fast!” He screamed as he stood over the sled. He started making buzzing sounds, moving his hands wildly up and down. Far below Jim, at the base of the hill, his grandson looked as small and fragile as a porcelain figurine.

“Come up and we’ll go again!” Jim roared. “But you have to hurry since we have to get back soon.” He pulled up his jacket sleeve to glance at his watch.

Lucas charged the hill furiously, cradling the sled tightly against his body, the snow crunching under his small boots.

“You go too!” Lucas breathed onto Jim when he finally arrived at the top of the hill, exhausted.

“I’d break my ass if I fell.”

Lucas started to laugh.

“Don’t tell your parents I said that,” Jim said, grinning. “You want to try the saucer? It’s wild.”

“Okay! How do I do it?” He hopped with excitement.

“It’s easy. You put your butt in it like this, just as if you’re lying in a hammock to relax,” Jim said, placing his hand at the center of the saucer sled.

“But how?”

Jim placed the saucer in front of him on the snow and sat down in it to demonstrate.

“Just like this, then you lift your feet and off you go without doing anything else,” Jim said.

“Dad! Dad! What the hell is going on?”

The voice came at Jim, and at first he thought it wasn’t meant for him since he didn’t recognize it. It sounded far too old, far too strained, but then he saw David striding frantically toward them in the snow. The saucer started to drift, so Jim dug his boots into the ground to stop himself but the snow was too slick, too icy, and the kicking only propelled him, taking him over the hill’s smooth crest. As he started to pick up speed he saw Lucas waving madly, growing small and fragile again before a sheet of standing pines. Then it spun Jim so he could only see the brightening tufts of morning cloud. Gliding swiftly downward, it spun him again, now revealing a sea of shops and stores beyond the hill, the snow-caked roofs of waking houses, the faded neon lettering of a movie theater. And beyond, the radiant orange and lifting blue of grounded sky, the day readying itself for flight.

Christopher Hazell is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in fiction writing at the University of North Texas, where he is also a teaching fellow. His writing has been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Commonweal, Plough Quarterly, and Dappled Things. His short story “Phantom Limb” received an honorable mention for the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction.