In the city on the hill, there were walls around our hearts.

There were lovely walls. They were white stucco that shone in the sunlight, and from far away the city on the hill was a pretender to the throne of the sun. And the red tile roofs were – what? A pretender to the blood in our veins? No, the city didn’t believe in things so crass as blood. They were a rose that never wilted. They were a rose without thorns. They were a bouquet of roses that will not be rejected by the aloof lover.

The city on the hill didn’t believe in things so crass as rejection.

And so in the vivid green gardens we lived lives without blood. The bright cobbled streets never witnessed rejection. And in the shady houses behind sparkling clean windows and firmly closed shutters we did all the bleeding and rejecting that human life requires to be done.

My father was a great writer, and thus a celebrated leper. His books resonated with the soul, and summarized in lacy confections of prose the philosophy of our century. They did not fear the metallic smell of sentences about blood. His books were received with that avalanche-like applause – a few lonely claps, people looking at their neighbors to see if they should be astounded or offended, that moment of relief when he knows he has not gone too far, and the triumphant result of that silent consensus crashing down. I cannot exactly describe that tension, that building potential, but it seemed like my childhood consisted of an eternal auditorium about to shyly burst into deafening applause.

At that age it seemed to me to be a force of nature. The calm before the storm. The sea drawing back before the next wave breaks. To me it was simply what happened on a book tour, and it never seriously occurred to me that the applause might never come, that the air would be filled with scandalized murmurs like locusts. I knew my father as a celebrated dreamer and I couldn’t imagine anyone fearing his beautiful dreams.

Children are famous for precociously reading literature, and understanding only the shallowest level. I knew my father’s dreams like I knew our little house, but I did not see the terror and awesome grotesqueries behind the fanciful words. I did not realize what a fine line he walked with his art, what a fine line he walked for his art. When people spoke tentatively and averted their eyes from him I thought they admired him and were intimidated by his fame and genius, when instead they feared to touch him, as if they could be infected with his great discontent and imagination.

I was thirteen before I understood the risk he took with every word, how easily the city could become offended and boycott his works. I was sixteen before I realized the great pain and pessimism he lived under and, dear god, I believe it was not until I was twenty that I could truly understand the great meanings of his works. I am convinced that many people never really understood them. Perhaps it would take the meticulous reading of the writer’s own daughter to understand. Not even I understand his last few books, though, and I don’t think anyone but him ever will.

It started with the book that is dearest to me, To My Victim, From Prison. It was the story of him and my mother.

They met at a party in an art gallery. He was so stricken by her beauty that he lied. Instead of introducing himself as a new writer, considered by all those who mattered to be in poor taste, he said he carved frames for portraits. He remarked scathingly on their contemporaries, those ‘shock artists,’ who had no respect for the traditional schools of art. She was disgusted to meet another conventional pseudo-artist, curtly informed him that she was a writer of controversial poetry, and moved along. She eventually had to leave the party because he followed her wherever she went.

On the basis of her looks and scorn, he fell in love. He showered her with roses, which she tossed in the gutter, odes, which she returned, and increasingly expensive jewelry, which she gave to charity. He became obsessed. He alienated all his friends with his constant talk of her. He was unable to earn money because all he could write about was her, romantic drivel or indecently passionate and despairing rants. He lost his house because he had spent all his money on presents for her.

That night, in the rain, he came to her house, penniless. He told her that he had lost everything in her honor, and asked to stay the night on her couch. She refused. He slept all night in Central Square, with a sign that said, “Without Love I Have Nothing.”

In the morning the city awoke to find him there. They were shocked. It was nonsense, there are homeless shelters, they said, the man is mad, mentally unstable, they said, then why doesn’t he just find a nice girl who loves him, they asked, pity the poor girl who loves him, they laughed.

And he was put into jail for thirty days for public scandal. From this action she realized he was different from the rest of the conformists, and on the thirtieth day she met him at the jail with a sign that said, “If You Have Nothing Then I Will Share Everything.”

They were both thrown in jail for an additional fifteen days, and after that they were married.

When I was three, she and my baby brother dressed as refugees from the south and went to stand in front of the president’s townhouse to protest his ten-year ban on political asylum.

His bodyguards shot them on sight, assuming anyone walking in a heavily guarded area, at midday, with a small child, dressed in a distinctive national costume, had to be a spy.

The last line of the book was, “Without Love I Have Nothing. But I have my little daughter and she and I will share my love’s memory.”

The publisher rejected his book. They said it was because it wouldn’t sell well. Normally he wrote surreal and philosophical fiction. But we all knew it was because it criticized the censorship of the government and our society, because it would remind everyone that this semi-respectable writer had once engaged in this pointless and shameful display. Enraged, he wrote another autobiographical book, this one about his childhood, called My Soul Has Red Shutters.

My father grew up in a large, clean, white stucco house on the outskirts of the city. His mother won a small local prize for her azaleas. His father was a chemical engineer. His best childhood memory is winning the City Spelling Bee, at the age of eight.

His first childhood memory was hiding behind his mother as dishes and vases flew past their heads.

His father had an explosive temper. When he came home from work, he smelled of sulfur and cordite and had the same air of gathering tension as the auditorium crowds. He was volatile, he was chemical, he was a charismatic man ready to explode the moment the cheerful red shutters closed.

His mother was a weary woman. She was born on the cusp of the Feminist Revolution and feared it almost as much as she feared her husband. She stayed at home, she cleaned the floor and washed the dishes and cooked so her husband could find a tiny fault with the meal and shatter the plate on the floor. She was an excellent cook and constantly improving. My father knew she was trying to apologize for nothing, to win his father’s love with cuisine, but it never worked.

Even though both lived in constant fear of his father, they were never drawn close by their shared victimhood. His mother found refuge in the tiny, windowless basement. She would set the washer and dryer to run at once, and covered by their rumble she would cry. Occasionally my father would sit at the top of the stairs and watch, wishing he could say something, but she loved his father and he despised him so there was little to be said. My father found his refuge in the attic, with all the windows flung open to let in the light and breeze. There he would write, hiding his journals under piles of junk.

At the age of nine, his last qualifying year for the Spelling Bee, he was “taken ill” during the semifinals and could not make it. A hurled glass had embedded shards in his face. His father had forbidden him to go to the hospital, and so his mother had had to pick out the shards herself. It seems like such a childish thing, but my father saw it as his chance to prove himself. He never quite forgave his father for having such timing with his rage.

And so my father tried to tell his teacher. He refused to go home one day after school, terrified to face his father again. He begged to be allowed to sleep on the reading pillows in the back of the class. Finally he broke down in tears and huddled in a corner, as if expecting a blow. Through his tears, he confessed that his father frequently grew furious and threw things or attacked the furniture and walls.

The teacher told him that his father would be unhappy if he heard this, and that it was probably better to keep such family matters within the family. Nobody likes a tattletale! He warned him that he could disgrace his family by starting malicious gossip.

After all, it is so unseemly to complain. Everyone knows that in our shining city, nothing so barbaric goes on.

When my father was fourteen, his mother died while he was at school. She fell down the stairs. His father must have tried to catch her as she fell, because there were hand-shaped bruises on her arms.

This book was, of course, vehemently rejected by the publisher. I am the possessor of the only existing copy. It will never be sold, but it helped me understand my father so much better.

When I was a child, whenever he grew angry, he would shove a few dollars in my hands and tell me to go buy a soda. He would then lock me out of the house, sometimes for hours. At the time I thought he hated me and wanted to be rid of me, but now I know one of his greatest fears was to turn into his father. He tried not to show any anger, for fear he might become violent, and perhaps this bottled rage was one thing that made his books so frightening.

His teacher’s denial of his father’s abuse was what truly cemented his hatred of our society’s hypocrisy and censorship. His father’s abuse was what cemented his habit of keeping every window in our house open.

He wrote a new book about his experiences as a young writer, the third in his autobiographical trilogy.

As a young, unsellable author he was forced to live in the very poorest districts. They were, of course, shining white and well-manicured, but inside the great apartment houses for the poor a thousand dramas of desperation unfolded, a thousand addictions and crimes and tragedies crammed into tiny, cheap apartments. This was a part of society that the rest refuted and ignored. Even the poor, proud residents of the buildings would deny everything if asked, would stubbornly claim that everything was clean and white, if cheap.

The publisher advised him to destroy the manuscript, saying that such lies and accusations were practically treason. The editor begged him to go back to his abstract works, and informed him that if he did not the firm would have to drop all associations with him

And oh yes, my father went back to abstract philosophies. He wrote a book of horror and loathing and despair, all of the dark and violent emotions that the citizens of our enlightened city had grown above. This was the last book he wrote that was even somewhat comprehensible to me. I at least theoretically understood what he wrote about, even though I never dreamed of experiencing such deep thoughts. When the publisher would not take it and swore they would not take any other book he ever wrote, he bought a printing press and set it up in our basement. He wandered the streets for hours, but could not even give his books away for free. He wrote more books, each more twisted than the last. He spent much of the next five years in and out of jails.

At last he wrote babblings, nothing more than dark and nonsensical words strung together. He had ceased to be a threat to anybody’s happiness. He was nothing more than a caricature of a madman, the town’s token unheeded philosopher with his dark lantern. Children laughed at him and adults tossed him coins as if they had forgotten he had a daughter and a home to go to.

I can’t tell you what rage it provoked in me. And yet I knew it was but a fraction of that which my father felt. That this proud man, this genius, philosopher, and dissident was reduced to a bit of street theater! That in his madness he was considered harmless! He was our artist. He felt this intolerable pain so our emotionless city could keep shining so whitely. He should be loved and respected in his old age, and I knew if he could just write a tale of his love for our beautiful city, the love that had forced this undignified role upon him, then he would be applauded once more. If only I could get him to explain that his hatred was born of love!

As I walked to the grocer’s one night, I came across him, sitting by a fountain in a square. I put my groceries down and sat next to him.

“You should come home for a while. Get cleaned up. We’re having chicken and rice.”

“My mother cooked that. And there was glass and thank god chicken doesn’t bleed when it falls like me,” he said.

“Yes, we like chicken, don’t we?”

“Hate it! Too white! Nothing in this damn city bleeds!”

“No, Father. You like chicken. Remember?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Come home! Stop embarrassing yourself! A man like you- a man like you ought to be the hero of our city.”

He only looked at me blankly.

“I know you love this city, as much as I do, as much as anyone. I know you’re doing this because you hate what our beautiful city does to itself sometimes. But come home! Write something beautiful, something coherent like you used to. Remember the auditoriums bursting into applause? That’s what you deserved.”

“They felt like my father. Smelled like cordite. Hate them! Hate them all, asleep!” he shouted.

“Shhhhh, no, I know how much you love this city, our shining city. Just explain.”

“I hate it! Hate it and everyone dies and it’s nobody’s fault! I’m shaming the family, girl, remember that! And to hell with what they think because I won’t keep it within the family within my whitewashed head!”

“Father, you don’t have to do this! Just be the man you used to!”

“Can’t won’t nobody listens! Listen! Listen to me, damn it! Listen to what you’ve done and weep like the milkweed butterfly!”

He stood abruptly and began walking away, muttering something insensible.

“Daddy-” I whispered as he began shouting about milkweed and bloodweed and shutters.

I knew then that he had never loved this city. He hated it for what it had done to him. And I could never hate our beautiful shining city, for all its flaws behind its façade of peace. But I could begin to hate its people, for what it had done to him.

It had reduced this genius to a madman.

It had reduced this madman to a clown.

It had reduced the best man in the city, the idealist who could have saved it from its complacency, to a hate-filled absurdity.

Reductio ad Absurdum.