Jamie Uy Elegy With a Death Star Inside It

Elegy with a Death Star Inside It after Larry Levis, “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It”

Jamie Uy

I.

At Disneyland, the father is shouting. I don’t know why he is shouting at the Happiest Place on Earth but his son is at the bottom of Space Mountain scrunching up his eyes as if his father is a bad outtake. An animatronic ghost in a haunted mansion, the yeti in a dark rollercoaster we all paid too much to ride. Then he grips the boy’s wrist and the son is wailing, bleating, Bambi-like, and screams YOU ARE NOT MY FATHER and the father swoops in, picks up his son, disappears on Main Street into the throng of too-bright balloons and butter popcorn and fake Fire Department trucks. The parade continues. I don’t remember what the boy was wearing, only that his eyes were preternaturally blue. I wonder if the father remembers what kind of shirt he picked out for him, from the dirtcaked drawers of their cramped motel, for his birthday.

The problem with fathers is that they were once sons and their connections to their own fathers is like rope dangling from an apple tree, ragged and frayed, a noose or a naval knot.

II.

My submission to Women’s Psychology Quarterly’s FATHERING IS A FEMINIST ISSUE read:

“It is easy to see the parallels between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces, George Lucas’s Star Wars, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Consider: Yorick’s skull. Consider: Luke Skywalker’s vision of his

own severed head in Darth Vader’s helmet. Consider: my father watching the first Star Wars movies in a theater under the totalitarian regime, with bated breath, the last of his pocket money, and the ghost of his father’s crimes hanging above him. Position yourself as the spectre/spectator: my father, looking at Luke looking at the husk of a man that is his father, his lightsaber ignited. Thesis: the daughter, Leia, looking at her father’s greatest weapon firing on her home planet, looking so much and so little like her father in the glaucous green of the laser cannons.”

III.

Death is expensive. Because I am the firstborn, I catalogue what I will inherit:

A deed for a house I did not grow up in Twenty-three of father’s ties, including my favorite, with teal diamonds The need to go to church Filing boxes of business documents, which I should shred A Costco membership A last name that is a bastardization of a translation Too many plaid shirts to count Five cartons of Asahi beer A Hot Toys statue of Han Solo, frozen in carbonite Unopened photo albums, with clippings of my baby hair 1998 books, such as Rich Dad Poor Dad A crippling disposition to please A one-year visa-free balikbayan stay from the Filipino Embassy Blu-ray copies of all nine Star Wars films

IV.

Fun facts about Star Wars:

Did you know George Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s harrowing film adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the Vietnam War?

Did you know that the Philippine-American War was the first war the U.S. fought in Asia, decades before My Lai--and that Gen. Jacob H. Smith (who has my brother’s first name), told his men to “kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me” in retaliation for the Balangiga massacre? (Did you know about the Balangiga massacre?)

Did you know that the Ewoks, those furry, harmless aliens with their arrows in the Battle of Endor, from Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, speak Tagalog?

V.

As kids, we loved the explosion of the Death Star. We bought cheap Chinese copies of Star Wars, where “Jedi” was translated as “Hopeless Situation Warrior.”

My brother enlisted in the army and earned the rank of second sergeant. After field camp, he said point-blank: you’re fucking lucky to have been born with a vagina.

I have always wanted Princess Leia to become a Hopeless Situation Warrior.

VI.

The night my father became a man, he was in a bar with his friends from San Beda High, smoking so much they almost didn’t see it— the students storming the palace, from Ortigas Avenue.

My father was the fastest runner in the rebellion. They took the half-eaten fish, all the good silverware, the wife’s jewelry boxes, and presidential diapers because the dictator’s bladder was failing.

The emperor had fled, like my father’s father, to America. When my father called him, he thought about the undersea telephone signals, how strange the stars above San Francisco would look,

and then he realized he would likely never see them. The night my father became a man, they brought baseball bats and pillboxes, radio transistors and prayer cards.

The soldiers greeted them at the gates. The moon shone something awful, hypothermic and supercharged. I imagine a hero’s burial.