*This is from an ongoing autobiographical novel, about my father’s cancer. This one is paywalled. I’m trying to see if people are interested enough/willing to pay for sections of the novel as I write. If you’d like to read the whole section (and many other paywalled posts), please start a paid subscription. $5/month or $50/year. For now, free subscribers have a preview. Enjoy.
Thank you for reading :)
***
Michael shrugged. “I’m ok. How are you, Dad?”
His mom looked the same: Short, wide-shouldered, with her medium-length auburn hair molded to her head like meat clinging to a bone. Her wild green-hazel eyes, like his, a little insane-seeming, conspiratorial. There’d always been a vibe of grotesquerie, brokenness, shame, fear, bright rage in his mother’s eyes. At least he picked up on that. In many ways she was a mirror of himself, of course. The apple usually doesn’t fall that far. His mother wore a thick blood-red blouse and jeans.
“Not great,” his dad said. His voice sounded awful; maniacal. Rusty. Not normal at all. Not even close. His left eye drooped badly. His other one was at half-mast. The gurgling rose up once more, even without coughing. It was just suddenly there. He sounded like a damaged, slow garbage disposal filled with too much water too fast. The feeding tube jerked lightly as he bent over, heaving and coughing. The machine beeped incessantly.
His father started speaking again but it was indecipherable. Michael felt his cheeks redden. He asked his dad to repeat. He tried, but he and his mother grasped none of it. Total drunken-like, slurring nonsense. Dad seemed irritated, angry. He couldn’t blame the man. What would that be like, to want to communicate verbally but, after three-quarters of a century alive on Earth, being unable to. He pitied his father. Then he felt shame for feeling pity.
Finally his mother half stood up and said, flustered, “Sweetheart, write it down.”
She gazed at her son, still standing in the open entryway to the living room, and he nodded. He walked into the kitchen, rifled through some drawers and found Dad’s old work writing notepad. He located a pen and brought the items into the living room, handing them to his father. Dad had slowed his coughing and was blushing bright awkward red. His dad looked up at his son, his almost transparent blue eyes seeming deranged and desperate. For the first time, Michael sensed a shift in the relationship power-dynamic between them. All his life, his father had had the upper hand, treating Michael in many ways as if his only son were stupid, foolish, profoundly naïve, and basically unworthy of seriousness and respect. He and his father shared a 37 year age gap; they came from incredibly different generations. It was The Steep Chasm between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. That bridge could not, it seemed to Michael, ever be logically bridged.
Michael, in his turn, both respected, feared, loathed and loved his father. He saw his dad as the penultimate intellectual: Two master’s degrees, one in chemistry and math and another in computer science; both a college professor and a computer engineer; a lifelong centrist Democrat; an avid reader of political history and biographies; a drinker of white wine; a confident, sometimes arrogant rational thinker composed of hard-data, algorithms, established facts, axioms; a cultural American who appreciated but did not need to directly experience Europe; a debater of the strongest arguments; a lecturer of The Way Things Were. His father had a way of calmly dismantling Michael’s aesthetic manhood. He’d slowly cross his legs, raise his chin slightly in the FDR-like patrician manner, and, in a slightly high, haughty voice, tell Michael How things were.