katamari

My father’s favourite thing to do is tell my brother and I to get off of our phones. There is a strange type of happiness in him, some sort of pleasure when he walks in on one of us looking at a screen. “All that blue light, or whatever it is,” he says. “It’s bad for you, that’s the point! It’ll make you go blind!”

He is a tax accountant, but while my brother and I are still in school he calls himself adventurer. His red pickup truck isn’t the type to go on a voyage that could be called any sort of epic. He makes do with what he can. An interesting rock becomes a wonder that he takes home to show us. A colourful bird is a treasure, the picture he takes of it sitting in the windshield for months like it is a fifth member of the family that we have plucked out of the woods. One day, though, when my mother drives the truck, the picture slips out through the open passenger-side window, flying into the wind in some crude imitation of its subject. When she gets home, my mother looks up an image of the bird and spend hours searching for an almost identical picture. She prints it out, places it where the original photo was, and my father doesn’t notice.

I have to wonder if this is something all mothers do. If it is built into them to lie, and if someday I will do it too. Maybe my mother’s lies become too much for her to handle, and that is why our parents split up.

My father tries to find love again, but says he believed too much in it the first time. There is no romance with the people he occasionally brings to the house, not the way he wants. He blames the screens, of course, because that is all he has to blame. I try to console him, but for some reason, it is hard. Men like him aren’t the type of people you can easily feel sad for – not the clear-faced, attractive kind you see on TV, the kind that can be described as wistful. Nobody has time for men like my father, men that want to be adventurers but are only ever tax accountants.

The night that I leave for college, I am restless enough to wake in the middle of the night and descend the stairs in search of something to cure my insomnia. My father lies in the dark, on the couch. I don’t know if he is asleep or not and I don’t dare try and find out. The reason he isn’t lying on his own bed is something I will never know for sure, but I can harbour a guess that whatever anger remains in memories of being sent to sleep on the couch for the night is warmer than the reminder of a cold, empty mattress. The next morning, he drives me to the airport. Before security, I almost consider turning around to catch one last glimpse of him, but before I can I am told to place my suitcase in the box and walk through the metal detector.

Years later, I get the call from my brother that our father has died. Something sudden; painful, but only for a brief moment. In a way, he has deprived us of a drawn-out year of him getting sick and us bidding him goodbye. It is almost funny, in an odd way, that the only thing I have left of him are the pictures on my computer. Maybe that’s the point, then. That I have to go blind to see him again.