The father of my memory, of my very youngest childhood, wears his gray weekday suit perpetually, like a fog. I am three, and four, and five. Is he depressed? Every evening he slumps in a chair and unknots his tie so when I tug on the end it will slither free of his collar, a glamorous, musk-smelling heap that I stroke and adore. The pleasure I get from doing this seems to please him a little but he’s not really paying attention to me: he’s studying his hands, flexing the fingers over and over again and gazing at them with an air of detachment, as though they don’t belong to him. Does he think that by studying their motion he might discover how exactly he got here, how he became a man whose son is dead? (I honestly don’t know. It’s a gesture he still makes frequently, one that helps me connect the father of my present to the one I write about now, and though it’s always seemed to convey a sense of helplessness I am aware that saying so means I editorialize. It’s unfair but true: what I remember and what I imagine are a blur.)

Sometimes I catch him staring at me with a sort of haunted tenderness---as though the fact of me is precious but unbelievable---that makes me feel vague and permeable and slightly loony, like I’m something he’s hallucinated. It is clear, in these moments, that my face causes him pain. Does it remind him of the boy he lost? Can he be in mourning, still? Brian has been dead for several years but I imagine the loss, and the relative freshness of my father’s grief, confounds him. He can’t reconcile the pain and the distance of its source and is stranded in some place between, apart from me, from his family. A better writer than I once described this experience as “the bewilderment,” as though it’s an actual place, a jungle which thickens around the bereaved over many years, isolating and obscuring them. This feels right to me, to my adult self. It helps explain why I could never know him.

Or never quite know him, that is. Though during the day my father had trouble looking me straight in the eye, at night the distance between us disappeared. Darkness made confidences permissible, and once free to confide he couldn’t help it: at bedtime he elegized Brian compulsively, inventing and revising the lost son every night as he tucked me into bed, casting him as the hero of every bedtime story and relating each elaborate, sentimental tale with sorry relish, eager for us to share a grief---for me to understand exactly who had been taken from us.

It was, of course, impossible. I understood nothing. These exchanges (for some reason I can’t help but think of them as having been collaborative) were evangelical, beseeching. To explain even the simplest thing, to introduce facts---like who Brian was, exactly---would have ruined them. He never did explain, not precisely, and I was never sure: my father said, sometimes, that Brian was a baby, but we had one of those in my brother Scott and he was boring, so Brian could only have been a grown man---a valiant, omnipotent, extraordinary man. A celebrity. Did my father know that every time he said Brian’s name I pictured Superman and Santa Claus and Martin Luther King rolled into one? I imagine now that’s what he saw Brian too---as larger than life, larger than any of the rest of us.

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