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.Well, we could, but he’d never hear us.He would say things to us, transmit the words into the viscous medium of our kitchen, and we wouldn’t get the message right away, it took a while for the words and sound to reach us through the light and air thick with delay, with silence and tension, the air resistant to communication and understanding.And then we would answer, but he was already gone, had already moved on, out, away from us.We would try to answer, make meaning from these conversations, these bits of days, these bits of daily life being all we had by then, my mother and I, all we had left with him.We were losing him.His invention may have been a failure, but his idea wasn’t.As it turned out, and I wouldn’t find this out until much later, there were twin projects.The director of the institute had already gone to visit another inventor, not far from our town, actually about half an hour away on the peninsula, where sometimes my mom and I would go have a picnic if my dad was working on the weekend.The houses there had Spanish tile roofs and mailboxes with roofs, too, and little doors, and the driveways were circular, for receiving guests, I guess, and there was a small park that overlooked the ocean, and a swing set and even a cast-iron jungle gym, shaped like a rocket, for kids to crawl up into, a set of bent metal rods, curved perfectly and painted red and white and blue.This other inventor had had a very similar idea to my father’s, the differences being mostly in execution, and the only real difference being that, on the day of his visit, his idea worked.That day in the park was my father’s chance, our chance to be a part of it, but the director already had seen that the idea could work and didn’t need to find a second diamond in the rough.That part of it would have hurt my father, I know, to know that it was possible for someone like him, a talented amateur, out in the sticks, a moonlighting cubicle worker, a wage-earner-by-day, inventor-by-night, to make it.It would have killed him to know that someone had done it, that all his work had been correct, all the work that he had dumped, a week after that day in the park, all the notebooks, in pieces, scattered and scribbled over hundreds of pages, on scraps, on Post-it notes, on index cards, in margins of books, on backs of envelopes taped and folded and crumpled and uncrumpled and crumpled again.It would have killed him to know that it hadn’t been impossible, our dream, but that we got one chance only, just once in a lifetime, and we had lost it.And with that, our idea, our prototype was the one lost to history.My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by obscurity, swept away and lost in time.If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something.Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage.Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in.His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to the field of fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.Here in the garage, where I watched him while he worked, twisting this, tightening that, and realized, not that I didn’t know it, but saw more clearly that, fundamentally, my father is, was, has always been a sad man.Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity.The sadness was generational, accumulated like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quantity in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness.Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness.Passed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.I remember one late-December morning in my father’s study, one of the last days of the year, felt like it was the end of something more.Not the best year, the family had seen better.Overnight the rain and winds had washed the sky and world of all haze and the early-morning light was even, perfect, the light of an artist’s studio.I was nine years old and my mother had told me to ask my father to come have breakfast.The clock in the kitchen was ticking.It was a blue plastic circle with a white face, and standard black arrows pointing to hours and minutes and a thin red needle for the second hand, which made discrete movements, jumped from mark to mark in its circumnavigation, with a kind of abrupt yet soft bouncing motion, and a sound that always seemed louder than it should have been.I called to my father a few times and, not hearing any response, walked down the hall, afraid of what I might find, not hearing a sound, and then, as I approached, I heard a muffled noise, a sound I was certain I had never heard before, and as I peeked in through the mostly closed door of his small office, I saw, for the first time in my life, my father’s eyes red and cheeks and chin wet with tears [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]