mean I’d been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent. It meant I was fastened to the earth and its machines. He was famous, he drove a Porsche; if the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that.
I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.
It might all have been a big misunderstanding, a missed connection: he’d simply forgotten to mention the computer was named after me. I was shaking with the need to set it right all at once, as if waiting for a person to arrive for a surprise party—to switch on the lights and yell out what I’d held in. Once he’d admitted it—yes, I named a computer after you—everything would click into place. He would patch the holes, get furniture, say he’d been thinking of me the whole time but had been unable to get to me. Yet I also sensed that if I tried too hard to set it right, it might tip some delicate balance, and he would be gone again. And so I waited in this suspended state, in order to keep him.
I followed him from the car into the house. We didn’t take a hot tub. We ate salads as he read the paper, we watched Flashdance. I didn’t try to sleep in his bed. At some point I awoke in the dark because I had to pee, the darkness pressing on my eyes, nothing visible. It was silent; the crickets had stopped. I wouldn’t be able to find the bathroom in the pitch-black. I couldn’t even tell what direction I was facing, or whether I was upright. I waited with my eyes open in the darkness and nothing emerged; it was as if the darkness were pressing back at my efforts to penetrate it.
To get to the bathroom I would have to walk through his room, down a few more steps in a hallway that led to another empty room and, off that, the bathroom.
I crawled out of the bed and found the door frame, also chalky, half-there, but now shapes emerged with more clarity, and I saw that in his bed across the room was someone with bright blond hair.
It was a man who had come to kill my father—he’d killed him already and was now sleeping in his bed! I already knew what this new man was like with his shining white hair: phony and full of blandishments. He’d say he was my new father, but he would be nothing like my father. I couldn’t see his face, but I was terrified; the blond hair glowed in the dark. I could hear my breath. I worried for my real father. After I crept to the bathroom, I crept back through the room and the blond man was still there, in the bed. He moved in his sleep, diving down under the covers as if plunging underwater. I returned to my bed and spent what felt like hours terrified, wondering what to do, dreading the morning when it would be clear that my life would be different forever and my father would be gone. I was too afraid to get up again and confront the blond man. I decided to wait until morning, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.
In the morning, there was no blond man and my father was alive. I thought I must have imagined it—I didn’t ask him about it. I was embarrassed for the terror I’d felt, and the protectiveness.
The next Wednesday night, my mother drove over to visit us when her class was unexpectedly canceled. We didn’t know she was coming. She found us in the kitchen, having knocked and called out and then entered through the unlocked front door, walking through the dark house into the bright and cold kitchen where we were sitting, eating. She sat with us as he teased me in the usual ways.
“How about that guy for your boyfriend,” he said pointing to a picture of an old man in the paper he was reading while we ate. I looked, then