I tried not to think about Dad too often. After Mom kicked him out, it was pretty rare that I’d see him. It was like he just disappeared, like I’d never really had a father, like it was just a dream.
But I remember one time. One time in highschool, he reached out through social media, said he wanted to reconnect, wanted to hang out. I had to pretend that I was going to Tom’s - Mom never would have let me see him. But I went.
He had a little place outside of town, not much more than a cabin. It was greener there, nice enough, but out in the middle of nowhere, away from almost any sign of civilization. You had to drive down a dirt road to get down the last stretch - luckily I was old enough to drive by then, and could borrow the family car. Mom’s car.
I remember thinking it was almost perfect. The location was beautiful, and the house was, well, small, and kind of run down, but that could have been fixed. But it felt so lonely out there. Like he was a hermit, or a leper.
He’d never ended up with another woman. He just got a dog - a doberman. He treated it better than he ever treated me. Maybe that’s not fair.
I don’t know what I expected, but I thought maybe he wanted to apologize or something. Say he was sorry for fucking up, sorry for leaving me with Mom, sorry for marrying Mom in the first place - it wouldn’t have meant much, but I figured he was going to do something like that. I was ready. Instead, he may as well have been mute. When I got there, he just led me down a path in his backyard that led out to the forest line, then down into a trail that wove its way through the trees. I hadn’t been prepared for a hike, but that’s what we were doing.
He didn’t speak, hardly at all. Would get my attention with a grunt - talked to his dog more than to me. I wasn’t much of a hiker back then, so it wasn’t more than twenty minutes or so before I started to regret coming, my feet hurting, the humid air starting to make me sweat.
“You got a girlfriend,” Dad said, finally. He said it like a statement of fact, like we’d just been talking about it and he was just reiterating what had already been said. Of course, I hadn’t told him. Maybe he’d been stalking my socials or something, I thought.
I wanted to say “kind of”, but I knew he wanted to hear “yes.”
“You love her?”
What the hell was I supposed to say to that? “I don’t know. Maybe.” Dad was walking ahead of me. Didn’t even stop, didn’t glance back at me, just kept walking, like he was talking to himself.
“Be yourself,” he said, unprovoked. “And never get married.”
That was when I knew, with a dreadful certainty, that my dad was an NPC. It all made sense, suddenly. The hike, the conversation - he’d seen it in a movie. Had to have. He was repeating lines. I regretted coming.
“You can’t really know anyone,” he said, suddenly talkative, and it was like the floodgates had opened. “Not really. You can’t possibly know what’s going on in their head. I thought I knew your mother. I thought I’d married a good woman. A loyal, caring, loving woman. One day, I go to bed, stressed about work, stressed about the economy, afraid I might lose my job in the lay-offs. I told your mom what I was thinking, and she patted my back, told me it was OK, told me that we’d pull through, that we’d stick together. And I believed her. I thought she was telling me what she was thinking. We had sex, and it was great, like when we first got together, and then went to bed.
“When I woke up the next morning, it looked like it was still your mom in bed next to me. Maybe it was. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but by the time I came home, told her I had been laid off - she wasn’t there. She was a stranger. A cold, heartless woman wearing the skin of your mom, walking around in her clothes. She wouldn’t hardly look at me, wouldn’t touch me, wouldn’t speak to me except to yell at me, or nag. That wasn’t the woman I married, I thought. But really, and I didn’t realize this until much later, really, I never knew her. It’s impossible to know anyone. I don’t even know you.
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“So don’t get married,” he said, voice still emotionless and monotone. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Apparently Dad had just about used up his allotment of words for the day, because he basically didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the hike. We walked for a while longer, then looped back around to his place. He led me inside, and made me eggs and toast - it was probably 7pm or so by then, but I’m not sure he had other food in the house.
His house was a wreck - clothes strewn on the couch, dishes piled up in the sink, pizza boxes on the table, and what looked like - from a distance that I didn’t dare close - pornography on his computer screen. He spent most of the meal looking down at his phone. His posture was worse than it had been, I realized.
This is what rock-bottom looks like, I thought to myself. I pitied him, and his NPC life. I used to look up to him, and now I pitied him. That might have been why I asked him what I asked him.
“You ever try being someone else?” I asked him.
He looked up from his phone, and stared at me. “What do you mean?”
I hesitated, not sure if it was even worth the effort. I’d never tried to explain the “spark” and “NPC” stuff to anyone before. It was my one advantage in life - if I gave it away, what would it be worth? But this was my dad. I wanted to try.
“You said to be yourself,” I said. “But what if you’re not- not the right person for the job?”
“What are you getting at?” Dad asked. He almost seemed angry, so I figured he had misunderstood me, somehow. I explained.
“Like, what if you did what someone else did? Y’know how they say when you get a new job, you should do what the most successful person there does? What if you did that in other areas of life?”
“Like marriage?” he said, drolly.
“Yeah,” I said, hoping he was catching on. “Anything. Marriage, career, family, school, whatever. Like, if I’m bad at sports, and I want to get better, I don’t do what I think I should do, because I’m bad at sports. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, let’s say I join the football team, try to be the quarterback, and I fail to make a single pass. If I can’t even throw a football, nobody would ever take my football advice, right? So then why would I take my own advice? I can’t trust my own judgment, clearly, because I’ve already proved that I don’t know what I’m doing by failing to do it in the first place.”
“The coach might not be able to throw a ball well,“ he said. “But he might still be a good coach.”
I shook my head. “You’re missing the point. If I’m fucking things up, that proves that I’m not good at whatever it is. Maybe life in general. So why the hell would I listen to my own thoughts?”
“Eventually you’ve got to make your own decisions,” Dad said, confidently. Another movie line, I was certain. Another platitude. But his face looked like he was thinking, so I continued.
“Do you?” I asked. “Do you really? Because I don’t think most people really do make their own decisions. They do what they see on TV, or in movies, and it doesn’t work because they don’t know that’s what’s happening. It’s like if you want to be a pro tennis player, and you watch nothing but sitcoms. But if you recognized it, if you realized that you weren’t really making your own decisions in the first place, that maybe you weren’t even capable of it, then you could at least decide to change who you’re copying. You could start watching tennis matches, start doing what the best tennis players do, the ones who know what they’re doing. Then you wouldn’t be fucking up anymore, because you’re doing the shit that works.”
“You calling me a fuck-up?” Dad said. He was angry. But I wasn’t giving up.
“Dad, look around.” I motioned to the chaotic mess around us. “We’re eating toast for dinner, Dad. Yeah, I think you’ve fucked up your life. But so did I! But if you just copy someone else, just find someone successful, then you can change all that! Seriously Dad, it’s super simple. If you want to get back on your feet, or get back with Mom, or…”
“That’s what this is about? Getting back with your mom?”
“No, I mean, if you wanted to, but no, it’s just-“
“We’re done,” he said, standing up. “I’m not going to listen to you tell me how much of a fuck-up you and your mom think I am. I think you should go now. It’s getting late.” He walked away from the table, put on a coat. I couldn’t do anything but follow him.
On the way out, he made one last remark. “I didn’t realize how much she had her claws in you.” I didn’t respond.
There was one other thing that stuck with me, and I’m not sure I could say why. I remember it perfectly, though.
It was when we were still hiking. On the way back to the house, there was a flower growing alongside the trail. The canopy of trees had opened up a little above us, and the sunlight must have fallen down on that spot just enough to let the flower grow. I looked it up later, and the flower was called “queen anne’s lace,” which is also apparently the same thing as a wild carrot. It was completely white, and looked almost like a massive snowflake - but it was actually made of smaller parts, like a fractal snowflake made up of smaller snowflakes.
Dad was in front of me, so he came to it first, but even from a distance its white beauty struck me. Nothing like that grew in town. I wanted to get closer and look at it, study it.
Dad was walking right towards it, and I remember exactly how it happened. He didn’t move out of his way, just kept walking at the same pace, same path, but he passed right over the flower - and instead of stepping over it, or moving out of the way, or even just walking on it like he hadn’t noticed it was there, he kicked it. Very subtly, like he hadn’t even thought to kick it, his foot swung to take a step, and he swung it just a hair quicker, changed his gait just a touch. But I swear to you he kicked it.
Then he stopped, a few steps beyond it. Delusional, I almost thought he was going to say something about it, tell me why he kicked it. But he turned back to me, and asked “Did you see where Duke went?” Duke was the name of that dog he had.
I shook my head, and Dad turned around fully, towards me. “Must have ran down the other way.” There had been a fork in the trail a little ways back, and I guessed he was looping back to take the other way, and make sure his dog wasn’t still out in the woods.
He retraced his steps, but this time - again, I remember this with absolute clarity - he looked down at the flower, which was now bent and broken, missing some of its petals, a remnant of what it used to be - and he purposefully walked around it. Like he wanted nothing to do with it, suddenly.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.