My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

Between March or April 2000 and August 2008, while I was traveling and writing articles and living in Germany, my consumption of certain drugs made me almost completely lose my memory, so that what I remember of those eight years—at least what I remember of some ninety-five months of those eight years—is pretty vague and sketchy: I remember the rooms of two houses I lived in, I remember snow getting in my shoes as I struggled to make my way to the street from the door of one of those houses, I remember that later I spread salt and the snow turned brown and started to dissolve, I remember the door to the office of the psychiatrist who treated me but I don’t remember his name or how I found him. He was balding and weighed me on every visit; I guess it was once a month or something like that. He asked me how things were going, and then he weighed me and gave me more pills. A few years after leaving that German city, I returned and retraced the path to that psychiatrist’s office and I read his name on the plaque alongside the other doorbells, but it was just a name, nothing that explained why I’d visited him or why he’d weighed me each time, or how I could have let my memory go down the drain like
that; at the time, I told myself I could knock on his door and ask him why I’d been his patient and what had happened to me during those years, but then I thought I should have made an appointment, that the psychiatrist wouldn’t remember me anyway, and, besides, I’m not really all that curious about myself. Maybe one day a child of mine will want to know who his father was and what he did during those eight years in Germany and he’ll go to the city and walk through it, and, perhaps, with his father’s directions, he’ll show up at the psychiatrist’s office and find out everything. I suppose at some point all children need to know who their parents were and they take it upon themselves to find out. Children are detectives of their parents, who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it. These children aren’t judging their parents—it’s impossible for them to be truly impartial, since they owe them everything, including their lives—but they can try to impose some order on their story, restore the meaning that gets stripped away by the petty events of life and their accumulation, and then they can protect that story and perpetuate it in their memory. Children are policemen of their parents, but I don’t like policemen. They’ve never gotten along well with my family.

My father got sick at the end of those years, in August 2008. One day, probably on her birthday, I called my paternal grandmother. She told me not to worry, that they’d taken my father to the hospital only for a routine checkup. I asked her what she was talking about. A routine checkup, nothing important, replied my grandmother; I don’t know why it’s taking so long, but it’s not important. I asked her how long my father had been in the hospital. Two days, three, she answered. When I hung up with her, I called my parents’ house. No one was there. Then I called my sister. A voice answered that seemed to come from the depths of time, the voice of everyone who has ever waited for news in a hospital hallway, a voice of tiredness and desperation. We didn’t want to worry you, my sister told me. What happened? I asked. Well, answered my sister, it’s too complicated to explain to you now. Can I talk to him? I asked. No, he can’t talk, she replied. I’m coming, I said, and I hung up.

My father and I hadn’t spoken in some time. It wasn’t anything personal, I just didn’t usually have a telephone on hand when I wanted to talk to him and he didn’t have anywhere to call me if he ever wanted to. A few months before he got sick, I left the room I’d been renting in that German city and started sleeping on the couches of people I knew. I didn’t do it because I was broke, but for the feeling of irresponsibility that I assumed came with not having a home or obligations, with leaving everything behind. And honestly it wasn’t bad, but the problem is, when you live like that you can’t have many possessions, so gradually I parted with my books, with the few objects I’d bought since arriving in Germany and with my clothes; all I held on to were some shirts, because I discovered that a clean shirt can open doors for you when you have nowhere to go. I usually washed them by hand in the morning while I showered and then let them dry inside one of the lockers at the library in the literature department of the university where I worked, or on the grass in a park where I used to go to kill time before searching out the hospitality and companionship of the owner of some sofa. I was just passing through.