The Papa Who Betrays His Boy Never Sees the Sunrise

[a fragment]

Part I

It is early afternoon at the Daube house. As a cloud passes across the sun outside, its light streams through the muslin curtains of the dining room and empties itself of a certain mammalian quality, becoming pale, like light from a gibbous moon. The chestnut dinner table seems to sag and lose its mammalian hue. JASON is sitting here, paddling at a bowl of mushroom soup with an undersized spoon. Through the wide doorway at his back, someone is rutting around in the kitchen.

JASON: Hey, mom? Do you have any idea when dad gets home?

QATHRYN: What, sweetie?

JASON’s mother, QATHRYN, comes bounding with hard, miniscule steps to the threshold of the dining room. Her physique shares the proportions of a paper cotton candy cone; everything, beginning from the neat, perfect circles of her loafer soles and moving up in a circular array of asymptotic lines to her topiary hair-do conforms to the shape of an elongated, inverted cone.

JASON: Dad. When does he get here?

QATHRYN: Oh, dad? Well, jelly-bun, you know he’s busy. It could be several more hours — maybe even after dark. But that’s nothing to fuss about. You can just sit here with mama while she cooks you a creamed chipped beef: your favorite!

JASON: I don’t know, mom. I was really hoping to get a second with dad before the first episode premiers. You know how he’ll be when that happens. He’ll seal himself up in that carbuncle of a study and I’ll hear neither a pip nor a whisp from him. You know, I haven’t seen him in a month. And I’m here at least twice a week…

Jason twists around in his seat, his puca shell necklace cackling under his Adam’s apple. The temperature of the afternoon light has plunged another five degrees centigrade, illuminating his spiked hair with the chthonic light of an Antarctic cave floor.

QATHRYN: That may be so, son, but that’s natural. Your father is a… passionate man. And we’re very proud of his new show. I bet you’re as excited as me. Don’t fret so.

JASON: I am excited… You know I am, mom. But I really need to talk to dad about something. I… need his advice. 

QATHRYN: Well, why don’t you talk to me about it? I’m here — just look at me.

QATHRYN stands up straight and gives herself a spin. Once she has worked up a good momentum, her white, freckled arms begin to lift off from her hips. Momentarily, she reaches such an unwarranted speed that her arms extend perpendicularly from her torso. When she finally comes to a rest, she drunkenly leans her shoulder into the frame of the kitchen doorway and regards her son with heavily shadowed eyes.

JASON: Thanks, mom, but I think this is really a father-son thing?

QATHRYN: Oh, I’m sure it is, darling. But why don’t you try me for a change? It’s not like your mother doesn’t have any worthwhile knowledge to impart. 

JASON: I know, mom. I value your advice, too… but I just really need to know what he would think about all of this…

QATHRYN: Come on. Give me a chance. What’s this all about?

JASON: Well, it’s difficult to say… Last Friday, on my way home from work, I was sitting at a red light and I suddenly had the worst headache. It came from out of nowhere, like one of those cluster headaches. It got to the point where my vision was blurring, and I began to panic. But even worse than the stabbing pain: I began to have certain… unusual thoughts. And, closing my eyes, an image of dad began to form in my head. His face was almost normal, but something about his eyes was worrying. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t have the words to describe it. But there was this… expression in his eyes. A knowing expression, as if he were taunting me with something we were both in on. And then, I could see his entire body. He was suspended in mid-air, in a sitting position. His leg was out in front of him and he was pantomiming, as if he were sitting in the driver seat of a car, pumping the gas pedal and holding onto the steering wheel. Then he put the “pedal” to the floor, and as he did so, I found myself doing the same thing. Only the light was still red. And I only just managed to open my eyes and stomp on the breaks before—

The ping of a mechanical oven timer resounds from the kitchen. Torn away from his revery, Jason notices that his mother has been intently pruning her nails with a pair of clippers and is not looking at him. The timer’s signal, however, has lit up her face. A riverine vein bridging her temple swells up and begins to pump. She races back into the kitchen and mutters over her shoulder: 

QATHRYN:  That’s okay, Jell-O. I’m sure it’s all fine. Finish that soup before it gets cold! 

JASON turns his back to the kitchen doorway. Before him, the heavy water in the bowl, with its buoyant specks of champignon, seems to shrink into itself. He jerks back violently in his chair and storms out of the dining room, heading toward the front door. 

JASON: I’m going home, mom! Tell dad to give me a call once he’s up tomorrow. I’ll let him know what I think about the pilot. 

QATHRYN does not respond. The only acknowledgement JASON receives is the wrenching scission of the oven’s door hinge as something heavy and raw begins to burden the grate inside. 

Out on the front walk, JASON removes his keys from his pocket and follows the trail of curved white flagstones to his hatchback Mazda, parked in front of the brick mailbox. While struggling to unlock the driver-side door, his eyes stop on a miniscule scene developing on the cracked asphalt below: in the blue-shifted light of day, a colonnade of army ants are enjoying the succulent carnival of a decomposing baby hare whose lower torso and legs are entirely absent. The greatest congregation of ants has crowded around the carcase’s now skinless face, carrying off pale crumbs of meat to its nearby colony which, as I can see but JASON cannot, is a burgeoning sump of cinnamon-colored dirt rising from the fissured blacktop directly below the Mazda’s road-blackened undercarriage. JASON continues to watch the pulsing line of ants and the halved baby hare with its alabaster cheekbones beginning to show. The cloud obscuring the sun then evaporates, and the tap water light becomes a springtime hefeweizen, which gilds the finely haired carapaces of the insects; the segments of their clicking bodies might have been chipped from a collection of dusty black marbles.

Part II

JASON’s suburban garden apartment is not unlike most. Plain, undecorated walls, painted white, with anonymous rounded runners at the bottom. A vaguely stained carpet with a mottled beige aura. The kitchen is like a narrow galley in a defiled sea craft, littered with blackened crumbs that had once been the golden-brown breading of deep-fried morsels — tenders, cheese curd, Philadephia rolls, and the like. The dining area is devoid of furniture: a troubling space that goes unused in spite of the rent expended in its name. And the living room is sparsely furnished, its unclean expanse broken only by an indented red couch, a white metal stool serving as an eating surface (yellowed by sauces and time), and a disemboweled credenza, where a modest smart TV and an outdated gaming console smoulder with dormant power LEDs. Of course, at this time of day, now that the sun has almost entirely withdrawn and this hovel is engulfed in a saturated darkness, you would not be able to see what I have described to you.

The knob of the front door rattles in its hollow aluminum embrasure. Then a searing path of white halogen light from the basement hallway darts over the abused linoleum flooring in the foyer alcove. JASON steps in and flips the lightswitch by the couch. He stands for a moment in the middle of the room, unable to kick his shoes off or remove his polyester button down shirt, which depicts the scene of a beach in Bermuda, crowded with horrible scribbles meant to leave the impression of husbands and wives throwing a duplicate infant into the air, dogs racing by the foaming tide at blurring speeds with foaming mouths. But soon JASON is able to bring his eyes into focus. He wanders back to the kitchen and takes a nearly empty water pitcher out of the refrigerator to pour himself a glass. Then he comes back out into the living room and lowers himself into his deepened couch. His fingers seek and find the round power button in the center of his game controller and the dust-caked, sculpted machine below the flat pane of his television screen chirps and begins to blow its fan. The screen lightens like a developing picture.

The new Amazon Prime series in which ELADIO DAUBE is acting in the main role has just become available, only ten minutes ago, while JASON was driving himself home from an empty municipal park. The show is called: “The Papa Who Betrays His Boy Never Sees the Sunrise.” Naturally, the thumbnail for the new show is the first item on JASON’s “recommended series” playlist.

In the thumbnail, JASON’s father stands in the foreground, his face turned away so that only the shadows playing at the edges of his eyes and mouth mark his features. Even his ears and hair are blocked by the word “Sees” in the title. Over his shoulder, in a stew of swirling watercolors, a young boy who has crashed his bike lies motionless on a bloodied sidewalk.

JASON reaches into the breast pocket of his tropical overshirt for a moist towelette, with which to daub his burning face. Then he presses the ‘X’ button. The first episode begins.

The title sequence is a short montage of time-lapsed images: first, a white lily in a rough clay pot withers and liquefies into its nitrous soil. Then, a rapidly wavering elderly hand covered in hardened black soot brightens, smooths, and shrinks. Another hand in front of the heat-blistered wall of a blue metal truck is shown holding a cone filled with vanilla ice cream, which melts in sunlight; the liquid drops of the ice cream fall onto a sidewalk where they begin to bubble and harden into brown lesions. Then there is a child’s hand, attempting without success to turn a glass doorknob. Then there are two bedposts in a late-afternoon bedroom, and in the middle depth between the bedposts, two knees clad in plaited khakis; the blurred hyper-exposure of a dribbling basketball. We see an adolescent’s nose framed in a bronze mail slot and watch as two ruby-red lines of blood retract into its nostrils. The final image is shot from inside a small safe, whose door opens onto an empty oak-paneled study… The study, and the house in which it is presumably situated, quickly erode and collapse into plush mounds of sawdust, sparkling with a swarming milky liquid. But then, with a fierce noonday sun melting the door of the safe into slag, the white substance nears the camera and resolves itself into a tumbling mass of noctuid termites. The sun then zips down below the horizon, leaving the plain white words, “The Papa Who Betrays His Boy Never Sees the Sunrise,” on a black background.

After this, we follow a wordless young boy for several minutes through a rain soaked wood into his backyard. The camera follows him all the time from behind so that his face is hidden. He enters his luminous kitchen and sits on a stool by a marble preparation island. We hear several more minutes of narration, told from the boy’s point of view, accompanied by intercuts of flashback footage. He introduces himself as “GEL-SON,” explaining (again in a disquieting mumbled tone) that his father started calling him that one day when he was nine years old, due to his enthusiasm for wearing his hair in flipped spikes, encased in petrified gel. He tells of the ensuing three years since that day, of how he has had little luck with making friends — he prefers the company of his father. But his father is always busy with something which the boy has never managed to determine, always jotting small messages to himself in a heavy ledger that he keeps in his office safe. The father never fails to lock the door to his study. The boy sighs and wonders whether his “papa” tries to avoid him. Then he confides, “I have only seen my dad a handful of times… and now I will see him again.”

The camera then turns in concert with GELSON’s head toward the den and the front door of the house, beyond which a car engine can be heard cutting out in the driveway. Keys jingle in the lock of the bronze door handle; the door opens up and a hard cutting light from the sun outside strikes the camera lens, interrupted only by the silhouette of GELSON’s and JASON’s father.

GELSON: Papa, welcome home!

Something about the boy’s voice is vulgar. PAPA ELADIO’s voice carries an unhidden disgust for it as he responds…

PE: Why aren’t you at school today, Gelson?

GELSON: Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, papa. There is no school, remember?

PAPA ELADIO is silent for an entire two minutes, standing absolutely still in his rectangle of harsh, white solar light. The silence is only broken by the father’s sighs. He sighs until the wind runs out of his lungs, about a minute later. 

PE: Every other day it seems like they’re coming out with an utterly unimportant national holiday… And yet, we taxpayers are still made to pay these lazy teachers. I entrust your upbringing to a faceless, inhuman, government-subsidized institution and, in spite of that, they’ve still got me playing daycare… Unbelievable… I suppose this means you will want dinner tonight?

The boy lowers his head a few degrees and scratches his gel-gummed scalp. The bones in his arm are visible through his skin and sparse muscle mass. 

GELSON: Oh… that’s alright, papa. I think I ate a snack earlier outside. I’ll… figure something out. 

PE: Excellent news.

PAPA ELADIO finally lets himself into the house, closes the door behind him, and issues toward the kitchen with a startling lurch. Even the cameraman appears to have been jogged and jerks the camera down to the tiled kitchen floor, after which we cut to another shot. 

From the new perspective, both PAPA ELADIO and GELSON are visible in front of the kitchen sink. Behind them, that same colorless blast of sunlight is rushing into the camera lens, and doing so with such undiminishing brilliance that the faces of father and son are buried under oily fingerprints smudged on the concave lens glass, which catches and refracts the light. 

PE: Why don’t you go outside, boy? Get some fresh air. Get in touch with your friends. With nature. A boy your age isn’t cut out for lolling around by himself at home.

GELSON: I was outside just now. For a long time. And before that, it was storming, so I couldn’t. 

PE: You can never get enough fresh air. And if it starts pouring again, all the better! That’ll give you an opportunity to start practicing for the swimming team. You’ll be an aquatic boy in no time!

GELSON: But the note you left on the fridge last week said that there won’t ever be any money for field trips or extracurricular activities, and that I shouldn’t bother to ask for it…

PAPA ELADIO drums his granite fingers on the cusp of the kitchen knife block and sniffs loudly, even though his nostrils are conspicuously unobstructed.

PE: Don’t try to tell me that your school would charge for participation in the swimming team? What for? That filthy scrim of human grease that covers you when you climb out of the water? No, Gelson, that you can do for free. And if you can’t manage not to pay for something self-evidently free, well, then you just don’t deserve to enjoy the fulfillment and camaraderie that comes part and parcel of belonging to your high school swim team.

GELSON: Yes sir…

The camera-eye cuts to a close-up of the knife block on the kitchen counter. PAPA ELADIO tips the block up onto its corner and swivels the mass of the compound object along the axis of one of its black plastic knife handles. After a moment, PAPA ELADIO exaggeratedly fumbles and drops the knife block on its side, spilling an assortment of cheap stainless steel blades onto the unseen floor.

PE: [sighing with lazy satisfaction] Alright, boy… I’m glad we’ve talked. I hope that I have made it absolutely clear what it is that I expect from you. Now, I am going up to my office [pauses for a strained moment of quivering windedness]. I don’t want to hear any talking, any walking, and I most certainly do not want to hear any knocking. In fact, for the rest of this month, your presence in my field of view better come with a signed and notarized good reason. 

GELSON: Yes, papa. I know what is expected.

The camera-eye fixes its immobile frame on the staircase, in the dim background of the den. For an entire four minutes, JASON watches this empty scene, hearing no sound and witnessing no activity. During this time, it is positively unclear what is occurring between GELSON and PAPA ELADIO. But then, PAPA ELADIO retreats from the kitchen and mounts the stairs. For once, his face is in no way obstructed. But, being so dim and distant, its features are lost in the squirming grain of the digitally recorded image. 

Now the camera moves backward and descends, so that GELSON enters the frame. He is kneeling down and wincingly scraping the knives into a glistening heap on the kitchen floor. He is only just beginning to lift some of these knives to the counter when his father’s wavering form halts midway up the staircase.

PE: …Son?… What on earth are you doing?

GELSON: [after a moment of stunned hesitation] I’m just… picking them up.

PE: That’s a funny thing to be doing.

GELSON: Funny?

PE: Well, yes. Funny. Do you not also hold the opinion that the activity in which you are currently engaged is… funny?

GELSON: Y-yeah. What a… funny thing to be doing.

PE: Huh, interesting. Why funny?

GELSON remains kneeling, face turned away from the camera, toward the ululating anthropoid on the eighth stair, whose pentaform frame is complemented by the economical pairing of khaki pants and a tightly tucked, though by no means restrictive, white polo shirt. 

GELSON: I… I’m not sure why it’s so funny.

PE: Hmm… You know, maybe I could help. I’m good at this sort of thing. You mind?

GELSON: No sir… I don’t mind at all… I mean, of course…

PE: Great! That is great, son — you know? — because I am a guy who just loves to help. Especially when it comes to my own son. Now, first, let’s think about the knives on the floor. How did they get there?

GELSON: They… fell?

PE: There’s a good start if I’ve ever witnessed one. Now: a little deeper into the specificity of the scenario. The knives fell — okay. Now, just so we’re on the same page, things fall for a reason, usually, right?

GELSON: Yes sir…

PE: Right. Great. I am glad that we agree. So… Why did these particular knives fall?

GELSON: They were… dropped.

PE: [with an encouraging, uncharacteristically good-natured laugh] Alright, we’re getting there! But don’t be shy. Think back to English composition. You remember? You don’t want to use the passive voice, because when we use the passive voice, the actor gets lost in the action, and the whole picture of who is doing what just — dissolves. It’s a question of responsibility, boy. Yes, it is true that the knives were dropped. Now, another, better way of expressing this truth is that someone dropped the knives. Tell me: who dropped the knives?

GELSON: You? Dropped the knives?

PE: Good. That wasn’t so hard. I, your father, dropped the knives. Do you think your father is a butterfingers, Gel? Think he’s a klutz, makes a lot of mistakes? Your father?

GELSON: No sir. You don’t make mistakes that often… I mean, not at all do you make mistakes.

PE: Hold on, hold on. Let’s take our time and use clear language. Are we talking about me now, or are we talking about “your father?” Because, while both “I” and “your father” could potentially serve as subjects in an English sentence, there is still a danger of incorrectly substituting one for the other, thus bogging the discussion down in a mire of… false information.

GELSON: …I mean… my father. He doesn’t make mistakes at all.

PE: He, your father, doesn’t make any mistakes? Ever? Not a one?

GELSON: My father does everything for a reason.

PE: Hm. Well, just based on what you are telling me — and maybe you would know better than me since this is your father and not mine — I would assume, consequently, that your father dropped those knives for a reason. A very clear and specific reason.

GELSON: Yes sir, he dropped the knives for a reason.

PE: So… now that we have established that your father has dropped these knives onto the kitchen floor for a definite reason, let’s think about the thing you are doing with the knives, the funny thing. Can you help me out? Why is this funny? Well, first, let’s figure out what it is that you are doing…

GELSON: I’m… picking up the knives?

PE: Interesting. You, your father’s son, are picking up the knives that your father has deliberately dropped on the floor for a reason. Could you run that back? I just want to hear you say it.

GELSON: I… my father’s son… am picking up the knives that my… father dropped on the floor… for a reason…

PE: Wait a minute, now. I think we’re crossing our wires again… I want you to think very carefully about this: who is picking the knives up off of the floor — you or “your father’s son?”

GELSON: My… father’s son? Is picking these knives up off of the floor?

PE: Okay, thanks for clearing that up. Now we can think more directly about the “funny” component of this series of actions. Let’s enumerate this basic plot. One: your father deliberately drops the knives onto the kitchen floor, with a clear purpose in mind. Two: the knives are resting on the floor, awaiting that event which your father has intended for them. And then, three: your father’s son begins picking these knives up off of the kitchen floor. The only thing that we have not clearly defined in this equation is what your father’s purpose was for dropping the knives. Now, we, that is “you” and “I,” have got to ask ourselves a series of logical questions in order to reach the most accurate conclusion as to what your father’s purpose in dropping these knives might have been.

GELSON: Okay, sir.

PE: Okay. Well, first, we have to consider the common usage of knives, and then compare this common usage with your father’s usage of knives. What are you thinking on that score?

GELSON: Well… knives are usually used… to cut things.

PE: Come on, Gel! I need you to work with me, boy! I need you to think. And what did I just say about the passive voice? People USE knives. And people don’t just “cut” things with knives. People slice things with knives; people gouge things and furrow things with knives; people stab things with knives; people split things up with knives and people even segment things with knives; people dice things with knives; people chop things with knives; people are known to sever one thing from another with knives; people shred things with knives; people sometimes, quite frankly, mince things to oblivion with knives… And I haven’t even come close to exhausting the list of the ways in which people USE knives on things… But that isn’t what your father did with these knives. He dropped them on the floor. In comparison with all the things that people usually do with knives, assuming that the dropping of these particular knives by your father was not a mistake, this usage of knives is somewhat unconventional and must possess an explanation of its own. If you were your father, how would you explain the fact that you have purposely dropped these knives on the floor?

GELSON: I don’t know, I… I’m sure that the reason was a smart reason…

PE: Okay, we’ll come back to that. Now let’s think about what your father’s son is doing with the knives — i.e. picking them up. The first thing you might wonder to yourself upon encountering the scene of your father dropping these knives and then your father’s son shortly afterward stooping over to pick them up off of the kitchen floor is why your father’s son would engage in a behavior that reverses the behavior of your father. After all, the father had a reason for dropping the knives, didn’t he? So there are two possible explanations for the son’s behavior. First, perhaps your father’s son is second-guessing your father and believes himself to be correcting a mistake. But, as we’ve established, your father’s son has already verbally acknowledged that your father had a very good, plain-as-day reason for dropping the knives on the floor. Right?

GELSON: Y-yes sir. My father had a reason for dropping the knives… My father’s son even said so, out loud.

PE: Right. So the first explanation for your father’s son’s behavior goes out the window. That would leave us with the second explanation, which is that your father’s son is to some degree, whether consciously or unconsciously, aware of your father’s designs in dropping the knives onto the kitchen floor and, in stooping down to pick them up off of the floor, your father’s son is not doing so out of some impulse of contrarian insurrection but, quite to the contrary, is completing the action which your father has initiated. This conclusion leads us into some interesting territory, wouldn’t you say?

The indefinite figure of the father, in a wash of white and off-white tones, tightens his mealy, swimming fists over the banister rail. GELSON is still petrified in his kneeling position, his reddening knee anchored on an intersection of black-and-white checkered vinyl tiles. JASON, who has not been able to tear his eyes away from his television screen for the past forty minutes, is perched on the edge of his collapsed vermillion couch, worrying and whitening the yellowish thumb of his left hand with the yellowish thumb and forefinger of his right hand. During this apprehensive pause, I observe as a gauzy sheet of dust coats the surface of every object, both inside and outside of the picture on the television. 

GELSON: …Interesting, sir…

PE: And do we concede to the possibility that the conventional uses for knives still implicitly lie waiting in the unconventional act of dropping the knives onto the floor? If so, then it could be that the dropping of the knives is just a preparatory technique — the initiation of a total action intended for the knives. And if we can concede that the use of the knives is initiated by your father, and then completed by your father’s son, what that entails is that your father and your father’s son have not finished using the knives. Do you agree?

GELSON: Y-yes… sir…

PE: Then perhaps now we have finally reached the point at which we can ask our original question: why is that which you are doing “funny?”

GELSON: I… I’m still not… sure.

PE: Yes, precisely. “You” are not sure. “I” am not sure. What you are doing, the funny action, is being unsure. And while you are busy not being sure, there you are, fumbling around with this pile of kitchen knives — knives which your father and your father’s son are in the middle of using! And I just wonder if you realize that you are getting in their way by being funny…?

GELSON, at a loss for words, inches away from the mound of knives gathered in front of him, between the marble preparation island and the marble counter, whence the knives have fallen. He continues to crawl backward, training his eyes on PAPA ELADIO, who himself has failed to move for several minutes. The son’s backward progression continues until the gleaming spires of his gelled hair fork into the camera lens and are crushed under the weight of his head. JASON is left sitting in his living room, staring at a now blank, black screen. But audio still stirs in his television speakers as an action continues to unfold. We hear the sound of stairs creaking as footfall commences; then there are distant footsteps, moving down a hall, deep inside the house. Then the slamming of a door erupts with such a peaking of volume that the audio through JASON’s speakers goes hot and moves the base of the television slightly across the surface of the credenza. 

GELSON’s whimpering breathing sifts through the speakers. We can hear the unctuous sniffling of the boy, whose nostrils are conspicuously and unmistakably plugged with a clear sputum — the kind that instantly exudes itself through the mucous membrane at the height of a bout of hopeless weeping. 

GELSON: [choking with sorrow] I… love… you… papa. 

With these words, the episode abruptly concludes. There are no credits threading their way to the top of the screen. All JASON sees is the “watch next” recommendation, a yellow-bordered panel in the bottom-right corner containing the cover art for a show which bears the mystifying title, “Liar’s Club,” in a font meant to simulate braided leather. JASON fetches the remote from the arm of the couch and switches the television off. 

He sits for a few moments, still tensely poised on the edge of his utterly trashed, rubicund sofa. He fingers a blackened circular hole in the cushion between his legs, through which a squinting patch of foam is visible. With his other hand, JASON worries his puca shell necklace, which cuts into the back of his pink neck. 

JASON then begins to think aloud, his words settling into the grit, compacted into the track of his patio sliding door:

JASON: What was it about the son’s voice? So familiar… But so foul. Ugh. He was basically chortling… But it’s almost as if…

And then JASON stands up. He walks toward the center of the living room with aimless steps. In his revery, he rams his left shin into the edge of the coffee table.

JASON: Fuck! You piece of shit! God-DAMNIT!…

At first, JASON is distracted, rubbing at the offended shin and clenching his teeth. His face is engorged with blood; air rushes in and out of his nose. But then he freezes and stands up straight once more.

JASON: It was him. It was dad. Everyone in that show was being voiced by my dad. 

He is not wrong. JASON’s father took a cruel pleasure in voicing the character of GELSON in this pilot of his new television series. He told me so, leaning over in his white-washed wicker chair, with a tinkling glass of whiskey in his hand, and his huge, bleach-white teeth vibrating with light between his very red and very healthy gums. And then ELADIO leaned in closer to me. He came so close that I could see the ridged depths of the pores in his round, doughy cheeks. And he said, “this is my idea of my son, Gelson is. I’m voicing him as a very self-conscious experiment in sadism — you could call it a sadistic parody of my own life, which is extended through progeny: my son is my life beyond the grave. But the even greater, graver parody — the parody of life in general as our modern science understands it — is that my son is a walking parody of me. And when he speaks aloud to himself in an empty room and his voice goes reverberating off of the blank, squalid walls, he will eventually come to realize that he doesn’t even have the luxury of listening to himself talk. He’s listening to me. He is listening to the pale, stunted, imitation of his father’s voice.”

[End of First Half]