circa 2001

My father no longer speaks to me in dreams. Now, if he comes to me at all, he communicates by scribbling notes down on small slips of paper, which he hands to me with a wry smile unlike anything I ever saw him flash in life. I can’t read the notes, but I understand them and fetch him what needs to be fetch, or tell people what they need to be told. We rarely ask each other direct questions, or get direct answers back. Sometimes we have no interaction at all; I have seen him as a man walking down the road who I drive past, or as a series of defiant police mug shots from several canted angles. There is communication of sorts, and mutual understanding, but never a voice. The mouth does not praise, condemn, or even laugh. 

When I looked back on the files I have kept on our dreamworld relationship since then—which I have obsessively hoarded and at times just as obsessively culled down to a few irreplaceable gems—I was able to pinpoint when this happened. Up until 1993, the 18^th anniversary of his death, this file contains entries in which he laughs, tells stories to his family, even regales us with the tale of a fake death and many years spent underground in Eastern Europe. In 1994 I dreamt of getting a box in the mail that contained reel-to-reel tapes with my father’s voice on them—but I had no reel-to-reel player in my dream, and never actually heard the voice that arrived to me in such an impersonal form. 

There is a few years’ gap between his appearances, but after 1994 my father’s voice is never an issue again. He appears randomly in the midst of my daily routines, failing to notice me or even see me. He shows up briefly in a clandestine spot, as if on shore for only a moment between the legs of a long sea journey, to smile at and hug his sons. I have visited him on his houseboat, which he shared with an alternate version of my still-living mother, but even there he would not speak to me. He has never given me an indication of whether he is mute by choice or accident or otherworldly decree. But I, still operating under the same childish guilt that plagued me at his death and has apparently calcified in me, can’t escape the feeling that his silence has less to do with him than with me—my actions, my inactions, my failures to maintain a strong enough connection between us to merit hearing the sound of his voice. 

Underneath this silence and my occasional desire to break it is the question of what my father would think of me now if he were still alive—or if, more accurately, he rose from the dead and saw the man that his death made of me. Obviously I would have become an utterly different man if he had never died; I would never need to ask what he thought of me because I could ask him, or learn if from his gestures and the tone of voice he used when he spoke to me about the stuff of my life—my marriage, my work, my writing, my health. And I would never need to hear his voice in dreams, because I’d hear it on the telephone, or at Thanksgiving dinner, or in the back of my mind telling me how to nail down tarpaper on a roof or mud over the corners of a freshly drywalled ceiling. The question of what he thought of me would never come into play in the fixed, permanent way that it does for me now, because I would sense it in a multiplicity of ways. What he thought about my poetry would be different from that he thought about the way I treat my wife at family gatherings, different from what he thought about how I cared for my body or my house or my garden. 

It is in this sense of multiple impressions that a real relationship is formed between two living people. A friend or spouse may resent your behavior one day, but the next day there are new impressions that wash away—or at least re-sort—the old ones. But this is not the case with dead people; they are permanent and finite, and because there is no opportunity for them to make further impressions, they achieve fixedness and solidity in the minds of the living. If my father were alive, I would sense how he felt about me from the way he acted toward me, exactly as I sense this from the people I encounter in my daily life. Because he isn’t here to provide that for me, I crave that from his ghost. And since that ghost is incapable of participating in the exchange of multiple impressions that forge a real relationship, I am left pursuing the judgment of a fixed, finite, and even monolithic father. 

Unanswerable questions cause us to burn the most mental fuel, precisely because they are unanswerable. They offer far more possibility, far more fodder for the imagination than the mundane shackles of reality. For years my mind has vainly asked this dead monolithic father what he thought of me, and instead of the certainty of a tone of voice or gesture it has received only the echoes of its own wondering—curiosity producing its own answers to sate itself. A college friend of mine once told me that he was jealous of my father’s death, because for him, his father was only his father: real, tangible, stubbornly itself. My dead father, however, could be anything I wanted him to be. I doubt my friend would have appreciated this realm of possibility for too long had his own father passed, because that possibility quickly slides into vagueness. Yes, the dead father is a finite father, complete and in his own way perfect. But if interaction with others offers a mirror on the self, then the dead father cannot mirror back to his son honestly; he can only stand where the son places him in that mirror, only respond to the question “What do you think of me?” with answers from the son’s own imagination. Because the dead father’s position is fixed, it is the son who must move in order to maintain the multiplicity of answers that are required for a relationship, and that his mind craves. Because of the father’s fixedness, the son’s sense of the relationship is paradoxically vague. 

Ψ          Ψ          Ψ

I spent many years in my teens and twenties—during which my father still spoke to me in dreams—trying my best to make my father into many things in an attempt to find similarities between us, and thereby earn his approval. He was a well-regarded fighter; I took up ice hockey and cultivated the art of intimidation. He was an alcoholic; I tried my best to be the same, though I never managed to. He came from the rough town of Paterson, New Jersey; I moved to the roughest part of whatever town I lived in to experience life as he lived it. He wrote, so I wrote. His father was Scottish, so I cultivated an interest in Scotland and cooked up half-baked schemes to move there and reclaim my heritage. His mother was Hungarian, and I cooked up equally sketchy schemes to move there and reclaim that heritage—despite the fact that I felt it nowhere in my life. He was a bit of a leftist who kept files on the activities of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society; I adopted a proletarian leftism that I thought would have made him proud. I sought my approval from him in a wide variety of stances in the mirror of our relationship, and since he could only reflect my own need for approval back to me, each stance proved insufficient and false. 

It is tempting for me to think now that the disappearance of my father’s voice from my dream life—and indeed from my memory, since I can no longer reproduce its timbre except as an “Aaaaah” that would most likely be uttered at a doctor’s office with the aid of a tongue depressor—simply means that I no longer feel the need to gain his approval. After all, I’m 37 now and have ambitions of being a father myself. And my life, with its college degrees and foreign tastes interest in holistic health, is so different from my father’s that I can’t imagine him understanding me. Wouldn’t it be easy, then, to say that his voice has disappeared because I no longer need it? To claim that the whole issue is a matter of physics, that my ability to reproduce the voice in my imagination ended with my brain’s electrochemical need to hear it? 

But I resist—stubbornly, violently, and from a portion of my psyche that I do not understand or have conscious access to—the idea that I no longer need my father. In fact as I first wrote the previous sentence, I imagined that I heard my telephone ringing; and I imagined that my father was on the other end, ready to fall into the kind of conversation that parents have with their children when they haven’t talked for a week or two. The twenty-six years since I saw him last are stripped away. The question of what kind of man I have made myself in his absence can, if I make him alive for just a few moments, be boiled down to such quotidian tidbits as how much gray I have in my new beard, or how busy work has been. The reason my father does not speak to me in dreams is not because I no longer need him to, but because I need him to so much that my psyche can’t dare let him. Because if it did let him—if it gave him voice for even that moment—then the question “What does he think of me?” might dust itself off and give way to the deeper, unasked question underneath it: How has his death affected me, and am I better off without him than with him? 

My father’s mouth is the lid to a Pandora’s box. His silence is the reality of his absence from me—his statuelike relegation to the past. If he opens it to speak, what will he say? And how will my mind, grown so comfortable now with this silent truce, keep from wanting to take a new, adult assessment of my relationship to my father. In many ways, his silence fortifies a the relationship of an adult to a child; I seek his approval and, hearing nothing from him, imagine ways to gain that approval or to pretend I don’t need it. But if he speaks—then the game is off, the breath of life is back in him for a moment, and the long-standing monolith of my father will crumble to reveal a new man with whom I must build a new relationship. 

The ghost of my father that I carry inside me wants this new relationship. I can tell by the way he smiles, by the aging softness of his once angry body. He doesn’t want me to worry anymore about what I think of him; he wants me to sense the hope he feels for me, the belief that I will prosper where he failed. The self that puts these words on the page wants that to happen, calls for that to happen. But the self inside, the frightened child who lost his hope when the man he counted on to shepherd him through the world disappeared, is afraid to let go of the uneasy, silent truce it has achieved over the course of two and a half decades. It isn’t ready for what I might learn if the mouth opened and the voice came out again. So my father’s mouth stays silent, the notes are scribbled and passed from hand to hand.