A brother and sister download their dying father's consciousness to a computer.

Dad In the Machine

DAD WAS LAID TO rest on a Friday. I know it was a Friday because it rained, and I remember thinking how I always get depressed when it rains on Fridays, and that it was just as well it was a Friday funeral since I would’ve been depressed anyway. The service was beautiful even though the flower arrangements outnumbered the mourners and the priest kept mispronouncing our last name. The cantor sang “Here I am Lord” with such genuine emotion that it nearly punctured the blanket of numbness covering the whole of my body. Dad’s brother, Uncle Rob, gave the eulogy because no one else volunteered, and he did a decent enough job considering the two of them hadn’t spoken in over a decade.

I stood in the second pew looking stupidly at the casket. I didn’t want to, but it was right in front of me and I would have had to make even more of an effort not to look at it, which would have only made me dwell more on how my father had been drained and embalmed and bolted into the coffin where he’d remain for eternity. My brother Tommy stood next to me, emotionless—more so than I—and silent and still, but with an air of something resembling humility, which is unusual for Tommy no matter what the occasion.

It was just when I had taken to wishing that someone would slap me across the face so I could feel something—anything—that I lowered my head to pray and caught sight of Tommy’s hands as they grasped the back of the pew in front of him. They looked just like Dad’s hands when he was young, as they appear in a mental image of a description of a memory I might have had as a child, of a solitary figure seated in a recliner with his hands resting on the arms of it, and me, standing next to him, invisible, as his eyes remained fixed on the glowing images of more interesting people doing more interesting things in the electrified box in front of him. I’d watch him until the unruly hairs from my pigtails made accidental contact with his hand, causing him to jerk it away. Those images are all that remain, and that’s when it hit me that he was dead. I would never again see the creases in his face which gave it such distinction, or inhale the smell of his clothes as I folded them and put them away. The last time I spoke to him was the last time I’d ever speak to him and I felt him fading away more quickly than I thought possible. The only proof he had ever existed were the genes making up half of who Tommy and I had become.

I looked at Tommy and he mouthed something to me which only became clear later. He mouthed the words “He’s not there.”

I didn’t cry in the church. I didn’t cry when I got home or when my neighbor told me how sorry she was, or when I looked through the mail addressed to Dad and wondered how long before even his name would disappear from records. I never cried, partly because I knew Dad would not have cried for me. Dad was never one to express emotion, and I had long ago decided it was because he had no emotions to express. I tried not to be angry or resentful about it because I knew it wasn’t his fault. It was the way God had made him. He was an iceberg of a man, a man who did not cry at his own father’s funeral, just as I did not cry at his.

But I did feel something soon after. It did not hurt or make me feel sad, or even weary or anxious, at least not initially. It was something I couldn’t comprehend at the time and have no hope of understanding even now. It began on a Saturday, two weeks after the funeral, when Dad was delivered to my door.

He came in a very plain cardboard box, the kind Amazon uses to deliver books. But there were no labels or postage, and it didn’t arrive bearing any insignia of UPS or USPS or FedEx. He lay there on my front porch, waiting for me to trip over him with my morning coffee.

I never got the chance. Tommy pushed past me, knocking me against the already deformed screen door and spilling my morning coffee all over my feet. It was piping hot.

“Hey!” I yelled.

Tommy said nothing.

“What is that?” I asked.

He snatched the package off the porch and shot me a look as if I had inconvenienced him somehow. He stormed back into the house and let the screen door slam behind him.

I called after him.

“Tommy! Tommy, what is that?”

It was the last I saw of him that day.

Over the week that followed, Tommy’s behavior grew more and more strange. Tommy is eccentric and a bit of a recluse anyway, but he stopped going to work altogether after the package arrived and spent every waking hour in the basement, which was odd even by his standards. Tommy is a computer whiz—it’s what he does for a living—and he is so secretive about his work that I jokingly tell people he works for the CIA. He would only emerge from the cellar when he had to get more supplies, and he’d return from his missions with arms loaded with cables and connectors and things that looked like props from a science fiction movie set.

For my part, I spent the nights of that week going through Dad’s few remaining possessions, and I was amazed by how few there were. Dad read voluminously, but would only read books borrowed from the library. He played several musical instruments, but didn’t own any. He had no car, very few pictures, and his entire wardrobe could fit in one small suitcase. He was a minimalist to the extreme, and it occurred to me that he had always been prepared to vanish without a trace, without warning, and without saying goodbye. In the end, that’s exactly what he did.

Among the handful of pictures he left behind was one of him and Mom on their wedding day. Dad, tall and plain, and Mom, short and strikingly beautiful, they stood before the photographer while Mom smiled and Dad looked off to the left with a blank expression that almost evokes pity. I often wondered what he was looking at or what he was thinking about when the pictured was taken. A hint of the answer revealed itself to me years later, within my own face in my own wedding picture from my own failed marriage.

Two weeks after the package arrived—on a Sunday, four weeks after the funeral—Tommy’s behavior turned from strange to bizarre. I realize that people deal with grief in different ways, that some throw themselves into their work or a new project, as Tommy was doing, while others, like me, use the time to reflect. I gave Tommy his space and I tried to respect our different ways of mourning even though I couldn’t imagine what he was doing in the basement at all hours of the day and night. I left him alone because I knew that’s what he wanted. I also hated going into our basement and did so only to do laundry. Our basement was not a very welcoming place. It was downright creepy, with stone walls that molted decaying whitewash, and low-hanging radiator pipes that made the six feet of height between the dirt floor and the petrified joists seem lower. I’m taller than Tommy, so I had to walk around hunched over to not smack my head against the iron pipes or invite dust-laden cobwebs to infest my hair. There was a large piece of asbestos that kept me away from the boiler, one that Tommy was too afraid to remove himself and too cheap to hire someone else to remove. Still, none of this was creepy enough for Dad, who told the eight year-old versions of me and Tommy that the ghost of a 1940s gangster named Mr. Spinalzo lived in the basement and would “rub us out” if he ever caught us down there. That kept us out for a good long while, which is what Dad wanted. It’s what the adult version of Tommy wanted of me.
I opened the door to the basement.

“Tommy?”

There was no answer.

“Supper’s ready.”

The only sounds were of him tinkering with his electrical supplies. He was no doubt seated at the workbench Dad had built from two-by-fours and the old laminate kitchen countertop.

I stepped onto the landing, which creaked horribly as my foot came down upon it. The sound was a composite of all the other footsteps that had ever fallen there. The sounds became embedded in the wooden boards over years and years of pressure and deformation, and somewhere within them the sounds of my father’s footsteps had been stored, ready to be released. I took another step and heard them come out, like putting a needle down on a vinyl record. Dad was there in the stairwell with me, his presence as real as Tommy’s a few feet away.

I reached for the old radiator pipe repurposed as our stair railing and walked down the steps, slowly, one foot at a time, not stepping down to another until both of my feet came to rest on the same one. The stairs were open in the back, and even as a grown woman I held my breath as I descended, waiting for Mr. Spinalzo to grab my ankles and pull me into the darkness forever. That’s when I heard it.

Tommy, do you think you could get me a job where you work?

There was no doubt it was Dad’s voice. That was one of his favorite things to say to Tommy. To the untrained ear, it sounded nice, a father asking his son to get him a job so they can work side by side, but Tommy and I knew differently. The the intention behind it was hurtful. It spoke of Dad’s view that what Tommy did for a living was so easy anyone could do it. Someone with no skills and no training could walk in from the street and work side by side with him. It was also Dad’s reminder that Tommy did not have a management position and couldn’t hire him if he had wanted. Tommy and Dad never got along.

Tommy, you’re supposed to be smart?

I heard Dad’s voice again and realized that Tommy must be playing the tapes of Dad we had found in a cardboard box in the attic. He searched like crazy for them months before Dad died. I thought nothing of it, only that his time would have been better spent talking to Dad while he was alive rather than preparing to listen to tapes of him when he was dead. I tried not to judge, but I did judge him, secretly, to myself.

“Listening to tapes?” I asked. I was at the foot of the stairs with the largest radiator pipe inches from my forehead. Tommy was seated at his workbench with a small black device, about the size of a laptop. He turned his head slightly, with the least amount of effort or acknowledgement, and smirked at me in his superior way.

“They’re not tapes,” he said.

“They’re not?”

“No.”

“Oh.” I recognized the start to one of our typical conversations. “What is that?” I asked, pointing at the device.

“It’s Dad,” he said nonchalantly.

“Oh.” I paused. “What do you mean?”

“I’m speaking English, Kell.”

“I know what the words mean,” I said. “I just don’t understand what you mean when you say ‘It’s Dad’”

“I don’t know how else to say it,” he said.

“Well think of a different way to say it.” I tried to keep my voice even.

“OK.” He cleared his throat for effect. “This isn’t a tape. This is Dad’s brain.” He put his eyelids at half-mast. “Is that better?”

This explanation made even less sense. “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

He looked at me, exasperated.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said finally. “You’re not good with computers, Kell.”

It’s amazing how someone who’s known you your whole life can cut you down with one short sentence. When Tommy said, “You’re not good at computers” he was referring to a very painful experience I had involving social media, a humiliating one that cost me a job I loved teaching an introductory class to drama and playwriting.

“Dinner’s on the table,” I said as sweetly as I could.

He turned away from me and went back to the device. “I’m not hungry.” He dismissed me with a wave of his hand, and I turned and hurried up the stairs. The creaks and groans of the staircase filled my head with images of Dad walking up and down it endlessly, descending night after night into his dark shelter guarded with ghost stories and neglect, retreating to it for no other reason than to escape from his children. I walked into the kitchen and stared at the meal I had prepared, at the two place settings I had set instead of three. It was like there had always been only two place settings. Normally I would have wrapped Tommy’s dinner and put it in the refrigerator for him to eat later, but that night I threw it in the trash. I ate alone, and went to bed early without even clearing the table.

Three nights went by before Tommy joined me for dinner again. Chicken is one of the few things Tommy likes to eat, so I prepared a whole one cooked all day in a crockpot with white and sweet potatoes, carrots, celery, onion, rosemary, and thyme. I prepared a salad of romaine lettuce—mainly for myself—with grape tomatoes, fresh carrot slices, cucumber, and an olive oil balsamic dressing. Buttered mini-rolls cooled in a wicker basket covered with paper towels.

We sat at our large oak table that Uncle Rob had made. The two leaves I put in it the year before were still there because I enjoyed the distance from Tommy that they provided. We ate in silence for most of the meal, until I asked him where the sounds of Dad’s voice had come from.

“They came from the device that came in the mail.”

“I guessed that much,” I said. “What is that device?”

“It’s Dad’s brain.” He said it as casually as if he were commenting on the dinner rolls.

“I don’t know what you mean when you say that.”

“It’s not a past recording, or it is, but not in the way you’d understand. It is not something that was recorded exterior to Dad’s brain, like with a tape recorder, or digital files saved to your phone. It is a recording like a saved memory, like a memory you recall from your own brain, where the sounds and images are retrieved and put into the cognitive part, the part where you exist and where you can make sense of it.”

“I’m sorry, Tommy,” I said, “but I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

He didn’t get upset like he did before. Instead he tried in earnest to explain it to me. Looking back, I think he wanted someone to tell, someone who understood. “The device in the basement contains Dad’s brain,” he said. ”Not the organic part, but all his memories. His entire brain was mapped and downloaded to magnetic media.”

I focused on a practical question to keep him talking, since I didn’t understand anything else.

“When did this happen?”

“Within five minutes of his death.”

He spread more butter on his already buttered roll and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. As he chewed, he spread butter on another roll, a big heap of butter that melted immediately and ran down the sides. “Do you remember right after he died,” he said, talking through the mashed buttered bread in his mouth, “Do you remember how I ushered you to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee?” He did do that. I had to think about it a little, but he did.

“That’s when they came and took his body,” he said. I could see the bread stuck between his teeth as he spoke.

“Who came?” I asked. My heart started to beat quickly.

“People from Synapse.”

“What’s Synapse?”

“That’s the company that provides this service.”

“Why do you always have to joke around?” I said. “Dad isn’t cold in his grave, and you’re making jokes.”

“Dad’s not in his grave. He’s downstairs on my workbench.”

“It’s inappropriate.”

“It’s better than being in a grave.”

“Stop it!” I shouted. Tommy did not flinch.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“How can I?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Lots of times.”

“Have I ever lied to you about something important?”

I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to try to think of a time. I ignored him and dished myself out some more carrots.

“What would it take?” he asked.

“What?”

“What would it take to prove to you that it’s Dad down there?”

I didn’t know. I wanted this joke to end. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of getting to me. He thinks he’s so smart, and it was the way he sat here looking at me with that smarmy look on his face which forced me to continue the conversation even though I wanted it to end. I continued it, knowing it was exactly what he wanted, and ironically proving to myself that he was much smarter than me just like I thought.

“Tell me how you heard about this service,” I said.

He slumped in his chair and lowered his head to glare at me from under his Jack Nicholson eyebrows and shaved scalp. He leaned forward into the table and stood, leaning across the table toward me, farther than his five foot six inches of height seemed to allow, and extended his chin over the bowl of white potatoes that no longer produced steam.
“Are you serious?” he asked. “That’s what you want to know? I just told you that I downloaded our father’s brain onto a disk, and you want to know who in the marketing department at Synapse did an extra good job of targeting my specific demographic?”

I guess it was a stupid question.

“People in-the-know know who Synapse is,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.” God, he can be infuriating.
“What happened to Dad’s body after they took it?” I blurted out. “Did they map his brain in the hospital room, or did Igor take it into the janitor’s closet?”

His face relaxed. “They took his body to their mobile lab parked outside the hospital, removed his brain, and delivered his body to the mortician.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Synapse is a model of efficiency. It also helped that Dad wanted a closed casket.”

That perked up my ears. “No,” I said. “That’s not true. You are the one who wanted a closed casket. Dad never said anything about it, and I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it.”

It took something as simple as catching him in a trivial lie which made me start to think he was telling the truth. I decided to play along, to see what other lies would come out, what other twisted logic could trip him up and reveal his true motive. I tried a different approach, one that would appeal to his passion.

“The technology to do this doesn’t exist,” I said with an authority I didn’t have. Tommy jumped on it.

“The technology has been around for years, but it’s far from ready for wide commercial sale. It lies in the bleeding-edge technologist niche market. When a mature technology hits the market, the R&D behind it is decades old. Microwave ovens were invented in the 1950s, thirty years before they became commercially available and found their way into domestic kitchens where even housewives could figure out how to use them.”

Tommy had little respect for women who worked inside the home, and that went doubly for our mother.
I sat with my mouth open, recapturing some of the magic of my high school performance as Helena in A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

“Tommy, how could you do something like this without asking me?” I acted hurt.

He smiled broadly. “Because I knew you’d never allow it. Because you lack vision, because you’d be unable to see the gold mine we have in front of us.”

As expected, he didn’t miss an opportunity to point out his superior intellect. To him, I was and will always be a hometown girl, hopelessly provincial even though I went away to college while he stayed here. Tommy has never left my parents’ house. I returned only to take care of Dad after he became ill.

“What gold mine?” I asked.

“We have complete access to Dad’s memories. We can run queries, find information.” This new line of questioning had knocked Tommy out of the doldrums. He was getting excited. “And not just his memories. We can have some real fun and run scenarios, to see how Dad would react. And someday soon,” he said, attacking another buttered roll with the table manners of a dog, “the programmers at Synapse are going to come out with a way to animate him.”

His words rose the flesh on my arms. “Animate him?”

“Yeah. It’ll be like Dad has come back from the dead.”

Had Tommy said, “Come back to life,” I don’t think I would have been as horrified. “Come back from the dead” sounded monstrous, even though it’s used several times in the gospel. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he didn’t “bring him back to life.” Somehow, the thought of what Jesus would or would not have done did not make me feel any better.
I tried as best I could to hide my anxiety by asking more questions. “Yeah, but what kind of life would that be for him?” I asked. “Is he even alive in there? Is that him, or just his memories? If it is him, will he know what’s going on?” Thoughts flooded my mind chaotically; I couldn’t piece them together into an intelligent line of questioning.

“I don’t know,” said Tommy, unperturbed, “but I’m sure the Synapse folks will figure it out. They think of everything.”

We ate in silence for a bit longer, until Tommy looked at me. I half-smiled at him and he looked back with squinted eyes and a brain behind them that crunched through scenarios from a lifetime spent observing my behavior.

“Kell,” he said. “I know you don’t believe a word I’ve said, but I will prove it to you. In the coming weeks, I will dig up something that only you and Dad knew—some experience only you and he shared—and you will be unable to doubt me, and you will treat whatever I say going forward as the gospel truth.”

That got to me, it really did, whether I believed in what he said or not. Turn of the Screw can still make my blood run cold even though I don’t believe in ghosts, and by the time I went to bed that night, the one undeniable truth was that, real or not, Tommy had conjured the ghost of our father and it hung heavily under our roof.

I wouldn’t wish the next few weeks of my life on even the people who fired me from my teaching job. I had found myself in a Shakespearean tragedy, with ghosts that roamed freely and a family member who spent every waking hour plotting my demise. I felt trapped in my own house, and even on the rare occasions when I ventured outside, my mind was still there, wondering what Tommy was doing in the basement, worrying that he was “running queries,” whatever that meant, and trying to dig up information about me and Dad.

I already had my fill of people digging up information about me without my consent. I found no humor in the irony that Tommy had alluded to my firing from school while he was trying to dig up private information he could use to hurt me. In the same way, what happened to me at school should never have happened. I had posted pictures of myself drinking beer and wine while on vacation. I wasn’t doing anything wrong or illegal, but when I returned, the school board fired me for inappropriate behavior. The novelty of such a privacy invasion was already wearing off, and not much attention was paid to it by the news media, not that I wanted attention. That experience changed me. For all the years I had been carelessly posting my personal information and pictures online, it never occurred to me what I was really doing. I was giving the world an inaccurate self-portrait, the most narrow view into myself possible. The things I posted did not represent all of who I was, but that’s all I shared with people, so that’s all they thought of me. I am more than the sketch I created online, and the companies that mine social media data know this too, and that is why they dig even deeper.

Tommy stopped coming to dinner. I watched the weight fall off of him from our accidental encounters in the kitchen, upstairs hallway, or passing in and out of the bathroom. He looked strung out, and I found myself worried about him even though he was making my life needlessly difficult. I had never seen him so focused on anything before, and was sure he wouldn’t notice if our house was on fire.

One night I turned from the kitchen counter holding a bowl of peas and saw him sitting at the table. He looked so out of place that I screamed and dropped the bowl. Peas and ceramic shards went everywhere.

“I failed,” he said. There was a look in his eyes of an unquiet mind.

“What?” I bent down to pick up the peas, but he told me to leave them.

“I didn’t find your proof.”

“You didn’t?” A feeling of relief swept over me, a kind I hadn’t felt since I was in high school and found out my mother didn’t have breast cancer. There was nothing in that machine, this was all a joke, a way Tommy had chosen to deal with his grief—a very selfish, childish way, with no regard for my own loss.

He shook his head. “You win.”

“I didn’t know we were playing a game,” I said.

“I couldn’t find anything that I didn’t already know about your relationship with Dad.”

“No?” This was not over.

“I found all kinds of other stuff, though.”

A knot formed in my stomach. “Like what?”

“Do you want to know what Dad really thought of Mom?”

My heart thumped around disjointedly in my chest as he spoke. This was not over by far. Whatever Tommy had been trying to accomplish, he was still striving for it. Part of me stood in awe of him, wondering where he had learned to be so cruel.

“Do you want to know if he loved her?” he asked.

“No.”

“I always wondered about that. Didn’t you?”

“Please stop.”

“I have the answer now.”

“Tommy, this isn’t funny.”

“I know you’re curious. Do you want to know if he loved her?”

“This isn’t real. What you’re doing isn’t real.”

“If it isn’t real, then what’s the harm?”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Stop being a narcissist. This isn’t about you.”

There was no end to his absurdity. A narcissist doesn’t take care of her father while her brother refuses to lift a finger to help. “I don’t need an electronic device to tell me whether or not Dad loved Mom,” I said. “Of course he didn’t love her. He was incapable of loving anything.”

“You’re wrong.” He rose from his chair and walked slowly toward me. “He did love her, at least he thought he did. I can only go by his memories, and we are the narrators of our own memories. It’s a shame we’re so unreliable.”

“Tommy,” I said. “I know you’re going through something now, but I am too.”

“It’s funny how the power of technology can still surprise me.”

“Tommy, I’m worried about you.”

“Do you want to know what he thought of you, Kell? I mean, really thought of you?”

Ten years after my mother’s breast cancer scare, new test results came back positive, and she was gone within six months.

I think I shook my head. I’m not sure.

“I searched and searched for something,” he said, “some kind of shared experience that the two of you had, something only you two would know about. I even looked for memories of abuse, but there is nothing. It’s like, I don’t know, like he never had a daughter. I know that’s a shitty thing to say, and it’s not what anyone would want to hear, but that’s what the data suggests. I’m sorry.”

He looked sincere. He looked concerned about me for the very first time.

“You’re making that up!” I screamed.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are!”

“I’m not.”

“Stop!” I tried to regain my composure. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know if that thing downstairs is real, and if it is, I don’t understand how it works and have to rely on you. That’s the problem. It’s like I’m illiterate and I’m listening to you read me the Bible, not knowing if what you’re reading is really in the book or stuff you made up.”

“For instance,” he said ignoring me, “I was able to find the name of the priest who married them. Did you know his name? I didn’t. I don’t think Mom or Dad ever spoke of him. It’s Father Lafferty. I later checked the church’s records, and guess what I found? That was the priest’s name. I also learned that Dad was concerned on his wedding day because he had dated the girl that Uncle Rob brought as his date. The girl was still hung up on Dad, and she just happened to be the woman Uncle Rob ended up marrying later that year, making the woman none other than our own Aunt Diane. She stood near them and stared at Dad while they were taking wedding photos. Dad was distracted, and it made him look off and out of the frame. Dad had been fooling around with Aunt Diane up until the wedding day.” The room began to spin on me. “And do you know where Mom and Dad stayed on their honeymoon in Atlantic City? It was the Shelburne Hotel, room 106, but then they switched rooms because Mom didn’t like the view. Their new room was number 213. I validated all of this with external sources.”

I wanted to laugh at everything he said, at the insanity of it, but what Tommy had learned made perfect sense. The trivial details about their wedding meant nothing: it made sense because Dad always treated me as if I didn’t exist, even while I provided his care before he died. Nothing could have proven Tommy’s claim better than the discovery that I was nothing to my father. Tommy had his proof. He had convinced me more than if he had produced a written assertion of Dad’s apathy that he himself had signed, more than if he had found the names of a million priests, and a million room numbers of a million hotels.

“You have no right!” I shouted. “You have no right to do this!”

“I have every right to do this!” he hissed. His voice dropped to something guttural, and his face contorted into a shape that matched. The anguish inside of him, the hurt that must have been building his whole life, made itself visible to me. I had never seen anything so grotesque.

“The man gave me nothing while he was alive. He had no humanity, so I have no problem treating him like a machine now, because that’s what he was.”

“According to you, that’s all any of us are. Would you do this to me, Tommy, after I die? Would you reduce me to a bunch of bytes on a hard drive?”

“You beat me to it,” he said. “Why don’t you put that on social media? You can quote me.”

I took out my phone and threw it at his face as hard as I could. He ducked, and it shattered against the wall. I ran out the back door—not stopping to put on shoes—and kept running until my side and my feet started to hurt.

All around me, everything seemed to stop, as if I had run so fast that I had become the only dynamic part of a still-life world. I imagined everything digitized, the way it would be if my brain were on a disk, if there were no physical world, but everything instead existed as pixelated images that were created on the fly. That is what Tommy believed. He used to lecture me that the reality we think we live in isn’t physical, but a virtual one, and always has been, and that’s why the future can’t be predicted because we all create it just before we move through it. As distasteful as the idea was, it comforted me when my parents died. It meant that they weren’t dead since they, along with me, had never really been alive.

I walked up and down my neighborhood streets. I thought of the night the nurse had called to tell me that Mom was near the end and that I should get to the hospital quickly. I called to tell Tommy, but only reached his voice mail. He claims he didn’t get the message until it was too late, but I don’t believe him.

Mom had gone down to seventy pounds. Large bruises marked her arms where the chemotherapy had been injected. Her skin had lost its elasticity and resembled colored tissue paper. Her thick head of dark curls was gone, leaving sporadic strands that made her look unkempt.

When she opened her eyes and saw me sitting beside her, she lifted her head up with what looked like every bit of strength she had.

“Kelly.” She looked at me with eyes filled with sympathy. “This is so hard.” And then she died. I was the only one there.

For years I thought about what she said to me. At first I thought she meant that dying was what she found so hard. The longer I lived without her, and the more interaction I had with my father, the more I concluded that the thought of leaving us alone with Dad is what she found so difficult. Her last words were an apology for dying first.

Whenever Mom and Dad would fight—and by fight I mean Mom yelling at Dad who would sit in his chair watching TV like he didn’t even hear her—I would always get in the middle, try to be the diplomat. Tommy would always run to his room, and I’d find him there in front of his computer, writing programs. As a boy, he created an imaginary cyber world where he had complete control over everything. I did it too, later in life, with the plays I’d write. On the page, I could control the characters’ every word, the outcome of every conflict. My characters behaved exactly as I wanted them to behave—until I handed the script to actors. That is where Tommy and I differed. My characters could surprise me, sometimes in profound ways if I was lucky enough to get some good actors. But Tommy’s programs were different. He had absolute control over how they functioned. Any surprises to Tommy were called defects.

Standing there, I wrote Tommy into an improvised play and staged it in my head. What was Tommy’s motivation? What was his character arc in this story? I read it and rehearsed it over and over again in my mind. I tweaked it, and ran it again until it became obvious. I knew what Tommy was trying to do and why. I wanted to run to him and throw my arms around him. I wanted to tell him I understood and then take care of him like I hadn’t been able to do while Dad was alive.

I arrived home and threw open the deformed screen door. I ran down the stairs to the basement, immune to the history of the stairs assaulting my senses. I stopped with both feet on the dirt floor and looked at Tommy hunched over the machine. Dad was there.

Tommy, I am so proud of you.

I ducked beneath the pipe and walked next to Tommy, shuffling my feet so I wouldn’t startle him.

Tommy, did I ever tell you how much I respect you?

I stood next to him. A book called “Synapse Hacks” lay beside him.

I love you, Tommy.

He turned to me. His face held the pained ambivalence of someone who has just completed a quest.

“Did you hear what he said? Did you hear that, Kell?”

I heard it. I had heard every word Dad said and even knew why he said it. Tommy made him say it.

Couldn’t he see what he had done? Couldn’t he see what I saw, that none of this was real, that all he did was force Dad to say these things?

Tommy stared at me with a bittersweet expression. I grabbed his hand and pulled it in close, caressing it. My hair fell down upon it, and he didn’t pull it away. The tears rolled down my face and dripped onto my feet. They were piping hot.

My words came out mechanically. There was no thought, no reasoning to them. They came out as involuntarily as a laugh or a sob.

“Can you make him say those beautiful things to me?”