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By Root 435 0

while, during these periods of living with my father, I would catch an illness that was like an odd, prolonged spell. These bouts would usually last for a whole day and night, during which I would lie in bed or wrapped up on the sofa, and I’d imagine that other people— usually members of my family—would come in and out of the room and talk to me. For some reason, when I was lying in the darkness, I’d concentrate on my hands. It felt like there was a great weight at the center of my palms and that if I could just close my fist around that feeling—if I could just capture it and hold it—I’d be okay. I’d squeeze hard enough to cut my nails into my palms.

Once or twice I hallucinated something else: my father sitting on the edge of my bed with a strange woman. He’d pull the top of her dress down until her breasts fell out, and she would look at me and giggle. “Leave the boy alone,” my father said, and I’d fall back into my fitful half sleep. Some might say that what I’ve just described is an example of recovered memory—in other words, that a scene like this may actually have happened, but I probably suppressed conscious memory of it. I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t think for a moment that my father brought other women into the houses where I lived with him, and I have no evidence that he had any affairs during his marriage to my mother. I’m not sure where a child gets a vision like the one I had. Maybe from a part of my unconscious that I somehow shared with my father, or maybe from some presentiment of my own future erotic fever.

Still, my fever dream reminds me of something I saw a few years later, when I was poking through my father’s desk drawers. It was a photograph of a nude man standing by a swimming pool, between two nude, large-breasted women. With each hand, he is reaching out and petting the women’s pubic bushes. Meantime, the woman on his left has her hand wrapped around his erect penis, while the other, smiling widely, has reached over and is cupping his balls. I remember it vividly for two reasons: One, it was the first explicitly sexual picture I’d ever seen, so of course it inflamed my mind. The other reason: I am fairly certain that the man in the picture was a younger version of my father. Either that, or perhaps he was one of my father’s other sons—somebody who carried the stamp of Frank Gilmore’s face—but then, that would be a bit too weird, wouldn’t it? All I know is that later, when my father died and we were dividing up his stuff, I went into his desk to find that photo. It was gone, and I never saw or heard anything about it again.

ONE YEAR, WHEN IT WAS clear that my father and I would be spending much of the Christmas season in Seattle, my mother boxed up some of our old, no-longer-used holiday decorations for me. These ornaments were as old as everything else in our life—a chipped Santa Claus figurine, an incomplete Nativity set (missing the head of the baby Jesus), and a plastic chime box in the shape of a cathedral. When you wound a key on the back of the box, a hymn would play and the painted plastic golden doors would slowly crank open, revealing a backlit Renaissance painting of the Ascension. (I realize now it was actually an Easter relic, though that wouldn’t have made much difference to my childhood comprehension of the holiday’s religious importance.)

When Christmas came around that year, I fell sick again with one of my spells, and my father and I were unable to make the drive to Portland to spend the holiday with the family. My mother was bitterly disappointed, and she accused my father of lying to her, or me of faking the sickness so that we could spend the holiday alone. I spent that actual Christmas day in bed with the plastic cathedral next to me, endlessly winding its key and watching its doors open to the painting of the flock of angels surrounding the rising Lord, while my father sat in the apartment’s front room, arguing heatedly on the phone for hours with my mother. The longer I stared at the old Christmas decorations and at the old walls of the apartment and its old doorframes,