Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

conscience and motive, but who among us really knows why we do the things we do or why we think the things we think? Is it not guesswork? And beyond that, what about the mysteries of the people all around us—our fathers and mothers, our children, our lovers, our friends? Is not each of us encased inside a leaden skull? Are we not all in solitary confinement? In her novella The Touchstone, Edith Wharton writes: “We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.” I cannot read your mind, Timmy, and you cannot read mine, Tad. Often you surprise me. Often you confuse me. Often I yearn to crawl inside your heads in search of some elusive ground zero, even knowing there is no ground zero, even knowing that minute by minute we all undergo endless modification. What was true five years ago, or even five minutes ago, is probably no longer true, and almost certainly no longer true in the same way. Yet I keep longing for a miracle. I want to live inside you. I want to swim through your thoughts and sleep in your dreams. What a magic show that would be.

       14

      

       Abashment

      After a dress rehearsal for one of our magic shows, during which Meredith slithered through the footlights in a sensational showgirl costume, seven- or-eight-year-old Timmy waited a few days before clearing his throat and saying, “Mom, do you think that getup is appropriate?”

      Meredith smiled and said, “It’s only for a magic show.”

      Timmy said, “But I just called you Mom.”

       15

      

       Sushi

      My memory is failing, overburdened by the brain-jangling pace of fatherhood, and now, when I try to survey the past several years, I’m mostly left with tiny, disconnected fragments of my life with Timmy and Tad. Each memory-shot exists in its own dimension. There is no before and no after, just flashes in the dark, as if brilliant pinpricks of light suddenly ignite and then blink out in a vast void of prehistory. Nothing connects with anything else. It would be nice to find shape or some sort of modest unity in my threadbare recollections, but I’m resigned to the sad fact that memory—at least my memory—is less a movie than a scrapbook of moth-eaten images and garbled audio clips.

      Here, at 2:37 a.m. on August 13, 2013, is a sampling:

      Back in 2010, little Timmy and I were inspecting a suit of armor in an old Belgian castle. “Boy,” Timmy said as we moved out into the daylight, “that guy knows how to stand still.”

      Tad’s first-grade teacher asked the class to write an essay. On a sheet of white paper, Tad carefully wrote: “S. A.”

      The year was 2009 or 2010, and in a park near our house Tad was playing a game he called Stop Sign. He circled his arms above his head, approximating the shape of a stop sign, and trotted up to a five- or six-year-old girl playing hopscotch. The girl hopped right past him. Tad turned and watched. After a second, he yelled, “You better not drive till next week.”

      And then, somewhere in outer space, a star ignites, and I watch Timmy at age three or four come limping up to me. What he says, exactly, I can’t remember—something like, “It hurts.” He isn’t crying. He’s puzzled. His leg is broken.

      Time passes, and he turns five or six, and Meredith and I are asking how he broke his leg, and Timmy says, “Spinning,” and Meredith says, “Spinning where? How?” and Timmy shrugs as if broken legs are a dime a dozen and says, “On the floor, in the kitchen, Mommy was doing dishes and I was spinning,” and the guilt trip of two parents who never knew how their firstborn broke a leg is partly relieved, partly resolved, though only partly, because there is also the memory of a hospital interview with a kindly social worker whose quizzical expression never changes as we explain, numerous times, that it is all a complete and baffling mystery to us. “Uh-uh,” says the social worker, also numerous times.

      And at some foggy point in history, years and years ago, Tad screamed in his sleep: “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” and two rooms away, as I lay reading a book, I was struck by the terrible certainty that my son was dreaming of his father.

      Out in the backyard one afternoon, Tad was helping our lawn guy, Jef Pierce, do his weekly mowing. Tad gathered up chunks of firewood and dropped them in front of Jef’s oncoming mower. Jef stopped, tossed the logs aside, and kept going. This repeated itself several times. “Okay, look,” Jef finally said, “why don’t you go get me a glass of water?” Tad stared at him and said, “Why do you want to mow glass?”

      And there in a flash of light stands Timmy at age eight or nine—probably eight—pursuing his bizarre new hobby of sushi preparation. Multicourse sushi. From-scratch sushi. Painstakingly presented sushi. More or less edible sushi. He wears a chef’s hat and a white apron. His expression is stern, his hands deep in sticky rice. The floor is littered with bits of crab and avocado and seaweed and cucumber and my son’s homemade spicy mayo. Bamboo mats have been carefully flattened and smoothed on the kitchen table. Expensive glass chopsticks have been encased in cloth napkins. This is my child? A prodigy sushi maker? (I do not care for sushi; I applaud people who do.) At one point, after Timmy offered to prepare still another raw-fish feast, I suggested we go outside and toss around a baseball, or kick a football, or try some other all-American little-boy activity. “Sure, maybe tomorrow,” Timmy said. “Did Mom buy seaweed?”

      Of such simple and mundane fragments have the years of my fatherhood been constructed. How little I have influenced my sons’ interests. How bravely they dive into their own. How I would chew and chew that sushi.

       16

      

       Pride (I)

      One constituent of a father’s pride is simple astonishment. We