Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Today | Nov 07 2004

I’m still alive. People have asked, so I’m answering.

Actually, I’m only certain that I’m alive as I write this, not necessarily as you read it. It’s possible I died at the moment I clicked “Publish,” or perhaps died many years later, by some other means, and now many years have passed and you’re reading what I wrote long ago, before I died.

I’m serious: this could be true, and likely will be, in time.

Today, though, I’m alive. Today meaning: the day I write this.

On this day, in the morning, I stood at my window and looked at the clouds. They seemed extra white, and the sky behind them, extra blue. It was beautiful, such whiteness and blueness, one moving against the other. I thought of times I’ve bought new glasses and gone outside and suddenly seen how contrast-y the world is. The world is quite contrast-y, as it turns out. When I can’t see this, I forget. In fact the only times I remember are when I haven’t seen it for a long time, so long that I forget having ever seen it, and then something happens, like getting new glasses, and I see it again.

While thinking about this, I remembered my imaginary child. I have an imaginary child. He’s usually around ten or eleven years old, and he’s always a boy. When I think about him, I often imagine that I’m dead and that I’m communicating with him from the grave. Since I’m his father, I want to tell him things, I want to impart some of the wisdom I accumulated while alive, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to think of what that would be. It’s not that I haven’t accumulated any wisdom; I think I have, a little. But when you add it up, it seems so paltry—certainly not the sort of things you want to impart from the grave to your one and only son.

I know he wants me to speak, I know he imagines I have something to tell him, but the truth is, I don’t. You do what you can and the days go by, and that’s the whole story, pretty much.

One time I broke down and told him to see the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly The Sacrifice but also Solaris and Stalker. I don’t know what got into me—the boy is ten or eleven years old and has never seen a film with subtitles. The next day, realizing my mistake, I told him to forget about The Sacrifice and to see Finding Nemo instead.

I now regret the entire business and wish I’d kept my mouth shut. As it is, I come across as a wishy-washy dead father, uncertain of his own pronouncements. Worse, the poor boy went out bought Finding Nemo on DVD, and now he watches it every day. I know what he’s doing: he’s looking for my message to him, buried in the story of a desperate father’s search for his lost son. What can I say? Message or no message, I hope he finds it.