A portrait of your father:
It’s a hazy, dreamy scene. The aviary is warm in the dark February outside and the circulation fans blow around the faint humidity. The floor is cracked, broken linoleum, green with creeping moss around the edges of potted trees reaching for the greenhouse ceiling. Fluorescent industrial lights dangle down and cast an unfamiliar white light; had the day not been rainy, they would have been off altogether. His father dislikes the industrial numbness they bring in lieu of real sunlight. Raindrops drum on the plexiglass roof and he remembers being young, laying on his back on the floor in here, watching them patter and run off into the containment chamber gutters whisking them away.
And there is his father.
He sees him by following the little flicker of lights the butterflies leave as they go past him. He only sees his sneakers at first, because the table he sits at is obscured by potted plants and mist systems, but his knee is bouncing and he hears the soft tapping of his fingers on his laptop keyboard.
Draven moves forward. He’s filled with a soft kind of comfort not unlike a drug when he rounds the corner and sees his dad, curly black hair in his Columbia sweatshirt that’s not yet pilling, 5 o’clock shadow and a battered toughbook, camera there, baseball cap, jeans, it’s him, it’s all him as he remembers him, filled out, somewhat sober, eyes attentive and sharp behind thick black frames, whatever dog eared paperback he’s working through put aside next to his camera and looking at it his chest warms as he sees it’s a copy of Frankenstein, the copy he’s seen his father read over and over and over again through his childhood, the one with the highlighted pages and the torn off cover that’s dad’s, dad’s, dad’s, that’s his that’s dad’s book that's the book that’s one of dad’s favorites—
“Dad.” His voice wavers, unsure, and he doesn’t expect his father to respond but he knows that his dad heard him because he does that little thing he always does where he cocks up an eyebrow in his direction and continues typing, saying just one minute, let me finish this email.
Draven comes and sits across the table from him, and he sees the outline of some of 408 crawling on his father’s sweatshirt as he does so, crawling in his hair, on the back of his computer. One lands on Draven’s fingers, wings fluttering gently. The whole world is soft and he feels light, airy, tinted with anxiety and love.
His dad looks up at him from his computer and Draven is so happy he wants to cry, and he must be crying, because his father looks at him with concern.
“Dad,” he repeats, and he doesn’t know what to say. Why did you do it? Did it hurt? Would you have done it if I stayed?
And none of his questions get answered, because his father looks him dead in the eye, removes his service pistol from his tattered backpack, puts it in his mouth, and without breaking eye contact pulls the trigger and Draven wakes up screaming.
