The voice of God. The voice of the Company. Which both came later, but came loud like blaring horns and after my father had put me to sleep for some time, and when I woke I ran my hand across rough sutures on the back of my skull. The voice rang true enough, then. It could not be escaped, any more than I could escape my father, and yet, still, there was no person other than my father to respond to.

And the voice of the Company, IT said, EXPAND AND MULTIPLY. And IT said, FIX YOUR MISTAKES. (But that is what my father said, too, but my father was not the Company.)

And the voice of the Company, IT said, TAKE THE OTHER AND REMAKE IT AS YOURSELF.

And the voice of the Company, IT said, IF YOU FAIL, WE WILL REMAKE YOU.

But this I giggled at through my tears, for my father remade me every day. He slapped me and kicked me and shouted when I made mistakes, and I made so many mistakes because I didn’t know how to do anything. And he would stave in my skull and I would wake up on the slab. And he would drive a kitchen knife into my heart and I would wake up on the slab. And he would break my legs with a steel pipe and then break my neck and I would wake up on the slab. All of this away from the others, to whom he would talk in a calm voice while consulting ancient tomes and, perhaps, taking off his glasses that he might bite upon the edge of them, in deep thought.

“We’ll fix you, we’ll fix you. Mind not the pain, son, it’s the price of the fixing. Everything dead can be brought back to life, so who minds a little pain, son.” As he suffocated me with a plastic bag because the creature had three legs, not four.

I cannot pretend this was not agony, but agony repeated so many times is a different kind of suffering.

“I made you so I’ll fix you,” he said, matter-of-fact, but I knew my mother had made me too, and if we were dead and merciful, it was not because this was false. But because it was true, and my father could not bear the sharing of the credit. For the mistake that he would fix.

So my father removed any memory of my mother from me—from every part of me. I could not tell you now the color of her eyes or what she wore or what her voice sounded like or what she smelled like. Did she hug me or keep me at arm’s length? Did she feed me breakfast, or toss a pail full of parts in my direction across a dirty floor? There is none of that left.