“You know, Kieran,” she said, gathering confidence, “In this life, a lot of people will try to convince you that you can’t be. That you can’t do. And if you run into trouble, you know, that confirms it. You just need to know that you can do great things. And I mean you too.”

She looked up into my eyes, and then her head seemed to droop like a flower toward my enormous feet in torn-up sneakers and her black leather clogs. At a loss for words, I nodded again and patted her on the back. It was a condescending, dismissive gesture, but I really couldn’t imagine what response she wanted.

I knew about my dad’s business problems, of course. He was a few feet away, talking loudly and amiably with my uncles close by the drink cart. He didn’t seem convinced that he “couldn’t do” at all, but she had seen him in his shaky, confused adolescence and doubtlessly had something of a broader perspective than I had.

His business filed for bankruptcy four months later. For months afterward, he was unreachable. I went by his one-story house on the north side of Ann Arbor and his car was gone. I looked in the big front window and all the furniture was moved around, pictures on the walls were askew, but no dishes out or any overt mess. The TV was gone, and the bookshelves were empty. No outward signs of catastrophe, he was just gone. My mom refused to talk about it, which I guess was her right as a woman who had been divorced for a decade.

The bitterness was getting to me. I had to leave. After I moved east, it started to seem possible that I would never see him again. He started to become more of an idea to me than a reality. I would remember things he said to me but not his face. I stopped returning calls from family, and never got any from him.

I hadn’t known how quickly your horizons can contract, until it feels like you’re running directly toward a blank, black wall with no clear knowledge of even where you’re coming from.

Toward the end of my experiment in Philadelphia, strung out and staring at the ceiling of the one-room apartment I shared with Marian, I started thinking about my past — less specific thoughts or even feelings, more a vague recall of images appearing one after the other in non-chronological succession. The image-memories couldn’t conjure up emotion — I was beyond that — but I couldn’t forget them. They would shimmer in front of me, superimposed on the unforeseen failures every day would bring. There, staring at the ceiling, I would monologue about it to the empty air, or to Marian, who was unresponsive. I’d open the window to let the freezing cold air in and feel sorry for myself.

♒