John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, in rehab, the pouchy bags had unnerved me, I think because they brought attention to his eyes, and these were different eyes from before. These new eyes seemed to shine with fear, or projected a nakedness that I couldn’t bear. These eyes belonged to a bewildered and overmatched little boy, and I didn’t want to see a little boy where my father was supposed to be. When we went to visit him in rehab, I always kept direct eye contact to a minimum.

   Now, at the dinner table, it was my father but also it wasn’t—this man was quiet, subdued, and the thing that most disturbed me: the way in which he handled his fork and knife. Before, his knife would tear into meat with murderous ferocity, and his fork would produce all kinds of noises—pinging, tinging, clacking, rattling—when meeting his plate and teeth. My father had always eaten with a brute vigor. Not this version of my father. This one ate, almost gently, and I never knew my father, or my mother, for that matter, to do anything gently. The common vocabulary of their actions and gestures registered as frenetic, frantic, hasty, insistent … everything in the key of volatile drama. Which was why my nerves couldn’t handle what was happening. When you are expecting death metal and instead receive a soft classical ballad … the echoes of metal keep reverberating within your nerves. The ghosts of the music you are not hearing can be more powerful than the music you are hearing.

   Because my father was silent, my mother was too. As was I. No one had anything to say. We ate in silence. We ate as if someone had just died in this apartment and out of respect for their memory we were eating quietly. I snuck glances at my father’s pockmarked face. A boxer’s face, mashed-up in different places. At any moment, I expected the rage to return, the sudden shift to fury … he’d snap at me, or my mother, for some perceived offense we had committed, something he found displeasing about us. It never came. This man was a punchless choirboy, and his knife and fork were used less like murder weapons and more like ordinary utensils.

   I wanted to scream into his face, wake him up to who he was, who he had always been, who I knew him to be. Who we knew him to be. My mother was an accomplice in this caricature of silence. I wanted to scream at her, too—Don’t you know this is false, this peace is a façade and charade? I know it. Why don’t you know it? You will revert back to being savages, the two of you hurling homicidal and suicidal impulses at each other, and I, I will feel right at home again, dying to escape.