Gregory nodded. Though well-intentioned, her words were a dreary reminder of what all of them knew but none of them said: Gregory hadn’t been close to his father. Technology, wealth, fame—to Gregory, these were features of a world where the things that mattered to him, namely books and writing, counted for nothing. He’d recoiled from all of it, starting early. His sisters and brother went from private schools to Ivy League, but Gregory insisted on moving to public school in sixth grade. He used his middle name, Cyrus, as a surname, initially at the behest of his father’s security team （it reduced the risk of kidnapping）; later, because he preferred it. He paid his own way through Queens College by going part-time over six years and working construction. His father, he knew, had been wounded by these choices. Gregory was nine in 2016, when Own Your Unconscious was released, and he’d announced to his father immediately that he would never use it. （“Come on, laugh it off,” he’d overheard his mother say. “He’s a little squirt.”） But Gregory’s father cared what he thought. “I love books. You know that, right?” he’d reminded Gregory over the years, at one point dragging out a crumbling paperback Ulysses as proof of his literary seriousness. But nothing could change Gregory’s belief that Own Your Unconscious posed an existential threat to fiction.
And yet that whole time, Gregory had nursed a parallel certainty that he and his father would one day be close. He’d even carried a mental image of that communion: laughing with his father like two peers talking about a play they’d just watched. And then, out of nowhere, his father was sick—dying of an illness he’d known about for months and could no longer hide. Gregory tried not to ask himself when Richard had been told. During his father’s telescopic decline, he and Gregory had had the essential conversations—You-know-I-love-you Yes-and-I-love-you—but they’d been forced, rushed, and there was no mistaking the relief in his father’s face when Richard entered the room. Gregory had waited too long. He’d squandered his chance, and now the chance was gone.
2
He made it to the Upper West Side on three different subways. There was a bad spell when he couldn’t get a seat on the 2 and hung swaying from a bar with his eyes shut until one opened up. At 110th and Broadway, he stepped out into heavy mounting snow that accentuated the tree-starved concrete landscape. The address Dennis had given him was on 107th, toward Central Park. As Gregory walked, the grand old apartment buildings above and around him began to look strangely familiar—not from his own memory, he realized, with a start, but from his father’s! His father had played certain sections of his consciousness for Gregory and his siblings, usually to illustrate a point or teach them a lesson—although, lately, it had occurred to Gregory that maybe what their father wanted was just for them to know him better. One such memory was the night he’d conceived of Own Your Unconscious. The stated lesson was that inspiration could come from any direction; that they should never give up. They’d watched as a family, sprawled together on his parents’ huge bed, wearing individual headsets. Gregory was ten. His father first showed them what he called the Anti-Vision: a vacancy where a new idea refused to appear. For several moments it filled the screen, depthless and white. Gregory was fascinated. Was it really empty?
Then the Anti-Vision gave way to Upper West Side streets as his father searched for an address, dry leaves tumbling over his boots.
“Can you go back to the Anti-Vision?” Gregory asked.
But the Anti-Vision wasn’t the point. Their father fast-forwarded through parts of the professors’ meeting and his cringy interactions with Rebecca, the pretty graduate student—first on the subway, then in the East Village, where they chased and fled each other in the dark. Gregory’s sisters tore off their headsets in agony.
“Oh my God, Daddy! You were such a dork!”
“I believe the word is ‘flirt,’？” their mother said, jabbing their father with a toe. “Little did I know!”
Their father activated the thought-and-feeling portion of his consciousness just before the moment of revelation. Gregory felt him straining to remember a boy who’d drowned, then felt the roar of his frustration at the inaccessibility of his memories. But amid that frustration was a tiny fillip—a hiccup, almost—of possibility. “There. That!” their father said as they peered through his eyes at the rippling dark river. “Can you feel that instant when it happens? I only knew later.” And Gregory felt it—a sensation like dropping through a trapdoor without noticing, yet, that everything is different.