Oh what haven’t you heard already—everyone has a story of some sad and skeletal beloved, wasting away with the poison still in their blood; you know all about their bald heads and glossy stares and the opiates that kill the pain but make them hallucinate late at night; they call you from the other room so you too can see the specters of their madness (snakes; spies; santa claus; men in trenchcoats on direct orders from the reaper). You know none of it is real and yet sometimes you wonder. This is that ineffable unknowable threshold; they are already moving away from this world, reeling in the strange darkness of a mind detaching itself from all senses, and who knows what exists in these blind interstitials between waking life and death? Perhaps all is imagination here: perhaps what they dream becomes the truth, what they fear rises up from the dust of their lives and demands acknowledgment before they can leave completely—

These are the things you catch yourself thinking, months later, when you lie down to sleep too late at night and are pulled back, back, back, to the morning on the day your father dies. He has spent all night in that dark gully of his own disassembling; he knows he is losing all lucidity; that there are precious few moments left for him to say what he needs to say before language itself disappears completely— I’ve been awake for hours, five hours, two hours, for the past five hours going over and over in my mind, it’s so tricky, so tricky, but I found the cure; I dreamed, I thought, I found the cure– But there wasn’t enough time, and see it was a double-edged thing because I was going to live and I was going to save all of these millions of people. But no, oh god, oh. Daddy, what is it? I wish I had been more clever.