Bronson Gao

六月十五日

家

くそ

I hold out the card. “Here,” I say. “Where’ve you been all day?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Why? Was your mom asking?”

“What do you think?”

“Yeah, probably she was.” He sits down on the sofa, and I’m glad he stopped breathing on me. The image is rough, but it’s been a minute since I felt glad he came home at all after a day like this. No, I felt pretty sure that he would keep going on too, which I resent.

But there are multiple pieces of resentment, overall: that he turned out to be the hypocrite I always wanted him; that the scenarios of hate I dreamed up as a kid, to get back at my parents, would come true in some way or form; that this is all caused by the collision between dogmatism and unwilling occurrence, my birth known as a quality control issue, a bad simulacrum. You should’ve known there’s too many fucking variables.

And I used to think this was the way things ought have been, y’know. It’s hard to see out of what you’ve always been inside of—the cult of the hard working American—hard to see the propaganda on your dinner plate, your clothes, what you can and cannot read and watch. It’s hard not to become that faithful inheritor of superstitions and prejudices, the securer of parental authority’s legitimacy in all corners of your life.

Maybe I’m blinded by disgust not to want any of it. Maybe there is more to what my “noble” father was as a human. But that kind of perspective has been blanketed by what I see right here, damping out all the heavy shit, or any conversation really, except for fishing, girls, football and guns.

He leans into himself, opens the envelope, looks long at the card and then puts it down. He doesn’t say anything, just stares at the ground between his legs.

It says, “You’re not who you fucking think you are, asshole.”