63: VENGEANCE
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They were in line at the deli when a black-haired man crept up to his father and shot him twice at close range, for reasons the boy was too young to grasp. He was seven years old. One day, he thought, as the black-haired man slipped into the crowd, I will find you and I will kill you. But as the years went by, and he became familiar with the ways of the world and the complexity of all things, and the chains of causation that tie each act to the future and to the past, he came to realize that he could probably get away with not doing it. Plus, how would he even find him?
64: A NIGHTMARE
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A man had a nightmare that his dad had a heart attack and died.
When he woke up, he vowed to eliminate the chilliness that had insidiously invaded their relationship.
He tried to call his dad, but continually pressed the wrong numbers on his phone. He knew the right numbers, he could see them, but he could not press them with his fingers. Later he saw his dad across the street. He tried to run to him but could not move his legs.
Now the man realized he had simply awoken from a nightmare within a nightmare. He was still, so to speak, in the outer nightmare.
In the next scene, he met his father for dinner. They tried to hug each other, but could not. Again the operations of dream logic. They knew how to hug, there was no real obstacle to a hug, there could be nothing easier than to hug. But here they were, standing essentially side by side, interlocking just one arm apiece, thumping each other energetically on the back.
Somehow he managed to order food and begin eating. He tried to speak, but — no surprise — could not. His father spoke, but in a very strange language. No, it was English, the son realized, but he still couldn’t understand what his father was saying. Then he did begin to understand it, but he could not understand why his father seemed to care so much about whatever it was he was speaking about. Then the son’s own mouth fell open and he spoke about some things he cared about, and his father didn’t seem to understand why he cared about them at all. Subsequently, they alternated between the father speaking about the things he cared about and the son speaking about the things he cared about. Neither, in accordance with the dictates of dream logic, could admit that what the other one was saying meant absolutely nothing to him.
After dinner he and his dad “hugged” again.
None of this upset the man too much. He knew he was dreaming. Even after ten years — in dreamtime — had gone by, he knew he was dreaming. One day he got a phone call informing him that his father had had a heart attack, and he woke up.
He realized that his father had been dead for twenty years.
Then he woke up again, this time to what was indisputably the outermost stratum of reality. His relationship with his father had actually never been better. But the fact that he was capable of such dreams even when things seemed to be going well concerned and saddened him.
65: VANISHED
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In the early Edo period, two samurai, a father and son, were disgraced when their lord’s army was routed in battle. The son asked permission from his father to commit suicide, but the father said, “Wait a minute. It’s not right that a son should die before his father.” He handed his sword to his son, who cut off his father’s head and prepared to thrust the sword into his own stomach. But he found, to his amazement, that the desire to kill himself had suddenly vanished. Now he wanted to go into the mountains and compose haiku about the changing seasons (especially the change from summer to autumn). His three servants, however, were regarding him with an air of expectation. “It is not right,” the son said, “that a master should die before his servants.” So the three servants thrust their swords into their stomachs and the samurai went into the mountains and spent the rest of his life writing thousands of haiku about the change from one season to another, several of which, particularly the melancholy death-conscious summer-to-autumn ones, all fallen leaves and so forth, are seen today as masterpieces of the form.
66: THE FAMILY SHIRAZ
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A Barossa Valley winemaker, whose prized Shiraz was consistently awarded 98 points by the influential wine critic Robert Parker, was laid low last year with a herniated disc, at which point he reluctantly relinquished control of the vineyard to his son. For over a decade the winemaker had been promising that the vineyard would pass one day to his son, but only now, with the herniation of his disc, did he finally follow through on that pledge.
His reluctance was justified: his son instantly instituted changes at every stage of the winemaking process, from growing to bottling. The famed family Shiraz was altered beyond recognition. The son assured his father that the changes were for the better: they were “innovations.” The father, on the other hand, who had been making Shiraz his way for thirty years, was certain that his son was making unnecessary changes simply to “make his mark,” to demonstrate his autonomy. And the wine, he believed, would suffer for it.
But they awaited the final judgment of Robert Parker’s newsletter. A 99 or 100 would vindicate the son. A 97 or below would vindicate the father. And another 98 would reveal to them the ridiculous, almost ceremonial aspect of their intergenerational conflict, a ritual that had little to do (or so a 98 Robert Parker score would indicate) with the actual quality of the wine.
The newsletter arrived. They opened it nervously, but were perplexed to find in it no numbers at all. A note explained that control of the newsletter had passed from Robert Parker to his son, David, who had replaced his father’s outmoded numerical rating system with an updated star-based system. “There is no basis of comparison,” he wrote, “between my dad’s numerical rating system and my star-based system. Our systems are fundamentally incommensurable. There is no common measure. They cannot be converted, they cannot be translated. They do not communicate. Each constitutes its own self-contained, self-consistent, sealed-off world of wine opinion.”
The prized Barossa Valley Shiraz was awarded seven stars by David Parker. How that compares to a Robert Parker score of 98 is unknown. The father and son have no one else to appeal to in order to adjudicate their dispute.
67: ABUSE
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The estate of an author who died thirty years ago has sued the young author of a book whose style and theme are so derivative of the dead man’s that the latter must be considered, they claim, the true author of it, despite being dead.
The young author, whose father happens to be an eminent intellectual property lawyer, has countersued on interesting grounds. He concedes that his book’s style and theme are those of the dead author, but denies stealing them. Rather, he claims that the author’s style is so potent and his theme so forcefully expressed that they were, in fact, imposed onto him against his will. The year during which he read every word the dead author had ever written (which at the time seemed like the most liberating year of his life, and which led to his quitting law school and taking up fiction) was really, in retrospect, a period of extreme emotional, psychological, and intellectual abuse. The countersuit also accuses the dead author of what it refers to as “conceptual and categorical abuse,” or abuse in which the abuser’s concepts and categories are inflicted on the abused, who comes to view them as intrinsic to the nature of things and can no longer think about reality in any other terms. The defendant’s father — who has had a personal animus toward the dead author ever since his son quit law school, for which he was uniquely well suited — even introduced an insinuation of sexual impropriety, claiming that the dead author “forcibly inserted his conceptual scheme” into the then twenty-four-year-old’s head.