Free Stories for Boys: A Memoir by Gregory Martin

no. Trust was a choice. When the suspicion that I was being played for forgiveness occurred to me – and it did often – I chased it from my mind.
    After a while, I ran out of steam. I didn’t know the next question to ask. But I still didn’t feel satisfied. I needed my father to do some of the asking now – questions for himself that he didn’t already know the answers to, and some questions for me. But I didn’t make that clear. Nothing was clear to me then. So we lapsed into silence broken intermittently by conversations about work and new furniture and three-inch-thick science fiction paperbacks.
    My father would disappear from my thoughts for days, and I’d wonder why I had such a strange ache in my chest. Oh. Yeah. My father wanted to disappear – from my thoughts, from his own thoughts. He wanted to go away. I wanted to let him go, and didn’t want to, at once. A day or two after recognizing this strange ache, I’d call. He’d tell me about how his work was going, how many patients he had on his caseload at the nursing home. He’d tell me about the science fiction novels he was reading – plots, characters, settings. He was flying through them, staying up late reading, reading, reading, sometimes until three or four in the morning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that; it had been years and years. Sometimes he asked about the boys or Christine, and I would talk for a while. There was relief in his voice when the conversation ended after ten minutes or so. Just because that part of him that had always been in hiding was now exposed didn’t mean he was going to stop trying to hide it. But to hide that part of him, he had to hide all of himself, from me anyway, the one with all the probing questions.

Renunciation
     
    WHEN MY FATHER DESCRIBED HIMSELF READING SCIENCE fiction deep into the night, I understood that he was not just taking a little break from an otherwise fearless and searching personal inventory. Some might deride my father’s reading as lowbrow – it was, after all, genre fiction. I didn’t care about that. I had no problem with science fiction. But my father was not supposed to be absorbed in pleasure. Not when I couldn’t sleep for five consecutive hours. He didn’t get to escape to another galaxy. He hadn’t earned that yet.
    Studying philosophy in college, I’d learned a little about the long discourse and debate about the nature of happiness. My father was not pursuing eudaimonia – Aristotle’s notion of the life well-lived. The virtuous life. A happiness that wasn’t really happiness – the emotional experience – but a path to aspire to and follow, a way of living, a “human flourishing,” rather than a feeling in a particular moment, or in my father’s case, hours of moments, until three or four in the morning.
    Neither was my father’s happiness the brand spoken of by the bald Buddhist photographer monk Matthieu Ricard, who lived in a hermitage in the Himalayas and was buddies with the Dalai Lama. Ricard was once a biochemist and had written extensively about Buddhism and science and happiness. Ricard had volunteered for thousands of hours of neuroscience research on the long-term effects of meditation on the brain, after which it was determined that Ricard was “the happiest man alive.”
    About this designation, Ricard has said, “It’s a joke which I find difficult to get rid of.”
    Ricard’s Buddhist notion of happiness is better described as “well-being,” or better yet: “a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state that pervades and underlies all emotional states, including all the joys and sorrows that can come one’s way.” It isn’t to be confused with pleasure, not even hours of it.
    Pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something which changes its nature. Beautiful chocolate cake, first serving delicious, second not so much, then we feel disgust…
     
    My father had never experienced