Free Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner Page B

couldn’t stand that, someone clinging to him and helpless without him, someone who would never criticize him no matter how badly he treated her, eager to please but equally ready to fade into the background; taking her own vows solemnly, but content to release the faithless from theirs; feeling that she had a spark of godhead somewhere deep inside, yet not especially surprised that no one else recognized it; yearning for romance and love, yet always half-way towards persuading herself that they did not exist. Wes definitely couldn’t stand someone like that.
    There was a tap at the door, and Wes’s father poked his head in with a sheepish smile.
    â€œGot five minutes?”
    â€œI’m doing my homework, dad.”
    His father stepped into the room, clasping an open laptop at his hip. “Just a quick question. I won’t bother you. What’s the homework?”
    Wes held up
War and Peace
and waved it wearily even as he lowered his eyes to his own computer screen, which had gone dark for lack of activity. Wes punched a button on the keyboard and the screen lit up again. His father strode across the room and took the book from his hand. He was barefoot, in a white T-shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts that may or may not have been underwear. His hair was freshly washed and plastered against his head, and he smelled strongly of Monsieur Balmain.
    â€œ
War and Peace
? I was just about your age, maybe a year or two younger, when I first read this. Very powerful. A big influence on me in my formative years.” He began to leaf through it, as if to revive fond memories.
    â€œWanna do my paper for me?”
    â€œYou have to learn to think for yourself, son.” He dropped the book on the bed and opened his laptop without sitting down. Wes noticed for the first time that his father had hair growing in his ears, squiggly little grey-brown hairs like pubes, and he looked down at his own toes, which had lately begun to sprout little tufts of light brown hair of their own.
    â€œWhat do you need, dad? I’m very busy.”
    His father turned the laptop downwards to show Wes the screen, which was opened on a Facebook page.
    â€œWhat do you know about Facebook?”
    â€œI know it’s not for old guys.”
    â€œWrong, pal. There’s more of my kind on here than your kind.”
    â€œWhat do you want to know?”
    â€œSee, I signed on a couple of months ago, kind of by accident. And I never used it, but then people started friending me. It started slowly, but suddenly it’s snowballing, dozens and dozens of people coming out of the woodwork, people I haven’t spoken to in decades.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI guess I want to know what sort of things I can do with it.”
    â€œHow do you sign on ‘by accident?’”
    â€œI don’t know. Nora wanted me to look at something and her computer was broken or she couldn’t find the charger. I don’t remember. But see, like here, somebody tagged this picture of me from college.”
    The photograph showed Wes’s father, aged maybe nineteen, sitting at the end of a row of students on a low wall at the edge of some sort of quad or terrace, supremely pretentious, in the pre-grunge fashion of the early eighties, in a thrift-store herringbone overcoat several sizes too big, his shoulders hunched Bob Dylan-style against a non-existent chill, as evidenced by the trees in full leaf directly behind him. Apart from the full head of thick brown curls and the blue-tinted granny glasses, he looked much as he did now. The look he had apparently been stretching for was that of a down-at-the-heels artist, a writer or a musician, in the days before he had become a household name, someone indifferent to the hunger and cold that come with the territory of being a young, unsung genius. Like many of the similarly affected students at Dalton, his father might have pulled it off had he not been studying at an elite