I adopted more and more of the ways of my father.
Eventually I became him entirely. I looked in the mirror and saw it had happened. The change was so complete I almost wondered if I really was him, the original him, and he had never had a child, and none of this had actually happened; he was just completely himself the whole time.
GREAT-GREAT-GREAT BY PATRICK COLE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 01
My father. He has this way of speaking where he stops after the first two words of a sentence. Then he pauses and pushes his head forward and resumes the phrase. “The mayor . . . knows who’s going to win the election.”
He also has this habit of nodding his head to the left when he speaks. And when he does this, at the same time he raises his right hand and turns the palm upward. Like a puppet, his head attached by a string to his right hand. It’s a habit I didn’t even notice, at least not consciously, for years. Not until I found myself doing it, too. Automatically.
I was 35 then. Something clicked over in the continual genetic cascade, genes tripping over each other, switching others on and off, then winking out themselves. I didn’t notice it until I started doing it myself, but then I knew exactly where it had come from. Maybe we don’t really notice someone, especially a lifelong presence, until we become them. And then we are forced to ask of ourselves and of them, “Who are you?”
That was the beginning. But it got worse. I developed his habit of sniffing when nervous. And rubbing my entire face with my hand, as if I needed to wake it up, as if I was looking for myself. Exact phrases made their way through my genes and out my mouth. It’s a hell of a thing. Happy as a clam. Top of the art - he says that instead of state of the art. It sounds stupid, and it always annoyed me. But then I started saying it too.
How can it be? I wondered. Am I trying to annoy myself? But the truth was, it didn’t bother me any more. Top of the art now made sense to me. And a song, an actual song, got stuck in permanent rotation in my head, the same song he always hums and mumbles and whistles - Everybody, loves somebody, some time.
And it intensified over time, as I automatically adopted more and more of the ways of my father, while my looks softened into his. Eventually I became him entirely. I looked in the mirror and saw it had happened. The change was so complete I almost wondered if I really was him, the original him, and he had never had a child, and none of this had actually happened; he was just completely himself the whole time. But something told me this wasn’t true, there was a trace, a final vestige of my former self. And I spoke to my father on the phone, proving he was another entity, though I could swear I knew what he was going to say the whole time. I looked in the mirror and thought, It’s a hell of a thing.