Blind Sight (3 page)

Luke cannot quite believe he is where he is, and for a moment he wishes the summer already over: hours running logged, essay written, father known. Questions begin to form, and so Luke opens his eyes and returns to the article about supplements. He wonders what doubling up on his protein intake would do to his body chemistry and if doing so would make him look more like his father, who is extremely muscular.

O
kay, new plan is to think out stuff for my essay while running, therefore accomplishing two things at one time, instead of letting my mind drift. I don’t want to have to worry about writing. It’s enough that I’ve got to answer all these emails from my family.

The conditions for running here are really great: sun without humidity, hills, near-absence of bugs in the eyes, cool stuff to look at. The section of Los Angeles that Mark lives in is called Beachwood Canyon. It’s not a scary-rich-looking neighborhood, but a lot of the houses have signs outside them saying they have video surveillance provided by Bel-Air security.

Mark said he could arrange for the studio to send him a car service, and then I could use his car when he’s working. They added another week that he didn’t anticipate, and he seems worried that I’ll be bored or feel stranded, or something. We keep having odd conversations where he’ll ask, “So you, like, drive and everything, right? Do
you want a car?” And I’ll say, “Do you mean … like … what do you mean?” and he’ll say, “I missed all your Christmases and birthdays. Can I buy you a car?” and then we’ll both sort of laugh. I told him about Vlad the Impala, and said I would be nervous to drive anything that wasn’t already on the short list for the Grim Auto Reaper.

Anyway, we are going to do more stuff together once the show is finished shooting and he has his “hiatus.” Yesterday, though, he had a day off and he took me out to Santa Monica beach. Oh yeah, I could tell my family about that. Of course, what they all want to know is how I
feel
about everything, and what it’s all
like
, how I am
experiencing
it. That’s called “qualia” in philosophy of mind. Qualia is the way things seem to us. It’s one of my favorite words.

What’s the qualia of being with my father?

I always knew I had a father, obviously, but we’ve just never had any dads around. Actually I think most people assume that all three of us kids come from Sara’s ex-husband. I don’t look like my sisters, but they don’t totally look like each other either. All of us look a little bit like Sara, especially Aurora.

Sara had a simile for the way we should think about my sisters’ father. Paul was like a caterpillar that had become a butterfly.

“You’re not sad for a butterfly that isn’t a caterpillar anymore, you’re happy for it,” Sara said.

It wasn’t always possible for Sara to get other people—divorce lawyers, for example—to accept this kind of explanation, so my uncle Louis—who wasn’t my uncle then, he was just our next-door neighbor in New York—helped Sara with the paperwork and she was divorced by reason of “desertion” as opposed to “metamorphosis.” On Sara’s advice, Aurora, Pearl, and I use the phrase “moved on” when referring to Paul, which we don’t often do.

I knew my father’s name: Anthony. In New York City, the building my family lived in came with a doorman who was also named Anthony. I don’t have any memory of this doorman personally, but I do remember the sucking air sound that happened when he pulled
open the glass entrance doors of our building, and so I guess I’ve always connected the name Anthony with that sucking air sound. The other thing Sara would say about my father was that he was young and beautiful: “Like an angel,” is what she said.

Sara didn’t tell me to think of my father as a butterfly, but more as someone who was on his own path, a path that did not include fathering in any sort of tangible way, and that I should choose to honor that path, whatever and wherever it might be. And according to Nana, we all had a father in the Lord.

In actual fact, I saw my father in two movies (
The Fast Lane
and
Night Begins Now
), without knowing at the time that it was my father I was seeing. Of course I had no way of knowing that Anthony Boyle had become Mark Franco, the guy who plays “Miggs,” the rookie cop who spills coffee all over himself when Laura Laughton smiles at him in
Night Begins Now
.

My father has told me a little bit about his acting. It took him awhile to get famous. At first he only got small parts like Prison Inmate, or Drug Dealer. Then he said he started really working out hard and his roles got bigger as he did. He’s played race-car drivers, assassins, bodyguards, Navy Seals. He’s been in a ton of movies.

The Last
is a futuristic drama where he plays the role of James Knox: an ex-military astronaut who struggles to lead a band of survivors abandoned by their own government to a place of refuge where they might be able to make contact with the resistance faction still thought to be circling the planet. (The planet is Earth, which has been partially destroyed by nuclear war and where strange things happen due to high radiation levels.) It actually makes sense if you watch it from the beginning.

The Last
is the number-one network television drama now. But even when my father began appearing on magazine covers, sides of buses, billboards, Sara failed to recognize him. She doesn’t really
notice stuff like that. Also, she didn’t have any photographs of him around to remind her of what he looked like, and their actual time together had been pretty brief.

Then, about four months ago, Sara got a call. And it was my dad. He said he wanted to get back in touch. If that was okay.

That’s what Sara told me when I got back from working that night. I was standing in the kitchen making myself a sandwich and Sara came in and asked me to sit down with her. “So something has happened,” is how she started.

“Really?” I asked, when she finished. “Wow,” I think I said. I felt a little dizzy, even though I was sitting down, but I had also done a ton of yard work, and was very hungry.

“I know,” Sara said. “We didn’t talk for that long but he’s … lovely. Just like I remembered. I think there’s something very … beautiful here.”

Sara held out a piece of paper. In my mother’s language, “beautiful” can mean many different things. Sometimes it means that something is very beautiful. Sometimes it means that something is awful, and it’s the process of understanding that something, and treating it with compassion and love, that is beautiful. I looked at the paper.

“Mark Franco,” Sara had written, with a phone number underneath that.

“Wait, who’s this?” I asked.

“That’s him.” Sara tapped the paper. “Anthony. He changed his name. He said it might be easier if you—we—just all call him Mark.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Why?”

“He’s an actor. He lives in Los Angeles. He wanted to know if I thought you would like to talk to him. I said I couldn’t speak for you but that I
thought
you would.”

“I would,” I said. “I do.”

I looked at the phone.

“Well, it’s probably too late to call now,” I said.

“There’s a time difference,” Sara pointed out. “It’s earlier there.”

“Maybe I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. I thought maybe I should eat first, and think things over. The first time you talk to your actual real-life father you want to be calm.

“Luke? Are you okay, sweetie? This is a lot to take in.”

“I’m okay. I’m just …”

“I know,” Sara said. “I am too.”

She got up and put her hands on my shoulders. Among other things, Sara is a Reiki Master. I didn’t experience healing rays or lightning bolts of clarity or anything like that, but Sara has nice strong hands. I asked her to tell Nana about the whole thing because I wasn’t quite sure of what my face was doing and because I knew Sara could use someone to talk to about it. It felt weird that I was still hungry, and weird that I still ate my sandwich and did things like flossing my teeth before I went to bed.

I didn’t sleep much that night and I woke up really early.

“Your mother told me there was a telephone call,” was what Nana said to me, at breakfast.

“My father.” I tried to make it sound casual.

“Well,” said Nana.

I waited.

“The Lord makes a tapestry of our lives.” Nana glanced at the ceiling and smiled approvingly, as if she were giving Him a thumbs-up for His needlework.

“Your mother and I trust your judgment, Luke. And you and your father are in my prayers.”

Then we worked on her crossword puzzle as usual. Well, I was a little distracted, so I didn’t contribute much. But Nana is very good at crosswords. Even though she is someone who believes that the sudden materialization of my father after seventeen years of absence is the work of a first-century mystic, she is also someone who knows the seven-letter word for the currency of Malaysia.

It was a Saturday, so Sara was at yoga class. I had a ton of homework to do, which I did while waiting for it to be late enough to reasonably
call California. I thought about what message I would leave if I got his voicemail, and decided NOT to leave one if that happened, but my father answered his phone on the second ring.

“Hello!”

“Hi. Hello. Is this, um … Mark?”

“Luke.”

“Yeah. Hi. I mean, hi. It’s Luke.”

“Hi. I’m … hi.”

“Hi,” I said, starting to laugh, forgetting what I had planned to say. “Hi Mark, I’m Luke.”

“Hey Luke,” my father said, laughing too. “Hey Luke, I’m Mark.”

Later that afternoon Sara came home and I told her about the conversation. I didn’t tell her that I had spent most of the day doing research online about my father. I hadn’t ever seen
The Last
, but I had heard about it. It was a strange thing, looking at all those pictures and saying to myself, “That’s my dad.” And also, “That extremely good-looking guy who is massively ripped is … my dad?” and, “That’s the guy I just talked to on the phone. Who is my dad.”

There were some mini-biographies of him on various websites but there wasn’t any mention of me on those. I was prepared for that: he told me in that first phone call that he had always thought a lot about me and wondered and stuff, but that he was careful to keep his personal life very personal.

“And I didn’t want to do anything without talking to your mom,” he had said. “I wanted to respect her privacy, and yours too, of course. She’s great, by the way, your mom. I was pretty nervous and she could not have been nicer or cooler.”

At school on Monday, my semi-sort-of girlfriend Amy asked, “What’s up with you?” and I said, “What?” and Amy said, “You’re weird today,” and I said, “Really?” After school, I biked to Kim’s Video and searched for every movie Mark Franco had appeared in that I could find from the list I got from the Internet. I rented
The Hard Line
and
Flight of the Phoenix 2: The Phoenix Rises
to start with.

“Did you tell your sisters about your father yet?” Sara asked when I got home that day.

I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought about it, which was weird, because normally I thought about my sisters all the time, especially this year since Pearl was away too, and I had been feeling a little lonely.

“Maybe I’ll go see them. This weekend?” Aurora and Pearl both go to college in New York City, two hours away by train.

“Oh, good.” Sara
was
being very cool about the whole thing, but I could sense anxiety underneath the coolness, and on top of it as well.

Mark Franco was barely in
The Hard Line
but had a much bigger part in
Flight of the Phoenix 2: The Phoenix Rises
. I watched these on my computer, using headphones to conceal all the screaming, shooting, and “Motherfucker!”s from Sara and Nana. His character got killed halfway through
Flight of the Phoenix 2
, and as it was now almost two in the morning, I stopped the movie there. I still couldn’t see any resemblance between my father and myself, but I knew that in movies they put a lot of makeup and stuff on people. I also thought he was a very good actor, even in the small part.

In the following week, I rented
Time Out
, and
In the Zone
, and
Goodnight Stranger
, which my father, in an email response to me, had listed as the ones where he had “halfway decent parts.” I’m not sure why, but I didn’t tell any of my friends what was going on. I actually kind of avoided Amy, really.

At the end of the week, Sara came to my room for a talk. I had been expecting this. The DVD of
Goodnight Stranger
lay on my desk, and I put my American history textbook over it when I heard her footsteps in the hallway.

“Tea?” Sara asked, from the doorway, a cup in each hand.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said.

“Okay time to talk?”

I nodded.

“So.” Sara handed me one of the cups and sat down on the end of my bed. “It’s funny. The moment I heard his voice on the phone all
these memories about him came flooding back. Little details, things I had forgotten.”

“Really?” I took a sip of my tea, which turned out to be kind of cold. “I thought it was just like … this moment that you had.”

Sara eyed me thoughtfully.

“Not exactly. There was a little more to it. There was love, for one thing.”

That sort of surprised me, because Sara had never said that she loved my father. “You loved him?” I asked.

She blew into her teacup, which must have been as cold as mine was.

“Well, it was a moment of love,” Sara said finally.

I nodded.

“He worked in an electronics store,” Sara said. “That’s where I met him.”

I remembered that Sara did actually once describe her brief relationship with my father as “electric.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like a RadioShack or something like that?” I tried to picture Mark Franco in one of those shirts the employees of Best Buy wear. Maybe with a name tag.

“Something like that. He—your father—helped me with a VCR.”

“It was one of those things,” I said. I knew the next part. Sara and Anthony—Mark—my father—had made a connection. There had been a spark. It seemed my mother’s choice of words in describing the night of my conception had not been entirely metaphorical. I tried imagining my father in a jumpsuit with a tool belt, cords dangling from his hands.