I am proud to call myself my father’s son
but I am even prouder to call myself my father’s reader
The books he wrote
The classic novels he composed
The vanguard literature that Dad persisted against all odds in creating was an incitement
a direct indictment
an impassioned critique
an impassioned protest of a culture whose highest honors are essentially betrayals

‘Would you mind putting that away,’ the flight attendant said, ‘we’re getting the cabin ready for departure,’ and Acker left off his shaky typing and shut his computer and stowed it in the pocket of his business-class pod and as the plane got in line for takeoff, as the plane sped and lifted and rose up through the sky, it was as if all his thoughts were left behind on the ground except: I’ve fucked up badly.

The festival dedicated to his late father was scheduled to open tomorrow evening on the Mediterranean island of Midorca and the evening after that Acker was set to present his remarks at the Biblioteca Pública de Midorca. It would be the festival’s main speech, the organizers had told him, it would be the keynote address, the organizers were seeking his permission to record it, and yet most of what he’d managed to write of it so far was this beginning: ‘I’m proud to call myself my father’s son, but even prouder . . .’

From there, he had a few stunted anecdotes that he could use to wing his way through the lecture’s middle, as he’d been winging his way through the middle of his life, but as for an ending, he had none, he had no hope of one: ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to thank –’ is not an ending.

His intention had been to finish a draft in transit, to use all this dead delayed time otherwise wasted waiting between flights and on flights to pressure his jumbled troubled filial notions into a more final respectable form – sensitive, intelligent, did he mention respectable – but drinking vodka sodas high above clouds that looked like tiny brains or like the tiny pills currently seeping into his brain, he was suddenly too woozy and drunk to get anything done and instead of trying to type any more under such slurry conditions he spent most of the flight out of Newark sitting plugged into some trash on his swivel-mounted screen, wallowing in the watching of a popular superhero franchise, watching the original and then the sequel and then the rest of the installments, but somehow, unsuspectingly, watching them out of order.

‘– a refill?’

‘What?’

‘– ice?’

‘What?’

‘Would you like another drink,’ the flight attendant had to yell, ‘and would you like it with ice?’

If this were a scene in one of his father’s (classic, vanguard) books, it would’ve been written this way: the main character, drunk and pilled, self-loathing, self-disgusted, gross and gassy and distinctly un-sober, would be watching ‘a popular superhero franchise’, but since this isn’t fiction but reality, we can say that Acker, failing to complete his remarks, was wrecked on Ketel One and Ambien and watching all the Batmans. He’d fucked up badly. He’d known about this festival honoring his late father for about a year now and he’d known about his late father’s hundredth birthday for – about a hundred years now? And yet despite having had all that warning to prepare, he was flying to the occasion equipped with just a few weak memories of youth, none of the emotional ones really emotional and none of the intellectual ones really intellectual, along with a trite diatribe against identity politics and cultural illiteracy in what he thought was his father’s style, which wasn’t really in his father’s style. A sad-because-too-revealing account of this one summer day together when his father showed him how to polish shoes (and then gave him a half-dozen pairs to polish and left him to it). A sad-because-too-revealing attempt to turn that polishing account into a metaphor (for what?). Short sketches of his father as a bad driver and swimmer, a lugubrious if dubious description of his adolescent drift from his father that tended to flatter himself in accounts of his flirtations with one of his father’s young girlfriends in Sicily and of his sexual experiences with another of his father’s young girlfriends on Crete, along with an embittered sour section – one that should be the ending, but could not be the ending – about what it was like to grow up on Midorca and then leave, when his mother left and took him with her back to the States, leaving his father behind to write the books that helped make him and the island famous.

About a decade ago, his father had returned to Midorca after picking up one major literary prize or another and, as the press coverage went, the moment he’d entered the house and set the award atop the only empty shelf in the crowded alcove reserved for trophies, diplomas, and other such encomia, he’d suffered a stroke and died. He was buried in a grave high up on the cemetery cliff above the sea and eulogized by old rich hippies and celebrity friends who flew in, name-brand painters and singer-songwriters along with investment bankers and property developers, while he, the dead man’s son, had stayed behind in honking New York to care for his ailing mother. She could not be left alone. If he’d left her alone that winter in cruel and brutally cold New York to fly to his father’s funeral in Midorca, the heavy traffic of nurses and doctors would have told her where he was, and she would’ve keened and raged and ripped the tubes and wires straight out of her havocked body and dropped dead on the spot, the way his father had, as opposed to what happened, which was that her consciousness continued to flicker and fade until she passed away peacefully just a few days later.

His father died on a Monday, his mother died on a Friday, something like that, and the more extensive weekend-edition obituaries of Geoffrey Acker – ‘the author of acclaimed volumes that skewered capitalist pieties’ (the Times), ‘who chronicled the Americanization of Europe and the banalization of America’ (the Guardian) – went on to note in an update that his first wife had outlived him only briefly.