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.
Acker had never gotten along with his father – the man who everyone meant when they said ‘Acker’, even the man he himself meant when he said ‘Acker’. He was the first son of his father’s first wife. He was the only son actually, the only child actually, of the first wife of two. There were also three biographers, five translators, and about a dozen dazed shambolic scholars from Europe, all gathered together in Zurich, specifically in Zurich Airport, specifically in a small, neglected terminal from which the smaller budget flights departed on airlines that shouldn’t exist, airlines that didn’t exist, special charters with nonsensical names and non-sequitur logos that kept changing. Something called EUsky with a winged cow. Something called Flingling with a bubble font in fire colors. The gate for MidAir (represented by a palm tree whose fronds were also whirring rotors, its lettering proto-Phoenician) was at the end of the farthest hall, a dingy, gray-carpeted, bathroom-less and café-less mustering point that slowly, gradually, over the torporous course of the day, became populated by experts, academics, men (mostly men) just shy of emeritus age, who seemed to all know one another personally or at least by reputation and greeted one another with stern handshakes (the Germans) and hugs and kisses (the French and Francophiles) and traded witty quotations in flavorfully accented English of favorite lines of the work of the man whose posterity had brought them together (‘over the torporous course of the day’). Some had been waiting for hours already and were relieved to finally have others around to complain to, the jet-lagged others who were just showing up on flights from Mexico City, Hong Kong, and Seoul. There was one flight a day from Zurich to Midorca and apparently much of the festival would be on it. The director of the Acker documentary, who was due to be interviewed onstage after what would be the world premiere screening of the Acker documentary. The author of the passive-aggressive memoir about informally studying with and even serving as an informal secretary to ‘Geoffrey’, who kept referring to Acker’s father as ‘Geoffrey’, in print and in person, every chance he got. Acker was the last to arrive – last and late – even after the late-because-of-a-tardy-pilot flight from Los Angeles, and the late-because-of-a-volcano flights from Scandinavia. They’d been waiting for him, they were impatient for him, he could feel it. As he rolled his fancy metal-armored luggage down the hall toward the gate, he felt their eyes roll over him like wheels, and in his stomach, in his throat, he felt a trepid rising nausea. Here we go, he thought. Time to be the son and heir, the head of the estate, the gatekeeper of the flame, the flamekeeper of the gate, the standard-bearer of the Jesus Christ enough already. YES – you have the permission to quote such-and-such my father wrote about so-and-so. YES – you have the permission to reprint said text, to reproduce this photograph, that clip. But NO – you may not use any of those diary entries where the old graphomonster was overtly misogynistic (if only XXXX were as sweet as her sweet tits) or racist (it’s as if XXXX thinks he’s owed a living for having been born a poor and boorish African). Oh Dad! Oh Geoff ! It was time to be his face – there was a certain resemblance of uncertain chin, invariably remarked upon – time to be the interface for a group of people with their own relationships and stakes: people who had some claim to his father and then exaggerated the rest, people who’d exaggerated some claim and then imagined the rest. The scholars whose tenures were made out of interpretations of his father’s early novels or late novels or the increasingly detached and elitist political non-fiction the man wrote to mark the years in between; the leather-swaddled former Marxist who cared only about Acker as a former Marxist; the plump and wistful Jew who cared only about Acker as a Jew; the crunchy, dreadlocked Jamaican-Estonian who wrote that article on the ‘mirror inversion expatriate aesthetics’ of Acker and Nabokov; and the bald, gay, very fit cyclist from Amsterdam who’d brought his folding bike along with copies of the jargonated monograph he’d authored entitled ‘Hetero-conservative influences in the pseudo-radical novel: the cis/systems fictions of Geoffrey Acker’, which mined fatuous meanings out of fabulous misprints and derived wishful phallic inferences from every mode of transport – taxi, bus, train, horse – Acker’s heroes ever rode.
As the flight’s pilots and crew arrived harried gateside and commenced with their checks, Acker was introducing himself to people he’d forgotten he’d already met and being introduced to others with whom he’d hazily corresponded, trying to keep everyone straight and placated from among the swarm of frumpled necrologists he was going to be sequestered with for the next lauding week beachside and poolside at the over-starred resort where they were being put up, asking where was the guy who’d edited that collection of his father’s letters (Acker owed him an email) and where was the guy who was supposed to profile him and write about the festival for some magazine (Acker wasn’t quite sure which magazine and was eager to confirm the New Yorker)? ‘– but did anyone tell you about the pub at the resort?’ an academic from somewhere in Britain that wasn’t Oxford or Cambridge was saying. ‘A pub, bar and grill, called Acker’s – unclear if that was always the case or they’ve just renamed it after your dad for our event.’
Acker was considering joking about whether that meant he could drink and eat for free when an Aussie academic asked, ‘Have you been back since your father’s death?’
But before Acker could answer, some other professors around him were chiming in about how ‘the island’s changed a lot, like most things for the worse’ and ‘it’s become all touristy and commercialized now that it’s a stop for the cruise ships’ and ‘there’s really nothing left from the era of your parents, when that whole countercultural wave took the island by storm, I assume you’ve read the book by –’
‘I haven’t,’ Acker said, and though he was still answering that earlier question, saying that he hadn’t visited Midorca since his father’s passing, his father’s Portuguese translator thought Acker had meant that he hadn’t read the book he was recommending to him (which Acker hadn’t, anyway), the book he was offering to send to him (to which Acker nodded in a way that might’ve signified thanks, anyway).
A man who’d identified himself as ‘your father’s voice in Polish’, said, ‘I think they did a wonderful job, actually, converting your father’s house into that museum.’
‘Casa Acker,’ the Brit said. ‘They did an excellent job.’
‘And they’ve been keeping up the grave,’ the Aussie said. ‘I was there for the dedication of the monument.’
‘You know,’ said an Ackerite from Paris, ‘I did a fair amount of research and consulting for the museum when it opened, when I was working on my dissertation.’
‘If by research and consultation you mean a fair amount of shagging the staff and vacationing Danes, then sure, I’m sure you did,’ said an Ackerite from Frankfurt.
The acolytes stood clustered around the living son, breathing in the terminal’s stale, recirculated air and blowing it out again as one-upmanship and banter, while readying to queue for boarding, putting away into their backpacks their much-thumbed editions of his father’s books and cocking their pretentious straw hats and clutching the handles of their battered suitcases, as if their suitcases were canes or walkers – ambulatory assistive devices that just happened also to be luggage, plastered over with stickers advocating world peace and declaring affiliations with distinguished institutions of higher learning.
Already – so soon, too soon – Acker had the desire to flee, to run away, but it wouldn’t be that easy. The business class on this flight wasn’t true business class, at least not like it had been from Newark to Zurich, where he’d had that private capsule all to himself, replete with spinny screen and a seat that stretched and yawned out into a bed. Here, the business class that he’d requested from the organizers – that he’d demanded from the organizers, once his daughter had insisted he not relent and keep demanding – was just a seat up front, in the first row alongside the window where everyone boarding passed him and greeted him again and exchanged some words or a wave with him again and resented his extra legroom.
Along with the festival participants passing him, he also noted some regular tourists or people he took for regular tourists, retirees mostly, whose curiously pre-tanned faces had also been lifted and tightened in such a way that only emphasized their bafflement when they encountered these sloppy bookish creatures gibbering to one another and blocking the aisles: Aren’t we headed out on a golf and tennis and spa-massage holiday? Who are all these losers, trying to cram their book-stuffed schoolbags into the overhead bins?
Acker was seated by the window in the first row that was ostensibly business class with one empty seat next to him on the aisle and he kept watching that seat and watching the boarding passengers as they passed down the aisle and thinking to himself: please let me be seated here alone or please if it’s not my luck to be here alone then let me share this row with one of those older, surely husbandless ladies with the cleavage. He didn’t know who he was praying to and enjoyed for a moment pretending that he was praying to his father.
One of the biographers – not the author of the so-called academic biography and not the author of the so-called popular biography but the author of the so-called revisionist biography – sat down next to Acker in the empty seat, a woman who’d lambasted Acker’s father and criticized his ‘turn inward and rightward’, harangued him for his treatment of women ‘as shabby in fiction as in life’, pilloried him for his position or lack of position on the American civil rights movement, and just generally went after the man with the energy and conviction of someone who’d truly loved him and felt jilted, though it was unclear to Acker whether they’d ever actually slept together. She’s old now, Acker thought, she’s my age. ‘I always put in the request to sit either in an emergency-exit row or up front,’ the woman said, ‘because of my knee.’ Acker forced a smile and looked down at her knee. It looked normal below the stretchy jeans. Maybe a little puffy. Maybe her knee was a little swollen or she was wearing a brace. Acker didn’t want to ask her about her knee and neither did he want to talk about the biography she wrote that was being republished for his father’s centennial in a new edition, nor about any of the other subjects that the woman wanted to talk about, from the unfortunate circumstance that the biography was being republished by a worse publisher than had originally put it out (‘but these days the alternative to a bad publisher is no publisher at all’), to the sabotaging editor who wouldn’t let her incorporate any new changes or corrections (‘this time the errors aren’t on me’) and the delinquent publicity and marketing departments that had pretty much resigned themselves to the fact that the literature of Geoffrey Acker was unlikely to entice the interest of the younger generation (‘who spend all their time online, where you haven’t even digitized your father’s archives . . .’).
They were already airborne at this point – so insistent was the biographer’s patter that Acker had barely registered takeoff. He’d wanted to see Zurich from above but by the time the biographer had given him pause to look out the window, the city was already behind them. There was rain dribbling down the window and then they were up above the rain, where the air was bumpy. Acker said something about how talking on planes made him nauseous. The biographer couldn’t sit with her knee flexed for hours and Acker couldn’t talk on planes, or actually, he was explaining to her, while in any type of motion.
The biographer, abashed, tugged at her long white braid and apologized, and as Acker was assuring her there was really no need, a memory opened like a flower in his mind of this woman doing that very same apologetic braid-tugging years ago at his mother’s in New York: there had been some sort of Q&A his mother had consented to, either to advance her own agenda against her ex-husband’s reputation or merely because she herself wanted the attention, but one of the biographer’s Qs had rankled his mother who, instead of providing an A, had threatened to toss her out onto the street, and the biographer, in an attempt to wait out his mother’s rage, had said ‘sorry I’m so sorry’, and in the very same nervous anxious way had stroked and pinched and tugged at her long braid, which was black back then, not white, tugging at it like tugging at the rope that rings the bell at the church by the Midorca cemetery . . . and then what? Acker couldn’t remember the rest of that day . . . had Mom calmed down enough to let her stay?
The next time Acker turned from the window, the biographer was asleep, she was snoring, and then – despite the plane being cramping small and the flight being short and occasionally turbulent – he was also succumbing. It was the drinks, it was the pills, it was the cumulative social obligations along with the sudden realization that he’d been awake all night – his head was lolling just as the land beneath gave way to sea and his dreams turned watery too: his mother, years ago, giving him some lawyerly document to take when he went to meet his father for one of their island summers together, a document it was important that he get his father to sign and bring back, he couldn’t forget, but then he’d forgotten . . . his daughter just yesterday, which didn’t feel like just yesterday, dropping him off in manic, frigid Newark and telling him once again how guilty she felt that she couldn’t accompany him, although the truth was that she hadn’t been invited officially and he’d never invited her unofficially himself, and then her saying to him, ‘I know you didn’t ask me, but if you did ask me, I’d say you can’t go out and talk about Grandpa without admitting what an asshole he was,’ although the truth was that she’d met Acker’s father only once, ‘an asshole to Grandma, an asshole to you, just an abusive controlling narcissistic asshole you only care about,’ and here his daughter’s voice was changing into his mother’s, ‘because of the money he brings in, the royalties and licensing fees and prestige that you can’t live without,’ and here his mother’s voice was changing into his father’s, ‘because you yourself have never been able to do anything . . . nothing of your own . . . nothing original . . . you’ve just sailed your way through life like a favored parasite who –’
He was jolted awake. The plane was jolted. In a way that Acker’s dead father would never have written it, the plane was shaking. In a way that only the dead author of the universe would have written it – and gotten away with writing it, because who would have criticized – it bucked and trembled and shook. In what would later be called, by one of the festival organizers who was already on the ground in Midorca, ‘a tantrum of coincidence’, and, by the magazine journalist who’d been assigned to profile the festival who’d canceled at the last moment due to a virus, ‘an affront to the subtlety of Acker’s corpus’, it dipped and juddered and dove. The tray in front of Acker was loose and flapping and the oxygen mask that had dropped from above was flapping like a wing against his mouth as if begging him to swallow it and the biographer was twisted around in her seat and with heavy breaths as if she were snoring while awake, she was appealing to him, she was panicking, showing him blood on her jeans, blood on her blouse, blood on her head. She’d bashed her forehead on something – on the bulkhead just in front, which was smeared with blood. Acker had a pain in his gut, where he’d been thrown against his seatbelt buckle. He went to loosen the buckle, loosen the seatbelt, but it was fastened too tight, his weight was against it, and the pain remained. The plane was diving, convulsing and diving, and the overhead bins sprung open like laughter and backpacks and totes were falling out and books were falling from the bags and other bags from the back of the plane were sliding and tumbling down the aisle, along under the seats toward the front of the plane, as the plane rocked and tipped and kept tipping and rocking forward at a sharper angle and choking on its own speed, until to sit in it was to sit fully aslant with wet plastic cups and cans and bottles and loose ice and popcorn and mixed nuts and shoes and the books these passengers had both read and pretended to read and even written themselves rolling down to Acker’s row and collecting at his feet. The biographer gripped her bad knee and with her other leg stomped on whatever detritus rolled in her direction along the floor of the plane, which due to the ever-more-severely pitched angle was becoming almost a wall of the plane. Thick black smoke obscured their row’s window and the window across the way. Below them, or behind them, or wherever it was their feet could be said to be, a telephone rang, shook like the plane shook, rang. Acker couldn’t hear it ring but it was vibrating and lighting up amid the pile of books and the loafers and sneakers of wildly different sizes and for a moment he didn’t recognize that the phone was his. The biographer was howling – she was trying to tell Acker something in shrieks, while trying also to untangle her braid from her oxygen mask and hold Acker’s hand and Acker swatted the mask away and raised the armrest and grabbed the woman’s hand and held it tightly and felt the blood sucking warm and slick between them. This is it, he thought, this is the end – stuck with a bunch of helpless experts strapped into the seats of a flying lecture hall that, tipping to a pivot, now flips over and over and over itself and spirals down and down through the clouds and splinters apart in midair, the victim of a flock of large black birds that until their very last moment, when they were shredded by the engines, had been no symbol.
Artwork courtesy of Alamy