If what stays with us most vividly in life is what is true,
and what leaves no memory is false,
then the heat of a certain day and the murmur of idle conversation simply blow away with the wind.
No matter what philosophy we argue so fiercely over,
the dead have nothing to say, the years that have passed do not return,
and even if you tell an empty room to be quiet,
the traces he left grow no quieter.
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Jude heard his father’s voice. He was asking whether Jude had eaten. Jude answered curtly, as he always did, and was about to add that his father should stop asking about food and get on with whatever he had been going to say. When he turned his head, the living room beyond his bedroom door was empty. His father ought to be over there. Wondering if the voice had come through his headset, he reached up to his ear, but his fingers found nothing.
Jude waited, looking at the open bedroom door. Wherever his father was speaking from, he must have heard Jude’s answer. He had asked because he wanted an answer, so he must have heard it. Jude could ask where he was when he began speaking again. But what came next gave him no chance to ask. It sounded like part of a conversation they had been having only moments before.
“Once you start something, you have to see it through. If you give up halfway, there won’t be another chance.”
That again. On a weekend, with the family so rarely having time together, surely they could talk about something else. His father, always away because of job transfers or business trips, would come home only to say the same things. Jude was about to answer that he had had reasons for quitting when he wondered where his father had come home from. Yesterday people had come and bowed their heads, and his mother had stamped documents someone handed her with her seal. There were still papers they had not returned. So where had his father come home from?
“I had my reasons for quitting.”
After he answered, the room fell quiet. Normally, his father’s next words would have come the moment Jude opened his mouth. This time he had a chance to explain. Even so, he kept looking at the bedroom door. Why wouldn’t his father speak to him face to face? Was he sitting in the living room, waiting for Jude to come out? If Jude brought up work again, that seemed likely to be the end of the conversation. Instead of giving the explanation he had been about to give, he asked something else.
“Were you going to call again that day?”
He did not say which day. The day he had hung up in the morning saying he needed to wash up. The day he had heard his mother’s voice on the phone that evening. He wanted to know whether his father, too, had thought of calling again in the hours between. Whether he had ever picked up his phone to finish their conversation from that morning, even if Jude did not call first. If he had, Jude could ask what he had meant to say as well.
There was the sound of a page turning in the living room. Jude got up to hear the answer face to face. But the foot he lowered from the bed did not touch the floor. He reached down once more and found only empty air. Just as he tried to look down at his toes, his eyes opened.
His feet had slipped out from under the covers and were hanging over the end of the bed. Jude lay there looking at the ceiling, then took his phone from under his pillow. There had been no calls. The funeral had ended yesterday, and he was lying in the small bedroom at his mother’s house. The bedroom door was closed, too. Jude drew his feet back onto the bed and rested the hand holding his phone on his chest.
If he had known it was a dream, he would have asked something else first. Of all the things he could have heard again, food and work. If he had not tried to explain why he quit, might his father have said something different, too? Perhaps he had turned the page to answer Jude’s last question. Jude closed his eyes again, still holding his phone. If he remembered how far he had got, it seemed the dream might pick up there. But the darkness merely gathered before him. Neither the sounds of the living room nor his father’s voice returned.
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Not long ago, Jude had quit his job as a sound assistant at a small theater. For three months, day after day he had loaded equipment at dawn and come home late at night. Whenever he asked when he would get to do sound work himself, the answer was that he should learn to carry the equipment properly first. He knew that needed doing, too. What he had never been told was what he would learn once he got good at it, or how much longer he would have to go on. He and his father had argued about it on the last day of his father’s life as well.
His father had asked what he expected to do if he could not even put up with that. When Jude asked how long he was supposed to put up with it, his father asked in return whether he had ever seen a single thing through to the end. Jude thought he still had not had an answer to the question he had asked first. Didn’t he have to know where the end was before he could say he would try to get there? But before he could put that into words, he felt he had to explain properly why he had quit, and gave a different answer.
“You said it yourself, Dad. That I have to try things to know what suits me.”
His father went back to his first question. So had Jude tried seeing it through to the end? Even while Jude was choosing his answer, his father demanded to know what was taking him so long. If he answered without thinking, his father would say he spoke before he thought. Jude felt bringing that up would only make the call last longer, so he said he had to wash up now. He hung up before his father began speaking again.
It did not take long to wash up. He could have called back. But if he called now, they would only go over the same things again. Perhaps it would be better to wait a little and start with something else. That evening he went to a movie. He thought it would be all right to spend a couple of hours doing something else before calling his father again.
On the screen, a man and a woman were making some sort of promise, but with every line of dialogue, a noise like rainfall came through the left speaker. Only when someone spoke, of all times. Jude tried to work out what he had missed from the next line, but the noise overlapped the voice again. No one in the row ahead turned around. Could they hear it all right from there? He missed another line while looking for an empty seat to move to. By the time he had watched the two part without knowing what they had promised, there was no reason to stay.
He went out into the corridor and turned on his phone. Twelve missed calls from his mother. Just as he tried to see what time the first call had come, the screen changed. When he answered, his mother told him the name of a hospital. Jude asked if he should come now, and she told him to come. He did not ask what had happened. He would find out when he got there. He thought standing around listening to an explanation would only make him that much later. Even after he had found a taxi, he checked only the hospital’s name once more before hanging up.
In the taxi, he thought of calling his father’s number. Perhaps he could hear his voice before he arrived. He could ask what on earth was going on, as though they were picking up their conversation from that morning. But even with the contact open, he could not make the call. What if his father didn’t answer? He was worrying about not getting an answer without even trying to call. Then it occurred to him that he might miss another call from his mother. Jude left the screen on, his father’s name still showing.
The taxi drove on toward the hospital. While Jude closed the contact and opened it again, it crossed a bridge and passed the streetlights. He had thought he needed to arrive as soon as possible, yet the closer they came, the more he dreaded the moment he would have to get out. He had already given the hospital’s name, so he would arrive even if he did nothing at all. The only thing he could keep putting off was calling his father. Every time the screen dimmed, Jude turned it on again. Afraid that he would learn what his mother had not told him before he arrived, he never pressed the call button.
At the hospital, his mother said it had been a sudden heart problem. Jude remembered the voice he had heard that morning. His father had been angry with him as though nothing were wrong. Surely he had not said those things that morning because he was going to die that evening. He must have thought they could speak again later. So had Jude. He could have called after washing up, and he had meant to call when the movie ended. Neither side of their conversation had allowed for the possibility that, in the hours between, his father would become unable to answer the phone ever again.
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People came to the mourning room saying they had known his father in one way or another. One said they still had not received something he had promised them. One by one, promises Jude had known nothing about came to light. To think there was so much left for a man who could no longer keep any promise. Whenever he heard about one, his first thought was where he should write it down. He felt he would have to ask his father to tell which ones could be canceled and which someone else would have to carry on with.
Someone gripped Jude’s shoulder and told him he had to take care of the family now. When he bowed his head, the hand fell away. When someone else came, he heard the same thing and bowed again. His mother was signing her name on the papers spread before her. When Jude offered to help, she asked him to find her seal first. At least it was a request for which he knew where to start looking. Jude brought her the seal, then went back to stand near the entrance.
Maeve arrived after three in the afternoon. The sleeves of her work clothes showed a little beneath her black coat. After she came out from offering incense, she stood with her hands together. At her workbench she was always holding a cable or a tool, so the sight of her standing empty-handed felt unfamiliar. Jude waited to hear what she would say. Maeve did not speak at once, either. After standing there a moment, she asked if he had had any sleep.
“What about you? Have you had any sleep?”
Maeve only nodded when Jude returned the question. She did not say she thought she knew how he felt. If he had heard that, he might have asked how she could know. With her saying nothing, though, he found he did not know what to say himself. A black stain remained on the cuff of her sleeve. She seemed to have come straight from work. Perhaps if he asked what she had been repairing before she came here, they could talk as they usually did.
Maeve repaired amplifiers and speakers. When a theater or a small performance venue called to say there was no sound, she would collect the equipment; if the fault required a visit, she went there with her tool bag. Jude had first met her while moving a box of cables. Told that something was plugged into the wrong place, he had started to pull out every cable. She stopped him, saying he would make a mess of the ones connected properly, too. After that, he asked Maeve before unplugging anything. When she did not know, she said she did not know. He had wondered whether they should trust someone so ready to admit her own ignorance, but the people at the theater kept entrusting their equipment to her and putting the things she repaired back into use.
“Call me if you need anything. Just ask me first whether it’s something I can do.”
“My father called in the morning.”
The answer came before Maeve had finished speaking. When she waited, Jude began telling her about that morning’s call. They had talked about work, he said, and his father had told him to stick with at least one thing to the end. Maeve had not asked what they had talked about, but now that he had begun, he felt he had to explain what they had said to each other in that last call. He told her he had hung up first, saying he needed to wash up. If he told the day’s events in order, Maeve would see where he could have called once more. That did not mean he could ask her whether he should have called then.
“He asked if I was eating properly, too.”
Once he had said that, there was nothing more to tell. His father’s words had not been so brief. During the call, Jude had had plenty to answer, and plenty he had not wanted to hear. But passed on to Maeve, it was about food and work. Questions one could hear anywhere. Jude started to add a few more words, then stopped. He was trying to explain how large a space his father’s absence had left, but his father’s words alone could not convey all of it.
“I see,” Maeve said. When Jude said nothing more, she asked whether she should get them something to drink. They moved to one side of the mourning room. Maeve put hot water and instant coffee mix into a paper cup, then took a white capsule from her pocket. When she opened it and mixed the powder into the cup, Jude asked what she was putting in.
“Caffeine. One coffee isn’t enough to wake me up.”
Maeve stirred the coffee and asked whether he wanted to try a little. It wasn’t very bitter, she added. Jude took the cup she held out and had a sip. It was nothing but bitter. His hand tightened around the hot cup, crumpling its side a little. Jude loosened his fingers and kept holding it. Maeve did not press him to say how it tasted.
Jude wondered whether there was anything else to say about his father’s last call. He had been angry that morning, and he could have called again but had not. If he said that much, it seemed their entire conversation would be remembered that way. They had spent many days together before the last one, too. Just because he could not think what to bring up first right now did not mean those times had disappeared as well. Jude spoke quietly.
“Still, you know, I think my father had a good life.”
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