The Trouble with Bliss

The apartment’s a brown-black dark, a city dark, the outside sky caramelized by the street and building lights. Morris carefully opens the door to the back room, his father’s room, and peeks in. The TV’s still playing, dancing a bluish ghost against the walls. The sound’s off. Seymour is in his lounge chair, asleep, his head rolled to one side. “Jesus, Daddy,” Morris says, seeing the wads of tin foil resting in his lap, the Post next to two empty beer bottles on the floor. Morris picks them up, then drapes a ratty, blue blanket over his father.

  Standing over him, Morris finds that Seymour seems small and old, a wizened child in the shifting stream of the TV’s glimmer. The sight startles him, like he’s come upon something broken and discarded, something that isn’t meant to be seen. This man before him isn’t the all-powerful father he knows. The man before him is exposed and frail, mortal. The man before him can easily be killed.

  This isn’t his father. His father can never die.

  Studying him, Morris recognizes something even more disquieting; he sees himself, sees his lineage, his features, hands, and face. He’s his father’s son. Before him is himself in two decades’ time. He’s trapped by the fact.

  I am a Bliss, he says to himself as he tucks the blanket around his father. He turns off the TV. “I’m a Bliss,” he says quietly.

  Chapter 8