So in I went.
When I unlocked the front door of our house and stepped into the living room, Muffit, our ancient beagle, glanced up at me sleepily from where he was stretched out on the rug. A few years earlier he would have been waiting for me just inside the door, yapping like a madman. But the poor guy had now grown so old and deaf that my arrival barely woke him. Muffit rolled onto his back, and I gave his tummy a few quick rubs before heading upstairs. The old dog watched me go, but didn’t follow.
When I finally reached the attic door, I just stood there at the top of the stairs, with one hand on the doorknob. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t go in. Not right away.
First I needed a moment to prepare myself.
His name was Xavier Ulysses Lightman, and he died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still just a baby at the time, so I didn’t remember him. Growing up, I’d always told myself that was lucky. Because you can’t miss someone you don’t even remember.
But the truth was, I did miss him. And I’d attempted to fill the void created by his absence with data, by absorbing every scrap of information about him that I could. Sometimes, it felt like I was trying to earn the right to miss him with the same intensity my mom and his parents had always seemed to.
When I was around ten years old, I entered what I thought of now as my “Garp phase.” That was when my lifelong curiosity about my late father gradually blossomed into a full-blown obsession.
Up until that point, I’d made do with a vague, idealized image of my young father that had gradually formed in my mind over the years. But in actuality, I really only knew four basic facts about him—the same four things I’d heard over and over again throughout my childhood, mostly from my grandparents:
1. I looked just like him when he was (insert my current age).
2. He had loved me and my mother very much.
3. He died in an on-the-job accident at the local wastewater treatment plant.
4. The accident supposedly wasn’t his fault
But once my age reached double digits, these vague details were no longer sufficient to satisfy my growing curiosity about him. So, naturally, I began to barrage his widow with questions. Daily. Incessantly. At the time, I was too young and clueless to realize how painful it was for my mother to be endlessly interrogated about her dead husband by his ten-year-old clone. No, my self-involved ass couldn’t seem to connect those glowing neon dots, so I kept right on asking questions, and my mother, trooper that she was, answered them to the best of her ability, for as long as she could.
Then, one day, she handed me a small brass key and told me about the boxes up in our attic.
Until then, I’d always assumed that my mother had donated all of my dad’s stuff to charity after he died, because that seemed like the first thing a young, widowed single mother who was trying to start her life over would do. But that summer day, my mother explained that this was not the case. Instead, she had packed everything he’d owned into cardboard boxes, and when we moved into our current house a few months later—purchased with the payout from the accident settlement—she’d stored all of them up in our attic. She had done this for me, she said, so that when I grew up and wanted to know more about my father, those boxes would be up there waiting for me.
When I finally got the door unlocked and burst into the attic, they were really there—a dozen pristine cardboard moving boxes stacked neatly in a corner beneath the sloping rafters, illuminated by a bright shaft of sunlight. For a long time all I could do was stand there frozen, staring at this tower of time capsules waiting for me to unlock their secrets.
I’d spent the rest of the summer up in that attic, sorting through it all, like an archaeologist unearthing relics in an ancient tomb. It took some time. For a guy who had only made it to the age of nineteen, my dad had managed to amass an awful lot of stuff.
About a third of the boxes were filled with my father’s collection of old videogames—which was actually more of a hoard than a collection. He’d owned five different videogame consoles, along with hundreds of games for each of them. I found the real stockpile, however, on his old PC, which contained thousands of classic arcade and console videogame emulators and ROM files—more games than one person could have possibly played in a single lifetime. My father appeared to have given it a shot, though.