In another box, I found an ancient top-loading VCR. I figured out how to hook it up to the small TV in my bedroom and started watching his old videotapes, one after the other, in whatever order I pulled them out of the box. Most of them contained old science fiction movies and TV shows, along with a lot of science programs taped off of PBS.
There were boxes filled with my father’s old clothes, too. Everything had been way too big on me, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying on every last stitch he’d owned, breathing in the smell as I stared at myself in the dusty attic mirror.
I got really excited when I found a box of old cards and letters among his things, along with a shoebox overflowing with carefully folded love notes my mother had passed him during their classroom courtship. I shamelessly read through them all, gulping down new details about the man who had sired me.
The last box I’d looked through had been the one that contained all of my father’s old role-playing game materials. It was filled with rulebooks, bags of polyhedral dice, character sheets, and a large stack of his old campaign notebooks, each one outlining the minutiae of some fictional reality intended to serve as the setting for one of his role-playing games—and each one providing a small glimpse into my father’s famously overactive imagination.
But one of those notebooks had been different from the others. It had a blue cover, and my father had carefully block-printed a single cryptic word in the center of its worn cover: pha?ton.
The yellowing pages within contained a strange list of dates and names, followed by what appeared to be a series of fragmented journal entries, which outlined the details of a global conspiracy my father believed he’d uncovered—a top-secret project involving all four branches of the US military, which he claimed were working in collusion with the entertainment and videogame industries, as well as select members of the United Nations.
At first, I tried to convince myself I was reading an outline for some role-playing game scenario my father had concocted, or notes for some short story he’d never gotten around to writing. But the further I read, the more disturbed I got. It wasn’t written like a piece of fiction. It was more like a long, rambling letter written by a highly delusional mental patient—one who happened to have contributed half of my DNA.
The journal had helped shatter the idealized image I’d constructed of my young father. That was one reason I’d vowed never to look at it again.
But now, the same thing that had happened to him was happening to me. Videogames were infecting my reality too. Had my father also experienced hallucinations? Was he—was I—schizophrenic? I had to know what he’d been thinking, had to dive back into his delusions and learn how they might be linked to my own.
When I finally worked up the courage to open the attic door and step inside, I spotted the boxes right away. I’d restacked them in the dusty corner where I’d first found them. They were unlabeled, so it took me a few minutes of shuffling them around before I found the one filled with my father’s old role-playing games.
I put it down on the floor and began to dig through it, pulling out rule books and supplements for games with names like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, GURPs, Champions, Star Frontiers, and Spacemaster. Beneath those was a stack of about a dozen of my father’s old campaign notebooks. The notebook I was looking for was at the very bottom—where I’d hidden it from view over eight years earlier. I pulled it out and held it in my hands and looked at it. It was a battered blue three-subject notebook with 120 college-ruled pages. I brushed my fingertips over the name my father had written on the cover—a name that had haunted me ever since I’d first looked it up: pha?ton.
In Greek mythology, Pha?ton, aka Phaethon, is an idiot kid who guilt trips his dad, the god Helios, into letting him take his sun chariot for a joy ride. Pha?ton doesn’t even have his learner’s permit, so he promptly loses control of the sun, and Zeus has to smite him with a thunderbolt to prevent him from scorching the Earth.
I sat down cross-legged and placed the notebook on my lap, then examined its cover a bit more closely. In the bottom right corner, very small, my father had also printed Property of Xavier Lightman, followed by his home address at the time.
Seeing that address triggered another flood of memories, because it was the same tiny house on Oak Park Avenue where my Grammy and Grampy Lightman had lived. The same house where I used to visit them almost every weekend when I was growing up. I would sit on their ancient sofa, eat homemade peanut butter cookies, and listen raptly as they told stories in tandem about their lost son, my lost father. And even though these stories they told about their only child were always laced with an undercurrent of sadness and loss, I still kept coming back to hear them again and again—until they both passed away, too, within a year of each other. Since then, my mother had been forced to bear the terrible burden of being my main living link to my father.