After the essay appeared in The Rumpus, my father shunned me. Publicly, he claimed that he’d never owned a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He refused to take my calls but he answered emails about the essay, answered at length in systematic point-by-point denials of each and every one of my assertions. Through back channels I heard that the editors of The Rumpus were embroiled in debate about whether to publish his rebuttal.

 

*      *      *

 

It was a desperate act, an act of desperation and an exercise in futility. I had the binoculars in my possession and I had the paper trail that traced them back to my father. Furthermore, I had the spectrophotometer. The spectrophotometer was a functional and not especially primitive instrument that I’d built from scratch, more or less, when I was thirteen. It outperformed the low-end spectrophotometers in the catalogs I perused when I first began my planning. From the first stages of my planning I was extremely competitive about the spectrophotometer. Anyone can assemble their own spectrophotometer or even linear accelerator. I was quite sure that I could design and build a spectrophotometer that would kick the butt of the basic run-of-the-mill color lab spectrophotometer, kick its butt or leave it in the dust, whichever was more humiliating to the victim.

 

*      *      *

 

So similar, it seemed to me, to the enigmatic phone calls of that exact year, the year I was planning and then building the spectrophotometer. At dinner—always at dinner—my father’s phone would ring; either I would grab for it or my brother would, and the voice on the other end would ask for my father. Either I or my brother would ask who was calling. The party on the other line, not in a joking tone, said to tell my father that it was Mr. X. We handed the phone to my father and my father got tough with Mr. X. Dug in his heels, refused to budge, whichever is tougher. After the first call, when we asked him what it was all about, he answered, not in a joking tone, platform tennis.

 

*      *      *

 

I was the victim, that was the theme of the essay for The Rumpus. I was the accidental victim of a concatenation of phenomena that included my fascination with optics and my father’s extravagances which were on the scale of, against the background of our actual financial circumstances, the Titanic. No way my father could possibly afford to drag us out of school early each Christmas vacation and put us up for a week in Lomas de Chapultepec. Our budget would have sagged under the weight of those hefty Zeiss binoculars from the high end of the line. As a consequence, an incidental and unintended consequence, I had suffered misfortune and undergone lasting trauma. The essay for The Rumpus explored how I was dealing with the trauma now and how it had affected the people who came into my life and how some of them had forgiven me and some had not and some were now dealing with their own misfortune and suffering.

 

*      *      *

 

Consider that had it not been for the binoculars, my life likely would have taken a direction more like my brother’s. We wore matching sweaters and sat side by side at a wholesome distance from the carnage, the unfolding drama of brutality and bloodshed. I monopolized the binoculars. I explained in The Rumpus how I wasn’t a shy child but neither was I interested in bullying, bathtubs full of sham blood. I explained how for my brother, the personages at the center of the action were miniaturized, were merely figurines. For me it was different. I was entranced by the phenomenon of magnification. My interest in magnification was innocent and wholesome. But the result of that fascination was that the carnage filled my field of view. Think of the difference between a nondescript small insect and that same insect seen photographed through a powerful microscope, the grotesqueness of the features of its face, its face, the haunting detail.

 

*      *      *

 

In an early version of the essay for The Rumpus, I’d drawn a parallel between my situation and the plight of combat veterans who are often stereotyped through the assumption that they suffer from PTSD. I edited out the parallel, but not because I believed it overstated the extent of my ordeal or its potential scarring. I had been very young and impressionable. It was when I’d only just started school that our father began to drag us out of school.

 

*      *      *

 

I didn’t actually have the spectrophotometer, not in my possession. A couple of years ago I hit bottom and sold it to an acquaintance who worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative. A bargain for the pharmaceutical sales representative and a few dollars in my pocket, a win-win. As I considered what kinds of proof I would offer against my father’s outrageous claims, I thought I might ask the rep to provide the invoice to the editors of The Rumpus. I went looking online for the rep and discovered that he’d recently been disgraced in a sting operation, answered a Craigslist ad and offered to pay for sex with samples of oxycodone, plus he was carrying way beyond the legal limit of weed in the glove compartment of his company-provided Lexus.

 

*      *      *

 

Then I decided I’d go see my father and make a documentary about it. I had some money left over from a color management patent I sold after I came back from hitting bottom. The documentary would be post-Rumpus, would move on from the issues of healing and forgiveness and formative trauma. I would film my father as he went about his crusade to prevent the construction of a high-rise next door to his condo that would partially obstruct his view. First I would need to talk my father into starting over. That was how the documentary would open, with me kicking in his door. I had enough money left over that I could easily afford to shoot myself kicking in the door.

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Fortunato Salazar's fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, New World Writing, Wigleaf, SmokeLong, Sleepingfish and elsewhere.