My mother calls to tell me my father goes missing for hours every morning. She says, “He wakes up at approximately 5:00 a.m. each day, with no alarm clock, and walks out the door by 5:30. I am worried about him, Michael.”

I stand at my kitchen counter, rub my eyes, and fiddle with the cord, stretching it away from the receiver. The sunset rims the edges of my blinds, blushes the walls. I imagine my father stepping through my parents’ door and evaporating, leaving dust and the smell of his damp wool coat in the entryway. Tomorrow, I’m driving to New York to visit him and my mother. In a week, Columbia University will hold a ceremony to honor them and their work over the past twenty-five years.

My mother hasn’t used my American name in months, and she has never said to me that she’s concerned about my father. Whenever I ask her about him, she tells me he’s “good” and then gives me an update on their projects.

I say, “Are you sure he isn’t at the lab?” Throughout my childhood, my father often slept in his office, including on the weekends, while my mother came home to make dinner for me. I used to picture my father pulling his coat around him and closing his eyes as his pipettes, chemical bottles, test tubes, boxes of dry ice, and microscopes stood sentinel around him.

“I am sure. I also thought he was going to the laboratory. I did not think about it much at first. The first week this happened, I only noticed the difference because your father does not like to wake this early. I asked him why he had made this change to his schedule to make conversation. Your father became very angry and said he was going to the laboratory, and that a good wife should trust her husband, and such and so forth.”

She’s speaking meticulously, as if she’s talking to an acquaintance. As if she fears I won’t understand her if every sentence isn’t grammatically correct and every word isn’t comprehensible. As if I’m not soothed by a Hungarian accent, which always sounded to me like water against stone. Cool, long vowels striking on consonants. The syllables trickling unpredictably.

My mother continues, “And so this is when I began to be suspecting. Because your father, he is not the type to speak to me this way. And also if he was going to the lab there would be no reason to be angry when he answered my question. So for the next two weeks, directly after he left, I went to the laboratory, and he was not there. He did not arrive until mid-morning. Sometimes this was at the 8:00 hour, sometimes 9:00. When I asked him about this, he said he was at the laboratory, I just did not see him. When I said this was not possible, he said he was also at Columbia meeting with colleagues, and such and so forth, and was very angry and shouting again. And so now you see why I am suspecting. Our lab is not big enough for one to not be able to find another. He also knows I do not care if he is meeting with colleagues, so why would he not tell me this? And also this does not explain the anger.”

Her description of my father does seem odd. On the rare times I’ve seen him angry, he doesn’t berate or shout. Instead he becomes quieter, retreating to the laboratory for days. I ask my mother, “How long have these morning disappearances been happening?”

My mother hesitates. I imagine her standing at her kitchen counter too, adjusting her glasses. A bit hunched, a bit carved by time. “Nine weeks and two days.”

“Nine weeks? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I did not want you to come to New York without warning. If you did this, your father could be suspecting or this could cause a disruption to his routine. But this week you have a scheduled trip to New York. So I thought this would be a sufficient time to tell you. When you are here with us, I would like you to follow him.”

I imagine myself trailing my father. My head low, a hood covering my face. “What?”

“Your father is a fast walker. I am not. You can follow without him noticing. I cannot.”

I think of my mother in her kitchen again. Soon, she’ll walk towards the fridge, surrounded by columns of canned beans and fruit preservatives and other nonperishables in case of a food shortage, and she’ll take from the freezer the same expired bag of frozen peas she’s used to ice her knees since my childhood. Although I don’t know how, she damaged her knee during the Holocaust. She accepts the muscle balms and braces I buy for her, but she won’t get any of her own. She refuses to carry a cane and to do physical therapy. She claims that because her legs don’t interfere with her scientific research, her injury is irrelevant. I say, “I know.”

“I would not ask this of you if I did not think it was important, or if I could do this myself.”

“I know. I’m glad you told me. I want to help. Just let me think about this for a moment.”

Right now, my father is—most likely—in his office, arching over his desk, tapping the wood as if his fingers form the levers to a perpetual motion machine, considering new ways to separate and combine molecules, ecstatically but silently fiddling with them in the same way a child plays with blocks. He almost never goes anywhere outside Columbia, and he never goes anywhere else without my mother. He’ll turn seventy-two this year. Could he, like my mother, see an illness as “irrelevant” to his family? I say, “The only explanation I can think of is that he’s sick and getting treatment. He probably is at Columbia. He’s just not talking to his colleagues.”

“This is a possibility.”

A possibility: she’s treating the situation as if it’s an experiment, comforting herself. Still, there are consequences around involving me that she isn’t considering. “Mom, if he’s sick and hasn’t told you yet, I want to respect his privacy. I don’t think it’d be right of me to—”

“I understand this. If he is at Columbia getting treatment, I do not need to know which department he is going to. All I want is to make sure that he is getting medical attention. There is another possibility you have not considered, and I think this other possibility is more plausible. Your father might think he is at the laboratory or with colleagues, when actually he is not. I could ask him where he is going many times, and he could believe each time he is telling the truth. It is possible he is going somewhere else and not remembering it. This would be a symptom of dementia. It would also be an explanation for the sudden anger. This can be another symptom. Dementia is in your father’s family. Both his parents had signs of this before the deportations.”

I can’t remember the last time either of my parents told me information about the war or before it. She must have planned this call on a night when she was certain my father had a work commitment and was coming home even later than usual, just like my father would’ve called me at midnight from the laboratory if the situation was reversed. I say, “I wish you told me about the disappearing sooner. I wish I could’ve come sooner.”

“You do not wish this. We do not want to risk a disruption in his routine, because it is the routine we want to be observing. You will wait, and you will follow him, and then we will have the answers.” She hangs up.

*

The next day, I drive to New York from Philadelphia. I try to listen to the news about Reagan’s latest antics, but I keep flipping the radio off. All politicians are crooks, anyway, according to my parents. They aren’t registered to vote.

If my father’s sick, I’ll transfer to New York, regardless of what my parents say. My mother will be conflicted about how much time to take off work, as I’m sure my father would want her to continue their projects, so they’ll need more help at home.

Ten years ago, I left New York for college, and I haven’t lived in the city since. Now, whenever I visit, the city’s metronome ticks against my skin. I can’t ignore it as I must’ve when I was little. If I felt this interference as a child, it would’ve unnerved me in a way the Son of Sam and the blackouts failed to. Time pushes against me like a physical force, a gust of wind. The flashing “WALK” signs all leer at me, insinuating I need to go faster, and I’m not doing enough.

The apartment where I spent my childhood and my parents still live is in an inconspicuous complex, owned by the university. My mother waits just inside the door and embraces me. “Mihaly,” she says. It’s her nickname for me—the Hungarian version of Michael. Her single concession: my parents did not want me learning Hungarian, which they deride as an archaic language, the tongue of nine million who refused to look beyond the borders of their land-locked country, slapped in Europe’s center like a piece of meat on a butcher’s slab. I used to know a couple Hungarian phrases despite my parents not teaching me, but the words have eroded from my memory over the years. Only “Mihaly” endures, worn deeper into the stone.

My father stands farther into the apartment. He says, “It is very good to see you, Michael.” Physically, he looks unchanged. Slight and tall. Excellent posture. I try to briefly stare at his eyes to see if I can detect a difference in his expression. But he has the same dark irises, the same oval face. Here are his protruding cheekbones. Here’s his diminutive mouth and eyelash-shaped smile. Though, of course, sometimes a disease doesn’t manifest itself physically, especially in its early stages. As we hug, I grasp him more gently than I usually would.

My father motions to the table. I follow. My mother goes to the kitchen. The whirl of the coffee machine is her blessing for the conversation to begin. My father says, “So, you are well?”

“Yes, I’m good. Things at the station have been really—”

“You are eating enough?”

“Yes.”

“You are getting enough rest?”

“Yes.”

“You understand you must get eight hours of sleep or more. Only this is enough rest.”

“Yes.”

Like his appearance, his questions are normal. My parents study muscular degenerative diseases. My father always asks about my physical health first.

I say, “How’s everything at the lab? Are you excited for the ceremony?”

My father waves away my question like he’s swatting a fly. “Everything is very good, Michael. You are hydrating yourself?”

This deflection is ordinary too. My mother will tell me about her research and her life in New York, but my father ignores questions about himself. I say, “Yes.”

“And you are taking vitamins?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

My mother enters holding a tray of coffee and French pastries. As she squeezes past my father, her elbow knocks over the menorah on the sideboard behind the table. I stand up to help her. She motions for me to sit, although she flinches as she bends her knees. The menorah is the only piece of Judaica in the house and was a gift years ago from a well-intentioned but misinformed graduate student. My parents and I don’t celebrate Hanukkah or any Jewish holiday. They hang their keys and ID cards on the menorah’s candle holders.

My mother places the tray before us and sits next to my father, another cue to proceed. She re-arranges the spoons by our cups. She hasn’t looked at me since we hugged.

My father says, “And you are well? And your house, you have fixed the roof?”

The roof has been repaired for months, but it isn’t alarming he doesn’t remember or doesn’t know. While my mother and I talk once a week, my father and I talk less than once a month. I say, “Yes, the roof’s good. And how are you, Dad?”

“And you are…” He looks up. I follow his gaze to the peeling ceiling, then I examine him as he persists in staring. When my father focuses, his face contracts, as if his jaw and cheek muscles are eager to exert themselves and contribute to his mind’s effort. Tonight, his muscles appear loose, thoroughly unburdened. “And you are hydrating enough?”

He doesn’t repeat questions in his experiments or conversations. Too inefficient. I turn to my mother, who is turned to my father. I answer to both of them, “Yes.”

My father keeps looking at the ceiling. If I didn’t know him, I’d say he looked like he was praying. A tilted head, shoulders turned crescent-shaped, pupils smudged like charcoal as he sees something other than paint or wood, some unknowable sky.

My mother puts her hand on my father’s forearm and says, “Tamas?”

He lowers his head and says, “It is all right, Judith. And how is your television job?”

Now, perhaps, we’ve returned to the script, as my father often asks about my job last. But his gesture still lingers in the room like a scent, the smell of latex on his hands when he embraces me. “I’m a meteorologist, Dad.”

“Right. You look at the weather.” He says this as if reminding himself of what a meteorologist does, like a student reciting out loud to prepare for a test. “And you are learning? You are helping people?”

On the wall is a framed biology award I won in high school. The paper remains the only decoration in my parents’ apartment.

I’m learning, Dad. We got a new radar in several months ago, and it’s phenomenal. Instead of showing six layers of precipitation it shows fourteen, and that allows us to watch the storm moving more precisely. Looking at the gradations of greens, yellows, and blues reminds me of bacteria blooming in petri dishes. And every day I draw my own charts instead of relying on the NWS forecast and the models churning out possibilities like centrifuges, because there are atmospheric layers we know are there but we can’t observe, even if we sent up a thousand weather balloons into the stratosphere, and so we have to make hypotheses, just like you. Another question, another investigation, questions engendering questions, as inexorable as a chain reaction, muscle maneuvering bone, myosin striking actin. And I’m helping people, Dad, just as you and Mom instructed I should in whatever profession I chose. My colleagues watch when I talk and jot down forecast notes as opposed to leaning back in their chairs to bask in the key lights. The kids at my afternoon school program get as quiet as a station recording when I speak, and they pack their hand-made charts in their bags instead of leaving the lesson on their desks. Often I help in a miniscule way, but sometimes that can make the difference, not having to shiver in a cold office all day because you wore the wrong shoes and now your socks are soaked.

I say, “It’s good.”

“Good. We love you very much, Michael.” My father gets up. My mother follows him.

*

Hours later, I sit on my childhood bed. The toy stegosaurus my mother made for me out of test tubes and wire when I graduated from elementary school sits on my desk. In the closet, I hang the suit I brought for the ceremony next to my toddler snow jacket.

Columbia’s idea to honor my parents likely came from an article they co-wrote six years ago, when I was in my early twenties, for Columbia’s magazine about their “journey to the university.” My parents didn’t mention the article to me. Instead, I learned about it from one of their colleagues who referenced it while I was visiting the lab and waiting for them to finish the day’s experiments. Before I could doubt myself, I asked the colleague for the magazine, and I learned the architecture of my parents’ pre-American lives: where they were raised, when they were deported, which camps they were sent to, and that their parents hadn’t survived.

My parents also wrote short anecdotes about their time in Hungary. My mother was the best in her year at mathematics until she was expelled, and my father was a delivery boy although his parents were wealthy, because they wanted him to learn “the value of hard work and industry.” My mother loved to swim, and before the war my father wanted to be a concert pianist. Both were raised religious. To my surprise, my father wrote more than my mother. His mother was a librarian, and his father was the owner of the town’s largest grocery store.

My parents had never spoken about the war publicly. Nor had they discussed their pasts with their colleagues, who, I’ve concluded from my own conversations with their collaborators, are as uninformed about their history as I am.

I bought my mother a membership to a gym with a pool, and, remembering how she read biographies of Salk and Pasteur, an anthology on Fields Medal winners. I remembered how my father, during our walk home after our bimonthly trips to The Museum of Natural History, would often suggest detouring through Central Park’s Great Lawn, where the sounds of saxophonists and violinists wafted through the air. I bought my father three tickets to the symphony. Then I offered my gifts and mentioned the article to them.

My mother scrutinized the binding and avoided my gaze. “Mihaly,” she said. “This is very expensive. I do not understand why you did not borrow this from the library.”

But my father looked at me and said, “You have disrespected us by reading this. We did not write this so you would read it. We are not interested in your presents and discussion.”

I responded, “Well…I wanted to learn about you.”

“And you did not think to ask our permission to read it?”

How to explain I’d acted rashly precisely because I knew this thought would stop me? I was silent.

“These were very strange choices, Michael, very disappointing and disrespectful.”

“Then why did you write the article?”

“Things of this nature increase funding. You would not understand. This is the end of our conversation about this.”

Late that evening, my mother came into my room and sat on my bed. She placed the back of her palm against my cheek, then my forehead, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was checking for a fever, some residue of madness. She said, “Your father is not so upset now. He remembered his chairman loves the symphony. This will be an excellent gift.”

I held my mother’s hand. “Mom. Why did you write the article?”

My mother curled forward, as though she’d just noticed an asymmetrical birthmark on my face. This gesture couldn’t have been good for her spine. She rubbed her thumb against my temple. “Mihaly, your father has told you this already. Our dean asked us about the war and he said this would be a very good way to get interest in the lab.” She kissed my hand. “It was not a pleasant kind of a thing, writing this article.”

That night, as was often the case, one of my parents woke up from a dream screaming. I knew, even from a young age, that I was not to enter the bedroom. Even when I heard my name being called, even after the yells subsided.

Don’t enter the room. Don’t wait to go back to bed. Remove my fingertips from the hallway paint so as to not feel the reverberations from the shouts. Don’t ask about Hungary or what happened to them. I don’t remember when they told me they were survivors or what they’d said to explain this to me. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know not to ask. And I didn’t, and I didn’t learn Hungarian, or read about the country, or take one class about the war, for the same reason I stood outside their bedroom instead of going inside.

But the article had given me hope that, at some point, my parents might share something with me. That, even if they never told me one story about their Hungarian lives, even as they will inevitably make only cursory references to themselves in their speeches at this weekend’s ceremony and at all the other tributes to them that I’m invited to, I might make chicken paprikash with my mother or listen to Franz Liszt with my father. It hadn’t occurred to me that if my father has dementia, I’ll lose even the illusion of this possibility.

*

The next morning, I wake up at 5:00. Someone shuffles around in the kitchen. I crack my bedroom door open. My father sits at the table, eating a bowl of cereal. I get dressed, then I wait in my bedroom until I hear the front door shut. I lean against the front door until I hear the ping of the elevator and then run down the hallway to the stairs.

I arrive outside. My plan to be about a minute behind my father has worked. He’s three quarters of the way down our block: far enough so he won’t notice me, but near enough so I can see him. I deliberately walk slower than usual and leave one crosswalk between us. My father heads north: the direction of Columbia. He probably has been receiving treatment at Columbia during these morning visits. Sitting in a hard-backed chair with an IV in his already slender arm.

But as my mother said, at least then we know he’s getting medical help. And perhaps there’s another explanation for why he’s going to Columbia. Perhaps he’s sitting and thinking in one of Columbia’s indoor gardens, because he once had a breakthrough about a project there, and now he’s made going to the garden part of his routine. Perhaps he feels embarrassed by this superstition, and that’s why he hasn’t told my mother.

My father turns west. Columbia is east.

Perhaps he’s walking by the river path. Perhaps his doctor told him he needed more exercise. This reason doesn’t justify his secrecy, but there could be an explanation.

My father is now on Broadway. Instead of continuing to head west, he turns with a flock of commuters, down into the subway.

My parents don’t take the subway. They call it unsanitary, slow, and unreliable. On the few occasions they can’t walk to their destination, they get cabs. When my father and I made our bimonthly pilgrimages to The Museum of Natural History, we rode in a cab downtown as a treat. I relished the thick smell of leather and the peculiar sight of my father anywhere besides the laboratory or home, as if I was watching a tropical bird flying through snow. He’d only need to use the subway if he’s heading to one of the other boroughs.

I run. The station is engorged with huddled masses and sweat. I’m halfway to the front of the turnstile line before I realize I don’t have tokens. There’s a policeman next to the turnstile, so I can’t go through without them. I turn to the people next to me and ask for tokens, babbling, trying to explain, but they shake their heads and turn away. I stand in the lengthy token line and fumble with my wallet. It’s now been about five minutes since my father went in.

I slam through the turnstile. I scrutinize faces on the platforms, searching for my father’s slackened gaze, but I can’t find him. At this hour, the trains come often. He’s gone.

I walk to the river path. A hot, dense breeze shoves past me and rustles the water. After seeing my father behave so contradictorily, I can still understand my mother’s hypothesis about dementia. On the other hand, taking the subway requires planning. Perhaps some days he’s more lucid than others? Perhaps some days he takes the subway and some days he doesn’t? On the days he does, does he have a destination in mind?

He moved at a fast pace today, as he normally does. He never abruptly stopped or staggered. Most likely, he had a token in his pocket, and he knew where he was going.

If he’s physically sick, why wouldn’t he get treated at Columbia, where his care would be subsidized? It’s possible he fears a rumor spreading about him, but if he’s going so early, he wouldn’t be spotted by colleagues.

Or my father is neither physically nor mentally ill. What if science in itself is the explanation? What if my father has been meeting with a colleague but at another university or research center? What if a lab with better funding is trying to lure my father away, but there’s no position for my mother?

My mother and I had, alone, eaten dinner together each evening, gotten sunburned at the Statue of Liberty, walked fourteen blocks to the bakery that made baklava on Fridays, wandered like lost lambs through Neue Gallerie and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, swam at Rockaway Beach, and even, once, traveled to Yankee Stadium, where she wore earplugs and gave me a lesson on the physics of home runs. Through it all, I’d tell her about school, and she’d tell me about the lab. In the beginning of their careers, my parents worked on their own projects, but over the years they combined initiatives, which delighted her. She talked about how by doubling perspectives on experiments, they accomplished more.

I return to the apartment and stop outside the door. When I deliver troubling forecasts, I don’t ignore the gravity of the situation. I don’t smile. I’m honest. And yet, as I speak, I imagine the conditions dissipating. The ocean smooth. I imagine my hope traveling out in my breath like a slipstream, and when my viewers speak with me after a storm, they tell me that while listening to me, they weren’t afraid. I envision my father exercising in a clean, vast gym downtown, supervised by a physical therapist and working with a specialized piece of equipment that can’t be found at Columbia.

My mother is eating breakfast when I enter. I sit down beside her and tell her what I saw. After I finish, she says, “We do not take the subway. This is irrational behavior. Does he always take the subway? You must find this out tomorrow.”

The image of the downtown gym seeps out of my mind. I’d like to place my head on her shoulder. Instead I press a napkin on my neck. It’s warmer at home than outside. My parents prepare for the cold year-round, tying sweaters to their waists in 101 degree heat. “Yes,” I say. “Dementia is a possibility. But I think he did plan to take the subway. I think he always takes it.”

My mother looks up from her cereal. “What do you mean by saying this? You did not see your father go into the station. Someone could have taken pity on a man who looked very confused and given him a token.”

Once, I asked my mother what made an experiment good. She said the best experiments are when you have twenty tests on a gel and eighteen of them are designed as controls. Each variable accounted for. “I want to make sure you’re prepared for all the possibilities.”

My mother sighs. “Mihaly, what is your meaning?”

Outside the window, the sky is a smug blue. “Have you…thought about what you might do if there’s nothing’s wrong with his health, and he’s lying to you?”

“Of course I have considered this. How could I not have considered this? There are some things that a parent should not have to discuss with a child.” She stands up slowly, and I can tell it pains her this gesture can’t be as quick and definitive as her words. “It is not good I have even asked this of you.”

I stand too. “It’ll be all ri—”

My mother shakes her head. “There is no need for false sayings. We are close by the answer now. I want to know if he is in danger. This is by far the most important thing. Now we cannot discuss this more at the moment. I have to get ready for work.”

*

I wake up the next day at 4:00. Unable to sleep, I rub my subway tokens like a rabbit’s foot and listen to my father eat. The elevator pings. I run down the stairs. My father walks a half block ahead. He enters the subway. He must know where he’s going.

I follow his hat and sloped back through the subway’s bowels. He stops by the downtown IND platform. I stand about twenty feet behind him and progressively sidle closer. The train arrives. I keep a handful of people between us and get on the same car he does. My father brings his shoulders close to his chest and tucks his head down. He looks like a pigeon in the rain, trying to keep warm. At Columbus Circle, my father raises his head. I move nearer to a door. He exits at Times Square, shuffling past me as he follows the commuters. We stop by the Queens-bound IRT platform. Correct again: he’s going to another borough. Once we enter the second train, my father adopts the same position he did on the first.

The train leaves Manhattan and climbs above ground. We pass lawns the size of parking spaces, advertisements for notaries. Trees strangled in too-small plots, national flags slapping fire escapes. Eventually, the commuter crowd thins, but my father stays, grasping the railing, his posture unchanged. At this point, the awnings are in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. We must be in Flushing, near the end of the line. At the second to last stop, my father exits.

He walks, as usual, briskly. Like yesterday, he doesn’t double back, stop to look around, or check street signs. Flushing is large: it’s likely there’s a research center around here.

My father turns right and walks up the steps of a two-story brick building with a door painted Coca-Cola red. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out what must be a key, and enters the building. There’s a sign outside in Chinese. Directly below, the English translation reads, “Welcome to the Chinese Presbyterian Church of Queens.”

I read the sign again. I check the street. My father is nowhere to be found. Had I hallucinated him walking in? No—he was right there, right against the door’s sheen, an abrasive against it. I scan the building’s oval windows and unadorned face. A carved cross perches on its roof.

I press the buzzer. No answer. I knock. Nobody opens the door. I turn the knob. It’s locked. I knock again. On the other side, people are singing hymns. I press my face to the door like a child. Across my cheek, the wood trembles with the gospels’ sounds. They can’t hear me. I cross the street to wait.

*

In the article my parents wrote for Columbia, I learned that during the war, like all other Jewish men of age, my father was drafted into an all-Jewish military unit. The unit was stationed in Budapest, where my father heard accounts of the death camps in the East. He illegally left his unit, returned home, told his parents the rumors about the camps were true, and begged them to go into hiding. But his parents refused. They told my father, “God will protect us.” “Three months later,” my father wrote, “they were murdered in Auschwitz.”

When and how did he start converting? Perhaps it began as a way to impress a colleague and then morphed into devotion?

He still needs to tell my mother where he’s going. If he doesn’t, she’ll keep believing something is wrong with his health, which will strain her own health. And if I tell her instead of my father telling her, she might resist the truth, as she did yesterday.

Minutes metastasize into hours. Above me, Altocumulus clouds, which look like grooves in sand, pass over the sun. It’s going to rain within the next few days. How, really, does that knowledge help anyone? In my career so far, I might have saved lives only once: last January, I noticed the models for an upcoming storm showed the pressure falling gradually, indicating cold rain, whereas my calculations showed the pressure plummeting, signifying a large snowstorm. I’d reported what I’d seen, and I’d been correct.

But, as my parents would surely observe, no matter how excellent we become at predicting the weather, we won’t be able to control it. It can’t be stopped like a disease. Regardless of what we do, snow will colonize our streets, and sleet will thrum against our windows. Blizzards will freeze us, and monsoons will drown us. I love my job, but I think about this. I think about this all the time.

At 8:00, the door opens. Men and women in street-wear attire walk onto the street. My father stands among them, silent. He waves goodbye and walks in the direction he came.

I tap him on the shoulder and he turns around. I say, “Hi, Dad.”

My father yanks his head back, pulling the rest of his body with him. “Michael? What are you doing here?”

“I—”

“Wh—why…why have you followed…followed me without my permission?”

“Mom asked me to see where you were going. She thought something was wrong.”

“You and she have…violated my privacy!”

Righteous flustering, while my mother sits alone in their apartment. “You have no idea how worried she is! She thinks you have dementia!”

Above traffic’s din, the train throttles its tracks, although we’re blocks away. My father clutches his briefcase. “No. It is not this. I know precisely where I am and what I am doing.”

“Then what are you doing at a church in Queens? Are you…have you become religious?”

My father looks down and scratches his ankle with his foot. “No, no. It is not this. It is nothing. I will stop going here. I have…I have been wanting to stop.”

“Wanting to stop what?” The train shudders on. “Can we sit and talk about this, please?”

My father continues to stare at the concrete. “It is nothing, Michael. Forget about this.”

“It isn’t ‘nothing.’ Not to your wife and not to your son. And if you stop without telling her why, she’s just going to keep worrying. Can we please talk?”

“I am playing organ for this church.”

“What?”

My father looks up. His face seems scrubbed, washed of emotion or memory. He shrugs, but the move appears staged, intentionally nonchalant. “I am playing organ for this church. So now you see, and there is no more miscommunication. We need to go back to Manhattan. I do not want to be late to the laboratory.” He turns towards the direction of the train.

I put my hand on my father’s shoulder. “Why are you playing organ in a church?”

My father faces me again. He maintains his indifferent mask. “One of your mother and I’s colleagues prays here. She said her church was not very big and needed a volunteer organ player because the one before had quit. This colleague, she has always been very good to your mother and I, so I said I would do this as a favor until they found a replacement. So every day I am practicing when the choir practices, because I am not so good at the organ, and on Sundays I am playing for the congregation. And anyway it is not important, because I will be stopping this soon. All right, Michael?”

“I still don’t…” Then I remember. “You wanted to be a concert pianist before the war.”

My father’s eyebrows dip down. “How did you know this?”

“The same way your colleague probably did. You mentioned it in the article.”

My father sighs. “This article did not even increase funding interest as the dean had promised. I am going to go back into the city. This is all I have to say about this. I do not understand why your mother decided to involve you in this.”

“She didn’t have a choice. She told me she would’ve followed you herself if it wasn’t for her knees. And it wouldn’t have gotten to this point if you’d told her where you were going instead of lying.”

My father stares at me. Ahead, another train enters the station. He nods.

“Dad, please. Can we talk?”

He shakes his head. Tilts it. Smiles his miniscule smile. “Michael, I should be talking to your mother, not to you. This does not concern you.”

“Dad.” I gesture to our surroundings. “We’re both standing on a street in Flushing because I’ve been spying on you. This does concern me.”

My father looks around and then back at me. His expression has changed to be the same equilibrium-calibrated gaze he takes in the lab. Not neutral, not restrained—instead, the opposite. Instead, a distillation of my father, observation funneled wholly towards a single data point.

He can acknowledge it: something in the experiment has occurred outside the scope of variables he prepared for. I know he’s able to.

He says, “All right, Michael. All right. There is a park nearby.”

We walk in the opposite direction of the train. I match my strides to his in an attempt to keep my breath even-keeled, my heart-beat at a consistent rate. If I’m too eager, I suspect he’ll say less. When we reach the park, we find a bench. My father places his briefcase across his lap.

I sit beside him and say, “Why didn’t you tell Mom?”

My father stares at his briefcase and drags his fingernail along one of its seams. He’s acting as if he did cheat on her. “Because it is not good to be playing the organ. I have been planning to stop, even before they find a replacement. And if I am stopping soon, there is nothing to say, nothing to tell.”

“Why isn’t it good? Why don’t you want to be the permanent replacement?” I can predict how he’ll respond to this, but at least this might get him talking.

“I need to be at the laboratory.”

“The only thing you did wrong was lying to Mom.”

“I am ashamed of this. I did not think…she would hypothesize I have dementia. I did not think she would worry so much about it. But I remember when she asked me, I had answered strangely, so yes, I think it is logical she considered this.”

I sigh. I anticipated he’d be embarrassed about doing something other than working, but not that his embarrassment would warp his mind to the point of being this irrational. “Of course that’s what she did. She went to a scientific explanation. That’s how her mind works. You would’ve done the same thing.”

“Yes,” my father says. He blinks. “Yes, this is true.”

“Dad?”

His fingers slacken. “I will tell her. And also, I will tell her I am going to stop. Every day, I am telling myself to stop…” His fingers tense and find the briefcase’s seams again.

He’d been embarrassed, but he’d gone. For months, he’d trained himself to wake earlier, walked out the door, taken the train, sat down at the organ, and played. He must, somewhat, know he’s lying to himself. “Why? Look, Dad, she wasn’t happy about maybe being lied to. But she was scared about your health more than anything else. And I’m happy you’re doing this.”

His fingers pluck at the leather in rhythm. Even when he’s anxious, he finds a metronome. I hadn’t considered this, but it makes sense his curiosity would lead him to an instrument with so many notes, lending itself to more possible combinations. Each key, now, a molecule for him. He turns to face me and brings his arms into a narrow V on his lap, as though he’s on a crowded train. “No, it is not good. It is taking my energies away from the lab and I have not been able to focus. I have made some miscalculations in my experiments recently.”

What’s he like as a performer? Is he a musician who absorbs the notes, his back and shoulders rising and falling with the crests and troughs of the score? Or does he keep his posture rigid, permitting only his hands to be dexterous? “Could I come on Sunday to watch you?”

“No, it is for worshippers, it is not a concert. And I will stop soon regardless.”

“You don’t need to stop anything.”

“We have already discussed this! Because of this, I have less focus in the laboratory, and this is shameful.”

“It isn’t—”

“It is, Michael! What is the purpose of playing the organ? Yes, perhaps it brings some comfort and joy to the listeners. But maybe it does not even bring this, or not for most. Meanwhile your mother is working in the laboratory. Meanwhile there are people who cannot move their arms and legs, cannot swallow, cannot barely breathe.”

I swallow, close my eyes, stare in the direction of the sun. It’ll rain tomorrow. The glare bores into my eyelids, implores me on. “Do you think you can’t do anything for yourself?”

“Enough, Michael.” I peek over—he hasn’t gotten up.

Remind him he must analyze a result so entirely unexpected it calls the experiment’s design into question. “We are,” I say to him, “sitting on a bench in Flushing…”

My father turns towards the park and lurches forward, as though his muscles have been jolted. “What you have asked, it is not an easy thing to explain.” He juts out his chin and raises his chest, using his diaphragm to buoy him upward. “After the war, I went back to the place I was raised, Hejobaba. I thought, that if my parents had lived, they would return there. But they did not come for weeks, then months.”

I imagine my father walking through a house at dusk. Moving a dislodged, splintered door beam gently, so as not to damage his hands, and walking inside his parents’ bedroom.

My father says, “My father was sixty-seven and my mother was sixty-three, and so I knew they had not survived the first day in Auschwitz. Still, I stayed. After the camps were liberated—”

“What were your parents like?” He won’t respond to my question. But when else in my life will I have an opportunity to ask, and when else might he be so willing to tell me?

My father yanks his head upwards, as he did when I first tapped him on the shoulder, then swiftly pulls it back down again, like a horse resisting its reins. He says, “My mother was a very ordered and intelligent woman. Everything was in its place. She was always reading. My father was mostly at the store. During the war, before the store was taken, he found how to keep it open so the people in Hejobaba could eat. I saw them most in the late evenings. We would discuss the day’s events, and my mother might tell a story, personal or political, and then I would play for them. I practiced the melodies in the afternoons.”

So his father gave him diligence, his mother intelligence. “They must have loved that.”

My father gives me a quick nod without turning to me. I’ve seen this posture and pace before, although it took me a moment to recognize: he looks like this when he gives an academic lecture, vacillating between kinetic and potential energy, frustrated his slouching second language can’t keep up. “After the camps were liberated, there were little remaining Jews from Hejobaba who had survived. From my Gymnasium, only three of us lived. The first was a descendent of the town’s chess celebrity. A celebrated girl. After a month, she laid down in front of a train. The second was not as known. After two months, he put his head in an oven and turned on the gas.”

Three teenagers stand on a road, their backs to me. Maybe they’re walking into town, maybe they’re walking out of it. Dust rises.

My father grips his briefcase sides, his lectern. He speaks. “After this, I moved to Budapest. And I thought very much about this question of how one can forgive oneself. I read philosophy and I wrote my observations in various notebooks. And I decided I should ask myself instead, how can I serve as much as possible? How can I give the maximum amount to the maximum people? This is why I became a scientist, because science provides the best methodology through which I can do this. I am asking myself these questions all of the time. Your mother shares this mentality with me. She had come to the same conclusions on her own, before we met. Our first times together, we were volunteering with various post war committees. For the two of us—”

“Where did you volunteer?”

My father puts his hand on my knee and squeezes. “No, no, stop this, listen to me. We are now approaching the most important component of what I have to say to you. For the two of us, your mother and I cannot stop asking ourselves these questions around, have we helped the most people in the most beneficial manner, and such and such. We cannot. We cannot. It would be impossible. But here, now, is the most important component. We are wanting you to have a good life. We are wanting you to contribute. However we are not wanting you to be spending your life asking yourself the questions we ask ourselves. This is why we have kept the focus on your education.” My father lowers his head, as if stepping away from the stage. “Your mother, she is able to think of things besides these questions. I cannot. She has always been better at this than me. I very much urge you to forgive her.” He stands up, speech completed, his back as straight as a thermometer. A posture antithetical to my arching mother as she talked about the article.

I remain sitting. “You’ve told that story—the one about your classmates from your town—before, haven’t you? You’ve always discussed the war with your colleagues, right? Mom doesn’t, but you do. And talking about it is excruciating, but it also gives you, I don’t know, a measure of, relief, maybe. Why is it that you can share things about your past with strangers but not with your own son? Why won’t you let it be a part of my life?”

“It is already too much a part of your life, Mihaly. This is the point. Why can I share the past with other people but not with you? Because other people listen, and they say, ‘Oh, very sad, very tragic,’ but then they will eat their lunch and have their day. They will forget.” My father brings his index finger to my sternum. “But you cannot forget.” He taps his finger against me. “Do you remember when your mother and I told you about the camps and such? I am thinking probably not. You were very young, in the first grade. But even before we told you, you knew something was not right. When you were in Kindergarten, you did not play with puzzles and such. You were making casts for your mother’s knees out of tissues. When we told you to make use of your toys, you said, no, not until you were finished. You were always asking about her knees. You have always, always tried very much to help.” He removes his hand. “Now, I need to go, I am already very late.”

*

On the ride back into the city, my father and I stand several paces apart without speaking. No matter. I’ll inscribe the Flushing conversation in my mind. I’ll lay down my father’s words, then lay them down again, until they sediment into my memory. I’ll use this day to inoculate myself against all future curiosity. And I will remember: my father didn’t just take me to The Museum of Natural History. He also took me to see the performers in Central Park’s Great Lawn.

I believed him when he said we detoured to the Great Lawn for two reasons: first, to increase the length of our route in order to exercise more, and second, because it was an excellent opportunity to instruct me firsthand in human bio-chemistry and physiology.

Two reasons, just two reasons. We didn’t stop as we walked by where the musicians played, and if he’d slowed his pace or found reasons, such as tying my shoes, to pause by the music, he’d been brief. I didn’t notice. And I didn’t notice how when we did stop, we stopped instead where the acrobats and the magicians staked out territory.

I believed him, and I thought he hadn’t watched how I walked faster the closer we came to them. I wanted to be at the front, where I could feel delight oscillating between the audience and entertainer. I could predict every flip and illusion, but it didn’t matter, because there were always members of the crowd who’d never seen the move before. I had to stay through the end of the act—the seconds after the crowd dissipated, when the conductor of our attention exhaled, sloughed off themselves, and became a person unworthy of watching, a person fiddling with their shirt buttons or sitting down to drink water, and this phenomenon was made all the more wonderful by the fact it was temporary, because the next show would start soon.

I will refer to these memories, all of which follow the same pattern. My father and I both go to the front. We both stay through the end. There’s my father, and there I am, leaning my shoulder into his arm. The magician begins his last trick, and I don’t observe the muscles he uses in this sleight of hand.