Embrace of Memory

A week after the funeral, I met Dad for coffee at Bentham’s.  He greeted me with a warm hug that lasted a few beats longer than usual.

“How you holding up, kiddo?” he asked as we sat at the table next to our regular one.  A couple of hipsters were sitting in ours.  How long had it been since we’d been here last?

“Fine,” I said.

“And Margot?”

She was urging me to go to therapy, which I kept putting off with some excuse or other. “Fine.”

“And Carson?”

Carson had barely known his other grandfather, so it was no lie when I said, “Fine.”  I paused.  “What about you, Dad?  How’re you holding up?”

He swallowed. The uncharacteristic three days’ worth of white stubble on his neck couldn’t quite hide how loose the folds of his skin looked.  But he mustered a smile for my benefit.  “I’m fine. Really.”  “Your father left something for you.”  Dad reached into his jacket pocket before sliding something across the table to me.  “He recorded it before he passed on.”

It was a tactile fob.  I cast a surreptitious look around the cafe to see if we’d drawn any attention.  Knee-jerk reaction.  Most people didn’t exchange these things in crowded cafes. Margot and I were always recording tactile experiences for each other, but they were surely of a much different nature than what was on this fob.

I frowned.  “What’s on it?”

“It’s a hug.  He just . . . wanted you to know—”

I spared Dad the burden of completing his sentence.  “A hug?  He wasn’t exactly a touchy-feely kind of guy.  Why would he leave this for me?”

Dad shrugged.  “I think...after he got sick...it wasn’t so much about who he was, but more about who he’d always wanted to be.”

I still hadn’t taken the fob, so he slid it a bit closer.  “I know you and he had your differences.  Just...play it when you’re ready.”

†

Some things require a bit of liquid courage.  I think I’d learned that from Father.  So, three days later, alone in my study at home, with a fifth of bourbon in my belly, I took the fob out of my bottom-most drawer.

I plugged the fob into the port on my computer, and placed my left palm on the tactile mat hooked into it.  I took a deep breath, but paused before clicking PLAY on the pop-up menu.  It’s just...data, I told myself.  That’s all it was.  The hardware merely manipulated sensory receptors, sending haptic feedback throughout the body to simulate the touch recorded on the fob.  There was nothing real about it.

I took my palm off the tactile mat.  On a whim, I dug through my old files, and found the videos from my wedding reception.  That was the last occasion where my father and I had been in the same room—where all the arguments and screaming matches had fortunately taken a back seat to the celebration of the moment.  After a bit of scrolling, I found the file of Father and I hugging...

Yup.  It looked every bit as awkward and forced as I remembered.  No memory is stronger than tactile memory.

Just get it over with.  I replaced my palm on the mat, and hovered over the PLAY button.  It was just data.  It was just a fake hug...like all the other displays of affection from my father throughout his life.  It was likely to make my skin crawl, but that was closure of a sort, too, wasn’t it?

“Or,” Margot had told me last night, when I’d spoken to her about the fob, “you could think of it as a last gesture from an imperfect man who loved you very much.  Most people would give anything to have a last hug from their parents.  Maybe you should hold onto that thing until you’re in the right headspace to be able to play it?”

She’d always been the smart one in our relationship.

With a sigh, I clicked out of the menu and disconnected the fob from the computer.  I put the fob back in the desk.

Not today.

†

And not for the next month, either.  As the funeral arrangements and condolences and thoughts and prayers receded into the haze of memory, so, too, did the tactile fob buried in my desk drawer.

Until my next business trip.  After I unpacked my laptop and the accompanying mobile tactile mat, I pulled the fob from my wife out of the interior pocket of my suitcase where she always left them.  Normally, in the privacy of my hotel rooms, I was eager to plug the fob into the system and see what kind of tactile treats Margot had recorded for me...

But then I remembered the fob from Father...and believe me, he was  the last person I wanted to be thinking of when I closed my eyes to be think about my wife.

I packed up the whole system, put it back in my suitcase, and laid on the double bed staring up at the patterns on the hotel room ceiling.

†

Tonight.

It had been over a month since Dad had given me the fob.  I sat at my desk at home with the fob plugged into the computer, and my hand on the tactile mat.  I took a deep breath.  I hovered over the PLAY button on my screen.

And hesitated.

I had good memories of Father, too, I reminded myself.  They were hazy and indistinct, from deeper back in my childhood: the picnics that he and Dad and I’d used to have in Wainwright Park, the...the...

I wracked my brain.  Surely there had to be something else.  Something before the animus that had seeped in between us, as insidious and stealthy as the cancer that had taken him.

I swallowed.  Playing the tactile rendering of his final hug would bring all the good memories to the fore, and banish all the negative ones to the trash bin of memory...right?  Surely that was his intent in making the recording.

My fingers hovered over the PLAY button.  But was it fair to supplant all those memories with something so...fake?

Finally, I summoned my courage.  I pressed DELETE instead.  The dialogue box asked me if I really wanted to erase all the data on the fob.

I pressed CONFIRM.

Then, I played the blank fob, and felt...nothing.  My nerve receptors remained unaffected.

Yes.  This was right.  It felt like all our last few conversations together.  If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine he was here in the room with me.

© 2020 Brian Rappatta

About the Author

Brian Rappatta's short fiction has appeared in venues such as Writers of the Future, Tales to Terrify, Shock Totem, Amazing Stories, and in the anthologies  Nemonymous and Chilling Ghost Stories from Flame Tree Publications. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop