Standard Disclaimer goes here. Lex, Lionel, and the rest are all figments originally of someone else's imagination. Currently they are figments of my imagination. How can you own an idea? So sue me, I have no money.
Author's note: Having survived DDT and decades of being shot at for the crime of being predators, peregrine falcons are slowly making a comeback and have developed an interesting habit of nesting on skyscraper ledges in cities across the US and Canada. They eat rats and pigeons and other small birds. They're smaller than your average housecat. They dive-bomb their prey at speeds over 100 mph, and they can catch a sparrow on the wing.
Four days ago I was sitting on the balcony of my penthouse in the city, thinking about a theoretical merger and slowly getting drunk. It was a very beautiful evening, and I had no pressing worries. The noise of my city drifted up to me and by the time it got to the fifty-eighth floor the traffic and the bustle of five million people had faded to the soft, intense background hum that I have always loved. The air was cool and the brandy burned warm in my throat. I remember, quite clearly, the fat pigeon which landed on the balcony railing, only ten feet from where I sat. I remember, quite clearly, the falcon coming out of the sky and killing it. I remember, quite clearly, the look the bird gave me when I stood up in surprise.
I have never been so close to a bird of prey and I was disappointed in its size. The falcon was tiny: barely larger than the pigeon, certainly not large enough to carry it away. Such force in such a little creature! The pigeon was shattered under its talons and when it caught my eye I couldn't look away.
That was four days ago; today I lie in a hospital bed, full of pain and morphine, half-dreaming about the intense, defiant look in the falcon's gold-rimmed eye and half-listening to my son's weary, worried fidgeting. He thinks I am still asleep, but I've been awake for a while now. I wonder if he regrets the things he said yesterday. I wonder if he's been here all night.
He keeps saying that he is not me, that he doesn't want to become my clone or live my life by proxy. Nonsense. He is me, myself. His flesh is my flesh, his bone my bone, his blood my blood. He is my son: how can he not be me? His triumphs are my triumphs, his pride my pride, his dreams my dreams, his rage my rage, his hate my hate, his greed my greed, his pain my pain. He says he believes in rebirth and second chances: ha! He denies his own past, and he rejects the future I offer him. Rudderless child, adrift in the vastness of the sea. I reach out to guide him and he slaps my hand away. He only knows what he doesn't want.
I admit it, alright? I am a bad father. I was a bad husband and I am a worse father. I know he hates me, I know why, and frankly I did most of it on purpose. I am not going to make excuses; excuses are for the weak. Not all of the animosity between us is my fault; there is enough blame to share here, and some of it does justly belong to him. And yet: my son is a flawed character, and some of those flaws are my fault, and mine alone.
You think you might have done better? Maybe, maybe. I was ignorant, and so I remain. I wasn't even thirty when he was born, far too young. I knew little about children, less about infants, nothing at all about raising a boy to be a man. When we brought him home from the hospital, three days old, I was filled with a joy I had never imagined I could feel. Holding my baby in my arms I saw a thousand bright futures. By the time he was five I'd made so many mistakes I knew he would hate me long before he was old enough to admit it to himself.
You think you might have done better? What exactly would you have done differently? How do you imagine you would have dealt with a child like my son? A prodigy: a boy who could read before he was three, who taught himself chess when he was four years old, who understood calculus before he was ten, who was fluent in three languages by the time he was old enough to realize the servants who spoke to him in Chinese and Spanish were from other countries. What do you do with a brilliant child? He was my intellectual equal when he was eleven years old. I have never met anyone like him, and simple probability suggests that I never will.
He thinks I saw his little brother as my last chance to have a normal child I could love. True, and yet not. The baby might have been normal - who can tell, with an infant less than a month old? I loved my son as much as I could, as much as I dared: I always have, I still do, I always will. He was never normal and won't be.
I was cruel to him, yes. I was distant and cold and never satisfied with him, however hard he tried, whatever he did to please me. He learned the lessons I expected him to from all those psychological games, but when he won he never saw my pride without seeing his mother's disgust. He learned he could never win without doing something appalling. Conscience has no place in the business world. I wanted him to learn: ask no quarter and give none. Never reveal weakness; people will take advantage of you. Take advantage of any weakness anyone else shows, however small the chink in the armor. I wanted him to learn: "business ethics" is an oxymoron. Keep your conscience at home.
But his mother died before he was done learning this: my wife, the only person I ever loved without reason or reservation. In my grief I made more mistakes. The woman he viewed as something between a favorite auntie and a surrogate mother, the nanny who loved him as her own: I forced her to leave, made her promise never to contact us again, ever. My bewildered, broken-hearted adolescent, who needed more than anything love and guidance: I sent him away to boarding school, because I couldn't stand to look in his face and see my pain in his mother's eyes.
Those two, I think, were the unforgivable decisions. He will never be able to separate them in his mind: Pamela and Excelsior. He will never believe that I did either thing for any other reason than to add my pain to his, thinking that at thirteen he could bear it.
He couldn't, couldn't bear even his own, but nevermind. Only two credible suicide attempts and six years of sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll and he learned the things I wanted him too. He lost his spoiled-rich-kid's sense of entitlement, which was my fault in the first place. He learned that the world does not owe him anything, though maybe I do. He learned that there are things in the world which are worth killing and bleeding and dying for, and that money is not one of those things. He learned not to trust people. He learned not to show pain, or fear, or uncertainty.
He learned not to make decisions based on emotion, or right and wrong. He learned that knowing the difference between the two is no reason not to take advantage of anyone you can. He learned to live with the weight of his conscience.
I assumed, always, when he was a child, that his mother would be there to explain the finer points of this duality to him: that you must be ruthless, that you must not let your conscience either evaporate into soulless silence nor allow it to crush you completely. It took him a long time to learn this on his own: most of high school and most of college. I was worried he wouldn't learn it at all, that he would collapse under the pressure of his guilt or drift away into sociopathic madness, all charm and wit and bright hard eyes and no soul to speak of. I always underestimate him.
What happened to him in those years in nightclubs and raves and parties and bars he shouldn't have been allowed into since he was mostly underage, whatever he saw or did or experienced, I mostly don't want to know. I read the police reports and I've seen his medical records, and it's too much already. Alcoholism and barfights and Ecstasy and cocaine and a host of recreational chemicals described only by acronyms or street slang - overdoses and gunshot wounds and broken bones and bloody gashes, it's enough, I don't want to know any more, I prefer to remain ignorant about the things he never went to a hospital for, the situations that never made it into a police report. I never asked anyone to follow him or stop him; I never asked if he'd been tested for AIDS or anything else; I never said a word to him about the poisons he poured into his blood.
He is my son; he is me. His pain is my pain, and when I was that age I was not strong enough to cope with it on my own. I forced him to deal with it alone, because I don't want him to have my weaknesses. I want him to be untouchable. I thought, if he could survive that, no one will ever be able to hurt him again. If he needed the release or escape or temporary insanity or whatever he got from the drugs and the girls and everything else - if he needed that to stand up under it and not go crazy, it is not for me to say what he should or shouldn't have done.
He thinks I am so sadistic, thinks I so enjoyed seeing his misery. He could not be anymore wrong. I didn't know how else to contradict my own advice about jumping on other people's vulnerabilities. I needed him to hurt enough that he would understand the price of power. He can hurt people without guilt, use their pain as a tool, ignore their misery when it suits his needs, but he will never do it lightly. He has endured enough that he will never be able to look at another person's suffering without sympathy.
For these simple reasons I never said anything about his drinking or fighting or drug use, never hinted at how terrified I was that he would somehow manage to get killed. He never guessed at how relieved I was, every time, to find him recovering and sullen in emergency rooms and not cold on a table in some anonymous city morgue. He has no idea that I ever had nightmares about that, never mind how often and for how long. The entire year he was nineteen - most of his sophomore year in college - every time the phone rang, day or night, I thought it was someone calling to tell me my son was dead.
I wanted him to learn to hide his fear, so I hid mine. He can do this himself now, but not flawlessly, not yet. I have had a lifetime of practice, but he doesn't think of this. He never saw me slip, so he believes my act was sincere. For this also, he will never forgive me.
Here are my mistakes, if you care to hear them. When he was a baby I spoiled him and feared him, because of his unbelievable intelligence and because I wanted him to have everything. When he was a teenager I sent him alone and defenseless into a world that mostly wanted his money in its pockets and his head on a plate, because I wanted him to find strength within himself.
This, then, is an accounting of my sins, and they are simple indeed, and large. When he was a child I was afraid to love him, because it made me weak. When he was older I was afraid to let anyone else love him, because it would make him weak. To these two, let us add all the small things that grew out of them: all the lies we told each other, all the hard words and deliberate manipulation, all the truths told only when it would hurt the most.
Yesterday I thought we were through with that. I thought the time when it was necessary had passed. I thought perhaps we could be colleagues at last, and maybe, someday, partners. Then I saw that this hope was premature. We are going to have to be competitors for a little while longer, until his bitterness fades just a bit, until the pain is not so fresh. But I thought that the time when the lies and the games were required was over, and now I see that this is not so, not yet.
When he told me he had never seen the difference between being my son and being my enemy, I believed that the terrible times were over, that I could treat him as an equal now. In his fury, something showed in his eyes that I have waited years to see.
Then the tornado came.
He saved my life solely because his conscience demanded it, but this is a minor failure. He'll have to learn, of course, so when I tell him the surgery failed and left me blind, I will say it as harshly as possible. I will tell him he should have let me die. Pity has no place in this world, and that's the only reason he helped me. He has to learn not to make decisions for emotional or ethical reasons.
Still, the time will come. When he told me he was my enemy, when he hesitated before reaching out his hand to help me, I saw it. It was there: I did not imagine it.
Four days ago I met a falcon, and witnessed death. Yesterday I had an argument with my son, and was flattened by a tornado. Today I lie in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery, trying to think of the right way to tell him that I am blind.
Waiting for the words to come, I breathe slowly and think of the sights I want to remember most clearly. My wife, smiling, before she got sick. The look of subservience on my underlings' anxious faces. My son's toothless baby giggle, six months old. The city's skyline, lit up on a cold clear winter's night. The interior of Chartres Cathedral. Sunset over the Pacific, from Bali's eastern shore. That falcon.
And last but not least, the look in my son's face yesterday, telling me we were enemies and always had been. Behind his antarctic glare I saw the falcon's burning golden gaze.
Author's note: Having survived DDT and decades of being shot at for the crime of being predators, peregrine falcons are slowly making a comeback and have developed an interesting habit of nesting on skyscraper ledges in cities across the US and Canada. They eat rats and pigeons and other small birds. They're smaller than your average housecat. They dive-bomb their prey at speeds over 100 mph, and they can catch a sparrow on the wing.
Four days ago I was sitting on the balcony of my penthouse in the city, thinking about a theoretical merger and slowly getting drunk. It was a very beautiful evening, and I had no pressing worries. The noise of my city drifted up to me and by the time it got to the fifty-eighth floor the traffic and the bustle of five million people had faded to the soft, intense background hum that I have always loved. The air was cool and the brandy burned warm in my throat. I remember, quite clearly, the fat pigeon which landed on the balcony railing, only ten feet from where I sat. I remember, quite clearly, the falcon coming out of the sky and killing it. I remember, quite clearly, the look the bird gave me when I stood up in surprise.
I have never been so close to a bird of prey and I was disappointed in its size. The falcon was tiny: barely larger than the pigeon, certainly not large enough to carry it away. Such force in such a little creature! The pigeon was shattered under its talons and when it caught my eye I couldn't look away.
That was four days ago; today I lie in a hospital bed, full of pain and morphine, half-dreaming about the intense, defiant look in the falcon's gold-rimmed eye and half-listening to my son's weary, worried fidgeting. He thinks I am still asleep, but I've been awake for a while now. I wonder if he regrets the things he said yesterday. I wonder if he's been here all night.
He keeps saying that he is not me, that he doesn't want to become my clone or live my life by proxy. Nonsense. He is me, myself. His flesh is my flesh, his bone my bone, his blood my blood. He is my son: how can he not be me? His triumphs are my triumphs, his pride my pride, his dreams my dreams, his rage my rage, his hate my hate, his greed my greed, his pain my pain. He says he believes in rebirth and second chances: ha! He denies his own past, and he rejects the future I offer him. Rudderless child, adrift in the vastness of the sea. I reach out to guide him and he slaps my hand away. He only knows what he doesn't want.
I admit it, alright? I am a bad father. I was a bad husband and I am a worse father. I know he hates me, I know why, and frankly I did most of it on purpose. I am not going to make excuses; excuses are for the weak. Not all of the animosity between us is my fault; there is enough blame to share here, and some of it does justly belong to him. And yet: my son is a flawed character, and some of those flaws are my fault, and mine alone.
You think you might have done better? Maybe, maybe. I was ignorant, and so I remain. I wasn't even thirty when he was born, far too young. I knew little about children, less about infants, nothing at all about raising a boy to be a man. When we brought him home from the hospital, three days old, I was filled with a joy I had never imagined I could feel. Holding my baby in my arms I saw a thousand bright futures. By the time he was five I'd made so many mistakes I knew he would hate me long before he was old enough to admit it to himself.
You think you might have done better? What exactly would you have done differently? How do you imagine you would have dealt with a child like my son? A prodigy: a boy who could read before he was three, who taught himself chess when he was four years old, who understood calculus before he was ten, who was fluent in three languages by the time he was old enough to realize the servants who spoke to him in Chinese and Spanish were from other countries. What do you do with a brilliant child? He was my intellectual equal when he was eleven years old. I have never met anyone like him, and simple probability suggests that I never will.
He thinks I saw his little brother as my last chance to have a normal child I could love. True, and yet not. The baby might have been normal - who can tell, with an infant less than a month old? I loved my son as much as I could, as much as I dared: I always have, I still do, I always will. He was never normal and won't be.
I was cruel to him, yes. I was distant and cold and never satisfied with him, however hard he tried, whatever he did to please me. He learned the lessons I expected him to from all those psychological games, but when he won he never saw my pride without seeing his mother's disgust. He learned he could never win without doing something appalling. Conscience has no place in the business world. I wanted him to learn: ask no quarter and give none. Never reveal weakness; people will take advantage of you. Take advantage of any weakness anyone else shows, however small the chink in the armor. I wanted him to learn: "business ethics" is an oxymoron. Keep your conscience at home.
But his mother died before he was done learning this: my wife, the only person I ever loved without reason or reservation. In my grief I made more mistakes. The woman he viewed as something between a favorite auntie and a surrogate mother, the nanny who loved him as her own: I forced her to leave, made her promise never to contact us again, ever. My bewildered, broken-hearted adolescent, who needed more than anything love and guidance: I sent him away to boarding school, because I couldn't stand to look in his face and see my pain in his mother's eyes.
Those two, I think, were the unforgivable decisions. He will never be able to separate them in his mind: Pamela and Excelsior. He will never believe that I did either thing for any other reason than to add my pain to his, thinking that at thirteen he could bear it.
He couldn't, couldn't bear even his own, but nevermind. Only two credible suicide attempts and six years of sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll and he learned the things I wanted him too. He lost his spoiled-rich-kid's sense of entitlement, which was my fault in the first place. He learned that the world does not owe him anything, though maybe I do. He learned that there are things in the world which are worth killing and bleeding and dying for, and that money is not one of those things. He learned not to trust people. He learned not to show pain, or fear, or uncertainty.
He learned not to make decisions based on emotion, or right and wrong. He learned that knowing the difference between the two is no reason not to take advantage of anyone you can. He learned to live with the weight of his conscience.
I assumed, always, when he was a child, that his mother would be there to explain the finer points of this duality to him: that you must be ruthless, that you must not let your conscience either evaporate into soulless silence nor allow it to crush you completely. It took him a long time to learn this on his own: most of high school and most of college. I was worried he wouldn't learn it at all, that he would collapse under the pressure of his guilt or drift away into sociopathic madness, all charm and wit and bright hard eyes and no soul to speak of. I always underestimate him.
What happened to him in those years in nightclubs and raves and parties and bars he shouldn't have been allowed into since he was mostly underage, whatever he saw or did or experienced, I mostly don't want to know. I read the police reports and I've seen his medical records, and it's too much already. Alcoholism and barfights and Ecstasy and cocaine and a host of recreational chemicals described only by acronyms or street slang - overdoses and gunshot wounds and broken bones and bloody gashes, it's enough, I don't want to know any more, I prefer to remain ignorant about the things he never went to a hospital for, the situations that never made it into a police report. I never asked anyone to follow him or stop him; I never asked if he'd been tested for AIDS or anything else; I never said a word to him about the poisons he poured into his blood.
He is my son; he is me. His pain is my pain, and when I was that age I was not strong enough to cope with it on my own. I forced him to deal with it alone, because I don't want him to have my weaknesses. I want him to be untouchable. I thought, if he could survive that, no one will ever be able to hurt him again. If he needed the release or escape or temporary insanity or whatever he got from the drugs and the girls and everything else - if he needed that to stand up under it and not go crazy, it is not for me to say what he should or shouldn't have done.
He thinks I am so sadistic, thinks I so enjoyed seeing his misery. He could not be anymore wrong. I didn't know how else to contradict my own advice about jumping on other people's vulnerabilities. I needed him to hurt enough that he would understand the price of power. He can hurt people without guilt, use their pain as a tool, ignore their misery when it suits his needs, but he will never do it lightly. He has endured enough that he will never be able to look at another person's suffering without sympathy.
For these simple reasons I never said anything about his drinking or fighting or drug use, never hinted at how terrified I was that he would somehow manage to get killed. He never guessed at how relieved I was, every time, to find him recovering and sullen in emergency rooms and not cold on a table in some anonymous city morgue. He has no idea that I ever had nightmares about that, never mind how often and for how long. The entire year he was nineteen - most of his sophomore year in college - every time the phone rang, day or night, I thought it was someone calling to tell me my son was dead.
I wanted him to learn to hide his fear, so I hid mine. He can do this himself now, but not flawlessly, not yet. I have had a lifetime of practice, but he doesn't think of this. He never saw me slip, so he believes my act was sincere. For this also, he will never forgive me.
Here are my mistakes, if you care to hear them. When he was a baby I spoiled him and feared him, because of his unbelievable intelligence and because I wanted him to have everything. When he was a teenager I sent him alone and defenseless into a world that mostly wanted his money in its pockets and his head on a plate, because I wanted him to find strength within himself.
This, then, is an accounting of my sins, and they are simple indeed, and large. When he was a child I was afraid to love him, because it made me weak. When he was older I was afraid to let anyone else love him, because it would make him weak. To these two, let us add all the small things that grew out of them: all the lies we told each other, all the hard words and deliberate manipulation, all the truths told only when it would hurt the most.
Yesterday I thought we were through with that. I thought the time when it was necessary had passed. I thought perhaps we could be colleagues at last, and maybe, someday, partners. Then I saw that this hope was premature. We are going to have to be competitors for a little while longer, until his bitterness fades just a bit, until the pain is not so fresh. But I thought that the time when the lies and the games were required was over, and now I see that this is not so, not yet.
When he told me he had never seen the difference between being my son and being my enemy, I believed that the terrible times were over, that I could treat him as an equal now. In his fury, something showed in his eyes that I have waited years to see.
Then the tornado came.
He saved my life solely because his conscience demanded it, but this is a minor failure. He'll have to learn, of course, so when I tell him the surgery failed and left me blind, I will say it as harshly as possible. I will tell him he should have let me die. Pity has no place in this world, and that's the only reason he helped me. He has to learn not to make decisions for emotional or ethical reasons.
Still, the time will come. When he told me he was my enemy, when he hesitated before reaching out his hand to help me, I saw it. It was there: I did not imagine it.
Four days ago I met a falcon, and witnessed death. Yesterday I had an argument with my son, and was flattened by a tornado. Today I lie in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery, trying to think of the right way to tell him that I am blind.
Waiting for the words to come, I breathe slowly and think of the sights I want to remember most clearly. My wife, smiling, before she got sick. The look of subservience on my underlings' anxious faces. My son's toothless baby giggle, six months old. The city's skyline, lit up on a cold clear winter's night. The interior of Chartres Cathedral. Sunset over the Pacific, from Bali's eastern shore. That falcon.
And last but not least, the look in my son's face yesterday, telling me we were enemies and always had been. Behind his antarctic glare I saw the falcon's burning golden gaze.