At night I dream that my bedroom is submerged under water. Like a huge inverted aquarium, water bears down on my ceiling and surrounds four walls. A glass wall separates my room and the effervescent bottom of the river. The water diffuses a faraway sun and casts my bedroom in blueish green. I can see the sandy bottom of the lake, like a submerged marsh. Vegetation glows in the jewel water, sparkling emerald water, tall grass and weeds slanted with the current. It would be beautiful if I could see a fish or an eel but except for the vegetation, there is nothing alive in this marsh.

My bed is pressed up against this aquarium wall. Floating a meter above the sand, on the other side of the glass, is a green and grey corpse. His eyes are open and white, skin grey and wrinkled, floating gently as if he were falling through the air. The green grasses caress him.

I sleep next to a corpse every night.

I wake up in my dream and the sight of it makes my chest seize in fright. I see it for the first time every time. He does not wake. He does not move except for the gentle rocking of the current.

In my dream, I’m in my bed but I can see everything as if I’m looking into a dollhouse. The rooms have been haphazardly rearranged as if a child stacked them like blocks. It is simultaneously confusing and familiar. When my father enters the house, a wave of sand and mud and water and vegetation spill in through the door from behind him. Terror enters with him. The corpse next to me seems mundane now, fear replaced by the living threat that has entered our yellow-painted kitchen. Again and again I wake up in my dream, corpse floating beside me, father entering, mud rushing.

Sometimes we feared my father, the man who was once little Gabriel. We could hear in the tone of his voice when he was angry—his speech and his yells had a rising inflection that indicated the random, unpredictable anger that could elevate to rage. The tone of his voice rose as if to ask a question, a question that had no rational answer. He screamed at us when we laughed at the dinner table. He yelled at us as if we made fun of him, humiliated him, even though we were just children joking with each other.

But other times he laughed along with us. I was always his favorite child. We shared a curiosity about the same things. I took on his interests in graphic design, in modern art, in history. I would stay up late watching X-Files and he would cook me eggs at 4 o’clock in the morning. When my sisters and I wanted something, if we wanted to eat McDonalds for lunch or to go to the little fashion store across the street, they would make me ask him because he would always say yes to me. Was this the same person as the man who terrified us?