I’ll begin with a story that my father told me. When I was nine, he brought me to his home town in the Philippines. Tayum is a small village in the northern part of Luzon, the biggest island of the Philippines, a 8- to 10-hour drive north of Manila. Longer with traffic. I sat in a whole day’s worth of traffic when we drove there. It seemed like we never moved. Young boys came to the window selling snacks, little bags of shrimp chips. They were shirtless and tan from peddling in the hot Philippine sun. My father told me this story in the car, he told me this story even before that, and he told me this story after that. Often our memories are not remnants of the experience itself but of the stories we tell and retell. Two young boys, Gabriel, my father, and Anastacio, his friend, used to play a game when they were children. Gabriel was nine and Anastacio was a bit younger, maybe 7 years old. In the forest behind Gabriel’s house, they would walk a mile out and come across a canal that ran at a shallow angle down a sloped hill. Gabriel and Anastacio would sit on the bank and wait for logs to float down the canal. Once a log came into sight, they would both jump into the water and race to the log. Whoever reached the log first went for a fun little ride downstream. The loser of this game swam behind, grasping for a branch or for the other boy’s ankles, but would often just slap at the surface of the water and return to the bank, hoping for a head start when the next log came floating down the canal. The winner, after riding the log downstream a bit, would then collect himself back onto the shore and run back up the shallow slope. The boys would wait upstream for another log and the game would start again. As my father tells me this story, I put myself in it, as if I were a child there with him. I was the same age as Gabriel as I watched them one bright Saturday from some distance that wasn’t close enough to talk to them but not far enough to hide. I sat on hardened mud, long grass pressed into the dirt. My father had just taken me there the other day, told me about monkeys that used to live in the trees, pointed out a large water buffalo fifty feet away while I rode on his back. But the animals were gone now. I distracted myself with the sounds of birds and the shapes of leaves high above us. Anyway, I could not swim very well, and even if I could, the boys probably would not invite me to play their game. They probably didn’t even consider it, really. I was afraid that if I asked they would taunt me, so I resigned myself to watching them from a safe distance. I watched as Anastacio just slightly lost his footing on the bank. He stumbled but awkwardly caught his little body with his arms, spindly for his tiny height. It did not faze him and Gabriel didn’t notice. The boys let out a yell as another log came floating down the canal. They leapt into the canal, not diving but just running onto the water as if they could run across its surface. Water leapt up all around them. The murky brown canal water seemed to rise up in stalks like tall grasses that whipped around in the wind before a storm. Through the stalks, I could just barely see Gabriel pulling ahead. As Gabriel approached the log, the stalks of water parted and I could see him a bit better. Gabriel slapped the wide log with wide fingers and flat palm, tagged it as he reached it. As it floated downstream, I noticed that it looked a little grey. Gabriel wrapped an arm around it and the log started to rotate, softly dunking Gabriel into the water. Anastacio was still desperately swimming toward Gabriel and the grey log. Even though he lost, he could still bat his little hands at Gabriel to try to fight his way onto the log himself. Then Gabriel screamed, a high pitched scream not different than any scream he let out when he and Anastacio fought over logs in the river. But Anastacio hadn’t reached him yet. Gabriel let go and, eyes shut and mouth wide and screaming, turned back toward the bank and thrashed as hard as he could, arms like windmills, water splashing and rising like surging tears. Perhaps there was a snake on the log, I thought. My father was always terrified of snakes. As Gabriel screamed and blindly swam toward the bank, Anastacio followed him, turning back, screaming, grimacing. As they neared the bank, I finally saw it: the log revealed a face. What came floating down the canal was not a log but a corpse, eyes closed and mouth slightly agape. His skin was grayish white with shadows of green and brown and black, as if he were painted on Halloween. He was pruned all over and the small black hairs on his chest stood up in small curls like tiny worms as the body turned again to face down into the water. The body floated downstream, passing me, as the boys reached land. Mud squished between Gabriel and Anastacio’s fingers and toes as they hurriedly climbed out of the canal and ran through the forest. Eyes still shut and mouths wide open, they screamed and screamed with their hands held out at their sides as if they wanted the rush of wind to clean their arms in the spots where they touched the decaying body and the water it floated in. I watched them run through the trees and then realized that I was grimacing, but not screaming, both hands slightly sunk into the soft dirt as if I were to vomit but only silence came from my mouth. I did not want to look at it but in the corner of my eye the body was again just a cloddish gray log. It floated downstream, turning and bumping slowly and awkwardly against the opposite bank. As they ran further and further away, the screams of the boys gave way to the soft trickle of water, the chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves, the silence of the little handprints in the mud. The man in the canal floated face down in a stream of his own tears. Years later, at age 48, little Gabriel, my father, would terrorize us. At age 48, he became a violent man. I don’t think it’s because of what happened at the canal. Who knows why he did such terrible and violent things? It could be because his mind was ill, it could be because his father did the same, it could be because sometimes he was filled with a rage that he was too scared to confront himself. Is it worth it to guess? To give any more thought to this man who did things that no one should ever do, that no one should ever experience? That no one should ever see, no child should ever see? Was Gabriel at age 48 even the same person as the little boy who screamed as he ran away from the body in the canal?

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?

Terror followed me to Augusta and Rockwell at age 22. Or maybe I brought it with me to Augusta and Rockwell. I’ve blocked out a lot of what happened in that apartment. I lived with a man there, but I can’t recall anymore what he said to me or the things he did. I wonder if past me was able to somehow receive all of that pain in such a way that future me would not have to remember it. I wonder if past me turned her mind off so that future me would be spared. I wonder if she knew then: there will be no memories, no flashbacks, no waking up in terror. Were the memories formed and then destroyed somehow, eradicated from my mind by some function of survival? Or were they never formed at all? Instead of experiencing his rage, his incoherence, his name-calling, his destruction, maybe my perception shut off, a mental black out, so that the memories wouldn’t form at all. Perhaps the time spent witnessing my father’s violence made it so that my mind could just switch off. I haven’t forgotten all of it. One night, I arrived home earlier than him after a night out. Maybe he’d come home an hour later, two hours later, four hours later. I didn’t know what time he’d get home. I couldn’t rest as I waited for him, waited to hear his footsteps come up the stairs, his yell spilling into and filling the apartment, a typhoon of objects thrown around the living room. Was this the past? Who would come through that door? Was it Gabriel at age 48? I felt an uneasiness that was like being perpetually stuck in the moment before a scream, held between the sharp intake of breath and the expulsion of sound. The anticipation, waiting to hear his footsteps, was felt in a stillness in the back of my throat, the stillness just before the shiver of tonsils in a shriek. So I hid. At two in the morning, my uneasiness and anticipation turned into an energy that became careful, methodical, and thorough. At the back of an unused bedroom, there was an empty closet, a long closet with sliding doors. I gathered blankets and a sleeping bag and laid them out on the carpet floor inside. They fit perfectly, folded in half, a cozy nest. A pillow. Headphones. A flashlight. My phone. I’m age nine setting up a playhouse. I made sure the volume in my headphones couldn’t be heard from outside. I put a rolled up sheet against the bottom of the sliding doors so that you couldn’t see the light of my flashlight. I hid in a closet so that he wouldn’t find me when he got home. I waited to hear the door open, waited to hear the mud rush in. It was like being at the bottom of a tank, or the bottom of the sea, looking up at the surface. Stuck in that moment just before you can no longer hold your breath underwater. I’m the corpse. Have you ever made yourself small, looked up at your closet from the floor? Finally, I heard his footsteps on the stairs, a deep, low thump muffled through our apartment walls. I heard him muttering and confused and angry. I heard him look for me. I heard his footsteps walk through every room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathroom, the back porch. I finally heard him walk into the empty bedroom, I heard him on the other side of the shut doors that I laid next to, the wall separating me from the swamp. I tried not to make a sound. I’m waiting for the corpse beside me to come alive. Who was on the other side of that door? Who was on the other side of that wall? I’m nine years old, seized before a scream. Please don’t find me. He didn’t find me. I held like this for hours. He didn’t sleep. He searched for me. He texted me, I had one of those navy Nokia phones with silver buttons and glowing green screen. Realizing I would never rest, I gave up hiding. I pulled open the closet doors to face him. I pulled open the closet doors to die. But the memory ends there. It fades to black. I don’t remember if I screamed. I cannot see who is on the other side of that door. Was this the same man who terrified us? The violence of the body in the canal, of Gabriel at age 48, of my childhood, of my dream, of the apartment at Augusta and Rockwell, is never in the present. The violence of the corpse in the water happened before the story, before the dream, or after the story, after the dream. Did he jump? Was he killed? Is it worth it now to guess? Gabriel’s violence at age 48 is never present. I tried not to watch. It happened behind me, in another room, just beyond a closed door, just out of my eyesight. Gabriel was violent with others in my family but not me. I was his favorite. I was only a witness. I am left with the horror of witnessing—a smell sick and putrid like vomit, the sound of an impact like a mallet striking a hanging and fresh veal, the sight of thin panes of glass shaken by a bellow of rage and a slamming door, the feel of my toes curling into a blanket at the bottom of a closet. The things that Gabriel did are things no one should ever see, not even you, even though you may be seeking it now. The violence is past the river, just through the trees. It is in the corner of my eye as I tried not to look. It is just slightly off page. It is just outside of your sight and if you turn your head to find the smell it will just barely escape your vision. But it is implied in the water and in the mud and in the silence of the dream, the silence of the canal, the silence of the text. Today, as our family sees each other’s faces from far away on a video call, the violence isn’t present anymore. We laugh and we love each other and we’re proud of each other. He has apologized for it, even though he doesn’t remember most of it. But the silence of memory remains. And for me, the silence of terror remains. But it is no longer in the canal or in my room submerged in water. It is in the silence of my Chicago apartment, on Augusta and Rockwell in a third floor walk-up, hidden at the bottom of a closet. As I entered relationships where I loved and feared the people who loved me and hurt me, the violence emerged from its concealment and looked me in the face. Sometimes my memory gets mixed up. I’m starting to forget things and I’m starting to remember the past differently. Here, I’m the little girl on my father’s back and I am also the little girl watching my father slap the corpse in the water. I’m the little girl witnessing and swept up in a typhoon of his violence, a storm that strikes and plunges little girls in the water and sweeps us downstream. I tell myself never again. I tell my father I love him. But I still watch the corpse, I sleep next to it every night. ■