Can’t say when it was that my dad began his compulsive collection of flashlights. Maybe if he had collected anything else we would have noticed sooner, had it been something that sees a little less application around the house like maybe hammers or tape measures. Its just that flashlights are kind of handy to have around, I guess. Easy to explain away, at least, especially when Explaining Away is exactly what you’re looking to do.
Dad’s collection of flashlights formed with the slow and quiet tenacity of an unchecked tumor. My old man never even expressed any sentiment about the things, which was odd given just how many ended up strewn around the house. You might as well have asked him how his unchecked tumor was, because his response whenever we asked about the flashlights had always been “I don’t know,” let out in a raspy breath, something like a loud whisper. He spoke enough of an accent to let you know he learned Spanish first and he was very non confrontational so I’m sure that was his way of distancing himself from the question. My mom and I, along with my older sister considered this an innocuous hobby at first, having even gifted him a couple flashlights and entire flashlight kits between the three of us.
Thinking about it now, I don’t know if any of us would have believed my Dad if he had told us the truth on the times we insisted on asking. Well, I say I don’t know, but the truth is I do know. I know we would not have believed him because at that point, if a loved one raves about lights in the sky then any responsible and loving family member would have to believe that loved one to be off their rocker already. But when I dare think about it too hard I can’t overlook what a convenient contingency that makes.
Either way, it became apparent slowly that this hobby was evolving into an obsessive tendency. Eventually the flashlights massed to the unknown number which flipped the switch in everyone’s mind and we decided something unhealthy was happening; perhaps what might even be a real issue. Something my family was never really equipped to handle. What began as a little hand flashlight in every closet led to one or two placed meticulously under every sink, in every dark corner, no matter the room, and every drawer, no matter its contents. The week before my parents packed up and headed home, it wasn’t uncommon to find cold flashlights in the deli drawer of the refrigerator or even tucked between bottles of shampoo in the shower caddy.
The explanation I’ve found sturdiest to cling to is only as steady as a buoy in a sea storm, one that can only just manage upon the surface of the ocean that is sanity, churning violently with uncertainty and hopeless depth. The most basic truth is that my dad was sick and the compulsive flashlight hoarding was a result of his illness. My father had suffered a string of losses in life around the time the flashlights really started gathering in mass around the house. He had just lost his mother and began forgetting things. He lost his job and his ability to maintain one followed as his functions declined. He became afraid to drive, and it was then that he confessed he was afraid to get lost in the town he’d spent the last three quarters of his life in, a town which is by no means big. It wasn’t a tumor that got my dad, and oddly enough in the end in his most lucid and fleeting moments, where the emotions made so much sense they burned for all the time they didn’t and the picture was unapologetically fucking clear to him, he would curse and wish it had been a tumor.
It was dementia that got my old man. I call him old, but he was young- too damn young for dementia. It snuck up on him all the same. It snuck up so good that it robbed the man clean of himself. With difficulty, I can accept that. That picture at least, is clear and sane to me. But that is only glimpsing down into the water. That’s a stray thought that doesn’t catch- a good day. Simply, my dad had dementia early and that is quite possible, that explains the flashlights strewn around the house. However, there is a voice that gurgles from the depths of uncertainty, waters which are deep indeed. It says my dad is gone for good and not because of dementia. Gone because of the beams in the night six months ago. Because of the Flashlights. The things I can’t understand. I’m afraid if I lend that voice an ear that it might just drag me down its rabbit hole, drown me in the black without a flashlight. I can even hear it now:
Dementia doesn’t explain how your daddy disappeared in a town of 300 where everybody knows his face. It doesn’t explain the beams from the sky, like flashlights all their own.
Most days I am caught in the ocean afraid to lose my grip on reason, that unsteady buoy, and all the while I am unable to glimpse over the vastness of black waters yet explained. My dad has been missing for three months now. He and my mom moved to their home in Mexico six months after the first incident with the Flashlights occurred.
Once past the collective family denial, once we all agreed we were living in the world where Dad was very much Not Okay, we all assumed my old man’s flashlight hoarding was some sort of metaphorical coping mechanism. In my mind at the time, he simply needed flashlights nearby to bade the darkness away. My father was born in Mexico, came from an estranged family of Spanish origin which never properly showed him the love he deserved. This in turn meant he never learned to efficiently express the tremendous love he had within him. This isn’t to say he can’t or never did express his love- on the contrary. I admire him because he found a way to cultivate the love he had into happiness by his own manner, his own coded language signed by his hand, regardless of how unsteady or sometimes even illegible. When I was little, for example, he wouldn’t take me to buy toys, but he would ask my mom to let me pick something out on his dime when she took me grocery shopping. I didn’t even know it was my dad paying for those toys until my mom told me recently, now that she’s decided that dad’s really gone. Now that we all have decided that dad’s really gone and are all now living in the world where Dad is not just Not Okay, but Dad is Probably Dead or At Least Not Coming Back. It’s sad how often little gems of truth are saved for after their moment, like currency of a lost age.
In the last week he was seen, my dad could not recognize his favorite song, or any song, really. He would get lost on his way to the bathroom. The morning of his disappearance he had confided to my mother that his wife had run off and robbed him, how all his suspicions had been proven to be right. He was completely senile then, hurtfully so. Unable to recognize the woman he was speaking to, with whom he’d spent his life and squeezed out his last conscious moments of joy, lost within his own hurt and unhealed parental betrayal. He had last been seen the afternoon before a storm with no rain, climbing up into the hills. That’s how I imagine he spent his last few days- weathering a big storm with no rain. Maybe if the rain had fallen we would have noticed there was a storm. But it’s so easy to brush a storm aside, especially when there’s no rain. The only things missing following his disappearance, the only things he seemed to have taken, were the battery to his ‘81 Cheyenne and the old work lamp he had hung in the garage.
The first night of the Flashlights my dad had stumbled into my room informing me he was lost. He’d had brain hiccups before, but none so severe as to leave him lost in his own home, that had been the first anyway. I sat up shielding my face from the light of what must’ve been one of those big D-cell powered torches, telling him his room was only one door over, telling him I could walk him if he liked. He only repeated how he was lost in an airy, empty tone and stepped backward out of my room, the torch still trained on my face. I watched the beam die to a sliver and then a ray and then into nothing at all as the door closed, like an Edgar Allen poem. Like a dream. I laid back down when the sound of the front door opened and through my bedroom window I could see the glow of his torch cut the night. He was a thread of light bobbing down the drive, cutting across the lawn and headed west along the road. I saw his flashlight turn the block the moment I stepped outside after hastily throwing on the day before’s jeans and slipped sockless into a pair of old Converse. It might’ve been the darkness.
It could’ve been drowsiness, or nerves. But my dad’s bobbing flashlight had made it all the way down to the opposite end of our neighborhood block, which had to be a good 200 feet away. His flashlight seemed to have dimmed to a low glow, no longer a beam and more like a sad pulsing orb. I felt panic then, for the first time. Something like the cup of milk was really starting to get full and would soon drip onto my hands and onto the table and then it was very possible it might spill altogether and this one felt big enough to flood the entire kitchen. I ran toward his dull glow, surprised at the distance and all the strides, I had to wonder how he had made it that far that fast. I looked ahead, wanting to see my dad, hoping to ease the panic. I only saw black. The road was dark. Real fucking dark. The streetlights were all out. I turned left onto Birckwood Street, hooking south and after my dad. Birckwood Street ends one block down at a cross with Fish Bowl Avenue. At the four way, the paved Birckwood street becomes dusty old County Road 311, a backroad tucked away neatly in a little corner of our happy neighborhood.
Ahead Dad’s flashlight began to work again. Working impossibly well, it seemed, because the entire backroad was lit. I remember rounding the corner and being able to see the lines of trees at either ends of the backroad and how their tips were green but they had a dress of dust from what the cars kicked up off the road. Somehow my dad had made it all the way down the block again. I don’t even remember wondering how he had done it the second time. As I rounded the corner I could see him illuminating the midnight trail ahead of him like a lighthouse, and he was beginning to cast that light upwards. I stopped running then. I realized that the black over our heads was not the night. My dad’s beam had not even reached a wide angle before I could see where the light caught on some titanic panel above. The light did not betray the thing above us by casting any detail, there was only the oval of a spotlight creeping along that black something. The way the searchlight floated I got the impression that my dad was standing under the very center of this titanic suspended carpet, this massive fake sky. My dad’s flashlight tipped up until it met the nucleus of the leviathan looming over us, his beam a big yellow nothing against the greater nothing beyond it. Over his head a new light began to emerge, appearing to open in welcome of my father’s approaching ray. It was like a sun flare in your eyes on a sunny day beach, all shimmering rainbows. I did not see the moment when the two lights touched. The strange light grew so bright in my eyes that everything else washed away.
Next thing I knew I was waking up in my bed thinking it must be morning the next day. My dad had stumbled into my room shining one of those big D-cell powered torches into my face. I jumped out of bed and walked him back into his room. I set his flashlight on the nightstand and helped him into bed. My mom didn’t even wake up. I walked back into my room and sat down on my bed. I had woken up wearing shoes with no socks. I found my mom washing the sheets the following morning. My dad had wet the bed sometime in the night. The worst part was he had burned both his hands bad enough to require a visit to the clinic and his eyebrows were gone. That had been when talk of moving dad home to Mexico started. And the process was quick, about as easy as you can ask for when moving internationally. I think we were all hoping that dad moving home would somehow leave the greater load of his trouble here. Whatever mental struggles he had here he carried with him. If there was anything else preying on my dad, and sometimes I think there was, I’m afraid it followed him. I think it would’ve followed him anywhere on the planet. I think it could have followed him to any planet.