MY FATHER BEFORE HE DIED wrote things we couldn't imagine because he never told us what he was writing and burned the papers before we could read them. The premature cremation should not have been the cruelty we perceived at the time but an expectation. His father had done the same, as had his father before him - the one who brought into the family She Whose Name Has Masked Me For Life.
Aside from that name, you wouldn't know we were related. Perhaps, though, even with that name, you would still not connect the one with the other. It was because of all those things that were written yet unseen by my male forbears that I was born in America. And it was because of things written yet unseen, with their monster-amalgam of monster-suppositions and monster-audience, that launched me into the world like a boat from a foundering ship into a raging sea, to live or die according to elements untroubled by the mechanics of destruction. . . .
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