layers of glass. This is what happens each Saturday, when Mom's at work. I will go inside, take the liquor from my mom's cabinet, and pour him a drink because he's asked me to. Then, slowly, he will become harder and harder to love. "No," I say. He looks at me. He pinches the hinge of his eyeglasses between his fingers, then lowers the lenses, enough so that his pupils are just over the rim, and he glares at me. I keep looking him in the eyes. I know this trick by now; he wants to intimidate me. But really, he just can't see without his glasses. Really, it's the only way he knows how to look into my eyes. "What did you say to me?" "No," I say. This time, when I say the word, he shouts a laugh: a sharp German noise swaying, suddenly, out from his scaled French nose. "If you ever," he says, "say that to me again, this will be the last time you see me." Sometimes I play this game, where if I stare at my parents long enough, they appear as strangers. Just like if you say your name over and over until it becomes a blob. I play this game now, without meaning to, looking at my father. I examine the windswept wreckage of his face, the lint on his Christ-like beard, his intricately beat-up jaw, the meringue of tobacco on his fingers. "No," I say again, and then he leaves. Dad's favorite philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, believes that the epiphany – a manifestation of the divine – is seen only in another's face. "The face," Lévinas argues, "in its nudity and defenselessness, signifies: 'Do not kill me.' It is this transitive innocence that creates the epiphany. The face is meaning, all on its own. It leads you beyond." The last epiphany I get to have, before my father dies, occurs when I’m sixteen. My mom and I enter Dad’s apartment, find him splayed out on the kitchen floor, naked and writhing slowly. He is sixty-seven by now, has been smoking and drinking hard since he was twelve. The smell of gauze, the heat, the pinch of the hallway – I remember these things well. I look into my dad’s eyes just once on this night. I don’t make the mistake again. He is emaciated, his cheeks sunken, his eyes like a frightened animal’s. It's like he's just been struck by a light for the first time, like some rawboned victim of a bombing. He gazes up at me as if I'm foreign. My mom is saying things to me, and I'm trying to listen. She wants us to pick him up, but suddenly I'm terrified by the thought of handling this fragile old man. When we lift him, he is so much heavier than I imagined. Quickly, we drop him sidelong into a recliner, and I watch him there for a moment, making sure not to see his eyes.
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