Gately's Trauma Wing: the wraith and the M.P. — "Just imagine the horror of spending…"
Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen
Context
Here the anthology gets its three-generation spine in a single breath: the wraith was, as a boy, exactly what his son became — a child gesturing "through the distilled haze" to a father who wouldn't see him, needing to be good but not too good, or he'd become a screen for the father's self-loathing. And behind that father stands the wraith's own grandfather, "the blank wooden man" who by family myth "drove" the wraith's father "to the bottle" and an early cerebral hemorrhage. The wound is the inheritance: not-being-seen passes father to son to son like the dipsomania that shadows it, each generation swearing to break it and handing it down instead. Himself feared as a child he was becoming his own blank father, then watched his most gifted son become the very blankness he'd feared — the theme's darkest law, that what you flee in your father is what you deliver to your child.