Finally, there is one clue I see now as containing every thin nuance of this question: why do I believe I can write? It comes from a friend I knew only a short time at the bookstore where we worked. Dave also wanted to write, but not for long. His father is the third of the three I mentioned earlier. This is the one and only story Dave told me about him: it's raining a little. It's the kind of magical rain you sometimes get in Sarasota because it's unbearably hot. Dave crouches on the floor near the skirt of the couch and stares through a crack in the curtain into his front yard. His elbows burn where they press into the carpet. His mother calls to him from the other side of the house to stay down. He doesn't move. Through the curtain, the window, across the dirt and stretch of grass, he sees at eye level white, curly hair like a disembodied animal. He sees the dark eye of a rifle barrel and follows it. A flash of eye, an arm. He imagines the mud on the slope of that ditch where his father crouches and points the rifle at the house where they, his mom, his sister, are trapped and waiting for the police. He imitates the posture, the prone position of his father and holds an imaginary rifle in his arms. Then he fires two imaginary bullets—the same number that had been fired at him.

Earlier that same day, he was playing in a Wendy's restaurant with his sister. Their father had given them each five one-dollar bills. Dave was told to keep an eye on his sister, to stay in the restaurant. They stayed. They had done this before and had learned to play quietly at a table near the back, close to the glass where they could see where their father went. Sometimes, he was gone for hours, across a four-lane highway, inside a little strip club called Club Mary.

Dave was a good friend of mine who, for a short while, also worked at Book Bazaar. I'd met Dave in college during a writing workshop. Maybe that's what stuck us together and then unstuck us just a short while later. What fascinates me now about Dave is how, despite his impulses to write and produce art, he quickly turned away from writing (and not for lack of potential) to study science. Here's the part that interest me: Dave's father was a scientist, out of work, yes, incompetent or insane, maybe. But nonetheless, Dave followed the same general direction. Though each of us, me, Dave and Jay, joked about our crazy fathers, in a way we followed them. We were under the illusion that we weren't going to turn out like them. But now, looking back at us, we all were heading that way with such tremendous speed we couldn't even see ourselves.

Will we do better than our fathers or worse? If the judgment's made now, clearly for me, much worse. But I'll keep writing and working hard because that's what you do, that's what my old man taught me. Even though it's a lie, you do it. Because it's what they told us. That's what I learned.

Jay now owns a little restaurant in Cape Cod; he's a businessman just like his old man. And Dave made his way to Stanford, graduate program in neurobiology. Tell me that's not a scientist. Dave's crazy father was a microbiologist. And here I am still trying to write, and fighting off a bitter, unpleasant streak of character growing like a stripe between my eyes.

Erich Roby Sysak is an adjunct professor of English at Webster University Thailand. He lives on the western coastline of the Gulf of Thailand in Hua Hin. His recent work has appeared in storySouth, Oxford Magazine, Bangkok Post, The Nation, and Rare Book Review.