My Father is writing an autobiography at my request. He is seventy years old; I look at him and he looks at me, and we don't believe it. He just built a house with only my mother's help, hauling bags of cement from his truck and nailing shingles on a high roof. The mark of seventy years strikes us both as a kind of social indiscretion performed by a stranger.

I am reminded of the writings of Benedetto Croce, and the question: Where is history? It isn't in some nether realm, still going on in a private replay of itself; it is in documents that are being examined or thought of, directly or obliquely, or it is not. It is in living brain cells or it is nowhere, since even documents require a reader to make them more than shadow-shapes, cities of calcite crystals, forest scenes composed of hoarfrost.

At first he writes things that are steadfastly bound to chronology: water siphoned from the bottom of a deep cave pond, and dripped back in upon a surface. Then he tells the stories I have heard, with modesty producing many qualifiers and disclaimers. All pointing to a desire to avoid pretense, a desire that is also, perhaps, a wish to avoid social risk. A world held close is one's own, and may be enlarged by will and curiosity when not limited by the constraints of a general viewing of it.

When my sister and I were very small children, we sat once half in my mother's lap in a big overstuffed chair. She read a story to us—I don't remember what it was—and in it one of the characters died. My sister and I commented immediately that we didn't want this to happen. My mother laughed and said, "Everybody has to die sometime." Everybody? "Yes, all of us will die." But not you, Mama—not you. "Yes, even me." My sister and I looked at each other at that point, and years later I confirmed with her that we both thought the same thing at that moment. Both of us decided we weren't going to believe it, that we would let it be part of the story that had resumed—my mother's voice as comforting as it had been.

Then it is the edges of the old stories that begin to appear. Like a youthful outing once with pellet rifles; a companion was about to shoot a bird and my father, thinking to scare the creature away with a random, preemptive shot, sent it downward in a drift. Now, long after, a sadness always when seeing birds on twig or wire puffed against the cold. And from the puddles around that time a plaintive note recalled at the sight of water collected over green grass in fields, and on parking lots after rain.

I want to write a book of questions: Where does a life go? Will I have my father's life to hold safe when he tells it to me? Is any detail ever absolutely lost, beyond the possibility of recovery?

I remember reading about something called "the information paradox." In the early nineties, astrophysicists were suddenly in a quandary: if material could drop into a black hole and be absolutely lost forever, what did this do to a notion central to classical physics, which holds that the universe is ultimately fully describable and understandable? If you have a vast jigsaw puzzle and parts can go missing, how can you ever be sure, theoretically speaking, that an understanding is complete? So they all got into a huddle and came up with a "workable explanation," one that didn't require the rewrite of Everything, and that dispensed with the problem. Apparently gamma rays may be thrown from falling matter at the event horizon (the point of no return for all else), and, there you have it—a tangible place holder for information. When I heard of this solution, I found myself thinking of the great library of Alexandria. At one time it contained at least 400,000 scrolls, many the only copies of ancient works. Around 400 A.D., all of it that hadn't already suffered from political machinations and neglect was burned by marauding armies. Given the solution found with respect to black holes, perhaps I should take heart: smoke was produced, a smoke with the distinctive smell of information burning. And surely that soot is wafting still, somewhere…. Is this thought stranger, really, than the belief that souls are, or will be, collected in a place—each in possession of the memories that serve as their identity? But when I think this thought, I imagine those scientists leaning back in their chairs, away from black holes, barely resisting the urge to exchange winks.

I ask my father to tell it again—my own voice an echo. A story I heard as a child and have always been ready to hear again. When I was very small my father went to work for a few months in the far north of Canada. Christmas came in Houston, and he was working in a seismic recording truck in a place so cold even simple hinges had to be warmed before they would work. They drove across frozen lakes, and sometimes down endless unpaved roads that were covered in a sheet of ice. Once, in the middle of a moonless, overcast night, far from any light made by man, my father was a passenger in a car driven by a fellow worker. The man was prone to fast driving, making relatively short work of the miles between a small town and the oil exploration site. They were driving fast, and suddenly a fuse in the car's electrical system popped: all the lights, even the dash lights, disappeared instantly, with only the retinal memory of them lingering for a moment. The driver, in absolute dark, braked carefully, since they traveled on solid ice. Blind, he could only attempt to hold the wheel steady to the last reckoning available to him. After some time had passed, my father asked, "Do you think we are stopped?" All was quiet and still inside the car. "I can't tell," the driver said. My father found a match in his pocket; he opened his door, struck the match and looked down at the ground. Ice in a blur swept by beneath them still, like the surface of a steel bearing, unfettered and gliding free.

Daryl Scroggins lives with his wife and daughter in Dallas. His poems and short stories have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Chiron Review, The Madison Review, Mudfish, Northwest Review, The Prose Poem, and The Quarterly. His book, The Game Of Kings, a sequence of prose poems, will be published this year by Rancho Loco Press.

 Daryl

 Scroggins