The machine sounds like magic and your voice is a weakness, and the weakness disappears inside the magic of the machine. What would it take for the channels creating noise for the machine, to clear. How do I deice to believe in the magic of the machinery, once and for all?

To look for the messages of the universe and believe in them is to become superstitious and perhaps be perceived as “out of one’s mind.” How do I decide to believe in magic, once and for all? This is like, every Sunday at church. Every time we ask what the originating energy is that starts our existence.

We believe ourselves to be human. We believe ourselves to be gods. Dad was obsessed with the mechanics of cars for as long as I could recall during my childhood. Busy taking them apart and putting them back together. Taught himself all the particulars of combustion and engineering. Not the brands or the ride or the experience of the drive, but the machinery. He hasn’t said a word about cars or car parts or the magic of human intervention in the fifteen years we have been in each others’ lives again or the last three months we’ve been in active communication. Dad was my magician, so I am trying to see the charm of a new terrestrial relationship with him now, without cars, without machinery.

But when the machine sounds like magic, what do I do.

I took his car out joyriding once late at night from our house in the suburbs. I must’ve been but 14. When I returned to the garage, taking caution to roll into the driveway with the lights off and barely idling-gliding in, I saw him in the doorway to the house waiting for me. My sister behind him sobbing. We all knew what was going to happen next. This isn’t a story about corporal punishment but I had taken the car out so many times before he caught me that I’m OK with the fact that he hit me so hard across the face blood flew from my nose. It didn’t last long. It’s any wonder he asks why I’ve been so morose around him. I must appear to be such a downer. If only he’d seen me driving.

I have a unique perspective on surviving survivors. My dad survived his own attempt to erase the magic of the machinery forever. This is a story about when parents attempt to end their lives and then change their minds by finding peace in their solitude instead of mystery. I’m stuck, still wondering how the universe turns, waiting for someone to explain the magic to me.

As I drove home late tonight from the drum studio, I sped past an antique Jaguar topless sports car, many years newer than the one my dad worked on in our garage, but same color scheme and familiar silhouette, even at night. The driver looked oddly like my dad, and I gave him a think while the sounds in my head made me excited still. Conflating the excitement of the noise with the nostalgia for my dad’s obsession with cars, for a split second, I decided I want him to be happy after all.