My meeting with Malik profoundly disturbed me, and I’m not sure why. His cryptic comments about my father stirred up a stew of fragmentary memories, but none has told me anything useful. I’m not even sure the images in my mind are real, and not things I’ve pieced together from old photographs and stories. A few things I’m sure of—salvaged from nights I sat in the loft of the barn my father used for his studio, watching him work into the small hours of the morning. The roar of the acetylene cutting torch, the hiss of steam as he dipped red-hot metal into the trough he used to cool it. The smell of acids he used for etching, the sound of the riveter as he linked various pieces of his sculpture into a whole that existed only in his mind. There were no sketches, no plans. Just raw metal and the vision in his head.Now and then, he would remove his mask and look up into the loft at me. Sometimes he would smile. Other times he just stared, watching me with something like fear in his eyes.
