Chapter Three: The Ghost in the Machine ---Fragments of a Dissociative Universe---
I have no memory of my father.
He exists for me the way a rumor does...an outline traced in someone else’s voice, a silhouette behind glass. His name was Mario Yelle, and by the time I could hold a single coherent thought, he was gone. I was two years old when he died, leaving only the strange, absolute silence where a man used to be.
My mother carries the images for both of us. She tells me I was once a different boy: open, trusting, loud in the way small children are loud about everything. “He always slept a lot and cried to go outside,” she says, as if reading from a tender confession. “He loved everyone, and he probably would have left with the first stranger.” I try to conjure that child, to feel the warmth of his trust, but the picture is sun-bleached in my head, edges smudged, colors gone. All I have are fragments and the sound of someone else’s memory.
The story of how he died is the first place I learned that the world will always choose efficiency over truth. It came to me in the flat, impersonal voice of print. The newspaper clipping lives like an accusation taped in a drawer: a Thursday evening around nine o’clock; a quarry in Saint-Constant; a site owned by a multinational called Concrete Lafarge. My father was alone in his 50-ton truck, and that truck plunged one hundred feet into the quarry’s dark throat. He did not linger. He was gone instantly.
The article is clinical where grief would be fevered. It calls the circumstances “nebulous,” like a polite cough to cover a rot. There were whispers then... talk of an unsafe road, of corners cut, of procedures ignored. Worse, the clipping records a smaller, corrosive detail that still tastes metallic: when a photographer tried to document the scene, “the authorities of the company... prevented [him] from taking any pictures.” That sentence sits in the paper like a stain. The company’s men moved to protect themselves before anyone buried a man. The death was not only an end; it was a lesson in how power buries its mistakes.
This was not merely a private grief. The injustice radiated outward. Workers smelled the lie and lit a match strikes followed, voices raised in anger that said this was not only a man lost but an outrage that could have been prevented. For us, though, the strike was noise at the edge of a new silence.
His death caused “a lot of serious drama in both families.” But for us, the aftermath was a slow, quiet fading. It was not a deliberate excision, but a gradual drift. My mother grieved, and then she continued her life. A new boyfriend appeared a couple of years later, and our world slowly reoriented itself around a new center. The connection to my father and his family didn't snap; it frayed over time. The last time I saw them, I was four or five years old. I have no memory of a final goodbye, just a silence that eventually became permanent.
What I inherited from my father was not tools or advice, not his laugh or the smell of his shirts. My inheritance was a single, sharp narrative: the violent, unresolved end. It was a story folded into every quiet moment... an echo when doors closed, a cavity of silence at holiday tables, a clipped sentence when people asked where he’d gone.
For a while after he disappeared, I remained the child my mother remembered, open, trusting, the kind who believed the world could be reached by a small hand. That boy survived the loss of his father. He clung to the ordinary warmth still possible in a home that had otherwise become a ledger of absences.
But survival is fragile. It can be washed away by the next storm. And it did not, in the end, survive what came next.
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