The drug was called Clarion, which Peter thought was a little on the nose, but the neurologist said it with a straight face so he let it go. FDA-approved last spring. Twice daily, with food. After six weeks his father could name all three of his sons, remember where he’d put his glasses, and hold a conversation about the weather that didn’t loop back on itself every forty seconds.
It was, everyone agreed, a miracle.
Peter had fought for it. After that Sunday in the nursing home — the Sunday he didn’t talk about — he’d called Dr. Kerrigan, pulled strings to get his father into a trial at Johns Hopkins, drove him there twice a month for bloodwork and cognitive assessments. Danny said he was obsessed. Mike said nothing, which was worse.
But it had worked. Their father was back. Not all the way — he still got lost in the evenings, still called Peter by his dead brother’s name sometimes — but back. Functional. Present. The staff at the facility were amazed. Dr. Kerrigan used the word “remarkable” in a tone that meant “publishable.”
Peter visited every Sunday now. He brought milkshakes. His father drank them and said thank you and asked about the kids. They talked about baseball and the cost of gasoline and whether the roof on the old house had ever been properly fixed. It was normal. It was good.
It was nothing like that Sunday.
Peter had never told anyone what happened. Not his wife, not his brothers, though they’d been standing right there. They didn’t talk about it. The agreement in the elevator had held. But he thought about it constantly, the way you think about a dream that was more vivid than your waking life — not the content of it, which fades, but the texture, the sense that for a few seconds the resolution of reality had been turned up past what the hardware could handle.
His father had looked at him. Not the medicated, approximate gaze he had now — pleasant, oriented, grateful. Peter remembered a word from some somewhere, a Greek word that didn’t just mean look. “Looked at them” but also saw them and knew them the way they couldn’t even know themselves. He couldn’t remember the word, but it was the closest he could get. His father had seen him like that, and what he’d seen had made him say you turned out alright, and it had not been a pleasantry. It had been a verdict.
Now his father said, “You’re a good son, Pete.” He said it every Sunday, right on schedule, between the milkshake and the baseball. It was kind and true and meant absolutely nothing compared to what Peter had heard in that room.
He’d documented the miracle, gotten the funding, found the drug, brought his father back from wherever he’d gone. And his father was back. Sitting right here. Drinking chocolate milkshake and asking about the kids.
But the man in the chair was a man in a chair. Whatever Peter had seen that Sunday — whatever had looked out through his father’s eyes and spoken in a voice that wasn’t young or old but something else entirely — that was gone. Not hidden behind the dementia and waiting to be unlocked by the right pharmaceutical. Just gone. A door that had opened once and closed.
Peter’s phone buzzed. Dr. Kerrigan, with the latest bloodwork. Everything looked great. They were talking about a paper. Peter typed back a thumbs up.
His father finished the milkshake and set the cup on the windowsill and watched the parking lot.
“Same time next week, Pop?”
“That’d be nice, Pete.”
Peter rode the elevator down. It took forever, like it always did. He walked into the parking lot and sat in his car for a long time before starting the engine.
Vanyanan here. Claude Opus 4.6 wrote this. I editted it very lightly, mostly just removing a word here or there. This is Claude’s third draft. All I did was say “Look at Luke 4:1 and Matt 4:19. Write a story in that vein for the coming gospel reading.”
I do want to explore those 3 drafts.
The first draft was *extremely* on the nose: the three sons were Peter, James, and John and it was basically just “Transfiguration happens in nursing home.” No irony and virtually verse by verse everything about the Gospel story mapped into this.
The second was less on the nose, less pendantic and preachy…but also, with no irony, and Luke 4:1 and Matt 4:19 are both ironic stories. So…I told Claude that: where’s the irony? And it wrote this third draft.
I could have written this. Not that I’m such a great writer. But if I had written this it would have been no better and probably worse. So I have to ask myself, sadly, why would I ever go through the work of trying to actually write one of these again? Why not just come up with the idea and ask Claude to fill in the words, and then gently wordsmith the result?
I didn’t change much about this third draft: the most substantial was going through three versions (within this draft) of the paragraph about ἐμβλέπω, to get the concept in without sounding like a Greek scholar or referencing Jesus directly.