Echoes of a Family (3)
"Everything just fades away."
Jack Nicholson always said those words whenever he was drunk. He said it when he first found out Sion was in Duluth and met up with him, and he said it throughout the shoot, dropping by night after night to crack open a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Through this production, Sion realized that Jack's approach to portraying dementia stemmed from that very sentiment.
"Back in my twenties, I was practically bursting with lust. If a woman walked past, even if she weighed over two hundred pounds, I'd chase after her just to get laid. Then the thirties hit, bringing fame and money, and that fire began to fizzle out. That's when I started chasing love. But in the end, even love couldn't fill the void inside."
Pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, he stared at his slightly trembling fingertips.
"The emotional capillaries die off as you age. It's inevitable, really. After all, the human mind is just an illusion conjured up by the brain. As things became familiar and dull, my forties and fifties slipped away. Joy was fleeting; the emptiness was constant. But you know... there was one single thing that remained in my life."
Acting.
"I acted in Chinatown."
He had acted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he had acted in The Last Detail. Those moments would remain immortal, forever etched into the annals of cinema history. Compared to that legacy, how trivial was his actual, physical existence? Having realized this, Jack Nicholson was finally able to accept his own aging, and the inevitable defeat that time inflicts upon all men. Yes, acting was just a job.
"But it's a damn good one."
He always concluded with that, before cheerfully pouring himself another drink.
Just like that, life was bound to fade. Whether one liked it or not, humanity slowly marched toward death. Yet, within every life, there was a personal movie. And there was a family to remember it. Thus, even the most ordinary-looking life acquired its own unique meaning. Jack had explained that his interpretation of the film's narrative was structured around Bob slowly realizing this truth. Ironically, he realized it through the very "fading" of dementia—like a man dying of thirst in a desert desperately searching for an oasis. Of course, Bob didn't realize it from the start. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a movie. Above all, a real human being would never accept their own decay and decline so easily.
The screening room was thick with silence. Sion could feel the audience's absolute immersion in the film. On screen, Bob had finally been admitted to a nursing home. After receiving a proper medical evaluation and being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, his son, who had returned to the city, came to visit. Unable to accept that he was fading, the father blamed his son for the placement rather than accepting it as his own choice. Even this projection was a symptom of his Alzheimer's, though Bob himself was entirely unaware of it. Ultimately, Dan stormed out after hurling harsh words at him. On a cold Duluth afternoon, as Dan stood lost in thought, Nancy, the nurse, approached him.
"Bob, are you alright?"
"I'm just... glad that I can slowly lose myself." Bob spoke as if he would rather remember nothing at all. "I'm actually looking forward to the moment the current 'me' completely vanishes."
"Don't say that. You have to fight this, Bob."
"Though, I suppose if I regress completely into a child, it'll make things rather difficult for you, Nurse."
"That's not what I meant..."
"I hope it never comes back. Not my mind, and not that boy."
They only brought each other pain. Left utterly alone, Bob faded. The film conveyed the passage of time through the whitening of his hair and the cyclical piling and clearing of snow outside. Unable to bear the sight of him sitting blankly by the window, slowly slipping away day by day, Nancy finally called his son, Dan.
"Your father is losing more and more of himself," Nancy said.
"I'm sorry. Please, just take good care of him."
"We strongly... recommend that you come visit."
"It's just a recommendation, isn't it?"
The line was about to go dead, but Nancy desperately held on.
"I have a daughter."
"..."
"Her father... isn't around. So I'm terrified. I worry about how the love I give her will affect her. What if I do my absolute best, but she only remembers the worst of me? ...That's what it means to be a parent, isn't it?"
"You don't know anything about us."
"I heard from Mina. And your father regrets what happened."
"Regrets crushing my dreams? Bullshit. If that's true, why is he still trying to stop me even now, when his brain is rotting away?"
"He's just reenacting that moment. Because it's the most intense memory of his entire life."
The greatest irony of the human brain was its tendency to cling to painful memories far more intensely than happy ones. In truth, Bob regretted that moment of confrontation so deeply that his mind kept replaying it, trapping him in a loop where he could only reenact it in reality.
"But even that has stopped recently," Nancy continued. Without any external stimulus, the loop had faded. "If we give him his typewriter, he'll tap away at it occasionally. But he can't write anything coherent anymore."
Hearing this, Dan looked like a machine that had never learned how to cry. A machine integrated into society, merely performing its daily, designated tasks. A massive, unresolved knot sat heavy in his chest. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea how to untangle it.
"...Nothing at all? The man who made his living on words?" For the first time, a question about his father escaped Dan's lips.
"Lately... he keeps asking us to play music for him."
"Ha." Dan let out a hollow, incredulous laugh. "What kind of music? Classical? Jazz?"
"Surprisingly, he says band music. But no matter what we play for him, he insists it's not the right song."
Bewildered by the absurdity of it, yet seized by an inexplicable premonition, the son ultimately went back to see his father.
Winter had returned, blanketing the ground in a thick layer of snow. When Dan stepped into the nursing home, his father did not recognize him. For a long time, the son stood frozen, staring in shock at the frail, elderly man his father had become in his absence. The father was like the dusty typewriter sitting on the adjacent table—capable only of spitting out fragmented, contextless characters. Yet, ironically, it was this very state that allowed the two of them to finally speak with a semblance of ease.
"Hello," Dan said quietly.
"Oh, hello there. What brings you to this place?"
"I came to see my father."
"Haha, what a good son. Your father must be very proud."
"Not at all. I'm a terrible son. I went out of my way to choose every single path my father told me not to take."
"Did your father really do that?"
"Yes. He did."
"He probably didn't mean it. He was probably just worried about you."
"..."
"Having lived through it first, he knew all too well that life can be a living hell. He likely just wanted to steer you away from the rougher roads."
Dan's face froze into that same expression again—the look of a machine that had never learned how to cry. But then, as if a broken gear inside him had suddenly caught, a tremor of pain rippled through his eyes. Every minute shift in his expression struck a chord with the audience, pulling them deeper into his emotional turmoil. Unable to bear it any longer, Dan rushed outside and began to dry-heave violently. Nancy, who had followed him out, tended to him with a deeply worried expression.
"Ha. This is just... ridiculous. Seriously." He collapsed onto the cold ground, muttering through his teeth, still unable to shed a single tear. "Worried? He didn't mean it? Would he still say those words if he realized he was talking about himself?"
"...Dan."
"Damn it, what is this? What the hell am I supposed to do now?"
Was he supposed to just accept it? Accept that the father who had tormented him and shaped his entire miserable existence had actually spent his life drowning in regret?
After smoking a cigarette to steady himself, Dan finally stood up and went back inside to see Bob. The old man was tapping away at a small typewriter resting on his lap like a child playing with a toy. When he looked up and saw his son—now a complete stranger to him—he beamed.
"Ah, you there. Do you happen to know this song?"
Bob tapped the keys—clack, clack, clack—producing a rhythmic pattern. Hearing that specific rhythm, Dan's face contorted.
"It's a song I used to listen to all the time, but I can't seem to hear it anywhere in this place."
"...By any chance, does the rhythm go like this?"
Dan placed his hand on the table and tapped out a beat.
"Oh...! That's it! That's the one!"
Bob eagerly grabbed Dan's hand. The hands of two men, bearing the exact same emotional scars, finally connected.
"..."
"Do you know it? Do you know what song it is?"
His father's eyes shone with the pure, innocent curiosity of a child. And standing before him, Dan found himself utterly unable to speak.
Oh, no way.
Damn it. Don't do this to me...
In the theater, the audience fell into a stunned silence as the next scene revealed the familiar faces of the former bandmates gathered together in one room.
"My father wants to hear our music," Dan said.
"What...?"
"He tapped out the exact drum beat right in front of me. Goddammit, I never imagined he'd remember that."
"Echoes of a Memory? We haven't played that song in over fifteen years."
"The demo tape is so stretched out it's unplayable, and we don't even have the sheet music."
"The sheet music is right here." Dan tapped his temple.
"...Wait, what? You weren't joking about all this?"
"Have you ever known Dan to make a stupid joke since we were kids?" Mina let out a sharp laugh at the dumbfounded expression on Donny's face.
"You're not seriously suggesting we play, are you?"
"..."
When Dan failed to answer, Mina gave his hesitant shoulder a gentle nudge.
"Oh, come on, it doesn't sound like a bad idea. What else is there to do in this sleepy town anyway? It'll be nice to take a trip down memory lane."
"Are you out of your minds?" Donny reacted fiercely. "That song is only complete with Nicole. And Nicole... is dead."
The color drained from Mina's face.
"I can't play that song again. Ever."
"...I said something very similar to my father," Dan said, his voice flat and calm against Donny's rising anger. "I told him, 'You're losing your mind, and you're going to forget everything. And once you do, I'll forget you just as quickly.'"
"Dan...!" Mina gasped, horrified by the coldness of his words.
But Dan remained unfazed. The circumstances had changed. "And he really did forget everything. Except for one single thing."
That thing was Echoes of a Memory. A silly, amateurish song written by a nameless teenage band in a tiny, forgotten town.
"Maybe that song is the only reason we can still remember Nicole, too."
"..."
"..."
A heavy silence fell over the childhood friends who had grown into weary adults.
Soon, they began to practice. Mina retrieved her bass guitar, which had been hanging as a decoration in a corner of her grocery store, while Donny pulled his dusty guitar out of storage. The three of them gathered in Bob's empty house and began to play. Since they were performing for just one person, they had to omit the keyboard for now, working to piece together the melody from memory. As they tried to sync up for the first time in years, their clumsy, out-of-practice playing made them burst into laughter. Sitting behind the drum kit, laughing harder than he had in years, Dan suddenly froze. He took a deep, shuddering breath, fighting back tears at Donny's quiet remark.
"To think your father remembered a song that literally no one else in the world even knows exists..."
In a small town, news traveled fast. Though they practiced daily without any soundproofing, the neighbors quickly understood the situation once they heard the story and left them in peace. However, Nancy, the nursing home nurse, took a keen interest.
"Why don't you put on a proper performance?" she suggested. "We can invite the residents of the home, and anyone else in town who wants to come."
"Whoa, this is turning into a much bigger deal than we bargained for," Donny muttered.
"I don't think it's a bad idea. What do you say, Dan?" Mina asked.
"...Sure. Whatever works."
"Wait, I see it here in the music, but why don't you have a keyboardist?" Nancy asked, glancing over the handwritten sheets.
The three of them turned to look at her, their eyes wide. "Uh...?"
"Do you know how to play the piano?" Mina asked.
"I... I took lessons for a bit in high school?"
And just like that, the final piece of the band was found.
Dan continued to visit Bob regularly after that.
"I'm here," Dan said.
"Oh, hello. Good morning."
"It's already afternoon... but yes, good morning. How have you been?"
Looking at his father, whose mind was slowly slipping away, Dan asked a quiet question. "You said you have a son."
"Of course I do. He takes after me, so he's a handsome devil."
"...What does it feel like? Raising a son?"
"Let me put it in terms of this typewriter. As a columnist." Bob placed his weathered hands on the keys of the old machine. "Press a key, and the carriage moves forward one space. And if you hold this shift key, you can write uppercase and lowercase, dividing the letters."
*Clack, clack.*
"It feels like... for my whole life, I was writing my own story on a blank sheet of paper. But then, right below it, another story begins to write itself alongside mine. And that story will go on much longer, lasting far beyond my own. At some point, you just start hoping that his story turns out much better written than yours ever was."
Bob smiled, a warm, innocent expression lighting up his deeply wrinkled face. Dan nodded slowly, as if a final decision had crystallized in his mind, and stood up.
Then came the day of the performance. For the first time in a long while, a warm, festive atmosphere settled over the freezing town of Duluth. Around thirty people—nursing home residents, staff, and local townspeople with time to spare—gathered in the home's outdoor courtyard. It was to be a brief, single-song performance under the open sky. Everyone was buzzing with excitement over the rare event. Bob sat nestled among the crowd, smiling cheerfully without a clue of what was happening, simply waiting for the show to begin.
Just before they took the stage, Dan turned to his bandmates. "Isn't music a strange thing?"
Even without the structure of spoken language, it had the power to make everyone who heard it feel the exact same emotion. Music operated on a different plane than words; it was a medium of pure emotional communication, free from the risk of misinterpretation. Perhaps that was why Dan had chosen to work with sound, unlike his father, who had spent his life communicating through words. Within sound, Dan could finally express the tangled, unspoken chaos of his heart.
And so, the performance began.
The guitar strings vibrated softly as Donny played a gentle, opening chord. A simple, familiar melody they had written in their youth—unpolished and raw—began to loop, and soon, the drums kicked in to keep the beat. With Mina's bass laying down a steady foundation and Nancy's keyboard adding color like a delicate seasoning, the band's sound coalesced into a single, harmonious wave of music, breathing life into the quiet courtyard.
The audience listened intently. There were no vocals. The original lyrics, written by a teenage Dan boiling with rage against the world, had been far too aggressive, so they had made the conscious choice to cut them entirely. Yet, the wordless, humming harmonies of the band members carried through the microphones, wrapping the crowd in a shared, bittersweet warmth.
It was a song played by children who had grown into adults. A song dedicated to a father with whom Dan had never been able to speak—and now, never would.
*Rat-a-tat-tat.* Dan beat the drums with a fierce, burning passion.
At some point, Bob's vacant gaze sharpened, locking onto the performance. The scene unfolding before his eyes began to blur, overlapping with the distant past—a memory of his son smiling brighter than anyone else in the world.
Slowly, the father's hand reached toward the instrument that had sustained him his entire life.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
He began to press the keys of the typewriter he always kept by his side.
*Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!*
On screen, the camera cut to Dan, his arms moving in a blur as he drove the rhythm of the drums. The film delicately crossfaded the visuals and audio. The rhythmic clacking of the typewriter keys and the thunderous beat of the drums slowly merged into a single, unified pulse, echoing through the air with a profound, aching resonance.
*Ah...*
*So that's why.*
The hand tapping the typewriter. The hand swinging the drumsticks.
The two men had lived completely different lives, yet they were fundamentally the same. Like the blood flowing through their veins, the father's life had flowed down through the decades, living on in the son. Watching the father and son silently bridge the chasm of lost memories through rhythm and sound, the audience was swept away by a wave of quiet, overwhelming emotion.