I happen to know that, on the night of my conception, my father had to be dragged to bed by my mother after he had spent hours playing the latest edition of Sega Sports World Series Baseball on the Sega Mega Drive console. In those days, it was common for men my father’s age to take an interest in the future as embodied by things like technology and gadgets—you found them featured in men’s magazines just the same as European cars and powdered cures for the common hangover—when those old delights were still slick on the public membrane—and so, being red blooded in all aspects of the day, you could say it was in his nature to invest himself in the advent of new and grandiose products. Which, indeed, it was. New products were a particular habit of his, and not merely unexamined, as others may have felt. It was a habit that went on to define him in many strange ways. Defined his marriage. Defined his family. More than you could say for the average consumer. It became a perpetual notion of his—thematic to him, if I can put it like that. Something he took together with his morning milk. And, of course, for as long as it carried on, he eventually grew ashamed of himself for it. Feeling that he had lacked the necessary vitality to a medalled life or an openness to the things he had lost. I refer to that night in particular because my mother was fond of repeating the story every so often, knowing by then how it had come to embarrass him, and feeling after such a long time that she was owed a certain satisfaction for the patience she had had to demonstrate. He did not like to think of himself as neglectful in any way. Not as a father, sure. Not as a husband in the Catholic sense. But especially not as a lover: running limp beneath a video game controller while a wife wandered the halls. And more than once, under circumstances I thought of as strange, he apologised to me for his behaviour that evening: for putting my life at risk, as he saw it, as though he had any notion of me at the time. But it has always sounded painfully ordinary to me. It was in his nature, as I say—and more than anything, our natures have the right to be what they are. It is the only way they are delivered to us. Habits, proclivities, etc. And without getting ahead of myself, let me be clear that I admonish no one in life for their proclivities. But, as my father died nursing regrets over those of his own, begging me to think of him the way he did, I will do my best not to absolve him against his wishes.

So then say I fought that battle to begin with. For my very own sake. The next generation is meant to will itself through the current one. Sexuality is said to be the tip of that spear. The psychic desire of all our loins being souls at work somewhere, warring desperately for relevance. Adultery and infidelity, incest, force, all the things we frown at being our means to escape the void. And I am sure I would have wielded any of them if they laid at my disposal—call it fetish, fantasy, all things “dark;” we are above nothing when it comes to ourselves—and, no doubt, in the case of my conception, I left some stain of it on the tissue of his hypothalamus that fought against the latest edition of World Series Baseball and its long list of advanced and updated features. It was the first fully licensed Major League Baseball game to feature all 28 teams and 700 players of the 1995 MLB season or of any season replicated in prior titles. Not a simple arcade game, but a true simulation. Meaning, that the degree of fantasy fulfillment it offered was unlike any baseball cartridge my father, or any spermatozoa, had ever encountered.

I know my mother had to use a certain tone when she asked him to come to bed, because she was concerned he was developing an unhealthy addiction to the game. She knew better than anyone what that process looked like and how it often ended up. He was an impressionable man; and it could be quite maladaptive the way he became engrossed in a television series, for example, or any domain of interest, really, once he was taken with it. Our home was littered with electronics catalogues and subscription magazines for the same reason. If he had possessed a more singular attention span, I am sure he could have innovated in any of those fields: photography, as he sometimes enjoyed, soldering, radio, telephony, or programming, we kept a stack of manuals on one side of the bookcase that instructed in computer repairs. But, as it was, his fixations jumped too swiftly. He could never hold allegiance to one thing for long, and his habits became a part of what my mother called a recurring condition—that is, an endless fascination with whatever seemed to find him when he turned his head: grand ideas, new, threatening, and expensive. I can attest to it. It was uncanny how quickly he could be taken by a thing—and how fervently! And to think it would be gone in only a few weeks, just like the rest. I believe my mother consulted the family physician over his behaviour, but he cautioned her against any serious intervention. He said that sort of thing would be too disruptive for a man like my father, whose temperament he was mindful of. He reminded her that he had already mediated once on their behalf after an incident during which my father had returned home from work to find her burning his VHS boxset of Twin Peaks in the backyard. After which he chased her through the house and into our garden shed, where he would not let her out for hours, until someone called the doctor over to talk some sense into him.

In the weeks before my father died, the nurses were required to wash and dress him. His hands were almost completely muted. He couldn’t conjure up his feelings with them anymore, drawing boxes in the air to explain his meaning, thrusting his finger through the final point on things. For most of that period—and it is the only way I seem to be able to recall him now—his fingers hung soft and blue from the shrunken size of his palm, the last bits of blue polish chipped from his nails after my children had painted them.

He was mostly delirious whenever I visited him. There was something tedious about speaking to him. I felt aware of some childish notion that, somewhere, his true self was grateful for our coming, as if he were watching us through a pane of glass behind his eyes. The leaf of a paper flower tacked above his head sometimes brushed the tip of his nose and caused him to grow frustrated. And as much as it occurred to him, he raised the matter of my conception with me in front of the girls, and its delayed catalyst that seemed to determine the course of our lives and the failed state of our family, crying now and again over the loss of my mother (who was not dead, as he figured, but long estranged from him in basically the same way).

“That night, that game of mine, god!” He raved. “Look at how you come and go from here and these girls of yours. Legs of yours! And I made them! Come and give me a hug, darling. It’s a miracle I have any of you. Right out of the catalogue, that game. I circled it with a god damned pen like I ever planned on waiting. I think I got it that same afternoon. Didn’t eat a thing your mother put in front of me. And what if I hadn’t gone to bed with her? What then?”

The man reeled over it, but as I have said, it made no impression on me. Old people often insist on being so disturbed by things; they bring them to such a point of starkness. Put the thought out of your mind, I said. But I began to suspect he was enjoying it. He was regretful—being very careful to cultivate it as a flavour. Based now from his hospital bed. Peculiar during sundown. Sad. Etc. It must have seemed the thing to do. I know how many movies he saw where characters resolved themselves that way.

“Don’t you know we all come down to chance in some way or another,” I said. “A trip to the store could have thwarted me for all you know. Or say you had one beer too many—I mean god knows I know about that.”

But he only pissed and moaned and called to the nurse for her help. Yes he enjoyed that part. Nurses—the cruel ones, the young, the male, the black, the sexual—appearing around his bed like spirits of one aspect or another. It is true the man was utterly compulsive, and certainly in life there was much he had been absent of, although I refrained from using the word now that he was looking for cues. He had the nurse browse his tablet for him looking for self-help materials in his audio library. Something that told him how to feel or what to say at moments. How to renounce himself properly. It was a new science. My mother called it a fixation. And this is what I believe he was trying to regret while he looked back over his life through the glow of the blue light, placards by the sticky moisture of his eye, seeing the World Series Baseball title screen as it smouldered over the carpet.

And it had to be, too—World Series Baseball. There were other cartridges that might have threatened him that evening. My favourite from our collection was Sword of Vermillion, but they lacked a real-world setting, something obvious to him, which he needed to incite all of his humours. I always knew him to be mad for any bat-and-ball sport he had the opportunity to excel in. It was a gentleman’s feat, he knew, and he was proud of it. It lent him a standard of legitimacy in the eyes of his betters and peers. If he could have simulated the game of cricket to its every end, he would have. Certainly at the expense of my conception. This was the way his life bent around his desires. And when they were important enough to him, he made no bones about it. I am sure there was much he confessed to himself without balking. Now and again, my mother attempted to challenge him over it. She accused him in front of us of not caring, never really loving in a “down-to-the-bone” kind of way, not searching, or trying; and when he was in a particular mood, he could stare straight through her, as if to confirm everything she said, not deigning to answer, but making his feelings plain on the matter. No. He had other things he was interested in. Often away over the long weekends. Everyone he played with told us how talented he was. He spent long evenings at training while we waited for him to return. And other duties, too, as they were required. Coaching, selecting, observing, scoring, and what they called match committees. And sometimes, for a period of weeks, he stayed up nights on end watching the international fixtures from England or America and swearing at the television for reasons that never seemed to change.

“Oh but he came eventually,” she said. And when they laughed: “—To bed, I mean!”

While he agonised over it for the dozenth time. Got a drink in the corner or something. Shame being new to him then, I was permitted to approach him and crowd him with questions where it served to prevent the room’s attention from finding him too long. She told everyone how she had found him bent in the living room over the controller. Her tone was careful that evening, always on the approach. You had to push through to his attention when you wanted him. Like spelunking. Find the right way in. I don’t imagine their exact physicality—and have nothing to recall of it, either—but I suppose she put a hand on him, meaning it gently and in good faith, and asked him to come to bed. He tried putting into words that he was several hours into a “career season,” just now in the middle of a match. He had picked the Cincinnati Reds because his uncle once visited Cincinnati, and had taken them on a long winning streak, which was not easy to do on the highest difficulty, especially when you looked at their default player stats. He said that if she tried to pull him to bed just yet, he would only make for fraught and useless company, and he would not be able to stop himself from simulating the game over and over and plotting for all the statistical outcomes the new edition now allowed for.

“If that’s true,” she said, “then you can sneak back out and play it once I’ve fallen asleep.”

I can judge from my date of birth that it must have been around summertime. They were long and hot in that house, and we all did what we could not to think about it, so that I can’t imagine their habits changed much between that evening and after I was born. I expect she found him shirtless under the ceiling fan, as he often sat before we installed the air-conditioner. Generally, the heat made him disagreeable, but he said it was fair enough. She did not like to sleep on her own—and he confessed to owing her something of himself after neglecting her so long in favour of the game. Small gestures like that always indicated to her that he was not so far gone as he could be. The way he had been for weeks while reading and re-reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. He discovered The Drawing of the Three in the corner store’s “library section” (a box of second-hand books they kept under the bananas) and afterwards began staying nights in the office to read in total silence and taking amphetamine medication to stay awake reading once he was home. We found him asleep in his car some mornings with books dog eared along the dashboard. He often woke babbling in invented voices he had assigned to key characters, he left the hot water running, forgot to turn the stove off, left skid marks unbrushed off the porcelain, because he was reading with one eye, one hand, while doing anything else. The police had to deduct points from his license for reading while driving. He put the bird out of the back room for squawking too much and when a cat got at it he covered the corpse with a copy of Wizard and Glass while it stank for days after. And at one point he started referring to me as “Sheemie Ruiz”—or just Sheemie—so much that I began to fear he had forgotten my real name, and he wouldn’t give it up until I started crying.

Which is why, when I find myself dwelling over that evening, as I have in the days since his death, I like to think of him rising to that occasion by being “up to life” in the most ordinary way, taking orders from his wife, finding that life agreeable, and going with her to bed. It must have been a difficult thing for him to do. And if it wasn’t then it was even more remarkable. His obsessions were kinetic and not easily conquered. There were only a handful of occasions in my lifetime that he managed to. And those were mostly concessions after we had begged him for so long. We often begged him over little things. She begged him over everything, though. I am sure it gets easy to ignore. Beg love, beg boredom, words all sound the same when they come from the background of some other mouth. But they were younger that evening then I think either of them realised. Concerned with right and wrong the way they were taught in school. Still attracted to each other. And it is nice to think of them as once beholden to each other’s needs. Exactly how much she needed to beg him first, I am not sure. Perhaps only a little if I may redeem him. But he gave it over to her for one reason or another, and in that way life goes on… —and besides, if I know anything, I am certain he left the Sega Mega Drive running in the cabinet while he anticipated his quick return. That’s how I know is that I can still see them as they were. Habits, motions. She rinsed the last of her yogurt from the bowl. Some cause to go in and out of the refrigerator, putting whatever away. The lights went out in the correct order from the back patio to the hall. And the dog went outside, whined a little, and found its bed.

“Come on then,” he said. “We’ll go lie down.”

Traffic was common by the front door, it came and went like strips of the night, natural somehow. Bugs at the front lamps that never died. Life’s eternal ceiling fan while the console built up heat in the cabinet, but not enough to do any damage. He was due back out any second. Behind the wall of the television screen, the Cincinnati Reds stood on base. But then, as shortly after he had gone, I was near to proper conception and my father was fast asleep on her side of the bed.

“Snoring like a baby!” she told them.

Actually, when she first told the story, she was far more graphic about it. They were all drunk that night and falling out of themselves. Suggesting that the way it occurred was somehow ironic and to that point she had been making about “when you least expect it.” Women, when they hosted parties, sometimes began to cackle, and this was how you knew things were going well. He was even drunk enough to humour her, and everyone laughed good naturedly at him. But I was only very young at the time, eavesdropping from behind the wall, and I have never been able to get the full sense of how it mattered. It was a private conversation, not intended for children. I regret spying on them, and I don’t like to picture them too vividly or admit, ever, that they must have made love from time to time. And even with all her reasons, I find myself wishing my mother did not shame him as often as she came to. I try to honour the fact as much as I can by not thinking back over it too often.

Fortunately for my mother the year was only 1995 and the full breadth of a game like Sega Sports World Series Baseball was still a decidedly finite experience. It was some time in the late stages of her pregnancy that life brought its changes, along with other fixations, obsessions of her own, every day brings new thoughts, and as the game ran its course my father gradually resumed his ordinary function as the man of the household, and before long he was snowed under her prescribed readings on infant nutrition and The Spiritual Life of Children. His mother had moved from across the state to settle near them and her mother took up residence in the spare room, preparing for the baby, and keeping an eye on him when it suited her. Little things caught his attention in the meantime, but nothing seemed to capture him properly, so he managed to remain present for that duration. I expect it was nice with all of them there. He could be unusually considerate when he wasn’t in the middle of something. And I think he understood there are parts a man is required play which he must be aware of ahead of time. Plenty of things were instructional on this. They always said he was “down at the pub” on the night of the birth, but by this they meant at the refectory across from the hospital, with a few of his friends who had come to celebrate with him. They had manned the telephone by the back office, and he wore a flannel shirt that seemed especially red and wholesome in the early spring rain.

“You just give me a call,” he said. And he came over the moment she did.

Her mother wondered where he was.

“He’ll be here soon. He likes his space.”

“Well he won’t have it for long.”

I found him crying into his handkerchief when I went up one afternoon. The nurse told me he had been inconsolable after finishing some daytime movie. He wiped his snot through his eyebrow when he saw me, so I took a paper towel off the wall and cleaned his face for him. Of course, your parents should always die first—it is noble of them, somehow, no matter how they might resist. In their deaths, we can imagine they have “stepped aside,” and whatever grace they may have lacked is there obtained. All this. Etc. Etc.! It’s been said somewhere before. But the problem was things began to feel futile once they got where they were going. The way you raised an imbecile all its life so it could die earlier than the ordinary human being. Then what? His face looked for me the way I knew he must look for the nurses now. It’s only one step beyond pride that submits totally to their gloves and hands. Catheters. Other tubes. It all goes up your arsehole for some reason. The first night he spent in hospital he waved off my concern and said: “We all end up here one way or another” and I was pleased to hear him in a healthy, cynical state of mind—but all the while after, and that same afternoon, he begged me to forgive him over that night again, which he must have uncovered somehow, and which I was tired of hearing about.

“I don’t want to hear you talk like that anymore.”

“You don’t even remember me, do you? Picture my face without looking at me. I don’t think you could. I can barely picture you when you’re gone now.”

“That’s because you’re old and sick and more senile by the day. You can’t picture anything anymore.”

“But still you don’t remember me. That whole life of ours. And I can’t blame you now, even though I do. Do you know I regret everything? What’s one thing at least? One thing from then about me.”

Well but of course there were ways in which I remembered him as mine e.g. “my mother,” “my father,” “my dog,” “my Game Boy Colour,” etc. Fine if that was all he wanted to hear. But he wanted me to assess his quality. To tell him stories of things he had forgotten. All I said was that I’d stay for a while. I had to evade a lot of questions, but I didn’t mind comforting him… I had to, to keep him from wailing. Basically, he said, we were all “of his making” (that was how he saw it at the time), and he felt that it gave him the right to do whatever he wanted. That if it weren’t for him, none of us would have been made possible. You could call it a god complex if you wanted to be dramatic. And it didn’t disturb me, even though he looked through me for the weight of his confession. I’m sure many men have felt that way at some time or another. And “Yes!” I tried to tell him: “like the tip of the spear, we will ourselves, and we must come to life, so where we will we will, but you sort of brought me forth, we need the living stewards, our mothers and fathers, so Yes, in that way it is all to you!—the debt of my life, I am happy to say, will never be paid and it is owed to you.” Not listening. On and on about the Sega console. The amount of money he made. “Bedtime stories.” You know good god! What he failed to realise was that the matter was too domestic, too plain! It was embarrassing to go over these things in serious detail. They recalled that dark kind of boredom which rests at the bottom of everything we do—the way the smell of an unclean pantry sometimes made you want to kill yourself. Emerge from the house on a long day to find that it is only 1pm and despair that things will never change. Parents, children, they made families, and all families hid strange habits of their past. I knew of some who only ate microwave meals. Reused teabags. Smoked cannabis a little brazenly. Or didn’t flush their piss for days. Laundry on the armchair. Dried bolognese in the carpet. Dog smell, cat hair, the memory of them in the humid soup of the rain that kept everyone inside, sky grey, hearts grey, looking forward to something new in life, for God’s sake, like a trip to Cairns or a new-new car. But that only hurt his feelings. “No different from that one or the next,” “sea of faces,” regrets not his own or something. There was no way into that last obsession of his. Wailing as though I had applied a straitjacket. I closed the curtains around his bed and let the nurses see to him for the rest of the night.

“Whatever you remember,” she said, “that’s all there was to him.”

“I thought people had repressed memories. And that maybe I had some.”

“No one ever abused you.”

“I’m almost certain you’re right, but still.”

A series of deaths, falls, and illnesses meant that my mother eventually came to live with me. She was very unwell, but she was afraid to think about it, so I never asked much of her. All she thought of after that was about the future. Never such that she counted her days. She was more fascinated by everything still to come. Global things that made her feel like she was there. I don’t know how much more she seriously expected to see, but if you’re honest with yourself, you hope for immortality. The latest earthquake made her think of the Mars landing and the ice caps melting. Events and disasters. Breakfast and television. Once, when she had been painting the front of our house, she fell from the step ladder and caught her wedding band on the louver window. It broke her finger in half and nearly tore it off. The blood ejaculated like in the films, streaked across the house. It was the first time I heard her scream the word “Cunt!” and then, a few seconds later, she called me a “Cunt!” because I was standing frozen and staring at her when I was supposed to be going for help and she was in such an incredible amount of pain. I fell through the garden and indoors looking for my father. He was deep in his study behind a locked door mining asteroids in the science fiction role-playing game EVE Online. He kept the door locked because he used noise cancelling headphones and he didn’t like it when we crept up on him. I tried banging, but he often made assumptions about what I wanted, so he ignored me. I had to write a note on a piece of paper and put it up against the window of the study for him to read. Then he took a deep breath, finalised some things, and said reluctantly through the glass: “Okay, let’s sort this out.”

“Will you go up and see him, then?” I asked.

Her ring finger still squared away at an angle when she held her fork.

“We said goodbye a long time ago. What difference should it make?”

“It’s a good point.”

Only that for me he was a long time dying and I could have used the company.

His true capacity for mania was first revealed to me during the morning of the New York September 11 attacks. The news came as a shock to both my parents, but he immediately notified his work that he would be taking the day for personal leave before resolving, without explaining why, that he needed to purchase a satellite radio from the electronics store. I had heard people discuss the country of America before and I had some notion of it being far away—where strange and televised things happened—but, other than fearing slightly the blurry images of pretend people burning and falling through the sky, I could not make sense of the matter or its seriousness outside of my father’s madness which took him by and by and by that afternoon. I’m not exactly sure how a man situated in rural Mackay was able to tune into The Rush Limbaugh Show with any regularity, but he became an avid listener, pouring over the program, as his setup required, as he poured over the dials and wires that kept the station in tune with his headset. His desk under the weight of signal boxes and other antennae that burned my finger or my tongue if I touched either to their ends. He even tried to call in from overseas; I can’t say why the calls never connected properly, but the bills always showed up in the mail by the end of the month which infuriated him. Everything became political after that. He kept pointing his fork at us over meals to root out our manufactured programming. He made the Australian National Security website his homepage so that he could constantly review our domestic threat level, thinking as local as possible, imagining the possibilities of an Islamist sect in Moranbah and all that they could do from there—or merely damage, as he estimated was more within their capabilities. So that by the time his panic caught up to him and he could no longer feign a reasonable response to any of these fears, he began blaming things like roadworks and the traffic conditions on the ragheads and petrol prices on the democrats, but I think by then he was just doing best to wield words over our heads he knew we did not understand.

Though but by the time we did, he was long onto some fascination with wildlife documentaries, science fiction series, or the police procedural I remember he quite enjoyed. The radio made its way slowly out into the back shed along with the rest of his gear. Guitar lessons on CD, airflight simulators, true crime biographies, cannabis cultivation. You could tell he was losing interest with something because when you asked him if he was still making progress, he would answer: “Yeah!” in a high-pitched tone and then make for it once or twice more as if to prove it to you. Between his primary fixations he had small phases attached to the television or the radio. These were half-hearted and as much as part of anyone’s media diet. What he needed to really get going was something with a pregnant appeal that caused him to stop in his tracks. Like Leaving Las Vegas and Casino, for example. Now there it was obvious the way it came to him: two films in the span of one evening: Las Vegas. The idea of it warped his character for months. A gangster and a pathetic degenerate. I think of it as one of his more dangerous phases. More and more I understood the significance of the garden shed and my mother’s constant concern over his “warning signs”. Being impressionable meant a lot of things. Editorials about the effects of violence in video games were written with men like my father in mind. He began drinking heavily. Brown liquor mixed with ice he liked to rattle on the glass. And I think he started whoring. Or, at least, he circled grotesque advertisements in the newspaper and left them out for us to see. He smoked indoors, swore regularly, and swaggered around the house with a frightening sort of gait, hands cocked by his side like he was ready to use them. Every time he re-watched either film, he took another phrase from it he would use for the week. I remember he was always trying to get a glimpse of himself in the windows, especially when he was wearing his sunglasses indoors. When he walked past her in the hall, he would smack my mother on the backside and call her some name or another. She pretended never to notice. Or that it was normal. She was in on the joke for however long it lasted. Of course, I couldn’t be sure how strange it really was. I had an impulse to lock my bedroom door of a night, which I still feel guilty over now and again, but some of the other children from school had described their fathers’ punching holes in the wall or breaking a glass over the results of the football game, and I guessed they all had it in them to misbehave now and then—a part of that prerogative he spoke of, the maker and unmaker, lord of his castle, or however he thought of it.

Mother: “Go on and put the movie on for him.”

Mother: “Could you bring him another drink? Don’t make him get up.”

Mother: “Go and watch it with him. He likes it when you’re there.”

Mother: “…” Chores. Eyes in the back of her head.

Father: “Where the fuck do you get off talking to people about me behind my back, going over my head?”

Father: “Get this through your head you Jew motherfucker, you!”

Mother: “Come on, it’s getting late. Time for bed.”

Father: “You only exist out here because of me!”

Mother: “Don’t say goodnight, he doesn’t like being interrupted.”

Father: “That’s the only reason! Without me, you personally, every fuckin’ wise guy still around will take a piece of your fuckin’ Jew ass!”

Father: “You’re fuckin’ warned don’t ever go over my fuckin’ head again! You motherfucker, you.”

And so like my mother, who showed me how to notice, I watched the seasons come and go and change his habits with them, a subject in his setting conditions. We seemed to endure him the most during autumn and winter as he withdrew, quite naturally, inside the home more. The feeling of uncertainty every time the cold began to settle over the ground. He only took up drinking once every few years, fortunately. And sometimes he got stuck on cannabis or pharmaceuticals depending on who he had been spending time with, but they washed away as phases the same as all the rest. His particular chemistry seemed immune to any one or permanent addiction; it didn’t matter the substance. German history, video games, opiates, ornithology. There was no figuring how each led to the other. When he drank my mother preferred to keep him drunk. The dial was up to ten on all things because she knew the largest part of the problem was the way he panicked beneath the elements of daily life—especially when between trips to the well. He wracked over every second if he was made to feel deprived. So she filled his cup and kept the cabinet filled with alcohol and brought people around the home as often as she could to keep him in character. No one understood his obligation to that part better than himself, who cleaned his sitting area meticulously at the first mention of company, dressed and shaved, and resumed looking us in the eye and calling us by our names. Which we was how we bided our time until the summer again, when we came to rest, and the mornings brought more out of him, the cricket season resumed, baseball on its tail end, all that took him both out and away and to a different state of mind. The ambassador in him and what became of the life we purported to live—which, then, you could finally say we did (again as the year), most of us normal in the plainest sense. The early days, though warm, would only heat while the sun burned directly over the skin or the grass, and when the shade eclipsed it, everything grew cold again, like we knew it would, patience granting more to come, when the heat came on to linger and overwhelm all it could in the weeks that followed…