A Film by Spencer Ludwig. David Flusfeder

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      ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘From the inside.’

      He holds out three pink packets of Sweet ‘n’ Lo, which has become an unspoken ritual between them. Spencer’s father has hardly any strength left in his hands. He is unable to tie his shoelaces or button up his shirts or behead the packets of sweetener he laces his coffee with. Spencer twists off the tops of the packets, and Spencer’s father nods, both in gratitude and as a kind of statement of the dry banal horror his life has become reduced to.

      As they wait for their food, they play backgammon. When their food arrives his father sulks, because he has just won two games in a row and resents the break in their sport.

      Spencer eats in a kind of voluptuous joy. He had not realised how hungry he was. His father eats more or less effectively. Spencer suspects that his father has no sense of smell and little sense of taste. Spencer’s father is accustomed to two meals; Spencer likes to eat at least three or four times a day. It never occurs to his father and it never has that anyone else might be feeling something different to him. You have no empathy, Spencer had once told his father. You remind me of your mother, Spencer’s father had said in reply, which was not a statement of approval.

      When he was a child and stayed with his father and stepmother, Spencer’s appetite was always being confounded. He spent the days either hungry or overstuffed from the monstrous dinners that Spencer’s stepmother provided. It never occurred to either adult that the child might be hungry, and Spencer had found it always difficult to express his desires in his father’s and stepmother’s world.

      ‘How is it?’

      His father makes a doleful face. It is the expression he uses when he is asked how he slept, when an elevator man asks him how he is feeling, when he deigns to look at his wife when she is talking.

      ‘You want to try some?’

      ‘No. No thank you. Here. Try some of mine.’

      The doleful face becomes brutal in its contempt. Spencer is grateful for the return of the waitress. Despite his protestations of hungerlessness, Spencer’s father consumes his cheeseburger, with only a few dots of mustard and ketchup on his trousers and shirt to show for it. He pushes away the plates, which Spencer is about to dispose of, but is deterred by his father opening up the backgammon set again. ‘Let’s get to work,’ his father says.