Walter and Walter Jr. in “Salud”

I wish I could take back last night. It was your birthday; this shouldn't be on your mind.

Walter Jr.

It's okay.

No, it's not okay. I'm your father. I don't want last night to be... I mean, you really... You can't think of me like...

Walter Jr.

Like what? I don't understand.

My father died when I was six. You knew that, right?

Walter Jr.

Yeah.

He had Huntington's disease. It destroys portions of the brain, affects muscle control, and leads to dementia. It's just a nasty disease. It's genetic. Terrified my mother that I might have it, so they ran tests on me when I was a kid, but I came up clean. My father fell very ill when I was four, five. Spent a lot of time in the hospital. My... [chuckles] my mother would tell me so many stories about my father. I mean, she would talk about him all the time. I knew about his personality, how he treated people, I even knew how he liked his steaks cooked: Medium rare, just like you. I knew things about my father, I had a lot of information. It was because people would tell me these things. They would paint this picture of my father for me and I always pretended that was who I saw too, that I remembered. But it was all a lie. In truth, I only have one real, actual memory of my father. It must have been right before he died. My mother would take me to the hospital to visit him. And I remember the smell in there. The chemicals. It was as if they used every single cleaning product they could find in a 50 mile radius, like they didn't want you smelling the sick people. There was this stench of Lysol and bleach, you could just feel it coating your lungs. Anyway, there, lying on the bed, is my father. And he's all... he's all twisted up. My mom, she puts me on her lap, she's sitting on the bed next to him so I can get a good look at him, but really he just scares me. And he's looking right at me, but I can't even be sure he knows who I am. And your grandmother is talking, trying to be cheerful as she does, but the only thing I could remember is him breathing. There was this... this rattling sound, like if you were shaking an empty spray paint can. Like there was nothing in him. Anyway, that is the only real memory that I have of my father. I don't want you to think of me the way I was last night. I don't want that to be the memory you have of me when I'm gone.

Walter Jr.

Remembering you that way wouldn't be so bad. The bad way to remember you would be the way you've been this whole last year. At least last night you were... you were real, y'know?