I learned about it in the local paper, in an ad featuring a tasteful illustration of a pathetic, smiling man-child with a single tear running down his face, and a serene older man wrapping a pair of unnaturally long arms around him. Alongside the illustration were the words: “Start over. Your new father awaits.”

What happened to his old dad? Perhaps he died from a rare and terrible cancer before the son had even formed memories of him. Maybe he was killed tragically during the son’s formative teenage years, when a faulty airbag in their Ford Mondeo sent automotive shrapnel deep into their skull. Or perhaps their dad was still alive, but they’d been a simply awful deadbeat dad for the extended duration of their fatherhood, with no hope or desire for redemption in this life or the next.

In any case, the shiny new clinic, with an opening special of fifty per-cent off, had been offering prospective clients a new dad if they could prove their old dad no longer existed, or if their dad was instead so terrible that they required a new dad effective immediately to begin remedying the almost irreparable damage the old father had done to the fabric of their son’s being.

I know all this because I’m sitting in the waiting room, having filled out a lengthy questionnaire about the foibles and transgressions of my own father, reading an elegant flyer about the clinic’s ninety-nine per cent success rate in other parts of the country, where it has operated for years before, at last, arriving in our backwater state.

Every five minutes a client emerges from a heavy door – they’re either nervous, crying, ecstatic or all three – followed by some version of an older gentleman, all of them looking vaguely like a late-career Martin Sheen. These smiling new fathers have pin-straight white teeth, wear pastel-coloured polo shirts and beige slacks, and smell of Imperial Leather soap. They trail their new sons, chuckling, patting them on the back, and offering vague encouragements en route to soulless taverns to drink affordable imported beers and, hopefully, form the kinds of unbreakable bonds that have been sorely lacking in the clients’ lives.

When my name is called, I stride into the room, ready and eager to receive my new dad, but there’s no ready-made, scientifically chosen father – the beginnings of tears in his saccharine eyes – in sight. Instead, a portly middle-aged suit with thinning grey hair and rectangular glasses sits behind a gargantuan dark-stained timber desk. His fingers are interlocked, forehead knotted in concern or exasperation or both.

‘Mr Jenkins,’ he says, monotone. ‘Have a seat.’

I oblige, and he starts with the serious stuff before we’ve even exchanged pleasantries.

‘We’ve looked over your application, Mr Jenkins, and while we sympathise with your predicament, I’m afraid spite is not on our list of approved reasons for us to provide you with a new father,’ he says.

I’m shocked. Hasn’t he read the meticulous dossier in front of him?

‘There must be some mistake,’ I say.

‘Mr Jenkins, we receive a lot of applications,’ he says. ‘While your father seems on paper to be… not a particularly decent man, compared to many of our clients he still ticks a lot more boxes than you might think. It says here you still live together, so that suggests to me, perhaps not harmony, but some kind of familial concord. Furthermore—’

I tune out his moronic droning and consider the absences and catastrophic missteps of my friends’ fathers. I admit that in many ways I am lucky. My father is alive and known to me, for one. A low bar, but this seems to have spared me from the substance abuse and other mental afflictions that have ravaged a significant proportion of my fatherless friends. He’s also never hit me, which is more than I can say for other childhood pals, who are now prone to pub violence and road rage incidents themselves.

‘Mr Jenkins?’ says the suit, squinting with irritation. ‘Are you listening to a word I’m saying?’

‘He tried to hit me,’ I reply, preparing the waterworks. ‘Last night. Put a hole right through the wall next to my face. This close.’ I’m holding my thumb and index finger an inch apart. He stares at me, my faux grimace, weighing the truth of a statement I believe in his puny heart he knows is a lie.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he says through gritted teeth.

***

When my new father enters in his mint-green polo shirt, a thousand butterflies rush my stomach. The room is suddenly filled with the dizzying notes of a glorious harmony, which I soon realise is just the high-pitched whirring of a cheap air conditioner, and a kettle boiling in a nearby break room.

‘My boy,’ he beams, beckoning me into his arms. For a moment, I think I spot a teardrop, but then I notice one of his blue eyes is simply discoloured, like a bruised fruit.

‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ he says, and while I’m aware that it must be some variation of a company script, the phrase’s Hallmark quaintness and my new dad’s hairy arms flurry warmth around me all the same. Why couldn’t this man be the thing that wrenches my bent insides back into place?

***

I realise my new father is mid-conversation when we stop at a pedestrian crossing just a block or two from the clinic. I haven’t been listening to a word he’s said. He looks at me expectantly, eyebrows raised. Chipmunk smile, jowls wobbling.

‘Come again?’ I say.

‘What’s the plan, son? Ready to sink back a few cheeky brewskis?’ he says, smiling and brandishing a six-pack of Stella Artois I hadn’t noticed he’d been carrying.

‘You know, my real father likes to tell people he’s a descendent of John Wilkes Booth,’ I say, ignoring his incessant babble. ‘It would certainly answer a lot of questions,’ I continue. ‘Did you know that for every Christmas and birthday since I was six, he’s only gifted me those racist board-games they sell at shopping centre tobacconists? Or that he makes his living selling bootleg Jetsons porn?’

‘I’m, uh, so sorry?’ he says, picking nervously at the six-pack’s cardboard.

‘What’s interesting about Wilkes Booth is, while many think he must’ve simply been some whacko, he was actually one of America’s most acclaimed actors.’ I nod my head. ‘What’s also interesting is he came from a family of famous thespians. In fact, some theatrical historians consider his more talented brother, Edwin, to be America’s greatest ever actor.’

‘Very interesting,’ my new dad says, though I can tell from his bemused, suntanned face that he doesn’t mean it.

‘What’s even more interesting is that I looked it up, and sure enough, Wilkes Booth never had any children, so either my dad was making it up, or we’re otherwise only tangentially related to him. Makes you think though, doesn’t it?’

‘About what?’

I sigh loud enough for him to hear over the passing cars. A thick blowfly lands on the collar of his shirt, then on his forearm, and back again.

‘About whether a distant descendent of such a man might still contain the same defective gene that made his long-dead relative shoot the President of the United States in the brain, and what havoc that might wreak.’

‘Oh.’

I press on down the street, his stocky legs struggling to keep up.

Where do they find these guys? If these clinic-prescribed fathers have biological children of their own somewhere, I sincerely hope they’ve been the model parents they now claim to be. More concerning is the question of what foul deeds these rent-a-dads’ fathers might’ve once committed, and how this might’ve metastasised in their sons and thus, the wider populace.

I reach out and pluck a hair from his neck, just to ensure he’s not a cyborg, and when he looks at me his eyes are filled, momentarily, with what I can only describe as unbridled terror.

‘Here we are,’ I nod as my house comes into view, the man’s catalogue of unintelligible responses still rattling in my skull. Hope flashes across his face, as if he can taste the Belgian amber in his hands. And I want to taste it too, to sip from its bubbling entrails and succumb to the warm glow of our newfound relationship, because we’re all bent paper clips in the nooks of god’s clutter drawer after all. But I know these things are impossible—that this man is deficient in a fundamental way I cannot even begin to fathom, and perhaps so am I.

I guide him through the gate, past the Ford Mondeo mum had her accident in, which dad keeps on our lawn as a memorial (and an omen to passing motorists), and through the front door.

Dad’s waiting in his lounge room chair where I left him, watching the football, a ribbon of cigarette smoke curling to the ceiling. He doesn’t look up.

‘So, this is the guy,’ he says.

I walk back outside and close the door, chuckling, the house already humming with gentle menace, and I leave them to sort it out among themselves.