Home Is Burning

by Dan Marshall

  This is the part where we fucked it all up. Stana walked the cat over to me and said, “You is put son of a bitch kitty in cage.” As she tried to hand her over to me, Brighton squirmed loose and darted off. We didn’t see her for another week, but eventually found her in our backyard storage shed. She was still shaking and clearly hadn’t eaten. If cats could write, I’m sure she would have written a poetic, Anne Frank–like journal entry about hiding from her oppressors.

  Before we could plan another attack that day, my mom came home. The game was over. “Why am I wearing these construction gloves and racquetball goggles? Well, Mom, because of all the construction dust, of course. I suggest you do the same, especially since you have cancer.”

  Stana, Greg, and I were all disheartened. Stana said it best. “Son of a bitch kitty. Danny, we is be so close.”

  * * *

  The next week, Stana seemed to have lost her motivation. She didn’t show me any cat piss. She focused on mopping the floors, washing the dishes, doing the laundry. I was tempted to grab her by the arm and guide her around to all the cat piss spots staining our carpet as she had done with me, but she seemed uninterested.

  Wednesday rolled around and I realized that I hadn’t seen two of the cats—Pongo and Pierre—for a few days. I asked other family members if they had seen them. “Not that I give a fuck, but have you seen Pongo or Pierre?” I inquired nonchalantly.

  They realized that they hadn’t seen them either. I figured that maybe they had had a powwow with Brighton and decided to take off to another house that wasn’t ruled by terrifying dictators hell-bent on eliminating them.

  Thursday came. No Pongo. No Pierre. I walked through the house inspecting the piss stains: none of them were fresh.

  It was surprisingly depressing. If nothing else, the cats were a nice distraction from the dying parents. With no new piss sprouting up, I felt like I had to return my focus back to my dad. No more fun and games. No more trying to kill cats with Stana.

  Later that night, Tiffany came bursting through the front door holding the two cats. “So some lady brought Pongo and Pierre over. She found them in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley, by State Street,” Tiff explained.

  Apparently pets are now required to have electronic ID chips implanted just below their fur so that, if lost, a vet or other local animal authority can identify them and return them to their rightful owners. Pongo and Pierre were both registered to my sister’s address.

  “What the fuck were they doing in the middle of Salt Lake?” asked my sister as she filled the cats’ dishes full of water and food.

  I knew. I knew it was Stana. I knew that she had decided to take the law into her own Holocaust-surviving, illiterate hands. I knew that she had gone behind our backs, rounded up the two cats in that cage she had brought over and left them for dead in the middle of Mormontown.

  But I played it cool. “I have no idea. That’s so strange. They must have run away or gotten lost.”

  Tiff looked puzzled.

  “Well, it sure is nice to have them back,” I concluded, petting one of them really hard.

  We were all surprised to see the cats again, but no one was more surprised than Stana. On Monday morning, when my mom was too far away to hear, she approached me. “Danny, how is the kitty here?” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Danny, I is catchin’ kitty and takin’ soooo far away,” Stana explained.

  “They have these ID chips in their necks. Someone brought them back,” I said.

  Stana shook her head and said, “Son of a bitch kitty. I is no believin’,” as if the cats had thought up the whole ID chip idea themselves.

  Later, my mom caught wind that Stana had taken the cats. She loved Stana but wasn’t happy about this. My mom knew that I had been supportive of Stana’s anti-cat ways, so she bitched me out to the point where I decided to love cats again, and then she decided to write Stana a long-winded note about how it is “my house” and that Stana “had no right to take those cats, even if they were peeing on our carpet.”

  After my mom had delivered the letter directly to Stana’s mailbox, I broke the bad news. “Mom, Stana can’t read.”

  MEET MIKE, MY DAD’S NEW VOICE

  The loss of my dad’s voice was the next step in the Lou Gehrig’s grind. He could still talk, but his breathing was so weak it was really difficult to understand him. He was also about to go on a respirator, so there was a chance he would never talk again. We thus decided to buy him a fancy communication device, the ECO-14. The ECO would become his voice if it got to that.

  My dad wasn’t very excited about the thought of communicating through a computer. He was trying to hang on to the things he could do for as long as he could. He wasn’t ready to give up his voice yet, so he saw the ECO as a tool to be used down the road, and only if completely necessary.

  But I was pretty excited about it. Not because I wanted my dad to lose his voice, but because I viewed the ECO as a new toy. The second I heard that my dad was getting a computer that could talk for him, my face lit up. My palms got sweaty. I smiled for the first time in weeks. I couldn’t wait to program phrases into the computer and hear it say them back in a Stephen Hawking–esque voice. I had always wanted to hear Stephen Hawking say, “Fuck my anus, you heavy-cocked whore,” and with the ECO, I finally could.

  The ECO was a large, bulky device with a touch screen—though the touch screen proved to be almost useless since my dad could barely move his arms. He would eventually have to navigate the ECO using an infrared sensor and a silver dot placed on his forehead. The ECO Web site advertises this feature with the following cheerful description:

  PRC’s new ECO-14 ushers in a new generation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices by combining advanced communicating and robust computing in a single device! This sleek, large-screened and versatile device is an AAC aid and Windows® XP-based computer rolled into one, allowing for powerful, independent AAC communication plus convenient, state-of-the-art computing on-the-go.

  I liked the “computing on-the-go” part. As if my dad would be bouncing along on the subway, double espresso in his hand, needing to shoot an e-mail back to corporate before his racquetball match with his mistress.

  My parents had purchased the ECO before I came home, but they hadn’t figured out how to get it up and running. It was a bit esoteric. So my dad, Greg, and I took the device down to this geek named Bart at the place where they bought it. Bart knew everything there was to know about the ECO, just like I knew everything there was to know about wiping my dad’s ass. He was a prototypical nerd: bacon breath, glasses, an autodidact, referred to computers as “her,” full of McAfee antivirus jokes, way happier than I’ll ever be. But the geek knew his communication devices, so meeting with him was the only way we were going to learn how to get Stephen Hawking to call my mother a racial epithet.

  At the time we went to see Bart, my dad looked like a walking skeleton. He was getting lots of Jesus-Christ-that-guy-looks-like-he’s-about-to-die looks from strangers. Utah is an especially tragic backdrop for physical decay because it’s filled with a bunch of smiling Mormons pretending life is perfect. Their cheery demeanor only seemed to amplify the bleakness of my dad’s situation. The tricky part about taking my dad anywhere was that we couldn’t stay long. He needed to get back to the BiPAP machine, where we all felt he had a reduced chance of dying. Plus, Greg or my dumb ass would always forget to bring things like extra Kleenex or a change of pants in case God sent us an angel in the form of a diarrhea shit. The Promote made him constipated, so my dad had started taking a laxative with his morning feedings, which turned him into a real shit monster.

  We rang the bell and asked for Bart. He was in the back room training for the Doritos-eating contest my imagination had entered him in. They took us to a large room in the back of the building that was filled with computers. Bart didn’t move from his chair. I guess laziness can be as crippling as Lou Gehrig’s disease
.

  “Hey, Bob,” said Bart as he reached to shake my dad’s hand, but then remembered that he couldn’t move his arms and settled for a shoulder pat. “You got the ECO-14, right?” My dad nodded his head as much as he could. Conversations were pretty awkward now, very one-sided. “Great device. Let’s take a look at her.”

  Bart poked around the screen for a bit, cracking a couple antivirus jokes, before realizing that we had put the computer in the wrong mode. What dumb-asses. He tickled the screen back into submission and set it up so that an alphabet appeared.

  “That was easy,” Bart said like a hotshot, a booger hanging from his left nostril.

  We began playing with it. I started to type in “Greg is gay,” but stopped after the “ga” to write “gallant” instead. Greg responded by starting to type “Dan is fat,” but stopped after the “fa” to write “fantastic at basketball.” We decided to get my dad involved in the joke, so I started to type “My dad is dying,” but dropped after the “d” and wrote “dandy.” He managed a slight smile.

  In other words, we were quickly learning how to fuck around with the thing.

  But I wanted to get into funnier options—things like changing the speaker’s voice to a woman’s, or to a very deep-voiced black man’s. I pictured my dad speaking with Karl Malone’s Louisianan twang and laughed.

  “I wanted to be traded yesterday, but don’t today. I’ve done a complete three-sixty,” I imagined my dad saying through the computer as Karl Malone.

  We couldn’t screw around too much, though. We were here to learn, and, as I mentioned, we never knew when diarrhea would slide into the picture.

  “How do we change the voice?” I asked.

  This machine was replacing our dad’s voice, so we tried to find one that sounded sort of like his, but it was difficult. They were all very computery—a chorus of bad first dates, each with a name and gender. There was “Will,” who sounded like he had a bad cold. There was “Rod,” who was a little too chipper. We didn’t want my dad to sound too excited about having ALS. There was “Micah,” who sounded like a tired donkey. There was “Saul,” who seemed to have been pulled out of a meth den. We finally settled on “Mike,” whose voice was a little softer than the others, the most normal from the list.

  “Fuck my anus, you heavy-cocked whore,” Mike’s voice said in my head.

  We also wanted to know how to preprogram buttons to say certain things, so my dad didn’t have to go through the arduous task of spelling everything out one letter at a time.

  “Oh, you mean Quick Hits?” asked Bart. “Go into the toolbar here and push Modify Page, then select the button on the page you wish to modify. And then you just type in whatever you want said. You can also change the icon using this picture option here and type in whatever you want it to say. Let’s try one. How about we do one that says, ‘Hello, my name is Bob Marshall’?”

  “Stupid,” I wanted to say.

  “Sure, Bart, let’s try that one,” I actually said.

  “Hello, my name is Bob Marshall,” Mike boasted.

  Right as we were programming the second Quick Hit, my dad leaned in and notified us that he needed to leave, that he was about to shit his pants, that maybe we could come back later. So we raced home. Greg handled the shitting and put my dad down for a nap. I went straight to the device to work on some more amazing Quick Hits.

  “Fuck my anus, you heavy-cocked whore,” Mike said, finally letting me get that out of my system. Relief washed over me, as if I were a heroin addict finally getting his fix. With that out of the way, I started to think of practical things my dad would actually need to say. So I started programming.

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Can you move my arm?”

  “I need a nap. Can you help me with that?”

  “I need to go to bed.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Could you scratch my back?”

  “I’m hungry. Can you feed me?”

  “I need some water.”

  At this point, I was bored out of my mind with this bottom-of-Maslow’s-hierarchy-of-needs bullshit. So, I started to ease into funnier, more risqué quips.

  “The dogs are barking. Can you get them to shut up?”

  “Please don’t smoke around me. My lung capacity is at eighteen percent, you inconsiderate asshole.”

  “Don’t look at me. I am not a monster.”

  “How am I doing? I have Lou Gehrig’s disease. How do you think I’m doing? Unbelievable.”

  “If you loved me, you would put three shots of gin into my feeding tube.”

  “Please give me five dollars. I have Lou Gehrig’s disease and you can still do all the things you love.”

  “There’s a knife downstairs. Please kill me.”

  I also thought my dad would probably want to thank me, so I programmed a few ways he could express his appreciation.

  “Thanks for all your help, Danny. You are the single best thing that’s happened to this family.”

  I then did one that was a slight alteration to Lou Gehrig’s famous speech at Yankee Stadium back in 1939.

  “For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth, especially since Danny is my son.”

  But saying “thank you” isn’t funny compared to something sexual. Because sex is funny, right? I continued to program.

  “Wow, that was a great round of sex. Let me rest for five minutes and we’ll go for round two.”

  “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  I placed a picture of a limp penis as the icon for the “blow job” button and a picture of a vagina for the “sex” button.

  After a couple hours of programming my nuts off like a little Bart wannabe, my dad finished his nap. I brought him down to sit in the kitchen—the heart of our house. He had always sat at the head of the table. He was still the man of the house, the head of the pride. I wanted to show him all the quick hits I had programmed.

  “And this is if you need to go to the bathroom,” I said, hitting the bathroom button to cue Mike’s voice.

  It didn’t take long before my dad noticed the limp penis dangling halfway down the screen. He pointed with his nose at the penis icon, and cleared his throat enough to speak. “What’s that one? The penis?”

  “Oh, this little guy?” I smiled, anticipating the payoff for my programming labors.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  You can’t laugh when you have Lou Gehrig’s—it’s one of the rules—but you can call over your wife and tell her to listen to or watch something, signifying that something is funny. So my dad called for my mom, who ghosted to the table in a nightgown, a yogurt in her hand, her permanent frown intact. I clicked again.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  Her permanent frown flatlined, her version of a smile. When you’ve had cancer for fifteen years, you can’t laugh—it’s one of the rules. But you can call over your daughter. Chelsea came over.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  Chelsea erupted with laughter and asked what a blow job was. She was too obsessed with dance and school to know anything about sex. Jessica entered from the TV room and asked what was so funny.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  She smiled. Being a popular seventeen-year-old, Jessica knew what a blow job was. Greg walked downstairs next, having just woken from his daily nap. He was wearing a robe and heading straight for the fridge. I told him to listen up.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  Greg was well versed in both giving and receiving blow jobs, so this really hit home with him. He chuckled as he made himself a giant plate of lasagna.

  Tiffany entered through the front door, making a rare appearance, and set her keys, coat, and cell phone down on the kitchen counter.

  “Hey, guys. What are you up to?” asked Tiff.

  “We’re
just fucking around with Dad’s new communication device. Check it out,” I said.

  CLICK. “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  Even Tiffany managed a smile.

  I noticed that the whole family was here. The past few years had pulled us in different directions, so it was hard to find a moment where we were all together, even under these our-parents-are-dying circumstances. And when we were together, we were always at each other’s throats. This was one of those rare moments that we weren’t. Everything seemed right again. Sure, the situation was different. We weren’t all together on a family vacation sitting by the pool in Palm Desert applying sunscreen and reading Dan Brown novels. But Dad was back at the head of the table—in the heart of the house, his little bald wife by his side, his children resting their hands on his shoulder. We all took in the moment. I knew my dad wanted to stand up and give a Lou Gehrig–esque speech.

  “We have been through a lot over the years. We have recently encountered an unprecedented amount of bad luck that all decided to hit at once. Shit has piled up pretty deep. But we are all still here now and I want you to always be there for each other, to be part of one another’s lives, because when it comes down to it, family is all that you have, and all that’s truly important in life. I love you all very much and am so proud that you are my family,” I imagined him saying.

  But there was no way he could rouse such a benediction from his weak body. Mike spoke for him now. I turned the device over to him.

  “Go ahead, Dad. Say whatever you want,” I said.

  With all his remaining strength, he lifted one of his long, pointy fingers and hit a button.

  “Boy, I could use a blow job.”

  CANCER COMEDIAN

  My dad was a morning person. Before the Lou Gehrig’s disease, he’d get up around six and go for a long run. Then he’d come home, sit outside in our gazebo looking up at the Wasatch Mountains with a cup of coffee and listen to the world wake up. He’d thumb through the Salt Lake Tribune, reading more than just the sports and entertainment sections, unlike the rest of us dumb-shit philistines. He’d think about what he’d done yesterday and what he had to do today. It was his alone time before his wife and kids flooded his life with activity and useless drama.