Malagash

by Joey Comeau

  She’s a psychiatrist, I’ve figured out. She hasn’t told me that, yet. She just leads the way. Down one long wide hospital hallway after another. She doesn’t say where we’re going, either, but there are coloured stripes on the floor. They go different ways. Colours come and colours go, but there’s one that is always under our feet. Blue, which a legend on the wall decodes for me as “pediatric psychiatry.”

  Our destination is a room clearly meant for children. Children-children, I mean. Waif-aged things. But here I am, so I guess it is meant for me, too. There’s apparently no institutional distinction between me and the waif. Two peas in a pod, even though he is half my age.

  Still, there’s enough of a distinction between me and my brother that they decided to deal with us separately. He’s back in the hospital room, waiting his turn. The doctor pulls out a chair for me and one for herself. There are plush creatures everywhere, a soft alligator, fuzzy and dark green, a hippo drooping across a box of latex gloves, a stuffed eagle with her wings outstretched and her beak felted.

  “I’ve been asked to help you prepare,” the doctor says. I don’t need this. I know that my father is dying, and I know what I have to do. The waif should be the one here. He would fit right in. I can picture him hugging an adorable raptor, his expression blank as ever.

  We’re back in the city for a scan they can only do at a real hospital. Nobody has their hopes up. I wonder if this doctor is my mother’s idea. But that’s ungenerous of me. My mother isn’t spiteful. And she isn’t cheesy, either. My mother is better than this.

  The doctor talks and talks. She does not talk nearly as efficiently as she dresses.

  People are so repetitive. Why? The way they talk is useless. All of the information is front-loaded in the context and in those first few words. The rest is repetition, redundancy, emphasis. A waste of time. This is just how everyone talks now. Listen to them. Are all conversations supposed to be like this? For the rest of my life? I hate it.

  And look at these toys. None of these creatures are soft in the real world. Perversions of danger, twisted, adorable shadows of death, made huggable. Blanketed in snow.

  “A weight will lift,” I feel like saying.

  “Your father is going to die. He’s very afraid,” the doctor says.

  And then she says it for another half an hour.

  >_

  In the hallway, I play back part of the recording.

  “Your father is going to die. He’s very afraid,” the doctor says.

  This is a waste of my phone’s memory. I delete every moment of her.

  She is gone forever.

  >_

  When I come in, there’s no time for a joke about the stuffed animals. My mother is already standing, and she hugs me before I can say a word. I hug her back, forgetting my carefully worded joke. I squeeze her tight, because it is unexpected. Because it is warm and I love her, and because she does not ever hug us. No matter how tight I squeeze, though, she’s squeezing tighter. It is very difficult to not start crying.

  I can’t look at my dad yet. Instead, I look over my mother’s shoulder to Simon. He’s staring at us with no expression at all.

  Behind us, the doctor appears again. All in black, nothing like me at all. Knocking on the door with the same fake-tentative knock she used on her first visit. My mother lets me go and takes the waif by the hand.

  “Hello, Simon,” the doctor says to him. She turns and leads the way. My mother and brother disappear down the hall, following the blue line on the floor. Their turn in the declawed raptor sanctuary.

  My father has books piled up on his nightstand. Paperbacks and hardcovers. Library books and brand new purchases. Thrillers. Tough, ruthless, cold-hearted men of action who nonetheless do the right thing in the end. I’ve tried to read them. I really tried. It could have been something to share with him. They aren’t for me, though. They feel empty.

  My father has a weakness for them. His word, weakness. Weakness doesn’t seem quite correct, though.

  A weakness for having no weaknesses at all? A soft spot for violence and happy endings. A weakness for everything turning out right every time. After the twist, of course. A soft spot for the twist.

  “How did it go?” my father asks.

  I am still a bit shaky from my mother’s hug. And the books seem like a perfect distraction. I point at them.

  “Really?” I say. “More?”

  He shrugs.

  “Dying doesn’t cure boredom,” he says. He’s still looking at me, wondering about the psychiatrist.

  “They told me you’re going to die, and that you’re very afraid,” I tell him. “They told me I have to be brave for both of us.”

  “Like on TV?” my father says.

  “Like on TV,” I say. I love his smile.

  >_

  Something has been growing behind my father’s pain and behind my father’s jokes these last days of his life. It isn’t the fear I was instructed to expect. That is there, of course. There are moments when my father looks afraid. Always when my mother is here, like he’s afraid for her benefit. Or maybe he is strong for mine. But that isn’t what I mean. That isn’t what I see growing behind his eyes. And it isn’t bravery, either. It is something else entirely. A calmness and a confidence have put down roots in him.

  I shouldn’t say “these last few days of his life.” My mother tenses up when I say things like that in front of Simon. When I get too close to an honest assessment. I have to talk the way she talks, for the waif’s benefit. I have to be careful. Never lie, but don’t let the truth slip out. He’ll melt if the truth touches him. So hope springs eternal, in my brother’s presence. There is always hope. Without hope we are lost. Hope is a shining light in the darkness of what is actually happening, and as long as we can keep my younger brother well lit, nothing bad will ever happen and everything will turn out alright in the end.

  “Are you going to die?” the waif asks my father today. Nobody has told me how his session with the psychiatrist went.

  “We don’t know for sure,” my mother says, even though we do. We do know for sure.

  “Hope springs eternal,” I say gravely.

  My mother gives me a dangerous look. I look right back at her.

  “What does that mean?” My brother is looking at me now, confused.

  “Without hope we are lost,” I say. “There is always hope. Hope is the shining light in the deepest darkness.” I try to keep my face deadly serious, the way my father does.

  “Sunday,” my mother warns.

  The waif is so confused that he starts crying.

  >_

  I have all three computers set up in my closet now, constantly running. My grandmother found me a long orange extension cord, and I made my mother buy me a power bar in Truro. Enough to handle the power adapters for all three. To handle my external hard drive. I found an old nightstand in the attic. One computer sits underneath, with just enough space for the cover to stay open. The other sits open on top. The third sits on my lap when I’m here. On the floor when I am not.

  “Good lord,” my grandmother said when she saw the cords coiled everywhere, the laptops open and flickering, one above the other. “Don’t get those wrapped around your neck! You’ll strangle.”

  Which seems like an insane thing to say.

  Simon is off on his own again.

  This whirring, overheated little room is mine and mine alone.

  Two of the laptops are disconnected from the internet but connected to one another. Each is running a different operating system, for testing purposes. I chose common but slightly out-of-date versions of the most popular operating systems. Vulnerable but everywhere.

  This is where my father’s ghost waits.

  He is not ready yet. One computer infects the other, sometimes, with his memory. He slips between them, back and forth. But only imperfectly. And n
ot as frequently as he should. It only works sometimes, and I don’t yet know why.

  And if it only works sometimes here—on a system I control, with software that I know and understand—how can I expect him to survive out in the world, with dozens of operating systems? Millions of combinations of software and hardware! No. It’s not ready yet. Not resilient enough. I need to find a better selection of vulnerabilities to exploit. A stronger suite of infection vectors. I need backup exploits, too, ways for the virus to spread if the first method fails.

  I have been focused too much on his words. I’ve been neglecting the code itself. The virus part of this virus. But the words are important. My living father still has more to say. I want as many of his jokes and kindnesses to make it into the software as possible, before I introduce him to that third computer, stencilled grey and black with a half-joking Ouija board.

  When everything is ready, it won’t matter how beautiful a day it is outside. I am going to summon the dead.

  >_

  We say our goodbyes for the night. Crowded beside his hospital bed. Every night we pretend to be casual. We pretend we aren’t being careful. Careful to ensure that our goodnights will be adequate if this turns out to be the real goodnight. If tonight’s the night.

  “Give Daddy one more kiss, Simon. Say you love him.”

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  “Say, ‘See you tomorrow, Daddy.’”

  “See you tomorrow, Daddy.”

  They go out the door first and I linger in the doorway for just a moment, phone in hand.

  “Goodbye forever,” I say. Our secret nightly ritual.

  “Goodbye forever,” he says.

  -- TWO --

  >_

  “Goodbye forever” is the perfect joke, because forever is impossible.

  Every night I say it, and every morning I see my father again. Forever is meaningless. Tough talk, an empty threat. Forever is our secret handshake. Our code word. Our decoder ring. Not a measurement of time at all. I know this because “Goodbye forever” comes easy. The passage of actual time is much more difficult.

  After we leave the hospital, the hours and the minutes just stretch and stretch. They pull nothing from all four corners, ’til it blankets and smothers every night with its emptiness. Still, time is not my enemy. I have my recordings, and I have a virus to construct.

  I squirrel up in this closet with these laptops and their unnatural light, listening to the day’s sound files, copying out words and phrases. Sometimes whole sentences, if they feel right.

  I work on improving the code itself, too, sometimes, but just as often that part of the virus sits neglected while I obsess over the selection of my father’s words.

  update recordings_db

  set transcription = 'goodbye forever'

  where filename = say_goodbye.wav;

  I will put “Goodbye forever” into the virus, but it will be the very last thing. The finishing touch. There is so much more to say before goodbye.

  My dad was in a good mood today. He and my mom laughed a lot, the way they used to, teasing each other with in-jokes that I’ll never get. Memories of people and places outside my frame of reference. A life they got to share together. I can almost see all of that information, like a database of facts and moments that I do not have access to. Like a book on a shelf that I can’t quite reach, and my mother and father keep quoting from it and laughing. It’s a book they read together.

  There’s so much I don’t know how to transcribe. I wish I could encode that feeling from his words. That implied shared history. The warmth and affection. This plain text is just a skeleton.

  >_

  I’ve started a playlist of my dad’s dumb jokes about dying. There’s a light in my father’s voice when he jokes like this, that he knows will brighten the room.

  “Dying and handsome. Mothers, lock up your daughters!”

  “They better not have chickens in heaven. Chickens are idiot eagles, and I hate them.”

  “Nurse, could you have the doctors check to make sure I have the right skeleton in? This doesn’t feel like mine.”

  “Hmmmm. What should I wear today?”

  “Dying isn’t even the worst part of all this. The worst part is that I’ll never get to be a cranky old lady in line at the grocery store.”

  “Oh good. We all lived another day. I mean, some of us had to work harder at it than others. I’m just saying.”

  “I’m not kidding. Chickens are garbage.”

  “Was that a smile? You can’t laugh at my jokes, I’m dying!”

  and,

  “To be honest, I feel kind of foolish for eating all those salads.”

  I like to lay in the top bunk at night and stare at the weird uneven stucco faces in the ceiling. And I drift off to the sound of my father not being afraid.

  >_

  Our mother has never really acknowledged that he’s dying. She knows just as well as we do. Better, probably. Yet she’s never actually said the words in front of us. I’ve been assuming that this is to protect Simon, although, of course, she uses the same careful language with me. We’re both her children. We both need to be protected. It must have been hard for her to let that doctor speak so bluntly. “Your father is going to die.” Did the doctor say it just like that to the waif, too? I can imagine the colour draining out of my mother’s face at those words. We both need to be protected, but Simon especially. Simon is . . . delicate.

  Since that day, things feel different. She never lied to us before. But she was very careful to tiptoe around the truth. Lately, she seems less careful. Today, for instance.

  “We’re going to buy your father one last steak before he dies,” she announces at the breakfast table. “And we’re going to have one last movie night, all of us together, like we used to. Your father deserves a treat.”

  And so, after cereal, we climb into the car together, and we drive all the way to Halifax to buy our father his last steak.

  “His favourite,” Mom explains as we drive, “is the Del Monico 7 oz. Derby style from the Steak and Stein. Medium,” she says. “Not a fancy steak. Not a fifty-dollar filet mignon from the Keg Mansion, prepared ice blue. Nope. Just a cheap steak drowned in marinade; we used to eat them all the time.”

  When we get there, she tells the waiter the same thing.

  “This might be the last steak he ever eats,” she tells him. “He loved eating here.” The waiter looks understanding, but a bit nervous, too. We order four steak dinners to go, and, when they come, we pile back into the car and drive an hour and a half back to Tatamagouche to the care centre where my father does not suspect a thing.

  Our mother holds the to-go bags behind her back.

  “What have you got there?” he says.

  And his face lights up when he sees those Steak and Stein bags. Beside me, Simon is carrying an armload of dishes we borrowed from our grandmother’s kitchen. He sets them down on the bed, excitedly.

  “It might be the last steak you’ll ever eat!” my little brother says.

  >_

  “We’re going to have a movie night,” my mother says as she’s packing our garbage into Steak and Stein bags. My father has hardly touched his meal. He can’t keep solid food down this week. But he smiles as she takes it from his tray. “Family movie night,” my mother says. “The way we used to.” Beside her, Simon nods very seriously.

  “One last movie night,” my brother says, and my mother throws the garbage into the bin harder than she intended.

  “Simon, what did I just tell you?” she says. But my father is laughing.

  “One last movie night sounds wonderful, Simon,” he says. “What are we going to watch?”

  “Anything you want,” I say. I pull my laptop out of my bag. “You name it, and I can get it for us.”

  For his last movie, my father requests the black-and-white 1950 film
Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart. He asks me to look up the old posters, too, with Jimmy Stewart and a big rabbit shadow. To download pictures from the original stage play, which was written by Mary Chase. To find a copy of the trailer for us to watch. Coming soon!

  “I can do that,” I tell him.

  “Does your last movie have to be black-and-white?” Simon says.

  “It isn’t my last movie,” my father says. “It’s our last movie. And Harvey is the best movie ever made, Simon. I want to watch it with you.”

  By the time I’ve downloaded the movie, they’ve piled the bed high with borrowed pillows. The harsh fluorescent lights are all turned off, and my mother has plugged in a soft yellow lamp borrowed from our grandmother’s house. They’re all waiting for me, crowded around my father in the quiet room. It really does feel like movie night. The waif even has a bowl of burnt popcorn, from the nurses’ break room.

  For the whole movie, my father taps his hand on me or my brother whenever a good line is coming up. He holds his breath at the exciting parts. He laughs too loud and looks to make sure that we’re laughing, too. He squeezes my hand while Jimmy Stewart gives a little speech. Two separate times, I look over and catch him with tears on his cheeks and shining eyes. Then he’s laughing and looking at me again.

  He slips back and forth like that, one moment completely lost in the world of the movie, and then suddenly and obviously excited that we’re here watching with him. Afterwards, he quotes his favourite lines, doing a bad Jimmy Stewart impression. His voice lilting like crazy into the high-torn registers. But the impression isn’t the point. He’s in love with the words themselves. The ideas. I record all of it on my phone.