by Joey Comeau
It all comes spilling out, and I’m so happy to finally be able to tell someone.
Simon listens to every word, and then he ruins everything.
“Won’t he be lonely without us?” my brother says.
>_
Simon has so many stories about dumb things he did together with our father. They once spent a whole weekend seeing what would happen when they put different things in the microwave. While Mom and I were away. Our new microwave was unpacked and set up, and the old one was meant to go out with Friday’s garbage. They microwaved ice cubes and grapes and DVDs and magnets—anything they could think of—laughing at the sparks, at the startling pop sound, and at one another’s shocked faces.
“Promise me you’ll never tell your mother,” our father said. “She’ll be furious that we did this without her.”
I thought my virus was a perfect plan. But with one question, Simon changed everything. It was so stupid and obvious.
“Won’t he be lonely without us?”
And that was that.
We stayed up all night, working. We went through everything, every recording I had, and we transcribed every word. My voice. My mother’s. Simon. Frank. Everything went into the virus. It should be all of us there, living forever on the hard drives of strangers. It should be our whole family echoing down through eternity, singing stupid Muppet songs and laughing at mispronounced words.
My father’s story doesn’t work if he’s the only character. If his ghost is going to live on in computers, if his echo is going to laugh and talk forever, then he shouldn’t be alone. My mother’s voice should be there with him.
My brother’s voice.
My own.
>_
When the sun comes up, we’re exhausted. But the virus is ready. Everything is transcribed. Our whole family is in this computer virus. It is the ghost of all of us together.
I have it set up so that Simon only needs to push one button, and it will go out into the world. He doesn’t need to understand the scripts. He doesn’t need to know how the virus will find its way into other systems. The misleading emails it will send with infected attachments. The infection vectors.
“All you have to do is hit enter,” I tell him.
“And then Dad will be everywhere? He’ll live forever?”
“We all will,” I say.
Simon thinks about this for a moment.
“Can we both push it?” he says.
And so we reach out our hands together and push the button. The script begins to execute, and the old hard drive makes a quiet sound as it spins up, but that’s all. The only output that shows on the screen is the simple confirmation, “OK.”
Simon watches, clearly hoping for more, but the screen stays the same.
“Is that it?” he says.
>_
Then we go down the hall to our mother’s room.
There’s no light on, under her door, so we figure she’s sleeping. That’s one of our theories, anyway. That she sleeps all the time. Simon heard her three hours ago, flushing the toilet. Some days he sees her, and some days it’s me who catches a glimpse. If we’re lucky, we get a hug. A tired kiss on the forehead. An “I love you” to go with our sighting.
Maybe she likes the recordings we play, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she wishes we wouldn’t sing the same songs over and over in the hallway while she’s trying to sleep. She has given no indication, either way. But the songs aren’t the important thing. The recordings are not the important thing. We are here so that she knows we are here. We’re here for when she is ready to come back. We’re not angry or frustrated that she had to go away like this. We aren’t giving up on her.
Simon opens the laptop and turns it so that it faces her door. We’ve queued everything up, and we’re going to play it all. Every recording that went into that virus, every word that will spread out into the world, that will live forever. It plays our father’s voice. Our mother’s voice. Our own voices. Sometimes our voices are clear and perfect, and we speak in turn. Sometimes the recording is muffled, a jumble of us all laughing at once in the hospital room. We play it all.
Exhausted and giddy with excitement about what we’ve done, my brother and I lean against the bannister and the hallway wall and we laugh and talk while it plays, making jokes about jokes. Telling our mother’s closed door about the virus, about our father’s ghost.
And yes, maybe this was all silly. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it was foolish to record all of our voices, again and again, to transcribe each and every word. We know it won’t save our father. It won’t bring him back to life. He’s gone, and it doesn’t matter how loud we turn up the speakers. He can’t hear it.
But our mother might.
C:MALAGASH>shutdown.exe
About the Author
Joey Comeau is the author of four novels and the webcomic A Softer World. His work has been nominated for the ReLit and Shirley Jackson awards, has appeared in the Best American Non-Required Reading and the Guardian, has been profiled in Rolling Stone, and has recently been translated into French, Spanish, Turkish, and German. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
TRY ANOTHER GREAT READ FROM ECW PRESS...
One Bloody Thing After Another
Jackie has a map of the city on the wall of her bedroom, with a green pin for each of her trees. She has a first-kiss tree and a broken-arm tree. She has a car-accident tree. There is a tree at the hospital where Jackie’s mother passed away into the long good night. When one of them gets cut down, Jackie doesn’t know what to do but she doesn’t let that stop her. She picks up the biggest rock she can carry and puts it through the window of a car. Smash. She intends to leave before the police arrive, but they’re early.
Ann is Jackie’s best friend, but she’s got problems of her own. Her mother is chained up in the basement. How do you bring that up in casual conversation? “Oh, sorry I’ve been so distant, Jackie. My mother has more teeth than she’s supposed to, and she won’t eat anything that’s already dead.” Ann and her sister Margaret don’t have much of a choice here. Their mother needs to be fed. It isn’t easy but this is family. It’s not supposed to be easy. It’ll be okay as long as Margaret and Ann still have each other.
Add in a cantankerous old man, his powerfully stupid dog, a headless ghost, a lesbian crush and a few unsettling visits from Jackie’s own dead mother, and you’ll find that One Bloody Thing After Another is a different sort of horror novel from the ones you’re used to. It’s as sad and funny as it is frightening, and it is as much about the way families rely on each other as it is about blood being drooled on the carpet. Though, to be honest, there is a lot of blood being drooled on the carpet.
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Copyright © Joey Comeau, 2017
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Comeau, Joey, 1980–, author
Malagash / Joey Comeau.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-407-5 (softcover)
ALSO ISSUED AS: 978-1-77305-109-3 (PDF)
978-1-77305-110-9 (ePub)
I. TITLE.
PS8605.O537M35 2017 C813’.6 C2017-902410-8 C2017-902989-4
Editors for the press: Crissy Calhoun and Laura Pastore
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover photos: ocean storm © DKart/iStockPhoto; sunset over the sea © mycola/iStockPhoto
The publication of Malagash has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation. The author would also like to thank the Writers Trust of Canada and the Woodcock Fund.
