INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014

by Andy Cox

  He’d been there almost six months when I made one of my periodic visits. I wished I could see him more often, but I lived on the other side of the state. The knowledge that my sisters lived in town and dropped in almost daily made me feel only a little better.

  “The clowns handed out candy,” Dad said, “at the parade.”

  He slumped back in his chair, a bit of today’s lunch clinging to his shirt.

  “What parade, Dad?” In the hallway, a nurse walked by, her heels clicking against the tile.

  “They played music,” he said, looking at me and then away, like he suddenly wasn’t sure.

  My sister, sitting next to him on the bed, shrugged her shoulders.

  He scratched behind his ear, something he’d been doing more and more over the last year. “Yesterday, maybe the day before.”

  Or it could have been eighty years ago, when he was six.

  “We went on a plane ride after, a green biplane.” He laughed to himself. “The biplane aces became barnstormers.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said. “Do you want more applesauce?”

  “I wore goggles.” He made circles with his thumb and finger on each hand and held them over his eyes, peering at me. “My house was so small.”

  •••

  Dad took me to see The Blue Max when I was twelve. Most of the time we watched science fiction or horror movies on television. When I was younger, he’d let me stay up for the 10:30 start of SciFiFlix on Friday night or Creature Features on Saturday. Great films when you’re eight or nine: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Dracula, The Mummy, and the Godzilla films. It seemed like we could always find Godzilla.

  Every once in a while, a true special occasion, we’d go to the drive-in or a ‘sit down’ theater.

  I loved science fiction, but I found romance in WWI planes.

  Dad’s arm pressed against mine on the chair’s plush armrest. He held an open box of Milkduds loosely in his fingers. I could smell them on his breath as he chewed silently. Popcorn smells too, and spilled pop. The soles of my shoes snapped free from the stickiness when I moved.

  On the screen, a biplane waggled its wings. A cloud wisp passed beneath its wheels. Below, so far that details vanished, the ground turned into big squares, like patchwork.

  I lived movies. When the plane turned, I leaned with it, thinking about the model planes hanging from my bedroom’s ceiling. I didn’t have this biplane, the one on the screen. It was German, maybe the Albatros D, a squat, efficient speed demon the Germans introduced at the end of the war. I had Fokker biplanes, some Nieuports and Sopwith Camels, but not this one.

  My glasses became goggles. Gloves covered my hands. Against the wind, I checked my guns’ trigger again. Somewhere, there were British fighters, but for now I flew alone, the engine’s roar pillowing me.

  Clouds swallow the sky for a second, surrendering the world to whiteness. Water drops stream from the wires and struts, then I am out again, into the clear. All air. All clouds. All sky, open and mine. Clouds like white islands float around, and I weave between them, the enemy forgotten.

  I glimpse him, then lose him, a red flash against the blue. My heart pounds. I’ve been reading WWI aviation history for months. The knights of the sky. I have my heroes, Rickenbacker, Bishop, McCudden, Fonck. I lie on my bed, hands laced behind my head, studying my model planes. Sometimes I turn off the lights and sweep my flashlight across them like a lonely search light. I think about their canvas and wood construction, and how they caught fire in the air, tumbling toward the ground. Tracers cutting curved paths. Anti-aircraft explosions. The smell of oil and gas.

  And always, above it all, beyond the heroes and ground’s pitiful limitations, flies von Richthofen. I dream von Richtofen, and labor for days assembling his complicated plane, trying to keep the wings even, to not smudge his beautiful red craft with glue, to hang him in a place of honor in the room.

  I see it again, a red plane that vanishes behind a cloud. Could it be? Is it possible? I will the plane to fly around the cloud, and it turns as I command. Where is it? Did I see it? My heart thumps hard. I grip the velvet colored armrest, leaning forward.

  Was he there?

  Then, above me, clear as an angel and more holy, the red triplane flies against the blue sky.

  “The Red Baron!” I gasp, loud enough that people sitting in front of me turn to look. Someone in the theater laughs, but I don’t care. It’s the Red Baron.

  Dad’s hand is on my arm, pressing gently down. I think, was I too loud? Is he warning me to be quiet?

  But he’s not looking at me. He’s leaning forward too, watching the screen.

  The Red Baron looks over the cockpit’s edge, spots us. His fingers touch his leather-flight helmet.

  He salutes us, the Red Baron, and then he banks away, impossibly aloft in his beautiful killing machine.

  •••

  Mom died four days after she checked into the physical therapy center, a separate facility where she was supposed to recover from the back surgery. We had arranged for Dad to be in the room with her during her rehab. He couldn’t really take care of himself, and whenever Mom was out of the room, he would become anxious and start looking for her. She couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him being outside the door, calling for her. She was eighty-four, weak from previous illnesses, and she’d never responded well to anesthetics. After two days on a ventilator, we agreed with the doctors that there was no hope, so they disconnected her. Thirty-five minutes later she passed on. Dad sat in a chair by her bed, holding her hand, but he wasn’t focused. I’m not sure that he knew what was happening. I hoped he didn’t.

  We moved Dad to the assisted care center that week. He went straight from the physical therapy facility to the care center without going back to the house. We reasoned that going home would be too hard on him. He wouldn’t want to leave, and he couldn’t stay.

  Within the month, my sisters began cleaning the house, clearing it out, and making it ready for sale. Since I lived almost three hundred miles away, they did all the work. They’d call me to talk about where furniture was going, to ask me what I wanted to keep.

  •••

  Cinderella City, the Denver area’s first shopping mall, opened when I was in junior high. It sported a fountain in its central plaza, a huge spray reaching toward the ceiling, falling short, then falling back in a misty clatter.

  Dad walked beside me the weekend of the grand opening, taking in the stores, smelling meats and spices grilled in the food court, working our way through the crowds. He was forty, dark-haired, confident.

  Girls, hired by the mall, in matching costumes of red blouses and short, silver skirts, reflective as mirrors, mixed with the crowd, handing out promotional flyers from some of the businesses. They’d all dyed their hair an unlikely blue. Background music filled the air.

  “They’re moon maids,” Dad said.

  “What?” I said. Lately I’d begun to find girls interesting in a way I never had. One stopped before us, handed Dad a green flyer for Penney’s.

  “Twenty percent off just this weekend,” she said, all smiles and long, tanned legs. She looked at me, and I could feel the blush. She winked with a beautiful brown eye, and, astonished, I watched as she turned away to hand the next shopper an advertisement.

  Dad laughed. “See, I told you, a moon maid.”

  Embarrassed, I shrugged. “She’s not so special.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” He dropped the Penney’s flyer in a trash can. “She’s a Martian moon maid, a much rarer creature. There are women, who are wonderful just as they are, moon maids, and then Martian moon maids. You are lucky to see one, and if you play your cards right, you might even talk to one and become her friend. They’re like unicorns: you have to be worthy and noble. Martian moon maids have standards, after all.”

  “So, what is Mom?”

  We turned into another broad walkway lined with stores. The color sch
eme changed from the light pastels we’d been walking through to darker, richer hues, and incense smells replaced the grilled meat.

  “Your mom is the Martian moon maid queen, son.” He spotted a cart between two stores. “Come on. I’ll buy you a pretzel. Have you ever had one with mustard?”

  I shook my head doubtfully. A pretzel with mustard?

  I’ve never had a pretzel that good since. And, as far as I can tell, that was the only time he talked to me about women.

  That was my sex talk from Dad.

  •••

  I wandered through the transformed home. Some of the furniture had gone to the care center with Dad. Books sat in boxes in the middle of the floor. Kitchen cupboards were bare, the refrigerator empty. Their bed was gone, so their room seemed strangely large, but I could smell them in it: Dad’s Chapstick and cologne. Mom’s lotions. And the oddly old smell that people leave when they’ve grown too old to take care of hygiene like they used to.

  I opened Dad’s nightstand drawer. He’d built sections into it so the items were neatly organized – fingernail clipper, pencils, television remote, cough drops – all partitioned. In the back cubby, he’d put a pocket notebook. Inside were the dates for rotating the bed’s mattress that showed if he’d simply flipped it over, or also swapped the foot for the head. An entry for every four months since he’d bought the mattress in 2005. The book showed the life of the previous mattresses too, and he’d created spaces for flipping the mattress for the next eight years, with places to put a check mark when he’d made the rotation.

  Dad loved keeping records. In the glove compartment of the car was a notebook with every gas and oil change (complete with mileage on that tank of gas) from when he’d bought the car. I found books for cars he’d owned back to 1946 in his desk. In his workshop, he kept records for paintbrushes: purchase date, projects completed, color of paint. Next to his golf clubs he kept a tally of every game he’d played: course yardage, total score, total putts. Taped to the wall beside his flying saucer detector in the closet, I found a list of dates. I guessed they were for when he changed the battery.

  When I was eight, Dad took me into his office to show me a chart he’d made. It noted bank deposits from the day I was born and continuing until I was twenty-one, more than twice my current lifetime in the future. “See, here,” he said. “Your freshman year of college will be completely paid for. Your sophomore year we’ll pay eighty percent, and junior year fifty percent. You’ll need to start saving money now to pay the missing percent and your senior year. We will give you a weekly allowance.” He brought out another chart. “If you save fifty percent each week, and then get a job during the summer once you turn twelve, you will have college paid for.”

  I was eight. All I could think about was the fifty percent of that allowance I could spend. In two months I might be able to buy a model plane.

  •••

  Dad exercised on his own most of his adult life. He had a copy of the Canadian Air Force’s exercise manual, and started his day with pushups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and stretches. He liked to walk; for years and years he walked to church. Although Mom gained weight, Dad stayed slim. Age reshaped him, though, loosening the skin, redistributing weight. I have a black and white picture of him lying on a boat dock at an Indiana lake when he was twenty. He was built like a bantam boxer.

  Now, at eighty-six, it can take him fifteen minutes to walk the 150 feet to the care center’s cafeteria. He gets distracted. Forgets he has a destination. Refuses to be rushed. When he has a walker, he’ll just pick it up and carry it. Often it appears that he’s forgotten how to use it. Several times now the interns at the care center have found him on the floor in the middle of the night, where he has fallen.

  Watching him walk is a bit of a nightmare. He’s always on the edge of toppling. He shuffles. A stray thread in the carpet might be enough to trip him.

  I’m frightened by the rate of change. Six months ago, when Mom had her back surgery, the event that precipitated their move into the care center, Dad and I parked the car in a hospital garage a quarter mile from Mom’s room. He walked stairs, sidewalks and corridors without help. He chatted about Mom’s progress and my kids.

  A friend of mine has terminal cancer. He asked his oncologist how long he had to live. The doctor said, “Your system is compromised. An organ could fail, or an opportunistic infection could set in, like pneumonia. I can’t predict catastrophe, but if nothing like that happens, I look at how fast your health is changing. If the change is observable over years, than you have years. If we’re seeing change over months, than that is what you have. If the change is observable over days, you have days.”

  It’s only been six months since he walked unaided to see Mom.

  •••

  Three in the morning. I’ve been reading John Carter of Mars since midnight by the light from my open closet. If I hear footsteps overhead, I’ll have time to turn off the light and feign sleep before Mom or Dad realize I’m flouting my bedtime. I’m eleven years old.

  The ceiling creaks. I look up from the book. On my dresser and desk, my aquariums bubble gently. I’ve been trying to breed fancy guppies. Even though the parents’ tails are long, flowing and beautiful, all the babies look ordinary. This has been a disappointment.

  The back door rattles. That would be Dad. He’s obsessive about security. He’d equipped the house with heavy storm doors with two locks on them, and the inner doors also had two locks. He’d check them a couple of times a night. Years later, when he bought a car with a remote lock/unlock key fob, he’d open the front door, unlock the car with the remote, and then relock. A couple of hours later, he’d do it again.

  He unlocks the back door. I hear the metallic rattling of keys. He’s not coming downstairs, so I return to the book. A half hour later, I realize he hasn’t come back in. What is Dad doing outdoors at 3:30 in the morning?

  The third and fifth stair from the bottom creak, so I step long and high over them.

  Dad built a telescope before I was born, a ten-inch reflector with a four-foot long barrel. He ground the mirror himself. Mom told me that it had taken months. During the school year, he would schedule a night for my class to come to our house to look at the sky. Last year, my fifth grade class saw Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. Mom made hot chocolate in a huge pot on the stove. Kids went out our back door into the yard, steaming mugs of hot chocolate in hand to wait their turn.

  There’s enough of the moon that I can see Dad standing by his telescope. He’s not looking through it. His head is cocked back. He’s staring up. I watch him for fifteen minutes before I’m too tired and bored. Back in bed, I open my book. Continue reading.

  I think I must have fallen asleep before he came in.

  •••

  My sisters made a box for me at my parents’ house, filled with bits of Mom and Dad’s life that they thought I would want. I haven’t gone through it yet. On top of the stack is a huge, brass telescope that looks like it would be at home on a pirate ship. It’s dinged, but the brass feels warm and smooth under my hand. When fully extended, it’s longer than my arm.

  Underneath the telescope sat a magazine with a familiar cover, the September 1963 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with part three of Robert Heinlein’s ‘Glory Road’. It was the first ‘adult’ science fiction I’d read. I had been nine. The paper had long ago yellowed, but it smelled like Dad’s books.

  I’m glad they put the box aside for me. I think I’ll make a display for the telescope to hang on my wall at home. Underneath, I’ll have a sign made. ‘Dad. Watcher of the Skies.’

  •••

  Dad picks at the skin behind his ear. He’s sitting on the chair by the door into his care center apartment. His focus is on the carpet a couple of feet in front of him. His fingers move slowly, rubbing the skin, pulling gently at his hair. I wonder what he’s thinking about, or if he’s thinking at all.

  I have a theory about Alzheimer’s: the brain is trave
ling, but it’s not making a trail. Maybe he’s remembering a conversation he had thirty years ago. Maybe he’s thinking about orbital mechanics from when he worked for Martin-Marietta. It doesn’t matter, really, because he won’t connect the next thought with the last one.

  Of course, he might not be thinking at all. Maybe his brain is idling, stuck in neutral. I can’t tell, and that’s frightening. His eyes move sometimes, and he blinks. His lips separate slightly, then press together.

  Six months ago, the last time we had a real conversation, he said, “The thing about getting old is that people talk to you, but you can’t follow what they’re saying.”

  When I leave the care center now, I always tell Dad that I love him. I don’t remember telling him that when I was a kid. I hug him – his shoulders are frail, like bird wings. His breath has gone bad. I wonder if he’s brushing regularly.

  Sometime in my early forties, I noticed that Dad and I never said “I love you” to each other. It might have been around the time his mother died that it occurred to me. I talked to him on the phone. He’d gone back to Indiana for the service. I wanted to offer some comfort, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He sounded business-like on the phone. “I’ll be home in two days,” he said, no hint of loss in his voice.

  “I’m sorry about grandma,” I said. “I love you.”

  “She was gone for a long time before she died,” he said. It had been a decade since she’d recognized him last.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t unexpected.”

  After he hung up, I realized he hadn’t said that he loved me. For a long time after, I made it a point to say “I love you” when I talked to him on the phone, but he didn’t say it back for years.

  •••

  When I was fourteen, Dad and I created a UFO sighting. We didn’t mean to. For a couple of months, we’d been experimenting with hot air balloons. Dad had found a pattern for them in Mechanics Illustrated, and I did the assembling. We cut the panels from a roll of tissue paper, then glued the edges together to create increasingly larger balloons. Dad made a launching station out of a three-foot section of one-foot in diameter, aluminum air duct he mounted on a stand. For the bottom, he shaped a pad from fiberglass ceiling insulation that he soaked in oil and gasoline. We launched several balloons this way that would fill with the hot smoke and rise fifty feet. The balloons didn’t last long. Anything would rip them, and the heat source sometimes threw sparks that set the balloon afire before it cleared the launch pad, but we persevered.