Kill Switch

by Chris Lynch

  The little old crusty in an ancient mariner outfit comes right up and blasts his concertina music for us, at us. It is more like a battle than a performance, though it is hard to tell who is winning. It’s also hard to tell what, if any, tune is involved.

  “Was that ‘Greensleeves’ toward the end there?” Da says, waving his finger at the man. The man’s wide-open, toothless, babylike smile suggests that it was.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Da says.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” the man says.

  “I wish you’d never asked,” I say in Da’s ear. “You don’t have a lot of money, Da. And we don’t know what’s going to come.”

  He stands up and pushes my head away as he goes to the bar. At the bar I see him order, then watch as another grizzled seafaring type says something to him. Da fairly leaps into a short, animated telling of something that makes the hardened old soul gasp, cover his mouth in shock-like, then wave the barman over to get Da another shot.

  A minute later, Da is sitting again with us, toasting America, the concertina, and life in general. Then, using America as his segue, he starts with the yarns.

  “Did I ever tell you…,” he says to all these people he has never met before.

  Chairs scrape the floor as folks inch closer. Old vertebrae audibly creak as people twist to lean their good ears into the story.

  He tells the one about the blinded scientist in Tel Aviv.

  He tells the one about setting the nerd’s face on fire with thick specs and sunshine.

  He tells one about impersonating a jockey and winning a big race on a drugged horse in Bolivia.

  A beer shows up in front of him. A few minutes later, a hefty-looking Reuben sandwich appears.

  He does not appear to remember me. He shows no sign of awareness, of either my presence or any of the strain and tribulation of the preceding days. He does not even show any of the tiredness he expressed only just recently.

  “He’ll be absolutely fine,” the frightening man sitting on the other side of me reassures me. I look at him, and he speaks from behind a gray walrus mustache and two cheeks with prominent T-shaped scars carved into them. There is nobody here, in fact, without some facial hair. Da’s beard has grown in rather fully. “He’s got currency here. In Lundy Lee, everybody lives on stories. One way and another, a man with stories gets by very well here. One way and another.”

  I look at the man while on my other side Da keeps storying away. Oohs and aahs and small claps are the background music as he reaches peaks of spellbinding.

  “That is good to know, thank you,” I say to the man. He winks reassurance and I see the same T scar on his eyelid.

  There is a brief lull in the show, as a couple of people head for the toilets, a couple more head for the bar, and one of the two women in the place comes up and puts her hand on Da’s hand. “Don’t you dare start again until I get back,” she says, unlit cigarette in one hand and the solution in the other.

  “I won’t,” he says, giddy. Probably the first time he’s ever been pleased to be asked to stop talking.

  I am hoping my first day at the university is half this successful, is what I’m hoping.

  “This is what you want?” I ask after tapping his shoulder, after he has shooed me away for the third time. “Is this the place, Da? Is this the time and the place?”

  “Valhalla,” he says impatiently, shooing me the fatal fourth time.

  “You understand, though? That I am leaving you. I am really just leaving you here. And going my own way. For good and for real.”

  He nods.

  “I knew it before you did,” he says.

  He reaches out and places his hand on the side of my face. He stares at me for several long seconds, truly, I think, appreciating me. Then he gives that side of my face a good, crisp clap, sending me away, finally, finally-finally.

  And so it goes just like that. After all. I go. I am shooed, and I go. I put on my trench, tie up the belt, gather my chunky sweatshirt, and I go.

  “Nobody dies of peritonitis in this day and age, right? So…” goes the beginning of the story he is spinning as I leave.

  Outside, I take it in, the town, the everything, and I still cannot fathom it. I curl around to the port side to walk along the grubby, crumbling dockland. The ferry is coming in, rusty tears running down all along its seams.

  “Hello, Young Man,” Zeke says, startling the ever-loving out of me.

  Once more, I cannot fathom it.

  “No,” I say. “No, absolutely not. No. He has found peace.”

  “Maybe peace never wanted to be found. Not by him.”

  “No. He is here now. Everybody tells stories here, so it’s all good and fine by everyone here. He has a beard now, like everyone here.”

  “We’ll give him a good shave.”

  I remember when Da joked about his whiskers, he said just precisely that, that they were going to give him a good, close shave. He made a little zipper-scar gesture at his temple.

  “Absolutely not,” I say. “The beard looks good. The beard suits him. The beard stays.”

  Then Zeke says something. Something that works a kind of sick magic, something that instantly calls to mind Da’s words about flipping a guy’s kill switch.

  “You’ll get it, son. Someday, you’ll get it.”

  There is a moment. There are, I suppose, lots of smaller, preparatory moments in your life. But I think there is the one moment where something of you is changed, profoundly, elementally. It probably does not happen to everyone, but that’s just because they swerve this way or that way and just narrowly miss it, because it was probably there, out of sight, out of mind.

  I feel different before I even do it. The doing of it is almost secondary.

  One of the many great things about a rotting old port town is that there is always a chunky piece of wood lying handy when you need it.

  I toss my new heavy Suffolk University sweatshirt on the ground behind me and pick up the chunky piece of wood. He smiles at me, almost, almost a laugh.

  I crack him, tremendously, right at that temple spot where the zipper scar would go, swinging right through him, the way good, natural hitters do. He drops to the deck, stands like a bleeding, cowering dog on all fours. I need him to look up at me. None of this honorable death baloney for you, mister. He looks up, petrified, horrified, glorified.

  He opens his sad little mouth to plead his soulless, meaningless case.

  But he doesn’t get his chance.

  I put down the chunky piece of wood, balancing it on one end between my knees. Then I conclude communications with a beautiful bouquet of wiggling fingers in front of my pursed lips.

  “Octo-shush,” I tell Zeke. “It’s a funny joke. From the office. You remember. Or do you remember? Are you even supposed to remember? Are you allowed to remember?”

  He doesn’t try to answer me this time. He knows we have our answer.

  Then I reclaim my chunky piece of wood and I club him. It’s done.

  He lies there at my feet in more blood than I thought a human body contained. I grab him, roll him, and shove him over the side, into the water. It actually goes plunk.

  I straighten up, look around, expecting… something. I look and look. Even the ferry pulling in, right there, right there so close, gives away nothing.

  I feel myself shaking. It only makes sense, though, doesn’t it? Big thing there. Nerves are dancing like spit on a skillet. I can feel myself shaking from my feet on up, like I am making the rotting wooden walkway beneath me crumble to bits with it, and then I will fall through and meet Zeke in the water. I feel it in my stomach and my head and even my vision-my eyes themselves are doing something they have never done before, actually physically trembling, juddering, side to side in the sockets, vibrating at the frequency of hummingbird wings. My brain and the backs of my eyeballs are leaning on each other and combining to make a buzz that’s a torture.

  I extend my hands wide in front of me to look. I close
my eyes then, to the juddering. “Stop,” I say, as calmly as I can. I open my eyes and watch my splayed hands again and they are shivering, quaking to make Parkinson’s seem like stillness. “Stop it,” I say, low, firmer. “Stop it now, Young Man,” I say, staring, staring, staring at my hands as the shaking slows, slows, calms, finally finishes.

  I stare at my hands for minutes now, waiting. I listen to myself, check myself, wait for myself. Stillness. There is a fair amount of blood on my all-weather spook coat. Into the water it goes.

  I did this. It was there to be done and I did it.

  It has been some time. I look up and around again at the peculiar port town.

  If Lundy Lee noticed anything amiss, or if it cared, it has already forgotten.

  There’s a story for the grandkids, I think.

  “Time, Young Man,” I say.

  I promised Jarrod I would see him off, and I meant it. This outgoing ferry will be him gone now to whatever happens to a guy like him on a boat like that, and good luck to him.

  “Maybe, when you get to college,” he says, “you can check out and see, maybe they need a caretaker. Then we can be a team again.”

  The boy and his relentless unfathomable heart does make me smile.

  “They might need a caretaker, but probably not as much as you surely do.”

  “Then there’s that. Either way, I see the team reunited.”

  The team. Unfathomable.

  I do wonder if there is such a thing as juvenile dementia. Maybe that’s the team we’re on, really.

  “Come here,” I say, and pull him close to me. I drape my new thick burgundy Suffolk sweatshirt around his shoulders. I feel they are death-bony shoulders. “Try and keep warm, at least,” I say.

  He pulls the thing on, wrapping himself into it and grinning like I gave him mink.

  “You defy all the laws of human nature,” I say.

  “Well, then, you defy all the other ones,” he says, trapping me in a spindly, unexpected kind of creepy hug that feels like the best thing I can remember feeling.

  Until it brings on the trembling in me again and I have to shove him away.

  “Just go to work, will ya,” I shout, turning away as he goes up into the tub of a vessel.

  The boat eventually pulls away, as it does a couple of times a day. It goes straight to the Big Island, which by all accounts is pretty small, and then another boat gig takes Jarrod away, farther, from here, from stuff, from me, from old difficulties and almost certainly to a whole bunch of new ones.

  He is waving at me, waving madly from the rail of the boat like one of the doomed idiots launching on the Titanic. But in this case, he is the only idiot waving, the other passengers and crew showing no interest in the port they are leaving behind or the people they are leaving to it.

  I wave at him a little less nuttily, but nuttily enough.

  My waving only makes him wave with ever more gusto, and broadening grin.

  An utter, unfathomable nut job.

  This is why love is for chumps.

  17

  Independence, solitude, silence, are all great things.

  But hitchhiking, ultimately, is for chumps. It is little wonder hitchhiking is so identified with mass murder. Ten minutes after you have been picked up by one of these jamokes, you want to kill them. Every one of them.

  I make it just under halfway before I break down and call my sister to come and bring me home.

  She is great for doing it. But I don’t feel chatty.

  “Is that it?” Lucy says, finally exasperated with me after about a half hour of the clam show. “Nothing? You got nothing for me after all that?”

  “Sorry,” I say, staring out at the trees I know individually by now. “Thanks for getting me.”

  “Well, I don’t get you, but that’s another story. So, you just… left him? Just like that?”

  “That’s what he wanted.”

  “Hnnn,” she says. “What he wanted, huh? Fine, then. I’m cool with that. Nice work.”

  “Thanks.”

  We indulge in some more silence until we reach her limit again.

  “Did you hear about Zeke?”

  Now I turn away from the trees. I feel my face flush just like when I didn’t know an answer in school. But I hope she is not paying that close attention to my details. She looks over.

  “Watch the road, jeez,” I snap.

  She watches the road.

  “No,” I say. “What about him?”

  “Dead. Yeah, just like that. They just found him a few hours ago. A mess, apparently. They say he was hill walking, way up there in the jaggedy foothills up north. Fell, apparently, a long way down a cliff face and into a flooded quarry. Very pretty, they say.”

  I look back to my trees.

  “Huh,” I say. “Wow. How’s Mom and Dad anyway?”

  I find out how they are when I meet them on the front porch. It feels like I have been away a year. I would love to get reacquainted with my cozy room and my lovely bed right now.

  That won’t be happening.

  “What’s this?” I ask, pointing at what is too obviously my suitcase on the top step. My mother is giving me a strange and tentative hug as I ask.

  My father has never been big on answering stupid questions, so he lets that one lie there. I extend my hand to shake his but instead he hands me this plastic file box sort of a thing. I look at him and wait.

  “You should have everything you need in there. There is money. Bank records, paperwork.”

  I open the box and there is all kinds of blah-blah-blah a person needs when a person has to be running his own life. Some of it I recognize, some I don’t.

  “Some of this is Da’s,” I say.

  “D. Cameron. If it is D. Cameron, it is for you. There are notes to that effect, which you can read at your leisure. If you need anything else, you know how to reach us.”

  “I’m not sure I do, actually,” I say. Little joke there. Goes over well.

  “Call me, Dan,” Lucy says. “Okay?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  We stand there, me, my parents, my sister, my belongings, playing out the grand mal seizure of awkward silences. The weight of it all threatens to pull the porch right underground.

  “Dad, college doesn’t start for another-”

  “Best of luck, son.”

  Pretty unambiguous there, my dad. I pick up my suitcase. Lucy rushes up and breathlessly squeezes me in the hug that I have been seeking, missing, dying for, and I feel myself well up at just the moment when I need to be made of much tougher stuff than that.

  This is why love is for chumps.

  I suck up my tears the way a little kid sniffles up snot. That’s that.

  I walk backward down the front steps of my house.

  “Is this because I released the old man, Dad?” I ask, in motion.

  He nods. “And because I suspect he has released you. I know what he was, Daniel. I won’t live with it again.”

  I stop dead in my backward tracks.

  This does not please them. My parents turn and go into their home. Lucy stands there, quivering, waving, blowing me kisses, and staying planted right where she is until I am gone.

  “You look like a man who could use a lift,” comes a voice from the car that is crawling alongside me.

  “I never liked you,” I say to Da’s old workmate Largs.

  “Fair enough, and mutual, Young Man.”

  “That is not my name.”

  “Hop in, Daniel. I will drop you where you are going.”

  “It’s just up ahead,” I say, “about twelve hundred miles.”

  “I was thinking more bus station.”

  I get in, and he goes quiet for a bit, tooling along the streets toward the bus terminal. When he has given me enough adjustment time, he talks.

  “Horrible shame, about old Zeke,” he says.

  “Horrible,” I say crisply.

  “But that’s old men for you. They fall down and die. Happe
ns all the time, they fall down and they die.”

  “You’re not that much younger.”

  “Ouch.” He laughs, a laugh that sounds like train wheels squealing on a bend of track. “I guess I’d better be careful, then, huh? But that’s what retirement villages are for, huh? So they can be safe and not hurt themselves or anybody else. Right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “That is a nice one you found for your grandfather. Perfect, I think.”

  I snap my head in his direction and all his chummy nonsense bleeds right out.

  “You are good, Daniel. But you are not that good. Don’t get all worked up, anyway. I meant what I said. It is a perfect retirement village for him. He’s safe there, I think. You did damn well there. He’s safe and god knows we don’t need any more old men falling down and hurting themselves right now. That doesn’t do anybody any good, does it?”

  To think, I merely hated him up until now.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I say.

  He pulls up in front of the manky, desolate bus station, stops the car, reaches into his blazer pocket.

  “Why do I want your card?”

  “In case you need anything. Just give me a call. And maybe after you graduate, who knows, maybe I can find something for you. There is always a place for a bright young philosopher with hard-world experience, you know.”

  I give Largs as cockeyed a look as I can manage. Then I tuck the card in my pocket once me and my belongings are out of his car.

  18

  Don’t forget me, will you? Da said.

  How could I? I said. How could anyone forget you?

  Ah, but you will, though. It’ll happen, probably quicker than you could know.

  Not happening, Old Boy.

  Don’t be stupid, Young Man. Be anything else but stupid. And it’s stupid to think you won’t forget. And it will happen to you, as well. Probably sooner than you could imagine. We all get forgotten. Don’t forget that.

  He was right. By the time I got to school, all this was forgotten.

  I made it. To the university, to freshmen week, which I remember almost nothing of, to philosophy.

  I made it.

  I got a roommate who is also philosophy and who smokes so much dope my computer giggles for ten minutes every time I open it up. He tells me all about his background on the sugar beet farm and I tell him all about mine, the summer camps and the horses and the high school archery team and my six-foot-two girlfriend, and he says “wow” a lot, and “cool,” and all the other stuff, the bumpy, prickly, complicated stuff is just lost in the fabulosity of my storytelling.