My father walked over to the big green plastic carnival ride. It was broken but he glued it together, assuring me it would be "good as new in no time."
He acted like it didn't bother him at all that a family friend had said something snarky last night about my father's hobby re-building carnival rides: "It's not like he's sending rockets to the moon, or anything." My father's cheerful banter as he worked meant, of course, that it bothered him a great deal.
The ride had a thick plastic green tree trunk of a base, into which fit a giant ball joint from which sprouted four extended arms. From each arm dangled a small pod. We had ridden it endlessly in summers of my childhood.
As it rotated, the pods would flare out in wide ruffling arcs, like one of the high speed swinging bucket centrifuges in my lab might do if the operator ever lost his mind entirely and started a run without first balancing the load.
The ride normally sat four, the size of my nuclear family. To test it, my father was loading just one pod with three people - himself, my mother, and the family friend, leaving the other pods empty.
"Well," he smiled at me, zipping a silk jump suit up to his neck, "wish me luck." He said it the way you might if your dangerous mission were going to the corner store for a liter of milk. I nodded at him, smiled back. He hopped into the pod and snapped shut the door.
My best friend and I watched the pod's progress on the video moniter he had rigged, next to an altimeter with a digital readout. First I was confused, as we watched the numbers rapidly count backwards from 900. Just before they reached 0, I understood that he had set the pod to shoot straight up. It was unclear if he had meant it to go this high, but at 0 it would exit the earth's atmosphere and they would be in space. Had my father been wearing a helmet?
No sooner had the question entered my mind, it was answered: my father's head, a grainy black and white shadow in the moniter, changed from a single blob to a wispy spray, then dissipated into. Nothing. For another second, when the pod's other two passengers remained intact, I wondered if he had provided them with helmets. Then their heads too became staticky confetti.
It is hard to describe that long moment, in which there was time for so many questions and regrets, like that old cliche about your life flashing before your eyes before death, only it was my final moments with my father that replayed in agonizing detail in the microseconds after I watched my parents die.
I remembered this sensation that had risen as his eyes met mine, right before he clambered into the pod. I'd wanted to ask. What he was doing. Did he need anything. Did he need anything special. And then he was gone.
There wasn't even time to fully process the event before I woke up, groggy, feeling hungover from last night's fried chicken. The shock was wearing off and I began to mourn my family even as I realized it had been a dream.
It's such an odd feeling, this residue of grief matched with reality. That didn't happen. It wasn't real. And still I feel such a sickening, terrible sense of guilt and sadness. That I didn't ask the question. Didn't understand. Didn't insist. Didn't even hug him goodbye. I just let them go. And then my family was gone, without fanfare, just a horrible, low resolution, soundless explosion.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Smuggling operation
I was hiding in the back of a closet in the cellar with my cat when the police battered down the door. It was dark, - maybe 1030pm - by the time they broke in, but there had been a helicopter circling overhead with a floodlight for the last several hours.
I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.
Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.
I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions.
"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.
I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me. She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something. It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation. She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do.
She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.
The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns.
It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty. I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.
This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police. Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges.
When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there. There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen.
So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in.
I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come. By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling. After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar.
I heard sirens, far away, then closer. They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house. I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me. I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.
Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda. I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard. They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy. I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank. And that is where they found me.
I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.
Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.
I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions.
"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.
I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me. She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something. It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation. She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do.
She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.
The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns.
It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty. I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.
This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police. Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges.
When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there. There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen.
So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in.
I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come. By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling. After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar.
I heard sirens, far away, then closer. They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house. I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me. I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.
Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda. I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard. They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy. I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank. And that is where they found me.
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