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.
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