Malagash

by Joey Comeau

  Jimmy Stewart’s character in the film is named Elwood P. Dowd, and the quote I like best is this one, in my father’s voice:

  “Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be,’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart.”

  My father pauses for effect.

  “I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”

  Over the next few hours, he quotes that line again and again, and every time he says it he includes the “you may quote me” at the end, even though it obviously isn’t the important part.

  When I get home, I transcribe the recordings into the virus. It is so confusing. Is this really him? He’s saying someone else’s words. Mary Chase’s words, in Jimmy Stewart’s voice, but they so clearly mean something to him. He says them like he’s thankful that someone finally gave him words for things he’s always wanted to say. He believes those words. You can hear it in his voice. You could see it on his face. And if words mean something to you, if an idea moves you, aren’t you changed, just a little?

  >_

  Dad is on a roll, telling stupid jokes one after the other while Simon sits on the hospital bed grinning from ear to ear. I would stay here forever, if I could. Not saying a word, just listening. Recording. I don’t even mind the sound of the crushed ice in his plastic cup. This is as close to perfect as we’re ever going to get.

  My mother, on the other hand, is agitated because she and I haven’t eaten. She’s standing by the door now. When the nurse brought Dad his lunch, she brought an extra tray for Simon, so they’ve both eaten. We have not. You have to eat every day so that you can live until the next day. Then you have to eat again the next day. Food is an inconvenience. A hassle. What is the good of medical science if we still have to interrupt whatever we’re doing to eat three times a day? There should just be a pill you can take.

  “We have to go, Sunday,” my mother says.

  I don’t want to miss anything. This is all important. Every stupid word. But I can’t tell her that. Not without telling her that I am recording this all on my phone. Without having to explain why. Without giving away my plan. So we have to go.

  We have to go and the waif can stay. The waif will get to hear these jokes, get to spend these moments with our father that I won’t get. These jokes could all be in the virus. They could live on forever. But instead Simon is the only one who will ever hear them.

  “Sunday, now,” my mother says.

  “I know,” I say, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I shouldn’t be mad at the waif. It isn’t his fault that he’s useless. And anyway, it’s hard to be mad at somebody who looks so genuinely happy.

  I casually set my phone on the side table, behind Dad’s books. It is still recording. I hope that the battery lasts.

  “Pick Simon up some mints,” Dad says.

  “I don’t enjoy mints very much,” my brother tells him.

  “Pick Simon up some mints, and I’ll eat them.”

  And then we go, leaving the two of them alone.

  >_

  I’m trying to be as quiet as possible, trying not to wake my brother. But the whole bunk bed creaks and groans every time I move. When I reach the bottom of the ladder, I am genuinely surprised to find him still asleep. He looks nervous, even when he’s unconscious. His brow slightly furrowed. His hand up to his mouth, muscle memory from when he used to suck his thumb. The waif in his purest form.

  I cross the room and curl into my spot in the closet. I was worried all day yesterday. Worried that one of them would find the phone, would see that it was recording. And I was worried that I had crossed a line. That I was violating their privacy. Now, though, listening to the recording, I regret nothing.

  There are some good jokes, and I am glad I didn’t miss them. Phrases and words that will be perfect to copy into the virus. But there’s something else here, too. Something new. A conversation I never would have heard otherwise.

  “Hey, now,” my father says on the recording. “Why are you crying?”

  There’s no answer. Just more crying, and my father murmuring reassuring words that I can’t make out. Then Simon says something, too quiet and garbled to understand. I can hear the tears in his voice, even if I have no idea what he’s saying.

  “Simon, I have no idea what you just said,” my father says. But he says it gently.

  “I don’t want you to die,” Simon says, louder. He’s still crying.

  Of course Simon doesn’t want our father to die. I don’t know why it is so unexpected for me to hear him say the words. But it is. Did I think that my brother was crying all the time just because he’s a baby? Just because he’s a delicate flower? Over in his bunk, Simon is still sleeping.

  “I don’t want you to die,” he says again on the recording, even louder now. Defiant.

  >_

  I don’t want my father to die. He knows. Every day I don’t want him to die, and every day he knows.

  Simon doesn’t want him to die, either.

  “I know, Simon,” my father says on the recording, more gently than he says those words to me. Or maybe he’s just being gentle in a different way.

  I don’t know how I will transcribe any of this. The way he sounds, talking to my little brother, is different from how he sounds when talking just to me. I feel certain that it means something different, too, even though the words are the exact same. This particular softness in my father’s voice is meant only for Simon.

  There are parts of my father that he shows only to Simon. Parts he shows only to my mother. What if I had never heard this? What if I had never realized this? Would this whole virus have been made up only of who my father was to me?

  I thought this was going to be easy. I would write down my father’s words, and he would live forever. But the more I record, the more I realize I am missing.

  So no, I don’t regret recording them in secret. I have to record everything. I have to record him when he is with Simon. When he’s with my mom. I need to find a way into his computer. Into his emails. His old pictures. I have to save as much of him as I can. Not just the part I can see with my own two eyes. Because now that I have started, it’s up to me how much of my father survives.

  I know that this computer virus will never actually be my father. It is a few lines of computer code, a text file filled with bad jokes. I know that it can’t replace the incomprehensible mess of human life. But it can be something. I have to believe that it can be something.

  >_

  Our mother waves once as she climbs into her car. She starts the engine and pulls around the driveway loop heading up the gravel toward the road. She looks distracted, as she passes us. Unhappy. My little brother, though, keeps right on waving until she’s gone. It is one and a half hours to the airport from here. She’s going to pick up Uncle Frank and Uncle Jonah and bring them back here. Our job, in her absence, is to prepare their room. Back inside the house, our grandmother is baking macaroni and cheese.

  “Do you know where the extra quilts are?” she asks as we pass.

  We do.

  Upstairs, we open the extra room. Simon has an armload of bedding, and I’ve got the cleaning supplies. The wallpaper is less flowery than in ours. Just a simple pattern of browns faded together. It matches the heavy wooden furniture. Only the chair by the window seems delicate, upholstered with a faded green flower print, but even that feels more serious than the flowers in our bedroom. We prop open the window to let in the fresh afternoon air. We dust and vacuum. We change the bedsheets, spread out the comforter and quilt.

  And when we’re done, Simon sits on the edge of the big bed.

  “This room is nicer,” my brother says. “But I like our bunk beds.”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t have an opinion. I’m just glad to be done, so I can get b
ack to my computers. Simon follows me, the way he always does, and he watches me curl into my small space in the closet. I reach out to close the door, but then catch myself. It usually bothers me, the way the waif is always watching. But I’m starting to think that’s because I’m selfish. I spend so much time worrying about myself, my own plans and thoughts, that I don’t even really see my brother.

  Instead of closing the closet door, I wave him closer.

  He takes a step and then pauses.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I can leave you alone.”

  I lift up my headphones and hold one of the earbuds out. The cord stretches far enough for him to put one in his ear and me to put one in mine. I watch patiently as he figures out how it fits. On my main laptop, I find one of the long sound files I’ve made of our father’s voice. This one isn’t jokes or movie quotes. It isn’t declarations of love or fear or sadness. It’s my father asking what lunch will be, what time it is. My father saying, “Oh yeah,” and, “I was wondering.”

  Simon sits closer on the carpet beside me, and I play it for him.

  >_

  Simon and I sit together, listening to Dad’s voice. My brother doesn’t say anything, he just listens and fiddles with the headphone cord. I am trying not to stare, but it’s hard. My father will say something, and my own emotions will play across my brother’s face. Dad will say a word just slightly wrong, and my own confusion will furrow Simon’s brow. He keeps squeezing my hand. Or I keep squeezing his. I want to ask him questions. What does he think of this? Does he understand? But I don’t say anything. I don’t want to ruin this moment, whatever it is.

  But it turns out the moment is over anyway.

  “Bunk beds! Well, aren’t you lucky! I’ve been trying to convince Jonah for years to get bunk beds.” Uncle Frank is here, leaning in from the hallway, his hand on the door frame. Simon and I scramble to our feet, headphones out. I close the laptop.

  “Uncle Frank!” the waif says. Frank is our father’s brother.

  “What on earth are you doing in the closet?” Frank is big and seems even bigger when he lifts me up in a hug. It feels immediately familiar to be hugged by him, even though we haven’t seen him in more than a year. I hug him back, tight. He even smells the same, like perfumed pine needles. He’s the only person I know who wears cologne, and it is everywhere. In his beard and thick knit sweater. In his hair. I can still smell it after he lets me go. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he says to me, his hand still on my shoulder.

  “I’m a sight for sore eyes, too!” my brother says, and Frank laughs. He pulls Simon into a hug, lifting my little brother up off the floor and spinning him around. I can’t remember the last time I heard Simon giggle. It’s a ridiculous sound—exactly the sound you would expect someone so small and frail to make. Frank sets him down, and the waif stands there, startled and delighted at the same time. “You’re here!” he says.

  “You didn’t know we were coming?”

  “I did!”

  Our uncle Jonah is here, too, setting the last of their suitcases on the floor, leaning an umbrella against the doorframe.

  He looks tired from their flight, but he’s smiling. His smiles are much smaller than his husband’s, more restrained but just as genuine. The two of them have been together since before Simon was born. He reaches out to shake my hand. “Sunday,” he says. “You look well.” He has a Haitian accent and a good handshake. He doesn’t talk slowly, but he speaks more carefully than Frank does. He does everything more carefully than Frank.

  He shakes Simon’s hand, too.

  “You are much bigger, Simon,” he says.

  “I’m a sight for sore eyes,” my brother says.

  “Yes, you are,” Jonah says. Then to Frank, “We should get settled in.”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay.” Frank grins at us and picks up a bag. “I still think we should get bunk beds,” he says to his husband as they disappear into their room. Simon and I stand in our doorway, listening to them talk. “I mean, really, separate bedrooms would be perfect,” Uncle Frank continues. “But even bunk beds would be nice. Up high above the room, with some space all to myself when I need it. Or when you need it. Not every night. Obviously. But it would be reassuring somehow, right? A place to hibernate.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It saved my Aunt Edie and Uncle Harry’s marriage, you know. They had separate cabins,” Frank says. “Right next door to each other. And they stayed married for fifty years.”

  “I know that,” Jonah says. “Do you want to know how I know that? I know because you pointed it out on the drive up here, less than one hour ago. You point it out every time we drive up here.”

  Downstairs, my mother is calling for them.

  “Hurry up,” she yells. “Visiting hours are only ’til five today.”

  They’re here to see my father while they still can. To say goodbye, same as us.

  >_

  “I’m the only one who ever cries,” Simon says to my father on that recording, when nobody else was there to hear. “Sunday never cries. Mom never cries. Just me.” Which isn’t true, of course. If anything, I cry too much. I just never let the waif see me cry.

  I keep listening to this conversation. I should be transcribing new sections, or working on finding a more reliable exploit for the virus to use. But I keep coming back to listen to this awkward private conversation, where my brother sounds more like a real person than I’ve ever heard him sound. He has always been the waif to me. Too delicate. Weak and frail. A punchline more than a person. I love him, but I am starting to realize that I don’t really see him.

  I don’t really see my father, either. Or my mother. The whole world has been revolving around me for as long as I can remember. I feel like someone just threw cold water on me. I’m awake now. I’m all wet.

  I’m so stupid.

  “I miss when Sunday and I were friends,” my brother says, at the end of the recording. And that made me feel bad in a way I can’t even describe.

  >_

  For the past few nights, after everyone’s gone to bed and it’s just me and Simon, I’ve been talking to him more. Not about anything important, really. I don’t think I could talk to him about Dad. Or about our mother. But we’ve been talking. I’ve been trying to explain computer programming to him, and he seems interested. We lie in the dark, and he asks question after question until one of us falls asleep. And then the next night it picks up, right from where we stopped.

  “What are the Boolean operators again?” he says.

  “You know this one already.”

  “I don’t remember them.”

  “Well, which ones do you remember?” I ask him.

  And he lists them for me. NAND, AND, OR, XOR. He learns faster than I do.

  “What is XOR?” I say, because that’s the one he forgot last night.

  “Exclusive OR,” the waif says. “One of the two values has to be true, but the other one has to be false.”

  “And what is NOR?”

  “Not OR,” he says. We talk like this for an hour, maybe. Every night. He asks his quiet questions about computers and I try to answer the best I can. He makes me promise him again tonight that I will show him how to write a computer program. A calculator program is what we decided on. Something simple, but not too simple. He asks me about the different programming languages we might use. Which ones do I like the best? Why? Eventually, his voice starts drifting away while he talks. Drifting in and out of focus. Either he’s falling asleep, or I am.

  There’s a long pause where nobody talks at all, and it feels like the night is over. But then he says one last thing.

  “Thank you for talking to me.”

  >_

  There’s no moon tonight. None of the windows in the back of the house are lit. So while I know the pond is there, I can see only the faint shape where the water reflects the s
ky, where the yard is wearing two different shades of black. I came down here to be alone, but this is not the kind of alone I wanted. Nothing out here seems comforting. It’s just empty.

  Turn the corner, though, and noise is everywhere. A house filled with family, gathered around the kitchen table. It lights the whole driveway, the red gravel loop around the big trees. The tire swing that hangs there. I sit down on the step, with my back to the front door. The clatter of dishes and laughter. Uncles, grandmother, family. This is better. Being alone is more satisfying when there’s a crowd nearby.

  Even the sky seems lighter in this direction. The field out there isn’t black on black; it has a texture and shape. There are streaks of grey cloud and blank sky. I can see the outline of that old elephant of a house, still stumbling in its field. I can make out the window and the small front door. My father’s calm is still there in that field, in the shape of the house, in the dark eye of the window. I wish I could get my fingers around that calm somehow. It would soak up this childish anger.

  “We’ve gone over this,” my father said today. There was none of that Simon-gentleness in his voice. I told him again that I didn’t want him to die. I said every single thing I knew I shouldn’t say.

  “Why aren’t you fighting this?” I said. “Why are you just lying there, dying? I heard the doctor. You could have done another round of chemotherapy.”

  “Sunday, it isn’t that simple,” he said.

  “Don’t you care about us at all?” I said.

  I haven’t transcribed the recording, yet. I don’t want to transcribe it. I’m ashamed.

  >_

  Downstairs, Frank is telling a story too loudly.