Malagash

by Joey Comeau

  “We rode that bike right down the side of the mountain; there was no path.”

  “There was a path,” Uncle Jonah says. “There most certainly was a path. You just thought you knew better.”

  “Frank always knows better,” my mother laughs. “That doesn’t seem to help much, does it, Frank?”

  “Anyway,” Jonah sounds tired, “maybe we should stop the story here and prepare for bed. We should stop now while everybody still respects—”

  “We shat blood,” Frank interrupts him. “Or anyway, I shat blood.” My mother’s laughter again, and my grandmother’s disapproving clicking. “I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital for sure,” Frank says.

  Beside me, on the stairs, Simon is laughing as quietly as he can. He was already here when I came inside the house. Grinning from ear to ear. So I sat down and joined him. We’ve been sitting here for an hour now, just listening to our mother and our uncles drink their wine and tell stories.

  “Don’t show off,” Jonah says. “It was hardly any blood.”

  “I shat blood!”

  “Having blood in your shit, that’s different from shitting blood,” Jonah’s voice again.

  “Oh really? Thank you, Doctor Science.” They’re both so deadpan, like comedians who’ve performed together for years. They have a comfortable rhythm.

  “In any case,” Jonah says, “you made your bed, isn’t that how the expression goes?”

  The briefest pause and then:

  “I shat my bed, you mean.” Everyone is laughing, chairs scrape against the tile floor of the kitchen. A bottle clinks against a glass.

  “At least it was your own bed,” my mother says, after a moment. “Some of us were not so lucky.”

  “Now that sounds like a story I desperately want to hear,” Frank says. More laughter. “Regale us with the shameful horrors of your youth!”

  Simon leans his head on my shoulder, and together we sit on the stairs and we listen.

  >_

  “What does it copy?” The waif is asking questions in the dark again, but I can’t remember where we left off last night. The room feels too warm. This whole house is always so warm, even when there’s no fire in the kitchen stove.

  “What does what copy?”

  “The virus,” he says. His bunk creaks. “You said it makes copies. What does it make copies of?”

  I don’t remember any of this. Did I tell Simon about the virus I’m writing? That seems impossible. I have no plans to tell anyone. Telling Simon would have been a big decision, not one I would forget. Did I talk in my sleep, then? Am I a sleep-talker? How would I even know? I used to sleep alone.

  “What virus?” I say.

  “You were telling me about computer viruses. Like the ambulance virus that draws an ambulance driving across the screen and it crashes into the side. And the siren plays. Or the plane that flies across the top. You said they make copies, but that was the last thing I remember. I think I fell asleep.”

  I like this new sound in Simon’s voice. This new confidence he has when we’re talking. It used to annoy me the way he sounded so unsure of himself all the time. It never occurred to me that maybe he sounded unsure of himself because I never wanted to talk. I was always on my way to do something else. Focused on something that really mattered. Why wouldn’t he sound uncertain?

  Now, though, he is just talking. The words seem to come out easily. It’s a small thing, but one that makes me happy.

  “They make a copy of themselves,” I tell him. “That’s how they spread. They make a copy of themselves and put that copy inside another program on the computer. And then, when somebody runs that newly infected program, the virus runs again, and it makes another copy of itself somewhere. It goes through every email address it can find on the computer and sends a copy of itself to everyone, disguised as some normal file they might click on. It looks for other computers on the local network, or for external storage plugged in to the USB ports. It tries to copy itself to each of these in turn. And so on forever.”

  This is how I’ve chosen to spread the virus, in any case. The methods I’ve settled on. The code I’ve written.

  “Oh. That makes sense.” He sounds sleepy already. There’s a long silence, where I don’t know what to say. I want to keep talking about viruses, to tell him more. I want to describe my old favourites. Or tell him stories of the people who created them. A ghost story before bed, about long-dead pirates. VX writers. Phone phreaks. Hackers.

  I want to indoctrinate my brother with the teachings of the Cult of the Dead Cow. Horrify him with tales of the Phone Losers of America. Buy him his very own cereal box replica whistle that blows at 2600 Hz.

  I’ve never met those people, and I probably never will. They wrote their stories and created their viruses before I was born. They’re all gone now, replaced by faceless communication security companies who tell no jokes. Who play no pranks. Atlantis sank into the sea, and they built an oil rig where it stood. There are whole majestic libraries down there, filled with dead jokes. An ambulance that drones across the screen to crash into the side wall of a monitor. A blocky, misshapen pixel parachutist. The AIDS virus now infecting your personal computer. An elaborate series of pranks and battle cries. An escape from high school or your mindless office job. A type of poetry for the sort of people poetry never wanted.

  My people.

  I want to say all this, but the waif is quiet now and probably asleep.

  The other night, Simon thanked me for talking to him. But I am starting to realize how long it’s been since I had someone to talk to, too.

  -- THREE --

  >_

  We’re always bringing him something. Cluttering up our father’s room. A book for his stack of thrillers. A light summer quilt for when the nights turn cold. A deck of playing cards, which go into the drawer beside the other deck of playing cards we forgot about. There are only so many practical things a person needs. But we still need to bring him things. A glow-stick headband for some silly pictures. A bobble-head doll of a lobster, which is stupid. But stupid is good. Stupid can win a smile.

  Today we bring a chessboard that Simon found in an old trunk. A ziplock baggie of little plastic chess pieces. My brother holds them up for our father to see.

  “Nice,” he says. “Are you going to teach me how to play chess?”

  “No!” My brother laughs.

  “I told Simon that you’d show him how to play,” my mother says.

  “And so the blind shall lead the blind,” my father says. To Simon, he says, “I would be very happy to teach you how to play chess.”

  “Don’t take your jacket off,” my mom says to Simon. She puts the chessboard on the bed beside my dad, and she kisses his cheek. Her jacket is still on, too. “Want anything in particular?” she asks my dad.

  “Maybe a hot chocolate today, instead of coffee?” he says.

  “Okay,” she says. “See you in an hour!” She takes Simon’s hand, and they leave.

  Every day, my mother and Simon walk to a coffee shop in town, ostensibly for breakfast snacks but really for the fresh air and exercise. For the quiet. Even yesterday, in the pouring rain, they walked.

  “That’s what raincoats are for,” my mother said in response to the waif’s complaints.

  It’s a half hour walk, each way, just for coffee. It seems silly, especially since we drive right past that place every morning. We could easily stop then. From a conservation of effort perspective, it doesn’t make any sense at all. It is inefficient, and I prefer to be efficient. Especially now. It seems wrong to spend a half hour walking someplace when we have so little time left with my father. That’s an hour lost forever. But if we are being honest, I also don’t care much for being outside.

  My mother is different. She needs to be outside. She needs to do things. To go places. To talk to people. It drives her crazy to
spend the whole day cooped up.

  For the first couple weeks, we did things the efficient way. We stopped to pick up snacks on the way to the hospital and stayed the whole day with my father. And at the end of every day, my mother was worn out. She was tired and irritated and sad. Which, of course, could be because we’re here every day, sitting around a hospital bed, waiting for her husband to die. But my mom didn’t believe that was it. Not entirely.

  So she made a change. She started walking, every day. Even when she clearly doesn’t feel like it. In the mornings, they walk, and get rained on, and get red mud all over their shoes. They buy scones and coffee, and they come back smiling. At the end of the day, she’s not quite as sad, and not quite as tired.

  It is logical in a way that makes me jealous, actually. My mother knows herself. She’s like a mechanic who can tell what’s wrong with a car just by the sounds the engine makes. She can fix things when they go wrong.

  >_

  While my mother and brother are on their morning walk, my father and I go through the obituaries. We take turns reading them out loud. The language is so boring and repetitive. You see the exact same phrases so many times. Words that were clearly meant to be respectful and traditional come across as formulaic and stupid. “So-and-so will be sorely missed” might be true, but it also sounds like your loved ones copied your obituary word for word from someone who died yesterday.

  “They might as well just write, ‘This is an obituary,’” my dad says.

  “This is an obituary,” I say. “These are the words you put in an obituary. Thank you for taking the time to read my obituary.”

  There is nothing about actual people in any of these memorial postings. There are no mistakes, no great regrets, no broken promises, no stupidities. There are no triumphs. No shining moments of pride, no redemption, no happiness. The language is identical for everyone, filled in with the applicable figures. Age. Number of children. Facts. It’s like reading out loud from a database and trying to imagine a real human being from just the numbers.

  You could actually write a computer program to generate these, and nobody would ever know the difference. An eighty-nine-year-old woman, survived by a husband, three children, and four grandkids? No problem.

  my @entire_human_life = ('89', 'F', 'Stroke', 'husband', '3', '4');

  “Goddamn it,” my dad says today. He points to a name. It is a short obituary. Even more clichés than usual. After a long battle with cancer, passed away in his sleep, surrounded by loved ones, etc. Aggressively standard. The kind of obituary that we love to make fun of.

  “Surrounded by nameless loved ones,” I say, but my father’s smile is gone.

  “I went to high school with him,” he says. “We were best friends.” My father rereads the obituary. “Long battle with cancer,” he says. “Ugh.” He tosses the newspaper onto his side table in disgust, and just like that our game is over.

  “I meant to call him,” my dad says.

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say “I’m sorry” or any other empty condolences. We spend every morning making fun of all that. But it seems like I should say something. I guess that’s where clichés come from, isn’t it? Too many people say something just so they can say something. Because they feel like they should. But when there’s really nothing to say, anything will sound empty. My father is sad about an old friendship he lost. That’s something worth being sad about. So I’m quiet. We sit in silence, and my father looks out the window.

  Eventually, though, he remembers that I’m here. He turns back to smile at me. He picks up the obituaries again.

  “Okay, who’s next?” he says.

  “We don’t have to.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he says. “Of course we have to. This is research for when you write my obituary. Who else could I trust with this? Sunday, I am counting on you to not let anyone say that I died surrounded by nameless loved ones. Or that I lost my courageous battle with cancer.”

  “I’ll tell people you won,” I promise him.

  “Exactly!” He laughs. I love it when my father laughs. “You tell people that. The cancer is dead. I did what needed to be done. I’m a hero.”

  >_

  In the car, my mother plays the familiar game of What’s Wrong with the Waif, while she drives.

  “Are you feeling sick?”

  “Are you angry about something?”

  “What is it, Simon?”

  “Did your father say something that upset you?”

  “Did your sister say something?”

  Meanwhile, Simon is sitting beside me in silence, just staring out the window. He’s been quieter than usual, his hands in fists, and when he went to the bathroom earlier, he slammed the door. Well, his version of slamming a door, anyway. He closed it abruptly, rather than his usual method of carefully turning the knob and gently returning the door to the closed position. Still, I can’t really blame my mother for just now noticing. Simon throws tantrums with the volume turned way down. Now that she has noticed, though, she won’t let it go.

  “Did something happen?”

  “Do you think we’ve been treating you too much like a child?”

  “What is it, Simon?”

  She never asks the real questions, like, “Is it about your father dying?” “Are you sad that your father is dying?” or “Are you angry that your father is dying?”

  Which is fair, because why ask a question when you already know the answer?

  And I guess even those aren’t the real questions. What my mother actually wants to ask is “How do I get you to behave the way I want? What switches do I flip to fix you so that you aren’t just one more problem I have to deal with today?”

  “Are you feeling sick in your stomach?” She’s repeating herself now.

  This would go on all day if I let it. But I think I know the answer.

  “He doesn’t like it when the nurse tussles his hair,” I say from the back seat.

  “Shut up,” my brother tells me.

  “What?”

  “The nurse,” I say. “Every day she comes in and she tussles his hair. She always brings him an extra plate of food. Or candies. Yesterday she tried to pinch his cheek.”

  “Which nurse?” my mother says. “The one who calls everyone ‘dear’?”

  “Yes,” my brother says. He’s still staring out the window, and I can see tears on his cheeks. I don’t like to see him so frustrated.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother says. “She seems nice.”

  “Well, nice or not, it should be up to Simon who gets to tussle his hair.”

  “Okay,” she sighs. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  Beside me, Simon is silent again.

  >_

  When we get to the hospital today, the nurse is there. She’s just leaving my father’s room.

  “Good morning,” she says, when she sees us. Then, specifically to my brother, she leans down and says, “Good morning, Simon.” She reaches out to tussle his hair.

  “I don’t like to be touched,” Simon says very loudly. Her hand stops in mid-air. Even my mother looks shocked.

  “Oh.” The nurse laughs. “That’s okay!”

  “I know,” Simon tells her. “I know that it’s okay. It is up to me who gets to touch my hair. It is not up to you.”

  “Well, good morning anyway?” The nurse laughs again. She has a look on her face like she might try to tussle his hair again out of embarrassed confusion. Simon’s hands are fists at his side and he is staring at her in a way I have never seen him stare at anyone.

  “Simon,” my dad calls from inside the room. He has no idea what is going on. “Be polite.”

  “I think he’s being very polite,” my mother says. She stands closer to her son, and she looks right at the nurse. “It is up to Simon who touches his hair,” she says.

 
>_

  Today, while Simon and I went down to the cafeteria to get some jello with cool whip, I left my phone recording. It was just my father and mother, alone in the room. We weren’t gone for very long, and so there wasn’t a lot for me to transcribe. Except, right before Simon and I came back upstairs, you can hear my parents kiss.

  “I love you,” my mother says. Very quiet. Almost too quiet to hear. She doesn’t sound sad, exactly. Even though she sounds like there are tears in her voice. I don’t have a word for how she sounds. There’s another kiss, and then she says it again, “I love you.”

  “I don’t blame you,” my father says.

  >_

  My mother and I never fight. Usually, I just say what she wants to hear. Even if I don’t agree, it is always easier to nod and smile. Always. What’s the point in fighting? To prove that I’m right? Right and wrong have no effect on the outcome anyway. She is the mother. I’m the child. So she gets her way. I figured that out years ago, and I have become an expert in getting along. I’ve become an expert in “Okay.”

  But not this morning. This morning I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t nod and smile and say, “Okay.” Because it’s not okay. I don’t want my father to die.

  My father doesn’t want to spend the last weeks of his life vomiting in some hospital bathroom. I understand that. There were times, during the last round of treatment, when he was in too much pain to even talk. We just sat there around his bed. The treatment they are offering now is more intense than before. The side effects would be worse. But I don’t want my father to die. I don’t want my father to die. I don’t want my father to die.

  I recorded the whole interaction, and now I’m sitting curled up in the closet, listening. I say interaction because it isn’t even a conversation. There’s no back and forth. I sound like a child throwing a tantrum. I didn’t really listen to anything my mother said, I was just waiting for my turn to talk.