Malagash

by Joey Comeau

  “We should ask Mom,” my brother says.

  I don’t say anything to that.

  >_

  “It’s almost lunch,” my brother says.

  When we emerge from the rows of grapes, I hear an engine in the distance. Two engines. A pair of motorcycles ride along the road, down at the bottom of the field. Headed toward the north point, where they’ll loop around. Just passing through. Enjoying the sunshine and the open road. Simon and I stand there and watch until they’re out of sight. We’re in no hurry.

  Our bicycles are just where we left them, twisted in the grass at the bottom of the field. We wheel them up onto the road again, side by side. They aren’t really ours. They’re too big for us. Simon has to ride standing up to properly reach the pedals. He can’t reach the seat. Mine has long tassels streaming from the end of the handlebars. I don’t know who they used to belong to. Our father and Frank, maybe? When they were teenagers?

  “You can go up around the point now,” was the only explanation our grandmother gave when we asked her about the bikes that were leaning against the tree one morning. “Or down as far as the Bible Camp.”

  The whole ride home from the vineyard, my bike makes a rusted shrieking sound, and the joker card Simon pinned to his back wheel whirrs like a toy engine. They’re old, and they’re not in the best condition, but they get the job done. We’ve been all over Malagash on these bikes.

  Visiting our dad in the hospital gave our days structure. Now all we have is the sky and red road and sandwiches every day at noon.

  We lean the bikes carefully against the driveway tree and let ourselves into the kitchen. Today’s lunch is tuna salad sandwiches. With bits of raw onion mixed in. Milk in small glass tumblers with playing card patterns on the glass. Our mother is not here. She’s still in her room.

  “I’ll bring her a sandwich,” the waif says, but my grandmother just shakes her head.

  “She just needs a bit of space,” my grandmother says. “She’ll eat when she’s ready.”

  >_

  After lunch, we go up to our mom’s room and knock.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” I ask through her door. “We saw blue jays down by the water this morning.”

  “Two of them!” my brother says.

  “Not right now,” my mother says. Her voice sounds far away. “Maybe later, okay?”

  “Or we could dig for clams!” Simon says. “On the beach!”

  No answer. We stand there like idiots.

  “Lydia, oh Lydia,” I start quietly. “Say, have you met Lydia?”

  “Lydia the Tattooed Lady!” Simon joins in.

  “She has eyes that folks adore so,” we sing to the closed door. “And a torso even more so!”

  >_

  Our mother doesn’t come down for dinner, either. The waif and I sit at the table while our grandmother brings us slices of brown bread and glasses of Pepsi. She has a plate of food laid out for herself, just like ours. A pork chop and peas. Mashed potatoes. Baked beans. She doesn’t sit, though. Not yet. She sets our glasses in front of us and suddenly realizes that she forgot the chow chow.

  I love the food our grandmother makes. Simple, standard dishes. Pork chops. Steak. Ham. Every meal with baked beans and brown bread to scoop them up. On the side, always a dollop of chow. Her pantry closet is stacked with cans of beans and glass jars of pickled green tomato chow. Packets of jello for us to make in the afternoons and eat after our dinner.

  “Where did you go today?” she asks us as she works.

  “We went out to the end of the wharf,” Simon tells her. “And we tried to dig up clams, but we only found tiny baby ones.”

  “And we saw blue jays this morning,” I say.

  “I love a blue jay,” my grandmother says, lifting the wall phone off the hook and setting the receiver down on the counter. Then she comes around the table and finally sits.

  “Why do you take the phone off the hook every day?” Simon asks her. He’s smearing too much margarine on his slice of brown bread.

  “Because there is nothing in the world more important than having dinner with my grandchildren,” my grandmother says.

  She shakes pepper and salt onto her food. She takes a butter knife and puts too much margarine on her brown bread, just like Simon does, and then looks up to smile at us.

  “And because it’s annoying,” she says.

  >_

  I showed Simon how to access all of the recordings on my computer. Every time he asked me to play him something, I would sit and choose the files for him. I felt weird about that, like I was deciding what he should remember, and when. So when he asked me again, I sat him down at the computer and showed him where the database was. I showed him how to browse the entries or search for specific words. I showed him the tags that meant a recording featured Simon and Dad. Or Mom and Dad. Frank and Dad. Me and Dad. Just Dad.

  I showed him how to list entries by “content.”

  “Private joke,” and “obituary plans,” and “warm, warm weather.”

  I showed Simon how to make a playlist of the files he liked. How to listen to the playlist on a loop. How to fix volume problems, which sometimes happened. How to save his playlist for later. How to give it a title. My brother didn’t need me to repeat a single thing. I’m not even sure that he needed me to explain in the first place. But he sat patiently and listened. He was building a playlist before I even moved out of his way.

  His hand was so small on the laptop’s touchpad.

  That was a week ago.

  Since then, he hasn’t been sleeping at night. We still talk after the lights go out, sometimes about computers, sometimes about our mother or our father. But he doesn’t drift off to sleep while we talk anymore. Instead, I’m the one who falls asleep, drifting off to the sound of his voice. Simon stays up. And when I wake in the morning, the closet door is open. The laptop has moved. The headphones are plugged in, when I know I left them neatly wrapped on the shelf.

  >_

  Simon didn’t go to bed at all last night. He’s asleep on the carpet, his body half in and half out of the closet. The headphone cord is twisted around his face, and he is snoring in that quiet, almost delicate way my brother snores. Shy, even in his sleep.

  The bunk bed creaks as I climb down.

  I know what he’s been doing at night, listening to our father’s voice. But I’m still curious. I want to know which recordings he’s opened. Which jokes in particular, which conversations? I want to know what makes him feel better when everyone else is asleep. What makes him feel safe.

  He looks so small, curled sleeping around the still-open laptop. The screen has gone to sleep, but it wakes up when I touch a key.

  A half-dozen recordings are listed. Simon and Dad. Recordings I made of them in secret. I lift the headphones up gently. Push them into my ears. I click play.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” Simon asks, and you can almost hear my father shaking his head.

  “I don’t believe in heaven, no,” he says.

  And there is a long pause as Simon processes that information. “What do you believe?” he says, finally.

  “I believe that when we die, we die.” Again there is a long pause, and you can hear my brother start to cry. Sniffles at first, and then quiet sobs. My father makes quiet sounds of reassurance. “Hey now,” he says. “Hey. We’re lucky that we get any time at all. Think of it that way! We’re so lucky.”

  The recording continues a bit after that, but it’s just dead air.

  >_

  “Sunday.”

  My brother is on the ladder to the top bunk, shaking my shoulder. The sun is shining and I can’t remember if it is morning or if I’m waking up from an afternoon nap. He shakes my shoulder again, even though my eyes are open and I’m looking right at him. I am obviously awake.

  “What do you want, Simon?”

 
“I think we should make a playlist for mom,” he says. “We could play it on the laptop speakers, and she could hear it through the door. Maybe it would make her feel better the way it makes you and me feel better?”

  So we sit down together and we make our mother a playlist. A playlist of jokes and laughter and hellos and goodbyes all mixed up and out of order. I mix everything in.

  First is our father’s voice, laughing, joking. Making promises. Teasing Simon. And then our mother’s voice too. And then it is Simon and me. All of us together, talking about the stupidest things. Working out the details of how many cups of coffee needed to be picked up. Who had forgotten to bring a book for Dad to read. Who was going to get him more crushed ice.

  All of us, laughing, saying “Goodbye forever” over and over. As if it didn’t mean anything at all. Because it doesn’t.

  >_

  Simon and I sit down on the carpet outside her room, with our backs against the stairway railing. I turn my laptop speakers all the way up. Simon presses Play. The first voice is our father’s.

  “Well, well, well,” he says. “Look who it is. My beautiful wife and adoring children.” A pause, and then, “How did you get past security?”

  When one recording ends and another begins, there’s a little clipping sound as the audio cuts out. As the sound quality changes.

  “We need a good nickname for that nurse,” our mother says on the recording.

  “How about Moose?” my brother says.

  “Moose?”

  “Yeah, like, I’m not a dear. You’re a moose!” Simon explains.

  “Simon, I have no idea what you just said.” Our father’s voice.

  Then another:

  “It is up to Simon who touches his hair,” our mother says, defiant.

  And another:

  “How come the cat never comes to visit? Is she mad at me?” our father asks, deadly earnest.

  “You know why,” our mother tells him, just as serious. “You know goddamned well what you did.”

  A clipping sound again:

  “Mahna Mahna.”

  “Do doo-do doo-doo dah doo-doo das doo-do”

  Our mother’s laughter.

  “No more!” She laughs. “Stop!”

  “Mahna Mahna!” Simon sings.

  “I will drive this car right off a bridge,” our mom says, still laughing. “If you don’t stop that song, I swear to god I will kill us all.”

  “Was that a smile? You can’t laugh at my jokes, I’m dying!” our father’s voice.

  “We know you’re dying,” our mother says. “God. We know. We know. It’s very sad. Why do you think we’re pretending your jokes are funny?”

  A clip. And then another. And another.

  We sit there in the hall, me and Simon, playing voices out of the laptop. There’s no answer from the other side of the door.

  >_

  My grandmother always visited my father when we weren’t there, after we had gone home for the day. Like we were taking shifts. She liked to be alone with him. The hospital never seemed to bother her about visiting hours.

  I have no idea what they talked about.

  I don’t have any recordings of my grandmother’s voice at all. We don’t really talk. That night, sitting on the front steps, my mother told me to go inside and ask her about her spoon collection, but I never did. When I think back, looking for her actual words, all I can recall are questions. Practical daily interactions, making sure that Simon and I are fed, that we are warm enough, comfortable, that we have what we need.

  I don’t have her voice, but I have recordings where I know my grandmother was there in the room. Family meals, sitting here at the table. Everyone laughing and boisterous. My grandmother’s voice isn’t on the tape with Uncle Frank and Jonah, but she is the reason my mother says a quiet “sorry” after she swears. She’s the sound of cereal being poured while I tease the waif over breakfast. How do you transcribe that?

  The only time I ever hear her talk at length is on the phone. I don’t understand a thing she’s saying, though. It’s all in French. She talks to her family every night. Her brothers and sisters, down on the south shore. Our grandmother talks to one or two of them every day. Her French peppered with English phrases and swear words. I’ve otherwise never once heard my grandmother swear, but on the phone she says “fuck” and “shit” as casually as my father used to.

  The only other time I heard my grandmother swear was when I found her at the kitchen table looking through photo albums of my father as a little kid. She looked up when I said her name, but she didn’t seem to see me at first. We just stood there. Then after a minute she said “shit” under her breath, wiped the tears off her cheeks, and tried to smile.

  >_

  “It’s quiet without Frank and Jonah around,” my grandmother said yesterday. “I’m glad that Frank and your father had a chance to make peace.”

  It was the first and only hint that there had been any tension between Uncle Frank and our father. I’m so used to people saying things that I don’t quite understand. Hinting at history I know nothing about.

  But it’s the most interesting thing she says on any of my recordings. It’s not an offer of food, or a question about our comfort. It is information. An opinion. A glimpse of our grandmother. She said it almost like she was talking to herself, while we sat out on the front steps. Simon beside us, on his knees in the dirt of the rhubarb patch that runs under the big front windows.

  The only reason I have this on my phone is because Simon was singing another song. I thought I would record him and play it tonight outside our mother’s door.

  “Neither one of them could ever let anything go,” my grandmother said. “They got that from your grandfather, not from me. Men and their principles. There are more important things in this world than being right.”

  “What did they fight about?” Simon asked, his voice small on the recording.

  But she was done talking about it.

  >_

  All day yesterday, I kept trying to get my grandmother talking again, to coax something out of her that I could record, could transcribe. But all I got was “Ready for jello?” and “More water?” and “It’s six o’clock, Sunday, dear. Why do you keep asking about the time? Do you have an appointment?”

  It was Simon who finally got her to actually talk to us.

  “How old are you, Nanny?” he said.

  “I’m seventy-one years old,” she said, and then she smiled. “But I don’t feel a day over seventy!”

  “You look young!” my brother told her, very seriously.

  “I always feel young,” she said. “I stopped feeling old a long time ago.” She smiled again, but it was an even briefer smile this time. Not a sad smile, but the way it flashed and then faded made it seem that way. “I used to think forty was old. When I was forty, I was living in a small town, raising children. Growing a garden. Volunteering at church bake sales. I was worried that I had turned into my mother, who I never wanted to be. I thought my life was over.”

  There’s a muffled sound here on the recording, which is me making sure that my phone is getting this.

  “My sisters were worried about me. I was sad all the time, they said. And that was true. So that spring they took me to Las Vegas, and it was wonderful. I was very excited because I had never travelled. It was the first time I ever went to the United States. And my sisters and I always had fun together, you know. Las Vegas was perfect for us. We drank too much wine. We gambled and we smoked and we wore short dresses and we swore like sailors. We were like teenagers.”

  She laughed.

  “I got us all kicked out of a casino for starting a fight with a girl in a cow costume. We were banned, they told us. Oh it was so much fun. Even in the mornings, when I had the worst headaches of my life, I was so happy.”

  “You started a fight with a lady in a cow costu
me?” Simon’s eyes are wide.

  “Well, I pushed her over.” My grandmother laughed. “Like when my brothers joked about ‘cow tipping.’ I’m sorry. I’m going on and on. I don’t know what made me think of all that.” Another pause, and then, “Your father would have been forty years old in December.”

  >_

  “You have to close these files down when you’re done with them,” I say.

  Every time I open my computer now, Simon has left a dozen files open on my desktop. I spend half my time just cleaning up after him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll do it now.”

  “No, it’s fine.” I close the files, one by one, as Simon comes over to stand beside me. Underneath the sound files, there’s a single text file open. It is a section of the virus with transcriptions of Dad talking to Simon, my mother, to me. I know that I did not leave this open. I am careful to never leave the virus open where he could see it. But here it is.

  He must have found it.

  “What is it?” Simon asks, and I tell him.

  I tell him every stupid hope and idea in my head about the computer virus. I tell him that it will be our father’s ghost. His memory. His echo. I tell him that a virus need not do harm. That not all self-propagating code is malicious. Our father’s virus would never delete files. Would never steal passwords or spy on the intimate moments of strangers. Would not spread like cancer, but like a story. Would slip through fibre optic cables to cross oceans, would pass like radio waves through the walls of houses that nobody even knows are haunted. A ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark.