The videos started coming every few days after that, beautiful instructional films and blurry cellphone footage, always showing metal birds in the desert.
After a few weeks, my father sent a link to an article, about how my company had helped secure the government contract for these UAVs with a particular contractor. I remembered sitting in on some of those meetings, but it wasn’t my baby or anything. And another article about civilian deaths. And a few days later, a third article, about how that company was suing my father and some of his friends over patents.
I never knew which pissed my father off more: that his designs were helping to kill babies, or that he was getting ripped off.
My mom’s survival chances dropped below 40 percent and we gave up on the radiation and the cyberknife. I took indefinite leave and moved back home to help take care of Mom. Eventually, Dad and I had to start talking again, because it’s hard to avoid speaking to someone when you’re each supporting one arm of a dying person.
6. the announcement
Saturday night, someone has rigged up a tire swing on a branch, which breaks and nearly kills Deedee. We need one car to go pick up groceries, and a separate van for the booze run. Everybody is looking at the tent city surrounding the house and making loud, meaningful groans. The bonfires are twice as big as the night before.
“It’s like a medieval siege.” Eric gestures at the tents ringing my dad’s fake castle. “It just needs a moat and some catapults. I’m kind of surprised my dad doesn’t have an alligator moat, actually.”
“Shark moat,” Octavia says. “Not alligator moat. A mad scientist always has a shark moat.”
“After this, we’ve done our duty, for like ever,” Dudley’s wife Ayanna is saying on the other side of the big fire. “This is the big reunion, and after this we’re golden for like a year or two. Right?”
“I sure freaking hope so,” Dudley says under his breath, but still kind of loud. Dudley grew up thinking he would always be the youngest sibling, until eventually Eric and I were born and he was just another middle kid.
“This is probably Dad’s last chance to torture all of us at the same time.” Robert has come up beside Dudley, Ayanna and me, hot dog in one hand and red plastic cup in the other. “Efficiency has always been a paramount value to him.”
A while later, Joanna claims that my father offered to make a batch of LSD for any of his grandchildren who wanted some, as long as they were over the age of fifteen.
“Is it true?” I ask my dad in the backyard, where he’s toasting marshmallows. “Did you really offer to make acid for your grandkids? Who are running around, in proximity to three large open flames?”
My dad just shrugs and says that at his age, the best you can hope for is to have good stories told about you. Then he’s swallowed by darkness.
By midnight, there is a nearly constant howling coming from all around us. Living in a city, you forget how dark the world can get. I feel like if I quit drinking vodka, I will start feeling prematurely hungover. I have had too much chocolate. Every few minutes, a child runs over my legs. I am remembering that I promised to help out with childcare this weekend, as the only childless adult here. The damp, freezing walk to the house for a bathroom break and vodka nearly breaks me.
“‘Will’ is a weird word,” says Eric, who used to be a novelist and also a teacher, among many other things. “I mean, it’s the most future-looking word in the English language. We talk about what ‘will’ happen. But when you actually will something to happen, we use the word ‘shall,’ not ‘will.’ And we reserve the verb ‘will’ for things that are going to happen, whether you will them to or not. And when someone dies, their final message to the future is their will and testament. Testament, of course, being a word that only has to do with the past, because you testify about what’s already happened. So ‘will and testament’ is like the future and the past in one document, except that it’s just a pointless list of material objects.”
We’ve all been avoiding mentioning the question of dad’s will, at least overtly, but Eric is an asshole. Eric already mentioned that he wants dad’s spine, he thinks it has some kind of carbon fiber nanotube thing.
The sun comes up, with its usual memory-erasing properties. The moment sunlight hits my retinas, the previous seven hours become an indistinct dream. My father and I are the last two people standing, near the ugly smouldering pit in the front yard. I am wearing two coats, and still feel colder than I can ever remember feeling. Dad’s glasses are misted up. He does tai-chi.
“Happy birthday,” I tell him.
There’s another big silence, and then I try to tell Dad that I’m sorry about the UAV thing. I know it was wrong. And as far as I’m concerned, he and I are good. I hope he thinks we’re good too. Whatever happens going forward, I hope we’ve found forgiveness for each other. And so on.
He puts his left hand on my shoulder. “We’re family, Em,” he says in my ear. Is it my imagination, or is there a clickety-clack vibration coming from his palm? “We never forgive each other. That’s what separates families from just any random assortment of people.”
Then he walks away, faster than I could hope to keep pace with, because he has a thousand waffles worth of batter to pour.
I sit down on the very edge of the pit and stare into the ashes. The ground is dew-soaked. The tents start jostling as people wake up from almost no sleep. The grown-ups cry out for coffee, the children start asking how soon they can go home. Eric is convinced he’s lost one of his children, until we find her sleeping in the linen closet. I keep staring ahead and downward. My eyes are full of floaters.
“Hey,” says my teenage nephew Terence. “They told me to come tell you that there are waffles. Plus Grandpa Mervyn has an announcement or something.”
We all crowd inside the kitchen/living room, two dozen of us perched on whatever furniture didn’t go in the bonfire. My father stands at a table piled with waffles, pinging a mimosa glass with a tea spoon. “If I could have your attention,” he says.
Joanna nudges me, like this is it. Robert and I catch each other’s eye for a second, and he shrugs with his hands up. Eric leans forward in his chair, nearly knocking Sebastian and Rosemary off his lap.
My father pauses, milking the suspense. He sips his mimosa and says, “I’m sorry to have to tell you all, I have cancer. It’s already metastasized. I waited too long to get rid of the other lung. Stupid mistake. Most of you will probably never see me alive after today.” He starts passing out waffles, asking people if they want a pat of butter on top, so that nobody has a chance to ask him any questions.
Halfway through the waffle breakfast, we notice that my father has vanished. The metal door leading to his basement laboratory is locked. And there’s a laminated sign saying not to enter, because the air down there is not breathable to normal humans. I make a half-hearted attempt to pound on the door. Joanna tries to talk Dad out of there, but he doesn’t talk back.
An hour later, I’m back in the minivan. Eric is driving twice as fast as before, on almost no sleep. As we crest a giant hill and a dozen windmills appear, Eric says randomly, “I guess we’ll have to wait to find out who gets which part of Dad, until we hear the reading of the will. I’m kind of glad nobody gets to call dibs on anything.” I get a spasm in my shoulder from twisting around to see where we’re going, so I give up and settle for a view of the lengthening road behind us.
My father has never told us much about the weird vision he saw as a young man at sea, except that he called it a maenad and it seemed holy. Although he mentioned once, when I got my first training bra, that the maenad had a dozen breasts, each shaped like a perfect tidal wave. The maenad rose out of the sea spray, almost translucent, and its gaze seemed to encompass the whole of the rusty gunship before narrowing down to my father. The maenad appeared to smile at Dad. That’s how he knew it was time to go home.
Thanks to Terry Johnson, Nurith Amitai and Dave Goldberg for scientific advice.
Copy
right (C) 2012 by Charlie Jane Anders
Art copyright (C) 2012 by Lou Beach
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