“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“You saw a truck drive off the seawall at the intersection of Coast and Bank.”
“It didn’t drive off. It was pulled off.”
“Pulled off.”
“That’s right. By the waves.”
“I’m not following you.”
“From the storm,” I said, impatiently.
The operator went quiet. “When did you say this happened, sir?”
“I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago. I can’t say exactly. My power’s been—”
I broke off. The power had been restored. The lights might have been off, but my appliances were all humming, and the clock on the stove read two in the morning. I couldn’t hear the wind anymore. In fact, the apartment couldn’t have been quieter.
“Sir,” the operator said. “Would you mind going over this one more time with me?”
I carried the phone to the window and pulled back the curtains. The parking lot was well lit and still as a museum display. The strewn garbage was gone. The tree I’d clambered over to get to the road was standing where it had always stood.
“Sir?” the voice said in my ear.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
“A mistake,” she repeated
“I fell asleep on the couch. I was confused. I must have been dreaming.”
“Dreaming.”
“That’s right.”
“Sir,” she said after a long pause. “Would you like me to connect you with our mental health department?”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m just… I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
The operator was reluctant to let me go, asking if I’d been doing any drugs, if I was under a psychiatrist’s care. I repeatedly assured her that I was fine and hung up, still standing at the window, staring at the magically restored tree. My face was raw from the wind, my ears ringing. Eventually, I became aware of the answering machine blinking on a side table. I had messages waiting, twelve of them, the most the machine could hold. I turned on the overhead light, momentarily stunned by the state of the apartment. It looked like it had been ransacked, with hardly a square inch of floor space to walk through, the walls smeared with grime, clouds of fruit flies swarming all around me. I sat down amid the filth to listen to the messages, starting with the most recent. A tinny version of my sister’s voice filled the room.
“Just got back from the service. It was nice, I guess. Still waiting for you to call. Seriously, Felix. This is getting ridiculous.”
A flutter of dread went through me at the word “service.” I skipped to the preceding message.
“Leaving for the funeral home now. I don’t know if you’ve been getting these messages, but I hope you’re going to be there. I really don’t want to have to do this alone…”
On the next message, Eileen confirmed what I’d already suspected. Dad was gone. I listened to message after message, all from my sister, hearing her grief unfold in reverse order, from acceptance to denial, and back further, to the anticipation of grief, when she’d first learned how serious his diagnosis was, how little time he had left. Finally, only one message remained. I pushed the play button, expecting to hear my sister’s voice again. Instead, after a few seconds of dead air, I heard my father, sounding weak and defeated, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Felix—”
I stopped the machine. Until that moment, I’d felt strangely detached, as if learning about the death of a minor character in a novel, an event that had been foreshadowed and brought to fruition at exactly the right moment. But the sound of Dad’s voice touched something dangerous inside of me, something I wasn’t sure I could survive.
A sudden, insistent scratching came at the kitchen cupboard. The rat was awake. I’d been feeding it for weeks, out of fear, throwing table scraps directly into the cupboard under the sink and quickly shutting the door, not wanting to see the animal, imagining it must have doubled or tripled in size. I threw a shoe at the cupboard and the scratching stopped. I began to erase the messages, pushing the delete button savagely, the evidence against me shrinking with each jab of the finger. When I came to the last message, I hesitated, then pushed the button one more time, erasing Dad’s final words to me before I’d even heard them. Then, just as methodically, with the same buttonpressing motion of my index finger, I went around the apartment crushing every fruit fly I could find, climbing onto furniture to get at the ones on the ceiling. A few tried to escape, but for the most part they seemed to have no instinct for self-preservation, passively awaiting their destruction. By the time the sun rose, I’d killed more than I could count. Not daring to rest, I gathered the surface clutter into garbage bags, hauled my dirty clothes to the basement, and crammed them into the newly repaired machines, using the quarters from my nightstand. That done, I stalked down to the corner store and purchased some cleaning supplies and a large rat trap.
Back home, I attacked the walls and floors with a stiff brush. I disinfected the bathroom, dusted the furniture, and finished the laundry. I organized everything I hadn’t thrown out and fashioned traps for the remaining fruit flies out of funnels of paper and baited glasses. Finally, I unwrapped the rat trap and carried it into the kitchen. I braced myself before opening the cupboard, half-expecting the rat to launch itself at me, but found only savaged food containers and piles of little brown turds. I swept it all out, put the trap down, smeared the catch with peanut butter and slammed the cupboard door. The sun was coming through the window at a low angle, painting everything gold. An entire day had gone by. Too tired to put sheets on the bed, I collapsed on the bare mattress, the events of the past twenty-four hours settling around me—the revelation on the machine, the imagined storm—and as I returned to the face of the man in the truck, I realized who it was he’d reminded me of. He’d looked exactly like my father.
I opened my eyes and found Dad frowning down at me—not a mental projection of the person he used to be, but his actual self, occupying physical space. I smelled his sour breath, felt his hand on my arm.
“Dad?”
“You okay?” he asked.
I tried to sit up, and he eased me back down.
“It’s all right. You were just having a nightmare.”
“I was?”
“Sounded that way.”
I lay back and he smoothed down my hair, an unusually tender gesture. “Big week coming up. New teacher. New grade. It’s normal to be nervous.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t about school. It was…” I looked at Dad, a hot pain stabbing my chest. “Something happened to you. I dreamed you’d died.”
“Oh yeah?” He laughed. “Do I look dead to you?”
I shook my head. But the truth was, he didn’t look quite alive either.
“It was just a dream,” he said.
I nodded. “Okay.”
Mathilda came into the room, wagging her tail as she padded over to the bed.
My clown nightlight cast a weak glow from one corner of the room. Dad’s eyes were heavy, like he’d been drinking. I wondered if he’d been looking at his magazines again—catalogues, I assumed, of ladies he was thinking about marrying (although I couldn’t have said why they weren’t wearing any clothes, or why the poses they struck made me feel like going to the bathroom). He adjusted my covers, then stood back, his face in shadow.