Chris Lynch
Kill Switch
Copyright © 2012 by Chris Lynch
To Jeannie and Murph-
Here’s to life, rebooted
1
I love my Da to bits.
Which will probably come in handy, as bits is what he’s in.
Da is my grandfather. He wears a MedicAlert bracelet, copper, that reads, MEMORY LOSS. He asks what it is a couple of times a day. I tell him. He’s cool with it.
Because he is a cool grandfather, always was. Retired early from some government job that was something like systems analyst for the Department of Agriculture. Never, ever talked about his work. Might have been because who in his right mind would ever have bothered to ask about a job as boring as that? Might have been.
Retired early, because he had worked his whole adult life after the army, had worked hard and faithful and what he got for that hard work was his brain started retiring before he did. Nothing serious. Medium-level comedy stuff like walking home at the end of a workday. Forgetting he took his car to work, and he needed to take it home again. Arriving, carless, at home about three hours late. That kind of stuff.
Apparently, though, systems analysts for the Department of Agriculture need full faculties. Can’t have Idaho spuds suddenly coming up looking like giant strawberries because of a couple of wobbly keystrokes.
So here he is, around and available every day. Cool as cactus juice, like always, but just more available. He lives with us now. That is as it should be. I like it.
We have been pals forever, me and Da. As a young father he was too busy, career building or agriculture networking or whatever, to do a lot of things like teaching his son, my dad, to swim and ride a bike. My gran did all that, and you could tell from the way they were with each other. My dad cried for about two months after peritonitis crept in and squeezed his mother to death.
I never saw my dad and his dad hug.
I hug my dad’s dad all the time. Hug my own here and there too, so we’re cool. Not the same, though. Not the same at all.
Da taught me to ride: bike, horse, motorcycle, and car. Oh, and glider plane, we did that once. Taught me to cook a little. We’ve tossed footballs and baseballs back and forth since I was little, but more now that he’s retired.
Taught me how to talk, even.
“Keep it lean, Young Man,” he always said when I would start running my mouth. “Use exactly the words you need, and no more than that.”
“Okay, Old Boy,” I said.
Not sure if you would call it jealousy. My dad never got in the way of my closeness to Da, but he was never allover thrilled with it either.
“You know why he does it, don’t you, Daniel?” Dad said, chilling the blood right out of me because he was saying it as the two of us stood in front of his mother’s open casket.
I couldn’t speak. He didn’t need me to.
“He does it because of all he didn’t do for me. Because of all that she did do.”
He would know better than me. And there was certainly a lot of sense in what he said. And I still lacked the power of speech. And I wouldn’t have spoken up if I could. But there was nothing to stop me thinking what I was thinking, either.
And because he loves me, Dad, I was thinking.
But truth is, Dad and everyone else could be forgiven for thinking I was the only one to ever see any emotion in the old man. Like he saved it up all just for me, and other than that there was nothing inside the Old Boy at all.
“You’re doing it again,” I say. We are having breakfast together, like we always do now.
“No, I’m not,” he says. He goes back to doing it.
“You know what I’m talking about?”
“Do you know what you’re talking about?”
“Yes, Da.”
“Good, then you know what to stop talking about.”
What we are and are not talking about is sausages. He used to slice bananas over his cereal all the time. The cereal would vary, the bananas, never. Now he slices sausages, in exactly the same way, as if nothing is any different.
“You know what the doctor said about you and the sausages, Da.”
“You know what I say about the doctor and the sausages, Daniel.”
“Could you not remind me of that over breakfast?”
“Détente” is what he likes to call this. One side says or does something objectionable, the other side counters with something objectionable, then everyone agrees to just shut up.
“God, is he doing the sausage thing again?” my sister, Lucy, says, walking into the kitchen. Lucy likes to talk as if Da were not here. Da likes to talk as if Lucy were a mentally deficient prostitute. It’s kind of a thing in my life, where all the people I really love tend to treat each other abysmally. I choose to see it as a battle royale for my affection.
“In the army I knew a girl named Loose Lucy. She had webbed hands that made a squeaking sound when she would-”
“Da!” I snap. I have heard this one before.
“What?” he pleads. “That story comes with its own limerick and everything.”
“Another time, maybe.”
“Why do you hate me, Da?” Lucy asks.
“I don’t.”
He possibly does. Probably not. He says he’s nice to her for my sake, because I seem to have some kind of unfathomable warm spot in my heart for the girl. He says it’s not his fault that the niceness in question always happens when I’m out.
“Prove it, then,” she says, open palm extended.
You might think this does nothing but reinforce my grandfather’s venal view of my sister and probably of humankind. But what it really does is please the Old Boy with the notion that his lessons, his hard-won, firmly held life beliefs, have been acknowledged by the youngers. It’s their one really good party trick together.
“Love is not money…,” Da says, forking over a bill, then another, while parroting his own oft-stated wisdom.
“But money is love,” Lucy says, delivering nicely.
“Didn’t Ben Franklin say that?” I ask.
Lucy waves her money victoriously in the air. Then she slaps me in the forehead before she passes out the back door, distant as she pleases, aloof, certain, and I ask myself yet again, how could anyone not love Lucy?
“Successful,” Da says, turning in her direction, watching her vapor trail as if she has left cunning floating in her wake, “at whatever she does. That girl is going to be just great.”
“Maybe you should tell her that every once in a while.”
“And undo all my hard work there? Not a chance.”
He takes a big spoonful of original Cap’n Crunch, with a sausage disk perched on top. He picks up the newspaper-which is sitting there from yesterday-and starts reading. The paper has clearly been read and reread, crumpled and disordered. Today’s is still rolled up on the front porch, if it hasn’t been stolen.
Here is what I like about The Condition. It shows how true Da’s opinions are, that he is not reacting to mood or weather or a bad night’s sleep when he thumps on about the government or sports or idiot businessmen. On the many occasions when he has read to me the highlights of a world that is already twenty-four hours behind us, his words are all but identical to the words he used the first time around. The same venom here, the same disgust there, the same contempt and mockery. These are the moments when Da is stamped indelibly into Da in the way time itself slips into the layers of geology in a mountainside.
Here’s what I don’t like about The Condition. Every time he repeats verbatim who he was yesterday, he’s reminding me how much closer he is to no longer being Da at all.
No unnecessary words, Young Man.
No needless repetition, Old Boy.