“Too much?”
“A bit,” she says. “I think you just told your son that you don’t have a son.”
My dad closes his eyes and concentrates, and then he shakes his head. “Ahh, fuck. I’m always too much. Born that way, I guess. Sorry, kiddo. I know I’m a moron.”
“Yeah, I definitely get that,” I say.
Dad ignores the insult and motions at me. “What about you? You don’t believe in that crap, do you?”
At first I think he’s asking if I believe he feels like he doesn’t really have a son — which is debatable — and then I realize he means religion.
“Nah,” I say. “I don’t subscribe to the Jesus stuff. Not a Jesus subscription holder.”
“I believe in waffles,” my dad says. “Lots of waffles.”
“I believe in strawberries,” Aisha says. “You think there are any left?”
I shake my head, because I know we’re out. “I believe in the Porcupine of Truth,” I say without thinking about it.
“The porcupine of what?” Aisha asks, leaning back in her chair.
The rules of improv with the group at my school are simple: One, just come up with stuff on the fly. Two, anything anyone else comes up with you have to treat as true, meaning you can’t deny anyone else’s reality. I nod at her like everyone knows about this stuff and let my brain play. “You never heard of the Porcupine of Truth?”
Aisha gives me that arched-eyebrow look from when I first met her at the zoo. My dad shakes his head, and I feel like we should be sitting out around a campfire. I place my hand over my heart.
“In my, uh, belief system,” I start, “when you get to heaven — which isn’t called heaven, by the way, but is instead called, um, Des Moines — you aren’t greeted by Peter or any saint or Jesus or anything like that.”
“So who greets you?” Aisha asks.
“The Porcupine of Truth. He meets you at the gates of Des Moines, which are less like gates and more like, you know, a velvet rope in front of a club. And when you get there, he asks you, ‘Truth or dare?’ ”
She says, “Wow. This is good to know.”
“Well, yeah. This is important stuff. And if you say, ‘Dare,’ and the Porcupine, say, dares you to run naked through the fields leading up to Des Moines and you won’t, he pushes a lever and you are sent to hell, which is actually Paramus Park Mall, the day before Christmas.”
“The what mall?” Aisha asks.
“New Jersey,” I say. “What were you, born in Billings?”
“Nebraska,” she says.
“And if you do what he says, you get to go into Des Moines, which as you know is a beautiful place with lots of trees and stuff.”
I sneak a look at my dad. His mouth is wide open, and it takes me a second to realize he’s a little awed. He hasn’t seen my improv shows like Mom has. He has no idea about any of this.
I continue. “And if you say, ‘Truth,’ the Porcupine, who is omniscient …”
“Where’d this all come from?” Dad says, but there’s a smile on his face, and it’s hard for me not to break character and smile too.
I repeat, “The Porcupine, who is omniscient …”
“Like all porcupines …” Aisha says.
“Exactly. Like all porcupines, she is all knowing.”
Aisha cracks up. “I like the ‘she.’ ”
“Know your audience,” I say. “So she scans through your life files and finds the four moments that are most embarrassing, and she asks you questions about those moments. For example, it could be the time you were on the school bus and you peed yourself laughing and left a puddle and pretended it was Jamey Foster who did it.”
Dad laughs. His face is lit up like I haven’t seen it before. I want to bottle this moment. This feeling. For all the times I don’t have it. Which is every other moment of my life ever.
Aisha says, “For example, not like that’s something that happened to you, right?”
“Right,” I say. “And the Porcupine of Truth asks you about this in front of a studio audience of all the people who have ever known you who died before you.”
Dad, still smirking, puts his hand under his chin and rubs. “Okay, so what if you’re a baby and you didn’t know anyone who has already died?”
“Good question. Then they fill the audience with dead child sitcom stars,” I say, trying to ignore the nauseous feeling in my chest. All this talk about death with my dying dad. Too much.
He starts to laugh again, hard, and that turns into a cough. “Of course,” he says as he tries to stop coughing.
“And you have to tell the truth in front of everyone, and if you do, you get to go to Des Moines. And if you don’t, you wind up in the pits of Paramus Park Mall. Or, if you’re lucky, suburban Chicago, which is what they call the place in between heaven and hell. I forget what it’s usually called.”
“Suburban Chicago, I believe,” Aisha says.
“Exactly. So that’s the Porcupine of Truth, and I swear on a stack of Bibles, or, where this particular story comes from, Entertainment Weeklys.”
My dad applauds, clapping his hands above his head. “Bravo, bravo. Now that there’s some good shit,” he says.
I can’t help but smile.
We bullshit some more, and it’s awesome. I kind of want my mom to see this, because of all the times she bad-mouthed Dad as I was growing up. And really, he isn’t that bad. Or maybe he is, or was, but he has good qualities too. He’s actually fun.
The conversation begins to stall, and Aisha stands up.
“Found some interesting stuff in the files downstairs,” I say, staying seated. “Divorce papers, stuff like that.”
He screws up his face like he’s annoyed. “My parents never got divorced,” he says.
“But I just saw —”
He shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, maybe after he left, she filed. I don’t know. But we never heard from him again.”
“But he signed —”
My dad interrupts me. “Stop. Enough. I don’t give a crap about any of that.”
“Okay,” I say. “But it was in the —”
“Seriously, kiddo. Stop.”
I tense my shoulders.
Dad exhales. “Relax, Carson. I really don’t worry about that anymore. When you’re dying, you don’t have time for that junk. The shit people did to you? It’s over.”
I nod and look away. The conversation stops, and my dad and I are just sitting there. Aisha looks over at me and says, “Awkward turtle.” She puts her left hand on top of her right with her thumbs out and then rotates her thumbs forward.
“What the hell’s an awkward turtle?” my dad asks.
Aisha shows him again, and I think about what funny thing I can say. Nothing comes to mind. And then, I once again do something that doesn’t feel normal to me. In a quiet voice I ask, “When did he leave?”
Dad makes a frustrated noise, but then he takes a deep breath and actually answers.
“It was the year my Brewers finally made the World Series. I remember because my father and I used to watch baseball together. Sometimes they’d be the game of the week on Saturday afternoons, because that year they were finally good. Harvey’s Wallbangers. Yep. The Wallbangers.”
He smiles at the memory.
“That summer. I was, what? Seventeen? One day I woke up and he was gone. I asked my mom. She had no clue. I figured he’d write or something. Never did. And of course that’s the year the Brewers got to the Series. Finally. We’d waited my whole childhood for that, and there they were, and he wasn’t there to watch it with me. Lost to the Cardinals. Stupid, fucking Cardinals.”
He shakes his head, and I can hear the despair. All these years later, and he can say whatever he wants to, but it does still matter to him. Like, a ton.
It’s hard to know what to say. So I just say, “Sorry,” and Aisha says, “That sucks,” and he nods and shrugs, and soon Aisha and I go downstairs and hang out.
“Well, that was, um, educational,” Aisha says.