It begins years prior, hundreds of miles south in the city of Anaheim. Within a venue where nothing is real.
The happiest place on earth.
We walk inside the gates and through the arches that separate the turnstiles and front garden from Main Street, U.S.A. There are dozens of stores along the way—mostly merchandise and toys. He guides me forward with his arm over my shoulders, knowing I don’t want to be here, while hundreds of moms and dads with their strollers, toddlers, and teens march in unison toward rides of choice like lines of worker ants crisscrossing along a sidewalk.
“Try to enjoy yourself today,” my dad says. “We can be sad later.”
He asks me what part of the park I want to visit first.
“Pirates, I guess.”
The Magic Kingdom smells of buttery popcorn. Of cinnamon churros and caramel sundaes. The day’s soundtrack is an amalgamation of chimes and children laughing and old-timey show tunes. We wade through the crowd and toward New Orleans Square. Find the line to Pirates of the Caribbean and wait our turn.
* * *
T-minus ninety days.
It’s late July, and I’m about to start my final semester of college in Monterey. My parents moved to the Central Valley of California, where the land is flat with farms and soil but ripe with a cheaper cost of living. It’s a three-hour drive for me—a trek across the mountains of Los Banos until the notoriously ugly sights of Interstate 5 come into view. Nothing but mud patches, dreary farmlands, and the occasional cow-killing fields that smell like shit. I do this once or twice a month to see my folks on the weekends. Sometimes my brother, in college in Oakland, synchronizes his visits with mine.
“I’ll be there in the morning,” I tell my mom over the phone.
“Your father and I will be home later in the afternoon. He has an appointment.”
“Everything okay?”
“Probably digestion issues but they want to make sure it’s not an ulcer.”
I get to the house after lunchtime and my brother is sitting on the couch with an annoyed look on his face because I’m a little late.
“Tree game?” he asks.
It’s our favorite football game. One of us is the quarterback, the other the defender. The quarterback stands on one end of the front lawn with three trees as targets—the one closest is worth four yards, the intermediate tree is worth ten, and the one on the other end of the grass is worth fifteen. My brother stands with his feet spread wide and dares me to throw it deep.
We’re into the fourth quarter, and he’s winning by a small margin when my parents’ car drudges over pebbles and earth, a cloud of dust kicking up as they approach the farm and house that’s 130 years old, never showing any signs of being a day younger. Plumbing clogs. Roof leaks. Zero insulation. A family of feral cats sprawl atop the roof and beg for food each time we walk in and out of the house. The silver Volvo makes its way onto our property. My father turns my way and gives me a look.
The look.
He acknowledges me but not in the “so happy to see you” way. This signals something different. My heart detaches and falls to my feet.
His body language gently asks me to leave him alone. So I do. He makes his way to the front door, cats yelling down at him, but he never says a word, retreating inside to the master bedroom where he’d sleep the rest of the day. My mom stays in the car for a minute or two, hands locked onto the steering wheel, and the car’s engine shut off. She looks forward. But I’m not sure she sees anything. My brother, with dirt stains on his white shirt and basketball shorts, walks over next to me.
Finally, my mom gets out of the car. As dark brown as my father is, she’s equally pale white. A good ole Irish American with red hair and green eyes shielded by cheap bifocals. She tells us what the doctors told them.
Stomach cancer. Advanced. Aggressive. Determined. They even gave the timeline until it’s all over. Three months.
That night I toss around under stale blankets. Give up on finding sleep and leave the guest bedroom. Follow the trail of cigarette smoke through the kitchen, past a sink full of pots and pans dirty with crusty marinara, into a hallway ruined by spectacularly tacky wallpaper—a pattern of a church, velvet ash tree, and a horse and carriage. I find him in the study, playing chess against the computer. I pull up a chair. We barely talk. When both parties know the destination, and neither of them like it, there is no point in acknowledging the journey. I stare at his profile, trying to store it in memory, never taking my mind off the clock that now winds itself backward.
T-minus ninety days.
What becomes of me after he’s gone?
Tick, tick, tick.
* * *
We watch the animatronic pirates blast cannonballs at one another—water splashes next to warring ships with masts aflame. Later we’re floating through a city, the victors pillaging and plundering and rifling and looting. Drink up, me hearties, yo ho! The pirates destroy the town. Chase women with manically horny expressions and arms outstretched, the damsel permanently out of reach because if they weren’t, well, this wouldn’t be Disney. Toward the end of the ride, that same dog is still holding the keys just out of the prisoner’s reach—like the last time I was here and the time before that. On and on that dog remains there for that pirate.
Never abandoning him. Never dying.
“Did that dog remind you of Astro?” my dad asks after we get off the ride.
“Of course.”
He pulls me into his side and hugs me. “I loved him too.”
I feel the swirl of heat and acid in my throat and sinuses. Fight back the tears that will soon arrive if I don’t try harder. But I can’t let them out because this is Disneyland and there are other preteens nearby and the last thing I want is to give them something to mock.
“Do you blame me?” my dad asks.
I start to say no but stop.
I’m no longer sure.
* * *
T-minus seventy days.
The final semester of college is supposed to be the easiest. Total cruise control until you put on a cap and gown and hop onto the nine-to-five hamster wheel.
But easy doesn’t exist in deep states of dread.
I rearranged my course schedule so I only have classes on Fridays. To maximize my time with him, I stay at the farmhouse Sunday through Thursday.
Because time is limited but regret is infinite.
In the beginning, it’s normal. In the beginning, it’s like it’s not even happening. Maybe it won’t ever happen. We play chess. We talk about life. He asks me about the future and I tell him big, bold ideas and why things will be great.
“I’ll write for the LA Times,” I announce. “Maybe I’ll launch a side business. Add another income source, you know?”
“What kind of business?”
“Something fun. Maybe I’ll open a movie theater.”
He nods and smiles.
I nod and smile.
His face turns serious, and I wonder if talking about the future is the worst thing I could be doing. He sits in an office chair. Swivels it back toward the computer, and searches for international news. Anything related to Pakistan or Kashmir.
And just like childhood, I sit there in silence, next to the man whose thoughts are too big for his size, trying to absorb whatever churns within him so we can go back to normal. But I can’t absorb it this time because normal left us weeks ago. Maybe longer. So the night is no longer the throne in which he remained royal. In which I was destined to one day assume.
The night no longer belongs to us.
And worse, it begins to do to us what it always did to everyone else. Frighten. Terrorize. Not with its horror—though there is plenty of that—but with its honesty. It’s the honesty that forces most people to bed early. Behind locked doors. And that’s because honesty is, without a doubt, the most terrifying outcome to face of all. So many wait for the sun to rise and for the day’s distraction to reveal itself. The distraction that pushed their attention away from their base emotion—the one they all recognize when they wake up. Some are drowning in that depressed, sadly content, contentedly sad state and consciously or unconsciously look for that new distraction to delay an eventual inner reckoning. But the night offers far fewer distractions. Stores are closed. Friends are asleep. And that crutch in the form of social media finally fizzles idle and your mind can’t escape into your web-based identity, the one that likes every photo in your feed, the one that lives a perfectly curated life. At night, it’s just you and the darkness and your most blistered thoughts and fears. Most can’t live inside the night. At least not at the late-night hours my father and I kept for so long. And since we had each other, there was nothing to fear.
But now the night’s honesty—the fully loaded weapon I recognized so long ago—has turned its barrel toward us. And all we’re left to reconcile is the inevitable thing two months from now.
I measure his body with my discerning eyes. Has he gotten thinner already?
* * *
T-minus fifty-eight days.
It’s September and I’m taking a shower underneath a stream of water weaker and slower than drool dribbling off an old man’s chin. At least the water is hot. But only at first. After two minutes, the showerhead buzzes, and the water runs arctic without warning. I crank the knob to the right. Nothing.
“Shit,” my dad says after I tell him. “The water heater.” He closes his eyes and drops his forehead into his palm. Keeps it there long enough to communicate where he’s at these days. The energy levels are dropping. He naps more. Eats less.
He’s thinner.
He’s five-eight. Now probably 160 pounds. His shirt sags off his body.
“We have to go to Home Depot,” he says.
I look up the nearest one on my laptop. It’s fifty miles away in Fresno. Everything is about an hour away when you live here in the Central Valley.
“Want me to drive?”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Let me.”
Everything feels good again on the ride there in his pickup. We stop at a burger joint and he gets a vanilla milkshake. He sips slowly, drinking a quarter of it, and soon after, his energy rises. We listen to talk radio and argue over the fastest route. We eventually reach Fresno—a flat city ripe with strip malls and fast food and little to no trees or bushes. Just cracked sidewalks, big box stores, and despair. We don’t spend much time inside Home Depot. He knows which water heater to buy and loads it onto the flatbed dolly.
“You drive,” he says.
On the way back, he falls asleep. His head rocks side to side as I try to keep the shitty truck on the smoothest parts of the road. The hair on the side of his head—the only part where hair remains—has turned completely silver. His lips are a little bluer. He’s fifty-one going on ninety.
We’re twenty minutes from the house when he wakes up and unclicks his seat belt.
“Pull over,” he grunts.
I slow the truck to a stop and park next to an alfalfa field. He gets out, hand cradling his stomach, and starts retching. The milkshake is lost. He gets back in the truck and tells me to drive faster. He wants to go home.
He stumbles inside the house, and I stay behind in the truck. The clouds overhead are silver, the nucleus within them getting darker by the second. It’s about to rain and I decide to manage the water tank by myself. My arms wrap only three-quarters around it as I successfully pull it off the truck bed. I can’t see where I’m going—the girth of the tank blocking my view. My shoe snags the lip of the walkway, and I stumble. The tank falls from my grip and smacks concrete, crumpling the aluminum frame.
My father comes to the screen door.
“What happened?” he asks with disbelief.
I don’t know what to say. My mouth stutters and stops. “I’m sorry,” I finally blurt out. “I’m so sorry,” I repeat. And I say it again. And again. “I’m so sorry.”
He opens the door and walks over to me. I’m taller now. Heavier. But when he pulls me in and hugs me, I’m still smaller.
“It’s okay,” he says softly into my ear. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Is this the last time he’ll have to forgive me?
My arms clasp around his torso.
145 pounds at most.
* * *
The enchiladas drenched in red sauce are the turning point. Neither my father nor I use a knife, just the fork, to pull apart pieces of the oven-baked tortilla, cheesy strands stretching from plate to mouth. Families with too much money for their own good drop six hundred dollars on a “gourmet Disneyland lunch” at the Blue Bayou—a white cloth restaurant next to one of the rides. But for thirty dollars and a walk to the corner of Frontierland, a decent plate of Mexican food is found at Rancho del Zocalo—a plastic tray eatery where all the Disney staff members wear ponchos.
“Authentic,” my dad says, eating away at the refried beans and rice.
It’s probably not authentic. But it’s tasty. Soon the tacit depression we share takes the form of planful enthusiasm.
“We should get our money’s worth before they close the park.”
I spread the park map across the picnic table. The sun’s glare reflects off the shiny paper, forcing me to squint as I trace the map with my index finger, guiding us from point to point. “We can hit Jungle Cruise and Indiana Jones next.”
Jungle Cruise is boring, and the “tour guide,” a red-haired smartass, spends the entire ride discharging corny jokes through the ride’s PA system. I shake my head as I step off the cruise boat.
“Stupid,” my dad laughs.
I laugh with him. “Very stupid.”
We hit the next ride. Then another. And one after that. The sun is falling back behind the San Gabriel Mountains, shading the Magic Kingdom with citrus sunlight.
His arm slides over my shoulders yet again.
* * *
T-minus thirty-seven days.
I tap my forehead with the end of my pen and stare down at a textbook from my philosophy class. The kitchen window looks out across the flat farms and hardening soil. The infinite drift of land within California’s Central Valley is different than on its coast. There, facing the ocean, the horizon blurs past our eyes’ ability to discern its end. The ocean transitions from shades of blue and green and gold. It glimmers. Sparkles. Reflects birds defying the limitations of gravity. The California coast is a reminder that we are human and once we were born and one day we will die, but the in-between is ours. The unending horizon in the Central Valley reminds one of something different. Mortality is inherent, but that is not the primary message. The sun beats down on barren land. Dying crops. People so stoic that the lines wrinkling their foreheads share a life story with one glance across a dusty liquor store countertop. Here, there is no such thing as defying limitations. Fate is written whether you like it or not. You are what you are, and good luck running away from it because there is no tide or big wave or sunny disposition available to distract you from all that you are and ever will become—and like everything else, you too will fade off into that flat, earthy, barren horizon because that’s all this existence is out here: seed to spoil.
I have an exam on Friday. It’s Wednesday now and each day this week I’ve tried to stare down at this textbook and absorb what I can and fail with every attempt. Focus is now a forgotten state of mind. I close the book and lean back in the chair. Hook my head over the backrest and listen to the rest of the house. For any rustling. A floorboard creaking.
For him.
He’s in the bedroom. Resting—which is simultaneously the most misleading and overused term in my life these days.
“He’s resting,” my mom tells me.
“I need to rest,” my dad tells me.
He must be resting, I tell myself.
But rest is the root of restore, and there is nothing restorative occurring within his body. Rest is a substitute for dying. And the amount of rest, day after day, is increasing.
I hear a cabinet in the kitchen close. He’s awake and every second he is upright—able to communicate with me—is a gift. I find him clutching the edge of the counter for support.
He’s thinner.
His wristwatch slides back to mid-forearm.
“Water,” he groans.
I fetch a small glass spotted with stains because nothing in this house is free from dust or grime. It could be cleaned a thousand times and never feel right. I hand him a full glass and his shaky hand moves to his open mouth, where he inserts his morphine pills. Swallows water to chase them down.
Later we sit at the kitchen table. There is no food before us because the idea of eating only hurts his insides even more than they already do. Which, in turn, removes my hunger.
“Right here,” he says, pointing to a spot between his sternum and belly button. He’s telling me where it hurts the most. He stares out the window, his eyes yellow and glossy. I ask him if the pills help, and he nods, but I can’t tell if he’s just saying that to make me feel better.
“We can still arrange for assistance.”
He shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “No nurses. No hospitals.”
He’s been adamant about hospice. About trips to the nearest hospital. He doesn’t want it because at this point in his life—after a serious heart attack a couple of years back and several back surgeries along the way—he’s developed a phobia of dying in a cold hospital. An alien facility a million miles away from his homeland and in the presence of strangers dressed in scrubs. He wants to die at home with his family.
But I’m not sure he understands what hospice offers. It’s not exactly a service he probably saw a lot of in the sixties and seventies in Pakistan. But to me, the idea of someone else—a total stranger—managing him in his worst states of being, the states that signal the end is nearer and nearer, is appealing, if not merciful. So please, I silently beg him with my eyes, agree to hospice. But he never does.
“I keep having the same dream,” he says. “I feel like I’m about to throw up, so I run to the bathroom. And I vomit and vomit until I can feel it come up out of me.” He points to the same spot between his sternum and belly button again where the mass currently grows—that cancer ball ruining my life and ending my father’s. “Then I’m healthy again.” He smiles but only for a half-second because it’s just a dream and this is real life.
Friday morning, I’m doing eighty-five miles per hour on the freeway, trying to get back to campus in time for my exam. My phone rings inside my car’s cupholder, vibrating atop pennies and dimes and maybe a quarter. I see it’s my dad calling. I fight the urge to pick up. Not because I don’t want to hear his voice—God knows how much I cherish that. But because something in the back of my mind tells me it’s a good idea not to answer, just this once. I’m hoping he leaves a message and I’ll have him recorded and can listen to it long after he’s gone. Because right now, forecasting out years and years, I’m afraid I’ll eventually forget the sound of his voice.
I drive into campus and make it in time for my exam. Afterward, I check my phone.
He left a voicemail.
* * *
At night, the fireworks begin over the Rivers of America. Explosions are fierce and bold. Colorful and sizzling. The park ropes off walkways and constrains the spaces in which you can comfortably watch the beautiful bombs burst above, forcing clusters of strangers to huddle closer until everyone is pressing shoulders into shoulders and tolerating the awkward proximity strangers sometimes must share.
In between the bursts of light and after each smoke cloud fades away, I can see the stars atop the black canvas night sky. I find one brighter than the others. I point at it.
“I bet you that one is Astro.”
My father locates it. His chest rises but holds longer than usual before exhaling.
“Dogs don’t live long,” he says. “But he was too young.”
That force of energy—rage and pain, packaged in the form of a softball—wedges itself in my throat, simultaneously compelling me to say what I feel but leaving me without the faculty of doing so without bursting into tears. Finally, I stop fighting it back.
“But he didn’t have to die,” I say. “You’re the one that made that happen. You!” I shove him at the waist. “You!” Shove again. “You!”
He grabs my wrists and tugs me in close. “Stop,” he hushes. “Stop.”
He feels my diaphragm beat against his body and waits for it to slow. For when I’m able to receive his message.
“If you loved him, you understand that you could not let him suffer.”
The bombs keep going off.
* * *
Death is an infection floating through the house with potent malignancy. It’s in the food I eat. The soap in the shower. It permeates my mind as I lay in bed, gnawing away at my brain like termites to wood, biting into cranial flesh just as I start to drift into unconscious nightmares.
T-minus thirty-three days.
He’s thinner.
His face is sinking in on itself. Cheekbones I never knew he had now cancer sharp.
No more solid foods. Barely any food. He’s eating the gel protein that marathon runners ingest during the race. He hands me back the wrapper and falls asleep in his chair. Like he did a couple of hours ago. This morning. Yesterday.
T-minus thirty days.
I walk past the bathroom door. Hear him screaming.
T-minus twenty-nine days.
I stand in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the frame while checking on him as he sleeps. His legs fuss underneath a blanket. They kick wildly, and his bottom half comes uncovered. His socks hang loose off his ankles. He no longer has calves. He wakes and half-cracks an eyelid. “Hello,” he whispers, childlike. He collapses back asleep.
Resting.
T-minus twenty-eight days.
When he’s awake, he sits in a semicomatose state. Yellow eyes and white lips. He no longer smiles.
“Get rid of those crosses,” he orders.
“What?”
“I never wanted crosses in my home. Get rid of them.”
He’s staring at the wallpaper—the intruder that my father has suddenly spotted. The same cracked wallpaper that adorned the interior when he bought the house. The faded illustrations of horses and steeples and churches. He never voiced an opinion over the damn wallpaper previously.
“I’m not Christian!” he barks. Tells me if he’s going to die here it will be in the absence of symbolism. Their symbolism. I take a Sharpie and scratch out the crosses one by one. He breathes heavier—chest rising and falling emphatically—as I complete the task.
He puffs on a cigarette. “Get out of here, Jesus.”
T-minus twenty-seven days.
I’m back in Monterey, walking across campus and through the quad, where intersecting walkways converge and split back off toward the most frequented university buildings, tall and newly constructed. He calls me.
“Hi, Dad.”
“What do you want?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, getting angrier. “What do you want?”
“I think you called me.”
He hangs up.
T-minus twenty-four days.
When he talks, his speech toggles between English and Urdu. He looks at me with no recognition of what just happened.
T-minus twenty-three days.
He’s fucking thin.
A jawline that could break against the late afternoon winds.
We sit in lawn chairs and watch the sunset. It’s October now and it’s no longer hot and it’s more enjoyable outside. Our chairs butt up against each other, side by side. After a period of silence, I ask if he wants to go back inside and sleep. He declines. He asks how my brother is doing. I say he’s doing fine but wishes he could be here more. The sun is now out of sight and the honesty of night starts to make its presence known.
“When is your graduation?” he asks.
“December 15.”
He weeps.
T-minus twenty-two days.
He’s thinner. Sicker.
The screams are more frequent. Coming from the bathroom. His sleep.
T-minus twenty-one days.
I find him at the kitchen table, his back to me as he sits with his semiautomatic HK disassembled. He sticks the long cleaning brush into the barrel and spins it in and out. He bought this gun in the late eighties, back when I was four or five, during the “fucking-dirt-poor” phase of our family’s history. He would take it to a pawn shop at the end of the month. Trade it for rent. Sweat bullets until two weeks passed and then when his paycheck arrived, hoping nobody bought the damn thing while he waited, he would buy it back.
Month after month.
Rinse. Repeat.
Aim. Fire.
“Why does Islam forbid it?” he asks after I take a seat opposite him.
“Forbid what?”
He twirls the brush between his thumb and index finger. Frowns so hard his mustache pulls over his bottom lip.
“I’d go to hell forever.”
“For what?”
“Doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.”
“Can’t do what?”
He sets the barrel down. Sprays it with cleaning oil.
He mumbles softly. But I hear it. Each and every word he spoke.
And I sit there wondering if I should or shouldn’t answer. Search for right and wrong. Try to figure out what to do.
When your father wishes he could just kill himself.
* * *
I remove my Payless ShoeSource Nike knockoffs. Socks too. Find the early markings of blisters on the insides of my feet. The train wobbles on the tracks as it takes us through a Disney tunnel, cutting through Tomorrowland and back toward Toontown. We’ve been at the park for ten hours. The train’s PA announcer tells us our next stop is Critter Country. But I know we’re not getting off here because we don’t have a destination in mind because we’re at the point in the day where we are just riding the train that slowly moves weary Disneyland patrons around the park’s outskirts.
I slip my shoes back over my feet.
“What about for people?” I ask. “Is it the same?”
“Is what the same?”
“That you can’t let them suffer?”
“People are not dogs,” he says. “People can take care of themselves.”
“So can a person do something that ends their own suffering?”
His face turns sour. “This is forbidden. Allah does not permit suicide. It’s one of the greatest sins.”
“So then can someone else help?”
“This is called assisted suicide. The person who’s sick must agree to it first. It’s legal in some other countries. A few other states too. But no Muslim country. We cannot do these kinds of things.”
“But what if someone does it on their own to make sure someone doesn’t suffer?”
He looks down at me, anger painting a scowl.
“That’s called murder.”
* * *
She arrives like Lady Death—the reaper rolling a hospital gurney into the family room. She’s a medical technician, sent here by the doctor’s office.
“At some point, he will have difficulty swallowing these,” she says, holding up a bottle of the most potent morphine pills made available. She’s older, probably near retirement. Her pencil-thin eyebrows communicate sympathy for what we’ve been through and are about to go through, but her confidence and rehearsed lines reveal that she knows that once she leaves this house, we are helpless when faced with the final stage of decay. “He’ll need your help when that time comes.”
She shows us how to operate the reclining function on the gurney, holding the controller like a TV remote. She takes a diaper out of a black duffel bag. Demonstrates how to change one on a cancer patient. Tells us about the death rattle—the gurgling sound piped from chest to throat that people emit when they are hours from death.
“Is that when the pain is the worst?” I ask.
“That’s what the medication is for, honey.”
* * *
T-minus nineteen days, and it happens at three in the morning.
He wails from outside the house in a way that makes me wonder if his soul is grieving at the realization its body can no longer exist in harmony with it. Piercing cries amplifying through the night. At the moon. Directed at God.
I find him face-first in a patch of grass, dew moistening his shirt and sweatpants. He’s clawing at the earth, inching his broken body away from the house—toward the moonlight laid flat across the farmlands in the distance.
“What were you doing out here?”
He looks up at me, spittle accumulating across his bottom lip. His eyes widen but I can’t tell if he’s relieved or scared.
“Can you get up and walk?”
He can’t.
I hook his arm over my neck and carry him back inside. Which isn’t hard because he’s nothing but bones and cartilage and cancer. Death, death, death lightening the load for his final trip. The man who hoisted my universe atop his shoulders is now so frail his neck can’t keep his head in place.
Fuck.
Ing.
Thin.
His hip digs into my oblique as I bring him into the family room, lowering him onto the gurney. I lift his head and slide the pillow underneath. Scratch an itch irritating my face. Then another. I realize I’m clawing at the tears falling off my face and onto his. I wipe his sandpaper whiskers he’ll never shave again. We all have a final spot where we spend our last moments alive. And now, watching his jaw hang open, I know he’ll never get off this bed. This is his spot, on this gurney we don’t even own, in this house we don’t even like, on this farm they should have never bought. So I do the only thing I can. Lower my head to his, my lips pressed into his forehead, salty as it is familiar. Bitter as it is infinitely heroic. I tell him I love him.
With his eyes closed, he speaks only Urdu in return.
* * *
T-minus twelve days.
My mom is away much of the time because she can’t get out of work. Inside the house, it’s all the same—an infinite loop of sitting next to him, watching him die. Changing out diapers and applying new pain patches to the parts of his legs where thigh muscles used to exist. Inserting white pills into his mouth, giving him apple juice or water to help him swallow it.
I drag a mattress out of the guest room and lay it on the floor next to his gurney. There I stay, never sleeping.
* * *
Nine days out and from my lips to God’s ears, the words depart.
It’s only when the worst is occurring that you hope for miracles. But on my knees, behind a locked bathroom door, hands cupped with palms facing the ceiling and sky and heaven beyond it, I wish for a miracle nonetheless.
“Please not now, God. I still need him. Please, please, please.” I beg. Throw out a few bargains. The remedial sins I’ll never commit again. “I won’t drink. I’ll pray five times a day.”
Eight days.
“Please, God!”
Seven days.
“Take ten years from my life and give them to him. Please!”
Six days. Six nights.
Not going back to Monterey until it’s over. Not for school or anything else.
Every minute is a lifetime’s worth of torture. He lays on the gurney, mouth agape, lips cracking. Even his eyelids fail him now, shuttering only three-quarters of his eyeballs, leaving up for interpretation if he’s awake or in a coma or just resting. Resting. But I can’t rest at night or the morning or afternoon or whenever-the-fuck I’m feeling the slightest bit hopeful that if I close my eyes sleep will actually, somehow someway, befall my exhausted mind and body, because just as I do his breathing mutates again—sometimes raspier, sometimes deeper, but more and more now the exhale is so audible that it sounds declarative like, Okay, I give in and I’m ready to depart this earth—and I absolutely freak out, hop up and grab his hand because if God is going to ignore my calls for miracles and bargains and exchanges of my life for his then I’ll be damned if I’m not right here, next to him, as he goes because that’s the only thing I can fathom as justified and owed to this man who left his homeland and family and everything he knew and came to a country that, yeah, pays infinitely more but never offers an immigrant the respect they deserve, but he did it anyway—happily—so I could build on top of what he fought for and with what he taught me, and my God what he has taught me—from how to be a man and to remain thoughtful and forgiving and compassionate and strong and to never stop remembering who I am because what I am is a part of him and who he is will never stop being a part of me because, goddammit, I am my father’s son.
Four days. Four nights.
“Can you swallow this for me?” I say in the sweetest tone available, placing another morphine pill in his mouth. I take a dropper out of a glass of water and squeeze the rubber end, releasing a sip’s worth into his mouth. “For me, Dad. Swallow the pill.” I run a towel across his chin. Change out his pain patches—now tripling the amount in total—on his obliques and thighs and back. A guttural whine escapes him. “Everything okay?” But he whines more. I look into his mouth and check if he’s swallowed the pill.
He hasn’t.
Nor the pills from this morning.
One semidissolved between his molars and cheek, probably the one from last night.
Three days. Three nights.
Not swallowing, no matter what my mom or I try.
He’s in pain and we don’t know what to do. We leave a message at the hospice center but they don’t call back because it’s after five.
I head for the bathroom. But divine intervention hasn’t arrived to date because what is already in motion was made by the very same higher power I address when I pray. I lock the door and get on my knees and try something different. I crank the prayer dial in the opposite direction.
I ask God just to kill him already.
“Enough.”
Two days.
Still suffering.
One day.
Nothing happens. Outside of the ongoing onslaught wreaked from this tortured environment.
Day zero.
This is supposed to be the day. His condition has worsened. He’s somehow thinner. As if it was possible.
“Please, God. Just do it.”
One day past.
“Why aren’t you just doing it?”
Two days past.
I can’t sleep. I can’t leave this room. I listen to his chest rise and fall. The spaces in between breaths elongating.
“Hurry up, God.”
Three days past.
He gurgles. He chokes.
“Dad, you don’t have to hang on.”
But he does.
And it’s now more than three months since this all began. The summer transformed into autumn and the perfection of autumn—its vibrant colors splashed across trees and leaves and all vegetation—now shows signs of its own death and the brown decay crackles under my bare feet while I wander outside the house, under the moon’s spotlight, my bottom lip quaking as I speak but I never register the words coming out of my mouth because I’m as disassociated from mind and body as I’ve ever been before—my arms flail toward the stars, and my breath blooms in short puffs of hot air extinguished within the vacuum of frigid farm atmosphere and I scream and curse until I finally understand that God is no longer listening and probably never was and if I want any agency—any sense of control over how I help him—I have to act now before he suffers another minute longer.
And just like that, the lunacy of this now ninety-six-day systematic deterioration quiets down. I tell my mom that my brother called.
“He’s trying to make it back here but just got a flat tire. AAA can tow him to the nearest Goodyear, but they’re already closed for the day.”
“How far away is he? Can’t the tow truck driver take him here?”
“It’s out of their ninety-mile radius, but they’ll take him to that Starbucks right off Exit 183. We could pick him up there.”
“One of us should stay here,” she says predictably.
“I’ll stay.”
Twenty minutes later she’s in her car and driving away from the farm and into the cold November night. I’m in the study, on the opposite side of the house from where my father is currently dying. I sit down in his computer chair. Swivel around a little before calling my brother.
“You need to come down. It’s time.”
He doesn’t say anything at first, and I know he’s trying not to sound like a younger brother. Instead, he deepens his voice. “You think it will be today?”
“Today or tomorrow—not sure, but we’re at the end.”
He organizes a to-do list out loud. The emails he’ll have to write his college professors. The rent check he’ll leave with his roommate.
“Another thing—Mom wants to pick you up halfway here—Pacheco Pass on-ramp to the five.”
“Why?”
“She probably wants to mother you before you get here.”
He agrees, and I know this will confuse the shit out of them when they piece it together, but I don’t care right now. And as I stand, turning toward the other side of the house, walking through the kitchen and across its creaky floor, I know that what I’m about to do requires assistance. I open up a storage cabinet in the hallway. Feel underneath a stack of neatly folded sweaters until my fingers graze the unmistakable handle—dimpled and heavy. I pull the gun out. Make sure it’s loaded. I take it with me.
The memory of the farm—what I’m about to do on this night—starts to flicker. It crackles with static.
I’m now hovering above my father, watching his chest struggle to rise, listening as the air that escapes his lungs does so in fits and stops. I now know the gun is too barbaric and look for another way.
Waves of electricity pulsate through this memory. It’s glitching.
I’m back in the memory, and I have the gun in one hand and the pillow off my nearby mattress in the other. I hold the pillow above his head, but paralysis has taken hold. I beg myself not to do it. I beg myself to get it over with now. Back and forth.
Do it.
No.
For him.
I can’t.
I glitch, and the memory is blocked. Fully disrupted. A satellite signal lost.
The glitch relents and I’m now bursting out of the farmhouse’s front door, gun by my side, as I sprint to nowhere in particular, tears cascading down my face as shame, shame, and only shame fills up my internal reservoir past its maximum capacity, spilling out over the edges, rising through my existence, drowning my will to live.
I fall to my knees. Put the gun to my head. My index finger wraps around the trigger, slowly applying pressure. But before the trigger snaps back, I pull the gun away from my temple, the blast going off right above the crown of my head, the bullet launched to nowhere in particular. And as I come to terms with the cowardice governing my every urge—even the one to die right now—the gunshot that just went off near my ear creates a burn heavy and deep, burrowing a sound through my ear canal I’d never forget, growing in volume as I try to understand what I’ve just done.
The hum.
It reverberates within my head all through that night. In the weeks that follow. Humming at deafening levels when I graduate from college a month and a half later and give zero shits. Through the several months after that. In the coming years.
The wind swirls clockwise, whipping my hair into my eyes. I set the gun down and do the only thing I’m capable of at this moment. I scream.
Take a deep breath in. Let it out.
This is what defines you. Just try and forget it.
Decide What You Are in 3, 2, 1 . . .