Here is what I told Raina:
My dad got the flu.
Then he died.
It wasn’t quite that simple, but it was close.
I wish there was a more dramatic story I could tell about how he hung on bravely while fighting some rare disease that has its own honorary 5k run. Or that he had died pulling someone from a burning hospital or standing up for someone who was being bullied, or even in a war we shouldn’t have been involved in just so other people could nod their heads in a way that normalized things a bit. Instead, when I tell people how he died, they usually say one of two things.
The first is:
“What?”
And the second is:
“That can happen?”
I don’t fault them necessarily. As much as they’ve been told to express compassion when someone has been dealt a loss, it’s human nature to worry about your own survival. And I think what they’re doing mostly is just being terrified that the next time they have a sore throat they could end up in the morgue. No one wants to think about that. There are already enough scary things in the world without having to frighten yourself with thoughts about how catching the flu at work might take you out.
But that’s what happened. He came home sick one night after teaching a class and he went to sleep on the couch right away. If I had been a better detective, or maybe a trained medical professional, this would have been the first sign. Dad was an energetic dude, and even when he was sick, he usually held forth from the sofa about whatever movie he was watching, sucking down herbal tea from a thermos. Just a few months prior, he had a cold and summoned me over to watch the beginning of Jaws with him.
“Ethan, did you know that the robotic shark didn’t work in the early days of the shoot?”
He blew his nose into the handkerchief he still carried with him everywhere.
“It sank like a stone! But that flaw changed the whole movie. They had to film without a shark at first and it’s what you don’t see that really scares the bejeezus out of you!”
It’s what you don’t see.
That phrase came back to me later and gave me chills. Because even though Dad was talking about a shark movie that day, he could just as easily have been talking about his own body in the weeks to come. Specifically, his lungs.
There are three main ways the flu can kill you. None of them is common, but all of them are bad. The first is a bacterial infection. This can cause pneumonia which can kill you. The second is multiple organ failure, which is what it sounds like. The third is respiratory failure. Basically, the virus inflames your lungs so much that oxygen can’t pass through the tissue. Then you just stop breathing.
That’s how it happened with Dad.
He’d been sleeping a lot since he came home sick, and had even canceled classes for the first time in five years. I remember I didn’t want to go to school on the morning it happened because I wanted to spend the day with him, even if he wasn’t feeling great. But school was sacred in our house, so that was not to be. Before I left, though, I went into my parents’ bedroom and lay down next to him.
Mom was in the kitchen making him some tea and toast, and I could hear her arguing with the morning news. Dad was awake, and it seemed like he was doing better, but he kept coughing and taking deep breaths. He asked me how I was, and touched my earlobe, which is something he used to do when I was a kid. Then we were just lying there together in his room.
It was dim and cool—Mom complained that he liked their room kept at the temperature of a deep freeze—but his body was so warm I could feel it a few inches away. I knew pretty soon I was going to have to get on the bus where I would try to stay awake on the quiet ride to school, listening to a podcast about horror movies. Then I would go through another day of diagramming sentences and solving for x, trying to blend into the crowd between periods, missing Raina, and eating lunch with the same crew of sort-of friends who put up with my talk about cinematography.
But for the moment, I didn’t want to move. And suddenly, I thought of a question I couldn’t believe I had never asked him. I sat up and looked at him, his curly hair nestled in the folds of the pillowcase. His eyes were half open.
“Dad,” I said. “What was the first movie you ever saw?”
A smile came to his lips before he answered; maybe he was playing the memory in his head, or just the thought of it was enough to make him happy.
“It wasn’t a real movie,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t show in a theater.”
“So, what was it?”
“Well,” he said, “there was this family next door when I was growing up, and they were a little strange. The Porters. The dad was a professor at the university, which was the first time I even knew that was a job. He was an education professor actually, and he home-schooled his kids. He let them follow their passions. If they didn’t want to learn fractions, they didn’t have to. They could make a map of the solar system instead. Everything was like that at their house.”
“That sounds kind of awesome,” I said.
“I was very jealous when I got older,” said Dad. “But I was young when I first knew them. Four or five, I think. Not even in school yet. I guess I had seen parts of movies before that, silly animated things, but my parents were big into reading. Movies were the enemy. Anyway, the boys always had a project going. If they weren’t building a robot, they were lofting a weather balloon. But one of the kids, the oldest of the bunch became obsessed with films. He finally convinced his dad to buy him a Super 8 camera in order to direct his own movie.”
“What was it?” I asked.
Dad stopped to take a long breath.
“It was a version of Peter Pan,” he said. “Kind of. I saw him and his brothers in the yard filming it. Their mother had sewed them costumes, and they were the most amazing things I’d ever seen. Bright feathers and green velvet. Spray-painted silver pirate swords. Incredible hats. There were painted sets and ocean sound effects from a tape recorder. They basically turned their backyard into an MGM studio lot. There was a wooden fence separating our two yards, but every day I heard them out there, I made my mom lift me up so I could see what was happening. I didn’t really understand it, but I knew it was something wild and important.”
“And they actually made a full movie?”
“It was only fifteen minutes long, but it was a movie. And they even had a screening one summer night not long before they moved away. They sold tickets for fifty cents in the week leading up to it and you had to have one to get into their backyard. I begged my mom to buy me a ticket, even though I knew the film wouldn’t start until well after dark. But she agreed. I think she was curious herself. She always talked about how ‘eccentric’ the boys next door were, but there was always a smile on her face when she said that word. Like it was something to be prized as long as it didn’t happen in our house.
“The night of the screening, Mom walked me next door. The youngest of the Porter boys was the ticket taker, and I remember he wore a little cap and called me ‘sir.’ All across the lawn were mismatched chairs. Some from the kitchen. Some folding chairs. Even a recliner transported from the living room. I had wondered all week how they would get a movie screen into their backyard, but when I got back there, it all made sense.
“Hanging on the clothesline was a bright white bedsheet. It was nailed into the ground so it wouldn’t blow around too much in the breeze. And set up by the house, on top of a bunch of crates was a real projector. I couldn’t believe what a simple trick it was. But I was in awe. They did it somehow. They built a movie theater in their yard and they were going to show us something they made.
“The adults drank beer near the house. I think my mother even had one, even though I never really knew her to drink. But all the kids were fixated on the screen, waiting for the last of the purple sunset to vanish behind the row of houses across the alley. There were fireflies blinking in front of the screen. Someone handed me some Kool-Aid in a paper cup. It was so sweet and cold; it seemed to make my whole body tingle.
“At ten o’clock sharp one of the boys welcomed everyone to the premiere of the film. He talked a little about his artistic process, in what was clearly an educational assignment from his dad. Then he walked back to the projector and flipped it on. There were a couple of bleeps, and the film flickered through the reels. Then there was a group of pirates sailing on the ocean.
“I mean, of course it was just a painted background, but there was wind in their hair, and someone was sloshing water around. The footage was grainy and dirty and poorly edited. The sound went in and out. But I sat there stupefied for the entire fifteen minutes as Peter and the Lost Boys fought the pirates and won and, in this version, decided to be kids forever.
“On some level, I knew it was all incredibly fake. I knew the actors were the same boys that did chemistry experiments in their garage next door. But all of that faded away somehow in the backyard. The summer night was gone. The fireflies were gone. The chatter and laughter of the adults disappeared. And for a few minutes, I was transported from my neighborhood to the high seas. I was a Lost Boy, too.
“When I finally went to sleep that night, I saw images from the movie in my head, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I couldn’t wait until I was older and I could help them out with their next movie. Maybe something with spies, I was thinking. I already imagined myself as the star, decked out in a long trench coat.
“But that never happened. Their father got a job at another college and soon after that I never saw the Porters again. Still, I told myself, if they had figured it out, I could, too. I could understand how the magic worked. Out of all the movies I saw when I was a kid, that’s the one that sticks with me because it was when I first realized that movies were made by actual people. They didn’t just show up on the screen from out of the blue. It took a group of determined fanatics to manifest them out of nothing.”
I was quiet for a moment, imagining my father as a kid, feeling so inspired. Then I faced him again.
“Did you ever want to be a director?”
He took a long breath.
“Maybe for a little while,” he said. “But eventually I just wanted to convert people to the flock. I didn’t need to be a god. Too much pressure.”
He closed his eyes.
“It’s enough just to love something,” he said.
And then my mom came in with his breakfast.
“Case in point,” he said, and smiled.
“Gross,” I said, out of habit more than anything else.
“Love is not gross,” my dad said.
“Whatever,” I said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You’re talking about my deepest belief here!”
“Okay,” I said. “Love is not gross. Just you and Mom.”
“It’s time for you to go to school,” my mom said.
“Fine,” I said.
“To be continued,” said my dad, and took a deep breath.
Those were the last words I heard from him.
To be continued.
I went to school a little late that day. I rode the bus. I solved for x. I ate a square of pizza and some soggy fries. And then in the afternoon, when I was listening to my government teacher talk about checks and balances, I was called out of class. And when I got to the phone in the office, the administrator who held it out, looked totally drained of life. But she didn’t say anything. She just handed me the phone, and when I pressed it to my ear, I heard my mom’s voice crystal clear, like she was standing next to me.
“Something terrible has happened,” she said.