Shadows Out of Time

But my father, a man who once spent years designing intricate inlay intaglios for rich people, who knew the name of every member of the Legion of Superheroes, who knew how to carve a spiral banister by hand, who could make a makebelieve wooden rubber-band gun in under a minute, who could name every artist who ever drew Spider-Man or Doctor Strange…My father sat in that seat and watched for two and a half hours and didn’t lose focus. He didn’t have to get up for the bathroom. He didn’t become confused. He watched the film with me as I watched him, and he seemed to glory in it, to find something special that the real world didn’t offer. Alien loses his past, his planet, his parents, and he moves on. Something there seemed to touch him.

When it was over, my dad reached for me and I had to guide him far more carefully back up the theater’s center aisle.

Up, for someone with Alzheimer’s, is ever so much harder than down.

I took his hand and guided him up the small incline back to the lobby. He could barely walk. His balance was fucked. I wasn’t sure if he even remembered one third of the film we’d just watched. Halfway there, he slowed, turned to me and said, “So…we’re going to save the world?”

I rolled the dice.

My father drives like a madman from the IHOP to someplace else. He doesn’t know what the someplace else is, but he knows he has to be there. It calls to him from the dark places of the world, the places his own son would call the underworld. He doesn’t really understand his son, all the glitter and glam, the gargantuan egos. He doesn’t understand ego. He just wants to do what his body tells him. And his body says drive.

It will be a year before the diagnosis, but he knows something is off.

Eventually, after morning turns to afternoon and afternoon becomes dusk, after two tanks of gas and so many, many wrong turns, he arrives at Altus, the town where his mother was buried. But this isn’t where his body says he’s supposed to go. He grew up a few miles away, closer to Carnegie. It’s there his father found a final resting place, near a ramshackle sharecropper shack where he and his family lived, where his father never forgave him for living at the expense of his mom.

When he arrives at the ruin, he doesn’t get out of the car. Instead he drives on past, out into the stubble of the cotton field. Somewhere near the creek, near stones he remembers sleeping on when he was little, somewhere as alien as it is familiar, he stops the car, gets out and, letting his body drive, finds a side path, a little road that leads to a glade between the tree-line berm and the lowering gulley that runs from here to Lawton. Just this side of the culvert, chalky teeth of gravestones rise from Oklahoma’s red-dirt gums.

After touching stone, saying sad words, forgetting everything he’s come here for, he remembers the IHOP, remembers he was supposed to be headed home after eating sausage and hash browns, and stumbles back to his car. Alas, the land is unforgiving. The dirt beneath his wheels is pure mud. For hours he tries to drive back out. For hours he is rebuffed.

While he presses his foot to the foot feed, while he regrets everything he’s done — now, before, later — he thinks about his father, about his father’s scorn. He thinks about his own son. Wondering how he’s going to explain all this if he ever gets to a phone, revving his engine ever higher and higher, he wishes three wishes.

May Dan understand I was never disappointed, only sad when he seemed to compromise.

May he know how proud…

The car finally jumps and clears the mud. He cheers, briefly confused about why. Now where was I? Oh.

May he be sad when I’m gone.

My father’s story appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! number twenty-five. I held the small digest-sized comic in my hand as I walked toward the door of the store.

Beyond all imagining, buggering all odds, the sisters each rolled ones.

Drunk and doomed and somehow dear, I rolled four.

The rest was simple math. Whether the game was new or ancient, the die polymer or pumice or bone, I won the day by the margin of a single digit. It might not be much, but it meant the world to me.

Holding the book like I had my father’s hand, I approached the door of the comic book shop and looked back one last time. I saw the Vampire tapestry being sucked inward, swept aside like a theater curtain at a premier. It allowed a clear view of the glowing table and the galaxy it held beyond. In that moment, playing the role of Orpheus, of Lot’s wife, I saw the wave motion table, like a Tesla coil without boundaries, expand beyond the framework built to keep its stars inside. The black hole at the center of those lost suns began sucking in all the light I’d seen, every part and particle of a store that couldn’t exist, all the images I couldn’t unsee.

Sister, sister, mother, father, tiny tinsel tree…