K Breese - Future Imperfect

“Why?!” I shout at him, kick sand at him. “Why are you telling me this?!”

My dad says, “Because I love you. Both of you.”

“But you betrayed us. Both of us.”

Dad says, “And I’m asking you to forgive me.”

“I can’t stop what will happen. No one can.”

Dad says, “You can try. You have to try. You can save Jimi.”

“Not from me.”

Dad says, “From himself. Don’t let him make you do this.”

I want to tear the stars out of the sky, to bury them in my dad’s eyes. I want to rip up the beach and pull Jimi’s mother’s bones out of the water and beat the world with them. This anger pulses and thrashes away inside me like a lizard. Standing here, in never-never land, I know I need to calm myself down. I know that if I don’t pull back now, I’ll lose control.

I think about Grandpa Razor, about Dr. Borgo, standing over me watching my eyes run crazy under the lids. I think about them shuffling their feet in anticipation. But mostly, I think about my poor mother and about Vauxhall. I remind myself of why I stopped the concussions. Why I decided to go clean.

And I feel the anger slip.

I step back from my dad, turn to the water, and I put my hands on my head and press down hard to press the pain away.

And little by little I can sense the fury trickling out.

Little by little it gets smaller.

Clipped away just like that orange monster Bugs Bunny shaved down to shoes.

It’s hard pushing my hate away, but it works. I take long, deep breaths, slow it down, and I’m able to cool it. I count a few stars, focus on the spaces between them, and then look back at my dad and ask him if this is going to be a regular thing.

“Should I ever expect to see you again?” I ask.

Dad shrugs. He stands up and puts a hand on my shoulder. This move, the one he’s doing here in the moonlight, it’s as old and established as anything else dads do. It’s nice. He says, “I certainly hope so.”

“How come you never did it until now? You’ve been in a coma long enough.”

“I’ve tried. For years I’ve tried. At first the door was just locked, like you hadn’t discovered your abilities. And then, I could just see from the outside. Like looking in at a diorama. The addiction kept me out. I don’t know why. It was like there wasn’t room for me in your mind.”

“What’s it like in there, Dad? Asleep like that.”

“It’s like nothing. It’s like a waiting room.”

“I hope you do visit again. I like this.”

“Me too. Just, no punches next time, ’kay?”

I agree.

We walk down the beach to where there’s a lawn chair I didn’t notice before. Dad sits down in it and takes a cold glass of water from out of nowhere and sips it, the ice chiming. Then he crosses his arms and looks over at me and says, “You turned out wonderful.”

Then, standing up with a huff, the chair and glass vanishing behind him like they were smoke, my father says, “You can’t trust Grandpa Razor.”

“How do you know that?”

“I met him, once, long time ago. Back when I was doing my thing, there was a group of them. We used to, well, when I was with this woman, Jimi’s mother, there was a wild scene going on in Denver. It was the late eighties and people were funny then. There was this punk rocker kind of guy, Bob, I think his name was-”

“Slow Bob?”

“Right, so you’ve met him too? Well, he kind of put together this group of people with similar talents. It wasn’t anything but a feel-good club, an opportunity to talk and drink and get our respective highs in a private place. Things, of course, got bad fast. Excess always leads to, well, regression. Deep down, people really are just animals. Grandpa Razor, he was the worst animal of all. What I’m saying is, be very careful around him. Be strong.”

And with that I’m pulled out of the vision the way a stuntman on a bungee cord is, just snapped back up into the sky and into the night and back behind my eyelids.

Before I even open my eyes I know something is wrong.

I can hear it.

The room is silent the way a cat is silent right before it jumps on an insect. I open my left eye first, just a crack, just enough to see through the haze of my eyelashes that the lights are still on and there’s no one standing over me. Then I open the right eye. Again, just a crack. I move it around, open it just a tad wider, and see a shadow to my right, in the corner. A cat ready to pounce.

I roll to my left and I do it fast.

I fall off the futon onto the floor and then stand up quick, both eyes wide open.

Grandpa Razor’s the cat; he’s standing on the opposite side of the bed with a syringe filled with red liquid. He looks surprised, but it’s hard to know ’cause his eyes are so heavy-lidded.

I back away from him, my fists up like I’m a boxer.

“What’s the deal, Gramps?” I ask, pushing back my fear.

He says, “Seriously? You weren’t supposed to wake up so soon.”

I notice a pile just under the table; it’s Dr. Borgo. He’s lying there pretty jacked but he’s breathing. Has a big lump on his head. Pointing at my shrink, I say, “You sure get around with that billy club. I hope that right now he can see the future and I really hope he’s enjoying a nice screening of me kicking the shit out of you three minutes from now.”

Grandpa Razor doesn’t laugh like I expect him to.

If anything he looks more determined and jabs his syringe around.

“You knew, didn’t you?” I ask, summoning up my new angry mode. Trying out my new angry voice. It sounds very effective.

This gets Grandpa Razor talking. He stops moving at me with the needle and he says, “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into, Ade. Wasting your gift, throwing it all away to try and…” He shakes his head in frustration. “You need to accept what the gift brings. There should be no debate about it. And if-”

I cut the slob off. “If you believe this rules business, then you couldn’t stop me. Doping me up here or OD’ing me wouldn’t do anything, right? If destiny is destiny, then why the hell are you trying to inject me with that?”

“This isn’t what you think it is,” Grandpa Razor says. “Regardless of what you saw, what Jimi’s father told you, you still don’t know what’s really happening. You’re still just as clueless, and what Janice told you, it’ll happen, and I’ll be there just cheering them on-”

He stops right there.

He stops because my rage boils over and I kick him full in the jaw. He goes back fast and he falls down hard, crushing a chair. There are teeth on the table and I see blood, but it doesn’t stop me. I jump on top of Grandpa Razor and just start whaling. After a while my knuckles hurt and they look ugly and I take a breather, but then I just go back to it.

At least until Dr. Borgo stops me.

I’m about to bring both my hands down together, my fingers all intertwined, down on Grandpa Razor’s mess of a face, when Borgo grabs my hands and tells me to stop. He tells me that if I don’t, I’ll kill this guy. He says, “Already, he won’t look the same for a few months at least.”

I stop. I fall back on the floor, my legs crossed, and look down at my hands.

They’re shaking from my rage. They are all ballooned up and red. My hands, they look like the hands of a boxer’s after a night of cheap rounds and hard faces. I look up at Borgo and say, “You don’t look very good, Doc.”

Borgo’s lump on his head is bigger than I thought at first. A classic egg.

Borgo says, “It’ll heal.”

“You see anything?” I ask.

My shrink tries to laugh but he says it hurts his ribs. He says, “If I didn’t stop you, what do you think you would have done to him?”