Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Now, my father’s hands move almost too fast for me to make out clearly. He carves a honey-baked ham to make sandwiches for us, and he flips the carving knife around like a Benihana chef while the kids cheer. Nobody knows exactly what he’s done to upgrade his hands, under all the liver spots and calluses. We know better than to ask.

“Don’t teach the kids to play with knives, dad,” Eric says at last.

Two nights ago, my sister Joanna called me, the first time we’d talked in months. “You know you’re probably going to get the hands, Emmy,” she said randomly at one point. “You’re his favorite, even after everything. You could probably get whichever parts of him you wanted.” Joanna is the only one of us kids who inherited Dad’s genius, she got a math PhD and even helped solve some theorems and things. She wound up being a super-actuary at one of the top insurance companies, and she can rattle off the chances of anything bad happening to anyone.

My father picks up Rosemary and Sebastian in each arm, holding them up to his Santa beard and cradling them. He bounces on the balls of his feet like he’s about to start Lindy-hopping.

I turn away for a second, and see a strange tapestry on the sitting room wall, way on the other side of the house. And then I realize, it’s not a tapestry. It’s a beehive in a glass case, open to a small apiary out back.

My dad comes up behind me, almost soundless, and touches my bare shoulder. His fingers are cool and a little sandpapery. “Looking good, Em. You’ve cut your hair in a bob, and gotten yourself a pair of glasses with baroque frames,” he says, by way of saying, “I see you.” He seems distracted. For a moment his hand stays in place and we watch the bees together, and I wonder if this means that we’ve patched things up between us. Or if we’re just pretending we’ve patched it up, and if there’s any difference. I try not to wonder if this is one of our last real moments together.

“Happy eightieth birthday, Dad,” Eric says, joining us, lite beer in hand. “I hope I look half as good when I’m your age.”

3. Intellectual property

By late afternoon Friday, pretty much everyone has arrived, and my dad’s house, the embarrassingly named Thimblewick, is overrun. There are my three older brothers and one older sister, plus their fourteen children and even a few grandchildren. There are only two bedrooms inside the house, besides my dad’s, and by common consent those go to the families with babies: My nephew Derek and his twin daughters Marjorie and Isabella, and my nephew Roger and his son Gregor.

And yes, Isabella’s last name is Pinch, like almost all of us. We all call her Izzy, though “Izzy Pinch” is still kind of ludicrous. She’ll just have to own it, I guess.

The rest of us wind up putting up tents, all over the lawn and the clearing out back before the woods. Dad swears the bees are practically wintering already, and won’t bother us. Of course, everybody starts getting stung, until Dad closes some vent. We build three bonfires, including one on the front lawn, where we dig a huge pit. It hardly matters—one of the banks will take the house soon enough.

After dark, Dad produces two turkeys and a bloated turducken from a massive oven, and starts carving them on a big folding table in the back yard. He can carve two turkeys simultaneously, although after he notices people watching he starts focusing on just one at a time. He shifts his weight effortlessly as he moves around the table. My sister Joanna is watching carefully, to see how he does it. Joanna’s hair has gone mostly gray, and she’s gotten hatched-faced.

Joanna told me she expects to inherit Dad’s pelvis and hips, when he dies. She thinks he developed some sort of technology that would revolutionize hip replacements everywhere. A new self-lubricating type of acetabular, plus there’s a gel in his hip sockets that’s full of these special bacteria that Dad found in the Antarctic that absorb the impact when his feet strike the ground, and turn it into energy.

It’s undeniably creepy the way Joanna covets her father’s pelvis.

Someone has set up speakers in the backyard, playing classic Motown and Stax. The music doesn’t even begin to drown out the lamentation of the children, who have just realized that (a) they’re camping out in the cold, (b) there’s only enough hot water for a few showers at any given time of day, and (c) there’s no internet or cellphone service. I hear one of my nieces, Deedee I think, explaining very seriously that if she can’t get online for two days, she will have lost all social status. Forever.

“I figure we’ve got a day, tops, until it’s full-on Hunger Games out here,” Eric says, like he relishes the idea.

All of the adults stay up late, drinking pungent scotch and reminiscing around the biggest bonfire. At least some of the kids get their usual bedtimes revoked as well, so that there are little white blobs running around us and shrieking. Every few minutes a kid comes running up and says that a kid hit another kid, and someone has to do something.

I wind up sitting next to my father, close enough to the fire that my face and eyes get dehydrated and I’m flushed, and it is like a perfect facsimile of emotional openness. My father sits perfectly straight, his spine effortlessly creating the posture of an 18-year-old Alexander technique student. His neck is a very pale green.

“I’m surprised,” I say, “you can sit this close to the fire. Don’t you have some parts that’ll melt or something?”

My dad just laughs and cocks his head.

With the loose clothes my father is wearing, you can’t even tell what he’s replaced. Most of the legs, for sure. The hip joints. The spine. The skin on his neck, of course. Rumor has it that his whole rib cage is some kind of hydrogen-based generator now. My dad can drink whiskey and eat spicy food without being in horrible pain afterwards, because he’s upgraded his stomach and turned his appendix into some kind of backup filtration unit. He can breathe smoky air better than I can. Nobody will know for sure what he’s done, until someone cuts him up.

Neither of us has talked in a while. I get the feeling my dad is trying to say something that I need to hear. I try to make a silence that he can speak into. We both stare straight ahead, at the pillar of fire. Eventually, my middle brother Dudley comes up and says that there’s a problem with the toilets. Both of them. My dad laughs and says he’ll get his plumbing tools. I stay by the fire, hoping eventually I’ll feel sleepy.

My father told me a hundred stories that he made up on the spot when he used to tuck me in at night, but I forgot them all and he claims he did too. Intellectual property is like that, he told me once. You can write ideas down but then they get trapped in a shape they can’t grow out of. That wasn’t the reason he’d started confining his biomechanical innovations to just his own body, though—it was more because his body was the one thing his creditors couldn’t ever take away. He was in debt so deep, he had to become a limited liability corporation and then sue himself out of existence.

4. Two boats

Saturday morning, my dad announces he’s taking a hike in the woods. Anyone who wants to is welcome to join him. He also claims the woods are deer tick-free, although he won’t say why. He passes out identical bright red scarves for everybody, so that we all look like carolers. Or cultists.

Everybody’s so bored by this point that we all agree to go along with him, although that means that our departure gets endlessly delayed because somebody’s baby needs to be changed, or there would be hell to pay if my nephew Stephen doesn’t have a juicebox.