Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“I’ve been trying to keep my kids from going off in the woods by themselves,” my brother Dudley says. “Even though when we were kids, we ran around in the woods all the time. Now, though, I keep thinking there could be snakes or raccoons. Raccoons can be vicious. I don’t want my kids getting the idea it’s okay to wander.” Dudley has gained a lot of weight lately, and it suits him.

“I thought the reason people kept their kids on a leash nowadays was because they were worried about kidnappers and pedophiles,” I said. “And you know, there’s probably none of those within a hundred miles of here. We could look it up, do a Megan’s Law thing, if we had the internet.”

I might be infertile. I might not. My ex and I tried for a few years, with no luck. But I never wanted to go get the tests because if they found something, then it would be a medical problem all of a sudden, and I’d be trapped on the conveyer belt. My dad taught me early on that sometimes the secret to happiness is figuring out which questions you’re better off not answering.

My oldest brother Robert thinks my father experimented on me in the womb and that’s why I can’t have children. But Robert would be ready to believe almost any horror story about Dad.

Finally, we’re all ready to go on the hike, and then somebody realizes that one of the children is a fake. That is, he’s not any of our kids. He doesn’t even look like a member of our family. He’s too perfect, too blond and tow-headed. Everybody always checks to make sure their own kids are all accounted for, but nobody ever checks to see if there are too many children. My brother Robert and I drag the kid, whose name is Nicky, inside the house to interrogate him, and it only takes a few minutes before he confesses: he’s an infiltrator. Nicky’s a child actor, whose main claim to fame is being a featured extra during the third season of He’s The Champ , and his talent agency has repurposed him for corporate espionage. He won’t say who his client is; it could be any of a dozen companies.

“I’ll drive him to the nearest town and drop him off,” Robert says.

“I’ll ride with you,” I say. So the two of us get in Robert’s hatchback and drive to Somerset in total silence, with Nicky in the back seat staring at us. We leave Nicky at a Friendly’s with a payphone, and we give him five bucks.

There’s no kid listening in on our conversation on the way back, but Robert and I still don’t talk to each other. Robert’s almost old enough to be my father himself, but he looks much older than that.

When Robert is parking, on the side of the driveway near the bottom, I ask him what part of Dad he thinks he’ll inherit.

Robert pauses in the middle of pulling up the parking brake. He looks at me for the first time. “The feet,” he says at last. “You notice Dad is never barefoot, and he wears those clown shoes. I think he’s got transgenic monkey feet, or something along those lines. He never loses his balance.” Then he gets out of the car and jogs up to the house, where everybody is ready to walk into the woods.

Joanna was the one who spread this idea that we would each get a piece of Dad when he passed away. She had some phone conversation with him where he said we would all be provided for, and we would all have something to remember him by. She swears he was pretty explicit about the arrangement.

My father is much taller than I remember, taller even than he was yesterday. His grandchildren cluster around his waist, asking him questions about himself. At first I think they’re actually curious about grandpa’s wartime experiences in Korea, like when he got kidnapped by pirates from Pusan who were raiding Taiwanese shipping in an old gunboat, and he drank too much homemade soju and saw some sort of “maenad” floating over the sea foam. But no. The kids are just trying to get my dad to explain how to get the internet turned on.

None of us brought a cellphone, so we have no way of keeping track of time, but it feels like an hour later when we finally come through the woods into a big clearing. A boat looms out of the tall grass and blanched dandelions. It’s an old-fashioned sailing ship, and you can glimpse a big wooden steering wheel on deck. It’s wooden, and half rotted, but the seven sails are clean and crisp and white.

Rosemary squeals and runs towards the boat, but my dad grabs her and scoops her up, putting a finger to his lips.

A deer comes out of the wide-open side of the boat, then looks at us. No horns, but a huge sinewy body, as tall as I am. A doe, then. Her body is dotted with clouds. She stands for a moment, then scampers into the forest. Another deer comes out of the boat, then another and another.

“It’s the deer boat,” my father says. As if he’s just proved something to us, that he’s been claiming all along.

5. Metal birds

Several years ago, my father stopped talking to me. He didn’t announce he was cutting me off, and I didn’t notice for a few weeks, or maybe even longer. And then I thought it was just another one of those queasy Dad moments, like when I converted to Christianity, or when I came out as a lesbian. It took a while to know for sure: this was different. My father was making a point of not talking to me, even when I spoke directly to him, like at a family dinner or something.

My mom was still alive, and I pleaded with her to tell me what was going on, but she said she didn’t feel like playing telephone with my dad and me. Mom was tired a lot. Nobody thought it meant anything.

I went home and stalked my dad. He still walked with a limp from his Korean war injury back then, so he couldn’t get away from me. “Please,” I said, “please just tell me. Whatever it is we’ll fix it. There can’t be something so bad we can’t make it right, between us, you can build anything, and I make problems go away for a living. Please, dad. Dad. This could be the last time we see each other, are you really going to waste it shutting me out? Please just say something.” He just gazed at me like there were no words. His neck gave off a pale green bioluminescence, because it was dusk.

Weeks passed, maybe months. I was bucking for a promotion at Real Outcome Solutions, so I only thought about my dad’s latest weirdness every now and then. And then my mom was officially sick and that took precedence.

One day my father sent me an email, with just a link to a video, about a minute long. A drone aircraft, a UAV, was flying over the desert, more graceful than any airplane with people inside could ever be. The plane coasted and then dove, like it was going to buzz someone’s house in the wilderness. And then a streak of smoke came out of it, and the house burst. The next thing you saw was a crater.

The videos started coming every few days after that, beautiful instructional films and blurry cellphone footage, always showing metal birds in the desert.

After a few weeks, my father sent a link to an article, about how my company had helped secure the government contract for these UAVs with a particular contractor. I remembered sitting in on some of those meetings, but it wasn’t my baby or anything. And another article about civilian deaths. And a few days later, a third article, about how that company was suing my father and some of his friends over patents.

I never knew which pissed my father off more: that his designs were helping to kill babies, or that he was getting ripped off.

My mom’s survival chances dropped below 40 percent and we gave up on the radiation and the cyberknife. I took indefinite leave and moved back home to help take care of Mom. Eventually, Dad and I had to start talking again, because it’s hard to avoid speaking to someone when you’re each supporting one arm of a dying person.