C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

I said, “Don’t matter why,” quiet as I could, but she wasn’t much listening to me just then. Mostly she was tellin’ a story that I thought ate her up inside, maybe one she was afraid I was gonna judge her for. One she was afraid was a deal-breaker for me, ‘cause a crazy parent might mean she’d go nuts someday too. I wasn’t gonna reassure her yet, not until she could hear me, which I reckoned might take a couple decades. I had the time.

“I was about half a mile from Dad when the car came out of nowhere. I didn’t hear it coming, and I still don’t know how it missed me. Something knocked me aside, and Dad…” She took a deep breath. “Dad swore he’d seen a man on a silver horse come down from the sky and tackle me.”

I twitched and sat up straighter, feeling like somebody’d rung a bell nearby. Annie’s jaw got tight. “After that he began to…have visions. About the man on the silver horse, and a lot of other things. He started painting them, and started telling stories about the paintings.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she wouldn’t let go of the wheel, much less look at me. “They got more and more awful, his stories. Stories about magic things happening. About demons and devils and…and sometimes about heroes, but the heroes lost a lot. And then after a while he started…”

She wiped her eyes and choked the steering wheel again. “After a while he started thinking I was important in all those stories. That the silver man had protected me because of that. And he wouldn’t…let me out of the house, not even to go to school. He was trying to protect me, he said, but he started getting…violent, and it…it just got worse and worse, Gary, until finally we didn’t have any choice. We’re lucky,” she said with all kindsa desperation in her voice. “We’re lucky, because the institutions aren’t like they were even just a few years ago. They treat him well. He’s not dangerous as long as he thinks I’m safe, so we tell him…well, we don’t tell him anything. We tell him I stay home except for when I come to visit him, and he paints, and…I should have told you. I should have told you before, but I was so afraid you’d—” She buried her face in her hands, and I finally took that as a chance to say something.

Or to pull her up against me an’ hold on, which seemed smarter. I kissed her hair and let her cry while all sorts of crazy thoughts swam around my head. Same ol’ voice saying this ain’t right, while the resta me wondered what the hell it mattered if it was right or wrong. Wasn’t like I could change what was, and when I thought that, the voice said hell, what if I’m remembering it wrong? and got quiet again.

Any other time and I mighta mentioned it all to Annie, mighta said I thought I was going crazy, but sitting in front of a nuthouse that her dad was inside didn’t seem like a good time to make jokes. Instead I said, “Don’t change nothin’, sweetheart,” against Annie’s hair. “Don’t mean I love you any less, and it don’t mean I’m worried about our future, all right? I’ve seen his paintings. Your old man’s an artist, and everybody knows artists are crazy. It ain’t a bad thing. S’all that I’m gonna see in this, okay?”

Annie laughed, except it sounded more like a wet snort. I couldn’t help laughing too, an’ she laughed again in embarrassment, ‘til I was belly laughin’ and she was snorting like a hog in mud. Tears ran down both our faces and we leaned on each other until laughs turned to giggles and finally into wheezing sighs. I kissed her hair again and said, “Better now?”, and she sat up to look at herself in the rear-view mirror.

“All except my makeup.” She touched under her eyes, tryin’ to wipe away mascara smears, then took a tissue from her purse and got herself tidied up again. As she folded it away, she said, “I love my dad, Gary. I wish he wasn’t in here, that this hadn’t happened to him, and I know it’s uncomfortable, but…be nice? Please?”

“He’s your father, doll. He’s always gonna have my respect.” We got outta the car and she took my hand, leading me into the institute. It smelled too clean and the halls echoed, but the doctors and nurses smiled hello, and called Annie by name as we went upstairs to an art studio. I hung at the door a minute, surprised to be watching half a dozen people painting and drawing. “This ain’t at all like what I thought it’d be.”

“It’s one of the newest institutes in the country. There were reform laws passed a few years ago.” Annie glanced at me to see if I knew what she was talking about, and I kinda shrugged. I remembered seeing somethin’ about it in the papers and hearing it on the radios, but it hadn’t affected me, so it hadn’t made much impression. “They used to be very bad,” Annie said. “A lot of them are still bad, but this one—a wealthy man’s wife was the first patient here. He had it built for her, so she could get the best care in the country. We were lucky to live so close, so Dad could come here instead of one of the other places. That’s him,” she said with a nod toward an older fella with hair blonder than Annie’s. He was sitting with his back to us, facing a window, but the painting he worked on didn’t have anything to do with the view. All I could tell was it was a woman with dark hair, but she seemed familiar somehow.

“Will he mind if we interrupt him?”

Annie shook her head. “He paints things from visions, not from the world, so the light never changes and the images never go away. It’s fine.” She tugged me forward, saying, “Hi, Dad,” when we were a few feet way.

Tim Macready turned to look at his daughter, a smile already in place. But then he looked past her at me, an’ the smile fell away into slack-jawed relief. He sank in on himself, hands going over his face, and dropped his forehead all the way toward his knees. The painting behind him was a green-eyed girl in her twenties, wearing her black hair so short it looked almost like my own military cut. I’d never seen a girl with hair like that, nor wearing the kinda outfit she had on: a white tank top short enough to expose her belly, jeans real low on her hips, and combat boots like my own. She had a kinda beaky nose, and a skinny scar on one cheek, and a buncha jewelry that didn’t match each other: something like gold earrings, but on the back curve of her ear, not the lobe, a silver choker necklace, an’ a chunky copper bracelet on her left wrist. Even weirder, she had a little purple bracer shield on one arm, and a glowin’ blue sword in the other hand.

I didn’t know what ta make of the painting, except looking at it was like a shot through the heart, just like seeing Annie for the first time. I stood there going hot and cold, and Tim Macready said into his hands, “It’s you. Thank God it’s you. You’ll take care of her now.”

Two months after I got to Korea, Annie wrote to say her dad was coming home. He’d quit painting that day, never even finishing the one he’d been working on, and the visions that had haunted him faded away. After a month, her letter said, the doctors had started being cautiously optimistic he’d recovered, and after two, they thought he was safe to go home. She’d explained to him about her being in school, and he was all right with it,

which is so strange, after so long, that it’s hard to explain, Gary. For the

past three years he’s been so adamant that I do nothing to risk myself, and

now to have him coming home, knowing that I’m only home for the

summer…my mother is worried, but trying not to show it. I only hope he’ll

be well enough for me to go back to Oakland in the autumn.