Chris Lynch - Kill Switch

“What time is it, Da?” I ask, standing over him. It is good to keep asking them questions, keeping them as sharp with the basics as possible for as long as possible.

He turns away from the clock, gives me the squinty quizzical look now.

“The numbers are seven inches high for goodness’ sake. Are you blind already, Young Man?”

I am never Daniel or Dan or Danny or D.C. or Danny Boy or even District of Columbia, which I loved, not first thing in the morning. That would be too much to ask, and so I don’t ask for it. Young Man suits me just fine, as does the attitude. Feisty. We’ll actually be needing some feisty.

“What time is it, Old Boy?”

“XL,” he says, curling back under the covers like a high school sophomore. At some point, and for no discernible reason, XL became his abbreviation for extremely early. He’s rewriting the language by bits now.

“It’s time for our walk, Da? Remember, Doc said you were supposed to keep up with it, religious-like. The walking.”

He sighs, growls, sits up.

“Doc also says I am supposed to report for observation this morning. Quack-ass doctor schmuck.”

I splut a laugh out loud at the spit-perfect bratty-boy way he says the word “observation.” This is the Da I want.

“Well, walking comes first. Remember he said that? Remember, Da? Remember he said to remember, that every day the walking comes first? Remember?”

These days Da remembers lots of things that never happened, as far as I know. He unremembers lots of stuff that did. Then there is lots more middle ground that who knows whether it did or not, but anyway, I am hoping I can slip some things past him just now.

He grins at me, closes one eye like a pirate, and says, “What are you playing at, boy?”

I make the exact same face. “Not playing at anything. Just carrying out my duties of care and love for my beloved grandfather. That so bad?”

Among his many advanced skills, my grandfather can hold a pirate face.

“What are you playing at?” he says again. “Who walks at this hour? Rats and raccoons, that’s who, and that’s all.”

I sit on the side of the bed. “I’ll be the raccoon,” I say, poking him.

“The hell you will,” he says, slapping my hand aside and shoving me out of his way, “I’m no damn rat.”

I didn’t lie. We did take a walk. We walked the three hundred yards, in the dark, to the park where we take our daily exercise. At four a.m. it is approximately twelve hours early. Okay, we also take an early walk, to the store about a quarter mile away. But even the early walk doesn’t happen until ten, and it is completely negated by being a venture to buy the pack of ciggies Da semisecretly smokes every day. He’s not supposed to smoke.

But we don’t do our circuits of the lovely, leafy park. We get into the waiting rust-bucket red Subaru wagon belonging to my cousin Jarrod.

“Wa-hey,” Jarrod says excitedly as we pile in.

“Wa-hey,” Da says, happy to take the backseat.

I get the front. “Jarrod, man, it reeks in here. Four o’clock in the morning, pal, and you are already sparking up?”

He pulls quickly away from the curb. “Danny Boy, I swear, that’s from yesterday.”

The smoke is clearly still visible in the vehicle’s close air.

“I can still see the smoke!”

He bows his head in something like shame. I reach over and adjust his forehead like it’s a rearview mirror. “Watch the road, fool. And pull over. I’m driving.”

We make the stop and change-up slick as a slightly addled pit crew at Daytona and are off again.

“I’m really sorry,” Jarrod says. “I was just really anxious. I’ve never been a getaway driver before and I just needed a soother to settle my nerves.”

“You are not a getaway driver,” I snap.

“Well, not anymore. You are.”

“Don’t bogart that joint,” says Da from the back.

I try to stare back at him while still being safe at the wheel.

“Da!” I say.

“ That is a cool old man,” Jarrod says.

“Da!” I say, suddenly unable not to be the prim parent of the group.

“Oh, please,” Da says, waving me off in the mirror.

“He’s just being provocative,” I say to Jarrod. “Comes with the territory.”

“What do you know?” Da says. “For your information, I lived the early seventies almost exclusively on cocaine and fruit smoothies.”

Jarrod is laughing and worshipping at the same time. “That’s incredible,” he says.

“I know,” says Da coolly. “Practically nobody had even heard of smoothies then.”

They are not related, being from opposite sides of my family. Jarrod is my mother’s brother’s kid, and for the most part is left alone by the family to do his own thing. He is twenty-seven years old and basically nobody has any clue what his thing might be.

Which is one reason I thought of him.

Another is that I knew he would be available, come on short notice, and not bother with uncomfortable questions.

Best of all, and maybe most shameful for me-if I had time for shame-is that he shares something in common with Da: He will remember very little of what transpires.

I do love him, though. And there’s nothing as powerful as the amalgam of love plus need.

“You are sure, Jarrod, that there is nobody there right now. As in no-body, right?”

“Boyo,” he says, “the students don’t come back for another two weeks, every last faculty and administration type is off squeezing the dregs out of the vacation, and I remain as king and emperor of all I survey there. It’s a really small school and all, and I think they even left me with, like, the only set of keys. It’s like twenty-five hundred keys or something.”

“I have more keys than that,” Da crows.

“Really?” Jarrod says.

It’s a three-hour drive. I do hope they both get sleepy before they get fussy.

Jarrod is the caretaker at a tiny college that you reach by driving to nowhere and then continuing on for another forty-five minutes. At peak term time it has approximately five hundred students, the vast majority of them sent there for its remoteness. Tuition is relatively high for a small school that isn’t known for doing anything particularly noteworthy, particularly well. The truth is, it is a haven for wealthy kids who have slalomed their way down to the bottom of the academic slope. And they do have a ski team. It’s a haven for their parents, really, and as such, the place is shiny and handsome and very well-equipped.

And getting in or out, through its private dense woodland covering about the landmass of Rhode Island, takes above-average determination.

“Left at the tree,” Jarrod says when I finally prod him awake.

We are looking at about fifty million trees.

“Once we find the place, Jarrod, I’m going to kick your ass.”

“We’re close, we’re close, I swear. It’s just…”

Lots of Jarrod’s sentences end just that way, so I am not hopeful.

“Quarter mile up,” Da says, surprising me into jerking the wheel. He has not given any sign of consciousness for an hour. “There will be a very small duck pond on your left. A fishing hut and a west-facing bench for watching the sunsets. Fifty yards past that there is a T junction. Take a right. I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t get a cigarette.”

I quickly get over the mild shock and beyond-mild skepticism I feel about Da’s contribution because I don’t have a lot of options and it’s always possible he is entering that so-far-gone-he’s-visionary stage of things. Then when the pond and hut and bench and junction all show up precisely on cue, I am converted.

“I don’t think that’s the way,” Jarrod says when I take the appointed right.