Chris Lynch - Kill Switch

And I still don’t.

“Why would you actually maim another person, Da? It just doesn’t compute. You can be a prickly guy sometimes, but there’s no way you could ever be-”

“He was a scientist of some kind,” Da says offhandedly. “I really didn’t do a lot of homework on him, so I didn’t know hardly anything about him. All I knew was that he was doing some great and important work, for which he needed his eyes, and he was doing that work for the incorrect guys.”

Now, I get a chill.

I take the joint.

I cough hard enough to break my own ribs, because I don’t smoke.

Da hops up and pounds my back, hard and many times, until I have to ask him to stop.

Here is one of my weaknesses, the kind of thing Da always mocked and scolded me for. When events spin out my control and understanding, I instinctively call my sister. Yes, it is childish, and no, she does not normally come up with insights or warm words. In fact, she is usually kind of an ass.

But the world gets back on its axis when I do it. For whatever reason.

I take out my cell phone.

“What are you doing?” Da asks.

“Making a call. Just calling home. To see if anybody even noticed we’re gone.”

“No,” Da says, and wrests the phone out of my hand with such calm authority, I feel, for a second, like that other stuff could actually be true. “No cell phones, Daniel. The basics here. You use your phone and they will be here today. You want them to catch us?” He assaults my phone like he’s disemboweling roadkill for supper, removing the battery and stuffing it in one pocket, slipping the SIM card into another.

“Hey, I got that phone for my graduation,” I said.

“You’re in college now. Stop living in the past.”

Again, it’s in his words, his tone. It was almost a lark, stealing him away so he could avoid observation. But hearing him actually put words to it, hearing him acknowledge… them …

catch us… makes it feel real and nasty and dangerous.

“Technology is for chumps,” Da says.

“This is for real, isn’t it?” I say, coming very late to the party.

“Yes it is, Young Man.”

“And it’s serious.”

“Deadly so.”

The air is heavy, smoke hanging there like it is never going to leave. The big, fat, scary words floating there too. I am speechless.

Jarrod is not. “Tell another one, Da. What else you got?”

“Okay,” says Da, like the genial gramps telling the little ones bedtime tales. “But first we have to eat. I am starving.”

The thought of food makes me retch.

There are a lot of woods around this campus. That’s a good thing, because woods are good. Comforting, relaxing, healthifying. But it’s also a bad thing because I never realized before that woods are damn scary.

In fairness, everything is scary now.

I am seeing shadows behind every tree. I hear unfamiliar bird calls and I am thinking it’s them and their array of clever spook tricks, tracking us and closing in and surrounding us. A chipmunk darts out of a hole and scares the squat out of me. A chipmunk.

Da looks as comfortable and calm as could be. It may have a little bit to do with the fact that in the last twenty-four hours he has gotten comfortable and calm with Jarrod at least three times. He’s not high right now, though. We are taking our daily exercise in a whole new atmospheric landscape, but he has that same contented air about him as if we were walking in the park back home.

It’s good to get out with him, just the two of us. I asked Jarrod if he wanted to come and he looked at me as if I had offered him some amateur, unmedicated surgery.

“Why would anybody want to just, like, walk?”

So I just asked for guidance, as he was the caretaker and all. Like, where freaks like us might find a decent walking trail or two.

“What is this, an exam? I am an employee here, not a student.”

“Jarrod?”

“Over that way somewhere,” he said, pointing vaguely with his nose since his hands and eyes were taken up with butchering a bunch of simulated people on his video game.

So we found “that way somewhere” basically on our own.

“I know you don’t like to hear this kind of thing, Da, but I am really worried.”

“Don’t be,” he says, looking all around at the flora and fauna.

“You have to stop saying stuff like that. It’s not helpful. This feels like a dangerous situation, and sometimes fear is the correct response to such things. I mean, if you aren’t just talking nonsense- ow, ow, ow, stop it .”

He has grabbed my wrist, bent it forward, and applied his thumb hard to the depression at the base of my thumb. I am down on one knee before I even realize what’s happening.

“I love you, Daniel, more than anyone on earth. And I do not talk nonsense.”

“I understand,” I say, straining not to spill tears since that would probably provoke him to paper clip my eyeballs out. He helps me up again.

“You okay?” he says.

I nod. “So, what’s going to happen now?”

“Well, I’m not going to kill you or anything, if that’s what you mean. Unless you make me really mad.”

“I won’t do that. But I meant-”

“I know what you meant. The answer is…”

And here he does something that shocks me and unsettles me probably more than all the other stuff. He takes me by the hand, and holds on as we walk. I stare, in disbelief, at my grandfather’s inhumanly cold hand.

“The answer is, they are going to track me down, wherever we go. They will get me and bring me back and, one way or another, shush me.”

I shake loose of his hand, as if he has just done something to offend me, though he certainly has not.

“Shush you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “shush, you know…” He holds an index finger to his lips. “Hey, we had a very funny thing back when I was still working. If somebody needed shushing, we would do the regular shush, with the one finger. Shhhhhh. If it got more serious, then we elevated to quadro-shush.” He holds up four fingers of one hand like a karate chop and wiggles them in front of his lips as he shushes. “Then, if it was serious serious, they got the octo-shush.” He holds both hands up now, eight fingers waving like sea grass underwater, in front of his shushing lips.

“That is funny,” I say, “I guess.”

“Yeah,” he says, lowering his hands and looking up high into the tree where some large dusky bird of prey just dropped in. “I’m pretty sure they are going to octo-shush me, Young Man.”

I can almost see Da’s fade-out coming, happening as if by design, as the cloudiness moves across his face.

“Because of all that stuff you did? What you know?”

“Huh?” he says, looking distractedly at the bird.

“It’s because you decided to start talking about it after all this time. Maybe your conscience is trying to make a comeback.”

He shakes his head, not entertaining that theory for a second.

“I just forgot to forget.” He shrugs.

“Well, just stop talking, Old Boy? Simple. Clam up, for god’s sake, and everything can go back to fine and you and I can go to the races and stop being the races.”

He shrugs again, and it is another new and unwelcome trait. Never a shrugger, this man, never on the fence about anything. “What the hell. I’m dying anyway, aren’t I?”

“You are not-”

“It is fatal, and you know it. Even I know it. Takes too long anyway. Disassembles you by bits, till you are nothing but bits. Maybe somebody gives me a homemade lobotomy, they’re just doing me a favor, sparing me the worst of it.”

“Let’s go,” I say, tugging him by the arm. He has mentioned his coming death only a couple of times but it makes me want to kill him when he does. “You’ve stared at that bird long enough.”