John Jodzio - Knockout

“If it didn’t look like her,” he jokes, “I wouldn’t need to be here, right?”

While everyone looks across the street, I sit down at my desk to decide which bills to pay this month. Electric or water? Gas or phone? I wonder if our power got turned off would anyone notice? Could I light some scented candles from my dead mother’s curio cabinet and just tell everyone I’m trying for more ambiance?

I rip up a past due notice about our mortgage and my father pads around stuffing everyone’s pipes. The doctors tell me to surround him with familiar things, to keep him on a regular schedule. The doctors tell me he will have good and bad days. At first, they tell me, the bad days will be equally bad for both him and me. Then the bad days will get subtly better for him and significantly worse for me. At some point my father’s realization of what a bad day is or isn’t will slide from his consciousness and this fact will cleave my heart into a number of tiny pieces but luckily leave him unfazed. He’ll get a lot better when he gets a little worse, the doctors say.

“How about a huge sale?” Jennie Frontiere asks. “Show their asses you’re here for the long haul.”

None of our asses is here for the long haul, especially Jennie’s. She’s got bone cancer and opium is the only thing that deadens the ache in her arms and legs. Sometimes she tries to knit mittens for her grandchildren, but after a hit on the pipe her knitting needles slide out of her fingers and clatter to the floor.

“What about promotional punch cards?” Jake suggests. “Ten pipes, the eleventh is free?”

The line snaking out Opium Depot’s door curls down our block. I scan it for familiar faces, for any customers of ours they’ve already poached. My dad keeps busy. He fluffs pillows, brews a fresh pot of decaf.

Our place looks almost exactly the same as when he opened the doors thirty years ago. Red and gold walls. Silk tassels hanging from every goddamn thing. I’ve worked the register since I was eight and for the last twenty years I’ve watched hundreds of people kill themselves slowly and convincingly. It makes me sad to think I probably won’t get to see our current group of regulars meet their maker too.

My father pushes dirty sheets into the washing machine, pulls clean ones from the dryer. Outside our doors, all bets are off, but inside here, he’s still a huge help to me. Inside here, he can sometimes make me forget he forgets.

“We’ve outlasted everyone before,” he says. “We’ll just do it again, right?”

The memory loss chatrooms tell me to pick my battles, to try to keep his stress level low. All the commenters advise me to conserve my energy for the long haul ahead. Why deliver bad news when you’ll need to deliver the same bad news in five minutes, they say, and then again two minutes after that?

“Of course we will,” I say. “We’ll bring those assholes to their knees.”

Allen, Jake, and Jennie shuffle back to their beds, jonesing for their next hit. I walk around and light their pipes. When I’m done I flop down on an open bed and my father lights me up.

“Maybe this will clarify things,” I yell out to everyone before I inhale. “Maybe we’ll get some better ideas after this.”

So yes, instead of fighting Opium Depot, what we decide to do in this case is to wait it out, hope for strength or illumination to descend from above. What we do in this case is smoke.

In this case?

In every case.

When I wake up later there’s a bright yellow piece of paper stuffed into my mouth. It’s a promotional flyer from Opium Depot. All my regulars have them in their mouths too. Someone from Opium Depot waltzed through our doors while we were zonked out and leafleted our asses.

My father’s asleep on his cot. He used to be a light sleeper, awakened by the tiniest floorboard creak. Now you have to poke him in the chest for a minute straight before he’ll open his eyes.

“Help me gather up those flyers before everyone wakes up,” I tell him. “If they find out how cheap it is over there, we’re finished.”

My father rubs the sleep from his eyes, threads his toes into his flip-flops. I grab his forearm, steady him as he stands. His knees are bad from all the up and down that occurs in this business. He had his right knee replaced last year. His left one is giving him trouble now, clicking and popping. I wonder if we should just skip replacing it. Maybe he’ll just forget he’s in pain? Or maybe soon he’ll forget what pain even is? I jot down a note to ask the doctors about this at our next appointment.

While we grab the flyers, I look over at the counter and see that while I was nodding off my dad bought a huge bag of fortune cookies at the Asian market down the street, snapped the cookies in half, and then pulled out all the fortunes. There are at least a hundred fortunes spitballed on the counter. This is the second time my father’s done this in the last week, leaving crumbs all over the countertop and the floor. Lately he treats fortune cookies like they’re pull tabs or scratch-offs, like one of them will be a winner, like he’s searching for a phrase he’s waited his entire life to be told.

“Dad,” I say. “We talked about you leaving here alone, right?”

“I went out for a little bit,” he says. “I needed a break. I needed some goddamn sunshine.”

After our visit to the doctor last week, my father and I had a frank discussion about his condition, about the safety measures we needed to implement to keep him safe. The doctors keep suggesting I put him in assisted care, with prepared meals and around-the-clock care. Strangely, the doctors always clam up whenever I ask them where to get the money to pay for all that.

“I don’t like the new rules either,” I tell him, “but we need to keep you alive.”

My dad opens and closes his hands while we talk, balling his fingers into fists and then fanning them out wide. The doctors warned me there might be some initial frustration when the new rules were put in place, that things between the two of us might get physical. My guard is up. My dad’s in good shape, he still looks like he could land a decent uppercut.

“Are you forbidding me to come and go?” he asks.

Today’s a good day for him, a day of complete sentences. Today’s not a day of him hiding underneath our kitchen table or pissing in the snake plant. Today’s not a day of him calling me William, his dead brother’s name. Today my father isn’t cupping his forehead and telling me how his brain feels swollen, that it feels like there’s a gallon of water sloshing around inside his skull.

While we talk, I stare across the street at Opium Depot, at that huge inflatable gorilla perched on their roof, its hands held above its head in victory. Their parking lot is packed, cars circling around waiting for a spot to open up. Their valets sprint past our window in their blue windbreakers and black pants, tracking down cars they’ve stashed in their overflow lot.

“It’s for your own good,” I tell my dad.

My dad stares me down in the same way he stared me down when I was in high school and I smashed his Buick through our garage door. I look down at the floor to avoid his gaze. While I’m looking down there I see a black ant skitter across the air vent toward a fortune cookie crumb, but before the ant gets there the air conditioning kicks on and it gets shot up in the air. The ant floats there above the ground for a second, defying gravity, its tiny legs moving willy-nilly until he falls down into the vent and probably dies.

“I can,” my dad says, before losing his train of thought.

“I still am,” he says, his voice quiet, drifting off.

Was everything always this dire? No, no, not this dire. Two years ago, I returned home from grad school with big ideas. I hired a graphic designer to print glossy brochures. I installed Wi-Fi. I bought a new couch for the lobby. I repainted the bathrooms sea-foam green, stocked healthy snacks in the vending machines. I marketed our space as a perfect option for a bachelor or bachelorette party. My father was skeptical about the impact these improvements would have on our bottom line, but he stopped questioning me after our quarterly profits shot up 14 percent.