io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE.
Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEEDs current issue.
This months selection is The Last Lucid Day by Dominique Dickey.
© Madison Brake
(you’ve got the option to also listen to the storyhere).
He pushes you down deeper.
It always ends with him walking away.
It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.
When you awake, sweat outlines your body in the bed like a policemans chalk drawing.
Your alarm has been going off for .
Youre running late for work, and today already feels awful.
You call in sick.
The voice of the message is automated.
You knew this was coming, but there was no way of knowing when.
You figure thats the purpose of the serviceto tell you exactlywhen.
Well, another hour in bed wont hurt.
You set your alarm again and close your eyes but you cant get back to sleep.
You catch yourself thinking about your fathers favorite beltthick black leather, buckle scratched to hell.
Youre a grown man and it still makes you feel wobbly with fear.
You haul yourself out of your sweat-damp bed.
Magnolia Assisted Living is an hour away in traffic.
You stop at an ATM on the way and get there just before eleven.
You were six when your parents called it quits.
Mom got Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays.
They alternated Easters, a holiday neither of them especially cared about.
Dad got every other weekend.
Every other Friday, youd haul your overnight bag to school and stash it behind the receptionists desk.
Every other Friday, your father would show up in the pickup line in his red sports car.
His bachelor apartment was two hours out of the city.
Youd eat together in silence.
That was when you felt closest to him.
At Magnolia, the receptionist tells you your father is in the garden.
Theres a long moment before he looks up and sees you.
Whatever it is, it makes sense to someone smarter than you.
Someone with the specialized knowledge required to understand it.
Lucid, your father is a genius.
Hes the most brilliant man you know.
And then he looks at you.
Its a Thursday, isnt it?
What have I done to deserve this?
Even now, he doesnt know you well enough to know youre forcing it.
I thought wed go for a drive.
You were a child.
You were counting on your fingers.
He took off his belt and laid it on the table.
He never hit you.
The threat of violence kept you in line, and that was violent in a quiet sort of way.
Every other weekend you eclipsed yourself.
You sat at the kitchen table with his belt beside you and you let your mind go somewhere else.
You hid in plain sight.
You spoke only when spoken to, in non-answers and with a heavy tongue.
You learned addition and subtraction by rote.
You learned to swim.
You learned to disappear.
You learned other things, too, that you were happy to forget.
You pull off the highway, circle for a bit, find a gas station with an attached market.
You give him two crisp twenty-dollar bills.
Inflation, you think.
That ought to cover it.
You follow him inside.
He doesnt look nearly as old as he is, and he wears his excitement like a little kid.
The stores small, but he takes his choices seriously, and you let him.
After a few minutes of witnessing his indecision, you wander away to figure out your own haul.
A bottle of ginger ale, weeping condensation.
A styrofoam cup of black coffee thats somehow burnt even though its freshly regurgitated from the machine.
You hand them over.
The pimply attendant takes your credit card, swipes it, and hands it back.
You stopped answering his calls and, eventually, he stopped calling.
You thought of him whenever you went to a gas station or mini-martall the time, at first.
The memories faded, as memories tend to do, and you thought of him less and less.
You hardly thought of him at all.
You had the quiet kind of happiness thats damn near impossible to capture in words.
You didnt think about him, you lived your life, and you were happy.
He called after your mom died.
He had a new number, but so did you, and you never asked how he got yours.
The thoughtfulness was unexpectedit was easier to see him as the man who would do the blatantly inconsiderate thing.
Sure, you said.
Ill see you there, he said.
The funeral was on a hot day.
He sat in the back and left as soon as the service was over.
You barely saw him, but he looked just the same as you remembered.
Two weeks after the funeralyou spent a week waffling, and another week working up the nerveyou called him.
Come over for coffee, you said.
You couldnt tell if the offer was for him or for you.
You couldnt tell what you hoped to gain, but you had very little to lose.
Your impossible, wordless happiness had already shattered.
What could he do to you that had not already been done?
What more could he take?
He came to your house on a Saturday afternoon.
He was a familiar stranger.
He hugged you tightly and came away crying, embarrassing you both.
You were right on time.
You sit in the car and you eat.
You dont speakyou dont even look at each otherbut you feel close to him.
Maybe this is enough.
Maybe this is all you needed.
He showed you proofs that made no sense, though you blamed your lack of mathematical knowledge for this.
He forgot he was cooking in the middle of frying an egg.
He left a burner on and wandered out of the room.
From there it spread to the curtains.
You brought him gas station coffee when you visited him in the hospital.
Im not going to be stubborn about this, he said.
I know I shouldnt live alone anymore.
But you didnt offer, and he didnt ask.
Ill send you a link, he said.
I already picked out a place.
Forty minutes out of the city, specialized in memory care.
say youll come visit me.
Ill come visit you, you said.
Awkward Saturday coffee had a new location.
He wore long sleeves to cover the burn scars.
He worked day and night on theorems that you began to see for the nonsense they were.
Time and memories flowed around him like choppy water.
You couldnt save himyou werent even sure if you wanted tobut you visited every week.
Theres this thing, he told you, though by then youd already done your own research.
A service they offer.
It can tell you when your last good dayyour last really good daywill be.
Its a double blind, I guess.
The doctors dont even know.
Its better if they just notify the family.
He scratched his arm through his sleeve.
You imagined the way his burned skin went puckered and thin.
I gave them your number.
I hope thats all right.
Reality closed over your head like chlorinated water.
Thats fine with me, you said.
Its my last day, isnt it?
You make a concerted effort not to tense up.
What do you mean?
Oh, come on.
My last lucid day.
He doesnt know you well enough to know your tells.
I thought you didnt sign up for that.
Dont give me that.
They did all the tests.
All the implantseven the ones that are still in trials.
You sure you remember your intake that well?
Yes I remember my fucking intake
Really?
Because sometimes you misremember stuff.
It comes with the whole terrain.
He doesnt say anything, but his expression is nuclear in its rage.
Theres an unguarded moment where he looks hurt, and he looks sad, and he looks very old.
The petty satisfaction you feel at having hurt him is undercut only by your own guilt.
You feel like a monster, like youre no better than him.
But what you want from himit cant be a deathbed confession.
You need it to feel organic.
You need it to feel real.
He answers so quickly he cant have possibly thought about it.
Does that surprise you?
I just think
The way I see it, I did my best.
And I didnt have a dad at all, so its not like I had a blueprint inthat regard.
I did my best.
Youre trying to think of a concrete example, one that doesnt hurt too much to talk about.
What about when you taught me to swim?
You could have drowned me.
Eh, he says.
you’re able to feel the fear as if its happening right now.
you might smell the chlorine and the sunscreen as if its on your skinmemory is strange, that way.
This is why you went so many years without thinking of him at all.
This is what you were avoiding.
You dont know what you want.
You want him to admit he hurt you.
You want to hear him say that he was wrong.
I could have died, you tell him.
You learned to swim, didnt you?
Its not just that.
I was a kid.
You turned out okay.
You did, he says, with perfect confidence, like he has no idea how wrong he is.
He barely knows youbecause you havent let him, because there is so much you havent told him.
Your mother is the only relationship you couldnt entirely destroy, andgoddammit you tried.
He doesnt know about the nightmares.
You arent going to show him the wounds.
Hes never going to apologize.
Why did you even bother?
Why did you even hope?
Hes going to forget you and he will never, ever be sorry.
Time is kind and memory is cruel.
Someday youll forget him too.
You were in college the first time you lost your father.
What about your dad?
I dont have a dad, you said.
You didnt even hesitate, and you felt no guilt for the smoothness of the lie.
If anything, it made you proud.
Look at me, you thought.
Look at the life Im creating without him.
Look at how good that life could be.
You realize, now, that it was practice.
Youve already lost him once.
You know how to lose him again.
Its an hour back to Magnolia, and you make the drive in silence.
Hes not even angry, and maybe you arent either.
You think youre mostly sad.
He sips his shitty coffee.
He turns on the radio.
Saxophone trickles out of the speakers.
He gets his notebook and ballpoint pen out of the backseat where he stashed them.
He leaves his trash in the footwell: metallic wrappers, an empty styrofoam cup.
You tell the receptionist youve returned him for the day, then walk him back to his little table.
He lines up his notebook along its edge, then turns to you.
Well, what do you do?
You meet his gaze and hold it.
This is your dad.
Hes your dad and hes old, and hes falling apart, and hes going to die.
You miss not having a dad at all.
You miss the years of easily denying his existence.
The lie that felt more and more true each time you told it.
He will never be himself again.
You miss him already.
You hug him tightly and come away crying, embarrassing the both of you.
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