My cousin was driving, yammering about something he didn't know much about. I'd gotten used to it years ago, after I went to live with his parents. We were on our way to my father's hovel, the apartment he tried to call a home. It was cloudy and rainy. I was looking out the window, deep inside my own head.
"Hey, you listening?" Alex said. "You've got that stare."
"Yeah, I'm listening," I said, then sighed. "What were you talking about?"
"I read this thing about dying," he said, taking a turn sharp enough to push me against the passenger side door. "Apparently your brain just sort of begins to fire random neurons and stuff? You get these single, random thoughts, not even about what's going on. You don't even realize you're dying."
"And how do the writers of this thing know? Did they interview someone who was dying?" I asked. Breaking Alex's silliness apart usually made me feel better. "How could they possibly measure such a thing?"
"They hooked people up. Boy, that must have been awkward," he said. He was driving too fast. "Hey, hi, we know your grandfather is dying, but, um, can we attach things to his brain? It's for science." A few seconds later, incredibly, Alex realized his mistake. "Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"It's fine."
"No, really, I know-"
"I said it's fine." I crossed my arms and looked out the window. I guess I should be happy he at least tried to apologize. I watched raindrops race down the window. "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to think about it. He was my father, even though he didn't act much like it."
"You can be upset if you want."
"I don't want to be upset," I said. "When my mom died he told me he didn't know how to take care of me. He tried, maybe, but he just didn't have the capacity. Why do you think I came to live with you? Because my father asked me to?" I waited a second. "He couldn't take care of me. I knew it, he knew, and child protective services knew it."
"You turned out okay," Alex said. "You don't have any problems. Not as far as I can tell."
"Just wait," I said. We approached the building my father lived in. "You'll see."
After I drew the key out of the lock, I tried to open the door. It moved about a foot, then ran into something. A smell flowed into the hallway and Alex backed away. "Ugh." I set my teeth and pushed again, trying to create a space large enough for us to enter. After a few seconds of effort, I sucked my stomach in and threaded through the doorway.
My upper lip wrinkled immediately. A rancid, wet smell hung. It seemed like it was night inside--piles of newspaper, pillars of thick books, and boxes of broken electronics made even moving around the entrance a challenge. Alex entered behind me, eyebrows hiding in his bangs and confused grin faltering.
"Whoa." He took a few steps. "Is this how it usually looks?"
"Probably a little cleaner," I said. "If he were still alive it would be messier. My dad was an agent of entropy. Sometimes I think he would move stuff around just to make it worse. On purpose."
"Why?"
"I don't know." I looked around the disgusting kitchen. Fast-food wrappers spilled out of the garbage can; flies hovered over dirty dishes in the sink. The fluorescent light above us was dead; shadows from the building's main hall cut the tile floor in half. The counters and floors were sticky thanks to an unknown fluid. The hot, wet smell seemed to be coming from the cupboards. I kept my mouth closed tight.
Something dripped.
"Uh." I turned around. Alex had his shirt up over his mouth and nose. "What are we supposed to do? You...are you going to keep any of this?"
"God no," I said, wishing I had a dust mask. Or a gas mask. "We're here to see if there's anything worth saving. I doubt there is."
"What about, like, pictures and stuff?"
"Anything I wanted I took when I left." I went through the kitchen into the dining room. It was just as messy, but at least it wasn't as diseased. What must have been fifty folders covered the small table, each one full to bursting with hole-punched papers. Alex flipped one open.
"The Drop," he read. He flipped a few pages. "What is this?"
"He wanted to come up with a new method of execution. Entirely painless."
"Isn't that what lethal injections are for?"
"'The needle still hurts,'" I said, mimicking my dad's voice. "He wanted to be able to hit a button and kill someone before they even know they were dead."
"But," Alex said, continuing to peruse my father's killing folders, "isn't the terror of impending death painful, in a way?"
I looked at my cousin with surprise. "The way I see it, it's impossible to kill someone painlessly unless they don't know they're going to die, which is impossible with a scheduled execution. The whole point is-" He swung his arm and pointed at the calendar. It was a year old. "This is the day you're going to die. Mark it." He looked back at me. "If I know that, a little needle prick isn't what I'm thinking about."
"I'm not saying my dad had his head screwed on straight." I opened one of the folders. "Look at this. Hard Suction."
Alex grimaced. "Doesn't really sound like execution."
"No." I closed the folder and plopped it back on the table. The entire surface shifted, revealing new strata of ways to kill someone. "I once asked him why he didn't try to think of a way to keep people alive instead of kill them. He said 'everybody is doing that.' Yeah, guess why, Dad."
"Did he ever have a really good idea? Did he ever, like, sell one of these? Did they ever kill anybody with something?" Alex pointed at the table, and its many folders, as a whole.
"My dad was creative," I said. "He was hard working. He was inventive. He was not smart. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the finished products, if he even managed to finish them." I flicked a hand at the folders as I left the dining room. "I doubt anybody other than his family knew what he was up to. I wouldn't be surprised if he never mentioned any of this to a single soul."
We entered the living room. There was a sagging couch in a corner with a lamp behind it, an old tube television across the room. In front of the couch was a circular coffee table, covered with papers--newspapers, loose-leaf, towel--coffee cups, dirty dishes, a few novels, multiple TV guides, used and abused napkins, a pair of disgusting tennis shoes, a phone book, and a picture of him with his arm around a young boy's shoulders.
I sat on the couch's edge and picked the picture up. I had been eight when my mother took it. Her health had been declining then, but the end was still a few years off. I was smiling; so was he. We were at a mall somewhere. I think it was to get stuff for the school year. That would explain the grinning, sunglasses-wearing sun on my t-shirt. Summer.
"There," Alex said. "You should keep that. See? Not everything here is trash."
I replaced the picture on the table. "Two years after the picture was taken, my mom died. My dad practically forgot to take care of me. Eventually you got saddled with me."
"Hey, you didn't get saddled with anybody!" Alex said. "Remember the first week you were with us? We saw Captain America? And that guy behind me spilled nachos down the back of my shirt?"
A smile broke through my face. I remembered Alex bellowing as molten cheese burned him. "I had to help put lotion on it."
"Yeah. Yeah! We had some good times!" He picked the picture up. "If you don't want it, I do. I bet mom will like it."
I nodded. I guess it wasn't such a bad picture. "Okay." I looked around the room. "Ugh."
"Yeah. Where did you get all your cleanliness from?"
"From this!" I said. "I lived in a pig sty for fourteen years, even mom couldn't keep it very clean. When I came to live with you I told myself I would never let this happen to me, no matter what." I forged through the trash on the ground, unhappy even my shoes had to touch it. "I guess I could use some of this furniture at school...I'd have to power-wash it, first."
"And, like, dip it in a bathtub of Lysol."
I moved to the hallway. Comparatively, it was cleaner, though only comparatively. There was so much dirt, and so many crumbs ground into the carpet it looked a different color. Cracks and scratches went up and down the walls. Some were natural life of a low-rent apartment, some came from materials my father had hauled through to his workshop. At least the hallway light worked.
We inspected the pictures. Some of them were crooked, hanging on bent nails. One had my parents, younger than I could remember them, standing side-by-side in a chapel. My mother wore a poofy white dress, and my father had a tan suit which, I imagine, wasn't even in style when the picture was taken. The next had the two of them looking back at the camera, sitting on a bench with their arms around each other. They were smiling. It was before me.
The next was Alex's family. The one after that was my mom's parents in a classic portrait style, smiling at something off-camera. Then it was me, dressed in jammies, arms held up by mother, wide toddler mouth likely letting loose a shriek of delight for whatever reason. I stared at the picture for a long time. Like my grandparents, I was looking at something off-screen. Was it my father?
The final picture was missing. A bare nail extruded from the plaster, looking rather forlorn compared to its weight-bearing brothers.
Alex loaded the pictures into his arms, lifting each one off its nail and laying it flat. "I know you might not want to keep all of these, but we should try to save them. At least the frames are kind of nice."
I snorted. "I suppose." I opened the first door as Alex put the pictures in the foyer.
"We just have to make sure we don't forget them." Alex joined me inside my dad's bedroom. "They're next to the medium-sized pile of garbage." He looked around. "Well, this looks more or less like every other messy bedroom I've seen."
I had to agree. Piles of clothes looked like trash heaps in the corners, and the largest one seemed to rise from inside the closet, spilling itself across the floor. A few shirts and slacks hung on wire hangers, as an example of random order within a chaotic universe. It was the brightest room in the house, though blinds blocked most of the light. The bed had a few tangled blankets, and the half nearer the door was bare, thrown clear as my father would rise from slumber. The other half--where my mother used to sleep--was covered in more books, a few folders, writing utensils, and a laptop. One of the books was large, bound in gray cloth.
As Alex bounced around the room, looking for anything he thought worth saving, I cleared a space on the mattress and picked up the book. I flipped to the first page.
"What's in there?" Alex asked.
"More pictures," I said. "My mom liked making these. She was always the one taking the pictures, too." There I was on the swing, with my father behind, having just given a push. There he was wiping frozen yogurt off my face. There we were, dressed in our best for his sister's--Alex's mother's--wedding. He wore his tan suit and was holding my hand. I had a small blue tuxedo with a crooked bow tie and bangs flopping down over my forehead. I flipped forward a little bit. I was in all of the pictures; I could see where my father had taped or glued pictures from elsewhere onto the pages.
I don't remember Alex sitting next to me. "Is it just pictures of you?"
I flipped a few more pages. "It seems so. Why would he-"
"Oh come on!" Alex nearly shouted it. "Why do you think he put every picture of you in one single book, which he kept on his bed?" He looked at me. I didn't have an answer prepared. "It's because he missed you!"
"Then I guess he should have paid a little bit more attention when I was around," I said. I slapped the book shut and dropped it onto the mattress. It bounced a few inches. I stayed sitting on the bed for a few seconds, rubbing my knees.
"Take a look at the closet," Alex said. "There might be some clothes you can scrounge."
"That's all old stuff."
"Retro is coming back. Here, look. A slim black tie. That's a staple of the gentleman's wardrobe."
"Everything in here is going to stink."
"So get them dry-cleaned. I'm sure my parents will help pay for it. Your dad just died; you get stuff."
"I'm so glad."
Alex, elbow-deep in the closet, looked at me. "I thought you said you didn't care your dad was dead."
I sat rubbing my hands around my wrists. I was staring at the dirty carpet. "I'm not happy about it. I guess it doesn't change my life much."
"It does," Alex said. "When my birth parents died...well, things weren't the same as they are for you, I guess. People thought I was young enough that it wouldn't really affect me. It did." He brought out a dusty jacket and laid it on the bed, sitting next to me again. "You were there for some of it. Remember my fifteenth birthday?"
"It was a perfectly reasonable response."
"Aw, no it wasn't. I ruined it for everyone. I felt lost, man. I thought I didn't have any real parents. I thought the people who had given birth to me had deserted me, and the people who had raised me were just pretending. I wanted someone who was actually connected to me."
"And here's me, throwing it away until my dad dies." I felt a stab of shame. "I'm sorry Alex. I didn't know it had bothered you so much."
"It wasn't really your fault either," Alex said. "You couldn't stay here. Your dad barely paid any attention to you."
"But he knew I was here, at least." I reached behind myself and dragged the photo album onto my lap, opening it to a random page. "And he missed me."
"You can miss him too," Alex said. "You can wish he wasn't dead even if you know he wasn't an amazing dad."
I was still looking at the pictures. In every picture with me and my dad, he had the biggest, stupidest smile. His mouth open wide, his cheeks puffed up to make himself squint a little bit. He always had his hand around mine, or around my shoulders. "He really did love me."
"Probably," Alex said. "Some people just don't know how to show it the right way."
"I suppose." I stood up. "Let's look at his workshop."
"I can't believe this has three bedrooms," Alex said a few seconds later. We stood in front of the door to my dad's workshop. The door was plastered with warning signs--like an adolescent might put up to try and keep his parents out. I pushed the door open. It was the smallest room in the apartment. "But this place still seems so tiny."
"That's what happens when trash takes up most of the walking area." I fondled for the switch. The bare overhead bulb came on, flickering into full strength. This room looked like a computer graveyard, smelled like a run-down museum dedicated to burnt-out electronics, and felt like one wrong move was going to bury us under beige computer monitors, sharp circuit boards, and dead car batteries.
Alex picked his way to the desk, taking care not to bump into what appeared to be shrines to the deity of outdated storage formats. He reached the bench, about waist-high to him, and flicked on the lamp. He peered down at a folder open on the bench. "Take a look at this."
I shifted a few hard plastic and metal items out of the way and joined him. "This one has notes written all over it." He flipped a few pages. "About the idea itself, about the construction process. He's even got a few names written down with phone numbers." He squinted. "Questions about small details. Manufacturers." He brought his head up and looked at me. "I think he was almost done building this."
"Yeah?" I asked. "Then where is it?"
Alex looked around. By spreading his arms and twirling a circle he'd knock over a hundred half-finished killing machines, most likely smashing them to pieces. "He didn't build anything," I said. "He just came up with the designs. This thing is way to big to even fit in here. It would fill up this entire room. No." I bent down to look at the folder again. "He couldn't have built this."
"Look though." Alex pointed at one of the notes scrawled in the margin. "'Power supply burns out.' How could he have known that without building it?"
"This...this is..." I looked at Alex. "This is ridiculous." I flipped to the front of the folder. "Look at what this machine is supposed to be able to do: 'painlessly and without harm, overload the target's nervous system in a single burst of energy, shutting down the brain's processes with the flip of a switch.' Impossible. There's no way anything my dad came up with could kill in this manner with the flip of a switch, much less painlessly."
"Look man," Alex said. "I know it might seem weird, but maybe your dad got better at this as time went on. I don't know a whole lot about electronics and stuff like that, but this looks pretty in-depth. Circuit designs, power readouts..."
"Yeah, well, I don't see it anywhere," I said. "The proof is in the pudding, and there's no pudding here."
"This stuff is smart. It's...out there, I guess, and I don't really think anybody would try to use a lot of these ideas to kill someone even if he had developed a working prototype, but...a lot of the stuff I've been seeing is really creative. Here, look at this one." He shoved a folder into my face. "A mild shock to disrupt pain receptors, and then a bigger one to kill. 'Like falling asleep,' it says."
"But you pointed out the problem with this entire venture just a little bit ago." I leaned on the cluttered desk. Piles of tools--screwdriver, pliers, soldering iron--were near my arms. "Just knowing you're dying or going to die is pain, in a way. I'm going to die today. His life's work is flawed. Everything he made was doomed to failure."
Alex frowned. "He made you, didn't he?" I didn't say anything. "And now look at you. You're in college, you're nearly at the top of your class. You're just as hard-working as he was, and if you really think that's a bad thing, I'm gonna start slappin'. You got a scholarship thanks to your high school's robotics club for Pete's sake. Once you figure out which super-hard science you want to do, you'll blow them away." He flipped the folder closed and set in on the workbench. "At the very least, he made one great thing."
I snorted, and felt a little smile grow. "I guess so." I paused. "Thanks. I mean, he wasn't a bad guy..."
"But we all have our problems," Alex said. He looked around. "Anything in here you want?"
"I have no idea. Maybe my dad was smart, but he wasn't tidy, you have to acquiesce that. There could be rare electronics or actual patentable inventions, but we'd have to dig through piles of junk to get to them. We can handle it later."
"Sounds good to me. What's left?"
"My bedroom."
A moment later we stood in front of the hallway's last door--save the bathroom, which we both decided would hold little worthwhile. The door I had used to escape from my dad was banged up--everything in the apartment was--but otherwise healthy. I opened the door, pushing forward as I walked. Did I expect it to remain unchanged since I had last seen it? What I didn't expect was to have most of it taken up by a large metal cage, built around what looked like a padded folding chair. Wires and other assorted electronic parts ran to and fro around the cage, across the mutilated carpet, and into the corners, where a computer bank and a control panel sat dead. The room felt hot, smelled like it was full of people despite being almost empty.
The window my bed had been under, which faced west, had a little bit of rain-dappled sunlight coming through. The clouds were beginning to break apart outside. None of the things I'd had while growing up were still inside. I could see deep indentations in the carpet where the bedposts, desk legs, and dresser had stood.
I felt twisted. It was a place I had spent the better part of fourteen years, happy or unhappy, and now it was entirely different. Where I'd had posters of bands or video games or movies, my father had hung up schematics, notes to himself, construction rules, or even shopping lists. Where my desk, at which I had worked on homework, played computer games, read, and dreamed of a better life, there was a tower of computers with a thousand cords spinning off in every direction. Instead of a wide space in the middle, perfect for board games or Legos, a killing contraption filled the room.
"Hey look," Alex said. "Pudding."
"He turned my bedroom into a construction yard," I said. I sighed. "I guess I should have known. Look at this thing. It looks like that steel cage you see at wrestling matches sometimes."
"This would never pass muster," Alex said, beginning to circumnavigate the machine. "It looks like the thing from the folder in the workshop. A little different from the original designs, though."
"I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking at here," I said. The cage, built around the chair frame, had wires attached to most of the places where vertical bars crossed with horizontal bars, but the wires simply ceased. They didn't seem to go anywhere. I crouched through a small opening in the cage, and found odd openings where vertical and horizontal bars met.
"It still doesn't look done," I said as Alex pressed random buttons on the control board. He flicked switches and turned knobs. "But it's way more done than anything he had tried to build when I was a kid."
"Yeah, but he had to clear out your bedroom to do it."
This was just a normal Alex thing to say. Thinking out loud, I suppose. He was right. After I had left, and after I had told him I wasn't coming back, that I couldn't come back, my father had removed everything of mine and put it away, replacing it with something that had, if the reports were true, killed him. He died in this room. The super had found him after neighbors reported a smell. A worse smell. He'd worked himself to death, suffered a stroke or a heart attack, or an aortic aneurysm.
"Can you turn the light on?" Alex said, still by the control panel. "I want to read the labels on this thing.
I exited the killing contraption and went to the light switch. Thanks to poor construction, the light switch was on the other side of the door from the handle--when you entered, you had to reach around the door to switch it on. I swung the door shut, meaning to hit the lights, and saw what covered the back of the door.
"Hey, are you going to turn those lights on?" I heard Alex pause, and then walk up to me. "Wow."
He must have made copies. He must have made a dozen copies. From one corner of the door's back to the other, he layered every picture of me he could get his hands on. I saw a hundred versions of my face looking back. Pictures from the hallway wall, pictures from photo albums.
Pictures from my Facebook account. Me with my friends at college. Dressed up to graduate high school. At prom with my girlfriend. Getting a scholarship. Birthdays he hadn't been to. Moments in my life I had forbidden him to see.
I pressed my palms over my eyes. My vision swam. I heard a sharp metallic noise. "Look at this." Alex's voice was careful, quiet, reverent. I looked, blinking away tears. He was holding a small...it looked like a picture frame, with a thin metal wire used to hang it on the inside doorknob. Withing the frame was a piece of paper.
"Make...him proud," I read aloud.
The carpet came up to meet me, and the next thing I knew Alex was crouched at my side. My head hurt. Alex spoke to me, but Hell if I understood him. He propped me up against the wall, but there wasn't enough room for my legs to spread out.
"Hey. Hey."
"Yeah," I said. I tried to lift my arm to wave him away but found myself too weak--the motion made me dizzy. I put my hand to my head slowly and found a bump rising. "The carpet gave me a concussion."
"It happens. Can you stand up?" He made it so. "There's no room anywhere in here. Let's go-"
"No," I slurred. "I want to look at the pictures." I tried to motion toward the door. "Inside the cage."
"Inside the killing machine?"
"It's fine. It doesn't even work."
"Yeah, still though-"
"Just do it and get me some ice."
"Yeah, right. Okay. Uh." Alex settled me into the chair. He rose and went to the door.
He stopped just as he was leaving. "I know you probably don't want the light on, but I don't want you falling asleep." He hit the wights lich.
Gren dar sudenth. KolMayatn leth garin sool-et, phshor aa seriarin pilm Uss'den melbarat ummi...uyo den barap, korlem forcais l'otsorthemia di (I am scared) iuos B dargelinii go beess uebavbjapgu. Ham'jem-h rbing tta AyTar a-'-e- (due to a sudden cessation)
And then Alex was back inside the room, walking toward me with a dripping bag of ice. Something was different.
"Wait." I pushed out of the chair. The dizziness was gone. My head didn't hurt. I felt for the bump and found nothing. "I think...it healed me."
Alex wrinkled his lip. "What did?"
"The...machine. You turned it on when you turned on the light." We looked at the control panel. Upon it, lights blinked.
I emerged from the cage and pushed past Alex, leaving the room and heading to the workshop. I flipped the folder for the machine open. The first page had a huge scribble over it, where it had once read: "Sub-sonic killer." Now, instead, it read "Sub-sonic healer."
I cried for my father.
"Hey, you listening?" Alex said. "You've got that stare."
"Yeah, I'm listening," I said, then sighed. "What were you talking about?"
"I read this thing about dying," he said, taking a turn sharp enough to push me against the passenger side door. "Apparently your brain just sort of begins to fire random neurons and stuff? You get these single, random thoughts, not even about what's going on. You don't even realize you're dying."
"And how do the writers of this thing know? Did they interview someone who was dying?" I asked. Breaking Alex's silliness apart usually made me feel better. "How could they possibly measure such a thing?"
"They hooked people up. Boy, that must have been awkward," he said. He was driving too fast. "Hey, hi, we know your grandfather is dying, but, um, can we attach things to his brain? It's for science." A few seconds later, incredibly, Alex realized his mistake. "Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"It's fine."
"No, really, I know-"
"I said it's fine." I crossed my arms and looked out the window. I guess I should be happy he at least tried to apologize. I watched raindrops race down the window. "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to think about it. He was my father, even though he didn't act much like it."
"You can be upset if you want."
"I don't want to be upset," I said. "When my mom died he told me he didn't know how to take care of me. He tried, maybe, but he just didn't have the capacity. Why do you think I came to live with you? Because my father asked me to?" I waited a second. "He couldn't take care of me. I knew it, he knew, and child protective services knew it."
"You turned out okay," Alex said. "You don't have any problems. Not as far as I can tell."
"Just wait," I said. We approached the building my father lived in. "You'll see."
After I drew the key out of the lock, I tried to open the door. It moved about a foot, then ran into something. A smell flowed into the hallway and Alex backed away. "Ugh." I set my teeth and pushed again, trying to create a space large enough for us to enter. After a few seconds of effort, I sucked my stomach in and threaded through the doorway.
My upper lip wrinkled immediately. A rancid, wet smell hung. It seemed like it was night inside--piles of newspaper, pillars of thick books, and boxes of broken electronics made even moving around the entrance a challenge. Alex entered behind me, eyebrows hiding in his bangs and confused grin faltering.
"Whoa." He took a few steps. "Is this how it usually looks?"
"Probably a little cleaner," I said. "If he were still alive it would be messier. My dad was an agent of entropy. Sometimes I think he would move stuff around just to make it worse. On purpose."
"Why?"
"I don't know." I looked around the disgusting kitchen. Fast-food wrappers spilled out of the garbage can; flies hovered over dirty dishes in the sink. The fluorescent light above us was dead; shadows from the building's main hall cut the tile floor in half. The counters and floors were sticky thanks to an unknown fluid. The hot, wet smell seemed to be coming from the cupboards. I kept my mouth closed tight.
Something dripped.
"Uh." I turned around. Alex had his shirt up over his mouth and nose. "What are we supposed to do? You...are you going to keep any of this?"
"God no," I said, wishing I had a dust mask. Or a gas mask. "We're here to see if there's anything worth saving. I doubt there is."
"What about, like, pictures and stuff?"
"Anything I wanted I took when I left." I went through the kitchen into the dining room. It was just as messy, but at least it wasn't as diseased. What must have been fifty folders covered the small table, each one full to bursting with hole-punched papers. Alex flipped one open.
"The Drop," he read. He flipped a few pages. "What is this?"
"He wanted to come up with a new method of execution. Entirely painless."
"Isn't that what lethal injections are for?"
"'The needle still hurts,'" I said, mimicking my dad's voice. "He wanted to be able to hit a button and kill someone before they even know they were dead."
"But," Alex said, continuing to peruse my father's killing folders, "isn't the terror of impending death painful, in a way?"
I looked at my cousin with surprise. "The way I see it, it's impossible to kill someone painlessly unless they don't know they're going to die, which is impossible with a scheduled execution. The whole point is-" He swung his arm and pointed at the calendar. It was a year old. "This is the day you're going to die. Mark it." He looked back at me. "If I know that, a little needle prick isn't what I'm thinking about."
"I'm not saying my dad had his head screwed on straight." I opened one of the folders. "Look at this. Hard Suction."
Alex grimaced. "Doesn't really sound like execution."
"No." I closed the folder and plopped it back on the table. The entire surface shifted, revealing new strata of ways to kill someone. "I once asked him why he didn't try to think of a way to keep people alive instead of kill them. He said 'everybody is doing that.' Yeah, guess why, Dad."
"Did he ever have a really good idea? Did he ever, like, sell one of these? Did they ever kill anybody with something?" Alex pointed at the table, and its many folders, as a whole.
"My dad was creative," I said. "He was hard working. He was inventive. He was not smart. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the finished products, if he even managed to finish them." I flicked a hand at the folders as I left the dining room. "I doubt anybody other than his family knew what he was up to. I wouldn't be surprised if he never mentioned any of this to a single soul."
We entered the living room. There was a sagging couch in a corner with a lamp behind it, an old tube television across the room. In front of the couch was a circular coffee table, covered with papers--newspapers, loose-leaf, towel--coffee cups, dirty dishes, a few novels, multiple TV guides, used and abused napkins, a pair of disgusting tennis shoes, a phone book, and a picture of him with his arm around a young boy's shoulders.
I sat on the couch's edge and picked the picture up. I had been eight when my mother took it. Her health had been declining then, but the end was still a few years off. I was smiling; so was he. We were at a mall somewhere. I think it was to get stuff for the school year. That would explain the grinning, sunglasses-wearing sun on my t-shirt. Summer.
"There," Alex said. "You should keep that. See? Not everything here is trash."
I replaced the picture on the table. "Two years after the picture was taken, my mom died. My dad practically forgot to take care of me. Eventually you got saddled with me."
"Hey, you didn't get saddled with anybody!" Alex said. "Remember the first week you were with us? We saw Captain America? And that guy behind me spilled nachos down the back of my shirt?"
A smile broke through my face. I remembered Alex bellowing as molten cheese burned him. "I had to help put lotion on it."
"Yeah. Yeah! We had some good times!" He picked the picture up. "If you don't want it, I do. I bet mom will like it."
I nodded. I guess it wasn't such a bad picture. "Okay." I looked around the room. "Ugh."
"Yeah. Where did you get all your cleanliness from?"
"From this!" I said. "I lived in a pig sty for fourteen years, even mom couldn't keep it very clean. When I came to live with you I told myself I would never let this happen to me, no matter what." I forged through the trash on the ground, unhappy even my shoes had to touch it. "I guess I could use some of this furniture at school...I'd have to power-wash it, first."
"And, like, dip it in a bathtub of Lysol."
I moved to the hallway. Comparatively, it was cleaner, though only comparatively. There was so much dirt, and so many crumbs ground into the carpet it looked a different color. Cracks and scratches went up and down the walls. Some were natural life of a low-rent apartment, some came from materials my father had hauled through to his workshop. At least the hallway light worked.
We inspected the pictures. Some of them were crooked, hanging on bent nails. One had my parents, younger than I could remember them, standing side-by-side in a chapel. My mother wore a poofy white dress, and my father had a tan suit which, I imagine, wasn't even in style when the picture was taken. The next had the two of them looking back at the camera, sitting on a bench with their arms around each other. They were smiling. It was before me.
The next was Alex's family. The one after that was my mom's parents in a classic portrait style, smiling at something off-camera. Then it was me, dressed in jammies, arms held up by mother, wide toddler mouth likely letting loose a shriek of delight for whatever reason. I stared at the picture for a long time. Like my grandparents, I was looking at something off-screen. Was it my father?
The final picture was missing. A bare nail extruded from the plaster, looking rather forlorn compared to its weight-bearing brothers.
Alex loaded the pictures into his arms, lifting each one off its nail and laying it flat. "I know you might not want to keep all of these, but we should try to save them. At least the frames are kind of nice."
I snorted. "I suppose." I opened the first door as Alex put the pictures in the foyer.
"We just have to make sure we don't forget them." Alex joined me inside my dad's bedroom. "They're next to the medium-sized pile of garbage." He looked around. "Well, this looks more or less like every other messy bedroom I've seen."
I had to agree. Piles of clothes looked like trash heaps in the corners, and the largest one seemed to rise from inside the closet, spilling itself across the floor. A few shirts and slacks hung on wire hangers, as an example of random order within a chaotic universe. It was the brightest room in the house, though blinds blocked most of the light. The bed had a few tangled blankets, and the half nearer the door was bare, thrown clear as my father would rise from slumber. The other half--where my mother used to sleep--was covered in more books, a few folders, writing utensils, and a laptop. One of the books was large, bound in gray cloth.
As Alex bounced around the room, looking for anything he thought worth saving, I cleared a space on the mattress and picked up the book. I flipped to the first page.
"What's in there?" Alex asked.
"More pictures," I said. "My mom liked making these. She was always the one taking the pictures, too." There I was on the swing, with my father behind, having just given a push. There he was wiping frozen yogurt off my face. There we were, dressed in our best for his sister's--Alex's mother's--wedding. He wore his tan suit and was holding my hand. I had a small blue tuxedo with a crooked bow tie and bangs flopping down over my forehead. I flipped forward a little bit. I was in all of the pictures; I could see where my father had taped or glued pictures from elsewhere onto the pages.
I don't remember Alex sitting next to me. "Is it just pictures of you?"
I flipped a few more pages. "It seems so. Why would he-"
"Oh come on!" Alex nearly shouted it. "Why do you think he put every picture of you in one single book, which he kept on his bed?" He looked at me. I didn't have an answer prepared. "It's because he missed you!"
"Then I guess he should have paid a little bit more attention when I was around," I said. I slapped the book shut and dropped it onto the mattress. It bounced a few inches. I stayed sitting on the bed for a few seconds, rubbing my knees.
"Take a look at the closet," Alex said. "There might be some clothes you can scrounge."
"That's all old stuff."
"Retro is coming back. Here, look. A slim black tie. That's a staple of the gentleman's wardrobe."
"Everything in here is going to stink."
"So get them dry-cleaned. I'm sure my parents will help pay for it. Your dad just died; you get stuff."
"I'm so glad."
Alex, elbow-deep in the closet, looked at me. "I thought you said you didn't care your dad was dead."
I sat rubbing my hands around my wrists. I was staring at the dirty carpet. "I'm not happy about it. I guess it doesn't change my life much."
"It does," Alex said. "When my birth parents died...well, things weren't the same as they are for you, I guess. People thought I was young enough that it wouldn't really affect me. It did." He brought out a dusty jacket and laid it on the bed, sitting next to me again. "You were there for some of it. Remember my fifteenth birthday?"
"It was a perfectly reasonable response."
"Aw, no it wasn't. I ruined it for everyone. I felt lost, man. I thought I didn't have any real parents. I thought the people who had given birth to me had deserted me, and the people who had raised me were just pretending. I wanted someone who was actually connected to me."
"And here's me, throwing it away until my dad dies." I felt a stab of shame. "I'm sorry Alex. I didn't know it had bothered you so much."
"It wasn't really your fault either," Alex said. "You couldn't stay here. Your dad barely paid any attention to you."
"But he knew I was here, at least." I reached behind myself and dragged the photo album onto my lap, opening it to a random page. "And he missed me."
"You can miss him too," Alex said. "You can wish he wasn't dead even if you know he wasn't an amazing dad."
I was still looking at the pictures. In every picture with me and my dad, he had the biggest, stupidest smile. His mouth open wide, his cheeks puffed up to make himself squint a little bit. He always had his hand around mine, or around my shoulders. "He really did love me."
"Probably," Alex said. "Some people just don't know how to show it the right way."
"I suppose." I stood up. "Let's look at his workshop."
"I can't believe this has three bedrooms," Alex said a few seconds later. We stood in front of the door to my dad's workshop. The door was plastered with warning signs--like an adolescent might put up to try and keep his parents out. I pushed the door open. It was the smallest room in the apartment. "But this place still seems so tiny."
"That's what happens when trash takes up most of the walking area." I fondled for the switch. The bare overhead bulb came on, flickering into full strength. This room looked like a computer graveyard, smelled like a run-down museum dedicated to burnt-out electronics, and felt like one wrong move was going to bury us under beige computer monitors, sharp circuit boards, and dead car batteries.
Alex picked his way to the desk, taking care not to bump into what appeared to be shrines to the deity of outdated storage formats. He reached the bench, about waist-high to him, and flicked on the lamp. He peered down at a folder open on the bench. "Take a look at this."
I shifted a few hard plastic and metal items out of the way and joined him. "This one has notes written all over it." He flipped a few pages. "About the idea itself, about the construction process. He's even got a few names written down with phone numbers." He squinted. "Questions about small details. Manufacturers." He brought his head up and looked at me. "I think he was almost done building this."
"Yeah?" I asked. "Then where is it?"
Alex looked around. By spreading his arms and twirling a circle he'd knock over a hundred half-finished killing machines, most likely smashing them to pieces. "He didn't build anything," I said. "He just came up with the designs. This thing is way to big to even fit in here. It would fill up this entire room. No." I bent down to look at the folder again. "He couldn't have built this."
"Look though." Alex pointed at one of the notes scrawled in the margin. "'Power supply burns out.' How could he have known that without building it?"
"This...this is..." I looked at Alex. "This is ridiculous." I flipped to the front of the folder. "Look at what this machine is supposed to be able to do: 'painlessly and without harm, overload the target's nervous system in a single burst of energy, shutting down the brain's processes with the flip of a switch.' Impossible. There's no way anything my dad came up with could kill in this manner with the flip of a switch, much less painlessly."
"Look man," Alex said. "I know it might seem weird, but maybe your dad got better at this as time went on. I don't know a whole lot about electronics and stuff like that, but this looks pretty in-depth. Circuit designs, power readouts..."
"Yeah, well, I don't see it anywhere," I said. "The proof is in the pudding, and there's no pudding here."
"This stuff is smart. It's...out there, I guess, and I don't really think anybody would try to use a lot of these ideas to kill someone even if he had developed a working prototype, but...a lot of the stuff I've been seeing is really creative. Here, look at this one." He shoved a folder into my face. "A mild shock to disrupt pain receptors, and then a bigger one to kill. 'Like falling asleep,' it says."
"But you pointed out the problem with this entire venture just a little bit ago." I leaned on the cluttered desk. Piles of tools--screwdriver, pliers, soldering iron--were near my arms. "Just knowing you're dying or going to die is pain, in a way. I'm going to die today. His life's work is flawed. Everything he made was doomed to failure."
Alex frowned. "He made you, didn't he?" I didn't say anything. "And now look at you. You're in college, you're nearly at the top of your class. You're just as hard-working as he was, and if you really think that's a bad thing, I'm gonna start slappin'. You got a scholarship thanks to your high school's robotics club for Pete's sake. Once you figure out which super-hard science you want to do, you'll blow them away." He flipped the folder closed and set in on the workbench. "At the very least, he made one great thing."
I snorted, and felt a little smile grow. "I guess so." I paused. "Thanks. I mean, he wasn't a bad guy..."
"But we all have our problems," Alex said. He looked around. "Anything in here you want?"
"I have no idea. Maybe my dad was smart, but he wasn't tidy, you have to acquiesce that. There could be rare electronics or actual patentable inventions, but we'd have to dig through piles of junk to get to them. We can handle it later."
"Sounds good to me. What's left?"
"My bedroom."
A moment later we stood in front of the hallway's last door--save the bathroom, which we both decided would hold little worthwhile. The door I had used to escape from my dad was banged up--everything in the apartment was--but otherwise healthy. I opened the door, pushing forward as I walked. Did I expect it to remain unchanged since I had last seen it? What I didn't expect was to have most of it taken up by a large metal cage, built around what looked like a padded folding chair. Wires and other assorted electronic parts ran to and fro around the cage, across the mutilated carpet, and into the corners, where a computer bank and a control panel sat dead. The room felt hot, smelled like it was full of people despite being almost empty.
The window my bed had been under, which faced west, had a little bit of rain-dappled sunlight coming through. The clouds were beginning to break apart outside. None of the things I'd had while growing up were still inside. I could see deep indentations in the carpet where the bedposts, desk legs, and dresser had stood.
I felt twisted. It was a place I had spent the better part of fourteen years, happy or unhappy, and now it was entirely different. Where I'd had posters of bands or video games or movies, my father had hung up schematics, notes to himself, construction rules, or even shopping lists. Where my desk, at which I had worked on homework, played computer games, read, and dreamed of a better life, there was a tower of computers with a thousand cords spinning off in every direction. Instead of a wide space in the middle, perfect for board games or Legos, a killing contraption filled the room.
"Hey look," Alex said. "Pudding."
"He turned my bedroom into a construction yard," I said. I sighed. "I guess I should have known. Look at this thing. It looks like that steel cage you see at wrestling matches sometimes."
"This would never pass muster," Alex said, beginning to circumnavigate the machine. "It looks like the thing from the folder in the workshop. A little different from the original designs, though."
"I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking at here," I said. The cage, built around the chair frame, had wires attached to most of the places where vertical bars crossed with horizontal bars, but the wires simply ceased. They didn't seem to go anywhere. I crouched through a small opening in the cage, and found odd openings where vertical and horizontal bars met.
"It still doesn't look done," I said as Alex pressed random buttons on the control board. He flicked switches and turned knobs. "But it's way more done than anything he had tried to build when I was a kid."
"Yeah, but he had to clear out your bedroom to do it."
This was just a normal Alex thing to say. Thinking out loud, I suppose. He was right. After I had left, and after I had told him I wasn't coming back, that I couldn't come back, my father had removed everything of mine and put it away, replacing it with something that had, if the reports were true, killed him. He died in this room. The super had found him after neighbors reported a smell. A worse smell. He'd worked himself to death, suffered a stroke or a heart attack, or an aortic aneurysm.
"Can you turn the light on?" Alex said, still by the control panel. "I want to read the labels on this thing.
I exited the killing contraption and went to the light switch. Thanks to poor construction, the light switch was on the other side of the door from the handle--when you entered, you had to reach around the door to switch it on. I swung the door shut, meaning to hit the lights, and saw what covered the back of the door.
"Hey, are you going to turn those lights on?" I heard Alex pause, and then walk up to me. "Wow."
He must have made copies. He must have made a dozen copies. From one corner of the door's back to the other, he layered every picture of me he could get his hands on. I saw a hundred versions of my face looking back. Pictures from the hallway wall, pictures from photo albums.
Pictures from my Facebook account. Me with my friends at college. Dressed up to graduate high school. At prom with my girlfriend. Getting a scholarship. Birthdays he hadn't been to. Moments in my life I had forbidden him to see.
I pressed my palms over my eyes. My vision swam. I heard a sharp metallic noise. "Look at this." Alex's voice was careful, quiet, reverent. I looked, blinking away tears. He was holding a small...it looked like a picture frame, with a thin metal wire used to hang it on the inside doorknob. Withing the frame was a piece of paper.
"Make...him proud," I read aloud.
The carpet came up to meet me, and the next thing I knew Alex was crouched at my side. My head hurt. Alex spoke to me, but Hell if I understood him. He propped me up against the wall, but there wasn't enough room for my legs to spread out.
"Hey. Hey."
"Yeah," I said. I tried to lift my arm to wave him away but found myself too weak--the motion made me dizzy. I put my hand to my head slowly and found a bump rising. "The carpet gave me a concussion."
"It happens. Can you stand up?" He made it so. "There's no room anywhere in here. Let's go-"
"No," I slurred. "I want to look at the pictures." I tried to motion toward the door. "Inside the cage."
"Inside the killing machine?"
"It's fine. It doesn't even work."
"Yeah, still though-"
"Just do it and get me some ice."
"Yeah, right. Okay. Uh." Alex settled me into the chair. He rose and went to the door.
He stopped just as he was leaving. "I know you probably don't want the light on, but I don't want you falling asleep." He hit the wights lich.
Gren dar sudenth. KolMayatn leth garin sool-et, phshor aa seriarin pilm Uss'den melbarat ummi...uyo den barap, korlem forcais l'otsorthemia di (I am scared) iuos B dargelinii go beess uebavbjapgu. Ham'jem-h rbing tta AyTar a-'-e- (due to a sudden cessation)
And then Alex was back inside the room, walking toward me with a dripping bag of ice. Something was different.
"Wait." I pushed out of the chair. The dizziness was gone. My head didn't hurt. I felt for the bump and found nothing. "I think...it healed me."
Alex wrinkled his lip. "What did?"
"The...machine. You turned it on when you turned on the light." We looked at the control panel. Upon it, lights blinked.
I emerged from the cage and pushed past Alex, leaving the room and heading to the workshop. I flipped the folder for the machine open. The first page had a huge scribble over it, where it had once read: "Sub-sonic killer." Now, instead, it read "Sub-sonic healer."
I cried for my father.