You know the drill. I was just the Classic burned out millennial trying to wrangle some old boomer fart,a man who has had the same shitty habits since “before you were born, kid”, who would rather vote for a proposition that increased taxes by a thousand dollars per year in order to buy kids more participation trophies than admit he’s not 25 anymore. In his squinty little eyes (vision had been shit since ‘05 and of course he wouldn’t wear glasses) he was the same scrappy little punk he was back when he was putting rubber snakes on the chairs of the school nuns. Man thought everything still cost a nickel and a nice firm handshake including elder care if he ever needed it, which he wouldn’t.
At least, he used to. He’s not like that anymore.
Now he’s eating right, drinking less, working out in moderation. And fuck, that would be enough for me, but that’s not the only change. He gets his news from a variety of reputable sources, he tries things he would have dismissed without a second thought before (last week we all went to a throat singing performance at the community center - fun!). And if he wants a damn beer, and my mom is off in some other room trying to read for once, he gets it himself! Gets it himself! Never thought I would see the day!
And what is the cause of his sudden transformation? I’m pretty sure I know. I’m pretty sure it is because of my Eagerness, Verisimilitude, Innovative thinking, and Largess, not to mention my Strength of conviction, Persistence, Effervescent personality, Little suggestions here and there, and Love of clean living.
My family members look at me a little weird when I say that, but it’s kinda true. In a way. It’s as much truth as I can tell them, anyway.
Some background:
He’s always eaten like what he called “a good old American boy” and what I call a pig. His food is so greasy he has to clutch it tight so it won’t slip out of his hands. Since I was a kid I would watch my mom in the kitchen, alternately cooking more-or-less balanced meals for us and gastly piles of meat ketchup and Doritos for him.
It’s gotten worse since he retired too. He used to work in construction, so at least he would work off most of the calories he was mashing into his big mouth. Now he’s retired, which means he’s either sitting at a bar with his toxic buddies watching some kind of sport game while eating wings or sitting in his lazboy eating potato chips. One time mom went out of town for two days and when she got back he informed her that he was glad she was back because he had subsisted on chips, cola and leftover halloween candy for the entire time she was gone.
This all came to a head during thanksgiving. It was after dinner. Me and my brother and my sister had come home, we were sitting in the kitchen which is just upstairs from the living room while my dad sat where else, glued to the tv screen.
One moment he was sitting there yelling at the screen, either heckles like “Come on! Stop fucking your mothers and play ball!” Or strangled attempts to bargain, like “one touchdown and I’ll never say a word against you ever again” with his hands folded over the remote like he was praying. The next he was almost doubled over, breathing hard.
My mom shook her head, remarked “Stomachache huh? I told this would happen if you ate a whole turkey”
“Aw, you had a bite” he panted, “Anyways Cher, I don’t think this is a stomach ache! I think I’m having a heart attack or something”
So we rushed to the ER, all thoughts of pie forgotten. My mom yelled at the receptionist every five minutes of the fifteen we waited, which may or may not have helped the situation but seemed to relieve some of her stress.
They took him back, ran a bunch of tests. They were fine. No heart attack. He hadn’t had one before either. He was quiet for once then, hands folded over his lap in his white hospital gown, ignoring even my brother’s ribbing and my mom’s snapped defenses of him.
When the doctor came in she teased out the circumstances of what had happened. Eventually she latched on to the fact that he had been watching the game when it happened, specifically watching his team lose.
“You were very invested in this game?”She asked
“Well…
It turned out that he’d made a bet with his bar buddy that whoever’s team lost the game tonight had to get a tattoo of the opposing team’s quarterback - an idea that had seemed excellent while smoking under the blinking neon sign of Blitz but was existentially terrifying in the moment.
“Ah,” the doctor said. She made the wise decision to dance around the term panic attack, but we could all basically tell that was her best guess as to what had happened.
“However” she said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, “I think this may have been a blessing in disguise,” she said, and began lecturing him about how he badly needed to improve his diet and exercise habits if he didn’t want to end up back here.
Mom did her best, trying damn near every trick in the book to get fruits and vegetables to taste like anything but. I love my mom’s cooking, but she’s no Michelin star chef.
She’d be the first to say she’s no domestic goddess, just someone who got pregnant at 20 and, well, here she is. If you ask about her career she’ll say “painter” not “housewife”. She does paint and is excellent at it, but she’s a housewife pretty much, at least since we were kids. No time for painting when you’re raising five kids, pretty much on your own. Now that we’re grown up, I think she’s either lost the knack or is too afraid to check whether or not she’s still got it.
She’s like that, never wants to see herself as downtrodden or weak. Everytime dad ordered her around she’d tell him, “Fuck off, Hal” and then do it anyway.
I finally got one of those meal plans, the ones that send you the ingredients and you cook it yourself. It was an expensive one too. Dad filled out some surveys on his health, what he liked, and they sent recipes tailored just for him.
It seemed like it was going great for about a week. Then we realized he was feeding them to the dog while mom wasn’t looking (most likely explanation for the dog diarrhea mom had been scrubbing out of the carpets for the past month, while he commented from his chair “hey don’t complain you’re the one that wanted the mongrel in the first place”) and subsisting on fast food burgers he bought on the way home from Blitz instead. Mom yelled at him but wouldn’t let me do the same, much less demand my money back.
As for exercise, he instantly trashed most of our suggestions on low impact excercises. Walks, and swimming would make him look, somehow like an asshole. Stationary bike was too expensive. Yoga was…well he went on a long time about yoga, and I don’t even want to repeat much of what he said here. He tried signing up for a kickboxing class, but he didn’t listen to the instructor or the correct way to punch because he, “Knows how to fight damn it,” and shattered his hand within the first week. After that of course he deemed exercising too much trouble, and sitting around like a lump to be exactly the right “impact level” of activity.
The last straw though, the last straw was covid. He tried the whole social distancing thing for a week before he was out at his bar buddie’s houses again. The mask lasted for two. He would get political about it - his freedoms, the constitution, but it was pretty clear that his only motivation was actually laziness. He got it twice, and he had my mom take care of him throughout, which meant that she got it twice. Worse, she still had to wait on him while her own lungs were burning away in her chest. Second time, she ended up in the hospital for a couple weeks.
The doctors said she was lucky she didn’t have to be intubated.
Every day, through a smudged ipad screen, I would read her a list of all the heartwarmingly kind messages to her that had been posted in the comment section of my (beautifully written, poignant) facebook post on the subject of her illness.
Every day she would try to muster the will to make withering remarks in response, but the words would come out mutilated beyond recognition. She would turn a deathly shade of white. Then a nurse would threaten to end her ipad time if she kept straining her throat and she would settle for rolling her eyes while hearing how a woman she’d met twice described her as “the sweetest angel with which god had graced the world”.
What I think she most wanted to hear, and what I most wanted to tell her, were my thoughts on the situation. I tried writing them out now and then, but, well, they all sounded so stupid.
She recovered, thank god (I like to think my conveyance of well wishes to her helped with that recovery, even if she never showed her appreciation for them outright) After that dad was better at staying home, but not any more willing to cook or clean for himself. When I talked to my mom she was less and less the snarky, tough woman I had once known - she was more just tired.
I was complaining about the situation on twitter one day and I got a message from a stranger.
She said she could sell me something that could help with my problem. A page with strange symbols all across it. It’s from an ancient book she told me. I wouldn’t understand what it said now, but a week of studying it under candlelight and it would become clear to me what it was and how to use it.
At first I assumed this was spam, but the account looked normal - there were three years of normal/boring tweets, as well as many candid photos, which all showed the same person and which were not as far as I could tell stolen.
So maybe she was not a bot, just an odd…okay…a slightly crazy person. Hell, I might as well give it a shot. Not that I thought it would work. Of course I didn’t.
But I thought I would get a story out of it, maybe even a new friend. It’s not easy to make friends at my age. And, well. She was cute in all those photos of hers. I’m single. Tinder sucks.
I never claimed I was a perfect person, okay?
We met up at a public park at 6:30 in the morning. It was foggy enough to make me late, mostly because the neighborhood was one of those where groups of lululemon-wearing women with golden retrievers would ignore the sidewalks and walk right down the street like they owned it, so every couple of yards a pack of them manifested out of nowhere and I had to stomp on the brakes to avoid running them over.
She sat at a picnic table, which I could tell even from a distance had been sprayed down with the sprinklers overnight. She didn’t seem to mind that it was wet. She was dressed in a flannel shirt and looked like her hair hadn’t been washed in a while. I didn’t hold it against her. It was quarantine, you know, everyone had kind of let themselves go. Not me. I don’t mean to brag, I was dressed nice that day. But most people.
“Are you @xxxxx from twitter?” She asked.
She had an accent I couldn’t place.
“You can call me Paul” I said, and held out my hand for a handshake. She looked at my hand as if she could not fathom what it was, looked back up at me.
Her irises almost seemed to pulse, growing wider, thinner, and wider.
“Are you @xxxxx?” she asked again.
“Yeah, the one and only”
She reached into her pocket, withdrew the folded page. The symbols didn’t look any less strange in person.
“This will help with your problem.” She said, as I titled the paper this way and that, squinting. “Under candlelight. Study.”
She turned, started to walk away, “wait!”I called
She turned back.
I ran a hand through the back of my hair, stammered, “Do you uh, like movies?”
She didn’t even bother to reply, just strode off into the early morning mist.
I went home and drank a little and moped a little. The paper was still in my pocket though and I was hit by some curiosity.
I had nothing else to do, might as well do what she said. Better story I told myself, though I kind of knew I wasn’t going to be whipping this one out at parties.
I turned the lights off and lit the candles. And I just sat there, staring at it, trying to memorize the shapes, but I couldn’t quite, because every time I thought I had them right they shifted again. It was strangely addictive though, like a game. Trying to memorize them before they changed, so I kept going. Must have been about an hour I looked. When I finished I felt terribly silly and tossed the paper aside and told myself I needed to see that therapist I’d been meaning to visit.
But the next day I retrieved the paper and did it again. By the third day I felt like I was on the brink of something. By the fifth I knew I was almost there. By the sixth day I had a general idea of the paper’s contents, and the seventh filled in the details.
It was a ceremony that invited a spirit to share the body of someone you loved. The spirit would have control, but the person would still be in there, awake, conscious. Not able to speak for themselves directly, but they could communicate with the spirit, who would relay their thoughts if it felt it wise to do so.
As the one who initiated the ceremony, the spirit would take directions from me, as long as I promised to allow it to accomplish it’s other business.
What that other business was, it didn’t say.
Well that’s ridiculous I thought. Spirits aren’t real and this ceremony is some kind of dumb prank on the exeptionally gullible. I decided that was my final decision on the matter then immediately decided it wasn’t and went out and bought a goat (craigslist!) and a stainless steel knife and a bowl of a very specific brand of honey to put out in my yard during the full moon.
So I invited dad over to my apartment, for the weekend, smiling sweetly when he refused to take off his muddy boots and then parked them on my coffee table while he complained to me about the effort it had taken him to take a rapid test and then drive over, “Not that he wasn’t happy to see me.” I gave him a cocktail of beer and nyquil, and although he complained about the taste he drank it all and slept while I dragged him into the garage.
won’t
I won’t bore you with all the gory (literally, be prepared if you’re planning it yourself) details of what went down. All I’ll say is, it’s not as bad as it seems at first. Sure it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Sure, scenes from it pop up every now and then in my dreams, often enough that I lay awake for hours too terrified to sleep. And sure, all the blood was hard to scrub out of even a concrete floor, and while I did so, the old penny smell of it combined with the fumes from the cleaning fluids made me vomit in my mouth several times.
However, during the actual ceremony, you will be too focused on your chanting to pay much mind to the scream or the blood or the strangled half-human howls or the desperate last ditch apologies. After all, if you so much pronounce “pasth’e nanchoz G’rag,” as “pasth’e nanchoz p’hel.” you could end up expunged from history! Best to avoid that.
Honestly, there’s only one moment I even remember in any detail. I had finished sewing my fingertip onto the stump of his and was half finished with sawing my dad’s tongue off, in order to pour the honey mixture down his throat.
“Please” he gasped except, of course, given the circumstances it sounded more like “pleagbth.” Tears slid down the sides of his swollen face as he looked up at me.
This brought back ton of shitty memories. All the times he yelled at me as a kid, for talking or for being quiet, for not dropping everything and running the second he wanted a beer from the fridge, for asking him for money or trying to talk to him about superheros or video games, sometimes just for existing in the same room as him. Any injury or illness he’d tell me to walk it off until we ended up at the hospital when it was “Jesus kid you should have said something, I mean really said something.” The two times I brought a girl home he couldnt wait to whip out every time I’d had an accident or said some stupid shit or had an interest he deemed girly or geeky. This was more or less standard, sure, but he would talk himself up at the same time - talking about his money or how cool he was in high school, in stark contrast to me. He’d even flex his muscles while the girl squirmed on the couch, cheeks red. I don’t think he was trying to creep on them either. It wasn’t about them. It was about trying to teach something to me. “If you want a woman you gotta be ready to fight off all the other men who want the same thing,” he’d say. Well there was no fighting. He scared those girls away from both of us every time.
I thought about all those things but I mostly thought about the doll.
As a toddler I had carried around a cabbage patch doll, probably something my sister had outgrown. She had blonde braids, which I would twist in my little hands when I was upset, and kind, albeit beady, black eyes. I fed her the first bites of every meal and whispered things into her stubby ears that I never would have told another living soul. At bedtime I would make my mom give her a kiss, which she groaned about, but always did anyway.
My dad was never a fan of it, but when I turned five, that’s when he put his foot down. I was too old to have a doll now. I was too old for anything that he felt would push me off the path to true manhood.
He started commenting, and then snapping and finally yelling at me every time he saw me with her. I started keeping her in my bedroom, then hiding her under my pillow, until one day I came home from school early to see her little felt body dangling from his fist.
I ran up to him, pelted him with my little fists, but he swept me aside, stepped towards my door. It was only when I started to sob that he turned back, doll clutched in his overgrown paw, and said something. Words I never forgot.
I repeated them back to him now, as he spat scraps of his ruined tongue onto the carpet, “You’ll thank me when you’re older.”
When the ceremony was over, he opened his eyes. His irises pulsed in the same strange way the girl from twitter’s had.
“Dad?” I asked.
“I am dad,” he intoned, in an otherworldly new accent. He said the words as if they came as a surprise to him.
“Paul,” I said, and held out a hand to him.
He seemed to think for a good long time, reached up, and bumped his fist with mine.
“You are my son,” he said.
There was a new tongue in his mouth, a normal, human looking tongue, although the way it undulated when he spoke was, I’ll admit, strange.
I spent the rest of that day talking to him, filling him in on the details of my dad’s life, informing him of the new habits I wanted him to take on. I got assurance, too, that my dad was still in there, deep down.
“Would you like to speak with him?” The spirit asked.
We were sat in my living room at this point, sipping on bottled seltzer, which my dad would have given me hell for even owning, but which the spirit seemed content with, although the carbonation initially startled him.
“Okay.”
The spirit’s irises swelled and contracted once more. Then they went still.
My dad looked at me, touched a hand to his face, and began screaming. Kept screaming. For minutes he screamed and screamed.
I tried a couple times to get a word in edgewise, but as usual, the man wouldn’t shut up. I sighed, drank my seltzer.
Eventually, his irises pulsed once again and the screaming stopped.
“There is a…period,” he said, now in the voice of the spirit, ”Of adjustment.”
“Oh sure, sure” I waved a hand, “naturally”
So, it was that easy. My dad has a whole new, healthy life. My mom was thrilled at first, babbling on and on about how she couldn’t believe her luck, which left me to just nod and smile, knowing I couldn’t say that the luck was actually me.
Eventually though, her effusive babbling became peppered with misgivings.
“Sometimes I look over at him and catch him looking sadder than I’ve ever seen him.”
“Sometimes he seems confused about things that shouldn’t confuse him.”
“He won’t tell me what he does all day.”
“His eyes have gotten all weird.”
Finally she invited me over one day. When she invited me in she took me to a platter stuffed with cheese and crackers and made small talk about my new job, but there was this undertone to it. I knew she would bring it up, and she did.
“Twice now he yells something like, ‘Kill me Cheryl,’ and I’ll ask what’s wrong, and he’ll insist he didn’t say anything”
I shook my head. Asking someone to kill him instead of just shutting up and enjoying the incredible improvements I had made to his life? Wow. Dad wasn’t able to appreciate anything. I guess I’d have to talk to his spirit about a plan to mitigate that behavior.
“He’s been like this ever since he went all healthy, which happened right after he got back from visiting you.”
“Oh?” I stuffed a piece of cheese in my mouth, eyes trained on the table, “I hadn’t noticed”
“I’m aware this makes me sound like a fucking
nutcase” she said, “But you did …something to him didn’t you.”
“No.”
“You keep taking credit for his lifestyle transformation. You keep saying he changed due to your uh, effervescence or what the fuck ever.”
“I’m just..I didn’t mean…”
She was looking at me the way she had looked at me when I was thirteen and trying to blame my sister for infesting our family computer with porn viruses.
I relented, explained.
As I had worried, she was not grateful to me as she should have been. However I had not expected her to be so furious.
She shouted at me, “He may not have been a perfect man but for fucks sake he was your father.”
I shouted back that she should have divorced him a long time ago, before he was around to fuck up my life.
She shouted back that I was lucky he was around, that I had no idea what it would have been like being raised by her alone, struggling with no one to rely on.
That I had no idea what she was like before she had him - depressed, crazed, barely even human. That he helped her in ways I couldn’t see.
She lunged at me. I shrank back, against the kitchen counter. She kept yelling, close enough to my face that every word misted my cheeks with spit.
I wanted her to stop.
I needed her to stop.
I fumbled behind me, grabbed the first solid thing I felt - the edge of a ceramic bowl.
I swung it at her head. It connected, making a dull ringing sound.
Wax fruits spilled out from inside, bouncing all over the linoleum.
She started to collapse and I caught her right as she tipped. I held her tight against my chest the way she’d held me when I was a kid, crying about the doll that was taken or as a high schooler crying about the girls who had dumped me or me at whatever age, crying over whatever dad had done this time, or failed to do. I ran a hand over her brown hair the way she’s always run hers over mine.
“It’s going to be okay” I whispered, just as she’d always told me then.
She’s tied to the bed in the guestroom now, while I’m preparing to invite a spirit into her. Its not how I wanted things to go down, obviously.
But it’s probably for the best. I mean, there’s her smoking (yes! Even after she almost died of fucking covid) and her weakness for twinkies. And her love for him, the old him. That’s some sort of mental disease isn’t it?
It’s okay. It’s going to be better. She’s going to be better.
She’s going to live a good long time in that body, and all she has to do is share it.
Wouldn’t you want someone to make that choice for you, out of pure love and concern, if you were making terrible choices for yourself?
Well, I hope so, because the spirit in dad has told me he and his brethren are making great progress, inhabiting the self destructive and the incompetent and the outright dregs of society.
Hopefully, before long, none of the undeserving will have a choice :)