Mark steps into the living room. He looks at the spot where the TV always stood. Where are the hassocks of yesteryear?
The original broadcast of Lost in Space is an expanding shell of electromagnetic radiation now 51 light-years in radius, a volume of space containing approximately 1400 star systems. How many little alien boys are now having weird dreams about Billy Mumy? But the signal is likely far too weak to be picked up by extrasolar receivers, even if they were monitoring the correct frequency. To Mark’s six-year-old self, John Robinson seemed the perfect dad, and Maureen, he half believed, was based on his mother. The two women had the same wavy hair, pointy nose, chirpy voice. Years later he could see that John Robinson looked like JFK, and a sad fact he’d picked up somewhere was that Lost in Space was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s favorite show in 1965.
When Mark visited during his mother’s decline, every morning she would wake up and say, “Markie, I’m worried about the TV. I don’t think it’s working.”
“Let’s check. It was working last night.” He would accompany her downstairs, where she would settle on the couch and he’d hit the remote. She never tried to turn on the TV herself, convinced as she was that it was far too complicated.
“It seems to be working, Mom.”
“Oh, good.”
“What would you like to watch?”
“Can we watch Miracle of the White Stallions?”
“Sure thing.”
“But we need to get cigarettes. Aren’t we out of cigarettes?” Mark and the daytime aides he employed hid the cigarettes every evening and told his mother she had run out, so she wouldn’t get up during the night and burn the house down.
“Let me check. Gee, it turns out we do have some.”
“Oh, good. Can I have a cigarette?”
Mark watched Miracle of the White Stallions and National Velvet each approximately 120 times. He was fascinated to notice that, each time he saw them, they seemed more perfectly executed—perfectly acted, perfectly written, perfectly edited—and consequently their emotive power grew and grew. When the good Nazi General Tellheim lit his cigarette and said, “After such a terrible winter, I think we’re going to have quite a nice spring,” and walked off into the dark to his suicide, it felt like the most profound expression ever voiced by man of nature’s dreadful and wonderful indifference to human suffering and death.
Mark handed his mother her cigarettes. He brought from the kitchen her bottle of Ensure and a packet of animal crackers, the only things she would consume. He listened about 200 times to a tape recording of a voice recital he’d done with Susan during a brief period, fifteen to sixteen, when she was taking singing lessons. His father had made three backup copies, easy to find within his enormous music collection by consulting his handwritten card catalog, and each copy in succession warbled more as it deteriorated. Every time they listened, his mother would cry. “What a beautiful voice! Who’s playing piano?”
“That’s me.”
“Is Susan still singing?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“There’s an ecumenical church. It has a big choir. She solos sometimes. She really enjoys it.”
“That’s you playing piano.”
“Right.”
“Is that a mistake there?”
“Not right there.”
Mark goes up the stairs. The floor refinishers filled the holes left behind when the chairlift was taken out. Dad rode the lift in his last years, a big man ascending slowly, whirring, his face the impassive mask of Parkinsonism. He had once scoured the newspapers of the English-speaking world to find the hardest crossword puzzles, the ones with clues built around puns and anagrams. He and an equally avid co-worker eventually determined that the ones in The Guardian were the most diabolical. The co-worker would go to a university library once a month and photocopy back issues, then he and Dad would race to see who could complete them first.
More than degrading memory, Lewy body dementia disrupts the ability to organize information. (His father explained this to Mark, as it was happening.) The dozen pieces of observed data in any moment are slippery uniform balls. The need to tie your shoelace and the need to escape a burning house have the same weight. Midway in the long decline, Mark watched his father struggle to write down (handwriting shrinks, freezes) a daily schedule for his meds: sixteen hours awake, pills spaced evenly throughout the day, four of this medication, three of that, two of that. Mark looked at the wavering lines of the chart his father had drawn, the microscopic names of the drugs, the empty spaces awaiting checkmarks, the pencil in hand returning again and again to the parameters noted above: sixteen hours, four of this, three of that. His father would become agitated, his memory good enough to know that this was not his brain, not anymore.
Susan’s old bedroom is at the top of the stairs. Mark doesn’t go in. The deaths of his parents he accepts, but he was only thirty-three when Susan was killed, and the moment he heard the news it seemed to him that he had entered an alternate universe, where everything was the same, from the disposition of galactic superclusters to the jiggle of air molecules in his lungs, except
