Poppa says, “I want to help you.”
“And why couldn’t you help me before? You know, when we were on the beach. The other beach, I mean. The future one.”
“You weren’t ready. Your mind wasn’t.”
“And how’s that?”
“You needed to be clean. Totally clean. I want you to understand, Ade. To see through all the fog, to make sense of this.”
“One of
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not a parasite? Some sort of psychic junkie that’s like-”
“Not at all, Ade.”
And Poppa Ministry takes off his mask. There’s a zipper in the back and the sound of it is long and loud. Like a train getting nearer. I brace myself for anything. At this point, I’m expecting him to be melted like a monster or to be a woman. I’m expecting anything but what I actually see.
Poppa Ministry, the masked man, he’s my dad.
Even though I’m not really in the here or the now, even though my body’s lying on a cold table in Grandpa Razor’s filthy basement, I can feel myself physically start wobbling. My knees are broken, not holding me up. My eyes, they just suddenly start watering like I need to sneeze. Only I don’t. Only my heart is overwhelmed.
My dad, it’s him from twenty years ago.
I’ve seen photos of him like this. With his big head of thick dark hair and his thin eyes and his nose, my nose. In the photos he’s smiling and he’s looking beyond the camera, he’s pointing up at the sky, he’s noticing something at his feet, but here on the beach, my young father is looking straight ahead at me. He is not broken. He is not sleeping. He is not dead.
Neither of us move.
The mask sparkles in the sand.
I can’t speak, so he speaks for me.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Ade. To surprise you this way. I wanted to tell you the very first time, but the connection… It wouldn’t have worked. I had to…” And he pauses; somewhere dark a duck sounds. “You’re in big danger, son. You know what happened on this beach, what Jimi did to his mother. If you kill him, if you come here and let the future play out, it will only make him stronger.”
I summon words. I say, “That sounds awfully fairy tale, Dad.”
He laughs his laugh, the one I grew up with, and says, “I knew this was going to be difficult to explain. I should start by telling you that I’m not who you think I am, that I’m not-”
And I interrupt him, “You can save me the evil-genius speech, Dad. How are you even here? How are you not in a coma right now? How are you, like, almost my age?”
He sits down in the sand, smiles up at me. “I figured out I had an ability when I was just a kid. When I tried really hard and really concentrated, I could send myself out of my body. I could project myself into other people’s heads. See what they could see. Into their dreams and, well, if they had visions of the future or the past or whatever, I could send myself there too.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I stopped long before you were born. To be honest, it was simple: You really don’t ever want to be in another person’s head. It’s not like stepping into a movie. Doing it, you get twisted by the emotion. Bent out of shape and heavy, like you just stepped out of a flat surface into a three-D one. The pain was, is, incredible, but the high…”
I nod slowly, me being the understanding father here. “I know the high.”
“I got pretty ugly. Your mom, she helped me so much, but I needed… I was desperate to get that back.” He lets all his air out through his nose and says, “It’s easy to make yourself believe that what’s in a bottle or a can will make you whole again. It’s not too hard to believe in an easy way out.”
I haven’t talked to my dad like this, well, never actually like this, but we haven’t talked this long and this in- depth since I was old enough to put myself to bed. Honestly, I don’t have time for small talk. Something major’s going down.
I tell my dad that I’m sorry he’s in a coma. I tell him that I’m sorry that for the past really long time I’ve been treating him like he’s basically dead. I say, “Really though, what you did was very, very shitty.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m weak. I was a stupid drunk. Will you forgive me?”
“I’m sure I will. Eventually.”
“Will you visit me?”
“Of course. I have been. I’ve been telling you everything. You never heard?”
“No,” he says sheepishly.
“Not a thing?”
He shakes his head. I can’t tell if he’s lying. He asks, “Can I give you a hug?”
And he stands up, sand sliding down his suit, and I walk over and we hug. He cries. Right there, this ghost version of him, this escape pod version of him, just cries and cries in fits and starts like a bad engine. When he’s done he pulls away and cleans his nose with his sleeve. Says, “Thanks.”
Me, not losing it, I ask, “You need to tell me how to stop it. How to change what I’ve seen.”
“I don’t know. But I can tell you what you’re up against.”
“Okay. And what am I up against?”
“I was unfaithful to your mother. Before your mom got pregnant with you, I had an affair. The woman was bad news. She was sick and she was mean. I have no idea why it happened, but it did.”
I have nothing to say. My dad reads the anger on my face.
The way I’m turning red, the way my fingers bite into my palms, it’s a rage that’s new to even me. I only know that I don’t want to be the pillow my stupid dad cries into right now. I only know that I’d rather see his teeth go flying out of his head.
He says, “You’re mad, I can understand that. But it gets worse.”
I bite my lower lip.
Dad says, “This woman, the one I was having an affair with, she got pregnant. She had a son that she didn’t want. I took off, went back to your mother. She never knew about the affair. We had you and I never looked back. It was over.”
A headache swims up the back of my neck, sinks its fangs into my brain.
Dad says, “The woman died. She drowned. Right here in this reservoir.”
The headache intensifies. It screams at me with a megaphone. Tells me to kick, to kill, to bite, to fight. The headache raging in my skull wants me to scream uncontrollably and crush down my father with my feet. What he’s telling me only happens in bad movies. It’s the end, really.
Dad says, very quietly, “Jimi is your half brother.”
And that’s when I clock him.
It just happens. My fist connects with his jaw between heartbeats. The blood pushes out, I knock my dad to the ground, the blood pulls back in. I stand over him with my eyes fast turning red. My skin is shaking around me. The whole beach feels like it’s vibrating on the same wavelength as my fury.
FOUR
My father, this young version of him, is lying at my feet.
The punch didn’t do much but knock him flat.
It feels good having done it, but still I’ve got this stress wrapped tight around my heart as if it’s bound up with coils of ragged rope.
What he’s told me, it’s impossible.
It’s the worst thing, the very worst thing, he could have said.
Sitting up, wiping at his chin the way boxers do, Dad says, “It’s terrible, I know. I should have told you sooner.
