Future Imperfect

the way, I’m sure your dad is very proud of you.”

“Is very proud?”

“Of course.”

“Mom, Dad hasn’t been anything but a vegetable for three years. I don’t think he’s proud of me. I don’t think he’s proud of anything. Dad’s just a lump lying in a hospital bed, growing its hair and nails out.”

The look on my mom’s face, it’s disappointment. It’s deep down, very hurt. Her face still scrunched up with emotion, wedged there in the door, Mom says, “He’s very, very proud of you.” And then the door closes and I turn the light out.

Tomorrow, I say to myself. Tomorrow it will happen and my life will begin.

Tomorrow.

CHAPTER TWO

ONE

Dad-

You remember that time we went to the sand dunes?

You and Mom were still together and I was maybe six. My memories from the trip are pretty choppy, but I do remember us walking in that really shallow creek and climbing the dunes. I remember sleeping in a tent. But most of all I remember something that you told me. We were sitting at the campfire, Mom had gone to bed, and you were looking at the way the smoke was twisting up into the sky, up into the stars, and you said, “When you get older, you’re going to want to escape sometime. Escape from what you made, from what you can’t change. And the only way to really do it, to get away from this, from everything that’s been done, is to lose yourself in repetition.” And I asked you what you meant and you just shook your head and said, “You’ll figure it out later.”

I’m guessing you meant drugs. For you, I’m guessing it was tipping back the brews. Uncorking the wines. Sip and sip and sip and repeat. Right? That’s what you meant, right? If so, I get the point. Only I’m not older and already I’m getting into the joys of repetition. Concussion, future, bliss, and repeat. Voila. Should I be worried?

For a long time, when you moved away, I thought you were trying to escape from me. Mom, sure, but me too. But now because I’m older and, maybe just a bit wiser, I think it’s because you’re hiding. I have lost myself in repetition, Dad. And it’s kind of saved me. Kind of captured me too.

I wish you’d stop lying in that bed faking. I wish you’d snap out of your coma, snap out of your nap. I wish you’d just call me and ask me what my deal is. I wish you’d just sit me down and say, “Ade, I’ve noticed all the gashes and bruises and hospital bills. I’m worried.” Most dads, they’d slap me if they saw me the way I am.

But you’re lost between the lines.

You escaped so far there’s no way back.

Ade

TWO

Of course, I already know what I’m wearing.

I want to look good, but it’s hard given the bruising and the cuts. It’s hard given the fact that I’ve got one eye that’s all bloody in the white of it. I dutifully slick my hair with pomade. I brush my teeth three times. I put a fresh stretch of gauze around my head.

First thing I do before school is go visit my dad. Mr. Coma.

What’s funny, and I think this every time I visit him, which isn’t that often, is that for my dad, the future is gone. He’s all past now. Not even present. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think God was playing some joke on me.

Me knocking myself unconscious all the time, this is how I’m supposed to look.

It’s not pretty.

On television, in the movies, you see these people in comas all sleeping prettily like they’re straight out of a fairly tale. They lie there, arms folded over their chests, their skin light and cool as a blanket of fresh snow.

These pop-culture coma people, they’re bullshit.

Here’s what it really looks like: my pop. He’s actually in a Persistent Vegetative State, which I think is just another thirty-dollar doctor term for coma. What makes it interesting is that he’s not exactly like furniture. He can kind of do things sometimes. Not on purpose but just because part of his brain, the reptile part down deep, is ticking off movements. He cries sometimes. Sometimes he sneezes. He coughs. He drools. He shits his pants this horrible liquidy stuff.

What’s really spooky about Dad is when he reacts to things.

You can yell at him and sometimes he’ll turn his head to look at you. Only his eyes won’t be open and, as the doctors have had to explain to Mom and me a thousand times, he doesn’t actually hear. Like not really really hear. He’s just on autopilot. His body doing its reptile things.

This morning I walk in and let my dad know the scoop.

“Today, Dad, is the day I’ve been telling you about,” I say as I sit in the chair across from him. This chair, it’s a rolly office deal and it’s been here for years. The leather is cracked and faded on it.

Dad doesn’t move.

His chest goes up and down. There is some drool on his shirt. Eyes closed.

Recently I’ve been coming to see dad without mentioning it to my mom. I’ve just been talking to him, getting into everything going on in my life, kind of like he’s recording it. And maybe he is. He’s my own personal unconscious diary.

Sitting there across from him, I bring up my worries. “See, it’s the Jimi thing that’s the problem. Like I told you last time, something straight up wrong is going on. A year ago, I wasn’t stressed. But now, I’m paying more attention. I just know he’s going to be a problem. Just know it.”

My dad, I think he farts.

The expression on his face is no expression at all.

I tell him again how Jimi’s an enigma. I tell my dad that the rumors are Jimi lives in a trailer home, that his parents are drunks, that he smokes a pack of cloves a day, that he won the Colorado Teen Thespian of the Year Award two years running, that he sleeps only two hours a night and drinks coffee laced with some suspicious Mexican energy drink powder he bought online. To my coma dad I say, “And those are the rumors most everyone has heard. The ones easiest to prove. The others, the rumors people only whisper, are almost too outrageous to be true: That he deflowered both Nelle Wishman and Jodi Criswell at the same time last summer at a pool party. That he blackmailed Mr. Rosen after catching our married algebra teacher making out one of the lunch ladies. That sometimes he has bruises on his back from where his parents beat him.”

My dad, for his part, just stares into the silence between us.

This gap of nothing, it’s pretty much his whole life now.

“Anyway,” I say, “guy with rumors like that has to be trouble.”

I walk over to my dad’s bedside and look closely at his eyelids. The balls of his eyes move slowly under the thin skin the way sullen fish do under ice. “But I know the future always works itself out. It’s like karma. Can’t change what’s coming down the tracks.”