Chapter Thirty Six

The Tail’s father was tended to in an adult care facility just off Greenwood Avenue.  The place was huge, but there were very few vacancies.  The number of monthly deaths within that place was very high, yet for every death there was another would-be tenant on a waiting list, looking for or dreading to find a place in which they might pass their few, final years.  For some it was a place of ending up.  For others it was a place of passing through.  One thing was certain: none stayed for very long.

The facility was brick where it faced the road, but the parts away from the road were newer, and decked in a white aluminum siding that could have been anywhere from five to twenty years old.  It was quiet inside the facility.  There was no music and very little noise.  There were trees that shaded the roads and walkways between the buildings, but few of the residents strayed outside.  There was an atmosphere of watchful mourning about the place which didn’t bear close inspection.  Once inside, one became circumspect in one’s thinking.  It was not a good place in which to dwell on anything eventful.

From the road there was a driveway that led into the compound.  The interior of the compound was less imposing than the parts visible from Greenwood Avenue, just rows of windows interrupted by doors.  It was the kind of building that would have impressed people back in the 60s, but so late into its life it retained only the quaintness of architectural fads come and gone.

Taking a right in front of the small library on 135^th, he took another turn across a double yellow and drove into the compound.  He had come there from his house, where he and his wife had been having a conversation.  She never argued, his wife.  She only set verbal traps for him.  The conversation had seemed harmless enough at the time, but on the drive over he began to wonder what she had truly meant by certain remarks, and why she had smiled so strangely during their talk.

        He left his Nissan parked within view of the glass doors that fronted the entranceway, and nudged his way through a crowd of off-shift Nigerians to where the nurse was.  A carpeted lobby staffed by a nurse led into the ward where his father was kept.  A short check-in procedure followed, and he thanked the nurse as he headed down the hallway beyond the reception desk.  His father’s room was at the other end of the hall, on the left.

        Along the hallway there were pictures of Seattle and its environs.  These pictures were all copies of works done by the same local artist, and all were variations on a single theme.  Seattle landmarks were submerged beneath the ocean, and the usual tourist haunts had become playgrounds for whales and dolphins.  On the left he saw the Pike Place Market, the sign obscured by a sperm whale’s fin.  On the right he saw the Space Needle, with salmon coursing through its observation deck.  The pictures sent his thoughts back to the Ice Age.

        He turned into his father’s room.  His father, a wrinkled likeness of the man he had worshipped as a boy, was on his hospital bed, watching TV near the windows.  It always surprised him to see his father, so different from the man in his memories.  It struck him that his father must be equally surprised at the changes his son had undergone.  No longer the boy, no longer the young man, but rather this middle-aged, serious person who talked of his own children, his own job, and his own wife.  And one of those children, he had begun to suspect, was not his own.

        “Glad to see you,” his father said after a pause.  They always began this way, with the same phrase.  In a few minutes they would be talking about the same old news.  The Tail could have written a script for their conversation ahead of time, and his rendering of their incipient dialogue would have been uncannily accurate.

His father was still very lucid.  Thank God Alzheimer’s didn’t run in their family.  His father looked shrunken and old, but he was still mentally present behind the wispy brows and the false teeth.  He was still – reassuringly – there.

        “Glad to see you,” he said, forcing a smile.  He truly was glad to see his father, even though there were other things on his mind.

        “Come sit down,” his father said, “Tell me what’s going on.  Of course you know what’s going on with me.  Nothing.  Old, lying here, dying… tell me what’s going on with you.”

        Ever the obedient son, he pulled up a chair next to his father’s bed.  A glance up at the television showed him a television personality interviewing a local author.  “It’s just an outline at this point,” the author was saying, “But I feel very strongly about the theme of time travel.  Time is always dragging us forward, so we share this desire to go backward, against the flow of time.  We are always trying to travel into the past.  At one extreme it could represent a desire for immortality, or even omnipotence.”

As the interview continued, the Tail and his father talked for some time about his work and family. And then his father added:

        “You know I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.  Do you remember how I told you stories when you were younger?  Do you remember what I told you about the stories?”

        “Yes,” he said, this time with a genuine smile.  “You told me that everything is a story, and that the little stories add up to one big story, that never ends.”

        “That’s right,” added his father.  “You remember.  So how about telling me a story?”

        “Fine,” he answered, “But I was just thinking about that second part, dad.  What if the big story really does have an ending, and we won’t like it?”

        His father scowled.  “Stories never end,” he said, “Not really.  They just go on and on.”

        “But what if…” he interjected, “There was a way for someone to end all the stories?  Or what if one day everyone died of a plague?  Or a war?  That would end all the stories, wouldn’t it?  Without people to tell them, without people to keep them alive, stories die, don’t they?”

        “No,” his father pronounced.  “No.  There will always be stories because there will always be people.  You’ve got to have more faith.”

        He thought about this for a while.  He had never thought about faith in such humanistic terms.  In his pocket he was holding on to his wallet while they talked, and inside the wallet was a photo of his wedding.  False images.  Faith?

        His father did not wait for him to counter the argument.  The old man knew that his time was short, and that there was no time to waste.  He reached out and patted the Tail on the forearm, knowing his son’s native skepticism as well as his own.  They had always been so similar, this father and son.  They had always known one another without having to explain.

        “You know your problem?” said the older man, “You’ve been playing a supporting role in your own story, when you should be the main character.  You have a lot of good in you, son, but you hide inside books too much.  You are a good person, and you could do a lot of good for people, but you hide from the world when you need to face it.  I know you get stepped on sometimes, but that’s partly your own fault.  You’ve got to get out there and claim what’s yours.  That’s what heroes always do, and you ought to be the hero in your own story.

“I mean, if you aren’t,” the old man said, “Then that means that someone else is. And if someone else is the hero in your story, then you might as well be the villain.  Right?”

        “Yes,” he said, too tired to argue.  But he couldn’t think of how to claim anything without destroying it first.  Again he thought of the pictures he had seen in the hallway, of a submerged Seattle.  Perhaps people as a whole were trying – and failing – to be the heroes in their own stories.  Or in the end, perhaps the meeker of the species would inherit the Earth.  Perhaps one day humpbacks would swim over his gravestone, and ask each other about this failed species, unable to take proper charge of its own affairs.  Or perhaps one day octopi would lurk within the eaves of his house, his oft thwarted ambitions only footnotes to their future empires.

        Or perhaps some other race might return from the future.  Something evolved from men, but not human any longer.  Perhaps one of those future things might try to understand men like him, and fail.  In his present mood, he could sympathize with them.