Malagash Read online

  ALSO BY JOEY COMEAU

  FICTION

  Lockpick Pornography

  It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry

  We Are Become Pals (with Jess Fink)

  Overqualified

  One Bloody Thing After Another

  Bible Camp Bloodbath

  The Girl Who Couldn’t Come

  The Complete Lockpick Pornography

  The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved

  Overqualifieder

  A SOFTER WOLD BOOKS (with Emily Horne)

  Truth and Beauty Bombs

  Second Best Isn’t So Bad

  Everybody Gets Got

  Let’s Do Something Wrong

  Anatomy of Melancholy

  CONTENTS

  >_ one

  >_ two

  >_ three

  >_ four

  About the Author

  Copyright

  C:MALAGASH>book.exe

  for my mother, Karen Byers

  -- ONE --

  >_

  “A weight will lift.” My father has a big cup of crushed ice that he keeps tilting side to side. It hasn’t melted enough yet. “A weight will lift,” he says.

  He’s tired of having to say “I know” in that reassuring voice, again and again. “I know, Sunday. I know.” So he’s found this new way of saying it. “A weight will lift. A leaf will fall. Fresh white snow will blanket this whole sleepy town.”

  “That’s very poetic,” I tell him.

  He tilts his crushed ice again.

  “Sunday, you are my daughter,” he says, holding out his hand for mine. I take it. “You are my daughter,” he says, “and it breaks my heart that the day has finally come for you to learn this hard and simple truth.”

  His face is very serious, which is one of the ways my father smiles. He pauses, as though he’s searching for just the right words. He isn’t searching, of course. Nothing comes easier to my father than teasing me.

  “The truth is that we, each and every one of us, get old and frail, Sunday. We, each and every one of us, lie down in the winter of our lives,” he tilts his ice, “to make way for the baby skunks and the excitable little porcupines which are born in the spring.” He says this in his hospital bed, wearing a flimsy bathrobe. His face is deadly earnest. He thinks he is so funny. “Poking their heads up through the frost, because it is their time now, my darling daughter. It is their time now to glitter in the sun.” Squeezing my hand like on TV.

  “That’s very poetic,” I tell him again.

  “You said that already,” my father says.

  “Very poetic,” I say.

  It’s my own fault for saying the same thing every day. I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to die.

  “Snow will blanket the town,” he says, solemnly.

  “Snow in the middle of July?” I say. “Oh wow, like in a metaphor?”

  “Sometimes the winter comes earlier than we want,” my father says. “Sometimes the sky—”

  “Okay, enough with the—” I stop myself. This is infuriating. It is meant to be infuriating. My father smiles at the crack in my voice, takes a sip from his melting crushed ice. And once again, I can see that I am arguing against death itself. A stubborn child. A little girl. I don’t want a weight to lift. I don’t want a leaf to fall.

  It doesn’t matter how stupid my father’s arguments are, how clichéd his metaphors. He’s on the winning side. The cancer is everywhere. In two weeks, maybe a month, we’ll have reached the end of this twisting garden path. And he will prove me wrong. A weight will lift. A leaf will fall. Fresh white snow will blanket this whole stupid town.

  >_

  I thought Malagash would be a small town, but it is not even that. One long road, a twisting red paved loop around the north shore of Nova Scotia. There’s a tractor sitting in a field. A dirt bike leaning up against a shed. We pass a pen of llamas, who look bored as hell. The Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to drive along beside us. Then it slips away.

  In the front seat I have my phone out again. The glass and metal object that was once my phone. I’ve got nobody left to call. Which is a relief, because I’ve got no energy left to pretend. There are only so many condolences a body can sit through. Only so many updates on what you’ve missed before you don’t miss it.

  I use my phone to record my mother. The thunk of potholes. Shaky video glimpses of the cottages slipping past. The waif humming to himself. The trees rushing. It records everything it can while we drive through my father’s hometown for the first time. Prim little houses spaced for privacy, each sitting on its own beautiful view of the sea. There’s an old general store with a dying neon PIZZA sign.

  My mother’s voice plays over the mud. The mud stretches out to the green-grey ocean.

  “A community is the polite term,” she says. “An elephants’ graveyard for people.” Laughter in her voice, like when she teases us. This place is family to her. Neither Simon nor I have ever been here, but my mom and dad had a whole life. They lived here together, before Simon or I were born. With the phone up to the window, I record what I can. There is a church, a vineyard, an abandoned salt mine somewhere beneath us, a bible camp, a wharf where lobster fishermen once set out to sea. Maybe they still do? Another wharf. Another. Wharves always look abandoned. There’s a real graveyard on both sides of the church. “Those plots are as far as some of these people ever go,” my mother says as we pass.

  Some facts my mother remembers:

  “The road is red like this from clay. They used what they had. Look how red the dirt is, too.”

  “When the tide is out, you can walk forever and only ever get up to your waist.”

  “Those cottages there belonged to your father’s aunt Edie and uncle Harry. Separate cottages right next door to one another. Isn’t that perfect? It saved their marriage.”

  There was no need to convince us to move here. We didn’t plead or fight. Our father wanted to go home to Nova Scotia, to die near his mother and his childhood memories. We wanted to be with our father. The math was simple enough. Take us anywhere, as long as we can be with him. Good riddance to the rest of it.

  Everything we need is here. We have our clothes. Simon has his puzzles and toys, and I have my computers. We won’t be here forever, I guess. Just for the rest of my father’s life.

  >_

  I record my father’s voice on my phone. Audio, but no video. I’m too worried about the slightness of his arms, the paleness of his skin. I record his voice because his voice still sounds right. He sounds like my father, and it is my father I want to remember.

  I record him on every visit. His jokes and laughter. His calm acceptance of death. His puns. The creak in his words when he talks about my little brother, the waif. When he talks about my mother. About me. I have never listened to anything as closely as I listen to these recordings. The ups and downs of tone. The reason for every small inflection. There’s so much meaning in every stupid little thing we say.

  Sometimes I hold the phone in my hand. Sometimes I set it on the table, or on the bed beside him. So the sound quality varies. It can make him feel far away, when I listen at home. Like his voice is coming to me from behind a thick hanging curtain. But that is only because he’s still alive. When he is gone, these recordings will sound closer.

  I record everything. Then I copy everything to a laptop that I’ve spray-painted gold. On the laptop’s lid, I’ve stencilled an old-fashioned cross in white. I know absolutely nothing about religion. This has nothing to do with religion.

  I am thorough with my recordings, but organization is a struggle. I divide them into phrases, sentences. Each
recording sliced into its parts. Sometimes just single words or sounds. Sometimes just a laugh. I have so many variations of his laugh.

  quick_laugh.wav

  sharp_final_laugh.wav

  long_rolling_laughter.wav

  longer_laugh_together_mom.wav

  sad_laugh.wav

  unexpected_laugh.wav

  laugh_for_me.wav

  But the most important thing is my father’s voice. The words.

  poetic.wav

  youre_my_daughter.wav

  sunday.wav

  sunday_sunday_sunday_monster_truck.wav

  birds_and_bees.wav

  sleepy_town_blanket.wav

  handsome_old.wav

  chickens.wav

  a_leaf.wav

  “A weight will lift,” he says. “A leaf will fall.” I am collecting my father’s words. “Fresh white snow will blanket this whole sleepy town.”

  I built a database to keep track of it all. Every file gets an entry in the database. Each filename was associated with a written transcription and with a text field where I tried to describe the context. But that wasn’t enough. So I added text fields for content, for tone, for facial expression. There’s so much that needs to be remembered. Bemusement. Mock outrage. Metaphor. It is an unusable mess of data.

  At night, I play long nonsense loops of his voice to myself before I fall asleep. Like a bedtime story. Like a lullaby.

  >_

  Our room is lousy with flowers. They’re on the wallpaper, the ceiling. Carved into the doorframe. They’re painted on the too-small chairs set in front of the bookshelf. This whole room feels so strangely lost in time, like an old photograph.

  The waif and I share a bunk bed. He prefers the bottom bunk, worried that he might fall in his sleep. But it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t mind the top bunk. When I am up there, it feels cut off from the room, more private. And I don’t care if I fall.

  If I had a choice, I’d prefer an actual bed, and my own room. And there are two more bedrooms on this floor, but they’re not for us. One is for our uncles, when they arrive; the other is for our mother. This room is ours.

  I am a bit too big for the bunk, though. My feet push against the footboard, and there is no room for a computer. Let alone three. That was going to be a problem. So I cleaned out the closet. I made it mine. The door is not soundproof, but it is dark in there, and private, and I even sort of like that I need to hug my knees to my chest to fit. So now, while my brother sleeps, I curl up in front of the machines and upload my father’s voice. I make new entries in the database.

  “Good morning, Sunday,” he says. “How was the flight?”

  “Who’re you typing to on that thing? A boy? Does he know any knock-knock jokes?”

  “How come the cat never comes to visit? Is she mad at me?”

  “You are so wonderful, Sunday.” His voice is very quiet and serious on that recording. I have a whole special tag for the recordings where he says my name. And for the ones where he says he loves me. Sometimes serious, and sometimes laughing happily.

  update recordings_db

  set tone = 'laughing happily'

  where filename = wonderful.wav;

  “Don’t tell your mother or Simon, but I love you way more than either of them,” he says.

  update recordings_db

  set tone = 'dead serious'

  where filename = loves_me_most.wav;

  The small flowers on the closet’s wallpaper flicker with computer light.

  >_

  There’s an abandoned farmhouse across the road from my grandmother’s house. The wood is bleached grey, and its roof has caved on the right side, like the house has stumbled to the left. There’s no sense of desperation to the house. It doesn’t struggle. It doesn’t thrash, or fight against its collapse. It is an elephant that has come far enough and can go no further. The proud grey husk of an animal that has earned each crease in its hide. That has lived long enough. Here is his reward.

  It’s getting dark now. The sky is the only thing you can see clearly.

  I’ve been sitting and watching. I want to touch the side of that old house. To put my hand on its flank and feel something creak in those big hollow lungs. But when I stand up to walk down there, the dark dissuades me. The sky still has colour, and the stars have begun to show, but the ground and shrubs along my grandmother’s driveway are gone. Vanished.

  The stumbling old farmhouse is just a silhouette against the stars now. That wouldn’t be such a bad way to die. To finally stumble and fall in a field, and to accept it. To be your own gravestone. It would be childish to struggle. Childish to thrash, or fight against your collapse. Childish to try and live forever. I can see my father out in that field, calm and quiet. I am the one still thrashing. I am the one who wants him to live forever.

  “Sunday, dear, are you out there?” my grandmother calls from behind me. Inside the orange glow. “Sunday, how much potato salad do you want?” Another late supper. The clatter of cutlery on flowered plates.

  Look at that house, so quiet and willing. If there is a good way to die, that’s it out there. Graceful and calm in the face of inevitability.

  It feels generous, almost. Beauty and reassurances are not for ourselves. Of course death will come. And of course there is no good way to die. There is no peace. A weight will not lift. A leaf will not fall. But we can pretend.

  >_

  I listen to my father’s voice to calm down sometimes. But that is not why I record him.

  I record him because I am writing a computer virus. I am writing a computer virus based on my father’s words. Based on his jokes and his laughter. Based on his stories. The virus will go out into the world and it will live forever on the hard drives of strangers. It will hide underneath everything, and in the dark it will very quietly repeat things my father has said. Every word that I’ve recorded.

  It won’t say anything out loud. It won’t speak in his actual voice. Partly because the sound files are too large to include in the virus itself. Partly because his survival will depend on not being heard. Not being discovered. So the virus will say his words for him; it will copy them into memory. Into the long stretches of unused storage. Like an echo in an empty room. Like the words written on the back of an old photograph, hidden by the frame. Like a ghost.

  And while the recordings are too large to include in their entirety, his voice does matter. So I messed with the configuration of open source voice recognition software. I set it to analyze file after file after file. To compare and contrast. I fed it laughter. Jokes. I fed it each quiet question, every dry observation. I fed everything through, and the software gave me a short string of digits. Just a fragment of a fingerprint. A pattern.

  And that pattern went into the virus source code. Not strictly necessary, but important to me.

  His laughter became a part of the pattern the virus used to recognize itself. It became a part of the cryptography the virus used to mutate, to hide my father’s plain text quotes from the anti-virus software that might look for him. Everywhere I used it, the pattern decreased the randomness of the virus’s behaviour so that, instead of pseudo-randomly choosing which changes it might make on an infected system, it chooses to behave based on this one number. Not for everything, of course. But in some places—in some moments—instead of flipping a coin, the virus will just do what it wants. It will be itself.

  This isn’t the most efficient way to do this. It isn’t the smartest, either.

  It feels right, though.

  >_

  My father has no idea about the virus, mind you. He wouldn’t understand a word I told him. Maybe he would understand the basic idea of it, but the basic idea of it is something I tell him every day. I don’t want my father to die. He knows. Every day he knows.

  Mom is the programmer, not Dad. Yes, Dad’s very proud when I win programmin
g competitions, but he just smiles when things get too technical. He never got the hang of computers. Never saw the point. “Look how beautiful it is outside,” is what he says. Even on the ugliest days.

  Two years ago, when I was suspended from school for hacking, my mother was furious. Not at me, but at the vice-principal who had sent me home. My father and I sat at the kitchen table and listened to her on the phone. Her voice got louder and louder.

  “No, I understand exactly what she did,” my mom said. “Do you?” She listened. “So let me get this straight. Private emails and data belonging to my children and hundreds of other children have been needlessly at risk for more than a year because you wanted to save some money running your own servers, and you’re suspending my daughter for bringing it to your attention? You don’t even have a proper IT person. My daughter was trying to help.”

  Which wasn’t exactly my motivation, if I’m being honest, but it sure sounded good. My father, though, just sat there smiling.

  “Some time off school, eh?” he said to me. “That’s fun!”

  >_

  At first, I like the way she dresses. Simple black clothes. Tight black hair. I like it because this is the way I try to dress. It’s how I want to see myself. I want to be as unadorned as possible. A cipher. I don’t want my clothes to betray anything that is going on inside me. A black hole from which no information should escape.

  Her white lab coat is out of place with the rest of her outfit. It is an intentional mistake, almost certainly. Not practical. The lab coat is a concession, the one piece of the doctor costume she wears. A prop. Otherwise, though? Simple. So yes, I like the way she dresses. But it’s hard to like someone whose job is to treat you like a child.