I Have Lost My Way(53)

When it stopped swimming, Dad pulled it out of the water and put it back outside, but it was already dead. He seemed surprised that he’d killed it. The water hadn’t been boiling, just very hot. He got very quiet and broody, locking himself in his room for several hours. When he came out, he was ashen. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered.



* * *



— — —

I realized that I was the frog in the pot. I had a lifetime to figure this out, but it took those two weeks on my own to realize I was cooked.

Two weeks might not sound like much, but you try spending two weeks alone in a house. Totally alone. No TV. No phone calls. No visit from the mailman. Nothing.

I did.

I thought the world had ended.

It had.

I waited for someone to come, to call.

They didn’t.

Outside, the rain was unrelenting. Biblical. If it kept up, I thought the whole house would be washed away, swallowed up into a gap in the earth, leaving no trace of its existence. Only forest. And frogs.

Maybe that was how it should be.

A few years earlier, my father had watched some doomsday documentary and had gone into full-on survivalist mode, readying the house for all manner of catastrophe. He ordered a bunch of dehydrated food, jugs of water, canned juices and fruits, granola bars, industrial-sized vats of peanut butter. “Enough for us to survive for a month,” he said.

I’d thought it was his usual impulsiveness. I thought it was Dad. I thought the food would collect dust in the basement for decades. I never thought I’d eat it.

But I did. I lived on that cache for two weeks. I’m not sure if I survived, though.



* * *



— — —

    Two weeks alone in a house. It did something to a person.

All those years alone in a house with my father. It also did something to a person.

I could see that as I roamed the empty house, waiting for someone to call, to show up, to say my name.

No one did. Why would they? I was already dead.



* * *



— — —

As the rain continued to fall and the phone continued to not ring and the doorbell continued to stay silent, I went through my father’s things. Without him there to put it all in context, to make it seem if not normal then typical, or at least Dad, I understood the water had been boiling for some time.

Under his bed I found the stash of mood stabilizers, the drugs Mom had insisted he take if he wanted to retain full custody after Mary died, the drugs I dutifully picked up at the pharmacy in town every month, the drugs I poured him a glass of water before bed each night to swallow down. He’d been hoarding them. For years, it looked like.

Next to that box was Mary’s old suitcase. Inside were the notebooks where he’d written his theories, gleaned from the documentaries he’d watched over the years: The healing tree frogs and his absolute certainty that the cure to Mary’s cancer was in our forest. The man who wrote the longest novel in history, discovered only years after his death, setting off a search for the thing he would create to leave behind after his death. The one about empaths, the one about suicide tourism, the one about the seeing blind man. There were pages and pages of notes, drawings, quotations. It seemed normal enough. Dad enough. Until I got to the entry about people who had learned to harness all 100 percent of their brains.

Dad had written pages and pages on this particular documentary. According to his notes, most humans utilized only 10 percent of their brains, but the people in this film had found the ability to access close to 100 percent and had accomplished superhuman feats like flying and learning dozens of languages. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite, Dad had scrawled.

I remembered when Dad first told me that; it was the day we’d gone out into the forest blindfolded, in search of limitless sight. I knew my life had changed that day, but I belatedly understood that his had too.

A lot of the films Dad watched were rife with conspiracy theories, which was why I’d stopped watching with him. This one had sounded particularly outlandish—but also familiar. I tried to recall it, and when I did, I realized it wasn’t a documentary at all. It was a science-fiction movie.

Not long after that, I discovered my father’s copy of The Lord of the Rings. The pages were darkened with underlined passages, full of doodles and quote callouts, theories scrawled into the margins, epic ideas about the location of Middle-earth. Had my father lost the ability to distinguish between science fiction and documentary, between real and imaginary, between Middle-earth and Earth? Had he ever had it in the first place?

Fellowship of two.

Had I?

Just us, buddy.

It was hard to read the book with all his scribbles, but as the rain continued, I forced myself. I read it cover to cover, out loud, as my father had read it to me all those years ago.

It had taken him six months to read it to me. It took me five days to read it to him.

The rain continued to fall. The water continued to boil.



* * *



— — —

It rained the entire time I was reading. It was only when I got to the very end, when Sauron has been vanquished and Frodo and Bilbo leave the Shire, that the rain began to slow to a drizzle.

I paused for a moment at the last page. My voice was hoarse. My nerves were shot. My heart was broken. And for a moment I was transported back to the day when we finished reading the book the first time, before my mother left, before Mary died.