The night of the Space X Dragon launch, my father collapses at the kitchen table.
A week earlier, he had his third surgery to correct the way his muscles, spasming with Parkinson’s, pulled at his spine, forced it into a parabolic function instead of a proud column. For the third time, a doctor split him open and inserted an Eiffel Tower of metal, and for the third time I flew to North Carolina to do all the things his healing body can’t. Even if this procedure goes exactly as the surgeon hopes, he will not be as he was, this man with whom I had climbed mountains with skis on our backs, whom I had stood at the finish line for at the end of triathlons, who had once run one hundred meters with the Olympic torch.
We head to the porch in time to witness the launch, but don’t discuss his upcoming procedure, or the pain I know he feels, the way the rods stiffen his gait to a slow shuffle. Instead, we talk about the International Space Station, the way hot sauce is currency there because of microgravity’s effects on astronauts’ ability to taste. We talk about the Dragon’s launch payload — 6,000 kg, a number he remembers even though things have begun to disappear in his mind, like whether he has given the dogs breakfast or if he’s taken his dopamine capsules. We talk about terraforming Mars, what it would be like to take a one-way trip to a new planet, never to breathe Earth air again. Would they be able to make chocolate, we wonder, like in the cake we ordered to share. We trace the rocket’s contrail, follow its white trajectory as it climbs the twilight, golden to deep blue. He’s quiet, and I take it for amazement, contemplation.
When we re-enter the house, settle in at the kitchen table, I begin to shuffle playing cards. Once, he could send a deck into a perfect cascading bridge, the cards shushing delicately into place, but we don’t talk about that. As I slide us each a hand, suddenly he is sliding too, the weight of him slipping sideways. Almost too slowly I am up and using whatever of myself I can to arrest his fall. Dad, I am saying, Dad, but he isn’t there. His eyes are closed, his arms loose.
So many times, when I was a child, he lifted me over his head, placed me on his shoulders, but I’ve never felt the heaviness of him and it is almost too much. Somehow, I manage to prop him up, his head rag-dolled back. I am still calling him, shaking him as gently as I can, afraid I have already jostled him far more than the fragile knitting of the internal structure can take. When his eyes finally droop open, they point upwards, as if still watching the sky.
Later, in the hospital, after they’ve hooked him into an IV and after his CT scan and blood and urine tests show there’s nothing seriously wrong this time but also no answers, I’ll tell him what he said when he opened his eyes in the kitchen, hours earlier. The dog beds. Don’t forget. How I asked, What, Dad? and he gestured slackly in the direction of one of his dogs, Zeke, who was lying nearby, panting. For the launch, he said. They’ll need them in the ship. I’ll tell him about how he repeated it as if it was the most logical, simple thing I could do for him.
Over the incessant chirp of the heart monitor, he will joke that he must have been having a very good dream, and I’ll laugh too, because we don’t talk about what it will be like when he really goes somewhere and no one can bring him back. Somewhere in the black above the humming hospital fluorescents, the rocket’s engines scream without sound.
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Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @WendyEWallace1 or on her website.