Stay Inside

5. Lothryn

Two days after my seventeenth birthday, my dad received the phone call he had been waiting for his entire life. He was sitting in his car after work, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun set. He was a writer and he spent his spare moments daydreaming about the stories in his mind that had never found a platform to be shared with the world.

He didn't have any friends or remaining family. There was no reason for his phone to ring except to be harassed by a collections agency. And yet, that evening when his cellphone rang from an unknown number, he answered.

There was a woman's voice on the other end, dark and cool. Her accent was European, English perhaps but hard to place. She asked for him by name.

"Who is this?" he asked.

"I represent Delphi House Publishing. I have in front of me one of your manuscripts."

His heart raced, he sat up immediately in his seat.

"Oh! Which um, manuscript, is it?" he said as if there were more than one he had ever completed.

"The novel," she replied. "Awakening: The Twilight of Eramice Odris."

It was a thrill just to hear the title on another person's lips. She had even pronounced it correctly.

"Of course, that one. I actually recently just changed the title, what with the success of that whole teenage vampire saga."

"We like the title and we like the book," she assured him. "I understand that it's part of a whole series."

"It is! I've written a lot more- I'm in process of, well not for a while, but I could-"

She cut him off.

"We'd love to see whatever you have. If you're available, we could meet with you in-house as soon as tomorrow. We have a one-thirty slot. Are you available?"

"Yes! I mean I have work, but fuck work!"

It was a side of my father I never got to see, the desperation, the yammering. My dad was consummately melancholy, the weight of his own post-apocalyptic world on his shoulders.

"I'll put you down for one-thirty," said the woman "Do you have a pen to take our address?"

He reached clumsily around in his back seat which was strewn with weapons for fighting zombies. He did not find a pen, but his forearm found the thick serrated spine of a hunting knife. It tore his flesh with its teeth and spilled his blood onto the upholstery. He cursed into the phone.

"Sorry, no," he grunted, trying to mask his pain. "No, I don't have a pen. Can you text it to this number, please?"

"No problem. See you tomorrow."

Then, she hung up and my dad celebrated, dancing in his car.

He wrapped his wound in a scrap of gray fabric he tore from a t-shirt. I imagine as he did, he considered what it would mean to find success in the selling of his book. How much change would have had to come to our lives for him to have told me the truth? Would we have moved out of the apartment? When would he have told me that the world wasn't the very hellscape he described? Would I have been able to forgive him for his lies?

He came home that night with an extra spring in his step. I noticed it immediately. Even the special knock at our door he did to let me know it was him had a nervous insistency. I noticed the bandage around his arm promptly after he entered.

"It's just a scratch," he insisted.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a few vials of antidote. My entire life, he had always managed to scavenge more for me. He said there were vats full of the stuff at the old hospital; he just wasn't strong enough to carry the vat home. He also revealed a few bags of corn chips and some canned soup.

"Is that all?" I asked him. I tried not to show my disappointment.

He shook his head and grinned. He pulled out some batteries for my tape player and a new cassette. I couldn't believe how lucky I was; I would finally get to listen to new music. I studied the case, trying to read the strange characters that covered the plastic box.

I caught my dad staring at me as I investigated my treasure. He was smiling and yet sad. Tears welled in his eyes.

"What?" I asked.

"I just love you so much," he said.

"I love you too." My eyes darted to the bandaged wound on his arm and back to the grief in his eyes. "You didn't get bitten, did you?"

"No," he said, shaking his head with a chuckle.

"Don't scare me like that."

"Today was a very good day," he said. "And I think tomorrow may be even better."

These were words I had never heard him say before. The sentiment confused me. I couldn't even begin to fathom what he meant.

"I think we're coming to the end of an era and ushering the start of something new and wonderful," he added.

"Do you mean it'll be safe to go out soon?" I asked. "The zombies are dying?"

"Yes. That's what I mean," he said.

I embraced him. He squeezed me tightly. I held back my tears of joy.

"I'm going keep feeling it out, but change is in the air," he said. He held me away from him at an arm's length so he could look into my eyes. "When you go out in the world, please never forget how much I love you, how I took care of you all these years."

"How could I ever forget?"

I answered without even a moment's thought. My father was my hero. I couldn't imagine ever harboring any lasting resentment towards him.

"It may seem ridiculous now, but I imagine things will become very complicated."

I suggested that we listen to the new cassette together in celebration of his news, but he told me he needed some time to himself and that he had a big day of exploration ahead of him.

So we went to our separate rooms. I drew in my notepad while listening to my new cassette in headphones. It was different than my other cassettes. Dad said it was classical music, an opera called Scipione by George Frideric Handel. It was in a different language than the other two, but I could hardly tell the difference.

My father, meanwhile, was fishing his dusty old laptop out of its hiding place. He used it infrequently, but I'll always remember the sounds it made, the strange boops it exuded when it turned on and the clacking of its keyboard. I heard the sounds through my father's closed door, but he never told me what they were from.

The prospect of his meeting with Delphi House Publishing both delighted and terrified him. Mostly, he wanted to make certain his chapters were as polished and complete as they could possibly be. He hadn't worked on the story for years but it existed within his own complicated paracosm- a detailed imaginary world. The world contained his own language, the very same I had been raised to speak. He had a hand-written dictionary in a leather-bound journal on the shelf above his desk.

In many ways, my father was a creative genius misunderstood by the rest of the world. And like many of his kind that came before him, his frequent escapes into own his rich imagination came at the behest of any responsibilities of reality. He had neglected his health for some time. He was prone to blood clots and was prescribed blood thinners to prevent them- though he frequently forgot to renew his prescription.

And so, that night, on the eve of the meeting he thought would change his life, as he reached for the dictionary on his shelf, my father suffered a sudden brain aneurysm. He stumbled backwards and collapsed on his back in the center of his floor.

I didn't hear the thud. I was listening to opera.