Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

My father is dying. Hes in the oncology ward at Torontos Wellesley Hospital, cancer eating away at his colon, his rectumparts of the body people think its funny to talk about.

Its unfair having to see him like this. How am I going to remember him when hes gone? As I knew him from childhooda temperamental giant who used to carry me on his shoulders, who used to play catch with me even though I couldnt throw for beans, who used to tuck me in and kiss me good night, his face like sandpaper against my cheek? I dont want to remember him like this, shrunken and old, an anorexic mummy with rheumy eyes and varicose face, tubes in his arms, tubes up his nose, drool staining his pillow.

Dad

Brandon. He coughs twice. Sometimes he coughs more, but it is always an even number. They rack his body in pairs, these coughs, like one-two punches from a wily heavyweight. Brandon, he says again, as if the coughs have erased the earlier uttering of my name. I wait for the words that always come next. Long time no see.

Its a little play we put on. My line is always the same, too. Im sorry. But Im like an actor whos been in the same part too long. I say it without feeling, without meaning. Ive been busy.

Hes been watching TV again. That forty-centimeter Sony mounted high on the hospital wall is a kind of time machine for him. Thanks to Channel Twenty-nine from Buffalo, which specializes in golden oldies, he gets to peek into the past. Sometimes he reaches back a full six decades for an I Love Lucy episode, flawlessly colorized and reprocessed in stereo. This afternoon he is casting back a mere twenty years for a rerun of Roseanne.

Rosie and Dan are standing in the kitchen talking about the latest trouble their daughter Darlene has gotten into. Im used to the crispness of my flat-panel wall TV; this ancient set has ghosting and blurry edges. I pick up the remote from the table beside the bed. Click, and the Corners and their little neat world collapse into a singularity in the center of the screen. The dot lingersa faint reminder of the former life, hanging on longer than it should. I turn to my father.

How are you feeling? I ask.

The same. Its always the same. I put the remote down next to the crystal vase. The flowers Id brought last time have withered. The once-bright petals have turned the color of dried blood and the water looks like weak tea. I take hold of the stems and, dripping on the stippled tile, carry the dead things over to the garbage pail and drop them in. Im sorry I didnt bring fresh ones.

I come back and sit beside him. The chair has a chrome-plated frame and vinyl cushions that smell like warm vomit. He looks old, older than anyone Ive ever seen. He used to have a full head of hair, even in his early seventies. But hes completely bald now. Chemotherapy has taken its toll.

Why dont you ever bring Tess with you? he asks.

I look out the window. Toronto in February is a gray city, like a photograph printed in half-tones. The last of the snow, old and dirty, has been eroded by the first spring rains, forming hoodoos at the sides of the roads. Wellesley Street is streaked with white salt stains. Its three in the afternoon and hookers are already at the intersections, wearing heavy fur coats and fishnet stockings. Tess and I arent married anymore, I remind him.

I always liked Tess.

Me, too. Dad, Im going away for a few days.

He doesnt say anything.

Im not sure when Ill be back.

Where are you going?

Alberta. The Red Deer River valley.

Thats a long way away.

Yes. A long way.

Another dig?

Not so much a dig this time, Dad. But it is a dinosaur hunt. It may take a couple of weeks.

After a long, long time he says softly, I see.

Im sorry to have to leave you.

Silence again.

If you dont want me to go, I wont.

He rolls his crab-apple head to look at me. He knows I have just lied to him. He knows I am going anyway. What kind of son am I, leaving behind a dying father?

Ive got to be on my way now, I say at last. I touch his shoulder, a bony thing covered by thin pajamas. Once the color of summer sky, theyve been washed and dried to the pale blue-gray of an old womans hair rinse.

Will you write? Send a postcard?

I cant, Dad. Ill be cut off from the rest of the world out there. Im sorry.

I pick up my trench coat and head for the door, resisting the urge to look back, to say somethinganythingelse.

Wait.

I turn. He adds nothing more, but, after a few eternal seconds, he beckons me closer, closer still, until I am leaning over him, his ragged breath pungent in my nostrils. Then, at last, he speaks, faintly but clearly. Bring me something to put an end to all this pain. That stuff youve got in the lab. Bring me some.

In the comparative-anatomy lab at the museum weve got chemicals for killing wild animals: painless clear death for the rodents; amber death for the larger mammals; an incongruous peach-colored death for the lizards and snakes. I stare at my father.

Please, Brandon, he says. He never calls me Brandy. Brandon was the name of his favorite unclesome guy from England that Id never metand nobody had ever called him Brandy. Please help me.

I stumble out of the ward, somehow find my car. By the time I realize what I am doing, I have driven almost all the way to the house where Tess and I used to live, where Tess still lives. I turn around, go home, and get very drunk, feeling no pain.

Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.

Fred loved that cat, and his wife knew hed be upset when she told him what had happened. But when he got back Sunday evening, he said he already knew the cat was deadbecause, according to the version of the story I eventually heard over my back fence, hed seen his cat up at the cottage, two hundred kilometers away. The tabby had appeared to him one last time to say good-bye.

I always looked at Fred a little differently after Id heard that. I mean, it was fantastic, and fantastic things dont happen in normal lives. Certainly they dont happen to people like me.

Or so I thought.

Im a paleontologist; a dinosaur guy. Some might think thats glamorous, I suppose, but it sure doesnt pay glamorously. Oh, about twice a year, I get my name in the paper or five seconds on CBC Newsworld, commenting on a new exhibition or some new find. But thats about it for excitement. Or at least it was, until I got involved in this project.

Time travel.

I feel like an idiot typing those two words. Im afraid anyone who reads them will start looking at me the way I look at poor Fred.

Sure, by now everyone has probably read about the mission in the papers, or seen the preparations on TV. Yeah, it really works. Ching-Mei Huang has demonstrated it enough times. And, yes, its incredible, absolutely incredible, that she went from a first discovery of the underlying principle in 2005 to a working time machine by 2013. Dont ask me how she did it so fast; I dont have a clue. In fact, sometimes I dont think Ching-Mei has a clue, either.