Asimov's Science Fiction (22 page)

It had been several weeks since the ex-corporal had replaced our father. The ex-corporal wore his skin very well, seeping right into Dad's follicles and wrinkles, occupying Dad's dimples when he smiled.

My little brother knew Dad had become a different person, although he did not realize to what extent.

"It's okay, Joe." I rested my palm on my bruised jaw. "He won't wake up."

I was feigning interest in the television; would-be-Dad was sleeping in his usual armchair, an unfinished book splayed open on his rising and falling diaphragm. Joe stared at him askance from the hallway. He was watching those closed eyelids, waiting for the signature flutter that would indicate more than REM. Waiting, perhaps hoping, for the cocking of the epilepsy barrel.

"Where did Daddy go, Gwyn?"

The man who used to read us to sleep vanished shortly after Jake's sixth birthday. Jake got a kitten for that particular birthday. My brother had a lopsided grin and a great deal of enthusiasm, but he was never very inventive. He named his kitten Mew-Mew, simply because that was the sound she made.

Mew-Mew made a different sound when the ex-corporal crushed her beneath the dryer in the laundry room.

"Moving furniture; I didn't see it there, poor thing," he'd said, but he looked like he was trying his damnedest not to smile.

"Gwyn?"

"Bedtime, Broseph."

I led Joe by the hand upstairs to our bedroom. I tucked him into the top bunk.

Glowing plastic stars kept the room from total darkness. I watched Joe's eyes trace the patterns on the ceiling as he drifted off to uneasy sleep. We three had failed to make proper constellations overhead, but there was the luminescent outline of a kitten. After Joe complained that the sticky stars were hardly glowing at night, Dad had leaned over backward to attach some fluorescent bulbs to the wall.

"A few minutes before you guys go to bed, be sure to turn the lights on. Then when you shut them off you'll be seeing practically the whole universe. Or one very starry kitten, at least."

Under our homemade starlight I wondered whether Joe could ever comprehend that Dad was light-years away in a tropical clime, trapped in the gangrenous body of another man.

Dad developed epilepsy when Joe was a baby and I was twelve years old. The first seizure was one we did not witness. Dad called it his first foray into the multiverse.

He was walking between classrooms, a mug of lukewarm coffee in hand, rereading a Michael Moorcock novel and feeling a bit jetlagged; we had just returned home from a Floridian vacation. When he collapsed, the soccer coach he'd been passing didn't know what to do about the foamy-mouthed man weeping like an infant in the middle of the green-speckled floor. She called for an ambulance.

Dad punched a nurse in the face during that initial tonic-clonic meltdown. They strapped him down after that. They put something like a bit in his mouth, although he'd already bitten through his tongue. When he awoke, the nurse's face was swollen with the indentations of his insensible fists. He cried about that, later—about the purpling underneath the nurse's eye.

"I'm so sorry. I don't even remember doing it."

She said she understood, but every time she put him on an IV she stabbed it knife-like into his arm.

After Mew-Mew's death, he wasn't sorry. The ex-corporal who crushed the kitten was an insurgent from a war-torn parallel planet, long since desensitized to cruelty.

The doctors were not certain why Dad developed epilepsy. The most specific medical explanation they could offer was the same one offered to countless others: most forms of epilepsy are the result of "abnormal electrical activity in the brain." They suggested that he had perhaps exacerbated a childhood head injury.

Dad would never confess to being sick. He told Joe and me that he was a transdimensional voyager. He traveled space and time while shaking in his bed or writhing on the floor. His sudden seizures were really rendezvous in other dimensions.

"I was thinking about untapped potential," he told me some weeks later, while we deadheaded some of his daylilies beside the house. For years they had been his pride; since the fit he'd been obsessive about maintaining them, as if he feared that any day he would be rendered incapable of doing so. "How often do we read studies theorizing that people only ever utilize something like, whatsit,
5 percent
of human brain capacity? Every person on this planet could be capable of interdimensional travel, Gwyn. Before it happened—"

"Call it a seizure, Dad."

"Before
it,
I wondered whether maybe all that untapped brain potential could be concentrated into a single burst of energy—a burst powerful enough to send the human consciousness abroad. Past the stars."

"Sounds like one of your books."

"Well, sure. But that's the last thing I can remember thinking before the fluorescent lights seemed brighter than sunshine and I smelled licorice from nowhere. Could those thoughts have triggered interstellar travel? Where do you think I was during those unconscious hours?"

I sat back on my knees. "You were in the hospital, Dad. We visited you."

"Sure, my body was. But where was my mind? It couldn't have been
nowhere."

"Maybe you were visiting that kitten constellation."

I waited for him to elbow me, but his eyes, dark-rimmed since the first fit, remained fixated on the petals in his hands.

"Dad?"

"I smell licorice again." When he looked at me, he looked like a child. "What do I do?"

I began to believe in interdimensional travel that day. By the time Dad was whimpering in my arms and slobbering like a rabid animal and I was screaming at an EMS worker over the phone, I had decided that my father's mind must have been somewhere very far away after all.

I sat at Dad's bedside on countless lukewarm autumn evenings while gran mal seizures rattled him from head to toe. Every time his eyes rolled back and that awful snoring started, we decided Dad was abroad, stumbling through a distant jungle or ducking under crooked wind-bent skyscrapers in some distant dimension.

Whenever he woke up properly, he told me of parallel worlds. And yes, there were zeppelins, all right. Steampunk was legitimized. He was sarcastic about cyberpunk: "Gwyneth. The universe where cyberpunk takes off is the one we're in already. Take a good look at your damn cell phone!"

He told me about places where people microwaved their faces to stay tan. He returned from planets where pachyderms were the dominant life form, where milk never went off because time was suspended, where lederhosen were cool.

I asked him if he was all right. If it was tiring to traverse the Universe.

"Not entirely."

I wasn't sure which question he'd answered.

According to the sci-fi novels Dad hoards, there are thousands or millions of versions of ourselves living out their lives in universes right on top of ours. Some versions of us got married. Some of us died young. Some of us were perhaps drafted into the military. And if there are an infinite number of ourselves, some of ourselves are bound to be terrifying.

Every time he seized, I saw others possess his vacated body. I saw him become a thousand different people. These people were his parallel selves.

Sometimes he became a rocket salesman. Sometimes he was a toddler weeping for his mother's touch. Sometimes he was old and sometimes furious and sometimes he spoke alien languages, clicking his tongue against grinding teeth.

Eventually one of the parallel people made a habit of manifesting. The ex-corporal. You could always tell him from the way he spoke: he had a twang in his voice that was not quite Kentuckian.

He first appeared when I was nearly fifteen, making his debut at Sunday dinner when Dad collapsed into the mashed potatoes. After the worst of the shakes passed, the then-corporal fretted over life insurance. It ranted about it by way of slurred speech and unfocused eyes. It gesticulated wildly with a fork.

"Where I'm from you
gotta
take out a policy," it said, while mashed potatoes slid down Dad's chin. " 'cause I've probably got jungle beetles in my brain, just like all war maggots, and it ain't considered proper to leave my hag of a Ma just earbugs when I go. And there's no getting away from the fact that I'll die soon. I saw a soldier get decapitated last week—decapitated by a whipper tree that swallowed his corpse whole in its roots. Because they threw us in a goddamn Etheropian jungle when most us city boys didn't even know carnivorous plants existed. And they expect us to kill goddamn natives?" He paused, letting Dad's head slump. "I think I'll leave. What will they do, kill me?"

The man lolling about at the dining room table, demanding to see his whore of a mother and begging not to be sent to the mud-sucking frontlines while Joe stared wide-eyed and my visiting grandmother spat out her wine—he was trouble.

The ex-corporal kept coming back. He didn't want to be enlisted any longer. He had been trapped in territorial warfare that he did not care two shits about for too long.

"This place is better," the ex-corporal muttered. Fluid dripped from his bottom lip.

"Better for a prospective deserter. I'm gonna move in, girlie."

"You can't."

"Can't?" he spat. "Do you know what it's like? Gunfire while you're sleeping? Eating? Shitting? Every moment squelching through trench-rot and gunfire, gunfire?"

"You can't stay."

Had his arm not begun trembling as my father's body seized anew, I think the ex-corporal would have strangled me then. Instead his arm spasmed, fell.

Dad came back sweating and weeping.

"Gwyn? What is it?"

"Nothing." I wiped my eyes. "Just... sometimes I think you're a very sick man, Dad."

I left him alone in his bedroom.

I asked Dad whether he knew that the ex-corporal possessed his body while he visited war-torn Etheropia.

"I'm tired of seeing
—dreaming about
that jungle. It's so humid there, and people are always screaming and getting swallowed by clay puddles. Everything reeks. It feels like parts of me are decaying." Dad stared at his bony hands where they rested on the duvet. "I dunno, Gwyn. Maybe... we should stop this game. I think Joey actually believes us." He swallowed, hard. "I mean, interdimensional traveler? That's not funny. Before the... the
seizures,
I never used to be crazy."

I wanted to shake him, to rattle his head against the headboard, but the convulsions had done that enough for one day. "You aren't crazy. You're traveling the galaxies, doing intergalactic body swaps."

"Pretty sure I just turn into a slobbering mess of misbehaved, randomly triggered neurons."

I bit my lower lip. Tightened the strap on his helmet, which he had once claimed was a cognitive lightspeed enabler, and not a means of stopping him from breaking his skull against headboards and tiles.

"When you seize, you're not you, Dad."

"Enough, Gwyn." He looked to the window. "This isn't science fiction."

Soon after that day, the ex-corporal moved in.

It began as many nights had. Our bedroom was right beside Dad's and the walls were thin. It's not precisely snoring, the sonorous sound that seizure victims emit. For a lot of sufferers this sound doesn't ring out until
after
a fit, but it was always my father's orchestral introduction.

I stumbled into his bedroom. Something wasn't quite right.

Although Dad was moaning as ever, his eyes were bright and wide and unfamiliar. It was like the moaning was an echo from far away, somewhere across the stars, and the man before me was detached from its exertions. When he saw me enter the room, his mouth snapped shut. I swear I could still hear Dad's fading moan reverberating inside his chest.

The ex-corporal raised his arms and blinked at his hands.

"I've come to stay, girlie."

"Dad?"

"Your daddy's stuck in the trenches and nursing a bullet wound or four, now. What did I tell you about gunfire. And he's got wet gangrene, too."

I took a step back from the bedside.

"He might bleed out while I'm here. Wonder whether I'll feel it. But this is a place where people have all their parts and pretty girls visit them in their bedrooms." He smiled; I didn't even know Dad had that many teeth.

"Wake up!" My voice came out sharper than I had intended.

"Come here, girlie."

When I left the room he stood up. Before I slammed my bedroom door shut, he craned his neck out into the hallway as if to memorize where I slept. I hushed Joe with a finger. I climbed into the bottom bunk and tried to breathe normally.

In the hallway a floorboard creaked. Someone was standing just outside the door.

If only the body would seize again. Dad might reappear.

The doctors celebrated. Dad's body was seizure-free. It was miraculous, they said. I could not tell them that it was the ex-corporal, gritting his teeth to the quick and somehow refusing to collapse.

I waited for Dad to reclaim himself.

And waited.

On the first day, the ex-corporal joined us for breakfast. He eyed the frozen bacon that Joe held up to him.

"This can't be real meat. Synthetic import?"

My brother crinkled his forehead. "It's Bacon Tuesday. Cook it, Dad! Sheesh-Louise."

The corporal's eyes flashed. He grabbed Joe by the nape of his shirt and pulled him into the air. The bacon fell from Joe's shaking fingers and hit the linoleum with a dull smack.

"I didn't take orders in the military. You think I'll take yours?" Urine ran down Joe's leg.

"I'll call the police," I said, holding the phone like a blade. "They'll take you away.

"What a clever girlie." The ex-corporal lowered my brother to the floor. "But if they take me away, you might never see your father again. And what do you think I could do to this body if you didn't keep your piggy eyes on it?" He laughed, long and loud and alien. "What do I care what happens to this meatsack? I mean, it can hardly get worse off than my own."

That night I caught Joey standing on tiptoe on his bunk, clawing at the stars in the ceiling. They fell to the ground haphazardly, patterns abandoned.