The Witness

He’s never going to get in shape. The Pilate's DVD is gummed over in dust. The elliptical next to his bed is falling over, the dislocated arms covered in laundry. The sea kayak he bought last Christmas is beached alongside the house, never launched, with veins of black fungus creeping across its yellow belly. How does he not see this?

This morning he’s rolling out his new mountain bike to ride along the commuter path that winds through our neighborhood. It’s a mountain bike--with recycled rubber handles and high impact shocks and knobby tires! A mountain bike to ride along a flat, cement biking path. Ridiculous! Look, look how his beer gut stretches the neon windbreaker, look at the expensive sunglasses, the obnoxious padded bike shorts and…look, look! He’s adjusting his padded shorts! Look at him glancing around to see if anyone’s watching! So stupid. He never thinks to look behind him, into the windows of his own house, and notice his own mortified son. What an idiot. Why must I be the witness?

He says all I do is play Xbox. He doesn’t even know what I do. He won’t let me drink soda or eat chips. “It’s bad for your body!” How does he know? He says we’re not buying paper towels to help the environment. Then when my sister spills something he grabs a shirt from the laundry to wipe it up. Now all my shirts have juice stains. That’s not going to save the earth, Dad. We’re not saving the earth. Like when mom got sick and he told us we were changing our diet and we couldn’t buy doughnuts, or anything with sugar, or white flour, and he stopped using his cell phone. She died anyway. And we still eat rotten stinking kale and fish oil gummy bears and bran--lots of dirt flavored bran. For what?

Last year, after I showed him the website that measures the melting ice caps, the one with the drowning polar bears video, you know what he did? He went out and got the Obama “hope” sticker. He stuck it to my bedroom mirror without asking. He tells me I need to stop focusing on the “negative.” He tells me, “It’s a new day!” He says Obama is going to save the bears and stop the ice caps from melting. He doesn’t get it. Obama is just a dad, like him, and his kids probably see him sneaking around the White House, smoking his secret cigarettes and think, “the poor sap.”

A few months ago Dad got all excited about the Nobel prize. “See?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s going to make things better. The whole world knows it’s true.” I was fooled for a minute, but then I asked him, “What do you mean ‘going to?’”

“Well,” Dad gave that same far away smile that my sister used to make when she crapped her diaper, “Well, the prize is because they know he is going to do good things.” Can you believe it? Going to do? I went out of my mind, “You don’t give a trophy to a team that’s going to win the World Series! Because sometimes they don’t. Their pitcher breaks his arm or their best player gets caught using drugs, and they lose. They lose Dad. And you shouldn’t have given the team the award because it got everyone’s hopes up and you just made it worse.”

But still he watches the news and calls me in every time there’s some sappy story of some school having a “car-free day.” He thinks it will inspire me to watch all these other middle school students walking to school with grinning faces that say, “We’re fixing the world!” He doesn’t even realize that I’ve been to “car-free” days and I know that half those kids are going to get rides home or to soccer practice and then that night their stupid father is going to forget something and drive across town to the grocery store and it’s all just so pathetic.

Why does everyone want to pretend? Like nobody even talks about the war in Iraq, but Connor’s dad is still in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever, and every morning he wears that sad American flag pin that his dad gave him and it makes me want to just hit him because he doesn’t even realize how stupid he looks. Wearing that flag is like showing off your burn scar from the time you put your hand on the stove, even though your mom told you a hundred times to be careful. Does he have any idea how exhausting it is to see that pin?

After the election Connor was all smiley and told me Obama was going to send his dad home. I said, “Good for you!” in kind of a snotty way, but I actually was kind of glad for him, because we used to be best friends, but of course he was wrong and his dad is still gone and I heard his mother say he might have to stay two more years, and now Connor pretty much doesn’t do anything anymore. He just sits and stares at the whiteboard and eats alone and gets yelled at by Mrs. Hotchkins to pay attention.

Dad says I make myself depressed. I’m not depressed, I tell him, I’m tired. I’m tired of pretending that things are going to get better. Like when mom got sick and dad made us get rid of all the plastic cups and Tupperware and we couldn’t eat real hamburgers. I hated all that, but Dad said it would make Mom better and so I didn’t complain and I actually felt good every time we ate the crappy food, because I thought it was helping. But after awhile I could tell that Mom was getting worse, and even though everyone was lying to me and telling me that my prayers were making a difference I knew it was all shit and that everyone was just too scared to say it.

So I asked her one night when she was sitting alone in the kitchen, “You aren’t getting better.” And her chest went flat and she just said, “No, I’m not.” And then I said, “You’re going to die.” And she looked right at me and cried. She cried without making any noise and said to me, “Yes, I am.” And then she hugged me, and I cried and tried not to make any noise, and my body went as weak as a beanie baby. Then she held me out so I could see her face and said, “Now let’s make the best of it.” And we walked out of the house without telling Dad, and left my sister alone playing with her polar bear, and went and got real hamburgers, and greasy French fries, and these huge-ounce cokes, and laughed a little bit.

That’s what I want. That’s what I want for dad. I just wish Obama would come on the television smoking a big fat cigarette. And I wish he would just look in the television, look at my father, and tell him, “I’m sorry folks. I really am sorry, but we’re all going to die. The polar bears, the owls, the Africans, the kids, the whole earth. The car free day isn’t helping. And the recycling is not helping. And the electric cars, well, it turns out they just make things worse…the extra battery acid and all that. And the Arabs and Jews, well I’ve been there, met with all of them, and I gotta tell you, it’s a huge fucking mess. Just a huge, fucking, knotted up mess. I’m sorry. I really am. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sending the prize back to Oslo. Sorry for blowing smoke up your ass.”

And then I want dad to just turn the damn thing off and just cry and let his snot run down over his mouth like I did at the funeral, and I want him to just yell and moan and smash his fist into the wall like some guys do when their girlfriends break up. And I just want him to go ape-shit until he scares the shit out of me and my sister and the whole neighborhood. I think if he did that I wouldn’t hate him so much. And when he finally got tired, I’d ask him to take us out and get steak sandwiches. At the same place mom and I went. And if he wasn’t sure if we should, I’d say, “Dad, when the earth floods I don’t want to be eating bean curds. I want real food Dad, and real Coke.”

And I think maybe he’d finally get it. He’d finally understand that when the first waves of the ocean start to breach the continent and come down our street and push through our door like New Orleans, I don’t want to be exercising or recycling or staring at my “hope” sticker. I want to be playing Xbox. Playing Xbox with Conner, just like we used to do when I first got that Star Wars game, before Mom died and Connor’s dad was shipped off. And it would be like it used to be, when we played for a whole day and ate chips and drank pop and got so far into it that we got mind fog where it felt real and we’re yelling at each other to “Watch out!” And it feels like all the Rebel forces are supporting us and we’re looking out for each other and our comrades’ voices don’t seem computer generated, but feel real and we’re trying to save the last hold-out of human beings, and together we’re blasting the white storm troopers and their mechanical droids.

That’s what I want. That’s how I want it to end. After all the bears are dead and the ocean is pouring over the tiles in our kitchen, creeping over the carpet, rising and covering our feet--but we don’t care because in our mind we‘re fighting the Empire, shooting and blasting and backing each other up, yelling “Reload!” even though the whole situation is hopeless. And my dad would sit next to us and drink beer without hiding it. He’d sit next to us with my sister on his lap eating chips or cookies or whatever she wanted. My dad and sister would sit and stare at the screen, and cheer us on, cheer Conner and me across the frozen tundra, through the waves of Imperial soldiers, on that faraway planet from the second movie, the one with endless glaciers and fields of frozen snow.