Read Online Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould - Free Book Online Page B

was already precipitating in him a subtle sea change, a slow seismic shift in direction. Was there any way to speed it up?
    “Hey, Dad.”
    Start with the easy call, build up to the tough one. That isn’t wimpy, that’s just sensible. Besides, it won’t be such a cakewalk, putting the old man to rights.
    “Oh, hello there, lad.”
Lad.
See, this is new too, the old-time tenderness.
    “How are things?”
    “Okay.”
    “What’s up today?” Matt’s flaked out on the suite’s overstuffed couch, a glass of juice balanced on the tray of his tummy.
    “Serena’s just left.” Serena, the Dadinator’s home-care worker. She’s been coming half days since all the widows—all the Pegs and Dots and Darlenes who swarmed the old man when his wife died—finally fled the scene, died themselves or were otherwise rendered helpless. Serena’s your basic bully of a saint, jollying the old guy along as though he’s some giant irascible infant.
    “She taking good care of you, Dad?”
    “Look at that,” the old man huffs. “She’s left the deck. Door open again.”
    Dammit. Those lungs just keep getting worse. The Dadinator routinely runs out of wind mid-sentence these days, this despite the ever-present oxygen tube, its clear plastic horns poking up his great grey-haired nostrils.
    “So Dad, I was thinking about maybe coming for a visit one of these days.”
    “Why?”
    “What do you mean, why? Just to see you.”
    “You never come in. The summer.”
    “Yeah, but I—”
    “Hot here, you know. Heavy rain last week.”
    “Crazy stuff, eh?” says Matt. “This global warming thing, it makes you—”
    “Such a simple system,” says the old man. “Binary. Rain or no-rain, dot or. Dash.”
    “Dot or dash, Dad?”
    “Still not so easy to. Decode, though.”
    “Decode, Dad?”
    It takes some delicate interrogation but in time the picture emerges. Extraterrestrials have been seeding the clouds over Toronto, it would seem, to make them shed rain on certain days and thus to generate a Morse-like pattern. To communicate. The aliens are no great surprise to Matt—they and their souped-up machines have been part of the Dadinator’s universe for some time now—but the rain’s a new wrinkle.
    What would Erin make of all this? Why isn’t she here to talk it through, to help Matt parse the grim mystery of their pop? The old guy’s got Erin there at his condo, actually, or so he seems to imagine, in a wooden box about the size of a four-slice toaster. He continues to cling to this object in a way that troubles Matt, even horrifies him. His dad
fetishizes
the urn, is what he does, reveres it like the finger-bone of a saint. Sure, Matt adores his father’s grief—the way it opens and deepens him, creates for them that point of potential contact—but the box of cinders freaks him right out. It’s a thing. Erin is not a thing.
    Matt shakes his head, sips his OJ. “Dad, I don’t think you can make clouds rain, can you? Don’t they sort of do that on their own?”
    The old man’s laugh is more of a gasping fit nowadays, the kind of respiratory crisis that makes you think Heimlich. When it’s over, “Governments have been doing it on the q.t. for. Decades, Matt. Look at Lynmouth back in the fifties. How many people drowned? You think that just
happened
to be right. After the RAF trials? Two hundred times the normal. Rainfall that year, that sound like a coincidence? And since then South Africa. Israel.”
    It was what, four years ago that Mariko helped her father-in-law hook up his first computer, explained about the mouse? Nowadays he’s up and surfing before bran. “Dad, I—”
    “Russia. Mexico. US of A. Silver iodide, from a plane or a. Rocket.”
    “Dad, is this the same extraterrestrials who make the crop circles?”
    “Crops,” says his father. “Weather.” He leaves Matt to connect the dots.
    Matt says, “Seeing Uncle Lenny much these days?” One upside, he’s easy to distract.
    “Lunch yesterday.