- 3:14am: *First warning beep this month*
- Feel fine but Father’s breath is jagged and wheezing. That can’t be it. Father’s condition is unsurprising and doesn’t affect my day-to-day. Can’t tell if I’ve been asleep or awake—may have nodded off. Note: vulnerable to nostalgia when circadian rhythms disrupted***
- Was it the dying breaths or the memory?
The Memory: His father thought it a swell idea to summit a ridge beneath a voltaic sky—lightning struck a few meters off, scorching a solitary spruce stubborn enough for the elevation. His father yelled at him to descend the scree, “take it at a run or you’ll break your neck! Put your weight in your ass, boy!” Somehow, he survived without the avalanche of slate burying him, and they skated down the mountain together, rising above the broken rock: sheer terror, laughing like lunatics. His father spent his remaining cash on two pints at the local, his arm tight around his son’s back, squeezing his bicep. “That’s what living’s about, Jackson!” Jackson grinned despite himself. “Nearly stopped living up there, Dad.”
- Yes. Likely the happy memory that triggered the Device this time, not the unpleasant ones. Must be cautious.
He cleared his eyes of crust, adjusted his cramped position in the sagging armchair across from his father’s bed, and meticulously inscribed the notes in his day planner app. The artless room smelled of antiseptic and air freshener, and Jackson had to reassure himself that the beeping machine in the distance wasn’t being emitted from him.
- Thinking about work helps. Solving problems. Must be careful not to think about mountains. Or lightning.
- Probably shouldn’t drink Kokanee. Psychiatrist said smell/ taste and memory is powerful stuff **
Through the musty curtains, streetlight-interrupted-night faded to dawn and buses trundled towards their first stops. A nurse opened the door and stood silhouetted against the greenish fluorescents from the hallway, and as his eyes adjusted, he recognized her as the cantankerous one. Limp hair shaggy over her eyes, pockmarks so deep in her chin they mimicked scars from knife slashes, she coughed with the cadence of early emphysema. She placed her fingers to his father’s neck, as if approaching a baby bird, and verified the death.
Was that a stifled sob?
“You can stay as long as you like, of course,” she said, her voice ripe with accusation: he rarely visited.
He debated looking at his father’s death face. Might trigger another beep. But he couldn’t help himself—the flesh was already waxy and unreal, lips retreated into themselves, shoulders unrecognizably small. The clinical bed engulfed the man, or what was left of him—whispers of limbs and barely a mound for a stomach, how was it his body had become so small?
No beep.
And then she was back, asking about beverages. If he would like one. He gathered his things, suddenly embarrassed, as if he had overstayed his visit.
“There’s no rush. Take your time,” she said.
“No no. I should be leaving.” He swerved past her and forgot to look back at his father for the final time.
A second warning beep. He paused in the hallway to open his day planner app and check the time.
- 5:57am: **Second warning beep**
- Don’t think it was father’s body. Didn’t feel much looking at him—good sign for funeral. Should be alright. But feel I should have held his hand, perhaps. Said goodbye.
- *Regrets* Need to let this go, pronto. Shower, gym, clinic. Solid workout should clear thoughts and boost endorphins.
Jackson wrangled control over his breathing—in, hold, out, hold—as he checked in at the Open Clinic, reminding himself that his endorphin levels were high, and five warnings remained on his Device. They wouldn’t treat him like a delinquent. This month’s projection featured flapping butterflies in a bright yellow canola field, blue sky masking the white walls. Rows of patients reclined in lime green chairs, staring at the projection or their phones. He recognized a beautiful man with hazelnut skin and a silver beard framed by his turtleneck. Today the seat beside him was empty, and the fellow offered Jackson an encouraging nod.
“I preferred the dolphins,” the beautiful man said, shutting his eyes—listening to Vivaldi perhaps? Wagner? Or perhaps he was stuck with binaural beats and ASMR.
Jackson usually avoided fraternizing with the other patients but allowed an exception this once. “Yes. Amazing creatures. The way they socialize and emote.”
“What do you think they’d be diagnosed with?” said the beautiful man. “They’re quite frisky. Perhaps a personality disorder?”
“Pardon me?” he replied, embarrassed to be missing some inside joke. Jackson positioned his shoulders slightly away from the beautiful man in case he was interacting with a resistant one—didn’t want staff making notes in his file:conversing with non-compliant patient. Observe closely.
He was confident that using this time to work on the eulogy wouldn’t trigger another beep—he’d slept eight hours and made a new personal record on the stair climbers. Still, he would only allow himself ten-minute intervals of writing before switching to fantasies with the beautiful man or listening to cooking podcasts. If his Device beeped inside the clinic, they might keep him overnight for monitoring.
Dad was love and chaos, heavy on the side of chaoMost of you know my father wasn’t the most reliable, but he was damn well- Dad was a wonderful father, entrepreneur,
husband,and friend.
After several hours, his latest psychiatrist rolled over on her stool in a puff of perfume. Two psychiatrists were making the rounds between dozens of patients—confidentiality now considered a demotivating factor in recovery. She opened her tablet and logged into his account, checking his Device’s metrics. “You were managing yourself so well,” she said, frowning. “Two warnings this week?”
He flushed, and the beautiful man beside him graciously kept his eyes closed.
“Yes I know, my father passed away three days ago and—”
“I’ll increase the release of Contrapine. You don’t want to end up with prolonged grief disorder.”
The diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder had been increasingly loosened by the American Psychiatric Association… when the term was first included in the DSM-5-TR in 2022, bereavement had to have occurred at least one year ago for adults and six months ago for children and adolescents for their grief to be considered pathological. Not even a decade later, criteria had been neatly trimmed to a month for adults, two weeks for kids. His sister was considering putting his niece on the Device after her classmate died a month ago—too much bed wetting and asking existential questions.
“No certainly not,” he responded. “Although I assure you the risk is low. We weren’t close. Can I drive?”
“Contrapine is for the working professional. It sedates but also contains amphetamines so you can complete daily tasks.”
“Perfect.”
She typed away and he felt an immediate soporific, yet energizing effect.
“Could you perhaps… since the funeral is three days away, reset?” A reset would clear his history of warnings for the month, give him seven chances to get through the funeral and any unexpected emotional complexities.
“That shouldn’t be a problem.” She paused, and he knew then that she had scrolled through his records—read about the time he became paranoid, certain he was being spied on and tracked (of course, he was being tracked, but only for his own benefit they reminded him). He wished he never took the chair beside the beautiful man.
“Mm. No. I’m afraid I can’t do that in this instance. The Contrapine will help. Stick to your routine and meditations and you’ll be reset in a month’s time, as prescribed.”
“But I only have five left and the funeral—”
“I would recommend sticking to your routines and meditations.”
“But—”
“You’ve been doing so well.” She logged out of his file and before she whisked herself away, he mustered a “Thank you so much, doctor.”
Jackson lingered as she rolled over to the beautiful man, slowly tucking away his headphones, hoping to balance out his own humiliation, to know some intimate fact of the beautiful man’s life.
“Mr. Cheng,” said the psychiatrist in a reprimanding tone. “How are you today?”
“Very well, thank you. My raspberries are finally in season and I’ve been—”
“Have you been keeping up with your regime?” she interrupted, glancing up at security.
“Yes of course. Even at my age of forgetfulness, I have reminders on my—”
“That’s not what our records show. Six bystander reports of you speaking to someone who’s not there. I think it’s time we helped you with the Device.”
“No please,” the beautiful man said with desperation, then willed his tone back towards cheerful deference. “I only mutter or sing to myself when I walk down the street to keep myself company. Harmless, I assure you.”
Jackson tried to slip away then, ashamed of his nosiness, but his jacket was wedged in the chair and where did he put his phone?
“Harmless until suddenly it’s not. With the Device implanted, you won’t have to schedule reminders anymore. Everything will be managed for you.”
“Please. I won’t be able to write. The antipsychotics already muddle my thoughts, the characters slip away from me.”
“It seems like you could do with a few less characters in your head, doesn’t it?” The psychiatrist smiled, then muttered into her neck, “prepare surgery.”
“No wait, wait. I’ve been chatting to this fine gentleman for the past two hours. Ask him. Ask him if anything about me seems off.”
Still fumbling with his jacket, Jackson stammered as they turned to him—the psychiatrist with raised brow, the beautiful man with pleading.
“I…,” Jackson was struck by an urge to distance himself from the beautiful man, to admit he barely knew him. “He’s quite normal and coherent,” he said firmly, “Lovely man to converse with.”
“That may be so, but I can’t very well trust the judgment of someone who’s had two beeps this week, can I?” She stood and pivoted slightly to the side as security homed in, two burly men with injectables at the ready.
“But my characters… please. Writing is my life. I’m nothing without them,” said the beautiful man, face contorted with terror.
She reached out and put a hand mechanically on the beautiful man’s shoulder, gracing him with a few extra moments of her valuable time, lowering herself slightly down to his level in a gesture of reassurance: “The Device will give you more comfort than make-believe characters ever will. Don’t be worried. You won’t have to worry now.”
- 4:05pm: ******3rd warning beep******
- Avoid patients at the Open Clinic. Save up for private appointments when in risk zone. ***
Back on the stair machine he climbed, thighs searing: up, up, up. The beautiful man would be okay: the extremes of his life would be amputated, his voices muted, he would be safe now. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a pain in his chest, as if something vital had been robbed from him—from the world—perhaps he should have spoken more eloquently, more passionately on the beautiful man’s behalf. But what was his voice but another defective note to add to the chorus? Maybe though, they would find each other online, several months after the beautiful man’s operation. They could keep each other on track, having both been fixed up nicely.
His father had called right before Jackson swallowed the bottle’s worth with whiskey, but he pushed it to voicemail. It was just like Dad, a prolonged absence, then an uncanny intuition. After his second attempt, they implanted the neural pacemaker for Jackson’s own safety, to monitor his brain circuitry and detect when specific neural patterns that led to his depressive onsets were activated. Long acting injectables led to diabetes and severe obesity and other pesky symptoms, so this was the latest management miracle, while still not a cure.
When he awoke in the hospital, his father held Jackson’s hand in both of his, his bruised cheekbone wet with tears. “I tried to stop them as soon as I found out where you were,” he said. “I tried to stop them.”
His father finally admitted himself to the hospital when the nerve pain in his feet blazed in unrelenting agony and he begged for relief, otherwise he never would have gone, and then, once he was in, they shipped him straight to the home for his own safety. He blamed Jackson of course, for not vouching for his invincibility. “You’re happy aren’t you, now that I’m doped up and propped up like a marionette, like you. I raised you with fire, boy, you had fire in you once, and you turned tepid,” he spat.
“Well it tends to burn the people around us, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t leave me here,” he pleaded, eyes suddenly helpless as a child.
“There’s nothing you have to worry about anymore, Dad,” Jackson said as they served his father second helpings of vitamin-enhanced jello.
He leapt off the stair machine and grabbed his diary.
- 4:57pm: Fourth Warning BEEP!!!!
DO NOT INDULGE IN SAPPY MEMORIES YOU WEAK FUCKWIT. PATHETIC EXCUSE OF
Please just stop. Just stop thinking about him. He deserved better than me, he was special and I left him to rot
- Next time on the stairs, ensure you listen to guided relaxation podcast. Exercise leaves too much room for the mind to wander.
The retirement home called, reminded Jackson to pick up his father’s things.
“I’m terribly busy. Can I come in three weeks’ time?” The Device would be reset then, he could risk another beep.
“Space isn’t cheap. It’s tomorrow or the trash.”
When he arrived after work, the cantankerous one was there again, somehow more haggard than before. “There’s only a few things,” she said, motioning to a weary cardboard box. “He wasn’t brought many gifts.”
“Yes, well… yes.” He stammered, anger rising above the guilt. “He was… not too much of a bother for you, was he?”
She inhaled harshly and released her breath with scrunched up eyes. “Half the time he screamed at me, tellin’ me he’d rather be five feet under than have his arse wiped, eat beans on toast with drooling inmates and be degraded by endless rounds of bingo.”
“I’m sorry about tha—”
“And the rest of the time,” her voice trembled slightly and swelled in volume, “he taught me how to paint, and I smuggled in canvas so long as he swore to tell me stories of the Yukon—settin’ up camp under the auror’ borealis, his toes nearly falling off from the cold and becoming the next Sourtoe cocktail,” she cackled. “Sometimes I unlocked the piano room and accompanied him. He was a stubborn bastard and hated half of what I played, cursed me off the bench. He taught me Cwm Rhondda and Suo Gân, and sometimes I’d steal a look at him, as his voice cracked on the high notes: his eyes shimmerin’ with more than cataracts. We’d sing late into the night—I know it was against the rules, he needed his rest, but he had too much spirit to let him just…”
She covered her hair self-consciously over her ears, and then he noticed it, the patch of absent hair, the scarring. “You… how did you…”
She turned away from him and scurried towards the door. “I need to check on the other patients.”
“But… they track you. Don’t they? Did they insert another one?”
“That should be all your father’s things. Thank you again for entrusting us with his care,” she said with finality.
“I didn’t entrust you, they just warehoused him here. I don’t even know how it happened. And he hated it here, besides you apparently, he loathed every second, I should never have let him fade away in here, he–”
He massaged his temples, “Fuck. No. That’s five. I’m so fucked. I’m so fucked I can’t go to that place again. They serve microwaved mush and play shit twenties hits, can’t move from all the tranqs, I’ll lose my job, I’ll lose my apartment… how did you get it out? I thought they had malware protection—”
“Shut up,” she whispered viciously while shutting the door. “Shut up right now. If they’re called here, they’ll find me too.”
He collapsed on his father’s crunchy plastic mattress, the place where his towering, terrifying father had transformed into a frail and fearful husk. “Did you ever take him outside?” he asked, dreading the response.
“Against policy,” she replied. And he moaned then, thinking of his father’s love of the formidable Rockies, scaling pine trees to escape grizzly’s, forging through thickly knitted spruce, gorging on tiny flavour-bursting blueberries, cooling the back of his neck with river water.
“But. I snuck him outside once or twice,” she rasped, then added with undiluted judgment, “he needed visitors to sign him out.”
“Christ. After the surgery… whenever he looked at me, he broke, okay? Once he said he missed me, and I knew what he meant.”
Another beep had him leaping off the bed. “Six. That’s six. I’m done for. That’s it. I needed three to safely make it through the funeral, and now I’m fucked. MORNING COFFEE GLISTENING RIVERS BABY RHINOS PINK PINK PINK FLAMINGOS SUNSHINE MOUNTAINS Fuck no NOT MOUNTAINS MASHED POTATOES APPLE PIE WITH CHEDDAR CHEESE AMBROSIA SALA–”
She jabbed him between the ribs and yanked him into the bathroom, wrenching on the shower handle. “You need to calm down. Now.” Her small but willful frame wrestled his torso over the plastic shower seat, dousing him in frigid water.
He jerked backwards and she let him stumble into the bathroom wall, hair soaking into his shirt and pooling beneath his leather shoes.
“I can help,” she said as they both panted. “I shouldn’t risk anything for you, but your father… he never shut up about you. There’s a network of people who’ve hacked it. But you’ll need a new identity, a new city, a new life.”
“I can’t just—I have a job and a house.”
“Then get out now and leave me be,” she replied calmly.
“I have two hamsters and… a promising dating profile. And there’s the funeral.”
“There are other ways to honor his life.”
His shoes squelched as he moved to the small window overlooking a parking lot, two rusting dumpsters, and the side of a grey apartment building. After his mother left, his father and him painted the whole interior of the house—walls of dinosaurs and daffodils, ceilings of swirling galaxies and flying dragons, doorways detailed with dancing, golden-haired tylwyth teg. When his father stumbled home after dawn, or days later, at least Jackson could lie beneath the ceiling and talk with his colourful companions.
“I’m not good with… I need routines and medication and therapy.”
“Fine. Nobody cares.”
“But—”
“But you get to decide.”
They startled upon hearing multiple voices echoing down the corridor—the muted dialogue sounded urgent and authoritative.
“Already?” she asked.
“Went off five minutes ago,” he admitted.
“Damn you. Get in the wheelchair. I’ll push you to the parkade. There’s a friend who can do the procedure. If you want it.”
Jackson rummaged through his father’s cardboard box, digging out his father’s flat cap beneath pinecones, rocks and strips of bark. He tugged on the hat, smelling mothballs and cedar. She covered his soaking torso, with unexpected tenderness, in his father’s quilted blanket.
They rolled slowly down the corridor towards the elevator as security systematically checked the rooms behind them. “There’s a stairwell to the right if we have to run.”
“That’s a losing game,” he whispered, slouching in the chair, hunching his neck forwards and slowing his breath to appear elderly. She heaved him over a peeling corner of grainy polysafe floormat and he let himself sway with the movement. To consider the hospital again was incomprehensible… yet it was known. He would be released eventually, despite the torment of not being permitted to know when, not even the courtesy of an estimate. Did they revel lording that over him, just a little, his life, his career, his health in their capable palms? The way he bowed down in politeness, forced to win points with every brief interaction? To be the good patient, the submissive patient striving for stability, did they ever admit to themselves the seductiveness of that position?
But still, still, he would be deposited back to his life, the malleable accordion of time crunching in on itself, racing to catch up with emails, with missed appointments, begging for mercy from his employer without revealing the nature of his ailment—but still, he could return to his hamsters—oh god, who would feed them when he was locked up, would they even believe he was capable of owning pets? Accuse him of a fresh delusion? But still, still they would make him better, his father’s death would be an unfortunate blip in his efforts to achieve, achieve constancy. He would be reset, could start anew in a familiar place. Rather than anew in the screaming uncertainty of what? A new city? A new life? There wasn’t even an image in his mind: just groundless, falling blank.
The elevator was only a few bedrooms down, past an intersecting hallway. “Do you like your new life?” he whispered.
“Not always,” she replied.
The impatient voices behind them grew closer. His head rang with continuous locating beeps, and he could no longer hear the drum of his heartbeat.
“What do we do now?” he asked, gripping the seat of the wheelchair, his thighs hovering above the vinyl, and he wished till his insides ached, wished with a love unmanageable, wished his father was alive now to yell at him: “Get off your ass and run from the bastards!” He laughed, he couldn’t help it, he laughed. The men’s shoes squeaked and their voices boomed down the hallway.
The elevator doors would never shut behind them in time. To the right, the emergency exit sign flickered as if prophesizing a grim future fit for a fugitive.
“What do we do now?” he asked again, and he felt his father’s bones twitching inside him, his drunk-weary sinews, his rage and grief and ecstasy and scorn.
Robyn Thomas is a Canadian writer and filmmaker currently living in Scotland where she’s completing her PhD in anthropology. Her writing has been published in Orca Literary Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, Marrow Magazine, Carmina Magazine, Psyche Magazine and other publications. She was a finalist for the North American Review’s 2022 Terry Tempest Williams Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
