You will write this tonight.
The planets are aligned.
It's a sign.
My father told me a story. I was visiting him at the VA, he used to be a soldier. The impression of mine had always been that he'd never been deployed. He'd always said he was about to go in, one of the last flights over there before they called the whole thing off. I always saw in my mind him on a Douglas airliner heading over the Pacific on the way to Vietnam and landing to hear that everyone's going home.
Turn that plane around, captain.
Mais non, he was having dreams again, he said. When he told the doctor, he said they started a few days ago. He told him they were about things he wasn't supposed to talk about. Silly me, I thought he was having sex dreams. They were about classified missions. About an explosion knocking out his legs and getting beat on, but also about a man running down a hill at him shooting a kalashnikov, and him drawing his sidearm and killing the man. Three shots: groin, sternum, neck.
I saw him laugh. I like seeing him laugh. I make sure he laughs at least once every night, and I always leave him smiling with a smile on my face. It's important. It's healthy.
"It's funny at the time, I remember thinking what tight shot pattern, well horizontally anyways. I was all over the place vertically. But my legs weren't working so I don't know how they got me out a there." He was looking out past the TV screen, past the curtains and the walls. "It was one of those no-man-left-behind units."
"Active duty?"
He looked at me with reluctant apprehension, and a dart of the eyes around and away. "This was active. I can't really talk about it though... I'm not allowed to."
"Classified?"
"Mhmm."
"Where?"
He shifted a little in his hospital bed, and a twitch ticked the side of his face.
"Well I mean, Europe or Asia."
"Oh, this was Southeast Asia."
Of all the stories of his that I've heard over and over again, I'd never heard about Southeast Asia. I don't think he's told anyone in over thirty years. That's why death unsettles him. He's seen it. He knows hospital wards. He's woken up in the one you're not supposed to walk out of.
"It was very nice," he insisted of the terminal ward. He's always had this thing about respect, about loyalty and love. It's off basis, totally, and it's absurd, sure, but it's there, and sometimes I see the crystal ball in his eyes. He loved his father, who was an engineer and built aircraft during the war, so he became an engineer. He'd been an air traffic controller before. That's why he bought all his property in Inglewood instead of by the beach. He liked watching the airplanes line up on approach. The constant parade right there from our porch.
When I was young, I hated him. To this day, still, he's the only person I've ever hit out of anger. He was hard on me, he got frustrated with me and yelled, and took off the belt a few times. I was certain he hated me too. But I'm older now and I know better. He loves me, maybe more than he loves anything else. He always has.
