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Dad chokes a little on a forkful. “See? I'm sure he'd agree.”

“For a guy with one arm, you're remarkably good at pushing people away.”

Mr. Weber gets up from the table and once again stoops to hug what remains of his oldest friend, holding him a long time while Dad chews, unaware.

 

SMOKED

That night while I'm igniting a rich yellow bud of On Golden Bong, the attic door creaks and descends, snapping into place. There's a long beat while I wonder if the head I see breaking the surface will be Dad's, improbably better or, having expired, Zombie Dad's, here to eat my brains. (He can have them.)

Instead Consuela's round face comes into view and without a word, she sits next to me and plucks the bong from my hands and expertly inhales a plume of sweet smoke while its source glows red and then expires, spent. She hands it back with a long, expectant look, and before I know it I've refilled and emptied it three more times. Since Jackie's departure this is the first time I've gotten stoned with anyone, and it infuses me with a feeling of well-being. Despite our inability to communicate (and the continued absence from Consuela's face of anything resembling a smile), smoking together feels socially responsible, or at least less like the furtive solitary episodes of a strung-out dope fiend.

Over the next week Consuela continues to join me in the hours after she puts Dad to bed. We smoke and vape and I talk and gesture and she listens and nods, again indicating understanding, assent, or possibly
What an idiot.
But this new intimacy as we orally intoxicate ourselves, each taking turns puckering a thin nozzle or a fat joint, is seductive. I find myself attracted to her although any reciprocal desire isn't forthcoming, her unsmiling face impossible to read. And when she's had enough (her already impressive threshold increasing nightly) she returns to her room just above the downstairs den we converted for Dad, to whom she is caring and attentive during his waking hours. Then we smoke and vape into the night all over again. I should be less surprised than I am to discover that we've powered through a month's supply of pot in about a week.

I'm viewed with what I perceive as unwarranted suspicion when I show up too soon to refill my prescriptions at The Hemp Collective. Following their worried looks out the window, I'm forced to see things from their perspective: outside in the van, my nervous Guatemalan drug mule watches over the informant bound for execution with a bag over his head. Which renders me the desperate pot dealer under the criminal thumb of drug lords.

“How I've run out is completely innocent,” I explain with the whiny high pitch of a completely guilty party. “I was baking the pot into brownies when it caught fire, and that took care of my whole stash. Excuse me, my much-needed prescriptive remedy.”

“This is a controlled substance, regulated by the federal government,” I'm told with the kind of cautious handling reserved for deranged felons and nitroglycerine. “Without exception, your prescription cannot be refilled prematurely. But I see you can refill it in just a week,” he notes, consulting my file as he sneaks another nervous glance out the window to see my dad, head-bagged, still hasn't moved while Consuela, perhaps sensing how things are going, has taken on an even grimmer demeanor.

“It's just a week,” I concur as I get up to leave. “Of course I can wait. It's not like I'm some kind of addict.”

*   *   *

“I think Dad could benefit from some medical marijuana,” I tell Dad's doctor with an unfamiliar sobriety made necessary by circumstance.

“I see,” he says, not seeing at all. “And what makes you say that?”

“He has trouble sleeping.”

“I could prescribe some Ambien,” he muses, shining a tiny light into Dad's eyes that fails to illuminate any understanding behind them.

“I'd worry about him becoming dependent on a sleeping pill. Or sleepwalking to the supermarket and buying all their Cool Whip.”

“Ha! The stories of sleeping pill–induced shenanigans are greatly exaggerated.”

“Good to know. I'd hate to find out he slipped out late one night and married a horse.”

“I'd be very concerned about the psychotropic effects of marijuana on him. The brain is a funny thing…”

“Hilarious! But aren't there strains that are so precisely engineered as to avoid those kinds of potent effects?” The doctor looks up from Dad at me. “Or so I understand,” I waffle.

*   *   *

Back at the house Consuela and I break routine, agreeing (she with a nod) not to wait until later to dig into our renewed stash. We wheel Dad inside his darkened bedroom and adjourn to the couch to sample Tickle the Dragon, the desired engineered effect of which I've forgotten but infer from its name is some combination of mirth and danger. The seeds I failed to clean in my haste pop like tiny fireworks as I inhale and pass to Consuela. It takes me by surprise when she makes a tiny circle of her lips an inch from mine and blows her smoke into my lungs; then she is full-on mouth to mouth, resuscitating my high with the recycled smoke of her lungs until finally, her tongue finds mine.

I kiss her back with the full force of my prolonged abstinence. I imagine the days and weeks of this that might follow, Dad parked in front of the television where the sensory assault will hold him while I thrust myself into his caregiver; stoned midday sponge baths; and maybe someday little bronze children who speak both our languages and can translate.

Consuela pulls open her blouse for me and presses her stiff brown nipple into my mouth. She moans, and I moan louder, and then she moans even louder and before I can top her again, my cell phone rings. I have no intention of answering it—until I notice over her bosom Dad's face on my caller ID. I reach for the phone and both of us fall to the floor.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Dad growls from the bedroom phone, clear as a bell.

 

WIRED

While not entirely lucid on the phone, Dad has managed to communicate effectively enough to extract me from Consuela and rush into his room. Lights on, I can see Dad still has the phone pressed to his ear.

“Dad?”

Just as suddenly, his face grows slack and he returns to that familiar blank state. Clicking off the lights seems to reactivate him, and he hangs up the phone.

“What the hell is going on?”

Consuela crosses herself and leaves the room.

“What were you doing to that woman? Why are you here? What's that smell?”

It becomes clear that Dad doesn't completely understand what has happened to him or why I am once again living under his roof, smoking pot, and having sex on his couch, three things he couldn't abide back when I was a teenager and apparently still make him pretty cranky. I sit with Dad in the dark and try to explain what's happened.

“You had a stroke.”

“A stroke,” he repeats. “How long?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“I was fine yesterday.” It's good to hear his voice … although eventually it grows weaker and less sure, as if he's adjusting to the darkness, and it too soon overwhelms him. “Car van doctor breakfast Weber phone.”

Soon he's gone again, and we sit quietly together in the darkness.

*   *   *

According to his doctor's interpretation of things, it turns out Dad's silence was not wholly a loss of the speech-functioning part of his brain but a combination of factors that apparently made it impossible for him to manage his surroundings or person-to-person conversation. His brain's circuitry gone haywire, Dad appears to have been overwhelmed by sensory input and, further, could no longer interpret faces—his ability to understand their complexity and nuance was completely lost, and the added distraction of visual overload (which at high speeds proved much worse, causing him to yelp) had resulted in his profoundly confused state. Besieged by this rush of indecipherable external stimuli, he'd simply shut down. But as his recovery progressed, Dad slowly discovered that a completely darkened room posed no distraction. Unlike here, back in the blazing lights of the ER where his mind is once again still as he's reduced to a squirrel-like state, accepting tiny pretzel nuggets from Consuela's hand without expression.

*   *   *

Back home Consuela puts Dad to bed and declines our evening attic ritual. Whatever spurred her earlier sexual aggression also seems to have dissipated, and I suspect there will be no opportunities forthcoming for stoned sponge baths or little bronze babies.

Alone in the attic, my heart leaps to see an e-mail from Will, who I feared had forgotten me, with the subject head,
Is This You?
The message says only
Hope you're doing well,
and there's a link, which I click on, taking me to a YouTube video of my “Bob the Sea Serpent” clip that Steve was supposed to take down. Apparently before he did, someone downloaded it and reposted their own version, inserting human lips and rhythmic jump cuts so that my tattooed nub appears to be dancing and singing, in the auto-tuned-within-an-inch-of-its-life voice of Rod Stewart, “The First Cut Is the Deepest.” Even worse, the video has somehow wracked up millions of views. It's only a matter of time before it catches up with Randy Fucking Pausch.

 

WORK

They say work takes your mind off your troubles—and by “they” I mean Fred Weber, repeatedly, in calls, e-mails, and in person at the Four Corners and even once at Broken Records where I ran into him looking for a collection of sea shanties. I feel a little guilty leaving Dad, but I know he's in Consuela's good care and will spend the day largely dormant, and upon my return home I can awaken his senses by shoving him into a closet.

Although I haven't missed the drudgery of my tiny cubicle at Ick Ick or the taste of file folders clenched between my teeth, I'm forced to admit it feels good to be around Will again, and Lilith—no longer “Wilith” judging by her circuitous avoidance of Will on her way to greet me. Once again she presses up against me in an uneasy hug; this seems to be her preferred manner of greeting now, even for minor encounters like running into the mailman or refueling at a gas station.

This isn't the place for ambition. You don't come in early and leave late or send e-mails on the weekend to demonstrate your dedication; there is no success to dress for or meetings at which to impress, no competition to get ahead or backstabbing revenge on those who made you look bad in front of the boss. (There's no actual “boss”—things run as they are remotely from D.C.) We bear none of the trappings of business: no boardroom, no conference table, no charts showing dramatic growth or plummeting sales; no staff meetings or pep talks, no performance review threats or the incentive of a set of steak knives. In a manufacturing company, there would be a need to sell the things we manufacture and plan their obsolescence; in the service industry, there would be an equal urgency to provide those services at a high enough level to encourage repeat business.

But we count fish.

Not an end in and of itself, of course. The purpose of our fish tallying is to determine how few or how many fish are returning to spawn as nature intended. But if there's a threshold—what might constitute “too few” or “enough”—we haven't been told. So for weeks and months and then years, those counts are passed up the ladder in the manner of our struggling sturgeon to the upper echelons of the government agency to enable them to … do what, exactly? Prove that the fish population is doing just well enough to avoid tearing down the dam. If there are promotions and bonuses and coveted seniority, fat pensions and gold watches at the end of an illustrious career, it happens far upstream from here, where bureaucrats and politicians fertilize each others' eggs.

But everyone here at Ick Ick does the work because they care and believe it matters, and it would be cruel of me to disabuse them of that notion so I pretend it matters too.

“It's good to be back,” I lie. “I missed my dead-eyed friends. I'm talking about the fish.”

Only Will laughs, the others standing in place like Children of the Damned before dispersing wordlessly. He follows me to my cubicle, somehow grown smaller.

“You're a YouTube sensation,” Will reminds me, dispelling any idea that it had all been a bad dream.

“In the most embarrassing music video since ‘Ice Ice Baby.'”

“How's your father?”

“I think he's recovering. He's starting to speak. But only from a dark room, like a closet.”

“That's pretty weird.”

I consider the irony that Dad is revealed by darkness the same way a blackout exposes who we really are—selfless rescuer, fearful victim, opportunistic looter.

“I'm sure science and medicine have seen stranger things, like
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
or something. Which would be hard on any marriage. So, what did I miss?”

“We're on video night counts, just for a week to see if there's any pattern difference. Not that it matters. Because next up is the data dump.”

“If that requires manual labor, I picked the wrong week to come back to work.”

“We collate six months' worth of records, make assessments, and file reports.”

“They received our counts daily,” I remind him. “Can't they just add all the counts up, put it in a nice flowchart, or maybe a pie chart with a big piece missing to represent certain extinction?”

“Ha!” Will barks in appreciation. “But the assessment is kind of the point. We're supposed to bundle it all together and include our judgment that things are okay—or at least going in the right direction. Ensure the continued survival of the dam, and secure funding for next year.”

“One hand washes the other.”

“Then why do I feel so unclean?”

“What if our reports said the numbers are
not
okay, and not going in the right direction? Use words like ‘extinction.' Also, ‘shitty' and ‘sucks.'”