“Similar to Knucklebones or Fivestones. Not as confusing as Craps,” Melody said, her grin like Eddie’s earlier.
“So, I just pick one? Or several?”
“Oh, for Goddess’ sake,” Eddie said, “you have seven possibilities. Pick one and—”
“Unless he picks a d10,” Mimi said. “Then he has to roll two.”
“Yeah, right, but that’s…Daniel, tell me, you’ve played D&D, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve rolled against a Dungeon Master, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Same thing. Except now you have three masters. So fucking choose.”
Suddenly, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality replaced Miles, and all the plasma balls around the room went crazy. Little, bubbled boils of lightning. I didn’t know if it was the game commencing or Melody’s anger. Regardless, the room grew brighter, in a UV-sort-of-way. Purple highlights hit everything, including my Muses. For just a few seconds, I could see their skeletons through their skin. It was like watching the entire room bathed in X-Rays. Everything except me. I looked at my own hands. I stared at the dice and the galaxy spinning inside its grail. Nothing else glowed from the inside, save the sisters. For a few seconds, I couldn’t even make out their faces. Skulls, three of them, stared back at me. Grinning, eternally grinning.
I looked at the seven die — teeth? — lying on the surface of the Milky Way.
Not a math major.
What are my odds?
If we all roll d20s, and if they top out as I crap out, I lose fiftynine memories.
What kind of memories do I have? What am I willing to lose?
If I roll two d10s, same scenario. Except I lobotomize 299 elements of who I am.
Is this what my dad went through? Is this what the past six years have meant? Losing a life, memory by memory? Offloading stuff one doesn’t give a shit about? Losing everything that ever mattered? Those memories back in the store, trapped inside innocence and ink…Are they as important to him as they are to me? How many are out there, beyond the curtain? How many have blundered into the dark recesses of some strange shoppe where only the most discriminating connoisseur might recognize their importance?
The first appearance of Gambit or the Uncanny X-Men themselves. The original run of Warlock? The first Infinity Gauntlet storyline? Shit, all those Scrooge McDuck tales that no one — and I mean no one — cares about, yet sell for insane dollars? How are they any different from what my father may have lost? Could he even know?
Can I?
If I dice against these devils?
“Our knowledge may be infinite,” Melody said, “but our patience…”
“Okay, d4,” I said, pulling out my last mini-bottle and downing it. At this point in my life, in his, what difference did it make? My memories, his memories? They were almost the same. He was losing memory. I was selling mine for tenure and tequila and temerity.
“Really?” Mimi, the tiny form of Mike-the-mono-eyed in her hands, stared at me. Blind, she stared at me. In the harrowing glimmer of galaxy glamour and Tesla tentacles, she stared at me. Half human, half Red Skull.
“d4,” I said again, thinking, if they all roll fours, the worst that can happen is I roll one, lose eleven memories. Best case? I win one. Anything else, I run higher and higher risks.
“Don’t you want to venture…more?” Eddie’s cranium pulsed with the plasma strikes illuminating balls around the room, a room whose boundaries escaped me. The walls didn’t seem to exist. Limits seemed extraneous.
“No,” I said. I wasn’t really clear on why I’d chosen the path of least resistance, why I didn’t want to bet the farm — young child, field, tornado — but then a memory, one I hadn’t found in the comics in the other room, one of my own, presented itself.
Two years ago I took my father to see Man of Steel. By then, he’d lost almost everything, his sense of balance, his knowledge of most people’s names. He barely remembered, from moment to moment, who I was. After we had a couple of Black Angus hot dogs at the upstairs Deli, we wandered down to the theater itself and I helped him into a seat. It wasn’t a great film, full of plot problems and the same sort of character carelessness I hated. In fact, it was precisely the kind of film I felt was killing the field I’d long found myself a part of. But…
But my father, a man who once spent years designing intricate inlay intaglios for rich people, who knew the name of every member of the Legion of Superheroes, who knew how to carve a spiral banister by hand, who could make a makebelieve wooden rubber-band gun in under a minute, who could name every artist who ever drew Spider-Man or Doctor Strange…My father sat in that seat and watched for two and a half hours and didn’t lose focus. He didn’t have to get up for the bathroom. He didn’t become confused. He watched the film with me as I watched him, and he seemed to glory in it, to find something special that the real world didn’t offer. Alien loses his past, his planet, his parents, and he moves on. Something there seemed to touch him.
When it was over, my dad reached for me and I had to guide him far more carefully back up the theater’s center aisle.
Up, for someone with Alzheimer’s, is ever so much harder than down.
I took his hand and guided him up the small incline back to the lobby. He could barely walk. His balance was fucked. I wasn’t sure if he even remembered one third of the film we’d just watched. Halfway there, he slowed, turned to me and said, “So…we’re going to save the world?”
I rolled the dice.
My father drives like a madman from the IHOP to someplace else. He doesn’t know what the someplace else is, but he knows he has to be there. It calls to him from the dark places of the world, the places his own son would call the underworld. He doesn’t really understand his son, all the glitter and glam, the gargantuan egos. He doesn’t understand ego. He just wants to do what his body tells him. And his body says drive.
It will be a year before the diagnosis, but he knows something is off.
Eventually, after morning turns to afternoon and afternoon becomes dusk, after two tanks of gas and so many, many wrong turns, he arrives at Altus, the town where his mother was buried. But this isn’t where his body says he’s supposed to go. He grew up a few miles away, closer to Carnegie. It’s there his father found a final resting place, near a ramshackle sharecropper shack where he and his family lived, where his father never forgave him for living at the expense of his mom.
When he arrives at the ruin, he doesn’t get out of the car. Instead he drives on past, out into the stubble of the cotton field. Somewhere near the creek, near stones he remembers sleeping on when he was little, somewhere as alien as it is familiar, he stops the car, gets out and, letting his body drive, finds a side path, a little road that leads to a glade between the tree-line berm and the lowering gulley that runs from here to Lawton. Just this side of the culvert, chalky teeth of gravestones rise from Oklahoma’s red-dirt gums.
After touching stone, saying sad words, forgetting everything he’s come here for, he remembers the IHOP, remembers he was supposed to be headed home after eating sausage and hash browns, and stumbles back to his car. Alas, the land is unforgiving. The dirt beneath his wheels is pure mud. For hours he tries to drive back out. For hours he is rebuffed.
While he presses his foot to the foot feed, while he regrets everything he’s done — now, before, later — he thinks about his father, about his father’s scorn. He thinks about his own son. Wondering how he’s going to explain all this if he ever gets to a phone, revving his engine ever higher and higher, he wishes three wishes.