Driver's Education Read Online Free PDF Page B

lift himself. And when I did help him, I could feel the reluctance in his muscles each time I’d lift him, how they’d tighten and strain, and resist my pull.
    He’s still stubborn like all hell. But now, as his mind has fogged over, he’s started to panic whenever he’s alone. Doors aren’t doors toother rooms, they’re doors to some total disappearance. It started about six months ago: I had left to run an errand, maybe, or to take a walk, to remember there’s something beyond this house, only to return and find him trembling, sweaty.
    â€œWhere the hell were you?” he shouted.
    â€œJesus, Dad.” I lowered him to a chair. “Out. Walking.”
    â€œTo where? TO CHINA?”
    â€œWhat? No.” I brought him some water. “Would you just—Christ, would you just calm down?”
    I started, then, to leave the portable phone in his lap whenever I left the room, the house.
    â€œWho am I supposed to call?” he asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I told him. “Finn?”
    So, he did. Often. Twelve times before noon, according to one phone bill. But he dialed other places too: numbers that no longer existed, people who’d long since died. Occasionally, strangers. He’d press the receiver to his ear, holding his breath as they repeated Hello, as they said, Who is this? Then, when he’d run out of people to call, when he’d exhausted his catalog of numbers, he’d listen in on my conversations. I’d be pleading with a producer, with an agent, and there it would be—his smothered cough. “Dad,” I’d say. And then: “Excuse me, I’ll have to call you back.”
    After that pattern repeated itself enough times, after I’d lost enough jobs, failed at enough pitches, I bought him a mobile phone. One of those hulking devices designed specifically for people who’re too old to operate them: numbers the size of half dollars; screens as big as picture frames. A red button in the dead center of the keypad that reads EMERGENCY.
    â€œIt’s not for me, obviously,” I’d told the young salesgirl at the electronics store. “I mean, ha ha, have you ever seen anything so big? It’s for my dad. Can’t get the guy to stop listening in on my calls, ha ha. Old people, though. What’re you going to do?”
    She’d asked, “Would you like your receipt?”
    On the way to my office, I make it through the kitchen and to the first creaky stair before he yells, “Colin?”
    â€œI’m still here.”
    The blank page on the computer is still taunting me, flashing about its plainness, its unwrittenness. Downstairs, through the holes in the floor, I hear him coughing again. Hesitantly, almost as if the keyboard in front of me is painful to touch, as if it’ll reach out and claw my fingers if I get too close, I begin to write.

HOW TO MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL
    Finn
    It’s 7:30 on Monday morning and I’m doing 360s in my swivel chair at work. I still have my granddad’s map in my pocket.
    After I stop spinning, I shove a pen into my mouth and chew, leaving tiny craters in the black plastic. I’ve had a nagging difficulty sleeping during the past year, ever since my granddad moved in with my dad. It’s not that I’ve been plagued with horrible dreams, I don’t think. Like the sort of nightmares involving death and forgetting and disease? It’s more the fact that I’ve been having no dreams at all. I’ve only seen the back of my eyelids before I fall asleep, and I’ll see them and only them again as I awake: I see exactly nothing in between. These periods of nothingness will last sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for two hours—but always, always it’s the absence of something, as opposed to the presence of it, that jolts me back to consciousness again.
    The phone on my desk rings. I look at the number displayed on the caller ID