Technology Softens a Poignant Farewell in This Sci-Fi Short Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Last Lucid Day” by Dominique Dickey. Enjoy! (You can also listen to the story here).

THE LAST LUCID DAY
by Dominique Dickey

You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail.

“I didn’t raise a son of mine to count on his fingers,” your father says in the dream—because ah, yes, it’s all of your worst moments rolled into a single nightmare.

You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands. He holds you down and tells you to count the seconds, show him how long you can hold your breath, but the only way to make sense of the numbers is to tally them on your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.

It always ends with him walking away.

It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.

• • • •

When you awake, sweat outlines your body in the bed like a policeman’s chalk drawing. Your alarm has been going off for . . . how long? Too long. You’re running late for work, and today already feels awful.

You call in sick. That’s sorted. What’s next? The voicemail.

The voice of the message is automated. You knew this was coming, but there was no way of knowing when. You figure that’s the purpose of the service—to tell you exactly when.

Well, another hour in bed won’t hurt. You want the feeling of waking up right, from a good dream or even from no dream at all. You set your alarm again and close your eyes but you can’t get back to sleep. You catch yourself thinking about your father’s favorite belt—thick black leather, buckle scratched to hell. You’re a grown man and it still makes you feel wobbly with fear.

You haul yourself out of your sweat-damp bed. You shower. Magnolia Assisted Living is an hour away in traffic. You stop at an ATM on the way and get there just before eleven.

• • • •

You were six when your parents called it quits. Mom got Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays. They alternated Easters, a holiday neither of them especially cared about. Dad got every other weekend. Every other Friday, you’d haul your overnight bag to school and stash it behind the receptionist’s desk. Every other Friday, your father would show up in the pickup line in his red sports car.

His bachelor apartment was two hours out of the city. At the halfway point, he’d pull off the highway and circle on the surface streets for a bit, eventually pulling into the parking lot of a mini-mart or a gas station. You’d stretch your legs and then he’d hand you a couple of tens and set you loose on the aisles of junk food. You’d eat together in silence.

That was when you felt closest to him. Not in his apartment, a beautiful place that never felt like home, but in the car in a nondescript parking lot, surrounded by overpriced snacks, his coffee black and gritty as tar steaming in the cupholder between you.

• • • •

At Magnolia, the receptionist tells you your father is in the garden. You pick through the trees and rosebushes until you find him sitting at a wrought iron table with a composition book and a ballpoint pen, scribbling. There’s a long moment before he looks up and sees you. You wish time could stop, could give you space to think about the meaning behind the words he’s writing—or maybe they’re numbers, or diagrams.

Whatever it is, it makes sense to someone smarter than you. Someone with the specialized knowledge required to understand it. Lucid, your father is a genius. He’s the most brilliant man you know.

And then he looks at you. There’s a flash of surprise on his face before he pushes himself to his feet and comes close, his arms held out as if to hug you. “It’s a Thursday, isn’t it? What have I done to deserve this?”

You smile. Even now, he doesn’t know you well enough to know you’re forcing it. “I thought we’d go for a drive.”

• • • •

Your father, a theoretical mathematician renowned in his field, stood over your shoulder as you did your homework. You were a child. You were counting on your fingers. He took off his belt and laid it on the table. He wasn’t actually going to beat you with it, but you didn’t know that—how could you possibly know that? It would take a few more years of this before you saw straight to the bottom of his empty threats.

He never hit you. The threat of violence kept you in line, and that was violent in a quiet sort of way. Every other weekend you eclipsed yourself. You sat at the kitchen table with his belt beside you and you let your mind go somewhere else. You hid in plain sight. You spoke only when spoken to, in non-answers and with a heavy tongue. No, he never hit you, but sometimes he took you by the shoulders and shook you, as if it would bring you back.

You learned addition and subtraction by rote. You learned to swim. You learned to disappear. You learned other things, too, that you were happy to forget.

If he had hit you with the belt, if he had made you count the lashes, you would not have used your hands to find the numbers.

• • • •

You drive for an hour, alternately talking about nothing and humming along to smooth jazz classics on the radio. You pull off the highway, circle for a bit, find a gas station with an attached market. You give him two crisp twenty-dollar bills. Inflation, you think. That ought to cover it.

You follow him inside. He doesn’t look nearly as old as he is, and he wears his excitement like a little kid. He has the cash crushed in one fist, the index finger of the other hand tapping his lips as he paces the aisles. The store’s small, but he takes his choices seriously, and you let him.

After a few minutes of witnessing his indecision, you wander away to figure out your own haul. Potato chips. A bottle of ginger ale, weeping condensation. A styrofoam cup of black coffee that’s somehow burnt even though it’s freshly regurgitated from the machine.

You’re at the register when he slides up to you, impatient—somehow he’s already made his picks and purchased them—and asks for the car keys. You hand them over. You watch through the window as he folds himself into the passenger seat of your practical SUV and begins to eat. The pimply attendant takes your credit card, swipes it, and hands it back.

• • • •

You turned eighteen. You stopped answering his calls and, eventually, he stopped calling. Part of you felt like he was giving up on you, but the bigger part of you felt relieved. You thought of him whenever you went to a gas station or mini-mart—all the time, at first.

The memories faded, as memories tend to do, and you thought of him less and less.

Twenty years passed. You hardly thought of him at all. It was peaceful. It was good. You had the quiet kind of happiness that’s damn near impossible to capture in words. You didn’t think about him, you lived your life, and you were happy.

• • • •

He called after your mom died. He had a new number, but so did you, and you never asked how he got yours. He wanted to come to the funeral, wanted to know if it was okay with you, didn’t want to just show up and surprise you. The thoughtfulness was unexpected—it was easier to see him as the man who would do the blatantly inconsiderate thing.

“Sure,” you said.

“I’ll see you there,” he said.

The funeral was on a hot day. He sat in the back and left as soon as the service was over. You barely saw him, but he looked just the same as you remembered. You wondered if he was wearing the same belt: tarnished silver buckle, black leather gone limp with the years.

Two weeks after the funeral—you spent a week waffling, and another week working up the nerve—you called him. “Come over for coffee,” you said. You couldn’t tell if the offer was for him or for you. You couldn’t tell what you hoped to gain, but you had very little to lose. Your impossible, wordless happiness had already shattered. What could he do to you that had not already been done? What more could he take?

He came to your house on a Saturday afternoon. He was a familiar stranger. He hugged you tightly and came away crying, embarrassing you both. His memory had already gone fuzzy around the edges, the past bleeding into the present, but he still knew you. He missed you. You were right on time.

• • • •

You sit in the car and you eat. You don’t speak—you don’t even look at each other—but you feel close to him.

Maybe this is enough. Maybe this is all you needed.

• • • •

Two years after you got your dad back—two years of awkward biweekly coffee visits, talking around all the things you wanted to talk about—came the fire.

He seemed to slip through time, confusing you with people he used to know, forgetting how old you were, forgetting which stories he’d already told you. He showed you proofs that made no sense, though you blamed your lack of mathematical knowledge for this. He got lost around the corner from his house, once, but his neighbors walked him home and he laughed when he recounted the incident to you.

He forgot he was cooking in the middle of frying an egg. He left a burner on and wandered out of the room. He was at his desk puzzling over an equation, a hand-drawn diagram that only he could understand, when a kitchen towel caught fire. From there it spread to the curtains. He would’ve been fine if he’d fled when the smoke alarm started to beep, but he tried to put the flames out himself.

You brought him gas station coffee when you visited him in the hospital. He had bandages around both his arms and he looked like he’d aged ten years in the time it took you to arrive.

“I’m not going to be stubborn about this,” he said. “I’m not going to do that to you—make you get a court order or else make you watch me die the hard way. I know I shouldn’t live alone anymore.”

In the silence, you wondered if he meant for you to make him an offer—you did have plenty of space, after all, in your mom’s old house. But you didn’t offer, and he didn’t ask.

“I’ll send you a link,” he said. “I already picked out a place. Magnolia Assisted Living. Forty minutes out of the city, specialized in memory care. Just . . . say you’ll come visit me.”

“I’ll come visit you,” you said.

Awkward Saturday coffee had a new location. He wore long sleeves to cover the burn scars. He worked day and night on theorems that you began to see for the nonsense they were. Time and memories flowed around him like choppy water. He was adrift. He was drowning.

You couldn’t save him—you weren’t even sure if you wanted to—but you visited every week.

• • • •

“There’s this thing,” he told you, though by then you’d already done your own research. “A service they offer. An implant. It can tell you when your last good day—your last really good day—will be. The catch is that if the patient knows their time is up, then the white coats say it leads to . . . negative treatment outcomes. It’s a double blind, I guess. The doctors don’t even know. It’s better if they just notify the family.” He scratched his arm through his sleeve. You imagined the way his burned skin went puckered and thin. “I gave them your number. I hope that’s all right.”

There he was: the man who would do the blatantly inconsiderate thing, tossing you into a responsibility that you never wanted, didn’t know how to bear. Reality closed over your head like chlorinated water.

“That’s fine with me,” you said.

• • • •

At the bottom of his bag of chips he licks the dust off his fingers, then looks at you for a long time. “It’s my last day, isn’t it?”

You make a concerted effort not to tense up. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on. My last lucid day.”

You shrug. He doesn’t know you well enough to know your tells. “I thought you didn’t sign up for that.”

“Don’t give me that. They did all the tests. All the implants—even the ones that are still in trials. Comprehensive.”

You shrug again. “You sure you remember your intake that well?”

“Yes I remember my fucking intake—”

“Really? Because sometimes you misremember stuff. It comes with the whole terrain.”

He doesn’t say anything, but his expression is nuclear in its rage. The anger makes you feel small, makes you think of his belt on the kitchen table in the apartment you never felt safe in.

And then the anger goes away all at once, his face slack as he gropes in the footwell for something else to eat. There’s an unguarded moment where he looks hurt, and he looks sad, and he looks very old.

The petty satisfaction you feel at having hurt him is undercut only by your own guilt. You feel like a monster, like you’re no better than him. But what you want from him—it can’t be a deathbed confession. The conversation will lose its value if he knows he’s out of time, if he’s only saying the words because it’s his last chance to do so. You need it to feel organic. You need it to feel real.

You ask the question you have always been afraid to ask: “When you look back at my childhood, do you ever regret anything?”

“No.” He answers so quickly he can’t have possibly thought about it.

“Really?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Wow.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“I just think—”

“The way I see it, I did my best. I provided. And I didn’t have a dad at all, so it’s not like I had a blueprint in
that regard. I did my best.”

“But what about . . .” You’re trying to think of a concrete example, one that doesn’t hurt too much to talk about. “What about when you taught me to swim?”

“You learned.”

“You could have drowned me.”

“Eh,” he says.

You think about him tossing you into the water, him pinching your nose and holding your head down so you’d learn to hold your breath, him walking away and leaving you flailing in the deep end. You can feel the fear as if it’s happening right now. You can smell the chlorine and the sunscreen as if it’s on your skin—memory is strange, that way. Funny that you thought you could bring up this story without feeling that familiar unhappy ache in your chest, your gut.

This is why you went so many years without thinking of him at all. This is what you were avoiding. You don’t know what you want. You want him to admit he hurt you. You want to hear him say that he was wrong. You keep pushing.

“I could have died,” you tell him.

“You didn’t. You learned to swim, didn’t you?”

“It’s not just that. I was a kid.”

“You turned out okay.”

“Did I?”

“You did,” he says, with perfect confidence, like he has no idea how wrong he is.

He barely knows you—because you haven’t let him, because there is so much you haven’t told him. He doesn’t know about the trail of wrecked relationships, all entirely your fault, which you blame on your attachment issues, which you blame on him. Your mother is the only relationship you couldn’t entirely destroy, and
goddammit you tried. He doesn’t know about the nightmares. Telling him how he’s ruined you would constitute admitting defeat, but he can’t apologize for the pain if you don’t show him the wounds.

You aren’t going to show him the wounds.

He’s never going to apologize.

Why did you even bother? Why did you even hope? He’s going to forget you and he will never, ever be sorry.

Time is kind and memory is cruel. Someday you’ll forget him too.

• • • •

You were in college the first time you lost your father.

“My mom’s an architect,” you said, when the subject of family came up in a conversation with your freshman year roommate.

“What about your dad?”

“I don’t have a dad,” you said. You didn’t even hesitate, and you felt no guilt for the smoothness of the lie. If anything, it made you proud. Look at me, you thought. Look at the life I’m creating without him. Look at how good that life could be.

The grief came later, when you replayed the conversation in your narrow dorm bed—a slow blooming feeling behind your sternum, like blood spreading in water. You realize, now, that it was practice. You’ve already lost him once. You know how to lose him again.

• • • •

It’s an hour back to Magnolia, and you make the drive in silence. He’s not even angry, and maybe you aren’t either. You think you’re mostly sad.

He sips his shitty coffee. He turns on the radio. Saxophone trickles out of the speakers.

“Back to the garden?” you ask, once you’re parked in front of Magnolia. The weather’s still nice, if a bit breezy. If he wants to spend his last good day working on proofs in the sun, you won’t stand in the way of that.

“Yeah.” He gets his notebook and ballpoint pen out of the backseat where he stashed them. He leaves his trash in the footwell: metallic wrappers, an empty styrofoam cup. You tell the receptionist you’ve returned him for the day, then walk him back to his little table. He lines up his notebook along its edge, then turns to you.

Waiting.

Well, what do you do?

You meet his gaze and hold it. This is your dad. He’s your dad and he’s old, and he’s falling apart, and he’s going to die. And then you’ll have a dead dad, who was a shithead in life and had the audacity to kick the bucket without apologizing for any of his shitheadedness.

You miss not having a dad at all. You miss the years of easily denying his existence. The lie that felt more and more true each time you told it. The story that you know you can never slip back into, now that it’s been fractured.

He will never be himself again. You hate him. You miss him already.

You hug him tightly and come away crying, embarrassing the both of you.

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About the Author
Dominique Dickey is a speculative fiction writer and game designer. As the creative director of Sly Robot Games, they’ve created Plant Girl Game and Tomorrow on Revelation III. They contributed to the Nebula Award-winning Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and the ENNIE Award-winning Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. Their novella Redundancies & Potentials is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock in 2024. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. They live in the DC area, where they’re always on the hunt for their next idea. You can find their work at dominiquedickey.com.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the June 2024 issue, which also features work by Varsha Dinesh, Andrea Kriz, Megan Chee, Dominica Phetteplace, Deborah L. Davitt, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Shanna Germain, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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