Gone Lawn 58 : Arthur Mandal

She grew up with aliens in the house and inscrutable jokes in the kitchen. Papier-mâché models of interstellar craft, painted all shades of battleship grey, bobbed on wires from their ceilings; photos of wrinkly Other Beings, half-glimpsed saucers skipping across clouds, plastered by her father over her bedroom door. His precious eight-inch reflector by the bookshelf he let no-one else but her touch. Her mother and grandparents eye-rolling, remonstrating, trying to pull him back from the excesses of his own fatherly-mania. Years later, the feminist in her would recognize he tried to get her interested in drones not dolls, in nebulae not needlework, even though she found it hard to forgive him for the other things.

There was no need for her mother to worry: by the time she was nine, she understood it was his passion, not hers. She played along with it like a pretend-Catholic, never telling her father the extent of her non-belief, perhaps because she wasn’t sure of it herself. She saw too clearly the reasons for his telescope, his podcasts, his NASA all-nighters. By the time she was a teenager, she realized he was seen as an oddball at work.

Her personal revelation arrived late — just before she left for college. It was someone her father followed religiously, someone he tremendously respected. She came across the talk by chance, scrolling for other things, and watched the whole one hour-fifty five minutes from beginning to end, shocked, emptied, appalled.

She walked around dazed for a couple of hours, looking up into the sky, and was surprised by a feeling of almost unbearable loneliness. It amazed her she had carried something for so long without knowing it – a secret faith, a clandestine creed. She realized she had never been so thoroughly, devastatingly, mathematically robbed of a belief before. The thought filled her with nostalgia for the time she had nurtured it and clung to it.

Her immediate concern was him. She knew or could guess all his settings, passwords, prompts, and removed the notifications barely an hour before he returned, with the dexterity a defense system removes a looming missile from its trajectory.

It was her last week at home. They went to a festival together, attended a premiere; she listened to long recitations he gave of various monologues from his favourite films. She laughed at his impressions and smiled at his joy, faking empathy with an excitement she now no longer shared. Sitting in the car with him, she realized she had taken over her mother’s role of long-suffering indulger — her mother, who had never believed there was ever anything up there to begin with.

Years later, the mother now gone, when they argued bitterly over something significant to him, unimportant to her, she sent him a link to the talk and then immediately regretted it. From the outside, her malice looked ridiculous: a middle-aged, disappointed woman, a greying, sarcastic, man.

She thought about what she did so much that she drove out to see him. The house was unchanged — still the same posters, papier-mâché models, FBI photo galleries. Only her mother’s absence, and a new tv. They sat and drank bad coffee together, laughing and joking as though nothing had happened. It reassured her, until she went upstairs to the bathroom and saw the empty square of carpet next to the bookshelf. Curtains drawn across the window. After a moment, she realized that all the upstairs windows in the house had their curtains drawn.

She didn’t say anything when she left. They hugged and he made a joke that didn’t make sense. As she drove back she thought about the joke, replaying it again and again in her head until, about three exits before home, she finally understood.

Arthur Mandal is a writer based in Eugene, Oregon (but grew up in the UK).
He has published over 20 stories in The Barcelona Review, LITRO, december, 3:AM, The Forge Literary Magazine, BULL, The Summerset Review, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat & Tears, Bending Genres and others.
He also has a chapbook forthcoming with the acclaimed Nightjar Press.
His twitter handle is @ajmandal15. arthurmandal.com.