Golden Pheasant

Outside the gate of my parent’s condo complex in Florida was a strip mall that housed a nail salon, a vape shop, a vacuum repair, and a massage parlor. After exiting the complex one afternoon, my brother casually pointed to the massage parlor and said he got handjobs there all the time. He’d tell our parents he was going for a swim in one of the five pools on the compound, only to instead visit the massage parlor and ask for a handjob, always from the same woman. He felt he was one or two visits away from moving beyond the handjob stage, but that woman had left the parlor unexpectedly and my brother hadn’t been back since, though I don’t know if it was because he had a penchant only for that one woman or if it took too great an effort to start what I can only imagine was a delicate arrangement with someone else. I’d never been to one of those massage parlors myself, but I must admit I had what could only be called a morbid and perverse curiosity toward them ever since I first learned about their existence as a teenager—perverse because the thought of paying for sex and handjobs excited me despite knowing it’d bring untold shame and regret after climax (this shame and regret would be but moderately abated were I not married), morbid because I knew that the woman inside those massage parlors were trafficking victims with horrible lives. In contrast, my brother told me about his encounters with such nonchalance I assumed he thought they were a normal part of life, a vice not unlike drinking a beer after work, buying legal recreational marijuana, or throwing a few dollars down at the dog track (until recently, they still had greyhound tracks in Florida). I don’t know if his fiancé knew about his proclivities or if she held the same assumed view about their normalcy. I wanted to

know more about the entire process, but I remained silent, wary of sounding overeager or giving the wrong impression that I wanted an introduction to the services. It was true that the familiar perversity I mentioned creeped up as my brother went on to describe the body of the woman who gave him handjobs (like most of us, my basest desires are activated at the mere mention of sex, even if I have no interest in exploring it as a literary subject and find it an unserviceable route for deeper insights into what it means to be alive (this, despite the fact that most of the terrible decisions in my life and a few good ones spurred from sex, with a significant portion of my youth spent in adjacent pursuit of it)), but the overriding feeling I had was simply wanting to know what my little brother was up to, much in the same way I had wanted to know about his first girlfriend, or would one day want to know what his future children were learning in school.

We were driving to buy a new pack of playing cards. The ones we had been using each night at the condo got water damaged from a spilled drink on the glass patio table, and over the course of the week I’d been in Florida, we got ourselves addicted to spades and gin rummy, two games I found fun despite always losing to my brother, who claimed to have sharpened his edge at cutthroat spades during the month he spent in jail on a distribution charge, a claim backed up by his effortless play style and frequent streaks of luck, two traits that stood in stark relief to my tendencies of overstrategizing and self-sabotage. It was hard to find a pack of cards than we would have guessed—both drugstores in the area didn’t carry them. Our last resort was a nearby Barnes & Noble. Our mother called as soon as we arrived at the bookstore, sounding somewhat frantic and demanding we return home immediately to take care of my father, who could be heard yelling indiscriminately in the background. My brother, who by this point in our lives had

far more experience with my mother and her moods, spoke down to her like you would to your neighbor’s dog. Relax and shut up, he said. After he hung up, I asked if we should abandon our search for playing cards, but my brother said we shouldn’t pay any attention to our mother, that these were just the type of freak outs she’d been having ever since our father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer some two months prior—if he were a more poetic man, he might have said something like her anxieties mirrored the moon’s pull on the ocean tides, which would have been fitting considering we were on the western Florida coast, but he was not the type to reach for such metaphors, and whenever I threw one of my own into the ether, he would tell me, in so many words, why my metaphor was too generalized and off-base from the specific reality I was metaphorizing, which in this case, had I floated my idea equating moods to tides, might have been that moods had none of the calm cyclical nature of tides, especially not our mothers, as they were far more volatile and hair-triggered with nothing natural about them (a criticism he would have been right to levy, as tides, moods, and the moon form a rather kitsch picture, though perhaps this would have also been fitting, as the entirety of Florida always struck me as rather kitsch). As we walked between the half-empty shelves of the Barnes & Noble looking for cards, my brother received another phone call, this time from my father, who in slurred words asked us to pick up a number of games, including Trivial Pursuit, Backgammon, Risk, and anything else in that vein that looked good, as two friends along with their wives had come down from Michigan that day to see him, and my father had the thought that everyone would cram into our one bedroom condo after dinner to play games and drink bourbon, presumedly like old times (it’s hard to imagine him and his friends ever played Trivial Pursuit, but I knew why he wanted us to

buy that game—earlier that week, when I had first arrived in Florida, my brother and I took my father to the small brewery in town for trivia night, a game we easily won thanks in no small part to myself, as I have a effortless knack for trivia and was writing down correct answer after correct answer before the host could even finish reading their question, stumped only by a sports question, which was the one time all night I turned to my father for guidance and which resulted in the one time all night he did not sit in his wheelchair with a vacant look in his eye and his arms resting heavy in his lap (one of his arms already effectively dead from the tumor pressing against his motor neurons), meaning he became animated and answered me, and when the scores were totaled up at the end of the night, I found out we won by a margin of twenty or more, but I told my father that it was an extremely close call, and were it not for his assistance on the sports question, we would have failed to clinch the number one spot, a lie he seemed to believe, for whenever he talked about the trivia night over the next few days, he was sure to mention that it was his answer that sealed the deal, which ostensibly made me happy as it was the intended effect, but that happiness could never completely clear the petty jealousy and envy I felt when he said this, for it was actually my trivia knowledge that had won us the game, not his, just as that happiness could never completely clear the strangeness I felt at the end of trivia night when I had first told him we had won, and all my father did was look at me like he was scared and lost before telling me his head hurt and he wanted to go home, but regardless my father seemed to think himself the trivia master now and wanted to show that mastery off to his friends in a game of Trivial Pursuit (I set up a purposeful and clever reassessment of this shortsighted thinking a few paragraphs later in this story, but it occurs to me now as I edit my sentences that my father

also might have considered our trivia victory a piece of crucial evidence in his fight against brain cancer since it was proof he wasn’t all gone just yet), however the only game Barnes & Noble had was an expensive edition of Backgammon, which we bought with my father’s credit card. As we were leaving, I finally noticed the notices on the door announcing the store was closing soon, which was why it was so empty inside and everything was priced to sell.

We passed the strip mall with the massage parlor again on the way back to the condo complex, and I was again tempted to ask about my brother’s experiences getting handjobs, and again I was stopped because I wasn’t quite sure how to ask. I wanted to know where he learned how to do such things, if he had learned those things from my father, who had once told me unprompted that a real prostitute never carried a purse, and who had taken my brother to strip clubs and bachelor parties after I moved away, and who had had multiple rumored affairs throughout his marriage to my mother, who had printed out pictures of topless women and stuck them between the pages of the books he kept in his office, and who generally liked to have a good time, or if my brother had developed this sort of habit on his own accord. When we got back to our condo, my mother refused to greet us. We helped my father out of his chair and one of us held a plastic urine jug up to his penis while the other supported the weight of my father before we lowered him gently back into his chair (despite all the problems that came with brain cancer, it was urination that was the biggest disruptor to everyone’s life—my father was theoretically safe if left alone for a few hours, provided he was in his chair with the TV on and his phone nearby, but whenever my brother or mother left to go to the store or even to take the dog on an exceptionally long walk, it wouldn’t be long before my father called them, screaming

and in tears, saying he had to pee and they needed to get home immediately, even if they had been sure to make him pee before he left, and whenever this happened, be it two minutes or two hours, my father would have pissed himself by the time they arrived, so the two of them had come to the mutual conclusion that one had to be home at all times unless strictly necessary, which seemed to stop my father’s sudden and unexpected urges for urination, but also made my brother and mother feel like prisoners to my father and his tumor (to spell it out, it was clear my father didn’t actually need to urinate, but instead was either suffering from or forcing symptoms of the panic attacks one must receive when they’re left alone with the knowledge that they’ll soon be dead)). Afterwards, we put compression socks on his legs, which was hard as his feet and calves were swollen to proportions that were unnatural and disgusting, his skin so taut it looked translucent like grease on a paper bag and his toes where swallowed up by the edema of his foot like the heads of Moai at Easter Island. Then we made him something he called Grandma’s Tea, which was just black tea with milk and sugar, this apparently the way his grandmother liked her tea when he was a boy, and the fact that my father gave it a proper, idiosyncratic name was representative both of how far he was sinking into himself as his disease progressed (also emblematic of this are the times we sat around his motorized chair in the living room to spend time with him, only for him to say he preferred to Go Camping, which to him meant pulling his blanket over his head with a slight pitch in the fabric above his mouth and nose, a shape that presumedly formed the tent in which he camped, and he would sit there in silence as we talked in hushed voices around him or watched TV, though sometimes an inch or two of the blanket would slip and I could see one of his eyes wide open, staring straight ahead,

though never once did I think he was listening) and how much he regressed as his disease progressed, meaning he retreated toward his childhood—for example, he also had begun calling my mother Mom, something that might be considered harmless enough (after all, I’m sure he was not the only married father to call his wife Mom) were it not for the long nights he stayed awake, lifting and dropping his still working arm onto his chest while he shouted Ow and Momma, as the tumor pressing against his skull left him in what I could only imagine a great deal of pain, and when my mother turned over in bed to soothe him, he would not stop shouting Ow and Mom, almost as if she was not there and my father was in an unreachable, catatonic state, which had worn my mother and brother down so much that after an hour or so of his antics, they would tell him to shut up, that his head was just going to hurt since he had a brain tumor and there was nothing they could do about that, all while I laid in silence in the living room on an air mattress with a blanket pulled over my head, my eyes wide open and staring straight ahead, listening to everything that was happening. After we brought him his Grandma’s Tea, we watched Family Feud together.

Our plan for the night was to eat dinner at the golf course clubhouse with my father’s friends and their wives visiting from Michigan. Like most condo complexes in Florida, ours was situated on a golf course. The clubhouse had a full bar and restaurant with set dinner buffets each night. My brother and I would go there as children when my maternal grandparents still owned the condo my father later bought and order virgin strawberry daiquiris charged to the room. Our mother took our father into their bedroom to dress him while my brother took turns getting ready in the guest bathroom, my brother going first. I sat at the glass table on the patio where we spent

our evenings playing cards, looking out onto the fourth hole. There were heavy black storm clouds in the distance, and the old men still out playing golf were hightailing it back to the clubhouse before the rain came in. When we were children, our grandfather would bring my brother and I out to the patio at night so we could hear the exotic cries of bobcat, tropical birds, and frogs. Compared to the Michigan suburbs where we lived, it felt like a jungle, especially with the palm trees and mangrove trees obscuring the light of the moon and neighboring buildings, though the thickest and most luxurious palm tree of all was later killed by my grandfather by driving a rusty nail into its trunk, putting the tree in such a sorry state that the landscaping crew eventually had no choice but to cut it down, which gave my grandfather the uninterrupted view of the golf course he intended, yet this also had the unintended effect of destroying an auxiliary effect of the thick luxurious palm tree, which was the ambient sound it provided during swift summer storms when the raindrops would patter on its fronds and create a rhythmic cloak that drowned the condo’s patio in a powerful calm, meaning the palm tree’s absence left a patch of carefully manicured grass to absorb the rain, so the only sound you could hear during the torrential Florida storms was the hard impersonal slap of rain hitting the concrete walls of the building, which is all I soon heard as I sat on the patio waiting for my brother to get ready while my mother found clothes that would be easy to put on my father—she had an entire closet’s worth of selection at her disposal, as my father had purchased a large amount of golf course appropriate pants and polos the year prior to his diagnosis for he intended to spend his retirement down here in Florida, and that closet full of clothes that would never be worn struck me as such a sad detail, yet also one so pedestrian that instead of feeling sorrow for my mother

whenever I imagined her shuffling through the hangers of colorful polos with tears in her eyes, I felt pity instead, as if this singular moment of her life was plucked straight from Chicken Soup for the Soul, which then made me wonder if this pity I felt was not a sign that some part of me wanted both of my parents to try a bit harder, that I wanted them to dig a little deeper and find a more unique way to die and suffer (I feel forced to admit that this train of thought ultimately led to the realization that I hated myself for feeling anything but compassion and grief and that I hated literature for making me feel that my life must be mined for unique experiences, that moments such as my mother shuffling through a closet full of colorful synthetic golf polos must hold a crystalline specificity in order to be connected to a greater mass, though perhaps I am mistaken in that belief and literature can sustain my mother shuffling through colorful synthetic unworn golf polos without any accompanying party).

The storm soon stopped, and the brief reprieve from the heat brought by the rain dissipated into humidity as the sun broke behind the clouds. I went to the bathroom so I could fix my hair and look my best in preparation for dinner at the clubhouse with my father’s friends and their wives. While I was looking into the mirror, everything suddenly went black with a click. The power had gone out. Back in the living room, my father was sitting in his wheelchair waiting to go while my mother put the finishing touches on her own outfit. The lights were out, the TV was off, and the fan overhead stopped spinning. He asked me what happened and I told him, to which he said nothing, though a few moments later he said we should probably go soon. I agreed with him and went out to main hall to see if it was simply our condo that had been impacted or if it was the entire building, a conclusion that was easy to draw once I saw our neighbors, all senior

citizens who had also chosen Florida as a place to spend the rest of their life, aimlessly wandering around, asking each other what happened. I ignored their eyes and went to the elevator to see if we could still use it to bring my father down to the ground floor, but the buttons were non responsive. Back inside the condo, the air conditioning’s absence was already being felt—sweat stuck the walls and it was heavy breathing through the thick Florida air. My father sat in the same spot in his wheelchair, staring ahead, while I heard my brother and my mother on the phone with the clubhouse and property manager, respectively. My father told me it was time to go now, I told him we were still getting ready. My brother told me the clubhouse still had power, and my father’s friends and their wives were already sitting at a table waiting for us. My mother reported that the property management wasn’t sure of the outage’s cause, as it seemed to be only effecting our building, and it could be anywhere from twenty minutes to three hours before the power came back on. I broke the bad news that the elevator wasn’t work, which induced a small silence onto everyone except my father, who didn’t seem to understand the implications. My brother and I debated the plausibility of carrying my father down the stairs in his wheelchair like he was a piece of furniture, but it was clear that the risks outweighed the rewards, for my father was a heavy man (after his diagnosis, he would jokingly say that he didn’t plan on dying skinny, so he ate just about everything he could get his hands on, such as cheeseburgers, ice cream pints, pudding cups, snack cakes, milk chocolate candies, frozen egg rolls, potato chips, microwaved brownies, and everything else you can think of in that nature, meaning anything ultra-processed and delicious, which was the food he ate his entire life though had consciously cut back on in recent years in efforts to control his blood pressure and blood

sugar, so eating that sort of food was very much a return to form for him, which sometimes made me wonder if those types of ultra-processed foods were not in some way responsible for the incurable brain tumor that he developed (which also made me consider weighing the potential of my own lifestyle choices to do the same before I quickly pushed the thought away, but not before those considerations caused me to remember the time I spent with my father soon after his diagnosis when I flew back to Michigan to see him and we sat on the couch together watching Family Feud, and every so often he would say out loud that he had tried to do everything right his entire life in terms of health and wellness, that he he did everything the experts said you were supposed to do in order to live a long and healthy life, utterances to which I had no reply whatsoever, so all I could do was stay silent and continue watching Family Feud (I wish I could say I reached out and squeezed his hand since I couldn’t find the words, but this would be a lie—I was paralyzed by awkwardness, not knowing what to say to a dying man, which was undoubtedly one of the last failures I would ever provide to my father), though now, in Florida, after surgery and multiple rounds of chemotherapy he lost his taste even for these ultra-processed foods (the chemotherapy was somewhat responsible for this loss of taste, but the real culprit was the bout my father had with Covid—a disease he caught because he refused vaccination for it, a cause and effect that strike me as both too coincidental and grossly contemporary to fit into a piece of fiction, but the main point is that Covid left my father with altered tastebuds for the rest of life, refusing him one of the final pleasures he had in the face of doom))), so our only option was to patiently wait for the restoration of power so we could use the elevator again. It was far too hot to stay in the condo, so we wheeled our father out into the main hallway, which was open

air and had a small balcony near the elevator that looked over the parking lot. I got two beers out the fridge for myself and my brother, and we slowly drank them as the four of us sat on the balcony in impenetrable disappointment. Every so often, my father would reach up with his good arm to press the elevator call button and ask us why it wasn’t working, and every so often my mother would call one of my father’s friends or their wives to let them know we were waiting, to which they were very understanding, and every so often I would take the cold can of beer and press it against my neck or chest. For some reason, my brother went downstairs and pulled both of my father’s cars to the front of the building, proving a perfect view of both the expensive Audi crossover SUV my father had leased a few weeks prior (despite being unable to drive it—the only reason he leased it all was because my mother had totaled his old car on the way back from the hospital after his brain surgery when she slammed into the back of a van that had run out of gas in the middle lane on the highway and then another car slammed into the back of her, this too being a detail that feels too coincidental to fit into a piece of fiction, and even when it happened, when I stood with my mother on the shoulder of the highway as we waited for the police and fire truck to arrive while she cried and screamed that she wanted nothing to do with me (I had been driving in front of her and swerved out of the way at the last possible moment, and I think she viewed this avoidance of mine as a failure of protection on my part, or as if I had substituted her fate for my own), I thought that this was a scene out of a tertiary and dramatic young adult book, something that would make me roll my eyes if it appeared on television, which is why I’ve refrained from fictionalizing it, but nonetheless the fact that the car was totaled caused my father to lease a new Audi as soon as we was able to, with the eventual hope that he would recover

from surgery to the point where he could drive himself to chemotherapy, a hope that ended up being overly optimistic, just as the decision to lease a car in the first place was overly optimistic given his diagnosis, though perhaps his decision to lease was actually practical according to that same criteria, but in any case he did get to ride in it for a good portion of time, as immediately after his chemotherapy treatments in Michigan ended, my brother drove him down to Florida in the Audi, as going down to Florida was the only thing my father talked about during chemotherapy, the only thing he seemed to look forward to doing), and the somewhat inexpensive automatic transmission Camaro he bought a few years prior, the same year he purchased this condo from my maternal grandparents, with the plan to drive it around southwestern Florida after his retirement. My mother wheeled my father over to the edge of the balcony as my brother stood between both cars, a cigarette between his lips and his arms spread out. With bravado, he asked my father if he saw the two cars, if he saw all that he built and the legacy he was leaving behind, to which my father only stared at a spot toward the ground six inches in front of him before asking if it was time to go and see their friends and their wives at the clubhouse. When the sun finally set and the power still wasn’t on, we decided to call my father’s friends and their wives and regrettably cancel our plans for the evening. My brother went to get us Burger King while we sat inside the condo with a few candles lit. I was leaving the next day on an early afternoon flight, so I finished packing my suitcase. For the first time, it occurred to me that my father made us buy Trivial Pursuit because he wanted to show his friends how good I was at trivia, that he had raised a smart son. My father ate half of a junior cheeseburger, and the lights came on in the house around midnight. We were still awake when the lights

flashed on, for my father was having one of his nights where he moaned all night from an ill-defined pain. I eventually fell asleep with the help of some earplugs, whereas my brother and mother stayed awake all night both tending to my father and cursing him for his behavior.

The next morning, I had a few hours to spare before I had to leave for the small regional airport. My father evidentially stayed awake all night, and when my mother tried to get him up and dressed for the day, my father hardly made an effort and instead slowly fell to the ground and decided to stay there, so my mother put a pillow underneath his head and a blanket over him, happy to finally get some peace. My mother asked if I could stay with my father as she took some time to walk the dog and my brother went swimming at the pool. I stayed on the couch reading a book I brought with me, listening to my father snore. I wasn’t alone for long when his snoring turned into gurgling. He was puking up a grayish green bile, though he appeared to still be sleeping. I tried waking him up, but he was unresponsive. I tried my best to roll him over so his face was no longer in the bile, but it was difficult on account of his aforementioned heaviness. I used one of his towels from the bathroom to clean up the bile, but most of it had already soaked into the plush accent rug my parents kept in their bedroom. I called my brother, but he didn’t answer. I called my mother who got home as quick as she could. My father was still sleeping peacefully, so we both figured it was an unlucky bout of food poisoning, as Burger King had never sat well with my father (he must have only ate half his junior cheeseburger for a reason). My brother wasn’t yet back from the pool to take me to the airport, and since my mother couldn’t leave my father alone, I called an Uber.

When I landed a few hours later for my layover in Michigan, I got a phone call from my mother. Apparently, while I was in the air, my father had thrown up bile a few more times and remained unresponsive. They rushed him to the hospital via ambulance. The doctors intubated him and gave my mother the impression that once the tube was pulled, it would be my father’s curtain call. I was to take the next flight back to Florida to say goodbye. I took the phone call much in the same way I would take a call from a mechanic reporting a transmission estimate, but as soon as I hung up, my legs started to shake and I doubted I’d be able to find the nearest airport bar, much less make it there (this was similar to the pattern of reaction I had when my mother first called me to tell me my father’s diagnosis back in autumn—they had been at the hospital all day, concerned that my father’s hypertension was causing his headaches and she called me to report the actual news just as I had arrived at the grocery store to buy some ingredients for dinner, and I had made it all the way to the sliding front doors before I felt myself slipping off reality’s plane, a feeling emphasized by the fact that a whiskey company had a small stand where they provided samples of their newest blend, something I’d never seen this grocery store do before or since, but something that felt too cinematic to pass up, so I walked over to the worker and asked for as many shorts she could afford to provide since my father had just been diagnosed with stage four brain cancer, the same kind John McCain had (words repeated verbatim from my mother), something I said with the candor typical of the recently shocked and afflicted, a candor that is very cold and impartial regarding who it is directed toward, but a candor that I think acts as a last line of defense for your psyche in that it is bonding your experience to another (if someone else has knowledge of your tragedy, then it must be real and comprehendible), and as a

last resort offense in that it states your situation so bluntly the listener has no choice but to reply in some way, even if that reply is denial (this is why it feels so uncomfortable when we are accosted with this candor by coworkers, strangers at the bus stop, or homeless who come to our car windows), but I should also mention that this candor is but only one of the many reactions I had to the news of his diagnosis, and the thing that surprised me the most was how very typical the world had seemed in those moments after my mother’s phone calls, it was just like in a movie when the camera shifts focus and the surrounding noise transforms into a high pitched squeal, that was exactly how things felt, both at the grocery store whiskey sample table and the airport terminal). I searched for flights with tears in my eyes, and the bartender let me drink for free. The next flight available was a red eye that had an overnight stop in Newark, so I drank until 11pm and got on the small pond hopper, the only other passengers were a high school hockey team and a nun who sat across the aisle for me. I wanted to ask her to pray for me, but I was too drunk and ashamed she’d notice. I spent the night on the floor in the Newark airport, getting up every so often to use the bathroom, once even jacking off in the stall, thinking about the types of masseuses my brother might see at the massage parlor, hoping it would relieve my stress, but all it did was give me a vague paranoia that I could have gotten an STD from the tip of my penis touching the rim of the toilet bowl, but that fear soon dissipated when I went back to my usual spot on the floor and closed my eyes.

I saw my father in the Florida hospital with a tube down his throat and a handful of diodes taped to his chest. My mother’s goodbye, was both loud and intensely private. She thanked my dad for providing her with the life they had lived, such as the vacations, condos,

Camaros, and Audis (this sounds like I’m being sarcastic or even flippant, but at the time I promise it was heart-wrenching to watch and hear, even if made me also consider how strange it was that possessions and proper nouns could make their way into a final goodbye), which was the second out of the three sad things I saw my mother do during my father’s illness, the first of which happened when I first flew home after he was diagnosed (they played their wedding song on a Bluetooth speaker and slow danced while they cried and my brother and I stood off to the side and watched, a scene so innocent and tender I felt like I should have been arrested for witnessing it), and the third of which happens in the next paragraph. The doctors then took the tube out, and we waited for the heart rate monitor to stop, which we were told could happen anywhere in the space of minutes to hours, though for my father the heart rate monitor did not stop at all, as he clung on well beyond anyone’s expectations, and the next morning the decision was made to bring him back to the condo on hospice care.

He was awake for a very brief time when we brought him back to the condo and laid him on the thin mattress in the living room where he would die a few days later. In that brief time, I had him FaceTime my wife, who had not come with me to Florida originally as I expected only a short trip, and who also did not come with me on my return, as not only were things hectic, but we also had a dog to take care of and plane tickets were expensive (I got to use my mother’s credit card to purchase the red eye flight from Detroit to Florida, and she later complained that I hadn’t taken the time to search for a better price), which were two excuses I used to justify my wife’s goodbye to my father through a small phone screen while he was awake and not responsive (I recall him looking at the phone like it was an object of uncertain purpose, almost

like you had placed it in the hands of a gorilla, and he only nodded and responded when instructed), a situation that would cause more than one fight between my life in the days, months, and years after his death, namely that my wife thought it was a closed off and protective measure on my part, as if I did not want to allow her near my father in an intense and personal time of grief (I assured her this was not the case (which was true), as I would have wanted nothing more than to have her by my side for a proper goodbye to my father, a regret, I told her, that I would have to live with for the rest of my life (this future regret didn’t occur to me at the time when my father was actively dying, for as strange as it may sound, part of me felt that we’d have the chance to do things right the next time my father died, or perhaps an even stranger part of me felt that my father dying wasn’t worth spending the money and effort to bring my wife out to Florida). Shortly after the FaceTime call with my wife, my father fell into a coma that lasted the rest of his life. A sound like a percolating coffee pot bubbled from his chest in the hours that followed, which was soon accompanied by a white foam that spilled out of his nose and mouth. My brother, mother, and I took shifts sitting at my father’s bed side, using a turkey baster we bought at the store to constantly pump the white foam out of his mouth and deposit it in a trash can at the bed side, taking note every few hours to shoot morphine into the back of his mouth with a tiny syringe. This lasted for a few days. My mother insisted on taking the night shift, and we shuffled the electric recliner my father used to Go Camping next to the hospice bed so my mother could recline the chair to it’s maximum extension as a makeshift bed in the living room. I got to sleep in their bedroom while my brother took the guest room. One of the nights, I laid awake in my parent’s bed listening to my mother talk to my father, telling him how good of a life

he gave her, how much she loved him, how he always took care of her, how much she would miss him, how there would never be another apart from him, and how she didn’t know if things would ever be okay, all words that bled into each other and were punctuated by sobs and tears. A repeat of what I heard at the hospital, though perhaps it is better to call it a symmetry. When minutes passed without a sound aside from my father’s coffee pot gurgling, I went out to the living room to see if she was still awake, only to see she had curled up and moved as much of her body onto my father’s hospice bed as space allowed, and I took a picture of this intense and personal moment, as if it were a scene I’d one day want to revisit. It sits on my phone to this day, that picture with no certain purpose (if I was writing this as an essay and not as a piece of fiction, I would include the photo here, but looking back at it now, it looks very anticlimactic, for the medical instruments are just out of frame and my mother was not as curled up on my father’s hospice bed as I originally thought, so it merely looks like they are a couple who could only afford a twin sized bed).

While my mother watched my father one afternoon, my brother and I went to a small private zoo near the brewery in the middle of town that held a few small alligators and exotic birds. My brother got high on the drive and continued smoking as we walked around the grounds, something he was allowed to do openly as we were the only two patrons. An employee was cleaning one of the large bird cages by using a high-powered hose to spray the bird poop off the concrete floor, a process that fascinated my brother, who was too high to even notice the ejected bird poop flecked against his exposed shins until it was too late. This made us laugh until we cried. In the back of the zoo were ornate botanical cages covered with green patina that

looked like something out of pre-war Berlin or Victorian England. They had manicured gardens inside, with carefully chosen plants and small ponds with running waterfalls. One of the cages held three golden pheasants. The birds had vibrant golden backs, blood red breasts, and accents of green, blue, and black across their bodies. It was the second time in my life I could recall seeing a pheasant (there are wild pheasants on the outskirts of Detroit, though they are the North American variety with brown bodies and mallard green heads), but the first time I had ever been struck by their appearance. They slowly walked around their large cage, picking for grains at the ground that weren’t there, slowly folding and unfolding their feathers, making brief flights up to higher rock ledges, all with a quiet dignity. Their colors were brilliant even against the lush topical plants of Florida. My brother and I both stood transfixed and speechless. The late-morning sun shining through the bars of the cage gave their feathers an iridescent quality. When all of this was over, I thought, I wanted to raise these birds myself. This never happened, but I am grateful that the image of the three golden pheasants is one that returns to me when I think of the last week of my father’s life, as I have three birds with colorful schemas to occupy space in my mind, living creatures that are completely removed from hand jobs, power outages, wives, failure, and white foam. They had the power to enact silence of a different sort, and I hope one day I can write a story about a man who raises them. But for now, the golden pheasants, even as I try to carve a separate niche for them in my mind, are regrettably tied to the structure of the week my father died, and I cannot return to the pheasants without returning to that week.
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