Michael Don
The internet invites you to click on an article titled, “The 10 Most Miserable Cities in America.” You know it’s clickbait, but you want to make sure your hometown isn’t on the list because you’re set to move back in a month and you’re in the market for decision-affirming content.
The most miserable city, it turns out, is Cleveland, and then there are a bunch of smaller places, mostly in New Jersey and California. But the list keeps going and going, way past ten, no end in sight. You’re about to click out because you feel duped, all these ad impressions you’re nonconsensually consenting to, the scroll-horizon not getting closer. Your brain and hand are so close to pulling off an exit, but then your hometown appears. Your heart sinks a little, your stomach hollows, though you’re also relieved it took so long to get to your city. You’re easily into the 30s, maybe even 40s. The list is not numbered; that’s the trick. Thirty-five-ish cities shittier than your hometown? Not bad. Holding your breath, you read your hometown’s description. Crime rates up. Population declining. One big employer recently left for Seattle. Fewer flights. Stagnant wages. Neighborhoods somehow becoming more segregated.
You click out of the miserable city article and land on a work spreadsheet. You’re updating donor contact information before the big spring campaign. Your boss knows about your dad, but she doesn’t yet know about your plan. You scan the address column of the donor information and note almost all donors are in D.C., Maryland, Virginia—the DMV, your co-workers call it. But you notice a few outliers in random places like Atlanta, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. You recall your childhood family vacation to Door County, Wisconsin. You remember standing with your dad on a dock and watching a fishing boat bobbing on top of the lake under a sheet of dark clouds, the wind picking up. Then you went inside a little seafood shop and were offered a sample of smoked white fish. You loved its smokiness, its saltiness, its fishiness. And that’s where the memory ends. You don’t remember if your dad bought any fish, or why your mom wasn’t out on the dock with you, or if the fishing boat beat out the storm.
You get back on the internet and a picture of a twenty-something with a neck tattoo of longitude-latitude coordinates pop up. You’re in the process of throwing the coordinates into the search bar, but then you get a text from your cousin that reads: good news cuz:)
***
Your cousin and her partner are passing through DC on a road trip down to Charleston. Your cousin was the closest thing you had to a sibling growing up, even though once you reached middle school, you rarely saw each other beyond holiday gatherings. Your apartment is full of boxes and bubble-wrap. You apologize for not being able to host them. You meet at a bar. They live in Boston. You ask them if they like it there, you’ve heard people are cold and roads take you around in circles. They say Boston means well, but it’s too competitive. Uber drivers have PhDs. Your cousin’s partner says their plan is to move to an underdog city. They both love underdog cities. They like the idea of slow and steady improvement. Empty storefronts are nothing but potential. Your cousin and partner look high on their plan to gentrify.
We must be cut from the same cloth, you say. You take out your pinkies and make a pact to all quit jobs and move to Rochester in two years, a bonified underdog city. You don’t actually love underdog cities—you prefer nice places that take pride in their niceness—but the drinks are making you agreeable. You keep drinking. You’re not a very good drinker. They seem like good drinkers; they are good drinkers. You don’t tell your cousin about your dad because you’re wanting to keep the good vibes intact.
***
You’re moving home to take care of your dad. It could happen in six months or five years. This is what he’s been told or at least what he tells you he’s been told. You’re suspicious of the five-year ceiling because the internet says someone with his condition and in his stage should not have another five years, and your dad has always been a public optimist.
Your boss agrees to let you work remotely. Your dad keeps holding on. In fact, after you get to town, he starts to get better. But it’s possible he’s not getting better and that he’s just happier, no longer alone in the house. He won’t show you any lab results or doctor’s notes that empirically suggest he’s getting better. You work from the breakfast room table while your dad goes for walks and grocery shops and meets friends at the café. When he comes back from doctor’s appointments you ask him how everything went, and he says the doctors are impressed by his resilience. You feel like you’re constantly holding your breath.
***
No one moves to Rochester. Your cousin and partner move to the Bay Area. They buy a two-bedroom condo in Oakland for nearly a million dollars with a dishwasher the size of a small microwave and a microwave the size of a shoebox. Your cousin proudly gives you a tour over Zoom. You stay in your hometown. Your dad shows no sign of being unwell. He gets up at six and walks five miles every morning. Lifts weights. Plays tennis. Reads books. You imagine his body giving out again. You have to imagine it. He’s not super old, but if he were to pass now, he would have already beat out the average life expectancy for American men. You would have to take care of everything. Make all the calls. Decide whether to stay in your childhood home or sell it. You imagine what it would be like to have a sibling. Someone who shares more DNA with you than anyone on the planet. Someone raised by the same people as you, a shared childhood, shared mannerisms, shared god-knows-what-else.
And then one early morning, your dad knocks on your childhood bedroom door and tells you it’s completely gone. You roll over and ask him how he knows, and he says he can just tell and invites you to accompany him to his next doctor’s appointment.
Your dad is right. Nothing worrisome detectable. The doctors are confused, amazed, thrown into scientific paralysis. You suggest to your dad’s doctor that people are social creatures and perhaps their bodies need human connection as much as their souls do. The doctor agrees that is part of it and then adds that human connection alone does not repair internal organs on the verge of failure, it does not keep cells from dividing. This is supposed to be the end of the conversation. You only have a bachelor’s in sociology. But you’re not in the mood to let it go—it’s too remarkable, too important, too inexplicable to let go. So you respond that there’s really no way of knowing for sure, no way of knowing what’s going on with your dad or really anyone or anything else. No way of knowing for sure. Your dad looks embarrassed, which helps you recognize you’ve taken it too far. The doctor only looks at your dad and says on the way out that she’ll see him in a month and not to overexert himself.
***
You go to your twenty-year high school reunion. You RSVP on the last day possible. Your dad suggests you would regret not going more than going. You’re not really in touch with anyone. The event is at a club in the city in a notoriously dangerous area. Your dad tells you to be careful, things happen in that part of town, but also not to worry and to enjoy the present.
It’s a modest turn-out. Almost everyone is married with kids. Three quarters of the attending classmates live in town. The others have flown in from California, New York, Denver, Chicago, etc. There’s a DJ. Yearbooks. Nametags. Open bar. A cake frosted with the school colors and a Cougar head. A printed-out sheet of the senior superlative winners.
You find yourself in conversation with Best Male Personality and Best Female Eyes. Best Male Personality is explaining to Best Female Eyes that there’s too much nonconsensual competition among parents. “This dad wants to compete with me about my kid’s achievements, his NFL picks, our commutes, and it’s all very subtle but it’s also so obvious. And I’m like, I don’t care if your kid can already write her name. Every kid will learn how to write her name.” Best Female Eyes laughs and nods as if to say it’s just so true. You nod along, the gripe makes sense, but you have nothing to contribute to the conversation. You almost make a joke about how nothing is consensual anymore, our systems which are designed to maximize profits over well-being are controlling your experiences in ways you can’t even imagine. But you don’t want to be that person, so you tell Best Male Personality and Best Female Eyes that you’re in need of a drink.
You see Most Likely to Become President across the room not talking to anyone. You remember liking her because she was modest about her smarts and had a sense of irony. You also remember she was an only child. You go over to her and strike up a conversation. She’s quick to tell you she was an ER surgeon but had to quit after a recent pregnancy brought her twin boys. They’d planned to be two and through, but now they are three and fucked. She lives in Chicago and traveled to the reunion as a much needed break from her life. She tells you all this with a certain detachment, like she’s narrating someone else’s story. Then her eyes become more present, and she says, I was this close, demonstrating a tiny gap between her thumb and pointer finger, I was this close to skipping this whole thing, eating dinner in my hotel bed, and going to sleep at 8.
You tell her she might have regretted not coming out more than coming out. You catch her up on your life in one sentence and she tells you to enjoy your freedom and that she does love her kids more than anything or anyone in the world even if they’ve robbed her of her career.
You mingle more. You fill up a plate of snacks. Knock down a few drinks. Agree to a few photos.
Class President, the organizer of this whole thing, gets the mic from the DJ and says, “It’s time to reintroduce ourselves to our classmates before we cut the cake. Name. Where you live. Fun fact. But before we do all that, I want to acknowledge a classmate we lost. Let’s take a moment of silence for Jackson Hoffman.” Class President closes his eyes and lowers the mic down to his waist.
There are gasps and then whispers. Classmates who already knew this news inform the gaspers what had happened. You are a gasper. You happen to be standing next to Most Athletic who you remember was friends with Jackson. You ask him what he knows and he tells you he doesn’t know all the details but his second kid had just been born and he’d been walking on the highway. You didn’t know Jackson well. Your clearest memory of him was from physics class when you and he were paired up to make a car that could go without an electronic motor. “Sleep is everything,” Most Athletic adds, shaking his head. “When that second one comes and the first one is still little, you’re just living on the edge.”
Class President opens his eyes and says, “All right, Cougars. Name. Where you live. Fun fact.”
The mic travels around the circle. No one makes an attempt at anything beyond the obvious, a small joke here and there until Best Male Personality goes off script to thank the organizers and promote his self-published self-help book for parents of what he calls the Go-Go-Go Generation of Parents. Mid-sentence, explaining how the Go-Go-Go Generation of Parents is already the most successful generation of parents, Most Likely to Become President lunges into the circle and swipes the mic from Best Male Personality.
“I want to get something on the record while I have the chance,” Most Likely to Become President says. “As you all know, I was voted Most Likely to Become President. The only thing you seemed not to know is that I was born in Korea. How could I become president if I wasn’t even born in the US? That’s pretty ambitious of you all, a pretty high standard—set up to fail, some would say.”
“We thought the laws would have evolved,” Class President says, laughing a little.
“I was born in Korea,” Most Likely to Become President repeats into the mic, “And I should have been voted Most Likely to Become a Surgeon. Now I live in Chicago. That’s all you need to know about me.” Most Likely to Become President gives the mic back to Best Male Personality, then grabs her jacket and slips out the back door.
You grab your jacket and follow Most Likely to Become President. You find yourself in an alley. You light up your phone and see a text from your dad telling you he has a little headache but not to worry, and that he’s off to bed and hopes you’re having fun and to be safe. Most Likely to Become President walks slowly and looks around but doesn’t look behind her. You hear a faint siren. You wonder if following Most Likely to Become President is an act of selflessness or selfishness. Perhaps it’s both? Most Likely to Become President steps behind a large dumpster. You assume she’s popping a squat for a pee, so you keep your distance. You text your dad back that you’re having fun and will see him for breakfast and that everyone gets a headache here and there, but maybe he should follow up with the doctor just to be sure. An image of the car you and Jackson designed pops into your head. You used a wound-up rubber band to turn a propeller. Jackson’s idea. You were more of a big idea person. He was more technical. But when all the cars were lined up in the hallway, your and Jackson’s car didn’t do so well. You don’t remember if you cared, but you do remember feeling bad that Jackson cared. He had wanted to win. You start to feel chilly and Most Likely to Become President is taking a while. Longer than it should take to pee. You go look for her behind the dumpster, you decide you’ll tell her you just wanted to make sure she’s safe because things happen in this part of town. And there she is, right where you expected her to be, only on the ground, curled up, clutching her jacket against her chest. Fast asleep. You sit down next to her, but not too close, and text your dad not to worry if he wakes up and you’re still not home.
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Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019) and Coeditor of Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature. His work has appeared in journals such as Washington Square Review, Baltimore Review, The Southampton Review, World Literature Today, and the Southern Humanities Review. He teaches at George Mason University.