Helium

Whenever anyone asked Brent’s dad Earl why he would give up a good paying government job to become a writer, Brent would cringe and Earl would tell the following story.                                                                                       

 “My five-year-old son Brent was riding in the back seat of the car sounding out the letters on the tanker truck in front of us.”

“He-L-I-um?”

“Just about.” 

“Helium!”

“You got it little man. What did you learn at kindergarten today?”

In Earl’s story the two of them spent the afternoon at the beach with their dog Heyboy. It was a crisp early spring day and the tide was low with miles of beach. Their fingers went numb looking for life in the icy tidal pools. Earl would go on at length about all the other people they saw out with their own dogs, slobbery old Heyboy getting sick from drinking seawater and the sheer joy of a man and his son spending an afternoon together on the beach. Just before it was time to go they heard a train coming and rushed up to place some pennies on the track. Brent said, “Helium is what they fill balloons up with, right Dad?”

After the train had passed, Earl and Brent were searching the rail bed for their coins when an undercover railroad cop approached. He told them they were trespassing and that placing anything on the tracks was a serious crime. He got down to Brent’s level, “One of those coins could have shot off the track and taken your eye out,” he said, making a quick jabbing motion toward Brent’s face. A heated argument ensued between Earl and the cop with pushing and shoving and bad language. Earl threw the first and only punch and in a flash the cop had him in handcuffs. The cop had one hand on Earl’s shoulder and was reaching towards Brent with the other when Heyboy bit the cop and an elephant sat on Earl’s chest. That’s how Earl described his heart attack. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital and Mom rescued Brent and the dog. The following day when he visited his Dad at the hospital the very first thing Brent said to him was, “Why didn’t the helium truck float away?”

Earl was convinced his heart attack and that story were signs that he should change directions and become a writer. If a story that good just drops into my lap, his dad would say, just imagine what I’ll be able to write when I put my mind to it.  Brent always felt responsible for his dad’s decision. If they’d gone to the library instead of the beach, his dad wouldn’t have had the heart attack. If he hadn’t asked about the helium, Earl would have kept his job. If it had been a better story, Earl would have been a better writer and his parents would have stayed married. Just after Brent’s eighth birthday, Earl moved into a small ground floor apartment on the other side of town. Brent and his Mom stayed in the same house and made ends meet by taking in boarders.

Earl didn’t do any of the things that Brent thought a dad should do. He didn’t seem to have a life outside the sad little apartment with its ratty old furniture. He always drove old rust buckets of cars. He called them Bic cars and seemed proud of the fact that he never paid more for a repair than it would cost to pick up another disposable car. The only new clothes he ever had were clothes that Brent’s mom bought for Brent to give to his dad for Christmas and birthday presents. Earl’s child support payments were so small that Brent’s mom often gave them to him for an allowance.

When his parents first split up, Brent spent every second weekend at his dad’s. It was so boring that in time it became one afternoon every second week and even that was more than Brent could stand. Every visit was the same. Earl would try to get Brent to talk about whatever was going on in his life and Brent would give one or two word answers. Then Earl would talk about whatever he was working on; a half finished novel, a short story, an article or a poem, and always there was the endless stream of rejections. He kept them in a folder and treated them like some kind of ever-growing badge of honour. They depressed the hell out of Brent. He’d have burnt every one of them. He couldn’t understand how his dad could keep on being an unsuccessful writer. Sometimes Earl would read something that had been published as if to show that this was a measure of his success, but to Brent it always seemed pointless and sad. He asked his dad once why he hadn’t retrained for a different government job when he had the opportunity. Earl seemed puzzled by the question and asked Brent what job could possibly be better then being a writer? Brent was thirteen and moody and suggested ‘school zone crossing guard’ would have been a good choice.

One day when his mom was driving Brent to his dad’s they heard a discussion on the radio about earworms. That’s when you get a song in your head and you can’t stop humming it. They told a story about a woman who, when she was fifteen, woke up one morning with a melody in her head. She had no musical training, but convinced her parents to send her for music lessons. She learned how to read and write music and wrote out the song. During the next forty-three years she wrote out that same piece of music one thousand four hundred and eighty seven times. They were all done by hand, numbered, dated and each slightly different than the others. When she completed the last one she wrote ‘perfect’ at the bottom of the page and killed herself. Brent was laughing when they played one of the only known recordings of the song.

“That sounds exactly like Dad and his ‘Helium’ story. He’s got a literary ear worm.”

“That’s not very nice. Brent you should have more respect for your father.”

“Are you kidding?” Brent replied. “Did you know that anytime he gets stuck for something to write, he works on yet another version of that story? I’ve heard it from the dad’s POV, the son’s POV, and various versions in the third person. He’s even written it from the dog’s POV. I don’t think he even submits it anymore.”

“That’s because writers need to write. It doesn’t really matter what he’s working on as long as he’s writing. It’s who he is and I hope one day you’ll stop being angry at him for it.”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t forget to invite him to your birthday next week. We can pick him up if he needs a ride. I still can’t believe my baby is going to be sixteen.”

On Brent’s birthday a small party was held in his honour.  Mom and her new boyfriend gave him a gift certificate for driving lessons, his uncle gave him a sex manual and a box of condoms, his cousins bought him some beer and he had high hopes that his girlfriend would be giving him her cherry later that night. Then he opened his dad’s gift. It was a handmade card and inside it said:

Brent and I have a secret place

Where the world moves a different pace.

But I will never tell a soul

Where is our little glory hole…

 It went on from there, but Brent could no longer see the words. He looked up at his dad. Earl was beaming and saying, “You might not remember this, but before my heart attack I took you camping and I taught you how to pan for gold…”

 “This is it? This is what you’re giving me for my birthday? A f’ing poem! Are you completely insane? Last week when you were telling me about the play Agatha Christie gave to her grandson and how he lived his whole life on the royalties from it. I thought maybe you’d finally managed to publish something big and were going to give me something to make up for being such a loser, but this, this is just pathetic!”

As Brent ranted, he watched his dad age ten years in two minutes. The effect was no less dramatic than seeing him gray and unconscious beside the railroad tracks, but once the words started he couldn’t stop the eleven years of frustration and disappointment from pouring out. When he was done, he stormed up to his room and slammed the door. The party was over.

During the final three years of Earl’s life, Brent’s relationship with his dad was polite, but distant. There was no visitation schedule anymore. Brent would stop by occasionally and take his dad out for lunch. They’d talk about Brent’s job or school or girlfriends, but they had become little more then acquaintances. His mom’s relationship with Earl had also changed.  They had become friends again in a quiet gentle way that Brent envied.

In fact, she was the one who found Earl on the floor beside his desk. She told Brent that the computer was still on and the story his dad had been working on was ‘Helium’. Brent suspected she was trying to push his buttons.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

September 11, 2001

            Brent’s Big Ben alarm clock rang at noon. He turned it off and listened to the still unfamiliar sounds in his second floor bachelor suite. I hate this room, I hate night shift, I hate that another man is living with my wife and son, I hate that even with all my planning I still ended up with my father’s life, I hate…

No. That’s enough. He got up, took his Paxil and jumped into the shower.

“Mind over mood, right Dad? At least I’m healthy and working. I remember you telling me that everything happens for a reason and even though it’s a cliché, I’m holding on to that now. Night shift’s not so bad. I get to pick Drake up from kindergarten every day. It kills me when I don’t see him. Does that pain ever go away Dad?  I bet when I was a moody teenager it was a relief not to have to deal with me every day. God, I was such a prick. I thought I was so hard done by. If I’d known how hard real life would get, do you think it would have made a difference? No, probably not.  I’ve got to go do the dad thing now. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

Brent’s first knowledge that something serious was happening in the world came when he turned on the car radio. The second World Trade Tower had already collapsed and the media reports were focusing on what was going to happen next. With no pictures and only sketchy details of what had happened earlier in the day, Brent felt as if he’d entered the Twilight Zone. He was so busy trying to make sense of what he was hearing that when he answered his cell phone and it was his estranged wife Cheryl, he forgot to sound annoyed.

“Have you heard what’s going on?” She asked.

“I’m just listening to it now. The World Trade Centre towers are gone? How is that possible? What the hell is going on down there?”

“It’s been horrible Brent. I’ve been watching it since I got back from taking Drake to kindergarten. I just can’t seem to look away. They showed people jumping out of the buildings. It’s like some terrible nightmare come to life. They’re saying it was terrorists. It’s so scary.”

Brent passed under some power lines and when he could hear her again she was saying, “Drake hasn’t seen any of this. Please don’t let him watch TV today. He’s so young, he doesn’t need to see this.” After he’d hung up, Brent realized that this was the first thing he and Cheryl had been able to agree upon in six months.

The echo of the school buzzer hadn’t yet faded when Drake and his classmates burst out into the brilliant autumn sunshine, a half a day’s schooling being more than enough for their hummingbird attention spans. He was ten feet past Brent when he yelled, “I’ll race you to the car Dad!”

Once Drake had finished his victory dance and was settled into his car seat with a snack Brent asked, “What did you learn at kindergarten today?”

“We learned about Block Parents.”

“Cool, tell me about it.”

“Well, Block Parents are safe people to go to if I get hurt or lost or if a bad person is after me and I can tell who they are because they have a sign on their door and the police come and talk to them to make sure they are safe people to go to and if a bad person is after me I should yell and scream and if they try to grab me I should hit and kick and bite and scratch to get away. Look, there’s a house on the corner with a Block Parent sign.”

“Wow, you learned a lot. How did it make you feel when your teacher was talking about that?”

“Kinda scared.”

“Do you think she was just trying to scare you because Halloween is coming?”

“Daad, that’s not funny! She was telling us so we’d know what to do if something bad happened and thinking about the bad things is what scared me.”

“That makes sense. So our project for today is cleaning up this pigsty of a car. You need to decide what you want to keep and where you want to keep it, I’ll throw out the garbage and we’ll recycle all the empty pop cans and water bottles. Then I’ll get you to spray the back of the car with a hose so I can see where it’s leaking.  It’s not good having the bottom of the hatch full of water like that.”

“Daddy I need all of those things. The leaves and sticks are for my arts and crafts, the rocks have magic colours in them and give me special powers, some of the toys are for playing with in the car and some are for when we go to parks and I like the water in the back, I can hear it splashing when we drive and I can pretend I’m on a pirate ship.”

“Well, I guess I can clean up the car another day. Do you want to go to the park?”

“Yeah! Daddy, do you ever get scared?”

“Yep, lots of times.”

“Really? What do you do when you get scared?”

“The best thing to do is to face your fears straight on, things usually aren’t so scary if you look right at them.” The radio was still on low and Brent considered his own growing fear.

“Another thing that sometimes helps is talking to someone. I often talk to my Dad. That’s your Grandpa Earl.”

“Have I ever met him?” Asked Drake.

“Nope. He died before you were born.” Brent said, watching Drake’s reaction in the rear view mirror.

Drake’s eyes were huge, “Does he ever talk back?”

“No, he just listens. Just like your teddy bear listens to you. I talk to my Dad when I’m scared or worried and it makes me feel better.”

When they arrived at the park, it was deserted. Apparently most other people were letting their kids watch the horrors on TV. They played in the playground for a while then went for a walk along the trails beside a small creek. Standing on a bridge playing ‘Pooh Sticks’ Drake asked, “What else do you talk to your dad about?”

“Mostly I just talk about things that are going on in my life; you, my job, good things, bad things, just stuff. The other day I was telling him about my leaky car. He had a car that leaked inside just like mine does. Instead of fixing the leak, he decided to drill some holes in the floor so the water would drain out. Unfortunately he drilled the holes into his gas tank and once the water got into the gas his car didn’t work very well. So he went to the junkyard and bought another tank. He was under the car taking the tank off and he thought there were four bolts holding it on, but unfortunately there was only three and the tank fell on to his face and broke his nose.”

Drake looked at his dad seriously, “Is that story true Daddy?”

“Of course it’s true. I don’t tell stories.”

“Yeah right, you tell stories all the time. Mommy says I should ask her before I believe any of your stories.” Brent took a deep breath and let the comment pass. His thoughts kept going back to the drama unfolding in the States. What did it mean? What’s going to happen next? How do I protect my son?

“Drake, talking about my Dad has made me think that sometimes we take things for granted. Our lives could be completely different tomorrow. I’d like it if we could think of some way to remember today.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s a beautiful day and we’re having a really nice time together. We never know how many days like this we’re going to get. So I think we need to come up with something to help us remember. Maybe it’s the leaves changing colour or the sound of the creek or the smell of the dog poop I stepped in, but I’d like it if we never forgot how happy we are today.”

“OK Dad, I’ll try and think of something.”

They arrived at Drake’s house at dinnertime, with cold wet feet from falling in the creek. They were tired, but happy with memories of a fun day still fresh in their minds. Before he got out of the car, Drake put a green heart-shaped rock the size of a golf ball into Brent’s hand.

“Here Daddy. You keep this at your house. It’ll help us remember the nice day we had together.” He gave Brent a hug and a kiss. “I love you Daddy. See you tomorrow.”

Brent drove toward home with the radio off. He squeezed his 9/11 rock and marveled at his son’s wisdom. He was half way home when he had a revelation.

“I get it now Dad! I understand why you needed to write ‘Helium’.” His dad didn’t choose that story it chose him. Brent pulled over to the side of the road and let the emotions wash over him. The small quiet story of a day with his son was set against a big story of unspeakable terror. It was perfectly clear and the words pounded in his head. Brent realized he had no choice. He had to write this story and get it perfect, even if it took the rest of his life. His hands shook and his tears flowed as he found a pen and on the back of a big manila envelope he began to write.