Free A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche

everyone’s good, including his own, my father must die.
    I don’t know if I’m drifting, rudderless, or if I’ve had too much to drink, or whether I really want my father to die. I can’t stand to see him cry, this man who is known to me and is my father. A father humiliated by his illness, crying, is a man stripped of his essential being, no longer a father, simply a man like any other. And, worse, a naked man. Imagine a father, naked and crying. But I would prefer that to what he makes me feel now—anger, rejection, which is to say hatred. But that’s no reason to kill him. I’m splashing around in the wine of my own contradictions.
    As a child I prayed to see him cry, to see him brought low, bent in humiliation as I had been bent under his orders and condemnations, not to mention blows and insults. I would have given anything for him to be normal, like I was, proud or ashamed didn’t matter, but just to show some emotion. If he was proud of me and my success at school, or in the theatre, which fed his own pride, he never said a word to me about it. It’s my mother who tells me now how proudly and approvingly he spoke of me, how he tried to stammer it out to me before his neurons stopped communicating and brutally extinguished his retroactive congratulations. I was his son, of course I would be successful. It was as though long before they discovered DNA and cracked the genome code he’d already worked out his own theory of genetic inheritance, a theory that applied only to success, it seemed, because when my brother was sick he always referred to him, when speaking to my mother, as “your son,” and never came to a play of mine that the critics panned.
    Why did I bring up Stalin? Because I was living under the dull, daily threat of dictatorship at the same time that Stalin was appearing on television. They had the same smile, my father and “the little father of the Soviet nation.” A snowy, black-and-white image, before televisions could deliver a true black: Stalin stood a head taller than all the other henchmen lined up looking martial and severe in their black homburgs. Stalin smiling under his thick moustache. A warm, engaging, confident smile. Looking out over Red Square with its rows of symmetrical regiments pouring through as though from an assembly line. The little father’s tin soldiers, all walking with the same mechanical, chronometric precision. Stalin making a kind of salute by lightly lifting a hand that could just as easily have crushed a skull. To me it looked as though he were patting the head of every child in the world. I can’t remember my father ever patting my head, or holding my hand, or putting a friendly hand on my shoulder. When the troops had filed past, Stalin turned and went back into his apartment in the Kremlin with his respectful model family. His children waited for a tiny, vague signal that told them it was time to laugh, or play, or run. The same was true for us at the dinner table, or when my father came into a room and interrupted one of our games. All activity stopped as we waited for him to send us to our rooms, or to go about in silence, which meant we could get back to what we were doing.
    One of the Medicals asks me where Dad is. I tell him, a bit sharply, I suppose, but his curiosity exasperates me. It’s merely a kind of clinical interest. Isabelle touches my arm, letting me know that I’ve overstepped the bounds of civility.
    I’m thirsty. I reach for a bottle. Bernard cries out when he sees my arm stretch uncertainly towards his precious vintage wine, and he swears when I tip the bottle over. I laugh sheepishly, as though to excuse myself without admitting that I’ve done anything wrong. I feel like my father. Slight loss of control, no loss of pride.
    “You’re behaving like Dad when he does something stupid.”
    Like Dad? That’s the only comparison I’ve never been able to stand. As I once explained to Mother, my first wife left me because, she