Happy Hibernation!
The Hibernation is mandatory. The Hibernation lasts the month of July. Outdoor air temperatures average 135 degrees Fahrenheit. People die. Especially people who are unfit.
Your father is unfit.
Take me somewhere, he says.
Where?
Away, he says. He stirs artificial sweetener into his Yosemite Sam coffee mug.
Citizens are encouraged to leave before The Hibernation begins but must stay gone the whole month. Hibernate or Evacuate, the signs say. At night, workers wear heat-proof suits and repair infrastructure. Steering wheels warp. Asphalt scars the tender feet of stray puppies. Swimming pools fill with suicidal scorpions.
Last year, your father made you watch the entire Three Stooges catalog. Every episode of The Benny Hill Show. You worked thirteen jigsaw puzzles and ate lots of banana popsicles.
There’s a lake up north, he says. Lake Mercy. Check it out.
The website says Lake Mercy’s water is crystal clear and cold, with natural healing properties from a healthy mineral content. The trees are impossibly green. The sky is impossibly blue. During The Hibernation, the sky where you live swirls with soot.
An escape will be nice.
But there aren’t any accommodations. Cabins are all booked. Campsites. Cots. Nothing. Put your name on a waiting list.
Is there anywhere else you’d like to go?
Your father shakes his head. Tears pool in the pink hammocks slung beneath his eyes. This is the place, he says.
Book a small apartment seven miles from Lake Mercy. Load up the car and leave before The Hibernation. Traffic is fierce.
Everybody’s headed for Lake Mercy, your father jokes. He rolls down the window and flags the attention of a couple driving a small car. Heat rushes in like an army. Lake Mercy? he asks.
Visiting family, they say. But we hear Lake Mercy is a wonder. Happy Hibernation!
It’s what everyone says to take the sting away.
Your father stretches out his legs in the back seat and laughs at wipeout videos on his phone. Surfers collapsing into frothy waves. People tumbling down stairs, rolling off logs, falling off bikes and skateboards. Wipeout videos are his relief. Humans trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing.
Stop at a charging point and get iced coffee and roasted peanuts. A path cuts through a tired park with sparse trees and empty picnic tables.
Going for a walk, he says.
It’s hot.
Won’t be long, he says.
Scroll through your newsfeed while you wait for the car to charge.
“Self-Care Is Important During The Hibernation!”
“Perfect Hibernation Outfits That Aren’t Pajamas!”
“31 Cookie Recipes For The Hibernation!”
“Free Hibernation Meditation!”
Your father comes back with a squirrel on his shoulder. He feeds it peanuts in the shell. Its tiny hands shear the nut free. Shards of shell tumble down your father’s shirt.
He came right up to me, your father says. He wants to come with us.
Not a good idea.
I’m not asking, he says.
Your father sits in the backseat and feeds the squirrel, lets it drink from his water bottle. The squirrel is calm and polite. Your father calls him Mr. Peanut.
Mr. Peanut is a smart boy, he says. Mr. Peanut is going to lap up the cool waters of Lake Mercy.
Force a smile into the rearview mirror.
The drive north is too long for one day. Stop at a motel for the night. Eat fast food cheeseburgers and watch an old movie about the future. The movie gets everything wrong.
Your father takes out the Bible and makes a nest of pillowcases in the bedside drawer. He shreds thin Bible pages and toilet paper, reading random scripture as he goes.
He must increase; but I must decrease.
Ask whatever you wish and it shall be done for you.
What I have written, I have written.
Mr. Peanut curls up inside the nest and sleeps.
The next morning your father does not wake up. Mr. Peanut sits on your father’s chest with his tiny hands held in prayer. What follows is what typically follows.
Emergency. Ambulance. Too late.
We were driving to Lake Mercy, you say.
I hear it’s a wonder, they say.
Mr. Peanut has climbed the curtains and sits on the curtain rod surveying the scene.
You will have to get his body back home. You should never have left.
What are my options? you ask.
We can’t keep him for the whole Hibernation, they say. No room. But we can cremate him for you.
What about something organic? Your father loves nature. Loved. The past tense makes you cry. You always imagined a cemetery, a gravesite, a place to ritualize a child’s mourning. Flags and flowers. Once, over bacon and eggs, your father mentioned he’d like to be shot into space. From stardust to stardust, he’d said.
From stardust to stardust.
The town is small. There’s a waiting list for cremation services. Stay in the motel room with Mr. Peanut and don’t get out of bed. Eat mushroom pizza and feed the squirrel your crusts.
Could you sneak him back home? Would they understand the circumstances and let you back in? But your father had wanted to see Lake Mercy. And Mr. Peanut should be returned to the wild. And you don’t want to go back home, where everything will remind you of your life together: a stained Yosemite Sam coffee mug, empty banana popsicle wrappers, jigsaw puzzles.
Two days later they deliver your father in a plastic rectangular box. It’s heavy.
Sorry for your loss, they say.
The silence is different than it had been before. It sounds like a really bad movie. A child, a squirrel, and a dead father travel across what’s left of America. What do they find? More of the same.
Feel guilty. If you hadn’t gone on this trip he’d still be alive. The Hibernation did not kill him. You killed him.
For miles things get foggy. But it’s not fog. You can taste it. It’s smoke. Fires near Lake Mercy choke the valley.
Your lucky day, says The Ranger on the phone. Cancellation. Two cots just opened up.
Cry because you don’t need two cots anymore.
Four lanes turn to two. Two lanes turn to gravel. Drive down a wooded path under an arched sign: Welcome to Lake Mercy.
In the parking lot there are license plates from everywhere.
Big Sky Country
Where the Rivers Run
Live Free or Die
A man cooks sausages on a hibachi. Your father loved a good sausage. You could fill a sausage with your father’s ashes, grill it on this stranger’s hibachi, and eat it.
Do not eat your father.
Open the door and let Mr. Peanut free. He scurries to the man grilling sausages. The man shoos him away. Mr. Peanut scoots to a nearby bench. He waves his tail. Bye-bye, Mr. Peanut.
Ready to see Lake Mercy?
The air is much cooler here. The parking lot is surrounded by woods and walking trails. Still everything smells like it’s burning. The Ranger shows you the grounds: cabins and campsites and two large barracks, where other visitors are hanging out on their cots.
You can pull the curtains for privacy, he says.
The curtain has flowers on it. You wish you knew the names of more flowers.
Enjoy your stay, he says.
Some people nap. Some people read or watch videos. Some are half naked and dripping wet, towels draped around their necks and shoulders. All of them have chosen to come here. None of them are dead.
Follow the signs for the lake. They lead to a red barn where there’s a line to enter. Nowhere else to go. No forking paths. The path only leads to the barn.
Where’s the lake?
The couple in front of you both smile and point ahead. There must be a welcome center. Lockers. A gift shop and snacks. A short and poorly produced film on the history of Lake Mercy. The line moves slowly. The couple in front of you share an egg salad sandwich.
Inside the barn is a surprise. The air is fresh. No more smoke. The ceiling is painted with blue sky and clouds, not painted, projected. The clouds drift. Every now and then a bird flits by. Impossible to tell if they are real birds or projections. In the middle of the barn, visitors encircle a fenced-in display. They point and take pictures. Inside the fence is a tableau: small trees, hills, gardens, orchards, and, of course, a lake.
I can’t believe it’s real, says the couple. How does he do it?
The water in the lake ripples from an unseen wind. The crowd moves slowly around the circle. Some pray. Some reach over and feel the grass, pinch the tiny trees. Touching is allowed. What’s not allowed is stepping inside the fence, entering the tableau. Visitors can stay for up to an hour per session. What is there to do for an hour? What is there to do for a month? Stare. Listen to the voiceover.
It took Mr. Mercy fifteen years to create this paradise… Lake Mercy is a small, functioning ecosystem. The sun comes up. The sun goes down. Rain falls. The seasons change. The tiny maples lose their leaves… At night there are stars, lunar cycles… Welcome to a world within a world!
Had your father lost his mind? Why did he want to visit a diorama for a whole month? No swimming. No boating. No fishing. No picnics. Nobody can take their shoes off and curl their toes in the grass, strip down and jump in the lake. Who wants to eat a miniature apple?
Go back to your cot and tell your father he hasn’t missed anything. But what if he didn’t know? What if he fell victim to a scam preying on the unfit? What if everyone here is unfit? If you could only peek inside their fanny packs.
Research how to send him into space. Space is expensive. And they only take a part of him, not the whole him, just a small vial of ash that could’ve been a toenail or a boring patch from beneath his thigh. You don’t want to send your father’s thigh into space. But you don’t want to keep him either, stored on a mantel, a nightstand, a cot, confined in a box.
Toss him off a mountaintop. Fire him from a cannon. Pepper him all over town.
Nothing seems right.
Try to sleep. Other visitors constantly make noise: laughing, snoring, talking, farting, microwaving popcorn.
Pack your things to leave.
The couple from the line recognizes you. You can’t leave now, they say. You have to see the stars!
Stars. Space.
It just might work.
Follow them with your father hugged in your arms.
The barn has become a planetarium, radiant with stars, planets, constellations. You will spread him across this fake galaxy, sprinkle him from the loft like snow, dust the tiny pines, flurry the tiny lake, dandruff the visitors’ hair, send traces of him to the places they all came from. Ashes across America.
A stanchion blocks a set of stairs. No one sees you climb. It’s dark. In the loft you are closer to the ceiling, but the stars are still far away. The visitors look ridiculous, shadows orbiting a madman’s hobby.
Remove the lid.
Visitors gasp.
A security siren blares, flashing blue and red and blue and red. Breach! A robotic voice says. Breach!
The lights come up. Instant dawn. The visitors all look pale and scared and hungry. You should run, but this isn’t about you.
It’s Mr. Peanut.
He tromps through the miniature landscape like a movie monster, a ravenous squirrel, pissed off and vengeful. He searches for a tree to climb, but they’re all so small. He rips trees from their roots. Tiny fruit falls from his claws.
The Ranger scrambles inside the fence, but Mr. Peanut is too fast, too wily. The chaos causes more destruction. The visitors watch, mouths agape, mouths covered, mouths twisting into smiles as The Ranger chases the squirrel through a world within a world.
You can feel it before it comes, the way it gathers in your body, a coil readying to spring loose.
Listen closely.
You aren’t the only one laughing.
Jeremy T. Wilson (@shiremy) is the author of the novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt and the short story collection Adult Teeth. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Short Story Award and the Hessman Trophy, presented by legendary Principal Durward U. Hessman to the fifth grade student who could eat the most corn. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.