Chapter 3: Vive Memor Leti
Welcome back to Only by the Grace of the Wind, a slightly surreal novel presented in twelve serial chapter instalments released every Monday morning. For this chapter, there is an addendum essay, which I hope you will peruse.
As always, please don’t forget to like, comment, and share!
Feeling lost? You can get your bearings by visiting the Table of Contents
The next time I see my father, it is raining. He greets me at the front door with a pat on the shoulder and squints past me, somewhere into the distance, where the palling sky weeps quietly.
“Spring showers,” he says.
I edge past him and doff my shoes. “In September?”
“I suppose it’s a bit late,” he replies.
We make our way into the front room, whose bookshelves and scattered mismatched furniture shimmer under a gauzy quilt of dust. My father seats himself in a cracked leather accent chair and reaches for his coffee, which I imagine he has been nursing since before the sun rose.
“It’s been quite the rainy week,” I say. “I could see it from the hospital windows.”
He pauses mid-sip to swallow exaggeratedly. “Oh, you’re working in the hospital now?”
“It’s my final internal medicine rotation,” I say. “The last time I’ll have to work on the clinical teaching unit, Thank God.”
He nods and sips at his coffee politely. “My full moon caller,” he says into his mug.
There is something reassuring in this refrain. To my father, my visits are perpetual returns. I am always coming back. In the hospital, days stretch and blur, pasting themselves together in a dizzying collage of ward work, anxiety, and a seeking kind of fatigue. Here, in my parents’ house, my muscles fall slack, and I gently lower myself onto the overstuffed arm of the sagging couch across from my father. The currents of anger, or outrage, or hurt, or whatever it was that has fed a litany of mumbled retorts, offered in enthusiastic gesture to my bedroom mirror and steaming shower tiles, have fizzled into a queasy silence. They say time heals all wounds, but I think it just steals tinder. And in the week that has passed since our fiery encounter, my fuel stores have emptied.
Pitomec has taken to buffeting me with interruptions whenever I speak. At first, he would drive a single doubting wedge into my daily rounds presentations. Like a panther stalking a gazelle, he would not telegraph his ambushes, which invariably left me eviscerated and twitching in front of my fellow gazelles. But within a day or two, he evidently tired of biding his time. Waste of time, he might say. And so, rather than wait for me to enter a clearing, he began to strike preemptively, before my juddering first words could escape my lips.
“Come on, doctor,” he would repeat in affected exasperation. “You are not clerk. Time to return to medical school, hmm? To learn again how to make proper presentation?”
I had submitted to this asinine hazing, swallowed the red hot indignation that flushed my cheeks, and hauled my body from rounding room to ward, ward to emergency department, hospital to apartment, and back again. One week down and three to go. Somewhere in the periphery of my thinking, I suppose I was also counting down the days until this looming encounter with the old man, who is as I left him, of course, upright and unwitting, happy to see his prodigal daughter.
“Dad, what do you want for lunch today?” I ask him.
“Oh, nothing too fancy,” he says. “A sandwich and some carrot sticks, maybe.”
I rise and make my way to the kitchen, whose patina of utilitarian cleanliness has dulled some in the past week. There is bread, of course, stale and brown, and peanut butter, which I find beside the drinking glasses. It appears the strawberry jam has stretched its legs and ventured out into the world beyond my father’s austere kitchen. I look for honey, an admittedly poor alternative, and, after some minutes of practiced searching, find it in the freezer. The plastic squeeze bottle crunches in my hand, but the honey is frozen into an amber block with little bubbles suspended in time.
I fill a bowl of warm water and submerge the bottle. Then I peel and chop carrots, which I place in a small square storage container. My father wanders in as I coax a glob of peanut butter off my spoon and onto a slice of brittle bread.
“Karina, you’ll have to remind me of what you’re doing these days.”
“I’m on an internal medicine rotation,” I say.
“At the hospital, then?”
I scoop the honey bottle out of the water bath and squeeze a reluctant and crystallized stream of honey onto the peanut butter. “I’m on the clinical teaching unit, Dad. It’s very challenging.”
He nods thoughtfully. “Oh, I can imagine. I suppose I’m lucky that stacks of paper never rushed me. An archivist can always come back to his tasks tomorrow.”
“Dad, you can’t put honey in the freezer,” I say. “It makes it crunchy. Do you know where you put the jam?”
He purses his thin lips and squints. “The jam goes in the refrigerator,” he says. “If you leave it out, it will grow mould.”
“It’s not there.” I shake my head and permit a sniff of laughter. “It ran away, I guess.”
“I don’t always remember,” he says. I balance the spoon on the bread and turn to face him. He is dapper in his pressed shirt and slacks. In his narrow, wide-set green eyes, there is a flicker of knowing, fleeting perhaps, but unmistakable.
“We all forget things, Dad,” I say. His cheeks crinkle with his spreading smile, which spares the corners of his eyes. I recognize this expression as something between wistful and grateful.
“So we do,” he says.
“Do you remember our fight last week?” This last question bursts forth and asks itself without my permission.
“A fight?” he exclaims. “Who, us?” He is genuinely flabbergasted.
“In the car. We had an argument on our way home from the community centre last week.”
He casts his gaze toward his Florsheims and shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think so, Karina. I’m sure I’d remember that.”
I gingerly place his sandwich in the storage container, careful to shift the carrots out of the way. “You said something hurtful, Dad.”
In the narrow kitchen, he maneuvers his body to face me. Even with his straight back, he stands just half a head taller. His face is freshly shaven, and I can smell the sandalwood of his aftershave. He pulls me close and embraces me. One firm hand rubs my back and the other rests on my curly bun.
My nose twitches with the promise of tears. His guileless gesture does not warm my heart. It punctures it, draws from somewhere in the deep a pang of seeking loss. Forgetting is a loss, too, I think. A loss of the remnant, perhaps, the dust of memory left behind. Perhaps I wish he could share the burden of this residue that hangs in the air like mist. It doesn’t go away because one of us can’t remember. And yet it must go away because one of us doesn’t remember.
“I love you, Dad,” I say. I rest my clasped hands across his back. The dam’s walls are quivering with increasing tension. What I need is a tete-a-tete with a dad fifteen years younger, the catharsis of vicarious understanding. I can imagine him leaning across the table in Alfalfa to gently grasp my fingers, his squint all the more serene under the imperious survey of the Emma Goldman poster. Is it a childish conviction to believe that everything would be OK, then? If he were copos mentis, then my mother would no longer be a ghost?
“Oh, Karina,” he says. “What’s wrong? Don’t cry. Don’t cry, please.”
He pulls back from our embrace to examine me with narrow eyes darting like lost fireflies. “Have I done something?”
A reflexive “no” almost escapes my lips, but I purse them tight against this impulse. Instead, I scan his lined face with my gaze, just for a moment, wondering, perhaps, whether the old man will say, “I’m still here.”
I dab at my cheeks with the collar of my loose cotton shirt. “It’s OK, Dad. I’ve just had a rough week, that’s all.”
He seems placated by this explanation. “Some weeks are just like that,” he says. “Some weeks, it’s all you can do to just put one foot in front of the other.”
It is a bromide almost unimaginable in the old Perry Bergson’s voice. And yet, I have just heard it, and it does its job. The spigot slows its flow to a few last drips. I scoop up the square plastic box that holds his sandwich and carrot sticks and snap on the lid. “Sandwich.”
He takes it and nods. “One foot after the other,” he murmurs.
We trundle single-file down the rickety rear staircase and out to his little jalopy. After our fight last week, I had dropped him off and almost run down the street to the bus stop. The fusty brown tarp, which I had folded in a neat square and left on the landing, is damp with the dew of the week’s rainfall. My father does not seem to notice.
I slide into the driver’s seat and edge forward the chair, which again has mysteriously slid back in my absence, and the familiar metal-on-metal howl causes my father to yelp and cover his ears.
The sky is brooding, and our little brown car whirs along the rain-slick roads. My father sits with his hands clasped over his makeshift lunchbox peering out the window. We pass the offset rows of squat, peeling bungalows, small fortunes disguised as hovels, and I nod at a young dog-walker wearing a hooded yellow raincoat.
“Bonneville looks different in the rain, doesn’t it, Dad?” I say.
“Oh, it’s the same city, Karina,” he replies.
“Do you know what you’re doing at work today?” It’s a silly question, but I have asked it before I have considered it. He turns to me with knitted eyebrows.
“That is a Mona question if I have ever heard one,” he says, and his face brightens. “Your mother would always ask me things like that.”
His uttering my mother’s name raises the hair on the back of my neck. I can’t remember the last time I heard him refer to her as Mona.
“Like what?” My voice creaks under the weight of surprise.
“Oh,” he says, and even in my periphery, I can see his mossy little eyes twinkle. “She liked to tease me about my work.” He affects my mother’s smooth, fluid cadence. ‘More papers to alphabetize, Perry? Shuffle first, collate later?’ Oh, and I would laugh. It was true, of course.”
It strikes me that he is unusually lucid this morning. I haven’t heard a single groan, redirected even a light non sequitur.
“Do you miss her, Dad?” I ask.
I fix my gaze on him for a long moment, too long for a chauffeur on duty. His lined umber face is alert, attentive, and I suddenly have the sense that I am in the presence of a time traveler, a man from the past.
“I’d like to think that wherever she is, we’re still connected by a thread. Like Ariadne,” he says. He cranes his neck and swallows discreetly. In the hollow of his cheek, wet streaks gleam. The old man’s tears bring my own, which threaten to blur my vision. I wipe them awkwardly and fix my gaze on the road.
“It’s sad, Dad,” I say. “I wish we could bring her back, reel her in.”
My father extends a hand and cups my neck gently. His skin is warm and firm. “In a way, she’s still here, Karina. Do you believe that?”
I tap my head lightly. “She’s still here in my dreams and my memories. There, she’s as she was, clever and vivacious and, I don’t know, Dad.”
“She left a trace,” he says. “All those memories. Hold onto your end of the thread.”
I wonder if he’s slipping into senility once again. “Hold onto it,” I echo.
“I mean it literally,” he says. “She left something behind. We all do. Everything leaves a trace.”
A flare of indignation slashes at the sorrow, but the sorrow swallows it in an instant. “I don’t understand, Dad, and it doesn’t matter. We both have holes in our hearts.”
He squeezes my nape in gentle reassurance. “That we do.” In the still silence that follows, his breathing is regular as a metronome.
“You remind me of her,” he says after a moment. He gestures at my hair, a dubious gift of inheritance. “She was grey when I met her. Had been grey for some time. Boy was she sharp, Karina.”
I turn into the narrow, steep-slanted driveway, almost obscured by overgrowth, and pass the familiar Episcopalian church, whose marquee reads: “For Everything There Is A Season, And A Time For Every Matter Under Heaven [Ecclesiastes 3:1].” We pull up to the familiar glass doors of the community centre.
I turn to face my father, whose gaze is cast past me, somewhere out the window, or perhaps into the thicket of memory.
“She flickers in and out, your mom. I can find her sometimes, join her in the old days, when we were well and whole. I know she’s still there. I—"
He pauses, and I hold my breath in anticipation of a groan, a shuddering return to befuddlement. But he simply rubs his nose and continues.
“I can still find her.” He grips my hand in his warm, soft palms and taps my knuckles with his fingertips. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.” He smacks the upholstery with his free hand and withdraws from me. “Well, Karina, we’re here,” he says. He smiles, squinching the corners of his gnomon nose. “Time for work.”
I pull the plastic container out from under his rear, and he starts awkwardly. “No strawberry jam this time,” I say.
“Honey,” he says. “I remember.”
And like a man fifty years younger, he flings open the door and bounds to the entrance. He bows his head to wave and, evidently noticing the open door, jogs back to nudge it shut with a flick of his shoe.
As is my habit, I linger in the car for some minutes, but this time, I do not buzz with officious anxiety. I have just witnessed an instance of paradoxical lucidity, an inexplicable bursting forth of shimmering clarity. It was like a visit from a ghost, uncanny, and now I am left to make sense of it. There is gratitude, but it is dipped in grief. He was here, for a time, but he will inevitably leave again. Like my mother, who tiptoes through my thoughts, hiding behind plants, surprising me in little flashes of recollection, my father calls forth a tangle of emotions with no name. A reproving voice tells me to sit with it, but instead I pull out my phone to text Rhiannon.
Karina [11:50:01]: What are the chances you’re free on this dreary Saturday?
The reply comes quickly and is announced by the tinny QuidNunc chime.
Rhi L [11:50:47]: just woke up but lets go get a coffee at ambling & shambles. missed you this week…month..how long has it been
Karina [11:51:05]: Hey. Somewhere between a week and a month. I’m 15 mins from downtown. When should I meet you?
Rhi L [11:51:13]: no no I was exaggerating, woke up at like 10 yah I could get there in a bit
Karina [11:51:18]: Ok, I’ll leave now, then.
Rhi L [11:51:21]: kk
I toss the phone in the cup holder and maneuver out of the community centre parking lot. From somewhere below the plaintive knot in my abdomen, an upswell of joy buzzes through my body. The palling, grey sky glows faintly under the tenacious presence of the tawny midday sun. Knowing Rhiannon often pushes the boundaries of punctuality, I take the scenic route and listen to the end of my caffeine podcast.
“And you know what I found?” Even without a bluetooth connection, the Californian’s voice is particularly resonant in the little brown Morris. “Life lost its zhuzh without caffeine. At the end of this little experiment, I went back to it, my beany master. It was quite the production. My wife and I got up early, we walked down to our favourite neighbourhood java spot, and with a smile stretching from one ear to the other, I ordered 16 ounces of pour-over bliss. ‘So long, sleep,’ I said as that first sip greeted my lips. And I just didn’t care. The world looked brighter on my way back. The colours were more saturated. I was a happy man once again. In coffee I trust…”
The stately, palatial homes recede and give way to small, squat bungalows with tiny front yards. I turn onto an arterial road, a boulevard, and the dim, rogue fragments of light on the dashboard retreat into the shadows cast by the commercial buildings that now loom over the road. And then they too ebb away in the rearview mirror, and I’m suddenly in West Wharf, with its low-slung, ultra-casual cafes and shops, most of whose names include an ampersand.
To my surprise, Rhiannon has snagged a (tasteful, Danish-designed) table near the front window of Ambling & Shambles. Her hair is wound in a tight bun at the crown, and her boxy white smile gleams under the warm cafe light. I hug her across the table and take a seat in front of a wood-backed menu propped on a miniature easel.
“I didn’t order yet,” Rhiannon says. She runs a slim finger down the menu and mouths a half-sentence to herself. “Coffee and avocado toast, I think. Yeah, that’s a today thing.”
I glance at the menu, too, and linger for a moment on the Bircher Muesli, a cold overnight oatmeal porridge made with fresh fruit, honey, and “knut mylq.”
“We’re ghosts,” I say. “I can’t believe I didn’t run into you once during the last week. Is it crazy in the OR?”
“Oh, who cares,” Rhiannon replies with mock exasperation. She tilts her head and fixes me with a wry smile. “Then again, I guess we can’t avoid talking about hospital life. Let’s set a time limit. Fifteen minutes business. But that’s it.”
“It’s inevitable,” I scan the coffee shop for familiar faces, but there are none amid the earbudded creatives hunched over their laptops. “Pitomec is such a piece of shit.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard,” says Rhiannon. “He was on the week after my CTU block. Sometimes, he’s a dictator, right, but other times he’s very awkward with women, someone told me. He can be almost bashful, like a boy. Hard to believe our programs let these maniacs anywhere near us. Are you surviving?”
I roll my eyes. “Surviving, yes, but not much more than that. I mean, between the hospital and seeing my Dad, I’m pretty worn out. How—”
Rhiannon interrupts me with two outstretched fingers. “How is your dad, by the way?”
It’s a perfectly normal question, of course, but I stumble in my reply. “He’s, well, he’s fine. Kind of in and out, there and back. I don’t know. He yelled at me last week and was being—uh, not nice. Today, he’s totally lucid. And not a little clearer, either. But a lot clearer. He’s present.”
“God, that’s weird, isn’t it?” Rhiannon says. “But, hey, you had company this morning.” She offers me a somber, closed-lip smile. “What a year for you.”
The last statement floats thickly in the air between us. “What a year,” I echo.
A painfully hip woman about our age sweeps over to our table and places a hand on the surface. She’s wearing a loose headscarf that seems to just caress her sleek, wavy black hair. We lean back in our seats to peer up at her. “So sorry to interrupt,” she says. “Do we know what we want today? I should tell you we have a single-origin in from Kenya. Triple-washed, really top-shelf. All direct trade of course. It has a kind of stone fruity, white tea kind of vibe going, really smooth mouth feel.”
“I think I’d like a latte,” Rhiannon says. “And an avo toast.”
“I’ll try the new coffee in a pour-over,” I say. “And just a veggie breakfast sandwich for me, please.”
“Gluten-free or sourdough,” the server asks. She points first to me and then to Rhiannon. We both opt for the sourdough. “Good choice.” She taps a few commands into the tablet balanced across her forearm and glides back to the counter.
“And what about you?” I say to Rhiannon. “It seems like they’ve got you working like a dog.”
She scoffs. “Tell me about it. The service is so preceptor-dependent. If it’s Dr. El-Abadi—Amira—then it’s all, ‘self care is so important,’ you know. And then I’m done at, like, three o’clock and it’s so nice. But then, if it’s Schumacher on, like it’s been for the past bit now, it’s very, ‘you’ve got to pay your dues. I suffered then, you suffer now.’ All that stupid suffering fetishism bullshit. But I’m fine. It’s not forever.”
My phone buzzes with an incoming call, but since it’s not a number I recognize, I let it go to voicemail.
“I don’t know how we do it,” I say. “Or why sometimes.”
Rhiannon affects the droning, low-pitched monotone of her father, Pan. “Because this is your ticket.”
I giggle at the imitation, which not only sounds nothing like Pan, but also comes with robot hands. “Our ticket to what?”
She continues with the android Pan routine. “Don’t you want to be a doctor? Every parent—I mean, child—every child wants to be a doctor. Reach for your dreams!”
“Hopes and dreams. Who needs those?”
In reply, Rhiannon gives one last robot flourish. My phone buzzes again with a variation of the last number, which I assume, given the day and time, is my medical school schnorring again. The calls began before my diploma was shipped to my apartment, guilt-soaked appeals to “give the gift of education.” The one time I answered one of these calls, the undergrad hired to extort me expertly penetrated my defences with an impassioned speech about his own hopes and dreams. Since then, the calls come twice a week, and I never answer.
“Do you need to take that?” Rhiannon asks.
“No, no,” I say, and reject the call. “So what else? All work and no play?”
“Are you asking about my love life?”
“Is that all there is in your life, Rhi? Vitamin P and one-night-stands?”
Her eyebrows knit and she recoils exaggeratedly. “Excuse me,” she says. “Who’s to say I don’t mix propofol with my love life?”
I burst out laughing. The server swishes over with our coffees and sandwiches. “Enjoy, ladies,” she says.
“For your information, I am seeing someone,” Rhiannon says. “Her name is Sila.”
“You know you could never go into politics,” I say. “I have enough dirt on you to cause a national scandal.”
My phone buzzes again. It’s the same number as last time.
“You know, Rhi, let me just take this.”
I scoop up the phone and stride over to a small alcove by the front door, where a hammock chair is swaying inexplicably in the still cafe air.
“Hello, this is Karina.”
The voice on the other line is tentative and hollow. “Karina, it’s Alexa,” she says. “Something’s happened.”
“What is it?” A frisson of terror turns my voice to gravel. Alexa’s soft, tremulous voice comes from considerable distance now, an ambient hum overlaying my heart’s kettle drum beats.
“He fell,” she begins, and then her words garble. She is weeping. “He fell, Karina. I’m so sorry. He was on the ladder and…he must have lost his footing. We found him lying there. I found him. I called 911 right away.”
“Was he awake when you saw him?”
“No. His eyes were closed”
“Breathing?” I’m on autopilot. “What did they say to you?”
“Oh, Karina. I’m so sorry. It was such a blur. I couldn’t—”
“Where did they take him?” I hear my question from above, somewhere outside myself. “I’ll go right now.”
There is a pause. I can hear a murmured question posed to someone a few steps away and the crackle of trembling fingers kneading the microphone. “They took him to Palisades Memorial.”
Without another word, I hang up and stumble over to the table. Rhiannon’s eyes widen at my approach.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Karina, what happened?”
“My dad fell off a ladder at the library. They took him to Palisades in an ambulance.”
Rhiannon is calm now, preternaturally so. “I can drive you,” she says.
“No, I can do it,” I say. Instinctively, I stuff my sandwich into my mouth and tear off a hunk.
“Sit and eat,” she says firmly. “Then we’ll go. You shouldn’t drive. Just eat, Karina. What’s five minutes?”
I do as I’m told. A stillness settles over us as I alternate between sips of coffee and overlarge bites. This lull isn’t equanimity or Schumacher’s sangfroid, but something more raggedy, a Trojan Horse with a sealed trapdoor. It is the dark spectre that accompanies me to pronouncements, the impassive face in the metallic hospital mirror.
I do not even glance at Rhiannon, who says nothing as I finish my breakfast. Premonitions tiptoe into my awareness, but I ignore them, too.
Soon, I am in Rhiannon’s air-conditioned SUV, and I notice, momentarily, that we cannot feel the road under us. Rhiannon hands grip the steering wheel at 1:00 and 11:00. She sits too far forward, like an eager spider, and brakes with a lead foot.
At the Emergency Department, our medical colleague, Faisal, jogs over to meet us in the waiting room, which is empty save a few roamers, shouting children, and sleeping transients. His scrubs are baggy and rumpled, but his dark, sleek beard is styled and wavy, like a Roman warrior bust.
“Karina,” he says. “And hey there, Rhiannon.” He fixes us with an inscrutable expression, curled lips and squinting, hooded eyes. “It’s pretty loud in here. There’s an empty family room in C. Let’s go there. This way.”
He turns and leads us with a windmill wave. We follow his upright figure through a set of automatic doors, which he opens with a flick of his laminated badge. We hug the periphery of the emergency department labyrinth, steering clear of nurses with transparent clipboards and shuffling patients in open-backed gowns. I worked in this ED in medical school, and the smell, a disgusting melange of cleaning fluid and what I can only describe as sickness, fills my awareness with memory fragments.
Faisal leads us into a small square room almost totally hidden from view in one of the many alcoves secreted in the ED’s nooks. There are four heavy industrial-stuffed chairs and a squat square table, on which someone has left a Costco catalogue.
We all sit, and Faisal begins to speak. He is hunched forward in his chair, elbows propped on knees, hands in prayer posture. “I saw the last name and made a bit of a leap,” he says. “Listen.” He pauses to consider his next statement. “Karina, can I be frank with you?”
I stare hard at his sallow face, the arched violet bags under his eyes. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
Faisal nods and takes a deep breath. “Your father had a fall. He was on a ladder. From what we can gather from the collateral, he must have been near the top, reaching for a book or something in the community centre library. It was a big fall.”
“He’s dead,” I hear myself say flatly. “He fell and died.”
Faisal meets my eyes and then lowers his gaze. The sweat beads on his broad forehead gleam like dew.
“He struck his head on the stone floor. It was a big fall, Karina, from eight feet up, I’d say. The CT shows a lot of intracranial bleeding. And…” He pauses to swallow. “Well, Karina, he was no longer with us when he arrived. I’m so sorry.”
In my ears, there is a whooshing. At first, it is quiet, almost whispering, but as Faisal speaks, it begins to roar, like waves lapping a rocky beach. It fills my entire awareness. I feel Rhiannon’s fingertips brush my shoulder, coaxing me to look at her, but I stare straight ahead, past Faisal, to somewhere else.
Both of my co-residents, one friend and the other a colleague, sit in silence. They have been trained well. They let the silence blossom. And in it, I find oblivion, an expanse of nothingness. My fingers and toes tingle, but I am otherwise numb. A bolt of anger shoots through the abyss like lightning in a desert, but without a conductor, it is merely a flash.
I am aware of the other two presences in the room with me, exquisitely so. I can feel their tension, their vicarious sadness, a surface itch. They are waiting for me to react. They want me to exclaim or wail or make some stereotyped gesture of grief. The setting is right. I have received the information. I now have space, both literal and figurative, to process it. Faisal’s task is almost complete. Soon, he will step out, tell me to find him when I’m ready.
“Karina.” It is Rhiannon’s voice. “We’re here.”
Faisal clears his throat. “You know what. Let me take you to him.” His voice is soft and gravelly. “If you’re ready.”
I nod and rise from the chair, and the sound of my thighs releasing from the chair’s vinyl startles me momentarily.
Faisal holds the door open for us. We exit through a side door into a wide, optic white back corridor that leads to a bank of elevators. Rhiannon cups my elbow in her gentle hand and matches my pace. I glance at her every now and then, and her eyes crinkle in a kind of greeting. I’m here, they assure me. And I’m not, my blank face replies. But I’m coming.
“He’s on the ward,” Faisal says. “In his own room.”
We ascend a few floors to one of the internal medicine wards, frenetic as always, with nurses pushing computer stations from room to room. At the rear of the ward, adjacent to an armed “emergency exit,” is a small single room with the door closed.
“Go on in, Karina,” says Rhiannon. She turns to Faisal. “I’ll stay out here and talk to whoever comes by.”
“Just page me when you’re finished,” he says. “I’ve already let them know Karina is here. They’re aware she’s staff.”
The door is heavy. I have to lean my body into it to coax it open. On the bed, lying supine, with a creased cream-coloured sheet pulled to his sternum, is my father. His eyes are closed, mercifully, and there is a prominent dent at his crown. Gravity tugs at his visage and gives it a decidedly patrician appearance, like a Mediterranean aristocrat sleeping on the beach. Though he is an old man, the muscles on his arms and chest are still firm, and he still has hair on his bare shins.
I approach him and gently wedge my hands under his neck to cradle his head.
“Oh, Dad,” I say. “What have you done?” I kiss his cheeks and then the depression in his skull. And then my heart breaks. “What will I do now?” Tears refract my view of him into a kaleidoscope of olivey skin and tufty white hair.
“You fractured your skull,” I whisper in his ear.
There in the darkened little hospital room, I hold my father and cry into his shirt. I caress his clean-shaven face. I beg him to not leave me, please, because I have no one left. I am aware, vaguely, that this is the last moment I will share with him, so I will it to dilate, to unfurl, to extend out along an endless skein of temporal thread.
My arms tire, so I gently lay his head down on the pillow and curl up next to him on the bed, like a child, one arm at my side and the other slung over his exposed chest.
“You went too soon,” I tell him. “There was more to say. It’s OK, though, Dad, because I saw you today. I really saw you. You were here. I love you, you know, Dad. I loved you even when you weren’t yourself. And I’ll miss you. I’ll miss all of you.”
There is a moment of blank, seeking, magnetic darkness, and then Rhiannon is sitting on the bed beside us, rubbing my back.
“You fell asleep,” she says.
I release my father and sit up groggily. “We should go,” I say. “I’ve said goodbye.”
Rhiannon pulls me into an embrace, and she weeps softly, her chin perched on my shoulder, lithe, thin body shaking very slightly with the sobs.
“What a friend you’ve got,” I whisper to her. “Both parents dead in one year.”
“I’m so sorry, Karina,” she says. “Come stay with me.”
We page Faisal before we leave, and he catches us before we exit through the hospital’s main doors. He is somewhat breathless from his jog.
“Karina,” he says. “I’m sorry. The hospital will be in touch. Do you want me to have a social worker call you?”
I shake my head. “You’re a good doc, Faisal.”
He tugs at his beard and gives me a tight-lipped smile. “We’re all thinking about you.”
The days that follow are a blur. I have just a little family in the city, my father’s sister and her daughter. To them, I make my only phone call, after which they take the reins from my hands. My aunt, Didi, is a retired professor. She has my father’s upright posture, mossy eyes, and prominent nose. She speaks crisply and clearly, always with a half-grin tugging at one of her lip corners. Her daughter, Sophia, is not quite ten years my senior, a psychologist in town who leans forward as she speaks and nods her head to a silent waltz. It is sad, I suppose, that it takes a tragedy to bring family together. My uncle Dave died of an aneurysm when I was in my early teens, and I remember going to their drafty old house by the community centre to sit with Aunt Didi and Sophia.
These two lovely women take care of everything. They call the funeral parlour. They schedule the funeral, ASAP in Jewish custom. In his will, my father has blasphemed. He wishes to be cremated, forbidden by millennia of tradition, and leaves a cryptic, almost lazy proviso to “scatter the ashes where life is unusually vibrant.” The laissez-faire funeral parlour lets this misdeed slide.
There are shivas at night, also organized by my aunt, where the woodwork’s sundry crew congregates in my father’s empty house to kibbitz, gesture at prayer, and nosh on deli platters provided by the city’s lone deli, Finkelstein’s (established 1921). My GI tract is becoming accustomed to a diet of bagels and cream cheese, knishes, and raw fruits and vegetables. The spreads are never-ending.
I am surprised to find myself talking easily with these guests, some old Jews who I imagine make the weekly shiva rounds, but most just old friends from unknown places. For hours on end, I sit on the overstuffed arm of my father’s flaccid couch, chatting with all manner of people, gentle and gruff alike, who knew my father. They share stories and bits of wisdom. They hug me, too, and in the warmth of their bodies, I do find momentary solace.
At the end of each evening, Rhiannon arrives to schmooze and eventually chauffeur me back to her apartment, where I sleep on an air mattress wedged beside her peeling white particle board computer desk.
She and I speak little, but this is my preference, I think, to introspect and ache in silence after the cacophonous gatherings. I am grateful for her embraces, sometimes punctuated by her silent tears that dampen my shirt collars, and the little breakfasts and cups of coffee she leaves me when she heads to the hospital. Some years ago, the resident association successfully bargained for bereavement leave, so once again I have been granted a one-month hiatus from my program. The upshot of this is that there is a low probability of my encountering Pitomec again. Internal medicine attendings rotate from week to week, so the odds are in my favour that his name does not reappear on my rotation schedule. I am ashamed to admit that this thought occupies the same space as my grief.
The old Jews of yore, who concocted the traditions to which their modern posterity are still yoked, knew that grieving has to be situated. The bereaved must not be lonely, especially in the beginning, when their hearts are battered and raw. The shiva schematic is simple. The funeral planning procedure leaves little to chance. There is an economy theory I heard about on a podcast once that too much choice is experienced as “unfreedom.” Though I bristled at the implications then, I can see the benefits of the “democracy of the dead” now. Tradition is, in its way, preserving me.
On the day of the funeral, the Bergson women gather in the mortuary salon. Sophia’s husband Prateek and two preteen sons, Joshua and Arjun, greet us briefly and then flee to the chapel, far from the grim aura of the salon, with its scrubbed floors and pallid decor.
Mother and daughter wear matching cobalt skirts and black blouses. Like me, their hair is tied in simple buns, one russet and the other alabaster. We embrace.
“We’re here again,” I say.
“First, David. Then Mona,” Aunt Didi sighs and smiles mournfully. “And now Perry.”
“How are the boys?” I ask Sophia and gesture toward the rear door.
“Oh, they’re fine. Everyone is fine,” she says, bobbing her head with each gentle declaration. “We talked about it. Death, loss, the cycles of life. They’re sensitive young people.” She leans forward. “How are you, Karina?”
The question tugs at the despair that has been dropped like an anchor into my abdomen. I glance at both of their seeking, caring faces for just a moment before lowering my gaze to the mosaic funeral home tile.
“It’s odd to admit, but I find myself wondering who we’re burying today.” I kick at the textured grout with my flat. “In a way, my dad has been dying for a few years now, just fading away in his house.”
Above us, there is an antique wooden wall-mounted clock with Hebrew numerals on its face. The hands run counter-clockwise. I can almost hear its whirring gears in the salon’s stiff silence.
“He came back for a few hours,” I continue. “The day he died. It was, I don’t know, it was uncanny. He was present there—or here, I should say. He was himself. We talked all the way to the community centre.”
Aunt Didi’s white eyebrows rise in disbelief. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Some people with dementia have a kind of awakening, a period of lucidity, before death,” I say. “I mean, this wasn’t the same thing, obviously.” Plump, heavy tears tumble onto my blouse. “But he was there with me, like a time traveller. He said beautiful things. It’s only now that I realize they were a kind of goodbye.”
“He was still in there after all,” says Aunt Didi. She kisses me on the forehead and strokes my shoulder. “What a remarkable gift that was. To have him back, even for a morning.”
“When my dad died, I remember wondering if you could ever really know your parents,” Sophia says. “Maybe you’re not supposed to. It’s strange to think about that now, as a parent. Who are you to your kids? Once they figure out you’re not just Mom?”
“I hope you don’t feel that way about me,” says Aunt Didi. She chuckles, tears glistening on her cheeks. “I’m an open book.”
Sophia squeezes Aunt Didi’s hand and smiles coyly. “Of course, Mom. But you know what I mean. Eventually we all learn that our parents are just people who happened to have us.”
We’re silent for a long moment, and then my Aunt Didi says softly, “I miss that man with whom I happened to have you.”
Like a furnace shuddering to life, a raspy baritone voice intones quietly from behind us. “Excuse me. I’m so sorry to interrupt.” It’s the funeral parlour director, a rotund, red-faced man wearing a tasteful black suit. He bows his head curtly to each of us in turn. “My sincerest condolences, alav ha-shalom. Everything is all set. We can begin the service when you’re ready. Please, take your time. There is plenty of time.”
He waddles away. I glance at the wall clock above us.
“Five minutes,” I say.
We linger a few moments to compose ourselves. I wipe my eyes with my shirt sleeve and check for puffiness in the reflection of a display case holding old, open Hebrew books with ornate gilded text.
The chapel is thick with mourners packed three to a bench. Most are elderly, but as I scan the assembled, I spot a number of jittery children in varying displays of misery between stern-faced parents. In the second row, Prateek wobbles, nearly asleep. He is flanked by his and Sophia’s two preteen sons, who lean over him to talk to each other. They wear matching stylish black-framed glasses and gesticulate in what I imagine are energetic whispers. Their sleek high-and-tight haircuts provide a jarring contrast to the tonsures, purple-hued perms, and dense birds nests of ruffled hair of their co-congregants. Sophia gives me one last hug and then squeezes in beside the larger of the two boys.
In the middle of the chapel, Rhiannon is wedged between two portly old men wearing yarmulkes. One of them coughs into both of his hands. She waves at me when my gaze rests on her, and then casts her eyes down to her phone, whose unseen reflection elicits a broad grin.
I take my place in the front row with my Aunt Didi, who rises to honour her late brother by leading the Mourner’s Kaddish. Like my father, she is limber-legged and eschews the ramp in favour of stairs. At the pulpit, she withdraws and unfolds a single sheet of paper from an unseen place. She swivels the microphone outward and projects her clear voice into the hall.
“Thank you all for coming. We are here to say farewell to Perry, my brother, father of my niece Karina and uncle of my daughter Sophia. Those of you who can, please stand, and we will recite the Mourner’s Kaddish":
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabah…
The words of the Aramaic twist the practiced tongues of the assembled, asynchronous as always, punctuated with coughs. I join their droning incantation at the stanza I know by heart, a plaintive refrain from my camp days, recited now, not sung in minor key:
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu
v’al kol-yisrael, v’imru: “amen
We are seated, and then there are speeches, encomiums from old coworkers and elegies from old friends. It is bittersweet to steep myself in all these people’s memories. I am pleased that my father brightened the lives of so many people, who now congregate to venerate him on news of his death. As I listen, I wonder how I would have handled an empty chapel. It would have been too much to bear, I think.
When it is my turn to speak, I take the ramp to the podium and adjust the microphone to my Lilliputian level. I take a small stack of index cards out of my back pocket.
“Thank you everyone for coming,” I say, and the sound of my voice resounds stridently in the chapel. My heart is beating kettle drums again, right in my ears. “I know some of you traveled to be with us. It means a lot to me.” I gesture toward Aunt Didi and Sophia and her family, nodding at each in turn. “Thank you also to Aunt Didi and Cousin Sophia, who have done, well, they’ve done everything during these sad times. I owe them a great deal. And to my friend, Rhiannon, I thank you, too. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I pause for a moment to consider whether I’ve forgotten anyone. “I guess thank you to everyone,” I say. A few of the congregants chuckle quietly at this lamest of lame jokes. I look at the index card crinkling in my quivering grip. My thumbs have smudged the black gel ink, blending the letters into looping shapes.
“My father was a remarkable man. You learn a lot caring for someone who used to be someone else. Or maybe I should say someone who became, was becoming, someone new each week, each month. I guess what I’m saying is, I became very accustomed to change. And my memories, some frayed, but most still quite vivid, kept both him and me together.” I pause to swallow and dab my eyes with a crumpled tissue stashed in my pocket. “I would be lying if I said this has all been easy, or truly edifying. It has been terribly hard. And confusing. I lost my father, first in slow motion, and then all at once; I had just months to say goodbye to my mother. And there’s just so much unsaid. So much love and pain and—and I don’t know what. So much unexpressed, I suppose. I miss them. I miss the way things were. And I don’t know how to think about what will be.”
I look out into the audience through a prism of warm tears. “I don’t know what else to say. Are you listening, Dad? It’s Karina. I will always miss you. I will always remember you. All of you. Until the next tete-a-tete.”
In my father’s will, I am bequeathed his house and car. There is also a very small inheritance, which I am told will be needed to defray “the costs of dying.” The night of the funeral, I find the courage, or anxious impetus, to move into my father’s dusty little house. I sleep in my childhood room, with its Wenzel Hablik posters and bookshelves packed with paperbacks, on a mattress whose innards seem to have disintegrated in my nearly one-decade absence.
My father’s ghost still roams the halls, I imagine, creaking along the slats of the hardwood, flicking on hallway lights. No one ever tells you about the aching lamentations stored in small things. My father’s cracked leather accent chair, for instance, whose scent evokes memories of both my parents, hunched vigilantly over a chessboard, and me crouched between them, hands on the board’s edges, watching their tense scrimmages unfold in tortoise time.
Though I am technically alone, I find a kind of homey comfort in what the Portuguese call saudade, a poignant yearning for something, or someone, lost. And besides, I still have visitors. Rhiannon comes by nearly every evening, as does my Aunt Didi. They stay for tea, brewed in a samovar I dig out of the basement and scrub back to life. During the days, I take long walks around the neighbourhood, stopping for a slice of fresh bread, “peasant rye,” at Haskel’s Wheat Treats.
I also drift through the house on endless tours. My parents have paid off the mortgage, and I am left with the decision, both crushingly mundane and melancholic, of whether to sell the house and some of my parents’ things.
A good deal of their furniture, the solid wood antiques that were patrimony from their parents and the old country their ancestors left behind, could be valuable, I suppose, but the thought of hocking them feels like a betrayal. There is no question that the sale of the house itself will change my life. Judging by the surrounding houses, this little bungalow will sell for an order of magnitude more than my parents paid just forty years before. Its equity could obliterate my swollen student debt, the four-hundred-pound man on my back. I could never stay in this house, with my parents’ spectres, but thinking about leaving, and thereby profiting from their losses, leaves a queasy residue, which I scrub away daily with a bristle brush and vinegar water.
In the office that my parents shared, the grey metal filing cabinets and circumferential wall-bolted bookshelves are speckled with dust. Growing up, I rarely visited this stale side room, in which my parents, mostly my father, spent so much of his free time. Now, I enter it trepidatiously, as I always have, aware of my inevitable intrusion. It is austere, but bright. My father left the curtains open and knotted around the wooden holdbacks.
I wipe down the surfaces and exposed book covers. The scuffed cherry rolltop desk is closed and its old wooden chair companion is somewhat askew. Peeking out from the seat is an old computer tower. Its cord is neatly wrapped and banded. I wipe it down, too, and lug it into the living room. I return to the room and open the rollback desk. Side by side, I find a computer monitor that must be twenty years old and an aquamarine manual typewriter with a sheaf of typed papers drooping over the platen. I give the monitor a cursory wipe and stash it on a nearby filing cabinet. Then I retrieve the manuscript, nearly a centimetre thick, and sit on the squat wooden desk chair to examine it.
The title page reads:
Last Letters
Perry Bergson
I flip through the ream and glance at the neatly typed, formal letters. There is one for my mother and Aunt Didi. Several are addressed to people I do not know. Out of courtesy and decorum, perhaps misplaced, I refrain from reading these intimate messages. But nestled amid them is one I do read. It is dated five years prior and addressed to me.
October 2, 2015
Dear Karina,
Is it odd to read this letter? There are some things more easily written. You see, a fog is descending upon me, fuzzing what was once so clear and bright. It is true that the past leans over the present, and its emissaries, memories, stretch across the great cosmic expanse like a bridge. As a younger man, I learned I could store myself in a city of memory, a structure of the mind held together with the glue of a life lived. These days, I am trying to secret myself there, to conceal my leaky mind and evade the cloud descending. Giordano Bruno, the visionary Renaissance gnostic, believed that memory properly stewarded was the sacred reflection of the whole universe. The infiniteness of outer space was mapped onto the endless inner depths of the human soul. In this way, the cultivation of a subtle, exquisite memory was the most intimate way of seeking and communing with God. To know oneself was to know the cosmos.
If only there were more time, Karina. I could show you what I mean. I am not a physicist, nor am I any great man of letters. But I am tantalized by time and the traces it leaves in memory. The momentum that carries us is impelled by currents we will never fully apprehend--historical, political, physical, cosmic. There have been sages who saw things as they are, the endless mesh of interconnections and the love that fills its gaps.
Have I lost you? What I mean to say is that we are woven into the fabric of an endless field of patterns, interconnections, and interrelations unfurling across the universe. Time is forever proceeding, and we experience it in our particular human ways, in our particular human places, through our peculiar human apertures, unique for each of us. We believe ours is a world of things and substance, but it is really a dense manifold of happenings. Everything is always becoming, Karina, roiling, shifting, changing. Even a rock, in its seemingly infinite rockness, is simply a long event, a vibration of quantum fields. It has a history! Isn’t that remarkable, Karina?
We are like the rock. Or the newt, or the mantis, or the ocean, or the quasar. We are unfolding. Capax infiniti — we hold the infinite! And just as I suspected all these years, as I built my memory city remembrance by remembrance, locus by locus, it is memorial thread, the yarn of traces time leaves in our neural architecture, that knits our selves together. Memory makes and remakes for us a map of the past eagerly leaning over the present. We are, then, Karina, histories of ourselves, compendiums of memories written in the language of time.
Perhaps you will see now that it is through memory, and the time it keeps, that we make our way in the world, such as it is, always fleeing from death pursuing. We, in the world, toiling for who knows what and who knows how long. The finiteness of time, with its murmured promise of our certain death, imbues it with a certain urgency and significance. We are free only so long as we can ask ourselves what to do with this time. There is never enough time. And there are those who want your time, Karina, and you must not let them have it. Perhaps you think me a crackpot for such a claim, but it is true.
In the long, sweeping arc of this world’s history, time’s many gobblers have stolen the time of others, hoarded it, wielded it, withheld it, mined it, exploited it, deprived us of it. In our world, in our epoch, Mammon has triumphed, and we sell our priceless, limited time as currency to temporal merchants. Our whole world is an edifice of stolen time. Have I overstated my case? Time is everything, Karina, for it is the very substrate of memory. It is the ground of being.
I sense that my temporal horizon is receding, and soon it will not matter for me. But your time coil is so much longer. Gather it up. Use it beautifully. Make memories, and keep them safe. At this point, perhaps you think me truly a crackpot, but there is an ancient technique for dilating, collating, and storing memories that I have used for the past fifty years with mounting wonder. It is called the method of loci, and it’s easy to learn.
Find solace somewhere quiet - an empty room or a secluded meadow. Close your eyes and imagine a place, real or fanciful, city, structure, or path. It will unfold as you imagine it, and to each feature, or locus, attach something you wish to remember. This could be a signpost, a chest of drawers, a building, a tree. Anything, Karina. Imagine yourself exploring this space. Label your loci. Explore some more. Soon, your place will be thick with the material of memory, which will return to you in vibrant recall when you stroll through the landscape you have made. The possibilities for these mnemonic panoramas are truly endless. Hide away there when circumstances demand it.
I hope you’ll take this suggestion to heart. A dubious gift from a crackpot old man, perhaps. Remember my warning about the gobblers of time. Festina Lente, Karina. Make haste slowly.
Love,
Dad
I read this bizarre, recondite letter slowly, turning over phrases like enchanted stones, searching for what lies underneath. I cannot remember when I last received anything more than a lunch note from my father, and I am awestruck at this baroque monograph on time and memory addressed to me.
Time’s gobblers. There is something between the words. At first, it is a felt sense at the margins of my perception, a swirling of my thoughts. But as I read, it takes sensory form. All at once, at the very edges of my periphery, there is a road, on which it appears I am standing. I can hear the gentle burbling of a stream. It is nearby. I can even smell bread, fresh bread of all things, its warm maltiness wafting from an unseen vent.
I am no longer sitting at my father’s desk in front of his anachronistic typewriter. I am somewhere else. I close my eyes in a long, purgative blink, but when my vision clears once again, I am still here, or there. The narrow road is paved. Beside it is a densely treelined walkway abutting tightly packed buildings and shops. There are people here, streaming past me. Snippets of conversation, decontextualized and intriguing, come into momentary focus.
“He watched me the whole time…”
“It’s done, I’m telling you. And it wasn’t easy. God knows it wasn’t easy…”
From my vantage, I cannot see much beyond my immediate surroundings. I will my leaden feet to clomp to the nearest shop window, whose edges are opaque. Like a child, I cup my hands against the cool glass to give me a clear view of the building’s interior. A young man and woman are locked in a lustful embrace. His hand is blanched against her lower back, and she leans into him. Her long auburn hair sways with the rocking of her hips. With clumsy fingers, he reaches down to her skirt and tugs.
Embarrassed and vaguely ashamed, I look away. It is only now that I wonder where I am. It is uncanny, but I am dazzled by a familiar ambient affinity that quenches the mounting dread. It is like a dream, but without the haziness, the surreal edges. I haven’t been here before, and yet it is not unfamiliar. I edge along the narrow pavement separating the shopfronts from the walkway, eyeing both the pedestrians and the buildings.
I deliberate whether I ought to flag down one of these people, ask them where I am. In dreams, when I have done so, they sometimes give the ruse away.
With all the grace of a baby learning to walk, I lurch onto the sidewalk and flag down a couple deep in energetic, hushed conversation.
“Hello,” I say too loudly. “Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you. I seem to be lost.”
The couple stops and appraises me inquisitively. The woman is pregnant. Her silvery hair and incongruously youthful face strike me dumb. The man is bald and wiry, with a gentle but upright mien. It takes all of a few moments for my skin to go cold. My breath escapes in an audible moan, which seems to take the man by surprise.
I turn from the pretty, prematurely gray woman to the older man. His narrow wide-set green eyes twinkle above his gnomon nose.
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology
