Chapter 4: Kairos
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“Everything beckons us to perceive it, murmurs at every turn, 'Remember me!'"
—Rainer Maria Rilke, "Everything Beckons to Us"It is like looking backward in time. The sepia photographs framed on lonely walls do not capture their vitality, their strikingness and self-possession. My counterfeit mother interlaces her fingers into my counterfeit father’s slack hand.
“You’re not them,” I grunt. “They’re dead.”
They turn to face each other in apparent puzzlement. “We’re not who?” says my father’s imposter. The couple eyes me warily. Surreptitiously, the man edges forward, shielding the woman’s body with his rangy frame.
“You’re pregnant,” I say to the woman.
Her lips twist into a wry smile. “Yes,” she replies sardonically. “With a baby.”
“A baby,” I mouth. It is impossible, all of this. My skin is buzzing with the itchy disquiet of mounting dread. “Where are we?”
The man cocks his head and squints at me. “We’re on Madeline,” he says. My mother, or whoever she is, squeezes the man’s knuckles until he winces.
“You’ll have to excuse us,” he says. “We’re in a bit of a hurry.”
They glide past me with a curt nod of farewell and I watch them stroll to a broad-windowed storefront a little less than a city block down the path. The man peers up at the plain, narrow white-and-orange sign lofted askew above the doorway, evidently to make sure he’s in the right place. They share a kiss before making their way inside.
The glinting sign is at once familiar and distant, gauzy and tentative, like the oldest of memories. I edge onto the curb to get a better view, and the peeling lettering comes into bold focus: Ola Bakery and Treats.
This is one too many synchronicities. I pivot on my heels and make my way back up the street, past the shop window through which I had inadvertently ogled the young faceless man and red-haired woman meeting for a tryst. It is only then, on second thought, or second glance, that it hits me.
This is where he put them.
Not knowing what else to do, I flee the scene, away from Ola, with its retro sign I don’t quite remember, and the lurid reminder that my father had a sex life before my mother. My insensate feet struggle to find purchase on the slick pathway as I bob and weave around clusters of aimless pedestrians. Why are there so many people here? I avert my eyes from signs and houses and faces, some vaguely familiar, but most uncannily alien.
I dodge a tree erupting from the sidewalk and slalom a crowd of chatting children. Then, in front of me, I see a teenage girl toting a small pet carrier. She is willowy and awkward, with braces that she glosses with her tongue. Her gaze is downcast, but she walks carefully, as though the creature in the crate is temperamental.
She lifts the plastic box to her lips to murmur to the animal through the metal mesh gate. “It’s OK, Lucius.”
Lucius. The invocation of my dead dog’s name takes my legs out from under me. I pitch forward, nearly colliding with the girl, who pulls the carrier to her chest with an expression of startled horror on her overly-scrubbed adolescent face. A face that was once mine. I inhale sharply, bracing for impact.
But there is only a rustling. The manuscript has fallen from my hands and spread across the hardwood floor. My feet are wrapped around the tapered legs of the ancient wooden chair still somewhat askew from the desk in my parents’ office. As though transitioning to wakefulness from a particularly persuasive dream, I grasp for solidity. I tap the floor with my feet and disentangle them from the chair. Then I lean down to collect the papers, which I hastily rearrange.
My breathing slows and my wherewithal returns to me lacquered in faint dread. I must have fallen asleep. Dreams can be that vivid, of course, and unsettling. It was a mosaic of fragments, some memory, but most seemingly conjured from stories told and implied. My pregnant parents heading to Ola. An awkward teenage Karina carrying a puppy-sized pet carrier. Only in a dream could I conjure the lurid image of a rendezvous involving my father and a redhead.
And yet, I am not tired. Even if I were, I have never been one to “conk out,” as my mother used to say. Post-call, I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. My muscles turn to lead. My head fills with cotton. A malaise descends. But I do not black out while reading. And even if I did, waking is a process. One does not snap back to conscious awareness without the groggy residue of sleep crusting eyes and thought.
I heave myself up and flip through the manuscript. Unfolding. The yarn of traces time leaves. City of memory. On rereading, my father does, indeed, sound like a crackpot.
The whole manuscript is thirty pages long, divided more or less into ten crisp letters. Now, I skim them one by one. There is one for Didi and another for his oldest friend Sam, who died a year or two back. I recognize a few of the addressees from his work stories. The names of colleagues, mentors, comrades.
Adjacent to mine is a letter written to my mother, Mona. I can bring myself to read only the first, wistful paragraph:
Dear Mona,
Do you remember my first letter all those years ago? Or was it a message left on your answering machine? Anyway, I had sneaked my hat into your purse at that little coffee shop downtown so that I would have an excuse to see you again. I have been trying to remember the name of that place for two full days now, but it’s lost in the mists, I guess. You have not yet mentioned the mists, those clouds of forced forgetting, but I know that nothing gets past you. First, keys, then someone calls my name over the loudspeaker at a grocery store. And then. And then, well, then what? Darkness. Darkness descends. You know, Mona, it is only the new that fades. The mists can’t obscure the rest. It’s protected, stored somewhere safe. There is an art to remembering, you know. Do I sound like a crackpot? You always said I was. I love you.
The voyeur’s thrill is, for me, a sour kind of sorrow. I scan the rest of the letter for any other mentions of time, memory, and traces, but there are none. My inner empiricist, rusty and creaky though she is, protests loudly against a creeping thought. I am bereaved, sure, but with the anguished grace that comes with experience. I trust in my durability. Without it, life would have turned me to dust. And yet, the most parsimonious explanation is that I was there, somehow, in a vivified mnemonic structure constructed by a man who is now dead. My port of entry, my ostensible talisman, was a typewritten manuscript written years ago and left absentmindedly in a typewriter. It is preposterous, all of it, a Gordian Knot of paradoxes.
And yet. I was somewhere else for a time. The notion is queasy, almost unseemly. But if my father were to build a city of memory, it would have in it a street where he could visit Ola and, perhaps, visit his teenage daughter and her beloved dog, the erratic, bedraggled Lucius, whom we had to put down almost twenty years ago.
I am tempted to call Rhiannon and spill the proverbial beans, but I balk. She would assume I have lost my mind. If I had heard it from someone else, I probably would, too. There is no space in our modern secular folkways for the supernatural. In medicine, we make patronizing allowances for so-called magical beliefs if they fit into a patient’s cultural terrain, but otherwise it is pathology, plain and simple.
Even Rhiannon, my friend and confidante, could not reconcile my entering my father’s memory city in the weeks following his death. The mere thought of such a confession brings flashes of my rotations in psychiatry wards, the locked units and sassy nurses and occasional patient who insisted she had been admitted against her will.
A frisson of panic tickles my spine. Whatever just happened to me, I cannot share it with anyone. Paul had his thorn. Jesus his cross. I am now stooped under the weight of a very peculiar albatross, bequeathed in unwelcome patrimony from father to daughter.
Thinking about it, stewing in it, I cannot bear to be in the house, with its enchanted manuscripts, any longer, so I text Rhiannon with a bland check-in:
Karina [10:03:46]: Hey, what are you up to?
While I wait for her reply, I continue tidying mindlessly, turning over the morning’s events in my mind. I am not one for esoterica or the occult, but I know from experience that our strange world is permeated with phenomena that I cannot explain. My mother’s brother, Michael, yet another cancer casualty, could read palms. A tortuous line might augur a rupture in a relationship. A suspicious wrinkle an illness. Even as I am recounting these forecasts, my mouth is twisting with contempt. And yet, I cannot deny that he was invariably correct and with great precision.
At a birthday party nearly a decade ago, I begged him to read my palms. It took some cajoling. He was not a performer. But eventually he acquiesced to his only niece. Quietly, with wincing clarity, he murmured to me that my thirties would bring unimaginable suffering. And of course, he was right. I am an orphan before my thirty-first birthday.
Most shocking of all, over the years, Michael had a number of precognitive dreams that prophesied earthquakes and other natural disasters. Everything was there: location, time of day, intensity of event. He was unfailingly, unflaggingly credible, so much so that I was often ill at ease in his presence, like a medieval villager before a known sorcerer. How did he do these things? What tricks, what deceptions did he employ to dazzle us rubes? My mother’s hypothesis was that intuition is a way of seeing without need of eyesight. It is not just an inclination, but a sort of perceptual portal that reveals patterns in the environment that otherwise would be opaque to us. If we understood it better, we could measure it. Michael was attuned to these fields.
I believed in Michael and I didn’t. Skepticism is a cottage industry, and after each prognostication, usually filtered down to me through my mother’s stories, I would cleanse myself of the superstition by scouring the internet for catechisms of debunking, usually polemics written by old, bored scientists handily disproving charlatans using potboiler experimental templates and posting their findings on DIY websites.
But a kind of mystical conviction lingers. It is a vague impression stamped upon my perception of the world. There are things that I cannot figure out, which is not to say they are without a perfectly sensible scientific explanation.
And yet.
Rhi L [10:16:58]: shouldnt have agreed to teach clinical skills to clerks heading there now
Karina [10:17:22]: How about after?
Rhi L [10:17:44]: kk let’s go to quayside- its early so our bench should be free. 13:00? Can bring sandwiches from giuseppes
“Our bench” is perched atop a rounded hill overlooking Wharftown. I have made the downtown trek to Quayside Park for as long as I can remember, conveyed by car, bus, bicycle, and, when I was animated by a high-valence emotion (take your pick), my feet. It is a special place not because it is especially spectacular, though perhaps, to an inland tourist, it might be. It is a part of me, a stone soup of memories brewed in the crucible of the first days, when everything was still new.
Today, I walk. My legs buzz with an electric secret, and besides, I have not ventured farther than my parent’s tiny garage-cum-storage shed in days. As always, I pack a backpack with a water bottle. In the laptop pouch, I carefully slide my father’s manuscript, held together by a straining, bulging paperclip. My inner map belongs to a flaneuse twenty years younger. It brings me through the gully, down by the capillary-thin stream, across which I leap, as always, and through the bohemian, still largely undiscovered residential side streets, where the last hippie Boomers live. I pass a garage with a kaleidoscopic mural of an ecstatic ape-man holding a rainbow mushroom. Inside, someone is playing the jazz trumpet. I synchronize my steps to each staccato, brassy punctuation, my response to its calls.
For a time, nostalgia eclipses everything. I move as though I am still whole, oscillating my attention from the neighbourhoods I know, still mostly intact, and memories of past walks, the concerns of a younger woman who had lost little to the erosive breeze of time. But the present creeps into my awareness. It tiptoes through my thoughts and greys them with the sheepish admonition that I am an adult woman and should not indulge in reveries. There is also the matter of the manuscript, which I plan to show to Rhiannon, but without disclosing that while reading the letter written to me, I embarked on a hallucinogenic journey into my father’s memory city.
What if, I wonder, she, too, transports? That would mean there really is something there, in the pages, one of my father’s “traces,” perhaps. I tsk to myself for giving in to this sort of magical thinking. A trace. Left like a spell on a piece of printer paper. I swing my backpack to my front and rummage through it to find the water bottle, which I bring to my lips.
At the end of a little residential cul-de-sac is a steep grassy hill pocked with amoebic brown patches. I trudge up, avoiding the piles of dog shit left by degenerate owners, and emerge in the same tree grove as always. I sip as I walk, slowly, along the dusty, leaf-strewn little path. It opens up into a clearing, from which I can look out at the wharf and the hodgepodge of low-lying buildings that hug the docks and sea.
My bench is as I left it, battered and wooden, with oxidized iron feet that look like hooves. Rhiannon is already there.
“You’re making me look bad,” I call to her. “Why are you so punctual all of a sudden?”
She holds up a limp hand and points lazily at her head. “This one’s always on time,” she says.
I slide in next to her and she passes me a sandwich in a crinkly paper sack. “Caprese,” she says. Before I take it, I reach over her to grasp the bare shoulder emerging from her stylish sweater. It is an awkward embrace that Rhiannon receives with an arm braced against the beveled armrest.
Her sleek chestnut hair is pulled in what she calls a “low pony,” gathered neatly at the base of her neck and tumbling down her back almost to its curve. She examines me with darting, searching eyes.
“How was clinical skills?” I ask.
“A lot of work,” she replies. “Only a few of them were prepared, and we were doing abdo exams, so just imagine the shitshow.”
“It’s always a shitshow. Thanks for the sandwich, by the way.”
She shakes her head. “No, of course,” she says. “You know, in Chinese, the greeting isn’t ‘how are you,’ but ‘when did you last eat?’ Now, I know.”
I chuckle. “I’m eating,” I say. “And cleaning up the house. There’s a lot to do.”
She unwraps her sandwich just enough for a few centimetres of crust and crumb to emerge from the parchment paper. “Tarragon chicken salad,” she says. “On focaccia.”
I unzip my backpack and gather the manuscript, careful to not bend the pages. “So I found this in the typewriter in my parents’ office.” I pass it to her nonchalantly, and she props it on her lap, sandwich held off the side of the bench in case of tarragon drippings. She flips through it, lingering first on my mother’s letter and then mine. I hold my breath and avert my gaze until she speaks again.
“This is all pretty wild,” Rhiannon says. Her eyebrows are arched above almond eyes.
“Yeah?” I hazard. I tear open my sandwich and position the warm ciabatta in front of my mouth, a bulwark against treacherous twitches.
“I mean, your dad was a wonderful guy,” she says. “Such a warm man. God, the letter to your mother is heartbreaking. He knew he was changing.”
“I wanted to see what you made of it,” I say.
Her gaze lingers on my face, probing for cracks in a facade. “Well, what do you make of it?”
It is a charged question. I have asked her to meet for a social lunch, only to thrust an intimate epistolary manuscript into her unsuspecting hands. Perhaps she can sense the brittleness of my composure. I had genuinely held my breath while she scanned my father’s letter to me. Up goes the ciabatta to conceal my unpredictable face.
“All kinds of things,” I say evasively. “I feel like there’s some hidden message in his letter I’m supposed to get.”
“He wants you to become a memory champion.” She takes a small bite of her sandwich and chews. “I saw a video of one of these memory guys. They gave him a shuffled deck of cards, and he memorized its order in, like, a minute. He said he placed—that’s the word he used—placed the card numbers and suits in furniture and stuff in an imagined house. Then he just walked around in his mind and opened wardrobes and drawers and whatever to recall the numbers.”
“I’d be irresistible to women and men alike,” I reply. “I guess I could relearn the Krebs Cycle by making a city of ‘ates.’”
She sniffs in polite acknowledgement of my lame joke. “He’s right about the time eaters. Stay away from people who will chew you up and spit you out just because they were food once. My mom says you have to make a plan or else you’ll become part of someone else’s.”
She is quiet for a moment, as though weighing her next sentence. “Maybe he wanted to leave you a gift, something of himself, you know?”
“It’s something,” I murmur. “Anyway,” I continue with unintended brusqueness. “I’m becoming that friend. Always talking about myself. My problems.”
“You’re allowed,” says Rhiannon. She taps my wrist, an invitation for me to meet her gaze. “You sure you’re all right, Karina?” With her hair pulled back, I notice her little dangly earrings, which appear to be monkeys holding cymbals. She is still searching my face for clues, eyebrows raised in obvious concern for her anguished friend. I have to go.
“I’m all right,” I say and force a closed-lip smile. I pull out my phone and feign surprise. “Oh, God. I’m so scattered, Rhi. I have to meet the lawyer to hammer out a few estate things.”
She nods and takes another small bite of her sandwich. “Go for it,” she says. “Do you need a ride?”
I shake my head and heave my backpack onto my shoulder. “It’s a nice day. I’d like to walk.”
“Well, anyway, it’s been a minute since I’ve loitered in a park,” Rhiannon says. She stretches her legs across the bench. “Remember, I’m here for you.”
I leave the way I came, side-stepping down the steep grade of the patchy hill. A fizzy, itchy kind of unease animates my awkward trot along my well-trodden route. On some whimsical level, I had hoped Rhiannon would transport to my father’s memory city. Then I could be certain my psyche isn’t collapsing. It isn’t until I pass the psychedelic garage that I realize I left my half-eaten sandwich on the bench.
At the mouth of the pebble-strewn driveway of my parents’ house, I swing my backpack around to my front to rummage for the keys. I also scoop up the manuscript from the laptop pouch and trap it under my arm. Crouching slightly on the rear landing, I yank the door handle hard to align the lock mechanism and jiggle my key into the fickle keyhole.
Impelled by a belligerent curiosity, I cannot resist rifling through the manuscript once more before I go inside. I glance, just for a moment, at the letter addressed to me.
It is true that the past leans over the present, and its emissaries, memories, stretch across the great cosmic expanse like a bridge.
Something happens. I can describe it only as a subtle turning, a seamless pivot in perspective from here to there. And then, all at once, I am again somewhere else.
The smell of fresh bread is familiar, yeasty and thick in the air, and I know that I am back there, wherever there is.
In front of me are a dozen stacked baskets filled with bagels: sesame, poppy, onion, egg, even the giant bialys, a delicacy I associate with New York. Behind me, a man with a thick Brooklyn accent is giving orders.
“OK, you two. We’ve got some deliveries. Special ones. Take these boxes here.” He taps the cardboard. “One to the paper mill and the other to Mr. Sam the butcher. Now, don’t look inside, you understand? Knock on the door six times. Six. Short knocks. Like this.” He taps the counter like a woodpecker. “Got it?”
I turn slowly, and the man, pudgy and ruddy-faced in a floured smock, glances at me for just a moment. Standing in front of the counter are two school-age children, a boy and a girl, with curly black hair and narrow, wide-set green eyes.
The boy gingerly takes a box off the counter. “Six knocks,” he repeats.
“Don’t open it,” the man says sternly. “Tell the fella at the door that pigeons clean up the scraps. Got that? Pigeons clean up the scraps.”
The little girl looks like a mirror image of the boy, but a few years younger. Her corkscrew curls are held at bay by a headband that seems to be adrift on a sea of hair. She reaches up to grab the other box.
“Same for you,” the man says. He oscillates his gaze between the two children and then pats each of their heads. “You’re good kids. Come back and see ol’ Shecky, got it? When you’re done. A quarter for each of you.”
The boy and girl gather their packages and shuffle toward the door. Curious, I decide to follow them. I count to three before I push my way through the flimsy mesh shop door and onto the sidewalk, which pulses with women in A-line skirts and dresses and clean-shaven men in Cary Grant hats. Even on my tiptoes, I cannot see the street beyond the sidewalk, but I imagine it is full of Packards and Studebakers. I wouldn’t know, of course, but those are the only defunct mid-Century American car makes I can remember. I am an unlikely tourist in the late 1940s.
The two children are talking quietly beneath the yellow awning. Their clothes are overlarge, an invitation to grow faster. Her floral dress is faded, but obviously pressed. His shirt and slacks look to me to be a three-day-a-week outfit. Nonchalantly, I linger a few feet away. Like a sailor’s wife at a homecoming, I use my hand as a visor and pretend to peer out at the crowd, looking for my man.
“I know you can do it,” the boy says. “Just knock on the door six times and say ‘pigeons clean up the scraps.’ We’ll meet back here. It will be quick. That’s fifty whole cents, Deed!”
The girl’s bottom lip juts out. “It’s scary.”
“Yeah, yeah, but it’s real easy,” the boy says. “I’ve done it a million times for Shecky. He’s good for the quarter.”
The girl sighs. Her tormented little face is a caricature of indecision. “But I told Mom—"
“Don’t tell her,” the boy warns.
“I did!” the girl hisses. “I told her we were going to Shecky’s”
The boy massages his temples in exasperation. “Oh, boy. We’re going to get it. Look, are you going to take the box or what?”
She looks like she’s going to cry. “What, you want to do it together?” the boy asks.
The little girl’s pout flips into an open-mouthed grin. “Yeah!”
“Hand it over,” says the boy. His nose twitches. “And don’t say I never do anything for you.”
With a box under each arm, the boy begins to trudge away from the shop. The little girl hurries after him. She bats at his arm like a kitten, and he maneuvers the box to allow her to thread her hand through.
The weight of the boxes tilts the boy on his axis, but he and his sister plod along stolidly. Soon, the two children are out of sight. I consider pursuing, but I know this story, this memory. My father told me about the errands he ran for a low-level mobster in Sheepshead Bay, where he lived for most of his childhood. He never did have the courage to look inside those boxes.
I turn away from the bakery and meander down a narrow backstreet, strewn with raw garbage and darkened by the shadows cast by fire escapes. With dainty steps, I avoid eggshells and excrement from an unknown source, hugging the endless wall of brick. Every door I pass is locked, with a corroded deadbolt crusted with those mysterious urban barnacles of decay.
I hear the men before I see them. The first voice is harsh and nasal, like a sports buzzer.
“Nice and easy. You don’t want me to break that kike nose of yours.”
The second voice is smooth and baritone, tremulous with quiet fear. I recognize it instantly.
“I don’t have any money. Honest. What do you want me to do? My shoes are new. You can have those.”
My skin begins to buzz with a galvanizing, desperate energy. Like a sound-seeking missile, I careen down the narrow alleyway in pursuit of that voice, clearer and more boyish than I remember, but unmistakable. My flats thwack against the asphalt, sloshing through God knows what. The tip of one of my soles catches on a cresting lip of asphalt, and I tumble, hard, onto a mercifully dry patch of ground. For a moment, my vision segments, but I remain in this other place, panting and discombobulated. I heave myself up and barrel forward.
They come into view as a dyad, an assailant and a victim, tangled against a wall. The mugger has brass knuckles, which glint against the collar of his mark, a small, rangy man with a dark pompadour. His gnomon nose twitches nervously beneath his narrow, wide-set eyes.
“You better cough up some coins,” says the mugger. “I’ll take the shoes, too. But you can either hand ‘em to me with some money in them or I’ll get ‘em off your carcass.”
From somewhere deep in my chest, where righteous anger tends to pool, my mother rises up inside me, a juggernaut.
“Hey,” I shout, and lunge toward the men, who both wheel toward me. The assailant’s pocked face twists into a disgusting grin.
“You brought me a present. A little princess of my own.”
Like a linebacker bereft of impulse control, I hurl myself at the man. I jam my foot in his groin, and he folds in half with a hollow bellow. Then I grasp his lank hair in both of my fists and wrench his head into the brick wall with a fleshy smack. His knees buckle, but just for a moment. I turn toward my father as a young man. His umber face is open, like a canvas. He gestures toward me with stiff fingers, and I am yanked backward by my collar.
A hand closes around my throat, and I am on the ground, staring up at the assailant, whose sneer has morphed into a mask of rage. My breath catches. Darkness descends. The last thing I remember is pressure, so much pressure, threatening to jettison my brain through my ear canals.
And then all at once, there is sun in my eyes. I am lying supine on the rear landing of my parents’ house. My backpack sags onto the cracked cement like a drooping pannus. I push myself to my feet, suddenly self-conscious, and search franticly for the manuscript, whose pages are fanned out on the bristly doormat.
I gather them in trembling hands and make my way inside the house, where I gently lower myself onto the sagging couch in the living room.
“Lesson learned,” I say aloud.
In the days that follow, I leave the paper-clipped manuscript stacked on the desk in my parents’ office. I am now certain that it is enchanted. The cognitive dissonance of this superstition gnaws at me. But how am I to make sense of my journeys to the other place, where my father’s memories seem to have taken on a life of their own? There, sensory experience was intact. Fresh bread was redolent. Sound was textured and varied. I could see everything around me in vivid panorama. Most jarring, I felt pain. Real pain, not the slippery, surreal discomfort of dreams, in which a canny observer might notice she can breathe underwater and survive a beheading.
I was there, in my father’s memories. I was really there. I was there until I wasn’t anymore.
On this latest excursion, I learned something astonishing about this place. My presence could alter the course of a memory as it unfolded, but only if I insinuated myself in its rehearsal. Outside Shecky’s bakery, I played the spectator. I spied on the childhood versions of my father and Aunt Didi like a ghost. I did not intercede, and no one noticed me. Presumably, little Perry and Didi completed their errands for the crooked Shecky and earned a quarter each. Like the anecdote my father liked to recount, the memory was neat and tidy, with a beginning, middle, and end.
But I was no mere bystander at the site of my father’s mugging. Ostensibly, had I not interceded, the memory would have unspooled quite differently. I wouldn’t know, of course, since my father never shared with me any story about a violent encounter in a back alley in Brooklyn. In any case, my interference in that particular iteration of events did not derail the memory, short-circuit it, but instead changed its progression. I attacked the thug, and he responded in kind.
A question remains, as yet unanswered. After the goon finished with me, what fate did my father meet there in that other place? I wonder if that is a moot question. I was not supposed to be there, in that set-piece of memory, and perhaps the sequence simply reset. All the players moved back to their positions, and the scene commenced anew. Or maybe my presence left some sort of residue in that world of memory, an indelible change, a cascading butterfly effect. I could never really know. As a happening, the mugging had transpired in another time, perhaps in the same place, and I never will be privy to the true narrative of this furtive memory. It was concealed from me with the mercy, or perhaps shame, that makes the darkest of secrets inviolate. It is a secret I did not know until today.
And now, I have a secret of my own.
On a misty Thursday morning, the estate lawyer, Barry, calls me bright and early. He is an older man, a friend of a friend of my father’s, and he kindly omits our biweekly phone calls from his fee ledger. He tells me that the astronomical cost of my mother’s chemotherapy had forced my parents to borrow against the equity of the house to cover the mounting bills. The house they bought for the cost of a 21st century truck in 1980 appreciated by an order of magnitude in the ensuing forty years, but none of that lucre remains. Barry’s augury is that I will recoup “roundabout none” of the equity that had sedimented, at least theoretically, in the house.
This is not quite accurate. Truth be told, in the course of the sale, I stand to make “somewhere in the mid-five-figures.” Barry is surprised by my elation at this news, but the sum quoted, a pittance to the old lawyer, would defray about half of my student loans, a flying leap toward emancipation from the yoke of debt.
To provide a small savings buffer, I decide to sell my dad’s little brown Morris. Unlike the furniture, which I likely will end up stashing in an indoor storage locker for the next decade, the car arouses no sentimental guilt. In parking lots over the years, overeager collectors would approach my father with thinly veiled lust and excited offers of cash. To the sixty-something antique car enthusiast with too much money on his hands, it was quite the coveted prize. My father would pause as though considering their unsolicited bids only to demur with smug politesse. His lined umber face would break into a sly grin, which he would wear all the way home.
I could use a vehicle, but not this one. The upkeep was always a source of tension between my parents. My mother, a seasoned skinflint, thought the old junker the height of indulgence. Anachronisms are expensive, and she likened my father’s “pet” to an antique radio that ate money.
I post on the online marketplace Rialto, and my first bite comes within minutes. The buyer, groovycardude1941, would like to “inspect the item” tomorrow. This gives me impetus to fill the Morris with gas and run it through an automatic carwash. From a sign pasted on the window of the squat, cuboid carwash office, I learn a full detail would cost nearly two hundred dollars, so I return to my parents’ pebbly, grass-tufted driveway and endeavour to clean the interior myself with a handheld vacuum, spray bottle full of vinegar water, and rag.
Barefoot, I somersault around the cabin, suctioning crumbs out of the leather and polishing what ought to shine. The bucket seats creak menacingly as I wipe down the once-lustrous burgundy dash. From the glovebox, which opens like a mailbox, a cascade of stiff tissues spills onto the floor like mounds of mouldy marshmallow fluff. With a mix of anger and muted disgust, I toss them into the repurposed grocery sack I’ve brought for garbage. When I return to wipe the interior of the glove compartment, I find my father’s cracked leather wallet and heavy silver pocket watch wedged into its beveled rear corner.
In the days leading up to the funeral, I had wondered, vaguely, about these accoutrements, which my father always wore on his person. Perhaps, I thought superstitiously, he would want to be buried with the paraphernalia of living. Or maybe I wanted them. My grandmother had told me once, when I was a child, that she collected the wallet contents of all her deceased relatives, mementos, she thought, of a workaday existence.
I flip open the wallet, and my father’s crinkled umber face stares back at me from the drivers license just barely sheathed in its torn plastic sleeve. The pocket watch is caught on a metal seam, so I have to gently edge it out of the compartment. It is stout and dull, smudged from lack of polishing. I push the crown latch to reveal the clock’s face. Its gentle, rhythmic ticking is silent, but I sense a change in the aura of the cabin, a thinning, maybe, of the atmosphere. All at once, there is a turning.
It happens in a dilated moment. In one instant, I am in my father’s old Morris. In the next, I am somewhere else once again. The air is fetid here, thick with the smell of mouldy bread, and the sky above is dim. My eyes adjust to the twilight, whose last rays illuminate a small, concrete alcove lined with enormous metal garbage bins and a ramshackle, splintered wooden shed with its door angled crookedly on its hinges. There is a shout, and instinctively, I duck behind the shed, careful to avoid a puddle of semi-fresh vomit, fluorescent under the glare of an overhead streetlight.
“Don’t fucking move,” says a voice, harsh and nasal, like a sports buzzer. “Nice and easy. You don’t want me to break that kike nose of yours.”
I peek around the corner and quail with a shudder of deja vu. The mugger’s pocked face seems frozen in a snarl. In one hand, he is clutching a long knife with a curved tip. The other hand is outstretched, buried in the fabric of another man’s jacket. That man is slight and balding. His narrow, wide-set eyes betray unvarnished fear.
“I don’t have any money. Honest. I just came out to take out my trash.”
The mugger shoves the smaller man hard. His body thuds against the thick metal of the bin.
“You got some nice shoes.”
“You can have them,” the rangy man says quickly.
“You better cough up some coins,” says the mugger. “I’ll take the shoes, too. But they better be stuffed with money or I’ll get ‘em off your carcass.”
Almost as a reply to this challenge, there is a shuffling of footsteps at the entrance. Another person enters the small rectangular space. She has a narrow form and wild curly hair. I cannot see her hands.
“Hey!” she shouts. The assailant turns just enough to glance behind him. His pocked face twists into a disgusting grin.
“You brought me a present. A little princess of my own.”
“Perry, are you all right?” the woman asks softly.
My father hisses and flaps his free hand frenziedly. “Run! Get out of here!”
My mother lowers her head, grey curls buoyant above her glowering visage. I am nearly paralyzed with terror, trembling electric.
“Run!” my father bellows.
The mugger’s grip on the knife slackens for just a moment. With an awkward upward thrust of his knee, my father seizes the opportunity. He knocks the curved knife out of the assailant’s hand and under a garbage bin. And then my mother is upon him. She has something in her hands, something glinting, which she brings down with clanging force into the mugger’s face. My father clings to the man in a sort of bear hug.
My palms are slick with sweat. I remind myself this could not be how it ends, how they end. They made it out of this fracas alive and I was conceived, away from here, wherever here is, far from the apartment complex presumably looming just beyond this concrete garbage cage. I weigh whether to hurl myself into the melee or flee like a coward. For just a moment, I am tempted to reach my narrow arm under the garbage bin to retrieve the knife.
Above the concrete alcove, the crooked streetlight spills light unevenly across the space. The mugger strikes my mother across the face with a closed fist, but she is like a lion. My parents, the world’s unlikeliest combatants, are fighting for their lives.
I cannot bear to spectate any longer. I do not want to know how it ends, this memory that was never transliterated into the language of story.
I edge past the vomit puddle and use the textured paint on the concrete wall to lead me to the doorway. I glance back, just for a moment, to see my father rising from the ground. His collar is stretched into a loop. My mother is on her feet, leaning over the prone mugger.
I do not wait to see what happens next. I bolt from the pen and find myself in a dim outdoor parking lot, an amoebic expanse of scattered station wagons. Above me is a dilapidated white brick walk-up apartment building. On one of the balconies rimmed with oxidized, peeling railings, a middle-aged woman sits in a deck chair, observing the scene and smoking a cigarette. She eyes me impassively.
“Call the fucking police!” I shout up at her.
Then I start running again, out of the parking lot, up a side street. I remember from my last visit to this other place that only a drastic insult to my body had brought me back to the mundane and solid, a hand wrapped around my neck.
Ahead, I spot a busy street humming with cars. If I slow down, I know I will lose my nerve, so I force myself to accelerate. My feet sting as my flats slap against the sidewalk. The pulsing light of passing cars marks my target like a lighthouse beacon. I leap from the curb and into oncoming traffic. Bon voyage, I think as a little brown hatchback slams into my ribcage.
And then I am back, pooled in the passenger seat of my father’s Morris, sweaty and panicked. With trembling fingers, I push open the door and heave my buzzing body onto a patch of blighted brown grass that conceals a carpet of pebble shards that tears at my shins and knees. I scramble to my feet and edge back to the car. The wallet and pocket watch are both open on the passenger seat. I fling open the door, turn my face away, and grope for the talismans. I pinch closed the pocket watch and toss it and the tattered leather wallet in the garbage bag, which I bring back into the house.
My legs feel like jelly. I deposit the cursed accessories on the manuscript, still swollen beneath a warped paperclip, and cover the pile with a dishtowel.
I pitch myself onto the bowed couch and collide painfully with the wooden frame beneath. I close my eyes and force my breathing to follow a new cadence. Three seconds in, three seconds out. Oxygen has a calming effect on the body. Soon, my pulse begins to quiet. I can think again.
Why? The how seems less urgent. The what a foregone conclusion, or so I believe. But why is this happening to me? Why in the hell am I perpetually hurtling into memories that belonged, or I suppose still belong, to my late father?
The question is a gateway to absurdity. I have always thought of myself as a rational creature, an information-seeker, but these occult journeys have shaken me, left me groundless and alone. All I know is that something is happening. When I physically touch certain items associated with my father, a manuscript or a pocket watch, I find myself catapulted into what appear to be his memories. There is, I suppose, a parsimonious explanation for why particular objects act as conduits. Both the manuscript and pocket watch are pregnant with memory. The watch was an inheritance from childhood. The letters are his last communiques with the world beyond his fast-dimming awareness. They are both invested with my father’s essence. He is in them, in some mystical way. They are still, even in death, a part of him.
It is memorial thread, the yarn of traces time leaves in our neural architecture, that knits our selves together.
I remember this phrase from the letter, at which I dare not glance again. Maybe I am brushing the ends of memorial yarn left behind, woven into traces inscribed in the unlikeliest of fetish objects. Like some sort of postmodern Ariadne, I am bound to my father by threads of recollection in which I am getting tangled. The past is indeed leaning over the present, and its weight is now crushing me.
I have to get away from this house and my father’s anamnestic portals to yesteryear. I pull on some outdoor clothes and gather my purse. For a moment, I kneel on the couch, deliberating where to flee. My instinct is to retreat to the affinity of Alfalfa, but I have a premonition that it, too, might contain a trace, a fragment of memory embedded in the Emma Goldman poster, or worse, in the diner itself. No, I will go to a place my father did not know, a place to which he never ventured, never even considered venturing. A place that would repel the Perry Bergsons of the world. Someplace loud and bustling, with indie music blaring. Painfully hip. Badly lighted.
Ambling & Shambles is too mellow, with its ovoid chairs hanging from ceiling chains and keyboard patter ambiance. I took him for coffee there once, and he was enamoured of the single-origin Aeropress he sipped cocooned in one of the swaying egg-shaped chairs. I remember a place Rhiannon had mentioned, a trendy new downtown restaurant that serves only dumplings and bao. I pull out my phone to search: “bao bonneville downtown” and the first hit is Bao to Me Baby! That must be it. Right beside Chatter Marx, an independent candle supply and leftist bookstore. It would be easier to drive, but I fear that the little brown Morris, too, is a trace. So I take the bus instead.
The restaurant is so narrow as to be almost a corridor, with a single cramped row of tightly-packed tables tucked along an exposed brick wall. Now at the tail end of the lunch rush, seating is available. The host deposits me near the only window and brings me a mason jar of tepid tap water, which I clutch in my clammy hands. The menu is projected onto the tabletop from a device embedded in the ceiling. Its borders appear frosted in the bright, clamorous restaurant. A server’s rear bumps my elbow, and so I edge my chair nearer the window and twist my body so that my back is nearly flush with the surface.
The frenetic energy is galvanizing. It fills my sensorium so completely that I cannot brood. I turn to the menu and scan quickly, eliminating the pork bellies and short ribs and bone marrows that seem to constitute most of the fillings. I settle on the “cubaono vegetariano,” which promises homemade seitan. One of the servers, a statuesque woman with a long ponytail topknot, whisks over to take my order with a curt nod.
I turn to peer out the street-facing window, to people-watch as I wait for my food, and I feel a hand on my shoulder. Now, tucked into the corner with me is a woman, looming. She is stout, with big hips and broad shoulders, but her features are small and delicately organized.
“Karina,” she says. “It’s so nice to see you again.”
I gape at her for a moment, trying to place her. But I do not recognize the face. She seats herself across from me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t—I don’t know if we’ve met.”
She smiles easily. “It’s been a few years. Amazing how time does fly.”
I study her now. Her thin, strawberry blonde hair hangs stiff and plaited just below her ears. It is almost diaphanous in the bright bistro light. Her face is round and milky, with a snub nose and pale pink lips. She is like a fellow passenger one might encounter on a bus, a casualty of selective inattention. Her surety brings a frisson of dread.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I say.
“I just got a haircut,” she says and pantomimes scissors snipping. “When we were at Palisades—jeez, when was that, 2017?—it was long-ish. I kept it that way throughout my chaplain training.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I say. “I’m drawing a blank.”
The woman sputters, clearly bemused. “It’s Min. Shared care,” she says. “We had a young patient, a woman about your age who was dying of liver failure. I remember the first thing you said to me. ‘She’s so jaundiced, I could almost see her in the dark.’ What a shock for both of us, a young person who should have had so much life left.”
A chill runs up my back. I do, indeed, remember this patient. She was the first I met on my rotation, a moribund woman in her late twenties who came to hospital in fulminant hepatic failure. Years of heavy drinking, her only escape from domestic violence, had left her liver fibrotic and wounded. In the somber little hospital room in which I knew she would die, I held the space, a novice Atlas shouldering a receding horizon. My first thought was a crass one, I remember. This woman’s skin and eyes were such a saturated yellow that she almost glowed in the dark. It was one of those forbidden musings, equal parts puerile and protective, to which I would never give voice. All at once, my tongue withers.
The woman leans forward and continues. “What a tragedy. Such a young woman. If she were alive today, you two would be the same age.”
I swivel slowly to examine my surrounds. The restaurant is still bustling in these liminal hours between lunch and dinner. Behind the bar counter, a bartender with a blonde bun and patchy beard shakes a cocktail with an extravagant hip thrust. Has there been a turning? Surely, it is impossible, here, in this ultra-hip bao bistro whose very existence would have stretched the boundaries of my late father’s credulity.
“Are you just trying to scare me?” I say. “I’m going to leave.”
The server whisks over to the table with my bao. It is served open-face, with the fluffy white steamed bread split into fat disks.
“Do you know what you’d like?” she asks Min.
“Tongue,” she replies. “Thank you.”
The statuesque woman nods and pivots on her heel. She and another server, a svelte man, pirouette past each other.
Min reaches across the table to clutch my trembling hand. It seems my words have finally penetrated. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Karina.”
I yank my hand away and promptly sit on it. The woman’s eyebrows knit in apparent indignation. “I saw you sitting here, and I thought you might want company,” she says. “I have to admit, I expected you to greet me a bit differently, what with our shared history.”
I eye her sidelong, a tacit challenge for her to break. She folds her arms and sniffs. The corners of her thin pink lips sag with mounting affront. She is genuinely outraged. But my doleful encounters with the jaundiced young patient, McKenna, were almost painfully quiet, bereft of the buffer other souls provide. She had two children and a restraining order against her savage husband. In my recollection, she never had any visitors at all in her dim room, even in the evening, when working people tended to drop by with greasy paper sacks full of gyros and fries from the Greek restaurant downstairs. We were always alone, alone together, trying jointly to reconcile how a woman in the last years of her second decade could be dying of liver failure, forestalled and stultified, holding out hope for a transplant I suspect we both knew would never come.
She was not there, this deranged woman sitting across from me. I have not scrubbed her from my memory, this cipher, or worse, charlatan. Like children intent on winning a staring contest, we glower at each other across the table. In her mortified expression, her thin pouting lips, I sense, or I think I sense, that my rebuke stings. She seems genuinely hurt. Incongruous and ridiculous as this is, this woman who calls herself Min believes we are old colleagues. So how do I get out of this? Do I throw some cash on the table and run for my life?
I could, I suppose, play along, feign familiarity, and then, when the timing is right, find a way to ghost maniac Min. It is a decidedly cinematic ploy, gleaned from cartoons and sitcoms, and my stomach churns at the thought of it. But it is the only trapdoor that comes to mind. I turn my wince inward and take a deep breath.
“Min, you’ll have to forgive me,” I say. “It’s been a difficult few weeks. My father has passed.”
I pause to give her a chance to respond. Astonishingly, she buys my ruse, cheap and ludicrous as it is. Eyebrows rise into thin arcs. Mouth forms a slack O. She is a parody of benevolence.
“Oh, Karina,” she exclaims. “I am so sorry. Please, don’t apologize. Death leaves us so, so—it leaves us discombobulated. And you have known so much death in the past few years.”
I shudder at this oblique reference to my mother. In spite of myself, I am frightened by her seeming omniscience, which is particularly baleful couched in earnest folksiness. I keep my hands in my lap to conceal their trembling.
“These days, my brain’s a jumble,” I say.
“And all alone in that house.”
I say nothing, both out of abject terror at this woman’s knowing and a half-formed conviction, learned from teenage television dramas, that it would appear more credible if I just nodded and looked at my plate. She seems to accept my feint. Her food comes, a tongue kalbi bao.
“Well, shall we eat?” she asks.
My vegan bao is now somewhat limp and soggy, a melange of cold sponge and lemongrass. In between polite bites, Min impels our conversation with anodyne bits of small talk.
“I’m married now,” she says. “We had our wedding in the Cathedral of St. Anthony. It was a beautiful ceremony.”
I offer nonspecific words of approbation. “Wow,” I say. “Good. Happy to hear.”
There is a part of me that expects a revelation to erupt during the course of our conversation, but it steadily becomes more insipid. It is the kind of encounter one might have with a distant cousin at a family reunion. I play the role of patient interlocutor, nodding and smiling. In time, the server whisks over to check on us.
“Together or separate?” she asks.
“Together,” I say quickly. I turn to Min. “A small wedding present.”
She is effusively gracious. In my role of old pal, this gesture is pro forma, or at least that is what I tell myself. As far as I can tell, she is truly a rube, unaware of the charade in which I myself am an unwilling participant. She plops her tote on the table and continues to chatter.
“You didn’t have to do this, Karina. It’s oh so generous. But that was always like you. You’re just so giving.”
Her voice drones on in a treble hum, which I punctuate with the occasional nod. I study her, searching for cracks in the lineaments of her round face. She is not masterful pretender, I decide, but a callow dork, blissfully numb to subtext. I gather my purse and she swings her tote over her shoulder.
“Well, Karina,” she says. “What a wonderful surprise to see you.”
I nod. “Take care.”
I make no mention of the future. We do not whip out our phones and swap numbers or QuidNunc names. I simply make my way out the door as casually as I can, and, with a quick glance behind me to ensure she is out of view, I steal into Chatter Marx, the leftist bookstore-cum-candle shop and make my way into the dense bank of bookcases flanked by teetering stacks of surplus paperbacks piled high into slipshod columns. It is only once I am there, with my nose deep in the spine of Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom, that I realize I never asked Min why she had sought a very late lunch alone at Bao to Me Baby!
An older man with a bushy moustache calls to me from the other end of the bookcase.
“Hello there,” he says. “Anything I can help you find?”
I shake my head. “No, just browsing.”
He leaves me with my thoughts and the fusty, warn pages of a used anarchist classic, which provide a tableau for frenetic appraisal. How was it that we crossed paths, anyway? She could have been anyone, a patient from the clinic, a neighbour, a friend’s aunt. Her nondescriptness, which would have made memory of her face slippery before, is unsettling in its elusiveness. She is every nurse with whom I have worked, every featureless bus passenger I sidle past on my commutes. She had been quite insistent that she was a chaplain-in-training at Palisades Hospital, where I had, indeed, finished my palliative care rotation nearly eighteen months ago. It is also, of course, where my father was rushed after his fall.
Memory is so fungible, I am learning. Its dense matrix of associations has an almost quantum character. Even in my father’s memory city, his own reminiscences could jumble, tangled, maybe, in their endless recapitulations. Surely, he was not mugged in two adjacent occurrences separated by thirty years. Which was true, I could not know, of course, but the glitch itself is telling. Perhaps Min, too, is a glitch. A glitch of my memory, maybe, a bland face in a grocery store superimposed onto my life.
I wonder if Rhiannon might be able to ask around about this woman. I decide to couch my snooping in absentminded curiosity, the mists of my own forgetfulness.
Karina [15:55:38]: Hi. Quick question for you. No hurry, but next time you’re at Palisades, can you find out the last name of a chaplain? We had met years ago when I was on palliative. Saw her today on the street. Her name’s Min, but I can’t for the life of me remember her last name. Small thing, but kinda embarrassing.
I wait there in stacks for some time, lazily, aimlessly browsing books I could actually read now, during my bereavement leave, which has slowed the martial procession of time to the pace of a brisk walk. On a whim, I pick up a yellowed paperback copy of Ursula LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven, and pay at the front. The moustachioed older man smiles as he rings me up.
“My hero,” he says.
I linger in the doorway of Chatter Marx, peering up and down the street in the flecked glass of the arc light before venturing out into the muted warmth of the late afternoon.
The bus is crowded in the early minutes of rush hour, packed tight with blank faces and weary bodies. I scan each in turn, logging, as it were, the lineaments of their grimaces and glowers. A phalanx of teens bursts into the bus cabin in a flurry of loose, overlong limbs and frenetic upspeak. Out of instinct, or practice, they chitchat quietly, huddled into a cluster, gawking at something, probably a screen, and gasping approvingly every now and then.
I make my way to my parents’ house along a serpentine route, wending through side streets, pivoting on my heels to survey my surroundings. I have the sense that I am being watched, but the streets are empty, as usual, except for the reluctant cavalcade of eager dogs and harried owners.
The house is empty, too, of course. I scoop my father’s pocket watch and wallet out of the garbage sack and slide them underneath the dishtowel on top of the manuscript, still straining against the enfeebled paperclip. I hold my breath and brace myself for a turning, a transportation to the other place, but I am spared further excitement.
Mindful of the exposed frame, I gingerly lower myself onto the bowed couch. In my parents’ living room, unchanged since my childhood, I am aware, as though for the first time, of a mellow ambient hum. In the still space, I can pick out each of the notes of its bombinating tritone, an insect symphony in a terrible concert hall. Perhaps if I listen intently in my small apartment, where every outlet is occupied, this electric buzz will swell into a mosquitoid chorale.
A strident vibration spreads across my outer thigh. I fish my phone out of my pocket and find a glimmering QuidNunc dispatch filling the screen.
Rhi L [17:46:12]: asked duncan the R5 on at pali tonight to check. Chaplains rotate. No one named min. U sure u got the name right?
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology
