Welcome back to Only by the Grace of the Wind, a slightly surreal novel presented in twelve serial chapter instalments released every Monday morning.
In an effort to expand my readership, this chapter will remain free to read. Please don’t forget to like, comment, and share!
Feeling lost? You can get your bearings by visiting the Table of Contents
From my apartment, it is a nearly one-hour walk to Honeycomb Market, a bustling, gargantuan outdoor bazaar that pulsates and throbs like an organism. The narrow streets are teeming with pedestrians, rollerbladers, skateboarders, and cyclists, who slalom child chalk artists and street-spanning clusters of leashed dogs. Shops and restaurants bunch up along the narrow sidewalks like folded fabric. Cryptic, psychedelic, and iconoclastic murals span chipped concrete walls and restaurant facades. On the front window of the Dastardly Dragonfruit produce co-op, a panorama of an ecstatic woman in Victorian garb arches her neck toward the moon, which gleams like a pearl in the cobalt sky. She is floating, it seems, buoyed by the words, “I accept the universe!”
Even in the dead of winter, loafers and customers congregate outside the restaurants and shops in amoebic clusters packed onto meagre patios, chatting and smoking rolled cigarettes, most of which, if my nose is to be trusted, are spliffs. Rhiannon insists that there is nothing one cannot obtain somewhere, from someone, in the microcosm of the Honeycomb Market, which is deceptively large and craggy, with much-rumoured clandestine pockets. No cars clog the cracked cobblestone promenades, so street performers stage fringe plays, flash mob concerts, and acts of derring-do amid the throngs of shoppers and tourists. Purse snatching is something of a pastime here, so I wrap mine around my torso like a harness.
On my way down Heatherington Street, past the Rasta Disasta, I hear what sounds like a crowd whooping and chanting. I peer down a brightly lighted, graffitied alleyway to see a pop-up professional wrestling ring with two bruising, burly men tussling before a swelling, shouting crowd of delirious hipsters. I am tempted to stay to watch the spectacle, but my compulsive punctuality dissuades me. There is something electric here, however, a tug, surprising though it is. I make a mental note to suggest to Ben that we wander over after dinner.
I meet Ben outside The Graceful Phoenix, an oblong corner restaurant that looks as though it was dropped from a great height. Its neighbour restaurants share two of its four walls, which appear to bow under the weight of an unseen burden. Ben is standing underneath its dented yellow awning with his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. When he sees me, he waves with two fingers.
“Hey, Karina,” he calls. “Right on time.”
I bow at the hips to hug him so that I don’t fall into an awkward embrace. We wade through the crowd of toe-tappers and gabbers clogging the foyer and into the restaurant. The host, an elderly woman with a tight perm, smiles at Ben’s approach. “Reservation?”
“Yep, six-thirty,” he says. “Ben Trovato. Tee arr oh vee ay tee oh.”
She motions for us to follow her to a small two-top table just a few feet from the women’s washroom, whose door she yanks shut before seating us.
“Booth or chair?” Ben asks.
“Booth.”
I slide onto the vinyl cushion and Ben scoots his chair nearly to the metal lip of the table. The host wipes the menus with a checkered cloth before handing them to us.
“Ever been here?” Ben asks.
“No, but I’ve wanted to for a while,” I say. “I try to not eat meat, so everyone always suggests the Graceful Phoenix.”
He taps the laminated menu emphatically. “It’s the best. All vegan. All made fresh. And if you’re game, I have a few suggestions.”
“Go for it,” I say.
“Fake meat. Duck, lamb, shrimp. They have everything. And it’s uncannily close to the real thing.”
I lean back against the understuffed pad and shrug. “All of it,” I say. “Everything you said. I’m hungry.”
He releases the menu, which swishes once before sticking to the tabletop. “OK, let’s do it,” he says, eyes squinted. “We’ll get a smorgasbord, a little of everything.”
Our server, a smiling young man with a resonant bass voice, takes our drink orders. We share a pot of oolong and ask for two cups of tap water, which come within a minute of his departure.
“So,” Ben says. “How are you? The doctor life is always crazy, I imagine.”
“Pretty status quo,” I say. “But then again, coming back is always hard. You lose your momentum.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you had been gone.”
“Ah, well, it’s, um, been a sad month,” I say. “My dad had an accident. It was a bad fall, and he was an older man. And he—.” I pause. “You can probably guess.”
“I’m so sorry, Karina,” Ben says. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, thanks, Ben,” I say numbly. “I had a month off to organize his estate, which isn’t much, and figure myself out.”
“Was your mom able to help you? I can imagine she was beyond devastated.”
I smile without humour. It is a question I could have telegraphed.
“Mom’s dead, too,” I say, trying to cloak my bareness with a breezy tone that probably comes off as unseemly. “I’m a true-blue orphan.”
“I can’t imagine,” he says quietly. He reaches across the table to flip my little white teacup and pours oolong with a steady hand. “I don’t want to pressure you to talk about it.”
I can see his earnestness, and I want to meet it halfway, but what emerges is a sort of wooden bromide. “I just kind of take it day by day,” I say. “Being busy helps.”
“Well, you certainly are busy.”
“Clinic is better than hospital,” I say, taking the opportunity to change the subject. “There are no twenty-six-hour shifts.”
His eyes widen. “Twenty-six? Like, one day and two hours?”
“Yep. The legacy of a nineteenth-century coke addict who believed doctors should live in the hospital while training. Now, hospitals can’t function without its army of trainee doctors.”
“Sounds brutal. Why do you do it?”
I fix him with a grin that I know is a shade too wry for comfort. “Are you asking if I’m in it for the Benjamins?”
He starts mid-sip and coughs into his tea mug. “No,” he says with a laugh. “I think I was reaching for something like, ‘I want to help people.’”
“That, too,” I say. “At least, I did. Medicine was one of the only vocations I could think of where I could truly do good. I wouldn’t have to sell anything, or make money for rich people, or otherwise compromise my commitments. That’s what I thought. Strip away the status, and it’s trench work, a trade, and yeah, I did want to help people.”
“Sounds pretty noble,” Ben says. “And now what do you think?”
“Now, it’s complicated,” I say. “But isn’t that the natural course of things? Idealism gives way to jadedness.”
“I mean, I’m ready to riot,” says Ben. “But for me, and I know this is naive, I thought academia would be a place to hide, you know, where I could read and write and, I don’t know, think usefully.” He grins slyly. “You know what I tell my students? History is medicine for social illness.”
“Sounds like snake oil to me,” I tease. “Dr. Trovato’s miracle history cure.”
He extends his index finger and winks exaggeratedly. “And it, too, could be yours, for five easy payments of—.” He pauses and screws up his face. “God, you know what, I’m not sure how much a semester of undergrad tuition is these days. A lot more than I paid.”
Our server approaches the table and glances at us each in turn. “Have you made a decision?”
I gesture to Ben, who, as promised, orders a smorgasbord of noodles, mock meats, and vegetables. “I hope you’re hungry,” he says.
While he recites his litany, I scan the menu and tabulate a rough estimate of total costs, which I then divide by two. Ben smacks the table with his palm.
“So excited,” he says. “I love this place.”
“Yeah, I’m excited, too,” I say. “And for axe throwing later on.”
“I’ve never been. Sounds like a backwoods betting game that city slicker hipsters have appropriated as entertainment.”
I laugh. “Rhiannon is always up on the trends.”
“Another doc?”
“She’s an anesthesiology resident. We met in medical school. I think you’ll like her. She’s a character.”
“I’m guessing I owe her a thank you,” he says with a coy grin, which crinkles one of his stubbled cheeks.
“For what?”
“Well, she’s the reason we met, right? She gave you the ticket to the MOTH thing. And now we’re here at The Graceful Phoenix.”
He stares at me for a long moment, and my ears and neck flush, exposed beneath my tight bun. My first impulse is to cover my ears with my hands, but instead I shift my plate. Maybe he hasn’t noticed the reddening. It could be the light reflecting off of my skin, not quite umber like my father’s, but olivey and occasionally, at least in photos, a bit glowy, too, like my mother’s.
Our food arrives piled artfully on long, flat earthenware platters. As each dish descends, Ben provides colour commentary. “Gai lan,” he says, gesturing at a pyramid of thick-stalked, evergreen vegetables. “And we’ve got lo mein—that’s the noodles.”
The server gently arranges an array of ovular chargers in the middle of our small table. They appear to be Peking Duck, lamb, and shrimp.
“That’s all the fake meat,” Ben says.
I roll my eyes and chuckle. “Which ones?”
“The ones that look like meat, dummy,” he replies without missing a beat. He extends his arm across the table and snaps his fingers. “Hand me your plate. I’ll make you a sampler.”
And he does, meticulously apportioning a small amount of each dish in concentric spirals on my plate, which he hands back to me.
“Oh, don’t wait for me,” he says. “Go ahead. Enjoy it while it’s hot.”
I wait for him, anyway, and then we dig into our glorious feast.
“This is outrageous,” I say. “It all tastes—well, real. No, better than the real thing. How did they get the skin on the fake duck to crisp?”
“I don’t know,” he says, covering his mouth with a slackly open hand. “Magic. The one that really blows my mind is the shrimp. I mean, I know it’s not shrimp, but it tastes exactly like shrimp. It’s not an approximation. It’s shrimp.”
We continue to chat while we eat, and just like last weekend, we settle into a swaying conversational cadence broken only by our insistence on offering each other tea whenever we glimpse a shadow in the mug across from us.
Our server comes to check on us. When he sees that we have not left even one lone scrap of onion on our platters, he plops the check down in the centre of the table. Like a snake primed to strike, Ben’s hand darts toward the shallow black tray. I flick it with a finger.
“Uhhp, not so fast,” I say.
He strums the paper bill but heeds my warning. “My invitation, my responsibility.”
“We can split it,” I reply. “Go Dutch, as my grandma used to say.”
“Or,” he bargains, “we could each cover one activity. I could get dinner, and you could pay for the axe throwing.”
“Let’s just split everything. That way it’s fifty-fifty.”
Ben’s nose twitches, nonplussed. “It’s not a big deal. We can split it.”
“I don’t want to make a thing about it.”
“Is it about the decorum, or do you worry I can’t afford it?”
“No,” I say exasperatedly. “I hadn’t thought about that. I just wanted to be fair. We’re both modern people.”
“Yeah, OK,” he says. “Maybe I’m the one who’s making a big thing about it.”
The server whisks over with a credit card machine. Once we’ve paid our halves, he deposits a vegan sour sop candy on each of our place settings. Ben pops the candy in his mouth and coughs. His lips curl into a disgusted pucker. “Jesus, that’s awful,” he says and spits it into a soiled napkin. “Look, I’ll come clean. We’re striking. Our wages have been put in an escrow account. It’s all fucked.”
“All the more reason to split,” I say.
He shakes his head vigorously. “No, that’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t want to pity-split. I wanted to show you a nice time.” His mouth twists, a pink flower in a patch of stubble brambles. “We had a meeting today,” he says. “Some of the old profs—you know, the ones who have pensions and tenure—are negotiating alongside the employer. One of them called our protest ‘fatuous.’ I know him, too. He lives a few blocks from the university in a house he must have bought for $50,000 in the 80s. An old hippie radical who morphed into a complacent hypocrite. Pulled the ladder up with him.”
He looks up at me sheepishly, as though he is just now aware of his incipient rant. “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he says. He taps the table in a staccato rhythm. “How does the expression go? Let us feast and throw axes, for tomorrow we die?”
“Something like that,” I say. I motion for him to get up. “Let’s head out. We can check out the wrestling show on our way to axe throwing.”
“Pro wrestling?”
“Yeah, in the alleyway behind Rasta Disasta.”
Ben smirks. “That’s the most Honeycomb thing I’ve ever heard.”
We emerge into the gloaming, still lighted by the setting sun, whose beams illuminate curling wisps of smoke emanating from surrounding restaurant patios. I gesture down the alleyway toward what had once been a wrestling ring, which a group of thin men is dismantling. Gone are the crowds and thick-muscled men in singlets. Even the canvas has been packed, revealing planks of plywood arranged in neat rows.
“Shit, we missed it,” I say.
“Also very Honeycomb,” Ben muses. “You’ve got to be in the know. Blink and it’s gone.”
“God, it’s all wood,” I say. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt to fall on that?”
“Not our sport,” he says and taps my upper arm. “We’re built for croquet.”
We backtrack to make our way down a capillary side street, which opens up onto Rovelli, one of downtown’s main arteries. Cars zoom past the narrow sidewalk, which seems to tremble with the roar of the semis heading to the quays. Every now and then, a rogue truck kisses the curb with a titanic tire as it passes us. We amble down the gentle grade that would, if we continued a bit past Paul Bunyan Axe Throw, take us right to the shoreline.
It is too loud to chat, so we bounce along side by side, our hands occasionally brushing. He grins at me every block or so and gestures at the roaring cavalcade of cars and trucks.
“It sounds like we’re in an airplane hangar!” he shouts.
Paul Bunyan is ensconced in a small strip mall between Rovelli and Hagland, just far enough from both for the ineluctable traffic to recede to a loud whisper. We meet our double dates in the glass vestibule. Sila is tall and willowy, with a jet black buzzcut and rosy lipstick. She is wearing a tank top that reads, “can’t beat ‘em, can’t eat ‘em, don’t need ‘em”. Rhiannon has let her sleek hair cascade down the back of her loose blue dress. She makes a beeline for Ben.
“Hey,” she says and clasps his hand. A grin spreads across her face, revealing her straight, boxy white teeth. “Heard a lot about you. All good things—well, more or less.”
Ben laughs amiably. “I should thank you,” he says. “You’re the giver of the tickets.”
“The special one,” she agrees.
Sila gives a little shimmy of greeting and extends both her hands so we can grab them.
“Hello, hello,” she says in a rich alto voice. “Thanks for coming, guys. I’m, like, so into this. It’s super cathartic.”
She waves us over to a wooden picnic table in the middle of a big, friendly room. Paul Bunyan Axe Throw looks like a repurposed barn, complete with scattered hay on the floor. There are a dozen or so self-contained lanes, with netting strung along either side to catch stray hatchets and a battered wooden shield at the far end with a crude red bullseye drawn on its splintery wood. We gather around our picnic table and take stock of our surrounds.
Beside us, a portly woman in a polka dot dress makes a dash toward the mouth of her lane, hatchet held aloft in like a warrior charging. She grunts as she releases it, and it ricochets off the target board and catches in the netting.
A teenager wearing a canary flip-brimmed cycling hat saunters over to our table. “OK, now the gang’s all here, it looks like,” he says brightly. “You guys ever thrown axe?”
We shake our heads. “Axe virgins,” says Sila.
The kid laughs and points at her approvingly. “OK, then,” he says. “It’s real simple.”
He gives us the rundown on axe throwing. Hold the hatchet, which appears to just be a ragged hardware store axe, above your head with both hands and release it toward the target board. He picks up a hatchet and demonstrates with narration.
“You see, you’ve got to keep your eyes on the prize, right? And then you throw, like this.” He flicks the axe forward at his elbows and it embeds in the periphery of the wood. “What do you think? Want to give it a go? Let me know if you want a round of beers,” he says.
“Yeah, let’s have a pitcher of lager, please,” says Sila. “The schatzi.”
“You got it,” the boy says and jaunts behind the counter just beyond the rear of our table.
Sila and Rhiannon are sitting so close on their bench that Sila’s shoulder abuts Rhiannon’s head.
“You guys eat?” says Sila.
“We went to Graceful Phoenix,” says Ben.
“I fucking love that place,” says Sila. She turns to Rhiannon and brushes a stray hair from the smaller woman’s eyeline. “We should go, babe.”
“It’s all right,” says Rhiannon loftily. “I mean, I wouldn’t say Phoenix is white people Chinese food, but it caters.” She spreads her hands. “Look, if I’m in Honeycomb, I’m going full authentic. I want to have to elbow my way through a crowd to get a table. I want someone to shout at me in Cantonese. Not a smiling ‘what would you like to order?’ but a surly ‘what do you want?’ Triple Lucky for life, that’s what I’m saying.”
Ben’s eyes widen. “I’ve been there, too,” he says excitedly. “Got yelled at and everything. Triple has my favourite congee ever.”
Rhiannon cocks her head. “Well, look at you,” she says. “Which one?”
“Winter melon and those tiny shrimp.”
Rhiannon nods approvingly. “I like him,” she says to the table. “He can stay.”
The boyish server returns with a sloshing pitcher and basket of hatchets, in which he has balanced the beer steins.
“Here you go, guys,” he says. “Any burning questions?”
We look at each other and shake our heads. “No,” says Ben, smiling up at him. “I think we’re good.”
Sila tilts the pitcher into the glasses. “Oh, just a quarter of a glass for me, Sila,” I say. “I’m a lightweight.”
She smirks and fills it halfway. “We’ll compromise,” she says.
We sip our beer, which is flat and a bit watery, and chat. Ben is gregarious and demonstrative, prone to extravagant hand gestures. Sila and Rhiannon lean forward on their bench with their elbows intertwined. They sometimes talk together in a textured, unintelligible hum, and then one of them will point to the other and say, “Nuh-no, you go.”
We decide as a group that we are not hungry for Paul Bunyan’s “World FAMOUS Beer Battered Onion Clusters.” Once everyone finishes their first pint of beer, and I sip roughly two sips, we decide it’s time to try our hand at axe throwing.
I rise and stretch out my back and shoulders, which are stiff from leaning over the picnic table and swivelling my gaze this way and that to follow the buoyant conversation. Ben grabs a hatchet from the basket and twirls the handle in his hand.
“I’ll throw the first axe,” he says.
“Go for it,” says Sila.
We all stand back to give Ben a wide berth. He raises the hatchet above his head, just as we were instructed. He peers back at us.
“What do I get if I strike the bullseye?” he asks.
“We will cheer,” says Rhiannon solemnly. “And then move on.”
Ben shrugs and hurls the axe toward the target board. It wobbles and strikes the splintered corner with the butt of the axe handle, which sends it rocketing back into the net. He turns back to us with a sheepish grin.
“Mulligan?” he says.
“No, come on,” says Sila. “Move over. My turn.”
She fetches a cleaner-looking hatchet from the basket and sidles over to Ben. “OK, watch and learn.” She anchors herself with one foot forward and the other planted sideways. She unfurls her long arms, holding the axe almost vertical. Then she launches it forward, where it embeds in the centre wood, just a few centimetres from the bullseye.
“That’s how it’s done,” she says triumphantly.
“Whoa, Si, have you done this before?” asks Rhiannon. Sila saunters over and gently tugs on Rhiannon’s earlobe. “Maybe,” she says coyly.
Rhiannon and I both manage to ricochet our hatchets off the wood so forcefully that they skitter back almost to our feet. Ben and Sila try to reposition us, but my next few chopping throws either fall short or tangle my hatchet in the loose cobwebs of mesh piled on the floor.
In time, we all get the hang of it, though, and I smile with a thrill of delight every time my blade wedges into the deeply fissured wood.
“Look at you,” Rhiannon says to me on her strut back to our table.
“I’m pretending it’s Fossal’s gargoyle face,” I say. Ben rises to take his turn, and my old friend slides in next to me and leans her head on my shoulder.
“Before clerkship, we used to do fun things,” she muses. “Remember? We’d go mini-golf, bowling, clubbing, dim sum, biking in the park.”
“Yeah,” I say. “The halcyon days, eh, Rhi? What happened?”
She leans in and whispers so close to my ear that her words tingle. “He’s cute,” she says. “And smart and normal. You owe me.”
Under the table, I pinch her arm. “You’re the worst person to owe a debt to,” I say.
She continues to whisper. “You just don’t want to admit that I’m always right,” she teases. “You know what, he also kind of looks like you.”
I laugh aloud. “What do you mean?” I say. Sila and Ben glance over to us from the throwing area, where they had been chatting.
“Be cool,” whispers Rhiannon mischievously. “I’m just saying, if you were a boy, you’d have messy hair and a little beard. You’d wear khaki shorts on a date, and you know it. That would be you.”
“Yeah,” I whisper back. “Well, you’d wear sweatpants that are five centimetres too short. And socks that have lost all their elastic and just, you know, hang over the tops of your Reebok Pumps.”
Rhiannon buries her face in my shoulder and heaves with peals of muted laughter. She comes up for air and says, in a sort of mumbling whisper, “Yeah, but seriously, though, this is good for you. I’m happy to be matchmaker. What’s it called in Jewish?”
“Yenta.”
“Is there a Portuguese word for it?”
“How would I know?” I say. “What’s it in Cantonese?”
Sila and Ben approach the table with quizzical smiles on their faces.
“What are you two gossiping about?” says Sila. She tosses her hatchet in the air and catches it deftly by the dappled plastic butt.
“It’s your turn, Karina,” says Ben. “Check out the board.” He brushes my elbow with his fingertips, a gentle beckon, and I disentangle myself from Rhiannon. We walk over to the throwing circle, where I see Ben has lodged his axe in one of the inner red rings.
“Shoptalk,” I hear Rhiannon reply to Sila. “Yes-huh. It’s just med shit.”
“Hey, pretty good,” I say to Ben. “You’re a pro.”
“I can show you,” he says. He grabs a hatchet from the basket and lofts it above his head. He pantomimes a two-handed, chopping throw. “You’ve got to follow through. Let your arms kind of swing, right?”
I try to match his movements, but the hatchet handle strikes the target board with a hollow thwack and ricochets halfway down the lane.
“Try again,” Ben says. “Maybe take a step back—like a half-step. That way, you’ll get a complete rotation.”
“I didn’t know you were a medievalist,” I say.
He laughs. “Just try it. We can’t say everyone’s a winner if you can’t get an axe to stick somewhere in the red.”
I do as he suggests and plant my feet. Axe up. The ridges of my tightly gripped hands just barely touching on the handle. With a chopping motion and a tennis grunt, I release the axe, which, to my delight, penetrates deeply into the scared wood at the far edge of the smallest concentric circle.
“Just a bit from the bullseye,” Ben says and claps me gently on the back. “Well done.” He gestures to the table, where Sila and Rhiannon are bantering so closely that their noses almost touch.
“Don’t judge,” I say.
“I’m not,” he replies. “Just a keen observer, that’s all.”
We return to join them at the table. Rhiannon fingers the handle of our second beer pitcher, at the bottom of which is a puddle of brackish brown liquid. “Who wants the last sip?” she asks.
“I’m good,” Ben says.
I wave her away. Sila’s face puckers. “Yuck, leave it, Rhi.”
“God, we’re becoming old farts,” Rhiannon says and sets the pitcher on the far corner of the table. “Sorry to be a bummer, but I’m getting a little tired, guys. Long week at the hospital.”
“Did you guys drive?” I ask.
Both Rhiannon and Sila shake their heads. “We knew we’d be drinking,” Sila said. “And I live nearby, so we walked.”
I turn to Ben. “Bus or walk for you? I just realized I don’t know where you live.”
“Quayside,” he says. “I could walk or bus.”
“I’ll bus,” I say.
“OK, then I’ll walk you to the stop on Rovelli and Mirror,” Ben says quickly. “That’ll take you to Hillside.”
Rhiannon snorts with laughter. “What are you, a walking bus schedule? How did you figure that out so fast?”
Ben smirks. “I think ahead,” he says.
We gather at the front to pay. “I’ll get it and everyone can just e-transfer me,” says Rhiannon. She hands the teenager in the yellow cycling cap her card before anyone can object.
“How was it?” says the boy.
“Good,” we say in chorus.
“Yeah, come back next time and we’ll show you some advanced throws. It’ll be rad. You’ll feel like warriors.”
The four of us exchange QuidNunc names and hugs before parting ways in the empty strip mall parking lot. Sila and Rhiannon stride toward Rovelli and jaunt down toward centre city hand in hand.
“We can go up here,” says Ben, pointing to a residential street. “It will take us right to the bus stop on the north side of Mirror.”
“You sure?” I ask. “I don’t want to take you out of your way.”
“No, no,” he says. “Actually, I’m pretty close. It’s right on my route.”
We make our way up the residential street, which is fringed by vintage street lamps standing like sentinels. For a long, swelling minute, neither of us says anything, but the air between us seems to crackle with static charge.
“So,” he offers, looking straight ahead. “I’d like to see you again.”
A draught of heat radiates up my throat and into my mouth. “OK,” I say.
He laughs nervously and stops to turn toward me. “That’s noncommittal.”
“OK means yes,” I say.
“Can I kiss you?” he says.
His eager, stubbly face is illuminated by the yellow light of the streetlamp, lips parted hesitantly.
“Yes.”
He leans in to gently meet my lips with his for one dilated, coruscating moment. We pull back and look at each other. His pale green eyes search my face for a cue. I reach down and fumble for his wrist.
“Let’s get going,” I say.
We walk the rest of the way in silence, hand in hand. As usual, the bus shelter is crowded with revellers of all stripes. Some are wearing sports jerseys, others club garb.
“OK, Ben,” I say. “This was fun.”
He hesitates, as though considering whether to try for another kiss, but I don’t permit a window. I wave to him and stumble awkwardly as I try to worm my way into the shelter’s cramped archway. I just barely avoid colliding with a couple hunched over a flashing tablet screen, and they scowl at me as though I am a degenerate. Ben claps his hands on his thighs and gives a sort of half-bow. “Whoa, careful, there, Karina,” he says. “Let me know when you get home, all right?”
I watch him lope up Rovelli in lighted flickers. The bus galumphs up to the curb, and I arrive at my apartment by way of a time warp, I suppose, or a black hole, with no immediate recollection of my walk from the bus to my doorstep. Inside, I hang my purse on the coat rack and rummage through it for my phone, which I cradle in my loose grip. I whisk into the washroom to grab rubbing alcohol and a tissue to wipe the screen and case, a habit I picked up from my hospital days. The tissue box is empty and I spot the brown cardboard toilet paper cylinder on the sink, mottled with bits of adhesive and paper scraps.
I rummage through the linen closet for a spare box or rogue roll. The towels tower high on the short, deep-set shelves, and I pat them to see if I’ve inadvertently smothered a box or roll in my zealous post-laundry towel stacking. But the aroma that wafts up is not detergent, but yeasty and bracing, akin to my mother’s sourdough starter, which she used to leave on our kitchen table like an adornment.
The phone drops from my hand and clatters on the hardwood floor. “No,” I say aloud. The air thins, and there is a shift, barely perceptible, in my awareness. Before I can blink, I am back in the dank, cavernous archives I had glimpsed during my first day back in clinic, where a younger avatar of my father moves blithely through the lattice of metal shelving and neatly labeled boxes. I am standing nearly beside him, so close, in fact, that I could touch him if I wanted. But he does not notice me.
Just as before, he slides one of the boxes out of its slot and plucks out a manila envelope. He holds it in his outstretched hands and peers down his gnomon nose. “4124,” he murmurs and returns the envelope to its niche. With a flick of his wrist, he tips another envelope into his hands, only to return that one, too.
I am tempted to reach out, to draw him into an embrace, but before I can muster my resolve, he is approached by a younger woman wearing enormous tortoise-shell glasses and a high-waisted pantsuit. Her feathered black hair is suspended in place.
“Mr. Bergson,” she calls to him as she approaches.
His eyelids crinkle with a smiled greeting. “Ms. Chatterjee.”
“I thought I’d find you here. I wondered if we could chat.”
“In private?” my father asks. “We could go in the microfiche room.”
She nods, and I trail behind my father and the woman as they pad down the aisle toward the rear corridor. With each pivot of her feet, the woman’s leather shoes squeak.
“How’s Carly?” she says over her shoulder.
“Karina,” my father corrects. “We just heard she’s going to have a big part in the eighth-grade play. Thomasina in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.”
“Oh, that’s great,” she says.
“And your boy must be six now. Tanvik?”
“Good memory,” she says. “He’s in school now. The teacher is very impressed with him. He’s already reading chapter books, so Guppy and I are over the moon about it. We’ve got him hooked on the Wayside School series.”
They stop in front of a plain wooden door, which my father holds open with a sturdy hand.
“Thank you,” says the woman.
My father strides through after her, and I am just able to squeeze in before it clicks shut. To my surprise, I am still invisible, though I know I could insinuate myself into the scene if I wanted, reify my presence here in the other place through some act of disruption or mischief. The room is cramped with mismatched file cabinets and dusty microfiche terminals. My father slides out two flat-backed chairs from one of the tables and gestures to Ms. Chatterjee to sit.
“Oh, thank you, Perry,” she says.
He hovers above his for just a moment before lowering himself onto the shiny plastic. “What can I do for you?” he asks.
She crosses her legs and clasps her hands over her knees. “I’ll just come out and say it, Perry. We had to go with another candidate for the director position.”
I watch my father as he receives this news. The lineaments of his umber face sag and his mossy green eyes flash dully as he nods.
“And I don’t want you to think it has anything to do with your experience or performance or, well, anything. You’re fantastic at what you do, Perry, and your cache of historical knowledge is so deep. It’s invaluable. Who else knew about that general strike in the 19-whatevers. Where was that?”
“Winnipeg,” he replies softly.
She snaps her fingers. “That’s right. Yes. See, that’s institutional knowledge. And a mind like a steel trap.” She shrugs and spreads her hands. “But Barbara did that database training in San Francisco last summer. And you know as well as I do that the frontier is digital, Perry.” She squints as though searching for something. “You’re an analogue archivist,” she says.
My father sniffs with a mirthless chuckle. “I’m an old dog, Kavita” he says.
“Oh, that’s not what I meant,” she says quickly. She extends a foot to tap his knee gently. “You’re the best. We want to offer you an advisory role. You’d be Barbara’s right hand.”
“Her Rasputin,” my father says and chuckles to himself. He allows his head to loll forward in a gesture of muted gratitude. “But OK, Kavita. Always happy to help.”
Kavita uncrosses her legs. “You’re a good egg, Perry,” she says. “It’s not personal.” She rises and wipes her palms on her pantsuit.
“I just wanted to let you know,” she says. “Nothing’s been announced officially, but you’re the most senior archivist here at City Arc. It would be, I don’t know, cold to keep you in the dark.”
My father continues to nod in a spiritless sine wave. “Much appreciated, Kavi,” he says.
“See you at the afternoon meeting,” she says. “Don’t forget about the room switch. It’s in K347 now.”
“Duly noted,” my father says. He holds the door open for her and she clops through.
He allows it to click shut once more and waits a few moments before swinging one of the chairs over to a bare section of table. He sighs and allows himself to flop onto its hard plastic surface. Then he smiles and looks up at the ceiling before cupping his hands at his belt buckle and closing his eyes. Like a mystic, his abdomen and chest swell with a deep inspiration, which he then blows through a slack O in his lips. His tidal breaths ebb and flow, untucking his dress shirt. His face brightens, and the corners of his eyes crimp with burgeoning delight.
I approach him slowly, surreptitiously, and study his features, which are dancing on their umber canvas. He is transporting to his memory city, I realize with a plaintive thrill. I’m here, I want to shout. I’m here with you. My hand extends of its own accord, and in that moment, I don’t know if I am going to tap his shoulder or throw my arms around him. My fingertips brush his starched collar, and the scene shifts in an instant, rendered in my awareness as a sort of jump cut.
I look down, and I am clutching a handful of stiff white hospital sheets. Someone at my rear hip-checks me.
“Move it, dear,” says a grating, officious voice.
Instinctively, I tuck my frame into the nearest surface, which is a hospital bed. All at once, the mise en scene comes into sharp view. I am standing at the head of the bed, which has been raised to forty-five degrees. A mass of tangled, wild silver hair sprouts up and over the headrest, almost touching my fingertips. The room is tense and hot, and the woman pressed against the mattress emits a primal yowl.
“Push, push, push, push, push!” instructs a crescendoing male voice from below.
“You’re doing great, Mona,” encourages the grating voice.
I peer along the bed’s side and see a matronly, bespectacled nurse gripping a hand whose bulging extensor tendons tremble under drum-tight skin. At the foot of the bed, a young doctor peers up from under the tented sheets.
“A few more pushes,” he says.
“Gahhhhhhh Jesus Christ!”
My mother roars with what must be another contraction. Someone beside me reaches forward to grip her shoulder. I turn, and there is my father. His face is not umber, but a pallid grey, and his little mossy green eyes dart back and forth.
“Look at you, Mona,” he soothes. “Keep going. I’m here. Right behind you.”
“Everything’s looking great,” the doctor says. “Is that another contraction?”
The bed shakes in reply.
“Push!” the doctor commands.
“Push,” echoes the nurse in her textured alto. “Go, go, go, go, go!”
“Yawwwwwwww! Fuck!”
The doctor thrusts a hand above the sheets. “OK, OK, OK, stop,” he says. “Hold up. Now, slow. Little pushes.”
“That means the head is out,” says the nurse. “Easy does it.”
Beside me, my father is panting quietly. He is still gripping my mom’s shoulder with a wan hand and murmuring to her. I scan the room and spot an empty chair in the corner, draped by the thick, plaited hospital blinds. I slide it over to him.
“Sit,” I say.
He smiles at me weakly and allows his rangy frame to slump onto the hard wood. “Thank you, nurse,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” I say. For the first time since I began training, this misidentification neither stings nor vexes. My very presence and awareness at the scene of my birth is a paradox so absurd and convoluted that I simply go with it, almost giddy. I resume my place at the head of the bed just in time to glimpse my pink, vernix-covered neonate body as it emerges from under the sheets and hear my inaugural yell, which is gratifyingly stentorian and self-assured.
The doctor stands and places baby Karina on my mother’s chest. From my vantage behind her, I cannot see our first meeting, but I hear her first words to my infant self in crisp stereo.
“Welcome to the world, my love,” she says.
My father shambles to his feet and uses the bed as a support to pull himself around to my mother’s side, where he dutifully cuts the umbilical cord with a pair of special scissors. Then he embraces my mother and baby Karina and mumbles something I cannot hear.
There is a stir, and all at once, the doctor is back under the sheets.
“I need pitocin,” he shouts. “Now!”
The nurse scurries behind the doctor to fetch a white metal cart, which she drags over. My mother yelps in pain.
“I need to reach inside,” the doctor says. He peeks his head out from behind the sheet tent, which bows as he wedges his elbows into the crooks of my mother’s knees and goes in search of retained tissue.
“Get Doctor Mickelson,” he commands the nurse. “Where is the PPH cart? Noreen?”
My heart jumps, but my training instincts override the burgeoning fear. In two steps, I am at the foot of the bed, ready to assist the doctor with the fulminant postpartum hemorrhage. In my periphery, I hear the door swing open, and I turn toward it. I am surprised to find that it is swinging to and fro in its jamb. A susurrus sigh fills my ears, and then the din of the hospital room gives way to an abyssal silence.
There is another jump cut, and when I blink, I find the hospital bed has been replaced by a speckled formica counter dusted with flour and scattered, uncapped pens. The aroma of freshly baked bread fills my nostrils, stronger now than ever in the other place. There is also, somewhere in the olfactory distance, the familiar heavy, brackish smell of cured meat. I look around me, surveying what appears to be a small bakery, with breads and oblong bagels heaped in metal mesh bins and wall-to-wall glass display cases filled with pastries. As far as I can gather, the bakery itself is a sort of entryway to a larger restaurant, whose raucous conversation wafts through the archway and fills the bakery alcove with canned, ambient chatter.
I am standing behind the counter with a hand on the display case’s cool metal frame. Behind the glass, plates piled high with nosherai are labeled in tight, blocky lettering: KNISHES, BLINTZES, CHEESE DANISH, BLACK AND WHITE COOKIES, RUGELACH, HAMENTASCHEN.
Beside me, a twenty-something woman wearing a bandana greets a customer duo. “Hello there. What can I grab you?”
Standing before me, so close that I can see their pores, are my father and mother as they had been before I was born. Their shoulders just barely touch as they lean forward to greet the woman. My father is balding. His hair is cropped short, and his umber face is elastic and handsome. Beside him, my mother is wearing a dark gold racerback dress, and her wild silver hair has been coiled into a tight bun that looks like steel wool. She is glowing, though I can tell by her wry squint that she is trying to be coy about it.
“We’re on a date,” my father says with a wink. “And I told Mona here that Finkelstein’s has the best sourdough rye anywhere on Earth.”
I take a step back to expand my vantage. Finkelstein’s is a relic, a remnant of a bygone era and perhaps palate. Had the old deli not catered my father’s funeral last month, I would have assumed it had shuttered years ago. When I was a kid, my father would occasionally bring home a pound of tongue or corned beef, which would make my mother retch. But more often, he and I would rise at six o’clock on a Saturday morning to fetch a flat, russet-brown boule, which he called “shtetl rye” and insisted, with mock reverence, was the “bread of our ancestors.”
The woman wearing a bandana reaches up to the middle bread shelf behind the counter.
“It’s the best bread in town, period,” she says. “Caraway or no?”
My mother squints at the bread. “What the hell is caraway?”
“They’re seeds,” my dad says. “Like fennel. It’s good.”
“Sounds a bit weird, but I can be adventurous,” says my mom. “We can eat it in the park. If I don’t like it, we can give the ducks licorice breath.”
The woman waggles her finger between the seeded and unseeded loaves. “So we’ll get the caraway sourdough rye, then?”
“OK, you know what,” says my dad. “We’ll get both.”
My mother throws her head back and cackles. “Two loaves of bread, one for each of us.”
The woman laughs, too. She twists the paper sacks and slides them across the counter. “Anything else? Maybe a cookie for dessert?”
“Jewish food is all carbs,” says my mother. “Well, at least carbs are low-fat.”
“We can have some fat, too. Get a black-and-white cookie,” cajoles my dad. “Or a danish. If we were at my parents’ house, my mom would offer you a knish with a slice of bread.”
My mom waves her hands in mock surrender. “No, no, two loaves of bread is plenty for this afternoon, Perry,” she says.
Somehow, I still have not been noticed, so I amble around from behind the counter to prepare to tail my parents out of the restaurant. My father pays with a five-dollar bill and scoops his change into his palm.
The couple edges around the lumpy, serpentine line that has formed while they were ordering and exits the restaurant. I follow suit, nudging open the swinging door with my foot.
But I do not emerge onto Valleycrest Circle, where Finkelstein’s has stood for seventy years, its kitschy red awning and vertical flashing sign unchanged since the early years of the baby boom. Instead, I find myself in a spare studio apartment, with a murphy bed that appears to not quite close and a smattering of austere furniture. Bewildered, I open the door once more, only to find a dingy institutional hallway with peeling wallpaper and patchy burgundy carpet.
I step inside the apartment, which smells like mildew and vinegar, and call out. “Hello?”
I meander over to the window at the far end of the room, which is semi-occluded by rebar and looks out on a wrought iron fire escape. On the coffee table are a few black-and-white framed photographs of my grandparents in their youth, seated on a bench in shabby old-country clothing, glowering at the camera. Another is of my father and Didi in their teens, beaming, each with a hand perched on the other’s hair, perhaps a reference to Thing, the disembodied hand from The Addams Family.”
I linger in the apartment to see if an avatar of my father will show up, but I am disappointed. In the meantime, I try in vain to close the murphy bed, but the mechanism is stuck, and it screeches menacingly. I head out through the front door once more to see what I can see. My foot catches on something flat and hard, and I tumble forward onto a hardwood surface. There is a wetness seeping into my dress, and the astringent smell of rubbing alcohol snaps me back.
“Shit,” I say and fumble for the plastic bottle I have just knocked over. But it is too late. My phone is floating in the shallow puddle like a lily pad. I scoop it off the hardwood and try to shake off the liquid. I really should move the tissue boxes I’ve stacked at the back of my linen closet. All it took was a fumbling brush of my fingertips to separate me from the solid and present.
I ignore my throbbing knees and whisk over to the kitchen in search of rice, which I hurriedly pour over my phone in a plastic bowl. It is my good luck that the device still works, albeit with a few dead spots in the touchscreen. I pray to the phone gods that the rice “hack” will resurrect my aging brick. Before I leave it to desiccate for the night, I manage to send the promised text to Ben. I hope he likes riddles.
Karina [23:51:22]: Mde i hom. Tak yo for agrat ni. dropped phoe i a pddle of rubbi lcoho (dont as), so Im ltting dr in rie. See yo soo.
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology