Chapter 1: Passing of a Shadow
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“The spirit of the worm beneath the sod,
In love and worship, blends itself with God” —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion
My father tells me the universe is spreading itself thin. All those countless eons ago, when the Big Bang made its stentorian debut, the Star Maker also left a whispering promise of death. In time, the kind that slays clocks, a cosmic ripple will come for our Sun. We will be long gone by then, my father assures me, our bones turned to soil, the soil turned to dust. But something, somewhere will witness the great extinguishment.
“An audience of microbes,” I say. “That’s fitting, don’t you think? First in, last out.”
“I suppose,” he mumbles through slack lips.
“But who will they tell?” I ask in mock alarm. I grasp his fingers, loose bones in onionskin, and shake them for emphasis. “Who will mourn the last light?”
“No one” he replies solemnly. “That’s the…well, I suppose that’s the tragedy of it.”
It is early afternoon, and almost as a response to the old man’s prophecy, the sun flashes manfully in the window. My father is standing cross-footed by the bookshelf in my parents’ house peering up at something. A curl of peeling ceiling paint, maybe. Or a flitting memory. I have begun to see him in temporal panorama, his once paintbrush-thick pompadour silhouetting a coarse silver halo. I can still divine his mood by watching his gnomon nose twitch below wide-set, narrow eyes that imbibe every bit of surrounding light. It is hard to remember when this all began.
“Have you eaten yet?” I ask. He is confused, but he disguises it with a cough.
“Well, not before breakfast, Karina.”
“It’s just past noon,” I say, and I can see in his mossy eyes a flash of dread. Or perhaps it is just the sunlight, which pulses every now and then with the passage of a cloud zeppelin. He pats my hand and smiles. In his lined umber face, there is a kind of begging. He wants me to excuse his memory slip, but senses that it is not the first. Maybe he has a vague, unformed recollection of the legion tips-of-the-tongue. Even forgetting leaves a residue.
“I brought you a sandwich,” I say. “It’s almost time for work.”
His lips curl into a sour pucker. He dismisses me with an insolent wave of his hand. “Then go get the car if you’re in such a rush,” he snaps. “I’ll be right out.”
“Dad, I came to see you,” I say, almost hiss, through clenched teeth. “Be nice.”
This light admonishment softens his bewildered features. He pats my hand with two bent fingertips. “I should count my blessings,” he says. “No one wants to visit a moody old man on a sunny day.”
This is true. I open my mouth to speak, but he starts to hum like a motor, trying to coax the words from his lips.
“Mmmm—I always say, Karina, you’re my—.” He pauses. “You’re my full-moon caller.”
I don’t have the heart to tell him I was here less than one week ago. Or that my visits are like clockwork. Just as he taught me, I am always punctual. I never forget my appointments. The old Dad, a man just a half-decade younger, would be proud of his daughter.
From my purse, I draw out a small, colour-splashed print of the Flammarion Engraving I scavenged from Bric-a-Brac, a chic junk shop a few blocks from my apartment building. “Do you know this piece, Dad?”
He peers down his gnomon nose and his forehead wrinkles. “Trees and stars—what is that young man doing?” he says quietly. “I suppose he’s looking for God.”
“Do you think he’ll find him, then?”
“Oh, I suppose he might, Karina” he mumbles, then pauses. “Away from those—hmm.”
I wait for him to say something more, but instead he ambles toward the kitchen, twitching hands clasped behind his back. Though I know it is not my father, but his spectre, that turns from me, his aloofness leaves a chill.
“It’s time to go to work,” I call after him. “I brought you a sandwich.”
After a few moments, he emerges wearing a grey Trilby hat with a black-banded brim.
“OK, I’m ready.” He pats his breast pocket and runs his hands along the pleat of his olive slacks. “Keys, wallet, pocket watch,” he mutters.
Since my mother died last year, he lives by such incantations, habits turning the cogs of the functional memory machine. I thread my arm through his and we make our way down the rear stairwell. The cold metal railing sways and squeaks beneath my reluctant hand. The unpainted wooden backdoor, which is at least twice my age, lacks a deadbolt, but if I lean into the squat globular doorknob and turn it clockwise, I can lock it from the inside, a deterrent against novice thieves.
“Mmm—no one wants what I’ve got, Karina,” my father says. “And if they do, let them have it.”
I ignore him and jiggle the external doorknob, sending a shudder through the flimsy frame. “Don’t lose your house key,” I say.
His little hatchback has been hibernating under a fusty brown tarp for the past week. With his help, I tug the canvas free, fold it into a rectangle, and deposit it on the concrete landing at the bottom of his crumbling outdoor steps.
Without my prompting, he opens the passenger door and seats himself. It has been some months since The Great Indignity, a license suspension following a collision with a train of grocery carts in the Danson’s parking lot, but he still plays the role of sulky copilot.
I slink in beside him. Mysteriously, the driver’s seat has retreated from the pedals such that my extended legs just brush the ridged plastic. The bar under the seat squeaks in protest as I inch the chair forward. My father grips the door to steel himself against the metal-on-metal howl, but he does not look at me as I check my mirrors. I have the only key, or so I am determined to believe. I twist it into the steering column without a word. The engine growls like a lion with laryngitis.
As has become our custom, we travel mostly in silence. The old man sits erect, hands clasping wrists in a medieval handshake. We trundle past a cavalcade of decrepit little bungalows, some owned by elderly hangers-on, like my father, and others rented by commuter students, packed tight in tiny rooms, each one paying a mortgage-sized tithe to live walking distance from the University of Bonneville.
His job had been my mother’s idea, a crackling thunderclap of ingenuity, perhaps, or the delirious fruit of desperation.
“Chemotherapy could drive a ghost to her knees,” she had told me, “I’m so tired. What am I supposed to do when your dad’s shipping that great mind of his to cloudland?”
A fixed income would not allow for home nursing care for her hollowing husband, so she concocted a plan to prolong his remarkably good health. Sure, his consciousness was dissipating into the aether, but the old man was spry, and in spite of my remonstrations, he was still an active driver at the time. So she gave him something to do.
“We all need a purpose, Karina,” my mother had insisted. “And they’re peaches over there—you know that—on board for the whole thing. It’s all set.”
“It” was a ruse of sorts, a noble lie, and likely not the first conspiracy to unfold within the community centre’s yellowed walls. To this day, I do not know how she finagled it, but my mother persuaded the closed-door elderly daycare to “hire” my father as the centre’s librarian.
As far as machinations go, it apparently was quite the production. My father, bedecked in a three-piece suit, submitted to an interview. He was given a tour of the facilities and introduced to his assistant, a university student named Alexa, who politely agreed to abet our skulduggery and serve as his faithful deputy. The surreptitious watchers gave him a wide berth. He was a retired archivist, after all, a man with a disarmingly dignified bearing, and he simply needed somewhere to go.
In my mother’s absence, it seems I have to plead poverty to every bureaucracy in the city, but the community centre has yet to draw a fee from us. Peaches, indeed.
My father’s remit is a lending library of impressive size and depth, a philanthropic gift from an eager tech magnate with designs to build a charter school in the community centre’s derelict west wing. In artless homage to Dyson, perhaps, the library is a freestanding cube structure perched on one of its vertices, with space-age crosscut windows interspersed among the crystalline bookshelves to allow passersby to glimpse the faces of adult browsers and the disembodied torsos of skipping children. A shiny metal gangway protrudes like a tongue from beneath a swinging marquee that rouses visitors to Blast Off Into a Book!
I have visited just once, some months ago, in a take-your-daughter-to-work-day spirit. I wandered among the stacks, not the taupe vinyl-coated metal of my childhood, but amoebic translucent things of varying shapes and sizes fitted with depressions for books, magazines, and electronic media. I peered through one of the portholes in this tacky vessel, fit only for a crew of armchair astronauts, and out at the pocked, water-stained walls of the community centre lobby.
It was almost like traveling in time.
Decay has a sense of humour, I’m learning. My befogged father remains fluent in Dewey, which he proudly proclaims when prompted, one of many inexplicable relics of a pristine functional memory. Before he arrives each afternoon, Alexa roughly shuffles stacks of books, some returned but most pulled from the shelves, in scuffed neon carts, and my father spends the afternoon desultorily returning them to their rightful stations. Like all employees, he wears a hands-free headset and a pendant-shaped communicator, whose functionality he learns anew every day. I gather he never initiates contact with his handlers, but they report he responds sanguinely enough when they check in. “Hello there. May I ask who’s calling?” he says in the same confounded tone. “Just checking in, Mr. Bergson,” they reply.
I wonder whether he ever chances upon his elderly daycare compatriots, frail and torpid creatures piloting whisper-quiet, nobby-wheeled walkers, forever slogging from the cafeteria to the rec room and back again in an aimless regress. Just a few rooms’ remove from the shouty games of Maj and dimestore movie thriller viewings, an interloper might spy my father through one of the library’s crosscut windows, marvel at his straight back, and conclude he’s one of the lucky ones. Each of his lined hands can grip three hardbacks at once.
Since the Great Indignity, I try to chauffeur him at least once a week. My arrival is always a surprise, but he usually welcomes me with peekaboo eggs and coffee strong enough to power a lawnmower. In the past few months, my rotation schedule has parcelled out precious few days off, so we rely more and more on the magnanimity of government service, a “seniors caravan” that carts my father to and from his engagements. A particularly jovial driver, Corinne, even accompanies a motley group of older adults to Danson’s once a week to pick up groceries.
I keep his car key in a little oblong ceramic bowl my mother made before she died. Sometimes, I cover it with packages of gum and parking receipts to allay my ambient guilt. In what I think is a particularly beatific and self-sacrificing gesture, I let the car sleep in his driveway and walk or take public transportation to and from the hospital and clinic. Woe betide the taker of the keys.
Presently, I have the felt sense that he is eyeing it sidelong, as he often does, his lips curled into the faintest of glowers. My betrayal is particularly sticky in memory.
“I just started a new block,” I say.
“What’s that?” he murmurs.
“I’ll be at the hospital for the next four weeks.”
“Oh, you mean a rotation. A new one already?”
“Well, it’s been a month, Dad. I’m heading to the clinical teaching unit. Internal medicine.”
“Tempus fugit,” he says and taps my knee. “Time flies.”
“It’s a lot of call. I have to figure out when I can see you next week—”
“I remember—,” he interrupts. He lifts his eyes to the horizon, and I can see from their saccades that a story is percolating. He begins to hum again quietly. “Mmmm—I remember when you were a baby, Karina. How many years ago was it now? Twenty-five?”
“Plus five.”
He flares his fingers in a quick count. “Thirty-two.”
“Thirty,” I say, almost reprovingly, and he sniffs with the vague recognition that he’s erred.
“You were just a baby,” he says. “And your mom wanted a taste of home. And you have to remember, her mother…” He chuckles to himself. “Mmmm—well, she used to make malasadas, the most delicious Portuguese doughnuts. There was a…a little Portuguese bakery just down the street. It was called—it… Hmmm. My word, what was it?” He trails off.
“Ola’s,” I say.
“Mmmm—that’s right,” he continues. “Ola’s. And you loved malasadas—they’re doughnuts, Karina—so we bought a plate for the three of us to share. You were just a baby, not two years old—”
“Mom said I was four.”
He bristles. “Now, Karina, you have got to stop interrupting me.”
I stare ahead and let my breath whistle from my nose. I know it’s cruel to obstruct the old man as he relays this prosaic, stubborn memory once again, stumbling over the same minutiae, but my patience is fraying.
“Go on.”
“Well, OK, now. Where was I?”
“Malasadas.”
He chuckles to himself again. “Mmmmm—just a baby with a plate full of Portuguese doughnuts. What did we expect? The bakery was jam-packed, Karina. And here we were, new parents.” In my periphery, I can see him gesticulating in stiff hand flourishes. “I mean, I was already an old man when you were born,” he continues. “Just a few years younger than I am now.”
This sort of temporal confabulation pricks my ears, but I say nothing.
“And we—and we each took our—well, the doughnuts and we held them in our napkins,” he says. “They were too hot to touch otherwise. Fresh out of the oven. You looked at us with a, what’s the word…with a curious—that’s it, a curious little grin. You held the plate high in the air, right over your head, and turned it over.”
He pauses to allow me to exclaim, or guffaw, or raise my eyebrows in surprise. I keep my face impassive. In my periphery, I can see him wringing his hands expectantly.
“Wow,” I offer.
“Do you remember what I said to your mom? Mmm—no, you wouldn’t. You were just a baby. Everyone in the bakery turned to look at this, this, this peculiar family. Without missing a beat, I said, in my crass Portuguese, uma grande malasada. You know, that’s, um…that’s a big malasada. And the whole place erupted in laughter.”
He emits a single, staccato guffaw. “Erupted in laughter,” he repeats. “Uma grande malasada.”
With an inexplicably chilled hand, he gently squeezes the nape of my neck, and I shrug my shoulders.
“Dad, why are your hands so cold?”
He starts and cautiously touches his brow with his fingertips. “You know what they say,” he begins. “Cold hand, warm—ah”
“Heart,” I say.
“Warm heart,” he intones after a long pause. I glance at him. Confusion is descending once again, an unwelcome guest. His lips purse in a befuddled grimace. The vents waft a draught of his sandalwood aftershave toward me, and my facade crumbles, leaving in its rubble a tug-of-war between solicitude and scorn.
“Sorry, Dad,” I say. In the mirror, I can see his forehead wrinkle beneath the brim of his trilby hat. My filial transgressions are already beginning to fade.
“You’re all right there, Karina.” he says and gestures at his wristwatch. “We’re making good time.”
Maybe he’s primed by the gentle segue from urban clamour to the manufactured quaintness of the outlying suburban enclave at the edge of the city. We turn onto a long, ribbony road dotted with smart colonial homes built on colossal, verdant, unfenced plots. Only by force of habit do I spot the narrow, canting driveway that dips under a tree canopy into a parking lot.
The community centre is an ambling, low-slung industrial relic, with cantaloupe-shaded brick and drooping aluminum eaves. Across the corrugated, pothole-peppered lot is an Anglican church, with a wide, sloping roof and a marquee proclaiming that its congregation welcomes “All of God’s Creatures.”
I pull up to the glass entryway of the community centre’s front entrance and hand my dad his sandwich. He slips it into his breast pocket, leaving an upturned fold of paper towel jutting out like a pocket square.
“Do you want to know what it is?” I ask.
“What’s that?”
“The sandwich. It’s almond butter and strawberry jam.”
Absent-mindedly, he pats his pocket and gazes out, seemingly past me, his eyes glinting like clouded jade. He cups my chin in the crook of his thumb and hums.
“Mmmm—my full moon caller,” he says in a singsong baritone. “Will I see you again today?”
I assure him I will return to pick him up in a few hours, after shift’s end.
“Do you want me to go in with you?” I ask.
His lined face puckers at the implication and he swings open his door. “Karina,” he admonishes. “I know where I’m going.” In an astonishing display of muscular fortitude, he plants both feet on the curb and rises from the passenger seat in one fluid motion, hands clasped at his sternum, perhaps for ballast.
He tips his hat at me, an atavistic gesture from a bygone era. “When do you start your next rotation?”
“We’ll talk later, Dad,” I say and turn from him briefly to retrieve my cell phone, which has slid from my rear pocket into the upholstery of the seat. “I’m heading onto internal medicine,” I grunt.
I twist back, and my father is gone. As usual, he has left the passenger-side door wide open, so I heave myself out of the car and kick it shut.
It is my habit to wait there to assure myself Alexa has received him. Like a first-time, but unusually conscientious, parent, I squelch the urge to accompany him, to buzz around him, mosquitoid, cataloguing the grammar of his forgetting. There is something forever dignified in his bearing, polished and urbane, and I fear the mortification would endure somehow, by some horrible inscrutable mystery of memory, and, well, I don’t know what. My mother had embraced the role of eminence grise, the wizard behind the curtain, but the deception wears on me. I am a reluctant, moody grifter.
I should count my blessings, I tell myself. My father still showers each morning, without prompting, and wields a safety razor like a samurai barber. He dresses himself in laundered clothes, not a button missed. And he cooks simple bachelor meals that don’t taste half-bad. He dusts and vacuums, too—a domestic forte spanning decades—and bounds up and down the wailing wooden stairs with a marathoner’s surefootedness.
His arithmetic is abominable, but he somehow manages his monthly expenses, scrupulously allocating funds for groceries and collating receipts in stacks secured with giant paperclips. In the first weeks of the new year, the old man had the presence of mind to send a crisp manilla envelope to his accountant, who promptly called me to share his amusement. I suppose old habits really do die hard.
In healthcare parlance, we would say he still manages his activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living—his ADLs and IADLs—but no one ever talks about the tenuousness of these routines, pasted together with the chewed bubblegum of habit and the sinew of family vigilance. And benedictions, perhaps, to gods small and large.
Let us pronounce, then, my blessings counted, my genuflections made at the altar of Mother Fate. I would also like to note that my grievances remain (mostly) unaired. It is at times like this that I wish I could conjure a sibling, a tag-team partner, a caregiving robot—anyone, really, to reassure me, validate my ambivalent hand-wringing, declare that this, like most of life, is a fait accompli, beyond comprehension, and everything will be as it must.
Almost on cue, a tinny bell peals, obliterating my trance. I glance at my phone, and there’s a raft of new texts, all from Rhiannon.
Rhi L [11:31:02]: Hey, what r u doing
Rhi L [11:37:24]: Omgsh, my staff today is at the golf course. I have to do all the epidurals and be on standby for ortho. Wtf??!!!
Rhi L [11:38:55]: Oh I remember. Your dad. Say hi for me.
Rhi L [12:00:09]: A new bakery is opening downtown. They make matcha kouign-ammans (sp??). We HAVE 2 GO
Rhi L [12:31:36]: The hospital is sooo empty on Saturday
Rhiannon Lai is a joyful paradox, a whirring, crackling intellect with a penchant for textspeak. On particularly bad days, I fear she may be a friend endling—a friendling?— the terminal vestige of a social life on its last, trembling legs. When my mother died last year, condolences came from conspicuous emotional remove, always written, never spoken, punctuated by hopes and wishes and prayers.
Only Rhiannon had shown her face. Or, more precisely, she had flung open the front door of my parents’ house and embraced my bewildered father, who looked both comforted and alarmed. He patted her back awkwardly, like a puppet with a broken arm, and muttered to her. I wonder if he knew who she was. Her cheeks were splotched with tears. I will never forget the fierce generosity of her grief, which filled the interstices of our staid, bereft home.
I can almost see her as I read her texts, overlarge scrubs draped over her lithe frame, surgical hairnet perched atop a thick black topknot, straight boxy white teeth gleaming in a smile spread across her almond-shaped face. My mother used to say she had a wild look in her eyes, which is high praise from a woman whose grin was always a shade too wry for comfort.
Anesthesiology is the a in the vaunted ROAD to freedom, whose siren call of work-life balance echoes in the ears of medical students far and wide. It isn’t quite true, of course. Easy street is a mirage even for anesthesiology residents like Rhiannon, whose dawn-to-dusk toil greases the machinery of hospitals around the world. Her derelict supervisor, Schumacher, a tenacious relic of the bad old days, is a notorious scumbag.
During a rare break in my general surgery rotation in medical school, I actually ran into Schumacher and his preternaturally gleaming, smooth face. He was reading a newspaper in the surgeons lounge. Unprompted, he declared that he had “liquid ice” running through his veins. He eyed me cooly and flapped the newspaper in a dramatic gesture. The breeze lifted the wispy hair plugs from his tanned pate. I was aware, then, that it was just the two of us in the lounge, cluttered with battered leather chaise lounges and outmoded computers. He looked me up and down like a rancher examining a limping cow.
“The French call it sang-froid,” he said, with clanging Anglo confidence. “And I can tell just by the look of you that you don’t have it.”
He meant, of course, that I was a young woman, whom he could have dismissed with more gusto just twenty years prior, possibly with a soliloquy about Mars and Venus and the vocational perils of menstruation. I stared at him blankly for a moment, but I wasn’t important enough to acknowledge further, so he went back to his newspaper.
It is verboten to leave a resident without adequate supervision, but the summer sun is shining on the links, and Schumacher knows he’s untouchable. Besides, he has at his disposal a stable of highly-trained peons indentured, by debt and compulsive self-abnegation, to the edifice that trains them. Tradition demands they pay their dues. Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
Karina [13:04:04]: I just dropped him off at the community centre. His shift is usually 4 hrs or so
Karina [13:04:16]: WTF indeed. What an asshole. Sorry you have to work. Do you have a clerk on with you at least?
Karina [13:04:25]: Yes, we should meet up soon. Let me know when you’re free.
My friendship with Rhiannon is sustained by these dispatches from the fray, minor confessions, and non sequiturs. We meet only when our orbits merge. This year, I’ve hopped on a comet circling a wayward planet. My father, or the man he once was, would probably appreciate these stellar allusions, but it is his gravity that binds me.
Rhiannon’s parents are much younger, of course, and require nothing of anyone. In these early years of retirement, they seem always to be jet-setting. Hong Kong last month. Machu Pichu a few weeks later. They have three children, all physicians, and live in a slick uptown condo, nestled amid the retro soda fountains and fusion bistros that are the hallmarks of neighbourhood revitalization.
I envy their comfort, their vigour, their vitality. They are the optic white teeth and glowing bronzed skin that fill photo frames in effulgent brightness. My mother was in her early forties when she had me; my father, the old deviant, was a decade or so older. Our photos are dull and wan, badly lighted. They have an almost penal sensibility.
My phone peals twice to announce an incoming duo of messages.
Rhi L [13:10:21]: No man. I let the clerk go. There’s no reason he should stay when staff is away.
Rhi L [13:10:30]: I will manage.
A benevolent resident relieves her clerks at every opportunity. We were medical students not so long ago, after all, our bright eyes and bushy tails just barely concealing bone-rattling dread and strivers’ fatigue. Besides, there are some things easier done alone.
Today is a statutory holiday, a magnanimous respite for her medical student—and me. With luck, the hospital will be quiescent. Some days, it feels like we’re just minding the store.
Karina [13:11:07]: May your pager be silent
I drive my father’s old brown Morris to my favourite sandwich shop, Alfalfa, a line-out-the-door diner that is open from morning to “whenever we run out,” which is usually mid-afternoon. Traffic is light in these halcyon hours before the big rush, so I open my window and revel in the breezy hum of the city in motion. This weekday time away from the clinic shines with a precious, golden lustre, and nothing sounds more luxurious than an Americano and an egg sandwich. We used to go to Alfalfa together, my father and I, sometimes to celebrate, but more often just to chat.
These were joyful excursions. He would sit across from me, his chair balanced expertly on its back legs, his head just kissing the wall behind him. When I spoke, he would listen, peering down his gnomon nose with his curious, slow-blinking half-squint.
He called these outings “tete-a-tetes,” and they were ours. Looking back, it is clear my father was always rooting for an excuse to steal away to Alfalfa. Good grades earned an early bird special on a Monday morning.
“Oh, you made lead in the school play, Karina?” Alfalfa for Saturday lunch.
If I appeared sullen and lachrymose enough, my father would clasp my slack elbow and lead me out to his anachronistic car.
“It’s time for a tete-a-tete, don’t you think?” he would say.
And off we would go. In these angsty, otherwise baleful teenage years, I gleaned bits of insight about my father the human, a man of letters masquerading as a reserved city archivist. He was sharp then, and scrupulously attentive. My middling problems, the adolescent’s agonized search for enduring, stable identity, interested him, or so it seemed to me. He listened, rapt, periodically reflecting my sentiments, like a Rogerian therapist. I appreciated his erudite allusions, dispatches from the faraway milieus of Eliot and Steinbeck and Tolstoy. The welter of high school quieted to a whir in Alfalfa, where I was introduced to the music of Mahler and Mingus and even Phil Ochs. The owner, Murray, wore his affinities proudly, and my father and I always sat beneath a portrait of Emma Goldman, looking bored, pince-nez straight as could be on the bridge of her nose.
During these years, my mother and I traded salvos daily, some packed with gun powder, but most anodyne barbs sent through tight lips. Alfalfa was a refuge then, a space free of maternal tyranny. My father assiduously parried any attempt I made to share my shallow rancour, which began to disperse as soon as I moved out. Time started to play a cruel little trick, then, revealing two women of remarkable similarity, simpatico spirits. I began to look like her, too, sinewy and small, with corkscrew curls. She had greyed in her twenties, and so had I. Like her, I let nature run its course. The silvery curls were looser, easier to manage, and I liked their mystique. And whether out of discomfort or politesse, we simply proceeded as though our relationship had always arced toward the sublime. Even when she was dying last year, we dared not revisit our brief dark period. Perhaps we simply saw it as a waste of my mother’s breath, which was so cherished in those last months.
I take my seat underneath a Soviet cosmonaut poster of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. He is holding a stylized red hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other, shaking them at the starscape in marked defiance. Whether out of sentimentality or compulsion, I reserve the old table, unchanged under Emma’s probing gaze, for a future tete-a-tete.
These days, on my rare visits, Yuri is typically my only company, and I am still trying to decipher the poster’s Cyrillic slogan.
“I think it’s something about hope and the last frontier—you know, space,” Murray had offered. “Long live Soviet space workers?”
I order an Americano and breakfast sandwich. In clinic, I eat while furiously charting, coaxing food down my esophagus with periodic boluses of water. Presently, I remind myself to practice mindful eating. Chew thirty times, a generic reedy chorus echoes in my ears.
I hold a swig of coffee in my mouth to allow the tasting notes to waft along my olfactory circuitry. Is that strawberry? I induce myself to care. Maybe a bit of evergreen at the end? My mind wanders for just a moment, or so it seems, and the jig is up. I peer into my saucer to find it empty and note, with muted disappointment, that my plate is scattered with english muffin crumbs. A wave of reflux, menacing in its fullness, dispels any remaining illusions of mindful eating. I am incorrigible, apparently.
I flip through a few of the ragged paperbacks scattered across a metal basket fastened to the underside of the table, but can’t bring myself to commit. I glance at my phone mindlessly. No new messages. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I plug in my headphones and begin to listen to a podcast on the postmodern perils of caffeine, which has hijacked our sleep and turned us all into crypto-junkies.
“After those brutal weeks of cutting back and breaking free of coffee’s grip, I realized I was sleeping more deeply than I had in forty years,” the author says in an adenoidal California drawl. “I felt like a teenager again.”
The addict in me bristles at this heresy. For the godless among us, it is only coffee that resurrects.
“And you know, it’s a drug, a real-deal stimulant, no question,” he continues. “But we’ve got to get ahead, don’t we? No one wants to be last in the rat race. And in our go-go-go culture, with its breakneck pace and unstoppable deadlines, caffeine is a necessity. Or is it? Just what are we in such a hurry for, anyway?”
Time tilts like a cyclone in Alfalfa, my eternal return, bending memories in its wistful crucible. You better enjoy this bit of freedom, I say to myself. This is it. But coffee’s wakeful galvanism is no match for a resident’s adenosine stores. My consciousness drifts. I drift.
I awaken to a polyphony of sounds, the double-beep of my alarm posing a dissonant challenge to the droning hum of the podcast cascade. My father’s shift is nearing its end. I bus my table myself and wave to Murray, who salutes me like a lazy soldier. Then I make my way back to the community centre to fetch the old man.
When I pull up, he is standing at the curb, swaying gently on his heels. The trilby hat is pulled low, obscuring his gaze. I roll down the window.
“Hello, Dad,” I say. “Need a lift?”
He turns to face me, momentarily muddle-minded, and then smiles with dawning recognition.
“Karina,” he says as he slinks heavily into the seat beside me. “Were you waiting long?”
“I just arrived,” I say. “How was work?”
He pauses for a full five seconds. “Dad?”
Almost in slow motion, he swivels toward me. “Yes?”
“How was work?”
“Oh,” he says. “It was quite busy, I’d say.”
“Any news?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “Mm—it’s a bit of a blur, isn’t it. I saw Alexa. Such a lovely young woman. We had a lot to do today.”
“Well, like what?” I ask.
In a decidedly petulant display, he slaps his thighs with his open palms. I peer at him sidelong for a moment. His gnomon nose, usually noble and aquiline, is crimped. “Karina, I do not appreciate the third degree,” he says.
These bursts of apoplexy are becoming increasingly unpredictable and out of character. His Hyde persona is a crude foil to the temperate, pensive man of my youth. But this stranger is emerging more often with every passing week, an infuriating hobgoblin impostor. Like a good family doctor, I attempt to deescalate.
“You seem angry, Dad,” I say through gritted teeth. “Why is that?”
“I just,” he honks. “I just…” The words aren’t coming. Like a whistling dragon, he begins to snort and hum. I resist the urge to swivel my head toward him and scowl. The car lurches as I release my lead foot onto the gas pedal.
“You just what, Dad?” I snap. “Come on, out with it.”
“Mm—it’s…you…” In my periphery, I can see his fists ball pathetically, like a baby about to wail. “What I mean to say is…”
A frisson of pure, red rage pulls me erect in my seat. I suck in my cheeks until they ache. There is a desperate, wild kind of exasperation kindled by this inane, impotent tantrum, enacted in private. Is it a reflection of something revealed or something changed? I do not know this snivelling, doddering old man, with his whistling breaths and mincing wrath.
“Look at you,” I snarl. “Don’t hold back on my account, Dad. Let it out. What have I done?”
“I’m…oh…come on now,” he bleats.
A red light looms hazily in the distance. I wait until the last possible moment to squeeze the brakes, which squeal in protest. I smack the steering wheel and turn to face him. He is tapping his teeth together, and the idiocy of the tic is too much in that moment.
“Tell me,” I bellow. “What in the name of Christ are you upset about? I do everything for you. I pick you up. I drop you off. I manage your life. I listen to your asinine, dumbshit, meandering stories. And do you ask me how I’m doing? No. Do you care? I don’t think so. I am going to work like a dog for the next four weeks. As usual, Dad. And in my spare time, which amounts to a few hours here and there, I don’t care for myself. I spend it with you.”
His teeth stop chattering and he unclenches his fists. Little teardrop rivulets swell in the corners of his eyes.
“This is my day off,” I seethe. “How dare you get pissy with me? Over nothing.”
“Well, now. Mmm—hold on there,” he interjects meekly. “Don’t you…don’t you steamroll me, young lady.”
“I’m not young!” I shout. “Your daughter is in her thirties.”
The light changes and I depress the gas pedal to the floor. The little brown hatchback mewls shrilly.
“Why, you’re…” he begins. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see he’s clenched his fists again. His lined umber face is conspicuously florid with quick-building fury.
“Yeah?” I say. “I what?”
“You’re a…”
I smack the steering wheel. “Why are you stuttering like a child? This because I asked you what you did today at work? You’re something else.”
“Mmm—you must—” he rattles. “Just let me speak.”
I must appear a grotesque to the drivers who pass and glance, even momentarily, into the little brown jalopy to find a thirty-something, prematurely grey woman and an old man gesticulating at each other in apparent rage.
“I’m all ears.”
“Karina, you’re being—“
“I’m being what?”
“You’re being—“
“Say it,” I howl.
“You’re being a bitch!”
***
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology. I’ve left them as a sort of cyber-hairshirt. Please read my repentant anti-AI mea culpa and, if you can, forgive me.
Ohhhhhh yes. Cognitive decline. Parents and children, now on role reversal. Caregiver burnout versus the pain of a mind that knows it’s not firing on all thrusters but can’t fully grasp why—certainly can’t figure out how to stop it…both haunted by the ghosts of What Was.
Heartbreaking in the journey, beautiful in the telling.
Good start! and again, good luck ...