Chapter 5: Ben Trovato (2024)

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Since the first turning, my dreams have become increasingly vivid. They unfurl out of the amnesiac darkness harrowing and aching, drained of their dreaminess. Sometimes, I am disappointed to emerge once again in the world of waking, where I am an aging orphan clinging to the headboard of my childhood bed. But often, I am relieved. The grittiest of these dreams leave an uncanny residue that sticks to me like sap.

Last night, my mother paid me a visit. In the year since she died, she has been, to use my father’s expression, a full-moon caller, appearing like an apparition from the clouded depths of memory. This time, she takes me by surprise.

“Shhhh,” she says, and cradles my head against her bony clavicle. The thick silvery braid of her favourite wig brushes my hands, which are clasped around her ribcage. I look into her wild, dancing eyes, the same carrot-in-swamp-water as mine. Her skin is pallid and thin. She is dying again.

“Don’t go,” I say. “Mom, I haven’t made it yet.”

“Shhh,” she says again, and squeezes me more tightly in her sinewy, emaciated arms. Her exhalation sounds like wind through the leaves of a single tree.

“But I’m all alone,” I say, begging.

“Shhh,” she repeats. “We’re all alone, Karina. Everyone’s alone, honey.”

I begin to weep, and my mother extends a cupped palm to catch my tears. “You’re so thin, Mom,” I whisper. “Aren’t you eating?”

She chuckles wheezily. “Your father tells me the universe is spreading thin. But yes, honey, I’m always eating. It’s just that the tumours are ravenous. I can’t keep up.”

Gently, I push myself from her gaunt embrace. Beneath me is a firm, springy mattress covered in heavily starched sheets. We are in a hospital room, a single with a big open window through which we can see the hills that spill outward toward the horizon.

There is a knock on the door, and a plump woman enters. Her face is round and plain, but its small features are delicately organized. She whisks over to the bed.

“Hello again, Mona,” she says. “It’s so nice to see you.”

“Who are you?” I demand.

“Oh, Karina,” breathes my mother. “Won’t you hush?”

The woman rests a hand on one of her ample hips. She is wearing a clerical collar. “Every day, you ask me the same thing,” she says and turns to my mother. “I think she might have dementia.”

I edge toward the lip of the bed, but my limbs become tangled in the safety rail, which looms like a wrought iron gate, towering numinously before me.

“Mom, help me!” I cry, shaking the bars.

“Shhh,” she whispers in my ear.

“I can’t get out,” I plead. “Mom, we’re trapped.”

“Shhhhh,” she repeats. “Don’t say another word.”

 ****

I awaken sweaty and panicked. A resonant buzz emits from my phone, which is plugged in beside the bed.

751-587-8942 [07:03:30]: So nice to see you again Karina. Hope you have a blessed day!

My breath catches. How did she get my number? I tap the screen and hold to invoke a hidden menu. QuidNunc asks me whether I want to accept this message. I do not, of course, so I let her message shimmer beneath Rhiannon’s, an omen of forced connection, and propel myself out of bed.

Groovycardude1941, nee Bob, is going to stop by soon, so I shoo away my homely demon and make my way outside to give the old Brown Morris a cursory walk-around. The little hatchback glistens under a dappling of morning dew. In my daze last night, I neglected to throw the fusty tarp over top, but I figure Bob will not protest. If he fits my stereotype, he will have a freshly laundered microfibre cloth draped around his neck, primed to wipe away the condensation. I cup my hands against the driver-side window to survey the burgundy interior, which looks a little brighter in the light of the rising sun.

Bob arrives in what I recognize as a Mazda Miata, the obligatory in-town cruiser for Boomer car nuts. He is as I expect. Thinning gray hair has been slicked back. His once-angular face has softened some with age, though his skin is otherwise youthful and sun-kissed, likely, I imagine, from frequent beach trips.

I meet him at the mouth of the pebbly driveway. He removes his sunglasses and threads one of the arms into the collar of his shirt, a tasteful salmon floral.

“Hello there, Karina,” he says, extending his hand. He turns to the Morris, beaming. “Wowee, look at that. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

I grasp his hand firmly, and he begins to stride, with me now in tow, toward the car. “Morning, Bob,” I manage to chirp. “Yes, this it.”

He releases my hand and circles the hatchback like a wolf. “Your dad sure kept it in good shape,” he marvels. “I remember these babies when they were new. I mean, I don’t remember remember, but I read about them in Car and Driver. Not many on the road here in ‘the States,’ as they say in England. Jeez, they’re so neat.”

My father had told me about the Kelley Blue Book years ago, so before my meeting with Bob, I used the online database to set a price for the car. The online forums I stalked have led me to believe I can ask top dollar, and Bob is predictably undeterred.

“Can I take her for a test drive?” he asks. His forehead is lined with deep grooves, and yet I have the impression that the man standing before me is really a seventy-year-old boy.

“Well, sure,” I say. “Do you want me to join you?”

He blinks at me. “You shouldn’t let anyone drive this kind of collectible without you being in it, Kari,” he says.

So we cruise around the block. Bob’s face is incandescent. Never have I seen a purer expression of joy. His grin, truly ear to ear, dilates with every depression of the gas pedal, every shifted gear. “It’s like driving a piece of history,” he says. He extends his hand out the window like a rudder, tasting the morning breeze.

We return to the driveway, and Bob promptly pays me in crisp hundred-dollar bills that appear to have been freshly cut. As he counts, he lets the bills slide into an open envelope.

“You know what there, I’ll come back in a bit to grab the car,” he says. “Have to wait for my wife to get back from her run so she can get the Miata back to the ranch.”

“That’s fine,” I say. “I can just leave it in the driveway.”

I hand him both sets of keys, and he lays a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You take good care of yourself, OK, Kari?” he says. Like a football coach consoling a crying quarterback, he gives me a paternal shake and a pat on the back. “My condolences, by the way. I’ve got a daughter about your age. Makes you think.”

I return to the house and scoop my phone off the kitchen counter.

Rhi L[09:22:09]: Y are u stalking chaplains anyway?

Rhi L[09:22:15]: U need a hobby

I have been derelict in my texting responsiveness. Without thinking, I open the message window to reply.

Karina [10:10:23]: Sorry, Rhi. I just unloaded the old Morris. Thank God for “collectors”

Karina [10:11:02]: I’m not stalking. Weird that no one knows her. Hmmm…

Karina[10:11:31]: Who has time for hobbies?

I wander into my parents’ office. The manuscript and talismans are still heaped on the desk, quiescent under the dishtowel. I glance at the enchanted stack for a long, seeking moment, at once tempted and repelled by the draw of another turning. I flip open the cherry rolltop desk and pull a fresh yellow legal pad from a drawer that I have to wrench open with both hands.

I return to the kitchen table and begin to limn my journeys into the abyss. I note the approximate time of each turning, its ostensible catalyst, a timeline of events. If the memory correlates with a story I know, I record both the details of the turning and the anecdote, marking in red pen the discrepancies between the two, either gaps filled or the introduction of new lacunae. I chronicle my returns, too, the encounters that brought me back, so to speak, the threats to life and limb.

At the bottom, I describe with as much meticulousness as I can, last night’s encounter with Min. What is most striking to me, as I look it over, is its banality. A woman approached me at a restaurant I essentially picked at random. She insisted, against my strenuous remonstrations, that we were old friends. My doubt was an affront, but when, in a scheming moment, I opted to feign familiarity instead, she was quick to forgive my forgetting. It was her ordinariness, her facileness, that was so unnerving. Her knowings, at once innocent and ominous, bespeak intimacy, but she is a stranger to me. Where did she get my phone number? I suppose it might be in some hospital directory. And yet, she’s not actually a chaplain, at least according to Rhiannon’s snooping.

I cap my pen and look over my notes, a scribbled outline punctuated mostly with question marks. There is again a temptation, attended now by an electric thrill, to try to invoke a turning. There, in what I have deduced is a city of memory stored in left-behinds and souvenirs, a whole universe is suspended in amber. Even if I were merely to spectate, I would be a voyeur with the purest of motives: saudade, that untranslatable Portuguese longing for what has been lost.

Rhiannon buzzes in my pocket.

Rhi L[12:22:42]: U should train ur memory. Learn all the presidents names in order.

Rhi L[12:23:17]: Hey I have a lil something for u check ur email. A ticket to moth, some kinda climate change mixer social event I dunno. Cant go bc I have to cover LeClerc this wknd on obs. Finish out ur month in style

Sure enough, in my inbox, I find a ticket to the Museum of The Future’s (MOTH) monthly Saturday Soiree, which promises co*cktails, lights, and “foodie bliss.” Downstairs, a chic party. Upstairs, a lecture and slideshow on the apocalyptic plight of Arctic glaciers in full retreat. Rhiannon and I have talked about attending one of these shindigs for months, but our rigid schedules, and my father’s needs, always interfered. Her reaching out now is impeccable timing, incidentally.

At the end of this weekend, I will have to return to my home clinic for my next rotation. The powers that be decided to defer my final internal medicine rotation for a few months to allow me to “re-transition into clinical life.” Back to clinic. Back to Dr. Fossal, my sneering primary supervisor, and the minutiae of inner-city family medicine, with its hodgepodge of viral illnesses, chronic disease management, mental health, and light social work. And back to my dim little apartment, which is walking distance from the clinic. What good luck that as my bereavement leave trickles out its last benevolent hours, I have somewhere to go on a Saturday night.

Karina[12:25:56]: Wow, Rhi! This is amazing. Thank you! <3

Rhi L[12:26:34]: Np. Let me know how it goes—next time ill join u

Rhi L[12:26:59]: Make another friend or something :)

I repack my duffel with the few clothes I brought for my monthlong sojourn in my childhood home, and I stash my laptop, the yellow legal pad, and Lathe of Heaven in my sagging, flaccid backpack. For a long moment, I stand before the pile on the cherry rolltop desk, pondering whether it would be wise to bring the manuscript and my late father’s accoutrements of living.

A voice, relentless in its interior pleading, urges me to scoop it all into the bag, to tote the enchanted bric a brac back to my one-bedroom apartment, where I know a poignant, anguished loneliness awaits. For a long, yearning moment, I consider it, the retreat of memory, or perhaps to memory, where rememberings are suspended in endless recapitulation. I miss them, my parents. I ache for them. And I could see them there, in my father’s memory city, where, like players in an endless drama, they are forever acting out a life lived. Am I becoming sentimental, then, like the plaintive old women who drip their tears onto the streaked glass of framed photographs?

In my father’s office, I find an empty blue binder, with mesh sleeves set in the plastic for odds and ends. With my eyes partially closed, I insert the manuscript, which I secure with the long vertical clip mechanism. Then I toss the wallet and watch in each of the mesh pockets. I mutter to myself sheepishly in the abiding emptiness of the house, and then I slip the binder into my backpack.

After one final desultory tour, I lock up the house. The driveway is empty and denuded, which is a bittersweet sight. My father’s old Morris has found a new home and a more attentive owner. For a wistful moment, I imagine Bob, bedecked in a baggy Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo shorts, hurling a frisbee for the Morris, which leaps in the air to snap its hood.

I trudge to the bus stop like a teenager returning, sleepless, from a bad sleepover. In the balmy hours of an early Friday afternoon, the bus cabin is empty save an elderly man, who stands a foot or so from the driver, pontificating enthusiastically.

“That’s what they do, Marv. They give you the goddamn runaround. I went to a town hall once and gave them a piece of my mind. I said, ‘look, it shouldn’t take all goddamn day to get a new drivers license.’ Am I right, though, Marv? We’re not Soviet Russia, for Christ’s sake.”

I sit near the rear and gaze out the window at the slow blur of buildings, streetlights, and pedestrians. In the distance, a billboard slowly comes into view. Its background is a deep crimson rumpled with gold-crested waves. A pirate ship is parked in the foreground, with a co*cksure captain grinning on its sloped deck. In his hand, he holds an oversized gold clock on a dangling chain. Cupped manfully in his other palm is an oblong tub of hand lotion.

The cabin air thins, just for a moment, and there is a shift, nearly imperceptible, in my awareness. By now, I know this betwixt-and-between space as the prelude to a turning, but it happens so quickly that I cannot steel myself against the inevitable shock of revelation.

Instinctually, I glance sidelong at the empty bus bench beside me, and when I return my gaze to the site of the billboard, I discover it is now a medical diploma, perfectly centred in its rectangular mahogany frame.

 Dr. Siddartha Ehrlich, MD

This time, there is no bready aroma, no bustling, anachronistic streets, no filthy alcoves charged with the promise of menace. Instead, I find myself standing in the doorway of a small, cluttered office. An ageless man sits at an unvarnished wooden desk, flanked by tilting stacks of papers. If it weren’t for his artless combover, shellacked in ribbony waves over a shining pate, I would think he was a medical student. His eyes are kindly, searching, humane.

Before him are my parents as I knew them in the last years. Their chairs are so close together that their shoulders appear fused, half cobalt blue dress shirt and half knitted oatmeal sweater. My father’s feet tap nervously. My mother’s face is impassive, or perhaps resigned. The doctor is wearing a white coat with his name embroidered on the pocket. He leans forward, hands clasped.

“I want to talk to you both about something,” he says. “I have some information to share. Is that OK?”

My mother replies immediately. Her voice is clear and low. “Please.”

Dr. Ehrlich nods and, like a schoolteacher, he addresses both my parents, shifting his gaze seamlessly from my father’s lined, umber face to my mother’s, which is partially obscured by her bountiful silver hair, which she has left down.

“The back pain you’ve been having, Mona, it’s another tumour.” He pauses to permit my parents to react. My mother breathes deeply and drops her chin slightly. My father reaches over to rest a hand on her shoulder.

“Lung cancer is sneaky,” Dr. Ehrlich continues. “Usually, when it makes itself known, it has spread, which means it has invaded the lymph system and often the bones, liver, or brain. That is what we mean when we talk of metastases. In your case, the imaging we did showed some lesions in the middle of your spine.”

He pauses again. My mother says nothing, and from the doorway, I cannot see her expression. For his part, my father seems bewildered, but also panicked. He searches the doctor’s face and then my mother’s, reeling.

“So what do we do?” he asks.

“There’s nothing they can do, Perry” my mother replies flatly. “I have tumours in my lung sacks and my back.”

The physician does not remonstrate. “It is concerning,” he says.

My mother looks up. Her face is slack, but in it, I can discern an aching sorrow, which tugs at the corners of her lips. “I am going to die,” she says.

“No,” says my father. He grips her upper arm firmly. “No, Mona. We’ll fight it.” He appeals to the doctor with arched eyebrows. “What do we do now?”

Dr. Ehrlich nods at my father and squints. “Well, Perry,” he says. “We will talk about choices. Mona has options.”

“How long?” my mother asks.

Ehrlich is unfazed. He, like all oncologists, is prepared for this question. “We can never say for sure, but in your case, prognosis is likely six months to two years.”

My mother looks past him, at the textured off-white wall, maybe. She twists her lips, trying, I can see, to not weep. Standing in the doorway, I am filling up with despair, liquid and heavy. It threatens to push me down to the floor, to drown me there. I swallow, and a sigh, a little eep, escapes from my lips. The trio turns to me.

“Karina,” says my mother. “What are you doing here?”

Her invocation of my name snaps me back to the bus. It happens in an instant, revealing the sticky once-red vinyl of the bus bench beneath my prone body. Embarrassed, I scramble to a seated position. I try to stretch out my body to loosen my muscles, which are suddenly stiff and cramped. My cheeks are wet with tears, which I wipe away gently with a crumpled emergency tissue I keep in my purse.

It is only by dint of habit that I do not miss my stop. In my periphery, the rainbow marquee of Round The Corner, stolid minimart and landmark, comes into view. My hand reaches up and tugs the cord, and I slink out the back door with a warbly “thank you” to the driver.

I make my way to my apartment, stunned with sorrow, loaded down by backpack and duffel, tilted slightly on my axis. My own memory of my mother’s prognosis begins after her fateful appointment with Dr. Ehrlich. We sat together on the saggy couch, huddled in its dimple. I had wept in her arms, my face pressed against her delicate clavicles, exposed above the neckline of her airy blouse. And then she began to deteriorate, week after week. Her skin lost its colour. She was thin before her diagnosis, but as the cancer ate away at her, she became truly cachectic, sallow skin hanging like fresh dough over bird bones. She died suddenly, not quite nine months thereafter, of a massive pulmonary embolism, which stopped her heart while she lay in agony on the bowed couch bed.

When he found her, my senile father had the wherewithal to make two calls, one to 911 and the other to me. I arrived after EMS. She wore a bracelet that read in capital letters, DO NOT RESUSCITATE, so they waited for the coroner, who pronounced her death.

I sat with my father in the living room. He was bolt upright, stupefied, silent. I wept for both of us, and every now and then, I threw my arms around his taut shoulders and assured him that everything was going to be OK. I would take care of him.

And I did.

This latest turning is not a surprise, I suppose. I had imagined the scene very much the way it unfolded. Dr. Ehrlich, the consummate humanitarian oncologist, delivered his dismal news, and my mother took it on the chin. My father was befuddled, of course, tragically confused. This image of him, whipsawed between panic and bewilderment, broke my heart. In the weeks following her death, he would call out to her, but eventually, mercifully, he was able to accept her loss as permanent. We seldom talked about it, her excruciating absence, but he always reminisced about her enthusiastically, often with a wistful smile crinkling his umber face. I took solace in these retrospectives, these memorial salves for the wounds of grief.

Someone has propped open the glass door to my apartment building with a chunky rock, which is both alarming and a blessing. I use my foot to thrust open the heavy stairwell door, and I trudge up the one flight of stairs. My inner elbows, the antecubital fossae, ache under the weight of my duffel. Somehow, I make it to my apartment without collapsing in a puddle somewhere. I toss my bags onto the linoleum floor in the kitchenette and massage my forearms with my thumbs, which also throb for some reason.

I open the backpack and pull out the binder containing the manuscript, wallet, and watch.

“These f*cking things,” I mutter to myself.

My one-bedroom is small but well-kept, and in the linen closet beside the squat bathroom, I find space for my cursed talismans behind the towels. I shove them as far as I can with my short arms, almost to the exposed wood at the rear of the shelf, and arrange the folded towels into a blockade, a bulwark against both temptation and accidental turnings.

Captain Clock, that sneaky bastard, has left residua in my dreams and memories and, perhaps, my father’s watch and manuscript. I presume some synchronicity of image and trace invoked this last turning. The enchanted items were essentially on my person, so this latest visit to memoryland didn’t deviate from the established pattern. But how did my father, in his confusion, instantiate this recollection in his memory city? Could a person with dementia create a locus?

Maybe it was a flash memory emblazoned into his consciousness, a moment so intense that its imprint was indelible. I record this latest event in the yellow legal pad and then toss it on the kitchen table.

At long last, the talismans are safely stashed away. The prodigal Karina has returned. It feels good to be back in my own space, spartan though it is with its anarchic bookcases and empty walls.

Besides, I remind myself, tomorrow I have something to do. A real something, a swanky event for under-forties at the MOTH. I unpack and tidy my small space, which shimmers under the faintest quilt of gossamer dust.

When I stayed with Rhiannon, she had shared her Dolus password with me so I could stream Strings, my new guilty pleasure, and lull myself to sleep on those first and loneliest nights. Had you asked me a year ago, I never would have thought I would succumb to the seduction of a melodrama about vain, self-serving orchestra musicians and their intricate web of torrid rendezvouses. But it turns out I have an insatiable inner voyeur.

I plop down on my firm little couch and prop my laptop on a stack of medical textbooks. The episodes unspool seamlessly, without even a minute’s respite between them. Story arcs rise and fall, and for a time, I am free. Like a real degenerate, I even bring the laptop with me to the bathroom and balance it on the ledge of the bathtub, so determined am I to not permit myself even a moment of unmediated contemplation. I lose the rest of Friday night to this glorious “binge,” this quarter-day surrender to the screen. Eyes open, mouth slack, mind an insipid desert. I am saved. Hallelujah.

Unusually, I do not awaken to shift myself to bed, and the next morning, I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. I rise, creaky and stiff, and drink my coffee in quick sips between ungainly attempts at yogic relief. In a past life, I had contorted my poor body and perspired in undignified drips in sweltering rooms, prodded and coaxed into body pretzels by a smiling tyrant wearing vermillion tights. Presently, I hold a cobra pose, body prone, head and neck arched such that my hair nearly grazes the curve of my lower back.

The past leans over the present, as my father wrote. I would add that the future looms like a shadowy titan at the far edge of the horizon. On this Saturday morning, I am ensconced in the present, betwixt and between, uneasy. In two short days, I will return to training, with its long days and surging stress. The turnings will continue, I imagine, wreaking havoc in my already precarious, disconsolate life. There is no space for them, of course, no interstices in which I can give myself to their mysterious insistence, mull over their significance. Nothing accentuates an isolato’s aloneness like an ironclad secret.

I sneak a look at my phone, but the screen is mercifully dark and quiescent. No flashing QuidNunc messages from the interloper Min. Rhiannon, my far-flung friend, is on service once again, covering obstetrical epidurals for a colleague. Without my father’s care to arrange, I will have more time for myself. What a terrible blessing, this new freedom. More time, and one fewer person with whom to share it.

Since I am up early, I gather my wheeled car and drag it down the stairs. The weekend Al Fresco farmer’s market shudders to life at seven o’clock, and by ten, the militant young mothers piloting three-wheeled strollers will be out in force, edging unassuming pedestrians onto the grass with gladiatorial vigour. I arrive in the open-air bazaar in the liminal period between opening and unbridled bedlam. The cheerful, airy vendors greet me as I pass. They neither exhort nor needle, but simply wait for me to notice their dazzling cornucopias of tomatoes, root vegetables, and assorted dewey greens.

There is a woman with dreadlocks selling beeswax soap scented with garden herbs. An older man hocks tea, whose provenance he will detail lavishly if you give him the chance. There is a community here, an assemblage of food and art people, and I cannot remember the last time I meandered among them like a welcome tourist. Perhaps it was with my mother, during those last moribund weeks, in which she insisted on taking shuffling walks outside.

I fill my cart with vegetables and fruit I cannot imagine I will have time to prepare properly during the week. I return home, dragging my wheeled cart noisily up the flight of grooved stone steps, and induce myself to food-prep, as the blogs call it, which, for me, amounts to a crockpot full of quinoa and vegetables that I will ration over the coming week and supplement with almond butter and jam sandwiches.

Flitting, uneasy thoughts interrupt my tasks. These murky wonderings beg me to conjecture, to concoct whimsical explanations for impossible things. Perhaps a less encumbered person would be excited by the presence of the eldritch and mystical in their lives. As a child who retreated to the otherworldly in books, I had fantasized about other dimensions, intrigue, conspiracy. Even then, the awe and magic of childhood was not quite enough. But these fanciful yearnings did not include my dead dad’s memories or the emergence of a strange woman, possibly an impostor, who insisted we were old friends. Besides, in those stories, plot mechanics were planted in auspicious places to orient the special little girls and boys. They were not slick with stress sweat, bumbling and alone. This is how you got here, a helpful turtle would say. And that is why.

So far, I do not know the why or how, but I am hopeful that my linen closet, with its towel blockade, will safeguard me from unexpected turnings. With bovine regularity, I check my phone and eagerly swipe away e-mails from the medical association, an outdoor supply outlet, and a f*ckless local political campaign. I am flooded with a sort of queasy restiveness, the kind that pushes, two-handed, at the minute hand, urging it into a looping pirouette. Bring me the evening, I seem to be pleading. And no more turnings or unsolicited texts, please.

I get my wish. Radio silence for the entirety of this Saturday afternoon, during which I scurry around my little apartment readying it, and myself, for an impending tidal wave, whose crest I can sense at some unseen, but keenly felt, horizon. My bathroom, a mid-century relic, has an old, chipped bathtub, which I keep clean in case I can find time for a soak.

I fill it and edge my way in. To deflect neurotic thoughts, I pipe a podcast through a cheap portable speaker I balance on the lip of the sink. The voice of Clara Castillo, host of All That is Solid, echoes tinnily in my small bathroom.

“The architecture of collective memory has all but crumbled. So says Helmholz Ebbinghaus, Donnell W. Rogers professor of social thought at University of Bonneville, whose new book, The Hegemony of Forgetting, just hit the shelves. Our era is marked by historical fragmentation, Ebbinghaus tells us. The nation’s once largely united vision of the past has splintered into a collage of competing narratives of purported pasts, which try to out-shout one another in our crowded discourse. Old verities have given way to post-truth. The victors’ spoils are safely behind glass. Unless you live under a rock, there is no escape from our postmodern image culture, which idealizes an imagined past and aches for a fantastical future that cannot come quickly enough. But unlike our forebears, who relied on the rudders of tradition and obligation to guide their precarious existences, we moderns look inward. Perhaps that is why, in the words of the great twentieth-century expatriate writer Henry Miller, ‘mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered.’

In The Hegemony of Forgetting, Ebbinghaus zeroes in on what he calls ‘neoliberalism’s pernicious presentism,’ which swallows up past and future in an assertion of a perpetual now. Gone are the spectres of 1789 and 1917. All the big issues have been settled, we are told. Depending on whom you ask, our present century is either a wasteland or a paradise. To the astute observer, however, there seems to be a curious stagnation in our privatized present. We seem to be going backward while rocketing forward, retrogressing while we careen toward oblivion.

What happened to the future we were promised in the 1960s, with 4-hour workdays and flying cars? How quickly we forget, Ebbinghaus quips. Instead of the better world of our dreams, we got credit cards and cheap consumer electronics. The march of time is inexorable, but the arc does not appear to bend toward progress. And yet liberal triumphalists stridently herald the “end of history” while the climate crisis knocks at the world’s door. In a particularly harrowing chapter of The Hegemony of Forgetting, Ebbinghaus shines a spotlight on the strangling of print media and defunding of university social science and humanities departments, our ‘institutions of memory,’ which he believes could be the last bulwarks against unanswered tyranny. Someday soon, we might find ourselves deprived of these organs of record, which clarify in retrospect what might have been unintelligible in the moment.

In this cynical welter of push and pull, a malignant incoherence has seeped into the psychology of the populace, which is more and more given to conspiracy and paranoia. Our collective consciousness is ailing, but the prophets tell us to “be mindful and grateful” and trust in the power of now. These are but a few of the features of the new dark age, Ebbinghaus warns, and it’s only going to get worse. ‘Smartphone democracy and the wrinkle in time’ is the topic of the hour. Where are we going? How did we get here? And in the absence of a coherent history, how will we make sense of what’s been done to us?”

These days, even my edification is fractured into fragments of repurposed time. In college, I joined the writhing clusters of shouting dissidents packed onto the grassy medians of busy streets. We protested fatcat bailouts and dirty wars, student debt and climate justice. Once, a slack-jawed man in an American flag hat brained me with a full can of beer tossed from his pickup truck, and I had to miss a week of class to recover from the resultant concussion. Apparently, he didn’t support universal housing.

When Chomsky came to my school, I stood with the rest of the sweaty groundlings, crammed in the back of an auditorium, awaiting the oracle. I wasn’t always a poseur. Once upon a time, I was a firebrand and iconoclast cheered on by my lumpen father, who applauded my adventures in subversion from the comfort of his overstuffed chair.

Is it medicine that has made me a fellow traveler who spectates, but no longer pipes up, speaks out, or joins in? I tell myself I’m too busy, but maybe this is simply how the status quo sediments in the radical soul. Utopian commitments particulate into dunes of pragmatic dust that smother the idealistic impulse. Arriviste fatigue does good work obscuring the listless guilt of hypocrisy.

When my skin becomes desiccated and furrowed, I drain the bathtub. It is going to be a warm, humid evening, so I decide to wear a loose, flowy dress. Before I leave the house, I check the linen closet once more to reassure myself that my talismans have not grown legs. I run through my checklist, a variation of my father’s. Cell phone is charged. Wallet is in my purse, concealed beneath emergency tissues. My keys are attached to a thin metal chain in the lining of my purse.

To get some exercise, or perhaps to simply waste more time, I walk the five kilometres to the MOTH, wending through side streets and fanciful commercial one-ways, where the hippest and most eccentric shops, most of which bear an ampersand in their names, seem to stack on top of each other in competition for customers. A prescient municipal ordinance prohibiting tall buildings, enacted decades ago, preserves a distant, hazy view of downtown Bonneville and the azure ribbon of water streaming along the unbroken horizon. The evening is peeking over the afternoon’s lazy, bobbing sun, gently coaxing away the light with a gentle breeze. I pull a light, knitted sweater from my purse and wrap it around my bare shoulders.

The MOTH is a sprawling structure with great arcing white wings curving toward the sky. Its iridescent windows glint at me in invitation as I skip up the stone steps to the entryway. I am painfully punctual. At a small folding table in the middle of the museum’s marble vestibule, a smiling woman with a septum piercing and horned-rim glasses scans my phone bar code and gives me a quick orientation.

“Upstairs, past the microchip exhibit, you’ll see a makeshift theatre, right? That’s where the lecture will be. There will be pillows off to the side that you can use for sitting,” she says. “And downstairs, you have your party. You know, your drinks and nosh stuff.” She winks at me and shimmies her shoulders. “Mingle, mingle.”

I make my way inside, past the slick box office and giant diorama of Mars, “The Red Promise,” and out into the brave and new. The mammoth foyer is decorated like a wine bar, lighted with little bursts of pale neon scintillating over tables at which a person—a tall person—could stand and enjoy a drink. In the centre of the room, the iconic scale model of the Challenger space shuttle glimmers under the reflected light of a disco ball lofted high above.

On the periphery, food kiosks have been assembled. Their signboards are bright and colourful, hawking sliders, cauliflower wings, and other assorted festival fare. There is even a mobile churreria run by a portly man with the bushiest handlebar moustache I have ever seen. It hangs, like a whale’s baleen, over his lips. I make a mental note to stop by at some point during the night.

At the far end of the majestic hall, a pop-up bar beckons. Behind its slick mahogany counter are twin shelves stacked with various spirits in contoured bottles. Its two bartenders are slicing citrus fruit and stacking glasses. The woman is petite, with ultra-high bangs and twin snake tattoos slinking up the sides of her neck, and her slim, bearded compatriot is wearing a bolo tie.

True to my appearance, I am a feeble lightweight, and I know better than to play chicken with spirits. Instead, I order a Stiegl Radtler, whose alcohol content and grapefruit essence better befit a kombucha. I will nurse this can for the rest of the evening.

Aside from me, there are a few others, mostly wallflowers, milling around like teenagers at a junior high dance. I install myself onto a bench by an archway and watch the room gradually fill. The music, which, on my arrival, had been experimental jazz, makes an awkward transition to house electronica. The basso rumble emanating from somewhere above pulsates in tectonic bursts that vibrate the Radtler can. Men in blazers and tee shirts thrust their hands in the air and bounce on their forefeet while trying to sip their beers. Women, most bonded to their friends in molecular clusters, thrust their arms up and undulate while staring askance, nosetips sensuously brushing their armpits.

The documentary is about to begin, so I retreat up the stairs near the entrance and make my way through the museum’s permanent exhibitions on microchips and the sixth great extinction to a makeshift theatre, which has taken over the entomology corner. I join a burgeoning group of people checkering the floor with pillows and extended legs. On my way in, I grab an overstuffed quilted cushion and find a place off to the side, where I can just glimpse the large white screen amid the mesh of massive, swaying craniums.

Somehow, I have missed the beginning of the film. Projected crisply on the screen is a desolate arctic tableau, an endless expanse of tundra. A stark cut draws our attention to massive floes breaking away from the surrounding glacial ice in thunderous cracks. They float haplessly away, and the camera traces their aimless, bobbing trajectory for some minutes. Water drizzles from giant ice shelves.

On one small iceberg, perilously far from solid ice, an emaciated polar bear prowls his frozen raft nervously, pawing at the water. The camera pans out to the widest of wide shots, and on the horizon, looming like a sinister behemoth, we see an oil rig, with its great smoke-puffing chimneys and tentacular appendages whose titanic fingers dig through the ice in a desultory rhythm. The blighted landscape is mottled with pools of still water punched in the ice as though by a colossal fist.

A young Inuit man draws a puny fish from an ice hole and drops it back into the opaque water with a shrug and simper. There is no music, not even the ambient peals of atmospheric bells as the stark panorama continues to turn. We are lofted into the sky and gifted an isometric view of the Arctic, with its inexorable, snowy whiteness cosseted in a cloudless azure sky blanket. Figures emerge below, minute and plodding. The camera descends smoothly, as though on a hydraulic pole, and soon, we can see that the group of human figures, all bedecked in arctic weather coats and balaclavas, are framing a textured message, drawn in towering blocky letters in the snow.

 Time is running out

Though the dance party is downstairs, its reverberations still fill the room. A muffled echo of a whooping cheer filters in from below: “Get it, girl!” A few of my fellows scan the room to gauge the mood, though nary a scoff, even sniffed, is heard. I turn slightly with what must be a smirk on my face and lock eyes with a man leaning against the wall opposite me. He puffs out his cheeks like a blowfish and shrugs.

I smirk to him in reply and turn back to the screen. A scientist is adjusting an instrument wobbling in a patch of semi-thawed ice. Though she is bedecked in thick, flowing snow pants, her black turtleneck and thinnish gloves give the impression of a spring skier pulling a rogue pole from a snowbank.

I have the sense that I am being watched, so I turn my head slightly to give my peripheral vision greater remit. The man squatting against the wall appears to be looking in my direction. I swivel my gaze to meet his directly. He does not balk or cast his eyes away nervously. Rather, he raises an eyebrow and co*cks his head toward the door. His clasped hands elevate in a sort of prayer gesture.

I shrug at him, and he pantomimes eating a giant sandwich. It is apparently so big that he cannot close his mouth. His eyes dart wildly for a moment before he retracts the mammoth panini—I imagine it’s a panini—and lets his lips part to take an ostentatious nibble. Again, he raises his eyebrows at me in invitation.

The documentary has shifted gears. A firenado rages through a dilapidated corridor of a generic small town. It tears across a seemingly endless field of wheat, leaving in its wake a blazing, crackling orange blight.

I rise slowly from my cushion and shuffle out into the sixth great extinction exhibit, where I linger by a prismatic display detailing an ongoing frog holocaust. Wall Man joins me by a 3D image of a Golden Toad.

He is slight and boyish, with messy brown hair, dense stubble, and eyes such a pale green that they flash on his approach.

“Thought I’d do us both a favour,” he says. “You hungry? We could get something downstairs.”

“Sure,” I say. “They have churros down there. And buffalo cauliflower wings.”

We trundle down the stairs to the ruckus below. In stark contrast to the decorous, pensive air upstairs, the MOTH’s great hall is teeming and cacophonous. The dance floor is packed like an ill-played Tetris board. Gawky, overburdened men and women straining under armloads of pitchers and heaping plates wend through the gaps to their friends, who hail their arrivals.

Ben leans close to me and shouts in my ear. “What should we get? I’m Ben, by the way.”

I survey the kiosks, excluding the meaty and messy: “Karina,” I shout back. “No duck skewers. Also, not the garbage nachos. Do you like falafel?”

He gives me a solemn thumbs-up. We edge our way through the globular masses of gesticulating thirty-somethings, steins hanging from loose fingers. The falafel kiosk is mobbed with the semi-drunk and likely-high, who form a lumpy, snaking line. Ben and I have to be vigilant and avoid the swinging arms of the larger, ungainly humans, who so seldom deign to look down.

I order a falafel sandwich and Ben a plate of stuffed grape leaves.

“Do you still want cauliflower wings?” Ben shouts to me. “I’ll split them with you.”

“Wings? Sure,” I shout back.

“Grab a table, and I’ll find you,” he says. “Divide and conquer.”

Ben, my sneaky new friend, is trying to buy food, to make, in our Millennial folkways, a roundabout courtly gesture. Is there subtext to accepting? The matronly voice in my head warns me, with vague unease, that I must always buy my own food.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” I yell. In the din, my voice sounds strained and strident. I never was a good shouter. I take his plate of grape leaves, which are stacked in a pyramid like green chrysalises.

He nods and peels away from me, merging, as it were, with the thronging mass of party-goers. For my part, I bob and weave in the interstitial pathways, ever-vigilant of swinging arms and unannounced repositioning. Along the rear wall, there is an open, crumby table, and I make a speed-walking bee-line toward it. With some straining, I balance the plates in one hand while wiping the debris with a napkin with the other. Then I lay the plates down and massage my aching forearms.

Ben returns with a plate of piping hot cauliflower wings, drizzled with red hot sauce. He stands beside me at the table, which is nearly at my shoulder level.

“Jesus, what a zoo,” he shouts.

“Thanks for grabbing the wings,” I bellow. “What do I owe you?”

He flaps his hand dismissively. “Come on,” he yells. “Does my outfit give me away?”

I give him the old once-over. He is wearing a cool blue sweater with a starched polka dot collar and beige cords. “Teacher?”

“Bingo,” he shouts. “But not the stable kind—you know, with benefits and a contract. I’m a sessional at University of Bonneville.”

“Well, how about this?” I yell. “I’ll get the churros later.”

He edges a bit closer to me. “I thought this was going to be a bit more, I don’t know, quiet. The e-mail said the theme was climate change and the melting of arctic ice.”

I gesture at the dance floor, where a cluster of women and men sway to the techno melody, which sounds to me like an egregious theft of Pachelbel’s Canon. “How does the old saying go? Work hard, play hard? Business upstairs, party downstairs?”

Ben laughs and shrugs. “Maybe we’re in a French film.”

“The Americans,” I offer. “Subtitle: fiddling while the world burns.”

“A bit heavy-handed,” he shouts. “But I’m in.”

“I’m relearning to talk to people,” I yell, immediately regretting my awkwardness. “What should I ask you?”

With a napkin held like a handkerchief, Ben takes a cauliflower wing and dips it into the little container of vegan ranch. “Well, I don’t know,” he shouts. “You’re really putting me on the spot. How about, ‘hey, Ben, how did you end up at this postmodern dance macabre, anyway?’”

“OK,” I yell. “That.”

“I have a friend with season tickets to the MOTH, but he and his wife couldn’t make it tonight. So he thought to himself, hmmm, who needs this? Which of my close personal friends would most enjoy a night of bleak climate realism and office rave?”

“That’s funny,” I shout to him. “I’m also here because of a friend. She told me I need to make some new ones.”

With exaggerated solemnity, Ben lifts up his plastic cup of IPA. I follow suit with my half-can of flat Stiegl Radtler. “To friendship,” he bellows. “To good intentions and the road to hell.”

We cheers, and our peals of laughter blend into a blaring synth rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, to which a group of women is doing the twist.

It turns out we under-ordered. Grape leaves, cauliflower wings, and an unusually delicate falafel pita are not enough for two hungry people. I lean over to Ben and shout into his ear.

“Hey, are you still hungry? I could grab us some churros. My treat.”

“We could,” he yells. “But I know a place nearby that has awesome dessert. We could bounce, if you want. It’s a lot quieter there. We could actually hear each other speak.”

“Yeah, OK,” I shout. “But do they have doughnuts, or something like them?”

His stubbly cheeks crinkle in an enormous, triumphant grin. “Oh, they have doughnuts,” he yells. “I’ll show you.”

We gather the mass of compostable plates and dirty napkins and deposit them in the nearby garbage can. Ben draws from his pocket a small container of hand sanitizer and motions to me. I hold out my hand, and he deposits a dime-sized glob in my palm.

“I’m impressed,” I shout to him.

“Compulsive,” he replies with a sheepish shrug.

Ben leads the way, carving, as it were, a path for us through the sweaty throngs milling around the kiosks and dance floor. As we pass the wall of amps, I jam my fingers into my ears, and Ben does the same.

We emerge into the welcome coolness of the late evening. I peek inside my purse, and my semi-illuminated phone screen tells me it’s not quite eight-thirty. For a moment, I am faintly uneasy about my decision to leave the relative safety of the MOTH soiree to gallivant around the city with a strange man. My mother’s voice echoes in the antechamber of my thoughts. Stick to populated areas. Don’t drink anything you don’t open yourself. Be assertive.

A breeze exposes perspiration in unexpected places. I lift my arms slightly to dry off as we walk.

“Follow me,” says Ben. His pace is strenuous, but I do my best to keep up in my flats.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Well,” he says with a grin. “Have you ever had malasadas?”

A chill runs up my spine, which I almost misconstrue as the harbinger of a turning. “I have,” I say slowly.

“Do you hate them?” Ben’s raised eyebrows betray a certain nervousness, which puts me at ease. I force myself to smile.

“Oh, no, I love them,” I say. “When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to a place called Ola.”

“Ha,” Ben exclaims. He digs his fingers into his messy hair for just a moment, and I can see I’ve ruined a surprise. “Well, I guess great minds think alike. We’re just a block-and-a-half from Ola. And it’s open until eleven.”

“This is Madeline?”

He points to a street sign at an upcoming intersection. “Yep. We’re just behind the MOTH.”

“I’m terrible with directions,” I say.

“That’s OK. I know where we’re going.”

We come to the entrance, and I peer up at the familiar illuminated orange-and-white sign lofted above the doorway. Ben’s face opens up, and I can see in his pale green eyes that his pupils are enormous even under the incandescent overhead light. His smile recedes, revealing a sort of hopeful alertness. I can tell he’s searching my face for clues, or perhaps a cue.

I open the door and wave Ben through. Inside, I am buffeted by a dense draught of sweet dough aroma and cinnamon. Through the open kitchen door, I can just glimpse the dusty metal of the enormous malasada-frying contraption, at which an elderly woman sits on a stool tossing dough into an unseen mechanical maw.

Ola is as I remember it. Anachronistic Portuguese posters and old country paraphernalia span its wallpapered walls. Beside the jam-packed bakery display cases is an archway that leads to a large dining room lined with folding metal tables draped in checkered tablecloths. At this time of evening, nearly all the tables are occupied with families and gesticulating older moustachioed men. Overhead, a soccer game is playing on a giant lofted flatscreen, but the volume has been courteously reduced.

We snag a table in the corner. My ears are ringing slightly. “We used to come here when I was a kid, too,” Ben says.

“Coincidence?” I ask, wondering, with creeping paranoia, if it is.

“My dad is Portuguese,” he says. “Well, he has Portuguese and Italian ancestry. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You don’t really need an excuse to eat doughnuts. Speaking of which, what kind do you want?”

“It’s on me,” I say. “I’ll get us a few different kinds.”

Ben holds up a finger. “Has to be gluten-free,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “I think they have flour in them.”

He laughs. “No, I’m kidding,” he says. “I’ll eat anything.”

I head to the counter, where a young boy, perhaps no older than thirteen, takes my order for Hawaiian custard and cinnamon-and-sugar malasadas.

“We’ll bring them to your table,” he says with a barely perceptible accent. “Pay when you leave.”

I return to the corner table, above which two dusky, scuffed boxing gloves signed with gilded marker are pinned to the poster-laden wall.

“How’d we make out?” Ben asks. He stuffs a laminated sheet behind the salt and pepper in the condiments tray. “They’re serving Portuguese beer now. Sagres and Super Bock.”

“Oh, would you like one?” I say.

He shakes his head with a grimace. “No, no.”

“OK, well, I got us a mix of doughnuts. Some filled and some not.”

He nods approvingly. “Thanks for doing that. You know, I’m realizing I haven’t asked anything about you. Pretty rude.”

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“Is it too tedious for me to start with ‘what do you do?’”

“I’m in healthcare,” I say.

“Doctor?”

“A resident. Run-of-the-mill family medicine.”

The underage baker sweeps over to our table with a metal bowl overflowing with disc-shaped doughnuts, some sprinkled with powdered sugar and others dredged in cinnamon and sugar. Ben and I take a moment to admire the small mountain of fried dough, whose sweet redolence is intoxicating.

Ben takes a napkin and delicately folds it twice. He uses this as a barrier to choose a doughnut and deposit it on his plate.

“Oh,” he says. “One sec.” He pulls out his tiny bottle of hand sanitizer and offers me a dollop.

“A man after my own heart,” I say.

Ben holds a hand up to his mouth. “Brings me back,” he says with a mouthful of malasada. “This is one of those places that never changes.”

This is not quite true. In the other place, the Ola sign was a creaky wooden slat hanging on a metal hook.

“Do you know if the building was ever renovated?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I remember it just like this. It’s always been Ola. Frozen in time, it seems.”

“And what about you?” I say. “You’re a sessional at the U?”

I catch him mid-chew. He holds up an outstretched finger and coaxes a bolus of doughnut down his esophagus. “Yes, a recent hire. I’m a few months away from defending my dissertation. So almost fully-fledged.”

“What’s your area?”

“History,” he says. “I’m interested in collective memory in the late 20^th Century. You know, the ways in which how we remember the past have changed in the last forty years or so.”

“In other words, how did we end up with a smartphone democracy?”

He nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, exactly. The journey from common good to treat yourself. Anyway, it’s been a bit of a challenge to get it finished. There are always things that get in the way.”

He drums his finger on the table for a moment and then squints at me. “I’m sure you’ve noticed with your work in healthcare, it’s a strange time,” he says. “Then again, people always have the sense that their era is uniquely troubled. And maybe it’s true. The U of B administration wants to sweep us away to make room for a ‘centre for tech excellence.’ Those f*ckers. We’ve been putting up a fight, but it’s looking pretty grim.”

“What a nightmare,” I say. “Like something out of All that is Solid.”

Ben can barely contain his excitement. “Such a terrific podcast,” he says. “I love the quote from that old historian in the last episode. What’s his name? I can’t remember. Anyway, he said that the humanities help us make sense of what’s been done to us. They pour sunlight into a dark world.”

I wonder if he, too, is tussling with his inner appraiser. There is a boyish earnestness in the push-and-pull, mapped across a tableau of shifting expressions. I cannot remember the last time I felt like this, interested, intrigued, pulled along by curiosity. Perhaps in the earliest days of my relationship with my college boyfriend, Jake, when my mere presence was enough for him. I have the sense that I am in the presence of a simpatico person, another echo, and my inner magnet strains against its short tether.

“It’s kind of serendipitous that we met,” he says.

“Oh, hardly,” I reply and roll my eyes exaggeratedly. “You were basically like, ‘psst, hey! Hey, you!’”

“I guess you caught my eye.” He leans back in his chair with a napkin glove hovering above a custard malasada. Even from across the table, I can feel the electric charge between us. It is at once titillating and terrifying, and its freighted implication shorts my flirtation circuitry.

“It’s the hair,” I say.

He laughs. “Well, it’s certainly distinctive,” he says.

“I’m both younger and older than I look,” I say. “How’s that for confusing?”

“Twenty-eight?”

“Flattery gets you everywhere,” I say. “I’m almost thirty-one”

Ben’s eyebrows rise in mock surprise. “Wow, so does that mean I have a thing for older women?” he says. “I’m a sprightly twenty-nine.”

We continue picking at the malasadas. He and I went to the same high school, it turns out, though separated by three years and four grades, which would explain why we never crossed paths. The seductive tug of connection is larded with potential hazard, like a Burmese tiger trap into which I could tumble if I don’t watch where I’m going. Surreptitiously, I glance at my phone screen in my purse, which I have propped up beside me on the wooden chair. It is almost ten-thirty.

“Ben,” I say. “I think I’m going to have to call it a night. I’m trying to get back to a normal sleep schedule. It’s been a strange few months, and everything’s been, you know, off.”

He straightens in his chair. “Well, I could walk you home. Do you live nearby?”

“I’m in Hillside,” I say. “It’s dark, so I’ll just take the bus.”

He squints one eye and purses his lips for a moment. “There’s a stop just a few blocks down Madeline that will take you through Hillside.”

I nod. “Yeah, Madeline and Clayton.”

“I could walk you to the intersection and wait with you.” He pauses for a moment. “I mean, if you’d like.”

“Oh, I think I’ll be all right, Ben,” I say. I point to a cluster of young women passing by the Ola facade. They are talking animatedly, and one of the women almost brushes the window with a gesticulative flourish. “The night is still young.”

“Yeah, OK,” he says with a closed-lip smile. “It’s not too far, anyway.”

“Are you worried?”

“Well, I’m not worried, really,” he says. “I just want to make sure you get home all right.”

“Would you like my number, then?” I ask.

His pale green eyes widen slightly and he draws his phone from a hidden pocket. “Ready when you are.”

We trade digits and QuidNunc handles. The pre-teen restaurateur is a master of body language, it seems, and he sweeps over with a credit card machine so I can pay. I gather my purse and rise from my seat. Ben follows suit. He keeps his hands at his pockets and raises his eyebrows.

“Karina, thank you for a great night,” he says. “It is my good luck I found you.”

“Someone wasn’t paying attention to the documentary,” I reply. “The world’s falling apart, didn’t you know, Ben?”

He laughs. “I’m a simple man. I only understand pyrotechnics and three-hundred-foot tidal waves.” He clasps his hands at his belly button. “Are you a hugger?”

We embrace awkwardly in the foyer to the restaurant, where the glass display cases of pastries and desserts glisten temptingly under the hot incandescent lights.

“Can I send you with breakfast?” he asks. “Pastel de nata?”

“No, that’s OK, thanks,” I say.

“Just a quick text to let me know you got home all right?”

I swing open the glass door and wave to him. The bus stop is just down the street. I find myself bouncing on the balls of my feet, galvanized by a giddy kind of energy, a throwback to the less fraught days. Vaguely, and perhaps masoch*stically, I allow myself to linger on the ambient anxiety that still, even with the tug of novel romantic interest, permeates my brain-space like mildew in a closet.

The group of young women who passed our window at Ola is waiting at the bus stop. They are young and dressed in bold, solid-colour dresses. Standing there, I feel decidedly staid. I cannot help but eavesdrop on their conversation. They are chatting about a nearby club, Kinda Into You, just a few blocks away.

“God, you almost need a bodyguard in there,” one of them says.

“It’s disgusting,” another replies.

“So why do we go?” says a third. She is standing cross-footed by the bench with her arms folded. “We could have gone to the Saturday Soiree at the Moth.”

The group moans. “Boring,” says the first woman. “Oh my God. Could you imagine?”

With a protracted shriek, the bus pulls up to the curb, and we enter single-file. I sit in the back, as is my habit, and replay my conversation with Ben in my head. I groan silently to myself. Perhaps flirting, like suturing, requires continued rehearsal. At least with suturing, you can practice on your couch.

The bus deposits me less than a block to my apartment building. This stretch is unusually dark because the neighbourhood association, mostly apartment-dwellers, refused to pay for more streetlights. I jog to the front door of my building and up the stairs.

My apartment reeks of quinoa, whose nuttiness, if that’s what it is, lingers aggressively in the air. With delicate precision, I tap a few drops of citrus oil into my diffuser, which I leave on while I wash my face. I sit on the couch to wait for a few minutes before I text Ben.

Karina [23:27:43]: Hi, Ben—I made it home safe and sound. Thank you for a great night :)

His reply comes almost immediately, like a cannonball shot at the speed of light.

Ben T [23:28:21]: OK excellent. Right place right time maybe? I’d like to see you again.

Again, I wait a few minutes before replying. I take a quick shower and brush my teeth.

Karina [23:59:29]: I’d like that, Ben.

I drift into the bedroom to grab a tee-shirt and pair of shorts.

Ben T [00:00:15]: How about Wednesday? I know a really fantastic vegan Chinese restaurant.

I chuckle to myself and make sure all the lights are off before settling down on the couch for a text exchange.

Karina [00:02:25]: During the week is too busy. I have an after-hours clinic shift on Wednesday.

Ben T [00:02:30]: OK how about Friday night?

Karina [00:04:03]: What time?

Ben T [00:04:16]: Name one

Karina [00:05:49]: 1930?

Ben T [00:05:55]: Is that 7:30 pm?

Karina [00:06:17]: Yes, sorry. That’s medical time (and military)

Ben T [00:06:46]: It’s a date

Karina [00:07:12]: haha, good night, Ben

I plug in my phone and wiggle into bed. Like an apparition coming in from the cold, my mother visits me again in my dreams.

We are sitting together at a round glass table suspended in the aether. She is as I remember her in the years before cancer hollowed her cheeks and thinned her skin. Her thick gray curls are loose and wild. She is leaning forward, both hands wrapped around an oversized mug, which I intuit is filled with ginger-turmeric tea, her favourite.

“So, how was it, Kar Bear?” she asks me. Her smile is a shade too wry for comfort.

“Tonight? It was good,” I say.

“Do you like him?”

“Mom, stop it,” I say.

She throws back her head and cackles her maniacal cackle. “Oh, there’s no need to be embarrassed,” she says. “He’s cute, honey.”

“How would you know?” I say. “You weren’t there.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, look at this.” From underneath the glass table, she draws an ovular mirror, which she holds up, occluding her face. Like an old-fashioned projector, the mirror sputters into focus, but instead of showing me the events of the past night, it displays a montage of images.

A photo of my prom party shimmers beneath a flurry of scintillating fairy dust. Scrubbed teenage faces, awkward hands grasped awkwardly over bony shoulders. Like a forgotten, dateless vestige, I stand gawkily beside Charlotte, immortalized in humiliated rictus, my looping arm threaded through hers. Then my parents’ wedding photo flashes in the mirror, a sepia flashback of white tuxedos and frilly eggshell dresses. With an exaggerated wipe, the photo dissolves into an oversaturated image of a fat baby face with an elated, gummy smile, which then transitions into a sort of vacation collection, where a pre-teen Karina gawks at the camera in baggy tee-shirts with bronzed annoyance.

“Mom, what is this?” I ask her.

“It’s your life, honey” she says.

“It’s a slideshow,” I say. “Mom, put that thing down!” I paw at the mirror, but my mother, the lion, has a firm grip.

“There’s more to see,” she says.

“That’s enough,” I say. “Let’s just chat.”

Slowly, she lowers the mirror, on which images continue to cycle. The last I glimpse is a photo of me at my medical school graduation, flanked on either side by my parents. Our faces are florid with joy.

My mother’s curly silver hair, the same texture as mine, peeks out from above the intricate wooden carving of the frame. Then her eyes, the same carrot-in-swamp-water as mine, and her straight nose. Suddenly, she drops the mirror, and I find myself staring not at my middle-aged mother, but a reflection of me.

“What do you think, honey?” she says in my voice.

“Mom, you look just like me,” I say.

“Lucky you.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I do like him.”

“If you want my advice, you have all the time in the world,” she says.

“Can you put your face back on?” I ask. “I’d rather see you right now.”

In the far distance, the ululating shrill of a ringing phone resonates quietly.

“You’re all that’s left,” she says. “And anyway, don’t you think you should get that?”

The ringing swells. Its strident call grinds with textured urgency.

“Mom, what is that?” I ask.

My mother’s cheeks, my cheeks, crinkle in bewilderment. We are in a small, barren room now. Silently, the walls begin to creak inward. They bow with every wail of what is now clearly a siren.

“Mom?” I call. I search the shrinking room, but it is desolate. Wisps of smoke curl up from the floor. Frantically, I flap my hand like a fan to clear the air. Cupboards open of their own accord. Drawers slam. A marble island materializes in the centre of the room. Its burnished surface is so effulgent that it reflects the dappled ceiling, which is ratcheting downward with alarming velocity.

I hop onto the kitchen table. “Mom,” I shout again. “We’ve got to go.” Like Atlas, I bear the full weight of the descending ceiling on my shoulders. The smoke is so thick now that I cannot see anything but the dazzling surface of the island, which flashes like a yellow beacon. The siren blares in great whoops.

My knees buckle under the weight of the whole universe. I peer down, just for a moment, at my reflection. Staring back is the moribund face of my mother in her final weeks, gaunt and pallid, fragile facial bones visible underneath thin skin. “No,” I whisper. “Not yet.”

The ceiling presses my body prone, and it is only then that I resign to our deaths. “OK,” I say. “Now is OK. Now was always OK.”

My last breath is mercilessly free of smoke, but the last sound I hear is an instruction from a robot.

“May I have your attention please? May I have your attention please? An alarm has been reported in the building. Do NOT use the elevators. Please proceed to the stairwells…”

*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology

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