I’m working late on the Greatest Book of Quotations when a paramedic calls to tell me that Father has hurt himself again. She refers to him as Flynn, one of his made-up names, and for a moment I think of telling her no, that’s not my father. That man you have there, I’ve never heard of him before.
In Quotations I’m just starting a new section, Proverbs. There it is on the laptop in front of me, the work in progress. So far I’m not impressed. A stitch in time saves nine, but Good things come to those who wait. Better safe than sorry, but Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Whatever your prejudice, there’s a proverb for you. The wisdom of the mob. First this way, then that.
“Hello?” says the voice. “Are you still there?”
I close my computer, push it away. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
I find them at a bus stop, Father dark and thin, an eighty-year-old schoolboy sitting with his hands meekly folded. It’s April 2020, so the paramedic wears a mask. She’s put one on Father, too, so I can’t see if he’s continued dyeing his moustache. The paramedic tells me he’s fallen and bruised his hip pretty bad, but they’re trying to keep the hospitals clear. Hence me. I tell her I understand. On account of Father I’ve met quite a few paramedics the past little while, and as a rule I like them. An amiable bunch. This one’s young, slim, with pleasant eyes. But when I say, “Has he been decent?” she laughs like one who’s seen it all.
“Your dad’s a real charmer.”
“Sure.”
“Look,” she says, “I really appreciate you taking him home. He said he wasn’t sure you’d come.”
I don’t know how to answer that. Her partner leans on the rear of the nearby ambulance, eating a sandwich, the wet and empty Gastown streets around him shining like they’ve been oiled. The first paramedic shows me part of Father’s bruise. In the lamplight it appears completely black. I ask if that’s unusual and she says in normal times they’d take him in as a precaution.
“Still,” she says, “so long as you check on him regularly, it should be fine.” She rubs his arm incautiously with a gloved hand. Even through the mask I can tell he enjoys that too much. “It’s a marginal case,” she adds, and I look at him and think, that’s true.
In the car he takes off the mask. Yes, it’s dyed, the moustache, just like his hair. In California the movie stars go grey, their untranquilized faces collapsing, but Father keeps himself spiffy. I wish he’d quit with those dark suits. They make him look like a pimp.
I say, “Should I even ask why you’re out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?”
Father knows how to wave away a question. “Don’t treat me like a child. So I fell. People fall.”
People fall. Proverb of the future.
Silence for a while. Outside, the emptiest Vancouver streets you’ll ever see. In the downtown area hardly anyone except my father goes for a stroll anymore.
“You still working on that depressing book of yours?” Father croaking to life again.
“Why depressing?”
“Writing down what a buncha dead people said, a lot of it not even smart?”
“Some of them are still alive. Anyway, it’s not my book. I was assigned a piece of it, with a lot of other people.”
“Sure, okay.”
“What?”
He says nothing. Then: “You and Tabitha, you kids of mine, when did you forget that life should be joyy? It should be joy.” He spreads his hands wide to approximate the uncontainable. Afterward he leans on my arm to get out of the car, gasping from the pain.
No pain, I think, no gain.
Outside Father’s Yaletown apartment building a girl sits cross-legged on the curb, a cup of change in front of her. “Can you help me out?” she says, not looking.
“One minute,” Father says to me, then shuffles to her, drops a ten into the cup.
She recognizes him, beams. “You!” She’s rising, face falling. “Are you okay?”
I don’t know why she’s so pleased to see him, this girl of layered black rags, of pierced nostrils, of too much eyeshadow, dreaded blond hair like ceiling plaster. Probably just the money. I notice she’s pretty, with an air of innocence, despite the get-up. I see Father’s absorption.
“Dad, come on. It’s not safe.”
He makes a face, pouts at the girl, grips her hand. “Apologies, darling. My son over there, he thinks that human touch is poison.”
When we go inside she waves to him, and he grins back at her, curling both sets of fingers like he’s playing a piano in the air.
Our old house, the one Father built meticulously for my mom, with love in every plank, had smelled just like this, a mixture of earth and bergamot, unknown spices, salves. Somehow he carried it with him, that smell, with the furniture and the clothes, to this rental apartment in the sky. How much does it cost, the apartment? He won’t tell, which tells me all. In the old days, when he worked as a lawyer, Mom had managed all the money. She had managed everything.
Now New Mom, in absentia, decorates the walls. That’s what we call her, Tabitha and I, the latest online obsession, Katya or Kira or Katerina, whatever made-up name. The biggest picture graces the mantel, a too-young woman with cleavage and flowers. He kisses his fingertips, then touches the frame.
“I know you think I’m an idiot,” he says. “I don’t care. If it wasn’t for this pandemic, she’d be here…”
I ease him into a chair, make him tea, tell him I’ll return to check on him.
“I’d like that,” he says unexpectedly, then smiles fondly at the picture again.
I regard it too, the picture, wonder how much money he’s sent her, this avatar plucked from an internet smorgasbord. It was Tabitha’s idea to introduce him to online dating, but neither of us had imagined it coming to this. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Which sounds true, and maybe even is.
Outside I stop by the girl, ask her name.
“Krystal,” she says. “With a ‘K.’”
“Okay, Krystal with a ‘K.’ Here’s another sixty. I want you to stay away from my father. Find a different doorway, a different old man.”
She views the money, pockets it, and turns away.
It’s a few weeks later when Yuma, one of the other compilers, asks to meet. It’s not at all necessary. All the work is online. She may as well live in Cairo.
We sit at a picnic table by the near-empty Seawall, wearing masks. Already I can’t remember her face from Zoom. Japanese, that’s all.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” she says. No accent. “I just moved here before this happened. I don’t know anybody.”
“I’ve lived here most of my life, and I hardly know anybody either. That’s Vancouver for you.”
We look out at the water. A cool, bright, still day. The tankers at anchor look abandoned. She wears a cardigan and a short dress with buttons down the front.
“Which section are you on?” I ask, to make conversation.
“I just finished the Stoics.”
“Anything good?”
She thinks a moment. “ ‘Nowhere can a man find a more quiet and untroubled retreat than in his own soul.’ Marcus Aurelius.”
“I can think of one or two other places these days.”
She smiles, I think, and opens a Tupperware, lifting her mask to eat. It’s quinoa. I tell her about my sister stuck in Bolivia, on the Altiplano, how she eats quinoa three meals a day, riding out the plague. She comments how I must miss her and I shrug.
“It’s amazing, sometimes, to think how little some of us need each other.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding disappointed. “I haven’t found that.”
We decide to keep our masks on for it, to lie there naked except for the paper. I tell her about my father and she finds it sad.
“He hasn’t called you?”
“Hasn’t even answered the phone since that night.”
Her brow furrows. Her brow is her face’s only means of expressing itself. “‘Nobody dies from lack of sex,’” she says. “‘It’s lack of love we die from.’”
“Hugh Hefner?”
“Margaret Atwood.”
“Well,” I say, and pull her closer, “her experience has been different from mine.”
After three weeks I finally go to visit him. The girl, Krystal, is gone from the curb. I have a spare key and let myself into the building, ride the elevator, knock, seeing nobody. “Just leave it,” calls a woman’s voice. So that’s it: a woman. I knock again, louder, and hear a sigh. After a few moments the bolt gives and the door opens and I see nose rings, eyeshadow, a wary stooped girl with her hand on the knob.
She’s shaved the dreadlocks, so it takes a moment to recognize her. The clothes, too, have changed. A loose shirt. One of Father’s.
“Yeah?” says Krystal. She doesn’t recognize me either.
“What the fuck are you doing here? I told you to get lost.”
“Oh,” she says. “You.”
I go in and she doesn’t stop me. How could she? She can’t be more than five feet tall.
“Where is he?” I say.
She shrugs, waves to the bedroom, goes to the kitchen, the smell of burnt toast rising from one heap or another. Everything in the place is in shambles, everything except her. She’s clean, I realize. That’s the difference. She shines.
I find Father asleep in the dark. His hair has grown out some, his head all patches of grey and black. It’s difficult to wake him, and I wonder about drugs. He doesn’t recognize me until I open the curtains, let the day blind him awake.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I say. “Get rid of her.”
“Who?”
“Don’t be an idiot. The girl.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, eyes me, gestures. “Sit down, son.”
“I should have you committed. I should call the cops.”
He knuckles a watering eye. “You don’t understand. That girl, she’s changed my life. She is an angel.”
“Funny, it doesn’t smell much like Heaven in here.”
He gets to his feet, wincing, touching his hip. Moves to the window, scrutinizes a tower across, as if reading it for clues.
He turns, thrusts a stubbled jaw. “You can’t talk me out of it. I love her. A heart in love is a heart in bloom.”
There’s no fool like an old fool, I think. A fool and his money will soon be parted.
Krystal’s cleared a space on the counter to put her cereal bowl. She munches away. I don’t know what happened to the toast.
I ask, “How much will it take to get rid of you? Two hundred? Three? Whatever it is, it’s yours.”
“I like your dad,” she says. “He’s sweet. I’m not leaving.”
For the first time I notice that New Mom is gone, all the pictures.
“Are you fucking him?”
She pushes the bowl away. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here, man? We aren’t doing anything to you.”
“That’s my father in there. That’s my fucking father.”
I think of drugs, fentanyl. I think of hepatitis, herpes, gonorrhoea, AIDS. I want the girl to roll up her sleeves, show me her arms. Take off her pants, let me inspect.
“Hey,” she says, “you’re the one that collects all those old sayings, right? Your dad told me.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I got one for you.” She flicks a knobby finger. “There’s the door.”
It’s Yuma’s idea to take off the masks. “It’s ridiculous,” she says. “Who are we kidding?” Her face, when she reveals it, is that of a stranger—long lips, pockmarked cheeks.
We lie there, bare-faced, watching Fox News. Her latest assignment is collecting modern quotes, to guess which words will last, which names. I’m still on proverbs, which mostly skipped that latter step. Nobody claims a proverb.
On the screen, a president stands onstage, addressing untold millions. Finally Yuma mutes it and we watch his lips, his hunched sweating shouts, all those silent flapping words that will outlive him.
Yuma says, “Have you ever noticed how all the cynics these days are fascists and reactionaries?”
“Well, not all of them.”
“Most.”
She’s oddly serious about it. I wonder if, somewhere in here, there’s a message for me.
A day later she confirms it over Zoom. She wants to end things.
“It’s my face, isn’t it,” I say. “I’m too old for you.”
She laughs. “You’re only forty.”
“But I look older. It’s the gloominess.”
“No, the gloominess is fine. Still…it’s different. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. I know it’s not a good time.”
I say it’s all right. I give her every opportunity to be kind. But afterward I stand a long time at the mirror. I look at my face and then decide it’s better not to.
The next time I visit Father he and Krystal are gone. The place is trashed, absolutely trashed. I find needles. I find an old doll of Mom’s, a keepsake, its throat torn out.
I call the police. “He’s old,” I say. “Probably with dementia.”
They’ll do what they can, says the officer, but these cases can be difficult, even if he’s found. “There’s none so blind as will not see,” he says.
“I get it. You can lead a horse to water, and all that.”
We could go all day, exchanging banalities.
After he’s hung up I consider what to do. It’s the kind of mess you want to burn, not clean. For some reason I have a strong desire to call Yuma, to put on my mask and slip into an anonymous slumber, waking only when it’s over, all of it. I wonder what I’ll tell Tabitha, if she’ll blame me, if she’ll understand.
I go outside, try to get some fresh air. And it’s fresh, sure, no cars. No Father, either. To one side an older man lies with bare dirty feet sticking out of a sleeping bag. I ask if he’s seen a man of my father’s description and he shakes his head and says, “Any change, sir?”
I give him what I have.
A young couple passes, unmasked, holding hands, and the man and I watch them dwindle. He smiles.
“A heart in love is a heart in bloom,” he says.
I stare, chilled, until his smile fades. Finally he shrugs and rolls away, his head on a bundle. From this angle he could be Father. Really, he could be anybody.
Will Richter lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
