North of unreal
The thing you remember most about last summer—your father’s radiation treatment, the sprint over the mountains to help him, your new baby riding backwards in the car that smelled of fermenting bananas. The thing you remember most is the small ball of yarn and two knitting needles left in the hospital waiting room. Left there on purpose, for people with too much time on their hands. Or too little.
You began to knit while your father waited in a blue hospital bathrobe beside you. You began to knit, although you weren’t quite sure what you were making. Click, click, click, the needles rubbing up against each other, poking in and out of the loops of wool.
Your father once told you he had the biggest prostate in all of Edmonton. He bragged about it. One of the biggest, anyway, his doctor had said. You pictured a hard red rubber ball, like a clown’s nose. Every afternoon, you picked up the knitting needles as your father lay down in a big white room under a big machine, as he opened his blue bathrobe to reveal the black felt pen tattoos on his hard, round belly, the arrows that showed them where to shoot.
On your way there to the hospital, as you drove away from home to head across the mountains, your backwards-facing baby watched a murder of black crows rushing towards something that was dying by the mail boxes. Later on, near Tete Jaune Cache, your baby ate fingers full of banana and pine cone. At Lake Annette, you carried her past the Quicksand! sign and counted felt-horned elk. In Jasper, you watched giddy young girls with bare bellies climb up on metal bike racks to peek in the window of the Athabasca, where K-OS was warming up in the bar. “K-OS,” you told your baby, pointing inside “Chaos!” She woke the next morning bigger, longer, even more your child.
Now, in the hospital cafeteria, your mother is eating mashed potatoes. “I got poisoning as a girl,” she is telling you, putting down her fork. “And it went all the way up my arm. From picking wild sweet peas.”
In the house you grew up in, your mother holds the baby while you climb into the dusty attic to retrieve your toys. Your mother has saved every plastic monkey from A Barrel of Monkeys. She’s saved the wine bottle you once decorated with macaroni and red spray paint. She has saved a dusty tambourine and a broken red ukelele, a Barbie classroom, the Etch-a-Sketch, and your Kinder Post German Post Office set, complete with forms and rubber stamps. Your baby ignores it all. She picks up your father’s slipper and peers inside. That night, you dream you are trying to save a calf that is sitting in your lap, and it is startlingly big and wild.
Ever since you were small, your father has always told you that when he gets old and sick, if he even makes it that far, you are to finish him off. Once, he suggested you smother him with a pillow. A nice, soft pillow. But you are ignoring his wishes. Instead, once again, you are rushing back to save him. That’s what you imagine. In the attic, you find your old diary from your father’s last emergency, when you rushed home as they were opening up his heart. You wrote: “The sky is black and blue, winter before dawn, the plane rising and landing, rising and landing, the snow blowing across the runway, and already they’re sawing open his ribs. His chest a seething, seeping zipper. What is it you want to say to him? What is it you need to say?”
Every afternoon, in the waiting room of the cancer hospital, you pick up the small ball of yarn and start again, even though you don’t know what you’re making. Even though you don’t know how it will end.
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