by Bella Pollen
How’s your dad? I imagine friends asking, and to inoculate myself—to inject antivenin straight into my heart—I practise my response.
He’s dead, I say. I am broken. Then I allow the pain to wash over me. I don’t even try to measure its depth. How will I ever surface? Who will I be without my father, and how much of me will he take with him when he goes?
In real life, when friends ask me how he’s doing, I give a tiny Gallic shrug. You’re sweet, this shrug implies, but we all go through the same thing sooner or later. But what I’m really thinking is: Fuck you! Don’t nod your stupid head like that. You don’t get it! Nobody has ever been through this! Nobody feels the way I do. Because Dad and me? We’re different.
“Road trip, Pa?”
“What? Now?” He looks at my brother and me in feigned surprise, even though he’s out of bed, out of his hospital pajamas, ready and waiting in his tweed coat.
“Engine’s running,” I tell him.
“Always in a hurry,” he says. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. Oh, well, if you insist.”
Marcus positions a wheelchair in front of the bed.
“How exciting.” Dad settles into it and sweeps the hem of his coat onto his knees. “Where are we off to?”
“Home,” Marcus says.
The word floors him. He closes his eyes, then opens them again, sangfroid recovered. “I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before, but you’re very unpredictable, the pair of you.”
We stop at the pharmacy on the ground floor for Marcus to pick up Dad’s prescription. Dad sits very upright. I study the familiar pattern of the tweed, the raglan shoulders, the curling frayed edges of those pockets from which, as a child, I used to steal quarters. I squeeze the handles of the wheelchair and dare myself to look down. I dread seeing anything old people–ish on top of Dad’s head, a looming scalp under wispy strands or a patch of skin with hyperpigmentation—but it’s all good. Dad has always had epically thick hair.
“How you doing, Pa?”
He considers. “Well, since you ask, I’m road testing a new emotion.”
“How exciting. What is it?”
“I believe it’s called gratitude.”
It’s a clear run home. The minimal traffic of the English countryside. I crank up the heating as we pass a market garden, then a long industrial estate encircled by barbed wire. Dad naps in the passenger seat. I look at his familiar profile, those hawkish cheekbones, nose from the Jewish side of the family, and inside my chest my heart feels loose and unstable, as though it’s being held together with sticky tape.
As we were leaving the hospital, Doctor God had stepped out of his office. “Quick word?” he’d said, touching me on the shoulder.
“I’m afraid the pneumonia might just be a symptom.” This from behind his desk.
“What do you mean?” In my pocket, my mobile was vibrating. Susie. I pressed decline. “A symptom of what?”
“I think there might be something wrong with his blood.”
This is not OK. To hear that the thing that your father has been battling, the thing that has stolen his strength—nearly stolen his life—is merely a symptom of something worse?
“What do you mean? Give me a name. Give me a disease.”
“Leukemia,” Doctor God said. “But we won’t know more until we do tests.”
A pause.
“I’m sorry.”
As I left his office, my mobile vibrated again. “It’s about Mum’s cough.” Susie said, and as she began talking I felt something internal in me collapse, a structural part—the steel of me. I leaned against the glossy walls of the corridor for support. Something has been growing inside our mother, Susie appeared to be saying. Something she’d decided not to tell us about until she was sure. Something she’d now had X-rayed and biopsied and found to be a tumour. “Tell Marky,” Susie said, “but obviously not Dad.”
“Course,” I said, although I can’t be sure I said anything, because by that time the edges of my brain were burning, hot as a jet engine.
Idiot parents, we’d agreed numbly before signing off, getting cancer on the same day.
Boom! In the car, Dad’s eyes snap open. “Cacophobia,” he says. “What does it mean?”
“Fear of poo.”
“Nope.”
“Fear of dark chocolate.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He looks out the window as the industrial estate recedes in a blur of smoke and light. “It means fear of ugly things. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t English the most wonderful language?”
My brother overtakes us in his dirt-streaked saloon. He hoots. I hoot back. Code for: Don’t panic, it’ll be OK, we’ll get through this, we’ll figure it out.
“Appalling drivers,” Dad says, “the pair of you.”
Marcus catches my eye as he passes. I clutch the steering wheel. Leukemia? Lung cancer? The words weigh down, heavy as iron girders. But even as my daughter heart is breaking, my child selfishness takes over. No, this cannot be happening to me. I won’t let it happen. We will go back to the beginning. I will write us all back in time. Back to Ninety-Second Street. Back to Papagoya and roast chicken picnics in Central Park.
Blink, and we’re there. I’m up in a tree, dangling thirty feet above the ground on the end of my father’s hand. Above me, Dad is whistling. He leans against the tree trunk for support. He looks young. Thirty-seven-ish, I guess. His black hair edges the collar of his shirt. His jeans, cowboy hipsters, are just a little bit flared.
“Ready?” he calls, adjusting his grip. His fingers are made of willow, supple and strong. My limbs are Potty Putty—nevertheless, we’re the same. Even as a child I know this. I’ve always known. It’s like I grew out of his arm.
He begins to swing me from side to side. Slowly, then with increasing momentum. Above him the sky winks through the leaves, almost within reach, as tantalizing as space. “Be brave,” he’d said earlier. “Who knows what you’ll see from up there.”
But I don’t feel brave. I have never been brave.
“Ready?” he shouts.
Far below us, sitting cross-legged on the picnic blanket, Susie is drawing. My mother is reading Here Comes Mumfie to Marcus. I love the way she tells stories, and for a moment I ache to be down there too, curled up in her lap. My head to her heart. That feeling-safe feeling.
“No!” I feel the panic rising. “Not ready!”
Blink again, and I’m me watching that eight-year-old self, frozen between sky and ground. And suddenly I see it. The genesis of limbo. Caught between safety and curiosity, courage and cowardice, being told stories and taken places. Torn between conflicting desires and warring selves.
There it is, there’s the moment.
For as long as I can remember, the opposing pull of home or away has been the central struggle of my life. It has split me in two. And those two selves I’ve imagined and reimagined, as twins, as spirit creatures, as tectonic plates, one constantly shifting underneath the other, subducting, grinding, creating friction, causing internal stress. I’ve blamed this for my own continental drift—across land, in and out of relationships, and over the course of careers. I’ve lived with the fear that disaster is inevitable, that the earthquake is coming and that when it does, my world will be annihilated.
Frantic, I kick my eight-year-old legs.
“Stop struggling,” Dad warns. His hold on me begins to slip, but all I know, all I’ve ever known, is to kick harder.
Now, alerted to my fear, my mother pushes to her feet off the picnic blanket. She comes to stand underneath the tree and looks up, one hand shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. Calmly she checks my likely trajectory, my fall from tree to ground, and moves into position. And, still twisting on the end of my father’s arm like a paper streamer, I’m rotated out of the moment. My perspective shifts and once again I’m watching myself through the crystal ball of time, suspended midair between my parents, in the middle, where I belong. And as my father urges me on, as my mother gives me courag
e, I see the two combine to create that electrical jolt I have so often felt passing through me, that powerful surge of happiness.
And I wonder. With my lousy sense of maps and direction, is it possible I’ve got my inner geography all muddled, too? I keep forgetting that the earth is not flat. Its roads are not straight but looped around and around. What if my duality, the thing of which I am most afraid, is not a fault line but simply two points at opposite ends of a circle, each forever leading back to the other? This realisation makes me feel strong. Strong enough to be thrown, strong enough to fly, strong enough to keep going through the removal of my mother’s lung, through the long years of my father’s treatment to come.
And finally I stop struggling. “Ready,” I shout. “I’m ready.”
Dad resumes swinging, wider and wider. Counting three, two, one—then he lets go.
I soar, airborne—perhaps for a single second, perhaps decades—looking for a safe place to land and eventually I find one.
I snatch at the branch above him, gripping it with my claws and balancing with my tail.
“Made it!” I cry.
“Brilliant daughter!” Dad shouts back. “Now tell me what you see!”
Toss a pebble into the water. Isn’t this how the relationships of our lives are formed? Your father helps you climb a tree. Your mother holds out her arms in case you fall. Every action, another pebble thrown, another circle created. The flight through the air, the joy you feel, the world you see from the top—every one a ripple, radiating out, growing wider, overlapping one another, connecting my whole life.
“Well?” Dad demands. “Tell me!”
I see what he’s always hoped I’d see. What he and Mum have always wanted me to see. “Everything,” I shout back. “I can see everything!”
In the car, Dad is looking at me quizzically. “Dreaming,” he sighs. “Always daydreaming. What is it this time?”
I smile. “Just stuff. New York stuff.”
“You’re way too young to retreat into memory. Pull yourself together.”
“Won’t happen again.”
“I should hope not. Memories are for people my age.”
Is that true, I wonder, that memories should be saved for grown-ups? For when you’re older and better able to ascribe meaning to them?
“Dad, do you remember taking us to see Fantasia?”
“Fantasia the movie?”
“Yes, one afternoon after school. You bunked off work. Turned up at the apartment out of the blue.”
“Rubbish.”
“We had to run all the way through the park to get to the West Side.”
“You’re making it up.”
“What about Airport ’77?”
He brightens. “Jacqueline Bisset, blown to smithereens in the loo?”
“Well at least you haven’t got dementia. What about Man in the Iron Mask?”
“Masterpiece.”
“We saw it together, remember? I was in labour.”
He looks at me uncertainly.
“You were the only other person in the cinema. Right in the front row. I sat at the back and then I realised it was you.”
Another blank look.
“Come on, Dad. I was having contractions. You held my hand and fed me popcorn.”
He looks stricken. “I’d forgotten. It’s too awful.”
I reach for his hand.
“Don’t get old,” he says.
“I won’t.”
How do I tell my father he has cancer? That Mum does, too? How do I tell Mum about Dad? Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe. It’s just another road trip, that’s all, a different kind of journey.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dad says.
“Oh?”
“Taking you to the movies? Coming back in the middle of the day like that when I should have been working. Holding your hand in labour, giving you half my popcorn . . .”
“Yes?” I say.
“Well, I think I must have been a terribly good father.” He gives my hand another squeeze. “I have to say, you’re really very lucky, you know.”
DEMON
(THE RECKONING)
The sun has gone, the day long since faded. Outside the window, night presses against the glass. The air has the opaque, dreamy quality of a summer solstice. The moon, a crown of silver in the sky, casts light over papers strewn across the bed. Four a.m. and my demon comes, as I imagined he might.
Yes, we still see each other from time to time, my incubus and I, though it’s fair to say that some of the heat has gone out of our relationship. Sometimes I wake to find his hand on my shoulder, before he slips away between the shadowy gaps of my sleep. Of late, he’s even acquired a sense of humour—should one choose to call it that. Earlier this year for instance, as I felt his iron filings drain from my body, he touched the palm of my hand with his finger and said, “You do know I’m married, don’t you?”
More recently he appeared to me no longer a collection of iron filings but made of flesh-coloured sandstone, and instead of a finger he had a rotating drill on the end of his hand, which he extended towards me. “Don’t even think about it,” I said scornfully and went back to sleep.
Only the next morning did the significance of this encounter occur to me. It was the first time I’d seen him not as an image in my head, not as a presence wrapped around my body, but as a “real” entity outside myself. Though in terms of recovery, arguably, we still have some way to go, I took this as a step in the right direction.
Before encountering him, I’d never considered myself an addict. Sure I smoked a little, chugged down the odd shot of tequila, and happily swallowed any pill slipped to me, but I could easily live without these things. Escape, solitude, wonder—these were the highs I craved. When I’m at home I love everything it represents, but sooner or later life becomes too comfortable, too predictable, and my fear of complacency sets in. After that I veer quickly from feeling safe to feeling edgy, unable to breathe, and finally so claustrophobic that I will do anything to break free, to experience the adrenaline and bliss of freedom. How uncannily like the pattern of my haunting.
Sometimes I think back again to that day at the Bronx Zoo when as a little girl I stood hypnotized as the cobra banged its head against the glass in its determination to escape. The following day it had. The glass was smashed and the snake gone. This had terrified me. The serpent had had me in its sights, with every intention of hunting me down.
I like to think that my shadow creatures are the mountain lion and the jungle cat, but perhaps in the end it’s the snake I understand best. Now I realise it meant no harm as it slithered through the unfamiliar streets of the city, excitedly taking in the new sights and smells, revelling in its liberty and independence. How long, though, I wonder, before it tired of freedom in those unfamiliar streets? Before it curled up in an alley, cold and lonely, dreaming of a dead mouse and a dry cage? How long before it yearned to go back to the only place where things made sense?
A little perspective informs everything. Demons, addictions, obsessions don’t always come out of a bottle. Home or away? I had avoided choosing between the two, preferring instead to inhabit the liminal spaces, the places between awake and dreaming, and there search out adventure and danger in worlds that were not my own. I’d driven my family crazy with this behaviour, until finally my confusion began manifesting itself in some sort of inhuman form. Deal with me, my demon had ordered. I am your demon, and you need to pay attention, or I will paralyse you forever.
So, I paid attention.
I’m piecing together a new story to tell myself. It’s still a work in progress. Meanwhile I no longer wish to be rid of my incubus. His visits always come when I’m alone, thinking about embarking on something new, and they serve as a reminder not to mess too much with the balance of life—that it’s OK to make my home in the middle, because from there, if I stretch hard enough, I can reach the furthest points of away. And that makes him a friend, not an enemy.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve heard tell of authors who manage to write books by themselves, but I needed a great deal of help from a good many smart people. Those collaborations, in their varying forms, were the happiest and most productive stages of what turned out to be a surprisingly long journey, and to all those who came on it with me, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
My love and thanks to:
Mac: For understanding. For loyalty and sheer generosity of spirit, you are, quite simply, the best.
Sam: My brilliant and insightful boy, who was in on these stories from inception, and in reading them over and over, kept pushing me closer to their truth. Sam, apart from coming up with almost all the best lines, it’s no exaggeration to say that without you this book would have ended up in a different place.
Jesse, Mabel and Finn: You are my Incredibles. For your iron support, relentless teasing and astute literary observations. I adore you #nowgotoyourroom, love your devoted 2%Mum.
My graphic memoir team, Kate, Amy, Daisy: For your creative ingenuity. Thank you for taking such an enormous leap of faith in working with me when it was obvious I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing.
Kate Boxer: For your soup kitchen and fried cheese things. For my beautiful lions and demons and that portrait you did that makes me look like Steve Tyler on a really off-day. I love seeing the world through your eyes.
Amy Gadney: For your ‘All at Sea Board Game’ and for somehow making my prose look pretty. For always cutting through the nonsense and insisting that everything had to be hand-done and genuine. You also bake really good soda bread.
Daisy Sworder: For your exhaustive optimism and inspired ideas. For being able to do everything I can’t and everything I can just that little bit better. I would be in the nuthouse without you, but then you know that already.
My revered and loyal editors: Elizabeth Schmidt at Grove Atlantic and Maria Rejt, at Mantle. I know this sounds oily, but I am proud to be published by you. Thank you for helping me make this book more of a silk purse than a sow’s ear.