Arria Deepwater
Negative Space
The door wore its patched-over reinforced repair with a shiny sort of broken pride. I don’t know what impression it would have made a few days earlier. Plain, utilitarian, vaguely shabby? But by the time I encountered it, the door had a story to tell; and it shouted its part in the drama to all who passed along the hall like a needle stuck in the groove of a record. It had stood firm but been torn asunder. It had fulfilled its purpose with strength and steadfastness. Force and urgency had acted upon it — but it had not given in so easily!
As I slid the key into the new lock, I felt the door smile at me. I muttered to it under my breath, reminding it of the other side of its responsibilities. Letting people in. If it answered me, I did not hear it. I think now there may have been some small amount of spite in its greeting, knowing what I would find beyond. Knowing what the apartment had kept secret all this time.
The hallway was sullen in its reception. Like a bored teenager, it slouched silently while I took in the haphazard stacking of trucker hats piled high in the shelving nook, covered in pink-grey dust. There was a small jumble of plastic grocery bags hugging the lee of the wall, an unorganized litter of prayer cards tangled with junky rosary beads, three lip balms, and a golf ball. Whatever, the hallway rolled its eyes at me.
The bathroom seemed as shocked as I felt, befuddled and caught off guard by my presence. In a slightly panicked bid to deflect my attention, it stammered half-formed excuses; offered a convincing story of some monstrous act being visited upon it.
With rushed apologies it pointed me toward large sections of the vinyl tile, implying they had been torn away. I leaned in, peering and confused, as the bathroom held its breath. Understanding snapped through my senses. The bathroom sighed, caught in its attempt to dissemble, and turned away in shame.
Dirt. A decade or more of repeatedly dampened dust. More sloughed off skin cells than there are stars in the sky, mixed with soap film. They clung like red-brown scabs to the vinyl. He had worn a path through the barrens. A narrow trail marked the territory of my father’s movements between the doorway and the bathroom fixtures, connecting them like pegs on a map, strung together by yarn. All else was wasteland, the skin of a creature long dead and mummified.
I stood up, struggling against the dread swelling in my limbs, feeling the apartment preparing to bare its teeth. On the table in the main room, paper dripped from piles towards the floor. Fragile stalactites of a mind scattered. More reached for my ankles as I picked my way between the dunes. Great drifts of handwritten notes, ballasted by dozens of unopened boxes of graham crackers and jars of peanut butter, spread across the space. Low against one wall, a row of empty Pringles stood like tin-lined soldiers waiting for orders. Clothes of all kinds lay carefully spread across a matching couch and chair, flowing languidly over the edge of the furniture to meet an ambitious pile of shoes sprawling before them like rocks waiting for a water fall. Whatever the project may have been, he had lost his capacity for it long ago. It sat collecting so much dust that the colours dulled, the edges blurred. A monument to good intentions.
Like the bathroom, the activity of his daily life was easy to trace. There was the recliner, a small space cleared amongst the rubbish on the coffee table, and the old TV — surrounded by eddies of paper, but standing clear of the surf. An unblinking eye, comprehending nothing.
The apartment came to me in waves. The main room was disorienting and seemed to shift behind my back when I turned to take in some new detail. The kitchen brought both relief and sorrow. Such strange gratitude. Amongst the refuse, there was no rotting food. He had held a line against some part of his disintegrating ability to cope. A line drawn with gently-used takeout napkins, smoothed and meticulously piled knee high on the floor in front of the pantry, blocking access to the oven.
The bedroom spilled over with undershirts so worn I could see through them. The sheets on the bed were unnaturally thick from lack of washing. Here too, the trail was clearly marked. Traveling to the lesser-used corners of the room, I found myself stepping over the rocky terrain of religious magazines, my pants catching on brambles of debris pushed to the edges of activity.
His dresser coughed to get my attention, and as I turned, it looked up at me from beneath hooded eyes. I remembered it, of course, and tried to greet it warmly — as I might a friendly relation — but we both felt embarrassed by the effort. As a piece of furniture it could still boast of excellent quality and condition, although fashioned in a style that will never come back. But the shirts hanging haphazardly from its generously proportioned mirror, the tumbleweeds of meaningless documents strewn across its six foot surface; these things weighed heavily upon its spirit. It shrugged in the direction of a disordered pile of change, and we shared a moment of sadness for all that was lost and all that had never been found in the first place. When I was a little girl, this dresser, proud of its dark walnut shine, held very little out to the world but the small towers of coins my father took out of his pockets each evening. Largest to smallest. Neat as a pin, never to be touched by small curious hands. My sister and I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom, unstacking and restacking them in small acts of rebellion.
At the hospital, the nurses came in twice a day to “clean him up. “ I was shooed out of the ward and into the atrium. I’d leave the room to the metallic swooshing of hooks and bearings moving smoothly along tracks anchored to the ceiling. Yielding yet impassable fabric walls of noncommittal yellow floating 10 centimetres from the floor. They fluttered like skirts, cut to a modest length, revealing only feet, ankles and a hint of lower leg.
I was not allowed to help, not permitted to see. My presence in the room was not sanctioned. “To maintain the dignity of the patient.” My father’s dignity during his time of dying — his passing through vulnerability, his transition into helplessness — maintained by my absence. My non-participation.
Pandemic rules barred me from the family lounge. Hospice rules denied me the first set of chairs at its entrance. There the sign read, “Seats not available to family of hospice patients.” I spent most of my time at the hospital forgetting to ask for whom, exactly, these two comfortable and expensive chairs were intended. They sat, nestled under the mural of sunflowers bearing the official name of the hospice and perched next to the plaques thanking major donors. The director’s and financial manager’s offices right there. I suppose this is communication enough for most people.
I sat in the chairs once. I was tired and feeling mulish. I tried to look at the hospice vestibule like a visitor. A visitor not attached by invisible threads to a person dying somewhere beyond the thick double doors to the ward; not immediately involved in the hushed business of kindly supporting death and those living in its proximity. The green leather of the chairs whispered to me that I was underdressed. The polished wood and brass of the donor plaques pointed out that I live on social assistance, that my father had lived in subsidized housing. I didn't sit there again.
Necessity dictated that I walk several meters beyond the threshold of the hospice to the low cushioned benches lining one wall of the atrium. The fourth floor of the hospital seemed planned around these courtyards, crowned in tempered skylights. Long hallways connecting each. Veins and arteries directing the flow of people and equipment between organs of open space, fuelled by sunlight. So while my father’s diaper was changed, while he was dressed in a clean shirt and deep creases of skin were wiped with cool damp cloths, I sat in the atrium and FaceTimed my sister on the hospital wifi.
Our father’s dignity was cordoned off in a distant room, contained more by mutual agreement and the assertion of authority than by practical barriers, while his daughters discussed his condition without him. An apparition of something better — something brighter — hovered in the sunlight of the atrium, but my sister and I avoided it. Preferring the familiarity of exclusion.
The dresser and I maintained a stilted, somewhat one-sided, conversation throughout the three days it took to clean and sort the apartment. It kept trying to offer condolences by way of clothing I might remember or a large manila envelope containing the records I needed to find. At one point, it produced a collection of school photos. My sister and me, frozen yet changing. Captured in small pristine rectangles cut from larger collections, suffocating beneath a mass of socks that may never have been worn.
At least he kept them, said the dresser, in a strange mixture of shyness and encouragement. But that’s exactly what a dresser would think is important. Near the end of the third day, when we had both grown tired, it wheezed a little as I pulled the last of the drawers from its belly. I sat on the bed, staring at what I found, uncertain.
A single collection of typed yellowed papers stapled together in the top left corner, and approximately three hundred dollars in rolled coins. I looked to the dresser, hoping for some explanation, but it had nothing left to offer. Its dark face expressionless. Empty.
Most of the coins were swaddled in brown wrapping, but two of the rolls were held fast in plastic holders. I popped each coin out. Not one issued later 1978, the year of the first separation. The year he and the dresser began their lives together. Maybe other things had come and gone in forty-two years; the drawer pocketing, discharging, and exchanging contents like most drawers do. But the apartment just shook its head at that suggestion, bewildered by the scope of human frailty and imagination.
The papers were a long hidden relic of a neighbourhood T-ball league. Six pages of team rosters. On page four, my name and his were listed, player and assistant coach. A reminder that he had really tried once, pinned beneath pounds of currency prevented from circulating. Separated from the world by unused possibilities encased in walnut.
My father carried distance within him like a ghost body. No matter where he was, he was far away. The distance digested time and language and listening, like fungi break down organic material and absorb its nutrients. And when it didn’t have enough of everyday life to feed on, it would turn to obsession, fear, and eventually political conspiracies dressed up as religion.
After the stroke, the ghost body was gone. Erased, everything rendered immediate and tender. His world constricted to a collection of random impulses and occasional flashes of consciousness. The space left behind by the ghost body was filled with electric butterflies. Disintegrating, reforming and disintegrating again. He was easier to be with.
Arria Deepwater is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Prize for Fabulist Fiction and the author of “Undertow,” published in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Stillhouse Press). Arria’s work is informed by the deliciously fractured reality of living in a queer disabled body, often exploring themes of grief, authenticity and the spiritual longing for a healed connection between modern society and the natural world. Arria shares a home with her mother, on a beautiful lake in the unceded Omàmiwinini territory known as eastern, Ontario, Canada. www.arrideepwater.com
