Calling from the Slopes

My father once called from deep within his dementia and left a strange voicemail. Two minutes and seventeen seconds of rambling half-coherence, halting, alternating between an easy but nonsensical fluency and long pauses punctuated by his familiar cough, his laugh, as if he was pulling himself together, is still pulling himself together and out of the grave, clearing his throat.  

He laughed at himself as he failed to find the thread. Laughed again and said he had pictures of me as a kid that he couldn’t see because his macular degeneration turned them into a page of colors, a smudge that was once the image of his son. I assumed my stepmother told him what or who was in the photo. The owner of the face he knew he should recognize but couldn’t see. When and how and where the photo had been taken, the person or place captured. Or maybe he was holding a piece of paper, a takeout menu, nothing. 

Hey, bud, he said, are you on the slopes today? Have you got a new ski outfit? 

I wasn’t. I don’t ski. 

One minute and thirty-seven seconds in, he grew lucid and told my voicemail that they—he and my stepmother—had passed the first test to get affordable housing in Toms River. He said it was near the shore, though he’d never been a beachgoer, spending our family vacations hunkered under an umbrella, nose in a book. Then his hopeful tone disappeared. Confusion and fear entered his voice, the whisper of it. He cleared his throat again, said, I’m doing some downhill skiing. Won’t take too long. He never skied but I wondered if he might be trying, through metaphor or allegory, to break out of his dementia to tell me something important. Some vital report from the front. I see him as he was then, all rickety fragility, looking closer to ninety than seventy, careening downhill, out of control, eager to hit the bottom and hoping it wouldn’t take too long. 

Maybe I was skiing. Maybe we are all skiing. United in our descent, though he pulled ahead of me and finished his run five years ago—one jump, one turn really, an outline obscured by the falling snow. 

In the final years of his life, I received many of these calls. Voicemails with nothing but minutes of static, the sounds of fingers fumbling with the phone or the fabric of his pocket brushing against it. Voicemails with his familiar voice, almost steady, slow but intelligible, asking the usual questions, saying hi and take care and call me. I returned the calls and listened to my father butcher the plot of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or GoodFellas or The Last of the Mohicans. His favorite movies, movies I’d seen with him a dozen times. I listened to him slowly get wrong the names of the actors, the director, the setting. And I humored him. As the plots unraveled, I almost wished he were right. That the movies existed as he remembered them, strange mishmashes of classics where a young Jack Nicholson escaped Nurse Ratched, joined the mob, and carried a musket on his way up the Hudson to the besieged British fort. I imagined my father imagining himself as a hero in the scene, hobbling after Jack, wearing a hospital gown and carrying a tomahawk, marching to the oddly fitting soundtrack of a Tony Bennett number, his smooth crooning echoing through the firs and ferns of colonial America as it echoes now through me. 

I couldn’t tell what was true, which of my father’s stories were new to me because his mind had shrunk and shaken loose older, hidden memories, like the apples we picked when I was a kid, the tiny, tart ones you could only reach with a basket on a pole or a ladder, or if he’d lost it completely toward the end. Was he bullshitting me like he used to, enjoying watching me struggle to decide how gone he was, to decide whether it was okay to laugh? 

At one point he told me he used to have lunch with Tony Bennett at a deli near Columbus Circle in New York in the seventies. My father had a job selling ties. There was a recording studio close to his office and Tony Bennett, hardworking showman that he was, spent his days recording and his nights performing at a nearby club. They could have crossed paths often enough there, two regulars meeting over soups and grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, to chew and smoke and chat. My father couldn’t remember what they talked about but he said he used to call his famous lunchmate Anthony. 

I like to think of my father frozen in that memory, a choice scrap of meat in aspic. Something to come back to, to gnaw. A clean linoleum counter; hot, cheap coffee served in heavy, white chipped mugs; the smell of grease, of frying bacon and aftershave and cigarettes; the city bustling outside, the ties practically selling themselves. Maybe Mr. Bennett sings a tune or two. Or better yet, saving his voice for the studio but so full of song he can’t stay silent, he hums. My father, though tone-deaf, can’t resist it. Doesn’t want to. Full of something, he feels himself begin to hum. 

Hey, bud, he always said. Said until he didn’t. Couldn’t. 

Hey, pops, I say now to no one, waiting for a call that never comes. 

Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in Minor Literature[s], Heavy Feather Review, 3:AM Magazine, Some Words, and elsewhere. His novella, Adar’s Freedom, is available now through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net. 

This essay first appeared in Tin House Online (2018).