The front door of my apartment shuts behind me. I slump against it in the dark and turn loose the heavy sigh I’ve been carrying around in my chest all day. That’s when I hear his voice for the first time, like sandpaper on metal.

“Life is hard to bear.”

I turn on the lights and see Nietzsche looking at me from my unwashed coffee mug on the kitchen counter. His walrus mustache twitches. “Life is hard to bear, but do not pretend to be so delicate!”

As my finger picks at the diagonal chip just above his porcelain hairline, he flares his nostrils. I slam the mug down in the sink, switch off the lights and head to bed. 

But I can’t sleep. I think of my father in his new bed at the nursing home.

The woman who answers the phone at the nursing station is already annoyed. “Yes?”

“This is Rose Morri,” I tell her. “I’m calling about my—”

“You just left.”

“Is he okay?”

“Fine. We are administering his medications and getting him ready for bed.”

“Maybe I can come back. Sleep in his room. In a chair. I won’t bother anyone.” Anyone being my father’s roommate, a tall, burly man with a penchant for wandering and whose dementia is more advanced than my father’s. What if the man wakes up in the middle of the night and becomes angry at the stranger in his room? Or what if my father can’t sleep because he’s confused about his surroundings, afraid? I imagine him looking around. Searching for me.

I stare at the dark corner of my bedroom as the nurse says something about my father needing to get used to his environment.

“He’s probably wondering where I went.”

“He hasn’t asked about you.”

The words slug me in the gut.

Before hanging up, she says, “He’s in good hands.”

I think of my father’s hands, once a zigzag of cracks and calluses that smoothed out from inertia as his memory faded.

“It’s gotten out of hand,” my brother told me after our father went door to door in search of our mother, who had died years before. “Dad needs to go somewhere he can be looked after.”

He forced my hand. So I put my hands up. Gave in. Gave up. My hands were full with work and the separation, I yearn to explain to my father. Now I’ve handed you over. But I never wanted to. My hands were tied.

Before I head to work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra flings itself from my bookshelf. The first Nietzsche book I ever read. I touch the torn jacket cover and flip through its musty-smelling pages. I used to reread it during bus rides to and from campus, convinced Nietzsche was right—that I could create the person I wanted to be and live the life I desired despite the obstacles and chaos around me. In the end, my books are all I got out of my Philosophy major. That and Vincent. We met in an Introduction to Existentialism course. He transferred after the second class but asked for my number after the first.

I put the book back, but within moments it hurtles off the shelf again and lands on the coffee table, open to a passage I highlighted decades ago: “Become who you are!”

Later that night I slump on the couch and eat leftover spinach frittata, a dish my father once loved but is now averse to. After I’ve demolished everything in my Tupperware container, I listen to Vincent’s last voicemail, the one he left three months ago. Before we decided to separate. Before he decided for me.

I transfer it to speaker phone and Nietzsche opens the office door wearing my fuchsia slippers. “The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions,” he snarls.

I respond by replaying the voicemail. Nietzsche shakes his head in exasperation.

A man is standing outside my front door with boxes at his feet when I get home. From far away he looks like the guy who never wipes the treadmill after his workout. As I move in closer, I realize it’s Vincent. I blink in confusion.

“You said I could come by to pick up the rest of my things,” he says. 

I didn’t forget but I thought he hadn’t meant it. That he would put it off and then finally just return home.

I make a show of dropping my keys, then jiggle them in the lock loudly before finally opening the door. I switch on the lights, scanning for any sign of Nietzsche. But the house is quiet.

 Vincent steps inside and looks at the living room like it’s his first time here. His eyes dart from the bookshelf to the floor lamp to our travel souvenirs on the fireplace mantle.

“I like to know where to find everything,” I say.

He stacks the boxes on the floor and I notice his shiny loafers, a pair I’ve never seen before. Then he sinks his hands in his pockets. “How’s your dad?”

“Hard to tell.” 

Vincent nods and I study the beard he’s grown since the last time we saw each other. It covers up his dimples—something I miss. “You have a new look.”

He caresses his beard. “Thought it was time for something different.” Then he reaches for the boxes, holds them up—“I’ll be out of your way soon”—and makes a break for the bedroom.

“Take your time,” I nearly yell.

As he shuffles through drawers and hauls boxes out to his car, I busy myself in the kitchen, setting out fruit and the coconut cookies he loves, though they’re a little stale. I make two espressos.

Thirty minutes later he appears in the hall with a flushed face, the last box on the floor, filled to the brim. “I think I got everything.”

My shoulders go slack, but I gesture to the cookies. “Have something.”

Vincent puts his hands out, like don’t shoot. “Thanks. But I gotta go.”

“An espresso, then.”

“I’ve cut down.”

I grab both demitasse cups and step toward him. “How’s work?”

He stares at the steaming cup in my outstretched hand. “It’s … you know.” Wipes his palms on his jeans. “The usual joys of teaching high school Geography. Glacial retreats. Altered ecosystems. Significant landform changes.” With a glance at my face, he turns and hoists the final box onto his hip. “Rose, I need to get home.”

I will my voice not to falter. “This is your home.”

“I’m sorry. But not anymore.”

Vincent’s words are still seeping into my mind hours later, after I have examined the bedroom. Scoured the closet. Pulled out every drawer. Run my hands along the entire surface of the dresser. He’s taken everything that reminds me of him. Left me with nothing.

When I finally come out, Nietzsche’s sitting at the kitchen counter.

“Please. Not a word.”

“I’m not interested in words at the moment.” He dunks a cookie in his espresso, takes a bite and smiles.

“Didn’t you say coffee makes a person gloomy?”

He shrugs and dunks again. “Come join me.”

When all the cookies are gone, he helps me set up my makeshift bed on the couch.

The summer heat reaches a peak and Nietzsche becomes fascinated by everything in my house. My electric toothbrush. The hair dryer. Toaster oven. My computer is an unending gem of curiosity. I don’t tell him about the Internet. That’s a rabbit hole for both of us.

If he’s not feverishly typing at the computer, he’s enamoured by the TV. While perched on the rocking chair, he watches soap operas, rom-coms, game shows. Throws his head back and roars with laughter long after the programs have ended.

I introduce him to several of my favourite films, including The Way We Were. For days afterward, he watches it on repeat.

My father sits by the window, tapping the dented side table like he’s sending Morse code. The fake plant I bought to brighten up the room is precariously perched on the ledge. Each time I visit I find it in a new position; occasionally it’s been watered.

As a gust of early fall wind rattles the windowpane, my father covers himself with his beloved grey cardigan. No matter how much of its yarn has unspooled over the years or how often its shell buttons go missing, he remains committed to it.

When he sees me, he pulls me in close, eyeing Mr. Renda, who paces the other side of the room, patting his hands on his T-shirt inscription—I’ll Be in the Garage—as if absorbing the immensity of its meaning. “He was in Petawawa,” my father whispers.             

At Petawawa, I freeze. Search his face.

In 1940, my father’s father was interned at Camp Petawawa. And when my Nonno came to live with us later on in life, I hid around dark corners to find out what secrets he would divulge to his son when they were alone. But I could never decipher details. I only heard them repeat the name with a mixture of reverence and fear—the way ancient people uttered the names of gods they were certain could destroy them.

The name hunched my Nonno’s shoulders and swelled his knees. It stuck to him like tar underneath his construction boots. It beat down on him like the hot sun on his back.

My father never talked about it.

“Petawawa,” I repeat, stretching each of its four syllables. “No, it was Nonno who went to Petawawa.” I turn to look for Mr. Renda, who’s now rifling through my father’s closet. He pulls out a pair of shoes and tries to squeeze his enormous feet into them. “That’s your roommate,” I tell my father.

But he shakes his head and turns away. Reaches out for the large tweed cap next to his lopsided lamp and flops it over his head. On the backside, white stitching spells out “RENDA.”

“This isn’t working out,” I announce at the nurses’ station. “I’m worried about my father staying in the same room as that man.”

“Mr. Renda was in the room first,” a nurse says. “He’s lived here for several years.”

“Then I’d like to move my father to another room.”

She exchanges a look with her colleagues as if to communicate that those in front of the desk live in another world than those behind it. “That will take a very long while.” Then she looks past me and I follow her gaze. My father and Mr. Renda are exiting their room, muttering to each other and laughing. They trudge down the hallway and disappear around the corner.

One Sunday evening I attempt to repair my father’s grey cardigan. With rudimentary knitting skills, I fill in gaping holes and sew on buttons I’m certain won’t survive the winter. Nietzsche slouches on the rocking chair, sighing dramatically as he channel-surfs. It takes a half hour before he switches to a channel that makes him sit up.

A preacher two-steps across a dais that looks more like a well-buffed stage, pumping his fists in the air. As he hollers about redemption, he wipes sweat from his face with an embroidered handkerchief, as if to signify that doing God’s work is a laborious task.

Nietzsche turns to me. “My father was a man of the pulpit. He was a—”

“Lutheran minister.”

Nietzsche tilts his head, trying to remember when he divulged this information. Then he continues, “When I was young my father became very sick. A brain disease. It made him blind and then bedridden. Finally, he forgot who he was.”

I accidentally prick my finger. “My father is forgetting more each day.”

“One evening, my mother guided me to the side of his bed. I didn’t fully understand what my father was telling me—I was very young. But I do remember that he kept calling me Ludwig, my brother’s name.”

I suggest that he must have been confused—scared, even—but Nietzsche shakes his head. “Not at all. My father was speaking. I knew enough to listen silently. Logic is not the way to truth.”

By the time I finish the cardigan, Nietzsche has fallen asleep. His hair is flattened against his skull on one side. I turn off the TV and drape a blanket over him. He fits about for several moments and then begins to snore. It’s not loud and thunderous as I would have imagined, just a slight wheezing that soon fades.

My father and Mr. Renda sit outside their room, munching cookies and slurping juice. Before dementia set in, my father disdained all things sweet. His palate only appreciated the bitter that the world offered up. He drank his espresso black and sometimes sucked on lemon rinds while my mother and brother and I watched on and cringed.

When my father sees me now, his face lights up. “Can you give my Papa another cookie?”

I glare at Mr. Renda, who’s dunking the last of his in a glass of orange juice. “That’s your roommate,” I say. “Not your Papa.”

Mr. Renda leans over and says something incoherent to my father, who nods with complete understanding. Then the food cart creaks by and my father reaches out to the health care aide. He asks for another cookie for his Papa.

The woman chuckles and hands Mr. Renda a treat. “It’s nice that you always think of him.”

My father nods. “He came back from Petawawa. They said he was an enemy. But now he’s home.”

Nietzsche begins to leave his belongings at my place. He constantly forgets his round-rimmed glasses everywhere—on the TV console, by the bookshelf, next to my wedding photo. The smell of his pipe tobacco seeps into my cushions and loose tobacco falls into the crevices of my office chair.

He insists I show him how to text, which both fascinates and disgusts him. I give him my old, clunky cellphone, and he practices for hours each day.

When I’m in the other room, he texts, “Where R U? LOL.”

If I’m listening to Vincent’s voicemail, he writes, “Bruh! Don’t B So Xtra.”

In time he asks me to teach him how to take pictures. His initial attempts show only a blur or are marred by his arm blocking half his face. But soon he works out the kinks. Most evenings when I return from the nursing home he’s still out, snapping photos of himself in front of Casa Loma or browsing the Ontario Food Terminal or perched on a Zamboni.

While Nietzsche explores the city, I scroll through Vincent’s Facebook page and find a series of photographs captioned “A New Life Adventure Begins.”

Not long ago, Vincent couldn’t look up at the CN Tower without a dizzying fear of heights, and now he rock climbs places with names like Rattlesnake Point, Old Baldy and the Outbreak Wall.

His most recent post shows him standing in front of Lion’s Head with sparkling white cliffs that look like daggers. Below, a dizzying drop into the cold waters of Georgian Bay. He and his girlfriend wear matching neon orange tops and camouflage helmets as they look straight into the camera. I can tell that she is, unlike me, emotionally available by the way she has her arms tightly wrapped around him and the fact that she smiles with her teeth. 

The nursing home walls are decorated with cardboard bats coloured outside of the lines. Resident names are printed on each one. I search for my father’s offering. His bat is scribbled with black crayon. “PETAWAWA” is all that’s written on it.

There’s a tug at my arm and I look down at my seven-year-old niece. Isabel strikes a pose, planting her legs a few feet apart and pressing her hands on her hips. She’s decked out in a pressed suit with a black tie that I recognize as my brother’s. A red cape is draped behind her suit jacket and her white dress shirt is strategically unbuttoned to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with a glittering S. Her wavy hair peeks through a rubber wig. After I plant a kiss on her cheek, she removes her black-rimmed eyeglasses with dramatic flair and greets me as only Clark Kent/Superman would: “I’m here to fight for truth and justice.”

I take her hand.

She leads me to the dining room, which is dressed in orange streamers and smells like burnt onions. A nurse with a witch’s hat playfully sweeps residents’ slippers with her broom, while the Mad Hatter tips his hat to everyone. Wheelchairs and walkers and canes are propped against the wall. Nurses guide residents to the dance floor to shuffle along to “I Put a Spell on You.”

Isabel plops down on the seat beside her father, who wears a vampire cape. He looks me over, asks about my costume.

I peer down at my sneakers, stretchy jeans and faded blouse. “I came as a disgruntled middle-aged daughter.”

He flashes his bloody fangs.

I scan the party. “Where’s Dad?” 

My brother motions to the centre of the room, but it takes several moments to spot my father. His hands are not his own anymore—they’ve been transformed into massive werewolf paws. He waves them in the air, out of time with the music. Beside him is Mr. Renda, his face painted green, wearing a tattered jacket. A volunteer positions his arms straight out in front so he can do his best Frankenstein impression. As “Monster Mash” begins to play, my father turns around with delight.

A chirpy health care aide leans over. “He’s happy because he’s dancing with his Papa.”

I scowl at her and then at Frankenstein. “That’s not his Papa,” I shout over the music. “His Papa died twenty years ago.” 

The care aide’s smile disappears and my brother shoots me a glance I refuse to acknowledge. “Dad looks like he’s having fun,” he says.

Isabel, ecstatic at the sight of her Nonno letting loose, begins to mimic his dancing. My brother cheers her on.

“It’s the disease that’s making him do that,” I yell.

A resident’s family member looks in my direction, another shifts in his chair. My brother takes in a deep breath and begins to say something, but his words disappear in the air as I jolt out of my seat.

Nietzsche has appeared beside my father.

Mr. Renda begins to hop, so my father does the same, pumping his claws.

Nietzsche joins in. “I’m so amped,” he hollers to me. “Your father is slaying.” He raises his hands in the air, pumps them in sync with my father’s.

I lunge forward and plant myself between them. “That’s enough!” I grab the werewolf mitts and try to pry them off. But they’re cemented on.

With another strenuous tug, I trip over the Joker’s feet, stumble into Anne Shirley and come crashing to the floor.

As the music dies out, the world looks down at me. The Joker and Anne Shirley whisper to one another; several witches and ghosts shake their heads. Isabel clenches my brother’s hand.

“Everything is gonna be okay,” I assure her, though the pain in my shoulder competes with my embarrassment.

Then I see my father, claws still intact, moving toward me. “Why are you there?” he asks.

Mr. Renda shrugs his massive monster shoulder pads, either because he doesn’t have an answer or he’s wondering the same thing.

I tell my father the truth. “I don’t know.”

He leans over and gently glides his werewolf mitts across my face, sweeping away strands of hair from my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Pa.”

He nods before the nurses guide him and the other residents out of the room.

At home, Nietzsche is already splayed out on the rocking chair, humming “Monster Mash.”

I hover over him in fury. “I don’t want to hear you.”

He cranes his neck. “What you did was cringe, TBH. Watching your father enjoy himself is going to live rent-free in my head for years to come.”

I drag my blanket and pillow into the office. The floor is cold and hard and my shoulder still aches but I don’t care. As I lie in the dark, Nietzsche shouts, “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

The next night Nietzsche tells me he needs to talk. “Your father at the party—the dancing, the music, his love of life—it was exhilarating.”

I shrug, unwavered. Still upset.

“It’s time for me to return to my writing,” he continues. “I’ve decided to go to Turin.”

I blink. “No.”

He narrows his eyes. “Nonsense. I’m going to immerse myself in the city and its people. And I’m going to write.”

“Please,” I mutter. “Stay here.”

He chuckles. “Why this face of despair?”

This is where you have a mental breakdown, I yearn to tell him. You’re declared insane. Brought to an asylum. Then taken in by your mother and sister who allow strangers into the house to ogle at you. You never write again.

But all I can say is, “Don’t go.”

“It will be an adventure.”

I shake my head. “Eventually, your sister, Elisabeth—”

“What about her?”

“She dresses you in white robes,” I blurt.

His face twists, then breaks out in laughter. “White robes! I am no prophet.”

“And as time goes on, she adds to some of your ideas. Expands them. Alters others.”

Nietzsche shakes his head. “The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”

“Please listen. If you go, it will happen. You will change. You will be different.”

“Different?” His voice takes on an airy tone, as if he’s playing along to a child’s mutterings. “Who do I become?”

“I don’t know,” is all I can say.

Before heading out, Nietzsche leaves a plate of spinach frittata on the kitchen counter. Next to it, he’s propped a note: “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” He signs it Dionysus.

My father stares at the blank TV screen in his room. The air is stale and cool, so I slip his grey cardigan over his shoulders. After a few moments, he screws up his face and hurls it to the floor. I resurrect it from the corner, pick off a tumbleweed of dust and empty out a pocket filled with cookie crumbs. In the other pocket I find crumpled pieces of paper. Ironing them out, I discover they’re pencil sketches perforated with tiny tears. My father’s pressed down with such force that the images seem engraved. In one sketch a row of identical wooden cabins is half-buried in snow. In another, a large group of men in overalls stand behind a fence, looking out at no one. At the top of each, he’s scribbled, “Camp 33.”

I turn to my father, whose hands are clenched in a fist. When I show him the papers, he nods. “I was there,” he mumbles. “I will never forget.”

“Pa, you were never in—”

His fist uncurls. He reaches for the drawings, holds the paper like it’s glass. He taps his forehead with his forefinger. “It’s all right here.”

I crouch by his chair. “Tell me everything you remember.”

The day before Nietzsche leaves, we rearrange everything in the bedroom and living room. They look airy and spacious and new. We share a joint and dance to “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” until we get hungry. Then we devour pizza and spinach frittata while watching The Way We Were.

I replay Vincent’s voicemail.

“Hey,” he mutters. “I know you called earlier but I was swamped. Had to finish marking. Gave the kids a quiz today and half of them thought Oceania was a country. And none of them knew what continental drift is. Anyway, it’s late, I know, but I’m finally leaving work now. I’m wired on espresso and haven’t had anything to eat. Did you eat already? I’m going to pick up dinner from that place I took you for your birthday. I forget the name. I’ll grab something from there. Not sure what you want, so I’ll surprise you. Even though you don’t like surprises. I dunno. Maybe you’ll like this one.”

Before I go to bed, I erase it.

It’s early spring, but in Petawawa, it still feels like winter. I stuff my hands in my jacket pockets while the Ottawa and Petawawa rivers send a burst of frigid wind in my direction. My boots sink into the soggy ground.

As I’m about to make my way into town, Nietzsche sends a text. “Greetings from Turin,” he writes. It’s a city he’ll come to love. Each day he’ll take long, solitary walks, sometimes accompanied by a notepad to record his thoughts and ideas. He’ll marvel at the museums, architecture and local theatre.

In the picture, Nietzsche stands on the cobbled street of Via Carlo Alberto. Smiling broadly and waving. Just behind him I recognize his apartment window, where he’ll live and write for the next several months. And though the sun shines over him, he’s bundled up in my father’s grey cardigan with all its buttons intact.

Image: Kate Greenslade, Victorian Man on Cudworth Street, 2016, drawing, monoprint and collage

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