We didn’t notice, at first.

His customary catachresis was our second language.

“We speak English and Jibberish,” we said, years ago, laughing with him about the “tenements of Buddhism,” that mental image of an apartment building full of monks.

His was a genetically modified language, severe dyslexia spliced with encyclopedic memory and a lifetime of avid reading. A menagerie of fantastical, hybrid verbal creatures cavorted Bosch-like through his stories. And we translated so automatically into the idiom of the rest of the world that we didn’t notice the more frequent stumbling of syllables running on broken legs.

When he told stories the disease was invisible. The cadences traveled on smooth rails of repetition. The words had become a part of his autonomic nervous system and could hum along without the need for conscious control. We were so used to the way the stories flowed frictionless along the contours of our family’s fabulized history that it barely registered when his repertoire of tales shrank from many to few to one.

He’d slide to the punchline and labour back uphill to tell it again, thrilling in the effortlessness of the words, the return of his fugitive voice, a lone boy whooping on the toboggan hill long after dark.

We didn’t catch the change until his face began to go still, like the animating soul had stepped off at the station to buy a bag of chips and a pop and now the train was pulling away without him.

He watches it go.

I can see him watching it go.

I can hear him breathing into the phone. His listening silence arcs transcontinentally into space, caroms off of a satellite and ricochets into my ear.

On the screen I can see his face, blank and watching. I can see the wild hair. I joke about his pandemic mountain man look. I tell him teasingly that it looks bad for him to keep getting brought home by the cops for marauding around the neighbourhood in slow motion in his slippers. 

I can see the army of engineers working ropes and pulleys so that eventually, like time-lapse footage of a building going up, he smiles. I can see the flywheels and the ratchets and the counterweights, the Rube Goldberg machine of his will heaving his heart into his mouth.

Love.

You.

falls heavy and hot with friction into the pixilated snow.