Kyle called every few days. If not for COVID, it might’ve been every few months. The virus had established a public pretense that people cared about stashed-away parents. There was a responsibility with being there on the phone, but he found it much greater this weird responsibility to pretend he was a man who could be made to cry.

The mother he knew was not necessarily warm, but as a medical practice receptionist she was likable. She had to have suffered from being married to his father, the mean bastard that every dead-end suburban circle seemed to have at least one of. Kyle’s brothers, nine and eleven years older, were born into a time where you didn’t get saved (as Kyle assumed he himself had) by the cupping hand of neoliberal society. His brothers fought miserably with their father, went into the service at eighteen, and became nomadic “veterans,” suffering every malady that nowadays went with the term. About six years ago, Kyle learned that both were already dead.

Oddly, it was his mother herself who cut short the meandering calls: “I need to start Bob’s dinner.” But then it wasn’t at all odd that her dementia focused on his father. He always tried to get her to leave the mean bastard, but she wasn’t a leaver. His father died suddenly when Kyle was twelve, and he thought his mother might finally make a better life. She got out of the house more, bought a new Accord, met the girls for margaritas at Ruby Tuesdays. But soon she was married to another bully, Walt Werner, a former navy cook and retired IHOP franchise manager whose adult daughter sold Navajo jewelry out of a heavy briefcase. Because Walt did all the cooking, Kyle’s mother never needed to start dinner or any other meal for him. It was always “Time to eat: Walt’s got the plates out.” It took another decade for Walt to be dead too.

The doctors weren’t surprised that Kyle’s mother had skipped her more recent husband when she needed a reason to get off the phone. He hadn’t heard his mother say “I need to start Bob’s dinner” since he was twelve, and hearing those words now made him realize something important: she never said “our dinner.” Dinner was all for Bob, as if the rest of them had claim only to the spillage, the seeds around the feeder. Kyle understood the science of dementia, but it still felt to him that when she said she had to make Bob’s dinner, she actually imagined herself doing so in some virtual world. That this other dimension of her unconscious was a place, a somewhere. It frightened him to think about this place, because if he had the same genes, he would wind up there too.

His mother’s mind was not the only thing deteriorating during COVID—Kyle’s marriage was breathing on a ventilator. In the first months of lockdown, he and Kim really got on each other’s nerves. For nearly a year before, he was sure their marriage was over, that he was a hapless victim of inertia. In July, Kim took the initiative to go off Upstate to her sister’s—to the grubby, chaotic home she used to complain about, with children she didn’t like because she didn’t like children.

Working “from home” when home was just himself felt to Kyle like hanging by a thread. Kim had taken the dog because as a Chihuahua it was her dog. But he missed getting up when it was still dark and putting the leash on Bart before he peed on the foyer rug for the millionth time. Now in the dark morning he lie there thinking over his mother’s situation. Had the real Cathy Werner left for another place and some failing mind had taken over on the phone, or was it that the real Cathy Werner was speaking from this other place, this other dimension, where her past life was recurring on demand? Was Kyle’s toxic father always waiting at the dinner table in this other place, with a big Mafioso napkin tucked under his chin, fork and knife in each fist?

In this COVID world of hanging by a thread, Kyle knew his family history would soon come down to himself. The coincidence of the near ending of his birth family and his thirteen-year marriage made him think about children. At 47, he was probably too old to be a father. He’d read that old fathers were the reason for autism. But if he ever did find a younger woman who wanted to get pregnant, their kid would have only him as history on one side. When he pictured this tragic kid with many problems beyond autism, it was easier to deal with being alone.

He had met Kim through Walt’s daughter. Faye was always traveling back and forth between Connecticut and the Arizona desert for business, and this southwestern connection made her a national parks and wildlife nut. Her greatest wildlife obsession, however, was found all the way up in British Columbia, in the Great Bear Rainforest: spirit bears, white-coated black bears that inherit their pale fur from a rare recessive gene. Faye had met Kim, then living in the East Village, on a Reddit thread for fans of these bears, and when Faye was in the city for a jewelry show, she arranged to have a drink with both Kim and Kyle.

Kim seemed so different back then, more hippie than hipster with her spirit animal card deck. One of the first things he remembered her telling him was that she dreamt of coming face to face with one of the magical white bears, making its way toward her with the sun shining through the trees, a salmon hanging out of his mouth. This was the moment he realized that all of his dreams were of inside places. He remembered thinking how sad that was, and that with Kim, maybe life would be more open and less sad.

Last fall, she’d helped him get his mother moved from her neglect house in Hartford and settled into the long-term care facility. He appreciated that his wife went through the motions of this being a shared priority. Although when it came to cleaning out the house and selling it, he was on his own. He dated the ending of his marriage to those few long weekends in November. Even though she adored the coincidence that both of their names started with K, she believed that anything in Kyle’s life before she entered it was his own problem.

The problem of Cathy Werner locked in a nursing home luckily fell in the laps of strangers. All Kyle had to do was call the place, wait for them to get her on the phone, and go along with her belief that he was her late brother, Roderick J. Mahoney.

“Rod, are you going to bring that ladder you keep talking about?” she asked during their last call.

“Funny you should mention the ladder,” he said, “because I just gave it back to Jacob since it’s his.”

“I don’t recall any Jacob.”

“Sure you do. He was that good-looking guy who had an eye for you.”

“Oh, go on. He didn’t really have an eye for me.”

“He sure did. Mamma even said so.”

Sometimes, though, Kyle’s mother was aware of him being “one of my sons”—sons for whom she never had names. When this happened, she seemed genuinely interested in his life, which was very strange since she’d always had a low threshold of boredom for his pursuits. While he was talking to her in person, she would stare into the distance and suddenly cut him off: “Do you think I need to refinish that end table?” And yet now with dementia, she asked more questions than she did in four decades of lucidity—Snapchat questions that instantly dissolved, because she didn’t wait for a reply. Do you have a pretty girl? Do you have a new car? Do you take your girl dancing in those big clubs with purple lights? Do you dress up in clothes that are all black?

It saddened Kyle to think that these fantasy conversations were the most interesting ones he’d ever had with his mother. Eventually, though, it all came crashing down with “I need to start Bob’s dinner.” Kyle came to think of “feeding Bob” as a horrific ritual on the order of feeding the gods—the way the Aztecs cut out the still-beating hearts of their victims and carefully extracted and buffed up their skulls for decorating purposes. Even as his mother moved closer to death, the cruel hand of his father seemed to tighten its grip from beyond the grave.

Kyle himself had a very loose grip, which may be why, to compensate, he dutifully read the facility’s weekly newsletter every Monday. This week’s feature was the menu for Thanksgiving dinner. It was noted that, among other regional delicacies, there would be both pumpkin and squash pies. When he read this he imagined himself in the ornery persona of his Uncle Rod: “Who the devil wants a squash pie?” To which his mother would reply, “Squash makes a much better pie, Rod. Bob doesn’t even know it’s not pumpkin.”

With the menu still in front of him, he received a ping from Kim saying that he should drive Upstate for Thanksgiving at her sister’s, as if nothing was wrong between them. He wanted to text back that he could no longer describe his life to himself, which meant that he no longer knew himself. Instead he wrote: “I don’t even know what’s going on in your life.”

“You can always follow me,” she wrote back. “Then you’d know everything.”

“I’m not a user,” he wrote, quickly adding, “Is Bart OK?”

“You know his IG. Follow him and find out.”

Kim wasn’t bothered that she’d become extremely online. Probably the most profound thing she said about Instagram was that going from there to real life was like taking off ice skates and walking: without the ability to glide, you didn’t know how to use your feet. She didn’t want to use her feet anywhere that wasn’t post-worthy. Five or six years ago, when her Instagram use was limited to “cute things I’m lovin’” and “cute things I just bought,” he didn’t worry about it. But then she began documenting her purchases with heightened purpose. When they needed a new sofa, she wanted to do it all online and he wanted to go out and sit on something. The only reason she went to a store was to post about it. She got a blowout and irritated the staff with her complaints about lighting. Kyle thought they had settled on the sofa, but the next day she ordered one from Room and Board—one they couldn’t afford—because she’d asked her followers to vote.

The night before Thanksgiving, having gone out to pick up a thirty-eight-dollar apple pie, Kyle walked home to the chorus of banging pots-and-pans rising up through the slats of fire escapes. From the street, it seemed like some ritual of aboriginal cliff-dwellers, banging from the crevices on their steel drums, hoping to appease the great leveler of a volcano god. Ten minutes in the door, Kim texted to rescind the dinner invitation. Her sister had decided it wasn’t safe. They would do Zoom instead, Faye would join . . . “and others.” Kyle put the pie in the freezer, drank the last of Kim’s nonalcoholic gin mixed with cheap vodka, and fell asleep, thinking he’d blow off the event. But he woke the next morning to a call from his mother’s facility. He’d forgotten that they were being proactive in choosing the chat times that worked best for them. He didn’t feel like playing Rod, but they had his mother right there on the runway.

“Happy Thanksgiving, dear,” she said. “I hope you have a lovely meal.”

It sounded like something she might have overheard another resident say. It wasn’t what she’d say to Rod, or to sons whose names she couldn’t remember.

“So what’s on the menu for Bob?” he asked.

“Oh, we get a twenty-pounder every year from some people whose drives he always plows. Kindly, you know.”

That “Kindly, you know” was a needed reminder that strangers had so far prevented the woman who birthed him from dying of COVID. He had so far managed not to get COVID. He felt grateful in a bitter way. This tilt toward altruism prompted him to text a colleague who had tested positive without symptoms and was stuck in Astoria. He was a young guy who didn’t know how to turn around without affirmation from his parents. Kyle asked if there was anything he could bring him. The guy said he wished he had dessert. “Like a pie?”

Kyle took the pie out of the freezer and headed for Queens. By the time he made the delivery and got back, it was time for the Zoom call. He had changed his mind about joining. Maybe it was being humbled by all the shift workers on the 7. He found the last of a bottle of red wine lurking on a shelf of the refrigerator door and poured it into one of those balloon glasses no one ever uses because they break in the sink.

The sounds at Kim’s sister’s suggested tension from moody kids—twin overweight boys with ruddy cheeks, always squinting, and a silent younger girl with a learning disability. The kids’ father had been out of the picture for years, a situation that, he learned, was fairly common in Ulster County. The other boxes beyond Faye were people he’d never seen before. He guessed and was proved correct that these were Kim’s Instagram friends, which meant she was the star of the show. The thing about Instagram was that the unit of a follower was always equal to one; it didn’t matter whether you were a current spouse or flotsam who’d just glommed on because people in your own life were bored with you. You had the same metric value and thus were accorded equal time and space.

Faye’s box was the only one Kyle thought worth looking at. Physically, she was a composite of Julia Child and Cyndi Lauper. Years ago she joined AA because she said she was an alcoholic. But then she realized that she just liked being in AA, having that group cohesion. They eventually asked her to leave, but luckily social media had come along. Faye the Chihuahua queen was the one who got Kim into the breed. But at least Faye was constantly out in the world—she’d seen the northern lights with six successive dogs. Even COVID couldn’t deter her from visiting national parks with a dog wearing clothes. Her strange prose enticed Kyle to view her Instagram every so often: “Having a spectacular and almost life-alterating experience with my Chihuahua mix that I’m still processing.”

It didn’t take Faye long to mention the spirit bears. She was encouraging people to donate money to the Katmai Conservancy, the place that did the Fat Bear Week contest. When Kim grabbed the spirit bear spotlight, Kyle could feel his face get hot. He was losing patience having to hear her talk as if she’d traveled into the wilds of Canada.

“Why don’t you move your fixation onto snow leopards?” he asked his wife. “They’re known as ‘ghosts in the snow’ and they’re more of a challenge. It’s way harder to get to Kurdistan. You can’t really drive there.”

Kim’s face went blank. “Are you drunk?”

“All you do is collect totems,” he said to the haphazard faces in these boxes. He could understand if what she wanted was to be someone else—another living, breathing human being. But what she seemed to desire was the unreal self she was able to present to the world in pictures. What he couldn’t articulate to either her or himself was that she seemed to him infirm in this way of living. To leave her would be like leaving someone with a debilitating illness. When he left the call, he had never felt so hungry or so repulsed by food.

Two Sundays after Thanksgiving, he decided to visit his mother in Hartford. He’d be able to see her through glass, talking on the phone like inmates on cop shows. The grounds outside the facility’s wall of window were supposed to be bucolic, but today it felt more like a Ray Bradbury novel or the morning after some traumatic event with police tape—too many nondescript individuals mulling around in masks, flattening already dead leaves with their pop-art sneakers. It was the ostentatiousness of the sneakers that made everything blank and interchangeable.

He was apprehensive as he waited for an aide to fetch his mother. He saw an old man yelling through the glass and heard from the phone of the woman standing six feet away: “I ran a JCPenney portrait studio for 34 years!” Did he really? Kyle wondered. He must have. That wasn’t something you’d only dream of as a child. Standing among strangers who might now be strangers to their own families, he realized that what COVID bludgeoned you with was the prospect of every life mixed together, that we’re all versions of each other. For all these people, previous structures of timelines and accomplishments had collapsed to a shambles; life was mainly sifting through the rubble for something decent to say.

When they wheeled his masked mother toward him, his heart sank all the way to the composted earth. Her shrinking, blanched appearance hurt like a sore. He wondered how long she would last here. He knew there’d never be a reckoning over his brothers. In his adult life, he never broached the estrangement of Steve and Griff in his mother’s functioning life of crooked hedges and trash not picked up and mail trucks cutting ruts on the edge of the lawn and the snooty tone of Alexa.

The aide was having a hard time getting his mother to grip the phone. It looked yellow to him, her noncommittal gaze, with the washed-out hazel of those familiar irises against graying corneas. He knew he must look frightening to her with half of his face covered in black. But then, of course, his was a face she no longer recognized.

“Bob is coming to get me,” she said when she finally had hold of the phone.

Kyle didn’t feel pity, sentimental or otherwise; it was more anger at the condition of the world, where calamity was the new normal. “Don’t you remember that you left Bob?” he said.

“Bob’s my husband,” she replied from behind the crisp paper mask, her breath faintly distressing the pleats.

“Yeah, you did it,” he continued. “You left him high and dry, fair and square.”

She stared with yellow eyes.

“You went to look for cars, but rather than buying a new Accord in champagne, you stole a red Ford pickup and left town with your one remaining son. You looked at Kyle and said, ‘Let’s do it!’ Don’t you remember? You went to look for Steve and Griff, your sons.

“You found them on Route 66—both of them; how lucky!—and everyone held tight in that pickup driving up the California coast all the way to British Columbia. That’s where the creator of the world turned every tenth black bear white to remind people of how perfect and pristine earth was during the Ice Age.”

He could feel tears streaming down below his mask, meeting in the gooey place under his nose. In his head was implanted the foreign shapes of his adult brothers walking the barren arctic all alone, not even together, but on separate sheets of pure white, stumbling like these stupid people on their phones. He knew he did terribly wrong; he was a bad son, just like he was a bad husband, because he had no tolerance for these magical places—magical dead-end places. What was so different from the dementia afflicting his mother and the one afflicting his wife? Both lived in worlds of their own making. His wife was using up her life to feed the beast of Instagram just like his mother was using up hers to feed the one that was his father.

The inability to break free made him grievously lonely. And yet he realized that COVID was making everyone suffer the same discomfort and despair, the happy families superimposed atop the sad. There was some relief in the thought that his mother remained in that imaginary place where she didn’t live the sins of her history, only the tedious but painless parts she kept washing out in the sink for the next day.

At some point, his mother had let the phone slip from her hand to her lap. The aide returned, picked it up, and spoke into it. “Is there more to say?”

Kyle shook his head at her.

The aide said to his mother, “Do you want to put your hand up to the glass so you can touch your son?”

His mother looked up at her and cupped her fingers for the phone to be brought down to her face. She didn’t even look at Kyle on the other side, just off and away, into the distance. “Time to eat,” she said. “Walt’s got the plates out.” §