On Being Here in ‘Goodbye, Vitamin’

In his travel narrative The Maine Woods, Henry David Thoreau, hiking through the Burnt Lands on Mount Katahdin, becomes increasingly conscious of his physical presence in the natural world. His self-awareness grows into awe, and he cries out: “Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

Thoreau revels in his contact with “the solid earth! the actual world!,” yet the experience also terrifies him. The strangeness of the landscape, regrowing after a fire, makes him feel his human beingness most acutely. He is deeply connected to nature but also, as a human in this otherworldly place, profoundly alone.

As the narrative builds toward his cri de coeur, the tense shifts from past into present, dislocating the words in time as well as space. We may wonder: When did Thoreau’s experience reach this pinnacle—during the hike or later, in writing about it? It’s even more amazing to think of his cry as Thoreau’s call to us, his future (or present?) readers. Thoreau, the embodied being, is long gone, but here we are, thanks to his words, perhaps slightly awestruck by our own existence.

Rachel Khong’s diaristic novel Goodbye, Vitamin, a journey through a different but no less disorienting wilderness, begins with a stranger’s phone call from a bizarre landscape:

Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights. The stranger called and said, “I have some pants? Belonging to a Howard Young?”

The narrator, Ruth, is already unsettled. Following a devastating breakup with her fiancé, she has just moved back into her childhood home to help care for Howard, who is and is not the father she has always known. It turns out that Howard has thrown his clothes into trees all along a downtown street, upset that Ruth has written his name and phone number on the tags inside them in case he gets lost. It’s a silent cry of rage at his encroaching dementia, a plea to the universe, and to his family, to affirm his dignity and autonomy as he senses both ebbing away.

The novel ends one year later with another call. The family takes a late-night stroll, testing walkie-talkies that Ruth’s brother, Linus, had given them for Christmas:

“Mom’s brought an orange, Dad,” Linus says. “Do you copy?”
“I copy,” you say, then “Over and out,” and all of us follow your lead, one after the other, into the darkness: over and over and over. Out, out, out.

The “you” Ruth addresses is Howard, whose mind is traveling into alien territory, even as he, in mind and body, is here now, walking and talking with his family. The tragedy of dementia is being physically present while mentally gone or going, and it is deeply unsettling for the sufferer and for their loved ones. At this final moment in the novel, the call to Howard is answered—Do you copy? I copy—or, perhaps more accurately, it was answered. For the novel’s characters, the moment is already passing into darkness. But by rereading, we can experience this sweet flash of connection, over and over.

Not that writing or reading makes up for loss in the real world. Throughout Goodbye, Vitamin, Ruth laments the futility of trying to keep her fading father with her and how the ground beneath her seems to slip away as he does. Earlier in the novel, close to the end of a medical appointment, Howard’s doctor says that caregivers commonly ask what they can do, and he says:

There’s nothing really to “do,” he says. Just be present.
“Like in the moment?” I say.
“I meant ‘around,’” he says. “But sure, that, too.”

In the short, dated passages that follow, Ruth tries to be present—to ground herself—in the present tense:

June 6
The present: there’s this woman in the same aisle of the supermarket, curling a large dog bone like it’s a barbell.

June 7
The present: glancing in the mirror, I notice a segment of noodle on my cheek. But I can’t remember the last time I ate noodles.

But the present starts feeling like a trick:

Theo [Ruth’s new love interest] would have dreams set exclusively in dark rooms—everybody whispering, and glowing red.
This is what he’s telling me now, in the present. I’m not cheating here.

Ruth soon realizes she’s losing her battle with tense:

The present: me remembering, Don’t get me wrong. It was what Joel [Ruth’s ex-fiancé] had said. But I did! I got it all wrong.
And: be present, and the words falling behind me, quickly, into the past, too.

Shortly after, when Howard asks Ruth to “write it all down, so I won’t forget?,” meaning a shopping list for a building project, she decides to record their experiences in writing. At this point, the narrative shifts from present into past tense. The past, however, offers no firmer footing. In just these few sentences, times and timelines swirl and collide:

You told me that in your twenties you had not believed in God, and for a little while you believed in sit-ups and eating right and meditation, and for a time after that you believed in me and Linus and my mother, and here you were, now, unable to open a box that had been taped shut, a box belonging to you. Here you were. Here we both were.

English has 12, or 16, or 24 verb tenses, depending on how finely you want to slice up time. Throw in sequence, duration, acts of memory, anticipation, speculation, etc., and you realize that both time and language are not just linear but overlapping, intersecting, recursive, elusive. Talk about a wilderness.

Who are we? Where are we? How can we tell?

As those of us who’ve witnessed it know all too well, people with dementia lose their words along with their sense of time, place, and self—making Ruth’s verbal efforts to keep her father present more impossible by the day. She gets it wrong, but can any of us get it right? Who can say exactly who and where we are now? As we tell time in language, language takes time, so all words become past tense, representing past us. And yet, we keep on talking and writing. We cry out in joy and terror and gratitude and awe.

Whether our words make contact, we can’t know. But in Goodbye, Vitamin, the attempt has happened and is happening still. Like the walkie-talkies Linus gives his family, the effort itself is a lovely present.•

Join us on December 12 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Khong will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Mimi Lok to discuss Goodbye, Vitamin. Please note that this event is on the second Thursday of the month. Register for the Zoom conversation here.