Flowerpot Rocks, Hopewell, New Brunswick, low tide
Home of the highest tides in the world, a billion tons of water ebb and flow in the Bay of Fundy. Located along the East Coast of North America, north of the Gulf of Maine and between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy is one of Canada’s seven natural wonders and in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Bay’s unique funnel shape together with the pull of the sun and the moon cause resonance so that at the head of the bay, in Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, the water at high tide can rise as much as 53.5 feet.
The world’s highest tides continue to sculpt red sandstone. At Hopewell Rocks (north of St. John, New Brunswick), tourists clamber over the sea floor at low tide. Later, when waters surge back, reclaiming exposed rock and mud flats and seaweed beds, canoes exploit the currents while water-gazers climb on platforms to avoid being stranded or carried off.
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Watergazers, watching
Alma, New Brunswick, low tide
In ports—such as at Alma, New Brunswick—boats lean against docks, waiting for the tide to come in, before heading out to check lobster traps.
Alma, New Brunswick, 6 hours later
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When the incoming tide crashes into the St. John River at St. John, New Brunswick, it creates raging whirlpools and rapids. At high tide, the power of the water actually reverses the flow of the river. Kayakers and boaters here brave the surge.
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St. John River, New Brunswick
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While the vertical tides have made the Bay of Fundy famous, horizontal tides are also spectacular. At low tide, more than 620 square miles of ocean floor stretch exposed to the atmosphere. Every beach on the Bay of Fundy bares a substantial intertidal area where millions of organisms live half the day underwater and the other half revealed; they have adapted to the extremes of temperature and salinity (Randall, D., Burggren, W. and French, K. Animal Physiology: Mechanisms and Adaptations, 3rd ed. W.H. Freeman and Co. New York, 1998–Source here).
Alma, New Brunswick, low tide
Alma, New Brunswick, high tide
Upper Salmon River, Alma, New Brunswick, low tide
Upper Salmon River, Alma, New Brunswick, high tide
The greatest intertidal expanses lie in the North; scientists have identified these tracts of muck and mire as “food pumps.” The power of the water that rushes back and forth stirs up nutrients—phytoplankton and zooplankton—feeding the creatures that inhabit the Bay. (Smith, R.L. and Smith, T.M. Elements of Ecology, 4th ed. Benjamin – Cummings Publishing Co. Menlo Park, Ca.1998. Source here.).
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Puffins breed on nearby islands. Flocks of sandpipers circle the exposed sea floor and then swoop in, concluding their 900-mile flight from Arctic breeding grounds with a feast. They gorge for two weeks on the Bay’s mud shrimp, doubling their weight before setting off on a 2500-mile non-stop migration to their winter grounds in South America, which they will complete in a little over three days (Thurston, H. and Horner, S. Tidal Life. Nimbus. Toronto. 1998. Source here.)
Northern Gannet
Approximately two million birds of all species stop here annually; this is the single most important stopover point for migratory birds on the Eastern seaboard. Other inhabitants include whales, seals, dolphins, porpoises, and all types of fish and crustaceans.
Boats slip through the fog, trailing these creatures; the lashed and lashing motion of the Bay of Fundy transfixes the water-gazer and invigorates the adventurer—who like Bulkington in Melville’s Moby Dick—finds that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.”
–Natalia Sarkissian
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Natalia Sarkissian has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been an editor at Numéro Cinq since 2010. Natalia divides her time between Italy, Egypt, the United States, and South Africa.
Ford has concocted a remarkable, controlled tale from the many themes on which he has based his career. The novel is one that feels, like the yarn Dell shares, meditated upon for years and years, perfected in a way that only comes with age and experience. When Dell cops, “I am blessed with memory,” late in his story, one can’t help but believe the same can be said for his literary creator. — Ben Woodard
Richard Ford has made a healthy living dealing tragic narrative blows to the residents of Great Falls, Montana. In his brilliant story collection Rock Springs (1987), as well as the short novel Wildlife (1990), fathers brawl and kill, mothers sleep around, and families dissolve amongst the city’s flat panorama. To Ford, Great Falls is a place where bad things happen to regular people, where children are left to fend for themselves, and where the line between good and evil ever trembles. Canada, the author’s latest Montana venture, finds the author comfortably exercising these principles while simultaneously dazzling the reader with detailed, rich prose. A story of desperate parents and the consequences of their poor judgment, the novel is heartbreaking, calculated, and nothing short of a masterpiece.
Canada unfurls through the mouth of Dell Parsons, a retired English teacher looking back to the spring of 1960, when he is fifteen-years-old and living with his parents and fraternal twin sister, Berner, in Great Falls. Dell speaks in a confessional tone and wastes no time in divulging the crux of his narrative, declaring:
First, I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. (3)
This announcement is reminiscent of Ford’s story “Optimists,” from Rock Springs, which opens with a similar flair:
All of this that I am about to tell you happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. (Rock Springs, 157)
Yet while young Dell initially seems analogous to that of Frank Brinson, the narrator of “Optimists”—he’s friendless, concerned about school, and coping with an unstable family—the forty years of careful introspection provided by Dell’s older voice adds a dramatic heft that separates the character from his less seasoned literary cousin. As Dell speaks, one senses both nostalgia and experience alive on his tongue. While mapping out the elder Parsons’ foray into lawlessness—his father Bev’s involvement in a flawed stolen meat scam leaves the clan owing $2,000 to a group of Cree Indians—Dell frequently pauses to consider his family’s fate. “It seems possible, I suppose, to look back at our small family as being doomed, as waiting to sink below the churning waves, and being destined for corruption and failure,” he muses early in the novel. “But I cannot truly portray us that way, or the time as a bad or unhappy time, in spite of it being far out of the ordinary.” (31-32) His is not merely a recounting of events, but rather a chronicle that reads as if meditated upon for decades.
This contemplation continues once the elder Parsons are captured for their crime. Berner runs away from home and Dell finds himself jettisoned to Saskatchewan in an attempt to escape the clutches of social services. Left in the care of Arthur Remlinger, a hotelier and the brother of a family friend, the boy is assured safety from the troubles lingering in Montana. But within days of his arrival, Dell wonders if Remlinger and his right hand man, the uneasy Charley Quarters, pose to him an even greater threat. “… Arthur Remlinger had seemed like a different person each time I made contact with him—which naturally confused me and made me feel even more alone than I would’ve otherwise,” the aged Dell recalls. (309) And as Remlinger slowly incorporates Dell into his business and personal life, the discomfort between the two grows. Sitting at a café, Dell listens in befuddlement as Remlinger rambles on about Canada, Tolstoy, and the Bronze Age before finding himself locked in the following exchange:
“Do you think you have a clear mind, Dell?”
I didn’t understand what that meant. Possibly a clear mind was the opposite of unsteady. I wanted to have one. “Yes, sir,” I said. I’d ordered a hamburger and had begun to eat it.
He nodded and moved his tongue around behind his lips, then cleared his throat. “Living out here produces a fantasy of great certainty.” He smiled again, but the smile slowly faded as he looked at me. “People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades. You’re not inclined to do that, I guess. You’re not in despair, are you?”
“No, sir.” The word made me think of my mother in her jail cell—smiling and helpless. She’d been in despair.
Arthur took a sip of his coffee, holding the cup around its rim—not by its little curved handle—blowing on the surface before he sipped. “That’s settled then. Despair’s out.” He smiled again. (312-13)
This chat, a sort of test on the part of Remlinger, pulls Dell closer to the underhanded dealings of his keeper (as well as the “murders” mentioned in Dell’s opening monologue), yet it also illustrates Ford’s masterful understanding of the power of conversation. In this moment and throughout Canada, the author’s sporadic employment of dialogue—most of the novel’s exchanges are told in summary—works wonders. These scenes are lean and spare, filled with indirect, seemingly distracted comments that, upon hindsight and context, speak volumes and drive the narrative to a higher level of excellence. They leap from the page and leave the reader spellbound by how much can be said in so few words. And as the story chugs toward its spiraling finale, the muscle of these conversations hang in the air like ghostly informants, warnings that tried their best to prime Dell and his cohorts for the horrors that wait for them in the cold Saskatchewan night.
In a recently published interview with The Daily Beast, Richard Ford was asked about his return to Great Falls as setting in Canada, and after touching on the city’s “dramatic landscape” and how he initially “just liked the name Great Falls,” Ford turned reflective, much like his character Dell. “I’m—I guess—by nature a writer who returns to subjects,” Ford said. “It must be I think that each time [I] write about something (Montana, New Jersey, real estate, families in distress) I open opportunities for later, even fuller consideration.” This “fuller consideration” is evident in Canada, for here Ford has concocted a remarkable, controlled tale from the many themes on which he has based his career. The novel is one that feels, like the yarn Dell shares, meditated upon for years and years, perfected in a way that only comes with age and experience. When Dell cops, “I am blessed with memory,” late in his story (416), one can’t help but believe the same can be said for his literary creator.
— Benjamin Woodard
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Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His reviews have been featured in Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. His fiction has appeared in Numéro Cinq. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.
Curious and maze-like story behind this delightful essay about an atypical Mennonite childhood in southern Ontario: Rick Martin lives in Kitchener, Ontario (it used to be Berlin, Ontario, but was renamed after a famous English general—Lord Kitchener—during the First World War). He lives next door to dg’s old friends Dwight and Kathy Storring. Long ago in the Triassic or, maybe, the Cretaceous, Kathy was a reporter at the Peterborough Examiner while Dwight took photos and dg was the sports editor (yes, yes, we all have a secret, sordid past). Kathy showed Numéro Cinq to Rick and Rick got inspired by the NC Childhood series to write his own story. Kathy showed Rick’s essay to dg, and here we are. (Accept this is a peek into the byzantine editorial apparatus behind NC—if you want to get published here, it helps to move next door to the Storrings.)
Rick Martin is a technical documentation and training consultant. He has taught technical and business writing at the University of Waterloo and York University. He has had dozens of technical manuals published and has written numerous essays and poems for his own pleasure and the enjoyment of family and friends.
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Two years old.
“What is a true story? Is there any such thing?” Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
I was a shy child and bewildered by almost everything around me.
My mother and father were born into horse-and-buggy Mennonite families in Waterloo County, Ontario. My father’s family were regular Old Orders, who eventually moved to the more modern Conference (or “red-brick”) Mennonite church so that my grandfather could have a truck to haul his produce to the Kitchener market. My mother’s family belonged to the more extreme Dave Martin Mennonite sect (founded by her grandfather), and when my grandparents were born again and joined the small Plymouth Brethren congregation in Hawkesville, they were completely shunned by their family and friends.
My father was a long-distance truck driver, so he was often absent. My parents’ first child died in his crib when he was four months old, so there was always a ghost in our lives. When I was 18 months old, my little sister was born several months premature and lived in an incubator at the hospital in Kitchener for months. With no means of transportation to the city and no one else to look after my older brother and me, my mother was stuck at our rented farmhouse near St Clements, unable to care for her fragile new baby.
Dad in 1958.
When I was still quite young, my mother, on the verge of mental collapse, had a spectacular conversion, in which Jesus appeared to her in a vision and assured her she was saved and going to heaven. This experience gave her strength to carry on through the adversities of near blindness from a childhood eye infection, too many kids (there were soon 5 of us), poverty, and a mostly absent husband who, she was convinced, was not saved: Dad drank and smoked and swore, had an explosive temper, and didn’t much like going to church.
When I was 5, my dad was transferred to Sault Ste Marie, 500 miles from family, friends, and any sense of security we had. We lived in a rented farmhouse about 5 miles west of the city for the first year, then bought an unfinished 3-bedroom house in a barely developed subdivision on the eastern fringes of town: gravel roads, no municipal water or sewers, roadside ditches, and no bus service for the first few years. Because my mother couldn’t see well enough to drive a car, we were stuck in the neighbourhood except on the weekends, when Dad was home.
Rick and siblings.
With her fundamentalist mixture of Dave Martin Mennonite and Plymouth Brethren beliefs, fed by radio preachers like Theodore H. Epp, my mother thought that TV, movies, card-playing, and dancing were all worldly, if not sinful. We grew up believing that everyone around us was a heathen, headed for hell, intent on tempting us into lives of sin. We could play with neighbourhood kids, but we understood they were different than us, and we shouldn’t get too close to them (in the summer, my mother held Daily Vacation Bible Schools in our yard, in an effort to convert our friends).
I knew, from the time I was conscious, that I was a sinner, headed for hell unless I accepted Jesus as my saviour. And I knew—from my mother’s and grandparents’ experience—that such a conversion was dramatic, that when you were saved, you knew it. Jesus never appeared to me, despite my nightly pleading, and I was never able to find the assurance that he lived in my heart.
Dad, of course, was a worry. I was pretty sure he wasn’t saved, and I knew he was in constant danger: fellow drivers were periodically killed in spectacular crashes, skewered by steel against some rock-cut on the winding road to Toronto. We prayed on our knees for his safety and his salvation, among other things, every night before bed.
And we believed in the Rapture, that Christ could appear at any moment and sweep true believers up into heaven, leaving the unsaved to a horrible stint with the anti-Christ. This was a concept invented by the founder of the Brethren, John Darby.
Four years old.
In many ways, the east end of Sault Ste Marie was a wonderful place to be a child. Just a block south of our house, on the other side of Chambers Avenue, there was bush all the way to the St Mary’s River, and on the other side of highway 17, a half mile north of us, it was bush pretty much all the way to James Bay.
The neighbourhood was all young families with lots of kids and not a lot of discipline. We ran wild, exploring and building tree-forts. We played baseball in empty lots and kick-the-can and hockey on the streets. At night, there were hide-and-seek games that ranged across the whole block of back yards.
We’d take day-long hikes back into the bush on the other side of the highway, cutting across the Indian Reserve and getting lost in the meanderings of the Root River. We built rafts in the drainage ditches and ponds down towards the river. We rode our bikes down to Belleview Park in the city and 7 miles out to Hiawatha Park to go swimming. In winter, we would hang onto the rear bumpers of cars and slide along behind them until they got going too fast and we rolled off into the snowbanks.
Mom often didn’t have a clue where we were or what we were doing; she just prayed constantly that we’d all get home safe and sound for supper.
Going to church.
Every Sunday, there were three services at Bethel Bible Chapel on North Street: 9:30 Breaking of Bread, 11:00 Family Bible Hour with a sermon for the parents upstairs and Sunday School for the kids in the basement, and 7:00 Gospel Hour. We rarely went to the first service, but almost always to the other two. If Dad was too tired, Mom would arrange for someone else to take the rest of us.
It was at Sunday School, we understood, that we could make real friends: these were Christian people, unlike our neighbours in the east end. So Sundays were the high point of the week. Often I would be invited to a friend’s place for the afternoon, between services. I soon realized that not all Brethren families were like ours. Most of them had much nicer homes and furniture and toys than we did, some of them had TVs, and many of them had a happy, easy-going, fun-loving approach to life. A few of the kids, whose parents had invited me, were selfish and nasty and treated me like dogshit on their shoes.
We’d often have Sunday School friends come home with us, too. Dad was the cook on Sundays, and he usually made a big mid-day meal of roast beef or pork and mashed potatoes and gravy and tossed salad. After dinner, we’d often go for a drive and a hike at Gros Cap or somewhere along the Lake Superior shore. I was always sad when the Sunday evening service was over and we’d pile into the car for the drive home to another week of school and neighbourhood friends.
Reading as a group activity.
Mom read stories to us every night before we said our prayers, things like The Five Little Peppers. It seemed our house was full of reading material (especially compared to those of our neighbours): the Bible, of course, but also novels, magazines, and newspapers. Mom was always reading, with her book held close to her nose, and—when he was at home and awake and not fixing something—Dad was often in his easy chair reading the Family Herald or National Geographic or some trucking journal. I can remember starting to learn to read, identifying letters and words, sitting on Dad’s lap while he read the newspaper.
At first, most of our reading material other than newspapers was religious in nature. Every Sunday, we got little pamphlets from Sunday School, and every Christmas our Sunday School teachers gave us story books and, later, novels with blatantly evangelistic aims. But when we got access to school and city libraries, we read the Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton’s several series, the Swallows and Amazons books, and all sorts of stuff: pretty much anything we could get our hands on. Eventually, in high school, I graduated to Steinbeck, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Kesey.
Christmas.
My older brother was always pursuing some hobby—stamp collecting, oil painting, magic, photography—with a passion that was infectious. I’d always end up doing what he did. I sent money off to some mail-order place in BC to get bags of stamps and bought an album to put them in. I got hold of an old Brownie somewhere. I helped my brother develop our film in the little dark room he carved out amongst the boxes in the tiny attic off our bedroom. But somehow, I could never generate the enthusiasm he had for these activities. It was always a borrowed interest, not strong enough to sustain me.
The one thing I did take up more or less on my own was a fascination with bicycles. I collected old frames and wheels in the annual spring clean-up, and from them I’d assemble strange bikes: I remember one that had a 28-inch front wheel and a 20-inch back wheel. About grade 8, I put together one of the first 10-speeds in town from parts I had lying around, parts I scrounged, and parts I bought at my friend George’s father’s hardware store. I would ride all over town, exploring every neighbourhood, and out into the countryside as far as Island Lake and St Joe’s Island.
I was also infatuated with cars and knew the year, make, and model of almost everything on the road by the time I was 5 or 6. Dad subscribed to Mechanics Illustrated, and I’d avidly read Tom McCahill’s car reviews every month. We would go to the annual Auto Show at the Memorial Gardens, and I’d drool over the new models. I remember the first Mustang I ever saw and the first MGB. I thought I’d gone to heaven when my dad’s friend took me for a ride in the ’66 Dodge Charger he bought with insurance money from the truck he’d crashed on highway 69.
Home built bike.
Our family was always short of money, usually running up a bill at Jean’s Handy Store for bread and milk between pay-cheques. Among other methods of getting cash, we’d pick wild blueberries in the late summer and sell them door-to-door in the neighbourhood for 10 cents a quart.
When he was still pretty young, maybe 10 or 11, my older brother got a paper route, delivering the Toronto Telegram across the whole East Side, and I was conscripted as his helper. The first night was miserably cold and snowing, and we wandered about through the snow drifts looking for addresses on Boundary Road and Trunk Road, a mile or more from home. We split up to find the last few houses, he in one direction and me in the other, and I never did find the one I was looking for. I arrived home what seemed like hours later, freezing and wet and miserable, feeling a failure.
When I was 12 or so, I landed a Sault Star route, and my dad loaned me the $50 to buy a brand new Super Cycle 3-speed, electric blue, with chrome fenders. I had about 50 customers spread along a 3- or 4- mile route that wound through the neighbourhood and ended up at the Husky Truck Stop down the highway at the very edge of town. For awhile, I had several customers across the tracks on the Rankin Reserve. I cleared about 5 dollars per week.
In the summer, I’d strap the paper bag on the back of the bike and race through the route in just over an hour, but in the winter, it was a long, slow slog in the dark, with the bag biting into my skinny shoulder and my hands freezing. When I got home, everyone else would have already finished supper, and I’d eat alone while Mom washed the dishes and my younger sibs dried them and put them away.
One year—1966, I think—as a bonus for signing up new customers, I won a trip to Toronto with a bunch of other carriers and some crusty old newspaper types as chaperons: it was the first time I’d been away from home with strangers. We stayed at the King Edward Hotel. We saw the Toronto Maple Leafs play the Detroit Red Wings, the first time I’d seen a professional hockey game (no TV, remember). And we went to see the movie Fantastic Voyage. It was the first time I’d ever been in a movie theatre, and my lack of familiarity with the conventions of either film or science fiction rendered the narrative completely unintelligible. The whole weekend was equally surreal and disturbing.
Sunday Afternoon at Grandma’s in Waterloo, 1963.
Mom always put a very high value on education (she and Dad had only gone as far as grade 8), and I did well in school, usually at the top of my class. But there was really little competition, given the sub-working-class character of our neighbourhood, and there was only one other boy, Roger, who did anywhere near as well as I. The other boys were all rough and rowdy, bigger than me and barely literate.
I was lousy at sports and a wimp on the playground. I was always in the Crows in singing class. I had to stand out in the corridor with the Jehovah’s Witnesses when the class sang God Save the Queen and recited The Lord’s Prayer. I had to sit out while they learned to dance in Phys. Ed. and learned about sex in Health. I was entranced by the girls, but afraid to speak to—let alone play with—them. I hung around the edges of things, much like my ghostly eldest brother.
Family reunion, 1966.
We often went to my grandparents’ place in Waterloo for our vacations—Christmas, sometimes Easter, and usually a couple weeks in the summer. If my dad couldn’t get off work, Mom would somehow find a ride with somebody who was heading down that way: she and her 5 kids crammed into the back seat for the 10- or 12-hour journey “home.” Our times in Waterloo County were usually a whirlwind of visits with all the relatives. Unlike my siblings, I had no cousins my age, and I wasn’t really close to any of them, but I’d often end up spending a few days in the home of some aunt and uncle I barely knew, homesick and struggling to decipher the strange habits and rhythms of my cousins’ lives.
Dad’s latest catch.
Every summer, Dad would take some time off to go camping. He loved the outdoors, and he loved fishing. We had a big orange canvas tent that we’d pitch at Echo Lake or Twin Lakes on St Joe’s Island. Dad would rent a boat, put his old 5-horse Johnson outboard on it, and go out fishing, taking any of us who were willing to go. My mom and the others would hang around the campsite, reading, paddling in the water, or playing on the beach.
Ice fishing.
Dad was not a patient man, and I could never get the hang of casting. I never caught a fish and couldn’t see the point of just sitting in a small boat in the sun all day, bothered by mosquitoes, worried about storm clouds. But it was better than the ice fishing, when we’d be huddled out on Lake Superior in our thin ski jackets and rubber boots and home-knit mittens, freezing as the sun set in the late afternoon behind the rim of ice. In both cases, I endured the misery only for the opportunity to be doing something with Dad.
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Perhaps it is because they are relatively rare that I remember my times with Dad so vividly. He gave me access to a different world than my mother’s. It was Dad who helped me realize I could fix things. I remember one evening helping him disassemble and repair the coaster brake from one of my bicycles on the back porch. He showed me how the parts went together and where to put the grease (probably Vaseline) and explained how the brake worked. Later, he showed me how to change spark plugs and set the points on his car.
I would sometimes hang around the garages where he worked on the trucks he drove: changing the oil, fixing the brakes, or overhauling an engine. Because he worked for fly-by-night operators during the 60s, most of the garages were awful places, old warehouses with dark puddles in the corners and rats scurrying around in the trash piles. He and the other drivers worked on the trucks under feeble lights, getting me to fetch tools or rags, swearing and laughing, and drinking beer when they took breaks. They were always friendly with me, giving me bottles of Coke and teasing me.
Once in awhile, I was allowed to go on a trip with Dad in his truck. It was wonderful, heading out into the night way up in the cab of that roaring machine, stopping in truck stops for hot hamburger sandwiches, going to places I’d never been before: Hamilton, Windsor, Muskegon, Grand Rapids. But it was also terrifying, being away from the familiar rituals of Mom and home, conscious of the 50 tons of steel or lumber on the trailer behind, worried that Dad would fall asleep or enter a curve too fast. And I always had to pee, but was afraid to tell Dad, to force him to pull over on the soft shoulder of the highway.
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As it turned out, we got home safely every time. Both Dad and I survived my childhood, perhaps thanks to Mom’s prayerful intervention.
I somehow managed, out of all of this, to cobble together a persona: about grade 6, I adopted the role of class clown, with little respect for rules or authority and with what I thought was a clever and cynical wit. That carried me, not especially happily, through high school.
I first met Katie Vibert a year ago when she sent me an email, out of the blue, about a project some of her students at the CEGEP de Sept-Îles in Quebec had just completed—a series of gorgeous banners depicting North Shore (the north shore of the St. Lawrence) artists and historical figures. There was I, bigger than life, on the college facade (this, of course, is in honour of my novel Elle which is set on the North Shore, even has a scene set on the beach in Sept-Îles). Now Katie has a show of her own work which reflects the both place and history–the North Shore, the Montagnais, new technologies. It’s a startling, vibrant exhibition.
dg
Katie Vibert: ICÔNES NORDIQUES
Sculpture by Canadian artist, Katie Vibert, on view in Val-d’Or, Quebec from June 3 – July 17, 2011.
Here’s a fascinating interview with the great Canadian ex-pat (she lives in Paris) short story writer Mavis Gallant. Gallant’s stories used to appear regularly in the New Yorker; she was one of those blessed few (like her fellow Canadian Alice Munro) to be “on retainer.” This splendid addition to NC’s growing collection of interviews comes courtesy of Jason DeYoung—it was originally published in Writer’s Carousel, May/June, 2004. It’s a pleasure to be able to make it widely available. (Find Gallant’s books here.)
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Knowing What Happens: an Interview with Mavis Gallant
Interview by Jason DeYoung
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Jason DeYoung (JD): How did Paris Stories and Varieties of Exile come about? What was the thought behind getting those books together since both books contain mostly stories you’ve published in previous collections?
Mavis Gallant (MG): I didn’t have anything to do with it. They were edited. One was edited by Michael Ondaatje [Paris Stories] and the other by Russell Banks [Varieties of Exile]. They are published by the New York Review of Books. They publish books, you know, as well as putting out the journal. And, they asked if I would be interested, that Michael Ondaatje would write the introduction and choose the stories. I said yes. I had nothing to do with it or complain about.
The second book was to be called “Montreal Stories,” but that doesn’t work in the United States because people won’t read anything that has Canada in the title. With any suggestion that it’s Canadian they’re allergic to it. So in the US they chose the title [Varieties of Exile]; in the Canadian edition—because there’s a Canadian publisher, too—they used the title I wanted. I wanted “Paris Stories” and “Montreal Stories” because they seemed to go well.
I was the one who suggested Russell Banks because with something about Canada in the United States you have to be very careful. I knew that he had Canadian connections. He has three Canadian grandparents. I wanted an American whose work I admired, which is the case with Russell Banks, and who knew something about Canadian writers and Canadians.
JD: As an American, I had no idea that there was such an “allergy” to Canadian writers.
MG: Well, the Canadians have the reputation in America of being very dull. If people know my name at all, they know I’m a writer—and that’s forgivable. (Laughs) But when I used to say I’m Canadian, people would look trapped. And there’s that feeling that they’re very dull and that Canada is a very dull place. Actually it was true years ago, but it’s not true now, so they haven’t kept up.
JD: In your short story, “Varieties of Exile,” Linette says that “anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots.” How autobiographical is this line?
Here are three poems from Ray Hsu in Vancouver that demonstrate wit plus a strange and beautiful talent for expressing mystery, vast spaces, ideas and ancient wisdom in a few terse lines. Ray is originally from Toronto but is currently a post-doc fellow at the University of British Columbia. His first collection, Anthropy, contained a poem on the death of Walter Benjamin (suicide on the Spanish border after his attempt to escape Nazi Europe, as he thought, failed) thus signalling at least in part Hsu’s aesthetic allegiance to the European mode of cerebral, critical, urban poetry of edgy juxtaposition as opposed to the North American penchant for lyric and nature imagery. Barbara Carey, writing in the Toronto Star, called him brainy and eclectic. She wrote: “It’s anthropology remade in the freewheeling, crisply detached style of postmodernism … Hsu’s work resembles that of Anne Carson, the celebrated Montreal writer and classics scholar who combines cultural references to the ancient world with a cool (in both senses of the word) contemporary voice.” His second book, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, was published last year and continues his investigation into what he calls the “grammar of personhood.”
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Three Poems
By Ray Hsu
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Notes to the Border Guard
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The man who would come to be called Confucius: I could see in his eyes that he
wanted something else out of the world.
As I began to move west from the vast plains to the borders of civilization itself into the
state of Qin, I would imagine him moving West too, away from sun behind him.
I told him about the other half of their souls and its depths. Sure, there was on one side:
the one of which Confucius knew, its intricate practicalities.
But on the other was a sprawling forest that sounded like an ancient poem.
When I look up I don’t see gods, but a different kind of order. He has one way of
comprehending this order, but it is among the bustle of this order that I sense another
still.
It eludes the treasure hunters searching for wealth and luck.
When I spoke to the king, even with his warriors far below, I saw that he was afraid.
Or was it the warriors themselves that the king feared? They needed something to
believe in—a spirit or an idea—or else they were nothing to themselves.
I tell the king.
Then I see in the king’s eyes that he knows. Yes, he thinks. I thought that politics was
about me.
No one knows what will happen. But what I have told him is enough for now.
I know that he is a sensitive man, that he may already feel in the wind a hint of the blood
that is in his future.
At the gate, I resist the urge to turn and look back at the kingdom.
This government wants to be so much more. It dreams of all tongues speaking its
language.
But it isn’t up for me to solve. Beneath my skin, I feel a readiness. It feels like an engine.
.
.
Stars in the blue sky before the night’s darkness
.
Before I start, you describe to me the brightness of the night sky. I am only an
amateur. Others supply facts, some bother with their points of view.
Some publish theirs as science, some make highly accurate predictions.
Somewhere light is not simply pollution. Different places, different skies: the
Texas Star Party, the Nebraska Star Party. Kitt Peak. The McDonald Observatory.
A sky with no clouds, as dark as it gets around here.
But you reach far out into the night to find me a dark sky. You remind me of Lao
Tzu: When darkness is at its darkest, that is the beginning of all light. What
colours do you find?
I turn on my red light. I put on my glasses, the mirrored kind you wear on
glaciers. No luck: the magnitude for tonight is less than before. It can only get so
dark. One more event horizon: the light we cannot escape. The sky brightens.
These lights are all too human.
You measure me a clear night so I can finally test my vision. Tell me where to
look.
.
.
How to Be Awesome
.
“The internet’s completely over. … The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip
and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are
no good.” — Prince, The Mirror
Meet Cyrus Chutt Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, waiting for a friend in the the Factory Tavern on Andy Warhol Square in Pittsburgh. His friend, Romesh, calls the bar to let Chutt know he’ll be late and the waitress inadvertently hits the speaker phone and public address switch and lets the entire clientele know she has a hard time getting past that name, Chutneywala. Thus begins Clark Blaise’s comic story “Waiting For Romesh” from his brand new collection The Meagre Tarmac, just out from Biblioasis. (See Philip Marchand’s review in the National Post.)
Clark is an old friend (dating back to the early 1980s and dg’s Iowa Writers Workshop experience) who once made the mistake of inviting dg to stay the night. Clark and his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, were sharing an appointment at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and living in palatial splendour in a huge house on Circular Street with an octagonal carriage house and mistress apartment in back. DG somehow managed to stretch that night into three months (this was in the days of dg’s impoverished apprenticeship, um, actually, he is still an impoverished apprentice), the walking definition of a Horrific Guest. Clark moved away, dg stayed in the house til it was sold. He wrote his story “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon” in the little glassed in conservatory.
Clark Blaise is brilliant story writer and memoirist, intelligent, cosmopolitan, a master of point of view. He has lived multiple lives and written about all of them, from his impoverished childhood in Florida, Pittsburgh and Winnipeg to his extended sojourns in India and his long and eminent teaching career. He is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Nowadays, he divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.
dg
.
WAITING FOR ROMESH
By Clark Blaise
.
These are the random thought’s, over a late afternoon and early evening, of a balding man waiting for his friend. What is the evolutionary advantage of thinning hair? Could it be that balding apes sensed heat and rain before their hirsute brethren, knowing to seek shelter, thus having more playtime to pass on their genes?
According to theory, one monkey out of an infinite number working on an infinite bank of typewriters will create a flawless draft of King Lear. It puts a human face on the notion of “infinity.” Two or three might come close, misspelling a word or deleting a comma, which seems somehow even more miraculous, more human, and tragic. It signals a failed intent. Perfection seems just a more refined form of accident.
Higher altitudes are cooler because fewer molecules are available for collision, thus releasing energy. Given infinite time, every molecule in a confined space – even if the molecules represent the world’s population and the confined space is earth itself – makes contact with every other.
All roads lead to Rome. It is said that if one sits long enough at a café on the Via Veneto, everyone he has ever known will eventually pass by. This has not proven to be the case, however, for Cyrus Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, seated this afternoon at The Factory Tavern in Andy Warhol Square, Pittsburgh. Cyrus, called Chutt by his Indian friends and Chuck by his colleagues at the Mellon Bank, has been waiting through a long afternoon, dinnertime and now early evening for his Wharton batch-mate, Romesh Kumar.
“I hope you weren’t offended,” the waitress said half an hour earlier, when she set his third narrow flute of beer – this one on the house – in front of him. She is tall and thin, wearing black jeans and a slack, black cutaway T-shirt. He searches for the proper word: singlet? Camisole? Her dark, krinkly hair is gathered in a ponytail. It was she, standing at the end of the bar, who had received Romesh Kumar’s “please-tell-Mr.-Chutneywala-I’m-late” phone call. She accidentally hit the speakerphone and public address system at the same time, alerting indoor and outdoor customers to a Chutneywala in their presence, and that she thought “Chutneywala” sufficiently amusing to ask for a repeat. Everyone had heard her giggle. They overheard her half of the conversation. “His name is what? Chutneywala? Come on, man. Who shall I say is calling? Everyone also heard “Romesh Kumar.” He had no secrets.
Kim Fu is an exuberant young Canadian writer whose work is popping up all over the place, including two poems in the recent issue of The New Quarterly that also features a short story by our beloved dg. Kim is currently finishing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia where she studied poetry with Keith Maillard. I have the good fortune of knowing Kim personally by way of her being a dear friend of my son, Jacob. Kim is kind and gentle with a fierce intellect. Read her poems and you’ll see.
— Lynne Quarmby
.
Let us change bodies
Let us change bodies
as we might change seats.
Everyone move one to the left,
now you are someone else.
Your teeth are misaligned in a different way,
your vision is wrecked or perfected,
you box people and art with new prejudice.
Your mouth is still mindlessly full: a street pakora,
or clear noodles made of bean curd,
or goat meat shredded and tamped down, or raw liver,
or an electric toothbrush, a lover’s finger, a deep-fried scorpion
all and any of these things suddenly routine.
Now you’re someone else,
the sun is crushing your eyelids shut,
sending you fleeing from noon, thirsty
down to the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
Now you’re someone else,
and the air is tepid bathwater, the grey inoffensive,
leaving you docile and confused about the time of day.
Now you are watching a window
as a wasp trembles in
and ricochets off the kitchen chair like a drunk.
Now you are in a bed that bows as deeply
as a suspension bridge,
cradling a man’s head to your chest as he weeps
and you feel your resolve drain away.
Now you are climbing the outer cliffs of a mountain
on a spiritual pilgrimage,
the marker at the top an upstretched hand.
Now you are climbing a mountain
because the landscape forms the profile of a witch
and you were drunk and wanted to prove a local legend wrong.
Now someone is taking your picture,
and you’ve forgotten how your mouth works;
you mash your lips together with one canine exposed
thinking it’s a closed-mouth smile.
Now your grown child is begging you to eat,
but grief has severed the ties between your hand and the spoon.
Now you are paralyzed by your own importance.
Now you are counting fireflies, or stars,
or lit-up homes in a valley.
Pinpoints lives that blink on and then off
or blaze like meteors in the Pleiades,
eclipse the night.
.
Tree Exposed by Lightning
The tree lies on the crushed house
looking startled, a man who wakes up
in a heap of alley trashbags, kidneys gone.
His rounded back is the still image
of a Tesla ball, a violet tattoo of branches.
The fastest path to the ground passes shoulders
and coils to the spine.
Look at the pulp heroine with her clothes ripped open,
backgammon points of breast,
insides of a tree: under black cinder,
raw sienna, a jagged reveal.
Was there a sound? A whipcrack,
less certain than thunder,
mild vertigo of expecting an extra step.
Then the creak, a warning to the house:
sorry, old friend.
Why do you know where you were
when so-and-so was shot,
when so-and-so pushed the button
and the bombs fell,
when the faces went stern on the television?
Why do those get to be the moments?
When the tree came down,
we ran out into the eye.
We ran from our homes,
from the store and the gas station,
the diner and the bank.
We knew each other’s names.
.
No-Fault Divorce, Winter
Gave a stranger fifty-five cents to ride the last bus
rumbling slowly along the unplowed streets.
He saluted me through the window. I pressed on,
past cars abandoned sideways at the bottom of a hill.
Decorative hedges shorn, branched as coral made of ice.
Street signs pressed in crystal. The city looked wild,
snow stacked haphazardly in the middle of the road,
lost hats and gloves, futile tire tracks. Somewhere,
blankets contoured to bodies, a glimpse of flesh:
glancing light off smothered patio furniture,
indistinct shapes to be dug out or forgotten.
Twenty blocks from home, sky relit by reflection,
I passed under dammed gutters, stalactites glistening.
Home: newly empty bed and sulphurous gas heat,
creak of water pipes almost audible. Cyclical,
inevitable, still no one was prepared. In the wind,
a poignant sting. Such pleasure in our defeat.
Intense global competition is laying low an industry dear to the heart of any Canadian who ever grabbed a hockey stick and laced up a pair of skates, or scrambled off the road when a buddy yelled “car.”
Sher-Wood Hockey Inc., Canada’s storied hockey stick manufacturer, is leaving home ice for good at the end of this year, moving the last of its stick production to China to slash costs.
Thursday’s decision by Sher-Wood is the latest blow to what little is left of Canada’s once-thriving hockey stick manufacturing industry and it underlines how vulnerable manufacturers are to the global forces of low-cost competition.
via Canadian icon Sher-Wood sets sail for China – The Globe and Mail.
ou remember once, when words were your only company, how it felt like treachery when writers wrote about their kids. You swore you never would. It was an easy vow, since you figured your books would be your babies. Your boys would be in books. Now you have babies, you have boys—but no books. O crazy carnival ride life: turning you here, depositing you there. Splitting open your heart, tying off your tongue. Could anywhere be the same as anywhere else?
Strangling on Trees
There are so many big trees on this island. Alder, Arbutus, Fir, Gary Oak, Pine, Spruce, Hemlock, Cedar, Yew, Maple, Dogwood: the light above your desk dims with each tree you type. Because nearly everyone who lives on this island is an environmentalist of some sort, it is considered a crime (worthy of, at the very least, several angry but carefully-composed rants against you in the editorial pages of the local paper) if you cut down a tree. Neighbors hear the chain-saw and come running in their gumboots. Even at 3 a.m. they hear it. Especially at 3 a.m. they hear it. Seeing the panicked fury on their faces, you decide to pretend that they are owls, swooping down to alert you to their nests of downy-white owlets perched in the branches above. Kindly apologize, while shivering in the shade that rotted tree casts.
You could argue that the giant slab of nature known as sky—the clouds the sun the stars the moon—are being neglected here, choked out by greenery. You never would. Somehow all this forested wilderness is inherent to being Canadian. And because you hide your American origin carefully, you also hide your tree-induced claustrophobia.
The Arbutus tree is your favorite. Muscular and red as any horse’s leg, twisting against sky with little adornment. When you go hiking your son likes to carry a piece of fragile red Arbutus bark in the pinch of his hand, which makes you think of love letters you left behind, in some other place you lived. He can only carry it a few steps this way before ripping it.
Because nobody cuts any trees or bushes back, when you pull up to an intersection you have to drive out into the road—into crashable territory, with your boys in the backseat—to determine whether it’s safe to pull out. You cringe and fight urges to close your eyes as you step on the pedal. You fantasize about coasting forward in a convertible, wielding a 30-foot -long bayonet.
You love the sun. You always thought you would live in the desert, as a hermit. You would take long walks on parched land in search of bones and flint, until your silhouette resembled barbed-wire.
When the wind blows wildly, limbs that normally nest snugly against the power-lines—because, again, it would be wrong to cut them—fall lightly, and everyone loses power. Your first son remembers with delight the Christmas Eve you each wore all your coats at once and melted pots of snow on the wood-stove to make drinking water. Admit it was very quiet, so quiet you could hear the snowflakes clicking as they landed. Remember the fun your son had scooping snow, the wonder on his face when he mistook the flickering candle’s reflection on the black windowpane for a sleigh scooting across the sky.
Still, when you go to a birthday party for a two-year-old who has begged for a logging cake—and the artistic mother has complied with hacked Cadbury Flakes for tree carcasses, with jagged silver gum wrappers folded into chain-saws—you laugh with delight and eat two pieces.
Other Lives: Sponsored by Water
Oh how you love to look across the water. The distance opens your mind. It’s as if someone skipped your brain across the sun-lit surface and every near-thought expanded into many full and amazing thoughts. Your island has, in addition to the ocean surrounding it, five large lakes. You spend large amounts of time at the edge of these waters, holding a baby, staring out. Once upon a time you were a long-distance swimmer. Your body twitches, remembering. You swallow. It’s cruel that freezing water can be so clean and turquoise. It’s cruel to feel land-locked on an island with so many empty boats and kayaks speckling the shores, begging (in little dips) for passengers.
During a limited stretch of hot summer days, you can bring the boys into the water with you. The older one wears water-wings; the younger lets himself be glided, emperor-style, in an inflatable boat. But you can’t go far. Your boys are anchors. You imagine one day they’ll take running leaps off the dock and stroke so fast away from you that you’ll have to stop and rest, treading water. You’ll look back to shore and remember wistfully how for years you trapped first one and then the other there, breast-feeding them on a blanket.
People live on boats in the harbours. From visiting 25-foot luxury yachts to old wooden planks with torn roofs, rotting into the ocean. Kids from the outer islands take a boat called The Scholarship to and from your island’s high school. No school bus for them. No chipper morning kid bombarding you with chatter, nope, not over the boat engine. Don’t forget your life jacket, honey! Calls your mother at the door. And at the dinner table you lift your fork and say: Today on the way to school? We almost hit a seal.
Your favorite boat isn’t technically a boat. You have to hike through hoards of trees to look out at it. You bring binoculars, and peer at the deck for signs of life. You never see any signs of life, which enables you to invent all sorts of stories about who lives there. Usually who lives on it is an 8 year-old girl named Delany who is crazy about the color orange. She is quite civilized for an orphan, and brushes her teeth three times a day. She made her toothbrush herself, out of driftwood and dog hair. People–all the people from all the places she might live but won’t—gather and they call out from the shore: Dellannnyyy! Delllannnyyyy! Come on home now! But she just keeps moving her eyes or her hand over the page and doesn’t hear.
Drop Me Right Here
Hitch-hikers on this island get rides. And then you will read something in the paper like this: To the hitch-hiker I picked up last Tuesday morning at Cranberry, headed to Fulford: you left your green metallic travel mug in my car. Call 653-8003 and I can return it to you. Nice drivers. Nice passengers, too. One of your friends claims a hitch-hiker left her a whole bar of organic dark chocolate in the seat. On purpose? You ask. I pretend yes, she says. She sighs and adds that ever since then she always gives her car-seat a careful scrutiny when the hitch-hiker steps out. Those damn hitch-hikers, she says. They make me crave chocolate.
(She is a friend from the prairies. You find the people from the prairies speak their mind more, with less polite wording, than the people from British Columbia. Because they have fewer trees to hide behind? Someday you will visit the prairies and see if it is like Texas, where you also lived. You hope it will be like Texas, but with less litter and animal corpses.)
You pick up hitch-hikers, too, if you’re not running late and your baby isn’t wailing in the back-seat. If Bob Dylan is playing on the car radio. You don’t stop for the crazy looking ones, the ones who probably need rides most. Usually you pick up females, who as the stats show are less likely to rape a driver or her babies.
Sometimes a hitch-hiker will shine with excitement, making you wistful for the days you were alone, travelling light and without an itinerary. Sometimes a hitch-hiker will be fatigued and full of shadows. When you drop her off your two boys, in the rear-view mirror, are coated with rings of light like in smultzy paintings of Jesus and you can barely breathe, hit smack in the throat with your huge luck.
Mama? Your son sang to you from the backseat, when he was Two, Do hitch-hikers have Mamas?
Animals That Aren’t That One
You had seen this landscape before you ever came to Canada, all swirling greens and greys and blues, peeping shards of sky, in the paintings by Emily Carr. Even her sweeping curves prepared you, for Salt Spring Island is full of hills and steep winding roads and therefore when you and your sons try to re-create your island in the bathtub you can’t just splay a floating bath-book out flat and call it done. You have to pile it up quite high with tipped plastic boats and cups and wash rags curled into hills. If you run here you will get faster. After eight months pushing your baby up and down hills in a stroller you will dash through a marathon in pouring rain to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Boston, you will murmur dreamily—until you double-check the atlas and see it, across that deceivingly-flat page, all the way over there. Unfathomable.
The first time you land in Canada and step out of the Vancouver airport you can’t believe the air. So cool and clean: you keep huffing it until someone asks if you are alright. If this is air, then what was that you had thought was air, back in those other places you’d lived? It must have been exhaust.
Geese dapple the fields, private and public. They dapple until you are right upon them—then they loom. Then they explode into the sky. Chasing a field of geese is well worth the mess it collects on the bottom of your shoes. When your first son is up and running, you waver between teaching him to ignite a whole field of geese with his wobbly body, and teaching him not to bother them. You do a bit of both.
You love the geese, and the deer: the deer that lurk all day and night outside the gate of your fence, waiting for you to swing it open, as plotting and stubborn as any deer in Gary Larson cartoons. They eat the apple-starts off the apple trees. They stomp across your tomatoes to get to the lettuce. When your son and husband rush out in their gum boots to corral the deer out the gate—the boy shrieking with delight, the man booming out the game plan, you stand at the back door laughing. No matter what they are wearing, you see them streaking across the yard in overalls and Daniel Boone caps. The sight is worth accidentally leaving the gate open. It is worth a ruined garden.
You love the geese and the deer for what they are not. They are not the animals that used to prowl the place where you lived before this, way up north. They are not bears, they are not mountain lions. They are not the grizzly bear that you surprised, that surprised you: it rose up on its hind legs and swatted at you, roaring. The roar echoed across the air; it would echo in your head for weeks. The grizzly mock-charged, its claws narrowly missing your face. But there is nothing mock about a charge. You put up your hands in surrender. I’m sorry, you half-spoke, half-whined: pathetic last words. You found it was impossible not to look into the eyes of the thing that is going to kill you. They were very dark, and flashing like the eyes of someone trying not to cry. You got away. One of you got away, and the other one of you will always be a mauled corpse on the side of a dirt road.
You’re told that sometimes a bear will swim across the ocean and land on this island. On ferry boat rides you scan the water not for orcas or dolphins, but for a massive hump of slick brown fur, straining furiously toward you.
Lots of Space to Generalize
The people here. To generalize, which of course any sentence must that begins, The people here. The people here…are industrious. Here are some of the things these islanders offer for sale, on the 15 minute drive to your son’s preschool: pottery, flowers, jam, vegetables, organic beef, eggs, kindling, monster dolls, honey, portable sawmill (for hire), knit leggings, birdhouses, baked goods, venison. You also pass two wineries, three (of many) art galleries, and the workshop of a shipwright.
You can sell whatever you make, too, right outside your house. But first you have to be industrious enough to construct a little wooden farm-stand.
The people here. They…..are polite and mild. Formal. Respectful of space.
In many ways this is a relief. You are a secretive Scorpio spy who has always associated being seen with diminished seeing powers. Also you have some social anxiety, otherwise known as: can’t we just communicate on paper? You’ve been known to slide into a closet when someone knocks on the door. When the phone rings, you step away from it. If you are returning from a run and see a visiting car in the driveway, even if you know the car and like its owners, your first impulse (and the one you usually take) is to keep running. So it’s a relief being here, where people give you a lot of room to hide.
On the down side, you can feel brash and snoopy, when you are merely being direct. When you feel brash and snoopy, you feel like a parody of an American. You can feel lonely at a party. Specifically, you can feel lonely for bars in places like Bandera, Texas, where heated discussions (possibly escalating into full-out pistol duels), made for wonderful entertainment and quick friendships. You can feel lonely for insistent, engaging types. Like the New Orleans musician on the corner of Iberville and Decatur who would call out to you on your way to work: Those new shoes you sportin’, aren’t they? Why you lookin’ so glum now, with this sun lovin’ on you? You best hustle, girl, you late today! You smiled at him, even when he drove you crazy–and now, when for long stretches polite islanders fail to call you out (too loud) or ask about you (too nosy), you are glad you smiled. Some people just flipped him the bird.
A woman you meet briefly tells you about a friend from the United States who was visiting her in Vancouver. He had recently been in a car accident, and his face had a fresh and gruesome scar right down one side of it. She introduced her friend to all her friends. They went to several dinner parties. And no one! She roars. Not one person asked him about his face!
You giggle. How rude, you say.
But. The people here….are kind. And smart. Respectful. And wanting to do good. And industrious. You feel lucky to be raising kids among people with these qualities. The flamboyant brashness–that can be introduced easily enough in so many places. By the television set, for instance. This other, the quiet space people create here, is so much harder to come by.
.
Things you do to fit
When you hear the temperature, you double it in your head and add thirty. You say pro-ject, not pra-ject. You write labour and colour and metre. You sing out “Zed” with your son during the alphabet song, even though it makes the verse not rhyme.
You say, Now where did I put my toque? without cracking a smile.
When you go to an outdoor festival in the heat of summer you don’t smirk at the little roped-off area you have to be inside of, to drink a beer. And babies aren’t allowed: they might grow up to be drinkers. You won’t smirk nor will you cry, thinking of those years you prowled the French Quarter with one hand curled around a go-cup.
In September, you add little tin wheels on the biggest zucchini from your garden so your son can enter the zucchini races at Fall Fair. At Salt Spring Fall Fair, for 20 dollars, you can enter “Muffin Madness” by betting on a tiny plot of numbered field. If the amply-fed-with-special-grain cow they release into the field decides to let his fresh poop drop on your number, you win the entire profit of the ticket sales. It’s quite a lot. People clench the fence nervously, willing an uncomfortable and oblivious animal to step right or left, to step forward or back.
In October, you take off your shoes and stomp with tons of other barefoot people–all various levels of clean—in a vat of grapes. For a long while after this you refrain from buying local wine. You make your Mom’s oyster dressing for Canadian Thanksgiving and wait for her or your sisters to call, so you can brag how you got to eat yours a month early. But no one calls; none of your people in the U.S.A. ever remember the mid-October day that is Canadian Thanksgiving.
In November, you wear a poppy on your shirt and ignore the election disputes that waif in vaguely from your computer. But you always watch nervously as the results of the Giller Prize—Canada’s big literary award–are announced on T.V. You rasp Shhhh! to your boys as the finalists, each one in turn, approach the podium to read excerpts from their books. You laugh a lot because of the amazing public fanfare made over books, and because writers make such lousy rock stars. When the lights hit their made-up faces, they twitch like moles caught naked and quivering outside their holes. The book you like best is seldom picked. Each year you wish you’d planned a party around the prize, with big money bets and impromptu readings and literary drinking games at the commercial breaks. But it is on in the morning, when all the writers you don’t know are writing.
In December, you watch as a large crowd of people huddled around a television set refuse to return to their vehicles and board the ferry headed for Swartz Bay. It has come down to shoot-outs in the Olympic Canada versus U.S.A. hockey match. Who you cheering for, Mama? Your son asks, over the excited commentary on the car radio. Uh, you say, suddenly exhausted. Does being an expatriate, straddling two homelands, automatically sap a person of the energy to cheer for either of them? Or is it just you? A disgruntled ferry worker begins waving cars forward and back, directing the intricate maneuvering required to drive around the abandoned vehicles. It is the last ferry of the night, but the crowd in there—black figures postured tensely in the yellow windows—would rather be without their beds than leave the game. Canadians, you finally say. Your husband winces, so that you have to quickly tell him you don’t mean the Montreal Canadiens. I mean those Canadians, you say, pointing to the empty cars as he rolls the truck forward.
In winter, it rains for weeks on end. This is good. If it snows, the very few plows your island has will focus on the main roads and neglect the hilly side streets. It rains, or it snows—it rains and it snows, the snow turns to rain again. The rain freezes. One night over whiskey, while your husband talks dreamily about his time in Belize, you try to remember your own hot seaside places. They are faded poloraids, buried under leaves and limbs. You tilt your face up at the snow-buried skylight, straining to recall. How can your body forget that kind of heat? A heat so stark it instantaneously dried the ocean droplets on your skin to lines of lace.
In winter, you take a hot bath with your boys.
But before that—twice, in fact—you decide it will be fine to give birth without drugs—since there is no anesthesiologist or surgeon on your island. The first baby is born on a table at the local hospital with the crazy mid-wife telling you not to push and the Victoria helicopter team on hold on the telephone. The second one is born with the calm and wise midwife, the one you wanted the first time. The baby arrives on a Friday afternoon on the floor of your bedroom, right where your husband tends to pile his dirty clothes. Because you spend most of your labour in the bathtub, you thereafter find taking a bath with his real live body in your arms, in the same tub, an extraordinary and humbling thing. This, you think, is why people stop moving. This is why they find a home and stay in it.
In winter, you grab a wash-cloth and get your whole face wet, so your older son doesn’t ask you why you’re crying.
Micheline Maylor comes from Windsor, Ontario, but lives in Calgary where she writes poetry, teaches writing at Mount Royal University and edits FreeFall Magazine. Some of these names may be familiar to you. Apparently, Micheline is quite good at getting dg to do things. He is judging a fiction contest for FreeFall and Micheline’s student Gabrielle Volke recently interviewed dg for an essay she is writing and the resulting dialogue appeared on Numéro Cinq and will appear in FreeFall. Micheline Maylor is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems was published in 2007. (Raymond Knister was an early 20th century Ontario poet, story writer and novelist, something of a cult figure in Canadian literary circles for his early promise and the tragic way he died. His daughter used to live in Waterford, dg’s hometown, and he chatted with her there in the drugstore, oh, maybe three or four years ago now.) It’s a pleasure to be able to introduce you to Micheline and print one of her new poems, a kind of memento mori, a stern vision of death, in Numéro Cinq.
dg
Bird at the University
By Micheline Maylor
Four months, it takes, for the sinew
to release bones from skeleton.
A whole semester.
From August, I walk back and forth past the bird
one hundred and twenty-two times.
I think of me and you, us,
while this elegant architecture called bird
disintegrates.
He’s belly-up, beak to the north,
wings splayed to the poles.
In two days, his eyes are sockets,
in four days, his under-feathers scatter to the east.
The gentle wind detonates
a downy bomb on still, green grass
only a few stray flight-feathers cling to the skeleton
in the mud beside the late pansies.
November snow covers everything.
Stray footprints press him tighter to the earth.
Much exists in my lexicon that was not there yesterday,
last week, last month, last year.
In this new normal, grief accumulates
with that first rime
with that first staying snow.
Yet, like the bird,
I learn to relax,
wings open,
to all these elements.
Herewith a startling and idiosyncratically romantic Steven Heighton short story “A Right Like Yours.” Many of you know Steven from previous appearances on the pages of Numéro Cinq, including his lovely poem “Herself, Revised” (very popular here), his novel excerpt from Every Lost Country, his book of essays The Admen Move on Lhasa, which Rich Farrell wrote about here, and his handful of Horace odes in translation, which you really ought to take a second look at for their grace and intricacy. Of these odes, David Helwig wrote to me in an email: “They seem to me technically brilliant. And therefore moving.” (Remind me to ask him if I can quote him.)
dg
A RIGHT LIKE YOURS
By Steven Heighton
He is short but he has shoulders and I think he wears the flattest shoes going, cheap sneakers of some kind, and that is attractive, that he doesn’t try to elevate himself in any way. His look is shy though, maybe cold, with green eyes that don’t meet your eyes but look at your mouth or chin in the same way as, when you’re in the ring, the other girl will stare a little below your eyes. So maybe he does it to practice. Always be in the ring, Webb Renton tells us.
I choose to think he is just somewhat shy.
It started because I was training for my fifth fight and my sparring partner had hurt that ligament in the knee that’s called, I think, cruciate but we just say crucial because that’s what it is. The other girls at the club are either on the little or the huge size and Trav is about the same weight as me, though he is shorter, and toward the end of a workout Webb yelled at him to get in there and give me a couple rounds. Trav’s face then—like someone told him to throw himself on a grenade. People started gathering ringside. Like I said, it was the end of the night, and I would have been interested too. I don’t think the coach had ever put a girl and guy in to spar that way.
For your edification and delight (while I do packets), here is a lovely new poem by David Helwig (um, who apparently has a new dog). I have introduced David before on Numéro Cinq so I won’t go on about our long friendship, his incredibly prolific career, his honours and acclaim. He has already published a translation of Chekhov’s story “About Love” and “La Rentrée,” a poem, on these pages.
dg
Stars
By David Helwig
The puppy stares through the log corral at the tall
companionable horses ambling to the fence;
the hair of her ruff bristles, fear of these giants
stirring her, though the abrupt newness holds her gaze.
Her brain all imbrued with the complex perspectives
of perfumery and stench, she studies these odd
grand beings who interrupt our evening walk
while the air cools and the blazing October sun
sets beyond the toy farm on the empty road
of the toy village, time falling away from us
over the old graveyard as the black dog watches
with careful eyes these creature of the distances,
attendant to night’s stubborn bestial wisdom,
the galactic white blaze on her chest retracing
a sign out of some far genetic wilderness;
she is hearing wild dogs in the whine of the wind.
We read the graves, small histories inscribed on stone.
What more is to be said about them, the lost ones,
who are recalled tonight while all-stars-that-are come
in white fire to the observers? Morning will bring
starfish, oysters on the beach, the glitter of light,
in the house of love, new confusions of friendship.
The horses now stand sleeping under this tall sky,
the dog dreaming fear beneath the bright evening star.
It’s a huge honour and pleasure to introduce to Numéro Cinq my old friend Leon Rooke who, all my writing life, has been an inspiration and a forerunner. This amazing story–“Son of Light”–appeared in Leon’s 2009 collection The Last Shotfor which I wrote a review that ran in the Toronto Globe and Mail. There is possibly no better way of prefacing this story than to give you the review, the whole thing.
Leon Rooke is a Canadian from North Carolina with a list of books as long as your arm. He’s a national treasure, a huge and kindly promoter of younger writers, a Shakespearean reader of his own work–have I mentioned prolific? He writes out of a wagon load of traditions which include the American post-modernism of Barthelme, Coover, Gass and Brautigan and the school of southern bombast (William Faulker, Barry Hannah and Flannery O’Connor–and by “bombast” I don’t mean a negative; I mean the high-flown stentorian style of the great southern preachers, rhythmic, hammering, mellifluous and grand).
Rooke eschews the dreary wet wool blanket of conventional realism, salting his stories with magic, myth, vituperation and improbability. Often, out of the most dark and moribund situations, he wrestles a startling and uncanny beauty, an affirmation of life, a stunning reversal that does not bespeak any faith or philosophy but a joy in the exuberant play of language. Like his contemporary Alice Munro, he writes outside the box, he writes to push idea of story to the limits and beyond. You sometimes read a Rooke story just for the exhilaration of seeing whether or not he can carry off the high-wire experiment he has launched.
In his new book The Last Shot, you will find stories in the southern style (in the Appalachian demotic of his novel A Good Baby), also parables, myths, burlesques, tirades and tender, wistful love stories. The famously reclusive J. D. Salinger appears in one story, haunting the garbage dump where his refuse ends up to make sure no one steals it. In another story, a magical (or literary) plague of moths invades a Mexican village and delivers a kind of aesthetic grace; it ends “…I felt for the first time what a glory it was to be alive in such a dazzling, incomparably fantastic world.” In “Magi Dogs” a painter paints a dog into a picture of a house and the dog comes alive. In “Lamplight Bridegroom 360″ a mysterious angel robs a bank, mystifies a crowd of witnesses, and delivers the money to a woman dying in a hospital so she can pay for treatment. Somehow the bank staff doesn’t even know it’s been robbed. In “How To Write A Successful Short Story”, Rooke hilariously sends up creative writing how-to books and conventional ideas of story (all those the ideas and theories he actually avoids) and incidentally tells a story.
Lately, Rooke seems to be interested in the technique of intercalated stories: I don’t recall seeing him do this before in quite the same way. Stories interrupt and delay other stories. The darkly comic novella “Gator Wrestling” is a novella mostly because of the this structure–the heroine Prissy Thibidault just wants to get across town and see the gator Rufus Seed Junior has caught but Rooke interrupts her journey and her story to tell the stories of just about everyone in town before he allows her to get to Junior’s house and see a mob prodding the somnolent gator with paddles till it ups and rips off Acy Ducey’s arm. Then, in Rooke’s version of Aristotelean peripeteia, magic unfolds: Rufus Seed Junior and his entire family, who have always wanted to go to Africa, turn “a lovely light chocolate”. We refrain here from drawing allegorical conclusions–Rooke is not writing a politically correct racial parable; mostly he seems to be having fun playing with stereotypes and attitudes.
I deeply admire the story “The Yellow House” (I included it in Best Canadian Stories when I was the editor) which sets up camp in a dreamy, fairy tale universe (part-allegory, part Italo Calvino of, say, Cosmicomics): there are two houses across the road from each other; in one, every one is sickly, melancholy, hopeless and dying, with an expansive cemetery attached and one “untidy” peach tree (sort of an inverted Garden of Eden); in the other, everything is bright, cheerful, loving and yellow. One day, for no reason except love, a boy from the yellow house walks down through the cemetery to pick the peaches, then he approaches the sickly house and proposes to the last remaining sister Precilla and kisses her fingers.
Suddenly, in a burst of Rookean afflatus, things get better, the sick house is flooded with yellow light, health blooms, sex is about to happen. “Out at sea, storm clouds were forming, tumbling and turning. A tumult of wind swept low over the water. Over the roof of the yellow house could be seen schools of silver fish in flight inches above the water. School upon school of these silver fish, all flying.”
It makes no sense to ask precisely what this means–something about the mystery of love and the delight of story-telling: in stories, grace can strike like a bolt of lightning and fish can fly over houses.
But maybe the best thing in this book is “Son of Light”, a gorgeously written pseudo myth about creation and death (whose name, in the story, is Dark). “I am death, Dark thinks. I could change you utterly.” The passages in which Dark haunts a mysterious desert oasis, sleeping unseen amongst the nomads for company, are an extraordinary blend of the Biblical, inarticulate dread and amazing intimacy. Only Rooke could write death (Dark) as a lonely young man stuck in a desert, curious and affectionate towards humans who are only partly aware of his presence, awestruck, mistrustful, yet somehow able to live with him.
There is something here, some magic Leon Rooke does with a twist of his hand, a complex image of the relationship between life and death, strangely humanized and desperate, comic, sweet, uncanny and so achingly beautiful you wish it were real.
dg
/
BABY DARK
His presence on earth was not a known thing: Dark, the baby. But out here on the long plain, the flat horizon around him like one thinly-sliced peel of orange, he lived well enough. Well enough, that is, to keep living. Dark could sniff where there was water. He could sneeze, and there was water. Where water was he dropped anchor. Anchor and seed, seed from a full pocket. Animals came, first one, then many. Birds dropped down. Grasses grew. Strange fruits. And, from to time, in the beginning to his distress, people.
All these desert oases–not that many–were his. His work, we should say. Proprietorship as such did not interest him; the occasional nomads appeared; they appeared first on the long straight, trudging single file, cresting one solitary dune after another. Onwards to the oasis. Where the first dropped down, over time dropped down the many: their parched black bodies falling in a heap. Skin hard as leather. What did they do with themselves before this oasis existed? Well they would not have come this way would they? An oasis exists, one heads for it. How otherwise may this long plain be traversed? Let us not be silly.
They crouched in Dark’s water, studying the depths as though for monsters. What is that? A water lily. What does it do? It flowers. And then you eat it? They sat so for hours. They sat on rocks, in his palm trees, on the groomed sand he each morning raked with his fingers. They watched each other and the horizon. If a storm was to blow in, if a cold front threatened, they shouted the announcement, arms flailing. In what seemed initially to Dark’s mind to be gibberish. Some time passed before his ears–unaccustomed to any sound except wind, storms, heat so charged it had its own many tongues–consented to think twice about the jumble issuing from their mouths. They spoke a kind of bejangled song, often dirge-like–until one learned to make in one’s own ears specific tonal adjustments. Then–amazing–it was music.
Against the night’s cold they wore skins, frayed furry jackets, lamb it was. Or kangaroo, wallaby–the hides of tree monkeys to the south. Kangaroo were plentiful out here, together with foxes, wild dogs, sand rats, but where had they acquired lamb? Otherwise they went about largely naked. A wrapping of skin which flapped over the groin, occasionally over the buttocks. Over the head. Looping down the neck’s backside. Bones looping the ankle, the neck. White-ringed eyes to lessen the sun’s glare. Their bodies for the most part were tall and leanish, some might say emaciated. One was aware of bones–a frailty?–in a way that one normally isn’t. Tall? Well, he rid himself of that view soon enough: once he had placed himself beside them.
Who’s there? they would say. In that high-pitched squall their voices clung to when frightened or angry. Or were they merely inquiring, as a fox might? They looked tall only because such meagre flesh adhered to their bones.
Dark rushed to no judgement on this. He was scarcely more than skeleton himself.
Large flat feet with over-large toes, toes all but horned: eyes that were ever in drift towards the horizon. They marvelled at certain cloud formations: caravans of bodies not that much different from themselves. Their children, Dark noticed, even-those new-born, had coarsened skin. A child fresh from the womb was immediately pounced upon. The soles of the feat were beaten, the pinkish hands dipped in briny liquid. Brow and scalp roughened.
Dark held these infants sometimes in his arms, if their mothers were otherwise occupied. How strange! He had never before beheld an object so incredible buoyant. He probed inside these babies’ mouths. Into every orifice. Surely these bundles were not of this earth. It was like holding…nothing. Until it moved. Until it squiggled. Until it wrestled itself over, clutching for something. Well he knew what it clutched after. He had witnessed the deed often. The creatures attempted nursing at whatever object picked them up. Always hungry: how interesting. Propped against rock or tree, they would attempt to nurse that. It was funny. Dark liked it. True, a pup in the wild would do the same. Still, the instinct engaged him.
He could watch these newly-born–mesmerized–these elongated black lumps–for hours.
They seemed never to cry. He remembered with chagrin his own crybaby years. His own fondness for the teat. Crossing impossible hills–wind, rain–an endless freeze. The Death family, eternal voyagers. Nomads themselves. Endless freeze, yet a warmth that also seemed to go on forever. Take it, sugar. Take the sugar. It was not that long ago. Ages, but what were years to his kind’s reckoning?
A single season that time of his youth was: so it seemed to Dark now.
These bonesome nomads had a hardiness he lacked. A backbone he never had acquired. Yet they followed the sun–they tramped onwards–much as his own parents must have done.
Here they came. First one dark shape on a far dune. Hanging there. Gesticulating. Arms flaying like a beetle upended. Quaint, Dark thought. What transpires there? Then another cresting a more distant rise. The same flaying arms. Hither, come hither. My nose smells water. Onward, one dune after another, those solitary marchers–until, unbelievable, here were the many. All falling in a heap where the first had tumbled down.
Finished, you would think. By thirst, famine, disease–by whatever. Then the one eventually crawling on hands and knees from the heap, scuttling on all fours until some benign impulse arrested his progress. Slowly rising. Other heads lifting. Then a full crawl of black bodies. Finally, all in assembly, upright, gibbering and jabbering.
Often the nomads would unfold their cloth, their poles, tent themselves from the throbbing heat. Unfold their goods. Amazing, the multitude of goods. How were these objects transported, when they travelled so denuded?
A mystery.
Well was he not himself a mystery?
More and more the mystery. Over years–how many?–it came to Dark that he was interested. These nomads, they beguiled him. How could such bones–blackened as cooked rabbit, bony as plucked bird…how could they prevail? How was it they had come to imagine they could?
Sometimes they remained a night, remained several nights. Never more than a week, two weeks. A month–six?–at the most. Where were they going? What strange purpose drove them forward. To what purpose, what end? What was out there? Or there was this: often he would see them out on the dunes, first the one, then the next. He would drop more seeds, find more water. Prepare for their arrival. But where had they got to? He would himself advance over the sand to meet them–not easy!–and espy them miles and miles in the distance. Crossing the long straight, cresting a dune–advancing his way, yes!–but at a certain point, at one specific dune on the long plain, each arriving party veered. Turned away. Why? There they went, heading off elsewhere. He knew these dunes, knew better than any. A thousand times he had traversed them. Nothing was out there. No oases beyond his own. A thousand miles of desert, desert almost without end. Where were they going? Month upon month, and where were you? In a place no different from that place in which you had found yourselves the day before. Nothing to eat, no water to drink, nothing to see except the same stretch of sand, the same sky, the same nothingness. Desert waves, boiling sun. Kangaroo, foxes, dogs, yes–but fewer by the year. And no water. No vegetation other than the rare scrub bush. A tuft of…had this once been grass? Bones. A bird carcass now and then. Flinging itself along through bands of pulsing heat until, exhausted, the wings of a sudden fall still. Down comes bird.
Yet there these nomads went. The space was theirs, he supposed. Always had been. It must be occupied, surveyed anew, found and found again. Might an intruder such as himself otherwise establish domain? No, they cared not a whit about him. His like had always been present. His like explained the barrenness, the lifelessness, the hard grabbling for whatever stock came to hand: the odd growth of thistle here, the patch of grass there. A running hare, a bird, a fox, a snake, a frog, a turtle, a dog. Gristle uprooted from the sand. What more was required? What more had ever been theirs?
But they did come. A relief. Dark had come to desire, even prefer , their company. Often he remained with them in their tents–frayed cloth held aloft by thin sticks–intrigued: they spoke little, laughed rarely. At the antics of small children playing. There’s a beetle crawling over the sand. Let’s pour sand over this poor crawling beetle. When the beetle at last emerges–befuddled, lost, disoriented–they laugh. Let us heap more sand on the beetle, that we may laugh again. An entire day a child might do this–intent as scholars, the beetle’s fortitude against the abysmal heavens as relentless as their own.
Searching for lice in one another’s hair, grooming that hair, was likewise a serious business. Many bones, twigs, the odd stone, rolls of dead leaves, twists of rusting wire, were to be seen in these heads of hair. Each item carefully laid aside until the cleansing was done. Then washed with spittle and, as carefully, restored.
Any evidence of color was disavowed. Vermilion, any color with a reddish hue, most particularly. At his oasis, any leaf so saturated was discussed endlessly. Then buried. Buried deep. A man or woman, never a child, might spend an entire day digging, digging. Remove this leaf that it may never again be seen. Let the hot sands deal with this. Should it possess an afterlife, let it not be ours.
So, too, a child whose nose dripped the color. Bury him in hot sand until the color ceases. Then whip him so that hereafter
he may not make us endure the ordeal.
The dead were unhappy. It was their blood coloring the leaf.
It amazed him: all those laws laid down. From where? Excuse me, but what is your source?
They smiled, discussed the issue, when a wild dog howled in the distance. Who goes there? By twilight, already they were asleep. Side by side, often in piles, limbs entwined, with no sorting arrangement he could decipher. You slept where your body fell.
They ate little. In fact, next to nothing. A fire, in the general scheme of things, was not required. Fire, on a whippingly cold night, offered its rewards, generally without respect to supper. What would they cook? Could air be cooked and eaten? Perhaps. In fact, very likely. In fact, what else could so winsomely convey the fragrance? Was this not how he had been feeding?
But these nomads had not the knack. They carried sharpened sticks, tools for hunting. Lures, traps. But out here? Certainly there were desert foxes, moles, kangaroo–but how often in this wasteland did one see them? Spiders, aphids, mites. By day, sun baked the land relentlessly. By night, whistling wind, a near freeze. You could be sure that if a thing moved it was not a thing alive. Not a thing that could be eaten.
Dark they saw and did not see: it was that kind of business. He would be drowsing, the heat invited such, would open his eyes, and one or more gaze would be upon him. An elder, sometimes a child, often women, poked with a stick that space which he filled. No matter. Sticks could not harm him; their thrusting was a nuisance, no more. They made no attempt to rid themselves of him entirely. His presence was an oldish thing: it was dangerous, the sticks, the gazes, but they could not refrain from expressing their discontent.
Perhaps they understood the water, the grasses, the fruits–this oasis–was his creation and they sojourned within it by his pleasure. It could be. Or it could be that this had not occurred to them. Perhaps they believed the oasis had cast itself onto the sands in the same manner that they had been. He was an entity apart from them. A being in whom blood did not course as it did within themselves, but a being nevertheless. May it keep its distance, may it not sojourn into our flesh, may it do its hunting elsewhere: that is all they asked.
Many of these people Dark now knew from memory. He knew their names. Since his own infancy, in a manner of speaking, they had been arriving; now many were old. So he felt himself to be: old, abandoned, all but useless. He did not regard these interlopers–that they certainly were–as his friends, not exactly. Yet he admitted to queer satisfaction: he liked them. Liked their newborn, their aged, their in-between. He was entranced that their personalities adhered to such meagre variance over the years. A new tribe arrives, how much it is like the previous one? Yet in this regard they could surprise him. They could indeed. Uncanny, their presences in regard to this. Such a multitude of paths they struck, yet how frequently the paths circled back. A youth, now grown old, how the mantle of youth still clung to him. Look at that old man sitting in the sand playing with his beetle. Amazing. Well was he exempt?
Notwithstanding this: many, mean and unkind, pure devils in childhood, were gentle and caring later on. What explanation here?
He remembers from his own youth a storm at sea: lightning bolts by the hundreds, each striking simultaneously: like a tree upended, lightning along every limb, igniting from every bough, the sky lit from horizon to horizon. Days on end, no relief. Thunder so fierce its origin seemed to be within you, of and from those scuttling about the heaving deck. Fires everywhere, bodies picked up and flung into the sea. Six times he had himself been struck by lightning, all within the space of seconds. Lightning skating on water, the sea boiling.
All hands lost. The ship shattered into a thousand pieces.
His work? How could that be, when he was himself floating? Fish of a silvery hue drifted around him in untold number: schools of death; among them, lumbering black sharks split apart far within the depths.
*
Dark has endured similar storms here. Lightning without cessation, wind and rain without end. Wind strips away your being, rain soaks inside, lodges in the heart. Parts of himself are out in the desert, being nibbled at by sand rats, insects: excuse me, what’s this? Edible? No.
During these storms he now huddles within himself, shivering, locked in his own tight embrace, still as snakes coiled on cold chimney hearths. Lower than snakes, elsewise why his exile here?
His mother soothes him, opens her blouse. Fits a swollen nipple to his lips.
Eat. Sleep. Think nothing. Mother is here.
He wants to go home. Where is home?
A while ago at his oasis an old woman, arriving sick, so misaligned in her features that her sickness might have been diagnosed as leprosy, had died during the tribe’s stay.
Their eyes devoured him. You! they said. Ugly one!
He was innocent. He was not even certain he would remember how. He had in fact, out of curiosity, the intrigue of elements now beyond him, held the old woman’s hands as she slipped away. She had looked into his eyes, at first fearful, then nodding. Yes. Yes, she said. You are innocent. I absolve thee. Such a relief that was to him; his eyes moistened, he would have called her back had he the means. He was not her nemesis. Her nemesis was within.
Clean her body with sand. Elevate the face to the southerly direction. Oil the soles of the feet. Fold a bone within each hand. Seven times encircle her body. Each time snip away a cutting of hair, a cutting of nail, a snippet of cloth. Wedge of skin cut from the thighs, should the dead be unmarried; from the belly, if she is.
In the desert, a dog slunk near him, no more than its own space away; it whined miserably, regarding him through scarred eyes. In the distance other dogs watched. The dog inched forward, lay its head in his lap. Foam leaked for the ears and mouth. With a jerk of the head, the dog died.
I’m innocent, he thought. Death arriving as light from the primeval void, light’s speed versus known and unknown obstruction.
I must quit this place, he thought .
The tribe ventured north. He trekked along for the company. They came to rocky shelter whose inhabitants greeted them as though with little comprehension. They ate. Music of a peculiarly Old World kind was played–a somewhat barren sound, reedy, as though it had long been confined to earth.
He loved the cold caves they slept in. A very beautiful young girl slept beside him an entire night: his eyes open, watching the dark. Listening to her heartbeat. She knew someone was beside her–initially she was on guard, without being precisely frightened. Once during the night, she raised up, lifted her thin arms, yawned, then collapsed back into sleep.
He must himself have slept a long time–years perhaps. He waked to a feeling of emptiness, cold and trembling, unable to think where he was. The word ‘tomb’ came to him. Then, ‘entombed.’ That brought a laugh, and he felt better.
He was hungry, starving in fact, but whenever was that not the case? Insects were crawling over him. They must have believed him dead; if, that is, insects held beliefs–which thought brought on another smile. It was at this point that he realized he was enjoying himself. He held aloft one of those insects: a hard dull shell the color of the stony world it inhabited: all those wheeling legs, the waggling head, the bulging eyes–yes?– and found himself entertaining a ludicrous, if wondrous thought. What if he could mate as insects might?
In the cave the nomads had been digging a well. The digging had been going on for thousands of years. Workers were lowered by rope into darkness. If you listened carefully you could just hear the resounding hammer and chisel. No more than two could work at a time, and the best workers had to be down longest. No one wanted to be thought of as a best worker and for this reason they were habitually complaining about how worthless they were when it came to hammer and chisel. Workers who remained too long were blind for days and days. They emerged, walking in circles, babbling. Tumbling over. Blindfolds were affixed to their eyes. They had to be led by hand to food and water. They seemed to know no one. They believed a black cloud hovered about their heads; they succumbed to panic and flayed at the blackness. They had to be restrained, locked up, put into a cage, or they might do harm to themselves. They spoke of coming across strange parties down there–parties whose outside was inside, who flaked into nothingness when touched, a nothingness that then took shape inside themselves. They screamed through the night. Occasionally they did not emerge from this madness, and were ever venturing out upon the sun-drenched dunes. Disappearing.
No one could accurately assess the depth of the great well. Each measurement had a radically different result. A thousand years digging. Why?
The hours of the day admire their every tick. Each second is a thrill.
The day’s heat was tight knobs of air. You would see out over the desert a massive army trudging your way. But it was heat walking. Heat walked under your shade and the shade burst into flames. Flames out on the dunes, where the very air had caught fire. The very sands did. One’s very eyelids did. Red ants strode the horizon. Fire plants bloomed in the sky: a red forest. Clouds aflame.
He caught a cold, caught worse, and for months curled up into a corner, whining softly, in embrace of himself. Bats hung by day around him, at dusk, first one, then a second, then all in harmony stirring their wings–gone.
A letter was found. Who knows how long it had been buried in the sand? The paper disintegrated in his hand. This hardly mattered. Deciphering ancient texts was old stuff to him. Where he was defeated was in capturing the tone.
Come home, the letter said.
THE HOSPITALLER
In the city, at Dark’s favored hotel, the hospitaller rushes from his office to greet him. He bows effusively, smiles with the excesses of one in rapture. The hospitaller invites him inside his tiny office. Offers coffee, tea, a biscuit. A glass of plonk, my esteemed friend, or is it too early? Something stronger? This man, like Dark himself, is not native to these parts. He is a newcomer, like the Sikhs, the Germans, the Chinese with their restaurants, the Asians with their taxies. A hospitaller, he knows the importance of a grand welcome. Kiss the lady’s hand, marvel at the arrival of the hatless gentlemen from the desert. Let the man know that his heart beats only for such arrivals: in your absence I have been as a man sick with fever, afloat in apathy, aswim in self-pity. Incomplete. Now, my friend, you are here, and the sun has returned to its proper orbit. Here, let me take your coat. Loosen your tie, rest your feet on this stool.
Travelling so takes it out of one, I’m an innkeeper, do I not know? It tires one, it bags the bones–but, ah, the exhilaration, those new worlds, each of which must be conquered.
All the same, alas, dear friend, we have no vacancy, none at all. How wearisome, I am abject, my apologies! If only I had known you were coming, if only–dare I offer this criticism–if only you had called in your reservation.
The usual, then?
Why, yes, of course the usual. What you must think of me! That I, a newcomer like yourself, in exile, so to speak, like yourself, would turn away a traveller of your distinction! The traveller must be rewarded, must he not? Where would our universe be without the traveller? Marco, Marco Polo, did he not set the pace? Is he not our model, are we not in his shadow? Even you, signor, a foremost globe-trotter. Another glass, then, for our unparalleled Marco–cheers, skol, salud, salute, bottoms up! If we did not have business to summon us, I would say let’s empty the decanter.
The hospitaller’s sofa, then, as usual?
Of course, my sofa. The honor is mine. In there, the little toilette where you may shower and shave, the small shelf where you may stow your belongings. The same peg to hold your coat–oh my, oh my, is it ever dusty. Oh, you travellers, the endurance, the struggle, wind, snow, and rain, but the road is ever there, is it not, it ever beckons. Marco Polo, what travails were sent his way. But ever onwards, onwards, is that not the theory. Onwards, for what awaits us around the next curve, dear me, those spices, can we help being chilled with wonder! But forgive me this prattling, I see you are exhausted. Such long days, such long nights, and nothing but bedbugs, bad water, dust in the nostrils. Tomorrow, by all means tomorrow you must tell me of your sojourn in the desert. The desert, it changes one’s perspective, no? But later, yes later. For now, stretch out on my long sofa, pure leather, black as miner’s black lung, beautiful, is it not? Here, let me slip off your shoes, I shall have them polished. You need tending, sire, no question, you are looking bony, ragged, lustreless, if I may use that word. Near death, if I may speak frankly. But a wee catnap and you shall be yourself again. I’ll lower the lights, if I may, let me spread over you this soft coverlet. There you are, yes, close your eyes. That scalp will need looking after, you know, it’s baked, your poor noggin is a sea of blisters. You really must wear a hat, you know. Our friend Marco without his hat, what would he have accomplished? Signor, why did you not follow his example?
Ah, my voice tires you, my apologies, my pleasure in seeing you yanks my tongue one way and another. So sleep, my friend, rest the weary bones. Then onwards, onwards, side by side with dear Marco, eh? I understand, a man of your calling may not tarry, may not dally. My heart will ache, I shall brim with sorrow at your absence. But you will return, will you not? Of course, you are the hospitaller’s glory, without you what purpose would I serve? Until the next time, then, signor! A private room shall we waiting, I promise you, I shall keep the reservation open. Yes, always open, what, in this day and age, that a being of your distinction should be compelled to inhabit a stable?
What? Excuse me, signor, did I hear you correctly? You wish to go home? I am distressed, signor, I will weep tears, but it is as you say: even our friend Marco must from time to time return home. For restoration, to shore up one’s vitality, to see the family, to net our grievances–one or the other. It will be our loss, signor. As you say, your heart has too long been riding the bumpy wagon. Are those tears in your eyes? No worry, we all have them. Shall I say it, signor? Your work here has not gone unnoticed. Your presence has been remarked upon, and not, alas, always agreeably. People talk, you know. Callous remarks are passed. But take no notice, signor: beings such as ourselves, are we ever applauded in our own backyards? And yet, signor: a single drop of moisture on the dry tongue, is that not sweetness of a kind to keep us steadfast, even fertile, in our labor? The beetle on the green leaf, is he too not in part the dreamer? The cloud passes overhead, does not the worthy traveller say Hello, as to a fellow sojourner? So, go home, yes, signor: by all means make the journey. Was this not the motivation for dear Marco’s incredible journey? That his mother should kiss him?
Be assured, signor: the hospitaller shall make all arrangements. Putt-putt, yes, a ship, this is your one available choice. Unless you have learned to walk upon water. No? Then sleep the sleep of an innocent child, old friend. Leave all picky details to me, your hospitaller.
*
Dark, in his sleep, already walks the ship’s deck–the sea easy, a bright moon hanging. To see the world through the eyes of his blind hospitaller, he thinks: how strange that must be. I steer myself by the sound of another’s breathing, the hospitaller had said to him at their first meeting. On a city street this was, in the long, long ago–Dark lost, after an endless time drifting–the hospitaller’s hand a sudden gentle touch at his elbow. By my lights, this is among the heart’s major duties. But you do not breathe, signor, so it was with difficulty that a blind hospitaller could find you. And now that I have, as I am sightless, it must be you who guides me across this noisy street. Take my arm, signor.
Your arm? What was I previously touching, hospitaller?
My heart, signor. Mind the curb now.
*
Let us stroll along together for a while, signor. Like our friend, Marco, arm-in-arm with a spice merchant, negotiating terms, let’s say.
How did you come to be blind, hospitaller?
Who knows, signor? Every hospitaller is, that is how matters stand. Long ago,
a nail driven
through a board
split that board
A blind man
passing by
was first to notice
so it came to pass that every hospitaller, as a condition for employment, must be blind. Marco Polo, recall, told his crew his ship’s flag must flutter against wind. Otherwise the world’s true spice capitals would elude them.
I do breathe, hospitaller. Your exhalations are my inhalations. As your breath crests a wave, mine is the stilled water in wait between.
No, signor. This not breath.
SHIP AHOY
What a surprising cargo: in the ship’s hold are bags and bags of pomegranates.
Mice and their ferocious kin nose among the bags, nip the ripening fruit. For nourishment, they prefer the burlap. Dark secures a space for himself among the lumpy bags, here his head, there his feet. The vermin sniff his calloused soles, probe the thick curvature of his nails. They lift their gleaming, scornful eyes: why are you here? What business do you have with us? We want cheese, peanut butter, bacon, New Zealand beef. We want to lick grease, sing songs, dance. Pay attention. Open your eyes. Talk to us. Explain yourself.
Or it may be that they mistake him for one of their own. It is not as though they are given to civility even with each other. Only when cornered by a seaman with a broom is their affinity with common humanity displayed.
Water sloshes along the boards, wetting him. Back and forth, slosh, slosh.
No matter.
Scum, algae, wasp dens, dirtdauber lairs, seaweed, moss, barnacled growths–up there, light spilling between boards, a tropical fern– occupy the walls. A trapped bird flutters endlessly about–in misery, in consternation, scummy-eyed, the head bloody, feathers sparse.
No matter.
Dark rises sorrowfully: his bones ache, movement is a torture. The bird obligingly flies into his cupped hand. He strokes the bird until its tremors cease. Such a quick, urgent heart. It could be the hospitaller is right: he has no heart to beat such as this. A rat glares at him. No favoritism, the rat says.
Daylight. Blinding daylight, he must rub his eyes.
The bird crouches in his open hand. The small heart palpitates, wind ruffles its mite-ridden feathers. I don’t know why any of this has happened to me. Were I a thinking bird I would take up my situation with a higher authority.
Even up here away from the hole, in cutting wind, one can smell the lush aroma of pomegranates.
The bird lists away; it steers a faltering course before wind halts its progress altogether. It hangs motionless there, fighting the wind. Why will the creature not turn, let the current sweep it away? Matters are not as they should be. Must every breath be an ordeal? The bird’s wings close, wind releases its grip, the bird plummets. This it recognizes, this it knows. It has been here before: this is mere acrobatics, a question of instinct, something in the bones. Time to soar. But all at once the bird is swooping past him. It flits back into the familiar black hole.
Dark’s feet feel entangled as though by ropes.
Now rain. Hard rain. So much rain.
He remembers seeing once, in the desert, in rippling heat thick as lava pouring along a shelf, a fleet of tall ships skimming the sand. Then the ships one by one burst into flames.
One time, a scrap of paper flew up into his face. Worn by wind and time, tissue-thin, bleached by sun. Indecipherable.
The nomads encamped at his oasis were absorbed with his table, the table where sometimes sat to think deep thoughts. They sat on his table, eating their food. Each had to crawl beneath it to study the table’s underside. They turned over the table and laughed at the four legs thrusting into air. Like woman, someone said. They shook the legs, laughing. They counted the legs. Like two womans, someone said. They laughed harder. An elder dropped down, mounting the table. Not like two womans, he said. No one laughed. They looked with unforgiving silence at the table. After a few days they scorned it and him. The table to them became invisible.
In the ship’s forward hatch a seaman obsessed with walls is placing love inside a very small box. Carefully, as though he holds a precious vase. Now he is wrapping the box in material so much the color of his own flesh he seems to be without hands. He will pitch his little box over the side when no one is looking. That is how certain kinds of love are dispersed into the world, he tells Dark: an open sea, no one looking.
Out on the sea the waves lash out. Foam spews from every mouth. The waves curse the wind, which curses them. Each wave curses the day it was born. The wind loves what it is doing.
Just look, wind says, at those hideous waves. The waves will have nothing to do with each other until they strike shore, where they will attempt to chew every predecessor into tiny bits.
Look at that stupid box. Where does it think it is going?
Look, there’s Dark looking at us. He looks as beaten about as we are: he can hardly hold up his head.
He dreams. It amazes him, these other worlds that slumber inside him. The rabid dog crawling up to settle its head on his lap. Uninvited. Stroke me, the dog said.
In a forward cabin, the skipper too is resting his head, closing his eyes. Thinking, If only I knew where I was going. If only.
The Captain is plunged into solitude. That is why he is drinking. Something like this always hits him midway a journey. He is lulled into grief precisely at that point in a journey when a thousand ports are scant hours apart in terms of the time necessary to reach any one of them. The Captain is certain his cargo–pomegranates, how strange!–would be welcomed at any port visited. Shore leave for his crew would take much the same form, whatever the port: the same bars, the same black eyes, the same whoring.
The Captain dreams himself a sweetheart in every port. How mystical, how practical, is he different from any other seagoing individual? Well, hardly.
In the very port just departed the mistress he loves, loves deeply, will already be forgetting him. Another year until Who’s-its return, she will be thinking as she unrolls the bolt of fine silk he has dropped on her bed. Ahead, another he is himself just now beginning to remember.
He loves all of these women, loves them deeply–most of all those that exist only in his head. Over there a port and over there another port and over there a hundred other ports. Such and so many nautical miles to one, to another: scarcely any difference.
Docking is always for him the hard part. He has never got the hang of docking a ship of this size. A junior officer must take the helm. It is good training for them. They like the job. No one suspects.
Except for that curious passenger down in the hole, asleep among the pomegranates: the Captain is fairly certain this passenger knows the score. Their eyes have met.
But the passenger is listless, he exerts no authority. His power to influence matters will not be exercised on this trip. Like any other passenger, Dark is only leaving one place for arrival at another. He desires only a smooth crossing. No storms at sea, no failures in the engine room. Steady as she goes: he wants that.
The Captain pours more whisky into his glass. Shadows flit here and there. The ship rocks, relaxes back, rocks: boards buckle and groan: it knows how it must behave, and the sea too is, for the moment, merciful.
The ship cuts through the waves. It has no doubts. It is not a ship that has known heartbreak. Pomegranates, the ship is thinking. How beautiful.
A seaman sings in the crew’s shower room.
Sometimes I feel, sings the seaman. He sings with a throaty woman’s voice. All hands hold still when the seaman sings in the woman’s voice. They sit or stand alone, heads hanging, bereft and bedraggled, like rags about to be thrown overboard. Only when the seaman’s singing voice dies will they again be swashbuckling men of the sea. An interesting story is told about this seaman whose singing voice is like a woman’s. In Naples, in Odessa, in whatever rough dock bar, in whatever port city he has shore leave, he swaggers into these bars in his thick seaman’s coat, his black seaman’s cap and steel-toed seaman’s boots: he shouts out, And how are all you fine homosexuals this lovely evening?
Sometimes I feel, sings the singer, like a motherless child. But the seaman’s song must wait, since there happens at this time in Dark’s voyage the incident of the seaman who loved walls.
INCIDENT OF THE SEA MAN WHO LOVED WALLS
“What does the wall say? If it is raining, or cold, or a no-nonsense wind blows, the wall says, Would someone please close that window. The wall speaks politely for the most part. If someone arrives with mop and broom it says nothing. It puts on a gloomy expression, not wanting you to note its pleasure. At night the wall stands there thinking deep thoughts. It is prey to nostalgia. Sometimes–not that often, mind you–lust comes over it like a smile over the madonna. The walls have eyes and ears is a line you might have heard. But this is not strictly true. A wall has a nose, though, and smells you as you pass. I’ve heard them sneezing from time to time. There was a wall I once knew which could run faster than you or me or anyone. Certainly faster than other walls. Walls marry each other. They mate for life, just as does the occasional seaman, animal, or bird. If I ever was to fall in love with a wall I would want to marry it. It goes without saying that walls come and go. They go up, they come down: that’s the natural law of walls. A wall will fall on you, if you’re not careful. They would like to, that goes without saying. A wall hardly knows its own strength. Walls hate trees, whereas they have a warm respect for dogs, for cats–cats most particularly. You can hear their giggles, their pride, as a cat walks a wall. Walls are thirsty. They have a drinking problem. A wall is distrustful of other walls perceived in the distance. What’s that wall up to? You will hear this whispered to you as you pass by. Outside walls and inside walls have nothing in common, a fact which may strike you as obvious, but I mention it to you because the matter goes deeper than that. What does a wall say? If it is raining, or cold, or a no-nonsense wind blows, the wall says, Would someone please close that window. It speaks politely for the most part. Walls abominate each other. Wars have been declared. If at the end of these wars no wall is left standing, neither outside wall nor inside wall–of course they are both outside walls now–neither will say it is sorry. They have no regret about being seen as heaps of rubble. Regret is not a word in their vocabulary, which is small. Stop. Go. Listen. Quit that. Give me ice cream. Close the window please. Such as that. They are dense to the point of idiocy, or so claim a number of experts in the subject. They have little ambition. Education, travel, the arts–they could care less. But they’ll comfort you on a cold night. They’ll stay beside you when no one else will. They lead long lives. They rarely fall ill, which is why wall physicians are in such short supply. Death’s walls, however: no personality.”
*
A long way from home, sings the seaman with the woman’s voice. But the seaman now is stepping from his shower, he is drying himself with a thin blue towel: his ears, between his toes, his scrotum. Not in the slightest does he resemble a woman: burly, big-thighed, compact as a discus-thrower. He is humming, he softly hums, but no one has even the smallest interest in his womanly hums. Like I am almost gone, is his hum. A long way from home. Who cares? Shut up. Because there is beginning now the incident of the seaman trickster.
INCIDENT OF THE SEAMAN TRICKSTER
A seaman in the crew’s sleeping quarters does cap tricks. Find the cap, I pay you ten dollars. The cap cannot be found, you pay me one single. How can a party lose? There the cap is on the man’s head. Dollars flutter in every crew member’s hand. The trickster seaman’s arms whirl, he pirouettes along the floor. The arms fall slack. The cap is gone. The cap is nowhere to be seen. His money is collected.
Again, find the cap. Twenty to one, how can you lose? There he stands, under his cap, grinning. Okay, thirty to one, which of you is ripe for the plucking? Bills flutter, every crew member participating. Okay, but this time none of that spinning, don’t spin. Fine, no spinning. The hat is on his head, there it is. Every eye watching. The seaman is encircled by the crew, how can they lose? The man winks, his mouth opens, his tongue darts out. His ears wiggle. The cap remains on his head. He jiggles buttocks, walks a slow circle. Stoops. Stands. The cap has gone. Cries go up. You mean fucker! You cheater!
Find the cap, says the man. Or pay up.
But the crew must search his body. They must remove his every stitch of clothing. He stands naked before them, grinning. No hat. They search the floor, the walls. His cap is nowhere to be found.
“Fifty to one,” he says. “Make it easy on yourselves.” There the cap is on his head.
At midnight he is still going. Crew members have pledged to him their coming year’s wages. Fifty thousand to one, the odds now are. We are desperate. The rules have changed. The capman remains naked. He is bound by ropes hand and foot. He sits on a paint can in a tub of water.
“The trouble,” someone says, “–is with that cap.”
Sure, that’s the problem. What do you mean?
“It’s a what-do-you-it, that cap. An optical illusion.”
“But we saw it. We touched it.”
The capman, a muscular Japanese, sits naked and immobile in his tub of water. Grinning. That cap restored to his head; waiting the next turn.
“Let him do it without the cap,” a voice suggests.
“What do you mean?”
“He starts off capless. No cap. We have the cap. But when he’s done the cap must be back on his head.
This idea is applauded.
“Can you do it?”
“Sure thing. Even bet. My fifty against your fifty.”
I.O.U’s flutter. Every cap of every crew member is removed from the room. The entire crew decides it too must strip. They must all be naked. The trickster’s cap is secretly hurled into the sea.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
The grinning trickster closes his eyes. His cheeks flare. The tongue darts. The men watch, utterly silent. Nothing is happening. Time passes. Such a long time passes. Every man is aware of the ship’s creaking, of this and that swell, the ship’s roll, the hum, vibrations from the engine room. Their destiny: a year without wages. What will their wives say? How will their children survive? To lose their wages on drink, the long binge, a spell in the brig, this a wife can understand. Such is her fate. But for a cap? Merciless Father, what have they done? But now all is not lost. Something can be recouped from their misfortune. Nothing is happening. The muscular Japanese is sweating. His eyes bulge. The little rat has out-foxed himself. They’ve got the little rat cornered.
“I want to raise the ante,” the little rat says.
“What? “
“Sign over your entire lifetime’s wages to me,” he says, “if I can make the cap return to my head.”
“And what do we get?”
“The satisfaction of learning how the trick is done. You can sign-on on other ships. Make your fortune.”
The crew talks this over. Debates rage. Finally it is decided. They will do it. They scribble these declarations upon scraps of paper.
The seaman’s body turns red, turn’s blue. Muscles ripple. Something is happening along the capman’s scalp. A vague whiteness is there. Something–can it be a cap?–is forming on his head.
Yes, there it is, that terrifying cap that a moment ago was hurled into the sea.
“Pay up,” he say. “Untie me.”
They stare at him. They stare at his awful cap.
Untie me, he repeats.
Not one among them will step forward. How they hate him. He owns their lives, but he is tied there, trussed up like a rat, with his bowl of I.O.U.’s. Finally someone does move. He strikes a match. He holds the flaring match over the assembled I.O.U.s.
The seaman trickster grins.
“Ah, but if you do that,” he says, “I shall own your souls.”
The man with the match hesitates. Seamen are superstitious folk, given to hallucination, rope dreams, dark nightmare. They know the sea is deep, the sky a mystery.
Even now, a mystery is unfolding. The trickster’s bonds are slackening. One by one ropes are falling like dead snakes about his feet. His grin has changed into a thing malevolent.
“The burning would not free you,” he tells them. “Nor would your knives inside my body.”
The seamen know that the man speaks the truth. They are helpless. Their fate is settled. Such is the destiny of every seaman sooner or later. This has nothing to do with disappearing caps. Their lives were never their own. Souls, less so.
*
Morning. One, after so many. Seamen rush about like bodies released from an asylum. Swash this, swash that, wrap rope to a hundred irons. Hurry up now. Gulls, other seabirds, laze in meditation over the ship, over the water, over one another. A bell rings. Whistles toot. Engines seek the deepest bass.
Secure the hatchets. Ready the anchor. Steady now.
Hail, Capitan! What shore?
Passing the Captain’s quarters, Dark sees a hooded figure just then emerging. A start of surprise. The figure is one of his own, though still a novice. Hardly more than a boy. But ardent in his enterprise, eager–Dark sees that. One of the old-fashioned kind. Dark can almost see the scythe in the boy’s hand. From the very air blowing through the cracks around the Captain’s door he can smell the boy’s work inside that room.
The boy at least has the grace to hide his head. He darts past. Then he is on the water, skimming that water to shore: black cloud above the foam.
Dark opens each porthole in the Captain’s cabin. He spreads pomegranate seeds over every space. Full fruits he stashes in the pockets of the Captain’s clothes. Bag after bagful he rolls under the Captain’s bunk. Linked fruit top the Captain’s charts. Dart likes the Captain. He interests him.
The Captain, pallid, stands by his junior officer at the helm. He watches the helmsman’s every move. At the dock a throng of people are waiting. The Captain is old: too many oceans. Soon enough he will know who has come to greet him.
HEART WING
The laboratories.
What guides Dark’s footsteps? How does Dark know? In no time at all he is entering the laboratory grounds. Security cameras, inside and out, might have caught a shadow whipping past. What was that? What? That shadow, there it is again. Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now.
I am death, Dark thinks. I could change you utterly.
Elevators frighten him; he takes the stairs. Locked doors prove no difficulty. Now he strides a long white corridor, shielding his eyes from the glare. So many lights, so much glare.
What is that pulsing? A sign, HEART WING. There to his front, a pair of swinging doors. Another sign, LONGEVITY UNIT. He sees endless aisles, tables placed end upon end, stretching a vast distance, the working surfaces covered with vials, tubes, bubbling liquids, microscopes. Cultures under glass. Workers in identical white tie-ons, most of them stationary, bent at these same tables, at these same microscopes. Scribbling onto color-coded tablets: white, yellow, blue.
His kind.
They work in silence, save for a vibrating hum emerging from the floor, the walls. The hum slows, ceases. He must exist as its cause. All turn now. Some rise, juggle spectacles, reduce a flame, slide one way and another this or that item. A hush settles. All are looking at him. They gawk, they murmur to each other. Smiles replace the quick frown. A few look away, down a far aisle. This or that one utters exclamation. Dark hears a voice–clear, precise, meant to be obeyed: Someone go tell Light her son is here. More whispering: a mutter. But now they are turning away: work calls them. So much work, so many years.
A woman’s heels are clattering. Not clattering, not heels exactly…a subdued sound, in fact, softest rubber. But in this hush, with these ears, in this pulsing, in the absence of the beating heart, every sound is magnified.
And here she is. Here someone is. Running his way. A screech. Another screech: his name. Daaaarrrkkk! The sound goes through him, hits the wall, bounces and echoes. His name. How long since he has heard it spoken? Such quivering in how she calls that name. Such heartbreak, such joy. Over there: a dart of whiteness along a far aisle, now that way, now this!
There she is, here she comes. Smiling, and such a smile. Dark feels his own face cracking open. He is leaving himself, he will fade as a shaft of darkness, a weightlessness of dust sifting beneath the floor.
“You’re here!” she cries. “You’re home!”
Arms enfold him.
Mother.
—Leon Rooke
(“Son of Light” appeared originally in The Toby Press edition of The Republic of Letters, compiled by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford)
A little over a decade ago, Hugh Kenner returned to Canada to deliver the Massey Lectures, a long-standing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio lecture series. House of Anansi subsequently published Kenner’s lectures under the title The Elsewhere Community, and Jeet Heer wrote the following review essay for Canadian Notes & Queries #55 (the same magazine, not the same issue, that just published my essay on Alice Munro). Though all this happened some time ago, it’s a pleasure to bring Jeet’s essay back on Numéro Cinq; new eyes make the piece new. And some of Kenner’s background may come as a surprise to a new generation of American readers.
Jeet Heer, whom I have come to know since he scrambled up the bear-sex idea in my novel Ellea couple of weeks ago, is a graceful man, a widely published and prolific literary journalist and a comic book scholar (he is finishing his doctorate at York University, incidentally, my alma mater, in Toronto).
dg
On Hugh Kenner’s The Elsewhere Community
By Jeet Heer
Canadians, who are now merely indifferent to literature, once lived in fear of it. Customs agents, armed with a high school education and a list of proscribed authors, stood guard not only against smut but also naturalism, aestheticism and modernism – anything strange and foreign. As late as 1946 books by Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce were deemed by official policy to be dangerous to the Dominion.
During this distant era, Hugh Kenner, a student at the University of Toronto, developed an interest in twentieth-century literature. His mentors of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, both of whom benefited from studying abroad, had brought back word of modernism of the Canadian hinterland. Kenner discovered that Joyce’s Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library. However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch for his morals, but unfortunately, was unable to find an obliging M.D. to attest to the fact that reading Joyce would not corrupt his physical stamina. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the 20th century.
Reading Ulysses, along with meeting Ezra Pound in 1948, was a turning point in Kenner’s life. Modernism, he quickly decided, was the central literature of his time. While D.H. Lawrence was also forbidden in Canada, Kenner believed that it was Joyce’s masterly of language, much more than his sexual frankness, that made him a revolutionary writer. He once made a sharp comparison between Lawrence and Jocye:
The telling difference between Constance Chatterly’s surrender (“She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense, yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything”) and Marion Bloom’s (“yes and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”) is a difference in the molecular structure of language: the former, a Victorian survival applied to counter-Victorian situations, the latter a radical linguistic innovation, rhythm and syntax interlocked, assured. Which is why the presence or absence on American shores of Lady Chatterly’s Lover ultimately makes no difference except to the publishing trade and the custodians of the immature, while the presence of Ulysses has for some decades been slowly altering the world.
Confident of the importance of modernism, Kenner would spend his career writing about not only Joyce and Pound, but also their many friend and disciples, including T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and W.B. Yeats. Viewed as a whole, Kenner’s critical oeuvre constitutes our best guide to twentieth-century English literature. No one else has written about such a range of authors with as much care, as much thought, as much perception. Moreover, especially in major books like The Pound Era (1971), Kenner has written prose of rare grace and energy, making him one of the few academic literary critics who delight as well as illuminate.
This is a poem by my friend Dave Margoshes, also a short story writer (also someone I could depend on for Best Canadian Stories in the decade of my editorship). Dave lives in Saskatchewan which is a province I used to visit a lot–those lovely summer residencies at Fort San (a retired tuberculosis hospital turned into a summer arts centre–some details from the place made it into a story of mine called “A Piece of the True Cross”) in the beautiful Qu’Appelle Valley. Every morning we were awakened by the call of bag pipes wafting over the dry hills. But he knows Vermont well, having been a guest at the Vermont Studio Center.
Author’s Note:
“Becoming a writer” is one of the poems in my collection The Horse Knows the Way, which came out last fall (from Buschek Books in Ottawa). The poem was sparked by something I read or heard – I thought by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – to the effect that “Everything I needed as a writer I had acquired by the time I was six.” In fact, I used that quote, or what I thought may have only been a paraphrase, as an epigram to the poem, and it appeared that way in The Queen’s Quarterly. Later, as I was preparing for the publication of The Horse Knows the Way, I was unable to verify the quote – now I have no idea from whence it came – and dropped the epigram. The poem, and an explanation like this about the epigram, appeared later in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009, from Tightrope Books in Toronto. So I owe Marquez – or someone – a debt of gratitude.
Becoming a writer
What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are, the people
one knows, their scandalous comments,
the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling
of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.
This moment, that, an eruption of violence,
a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,
the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful,
all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,
to deliver, to inspire. Story emerges
from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies
flashing like lightbulbs above the heads
of cartoon characters. All this within you
where you least expect it, not so much in the head
as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking
with the knowledge of the body, the writer
neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging
within himself for riches unimagined, for salt.
Mark Anthony Jarman is an old friend dating back to our days at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s from Alberta, lives next to the Saint John River in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he teaches at the university. He plays hockey, wrote a hockey novel, has three sons, and was a regular pick when I edited Best Canadian Stories. He is the subject of my essay “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story” which originally appeared in The New Quarterly and can be found in my essay collection Attack of the Copula Spiders. He writes the wildest, most pyrotechnic stories of anyone I know.
This story originally appeared in Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner (Douglas & MacIntyre, 2010).
dg
/
The distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me.
I am as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.
James Welch, Winter in the Blood
I was lost in the stars, but not lost, my tiny craft one of many on a loop proscribed by others, two astronauts far out in a silk road universe of burning gas and red streaks, and one of us dead.
Then the land comes up at us, the speed of the land rushing up like film and our Flight Centre men at serious blinking screens. Our valves open or don’t open, the hull holds, the centre holds, little I can do. The dead man is not worried. I will not worry anymore, I renounce worry (yeah, that will last about three seconds). The angle of re-entry looks weird to my eye. I had to haul his corpse back inside for re-entry so he wouldn’t burn up.
In the city below me traffic is backing up into the arterial avenues. They want to see us return, to fly down like a hawk with the talons out.
“Units require assistance. All units.”
We are three orbits late because of the clouds and high wind. They want to be there if there is a memorable crash, our pretty shell splitting on the tarmac into several chemical flash-fires engraved on their home movies.
We were so far up there above the moon’s roads, my capsule’s burnt skin held in rivers and jetstreams that route our long-awaited re-entry. Up there we drive green channels riven in the clouds, ride stormscud and kerosene colours in the sky, then we ease our wavering selves down, down to this outer borough, down to rumpled family rooms and black yawning garages, down to the spanking new suburb unboxed in the onion fields.
I’m a traveler, an addict. I descend from the clouds to look for work, I was up there with the long distance snowstorms. It’s hard to believe I’m here again, hard to believe Ava became so uncaring while I was gone from the colony.
Ava’s messages are still there. “This message will be deleted in 2 days.” I press 9 to save it yet again. I save her messages every ten days, my private archives, my time capsule, a minute of her lovely voice.
“Loved your last transmission,” Ava said in September. “It made me laugh! And I loved the pictures you sent! I can’t wait to see you.”
But then the change in October, the October revolution. We are changelings locked in a kingdom of aftershave ads and good shepherds, lambs and lions and the Longhorn Steakpit’s idea of a salad bar.
Her messages were so very affectionate, and we’d lasted so long, so long, but in the end our messages were not enough. Our words were not enough. A week of silence and then a new message. I knew it.
“Some bad news,” as Ava termed it. She’d met someone else, she’d had a lot to drink, one thing led to another. And I was so close. Only a few days more. But she couldn’t wait for me. So long.
In the Coconut Grove bar in the afternoon I’m feeling all right. I’m good at clarity and appreciation, but I’m slightly out of time. Time slows and I lurk in it, I can alter it. Do you know that feeling? I drink and carefully move my head to study my world. Venetian blinds layering tiny tendrils of soft light on us, the purple tennis court on TV, an AC running low, the lack of real sky. It all seems okay, it all seems significant, it all seems deliberate and poised for some event. But only to me, only I know this mood, this valiant expectation, this expedition into the early realms of alcohol.
Perhaps I am not quite right, but I savour the strange interlude. I’m a lonely satellite in space, a craft drifting alone, drinking alone. In this room the music is fine, the hops have bite – the perfect bar moment.
Then the bartender cranks up the volume on Sports TV and snaps to his phone, “The girl who cut my hair butchered it. I didn’t have the heart to tell her, you suck.”
And that’s the end of my spell, the end of that little mission to Mars. And I was so enjoying it.
“Hey dog, you flew with that dead guy, didn’t you? And then your girl dumped you. She’s hot. Bummer, man.” I wait until the bartender goes to the washroom to work on his hair and I exit without paying.
Maybe not the smartest idea, but I call Ava in Spain. She left me, but she’s the only one who will know what I mean.
“What do you want from me? Why are you talking like this?” Her slight laugh.
Apparently I have some anger to work out.
Turquoise mountains at the end of the street remind me of Tucson or Utah. The mountains of the moon. I kill time walking. Funny to be on foot once more. The sun and earth – what are they to me? I still orbit Ava, but she’s not there, no there there, so to what furious solar system do I now pledge my allegiance? I still orbit her blue-eyed summer kitchen memories and the cordwood and pulpwood childhood in the north.
Need to change that orbit, need orbit decay.
In the building where she used to live they now deal ounces and eight-balls. I was gone, Ava’s gone, the moon has changed.
Not sure I like the messages I’m picking up re the new frontier. No one foresaw this, crystal and crank smuggled in to the colony, dealers and Albanian stick up crews and crummy walk ups, the adamantine miners working the face under Dwarf Fortress, all the single males earning big bucks in the catacombs and mineral mines, but with nowhere to go, the shortage of places to live, the exorbitant cost of milk, the new gang unit brought in, dead bodies on the corner with splayed hands and wrists smeared red with their own blood, and bouncers at the door working hard at that Russian look. With the economy in the toilet the Minister of Finance is studying the feasibility of holding Christmas four times a year instead of two.
At the reception for me and some other space cowboys the party crackers lie like ashes on my tongue. The fruit salad fallen from soldered tins; taste the fruits of duty. My long periods of radio silence and now the noise of crowds and halls of ice cubes.
My brother-in-law Horse the detective is at the reception with a woman he says has just moved to the moon from Babylon to escape the war. Delia looks nervous, as if still in a war zone. Her family made her leave her home, smuggled her over the border, they feared for her life if she stayed.
Forget this place, they said of the only home she’s known, it doesn’t exist anymore.
“How do you like it here so far?”
Delia says, “People are very kind to me, but it’s not what I thought.” She shrugs. “All my life I wanted to see the moon, stared up at it. But I miss my home, my family, my car, my brothers, the path to the river.”
“Can they visit?”
“No, it’s impossible now.” The family had money, but now it is all gone, they are bankrupted by the war, the stolen gold, the extortion, the journey to other lands. Her English is very good.
“How is the new job?”
“Horse can tell you better than I.”
“Brutal,” says Horse, “A ton of movement with the gangs, a lot of old grudges, eye for an eye. We just had a 27 before we came here.”
“27?”
“It means he was already dead before we got there,” Delia tells me. “Another young guy,” she says. “They get younger and younger. Children.”
Five phones ringing on the silent body, once so talkative, now so grave. How may I direct your call? How come it’s so easy to become a body? He is past saving, his messages will be deleted in ten days unless someone who loves him presses save.
The woman from Babylon asks about my last trip in the light years, where I slept in far stars like fields sown with salt.
“Is it boring out there? Is it better than here?”
“It was wild, hard to describe, almost religious.”
“What about when Curtis died?”
“I don’t know, he was just dead.”
Was it an accident or did he do it to himself? This question is not in the press. One time, after he was dead, I swore I heard a fly buzzing inside the windshield, that manic little taptaptap. I turned my head slowly; there was no fly. I had wires to my skin, an extended excellent dream.
I hear Delia speaking Arabic on her phone. Her uncle is a consul in Vietnam with an Irish wife. We, all of us, have come so far from home.
Very few of the December class returned alive. There is a chance they are still out there, or else something is killing them, making them martyrs. Or perhaps some Decembrists stumbled onto a beautiful world, and chose to not steer back to this one. Why am I the only one who found a course home? And to what?
It’s just survivor’s guilt, the detectives insist. Take up golf. Some good 18 hole courses on the moon, especially the Sea of Mares, Sea of Tranquility, condos with fake pools stocked with trout fingerlings.
“You can rent an AK at the range,” says Horse. “Or sled down Piston Alley.”
Piston Alley is named for all the sled engines that have blown pistons on the long straight stretch. The engine runs the best ever just before the piston shoots out like a tiny rocket. I don’t really want an AK47.
In the NASA gymnasium the trainee astronauts play tag. Astronauts get lots of tang; that was the old joke. Poontang. When I was out there I craved smoked salmon and dark beer. The dead man went on for hours about steak and ice cream. I have a few too many bank loans. Curtis was outside when it happened, his air.
The woman from Babylon stares at me with her very dark eyes, says, “I wonder if perhaps you would help us in the interview room.”
Did Horse put her up to this?
He says, “The Decembrists are famous with the school-kids.”
“But with these jokers you pick up?”
Horse says, “You’ve always been better than me at reading faces. You can let us know when it’s a crock. We’ll have signals.”
Horse makes it seem like a job selling vacuum cleaners.
“Think about it. Something to do.”
Something to do — he has a point. Maybe a distraction from Ava in my head. I have escaped gravity and achieved a kind of gravitas. Yet I feel a broken shoe. I can’t sleep (night and day), my mind locked on her with someone else (day and night I think of you), and the lymph nodes each side of my groin are swollen tight as stones inside a cherry; no idea what that’s about, what’s next, what’s approaching me.
They are ploughing a new road by the graveyard, by the old settlers and the new settlers in the cemetery under Meth Mountain. The lumpy graves look to be making their slow way across the whitemoon’s dusty field, the dead in their progress to us, their magnetic message under clay walls and organic reefs and the moon’s Asiatic peaks just past the plywood windows of the closed mall.
Ava quit her job and got away, but when I filled out a Planet Change Request Form it was turned down by upstairs. I know it’s not a planet, but that’s the form they use. At the drive-through window on Von Braun Boulevard I order a combo and a willowy uniformed teen hands me a paper bag.
“Enjoy your meal.”
I drive to the carved-up picnic tables by Lost Lake. Opening the bag, I find $6000. They have handed me the day’s receipts. Or gave something to the wrong car. Someone will be pissed off. And where are my fries? I’m not driving all the way back down the mountain.
Now, how to use $6000? Pay down the loans or just buy a giant TV? I’ve always wanted a jukebox or to buy a bar in Nebraska. Maybe I will. I can learn things. Ava said, Whosoever wants to be first must first be slave to all. That night I sleep among the fences under stars where I rode so long. Perfect carpentry is a thing of amazing beauty.
Downtown I see Delia walking by the Oppenheimer Fountain. She seems shy. I feel her lovely eyes hide something, some secret limit inside her. Is she resigned to it? I like the idea of a secret, like her face.
“So I can just ride along in the car?”
“Hell yeah you can ride,” says Horse. “That’s it exactly. A goddam team!”
I can ride, privy to the children selling ghost pills stepped on a few times, dividing the corners, eyes like radiogenic freeway lights. It’s the Zombies versus the 68th Street runners, yellow flashes on a dark wall and the Indian Head Test Pattern, and from this world of instant grudges we pluck the sad eyed murderers and take them into Interview Room #2, where we strive to arrive at some form of truth acceptable to most of us.
Everyone loves truth. Ava told me the truth, did she not? She loves me, she loves me not. It’s a gamble, shooting dice while clouds boil around the sun, goading the dominos.
Who controls the corner, the zoo? We travel to the far corners of the universe, but we can’t control the local corner, can’t control the inside of our head.
In the interview rooms prisoners must be checked every 15 minutes. Someone slumped there in a chair killed a son, a cousin, killed in the triple last time. Horse walks in with his coffee. It goes on, it goes on.
They seen you riding with Moonman and Mississippi and Ghost.
Seen me?
You been slinging dope?
I don’t know no Mississippi.
Tight bags of meth hidden in the torn baby-seat.
Where were you rolling?
Nowhere. You know, just rolling nowhere.
By the fountain her gasmask matches her dress. Males never quite exist for me — only women. I don’t carry a mask; the air inside is fine, but she is very cautious and keeps it with her briefcase.
Five p.m. and the moon goes violet. Free Fanta for all teens at the moon-base chapel. She doesn’t drink and I am a spastic snake.
At dinner she doesn’t know she saves my life just by being there in front of me. I’d rather she not know my sad history, my recent heartbreak. It’s so pleasant to meet someone so soon after Ava, but still, the joy is tempered a tad by the prospect of it happening again, of another quick crowbar to the head. But I resolve to be fun. After the attack on the Fortran Embassy I resolve to be more fun.
Delia says she swam a lot in Babylon before the war, and she has that swimmer’s body, the wide shoulders. She says, “I am used to pools for women only, not mixed. I don’t want to swim in the moon-base pool.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll laugh.”
She doesn’t want to swim with strange men, but also fears catching some disease.
“I was hesitant to tell you about the pool. I feared you’d laugh at me.”
“No, I understand perfectly.”
But now I want to see her in a pool, her wide shoulders parting the water, her in white foam, our white forms in manic buzzing bubbles, her shoulders and the curve of her back where I am allowed to massage her at night when her head aches.
Strange, Ava also had migraines, but I was rarely witness to them; she stayed alone with them in the whimpering dark and I would see her afterward. Beside me in her room, Delia makes a sound, almost vomits over the edge of her bed, almost vomits several times from the pain, her hand to her lips, her hands to her face.
Delia is very religious, very old-fashioned, jumps away in utter panic if I say one word that is vaguely sexual, yet she delights in fashion mags and revealing bras and cleavage in silk and she allows my hands to massage her everywhere when she aches, allows my hands to roam.
“How do you know where the pain is,” she asks me, her face in pillows.
I don’t know. I just know how to find pain.
At Delia’s kitchen table we study maps in a huge atlas, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Assur, where she says her ancestors were royalty in a small northern kingdom. I love the small kingdom we create with each other in our intimate rooms or just walking, charged moments that feel so valuable, yet are impossible to explain to someone else. I saw her in the store, saw her several times in the middle aisles, knew I had to say something.
“I noticed you immediately, thought you were some dark beauty from Calcutta or Bhutan.”
“You saw me several times? I didn’t notice you.”
“But you smiled at me each time.”
“Everyone smiles at me,” she says brightly. “And you whites all look the same,” she adds, and I realize she is not joking.
Her white apartment looks the same as the other white apartments, windows set into one wall only, a door on another wall. I realize both women have apartments built halfway into the ground, a basement on a hill. Yet they are so different. Ava’s slim Nordic face pale as a pearl and her eyes large and light, sad and hopeful — and Delia’s dark flashing eyes and flying henna hair and pessimism and anger and haughtiness. Ava was taller than me, tall as a model. Delia is shorter; I find this comforting.
I close my eyes expecting to see Ava’s white face, but instead I’m flying again, see the silver freighter’s riveted wall, the first crash, then sideswiped by a Red Planet gypsy hack, a kind of seasickness as the Russian team ran out of racetrack, Russians still alive, but drifting far from the circular station lit up like a chandelier, their saucerful of secrets, drifting away from their cigarettes and bottles, from a woman’s glowing face. So long! Poka! Do svidaniia!
The young woman in Interview Room #2 speaks flatly.
They killed my brother, they will kill me if they want.
We can help you.
She laughs at Horse. You can’t help me.
Who to believe? I want to believe her. She got into a bad crowd, cooking with rubber gloves, the game. Our worries about cholesterol seem distant and quaint. She’s not telling us everything, but we can’t hold her.
“I’ve come into some money if you need a loan. It’s not much.”
Delia raises her dark eyebrows in the Interview Room, as if I am trying to buy her with my paper bag of cash. Maybe I am trying to buy her.
“And how am I supposed to pay you back? I have no prospects.”
On her TV the handsome actor standing in for the President tells us we must increase the divorce rate to stimulate the economy. We need more households, more chickens in the pots. I am sorry, he says, I have only one wife to give for my country. We switch to watch Lost in Space re-runs.
At night I ask my newest woman, my proud Cleopatra, “Is there a finite amount of love in the universe? Or does it expand?”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t know you and no love existed, but now I love you, so there is that much more.”
“Say that again,” she asks, looking me in the eye.
I repeat my idea.
“I think you are crazy,” she says. “Not crazy crazy, but crazy.”
I am full of love, I think, an overflowing well. Perhaps I supply the universe with my well, perhaps I am important. Her full hips, the universe expanding, doomed and lovely, my mouth moving everywhere on her form. The bed is sky-blue and wheat gold.
“How many hands do you have,” she asks with a laugh in the morning, trying to escape the bed, escape my hands: “You’re like a lion!”
She is trying to get up for work. My first time staying over. I am out of my head, kiss me darling in bed. Once more I can live for the moment. But that will change in a moment.
My ex on earth watches our red moon sink past her city. The huge glass mall and my ex on an escalator crawl in silver teeth, at times the gears of the earth visible. We are all connected and yet are unaware. Does Ava ever think of me when she sees us set sail? We hang on the red moon, but Ava can’t see us riding past.
“How many girlfriends do you have?” Delia asks, tickling me. “Many?”
“Just you. Only you.”
“I don’t believe you. I know you flyboys.” She laughs a little at me.
“How about you?” I ask. A mistake.
She turns serious, conjures a ghost I can never hope to compete with. “My fiance was killed,” she says quietly. “He was kidnapped at a protest and they found him in the desert. His hands were tied with plastic. My fiance was saving to buy me a house. My parents told him that I wished to go to school before we married and he didn’t mind. My parents sold their property for the ransom, but the men killed him regardless.”
I remember my parents’ treed backyard; I tilted the sodden bags of autumn leaves on end and a dark rich tea came pouring out onto the brick patio. Do the dead watch us? There were bobcat tracks: it hid under the porch.
Horse says, You know why we’re here?
I watch the boy’s face; he is wondering how much to admit.
Got an idea, he says.
The rash of robberies and bodies dumped in craters and the conduit to the Interview Room and my irradiated bones that have flown through space and now confined in this tiny Interview Room.
You never sell rock?
Like I told you, never.
He’s got a history.
Somebody’s took the wallet before they killed him.
Holy God. Holy God. Dead?
The man is dead. We need the triggerman.
This the t’ing. I have no friends. I learned that.
The young man wants to pass on his impressive lesson to the interrogators, but he has misjudged, his tone is all wrong. He thinks he is good, world-weary, but he hasn’t seen himself on camera, has no distance. The face and the mind, O the countless cells we represent and shed, the horseshit we try to sling.
Man, they had the guns! I was concerned with this dude shooting me in the backseat.
Down the road, what will haunt the victorious young tribes? They’ve heard of it all, but still, nothing prepares you.
You have your ways, Delia says, you can control me.
I wish. I can manipulate her, get some of her clothes off, but I need her more than she needs me.
She says, I don’t think I can control you.
I can’t tell if she thinks this is good or not. We spend time together, but I have trouble reading her, can’t tell if she likes me.
Delia is not adjusting well to being here. She hates the lunar landscape, the pale dust and dark craters past the moon’s strange-ended avenues. She is weary of the crime, the black sky.
“The weather,” she says, “never a breeze, never normal, either one extreme or another. Killer heat, fourteen days! Boil to death! Or else so cold. Fourteen days, freeze to death! Cold then hot, hotthen cold. And there are no seasons. At home summer is summer and winter is winter. Food here has no taste, has no smell. I hate everything and then I hate myself. All my life I wanted to meet the man in the moon and now I’m here.”
“You met me.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
I wish she spoke with a bit more enthusiasm on that topic.
She is losing weight since moving to the moon.
This is not acceptable, she says to the waiter. You would not serve me food like this on earth.
But we’re not on earth. Forget earth.
I’ll make you some of my own, she says to me later. Which she does, a creamy and delicious mélange at her tiny table in the apartment.
Sunday I bring my bag of illicit cash and we shop for fresh spices. We hold hands, touching and laughing in the store, fondling eggplants that gleam like dark ceramic lamps. We are the happy couple you hate, tethered to each other like astronauts. I am content in a store with her, this is all it takes, this is all we want now, red ruby grapefruit and her hard bricks of Arabic coffee wrapped in gold.
Romance and memories and heartbreak: One war blots out an earlier war, one woman blots out the previous woman’s lost sad image, one hotel room destroys the other, one new ardent airport destroys the one where I used to fly to visit her. The only way I can get over her. We are prisoners, me, her, bound to each other like a city to a sea, like a kidnapper to a hostage.
Why did Ava leave me when we got along so well? It was so good. I think I lost something human in the blue glow of that last long flight. Will it keep happening to me? Now I am afraid. The Russians from Baikonur Cosmodrome never returned, the sky closed over them like a silver curtain, like the wall of a freighter.
They went away and I was inside my damaged capsule, inside my head too much, teeth grinding in ecstasy, quite mad. They had me on a loop, my destiny not up to me. We are abandoned and rescued, over and over. But who are our stewards?
We went backwards to the stars. For months rumours have suggested NASA is near bankruptcy, bean counters are reorganizing; my pension is in doubt, as is the hardship pay I earned by being out there. Now we are back to this surface, back to the long runway and smell of burnt brake pads by the marshes and Bikini Atoll.
Me alone in the photograph, the other travelers erased. Or are they out there still, knowing not to come back? You can’t go back to the farm once you’ve seen the bright lights, seen inside yourself.
One day I delete Ava’s sad lovely messages. Why keep such mementos? You burn this life like an oil lamp. You make new mementos, wish they could compare.
I remember parking the car by the dam with Ava. The car was so small we had to keep the doors open as I lay on top of her, but the dome light had no switch. To keep us in darkness I tried to hold one finger on the button in the door and my other hand on Ava. That ridiculous night still makes me laugh, but I need to forget it all, to delete every message and moment.
You are unlucky in love, Delia says. The God is fair and distributes his gifts and clearly you have many talents, but not luck in love.
Is she right? I had thought the opposite, that I had inexplicably good luck that way, but now I wonder; she does seem to know me better than I do myself. I was lucky to know Ava, but now my thoughts are distilled: Ava was too tall, too pretty, too kind.
What I thought was good fortune was bad fortune. Was I bad luck for the Russians? Did I kill Curtis? Strangely, I feel lucky to have met her, to have crossed paths in the long florescent aisles of the store. With my cash from the drive-thru I buy her shoes, an ornate belt, French dresses. She is very choosy, but I like to buy her things.
In her room when I squeeze her hard she calls me a lion. Says I will devour her. I want to devour her, her ample flesh. My tiger, I call her. My tiger from the Tigris will turn. Friday night and we don’t talk, no plans do we make. I thought that was kind of mandatory. Are we a couple or not (Is you is or is you ain’t my baby)? It is odd to not know.
Desire has caused me so much trouble in my life, but I miss it when it is not around. Living without desire – what is the point of life without desire?
Perhaps that is a question an addict would ask.
Perhaps I am not unlike that French youth – you must have read of his sad sad plight – rejected by a circus girl with whom he was in love. A circus girl! I love it. The poor French youth committed suicide by locking himself in the lions’ cage.
I was locked in a cage, tied in a chair, in a capsule’s burning skin, hairline cracks like my mother’s teacup. A rocket standing in a pink cloud and I am sent, her pink clitoris and I am sent, 3,2,1, we have ignition, my missions hastily assembled, mixed up, my mixed feelings as I move, my performance in the radiation and redshift. The officials and women are telling their truth about me. I was thrown like an axe through their stars. I was tied in a chair, a desert, waiting. When the engines power up – what a climb, what a feeling! And who is that third who hovers always beside you, someone near us? When I count there are only you and I together – but who is that on the other side? 1,2,3. 3,2,1.
Why can’t Delia say something passionate to erase my nervousness? I have to live through someone else. Why can’t I be aloof, not care. I used to be very good at not caring. But when Delia hates the moon I feel she hates me, when she says she has no money and that the moon is dirty!, too hot!, too cold!, then I feel I’ve failed her with my moon.
Why does she not say, Come to me my lion, my lost astronaut, I love you more than life itself, my love for you is vaster than the reaches of the infinitely expanding universe, oh I love you so much, so very much. But no one says this. Her expanding clitoris under my thumb. She is calm, she is not passionate. But she is there, I’m happy when she is near. After my trip I crave contact.
I am being straight with you, swear to God. I had a couple of ounces. He was on me – it was self defence.
Did he have a weapon, Delia asks. How can it be self defence if he didn’t have a weapon?
Friends we question say the dead man was always joking, always had a smile.
We were sitting there, the kid says. The gun went off, the kid says, and he fell out.
It went off. Delia tells me they always word it in this passive way, as if no one is involved and, in a kind of magic, the gun acts on its own.
Government people contact Delia. Don’t be afraid, the government people say to Delia, which makes her afraid. They visit her at her apartment, claim they are concerned that a faction in the war at home may try to harm her here.
Has anyone approached her?
No, she says. No one from home.
Has she heard from her uncle in Vietnam? they wonder. Is he coming here?
They were very nice, she tells me, they bought me lunch.
I look at the white business card they gave her; it has a phone number and nothing else. My hunch is that they are Intelligence rather than Immigration. She asks questions for a living and now she is questioned by people who ask questions for a living. Now I worry we are watched, wired, wonder if they hear me massage Delia’s shoulders and her back and below her track pants and underwear, if they hear us joke of lions and tigers.
In the interview room: He owed me money so I hit him with a hammer. He was breathing like this, uh uh uh.
A day here is so long. At Ava’s former apartment building I pick up my old teapot, books, and an end table from the landlord’s storage room. The aged landlord’s stalled fashions, his fused backbone.
“Young man, can you help me with the Christmas tree?”
Of course. I like to help. He was one of the first here.
“The moon used to be all right,” he says. “Now it’s all gone to hell.”
He gives me a huge apple pie from the church bake sale. They attend church religiously, they’ll be in the heavens soon.
And poor Mister Weenie the tenant evicted from his apartment down a red hall.
What was his life like, I wonder, with a name like Weenie?
Horse laughs when I tell them, but Delia doesn’t get the humour.
Now it’s on the books as The Crown versus Weenie. How he yelled in a red hall.
“I belong in there!” he hollered, pounding at the door closed to him. “I belong in there!”
Mister Weenie pounds at doors that once opened for him, and I wonder where we belong and who do we belong with. In times of great stress, says science, the right brain takes over like a god and the left brain sees a god, sees a helpful companion along for the ride, an extra in the party. Does Mister Weenie see a helpful companion?
My ex quit her job to move to Spain. Ava has always loved the sun, the heat in Spain, the food, the language, the light. On a weather map I see that Spain has a cold snap and I am happy, as I know Ava hates the cold. I want her to be cold and miserable without me. I am not proud of this part of me.
Delia reads from a childhood textbook that she found in Ava’s belongings: “Our rocket explorers will be very glad to set their feet on earth again where they don’t boil in the day and freeze at night. Our explorers will say they found the sky inky black even in the daytime and they will tell us about the weird, oppressive stillness.”
“It’s not so bad,” I say. “The stillness.”
“It isn’t at all beautiful like our earth,” she reads. “It is deadly dull, hardly anything happens on the moon, nothing changes, it is as dead as any world can be. The moon is burned out, done for.”
Delia endured a dirty war so I admire her greatly. She gets depressed, refuses to leave her room. Where can she turn? Her Babylon is gone, the happy place of her childhood no longer exists, friends dead or in exile or bankrupt or insane.
My dark-eyed Babylonian love, my sometimes-passionate Persian – where will she move to when she leaves me?
Out the window are astral cars and shooting stars. Where do they race to? I know. I’ve been out there, nearer my god to thee, past the empty condo units, the Woodlands Nonprofit Centre for New Yearning, the Rotary Home for Blind Chicken-Licken Drivers (hey, good name for a band), the Rosenblum Retirement Home (Low Prices and Low Gravity for Your Aching Joints).
My happiest moments with my mouth just below her ample belly, I forget about outer space, her legs muffling my ears, a gourmand of her big thighs, her round hips, surrounded, grounded by her flesh; I have never liked flesh so much as with her. The world only her in those charged moments, my brainstem and cortex and molecules’ murky motives driven by her and into her. The devil owns me. No devil owns me.
The valves on my heart are wide open. I have no defences, sometimes I am overflowing with affection – and I have found this is a distinct disadvantage when dealing with others. I never want this to end; so what do you suppose will happen?
The crowd pays good money to file into the old NASA Redstone Arena, into the band’s aural, post-industrial acres of feedback and reverb. The band used to be someone, now they play the outposts. We are happy to see them here.
The woman singer moans, Don’t you dog your woman, spotlights pin-wheeling in the guitarist’s reflector sunglasses. She sings, I pity the poor immigrant.
We will remember, we will buy t shirts, souvenirs, get drunk, hold hands on the moon. We will remember.
Later the ambulance enters the moonbase arena, amazed in pain and confusion.
The white ambulance takes away one body from us so that we can see and not see. Carbons linger like a love song for all the coroners in the universe. One casualty is not too bad. Usually there are more. An OD, too much of some new opiate, some cousin of morphine, too much of nothing. You pay your money and you take your chances.
Who calls us? The ambulance tolls for someone else. Who owns the night, owns the night music of quiet tape hiss and music of quiet riches and debts in messages and missives from the crooners and coroners and distant stars? I have learned in my travels that the circus girls own the night, and the Warriors and Ghosts and Scorpions run the corner. They have the right messages.
And come Monday or Tuesday the interview room still waits for us, will open again its black hole, its modest grouping of table and walls and the one door. But Delia books off work: the war, the government people, the questions.
Say that one more time?
Who do you think did this?
Dronyk.
Dronyk says you did it.
Who’s bringing it in?
Who. That’s a good one. Who isn’t! Man, who’s bringing it in. Can I have a smoke?
The room – it’s like a spaceship for penitents; we climb in and explore a new universe, their universe. Fingers to keyboard: does he show up on the screen? A hit, a veritable hit, he’s in the system, the solar system.
I don’t want her to worry, but I want to know that she knows.
“Those government people asking you questions; they may not be who they say.”
“I know that,” she says. “I wonder if they are watching us now?”
We watch Delia’s TV. In the upscale hotel room the actor states to the reporter, Friend, for this role I had to go to some very dark places. He was gone for a while, celluloid career gone south, the actor is hoping for an award for this project, a comeback in the movies.
Gone? I’ll tell him about being gone. I went up past the elms and wires, past the air, past the planets. Where did he go? A piano bar, a shooting gallery in the Valley, a dive motel in the wilds of Hollywood? The actor went nowhere.
When you return to a place that is not your home, is it then your home? I insist she go out with me and then I fall into a fight on Buckbee Street in the fake Irish bar (yes, fake Irish pubs are everywhere).
“Hey, look who crashed the party. It’s that rug-rider cunt who sent me to jail.” The slurring voice in the corner, a young man from the interview room.
The brief noise of his nose as I hit him and he folds. Granted, it was a bit of sucker punch. Why oh why didn’t I sprint out of the fake Irish pub at that point? I stuck around to find myself charged with assault. Aren’t you allowed one complimentary punch at Happy Hour?
Now it’s my turn to be asked the questions in Interview room #2. I’ve been here before, know the drill, I know to stonewall, to lawyer up.
What the hell were you doing?
Wish I could help you, Horse. Really do. Beer later? Chops on the grill?
Mine may be the shortest interview on record.
Delia says to me, Stand against that wall. Face forward.
The camera flashes in my eyes.
Now please face that wall. The camera flashes.
After the fight in the fake Irish bar Delia gets depressed and doesn’t want to see me for a week, lunar weeks, it drags on, which gets me depressed that she is depressed in her subterranean room andwon’t let me even try to cheer her up, have a laugh.
“No, I’m in a hopeless situation,” she says on the phone. “I don’t want a temporary solution.”
“Everything is temporary.”
“That is true,” she admits. “Everything is temporary.”
But, I wonder, what of Curtis? Gone, permanent. Ava? Gone. Is that permanent too? I feel myself falling from the heavens.
“Are you hungry? Let’s go out,” I beg.
“There’s nowhere to go here. I’ve told you, I don’t want temporary solutions.”
“Can I come over?”
“I’m tired of questions. No more questions.”
The other astronaut, Curtis – I wonder if I’ll ever know for sure whether it was a malfunction or suicide. Curtis might have tinkered with his air and made it look like an accident, a design flaw, or his air went and it was horrible. I often wonder where I’d like to be buried; perhaps he wanted to die out there. Flight Centre instructed me to tether him outside to the solar array until just before we got back; didn’t want him stuck out there burning up when we made our grand entrance. Maybe Curtis wanted to burn up, the first outer space cremation. It’s almost poetic, but the Flight Centre would not see it as good PR.
You know who strangled the old man? You know who did it? A fuckin stupid crackhead!
He is pointing at himself and in tears. It’s Ava’s landlord who is dead.
I fouled up good, says the aged addict. Using that stuff wore me slap out.
His craggy face. He is sincere, his hard lesson. But he is somehow alive. His prints don’t match his face, but I can read his mind. By the power invested in me. He is thinking like a cheerleader, he is thinking, I must look into the future.
Yes, I tell myself, I too must remember there is a larger world out there, a future. I too must think like a cheerleader.
“This has worked a few times,” my lawyer says before we file into the courtroom. “You guys are the same build. Both of you put on these glasses and sit side by side.”
The judge asks the victim, “Do you see him in the courtroom?”
“He bumped my table, he spilled my drink and then it all went dark. I had a bad cut over my eye. I couldn’t see nothing. Dude was on top of me wailing all over me, and it went dark.”
Wailing? I hit him once and he dropped.
“So you can’t point out the assailant?”
“Hell if I know.”
His girlfriend takes the stand, says, “It might be one of them over there. I thought he was going to kill him, beating him and beating him. I remember the third guy, that tall white-haired feller.”
They cannot ID me. The judge throws out the case, my lawyer makes his money, the truth sets you free.
After my lawyer takes his cut I still have $3000 of the $6000 cash in the paper bag. She’s so sad. Delia saved me, but can she save herself? Delia believes that her God takes care of her. I guess I don’t need to buy a bar in Nebraska. With my cash I buy her a ticket back home to the Hanging Gardens, a visit, but I suspect she’ll stay there or land a more lucrative job in Dubai and never return from the sky.
You are nice, she says.
Because I like you. I like you a lot.
Thank you, she says.
She never says, I like you. Just, Thank you.
The Interview Room is never lonely for long. Who did it? Why? Someone always wants to know. We come and go like meteors, Horse at his desk staring.
That’s the one was running.
Did you see the shooter? Did you see?
I ran off, I didn’t see anything.
No one sees anything.
Why did she leave when I was almost there? Who shot him? Who was the third guy? Don’t know a name. I ran. Give me your money, I heard him say, then Pop pop pop! Man I was gone. No need for it to go that way. I don’t want to do nothing with nothing like that. Maybe Eliot did it.
This is good, this is rich: a collection agency calls my voicemail using a blocked number. The young hireling tries to be intimidating. It may be the loansharks or skip tracers or maybe the poor Burger King clerk at the drive-thru wants his paper bag back.
“Reply to this call is mandatory,” the dork voice speaks gravely on my voicemail. “Govern yourself accordingly,” he says, obviously proud of this final line.
Govern myself? I love that, I enjoy that line immensely, much the way the roused lions enjoyed the French youth’s heartbreak as he walked in their cage, as he locked himself in their interviewroom. You sense someone else with you, you’ll never walk alone, and the empty sky is never empty, it’s full of teeth.
Maybe I’ll re-up, sign on for another December flight, collect some more hazard pay, get away from everyone, from their white apartments and blue eyes and dark eyes. Be aloof, a change of scene; maybe that will alter my luck. I’ll cruise the moons of Jupiter or Titan’s lakes of methane, see if I can see what’s killing the others. Once more I renounce worry! And once more that notion will last about three seconds.
One Sunday Delia phoned at midnight, barely able to speak.
What? I can’t hear. Who is this?
A delay and then her accented Arabic whisper: I have headache.
I rushed over with medicine for her migraines and some groceries, sped past the walled plains and trashed plasma reactors in the Petavius crater. I was happy to rush to her at midnight, happy that she needed me to close the distance.
In her room I saw that she had taped black garbage bags to the windows to keep light from her eyes, her tortured head. I unpacked figs and bananas and spinach as she hurriedly cracked open painkillers.
“Thank you for this,” Delia murmured quietly with her head down, eyes hidden from me. “I know I bother you, but this is hard pain. Every day I will pray for you. Every day I pray the God will give you the heaven.”
Here is a story by my friend Michael Bryson from his 2010 collection How Many Girlfriends. For several years Michael published a terrific online magazine in Toronto called The Danforth Review, which is sadly defunct although the pages now reside in the Library and Archives Canada and can still be accessed there. This was before online magazines had much legitimacy; Michael was ahead of his time, and his magazine was a useful lens on what was new and coming in the Canadian literary world while it lasted. He also writes. I put one of his stories in Best Canadian Stories (2005). And he publishes a blog called Underground Book Club.
dg
—
When I was sixteen, a man spoke to my parents. A week later, he bought me a new set of clothes and I flew with him to California. His name (and I’m not making this up) was Sly. Maybe my story starts with the arrival of Sly. My parents will tell you straight out he’s an evil bastard, which is true enough, but Sly’s character was nothing if not Byzantine. He looked a bit like Santa Claus, an fact he exploited with the young and the old. It took me a long time to see the bits of him that I can claim to know, because for a long time I couldn’t see over his wake. I would look at him and see just the crest of his wave. He was my substitute father, my mentor, my guide in the world of glitter he had brought me to, and I was his servant. I was his paycheque, too, but it took me a long time to figure that out. I’m trying hard not to cloud my judgement about Sly here. I’m trying to tell you things that are simple and real. I would like to say things about Sly that even Sly would agree with, if he were here to agree with them, which he isn’t, since he’s dead.
Maybe that’s where we should start.
It was a dark and stormy night in New Hampshire (I’m not making this up). I was in L.A. with Lily (more on her later). Sly was in New Hampshire. I was trying desperately to get him on the phone. In recent days, we had argued. I had been in a professional slump. At the time, I blamed Sly. “Patience,” he counseled. In my condo on the outskirts of the city, Lily laid out the last of our drugs. It was approaching nightfall. Lily was still wearing her bathrobe. Beneath her robe she wore only her bikini bra. She was seventeen. I was twenty-one.
“Sly, you fucker!” I screamed into the phone. I kept getting his answering machine. He had gone to New Hampshire to meet a new client. A potential new client, anyway. I was afraid that I would lose his attention. Before he had left for the East Coast, he had been reassuring.
“I have a script on my desk right now. It’s perfect for you. The producers want you. It’s a role that could really make you.”
“Well, shit! Send it over!”
“When I get back,” he promised.
The circus was his favorite metaphor. “Life’s the Big Top, kid,” he would say. “Don’t ever forget that.”
After he died, I kept hearing his voice over and over. “Life’s the Big Top, kid. The Big Top, kid. Don’t ever forget that.”
Let me tell you one thing clear and true: I haven’t forgotten that. Life is a carnival. The carnival is the centre and source of all life. Sly taught me that, and now I’m telling it to you.
David Homel on location on a film shoot in the Dominican Republic, on the Puerto Plata-Sosúa road. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Here’s an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by my friend David Homel who, not coincidentally, is going to be the visiting translator at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing winter residency (January, 2011). Go to his reading, walk up and say hello, give him the secret Numéro Cinq handshake, whisper the Words of Power. David is a novelist, translator, and screenwriter. He has won the Governor-General’s Award for Translation, not once but twice. His novel The Speaking Cure won the Hugh McLennan Prize. Last year David and his wife, children’s book author Marie-Louise Gay, co-authored a picture book entitled Travels with my Family.
The Midway is due to be published by Cormorant Books in Toronto in September.
Excerpted from Midway
Author’s note: In this excerpt, the novel’s hero Ben Allan confronts the heart of the male mid-life crisis which manifests itself to him as the fear of death and a desire to destroy everything his life is built on. The real problem, Ben is discovering, is with death itself: it refuses to let itself be known, even after it has visited. Ben has two allies in his attempt to work out a new way of living with his wife. Unlikely allies, it’s true: a couple of plastic dinosaurs. They prove to be pretty good therapists.
“I’m afraid I’m turning into a cliché,” the stegosaurus lamented to the tyrannosaurus. “You know, the one with the discontent middle-age male. The mid-life crisis from which there is no escape. The red convertible and the blond girl with the wind in her hair.”
“Sounds delicious. But don’t worry about being a cliché: there are no new emotions,” the tyrannosaurus answered in his pontificating manner. “The genius is in how you experience them.”
“And I am experiencing them,” the stegosaurus said ruefully. “Human, all too human.”
“Are you complaining by any chance?” the tyrannosaurus asked. “Night after domestic night, isn’t that what you wanted? What you pined for, like in one of those sentimental ballads you liked to listen to when you were a teenager and that formed – deformed is more like it – your emotional universe to this very day? And now that you have a few of those wild, inconvenient emotions you once craved, you hesitate. You retreat. You are becoming human. Careful what you pray for – you just might get it.”
“I was hoping for more empathy from you,” the stegosaurus said. But even in the lower forms of vertebrate life, among the prehistoric, the extinct, empathy was hard to come by.
The tyrannosaurus snorted. “You know my nature. It’s a world I never made.”
Typical, the steg thought to himself, for his brother reptile to quote James T. Farrell, the pugnacious pride of Chicago, that tough-guy writer whom he personally considered one-dimensional. But he kept that thought to himself. He had been drinking, albeit modestly, but he didn’t trust his own thoughts after two glasses of wine. Unlike the tyranno, he was an inexperienced drinker. The stuff went to his head, and sometimes he couldn’t tell which thoughts were his, and which belonged to the wine. The effect wasn’t very pleasant.
Both dinosaurs had been drinking, though they were still within the domain of “moderate.” You couldn’t call them “social” drinkers, since their society had long since disappeared. They were just a couple of lonely guys, up late at night, egging each other on, a meditation for two, spoken out loud. They were lonesome monsters, and they knew it.
The steg was a worn green color, like the copper roof of some university pavilion in an Ivy League school. He carried his characteristic bony plates of defense on his back as if they were a burden, which they had become, now that his place in the world was assured. The tyrannosaurus had no other defense than his famous teeth and nails, powered by an aggressiveness that even scared him if he bothered to consider it. He was earth-brown, but his drab color made absolutely no difference to him. They were both banged up from a lifetime of play: the stegosaurus was missing a horn, and his companion had his tail twisted up at a jaunty angle that seemed out of character for this most fearsome of predators.
Here’s a poem by John B. Lee, a poet who lives in Brantford, ON, just along the highway from the farm where I grew up and which my family still owns. For a while, John even taught at the high school I once attended. One nice coincidence: The first time I co-judged (with the novelist Lisa Moore) the Winston Collins/Descant Best Canadian Poem contest, we picked John Lee. The judging was blind, so the convergence of fates was particularly appealing. “Burning Land” is written, yes, in Canadian. “Stoneboat” is a word I grew up with: a flat plank sled on low iron-shod wooden runners, drawn by horses, used to haul stones out of the fields. (See also “tobacco boat”–a tall narrow sled on steel runners, drawn by a single horse between tobacco rows during harvest.) James Reaney was a massively influential and inspirational southwestern Ontario (Sowesto, as we call it) poet and mythographer. Raymond Knister was an early modern short story writer and novelist who died young in a drowning accident. His was the first Canadian novel I ever read that was about my home territory–he even talks about tobacco growing (we raised tobacco from the 1920s on). Raymond Knister’s daughter still lives in Waterford, my home town. I ran into her in the drugstore last fall.
dg
———
Burning Land
“talk farmer …”
my mother chastens me
in conversation, for
though I have been to school
I’m still her wayward son
and what shall I say
shall I say
clevis and gambrel
sheaf and stook
shall I limit my earth
to the matter of mud
the matter of water and loam
or lambing in April
or driving a spile in the bloat of a cow
or the bark of maple in spring
what shall I tell her
concerning the Georgics of Virgil
the shearing of ewes, the keeping of bees
of Piers and his plough
of Jefferson’s science
of the three sisters of the Iroquois
or of Clare who wept at the closures
of the Idylls and eclogues of Spenser
of old or the pastoral beauty
of Eden and Eve
of her murdering son
and the land where he roamed
how David the King was a poet
with his lyre and his psalms, how he sang among sheep
how Wendell Berry walks on Sunday
with his pencil to the page
how Frost came appling out of orchards
blunt and rubbling at his dry stone wall
how Reaney
lost his Milton in a furrow
how his father
pierced a gasy rumen with a fountain pen
how Knister came to wintering after horses
writing “the horses will steam when the sun comes”
and how I listen for such lines
how I learned my Greek on shoulders
my mind much like a stoneboat with a single earth-heaved stone
how I came to Latin
in a cowflap, Latin fallen from the paper cows of Rome
how I told myself such stories
with a clay clod in my hand
I might have been Prometheus
with my breath of ancient words
while the ashes of my forehead
burned like burning land.
Herewith it’s a huge pleasure to introduce my friend Bill Gaston, a writer of poignant and sometimes Rabelaisian family stories, plays, novels, and a fine sports memoir Midnight Hockey. He teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island (way to the left if you’re looking at a map of Canada). “The Night Window” can be found in print in Bill’s story collection Gargoyles. It’s a story I know well because I included it in Best Canadian Stories the last time I edited the annual anthology (during my ten years as editor, I picked Bill three times).
dg
The Night Window
By Bill Gaston
Tyler’s librarian mother has brought two home for him. He hefts them, drops them onto his bed. One is on fly fishing. The second is Crime and Punishment. Tyler suspects Dostoevsky is a writer he will read only if made to, for instance if it’s the only book he brings on this camping trip.
Tyler knows that what he is actually weighing here is his degree of insubordination. Yesterday his mother’s boyfriend–Kim–went through all their gear, inspecting wool sweaters and cans of food. Peering into Tyler’s hardware store plastic bag he shook his head and pointed in at the new reading-light with its giant dry cell battery.
“It’s a natural-light camping trip,” he said, unpointing his finger to waggle it, naughty-naughty, in Tyler’s face. Tyler saw how he could fall to an easy hate of his mother’s boyfriend, except that Kim was just always trying to be funny. His mother had explained this early on.
“Umm…no lights?” his mother began, half-coming to Tyler’s defense. “If I have to pee in the middle of the night? Kim, you want some on you?”
It was this kind of statement (which had Kim laughing over-loud) that made Tyler turn away blank faced, that made him not want to go camping, and let his mother go wherever she wanted without him. It must be exactly this sort of statement that offends her co-workers at the library; it’s the reason she fits nowhere, and dates someone like Kim Lynch.
I recently started reading Steven Heighton’s essay collection, The Admen Move on Lhasa, after discovering his writing on Numero Cinq. The title essay elegantly compares a work of art to a “living and visionary” city, in this case, Lhasa, Tibet. He contrasts art (and Lhasa) with advertising and schlock (and modern, planned cities.) There were many illuminating points which I will not be able to do justice to here. The following are just a few quotes, the ones I underlined and double starred.
…art usually involves an invitation and solicits the entry and collaboration of the audience, while advertising usually implies a threat. Or, to continue this meandering trip towards Lhasa: art invites you into the city along any available road, while advertising dictates where you enter. And when.
Perhaps artists can begin to suspect they’ve created a memorable city, a god-haunted world or visionary town—some site worthy of a repeated pilgrimage—only when responses to the work are unpredictably and ungovernably divergent, diverse, off the wall, missing the point that good artists do sometimes try to make but without ever quite succeeding—always seeming instead to convey something else. Something impossible to signpost.
Schlock makes us understudies loitering in the wings of our own lives.
It’s not that art cannot be entertainment, the way schlock is, or is advertised to be, but rather that art, while entertaining us, also unsettles. For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the great sleep of death. Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake-up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.
This entire collection is filled with great essays, insightful, honest and so well-written. I hate to be simple-minded and say, This is really good, go read it, but…This is a really good collection. Go read it!
I’m pleased here to present the first few pages of Steven Heighton’s new novel Every Lost Country, published just yesterday (really! May 4) by Random House in Canada. Many Numéro Cinq readers will already be familiar with Steven, having read his poem “Herself, Revised” published here a couple of weeks ago. The poem is from his recently published collection Patient Frame. It is not my intention to flood the market with Steven Heighton prose and poetry, but the man is a walking definition of the word “prolific” and ambidextrous and a compatriot and his words are good companions in the long summer evenings.
dg
from Every Lost Country
Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic. Dulling the mind, it dulls distinctions, slurs the border between abstractions—right and wrong—or apparent opposites—dead and alive, past and present, you and him. The brain, rationing oxygen, quiets to a murmur, like a fine-print clause or codicil. You’re at high altitude for the first time and this mental twilight is a surprise as rewarding as the scenery. This recess from judgement, sedation of the conscience. How your sleep here seems too shallow for the nightmares that await you at a certain depth. You and the rest of the party are basically drunk. Till now you’ve had to treat others for minor problems only, small cuts and contusions, headaches, insomnia, so this intoxication remains a luxury, not a medical challenge. Or a moral one.
To you, right and wrong are not abstractions.
Still, think of the freedom of those summit squads dreamily bypassing climbers fallen in the Death Zone—the strange luxury of that. What Lawson himself has done. You might have thought twice about joining his expedition as doctor, and bringing along your daughter, if you’d known his story when you signed the contract. But at this altitude your numbed mind has to wonder. Camp One. Put yourself in his boots if you can. Now say for certain what you’d have done, or will do.
September 20, 2006, 4: 17 p.m.
She sees the trouble coming because she knows her father.
Sophie sits where she has sat for the last few afternoons, on the flat top of a concrete cylinder rebarred into the glacier, her backside in Nepal and her boots in China—Tibet. The seat of her favourite ripped jeans covers the line of Chinese characters inscribed in the concrete. Beside her stands a lightweight aluminum flagpole not much taller than she is and skewed some degrees off vertical. The breeze cooling her back can’t stir the small Chinese flag, because monsoon winds or, more likely, mischievous Sherpas like Kaljang and Tashi have spooled and tangled the flag tightly to the pole. Come to think of it—and the notion pleases her on a number of grounds, playful, political—she is likely seated a dozen steps or more inside China now. Chinese border patrols have to hike up the glacier and adjust the markers from time to time. A week ago, she and her father and Kaljang and Amaris stood at the edge of base camp and watched the Chinese set up a device on a tripod and take readings and untangle and lower the flag and remove the flagstaff and pry out the marker and roll it laboriously upslope and core new holes in the ice and slot it in. Some of the men were in blue coveralls and black toques like a SWAT team, others in olive down vests over camouflage gear. They trudged from chore to chore and said little. They ignored their audience, though one of the men in camouflage, maybe eighteen or so, waved shyly and blew kisses to her and Amaris. Amaris ignored him. Sophie waved back. Beside her, Kaljang’s eyes narrowed merrily in his brown face and he showed his nicotine teeth. She snuck a glance at her father on her other side, but he too seemed tickled by the scene, rubbing his salt and pepper stubble, shaking his head affably. He seemed almost himself again up here.
Though I’ve known and admired Jack Hodgin‘s work for ages, we actually hadn’t met til we ended up on the same judges’ panel for a literary award three years ago. Usually, these things are tense affairs, but Jack, our third panelist, the novelist Joan Barfoot, and I had such an agreeable time together we became internet friends, a tiny community of three sending group emails back and forth. Joan lives in London, Ontario, and Jack lives far, far away on Vancouver Island. He has been known to complain ruefully, upon finding a sequence of emails from Joan and me, that everything happens in the rest of the world before he even wakes up in the morning.
Jack has been a huge and beneficent presence on the Canadian literary scene for a couple of generations now. You can find all this for yourself by exploring his website (which, incidentally, contains a generous amount of writing advice). I love the list of prizes he’s won; it’s almost as long as the number of books he’s published. I am also fascinated by his real life relationship with the fictional character Dr. Jack Hodgins in the TV series “Bones.”
This little essay is just a taste. I like it because it reminds me of all the friends who have made the pilgrimage to Oxford–so many of us loved Faulkner and yet had to fight our way out from under his stylistic shadow.
Jack has a new novel coming out in May. It’s called The Master of Happy Endings. This is what Alice Munro says about it: “From one of Canada’s master storytellers comes a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his later seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.” Buy the book.
dg
FAULKNER MISSISSIPPI: April 1982
Walking up the pathway towards the front steps and white pillars of the house known as Rowan Oak, I was aware of a chill that lifted the hairs at the back of my neck. William Faulkner had lived here, had written most of his novels here, had walked up this pathway, perhaps had even laid this herringbone brickwork in the pathway himself. The man would not be inside, of course – he had been dead for several years – but the house was open to visitors, with a resident guide from the nearby university. Still, I was about to reach the destination in what was really a sort of pilgrimage.
We had spent a few sunny April days in New Orleans before driving the little rented car north, pausing only briefly in Baton Rouge before passing into Mississippi. We’d visited the ante-bellum houses in Natchez and toured the 16 miles of Vicksburg battleground before driving on up the highway through pine forests in the direction of Oxford.
In the direction, that is, of the town where once lived the man whose books had thrilled and inspired me, and whose powerful voice and vision had so invaded me as to destroy all my earliest attempts at writing – two bad novels and several stories, all rejected and abandoned — before I’d eventually found my own place and my own voice. Still, though I may have shaken off much of the power I’d once allowed him to have, I had not abandoned my admiration for the man and his work.
Of course the first indication we were entering Faulkner country was the little signpost naming the Yocana River, which was just a narrow yellow creek barely moving at the bottom of a muddy ditch. It was not easy to imagine this “Yoknapatawpha” in anything like flood, or to believe in the difficulties it gave the Bundren family when they crossed it with the mother’s coffin, heading, as we were, for the town where “Pa” would get a new set of teeth, bury his wife, and find himself a new one. I hoped this was not a hint of more disappointments ahead.
Herewith, a lovely poem by my friend Steven Heighton from his new book (his fifth poetry collection) Patient Frame. Steve is also a prolific novelist, story writer and essayist. He has a fourteen-year-old daughter and recently took up hockey–has been trying to lure me into a comeback (not going to happen). Read him and look up his other books. Something here not to be missed.
dg
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HERSELF, REVISED
There’s a final bedtime when the father reads
to his daughter under the half-moon lamp.
The wolf-eyed dog sits guard on the snowy
quilt at their feet—ears pricked, head upright
like a dragon on its hoard—while the daughter’s
new clock ticks on the dresser. When the father
shuts the book, neither feels in the cool sigh
cast from its pages a breath of the end—
and how can it be that this ritual
will not recur? True, this latest story
is over, Treasure Island, which held them
a dozen nights, but “the end” has arrived
this way often before. Maybe she’s tired
of the rite, or waking to a sense of herself
revised? Maybe he’s temporarily bored,
or unmoored, reading by duty or rote,
turning deeper inside his own concerns.
How does the end enter? There’s a hinging
like a book’s sewn spine in the raw matter
of time—that coded text, illegible—
and stretched too far, it goes. An innocent
break, the father off one weekend or the child
sleeping at a friend’s, followed by a night
or two she wants to read alone, or write,
for a change, in her new padlock journal.
She has no idea what has changed. She
can’t know that the enlargement of her life
demands small death after death, and this one,
the latest, is far from last. She will not
notice this death, being so intent on life—
so implied in its stretching crewelwork
of seconds.
Some nights later, suddenly,
writing cheques or checking email, he might
notice and wonder at the change. In a sense
such minor passings pre-enact his own.
For a moment he might lay down his pen,
forget the figures, peer over the roofline
and find she was right—Orion, rising,
is more blueprint of butterfly, or bird,
than hunter. How does it enter, through what rift
or flaw? Maybe it doesn’t enter at all.
It was there in every sentence: the end.
I can do no better than repeat what I said when I introduced David’s translation of the Chekhov story “About Love,” published earlier on these pages. David Helwig is an old friend, a prolific novelist, story writer, translator, and poet, and a mighty gray eminence on the Canadian literary scene. In 2007 he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Prize for distinguished lifetime achievement. In 2009 he was appointed to the Order of Canada. His book publication list is as long as your arm. He founded the annual Best Canadian Stories which he edited for years. He is also a very graceful human being as evidenced by his comments on Numéro Cinq.
I had my choice of new Helwig poems to post here, but I picked this one because I really like it. The last stanza alone is worth the trip. It’s a rare poet who can make you feel the fever and mystery of life in as few words.
Unfortunately, the poem is written in Canadian, so I’ll have to translate a few of the words for my American and Mexican readers. Lower Canada College is a venerable Montreal private school, Lower Canada being the former name for what became the province of Quebec. There is an Upper Canada College in Toronto, another venerable private school (not a college in the American sense, a grade school and high school). Upper Canada is what we used to call Ontario. Upper Canada and Lower Canada as designations don’t make a lot of sense intuitively to Americans since they are actually east-west neighbours. But in the days when the St. Lawrence River was the major highway east and west, Ontario was upriver and Quebec was downriver.
Hugh MacLennan was a great Canadian novelist, whose book Two Solitudes invented the myth or metaphor that, for decades, defined the way we thought about relations between the French and English sides of the nation. His other fine novel, Barometer Rising, about the Halifax Explosion of 1917 I gave to my son Jacob when I took him to Halifax for his freshman year at the University of King’s College last September. MacLennan taught at Lower Canada College and later McGill University.
The rest you can figure out for yourselves.
dg
La Rentréé
The dignity of a considered rhythm: today
the school year begins. Across the dappled green lawn
of Lower Canada College children of privilege
kick a soccer ball, foregather in little groups;
by the fence a red-head and her friend exchange news.
The ghost of Hugh MacLennan in his teaching days
observes from the shade of a tall tree. He can hear
the plock of tennis balls from further up the street,
the sacred precincts of the Monkland Tennis Club.
A seasonable invention, all these memorable
hours, a cherishing of slowness, as eyes might observe
the infinite seconds of fine craftsmanship,
afforded to some in their best bargain with time,
the finely grained and cut and carved, its artifice
emulating the splendour of the eternal,
the existential calm of the elegiac.
Then turn the wrong corner. A house has disappeared.
As if entrapped in the suicide’s murderous mistake
or the muddle and depletion of dementia,
you come upon maddened wasps in all the cities,
sea giants, monsters, dragon, roc, sphinx, mermaid,
a phoenix tattoo paints resurrection on a pale skin.
Retrace your steps toward the pragmatics of freedom
in the grace of the familiar, that shape of our being,
the chosen hour of the chosen day, though the lost
slip from the slender thread of their living, yet first
and last the taut and shining wire vibrates
with tunefulness, proposes such fine music.
In 1968, an American assistant professor at York University observed to me that in terms of political spectrums, the Canadian Right begins somewhere left of the leftiest American Left. Here’s an essay by Stan Persky on Naomi Klein in the online magazine Dooney’s Cafe. Klein used to edit This Magazine where I once or twice published stories (I suspect this was before Klein was even born). There are a couple of interesting message vectors here. The first is that these are people who come from a Canadian Leftist tradition which, in many ways, has its roots in a Prairie Protestant religious movement of community and co-operation (unlike the U.S. where Protestantism is mostly on the Right). The second is that Canada also has, through Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, another tradition of culture criticism that rises from a study of the social and cognitive effects of technology. These two threads seem to coalesce in Naomi Klein and her critiques of market capitalism. Oddly enough, as Persky points out, Klein is getting some traction on the American Right, which seems paradoxical and fascinating. All this talk of Right and Left doesn’t mean that much any more since both sides seem to assemble slogans without giving much attention to underlying consistency or purpose. It’s strange to think that Tea Baggers and anti-globalization demonstrators actually agree on some things. Anyway this is a interesting article, not the least because it’s about how to write a bestseller against the idea of bestsellers.
It’s a great honour to unveil on these e-pages David Helwig‘s new translation of Anton Chekhov’s story “About Love.” David Helwig is an old friend, a prolific author and translator, and a mighty gray eminence on the Canadian literary scene. In 2007 he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Prize for distinguished lifetime achievement. In 2009 he was appointed to the Order of Canada. His book publication list is as long as your arm. He founded the annual Best Canadian Stories which he edited for years. He is the author of an earlier book of translations, Last Stories of Anton Chekhov.
This post includes Helwig’s introduction to his new book of Chekhov stories and the story “About Love.”
dg
/
Anton Chekhov spent the winter of 1897-98 in France, most of it in Nice on the Côte d’Azur. He was avoiding the cold and damp of the Russian winter. In March of 1897 he had suffered a severe haemorrhage and was told that both his lungs were tubercular. Though he himself was a doctor he had for the previous ten years succeeded in ignoring the symptoms of his disease. Now he could no longer evade the medical facts.
That winter Chekhov read extensively in French and was much impressed by Émile Zola’s public intervention in the Dreyfus scandal. (One suspects that the little anecdote in ‘About Love’ concerning the supposed Jewish gangsters might have its origins in this.) Chekhov improved his knowledge of the French language—he was interviewed about the Dreyfus affair in French—but he did only a limited amount of writing. In May of 1998 he returned to his estate at Melikhovo, and in July and August he published in the magazine Russian Thought the three connected stories translated here. A year later he described them as a series still far from complete, but he never returned to them, and they remain his only experiment in linking his stories.
Within an overall narrative about the travels in the Russian countryside of the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and the teacher Burkin, Chekhov presents three framed tales, the first a kind of grotesque comedy of the sort associated with Gogol, the second not dissimilar but with a more explicit and impassioned response from its narrator, the third a poignant little story of failed love that may evoke for the reader Chekhov’s most famous story, “The Lady with a Little Dog.” Emotion grows more personal as we move from one to the next. In the first story Burkin tells a tale about an acquaintance. In the second Ivan Ivanych tells about his brother. In the third their friend Alyokin tells a story about his own life.
While the framed tales provide the dramatic core of each story, the framing narrative offers a vivid evocation of the Russian countryside, with a sense of history and geography complementing and containing the urgency of the tales. In ‘Gooseberries’ an extraordinary passage describes the aging veterinarian Ivan Ivanych swimming in a cold mill pond, unwilling to stop, in the grip of some inexplicable joy; then at a paragraph break the story modulates in a single line to a quiet sitting room where the framed portraits of soldiers and fine ladies evoke a past gentility, and Ivan Ivanych begins to talk about his brother’s life, its obsession, the crude and joyless littleness of his achievement.
A passage from the conclusion of the first story lifts our gaze from the events we’ve just been told about. “When, on a moonlit night, you see a wide village street with its peasant houses, haystacks, sleeping willows, tranquillity enters the soul; in this calm, wrapped in the shade of night, free from struggle, anxiety and passion, everything is gentle, wistful, beautiful, and it seems that the stars are watching over it tenderly and with love, and that this is taking place somewhere unearthly, and that all is well.”
The point of view in Chekhov’s stories can be slippery. The “you” of this passage is unidentified but the verb is in the second person singular; it speaks intimately from some detached narrative intelligence to each single reader. The passage gives the sense of a benign universe surrounding the events.
Yet just a few lines earlier we have read Burkin’s harsh conclusion to the tale he has been recounting. “We came back from the cemetery in a good mood. But that went on no more than a week, and life flowed by just as before, harsh, dull, stupid life, nothing to stop it going round and round, everything unresolved; things didn’t get better.”
Such a counterpoint of one voice with another, one mood with another, their contradiction, suggests a subtle ironic interplay not altogether unlike the form of Chekhov’s plays. Always, in Chekhov, there is a sense that the events evoke other possibilities, offstage or after the narrative ends. The very last line of ‘About Love’, the third of these stories, offers a grim hint at what might be still to come.
In 1991 Oberon Press published Last Stories, my translations of the final six stories of Anton Chekhov’s career, including two or three of his finest and best known works. It seems appropriate to repeat here what I said in the introduction to that book, that while there are a great many translators whose Russian is better than mine, there are not so many who have had a long experience of writing narrative prose. These narratives are my personal versions of Chekhov’s stories; they are also as close as I can make them to the precision and suggestiveness of the originals.
–David Helwig
About Love
By Anton Chekhov
Translated by David Helwig
The next day for lunch they were served delicious meat turnovers, crayfish, and lamb cutlets, and while they were eating, Nikanor the cook came upstairs to ask what the guests wanted for dinner. He was a man of middling height with a pudgy face and little eyes, clean shaven, with whiskers that looked not so much shaved as plucked out.
Alyokhin told them that the beautiful Pelageya was in love with this cook. Since he was a drinker with a violent temper, she didn’t want to marry him, but offered to live with him all the same. But he was very pious, and his religious principles wouldn’t allow him to live like that. He insisted that she marry him—he would have nothing else—and when he was drinking he berated her, even hit her. When he was drinking she hid upstairs, sobbing, and then Alyokhin and his servant wouldn’t leave the house, so they could defend her if necessary.
They began to talk about love.
“How love comes into being,” Alyokhin said, “why Pelageya didn’t fall in love with some other man more suitable for her, with her inner and outward qualities, but instead chose to love that mug Nikanor”—everyone called him the ugly mug— “since what matters in love is personal happiness, it’s beyond all knowing, say what you like about it. Up till now we have only this irrefutable truth about love—‘It’s a sheer, utter mystery,’— every other single thing that has been said or written about it is not an answer but a reframing of the question—which remains unresolved. The explanation which would seem to be suitable in one case won’t suit in ten others, so what’s much the best, in my judgment, is to explain each case separately, not attempting to generalize. What we need, as the doctors say, is to individualize each separate case.”
“Absolutely right,” Burkin agreed.
“We respectable Russians nourish a predilection for these questions, but we have no answers. Usually love is poeticized, adorned with roses and nightingales, but we Russians have to dress up our love with fatal questions, and chances are we’ll pick out the most uninteresting. In Moscow when I was still a student I had a girl in my life, sweet, ladylike, but every time I took her in my arms, she thought about what monthly allowance I’d give her and what a pound of suet cost that day. Really! And when we’re in love we don’t stop asking ourselves these questions: sincere or insincere, wise or foolish, what our love is revealing, and so on and on. Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, what it gets in the way of, fails to satisfy, irritates, I just don’t know.”
It was like this when he had something he wanted to talk about. With people living alone there was always some such thing in their thoughts, something they were eager to talk about. In the city bachelors went to the baths or the restaurants on purpose just so they could chat or sometimes tell their so-interesting stories to the attendants or the waiters, and then in the country they habitually poured out their thoughts to their guests. At that moment what you could see outside the window was a grey sky and trees wet with rain; in this weather there was no place to go and nothing remained but to tell stories and listen to them.
“I’ve been living at Sophina and busy with the farm for a long time now,” began Alyokhin, “ever since I finished university. By education I’m a gentleman, by inclination a thinking man, but when I arrived here at the estate, it carried a big debt, since my father had borrowed money, partly because he spent a lot on my education, so I decided not to leave here, but to work until I paid off the debt. I made the decision and started in to work, not, I confess, without a certain repugnance. The land here doesn’t produce much, and for agriculture not to be a losing proposition it’s necessary to profit by the labour of serfs—or hired hands which is about the same thing—or to farm in the peasant way, which means working in the fields yourself alongside your family. There’s no middle way here. But I didn’t shilly-shally. I didn’t leave a scrap of land untouched. I dragged in every peasant man and woman from the neighbouring villages; work here was always at a raging boil. Myself, I ploughed, sowed, cut the grain; when I grew bored I wrinkled up my face like a farm cat who’s eaten cucumber from the vegetable garden. My body ached and I slept on my feet. At the beginning it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this labouring life with my educated habits—all that counts, I thought, is to behave with a certain outward order. I settled upstairs here in the splendid reception rooms, and I curtained them off so that after lunch or dinner I was served coffee and liqueurs, and at night while I was lying down to sleep I read the European Herald. But one day our priest arrived, Father Ivan, and he drank all the liqueurs at one go, and the European Herald went to the priest’s daughters. In summer, especially during hay-making, I didn’t have time to get to my own bed, I’d take cover in a shed, on a stone boat, or somewhere in a forester’s hut—but why go on about it? Little by little I moved downstairs, I began to eat the servants’ kitchen; all that remained to me from our former luxury was those servants who had worked for my father, and to discharge them would have been painful.
In those first years here I was chosen honourary justice of the peace. Whenever I had occasion to go into the city, I’d take part in the session of the district law court; it was a diversion for me. When you go on here without a break for two or three months, especially in the winter, in the end you get to pining for your black frock coat. And at the district court there were frock coats, full dress coats and tail coats, and there were lawyers, men who’d received the usual education: I’d get into conversation with them. After sleeping on a stone boat, after sitting in a chair in the servants’ kitchen, to be in clean linen, light boots, with a chain on my breast—this was real luxury!
In the city they received me amicably. I was ready to make acquaintances, and out of them all, the soundest, and to tell the truth the most pleasant for me, was a friendly connection with Luganovich, the cordial Chairman of the district court. An attractive personality: you both know him. This was right after the famous affair of the arsonists; the trial lasted two days, we were tired out. Luganovich looked at me and said, ‘You know what? You should come to dinner.’
This was unexpected since beside Luganovich I was of little significance, just some functionary, and I had never been at his home. I stopped off in my room for just a moment to change my clothes, and we set off for dinner. And there the opportunity presented itself to make the acquaintaince of Anna Alexeyevna, Luganovich’s wife. She was still very young then, not more than 22 years old, and half a year later she was to have her first child. The past is past, and right now I’d find it difficult to define exactly what it was about her that was unusual, what it was in her I liked so much, but over dinner everything was irresistably fine. I was seeing a young woman, beautiful, good, cultured, charming, a woman I’d never met, and right away I felt a sensation of familiarity, as if I’d seen her before—that face, those clever, friendly eyes—in an album that lay on my mother’s dresser.
In the arson case we’d prosecuted four Jews, supposed to be a criminal gang, but as far as I could see, quite groundlessly. At dinner, I was very worked up, finding it all painful, I don’t remember now what I said, only when I spoke Anna Alexeyevna turned her head and said to her husband, ‘What is all this, Dmitri?’
Luganovich, that good soul, was one of those ingenuous men who hold firmly to the opinion that if a man is brought to court it means he’s guilty, and that to question the rightness of a sentence may only be done by legitimate procedures on paper and certainly not over dinner and in a private conversation.
‘We weren’t on hand with them to set the fire,’ he said softly, ‘and we’re not in court here to see them sentenced to prison.’
And both of them, husband and wife, did their best to get me to eat and drink a little more. By small things—this, for example, that they made coffee together, and this, how they understood each other in a flash—I could grasp that they lived comfortably, in harmony, and that they were glad to have a guest. After dinner they played piano four hands, then later on it grew dark and I set off home. That was at the beginning of spring. Subsequently I passed the whole summer at Sophina, without a break, and there was not a moment for a passing thought about the city, but the memory of the well-proportioned, fair-haired woman stayed with me all day; I didn’t think about her, but truly, her sweet shadow lay on my soul.
In the late fall there was a charity performance in the city. I entered the governor’s loge—I was invited there during the intermission—and I saw, down the row with the governor’s party, Anna Alexeyevna—once again, irresistably, the intense impression of beauty, and the sweet, tender eyes, once again the sense of closeness.
We were seated side by side, then we started out to the foyer.
‘You’re losing weight,’ she said, ‘are you sick?’
‘Yes. I’ve caught a chill in my shoulder, and in the rainy weather I have trouble sleeping.’
‘You have a dull look about you. In the spring when you came to dinner, you were younger, more cheerful. In those days you were enthusiastic, always talking, and you were very interesting, and I confess I was even a tiny bit taken with you. Often as the year went by you came to mind for some reason, and today when I was getting ready for the theatre it seemed to me that I’d see you.’
And she laughed.
‘But today you have that dull look,’ she repeated. ‘It ages you.”
The next day I had lunch at the Luganovichs’. After lunch they left the house to go out to their summer place to put things in order for the winter, and I with them. And with them I returned to the city, and at midnight I drank tea in the quietness of their house, those domestic surroundings, as the fireplace burned, and the young mother kept going out of the room to see if her daughter was asleep. And after that with each arrival I was, without fail, at the Luganovich house. They expected it of me, and it was my habit. Usually I entered without being announced, like someone who lived there.
‘Who is it?’ I heard from a distant room the drawling voice that seemed to me so beautiful.
‘It’s Pavel Konstantinich,’ answered the housemaid or the nurse.
Anna Alexeyevna came out to me with a worried look, and every time she asked, ‘Why have you been away so long? Has something happened?’
Her glance, the fine, graceful hands which she reached out to me, her everyday clothes, the way she did her hair, the voice, her step, each time all of this produced an impression of something new, extraordinary in my life, and important. We talked for hours and we were silent for hours, each thinking our own thoughts, or she played the piano for me. If no one was at home, I stayed on and waited, chatted with the nurse, played with the baby, or I lay in the study on the Turkish divan and read the newspaper, and when Anna Alexeyevna returned, I greeted her as she came in, took from her all her shopping, and for some reason, each time I took the shopping it was with as much love and exultation as a young boy.
There is a proverb: if an old woman has no problems, she’ll buy a piglet. The Luganovichs had no problems so they made a friend out of me. If I didn’t go to town for a while, that meant I was sick or something had happened to me, and both of them grew terribly anxious. They worried that I, an educated person who knew languages, lived in the country instead of occupying myself with science or serious literary work, went round like a squirrel in a cage, worked a lot but never had a penny. To them it seemed that I must be suffering, and if I chatted, appeared confident, ate well, it must be in an attempt at concealing my suffering, and even in happy moments, when everything was fine with me, I had the sense of their searching looks. They were especially full of concern when I was actually having a hard time of it, when one creditor or another oppressed me or when money was insufficient for the payments demanded; husband and wife whispered together by the window, and in a while he’d come up to me and say, with a serious look, ‘Pavel Konstantanich, if at present you should be in need of money, then my wife and I beg you not to feel shy, but to apply to us.’
And his ears grew red with embarrassment. That’s just how it would happen, the whispering by the window and he would come toward me with red ears and say, ‘My wife and I beg you earnestly to accept this present from us.’
Then he gave me some cufflinks, a cigarette case, or a lamp; and in response to this I would send from the country a dressed fowl, butter, flowers. It is to the point to say that both of them were well to do. From the first I had borrowed money and wasn’t especially fastidious, borrowed where I could, but no power on earth would make me borrow from the Luganovichs. That’s all there is to be said about that!
I was wretched. At home in the field or in a shed I thought about her, and I tried to see through the mystery of this young, beautiful, intelligent woman married to an uninteresting man, almost old—the husband was over forty—and bearing his children. How to understand the mystery of this uninteresting man, a good soul, a simple heart, who deliberated with such boring sobriety at balls and evening parties, took his place among reliable people, listless, superfluous, with a humble, apathetic expression, as if they might have brought him there for sale, who all the same believed in his right to be contented, to have children with her, and I struggled to understand why she was his and not mine, and why it must be that such a terrible mistake ruled our lives.
Arriving in the city, I saw in her eyes each time that she had been waiting for me; she herself confessed to me that whenever she perceived something unusual outside her window she guessed that I was arriving. We talked for hours or were silent, but we didn’t confess to each other that we were in love, but shyly, jealously, we dissembled. We were afraid of anything that might reveal our secret, even to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I debated, questioned myself about what our love might lead to if our strength wasn’t sufficient for the battle against it; it seemed to me incredible that this calm melancholy love of mine might suddenly tear apart the happy, pleasing course of life of her husband and children, of everything in that home, where they loved and trusted me so. Was this a decent thing to do? She would come to me, but where? Where could I take her away? It would be another thing altogether if mine were a pleasant, interesting life, if for example I were struggling to emancipate my native land, were a famous scholar, artist, painter, but no, I would carry her out of an ordinary, dull condition to another much the same, or to something even more humdrum. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case of my illness, death, or if we should simply stop loving each other?
And she, apparently was having the same thoughts. She considered her husband, her children, her mother who loved the husband like a son. If she should give herself up to her feelings, then she would have to tell lies about her state or to speak the truth, and either one would be awkward and horrible. And this question tormented her: should she offer me happiness, her love, or not complicate my life, already difficult, full of every kind of unhappiness? It seemed to her that she was already insufficiently youthful for me, insufficiently industrious and energetic to start a new life; she often talked to her husband about it—how I needed to marry a clever, worthy girl who would be a good housewife, a helper—and at once added that in the whole city such a girl was hardly to be found.
Meanwhile the years passed. Anna Alexeyevna now had two children. When I arrived at the Luganovichs’ the maid smiled pleasantly, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinich had arrived and wrapped their arms round my neck, and everyone was glad. They didn’t understand what was going on in my soul, and they thought that I too was glad. They all saw in me a noble being. Both the adults and the children believed that some noble being had entered the room and this induced in them an attitude of particular delight with me, as if in my presence their life was finer and more pleasant. Anna Alexeyevna and I went to the theatre together, always on foot; we sat in the row of chairs with our shoulders touching. In silence I took from her hand the opera glasses, and at that moment I sensed her closeness to me, that she was mine, and each of us was nothing without the other—yet by some strange misunderstanding, leaving the theatre we would each time say farewell and separate like strangers. What people in the city said about us, God knows, but in all they said there was not one word of the truth.
In the following years Anna Alexeyevna began to go away more often to visit her mother or her sister; bad moods came over her, a sense that her life was wrong, tainted, and then she didn’t want to see either her husband or her children. She was by now receiving treatment for a nervous disorder.
We were silent, everyone was silent, but in the presence of strangers she experienced some odd irritation with me; whatever I spoke about she would disagree with me, and if I raised a question she would take the side of my opponent. When I dropped something she would say coldly, ‘Congratulations.’
If, having gone to the theatre with her, I forgot to take the opera glasses, she would say, ‘I knew you’d forget.’
Fortunately or unfortunately, nothing happens in our lives that doesn’t end sooner or later. The time of separation ensued, since Luganovich was appointed Chairman in one of the western provinces. They had to sell furniture, horses, the summer place. When they went out to the cottage and back, looked around for a final time, looked at the garden, the green roof, it was sad for everyone, and I remembered that the time had come to say goodbye, and not just to the cottage. It was decided that at the end of August we would see off Anna Alexeyevna to the Crimea, where her doctors were sending her, and a little later Luganovich would leave with the children for his western province.
We sent Anna Alexeyevna off in a great crowd. When she had said goodbye to her husband and children, and there remained only an instant before the third bell, I came running toward her in her compartment in order to set on a shelf something from her work basket that she had almost forgotten; and we had to say goodbye. When our glances met, there in the compartment, strength of mind abandoned us both, I held her in my arms, she pressed her face to my chest, and tears flowed from her eyes; I kissed her face, shoulders, hands, all wet with tears—oh how unhappy we were about it! I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I understood how superfluous and small and illusory everything was that prevented us from loving. I understood that when you love, when you ponder this love, you must proceed from something higher, of more importance than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in the commonplace sense; or you shouldn’t think at all.
I kissed her for the last time, shook her hand, and we separated—forever. The train was already moving. I sat in the neighbouring compartment—it was empty—and until the first village I sat there and cried. Then I went on foot to my place at Sophina . . .”
While Alyokhin was telling his story the rain had ended, and the sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych went out on the balcony; from it, there was an attractive view of the garden and the stretch of river, which now shone in the sun like a mirror. They feasted their eyes and at that moment felt sorry that the man with kind, wise eyes who talked to them with such candour, who really did go round and round on this huge estate like a squirrel in a cage, wasn’t occupied with science or some such thing which would make his life more pleasant; and they thought how sad her face must have been, the young lady, when he said goodbye to her in that compartment and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had run across her in the city, and Burkin had already made her acquaintance and found her attractive.