by Oisín Curran
George swirls the wine in his glass and sniffs and snuffles it.
His clothes and skin are wet with sweat, eyes twitch.
Now eat! he says.
The food is good. Very good. Cold soup, salad, bread. I eat and eat but then feel strange. Not bad but strange. George eats fast and then faster. He finishes before I take a few bites. He moves so quickly he’s a blur and his voice speeds and rises until I can’t understand it. Suddenly there’s a letter in front of me and George is gone. Confused, I read:
My dear child, it says, Fear not, all will be well. Unfortunately, I have to go. The big feathered thing outside told me I need to join it. Probably won’t be back—by the time you read these words, I’ll be long gone. I drugged your soup and wine—nothing dangerous, promise—standard stuff to slow functions for a voyage. Can’t tell you where you’re going or how long it’ll take. No idea where you’ll land. It’ll probably take a few years—usually does—but will feel like a week or so because of the drug. You’ll be lonely at first, but might end up liking it. No shortage of books to read! Food pantry is down the hall to your right...
I look up. Something fast and green in the corner of my eye. Plant. A plant! Shooting from the ground. A leaf uncurls and stretches. Snail sprints across it. I stand suddenly. Spider spins a web where I sat in seconds. All around me the jungle gropes and grows and rots and grows and grows, grows.
I stumble out and down the hall to the library.
For a long time, I don’t know how long, I sit in a big armchair, thinking about my luck. On the one hand it seems good —I’ve survived everybody I know. On the other I’m alone. Completely. Not just alone, but trapped, flying, or drifting, I don’t know where. I knew once. I could feel it. I don’t anymore. I’m lost in every possible way.
Air from somewhere moves a little, makes dustballs spin across the room. Silence. Silence. I’ve never heard so little. After a while even spiders make noise. Thread squeaks stickily from their bellies, snaps onto other threads. A little later flies die-buzz over and over. Death, death, death, death, death. I’m mineralizing. Barely living. Rook, Quill, George, an entire city, all dead. All for me. For what? For a half-life in a comet full of plants and books and dying flies?
I move. I have to, just to prove I can. A book lies on a small table next to the armchair where I sit. I pick up the book and walk out. I walk down halls, down stairs, through caves and caves. Big rooms with big faces carved in the walls. Faces as big as me staring out. Caves of food. Dried grains, dried fruit, dried mushrooms, canned everything. Caves full of machines that pump and whistle and turn. I climb down a ladder, through a pink mist. I hear waves lapping below the mist. Then I’m through. Below is a giant cave. The cave is a full of lake. Bright lake. The ladder ends above a skinny beach that curves around one section of the water. When I let go of the last rung and step on dark sand, I see why the lake shines. Pale lilac flames burn just above the water. The flames aren’t hot. I touch them. They make no noise. The quiet fire quiets me. I sit on the sand, open the book, and, by the light of the flames, read.
John Lennon was dead. New Pond was dead. It was Christmas Eve, 1980, and everybody I knew was weeping and had been doing so for weeks. The heroes of my parents’ generation had been murdered when they were young, but then assassination moved back abroad where people weren’t as surprised by it. The scions of the counterculture had kids and got down to making lives and livings and forgot about death.
Then Reagan was elected, Willard arrested, and, to add horror to absurdity, a madman shot John Lennon. All was lost.
We’d never seen so many grown-ups crying at once. It was disconcerting. We brought our parents hankies. We made them toast. We didn’t know what else to do. Were they crying for John Lennon or for New Pond? Both? Some of us cried in solidarity, or just because everything was so sad. And when we did that, our parents straightened up. They dried their eyes. They called a meeting.
From the podium at the front of the Town Hall, Bernadette was the first to speak.
Finally! she thundered. Finally we’re rid of that sick tyrant.
The rest of us sat on wooden folding chairs, listening. The great pot-bellied stove was burning full-blast and together with the heat of the sixty bodies a stifling atmosphere was generated—such that the great windows had been opened to the snowy night. Above us at either end of the hall the basketball nets hung gloomily from their hoops.
Bernadette went on, saying that we all knew what Willard had done, what he was, so why had it taken so long to reach this point, why didn’t we throw him out and broadcast his abuses? The worst of his crimes could have been prevented.
My family, she said, voice cracking, Has been laid low. We’ve been hit hard. Many of you have been screwed too, literally and figuratively. And whose fault is it? It’s ours. Mine, Bill’s, yours, all of ours. The damage he caused our hearts is on our heads.
Next came Blatsky, who questioned mournfully, our bitterness, after everything Willard had done for us, all the land he had given, all the time donated to helping us, to instructing our stubborn egos by whatever means at his disposal, and if we had chosen to misunderstand his methods, if we couldn’t understand where he was coming from, maybe we didn’t deserve to have him. But deserve or not, we should gather the money to post bail for him and beg him to come back. Certainly he would never survive in the outside world where simplistic moral conventions would grind him to nothing.
Iris couldn’t stand it anymore and began yelling from her seat.
Is it a simplistic moral convention to protect your children from dirty old men!?
The girl was hardly a child, said Blatsky. In many cultures she would already b—
But he was shouted down before he could finish and slid away in a lachrymose huff.
Although there were a few sullen stalwarts who shared Blatsky’s views, the consensus was against them. There could be no question of getting Willard out of jail nor of his return to New Pond—too much damage had been done and nobody was going to risk their children to Willard’s wayward hands.
What we need, Bojanowski argued, is a new Roshi, a new, untainted centre of gravity around which the community might orbit and grow. What good fortune, he went on, that we have an excellent candidate for the position in the person of Yoshida Roshi, himself a properly ordained master.
Yoshida sat calm and dispassionate, apparently indifferent to Bojanowski’s words—the very picture, in fact, of the Zen master oblivious to worldly ambition.
But here Myles rose and, red-faced, nervous as always when speaking in public, and perversely loquacious as a result, proposed via a lengthy analogy concerning the English Civil War, the regicide of Charles, and subsequent reign of that unmentionable monster Cromwell (may his name live in infamy for his crimes against Ireland), that it was too soon to appoint a new teacher, even if a new teacher were necessary. It was time, he thought, to take no action, to reflect rather on our previous inaction, which had led to Willard’s crimes. It was time to wait and let the bruises heal and then perhaps to reorganize ourselves, perhaps even without a teacher.
Bruises! cried Ms. Lum. They’re not bruises, they’re festering wounds, they’re chronic diseases.
Yoshida, meanwhile, had shown no reaction to Myles’s words, but it seemed to me that his expression had altered from disingenuous indifference to stony irritation. And in the end no consensus could be reached between those who wished to recall Willard and those who advocated the appointment of Yoshida, and so, by default, Myles’s proposal of actionless action was chosen with no ceremony to mark the event. The meeting dispersed with little friendliness and we went to Midnight Mass.
Midnight Mass! Not quite the high drama of Easter, but nevertheless entertaining, with its peculiar pageant and nativity enacted by toddlers—the miniature Mary and her Joseph stumbling over their robes as they made their way up the aisle holding a plastic baby Jesus ha
rdly visible through the billowing incense. The off-key screeching of the choir and the dismal electric organ ordinarily depressed me if we happened to come off-season, but this was a festival! All the lapsed and lazy and regretful Catholics turned out here with their dutifully baptized children for this, one of their twice-annual pilgrimages to the mother church (not counting weddings, funerals, and baptisms), and in this we were no different.
No, do not think that my parents returned to the bosom of the church for solace in the wake of the dissolution of their community. Every Christmas Eve of my childhood was passed in the illuminated midnight of that church, listening to the genial platitudes of Father Malenfant, while kneeling and standing and sitting and kneeling, not taking communion, for we had not confessed, nor for that matter had I ever been baptized (although it was suspected that Evelyn —Myles’s mother—had seized her opportunity when alone with my infant self to perform an emergency baptism and save my soul from perdition should death visit me early).
Perhaps Iris could have abandoned her native religion entirely but not Myles—through a tumultuous childhood of immigration and multiple dislocations, Catholic Mass had been a constant—a constant that stretched behind him (and behind me, as he liked to remind me) fifteen hundred years to the days of Colmcille and Saint Kevin, the latter being so friendly with God’s creatures that flies did him the favour of walking under the lines of text he was reading to help him keep his place (these flies linked in my mind with the thoughtful snails who allegedly crawled onto Siddhartha’s scalp to protect him from the blazing sun while he was sitting in full proto-Buddhic samadhi). Yes, Catholicism and Zen warred in Myles’s soul—the apophatic and the cataphatic, the chatty and the cryptic, the riotous and the ascetic—and it’s all very well to say that there’s no need for this war, that no conflict must exist, but saying it does not make it so.
I think of Christ, Myles said as we drove home through a gathering snowstorm, As a Bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who chose incarnation to help sentient beings and suffered for us much as the Buddha suffered through his multitudinous incarnations. Martyrdom has a long and highly reputable pedigree, but really Jesus, if there ever was an historical Jesus, was a mere pebble upon which the oyster of Church history formed the pearl of Christ, building the nacreous layers from the pagan traditions of Osiris, Zoroaster, Wotan on the Tree of Life, the Dagda, etc….
Iris, meanwhile, was chewing her nails to the quick to relieve her anxiety over the wretched driving conditions occasioned by the snowstorm.
Slow down! she cried at regular intervals. To which Myles would scoff that it was hardly a blizzard, there was no need to overreact. Just slow down, she would repeat and then stare out the window caught somewhere between sullen irritation at his rebuke and an attempt to will the panic from her body.
Oh! she exclaimed with pleasure as we approached the radiance of the Whites’ house, and Oh! An eruption of Christmas lights flung across the bushes and trees and lawn led to the double-wide trailer dazzled with illuminated snowmen and Santas, entire sleighs and even reindeer, and a great luminous crèche filled with donkeys and ducks, kings and their gifts, sheep and their shepherds. And then it was gone, a brief vision in the storm. At all other times of the year, the trailer squatted unremarkably on its little patch of immaculate lawn, biding its time for that brief annual winter bloom.
Our own house was more modestly lit, but Iris loved her lights. Christmas, as far as she was concerned, was itself a festival of light in the darkness of winter. Somehow, in spite of her health, she had managed to hang bundles of tiny white lights both outside and inside the house, where the small Christmas tree was nearly falling over with its burden of glimmering ornaments. Two days after Christmas we were to return to Boston for Iris’s checkup, and she had apparently decided to counteract her mounting dread with decorations and photons. Bells hung from every doorknob, tin angels twirled above candles, and although I felt myself too old for the tradition, I let her read “Twas the Night before Christmas” to me before bed.
The gifts the next morning were as follows: socks, mittens, camel bells, fudge, a Dover reprint of Lord Dunsany’s stories with hallucinatory illustrations by Sidney Sime, The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes, as requested, with the original illustrations by Sidney Paget. Myles received a book on etymology and Iris a volume describing the megalithic monuments of Europe, which she had ordered herself. She and I both unwrapped curios from Myles’s habit of buying up remaindered books (to wit: The Collected Letters of Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Complete Guide to Harness Racing, Rolls Royce: The Early Years). Then we ate banana bread sent by Aunt Carolina and sat about in our bathrobes reading our books while listening to a church choir on the radio.
How Myles and Iris afforded any presents, given their flat-lining bank account and mounting bills, is unknown to me. Cheques from grandparents judiciously spent, I think.
We rested carefully and thoroughly, for we knew the next day would be strenuous and long and distressing. We had Christmas dinner at the Krimgold-Gragnolatis. Although Bernadette was of Catholic descent, Bill was Jewish, so there was a menorah on the table, fully lit because by that date, the Festival of Lights was already over.
Iris was subdued due to her imminent checkup, as were Bill and Bernadette due to everything else—Athena refused to leave her room upstairs, Artemis ate with a disturbing aggression, and Apollo tried to keep up, but his effort was forced and he was so forgetful that he would often lapse into a daydream mid-chew. I chose to follow Artemis’s lead as well and ate with abandon, and Myles shovelled the excellent food down his throat with more than his usual disregard for nuance or flavour. He ate, as did all those of us who ate, as a way of forestalling dread and guilt. And also there was the matter of the delicious braided challah and the beautiful and multiple pies that sat in such splendour on the side table. Iris had little appetite—something I recall with chagrin since I only note it now in review; at the time I had little awareness of how fraught that time was for her, or I suppose I must have had some subliminal awareness that recorded the tightness of her shoulders, and the spareness of her appetite.
Halfway through my meal, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, which was upstairs. The hallway there was narrow and dark, and the door to the bathroom was closed, but just as I reached it, the doorknob turned and Athena came out.
She saw me and her eyes flickered away and down. I said hello and could barely hear her response. Her face, once incandescent, was grey. She moved as though drained of force. And I said nothing, did nothing but blush. I had always blushed when near her, always been speechless, but now my speechlessness was compounded by what had happened, what I knew, what I knew she knew, what everybody knew, and what I had done to bring it all about, and having no words seemed a further failing on my part. I wanted to speak, to ease her suffering, but it was beyond me. She stood aside, and I backed up muttering, Sorry, go ahead, but she shook her head mutely and waved me past.
The next day, St. Stephen’s Day, as Myles insisted on calling it, we set out early, yet not early enough, for Iris was in the car anxiously waiting while Myles rustled about shaving and packing last-minute notebooks and pens, amulets and talismans, and Iris honked the horn and sent me back into the house multiple times to urge my father on. Meanwhile he, with increasing agitation, turned in circles searching for socks, his wallet, a shirt, and sent me back to Iris with orders to extract the locations of these items from her, and I, a hapless double agent relayed the request such that she, with a yelp of incredulity, shot from the car to deal with the matter directly, only to see Myles exiting the house at a clip. As he leapt behind the wheel, Iris reckoned at volume that we would be late for her appointment, at which Myles scoffed that we would be early as he peeled out of the driveway in reverse, nearly colliding with a passing truck, and then we were rattling over the dirt road’s winter skin, with Iris informing Myles that she would far rather be late
than perish in a car crash, and Myles slammed on the brakes, clapped his hand to his forehead, and said, Oh shit! I forgot to feed the stove. Iris said with asperity that she had fed the stove as usual and in addition, as usual, she had made the necessary arrangements for a fire to be started every day to keep the plants from freezing. What did she mean, Myles wanted to know as he floored the accelerator, by saying, As usual?
It had been, and always would be, one of Iris’s complaints that while Myles planned parties, it was she who ended up preparing for them. And despite her still-convalescent state, this was the case once again. But when she complained, Myles countered that she was not including the time he had put into brewing the beer for the event, nor the countless phone invitations. She said that he loved nothing better than talking to people on the phone and that he had brewed the beer as a matter of habit.
Thus was I inducted into a pattern of family behaviour in which I helped Iris to compensate for Myles’s failings (in my view), or in which I participated in the tasks and duties of household work that children should be obliged to carry out (in Myles’s view). In short, I cleaned a motley assortment of wineglasses and beer mugs that had acquired a thick, sticky coating of dust from disuse and woodsmoke.
We had returned from Boston the day before, and the news was good. Iris was healthy and there was no sign of cancer. A jubilant Myles had said, as though it were the inevitable and incontrovertible conclusion to be drawn from the situation, that we would have a party.
Upstairs, Myles put in phone calls from coast to coast to each person he could think of. He even called Saint John to invite Bayo, who was glad to talk but couldn’t leave Canada until he received landed immigrant status. In the meantime, he’d gotten his work permit and was putting in punishing hours at a bottle factory and had found a cheap place to live nearby.
Downstairs, Iris moved about methodically sweeping and scrubbing and tidying, and whenever Myles took a break from the phone, she put in yet another call to yet another government department to discuss how she could possibly pay her mountainous medical bills. She would be redirected elsewhere and given a new phone number to call, but before doing so she would return to cleaning for a while, pausing only to yell up through the floorboards to Myles that he must pull himself away from his piles of books and half-written essays, to which he roared back that she must calm down as there was no need to lose her cool over a party, but her words dug him out of his trench and he began frantically bottling beer while pondering aloud how they were to make enough Irish coffee and in what cups they would serve them, and Iris said with irritation that she had secured a coffee machine from the historical society/volunteer fire department/garden club and Charlotte and Jane were bringing paper coffee cups and this was just typical of him, always so last-minute, and if it weren’t for her losing her cool then the party would be a disaster because he certainly couldn’t be relied upon—Was he listening to her? No, he was tuning her out. To which he replied that he’d been tuning her out for ten years, why stop now?