by Oisín Curran
Hours of near-death struggle and before that the outrageous adventures of the expedition, and now, an end I never saw coming: riding the back of a murderous fish to the bottom of the sea. And straight down I see the twinkling lights of my city growing closer. Will they collect my bones, the citizens down there? Place them in some museum they keep of the castaway corpses who fall from their sky? I need to breathe; I need to breathe, knowing, of course, that the water-breath will be my last. Yet the ocean is so warm it seems not water at all, but the thick air of a city summer. I have the sensation of riding the back of some great bird. I feel feathers under me, black and wild, the shark’s nose is a beak, its head the head of a hawk; and looking down I see the wide waterfalls of a wide river washing through the middle of the city.
A lodestone in my belly lights and pulls. City. I gasp—inhaling a lungful of dirty wind. It smells of lilacs and gasoline exhaust, and I think I can hear cars honking far below.
Now the bird stops its headlong plunge and flattens out into a languid downward spiral. We’re level with high-flying gulls. They wheel and fling themselves through columns of air around us as we drop, my creature and I, to the city below. Now I can make out a park, and as we sweep down under its treetops, I spot a young couple—a man and a woman sitting on the grass. I know them. And at the same time I understand that the creature beneath me is no longer a bird. Its wings beat too fast to see, and my hands grip exoskeleton behind spherical eyes that sparkle in the light. I’m skimming over blades of grass aboard a fly. We close in on the couple where they sit enjoying the spring air. And the fly and I keep shrinking, and as we shrink so does the speed of our flight and we are no longer two but merged into a single thing, a fleck of dust not flying but drifting forward as the man speaks; the woman throws back her head and laughs, and I am smaller and smaller still, nothing at all now but a speck of light barely moving, slowly spinning in the warm spring air between them.
Our tiny house was radiant. Here was the hour I loved best—the hour of floor soap and new candles. They lit the shining floors and the dark, spotless, wavy old window glass and here and there were bowls holding narcissus bulbs that anchored slender green stalks atop which balanced small white flowers exhaling spring into winter night.
Iris and Myles were sitting, sharing a beer. I wandered up and down, absorbing the sheen of cleanliness draped over the interior of our house like a coat of fresh paint. Put on a record, Myles said, his voice dark and warm. Yes, said Iris, Put on the Dubliners. No, said Myles, the Wolfe Tones. No, I said as I sat down at the piano and began to play “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” A knock at the door, and I jumped to answer it. It was Bill and Bernadette and Artemis and Apollo and, to my surprise, Athena. She was still pale, but less so. She stuck tight to Bernadette but accepted, stiffly, my parents’ embraces. Then Rinzai, Soto, Poe, Herbert, and Emilia were piling in behind, and I took the kids upstairs to my room, where I situated them with a set of dominoes and taught them Mexican Train. I heard the hubbub growing steadily below and the tuning of fiddles and guitars. By the time I made my way downstairs, every step was packed with a minimum of three people and it took me twenty minutes to thread my way across ten feet of floor space. Bill was bowing wildly at his fiddle while Athena’s fingers flew up and down the keyboard as Bernadette turned the songbook pages for her and there was somebody with a guitar and another with a ukulele, but I couldn’t make out who in the crowd. Jack sat near the musicians, his face finally looking like him again—his sunken eyes were almost happy. Passing through a rare open space in the far corner on an elliptical route to the door, I overheard Herman Bojanowski lamenting to Iris that while he knew Willard had to be deposed, now the community was rudderless, adrift.
We were at the centre of the universe! he cried. Now we’re in outer space.
No! shouted Iris over the noise. We were never on the map at all—we were nowhere, that was the problem. Now we’re somewhere!
Uncomprehending, I moved on, noting that the pickled string beans I had disgorged from the jars where Iris had so carefully stowed them in August were not being eaten. People were sticking to beer. Gnawing on a bean, I squeezed my way outside, free of the stifling party heat.
Two extremely drunk men were heaving snowballs at each other, staggering backwards and sideways with each throw. A half-moon idled behind the thick curtain of cloud that covered the sky, and so I could not distinguish their faces, but they were yelling at each other in sharp staccato barks, and from their voices I deduced that it was Yoshida and Willard cursing each other in Japanese. Or, at least it sounded like cursing. They might have been having a civil conversation, for all I knew. It was characteristic of Myles to have invited Willard to the party in spite of everything—but inexplicable to me that Willard would have accepted. Had he no sense of shame? Maybe he had come in hopes of winning back his flock, maybe just to hold this snowy duel with his ancient rival.
I left them to their combat and wandered out to the road to marvel at the dozens of cars that lined its shoulder for nearly a quarter mile on either side of our driveway. Out here the volleyed shouts of the Roshis and the noise and music of the party were muffled. I breathed deeply, taking in the last, sharp lungfuls of the year.
Tomorrow, January 1, 1981, the decade would begin in earnest. At the stroke of midnight everyone would cut their feathered hair, taper their bell-bottoms, narrow their collars, and buy new stuff. No more repair jobs. No more making do. No more denim patches. All the big old rusty cars would be traded for small, shiny ones. In a few days, impossibly, Ronald Reagan would swear his oath of office. The ragged edges of happenstance and invention would continue their unsteady but ceaseless retreat before the radiant plastic tide. I could only hope this tide, like all others, would come and go.
A shadow in the snowbank. My Shadow? No, of course not, Shadow was dead, had been for months now. She retreated, too. Familiar welling in my gut, up my chest, my throat, my nose, under my eyes, where it pooled and pressurized. A practised flip of thought would deflate the sob before it burst. I’d gone this long without crying, why start now? But she was fading out, and I knew suddenly it was now or never because my cat, my cat, I wanted her back. If I didn’t cry for her now I’d never cry again, I’d be as frozen as all this snow under which she lay, lost, my particular cat, my weird little cat who could only be held in one position (horizontally, with feet against my stomach) but would otherwise step from the fridge-top to my shoulders, where she rode fearlessly, growling at all comers until she leapt off and pranced and tossed her head like a pony or darted after toys with psychotic intent or clawed her way sideways across the living room rug or crawled happily under my bed’s fitted sheet, loudly purring, no more, no more. I would never hear that happiness again.
Shadow was dead, Simone was dead, New Pond was dead, Willard rotten, Athena hurt. Iris lived.
Iris would live!
I gulped air and found I’d doubled over in the shadowed snow. My knees were soaking wet and frozen. So was my face. My tears slowed. To cry was to cry, nothing more. My mother was alive after all. And she was going to keep living, as she’d promised me she would.
Standing there in the snow, I looked up through freezing tears at the dark matted silhouette of pointed firs and spruce and beyond them the dimly backlit clouds through which I could see no stars, nor the blinking lights of jets, nor the fixed signal of a passing satellite. I wondered what else sailed past unobserved: how many planets carrying the bones of loved ones from another life, how many meteorites crashing to earth trailed by giant feathered ghosts, how many comets bearing children who sit in shock by burning lakes as they come flaming through the atmosphere to be born?
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Harp & Altar for publishing an excerpt from an early draft of this book. I must acknowledge A Brief History of Moonspring Hermitage by Sarah LeVine and Morgan Bay Zendo, which was an invaluable resource. A grant from Arts Nova Scotia p
rovided a much needed financial boost at a critical point in the writing process. I want to thank my excellent editor, Malcolm Sutton, for patiently nudging me to complete this project and for providing such insightful notes, suggestions, and queries throughout. And my gratitude also to head thugs Jay and Hazel for their ongoing efforts to bring unconventional work to light. This book, or any book of mine, would not have been possible without my parents, who surrounded me so completely with love, books, and the love of books that I experienced literature via total immersion. Lastly and above all, my endless, fathomless love and thanks to Sarah Faber, my first and last reader, without whom this book couldn’t have been dreamed up, never mind written; and to Fianan and Neva, who daily leave me speechless with gratitude.
Colophon
Distributed in Canada by the Literary Press Group:
www.lpg.ca
Distributed in the United States by Small Press Distribution:
www.spdbooks.org
Shop online at www.bookthug.ca
Designed by Malcolm Sutton
Edited for the press by Malcolm Sutton
Copy-edited by Stuart Ross