No One

by George Bowering

  But in the kind of life I managed to lead, or rather to follow, a person has to learn the airplane passenger life by heart. This person has to keep busy with tickets and shoulder bags and paperbacks, so busy that there isn’t any time to nurture fear about the condition of vertical stabilizers and their electronic manipulators. Or, say, pilots with suicidal temptations.

  Fear is the subject, isn’t it? And if you get enough fear, you are in the place of awe. In recent years, non-readers have been using the word awesome as if it means something you like a lot, something that makes you wriggle your little bum in expectation of enjoyment. These people don’t read ancient texts such as the Old Testament, and if they did, they would be puzzled by a God who wants them to fear him. I’m saying that you are nowhere near awe if you are not stricken with fear right to your soul’s innards.

  So there I am in an airplane as so often happens, specifically in a CPA Boeing 747, just about forty thousand feet above the so-called surface of our planet. There are, what, four hundred of us humans in this big aluminum tube with wings, some of us working minimally, most of us asleep, the lights off. It is midnight, and we are crossing the equator and the International Date Line at the same time. Maybe we will slip out of time into something else altogether.

  I’m awake, and looking out the little window to my left, out and down, or really, is there a distinction between down and upward here, now? I don’t care. It is midnight, we are trying to enter a new day and a different hemisphere, and in addition to all this, there is a full moon. There is no land below us, and no clouds, just a huge powerful orb of water, it must be, shining full of moonlight, immense, somehow in space, empty but everything.

  When I was a boy and most of the adult world was trying to make me believe in the divine, they should have put me in this seat in this 747, looking out at this light in this darkness where I could lean on a wall that was cold as fatality on the other side of its centimetres.

  Ah, I said.

  Ah.

  That is not wine-dark, I whispered in the silent cabin. Never.

  Or maybe I whispered it to the sleepy head on my right shoulder. By the moonlight that was curious enough to enter our window I could see her closed eyelids, perfect lashes folded in what appeared at least a literary facsimile of innocence. As far as I knew, she was innocent as all get-out, which is not what I contemplated doing. At our two-hour stop in Honolulu she stayed with me, getting through stupid jokey discussion into what passed for serious talk about recent Canadian painting. She knew all there was to know about prairie landscapes and so did I, but I pretended not to, just to test her, just to see how she looked when she was looking inward to remember pictures she had seen in Saskatoon.

  We smoked cigarettes in the little smoking-permitted corner, and I kept looking away from her blue eyes. I wasn’t used to blue eyes, except in songs. These blue eyes in the middle of a long tiring voyage, that should have been exhausted or closed as they would be hours later, looked up at me because I am tall and she less so, and in looking up at me that way just about made me forget my voyage and go wherever they would be, go into them, if that is what they want, and yes, I am getting silly here. It’s all right. You are writing this story, not I. I am simply reading it.

  When we got back into the plane for the long southwesterly throw, I put my paperback Fitzgerald face down on the meal tray, leaned my head against infinity and slept, I think, for an hour. Before I went to sleep there was a homely old woman, harmless and friendly, sitting in the middle seat to my right, already in a little CPA blanket. When I woke there was a head on my right shoulder, but it was not hers. It belonged to a winsome freckled blonde woman and it featured another recently updated pageboy cut. According to Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom I had been reading on the way down to Los Angeles, this blonde head, sleeping or not, contained inside it everything that I was gazing, moonstruck, at outside my window.

  Here in the stratosphere, overlooking wide waters with imaginary lines across them, I could not have made an orderly sentence if I had been asked to. If she were to awaken, I would not know what tense to speak in, but would simply have smiled slightly and gestured toward the awesome scene.

  A wanderer, harried for years on end. Here I go again, I was thinking, somewhere in my thorax.

  I have wandered to the Antipodes quite a few times, and if you asked me what I liked best about the trip, I’d have to say the fact that you approach Cairns or Auckland or wherever early in the morning, so before land comes at last into sight you are eating breakfast, and this breakfast includes a bowl or plate of tropical fruit. Here’s something even better: the wakened blonde in the pageboy tells you she cannot abide papaya, especially with lime juice, and she has no objection to your spearing hers with your little white fork. Whether this is true or she is just trying to get closer to you, some extra breakfast fruit puts you in an excellent mood to assuage the tiring round-the-clock flight.

  In some parts of the former British Empire it is called paw paw. In Cuba you should not call it papaya because that is a slang term for a woman’s sexual organ. You should say fruta bomba instead. I always thought that sounded even naughtier.

  Anyway, as long as there are mango and papaya and pineapple and kiwi and guava and feijoa around, I can put up with the sheep these people choke down by the thousands.

  We fetched up at the University of South Australia, where for a week we would mingle with academics from all over Australia and New Zealand and Canada, and even a few from the USA. They were all there to tell each other what to think about Canadian literature and art, and use up the various kinds of dollars handed out by the Canadian department of foreign affairs. I was just trying to avoid such things as the last, but the academic world wanted me to enlighten them about the finer products of the human imagination, so there I was, along with a lot of other adults occupying the student quarters of a scenic uni, as they call it there, in Adelaide.

  As I hadn’t slept much over the previous twenty-four hours, or twenty-four and a half hours because of the half-hour time zone we were all dropped into, I got myself a little rest in the little bed they assigned me in a little room of one’s own one floor above the source of a most peculiar sound that repeated every half minute. Sounded like some liquid in some glass pipe in some echo chamber. It was a lovely sound to drift into while sliding into sleep by the Great Australian Bight.

  I missed the free lunch altogether, but woke in time to get to the student cafeteria to eat some animal for dinner. As luck would have it, our queue snaked right past a big stainless-steel cylinder in which one could espy small thin slices of greyish meat. Having missed lunch I did not complain when my plate was piled high.

  “What is the source of that unfortunate flesh?” I asked an Aussie in front of me.

  “It’s lem, might,” he said.

  Was he saying that it might be lemming? If they had an animal called a lemming here, it would not resemble much the lemmings of the Arctic. Or was his reply a reference to science fiction one way or the other, and hence a warning?

  I ate some anyway, and was pleasantly surprised by two contradictory facts: it was lamb, and it tasted really good.

  And there was, of course, pavlova for dessert. Fantastic in appearance but nowhere as pleasant to eat as feijoa or guava.

  It turned out that I found myself sitting between the Aussie with the information and the blonde with the new pageboy.

  “What,” I asked the Aussie, “stations itself outside your window and makes a sound like some liquid in some glass pipe inside some echo chamber?”

  He thought for a moment and then his eyes lit up behind his glasses. “That’s what we call a magpie. Doesn’t sound like your magpie at all. As to looks, he is white where yours is black and black where yours is white. More or less.”

  “Your crows — are they white?”

  “Now you take your possum. Our brushtail possum is a sweet little guy
who just wants to see what you left in your trash can. Your possum looks like a giant rat on methedrine.”

  “Isn’t it o’possum?”

  “That’s in Ireland, might.”

  “Hey, it’s my first day in Australia. I’m not ready for down-under humour,” I pleaded.

  “Pled.”

  “Wait! Who said that?”

  “I did. The reader.”

  “Hold on there. This is not that kind of book.”

  “What kind? What do you plead?”

  “I am just saying that this is an old-fashioned narrative. The main character is someone in the book, and the writer is someone outside the book. In life.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if we don’t have that separation, you would probably just think that all the sexual intercourse happened to the author, when really it happened to the fictional narrator. And we cannot really trust him to be telling the truth.”

  “And you can always trust the writer to be telling the truth?”

  “I am not going there. Also, I am not sure that you are right about pled as opposed to pleaded.”

  “I have noticed,” said the blonde with the new pageboy, “that there are a lot of animals and fish and trees and so on here in the topsy-turvy world that have the same names as some of those items in Europe and America, but they are clearly not the same kind of animal or plant. Not even close, sometimes. Like that fish you call a salmon.”

  “You’ve been to our continent before?” asked the Aussie.

  “No, I did my research before this trip. I am a responsible scholar,” she said.

  “My name is Brian,” said the Aussie. “And yours is —?”

  “George,” I said, “Something.”

  “Cecilia,” said the blonde. “If I am in a good mood, I answer to ‘Cissy.’”

  “Do people ever make fun of that nickname?” asked Brian.

  “Oh,” she said, “I have ways of handling those pigs.”

  Rather harsh, I thought.

  I thought that I would be hitting the sack early that night. I was jet-lagged as all get-out, and determined to get to the 9:00 a.m. panel discussion about comparative aboriginal feminist writing. But there was a permanent welcoming party in the university pub, and our Aussie hosts were buying the Coopers unpasteurized, so I felt that it would have been shameful to be under the covers rather than under the down under influence. Besides, we Canadians were ambassadors in a manner of speaking, and bore a certain responsibility.

  I would have learned a number of drinking songs that night, if I had been able to understand what the blokes were singing. I would have got into a darts game — or drafts, I think they called it — but I could not understand Aussie rules, such as throwing darts at your friends’ heads, or into the ceiling.

  Eventually I found my way to my little room, after a longish stop for a pee in the communal dunny. There would be another day for brushing my teeth and that sort of thing. I managed to get my clothes off, except for my socks, and I just flopped onto the top blanket of my little bed.

  “Good night, Sheila,” I whispered to the realistic hallucination of the short redhead I had talked to at the pub.

  “It’s not Sheila,” came an answering whisper from just inside the door, which had apparently opened and closed without a click. “It’s me from across the hall,” came another whisper.

  As she got closer I could see quite a bit in the faint light of the southern hemisphere. It was, of course, Cecilia. She was attired in a way I had never seen before. All she had on was a half-slip, but she had pulled it up so that the elastic top was above her breasts, and her legs were bare from high in the thighs down. When she got really really close, I saw that the breasts that the elastic was above were quite small, set apart and almost, you would say, negligible. And I had never been in the habit of neglecting breasts.

  I wasn’t all that wide awake, as you know, but I was in no danger of nodding off, either.

  When she traded the whisper for quiet speech, she spoke in a surprising little-girl tone, little girl asking for something she knew was not altogether a given. She was wearing almost nothing, however. I was glad not to be imprisoned below the covers of my little bed.

  “Can I spend the night here?” she asked in that surprising little-girl voice.

  Being as to how it was in a student dorm, the bed was not very wide, but we did spend the hours of darkness there. We did kiss. I did take off most of my clothes, and that half-slip did get pulled off over her blonde head, so I did rest a hand on her tiny breast, the standing nipple in the middle of my palm. We nuzzled and cuddled, I’d guess you’d call it, we two who barely knew one another, and no, she did not put her hand where you may be thinking, though that object did rise, I’d say, halfway up. I fell asleep with her sweet head on my chest, and in the morning she wasn’t there.

  We spent the week at the uni and in and around Adelaide. For the first time I had dinner in a town with a name you can read backward if you want to, this being Glenelg, where I asked why they didn’t spell it Glennelg. Apparently it is named after some place in Scotland, or maybe Mars. We had drinks one night in a farmhouse among the hills north of Adelaide, where for some reason I described a night in Austria where my Australian friend Tony had parked his car under a mulberry tree and we got into a mulberry-littered Volkswagen the next morning. Well, our host went out into the night and did not come back for fifteen minutes, but when he did he handed me a mulberry. The last one of the season, he told me.

  We travelled the city’s very straight roads in a marvellous streetcar.

  “I am holden on to this memory,” I announced.

  “Bile ducked when he saw that one coming,” said a Canadian friend with advanced literary taste.

  Cissy and I were usually together that week. One day we made rude jokes after we had put some of our lunch quiche on a patio rail and watched the kookaburras pick out the bits of ham.

  “Their national bird eats quiche,” I announced.

  “He’s a manly bird. Eats meat,” countered my friend Bruce.

  I heard a bird sound even stranger than the magpie’s.

  “That’s our national bird laughing at you Canadians,” said my other friend Brian.

  My friend Murray sat beside me. He had a jam jar in one hand and a pretty piece of plant life in the other. He recited a poem for us:

  Behold the lovely wattle.

  It’s the emblem of our land.

  You can place it in a bottle.

  You can hold it in your hand.

  Aussie humour is not often that gentle, but I love it. Who but the Aussies would invent a game called dwarf tossing, and then the even better dwarf bowling? I suppose that you are going to raise your hackles now, like the German lawmakers who banned dwarf bowling in some cities. Innocent-eyed outrageousness — the Oz folk are adept at that.

  You try growing up in a country where all the snakes on the ground and a lot of the creatures in the sea, and many of the plants coming up through the sun-beaten soil, not to mention the poisonous toads and murderous insects, are trying to kill you. If you don’t develop Aussie humour, you might as well go and see how long you can stand on one foot in the outback.

  They’ll teach a genial tourist to say, “Up your leg, Thelma,” when proposing a toast to a lady local, just so she can say, “Up yours too, Cobber.”

  Sometimes Cissy and I went to hear separate papers, and sometimes we skipped them altogether and headed on down to Henley Beach and a chicken shack there where I happened to know a guy from Saskatchewan who had improved his life.

  There were quite a few photographs in which we both appear, as there would be — unsurprising alert — in various conferences around the world. I am always surprised to see that I appear robust and perhaps noisy, while she always looks demure. I don’t often use that adjective, but there you go.

 
There may have been one night we spent in our respective rooms, but usually we found motivation to overcome the discomfort of sleeping two to a bed made for one healthy Australian student. Sleeping was our main activity, for some reason. I didn’t quite understand myself, but I admired Cissy for waiting. This was not the first time I had ever chosen cuddling over poking, but it was the first time I had ever done so while acutely desiring the latter. The U.S. poet Susan Howe wrote in her book about the bashful Emily Dickinson, “When I love a thing I want it and try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from the universal is the entrance into evil.” I think Cissy wanted me or it or some progress keenly. We never mentioned the name or existence of her husband, the famous actor who was not in South Australia, nor, as far as Cissy knew, in the southern hemisphere at all. I did not know him, but I had seen him tromping the boards dressed up as an unfortunate British king.

  On our last night before flying homeward, we went to bed quite late because of the Aussies and their hospitality. If you want to make friends with people who do so quite openly, find yourself some Australians. I think Cissy might have been a little tiddly, but I wasn’t. I was just a little excited and unable to sleep, the way you get the night before flying somewhere.

  Cissy was lying on her back, using almost all the square footage, so that when I returned from brushing my teeth, I was faced with the problem of sleeping space. The one sheet was somewhere on the floor, and so were her clothes, including whatever it had been she might have pondered wearing to bed.

  “Did Thorne Smith write this?” I asked out loud.

  There was no answer, so I did what any sensible middle-aged middle-class man would do. I dropped my duds to the aforementioned floor and approached the little bed from the direction of its foot. First I took hold of Cissy’s two bare heels and moved them apart, then farther apart. When there was a little room for me, I got up on my knees between those heels.