Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I was looking into the heavily made-up face of the television reporter.

  “Hi!” he said. “How long has it been since you came out of the closet?”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I was marching for a free Quebec.”

  I turned and headed back the way I had come, my face burning.

  I had nothing against homosexuals; I believed they deserved all the rights they could get, and now that I knew how it felt to be called a faggot by someone who really meant it, I had a new perspective on the whole matter. It had hurt, and I wasn’t even gay.

  But I vowed that if I saw that French-looking guy again, I was going to teach him a lesson in international relations.

  I met Annie again at six that evening.

  “What did you do today?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “Walked around.”

  “I heard there was a big march today,” she said. “Did you see it? We wanted to go, but we were too busy.”

  “You wanted to go?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we—well—do you know what it was about?”

  “The march?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said quickly.

  I thought I understood then. The shaved head, the sexless appearance, her general anger at all things male and masculine. The Palestinian women.

  Annie was becoming a lesbian.

  “Look at this,” I said, producing a magazine I’d bought at a bookstore. I had to change the subject because there was a sick feeling in my gut suddenly that I could not explain. Oh, don’t become a lesbian, I pleaded with her silently. How are we going to get married if you’re a lesbian? The magazine looked to be a literary journal, but I couldn’t be sure because it was in French. Lesbian! No!

  “Le Journal des Lettres,” she read out loud. “It’s local. They publish short stories.”

  “What kind of short stories?” Are you already a lesbian?

  Annie shrugged. “Any kind, I guess,” she said, leafing through it. “Why?”

  “How good are your translating abilities?” You’re not in love with those weirdo Palestinians, are you? Are they in love with you? Oh God.

  “You mean from English to French? Why?”

  “Do you think you could translate my story about Willie into French?” Don’t, don’t, don’t, I begged her in my mind. We’re not all like your father. I can be good to you.

  Annie pursed her lips. “Well, I suppose I could. I could do it literally. But I’m not sure it would still sound like a story. It wouldn’t be as good as it is now.”

  “Maybe it would,” I said. “Don’t sell yourself short.” Shit. It’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve gone over.

  “I don’t know. I’m not too good at idioms yet.”

  “What do idioms have to do with it?” I gave up my internal monologue. It probably was too late, I realized. Maybe this is how it really is supposed to be.

  “You need them to tell a story,” she said. “They’re like sayings. Or just a general feel for the language, I guess. And to do that you have to really know it.”

  “Will you try it?”

  “Are you thinking of sending it to these guys?” She tapped the magazine with a chapped and reddened finger. The Palestinians had Annie doing dishes constantly, and it was beginning to tell on her skin. Some women’s libbers they are, I thought indignantly—taking advantage of her age, working her like a dog. And taking advantage also of the fact that she’s here illegally. I wanted to say something about it, but I held my tongue. I didn’t want to start tearing down what little progress she’d made in building a new life.

  “Well, I’m not having any luck in America,” I said.

  “We don’t say ‘America’ here,” she giggled. “Say ‘the States.’ It’s a little less dramatic.”

  “Whatever. Will you do it?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “But I can’t promise you it’ll be any good.”

  “Trying is good enough,” I said. “I have faith in you.”

  She smiled at me shyly, her chin supported by one slender hand. I had a flash of how she was going to look when she was older. She’d be one of those women who attracts attention to herself without trying, just by existing, the kind of woman who radiates a certain calm purpose in everything she does, and she would be beautiful besides. And she would have children. I was certain of it.

  “Nobody ever tells me that,” she said. “That they have faith in me.”

  “You’ve been hanging around the wrong kind of people,” I said.

  “I was born to the wrong kind of people,” she said, and her face darkened for a moment. I recognized a storm approaching. We’d agreed that we were never, ever going to discuss her father again. She’d decided she would reserve that for the therapist she knew she would need someday. When we were together, it was my job to help her forget about it.

  “Drink your beer,” I said. “I’m taking you to a movie. What do you want to see?”

  She smiled.

  “Return of the Jedi is playing,” she said. “We can make the beginning this time. I hope you don’t mind subtitles.”

  We spent the rest of that evening and the next several evenings in the same way: we walked, sometimes holding hands and sometimes not, and slowly I learned of all the little niches of Montreal that Annie had claimed as her own. They were frequented by others too, of course, but in my eyes the very fact that Annie was in a place made it hers and simply on loan to everyone else. She loved bookstores, cafés, parks, or just certain building facades, patches of sidewalk, concrete stoops that made her feel a certain way when she was near them, for no particular reason at all. She’d spent her first two weeks in Montreal just walking, she said. It hadn’t been cold then, and she’d needed to know if she could be comfortable here.

  “If you ever want to know a city, just walk around it for a while,” she said. “Smell it. Listen to it. Every city has a mood of its own.”

  I thought this so lovely I wrote it down in my journal.

  My last night we lay next to each other in bed, not speaking. In the last eleven days, I’d crammed more sights and sounds into my poor provincial brain than it had ever known before, and now that I was going home in the morning I felt a keen sense of loss. Life in Montreal was just too exciting. But gradually I began to fall asleep, and as I often do when drifting off, I had a waking dream.

  I was standing in the cemetery of St. Jude’s Church in Mannville, where Mr. Simpson had been buried and where five generations of Manns already lay. We’d accumulated an impressive amount of tombstones since our arrival in the New World, and I stood now in my dream looking at them, reading the inscriptions one by one as I’d done a hundred times before. This time, however, there was a new stone that I had never noticed. It was shuffled in with the rest of them, standing between Grandpa’s, which he’d already placed years ago with the date of his death left blank, and my father’s, which was not truly a tombstone because there was no body beneath it—it was only a memorial, his body never having been recovered. I peered closely at this new apparition, puzzled that I’d never noticed it. It was covered with a kind of writing I couldn’t recognize.

  “You’ll be buried here someday,” said a voice, “and so will I.” I turned and saw not Grandpa, from whom I would have expected such a speech, but Doctor Connor. He was standing next to me in his white coat, his hands folded respectfully in front of his crotch, as though we were in the midst of some religious service. “I knew you before you were born,” he added.

  I turned and looked again at the new tombstone. The writing, I saw now, was Japanese. The characters blurred before my eyes, and then resolved themselves into English letters for a moment before they blurred once more and went back again. They read, “Enzo Fujimora is a very old man.”

  A shock of recognition went through me as I read the name. Enzo
Fujimora was the fighter pilot who had Willie’s diary.

  “He’s not dead yet!” I shouted happily to Doctor Connor. “Connor! He’s still alive! He’s still coming with the diary!”

  But he was no longer standing next to me. In his place was Grandpa, and he said nothing but gave me a quiet, frightened smile.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Then my eyes opened. Annie was shaking me gently, shushing me. “You’re having a nightmare,” she said. I struggled into a sitting position.

  “Where are we?” I asked, confused.

  “In my apartment,” she said. “In Montreal. You were having the Rory nightmare again.”

  “No,” I said. “This wasn’t a nightmare.”

  “Well, you were shouting.”

  “What did I say?”

  “They weren’t words,” she said. “Just shouts.”

  “I don’t have the nightmare anymore,” I told her. “Neither does Grandpa. It wasn’t the nightmare.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” she said, but I imagined she was looking at me strangely.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said.

  “I wasn’t looking at you like anything,” she said, but whereas I had imagined it before, now she really was looking at me strangely. “Are you all right?”

  “It was a different kind of dream,” I said. “Something’s happening.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have to go home.”

  “You’re going home in the morning.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said. I got up and began throwing my belongings into my bag. “I have to go home right now.”

  “Billy, you’re still asleep,” said Annie. “Get back in bed.”

  “I’m not asleep!” I said.

  “You’re confused, then. You had a bad dream. Now get back in bed. It’s freezing outside and we’re not walking to the bus station in this weather.”

  But perhaps I really was asleep because, although I remember clearly the dream itself, my memory of this conversation is hazy, and I have no memory whatever of what happened next. Annie claimed, in a letter she wrote to me after my return to Mannville, that I said to her, “You used to be my mother, when we lived before, and that’s the only reason I’m going to listen to you,” and then I got back into bed and dropped instantly into unconsciousness. That had given her pause. Actually, she said, it did more: it spooked her so badly she was unable to get to sleep for several hours. My tone had been so intense, so convincing, that she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up, and she’d been chilled to the bone despite the layers of heavy blankets on her bed.

  “Sometimes,” she wrote in the same letter, “it’s not easy being friends with a psychic.”

  Morning came and I awoke refreshed and rejuvenated. We breakfasted on hot coffee and cold falafel, courtesy of the Palestinians, who’d betrayed no emotion upon my arrival and who showed exactly the same stoicism now that I was leaving. I bid them each farewell in French, as politely as I knew how, and Annie and I walked together to the bus station. I wouldn’t remember the dream until later. Just now I was dreading my return to Mannville and the boredom I was sure was in my future there.

  “No sense in you waiting around with me,” I said. “You ought to get back to work.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you ever coming home?”

  “I am home,” she said. Her eyes were suddenly wide and glistening. “I thought you understood that.”

  “Force of habit,” I said, cursing myself for my careless words. “I meant coming back to Mannville.”

  “No. I’m not.” She stood with her arms folded in front of her thin chest, looking up at me both in defiance and in expectation.

  “I think this is great, what you’re doing,” I said because I sensed she was waiting for me to say something. Despite Annie’s bravery and fortitude, her plan needed my pronouncement on it, either my blessing or my condemnation. But I would never condemn her for what she was doing, even if I thought the Palestinians were taking advantage of her. For her it was a question of survival, and I knew she would go on living alone in Montreal no matter what I said about it. And she would do it until she was done, and ready to go on to the next thing. “Really. I wish I was doing it too. I’m jealous.”

  “Consider my life for a moment, you dipshit,” she said, smiling wanly. “How could anyone be jealous of me?” But her smile contained a hint of relief, and I was glad I’d said it.

  “I guess I just wish I had more time with you,” I said. I drew her to me and held her tightly for several moments.

  She said into my ear, “Thanks for coming.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I said, releasing her.

  “It means something to me,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I was really nervous about it. It was like…my past meets my future, you know? I was afraid there would be a collision or something. But there wasn’t. It worked out just fine.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure it would.”

  “I could tell.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry I was such a bitch when you first got here.”

  “Forget about it,” I said. “I understand. Don’t forget to translate my story.”

  “I won’t,” she promised. “Tell your grandfather I said hi.”

  “Oh no!” I said. “I forgot the picnic basket!”

  “It’s still at my place,” she said. It was too late to go back for it; my bus had just pulled up to the loading dock.

  “Oh man,” I moaned, “Grandpa’s going to kill me.”

  “Over a picnic basket?”

  “That’s my picnic basket. The one I came in.”

  “You mean when you were a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I always thought you were speaking figuratively when you told me you were delivered in a basket!” She was laughing.

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said. I wasn’t amused. “Listen. That basket is the only thing I have to remind me of my mother. It’s the only thing I know for sure she touched. I have to have it back.”

  “I’ll send it to you.”

  “No! It might get damaged in the mail. Or lost.”

  “I’ll pack it up good,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Please,” I said. I was surprised at the sudden upwelling of panic I felt in my chest. “Please be careful with it.”

  “Jesus, I will,” she said. “Don’t you trust me?”

  I was suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  A garbled voice came on the loudspeaker and announced my bus. “Toronto-Buffalo-Erie-Pittsburgh and points south,” it said.

  “Sometimes we get hooked on things,” said Annie.

  “I’ll write to you a lot,” I said.

  “I’ll write back.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Annie?”

  “Yeah?”

  Are you dyking out? Will you ever love me? Will you always hate men? Will we ever be together? Will you marry me? Isn’t there something I can do to make things all right again?

  “Bye,” I said. I couldn’t say those things to her—not now, not ever.

  We embraced again and I got on the bus. I found an empty pair of seats and sat by the window. My panic over the picnic basket had subsided. I amused Annie, and distracted myself from my own despair, by putting my lips to the glass and puffing out my cheeks, until we pulled out and headed, as the announcer had said, for points south.

  It wasn’t until we were well under way that my dream of the previous night began to filter back to me in little bits and pieces. I wrote them down in my notebook until I was sure I had the whole thing recorded in the proper order. There was one line of Doctor Connor’s that puzzled me greatly. He’d said it before in his office, too, while he was plea
ding with me, pained, to give up the noun formula of writing, but it had borne more significance in the dream than it had in real life. It was “I knew you even before you were born.”

  Connor believed seriously in reincarnation. He’d told me more than once of his belief that souls travel in flocks, like birds, following each other from life to life just as swallows go from tree to tree. Our roles may change, he said, but the souls stay the same; someone who was your brother in a past life may be your best friend in this one, or your sister now may have been your wife in ancient Rome. He pooh-poohed my objection that this would be incest. “What matters is that the souls are together,” he said. “The bodies themselves are insignificant, and so is what you do with them.” Any number of soul combinations were possible. He even believed people changed gender from life to life, as easily as people change clothes.

  But I didn’t believe in reincarnation. That is to say, I’d never paid any attention to him when he talked about it, and I never considered it when I thought of how I was connected to people, such as Annie or Grandpa or Connor himself. It would come as a great surprise when I received Annie’s letter telling me what I had said my last night in her apartment, about her being my mother in a life before this one. Ordinarily I would have put it down to the fact that I was sleep-talking, or at least only semiconscious. But now I began to wonder what Doctor Connor knew, what he might have been hinting at. His knowledge had always seemed limitless to me; there was no subject upon which he couldn’t discourse at length. He knew about medicine, cars, politics, economics, both world wars, all major religions, most of the great Western thinkers, and a few Eastern ones. I’d no trouble convincing myself that his learning had finally exceeded the bounds of the physical world and gone on to encompass the mysteries of the afterlife. I couldn’t wait to talk to him. I would ask him point-blank what he meant by appearing in my dream, for I was talking myself into believing that even that power was in his repertoire.

  Back in Mannville, I was met at the bus station by Grandpa and Mildred. Grandpa looked as if he had not slept in days.

  “You leave for a while and the whole fucking world falls apart,” he said, his voice cracked with fatigue. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Billy, but Connor’s dead.”