The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  “Ian,” she said at last.

  She had turned towards me and I could see her face now in the moonlight. For a brief instant the child had returned. We were twelve again. We were kids who played near the shores and picked up sand dollars and put stranded starfish back into the pools. Then it was gone, and she was Gwen, the older one who dazzled in sunlight and walked in grace.

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  She didn’t say a thing. Her eyes had swallowed me. She dropped the jacket now and slowly stood up, inches from where I knelt. She stood full before me now, the moon at my back, and I could understand that she wanted me to see more than just her beauty. Her breasts were round and full, magnetic above my face, and the skin over her stomach was smooth and taut. It was like the smooth morning sun on the skin of the horizon when the sea has gone perfectly still. I could tell by the way she placed her hands on either side of her stomach that she was trying to tell me something. Still stunned by the intensity of the moment, I leaped to the portent. Remembered the talk at school. I had never heard the words myself from Burnet, only the jokes, the rumours.

  My hands seemed to move of their own accord as they reached out and touched those two delicate hands. Leaning forward with what I thought could be my final breath on earth, I rested my head gently against her beautiful belly and then kissed her just above the navel. I could feel her shake with a spasm of sobbing and heard her begin to cry but I didn’t move, didn’t let go. Kneeling there on the wet sand and getting to know this mysterious, dangerous girl for the second time in my life, I whispered, It’s all right. Everything is going to turn out just fine.

  There was nothing more to be said that night. Things were going to be all right. I knew it and I knew that I would somehow take charge of this situation. The old Ian, the rescuer of dead grandfathers, would make something good come out of this. I was filled with a sense of responsibility and necessity and returned to the land of the living.

  In the days that followed, Gwen and I walked to the bus together. We talked in soft serious tones in a language that was different from the rattle of nonsense spoken by our peers. And we met at night, out along the same sandy cove, where we walked and we talked.

  “It was my idea,” she said. “I could have told Burnet no, but I wanted him.”

  I was probably the stupidest kid my age in the world when it came to matters of sex. Sure, I thought about it. I knew other guys who bragged, including Burnet, but in my company he had never said anything about Gwen. Yet I had believed I understood what sex was all about. I was a kind of romantic pervert, I suppose. I ached for love. I ached to be in love and my mind was fixed on Gwen. If I had thought of having sex with her, it was always because that would be the natural thing so closely tied in with that deeper feeling. The other guys spoke about sex so differently — “fuck ‘em and forget ‘em” was a sort of macho anthem that I heard over and over. The code of the male destroyer. Only this time Burnet the destroyer was also the creator.

  “How come you didn’t do anything to keep from getting pregnant?” I asked.

  “I wanted to but Burnet said that it didn’t seem as natural that way.”

  “What a jerk,” I said. “Why did you listen to him? How could you do it with him?” I was really mad at her arid she looked hurt.

  “I wanted to,” she said. “I just wanted to, that’s all.”

  I swallowed my anger, my pride. I tried to erase the awful image of the two of them screwing. That’s the verb Burnet would have used. It was certainly not lovemaking. “Did you love him?” I asked. I guess I wanted all the pain just then. I wanted her to pick up the hammer, pick up the metal spike and drive it straight through my heart.

  “I think so. I’m not sure. I knew it was you I should have been in love with but — I guess it was him. I can’t explain it.” She came over to me and took my hand, held it up to her cheek, wanted me to look her in the eyes, but I couldn’t.

  “Do you think he loved you?”

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t know if a guy like Burnet will ever feel real love, not until he stops hurting so bad. That’s part of why I fell for him. I knew that beneath his tough exterior he was very vulnerable. I think I believed having sex with him might help him in some way. It sounds crazy, but I thought it might make him more caring, more compassionate.”

  “Guess that’s why he decided to go to Vietnam,” I said, the acid of my dark sarcasm carving a new chasm between us. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  She pulled her hand away, started to inch backward.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that.” I picked up a handful of sand. “What about now?” I asked. There weren’t quite tears in my eyes but I felt the sting of their presence. I would hold back. “Do you still love him now?”

  She shook her head no, but it wasn’t convincing. I wondered if she had any idea of my hurt, my pain. Is that what it would take for her to fall in love with me? I deserved as much pity as Burnet. If pity would make Gwen love me, I would cut off my arm and scream in pain until she was willing to com-fort me, to love me, to make love to me.

  Fortunately, my good sense prompted me to say nothing. If silence, the inability to express myself, had been my worst fault of late, it was also to be my saving grace. I pulled her back to me — or at least this other Ian did, this Ian with good sense, who had suddenly transcended the boy. He wrapped his arms around Gwen, he kissed her on the neck, he whispered in her ear that he loved her and would do anything to help her and that he didn’t care if she loved him or not, that he’d always be there.

  28

  Gwen had not told her parents but she told her grandfather, crazy old Duke who seemed to sparkle with good natured vitality ever since he had arrived on Whalebone and accepted his new identity. He was an easy guy to talk to and I understood why she told him. He was never judgemental and always somewhat askew, never direct with an answer. His answers, like his opinions, were cloaked in mystery and beauty.

  “I explained everything and asked for his advice,” Gwen said as we walked home from the school bus that had let us off at the bridge. We walked past the barking hounds of Burnet’s house. We could hear his old man yelling out the door for them to shut up, heard him fire off a string of foul curses like machine-gun fire. I gulped, wondering what Duke could possibly have to offer.

  “He said that there are always waiting souls in the great soul bank. Sometimes they come into the world, sometimes they don’t. Usually it’s not us here on earth who have anything to do with the decision.”

  “What’s a soul bank?” I asked.

  “I asked him the same thing. He just quoted something from William Wordsworth — ‘not in entire forgetfulness… but trailing clouds of glory do we come.’”

  “Trailing clouds of glory,” I repeated. It had an eerie, deja vu feel to it. Of course, it was something Duke would say, part of the great mystery of who he was. What exactly had he been before he ended up on the street? A professor? A poet? Himself trailing clouds of ragged glory from his street life outside Grand Central Station? “What do you think he was trying to tell you?”

  She looked a little glum. “I’m not sure, really. I think he meant something about the baby.” It was the first time she really said the word and a chill ran down my spine. It’s incredibly odd how there can be such a big gulf, a huge distance, between the idea of being pregnant and actually having a baby. “I think he was implying that if I have the baby, a soul will come into the world; if I don’t have the baby, the soul will still be out there and come into the world another time.”

  “You’re pregnant. You are going to have a baby. What else is there to it?”

  She hung her head. “Think about it, Ian. Vietnam, nuclear bombs, China, assassinations, dictatorships. A father who gets his kicks by going off to war to kill people. Does it make good sense to bring a baby into the world right now?”

  I tried to sluff it off. “You’ve been watching too much TV. Look around,” I said, sw
eeping my arms around at the blue sky, the yellow lichen-covered rocks, the exotic, wind-sculpted spruce trees and juniper. The air was filled with the tangible smell of clean salt air laced with bayberry and other delicate maritime perfumes. “Look at this. Where’s the murder? Where’s the bloodshed? No assassinations here. This is a great place to bring a kid into the world.” Once again Gwen had ripped me out of my little fantasy cocoon of safety and happy endings. I thought I had it all figured out. I had never said it, but I assumed that I was going to marry her or at least live with her. That she would have the kid and I would be the father. Happily ever after. I was refusing to think about the bastard Burnet who I had tried to flush out of my memory. In truth, I secretly wanted him to die in Vietnam. It was part of the package. Part of happily-ever-after. “It’s not your decision, “ I said to Gwen. “We’re going to have the baby together.”

  The birds flew over — gulls, sparrow hawks, a sweep of plovers. Gwen had grown deaf. “Could we go talk to your friend, the doctor? I’d like to talk to Ben Ackerman.”

  I looked up at the plovers, now arcing off to the sea. I had to stop myself from saying out loud what was going through my head:Ben Ackerman is not a real doctor. “You want to see Ben?” I asked. “Why?”

  “I want to know about my options.”

  “What options?”

  “I want to know if I can not have the baby.”

  “I think you should talk to your parents first,” I said. I knew her mother and father would be reasonable. I also knew they would try to talk her out of it. “And I think you should tell them I’m the father, not Burnet.” This was a very important point to me. Yet another lie I wanted to add to my life. I don’t think I even cared any more that Burnet was the father. I wanted it to be my baby.

  She gave me a look of soft defiance, but behind it I saw the fear. What exactly was she afraid of? What was it that had sent her out into the cold water the other night? A fear, deeper than anything I could understand, a sad, haunting despair. She had told me nothing about her actions. I had wanted to believe it was just a test of herself, something she could not explain to me. Something I could never fully understand.

  “Were you really trying to drown yourself?” I blurted out.

  “I felt like I had thrown everything away. I wanted to change the world and if I had a kid now, I would be bringing up a child in a world that was ugly and cruel and full of hate. If I have the baby, I won’t be able to make this a better place. Once it’s better, then I’ll have kids. I’ll have ten of them and you can be the father.” She sucked in her breath. “No, I don’t think I would have been able to kill myself.” She looked almost embarrassed now. “The water was too cold.” She laughed at the absurd point she was making. “People who are serious about killing themselves slit their wrists indoors in bathtubs full of warm water. It’s hard to explain, but I just needed to do that. I needed to push myself a little, to toy with the idea and to feel the pain. You weren’t supposed to be there.”

  Did I believe what she was telling me? I don’t know. But she had brought me back to a possibility more frightening than any I’d tried to understand yet. I suddenly forgot about the invisible baby, the sweet martyrdom of my fatherhood. Gwen was mysterious and unpredictable in ways I could never fathom. I was suddenly aware that somehow in all this mess I could lose Gwen. She might simply vanish from the island, from my life. And I could not let that happen.

  “I think we should go see Ben now.” I said.

  He was wrestling a section of framed wall into place when we arrived. It would take him forever to build this house. He was too much of a perfectionist and it was slow going. Gwen and I walked across the floorboards and I grabbed onto the wall to steady it as it wobbled in the breeze. Ben smiled at us both, picked up a level and began to readjust the framed section so it was perfectly vertical. He began to hammer it onto the subfloor. When he was certain it was anchored, a great grin of satisfaction came over him. One modest item had been set right in the world, one fraction of perfection achieved. He threw his hammer down with a loud bang on the floor and rubbed his hands together. “How are you two kids doing?”

  “Gwendolyn’s pregnant, “ I answered.

  Ben pulled three nails out of his nail apron and studied them as he rolled them between his fingers. “That’s a bomb-shell,” he said.

  “I’m thinking about having an abortion,” Gwen said. “I’d like your advice as a doctor.”

  Ben gave me a puzzled look. I don’t think he had considered himself a doctor any longer. No one had called on him for medical advice in quite a while. I think he was happy to have grown out of the lie and into another role: the world’s slowest, most meticulous and grudgingly perfect house builder.

  “Abortion laws were beginning to loosen up in New York State when I was leaving the profession.” Ben looked at me, silently asking for my compliance with the lie. His voice, how-ever, had assumed a cool, clinical tone like he had used at the nursing home in New York City. “My colleagues had per-formed some at the hospital. I had been involved in one or two emergency situations. I’m no expert. How far pregnant are you?”

  “Fifty-two days,” she said. She knew exactly the night. It had only been once.

  “If you want an abortion, then it should be soon or it will be much more complicated. Have you thought all of this through? It’s an important decision.”

  “Yes,” Gwen said immediately.

  “Are you sure it’s the right thing?” He was looking more at me than her now. I think he was shocked to think I was the one who had made her pregnant.

  “Yes,” Gwen answered again.

  “Do your parents know?”

  “No. It’s my decision.”

  “I think you should discuss it with them.”

  “Would you be willing to give me an abortion here on the island?” Gwen asked.

  “I would be breaking the law. But even without that, the answer is no. Why do you want one?”

  “I’m too young. I want to live more of my life more first. I want to help stop the Americans from killing people in Vietnam. I want time to change things, to make people see how bloody cruel they are. I want to fix up the world as best I can and then have kids. Ian understands.”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I do.” It ‘was so odd again to see my father in her, to recognize that same flawed, possibly fatal drive to improve upon the human race somehow, to take the whole global problem in hand and fix it. I would never understand this deep-seated motivation. Now, in order to stop the killing in the world, she would have to postpone the arrival of one new soul into it.

  Ben shook his head. “I think I understand what you’re saying but I can’t help you. I’m not licensed in Nova Scotia to practice medicine, certainly not abortion and abortion is not legal here. I think you should go home and discuss this with your parents.”

  I guess I knew then that Ben had ceased, once and for all, being a doctor. It seemed to cause him pain to be brought back into the difficult moral arena that medical decision-making created. He walked across the floor of his someday home and picked up two two-by-sixes and began to measure them, marking them with the T-square and trying to pretend we weren’t there.

  “Thanks. Bye,” Gwen said as we walked down the plank to the ground.

  “Why can’t you tell your parents?” I asked her. “They aren’t like other kids’ parents. They’re smart. They don’t see the world in black and white. They’ll understand how you feel.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my mother wanted to have an abortion once. She was young and pretty and thought she had a career ahead of her as a dancer, maybe an actress. Then she met my father. She got pregnant and decided to have an abortion — it was illegal in those days, of course, but she had found a ‘safe’ clinic in Las Vegas. She was all ready to go. My father was in Alamagordo making new bombs. He went to see her, found the note she had left for him. He drove to Nevada and stopped her. He f
orced her to go back to New Mexico. He convinced her to have the baby, and she resigned herself to it. They ended up getting more serious with each other and getting married. “And somehow a little tiny soul waiting in a soul bank some-where had its way and came into the world.”

  I tried to think of a world without Gwen. Now I could begin to see the difficulty of her situation.

  “But this is different. Very different,” she asserted, rubbing her hands across her face. “I need to make the decision. Correction. We need to make the decision. What do you think we should do now?” The ball was back in my court because I was inextricably involved in the game.

  “C’mon,” I said. “There’s somebody else on the island we can talk to.”

  29

  My grandmother was the most no-nonsense woman who ever walked the face of the earth. A woman who possessed warmth, kindness and compassion, she also possessed that rarest human quality: common sense. We arrived while she and Jack were drinking tea and discussing a book they had both recently read and admired: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.

  “We need your advice,” I began, looking at Bernie. “It’s of a private, medical nature.” I lowered my eyes but hoped that Jack would get the drift.

  Jack, always humble, always willing to slide out of this century and back into the days of pirates, scraped his chair back and said, “I have some reading I need to do anyway. Good to see you again, Ian.”

  But Bernie grabbed him by the cuff. “Stay, Jack,” and turning to Gwen, “I tell Jack everything, anyway. That’s the way we are. No secrets. No weapons. Everything plain as the nose on your face. That’s our relationship. So he might as well stay.”

  Gwen gave me a shrug. She trusted me. I trusted them. Maybe pretty soon the whole island would know. Gwen wasn’t really all that troubled about that. She was probably infinitely different from a thousand other North American girls who got pregnant. She wasn’t trying to cover anything up. She just had her priorities. Fix the world, then have a pile of kids. She looked down at The Feminine Mystique sitting on the table.