by André Babyn
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just start it now.”
* * *
“Durham. Town of ‘X’-thousand (the number’s too small to matter). Located one and a half hours out of Toronto, in the exact centre of nowhere. The centre’s centre? Not by accident, it’s the precise location where Principal Chalmers parks his 1999 ‘Woodland Pearl’ Toyota Camry on the Upper Canada Secondary parking lot.”
Some laughs.
“Like a zen koan, the question inevitably repeats itself: ‘What can anyone say about Durham?’ Is it possible to film a documentary on the nothing that this town is? What, if anything, is being filmed? … Durham wasn’t my first, or even my second, choice for the topic of this documentary. In fact, if I’d made a comprehensive list of all the things I wanted to produce a documentary on, Durham would be right at the very end, footnote to triple-z omega, double-bracketed, point-six font. But, like everyone who ends up in Durham, I ran out of options, and was stuck with the one topic I couldn’t escape. Durham: sinkhole, vortex, labyrinth, perpetual eye of the hurricane, leaking storm shelter, closed harbour, mirror world, fallback option, no one’s first choice — ever, emptiness, tabula rasa, sound of one hand clapping, home.”
My documentary started with shots of the town. Main Street, the school parking lot, shots out of my bedroom window, from the town bus that sometimes ran from the senior’s home to the strip mall. Cars passing on the highway late at night. The bar on Mill Street, lit up in neon. The empty library. The park on the edge of town.
“But even if Durham is nothing, it’s where I grew up. It’s probably where a lot of you grew up, too. People live here and that’s what makes it important.” Sweep of the cafeteria. Shot of Huddy eating lunch. Parking lot of the strip mall on Main. Shot of cars filling up at the gas station. The sun rising over my street on the Sunday morning following the fight. I knew I was bordering on cliché. I hoped that it didn’t matter. “It’s where my brother grew up, too. For those of you who don’t know, he died two springs ago. I’m not going to talk about that. I don’t want to. I can’t. Instead, I’m going to talk about an accident that he had when we were kids, which took place in the little forest on the edge of town, a forest that no longer exists.” I’d climbed the jungle gym to get a pan of the recently razed land. “It doesn’t look like much, but even in the middle of nowhere, in the most mundane places, stories happen that are worth being told.”
I buried my head between my knees, staring at the carpet. I didn’t want to watch the documentary and I was afraid of looking up at my classmates. I stayed that way until the end of the movie. It was eerily quiet and I worried that everyone was sitting in shocked silence, completely at a loss for what to say, united in their displeasure.
There was clapping once the credits ran. I didn’t move. To my ears it felt forced, muted. I only looked up when Wright walked up to the VCR and ejected the tape.
“Well,” he said, “that was certainly something.”
My face fell. I was sure he hated it.
But he saw my reaction.
“No, Kent,” he said. “I thought that was really good.”
There were murmurs of assent from the rest of the class. Stunned, I walked back to where I had been sitting. Lauren punched me lightly in the shoulder. She was smiling.
“Buddy,” she whispered. “Nice job.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m glad I’m going tomorrow,” she continued. “Can’t compete with that.”
“Jesus,” I said, trying to hide my grin.
I was so relieved that I didn’t even notice who was up next. It was Walid. For a minute I worried about what he had said outside class. What if he hadn’t done his documentary on Watt? What if I was the subject of his movie? I cringed, expecting the worst, wondering if I should leave the room. It didn’t seem fair that my relief could dissipate so fast.
But I didn’t have to worry.
“As some of you know,” he began, “my dad works at Headwaters.” That’s the hospital in Orangeville. “So I decided to do my video on him. As much as I could.” He popped the tape in. The screen opened on a fluorescent-lit corridor. The word MRI appeared on the screen, then separated, reading Most/Radical/Images. There were some laughs.
The rest of the documentary was pretty much as advertised.
I guess I’d underestimated him.
* * *
I found out what Walid had been alluding to during a break after his video. I was talking with Lauren and this guy Mark from our class. I didn’t know Mark very well because he mostly hung out with the skaters, but I liked him because he usually understood my jokes. He said that Walid had caught our fight on tape, and that he’d been showing it around earlier that day, playing it off his camcorder.
“The whole thing?” I asked.
Mark nodded.
My stomach dropped.
“But it looked like you kicked his ass,” he said.
“Really?” asked Lauren, turning to me.
“No,” said Mark. “It was pretty bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Walid destroyed me.”
“Good try, though,” said Mark.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re not much of a fighter, are you?” asked Lauren.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“That’s good,” said Lauren. “Fighting is dumb.”
My heart skipped.
“I, uh, also hate fighting,” said Mark, looking at Lauren.
I briefly wondered whether something was happening between them.
“Do you want to not fight later?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Mark. “In the parking lot, after school.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Lauren laughed.
I decided that I didn’t care that Walid was sharing the tape. I probably could have got him in trouble for that, but it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t care that people knew. I mean, maybe I would have cared if people made a big deal about it, but no one had, except Walid, I guess. Most people, I thought, wouldn’t.
That turned out to be an accurate assessment. Maybe it would have been a bigger deal when I was younger. I remembered when Yanni Caucescu beat up Scott Michaels in grade ten, and how people had made fun of Scott for weeks afterward because he had taken a huge swing at Yanni and totally whiffed, landing on his face. Maybe I just hadn’t embarrassed myself when I was getting beat up.
I felt a little bit proud of myself for that.
I was more concerned about Lauren and Mark, because it turned out they were actually dating. Or that they started dating pretty shortly afterward. I found out two weeks later, when I saw them holding hands in the cafeteria after school. One night I wrote her a long email, explaining that I had feelings for her, or thought I might have. I said that I felt hurt by the fact that she didn’t feel the same way about me, that she’d jumped into a new relationship without exploring whatever was happening between us. Oh god, I wish I’d written that out as reasonably as I just did now. I was angry. But I didn’t send it. I let it sit on the computer and then I watched some television and went for a walk and when I got back I deleted it. I didn’t want to lose any more friends. It wasn’t really any of my business.
I got an A-plus on the documentary, my first in almost four years of high school. It felt good. But also kind of hollow. It was nice to get the validation. But I also didn’t think it mattered, not in the way I thought it would. I didn’t even tell Mom.
Wright pulled me aside after handing our grades back.
“I want you to submit your documentary to the contest,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, surprising myself.
He looked confused.
“I think it’s really good,” he said. “You have a real chance to win. Seriously.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“I don’t see what there is to think about, but okay,” he said, giving me a long look.
I left the classroom quickly, and took a few minutes i
n the hallway to compose myself before heading to my locker, pretending I was looking through my bag. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to share my video, even though I knew it was good, even though I might have been able to use it to get out of Durham, at least in a small way. I thought about that for a long time. Maybe I wasn’t ready to go. Which was stupid, I thought. I needed to go. I had to leave. I told myself that I would submit the video.
But I never did.
Two
Sarah’s Part
None of them were injured and at first they denied that anything unusual had happened at all. May said, “I thought it was just a dream, so I kept on going.”
— Joy Williams, “The Blue Men”
1
I was trying to understand life and death, but everything was a tangled mess.
I was doodling on the edge of the notebook, writing my name in cursive, over and over: Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Outside, rain pounded the drooping willow in our front yard, its limbs whips rattling in the wind. In the chapter of Evie of the Deepthorn I was currently writing, the water was coming down so hard that Evie thought she was blind. She was slipping through the mud and grabbing at trees to propel herself forward, digging huge black ruts in the earth with her boots. A long way back she’d become separated from her horse, Excalibur, and she could hear his mournful whinnying as he made his way through the brush. But she didn’t know if he was right or left, ahead or behind her.
I needed to understand life and death because I was stuck on the book. I didn’t know how to write anything that hadn’t happened to me, and so the things I did write came out flat. Except the sections that were based on things that I had actually experienced. Like rain. Like confusion. Like slipping in the mud. But I couldn’t have Evie wandering through the forest in inclement weather forever, forever alone — that would get boring.
For me, too.
There was lots of death in the book and I didn’t know how my characters were supposed to react. That was a major issue. It all seemed so arbitrary to me — would they burst into tears? Go insane? Get angry? I had no idea.
The previous summer my mother and I had gathered the branches that had fallen from the willow during a similar storm. Mom had seen someone twist them into baskets on a TV show. The woman on TV wore a checkered blue shirt with a little red bandana tied sweetly ’round her neck. I remember passing the television and thinking, “That person is too twee to live.” But I secretly envied them for how together they looked. I knew it was all on the surface, or at least that’s what I hoped, but I was so far from being even together only on the surface that I felt like a member of a doomed second species, meant to live in caves and serve her kind on hand and foot.
I felt so ugly moving on the earth. I could never figure out the right kind of clothing to wear or the right way to style my hair. So instead I tried my best to be anonymous, to not stick out, to wear things that wouldn’t mark me in one direction or another.
Sometimes sticking out is the worst decision you can make for yourself. Especially when you don’t know what you are.
Especially when everyone else knows you don’t know.
Anyway, we’d gathered the branches after the storm and put them in a big bucket in the laundry room. I remember looking up at the tree afterward with a kind of sadness. It had lost a lot of branches since we’d moved in. It had been majestic then, reaching from its full height of roughly thirty feet to the ground. My mother thought my dad wasn’t watering it enough. My dad thought the change was due to the neighbours paving their driveway (it had been only gravel before). I guess it didn’t matter what the issue was. Now it was thin and spindly and if you didn’t know it was a willow you might think it was any other kind of tree, though nearer to the top the branches were still long enough to make rainstorms more dramatic from my window.
The willow seemed a kind of symbol, like it stood for the way a person is stripped and made emptier with the passage of time. Some days I had the ridiculous notion to take the fallen branches and stick them back on, like with a staple gun or something, as if that were enough to turn back the clock.
After watching the TV program about willow baskets, my mom went out to Home Hardware and picked up a book on crafts you could do at home. It had a picture of the same woman from TV, with her mouth open and a crescent of cool white teeth showing coyly between her lips. A little sticker, too, in case it wasn’t obvious, reading: AS SEEN ON HOME & GARDEN TV.
When I saw the book downstairs, left in a prominent location in the kitchen, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. Somehow I knew that it had been left out for me. I tried to hide it underneath a stack of tablecloths, trying to make it disappear as casually as possible, like it was an accident, or like I was, but two days later Mom told me that she wanted me to help her with a special project. She said that we needed to spend more quality time together. She said I was getting weird, sitting upstairs alone in my room. That I would scare boys away if I cast too many spells by myself.
Getting weird?
I wondered, exactly, what boys I had scared off were going to come back once they heard that I was doing weekend wicker-basket projects with my mom.
But either way, I didn’t cast spells. I had a couple of polished Tiger Eyes that I picked up at the alternative place on Main, little polished orange-and-brown stones, and I think that’s what she was referring to. They don’t have anything to do with magic or witches or anything like that. I just think they’re pretty. And I like the idea that carrying around a pebble in your pocket can increase your blood flow and your self-awareness, which is what the little card at the store said that Tiger Eyes are supposed to do. They’re supposed to calm you. I mean, I don’t necessarily believe that, but maybe I also do, in a way. It couldn’t hurt.
In any case I’m not a witch. And I don’t pretend to be.
Maybe things would be better for me if I were.
I knew what she meant about getting out of my room, but it was the principle of the thing. She said I was being a brat and that she was trying to be nice to me. That if I didn’t even hang out with my mother I was going to lose all of my social skills and then who would love me?
I got through about half a basket before it yawned open like that egg thing at the beginning of Alien. Except instead of spitting out a xenomorph it just fell apart. It was really frustrating. I didn’t have the patience to fix it and everything I tried just made it worse. Mom told me to be quiet and stop complaining and start again — but with less attitude — and instead I threw the basket across the room. It broke into about a million pieces, the branches scattering in every direction. That felt really good. Even though I knew when I threw it that I was irrevocably bad. Like I was crossing a threshold that meant I was everything Mom said I was. But it also felt like I couldn’t have done anything else — like I was always going to break the basket. Like I was forever trapped in that action. It’s weird to feel fated to be ruined and to want to do better but also to enact that, over and over.
Then I stormed upstairs while Mom threatened to take away my TV privileges and my computer. What did I care?
“Sarah, I’m warning you!” she called up the stairs. “Sarah!”
“Fuck you!” I screamed, from the top of the stairs. “Fuck you! ”
Not my proudest moment.
Then she grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back to the kitchen and told me to clean up the mess and I said, “No, no, no, fuck you, fuck you!” and I squirmed away and ran out of the house. Just like that, without even shoes. I made it about a block or so before stopping to take off my socks, not that it mattered by then. They were grey and green from the grass and the asphalt. Then I wandered around barefoot, shy of seeing anyone, feeling stupid and deeply broken, until enough time had passed that I thought I could sneak back in.
I liked writing about Evie struggling through the rain, but I was scared of where she would go and what would happen to her there. Who she would talk to and how they would act.
When I
wasn’t actively writing, I was thinking about all of that and watching the grass shimmer in the rain. We hadn’t cut it in a long time and it humped over, rustling and swaying in the wind. It was pretty. Or at least I thought so. Mom kept asking me to cut it, but I didn’t want to do it because that was usually Dad’s job. I thought she should do it if she cared so much.
I don’t know why Dad had let it grow so long, but I thought that maybe he was depressed.
Maybe I felt a bit depressed, too. I hadn’t wanted to do much but work on my story and look at my computer or out the window at whatever was going on out there. I had one hand on the windowpane and one hand on the lamp turned on over my notebook. The lamp gets hot, but not quite hot enough to burn. If I put my hand on it as soon as it turns on and wait for the heat to come it sort of cools down, or seems to. I mean, I can do it, somehow it’s tolerable, as opposed to waiting until the light’s been on for a while and burning my hand as soon as the hot metal touches my skin.
There’s nothing I like better than sitting at my desk when it rains and looking out the window, except opening it a crack and getting into bed and pulling the covers up and listening to the water run down the house. I know that means I’m just like every other quiet teenager on the planet.
And I don’t mind that, either. It’s nice to feel at least in one small way that I belong.
Here’s what’s going to happen in my story, in case you’re curious. Evie is going to save the whole kingdom. She’s going to kill Llor, the ice queen, and cleanse the Deepthorn of her legions. I knew that before I started writing.
Evie of the Deepthorn is not going to be postmodern, or depressing, or whatever. It’s going to be the opposite of that kind of book. It’s going to make people feel better about their lives instead of worse. When readers get to the end of Evie of the Deepthorn they’re going to feel like everything makes sense in their lives, like there is order in the universe, like cruelty can be reversed.
I’m going to feel that way, too.
* * *