by André Babyn
Those dreams were confusing. Sometimes I would wake up and realize I was wet, ashamed because at some point in the dream Richard had turned into Jess, which felt weird and made me worry that I was gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay. I just didn’t want to be. Not for any good reason. Now I don’t know. Probably I’m not. Sometimes I woke up afraid — gasping for air, struggling against my sheets — because Richard had turned into something else. A kind of shadow — tall, gangly, with long hair, that would stalk me through my dreams. Familiar — something I knew but couldn’t quite catch. It was a fear that felt big, and primal, like it had always been there, vibrating at my very core.
In the morning after each of the dreams I would sit with the two feelings — the euphoria I had felt with Richard, the fear that came in the other dream.
I didn’t know which one to trust.
I couldn’t trust either.
It felt rude to see Richard in the hallway and to know that he was going to talk to me, and that despite everything I told myself it was going to mean so much more to me, even if I startled and ran away. Even if I startled so much and so often that that’s probably what he’d come to expect, forgetting his original object, instead content only to say a few words and watch me gasp for breath and turn my four knotty limbs against each other on the cheap tile.
In any case, before the end of grade nine Richard started seeing someone named Noreen. I saw their love blossom in the halls, and they became a serious couple, one of the few that have stuck, a union of two names that seem older, like they are fated to be, Richard and Noreen, and by the next year we were strangers again in the hallway. It was even worse seeing him then, with my face blemished — not only because it changed something he once might have liked, but because it felt like what had been in me the whole time, that he hadn’t seen, but I’d known was there, what I’d been afraid of, had finally made its slow, oozing way to the surface for everyone to witness.
* * *
When my dermatologist prescribed the pills that began to tame my acne he asked me first whether anyone in my family had a history of depression. We were sitting in his second examination room on the third floor of a nondescript office tower just off of 89. It was September and felt like summer still or maybe it was early October and unusually hot. I remember my bare legs sticking to the plastic of the little bed they make you sit on, even though he’d also pulled a thin, paper cover over it. The window was open and the heat was oppressive and it smelled like car exhaust from the highway, and the fluorescent lights were burning my eyes. He had been both dismissive and efficient, authoritative, when looking me over: itemizing my condition, asking me whether I had any acne on my back or anywhere else. “Yes,” I said, to all of his questions about the location of the outbreaks. “Yes, yes, yes.”
A history of depression, he had said. It rang in my ears.
No one had been hospitalized or ever tried to kill themselves. At least not that I knew. His question had made me kind of scared — like to answer it I would be revealing myself in a way I wasn’t prepared for, even though I’d given him everything else he asked.
I said no.
“Good,” he said. And he asked me my weight and then took out a pad and started to write out a prescription. “In certain cases, the pills I’m going to give you have been known to exacerbate depression. To make it a little more intense. Let me know if that happens to you and we’ll switch you onto something else. But this is the most effective stuff.”
I nodded. He kept writing, then turned back to his computer and fiddled with his charts.
“You should know, there have been some claims that that kid down in Florida was taking this, but it’s not entirely true. He stopped treatment about a month before he killed himself.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t heard about him.
“In other words, don’t worry about it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s no significant evidence.”
I nodded.
“It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
I didn’t care. That was the price of a smooth face.
And back, which I hadn’t even considered before, though of course.
He finished whatever he was doing on the computer and explained the dosing schedule. Then he sent me back out into the office, where my mother was waiting. When we got home I Googled the name of the medication, Florida, teenager, suicide, and I found an article about a kid who had stolen a Cessna and flown it into a Tampa office tower. A note found in his bedroom claimed that he was operating in concert with Al Qaeda (it wasn’t true) and that he was trying to turn the upside down right side up. America was oriented in the wrong direction, according to his manifesto.
I looked at the photographs of the office tower and the suburbs that surrounded it and I thought that everything did look upside down. I printed out the photo and turned it upside down and hung it in my room, just above my bed. It stayed there for a couple months, as I kept taking my pills every morning and evening, as my acne started receding and my face started to get clearer, so much so that even Ross noticed and said it was a huge improvement, though I hated him for saying anything, until one day the poster disappeared when I was at school. Mom had taken it down, telling me when I got home that it was morbid and that she worried about me.
But it felt true.
My cousins on my mom’s side used to live in Brampton, in a huge residential tower on a street of huge residential towers, high and wide and clear and bright, with ornate lobbies and concierges and underground parking lots. But in between them pavement, empty lawns, tiny trees and shrubs, and the howling of traffic going by on Highway 10. The rush of cars constant, ever-present, like the sound of blood rushing through veins. When we got out of the car sometimes I imagined the buildings being excavated a thousand years in the future and the assumptions the archaeologists would make, and how they would miss the one thing that was crucial to understanding what it was like to live there, the machine hum and throb, like the wings of fibreglass zephyrs swooping and diving, and I wondered what they missed now in the digs out in ancient Mesopotamia or in the Mexican desert that you could never even hope to reproduce, the dim, menacing rumble of a world hundreds of years removed.
It all seemed upside down to me, in the same way that the photo of the office tower in Tampa did. Now my cousins live in a little upscale subdivision in Waterloo, but when they were in Brampton we would sometimes walk over to the corner store to grab a can of soda, and I remember those walks being endless, us so far from the thing we wanted, even though that thing was nominally part of the complex from which we originated. The scale was not human — you were meant to drive. What was a blink in a car was a whole afternoon on foot. The avenues were wide and the distances between things large.
It was like we were walking on a treadmill, moving endlessly with only the slightest shift on the horizon. I think it took us something like forty minutes each way.
I remember in the car on the way home I paid more attention to the strip malls and suburbs that we passed on the road out, seeing the distances differently than I had before, when they had been innocuous blurs, quickly accessible via right or left turn signal.
I thought then that there was a menace to the distance that had been erected, the distance set up between everything. My cousins’ home had always been its interior, intimate and warmly lit and engaging and varied, and I hadn’t spent any time assessing its outside. I felt grateful to live in Durham, a place that was maybe nowhere, but was at least for human beings, with a main street off 89 with churches and restaurants and little stores and close houses and mature trees. But I could see Brampton on the horizon, or what it represented, in Durham. I could see it even though it was over an hour away, with the new developments on the north side of town and the new gas stations and the promised shopping centre that they were going to build south of the highway.
What will it be like to live through so much change? I wondered, at the
same time that I was almost afraid to find out.
My dad had been upset about some of the new development and I hadn’t until then been able to understand his anger or what it meant, only thought about the future fast-food chains and convenience that would come with them. But it felt after to me like an eradication heading straight for us, a nothing that was coming and going to turn us upside down. To concentrate us and pin us, smouldering, to the side of an office building in Tampa.
4
Ten years later, and I still feel like I’m living in the upside down.
I’ve been having this dream, lately. I’m walking in a deserted landscape. Everything’s grey, twisted, destroyed. A layer of creepy fog brushes against my legs. Excalibur is with me and I’m holding the reins, leading her somewhere, although I’m not sure where. The ground is loose, uneven, and I keep stumbling, though I never fall. But my shoe catches on something and when I look down I see a woman’s hand sticking out of the soil. I don’t scream, because for some reason it makes sense. Like I should expect to see it. Instead I carefully brush the soil from what turns out to be Evie. Evie’s lifeless body. Evie in her ragged leather armour. Looking peaceful, like a dove. I hear a voice.
“Ho! Hey! Mush!”
My father, dwarfed by Excalibur, is sitting astride the horse, trying to tell her where to go. He points to the horizon, where a city, silhouetted by a falling star, or a nuclear explosion, ominously waits for us.
I told this dream to my psychologist, who asked me what I thought it meant.
“That’s your job,” I said.
“But it was your dream.”
“So?”
“So you know better than I do.”
We sat there in the quiet for a little while. When this happens she usually asks me where I’ve “gone” when I finally bring my eyes back up to her.
As if I was anywhere else. I’d been intently examining the carpet pattern.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was thinking about my dad.”
“You miss him.”
“Of course.”
“Where do you think he was pointing you?”
I hadn’t considered that. It was only sitting on the GO Train later that I thought about her words again, and my dream. I was taking the train out to the suburbs, where I would board the bus that would take me to Durham.
From my apartment window in Toronto, facing east, you get a comparable cityscape to what I saw in my dream. Before the sun has risen, when the sky is just slightly coloured, the buildings that make up the downtown black obelisks in its light. But I was certain that it wasn’t a sunrise in my dream. Closer to sunset, but not that either.
I wasn’t sure what it was.
* * *
I keep choking on this weird feeling that caught me again as I was staring out the train window. A feeling I can’t name but that’s been bothering me ever since I agreed to come out here, and maybe even before that, too. It’s the same feeling I get reading Kent Adler’s book Homesickness, except when I’m reading Adler’s poetry that feeling is somehow something I want to have. It’s a feeling of imminence. Like something is coming and I don’t know what.
But it’s big and it’s going to change a lot.
The poem that most affects me like this is “October 23, 2012”:
Heeding the birds
As a car peels out
I locked the garage
An entire flock
As a bear moves
Shaggy with death
And car horns
Heard in delirium
Waiting for the light
Of a passing vehicle
I feel like I know exactly what he means. Like I’m with him, waiting to be overcome. He was from Durham, too, so I think he understands. Except for Adler the poem was set in the future, his future, a future I think he knew would never arrive, and for me it’s my present, more or less.
Tom thinks it might help me to do meditation. He’s always putting on bells or chimes on his phone or on the computer or on the stereo (his mom in Victoria sent him a Buddhist chimes CD in a care package last April) and telling me to close my eyes and breathe. Usually I resent it; it’s none of his business, but I tried doing some on the train. I did the one where you picture yourself at the bottom of a pool of water, each exhale a stream of bubbles carrying your troubles away and to the surface.
It was a little difficult getting settled. The train was crowded and I’d been facing two middle-aged day traders or securities executives or bank robbers or whatever, loudly gossiping about their colleagues or their rivals or both, talking tactlessly about moving crazy sums of money from one account to another. The numbers they used really were astounding, casually referring to amounts I never thought were possible outside of news reports, more money than I could ever dream of seeing.
Before a seat opened up and I was able to sit down I stood next to them and watched their stubbled chins move over this landscape, so foreign to me, with a confidence and lack of self-consciousness that I’d always wanted and never known.
And never would know.
Seated I tried to imagine myself under a great quantity of water, placing myself in the midst of an immense cool blueness, nourishing and safe, like a blanket of amniotic fluid. But no matter how hard I tried to imagine the toxins rising out of me with my exhalations, bubbles rising and bursting on the surface far above, I just couldn’t concentrate on my breathing. I couldn’t still my thoughts. I couldn’t go where I needed to go.
Whenever I opened my eyes and caught a glimpse of my neighbours’ tailored suits, trendy coffees, muted accessories, and expensive-looking phones — I got angry, angrier than I had any right being. The water I was trying so hard to peacefully bury myself under turned to a fierce boil. Instead I took a book out of my bag and stared hard at the men when they weren’t looking, trying to will them into getting a nosebleed or a migraine. Something to make them feel fragile, or at least the possibility of fragile, even for a moment. As fragile as I felt nearly every day, whenever I stopped and caught myself.
It didn’t work.
Which is just as well, because it wasn’t their fault, even though it was. But it was only their fault in a way that was so much larger than them it felt useless to make them the target of my anger. I wanted a kind of security that just wasn’t available to me, even though it might have been, maybe, a long time ago. But I had so much trouble letting it go. That was one of the reasons I was coming back to Durham, as much as I hated to admit it.
I’d stopped getting nosebleeds when I finally went off the acne medication in my undergrad, but I still felt like I was on the verge of getting them. There was still the possibility. I mean, spiritually.
In a way those businessmen would never understand.
When I was a little kid I remember that everything seemed so simple. Even if I wasn’t particularly popular in my classes I always did well in school and was praised by my teachers. That changed by the time I got to high school, but I still believed in my underlying competence. I was still able to write Evie even though I’m not sure I believed in anything else. I still thought it would lead to something.
Even just in myself.
Now everything feels so hard. I’ve made so many sacrifices to keep working and writing and they haven’t amounted to anything. I just feel drained and exhausted. I’m no closer than I was then, although I have made solid inroads into establishing a lifetime of feeling poor and trapped.
Really solid inroads.
Sometimes when I’m lying on the couch with a book open and abandoned on the ground beside me Tom will come and sit down gingerly in the armchair next to me, and say, in a saccharine voice that I once used to love because it felt like the mark of someone who cared about me, “Sarah, I think we need to talk.”
But what he means is: Sarah, you need to talk. It’s never about us, though on that subject I have a lot I could say, but about how I could be doing more to centre myself, to take pleasure out of the ever
yday, to appreciate what I have, and to expand my support network. And I don’t want to do any of that, although I think it might be nice to have more people to talk to so that I could occasionally complain about him.
Not that he’s so bad.
But one of the reasons I was so excited about leaving our apartment for a week was to get away from us, for at least a little bit.
To still myself and take a breath and look around.
The truth is that sometimes I want to be depressed. Maybe I need to be, I don’t know. It’s not a problem that anyone needs to solve, especially not someone who doesn’t really understand the cause. I mean, as much as I love Tom, or at least think I do, it seems difficult for him to see that my problems are larger than my immediate circumstances.
And maybe sometimes I need to acknowledge that, too. I don’t know.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to Durham. For a few months after I started school in Toronto I used to come down every week — nominally to see Tiff and Jess if they were in town, and Carl, who I’d gotten in the summer before my final year of high school (to add something light to the house, something for me). But I also came back home to feel attached or connected to something when everything else in my life felt so new and strange and different. I wanted the comfort of the house I grew up in, I wanted to hide in my room under the covers and look at the pathetic willow out the front window. I wanted to see my mom. Even if I didn’t see her very often, because she was already dating Dan and didn’t want me to know (I knew). Even if we fought a lot. There was still something comforting about spending time next to her, in eating her home-cooked meals, tastes familiar from childhood, in sitting on the couch together as we silently watched something dumb on television.
But then things got busy. I started to feel like I didn’t have time enough to call home, let alone to spend my entire weekend travelling back and forth on a bus. And Mom and Dan got married, and after he moved in it didn’t feel so much like my home anymore.
Looking out into the hills and the fields and the calm after the bus I transferred onto in Brampton escaped the suburbs and entered the empty highways on the way to Durham, surrounded by nothing but forests and fields and meadows, green turning yellow and gold, haze of life floating in the air, a clarity, homes dwarfed by the emptiness on either side, I realized how hungry I was to see it all again, to break out of the grey that I inhabited and into something that I was surprised to discover seemed alien and different to me now, but also deeply urgent and real, like it was somehow rising out of me even as it rushed past me on the other side of the window.