by André Babyn
Despite the fact that the motorcycle was faster and more agile than the police car, despite the fact that the two fugitives regularly took turns that the cops couldn’t make, detouring over fields, weaving in and out of traffic, and shooting down dirt paths, they never seemed to widen the gap on their pursuers. I wasn’t sure at first if I was watching a comedy, with the two cops its bumbling and clueless protagonists, or a horror movie. A horror movie about how terrifying and malicious politeness can be when it represents authority and conformity.
I thought the police were going to pull out rubber masks when they caught up with the couple, the kind that killers or bank robbers are always wearing in the movies, with presidential faces on them, like Reagan or Bush or Clinton or Jimmy Carter. That they would pull out gloves, aprons, tourniquets, saws. But continue to refer to each other and their victims with the same nauseating obsequiousness, even as they started to cut into them. I’m not sure why I thought that, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be watching that movie because violence, especially that kind of violence, absolutely repulses me.
Instead, the two police officers somehow managed to back their car into the motorcycle as it emerged from a hidden forest trail: one officer, stepping out to trade insurance information, accidentally cuffed the man as he tried to take a swing at him; the other knocked the woman out as she was trying to make a break for it by opening his car door at just the right moment. As apologies flowed from the officers to their two waylaid victims, a backup car pulled up and congratulated the two cops for finally catching the conspirators.
Secret plots were revealed, good became bad, and the credits rolled not long afterward. In retrospect it was a stupid movie, of a kind that used to be fairly common.
* * *
Then I dreamed that I was standing on a cliff overlooking a valley, searching for a river flowing down below. I knew the river was there, but I couldn’t see it. I paced back and forth, looking this way and that, occasionally consulting a guidebook that I was carrying (and which I couldn’t read, but still seemed to understand). Finally, just when I was giving up hope, I saw it, just the merest glint reflecting off a tiny strip of water snaking its way through a deep crevasse. I don’t know why the river was so important, but I ran back to my truck (I have never owned a truck) to grab my binoculars and get a second look. But by the time I returned the river was gone. I searched up and down the valley, but couldn’t find it again.
I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I thought I must have been excited for my trip the next day. So I got out of bed and started rereading Alert on the couch, until I fell asleep again. Then the telephone rang and I answered it without thinking, still in the confused haze of sleep.
“Hi,” said a voice on the other end of the line, a regular voice somehow echoing off of itself. A voice that was coming to me from the depth of something very far away, a place, I could tell, I didn’t want to go.
I tried to ask who was on the other end, but found that I was too terrified to speak.
“I’m coming up,” the voice said.
Without thinking I pressed the button that opened the door downstairs. For a moment or so I was frozen in terror, standing at the phone and wondering who it could have been. At first I thought it was Jeff, but of course it wasn’t, because if it was Jeff I would have recognized him right away.
Then I knew who it was, like I was a dog picking up a scent.
It was Adler.
He knew I was searching for him and he was coming for me.
There were two quick knocks on the door. Then another two, this time louder. I panicked, and the next thing I knew he was in my apartment and I was hiding in bed, tangled in my sheets, watching his legs and torso walk through the next room. Something was obstructing my vision and I couldn’t see his face. But I knew it was Adler and that his face would be horrible. Or completely blank.
Somehow he didn’t see me. He just kept walking up and down the room, calling my name, until I woke up. In my bed. I’d just watched the movie after dinner and gone straight to my room — I’d even left Alert in the car.
I knew then that I’d have to leave for Durham immediately, either leave immediately or cancel my trip. But I still had some work to do which put off my departure until midday.
* * *
I stopped at a diner before making my entrance into the city, a place that a colleague had recommended when I told her where I was going and that I didn’t know how I would pass the time and what to expect. “Make sure to get the deluxe,” she had insisted, “and not the regular. You won’t regret it.” I ordered the deluxe hamburger combo, with a strawberry milkshake and fries, even though I never have sweet drinks and I don’t eat fried food. I sat out by the window and ate my meal slowly, watching the people coming and going in the parking lot and the cars passing on the highway. The sky was bright but vacant, lonely, overwhelming the trees and cars below.
The food was about what I was expecting — salty and sweet and hot and messy. It was good, but good in a way that wasn’t exceptional. The best part about the place was that it was on the side of the road, coming suddenly after a bend in the highway, after so much driving through empty roads.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly, why I had gone out of my way to come so far from myself, why I was hunting Adler in Durham and at the same time afraid of what would happen when I found him. I told friends that I was on a research trip (they all thought I was writing a book), that there was a cousin in town who had a box of Adler’s personal effects that had been excluded from his papers, but this was a lie — the closest living relative of his I knew of was near death and living in Kingston, though of course there must have been others, though none that I had reason to suspect would know anything more than what was already available in university archives.
Though I was lying about writing one, there was a book in me, or at least that’s how I described it to myself. There was another version of Alert — a private one — and I had come to read it, even though I was a little bit afraid of finding out what it said. Even though I was worried I wasn’t coming to find anything, but merely running, getting as far away as I could imagine (out of reality, into a book).
Jeff and I had gotten into a huge fight the last night I stayed at his house. This was about six months earlier. I don’t remember, exactly, if he was initially angry at me or his mother, who had called that evening and explained that she wasn’t going to be visiting after all. It seems crazy that I could forget, since for at least a month it was all that I thought about. I still thought about it sometimes, as if I could resolve everything from that distance, as if I could turn it in a direction that caused it to make sense.
Jeff’s mother didn’t approve of me. It was the colour of my skin. My parents’ religion. It was almost funny — her son was gay and she didn’t seem to mind that in the slightest. As a result of her disapproval she often made plans with us and cancelled at the last minute, sometimes even expressing her surprise that I would be there. Even though she’d always known that well in advance. Even if I had met her a handful of times and was always polite to her, despite the fact that I had lots of opportunities to tell her off. Despite the fact that I wanted to more than anything else, found myself swallowing my rage, nodding my head mindlessly with glassy eyes as my insides burned and my consciousness rolled up into a corner of the room. So it wasn’t that I ever wanted to see her — I hated her sniping comments, her gall, her false superiority. It wasn’t that I particularly supported the relationship she had with Jeff, who would sometimes fly into a rage at something she said, screaming and yelling while she pretended not to notice, driving him into even deeper anger. But I hated when she cancelled because it put him in such a bad mood, and then it was just me and him, and more often than not I became his target. It was always my fault when I tried to talk about her with him, later — she was somehow beyond reproach, a topic that I was not allowed to broach because I could not pretend to understand the
ir complicated history, the dynamics of control that she exercised over him and that he had to constantly navigate.
“What’s to understand?” I had asked him, more than once.
“You wouldn’t get it,” he said.
But he was the one who didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to talk about something that had everything to do with me.
We still hadn’t made up later that night. I found it impossible to go to sleep: I thought I could feel him staring up at the ceiling through the darkness, his body stiff as a board. But when I turned around to look at him I saw that his eyes were closed.
It didn’t matter. It was like they were open. Closed or open, Jeff was burrowing into himself, scraping away at a space inside him. Arming himself against me.
“Jeff?” I whispered, reasoning that if he was so upset we might as well try and talk things out. But he didn’t answer me.
“Jeff?” I asked again.
There was still no answer. But I knew he was awake.
I felt like I didn’t exist.
I opened my eyes and stared at the wall, thinking it was both completely debased and totally natural that my existence depended on his approval.
He’s right, I thought. I’m weak, I’m a child, I’m utterly dependent. He has every reason to be upset with me. He might as well be dating a ghost or the wind.
Or a dream or a sunbeam.
* * *
It was a ten-minute drive from the diner to the cemetery. I parked in the lot before the cemetery’s gates, in a ragged gravel strip marred with potholes. Behind the gates rose an asphalt path, about as wide as three people could walk comfortably abreast. The cemetery was built on a series of small, grassy hills dotted with graves — the path rose up one and weaved through a series of others that I could see behind it.
The day was so hot and dry and empty and airless that when I stepped out of the car a palpable feeling of doom and foreboding came over me, as if I wasn’t walking to Adler’s grave, but my own. As if the cracking heat would halt my footsteps and turn my bones brittle before I could make it up the path. I felt exposed standing on the parking lot so close to the highway, conscious of the fact that I was the only person in sight. Which made me a kind of target … but for what? Maybe the weeds peeking through the gravel at the side of the road, the cicadas leaking their infuriating August buzz.
But the day was also bright and clear and there were birds singing in the trees, too, singing and flitting from branch to branch. And I was on the verge of doing something that I had wanted to do for a long time.
I was stuck between these two moods when an orange truck pulled suddenly into the lot, one wheel hitting a deep pothole and kicking the suspension up and down with a loud “thunk.” Punk music blared from the open windows and a spray of gravel and dust rose up as the truck made a hard turn into its parking spot, coming to rest immediately adjacent to my car. I stood in shock and horror as a burned and peeling shirtless man wearing red basketball shorts and what looked to be yellow Oakley sunglasses got out of the truck and began banging on the hood. He was either trying to get it open or to somehow turn the engine over through the metal and the cavity that separated the engine from his open hand. I wasn’t sure which it was, but I noticed that there was steam rising from under the hood, I thought which meant that it was overheating. Another man leaned out of the passenger-side window and gestured wildly in the first man’s direction, communicating nothing that I could see.
They had come very close to hitting me as I was crossing the lot, but I was so dazzled by the spectacle that I almost didn’t notice. My veins had frozen in fear and shock and now they were running again, sending rivers of adrenalin up and down my body. I worried that if I stuck around the two strangers would start to work on me like they were working on their truck and so I shook it off and hurried through the gates before me.
* * *
Through the literary agency that represented Kent Adler’s work, I was able to get in contact with the cousin whom I have already mentioned, his closest surviving relative, now in her seventh decade and living in a suburb outside Kingston. I sent her an email asking what she could remember of Adler’s family, and she sent back a short note and a few scanned photographs.
“Of course I remember him,” she wrote. “But not very well. The last time I saw him was a long time ago. We were just children. I was always a bit shy because we didn’t really spend much time with that side of the family. And Kent and Jeff were both at least a few years older than me.
“But I do remember that Kent was the kinder one. Or at least he was always patient with me. Would let me beat him in checkers. That sort of thing. Jeff was more of a mystery. I remember he could be quite moody. Whereas when I think of Kent I see a little boy smiling amiably and reaching for my hand, Jeff is a hazy blur standing at the very edge of consciousness. One that I often wished to understand but could never quite make out. Some of that I’m sure was the age difference. The photographs do help, though.
“Of course it was still quite a shock when Jeff died. Very sad. And then to lose Kent and his mother, both so young. My own mother never quite recovered.”
One of the photographs is an image of three children standing in front of a house. Two little boys and a girl. The smaller boy — this is Kent — has his arms around the girl. The photo is undated, but he looks like he would have been about six or seven. The older boy, Jeff, has his hands in his pockets. His posture suggests that he doesn’t want to be photographed — but there’s a reluctant smile on his face.
Perhaps even a glint in his eye. He is enjoying himself.
I don’t understand why I’m less interested in Kent in the photo, why I find myself scanning over his image and passing on to Jeff. Perhaps, at that time, Kent didn’t exist. Not in the way that he did later. Not in the way that he would in his poetry. He looks like anyone. Just a boy, unvisited by tragedy.
Maybe I’m looking for something that I should look for in myself. Maybe when I look at Jeff in that photograph I see something that I am missing.
On my last night in Jeff’s apartment, when I couldn’t sleep after our fight, I got out of bed and walked into the living room. Then I stood next to the couch and looked out the window, into a courtyard between the three apartment buildings that made up the complex where he lived.
The moon was out. Nearly full. Waxing or waning. I wasn’t sure which. I wanted to go for a walk, in the moonlight radiating through the side street that surrounded the buildings.
I wondered whether a person could radiate, dissipate and slip through the walls. I wanted to. But all of my things were in Jeff’s room, on the floor or in my bag, and I didn’t want to go back in there and disturb him. So instead I lay back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. In the other room, too, was Alert, and I wished I had it with me.
Alert was published posthumously, and many critics panned it for its style: more expansive, less controlled, than Adler’s other work. Less interested in creating sonic diversity or cultivating surprise on the line level. Perhaps they are right and it is not like the poetry that came before, but I wonder if it was meant to be. In any case, the poems call to one another in a way that echoes my own sadness.
I wanted to reach out to it that night, to live inside it, to become a word or phrase or one of its neatly composed stanzas. To inhabit the space beyond the real that I see in my mind when I read the book.
Maybe that’s what it means to radiate, I thought.
I fell asleep on the couch and woke to the sound of the bathroom door slamming shut, the water running, Jeff’s shower. I quickly went into the other room and gathered my things, throwing on pants and a sweater. I put my stuff by the front door and grabbed a few swigs from a half-empty two-litre of orange juice that I had purchased a few days before, then put on my shoes and walked out into the hallway.
At first I thought I might just go for a walk, or home to cool off, but after locking the door I turned and slipped my set of ke
ys back into the apartment through the mail slot. Almost an instinct. Then I hurried to the elevator. I didn’t want to know him anymore. And I didn’t want to know anyone else.
I wasn’t yet sure if that included me, too.
* * *
The cemetery was about a hundred and fifty years old. In the newer sections the plots were neat and orderly, regularly spaced, the grass clipped and the bushes trimmed. But there were areas densely packed with lines of tombstones, some leaning and so closely spaced that the ground between them was rough and overgrown.
In any case the grounds were much larger than I had anticipated. I thought — for a town the size of Durham — in the worst-case scenario I could just scan the markers one by one until I found it. I had no idea where in the cemetery he had been buried, but fortunately a sign alerted me to the fact that there was an office in town where I could get directions, a real estate office that was the home of the volunteer groundskeeper.
When I got back to the parking lot, the orange truck was gone. But someone had written the word slut in large letters in permanent marker over my white driver-side door. I checked to see if there was anyone else around, but the parking lot was just as deserted as when I had arrived. As I was about to open the door to get a rag or something from inside and try to wipe it off I noticed something else, smeared on the handle. I took off my glasses and leaned in for a closer inspection. The smell was overpowering.
It was shit.
Okay, I thought.
For a minute or two I stood without doing anything, unsure what I should do. Then I pulled a handful of long weeds from the side of the lot and stood in front of the door, trying to decide whether to use them to clean off the handle. Instead I climbed into my car from the passenger side. When I crossed the centre console I accidentally depressed the emergency brake and caused the vehicle to violently jerk two or three inches backward. I jumped up and banged my head on the ceiling as I scrambled to get behind the wheel and tried to prevent the car from rolling out into traffic.