by André Babyn
Finally in the driver’s seat, I thought about skipping the hotel, leaving the cemetery behind forever, and just driving back to Toronto. It seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t very far and I could have been back by that evening. Well before. Instead I backed out of my space and turned back on the highway, toward town.
* * *
The office of Penelope Trin, realtor and volunteer groundskeeper, was in what counted for downtown in Durham, sandwiched between the dusty, abandoned shopfront of what had apparently been a bakery and a store that seemed to only sell figure-skating outfits for little girls.
The bell rang when the door opened and woman’s voice, I assumed Trin’s, called from somewhere in the back.
“Sarah?”
The office was otherwise empty. Inside it was cool, much darker than the street. Venetian blinds were half-lowered over the windows, and only a single lamp, behind the reception desk, was lit. A pile of papers sat on the reception desk, next to a computer with the Windows logo bouncing idly on the screen and a small cactus wearing a miniature sombrero. A thin wool cardigan was draped over the back of the chair. Another plant, much larger (I couldn’t figure out whether or not it was plastic) stood in one corner, by the window, and real estate listings pinned up with thumbtacks lined the wall nearest to the door. At the far end of the room, where the voice had come from, was a door, half-ajar, probably Trin’s office. There was the sound of someone back there, shuffling boxes, but no one came out.
After a minute I could hear someone mounting a staircase from somewhere below us. A woman, who I guessed was Sarah, emerged from a second doorway located between the desk and the office. She looked young, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. She had straight brown hair that ended at her shoulders, glossy and well-kept. On her cheeks were the ghosts of acne scars. I thought I saw a sharpness in her eyes, momentary, that disappeared once she settled down behind the desk and flicked the mouse to dispel the screensaver.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Actually I’m not even totally sure I’m in the right place. I needed to find a grave?”
Sarah looked up from the computer and stared blankly at me.
“This is a real estate office,” she said, pointing to the wall of listings behind me. “We sell homes. For the living.”
“Uh … okay, but at the cemetery —”
“I’m just messing with you,” said Sarah, turning back to the computer. I thought I heard a short, low “ha” cough out from the office in the back.
“What was the name of the person you were looking for?”
“Kent Adler,” I said.
She seemed to hesitate before typing his name in, so I repeated myself and then spelled out his last name.
“He was a poet,” I said, almost defensively. For a minute she had looked like she’d known who I was talking about.
“Have you read him?” I asked.
She looked up from the computer and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was pretty well-known,” I said.
She shrugged and said something I didn’t catch.
“I’m sorry?”
“A pretty well-known poet,” she said.
“Okay, yeah,” I said.
“He’s right here,” she said, pointing to the screen. “Plot E-22.” She wrote the number down on a piece of scrap paper, folded it, and handed it to me. Then she looked back at the screen and scrolled the document up and down.
“Is that it?” she asked.
I wondered if I should tell her about my car and ask her where I could find a place to get it cleaned. But something stopped me. Somehow it felt too intimate a story to tell. Like I’d been marked. As if I would communicate something reprehensible about me, even though I had nothing to do with it and it wasn’t my fault.
To be honest, I felt like asking her if Durham was a good place to live.
I didn’t know why I wanted to live somewhere that obviously didn’t want me, but I was suddenly curious about her, and curious about her life. I wondered if we had anything in common. But I didn’t want to ask her that directly — it felt too violent and personal a question.
“Are you okay?” she said.
For a minute I felt like I might start crying. My eyes met Sarah’s. I thought she looked horrified when she saw the emotion in my face.
She might have only been embarrassed.
“No,” I mumbled.
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean — there’s nothing more,” I said. “Thanks.”
I stepped away from the desk and turned to the real estate listings. Feigning interest. I wanted to leave, but I thought it was necessary that I stay for just a few more minutes, to deny whatever had just transpired. Or to create plausible deniability. If I took my time with the listings she might start to doubt the reality of what had just occurred.
* * *
Before getting back in my car I purchased a pack of baby wipes and ran them several times over the car handle, over and over, until I’d used up the whole pack. In the driver’s seat, I took out my notebook and set it on my lap. I wanted to write something about Adler but I couldn’t concentrate on that. I kept thinking back to that last night in Jeff’s apartment, the fight.
I tried to remember the colour of his eyes. “Green,” I wrote. “No, hazel.”
How could I forget?
There were days he was practically the only man I looked at, besides myself in the mirror, days we spent in bed while night turned to day and back again, slow weekends where we ate breakfast in the afternoons, his mannered breakfasts with so many moving parts: espresso and heavy rye toast with pumpkin-seed butter, fruit, a small piece of baklava or something sweet, a glass of water, sometimes muesli with cold almond milk. Those moments felt rarefied and I didn’t want to be with anyone else. Even if our world was functionally as small as the little cups we drank the coffee out of.
I’d hoped coming up to Durham would help give me a little perspective, some distance, the ability to understand how I had let myself become so small. I thought that if I brought myself to the place where Adler had lived and died and written so much of his poetry that I could gain some small part of his ability to understand. Maybe his intuition, too. His genius.
I needed to submerge myself completely in his life.
I put my notebook away and drove at random through the town. Finally I found a car wash, where I bought a ticket from the fat guy at the register and drove into the line of cars waiting to enter. Once I’d gone through a kid came up to the driver-side mirror to give it a few token wipes. But after glancing briefly at the car he stopped what he was doing and gestured to another kid, who looked at the door and then up at me with obvious astonishment. At first I thought they were playing a prank, even though I knew very well what they were looking at.
I rolled down my window.
“It didn’t come off?”
The kids shook their heads.
“Did you see who did this?” one of them asked. The first one again.
I shrugged.
“Not really,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
“You didn’t see anything?”
“No. I mean, it might have been these guys I saw. Driving an orange truck. Out by the cemetery. But I don’t know for sure.”
The kids looked at each other significantly. “Orange truck,” they repeated. “Out by the cemetery.” The one who hadn’t said anything to me reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It was for the owner of the car wash, identified as Walid Khan.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“You should call him, as soon as you can. He’ll explain everything.”
“What do you mean? Explain what?”
But the kids had already turned to the next car pulling out of the wash. I didn’t know what to do. I felt vaguely ridiculous sitting there with the window open and my car running, looking at
the kids, waiting for something. I was hesitant to leave, maybe because it still felt like the most successful conversation I had had with strangers in months.
“What are you, CIA?” I called out, joking. They didn’t seem to hear. I repeated myself, but louder. I thought I caught one of the kids glancing in my direction as he moved around the car he was wiping down.
* * *
According to the sign on the gates, the cemetery closed at five o’clock every day. It was still before five but the gates were firmly locked. I wasn’t in the mood to try and hop them, even though it looked relatively easy and I doubted anyone would have cared. So instead I drove around until I found a restaurant that looked passable, a quiet Chinese place near the centre of town. After dinner I walked in circles around the downtown, veering off at random to explore the side streets. Much of the town’s architecture consisted of quaint brick houses that had been built at the turn of the previous century, overgrown with the vines and weeds of late summer. Buried behind veils of verdure, everything, even the odd misfit house, ugly or ill-painted, seemed to have its place, as if the town had risen up out of the weeds on its own accord, as if it were a natural feature of the earth. I felt jealous. It was only where the grass was cut too close to the ground, so that it had burned out and left long, dark brown patches of mud, that Durham looked like something haphazard, planned.
The last time I’d seen Jeff was from the window of my apartment building. He had buzzed up but I didn’t let him in, pretending I wasn’t home. Instead I turned off the lights in my apartment and waited by the window, where I watched him walking back to his car. That night I dreamed the car was still there, its cabin lights on, noxious gas pouring from its exhaust. Jeff a distant silhouette, sitting perfectly still in the driver’s seat. I woke with a start and went out on my balcony to get a better look at the parking lot, and stood there alone in the dark and chilly spring air.
I stood out walking the streets of Durham. I had only seen one other brown person in the whole town. From my car. And a general insecurity had long ago taken root inside me, telling me that I didn’t belong. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know, quite literally, why I had come or where I was going.
2
After that guy came into the office, asking about Kent, or Adler, or whatever, I started to get the shivers. I put on my sweater, but I didn’t warm up and I guess I was still shaking when Penny came out of her office, to see what he’d wanted and, probably, to get me to file something else downstairs. Instead she took one look at me and told me to go home.
“But I’m not sick,” I said.
She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Moments later I was outside in the August sun, still shivering even though I hadn’t taken my sweater off and I was walking quickly in an attempt to get my blood flowing and my heart rate up.
It was true that I didn’t feel sick. I felt disturbed, but I didn’t know the source, as if a void had opened up before me or inside me and I could feel it yawning, but I didn’t know where or what it was. Okay, I mean, I had some idea, but I didn’t know why that guy asking about Kent would have freaked me out so much.
Instead of going home I walked to the cemetery and before long I was standing at Kent’s grave. Looking down at the flowers I had laid the previous Thursday (just weeds, dried and mostly scattered now). My heart still beating, as if that guy might appear at any moment, jump out of the forest and start reciting verse, or reach for my hand, or break down on the ground in front of me. I picked up the flowers and peeled off the poem I had pasted to the stone.
Letter to a Poet
My father taught me
Nothing
A poet has died
Look up: the trees
Are singing
A poet has died
Everyone
Gets in their cars
A poet has died
I wish I had more
To tell you
I crumpled up the poem and took it with the flowers and threw them into the bushes. I didn’t know where the guy was, but I assumed if he hadn’t already come he would be on his way, so I thought it would be best to leave as soon as possible. Since I had the key with me I pulled the gates closed and locked them, and after I got home I called into the office a few minutes before five and let Penny know what I had done so she wouldn’t go out herself.
When I got home I shut the door quickly behind me and glanced at it with trepidation every couple minutes. As if the guy was going to barge into my apartment at any moment, shaking and screaming about god knows what.
I think Carl guessed that I was nervous and kept climbing onto the counters — not for food, because there was nothing on them, but as if to confront me. To get at my height. I don’t know why I thought that’s what he was trying to do, he’s just a stupid cat, maybe even stupider than most, but that’s what I felt. He also kept staring up into a corner of the wall above my head that had absolutely nothing of interest there, a completely barren patch of perfectly white wall, as if from his vantage he was able to see past it into other dimensions, other dimensions where he was able to violate laws of time and space and see into my soul and all of my future actions and god knows what else.
Dumb animal.
I was still shivering so I sat down on the couch and pulled the blanket over me. I thought for a minute about calling someone, anyone — either Amanda, or Penny, or even (and this is how I know I was disturbed) Mom. But what would I say? This guy came into town and asked about this poet I liked and it completely freaked me out?
Eventually Carl settled down and climbed onto my lap and I put on a movie, something stupid that I wouldn’t have to think about and which I don’t even remember, and moments later I was asleep. When I woke up it was still dark out and the TV was still on and Carl was still beside me. I walked to the kitchen and from there to the balcony, where I stared out over the alley behind my apartment and watched as the night lifted, black to blue, watched until the sun rose up into the sky and I felt a kind of relief, although I couldn’t say where that relief had come from or what it had meant, if it meant anything at all.
3
Eventually I got tired of walking around Durham and feeling out of place and found the hotel where I was staying, an old mansion — or maybe it had once been a hospital? — just a five-minute walk from the centre of town. Staggered vines clung to its surface, rust stained the stone foundations, and old wood lined the hallways and stairs, giving the building a sense of history and place. I felt like I could feel the many lives that had passed through. Or perhaps not the lives themselves, but the traces of them, of so many passing in succession, as if they all left behind a particular residue that could only be detected when gathered together.
I felt like I was where I belonged: small, forgotten, appropriately dwarfed.
* * *
The next morning I was in a better mood, even though I hadn’t slept well. I’d left my windows open and the smell of perfume wafting indoors from the vines flowering outside had contributed to my bad sleep, waking me up throughout the night, as if it were the perfumed train of a long-dead relative come to give me a warning. Or just to haunt me. In my dream I saw Jeff lying with his back to me, but when I tried to rouse him or turn him over to see his face there was no response, not in him or from his body, just the back of his head no matter which way I looked, just the night and its stillness and a growing horror of his prone form.
As I was getting dressed I found the card the kids at the car wash had given me. I stared at it for a while, wondering if I should call, letting the absurdity of the previous day slowly percolate through me. It would be nice to have some answers. Or to have someone to talk to. I dialed the number and let it ring, over and over, but no one picked up and it didn’t go to an answering machine. I put the card on my night table and went downstairs. After a bad breakfast in the hotel dining room — I wasn’t that late, but the coffee was cold, the pastries picked over and forgotten — I went for another walk. The cemetery opened a
t nine, assuming the hours posted on the gates were correct, which I supposed I couldn’t, given how early it had closed the day before. I found a florist, but it opened at ten, so I grabbed a coffee across the street, from a small deli that also sold pizza and submarine sandwiches. It was awful coffee, but at least it was hot, which is the most important thing.
While I had been eating my breakfast at the hotel I overheard one of the staff telling a guest about a woman who had complained about a ghost when she was staying there. The woman had woken up in the middle of the night to a high-pitched wailing which she thought must have been the radiator. But it was August, probably the hottest night of the year, and the woman was sweating through her sheets. She was on the point of calling down to the front desk to complain when she heard a man whispering in her ear: “That’s not the radiator,” he said. “It’s my wife.” Of course, she didn’t sleep and the next morning she checked out as soon as she could. The man who was telling the story explained that they had checked the records afterward, and a woman had died during childbirth in that room, a long time ago.
I kept thinking about the story, about how strange it was that the two ghosts were sharing the same room. The woman who died giving birth and her husband, who might have lived to an old age, or at least probably didn’t die at the same time as his wife, unless he killed himself. Maybe, I thought, there wasn’t a man at all. Maybe the ghost of the woman who died had gone crazy from the solitude and was speaking to herself. Or the same thing had happened to the man. In any case I was glad I hadn’t heard either of them the night before.
I had forgotten my notebook, but I had a pencil in my pocket and to kill the time I scrawled the words “early morning … bad sleep … dreams of ghosts … fragrant night” on my receipt to remind myself of the breakfast and the night before. I didn’t have much room, but I couldn’t think of anything else to write. After sitting and drinking my coffee awhile, I saw Sarah, from the real estate office, crossing in front of the window.