by André Babyn
I lied earlier. I love poetry. I love art. I love it here, too. I hope you have found whatever it is you’re looking for. You seem like a nice person.
Though perhaps a little confused.
Take care.
Sarah.
I read the letter twice, then ripped it to pieces.
6
The next morning, as I was packing up, I dialed the number on the card again. For a few moments I waited on the bed with the receiver of the hotel telephone propped up against my ear, listening for the ring. I closed my eyes, expecting it to cut to a dial tone at any moment. I liked the idea of leaving Durham the same way I had come. But, to my surprise I heard the line pick up, the voice of a man on the other end.
“Hello?” it said. “Who is this? Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly confused. “I’m sorry, I —”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just don’t waste my time.”
“I mean — I’m looking for Walid Khan?”
There was a sigh on the other end. “That’s me,” said the voice. The tone of his response told me immediately that I had made a mistake. “What do you want?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought, somehow, it would be obvious.
Anyway, what I was about to describe felt like a million years ago.
“Um,” I began. “I was referred to you at the car wash? Someone vandalized my car, and for some reason I thought you might be able to help me? Or that I could help you? I heard you were maybe investigating?”
I heard swearing.
“Those fucking kids.”
“Excuse me?”
“Listen, I’m sorry about your car. But I have nothing to do with it. I don’t even own that place anymore. Don’t ever call me again,” said the voice. The line went dead.
* * *
Maybe I’d come to Durham to run away from Jeff, but somehow I had run toward him, too. Was it an accident that in coming to Durham I’d also come closer to Jeff Adler, Kent’s brother, the boy from the photograph whose eyes reminded me of my own? Or maybe it was Kent who reminded me of myself, Kent standing next to his brother in the photograph and looking back at photographs of them together years later. Sometimes I wished I could go back to a time before Jeff, a time before his anger and my pain, but I knew that was impossible. And maybe, confusing to me, not even something I really wanted.
Jeff Adler died in a freak accident when Kent was ten. Kent describes finding Jeff face down in a creek near their home in his long poem “Surfacing”:
eyes glossy
like a cat
drunk on milk
I tried
to say hello
In interviews he explains that he could remember who he was before the accident, but that that person didn’t feel like the same person he was afterward. Like he was forced into a new awareness of himself at too young an age.
Sometimes interviewers would press him about these details, making connections to other texts as if he was merely attempting to resonate with the past instead of describing something traumatic that had happened to him. But he seemed hostile to demonstrations of erudition over intuition or empathy. In one of his poems, “Soundings,” he explains that you “can’t stretch/your past back/only press/forward, closing your eyes.”
But that didn’t mean that he avoided the past entirely. In later years some of his poems would openly ask whether the accident was intentional, whether Jeff had committed suicide because he had seen “something too soon/before him.” He knew that to speculate on the accidental death of a thirteen-year-old boy so many years after he had passed was more about his own response than his brother’s life, but he still couldn’t help but imagine a world in which his brother was “allowed to/act,” rather than be “acted upon.”
After I checked out, I went back to the cemetery to say my final goodbye. I had planned the moment to be a grand farewell. I think I expected to be able to say goodbye to Jeff, too, my Jeff, like I could release him forever and go on without him. But I understood then that he would never leave me.
There wasn’t a poem on the surface of Adler’s stone. Maybe the rain had washed it away. Maybe Sarah had taken it down. Before I drove over I had purchased a small bag of flour and a bottle of water from a convenience store near the hotel. I mixed the two together and used them to paste up a page I had torn out of Alert, smearing the glue over both sides with my hands.
Evie of the Deepthorn
Evie pulls her horse Excalibur
both are very tired they are looking
for a place to settle underneath the grey
tines they want to slay
a dragon they have many enemies
Far away a field hand splits with his shovel
a white skull with a wormy rag
of flesh he digs a little finds vertebrae
ribs scapula humerus coccyx another white
skull missing its jaw shreds of cloth and a doll face
black from the earth Just the large two
skulls He has given up his other work curious
about who the doll belongs to That night he
barricades his door and puts a knife under
his pillow Still he is woken by sharp
voices calling from an emptiness
He dreamed of a woman moving
a forest so dark Just her eyes and the steam
rising from the horse’s mouth She was looking for
something and when he woke he was angry
and went down to the river and bathed in the stream
Then he went back to the field
seeking the doll’s owner Cut
the earth, the shovel through a girl
a young girl, splitting her
delicate spinal column
* * *
As I was driving back through town, I thought I saw Sarah on the other side of the road, walking in the same direction I had come from.
But instead of honking or waving I just kept moving, driving down the highway, out of Durham, turning right at the crossroads to get back to Toronto.
Epilogue
Pain: A Manifesto
Out the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
— Wallace Stevens
1
Two boys meet in high school. Nobody likes them (they don’t even like each other or themselves). But through mutual circumstance they find themselves entangled, in the same way that planets with a shared orbit will eventually collide. One day one of the boys asks the other over to his house after school. The second boy agrees to this with some trepidation: it has been years since he has accepted an invitation to another student’s home, fearing tricks or humiliation. The house is small and is crammed with things: old toys, boxes and broken electronics, tangled cords snaking over a grey-beige carpet. The second boy feels like an interloper, like an astronaut who has touched down on the face of an alien planet. The basement, where the first boy lives, smells like baloney and Cheez Whiz digesting in someone’s stomach acid. The second boy doesn’t know how he could possibly identify that smell, but that’s what it is. A dog in a cage barks at the bottom of the stairs: a mean, terrified bark. A big brown dog with bloodshot eyes. “That’s my uncle’s dog,” explains the first boy, when he sees the fear in his friend’s eyes.
“What’s he doing here?” asks the second, expecting to hear that the uncle is out of town or perhaps in the hospital. The first boy only shrugs, an indifferent shrug that is somehow infinitely worse than anything he might have said. The dog barks all evening and no one ever comes down to let him out of his cage. Eventually the second boy leaves, cutting through the forest — really just a few trees, a broken mattress, a collapsed tire, and a hubcap — on his way home. He reflects that he has never had a friend so poor, though he thinks that is because he hasn’t had many friends. He tries not to feel alarmed. There’s no reason that he
should feel alarmed.
When he gets home he sends his friend a Facebook message, which he knows won’t be seen until the next day: “The entire time I was walking home I imagined strapping that dog on a rocket to the moon.”
It’s not true.
2
They talk about filming a movie together, a movie about two aliens that look like U.S. presidents. Their spaceship touches down in the middle of the forest and the aliens wander aimlessly for a while, talking about how much the planet resembles their own. “The only problem is the sky,” says one of the presidents — maybe Reagan or Carter, maybe Clinton or Nixon or Obama. “Yes,” says the other, “too bad it’s the colour of shit.” Elaborate plans to produce real-life sky-blue shit, no CGI. The planet is of course Earth, but in the movie it’s not Earth, but another planet, a third planet. Not the planet the aliens have come from and not Earth. Eventually they find a town and go to a movie theatre. At the theatre there’s a movie playing about two aliens who touch down on an alien planet — a fourth planet. And et cetera. It’s an intentionally stupid and impossible idea.
“Boy, the sky is really the colour of shit today,” they will say to one another, without prompting, walking home after school.
3
Two boys meet in high school and they make everyone afraid, like they’re going to pounce suddenly and rip out their throats. Not because of the two boys’ size. Not because they are violent. Because they are sad and sullen and sometimes unstable in a way that reminds others, vaguely, of the Columbine shooters. Even though everyone, including the boys themselves, knows that they could never hurt anyone else.
The boys put up a brave front but sometimes they crack and let their terror through the mask. That’s when they’re most unstable and most liable to do something that will provoke real fear. But fear that maybe lasts for two or three seconds. Fear that is based more on seeing something you don’t wish to become.
4
One of the boys says that he saw their history teacher, Mr. Demetri, lying on a stretcher on the side of the road. Twisted into himself, attended to by two frantic paramedics. His car crumpled into the front bumper of a black pickup truck swerved to the median. “Holy shit,” says the second boy, in a Facebook message. That’s all he can think to say.
While his friend is typing something else the second boy closes the browser and goes outside to lie in the sun. He imagines Mr. Demetri’s consciousness escaping into the sky from out of his mangled corpse. The boy’s phone — a cheap Samsung that he bought from his cousin — pings. It takes a moment for the phone to unlock so that he can read the next message.
“Yeah,” is all it says.
“That’s really fucked up,” writes the second boy. A few minutes later his message is marked as “seen,” but there’s no response.
The next day the second boy expects an announcement over the morning PA, but there’s nothing. And when he gets to history for third period, he is startled to see Mr. Demetri going over his lesson plan at his desk. The first boy bursts into laughter when the second sits down. Still, it’s difficult for the second boy to shake the image of Mr. Demetri lying crumpled on the side of the road, even though he knows that nothing happened, that Mr. Demetri is okay and standing at the front of the class.
5
Two boys meet in high school and pass through the high school like ghosts. The boys believe in reincarnation. “After I die,” the first one says, “I’d like to be a hockey player. A winger.”
Oh, Jesus, thinks the second boy, not this again. “Why?” he asks, instead.
“To glide on the ice. To be limbs working. And maybe to fuck all the girls.” The first boy is the right height to play hockey, but he’s skinny and misshapen and all of his life he has been uncoordinated. He moves like someone who spends most of his time sitting down. The second boy is not much better: he’s skinny, too, and sometimes he feels like a praying mantis blown about by the wind as he steps gawkily through the halls. He’s sure that if someone put him on skates he would shake and stutter into his own team’s goal.
“I’m going to be an atomic bomb,” he says.
6
“Even in the coldest weather I can hear him coughing. Even when it’s negative thirty degrees.”
The second boy looks out and sees a white face with dark circles under his eyes leaning out of a window in a neighbour’s house. Peeking out of the darkness. A resigned look.
“He looks like a sick dog,” says the second boy.
“I think he has cancer.”
The face retreats back into the house and a pale arm pulls the window closed.
Silence. They’re pressed together, looking out the window above the kitchen sink. For a minute they hold that position. They’ve caught each other unexpectedly — neither can say what’s going to happen next.
Sometimes the first boy looks at the second and wants to kiss him, a spontaneous outburst. Affection, love. He shakes the idea from his mind. Then he reaches into a cupboard and pulls down a large bag of barbecue chips.
7
Two boys meet in high school and play a game with each other.
“Who would you murder first?”
The first boy decides he wants to murder Mr. Wright. For exposing him in class. “I’d pop out his eyeballs and swallow them, one after the other.” The second boy tries hard to think of who he would like to murder. He imagines a giant bulldozer randomly crushing one end of the school, everyone caught in the rubble turned to a bloody paste. Himself, standing over the wreckage and trying to feel its consequence. Even imagining specific faces. It might as well be an accident on the moon for all that it makes him feel. It’s not real.
Am I a monster? he wonders.
“Principal Chalmers,” he says. “He looked at me funny in the hallway today.”
In a week the first boy will have saved enough money from his job at the grocery store to buy a used black motorcycle off Craigslist.
8
Riding on the motorcycle together is awkward at first and the second boy is sure that people are talking about them. But people have always talked about them. Maybe it doesn’t matter. In any case they are careful not to ride together right after school.
They weave up and down gravel roads, the second boy leaning with the first boy to counterbalance the motorcycle. Leaning forward, too, afraid he will fall off. The second boy tries not to think about how when sometimes pressing into his friend on the motorcycle he feels a warmth flowing into him, a radiant warmth spreading out from his chest. They stop at the top of a hill and look out. The country is a sloping patchwork of forest and fields until the horizon, where a piece of the CN Tower stands like a compass rose.
Later they ride back to the first boy’s house, where they will sit on the first boy’s bed and play video games while clothes run in the washer and dryer in the room next door. The trip back is much faster than the trip out, the first boy gunning it on straightaways, taking corners quickly, pretending that they’re being pursued. But no one catches them.
Today the cage is gone and the second boy asks what happened to the dog.
“My uncle took him,” says the first boy. “And then he died.”
9
Two boys meet in high school in a backward place where nobody understands them. They’re under no illusions that there’s anything particular or special that prevents their fitting in. All they know is that they don’t belong. Probably they’ll feel that way for most of their lives. They create a Google Doc called “Pain: A Manifesto” and it grows between them, filling with rants or ideas about ways to “disrupt the flow of contentment in the Town of Durham.” The title of the document is only partly ironic. The same is true of the ideas themselves.
idea: paint all white cars black and all black cars white
idea: place hidden cameras in downtown intersections
idea: tie off limbs with rubber tubing
idea: (following above) hack off limbs during high-school graduation
id
ea: slut-shame old men
idea: slut-shame everyone
idea: encourage littering in gas stations and parking lots
idea: encourage littering (universal )
The document is like a brain growing between them. A useless or festering brain. An unproductive brain. A stupid or lazy brain. In the words of the second boy’s father. Or at least that’s what he imagines since he would never show it to him. Sometimes the first boy stays up until late at night typing ideas and complaints into their brain, coming into class the next day looking haggard and with deep circles under his eyes. “A List of All Best Possibe [sic] Universes,” reads one section that the second boy spends his entire free period reading: part philosophy, part diary, part laundry list of complaints.
10
What would their lives look like under different restrictions or constraints? Born into different shades of privilege? An easy question to ask.
Both can imagine some part of themselves perfected and shimmering, moving with ease through the hallways of Upper Canada. With all of their unproductive detritus cast off. They both understand that their lives are accidents, that all lives are.
Neither includes the other in their fantasy.
11
Two boys meet in high school and one dreams about the other. Though the person in his dream is a girl, the boy is somehow certain it’s his friend. The girl is wearing a letterman’s jacket and a mid-length grey skirt, like some idea of the fifties incarnate. They’re in the school library, but a different library than the one he knows, with higher shelves and stage lighting. A murky darkness surrounds them. He’s inconceivably happy. They’re working closely together, the girl leaning over his shoulder, occasionally grazing him with her breasts. His hand touches hers. Hers touches his. An electric shock. It’s not the girl, it’s his friend, and they’re lying on the floor and kissing. It feels familiar. When he wakes up he is harder than he’s ever been in his life.