The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  I longed for the certainty of my lost boyhood, ached for Filander, yearned for God. Such nights, if held in God’s hands, might only be a practise run for dreams. But there was no sleep, and no going back, and no Filander—not even the fantasy of him was left to me—and no God, and I watched the second hand travel unhurried round the tiny clock face as if there were no hunger for morning. I alternately watched the flow of seconds for ten minutes or so at a stretch, then closed my eyes for as long as I could bear the darkness—a different kind of darkness, somehow both more grey and less flat—only to open them to find that in this way I had passed nine minutes, or only seven, or perhaps just three. Nine or seven or three minutes closer to morning, but also to my death, an end that, in God’s absence, held no more security than life did. I thought about how death is something we can’t know, the end of a hundred thousand moments we can’t understand. It is not The Mystery but merely one mystery of an uncountable number, like the stars.

  I reached for the clock and turned it face downwards on my night table, but the faintest glow was still visible around its edges, so I placed it in the bed beside me and smothered it with my extra pillow, killing time. A cloud of pinpricks formed, like the specks behind my eyes when I rise too quickly, then scattered and became a line of tiny lights; a straight, small arrow of light where life is just what happens to us in between the banging on the cookie sheets with a wooden spoon and—what? The final letter dropped into the slot, the final episode of Star Trek, the final piece of toast with marmalade, the final sounding of a note, even if sung by those who sing like angels? What is the point of raking leaves that are sure to fall again another year, visiting a mother who does not know who I am? What is the point of telling the stories of our lives to others, or telling ourselves about the truth—or falsehood—of our stories?

  What is the point of music?

  Was my life’s songline a composition in binary form, the second half similar to the first, but played in a different key? More singing with my mother, only with her remembering fewer and fewer words? More turning around on Bath Road, only perhaps with more decisiveness? More letters slipped into mail slots, but at a quicker pace? More drinking beer with Ed as he gradually hollowed out into someone who defined himself first and foremost by his failure to reproduce? More walking the line between singing and not-singing, the notes echoing faintly before dying into silence?

  Outside, without warning, a crow cawed, an unforgiving sound, still full of the black taste of night. Another answered, closer, and then they took up their call-and-response, and one by one the stars, inside and outside my window, disappeared from view. There was a brief lull, when it seemed the dark would be eternal. And then again the caw of crows, double and triple calls, answered in increasing numbers, a round of harsh and tuneless notes, like untameable sounds descending along the road to hell.

  Almost imperceptible, the light bubbled up to meet the sky. But then it was suddenly luminous, as if lit by a glowing ring around the earth. The crows continued their atonal talk, holding on to the night’s edge with their sharp-clawed toes. My eyes were wide open, and now I could see the outline of the window frame, and now the hump of the extra pillow beside me and the curve of the footboard on my bed.

  It was my birthday. It was a particular birthday, and I was a particular age—not an age that others would recognize as significant, not yet the labourious turning of a decade. But the dotted line between the first half and the second half of life, the exact day between the time of my birth and the end point of the average life expectancy for men in Canada, and in addition, as if that wasn’t enough, only ten years short of the age my mother was when life for her was effectively over.

  IN THE BIRTHDAYS OF MY EARLY CHILDHOOD there was only one cake, instead of the two that appeared for all my brothers. It reinforced the notion that twoness was normal and that I was somehow deficient, unsubstantiated by confectionary.

  On birthdays—my own or anyone’s—I missed Filander most. On non-birthdays his shadow played beside me, sang beside me, went shyly to school beside me, however reluctant he was to put his hand up in class to answer the teacher’s questions. When I hid in the elderberry bush from my brothers, soltanto, I was defended by his spirit.

  I both knew and didn’t know that he was fantasy. All children engage in magical thinking, and I was no exception. My five senses declared that he did not exist, but I knew something beyond sensing—like the mystery that occurs when people sing together, and the music becomes more than instruments and voices. Filander was like that music, mysteriously radiating energy into the universe, an essence that swelled and expanded to fill every crevice of creation. I knew him by morphic field, echolocation, pheromones, and infrared light. He could not be argued with.

  On my birthdays, faced with only one cake, all I felt was confusion. On each new birthday, I hoped my mother would have noticed him sometime in the preceding year, trailing after me to my makeshift bedroom, sitting in a vacant chair in the peeling kitchen, attached like a conjoined twin to the side of my palm when I reached out my hand for an extra piece of toast or a glass of watery milk. Now he was attached on one side, now on the other, never anchored quite as securely as I wanted, left or right, but still there hazily along the fault lines, those bright scars, the testament of my faith that I was not, could not be, alone. But every year a singleton cake made its entrance down the long hallway, having been hidden on the floor of my mother’s tilting wardrobe to prevent it from being eaten prematurely by my foraging brothers. Once it appeared and was placed on the chrome table in front of me—the one day of the year I would sit in a chair while one of my brothers stood impatiently behind me—I couldn’t help but have a small moment of doubt about Filander’s existence. I was almost relieved when my brothers demolished the evidence, scorrevole, before I could blow out the single set of candles—and, most years, even before my mother could light them.

  We try all our lives to make the world into something we can understand. It is the best argument against the existence of God that I can think of. My mother bought our birthday cakes from Dominion, and who knows what favours she had to grant in order to afford them.

  I ESCAPED IT IN MY FIRST YEAR in Toronto, because November arrived almost before we knew it, and there was no expectation that by that time I would have made friends good enough to invite over. That first year, for my thirteenth birthday, Annie and I walked up to the Danforth—with a striped golf umbrella, just in case—where we ate moussaka and I drank well-watered Assyrtiko. But by my second year at St. Mary’s, and my fourteenth birthday, Annie was insistent that we have a party to celebrate, as if I had to prove, somehow, that I was a regular boy and not a misfit.

  I was in a quandary that I didn’t know how to solve: who to invite that Annie would approve of? Kevin, Eric, Josh? Instinctively, I knew the three of them together would be a mistake, but to choose any one of them was impossible.

  “But I don’t need a party!” I said to Annie, for the seventh time. “Really. Last year was fine; let’s just do that again.”

  “What about that boy you sang the duet with? He seems nice,” she said. “Cool. He seems cool,” she corrected herself. I made a face.

  “I’d just as soon go and eat Greek food,” I told her. “Just you and me.” I didn’t want to tell her his name.

  “Invite him to come along with us,” she instructed. That was really the end of our discussion, except for some amount of reminding on her part, and some amount of avoidance on my part, so that the days slipped by in calculated inaction and I never did ask anyone. On the day, after school let out, Annie and I walked up to Greektown with our fall jackets clasped tightly around our necks against the swirling wind, and I had a single sip of ouzo in a shot glass after our meal.

  BUT IN THE END, I got a party anyway.

  The basement lunchroom was the only part of St. Mary’s Choir School that was not beautiful. The oak-panelling in the rooms and h
allways above stopped abruptly on the landing halfway down the stairs, where grey-painted cinder-blocks took over, and the high windows of the classrooms above gave way to flickering fluorescent lights. The room was small, and necessitated two shifts of boys, all seats taken in both sittings. The younger boys got the earlier shift; I suppose the administration thought our immature stomachs more delicate and so were disinclined to make us wait. Despite the crowds, I never had to stand and eat, as I had had to do at home. There, we would all—my mother and myself and all my brothers—have been able to sit down together, since the long rectangular tables in the lunchroom each had eight chairs, arranged in two lines along its longer sides.

  There were seven boys already at the table when I arrived, a little breathless, from math class. Not one of them looked at me as I sat down and opened up my lunch bag; in fact, they were rather curiously not-looking at me. But I was hungry and concentrating on unwrapping my tuna sandwich.

  “One, two, three—” said Eric, and suddenly there were seven presents in front of me; every boy had pulled out a box from where he’d hidden it under the table or under his arm or in his blazer pocket, and tossed each box, underhanded, backhanded, under a knee or facing backwards, onto the table, making a seven-note thudding tune and a jumbled pile of bright gifts.

  “Happy birthday, dumb-nuts,” said Kevin. One of the boxes fell to the floor at my feet.

  “Open that one first,” said Brian, and he bent down to retrieve the small square box, waved it under my nose, and then hit me in the ear with it. Everyone laughed.

  I was meant to open them all.

  They were small things, tokens—I can see that now, but at the time I might as well have been given the Crown Jewels—or all the sheet music in Long & McQuade. The one from Brian, opened first, was a Rubik’s Cube, and was subsequently passed around the table in admiration. There was a harmonica, which, despite the fact that I never really wanted to learn to play, became the first instrument I ever owned myself. There was a giant Hershey bar that James had gotten from his aunt who lived beside the legendary chocolate factory in Smiths Falls.

  They weren’t merely presents; I was opening a tower of inclusion. I was being invited in to a place I’d never thought to go. Once in, I found I desperately wanted to be there.

  I MAY HAVE GIVEN THE IMPRESSION that I haven’t seen any of my brothers since my homecoming twenty years ago, but this is not entirely accurate. I had not seen all six of my brothers together since leaving the house of my childhood when I was twelve years old. My contact with them in any other form or number has been infrequent and sporadic. Singly, they occasionally email, or, doubly, sometimes even show up on my doorstep or in the locked ward of the nursing home, with an irregular rhythm that is measured in light years and celestial orbits. I have not seen any one brother alone in over thirty years. Stereotypical twins, they always come in sets of two, like ear plugs or altar candles. It is as if they need to be mutually bolstered to accomplish the act of arriving in their hometown, visiting our mother, and announcing their presence—to me, at least.

  They can announce themselves to our mother all they like; she has no idea who any of them are. Oh, she knows she had sons in numbers; she still sometimes talks about the six of them in her indecipherable ramblings. But she couldn’t equate these overgrown men with the thin brown creatures she longed to show off in Twinsburg, Ohio. The odd time a duo visited while I was there, she looked from one identical face to the other, and seemed not to find it untoward that the same person was seated on both sides of her bed simultaneously.

  But I hadn’t seen them, even one set of them, in a long time when I came home from work that unseasonable late fall afternoon, still exhausted from the godless night of no sleep, to find my welcome-mat askew, my front and back doors wide open, and all my brothers crowded into my backyard—I’d say it was postage stamp-sized but I avoid workplace analogies—standing at ease on the newly-raked grass, a twelve-pack of Keith’s and a two-four of Rickard’s Red piled in the centre of their half circle, like it was a double-decker fire keeping them warm. My supply of fuel for Ed’s late-night visits, almost burnt down to embers.

  If I’d seen it coming, I’d have closed the front door with myself streetside, and run back to the shop to dust the neglected shoulders of guitars and the hips of drums, back to the nursing home to sing with my mother, back to anywhere but my burgled house and this twin-invaded backyard.

  But I didn’t see it coming, and they hadn’t heard me coming, so I stood on my small back porch, momentarily unobserved, completely unnerved, looking down at the tops of all of my brother’s heads, some of that mass of dark hair now flecked with grey. The tiny yard was a sea of cramped and crowded movement, like an over-sized orchestra warming up in the pit. There was head turning and emphatic gesturing and back slapping and outbursts of laughter, deep and resonant, oboes and the lower notes of cello. The Ns were clinking bottles as if they had just declared a toast. Samuel was attempting to feed Cheesies to Fly-by-Night, holding out his orange offering on the palm on his hand. Alistair was blowing his nose in a blue plaid handkerchief. Abraham was leaning sideways talking to Maya—speaking of orange, God help me!—across the fence.

  The ghost of Filander moved past their middle-aged bodies like an ache. I thought about the dust on the guitars, and my legs started to move backwards, but AA saw me, and Abraham lifted his hand and held his palm out in my direction, and they all stopped talking and looked up.

  Alistair honked, wiped his nose back and forth, and slipped the cloth into his jeans pocket. They all leaned forward and stretched out their hands, inviting me to come down from the conductor’s rostrum.

  “Hey buddy … hey brother … Frederick … happy birthday! Surprise! Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday! Long time no see!” they all said. “Maya showed us where you kept your key.”

  “Happy birthday!” echoed Maya, raising her bottle; she tossed it over the fence to Nicholas and, almost one-handed, vaulted over the pickets.

  MY BROTHERS AND MAYA STOOD IN MY YARD drinking beer with their jackets on until the sun moved behind Maya’s maple tree, and we were all enveloped in shade and rapidly cooling autumn air. Instead of leaving, as I hoped and expected, they simply moved inside and took up residence in the erstwhile living room, each one taking a place behind or beside an instrument and randomly plucking or plinking notes at odd times in their boisterous conversation, an accident of music. The whole time, my heart felt like it was caged in iron, and I could only inhale with short shallow breaths. Every time I exhaled, I felt my heart shrink and condense, until I had something metallic and foreign inside my chest, beating a retreat. My mouth was parched as if there were a whole desert inside me—sand storms, cactus plants, and mirages. Every time I was called upon to talk, I found my jaw stuck together and was compelled to lick my lips and swallow numerous times before I could get any words out.

  We had a lot to catch up on. Or I should say, I had a lot to catch up on, since my life—in its outer form at least—hadn’t changed a bit since I had last talked to them or seen them.

  My contribution to the conversation went pretty much like this:

  “You still directing that choir, then?” asked Salvador.

  “Oh, yes,” I managed to reply.

  “How’s old Ed?” asked Abraham, in a momentary lull some half hour later.

  “Oh, fine, he’s fine, doing well enough.”

  “Still with the post office?” asked Nathaniel, at a time when several brothers had gone outside in the dark to smoke near the frost-ravaged flower beds. “Mail still goes the old-fashioned way, does it?”

  “Yes, yes it does,” I stammered and nodded, but my reply was lost in the ensuing discussion—heated debate, rather, and growing more heated as the smoking brothers returned—of the merits of this or that email program, or this or that server, or this or that brand of computer.

  I can’t accurately convey wh
at those hours were like for me in my invaded house. Sometimes there was one voice talking, toccata, but more often there were three or four or five brothers speaking at once, tutti, in a kind of vocal competition that was jovial, intense, erratic, and physical. Nobody sat still for long, and congenial shoulder punching and exuberant back slapping were de rigueur. Maya’s alto voice—always a surprise to my ears in the midst of the tenor and baritone sextet—sounded confident and clear, and flowed through the conversation as if she were used to such rowdy gatherings and had six older brothers herself.

  The details were understandably hard to follow. Catching the occasional word or phrase, piecing together fragments of meaning, I did manage to learn that Abraham was on Day 36 of his most recent attempt to quit smoking; Alistair had just come back from a fishing trip in the Dominican, having caught himself a girlfriend from Nova Scotia while there; Salvador’s bride-to-be was very much looking forward to meeting me; Samuel was thinking of becoming a monk; and the Ns had been recycling motor oil for three years longer than the national average.

  The Ns had come for a car show, and had convinced AA to come along for the ride. The SS had been sent on a mission from Johanna, to act as emissaries of persuasion in her Madrigal family reconciliation plan. They had been to see my mother, en masse, earlier that afternoon, and had found her anxious and confused and fearful of being arrested. They had tried again, two by two, and had found her more congenial, but still rather focused on Pyrex.

  In addition, I learned that Maya had been a blacksmith before she’d been a plumber and had changed careers because she found the work too hard on her back; that, contrary to appearances that evening, she was an only child; and that her hair was not naturally auburn, but blonde.

  At some point my brothers began to talk about my childhood and their adolescence, as was perhaps universally inevitable during the marking of a family birthday.