by Dian Day
“I called,” he said. “Did you get my messages?”
I think someone should write a book about the history and uses of the invocation of left messages: that act of sending information, where there is a time delay between sending the message and its delivery, and often a physical distance between sender and receiver. How this time and space disruption allows for interpretation, suggestion, insistence, and bluff. In fact, in the neat absence of procurable proofs, the doors are thrown wide open to downright lying. It’s not really a very secure system of communication. It wasn’t the first time I used this to my advantage.
“Messages?” I said. “No.” We were standing on the porch, and his newspaper was still lying on the top step, unraveling in the wind. Neither one of us did anything about that.
“Look,” I said, “I can’t invite you in; I’ve got to go out tonight. I’ve only got a minute or two to get ready.” I didn’t want to tell him I was going to choir. I didn’t want to say anything about music at all.
“Sure,” he said. “No problem. I’ll come another time.”
“I’m pretty busy these days,” I told him. “Sorry.”
“Right,” he said. He was nodding slowly, sizing up the situation, figuring out what to say next. He half turned away, and I thought he was just giving up, but he turned back again, and that look in his eyes turned out to be determination. “We could talk. We could finally get past it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered back.
“You—”
“There’s nothing to get past!” I interjected. There was more than a shadow in my voice; there was a full body of raging anger. It was so foreign to me that I didn’t know how to feel it. I didn’t know where all this disquiet was coming from. I just wanted my perfectly guarded life back.
He opened his mouth, and closed it again. He just stood there looking at me, it seemed like a long time, pursing his lips and nodding slightly to himself, as if he had half expected my response.
“I’m sorry, Frederick,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to bother you.” There was a peculiar look in his eyes. As if he felt sorry for me.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT NEW PIECE?” Alex asked me. We were sitting beside the path, under a tree in the Allen Gardens conservatory, and Alex was brushing tiny stones from between his knees and tossing them ineffectually at the trapped pigeon that strutted a revolving path around us, just out of reach, waiting for crumbs.
“Which one? The Purcell?”
“Yeah.” He sang the first line, the notes flowing like water, his cambiata voice, in that moment, untroubled.
Come, come ye sons of art, come, come away
“Woolly,” I pronounced, deepening my own voice and tucking in my chin as I said it, the way our choir director did.
“Arse!” Alex said, laughing, and he hit my shoulder with the back of his hand. A trickle of dust fell down my neck.
“Woolly, woolly, woolly!” I repeated with fake seriousness, as I ducked and rolled out of his way. It was a word the choir director used often in those days, in a room full of choir boys, some of whom could no longer be counted on to sing the right notes. My own voice had changed, but Alex’s hadn’t fully. There’s a certain quality to a boy’s changing voice; it’s not quite treble, but it’s not quite anything else yet. Alex’s voice was lurking in an alto-tenor range, but some of his notes were true renegades. He didn’t seem worried by it. He just laughed when a note broke, as if it were something easily put back together.
“You could knit a sweater with that voice!” I said. He threw his book at me, and the startled pigeon fluttered three feet into the air and landed a little farther away. I caught the book and opened it upside-down, pretending to read, still imitating our teacher.
“Master Hughes, please sing baaaaa!” I put my hand to my ear.
“Baaaaa, baaaaaaa,” said Alex, obligingly. “Baaaaaaaaaaa.”
“I can’t hear you Master Hughes! Can you baaaaa louder?”
“Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” he brayed.
“You sound like a real sheep!”
“I know,” agreed Alex.
“Real sheep shit.”
“Baaaaa, baaaaaaa,” said Alex.
“Why do we need to have shits in the choir, anyway?” I said, mimicking the voice Kevin had used when he had said exactly that to Alex earlier in the afternoon.
“Fuck off.” Alex’s voice changed then. He said it lightly, but there was a waver—and a warning—in his words that wasn’t due to his voice breaking. He wasn’t playing any more. He reached for the book he had thrown at me, grabbed it out of my hands, snapped it shut, and unzipped his knapsack.
“What?” I asked, “I was just teasing!” But then I was uncomfortable in the silence that followed. Alex had his head down and was collecting his things—his choir notebook, a mechanical pencil, the crumpled pizza wrapper—and ramming them into his bag. He stood up, and bits of gravel rained down around him. He brushed off the seat and knees of his pants.
“I better get going,” he said.
The afternoon felt ruined, but I didn’t know why. I was angry at myself for it. I suppose that was why I couldn’t let it drop. I had to take it out on someone.
“You should try standing up for yourself, for a change.”
Alex picked up his bag and put it on over his blazer. The pigeon spotted a crumb and sidled up to him, pecking the ground and cooing.
“Fuck off,” he said to the pigeon, angrily. He kicked at it, and it flapped up and away like a dirty newspaper in the wind.
“Why don’t you stand up for yourself, sheep shit?” I asked him. I was goading him so he would answer me.
Alex turned his head then, and gave me my answer. “Fuck off, Frederick,” he said between his teeth. His face was bright red, and his eyes were like wood. And he turned toward the exit without asking me if I was coming.
I sat slumped on the path in shock. Alex reached the banana tree and didn’t look back.
“Wait!” I called after him. “Wait!” I got up frantically and looked around at all my homework spread out around me, my music book turned to Ave Verum, black and red and green pencils piled like the end of a game of pick-up sticks.
“Wait!” I yelled. I didn’t know if he could hear me. He didn’t even slow down.
“Why don’t you just tell them to fuck off?” I screamed at him. He turned a corner and disappeared.
I stood there until the pigeon came back. When I kicked out at it, dust tickled down inside my untucked shirt and fell onto my open music book like lost notes.
I DIDN’T EVEN WAIT TO SEE if he picked up the newspaper. I closed my front door with Alex on the other side of it. I was late for choir—or I would be if I didn’t get a move on.
I went upstairs to splash my face with cold water.
I couldn’t help myself; I went into the front room and approached the window from the side, moving my head slowly around the edge of the curtain, so I could look out onto the street without being obvious about it. Alex was still out there, leaning his hip against a car parked on the road opposite my door, head bowed, huddled into his coat, and sucking his cheek in indecision.
As I watched him, he fished in his jeans for his keys and unlocked his car. He got in and drove away without looking back at my house.
ALEX HAD ALREADY BEEN AT ST. MARY’S for three years by the time I arrived. Until that point, he had enjoyed a kind of immunity from the worst of what the rowdies might deliver, since he did have a very rich voice; before mine, the former One Best Voice, which was currency at St. Mary’s. Before puberty he had more range than I did, and an alarming breath control—a talent he used as often to win breath-holding wagers as he did to hold a note during choir practice—as well as a remarkable memory for a musical score. We were so often paired in choir, a duo of fine voices—the Two Best
Voices—and were selected to perform solos and duets at countless masses, concerts, and funerals. Our teachers, unknowing of its relevance, even referred to us on occasion as “our St. Mary’s singing twins.” Fair to my dark, erratic to my staid, I was so sure he was nothing at all like me—nor, I was doubly sure, like Filander.
I was newly come from a public school where my notorious brothers had paved the route before me, but it was a road I had refused to travel. When the bullies at Central discovered I was more inclined to hide than fight, they sought me out everywhere. I thought it was clear what side of that road I would always be on.
At St. Mary’s, there was no longer any reason to hide. My voice went in front of me, both my sword and my shield. I did not know—didn’t care to know—why Alex’s voice did not protect him the way mine protected me.
When I said the two words to Alex Hughes that changed the course of both of our lives, he did not look shocked, or even surprised. Rather, his chalky face suggested he had known all along what was coming, and only ever wondered when and exactly how. He looked at me only briefly, the colour draining from his over-heated cheeks, his blond hair hanging limply across his forehead. His eyelids narrowed slightly in that ever-frozen moment—or perhaps I merely imagined it—and his eyes fell from light to dark, the way I thought an animal’s would as the knife was at its throat. He’d known all along that I would betray him. He looked like Jesus once kissed by Judas.
ED WAS SITTING BEHIND THE COUNTER and he had his feet up on the shelf underneath. He’d pushed aside the accounts ledger and the tea-stained mugs and the plastic recycling that ends up there because he can’t be bothered to take anything back to the storeroom and put it in the blue bin. I had to lean over the counter to hand him his letter, and the edge of the glass stuck in my chest. He didn’t really look at it as he took it, just held it loosely in his hands and kept staring at the toes of his sneakers. He wiggled his feet back and forth as if he were hearing some silent melody, but I couldn’t decipher the tune from watching the rhythm.
“It’s from Annie,” I said. He seems to need a lot of encouragement these days to interact with the things of this world.
He looked at the envelope then, and grunted.
“Open it,” I said, and I stood there waiting for him to put his feet down and find a knife, even though I was dripping melting snow across the display of classical guitar strings. He clattered among the cups and found a knife that actually appeared to be unused, but wiped it across his pant leg anyway. I watched until he had the knife inserted under the flap, then turned to go back out and continue my route. I had the next door shop’s pile of mail in my left hand, and my right hand was on the bar of The Whole Note’s door, when he said, “Annie.” It seemed he was saying a lot more than just one word with her name.
I turned back to look at him. The letter and knife were still in his hands, but he hadn’t used the knife and the letter was still unopened.
“Why don’t you write to her?” he asked. It was like he’d saved up pennies for twenty years just to buy that one little question.
“Why doesn’t she write to me?” I answered. It was impulse. I didn’t really think about what he was saying or why he would ask me that then; I just felt resentful, and didn’t want anything else to be my fault. Heat flared inside me, licked the inside of my skin with instant fury. “Why are you on about this now, anyway?” I asked him whitely.
“It seems like you blame her for something,” Ed said. He was angry too.
“I’m not blaming Annie for anything,” I argued. “I’m grateful to all of you.” But I heard the tone of my voice and the force with which I spoke, and I knew I didn’t sound grateful at all.
I put my hand back on the bar and pushed. I heard the shop bell tinkle, and, as the door opened, a bus roared by and threw slush across the sidewalk like an unwelcome offering from a careless hand. I went out into the street, and it seemed like the whole world was a roaring bus, overfull with impatient riders, the ill-mannered driver counting the stops until the end of his shift.
I WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD before I knew the true story of Filander. It was Annie who told me about polydactylism. She looked it up in a dusty volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, searching haphazardly under poly-, after I told her about my missing half, my parasitic twin, and showed her the scars on the outside of my hands.
“Wherever did you get such an idea?” she said. She had that air about her, as she often did, that suggested, in the nicest way, that my vocal talents made up for my lack of brain function.
“My brothers told me,” I explained, and as soon as I said it I had the terrible feeling that she was going to be right about my brain. How could I have believed anything told to me by my brothers, and for so long?
“I have the proof,” I insisted, holding up my hands, holding on desperately to the frail shadow of my twin slipping from my grasp. “Look!”
And then she got the Encyclopedia from the shelf under the stairs.
“Poly … poly … poly…” she muttered to herself as she flipped the thin pages. “What’s it called? Poly-something.…”
I didn’t want it to be called poly-anything.
“It’s Filander!” I said then. It might have been the first time I had said his name out loud. It was the last.
It was about a week before my final St. Mary’s Christmas concert at Massey Hall. I am not sure what inspired me to share my deepest secret with a woman who was guaranteed not to play along with a fantasy, no matter what the emotional fallout might be. In that house, truth always came before feeling. For Annie, Truth was God.
“Nonsense,” she said. “It’s a gene mutation. It has nothing to do with twins.”
She looked up, exasperated, from the open leather-bound book on her knees. I can remember the colour of the ruddy leather against her pale flowered dress, and the way the fabric hung in bunched-up folds, caught under the book and between her thigh and the hall chair. The mid-afternoon light from the transom above the front door was already weakening, and she looked to me like a fading spectre; her ghostly finger pointed at her place on the luminous page.
“Turn on the light, Frederick,” she asked. “I can’t see what I’m doing.” And it was true, she couldn’t.
I think of that night as the pivot point of my last year of high school. Before that night’s revelation, everything in my life felt like it was moving me towards perfection, orchestrated by the hand of God, and afterwards everything slid rapidly downwards into an unsounded darkness.
I had scars on my hands because of a gene mutation.
I had never had a twin, not even the little finger of one.
I have always been alone.
PRETTY MUCH RIGHT AFTER FILANDER’S DEATH by Encyclopedia Britannica, I decided that seeing God on my bedroom wall was suspect. After I left Annie’s, I spent months reading about emotion-induced hallucinations and the meaning of dreams, and by eighteen and a half I’d filed God away in the never-never land of theta waves and rapid eye movements. Twenty years later, I’m not so sure it’s that clear-cut. I can’t make myself believe or unbelieve things just because I want to.
I look back at everything that happened to me in the first two decades of my life, and it seems such a wandering tune to get me where I am now. Such an inexplicable series of events, C leading to D leading to E leading to F, where all the notes have a pitch that is strange and new and never previously heard by the human ear. How can we know beforehand what the music will sound like? How can we make sense of it afterwards, the notes always discordant and aleatoric? Sometimes I think that all the music I make is simply a confused attempt to create harmony out of an untuned, solo instrument. The piece is already written, libretto and score, and I can only interpret the sounds, sing the words, weigh the silence. An impossible task.
EVERY MORNING I GOT UP one day closer to the wedding and the knot constricted in my stomach, like
an over-taut harp string, ready to snap. I slept less and less, and wandered through my music room hearing the silence of the strings and skins. Somehow, I almost always passed them by and ended up at the back of the house; I sang more and more often alone in my kitchen at all hours of the night.
On the morning that there were only twenty-eight days left, I looked at the calendar and noticed that I had arranged to meet Kathleen for supper at the Sea Biscuit. Ed still wasn’t showing up regularly in the evenings, and when he did he was more inclined to sit silently than sing, and I had grown a little tired of sitting around waiting for things to get back to normal. I guess I hoped if I just got through all the wedding business as quickly as possible, my life would begin to settle down again. At that point I could still let myself think things would be normal again, one day.
Besides, I didn’t know Kathleen from a hole in the ground, and she didn’t know me from Adam, and I didn’t think that was the best way for us to go to Salvador’s wedding. I had finally gotten to the point where it made me weaker in the knees to think about going away with her for the weekend as an unknown entity than to think of getting to know her better before we set off.
I have to reiterate that it was all a matter of degree. On the day of the purported date, I sorted my mail in such a distracted fashion that I did not absorb any of Dave’s updates on the kitten’s antics. He can talk as he sorts, and I can’t, and he knows this, so luckily he failed to notice that I wasn’t paying the slightest attention. I walked my route that morning feeling like a sleepwalker, with streets and numbers more mixed up in my hands than they had been since I was a novice postie. The chimes and bells that hung over the Princess Street doors were like an entire fleet of alarm clocks, but none of them were any use, and I couldn’t seem to wake up, no matter how many shop doors rang as I went in and out. When I walked up the steps to the Sea Biscuit, with Neil’s bills—for fish batter and seafood sauce, presumably—ready in my hand, my muscles felt so weak I could barely get the door open.