Foreigners

by Stephen Finucan

  Of Gaynor’s slim volume of abandoned correspondence there were two letters in particular that Payne always found himself coming back to. They were written less than a week apart, and the last just the day before Gaynor disappeared into the dark forests of the Algonquin. These, and others, were found—along with the three brief novellas Gaynor had penned, only two of which survived burning—among his effects at the lumber shanty where he worked as a sawman. The first letter was manic in its composition, in terms of both language and the hectic swirl of the hand; a mind committed and raging:

  Penelope,

  All is nothing after the wilds. There is no truth, no beauty, in your world. In the world I once shared with you. It evaporates in the face of this wondrous nature I have found. Meanness and meaninglessness is all that civilization has to offer. The toil and struggle of that world is for naught, for that is what it makes of a man. Naught. Knot. Not. The real truth is here. The nothingness of the bush, for that is what they say is out here: nothing but trees, nothing but beasts, nothing but savages.

  I will not see you again, my wife. I am going away into the forest never to return. When they ask you, and they will, what became of your husband, tell them this: nothing.

  Yours, etc.,

  N.

  Reading it that first time after he’d rescued it, along with Gaynor’s original handwritten manuscripts, from a mouldering packing crate in the bowels of the National Library in Ottawa, Payne was struck by the perfect nihilism. He was elated; it was like finally finding the legendary pirate treasure of Oak Island. And to be sure, when Payne first contemplated Gaynor for his doctoral dissertation, his subject was as fabulous as that buccaneer loot. The only mention of him in academic texts was as a footnote, more often than not in reference to other writers of the time: Moodie, Traill, Richardson, et al. And as for his two slim fictions—The Woodsman of the Northern Woods and The Shaman and the Sawman—the editions published by permission of the poor destitute Penelope, in hope of somehow lessening the privation into which she’d fallen, they had long ago crumbled into dust.

  So when he’d cut loose the stiffened string that had long bound the crate, and breathed in those first stale spores of disregard, Payne felt as if he were breathing in a brilliant future rather than a neglected past. His hope soared even higher when he came to the final, unsigned missive:

  My Dearest Penelope,

  Paradise will be your reward.

  As for me—I am at the gates:

  Per me si va ne la citta dolente

  Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore

  Per me si va tra la perduta gente

  How quickly all that confidence and hope had dissolved, Payne thought, nestling his head now into the small hollow created by his tilted seat back and the upright back of the empty seat between himself and his snoring companion. It had started to dwindle during his thesis defence.

  He’d been so cocksure beforehand, as he sat on the hard wooden bench outside the examination room. But once inside, seated on an equally hard wooden straight-backed chair before his stern-faced inquisitors, he’d felt it all start to slip away. His argument—that Gaynor’s nihilism, present both in his letters and his literature, could be viewed as a precursor to the French existentialism that followed some six decades later, because after all, what was an existentialist but a nihilist with an axe to grind?—fell on deaf ears. One of his examiners, a withered old professor with an incongruously dark shock of hair, went so far as to say, “This Gaynor, I wonder if rather than a nihilist, as you seem bent on contending, he simply had nothing to say. For that is the impression I draw from your thesis. But perhaps again, Mister Payne, it is you who are the nihilist.”

  And there it began, Payne thought, opening his eyes once more to the static blue wash of the television monitors. Dante Alighieri, Noel Gaynor and Harvard T. Payne standing before the gates that lead unto the suffering city, unto eternal pain, unto the way that runs among the lost.

  Payne couldn’t bring himself to rent the video, so Kathryn did. He suggested that maybe they go to a different store, one farther away from his house, but she laughed and made her way into the partitioned adult section and left him standing alone beside a rack of computer games. He wished he’d waited in the car, and was just about to make his way back down the aisle toward the exit when she re-emerged, a wide happy smile curling her lips.

  “I think you’ll like this,” she said, holding up a cassette case that bore the picture of a great buxom blonde with her legs pulled up to her chest and wooden shoes on her feet. “See what it’s called,” Kathryn smiled: “Double Dutch.”

  The title, as it turned out, was a trifle misleading. For while there were many instances of doubling up in the film, there was little about it that was Dutch. But the incongruity did not seem to bother Kathryn. She sat transfixed as scene after scene flickered by, each beginning innocuously enough with a mistaken identity, the ordering of a pizza, a hopeful job interview, then progressed, with alarming rapidity Payne noted, into myriad breathtaking coital acrobatics.

  Each successive coupling was accompanied by Kathryn’s low, shuddering groans, and more than once she pressed pause on the VCR and pointed toward the frozen image, grinning a Cheshire grin. Payne, sitting beside her on sofa, grinned and groaned in response, but felt somehow let down by the whole thing. He noticed early on that not only the dialogue but also several of the visuals were running on a loop.

  When Kathryn finally decided on a segment, rewound it and watched it twice, and said with her now customary throatiness, “Ooh, let’s try that one, naughty boy,” Payne felt a shiver of fear run down his spine.

  He remained sitting on the sofa as she climbed down onto the throw rug in front of the television and slipped out of her panties and bra. He marvelled at the determination on her face as she closely studied the frozen image on the screen, twisting her limbs so that they matched the rather uncomfortable-looking contortions of the actress in the video—the same actress, Payne realized, who graced the cover of the cassette. Where are her wooden shoes, he wondered.

  “Well?” Kathryn said, her head turned awkwardly back over her shoulder, looking as if she’d just gone through a severe chiropractic manipulation.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s your turn now,” she said and grinned another grin, this one as crooked as her body. “I can’t stay like this forever, you know.”

  Payne stood up from the sofa and, as he slowly lowered his boxers, was gripped by an overwhelming sensation that seemed to come at him from the darkest shadows of his past. He felt himself back in the boys’ locker room of his old high school. We all shower, Mr Payne, came Coach Foster’s voice through the mist. Now off with your drawers.

  “For Christ’s sake, Harvey,” Kathryn said. “Hurry up. I think I’m getting a cramp.”

  Payne took a deep breath and swallowed hard, then stepped out of his underpants, almost certain that the laughter and wet towel ends would follow in the wake of his old gym teacher’s echoing words. He even flinched when Kathryn reached out and touched his shin.

  “Come on, let’s go,” she purred.

  Keeping an eye on the television, Payne lowered himself onto one knee. The throw rug, he noticed immediately, was very rough against his flesh, almost as if he had just knelt on splintery wood. Already, in this the earliest stage of positioning, he appreciated the dexterity of the actor motionless before him. Then, stretching out his other leg to full length, in the same manner he remembered having seen a back catcher for the Baltimore Orioles do, Payne felt a tightening in the back of his knee, as if an elastic had been stretched to its limit. Still, he proceeded, and took hold of Kathryn’s left ankle and brought it to rest on his shoulder.

  “Almost there,” she whispered, as she fitted her right leg into the empty triangle of space created by his outstretched thighs. “Now, get in closer.”

  Payne, a sheen of sweat forming on his brow, began to shuffle forward, finding it not only difficult to keep his balance, but a
lso somewhat painful, as the carpet grazed the skin from his knee. In place finally, and not more than a little out of breath, he hunkered slightly, so as to bring his hips onto the same plane as Kathryn’s. It was then he felt the sharp snap. It did not, however, occur in the strained ligaments behind his extended knee, as he had expected.

  “What’s wrong?” Kathryn asked, perturbed.

  “Something …”

  “Well, what?”

  “… in my back.” Payne groaned, as frozen in place as the far more flexible actors on the television. “Something’s happened … in my back.”

  “What already?”

  “I don’t know …”

  Kathryn shifted.

  “Ouch,” Payne yelped. “Please don’t … can’t move.”

  Kathryn moaned and Payne could see out of the corner of his eye that she was wriggling the toes of her foot propped on his shoulder.

  “Oh, Harvey,” she whined. “You’re going to have to. I can’t feel my leg.”

  “Just give it a second,” he begged. “Something’s slipped, I think. I just need a second.”

  Payne tried to adjust himself to relieve the pressure on his bent knee but succeeded only in igniting a fire in his lower spine.

  “Please, Harvey,” Kathryn said, an edge in her voice. “I’m getting a pain in my hip now.”

  Suddenly there were other voices in the room, moaning and gasping and calling out. Payne, frightened, twisted around to see who’d walked in on them and as he did felt the cold blade of agony tear up his spine and prise apart his shoulder blades. As he fell sidelong onto the rough throw rug, which he now in a flash resolved to pitch into the garbage, Payne recalled the ancient Norse tradition of the “Bloody Eagle,” which involved the cutting open of an enemy’s back so as to expose the heart and lungs to the cold air. And as he cautiously reached around to feel the warm sponginess of his displaced organs, he heard Kathryn’s laughter.

  She was leaning against the sofa, massaging her tingling leg with one hand and pointing toward the television with the other. The pause button had cut out, and on the screen the two actors were performing with ease and obvious pleasure the act that now left Payne in paroxysms of Nordic anguish.

  Payne, feeling the muscles in his lower back, just to the right of his spine, curling up into a hot little fist, arched his shoulders in the hope of unclenching them. He’d been expecting the discomfort at some point, what with having to sit for so long, especially in the confining seats of coach class. He’d already grown accustomed to the dull, slow-burning ache that had visited him with regularity since the fiasco with the video. If he was in his office working and it came upon him, he would lay himself down on the floor with his arms outstretched, crucifix-like, and wait out the spasm. He’d even done this once on the cold linoleum tiles of his kitchen floor when a particularly intense knurl formed as he was tending to a large pot of angel-hair pasta. But the prospect of lying supine in the aisle of economy class was unlikely. It was not simply his humility that prevented him; the remarkable narrowness of the aisle made such an act impossible.

  It was the doctor in the emergency ward who suggested lying on the floor to him. The embarrassment of that visit reddened Payne’s cheeks even now. The most difficult thing had been getting his clothes back on. He had to remain lying on his side while Kathryn pulled on his underpants, gently rolling him onto his back only when it came time to slide them over his hips. The doctor hadn’t been nearly so gentle when he pulled them halfway down his buttocks so that he could get a good look at the affected area.

  “And you say you did this moving an armoire?” Payne remembered the doctor saying, his voice flush with doubt. “Must have twisted yourself into an extraordinarily awkward position. And what about the abrasions on your knee and cheek?”

  “Fell down,” Payne replied. “When I twisted myself.”

  “Yes, I see,” the doctor said, again with suspicion, casting a quick glance toward Kathryn. “Of course,” he continued, patting Payne on the belly, “if you got rid of a bit of this you wouldn’t have near so much trouble. The abdomen and the back should act as counterbalances, you see. It shouldn’t be a case of one supporting the other.”

  Payne remembered the look on Kathryn’s face as she stood there, her back brushing up against the plastic curtain of the examination carrel. The doctor explained that it wasn’t anything serious, a pull of the latissimus and probably the ilio-costalis, as well—nothing that rest and heat wouldn’t cure. As he said this, Payne saw slight traces of distaste reflected in Kathryn’s eyes, as if she was being forced to watch something that, although organic, was also unsightly, like childbirth or death. What had been missing from her expression, though, Payne was now willing to admit, was compassion.

  That was the beginning of it, Payne now realized, and thought about how it was that examining rooms figured so prominently in his declines.

  He gazed up at the television monitor. The little white airplane had exceeded the apex of its arc, which passed just south of Greenland, and was dipping now toward the Irish coast.

  During the week that he was laid up, Kathryn came to him with heating pads and hot packs of various shapes, sizes and consistencies. Of the electric heating pads Payne was wary, afraid that if he happened to spill the orange juice he kept on his bedside table he might inadvertently electrocute himself. He was much more confident with the Presto-Relief Hot-Cold Compresses: small plastic pouches filled with a gelatinous blue slime that could be put in the freezer to cool or popped in the microwave to warm up. He liked the way they moulded themselves to his back and his neck, which had begun to stiffen with the extended bed rest.

  Payne found that he enjoyed convalescing, looked forward each day to Kathryn’s coming around to check on him. He took pleasure in watching the way she moved about the bedroom, picking up his knocked-over juice cups and clearing away plates of dried sandwich crusts and toast ends and plastic soda-biscuit wrappers. And to have her climb into bed beside him and rub minty-smelling analgesic on his back took him to new heights of arousal, so much so that when Kathryn tried to roll him over, he would feign agony and urge her to apply more ointment.

  Payne was glad, too, to be shed of his lecturing and tutorial obligations for a few weeks, passing the latter off to an eager TA. He used his time to reacquaint himself with poor neglected Noel Gaynor, sifting through his collection of Xeroxed miscellany, rereading his doctoral thesis and the pared-down academic article he’d had such trouble getting published—all of which he coerced Kathryn into carting home from his office.

  With a vigour he had not demonstrated since gaining tenure, Payne rededicated himself to his dream of transforming “Lost in the Bush” from treatment to book-length treatise. He threw himself into his work; at first he lay on the bed, with his notes spread out across the duvet, and then, after his back started to come around, he hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling in old-fashioned marble-covered writing tablets. He filled page after page with musings on Gaynor’s life in England, extrapolating from fact. He pestered the chief librarian at the college into sending a courier with precious archival material. He began to annotate both volumes of fiction, convincing himself of the possibility that he could publish them as a collected edition along with the letters, with himself as editor, of course. From there it would be a short step to getting it and his companion book on Gaynor’s life and work onto the course list at Severn, and from Severn like wildfire to institutions all across the country. It was as if, huddled in his kitchen with a warm Presto-Relief Hot-Cold Compress tucked under the waistband of his boxers, Payne could finally see the light of redemption glowing just off in the distance, just as Gaynor must have when he looked out toward the blackness of the Algonquin bush.

  So immersed had Payne become that he took little notice of the change in Kathryn. On into his second week of recuperation she still came every day, but arrived later in the afternoon and left earlier in the evening. She did not share Payne’s enthusiasm for his subj
ect, and would sit quietly by while he conjectured about Gaynor’s life with Penelope, about how stifling the monotony of their marriage must have been to drive him to seek contentment in a wild and untamed world. And when, in the middle of one of his flights, she rose from the sofa and took up her backpack and car keys, he broke off and asked where she was off to so early.

  “It’s Professor Foden. He’s got us doing papers.”

  “Really?” Payne said, distracted. “What on?”

  “Oh, you know,” Kathryn smiled, rummaging through her bag. “The Greeks. Aristophanes.”

  When she called the next afternoon to say that she wouldn’t be able to come by, Payne thought nothing of it. He was deep into Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide, marking passages he felt both infantile and arrogant and preparing a counter-argument with material taken directly from one of Gaynor’s unsent letters. But the following evening, when he looked up from the table and saw that it was past eleven and he hadn’t heard from her, he became worried.

  The answering service picked up on her cellphone, but he didn’t leave a message. Instead, he hung up and the dialled her apartment. He could feel an immense knot forming in his lower back as he listened to the faraway ringing, and he reached around and did his best to knead it away. Payne was just about to hang up when she answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Kathryn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right? You sound out of breath.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Then why are you panting?”

  “I … I’m working out.”

  Payne could hear her trying to steady her breathing.

  “… I just finished doing some sit-ups … I’m a little winded.”

  “Oh?”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Is everything okay?” Payne asked.