Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady

  “One’s true, one’s made up,” Alison sighed.

  “True, false; good, bad; black, white,” Sara shot back — keyed up on nervous adrenalin and feeling as if she was barely making sense. “No. It’s an imaginary distinction.”

  “But,” the only man in the room leaned forward, brow pinching. He was in an awkward position already, and knew it. Even sitting down, he hulked over the women.

  “But,” the man repeated. His name was Mac. “Surely there are differences.”

  “No, there are no differences,” Sara insisted. She didn’t know why she was being so adamant — of course there were differences. Maybe it had to do with establishing authority — forcing them to agree to a patent untruth right off the bat. Two plus two is five, repeat after me.

  “Even,” persisted Mac, “attitudinally speaking. Attitudinally, wouldn’t you have to take a completely different approach to writing a work of fiction than you would a personal memoir?”

  Mac ducked his head and raised his eyes to her then. A gesture of deference that was almost dog-like.

  Sara pretended to think about it but really she was trying to calm her nerves.

  “But you are talking about,” she said, “the kind of differences that exist between any two projects. I write … I want to write, say, a whimsical story from the point of view of a dog. The next day, I want to write some kind of — I don’t know — something weighty. Something from the point of view of a, of a rape victim or something.”

  Everyone was suddenly watching her with their mouths shut. She glared back at them.

  “There will always be attitudinal differences — from one story to the next — is what I’m saying,” she continued, the jolt of annoyance having cleared her head. “My point is, they’re all still going to be stories, no matter what category we choose to put them in — fiction or non.”

  Sara sat back in her chair, satisfied she had finally said something teacherly, and ready to suggest a coffee break. But when she glanced at her watch she saw they had only been together in the meeting room for ten minutes or so. She suggested one anyway.

  THE LAST TIME she spoke with her brother Wayne, he explained to her why it didn’t matter that people were disappearing from the street. He said it was part of God’s plan.

  “I don’t think it’s part of God’s plan,” she replied.

  “Well, what would you know about God’s plan,” said Wayne.

  This is how they talked to each other. There were no particularly nuanced arguments, no fine points to be made.

  “What do you know about God’s plan,” Sara jeered back at him.

  “More than you,” Wayne answered. Wayne had a blackboard in his apartment, Sara imagined, like a football coach would have. There was a line drawn down the middle in chalk. On one side of the blackboard was written The Wayner and on the other side, Stupid Hippie. And every time Wayne came back with a zinger like “more than you,” a mark went under The Wayner and then he sat back, satisfied, licking the chalk from his fingers.

  “It’s God’s plan,” Sara exclaimed, like she was starting to understand. “I get it, I get it, the women are the chosen ones! It’s been them all along! They’ve been called! They’ve left us all behind!”

  Wayne sighed his disgust. “You pretend,” he said, “to be stupid, and say stupid things when you know the truth as well as I do. I’ve never understood why you do that. It doesn’t make you seem smart, if that’s what you think.”

  “They’re whores,” said Sara. She stood and carried the phone with her to look out the window at her pansies.

  “Yes.”

  “God is cleansing us of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like the bombs. On the heathen cities. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But all women on the outside are whores.” Sara was babbling again, almost gleeful. “Yes? Right? And everyone outside Eden is a heathen. So why aren’t we all disappearing? Why isn’t the city burning around me? Where is the angry hand, reaching down to smite?”

  She was leaning forward, grinning hard, as if Wayne were there in the apartment with her. But if Wayne were there, she knew she’d never talk like this.

  He waited an insolent moment before answering.

  “I left — and you know I left — because I didn’t believe all that bullshit. I’m not a fanatic.”

  Shriek. She could almost hear the chalk against the board.

  MAC CAME UP to her at the book table, where Sara was noting which of her books Terry had ordered to sell at the retreat. There were about twenty copies of her teenage memoir stacked there, and he had used it as a display copy too — Escaping Eden — the book that was to represent her as an author. Tucked behind the stack of memoirs were five copies of her second novel, and no copies of her first or her collection of stories.

  She was standing there thinking that talking to her brother Wayne was like talking to God. Maybe this was the reason she still stayed in contact with Wayne, despite the futility of their conversations: the acid frustration it provoked. It was like talking to God — pointless, maddening and compulsive. Wayne didn’t make sense; he didn’t have to make sense. He didn’t bow to the logic of Man. Wayne’s wisdom was his unfathomable own — undreamt of in her philosophy. The Wayner was what The Wayner was.

  “I loved it,” Mac told her.

  She swivelled and blinked. He smiled and reached to tap the stack of Edens with a hirsute finger.

  “Oh — thanks, Mac.”

  “It’s the reason I came here. I hope you don’t — I mean I think you’re a brilliant memoirist.”

  “Thanks,” she said. They stared together at the pile of books. “Did you think I was going to be nineteen?”

  “What?” said Mac.

  “Everybody thinks I’m going to be nineteen. Because I was nineteen when I published the book, and it was such a big deal. Oh my God, she’s nineteen! And they still make a big deal of it on the cover — see?” She picked up one of the copies, which was the newest edition, and showed him. She held the photo of the nineteen-year-old up beside her face.

  Mac laughed a little. “I didn’t think you’d be nineteen. But I did — you know, I read the book and I thought — I want to learn from the person who wrote this book. I want to tell my story with the same kind of honesty.”

  “I don’t even remember writing it,” Sara told him.

  BETTY AND HERB were to read at the beginning of the retreat, and she and Marguerite were to read at the end. Herb, charismatic and engaging, was also a wonderful reader, but his prize-winning book was about a middle-aged male university professor having a torrid, forbidden affair with one of his undergraduate female students. Sara had read somewhere that the “twist” in Herb’s novel, the thing that elevated it from hackneyed smut, was the fact that even though the sexual relationship starts out fuelled by nothing but goatish lust (with the typical mid-life crisis and dash of misogyny thrown in), it unexpectedly evolves into a profound and tender love. Not even love affair, but love. The couple take up arms, philosophically speaking, against their numerous inquisitors instead of slinking away and apart as anyone would have expected. On the contrary, they vigorously defend their love, repudiating shame and defying censure — be it official or otherwise. The review Sara read claimed this aspect of the novel was what made it startling and brave. What made it brilliant, the reviewer added, was that, for most of the novel, the reader found herself taking the part of the inquisitors, feeling the very same contempt and moral outrage, only to be ambushed and chastened by the sudden purity of the love story.

  For this particular reading, however, Herb eschewed the love story altogether in favour of the sex scenes. He strung them together, flipping from one marked page to the next so that the descriptions of the professor and student’s couplings were relentless and all seemed to blur into one endless, gross encounter. Sara wondered if Herb was just getting a kick out of reading these words aloud in a monastery, out of the fact that celibate h
oly men slept and studied only a few feet away. Maybe he imagined his resonant stage-actor’s voice carrying all the way into their wing, slipping like a tongue into hairy Franciscan ears.

  She pictured her brother Wayne sitting in the back with his Chevron cap perched on the crown of his head, lips obliterated under his moustache, meaty arms folded.

  Betty got up to read next. She wore a somewhat more revealing but less stretchy minidress than the one she’d been wearing all day, with long satin gloves and big crucifix earrings. She made some prefatory, self-deprecating jokes about herself and shrieked laughter into the microphone.

  “This is a poem about my mother,” she told everyone a moment later, wiping her eyes. She read the title — a sad, solemn title — and laughed again like it was a private, uproarious joke.

  Betty did something to her voice for the reading — Sara had heard other poets do it too. Sometimes it seemed stagy and contrived and other times, depending on the poet, it worked well. With Betty it seemed natural. She changed her timbre substantially — the entire personality of her voice changed. It was low and meditative. There wasn’t any laughter. It was the speaking-voice of Betty’s mind.

  Sara looked out the window and saw how the sunset was painting the valley. Her eyes turned on like taps. She tried to get it under control. This happened at the movies sometimes — even during the previews. The music would swell, a camera would zoom in on a face, and it was as if someone had reached beneath her ribs and flicked a switch. It didn’t matter what was going on, necessarily. The content wasn’t the problem. It was a thing that happened outside of words.

  Afterwards the polite thing to do was discuss the readings with Betty and Herb respectively.

  “I cried,” she told Betty, who looked startled, and then laughed. Sara laughed with her, feeling relief. This was the same sort of phenomenon as my plane was hit by lightning, the same sort of ritual. You speak it in defiance. It was freeing the same way blasphemy was freeing.

  WHEN THEY WEREN’T having group meetings, they had private meetings, one on one. Individually, she found them to be splendid people, and wanted to assure them that the fact they had any proficiency at all was wonderful and they shouldn’t get so tied up in knots about it because they also had jobs and houses and licences to drive cars, which made them like gods as far as Sara was concerned.

  She and Mac conducted their meeting walking into town to buy alcohol and bottled water. It was coming toward the end of the week and people had started to sit outside and drink in the evenings, prompting Terry to bring his guitar out of his office and play Gordon Lightfoot songs.

  Mac told her about his memoir as they walked the gash of road through the endless fields on either side. The sky felt like something they could disappear into. She made sure to walk in the middle of the road, like a child avoiding cracks in the sidewalk.

  “This landscape is crazy!” Sara interrupted Mac at one point.

  “Different from where you grew up,” said Mac. Not a question. He figured he knew everything about her. He was, she had determined a few days ago, constantly angling to discuss Eden.

  “I’ve never been to the Kootenays,” he continued. “I love how you describe them in the book. The mountains and trees … the clouds against the mountains … ‘yet another barrier.’ It was great how … I mean, you said everything but the word ‘prison,’ right?”

  “God-made dungeon,” said Sara. She thought she was saying it spontaneously, but the moment she did, realized she had quoted the nineteen-year-old.

  “Oh, that’s right, that’s right,” said Mac. “You did say dungeon. But that sense of claustrophobia — it came across so well. None of that here, eh?” He gestured to the sky. Here you could gesture to the sky simply by raising your arms a few inches. “Nothing holding you back.”

  Sara was concerned because Mac was clearly modelling his book too closely on her own. His story wasn’t even really his, but his grandfather’s, who had been a leader in the Winnipeg General Strike. He had done endless research. He had, as he put it, “reams” of material.

  She decided to tackle the subject head-on, to talk about Eden as much as Mac craved in order to dissuade him, to show how him wrong-headed it was. He wouldn’t be able to write his own book until he fell out of love with hers.

  “Do you see why this approach can’t work?” she demanded as they walked. Walking made it easier to be honest, they didn’t have to look at each other. The crunch of gravel filled in the conversational gaps. “The two books have nothing in common.”

  “But it’s more the attitude of your book I’m trying to get at —”

  “This attitude thing again —”

  “The tone.”

  “The tone is internal, Mac. The tone is the inside of a teenage girl’s head. Do you think I had to go to the library and research that?”

  “But how did you … like that thing with the trees and the mountains and the clouds against the mountains — one barrier after another. Crafting those kinds of metaphors. That’s the sort of thing I’m after.”

  “They weren’t metaphors,” said Sara. “That was how things looked, through my eyeballs, and so I wrote it down.”

  Crunch gravel, crunch gravel. Mac was casting a shadow over her. He is so big, thought Sara. He could kill me.

  “I thought you didn’t remember writing it,” said Mac, smiling at the approaching town.

  SOMEBODY HAD BOUGHT a newspaper and it lay splayed across one of the tables in the main hall. There was news from her city, and news from overseas — all the news she didn’t want. She was thinking about throwing it away when Herb wandered in from the cafeteria, noticed Sara hovering, and asked if she was reading it.

  “No,” said Sara. “No one should be reading it.”

  “It’s sad,” said Herb, settling into a chair. “But we have to live in this world, don’t we, retreat or no? We can’t close our eyes to these things, much as we want to. That’s what writers do. We face up.”

  Some of the participants heard what Herb was saying and inched closer. Sara had noticed this on several occasions — Herb wandering into the main hall with a cup of coffee, initiating a conversation, waxing casually profound on the subject of writing until he had gathered a tiny, devout clan around his chair.

  “War,” said Herb, scanning the front page. “Are you telling me you haven’t considered writing something about the war — if you haven’t written something already?”

  “I refuse,” said Sara, feeling the perverse adamancy descend again. She had written a handful of terrible poems only a few months ago.

  Herb’s talking about the war, someone called nearby.

  “Oh, Sara, don’t,” said Herb, as if she were hurting him. “Don’t refuse. Don’t turn your back. If writers refuse to discuss these issues, where does that leave us?”

  “You cheapen it,” said Sara. “You cheapen it when you give it words. The more you talk about it, the more commonplace and mundane it becomes, until we’re all going, oh yeah, the war, war — war war war. It’s just war.” Sara felt itchy all of a sudden, wanting to scratch herself like a monkey. “We work in a pretty cheap medium, really.”

  Betty was walking past. She caught what Sara had said and laughed explosively.

  “Let’s all stop writing!” exclaimed Betty, not slowing down on her way to wherever she was going.

  “Yes,” said Sara, “let’s stop.” She turned around and saw Terry, who smiled and gestured to her.

  I’m being called to the principal’s office, thought Sara. But that wasn’t something so much in her experience as it was the rest of the world’s — the outside world’s. To her it was just an expression — one of the many exotic, puzzling expressions she heard after leaving the family, like pushing the envelope and don’t be hatin’. Growing up behind the mountains, Sara was only ever called into her father’s office. Her father’s office was wherever he happened to be.

  She sat across from Terry, who had nice blue eyes and laugh lines and lov
ed a good Gordon Lightfoot singalong. Plus, he was no more than six years older than her. Plus, she had done nothing wrong and was being ridiculous because she was sweating and closed-mouth panting the way she had done on the plane.

  “How are things?” said Terry.

  And it was also like her shrink’s office, when the province decided she had to see a shrink before she could be declared an independent minor. How are things, that was how the meetings started. Sara’s shrink had been a woman, however. One of the social workers had insisted on it — Sara found that out later, poring over her own files for the memoir. She had lied to Mac about that — she had conducted research on herself.

  “Things are great, Terry.”

  “Week’s gone okay?”

  “It’s been great, yeah. Wonderful group.”

  “Mm-hmm?” His eyebrows went up. “Any stars this year?”

  There were no stars, but Sara threw out Alison’s name to make Terry happy.

  They smiled at each other, Sara relaxing a little. Maybe Terry was holding these impromptu, individual meetings with all the instructors.

  “I wanted to ask you,” said Terry, “if everything’s okay in your bathroom.”

  Sara sat for a moment.

  “With your toilet and everything,” Terry prompted.

  She burst into laughter like Betty.

  “Oh my gosh! Yes! I’m sorry, Terry, I should have mentioned —”

  Terry started to shake his head rapidly and wave his hands. “Yes, the maintenance guy had it fixed by the end of the day, no problem, no problem at all.”

  “Because,” said Terry. “I was going to say, we could always switch your room, if you’re having any problems.”

  Sara shook her head back at him. “Oh God, no, it’s fine, it’s been fine all week.”

  Terry didn’t seem to be absorbing her reassurances. He pressed his lips together and inhaled through his nose.

  “So the shower and everything is —”

  “Shower, sink, toilet,” recited Sara. “Everything’s great.”

  Terry blinked his fine blue eyes at her.

  “I mean,” said Sara. She thought for a moment about the shower. “I can’t quite remember if —” She tried to imagine the taps, the nozzle. Tried to conjure up a picture in her mind.