by André Alexis
The second thing that occurred to him was that he was dreaming. What brought this thought was a bedside table that stood near the sofa. On the table, clearly visible and face up, was a five of diamonds. Rather than inspiring fear or dread, the card brought relief and an irrepressible laugh. He examined it and saw that it was, in fact, exactly like Michael’s card: dark back, skeleton, red D.
It was, of course, impossible that Michael’s card should be here, behind his house.
Ergo, though he was lucid, he was dreaming.
Moreover, he knew the course of this dream: he would be attacked and killed by his own furniture. Wasn’t that what “Michael” had described? And could there be anything more ridiculous? What would come at him first? The credenza or a lawn table? A kitchen chair or the wooden stepladder his daughters used to reach the bathroom tap?
Really, either it was a dream or he had entered a place beyond his understanding and, if that was the case, if he was in the midst of something supernatural or demonic, what was there to do but treat it all as if it were a dream? On the other hand, the thought of the demonic was, despite his fear, intriguing. It was exhilarating even. What would Satan want of him?
As if in answer to that very thought, Michael stepped out of the woods.
— I can’t believe my bad luck, said Michael. The old woman was supposed to sit beside me. Not you.
— I didn’t know, said Perry.
— It’s not your fault, said Michael. I’ve always thought free will was diabolical, and not in a good way either. But, honestly, Perry, you have no sense of evil. Don’t you think Satan has better things to do than rearrange your furniture?
— But you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?
— It would be a kindness, if I did. The worst you can bring yourself to imagine is the loss of your wife and children. And you can’t even do that with panache. I mean, you could have imagined them flayed alive or nailed to the trees, raped or mutilated or any number of things. But, no, in your worst nightmare they’ve simply disappeared. I’m stymied by men like you.
— So, I am dreaming, said Perry.
— Yes. But that doesn’t mean I won’t kill you. I’m capable of kindness, you know. In a few minutes, your furniture will trample you to dust. It’s a waste of my talents, but I feel for you, and someone has to save you from your well-balanced life.
So saying, Michael touched Perry’s shoulder and leg, turned his back, walked out of the light and into the woods. And Perry found himself unable to move. He stood before the semicircle of his belongings, dismayed and frightened as the dark grew darker and there was something like a rumble from the earth. He had heard that when one dies in dreams, one dies in reality as well.
What came at him first was a night table. It moved away from the rest of the furniture and then ran at him. As if on cue, the other pieces came to life. The sofa shook. A floor lamp trembled. And then, preceded by the night table, the chairs, credenzas, desks, lamps, chests, tables, loveseats, recliners, and grandfather clock charged as one, bearing down on him like a herd of wasp-maddened cattle.
A spectacular end, a martyrdom by home furnishing, himself a St. Sebastian of the suburbs, his death one that would be mentioned, speculated on: how strange . . . how odd . . . he died in his sleep . . . who would have thought?
But Perry was not that kind of man. He had not lived the kind of life that had a place for maddened furniture, diabolical encounters, or phantom neighbours. And he woke from his dream, relieved and disappointed, as a night table struck his thigh and the steward announced their arrival in Kingston.
— Kingston Station, Ladies and Gentlemen. Kingston.
Beside him, the young man had put his cards away. He was now balancing a coin between the fingers of his right hand. His fingers fluttered and the coin moved from knuckle to knuckle before being passed from little finger to thumb to begin its journey again.
It was unpleasant to watch, but there was nothing diabolical about it.
The small details of life overtook Perry as soon as the train arrived in Ottawa. He gathered his things, negotiated his way around the slower travellers, thinking only of home, scarcely seeing what was before him. He was among the first out of the station, the sky above filled with clouds, though here and there you could see a bright evening through the rents in the cloud curtain.
He took a cab from the station, through the city, to the end of Arrowsmith, from where he walked home. How different this walk was from the one he’d recently made in his dream, though, for a moment as he walked, the worlds coexisted, and it was as if he were walking along the street and a map of the street at the same time.
The houses were lit up, dark outlines with warm yellow patches, and the neighbourhood looked as if it had been waiting for him. In the Rodinsons’ living-room window, Mr. Rodinson stood talking to someone out of Perry’s view. In an upstairs window at the Ricciardis’, a young Ricciardi was practising the violin. The boy’s movements were graceful, and you could faintly hear the notes of Vivaldi’s Winter. Here, the Pattons were watching television and, over there, the Gurneys were doing God knows what.
It was exactly as if Arrowsmith, the street itself, had missed him, and although it was home and he knew it was home, there was something troubling in the intimacy, something not quite right. It suddenly seemed to Perry that although he certainly belonged here, belonged to the neighbourhood and to the street, the street was dull and unlovely. It was, he thought, exactly the kind of place where men like him lived and, for the first time in quite a while, he felt despair at belonging.
At the sight of his house, gratitude (like a reflex) descended on him. He felt relief, though he could not rightly see what it was that had upset him: the trip to Toronto or the journey back, a foolish dream or a revulsion at the world that was his?
— I’m home, he called
and dropped his bag on the floor beside the doormat.
— In the kitchen
Liz answered and he went to her.
It sounded as if, on the second floor, a troupe of acrobats was at play. Hard to believe two little girls could produce such a rumpus. Then, as he and Elizabeth kissed, the sound from the second floor stopped, took up again, and grew louder as the girls raced down the steps crying
— Daddy! Daddy!
— What did you get us, Dad?
— Don’t run, he cried
but as they came recklessly towards him, he went down on his knees, smiling, his arms open, waiting for the impact of the two compact bodies. But, here again, an unpleasant thought overtook him. As Zelda launched herself at him, he imagined withdrawing or moving out of the way so she fell to the floor. His daughter, seven years old, knew he would be there, knew he would not let anything happen to her. He caught her and held her happily wriggling body in his arms, but he said
— You shouldn’t throw yourself like that, Zeezee. You’ll fall.
When the girls had been tucked in and kissed goodnight, when he and Elizabeth had washed the dishes and put them away, when they had spoken about their plans for the following day and Liz had made herself a cup of tea and carried it up to the bedroom, where she waited for him, Perry took the garbage out to the backyard.
He turned on the light in the yard and, having put the green bag in a metal bin, he went to the gate and looked out at the woods. The parabola of light from their yard was like a pale yellow cloth on the ground before the first thin trees. At night, it was easy to imagine a sacred world adjacent to this one, a world in which everything human was diminished and every speck of earth was a symbol of the divine or its opposite. It was even possible, at night, to imagine the worlds as porous, the divine (or its opposite) intruding on the banal, though he had no real access to that other world, and only glimpsed it in strange dreams. For the most part, the miraculous seemed to shun him. It had left his life ages ago.
But what a long day he’d had.
A night wind blew through the trees, bringing with it a cold that drove him back inside. As he closed and locked the door, the day returned to him in pieces: his pity — or was it admiration? — for Mark Beaumont, his train trip, the ambush by his own furniture, his dissatisfaction with home, unhappily belonging to his little world, himself capable of hurting his own child. It was with thoughts like these, surely, that death entered the world. No, not death. Death needed no entrance because it had no exit. Something else entered: the abyss or despair or . . .
No, he had no words for it. He could suffer from it, but he could not name it. And, further frustrated by his own inarticulacy, he pushed an empty teacup from the kitchen counter. It fell to the floor and broke into four or five big pieces and a dozen smaller ones. He would have left it there too — its pale blue florets against the white tile floor — but there were the girls to think of should they rise early and come down to the kitchen on their own. So, dutifully, resentfully, he swept the pieces into a tidy pile by the back door and, defiantly, left them there.
As he undressed for bed, Liz asked
— Is everything okay? I thought I heard something break.
— A teacup, he answered. It was nothing.
COCTEAU
In the beginning, the town of Redfern was a handful of wooden houses beside a shallow lake. After a while, it accumulated a gas station, a restaurant, and a school for the blind. And then, over three decades: a number of churches, two gas stations, a handful of stores, more schools, and a tower tall enough to be seen for miles across southern Ontario. The tower and the school for the blind were the only things that brought outsiders. The tower had been built of stone hacked from quarries in the Middle East. It was a quarter of a mile wide and almost as high. It had been designed and financed by Samuel Tench, at the turn of the twentieth century. Mr. Tench, wealthy and odd, had been obsessed by the Bible since his childhood, obsessed in particular by the Old Testament, obsessed above all by the story of Babel. And so, the tower was built and maintained, until Tench’s fortune was squandered. After which, Tench lived alone in his tower until he died, entombed on an upper floor, unmissed until his body was discovered by one of the young men for whom a night in the tower was a rite of passage: some rum for Mr. Tench, no bedding, no pillows, just night, darkness and nerves.
When, in 1957, the county decided to maintain the tower, to keep it clean for tourists, it was discovered that Mr. Tench, dead for some thirty years, had not quite vacated the premises. He presented himself to the first of the tower’s caretakers and asked for milk and gin. The man fled, and so did the one hired after him, and the one hired after that, and so on until the death (angina pectoris) of the tower’s last caretaker, in 1975. After that, the tower’s care was kept to a minimum: a small squadron of janitors — townspeople, mostly — who worked at noon. From time to time, young men (and, as the years passed, young women) still tried to spend a night in the tower, but no one went with pleasure, it being almost certain they would encounter the dead. The fortunate ones were kept from entering by the town’s lone policeman, who sometimes stood watch until midnight or one in the morning. The less fortunate suffered, each in his or her own way, from their meetings with Mr. Tench and passed into adulthood more traumatised than they might otherwise have been.
So, it was contrary to expectation when, in 1987, the county hired Marin Herbert as caretaker to the tower. It was unexpected because, first, Marin was young: twenty years old. Second, he was legally blind, a graduate of Redfern’s school for the blind. He saw little more than a murky blur without the bottle-bottom-lensed glasses he had worn since he was old enough to wear glasses. Third, Marin was nobody’s idea of robust. He was thin, his arms and legs like sticks pushed into the long bladder that was his torso. (He was handsome, certainly, but handsome as poets are handsome: darkly, his inner spirit suggesting pain and redemption and dreams of the Hellespont.) He was hired because his mother was on the committee to keep the tower clean, and Marin had been in and about the tower since he’d been old enough to accompany his mother on her rounds. The place held no frights or terrors for him, and its atmosphere, gloomy and ghost-ridden though it was, reminded him of childhood. Also, his uncle was county reeve, a man respected in Redfern, and he approved of Marin’s desire to make himself useful. Marin would sweep up the tower’s many rooms, watch over the property, and report any youths who tried to enter the place after dark. In exchange, Marin would have lodgings in the tower (a bed, a table, an ewer and bowl, a bookcase) and two hundred dollars a month. No one envied Marin, and no one suspected he would be at his post for long: a month or two at most, until he decided what he wanted to do with his life — that is, what he really wanted to do, because what Marin thought he wanted was to be a writer, a thing for which almost no one in Redfern had any use. In fact, Father Hayden, the Catholic priest, had spoken to him about it, gently proposing
— Look, Marin, you’ve got the Bible, source of all truth. Either you’ll write the truth, which already exists in the Good Book, or you’ll write falsehoods. And the world has enough lies, doesn’t it?
— But, Father, answered Marin, even the echo of our Lord’s words is wonderful, isn’t it?
— Umhmm, said Father Hayden. I recognize Satan’s words when I hear them, you know.
Marin’s first night in the tower was uneventful. He swept the top floor (the 33rd), ate the chicken his mother had left in a basket for him, wrote a dozen lines on his Braille typewriter, and then, suddenly exhausted, barely made it to his narrow bed, where he fell into a profound and dreamless sleep. His first seven days passed in much the same way: undisturbed by ghosts or apparitions, Marin would sweep one of the tower’s floors, retire to his room, write a few lines of verse — lines which, in the morning, he inevitably found drab and prosaic — before falling into deep, dreamless sleep which did not nourish him at all. In the mornings he was as tired as if he hadn’t slept. And then, on his eighth evening, as he was typing his day’s complement of verse, he felt a presence, someone looking over his shoulder, and then a voice spoke.
— Your poetry is terrible.
— I know, answered Marin.
And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Marin and the presence with him discussed poetry. Marin’s companion insisted that, being dead, she understood what poetry was about. She was inclined to think poetry something the living did that could be understood only by the dead, the dead being the only ones with sufficient distance. Moreover, his poetry was “off” because he had the wrong attitude.
— Words know when you’re afraid of them, said Marin’s companion.
— I see, answered Marin
who saw (in all senses of the word) very little. He felt and he heard, though, and when, after an hour or so, the presence left him, he fell asleep, erotically dreaming about an umbrella on a blue-linen bed. When he awakened in the morning, he was as tired as ever, but he found he had written lines that were not at all like his usual work:
We will wake bruised in the dew
glass-wet and gleaming . . .
Now, when had he written that, he wondered, and where did the lines lead? Whose poem was he writing, if not his own? If he had been an intellectual, he might have stopped writing altogether until he could figure things out. But Marin went on in the knowledge that, wherever the verses came from, they were more interesting than his own, and, the following night, he followed his routine. He swept up, retired to write, and, for two hours, hours that passed as if they were minutes, he spoke with the presence that occupied the tower with him, a distinctly feminine presence, though he persisted in thinking of her as “Sam.” And the following morning, he woke to find he had filled pages with verse:
I inhabit my body, as if I were a small visitor . . .
They were nothing to do with him, but he recognized his own handwriting and vaguely remembered thinking some of t
he words.
In the weeks that followed, Marin slept and had vivid dreams, but he woke in the morning as exhausted as he’d been the night before. He wrote reams of poetry: pages and pages of lyrics and sonnets, expressing love for the world and anguish at time’s passage, feelings he hadn’t known he possessed. Also, his visitor began to spend longer and longer sojourns with him. From the hour she had spent on her first night, she moved to two, to three, to six hours, staying with him, finally, the night long. Her conversation was elegant, informed, and even seductive. So much so that, after three months, Marin began to feel longing for a woman he knew to be dead. Naturally, he found this strange, and found himself strange, too. He was not alone. His mother became concerned at his refusals to leave the tower for more than an hour or so at a time, at his emaciation and pallor. Marin had always been slight, as if, she thought, he could not resolve himself to be part of this world. But, these days, it looked as though he had chosen the hereafter and was headed there. He was dangerously thin, and barely coherent when he wasn’t silent. He visited his parents every Sunday, but his mother could tell he was anxious to return to his tower to write, though writing had never taken so much from him before. In distress, she asked the town’s only official (that is, published) writer if it were normal for writers to keep to themselves, ignore their families, write until they were pale and exhausted.
— Of course, the writer assured her. I was always exhausted before I was published.
This answer did not reassure her at all, however. It didn’t resolve an important matter: Was her son a real poet or was Marin wearing himself out with gibberish? Without his permission, she took a handful of his poems and sent them off to a magazine in Toronto. She assumed that his work would be rejected and that rejection would bring Marin to his senses. To her dismay, the poems were accepted and published, but when she told Marin what she’d done, sheepishly congratulating him for his talent, it was as if he couldn’t have cared less.