Nocturne

by Helen Humphreys

  I am no different. I once went to an arts colony for a month to finish a novel and abandoned the novel the second day I was there. The live-in studio I had been given, in the middle of the woods, had a piano in it because the space was meant for composers as well as writers.

  All around me, in all the other cabins spread out over the 450 acres of the arts colony, artists were happily industrious. At dinner people were abuzz with their own genius and productivity. There were endless stories of endless brilliant ideas and I was soon sick of all of them.

  I didn’t do any writing, but I was seized by a sort of rogue creativity, the spirit of the place perhaps, where artists had been coming to paint and sculpt and compose for a hundred and fifty years. I didn’t write, but I started to play the piano in my studio, even though I hadn’t played since I was seven years old. I made up short, mournful songs and called my friends on my cell phone when I knew they wouldn’t be home so I could record these on their voice-mail. I didn’t think about my characters, but every day I sketched the old stone wall outside my studio, noting the slightest changes in the weight and shape of the new-fallen snow.

  I become obsessed with the stone walls that were scattered like broken, human music across the estate, and spent hours following their weave through the snowy woods. They were made from clearing the fields, were used to mark boundaries. They were built using large rocks, often glacial till, for the base. The size of the stones got progressively smaller as the wall got higher. All the walls were thigh height because that is as high as a man can lift a stone without strain, without having to raise his hands above his heart.

  Spring never came at the arts colony. The snow continued to fall. Deer came out of the heavy snow of the woods to walk on the main road and were hit regularly by the cars that travelled the slick winter distance between our town and the next.

  For a while I stopped going to dinner in the main house because the other artists were spooked that I had given up writing my novel. They were afraid it was catching. I hoarded the lunch food and for a number of days dined only on fruit and cookies and carrot sticks.

  At the time I didn’t know what to say about any of this. Giving up my novel was mysterious and terrifying and yet there was a freedom to it that I don’t remember ever having had before. I would lie awake at nights in the studio, the snow unfurling against the window by my bed—the woods lit up like an X-ray—and I would listen to the hammering of the sculptor who was in the studio next to mine and liked to work late. The sound was rhythmical, each rise and fall of his arm like the rise and fall of my own breath. The noise filled the night, fitting it so perfectly that I couldn’t imagine a better answer to the stars or the owl or the moving shadows of the deer out among the snowy trees.

  On one of my last days at the colony I went to help another sculptor with her piece. I had started to lend myself out to the artists who were still engaged with their work. We were in her studio, a replicated Italian church. I was holding the sides of her sculpture together so she could close it with wire thread. The room was bright with morning as I stood there, pressing my hands against the metal in the exact position of prayer, and she passed the needle through one series of holes and out another, the wire stitches like sutures.

  And in this way she mended me. In this way, I was mended.

  Just because I was good at writing, and you were good at the piano, didn’t mean that we were immune to the other arts. It was creativity in general that raged in us, and although we found a place to put it, a place where we could answer it best, I think that whatever our circumstances we would have found a way to express that creativity, and that was the real gift. That is what made us and kept us free.

  Your first poem about the dawn was about light and movement, about the contrast between the artificial light of the hospital room and the natural light of the world outside the window. Some of the language was formal, but there were places where you sounded exactly like yourself, where your voice rang through.

  I felt sorry for the dawn. It is so beautiful, / fragile, but yet badly respected by the day, you wrote.

  The weather on the second morning was stormier, and you talked about the grey clouds and the turbulent sky. You wrote, The grey and white colours are evenly dispersed. / Today we are happy with the black and white movie.

  Creativity leaves a mark. It leaves words, music, for those of us who have stayed behind after you’ve gone. I can listen to your CDs in my car and the essence of you is suddenly there with me as I speed along the highway towards Toronto, or meander up the country roads to my cottage.

  The fact that you spent those two days at the end of September when you were in hospital writing poetry fills me with admiration for you, and with optimism. It is not that the creative urge transcends death, but it is something to shore up against it, and it keeps its meaning, right to the end, to the very last breath. Art is always about the possible, is its own form of hope.

  Somewhere a door has opened and somebody has / begun their day.

  32

  I have been to so many of your concerts over the years, Martin, that I can no longer list or remember them. I used to have a file folder where I kept the various programs and ticket stubs, but at a certain point I gave up adding to it. Now, of course, since you’ve died, and since you kept everything, I have access to all of this information again.

  One of the concerts I enjoyed most was at the National Physical Laboratories in England. A group of scientists had organized a lunchtime series at their workplace. They invited various musicians to come and play for them in a lecture hall cum concert hall. The acoustics were good, and I remember sitting up near the back of the rise of seats and watching the scientists in their white lab coats, quietly eating their sandwiches and listening.

  Afterwards we sat outside on a bench, having a cigarette as the scientists scurried back and forth between the buildings. You must have been living in England then, and I was over for a visit. I don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. There was a lot of overlap to our lives in those days. We were made of each other then.

  The National Physical Laboratories don’t seem to have concerts any more. Maybe they don’t feel the need to continue to celebrate the connection between music and science. Maybe they are too busy doing what they do, as the U.K.’s national measurement institute, which is to apply “the most accurate measurement standards” to science and technology.

  33

  The river that was at the base of the valley you could see from your hospital window at the end of September was not dissimilar to the river at my cottage, although I never thought this before you were dying. But it makes sense that I chose to own a piece of land that echoed a place where we had spent time as children, where we had felt wild and free.

  After you died I spent a lot of time at the cottage. I barely had any energy to move, but I could sit by the river and watch it.

  The river wraps around the land, like two bodies spooning in bed or the symbols for yin and yang, one in motion, one still. When the river is low, the land seems predominant—you stand on the land and look at the river; the land is safety, high ground, the stable, constant world. But when the river is high, the land seems fragile, about to be washed away, the fast-forward motion of the water suddenly seems dangerous, and it feels as if the land will not protect you any longer. But the river is always allied with the land that borders it. One creates the other, and the lesson of the river is to learn when to be the river, and when to be the land—when to push forward, and when to remain perfectly still.

  The river makes no sound when it is fully flooded. It has filled its voice. The surface is dark, and the current moves the water forward in one long, undulating ribbon. But when the river is low, it is all noise and gurgle, rocks exposed, a small waterfall that bubbles and churns. The water rattles with its own emptiness.

  Some people can stand beside a rushing river and feel restless, feel that the relentless force of the water wants to move them into action. But when I s
tand beside the river, I am grateful for the forward surge of the water. It allows me to remain motionless because the water is doing the moving for me.

  Shortly after you were diagnosed, you came with your girlfriend to the cottage for the weekend. You sat in a chair on the grass in front of the river, but you didn’t see it. You were so distracted by the fact of your cancer, and by your task that weekend of having to phone your various employers to let them know that you were terminal. These conversations were hard ones to have and so you punctuated them with walks up the road and cups of herbal tea.

  The truth is that if you hadn’t been about to die, you still might not have noticed the river. You were often restless and distracted. Not so much when we were young, but increasingly so as you got older and busier. It was hard for you to be where you were, except when you were working, when you were playing the piano.

  Dying brought you back to the present, although not entirely. You were still distracted, but you were also capable of existing in the place where you were situated.

  You were never again at the cottage, and I wish that day that you had been able to relinquish enough fear and control to watch the river, to let it carry your burdens away.

  34

  As children we spent a lot of time fishing. As adults, we wriggled like worms on a hook in our intimate relationships—twisting this way to please, that way to avoid telling the truth of how we really felt.

  Your death has given me no choice but to slow down. This has meant that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I know what I’m feeling when I’m feeling it, that I’m able to fully experience the present moment.

  This may be why the completely unexpected happened and I fell in love again. It saddens me that you’ll never meet Nancy, and that my new life is so far removed from my old one. And it feels strange to me that your death is the hinge between those two worlds, the point at which everything changed.

  35

  I felt you partially leave two days before you died. I told the nurse on duty that I thought something was different, but she checked your stats and said nothing had changed. Maybe nothing had changed externally, but something had shifted in you. I could feel that you were less present, that you were unhooking yourself from life. Not that you were giving up, because you were someone who never gave up or lost hope, but that you were less attached to the moment everyone else was existing in.

  When my first dog, Hazel, died a few days after I got back from Vancouver, in the same week as you, she approached death in a different way. She lay awake at night, staring off into the darkness, as though she were waiting for something, with a look in her eyes that I’d never seen before.

  She waited for death. You left when you sensed it was coming.

  36

  In the end, you can step out of the room or you can’t. The body leaks or it holds.

  Your body was constantly leaking. Your blood vessels wouldn’t bear up, and the smell that lifted from your skin was the smell of the drugs they were continuously pumping into you. The smell was sweet and cloying, a bit like decaying flowers.

  I remember how Grandad hated lilacs because he said they were exactly what death smelled like, what dead bodies smelled like. But I found the scent of flowers on your skin a comfort. It wasn’t a bad scent, and it wouldn’t have bothered you if you had been able to smell it for yourself.

  But you would have hated how your body looked after the operations. There were bags to drain the incision in your belly, and bags to collect your urine and fluids, bags to drip fluids back into you. There was a PICC line in your neck, a nasty hole bored right into your jugular vein to expedite the injection of drugs. This hole was always bleeding a little and looked sore. Your whole body was swollen because your kidneys weren’t functioning properly, which made you look so strange because you were also skeletal. Never anything but thin, you had dropped to under a hundred pounds with the cancer.

  Most of your body was draped with a sheet, to spare anyone from seeing the gruesome incision and its attendant bags.

  Your face was just a skull covered with skin. I hadn’t realized that there was fat around the temples until I saw your temples caved in. There was sweat on your forehead from fever because your body was fighting the infection that came with the perforated bowel. The ventilator split your lips and made sores at the corners of your mouth. Of all of it, the ventilator was the worst, because it prevented you from talking, from telling us what you wanted, from having a voice. At the beginning, after the first operation, when we were hopeful you would recover, we were told that the ventilator would be coming out any day, but that day just kept getting pushed back. I wish now that we had insisted they remove it from you, or that you had managed to tear it out, as you tried to do before they increased your sedation.

  But even if we had insisted, I’m not sure that the medical staff would have taken you off the ventilator, that we could have made them do it. They controlled the mechanics of your body.

  The hopeful scenerio was that you would beat the infection caused by the perforated bowel and the ventilator would be removed and you would be able to go home. You would still die from the cancer, of course, but later, in the spring, perhaps as late as your birthday. It seems fair to say that this would have happened if there hadn’t been a further perforation in the bowel that they didn’t catch in that first emergency surgery. When they told me that they’d have to operate again, I just stood at the nurses’ station and cried. I knew that although you had the strength and will to survive one major operation, you probably wouldn’t survive two.

  37

  In the late winter, ten months before you died, when my life was still a life I recognized, I woke early one morning in my old house and came downstairs to make coffee. That house had French doors that opened out onto the garden. I saw a movement outside and walked up to the French doors to see, on the other side of the doors, a hawk devouring a songbird.

  The hawk was right up against the glass, six inches from my living room. I was able to sit down in a chair right in front of the bird and it didn’t notice me there.

  It was late February or early March. There was still snow on the ground, although it was constantly melting and refreezing, so the snow was uneven and hard. The hawk had the songbird pinned down in a hollow, one talon holding the body prone, while it methodically ripped the feathers from the bird with its beak.

  It was a slow task, and the hawk was deliberate and focused, intent on stripping the bird and then eating it. The removal of the songbird’s plumage reduced it to a generic piece of meat, and I wondered at the time if it was important for the hawk to obliterate the identity of the bird before consuming it, as though a bird that was recognizably a bird would be harder for another bird to devour.

  Whatever the reason, the hawk carefully pulled all the feathers from the body of the songbird and then ripped open the chest cavity and dipped its beak inside. Holding the bird firmly with the one talon, the hawk started to pull out and eat the entrails. Blood dripped from its beak and stained its chest feathers and the snow on the ground beneath the little songbird.

  Around this time, Hazel came downstairs to see what had become of me, and the hawk caught the movement of the dog through the glass and started. It grabbed the limp carcass of the songbird in its talons and lifted over the snow and the backyard, flapping up and over the fence, presumably to land in another, more private spot in which to finish eating.

  Never, in my years of living in that house, and my years of living in previous houses, had anything like that happened before. It was strange on two counts—not only because it happened in a city yard, but because it happened right up against the glass of the French doors. It unnerved me, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that the carnage was for my benefit, that death was coming to my house.

  And, of course, it did.

  You died within that year, and Hazel died, and the winter after you died was an Ontario winter you actually would have liked—not like the previous two cold and sno
wy winters that you had had to endure when you moved back to Toronto—but a mild, practically snowless winter that pretty much ended in February when the crocuses and snowdrops started to bloom.

  After I came back from Vancouver the second time, after cleaning out your apartment, I stood in the backyard one day, calling for the new dog to come in, and I looked down and noticed that there were still the feathers of that murdered bird on the patio by my feet, that there were still spots of blood staining the flagstones.

  38

  The day you died there was a full moon. It was a December moon, the moon with the highest trajectory across the sky because the midwinter night is of much longer duration than the day. The sun has a low arc at this point in the year, and the moon is visible overhead for a greater length of time.

  After you died we walked out into the cold of the parking lot. The sun was setting red behind the mountains, and the moon had already risen. We drove, with your friends, to the pub where you used to go for a beer, and being in different cars, some of us got lost on the way and we all arrived at different times.

  The pub was called the Mountain Shadow Inn, and it had the look of a Swiss chalet, lots of carved wood inside, a balcony on the outside that hung over the entranceway. The eaves were decorated with gingerbread trim, some of it painted red and white. The building sat by itself on a patch of land just off the highway. There was nothing else around, no other buildings. The moonlight made the grass look silver as we walked across it.

  Upstairs, where you used to like to go, there was a large-screen TV overtop of a fireplace, and lots of nooks and crannies to sit in.